Generation X (17 page)

"It's not something you
buy,
Dag. You sound like Tobias when you

"It was really QFM, I mean

talk like that. And she's
hardly
making a vocation of 'nunning'—slop
painter pants? That's 1979

being so negative. Give her a chance." Claire resumes her perch on the
beyond belief."

stool. "Besides, would you rather she was still here in Palm Springs doing whatever
it
was she was doing? Would you like to go down to Vons supermarket and buy needle bleach with her in a year or so? Or play matchmaker, perhaps—fix her up with a dental conventioneer so

she can become a Palo Alto homemaker?"

The first kernel pops and it dawns on me that Dag is not only feeling rebuffed by Elvissa, but he's envious of her decision to change and reduce her life as well.

"She's renounced all of her worldly goods, I take it then," says Dag.

"I guess her roommates will filch most of her possessions she's leaving beind here in Palm Springs, poor things. VSTP: very severe taste problem, that lady. Snoopy lamps and decoupage, mostly."

"I give her three months."

Under a fusillade of popping kernels, Claire raises her voice: "I'm not going to harp on about this, Dag, but cliche or doomed as her impulse for self-betterment may be, you just can't mock it.
You
of all people.

Good Lord.
You
should understand what it means to try and get rid of all the crap in your life. But Elvissa's gone one further than you, now,
hasn't
she? She's at the next level. You're hanging on still, even though your job-job and the big city are gone—hanging on to your car and your cigarettes and your long distance phone calls and the cocktails and the
attitude.
You still want control. What
she's
doing is no sillier than your going into a monastery, and Lord knows we've listened to your talk about
that
enough times."

The corn appropriately stops popping, and Dag stares at his feet.

He gazes at them like they were two keys on a key chain but he can't remember what locks they belong to. "God. You're right. I don't believe myself. You know what I feel like? I feel like I'm twelve years old and back in Ontario and I've just sloshed gasoline all over the car and my clothing
again
—I feel like such a total dirt bag."

"Don't be a
dirt bag,
Bellinghausen. Just close your eyes," Claire says. "Close your eyes and look closely at what you've spilled.
Smell the
future."

The red light bulb was fun but tiring. We head into my room now for bedtime stories. The fireplace is lit, with the dogs snogging away bliss-fully atop their oval braid rug. On top of my bed's Hudson Bay blankets we eat the popcorn and feel a rare coziness amid the beeswax yellow shadows that oscillate on the wooden walls that are hung with my objects: fishing lures, sun hats , a violin, date fronds, yellowing newspapers, bead belts, rope, oxford shoes, and maps. Simple objects for a noncomplex life.

Claire starts.

LEAVE

YOUR

BODY

"There was once this poor little rich girl named Linda. She was heiress to a vast family fortune, the seeds of which sprouted in slave trading in Georgia, that propagated into the Yankee textile mills of Massachusetts and Connecticut, dispersed westward into the steel mills of the Mo-nongahela River in Pennsylvania, and ultimately bore sturdy offspring of newspapers, film, and aerospace in California. "But while Linda's family's money always managed to grow and adapt to its times, Linda's family did not. It shrank,

dwindled, and inbred to

the point where all that

remained was Linda and

her mother, Doris. Linda

lived in a stone mansion

on a rural Delaware es-tate, but her mother only

filed her tax claims out of

the Delaware address.

She hadn't even visited it

in many years—she was

a socialite; she lived in

Paris; she was
on the jet.

If she
had
visited, she might have been able to prevent what happened to Linda. "You see, Linda grew up happy as any little rich girl can, an only child in a nursery on the top floor of the stone mansion where her father read stories to her every night as she sat on his lap. Up near the ceiling, dozens of small tame canaries swirled and sang, sometimes descending to sit on their shoulders and always inspecting the lovely foods the maids would deliver. "But one day her father stopped coming and he never returned. For a while, her mother occasionally came to try and read stories, but it was never the same—she had cocktails on her breath; she would cry; she swatted the birds when they came near her and after a while the birds stopped trying.

"Time passed, and in her late teens and early twenties, Linda

became a beautiful but desperately unhappy woman, constantly search-ing for one person, one idea, or one place that could rescue her from her, well, her
life.
Linda felt charmed but targetless—utterly alone.

And she had mixed feelings about her chunky inheritance—guilt at not having struggled but also sometimes feelings of queenliness and enti-tlement that she knew could only bring bad luck upon her. She flip-flopped.

"And like all truly rich and/or beautiful and/or famous people, she was never really sure whether people were responding to the real
her,
the pinpoint of light trapped within her flesh capsule, or if they were responding merely to the lottery prize she won at birth. She was always on the alert for fakes and leeches, poetasters and quacks.

"I'll add some more about Linda here, too: she was bright. She could discuss particle physics, say—quarks and leptons, bosons and

mesons—and she could tell you who really knew about the subject versus someone who had merely read a magazine article on it. She could name most flowers and she could buy all flowers. She attended Williams

College and she attended drinks parties with film stars in velveteen Manhattan aeries lit by epileptic flashbulbs. She often traveled alone to Europe. In the medieval walled city of Saint-Malo on the coast of France she lived in a small room that smelled of liqueur bonbons and dust.

There she read the works of Balzac and Nancy Mitford, looking for love, looking for an idea, and having sex with Australians while planning her next European destinations.

"In western Africa she visited endless floral quilts of gerbera and oxalis—otherworldly fields where psychedelic zebras chewed tender

blossoms that emerged from the barren soil overnight, borne of seeds awakened from decade-long comas by the fickle Congo rains.

"But it was in Asia, finally, where Linda found what she was looking for—high in the Himalayas amid the discarded, rusting oxygen canisters of mountaineers and the vacant, opiated, and damned bodies of Iowa sophomores—it was there she heard the idea that unlocked the mech-anisms of her soul.

"She heard of a religious sect of monks and nuns in a small village who had achieved a state of saintliness—ecstasy—
release
—through a strict diet and a period of meditation that lasted for seven years, seven months, seven days, and seven hours. During this period, the saint-in-training was not allowed to speak one word or perform any other acts save those of eating, sleeping, meditation, and elimination. But it was said that the truth to be found at the end of this ordeal was
so
invariably wonderful that the suffering and denial was small change compared to the Higher contact achieved at the end.

"Unfortunately on the day of Linda's visit to the small village there was a storm. She was forced to turn back and the next day she then had to return to Delaware for a meeting with her estate lawyers. She was never able to visit the saintly village.

"Shortly thereafter she turned twenty-one. By the terms of her father's will, she then inherited the bulk of his estate. Doris, in a tense moment in a tobacco-smelling Delaware lawyer's office learned that she would only receive a fixed but not unextravagant monthly allowance.

"Now, from her husband's estate Doris had wanted a meal; she got a snack. She was livid, and it was over this money that an irreparable rift between Linda and Doris opened up. Doris untethered herself. She became a well-upholstered, glossily lacquered citizen of money's secret world. Life became a bayeux of British health hydros, purchased Vene-tian bellboys who plucked the jewels from her handbag, fruitless Andean UFO trace hunts, Lake Geneva sanatoriums and Antarctic cruises, where she would shamelessly flatter emirate princes against a backdrop of the pale blue ice of Queen Maud Land.

"And so Linda was left alone to make her decisions, and in the absence of nay-sayers, she decided to try for herself the spiritual release of the seven-year—seven-month—seven-day method.

"But in order to do this, she had to take precautions to ensure that the outside world did not impinge on her efforts. She fortified the walls of her estate, making them taller and armed with laser alarms, fearful not of robbery, but of possible interruptions. Legal documents were drawn up whic h ensured that such issues as taxes would be taken care of.

These documents also stated the nature of her mission in advance and sat there ready to be brandished in the event that Linda's sanity might be questioned.

"Her servants she discharged, save for one retainer named Char-lotte. Cars were banned from the property and the yards and gardens

were let to run wild to spare the annoyances of lawn mowers. Security guards were placed on constant guard around her estate's perimeter, and another security system was hired to monitor the security guards, to prevent them from becoming lax. Nothing was to interrupt her sixteen hours a day of silent meditation.

"And thus one early March, her period of silence began.

"Immediately the yard began to return to the wild. The harsh Ken- tucky Blue monoculture of the lawn quickly became laced with gentler, indigenous flowers and weeds and grasses. Black-eyed Susans, forget-me-nots, cow parsley, and New Zealand flax joined the grasses that began to reclaim, soften, and punctuate the pebbled driveways and paths.

The gangly, luxurious, and painful forms of roses, thorns and their hips overtook the gazebo; wisteria strangled the porch; pyrocanthus and ivies spilled over the rockeries like soups boiling over. Small creatures moved into the yard in abundance. In summer the tips of the grass became

permanently covered in a mist of sunlight sprinkled with silent, imbe-cilic, and amniotic butterflies, moths, and midges. Hungry raucous jays and orioles would swoop and penetrate this airy liquid. And this was Linda's world. She overlooked it from dawn to dusk from her mat on the outdoor patio, saying nothing, sharing nothing, revealing nothing.

"When fall came she would wear wool blankets given to her by

Charlotte until it became too cold. Then she continued to watch her world from inside the tall glass doors of her bedroom. In winter she observed the world's dormancy; in spring she saw its renewal, and again each summer she watched its almost smothering richness of life.

"And this carried on for seven years, in which time her hair turned gray, she ceased menstruating, her skin became like a leather pulled tightly over her bones, and her voice box atrophied, making her unable to speak, even were she to want to do so.

ME-ISM:
A search by an

individual, in the absence of

"One day near the end of Linda's period of meditation, far away on the training in traditional religious

other side of the world in the Himalayas, a priest named Laski was

tenets, to formulate a

personally tailored religion by

reading a copy of the German magazine
Stern,
left in the local village himself. Most frequently a

by visiting mountaineers. In it he came across a fuzzy telephoto of a mishmash of reincarnation,

personal dialogue with a

nebulously defined god figure,