S. (14 page)

The person you
should
be writing sly advisements to is our dear
madre
. Never, really, the most acute manageress of her affairs, family or otherwise, she is flipping her lid down there, in my opinion—acting and dressing like a seventy-year-old beach bimbo (she watches with inane delight something called “Golden Girls” on television), going out on disgusting dinner “dates” (I think at that age the thrill is mostly in just the eating, but God knows) with some octogenarian former admiral she’s lured into her sun porch, and doing unspeakable things with what little of Daddy’s money she hasn’t already wasted. She’s fallen in with some smooth young broker who’s got her to believe she’s the Hetty Green of South Florida—by the time the two of them get done “adjusting” her portfolio there won’t be so much as a treasury bond left. There is a whole tribe of people in Florida—brokers, podiatrists, chiropractors, faith healers, home helpers, seductive practical nurses—who prey on the old and senile, and one of my fears
as Mother gets battier is she’ll give all the silver away as a tip to the boy who trims the palm trees in her patio.

You’re just a little blue water away from her, and all of your fancy hidalgo friends have fail-safe apartments in Miami in case the Sandinistas take over—couldn’t you go visit her and see what’s going on? My intuition is she’s being taken terrible advantage of by
men
. She always was man-crazy, let’s face it—all those nights dragging poor Daddy off to some party or other so she could flirt and flash her boobs while all he wanted was to sit home marinating in his old books and having yet another whiskey, leaving us in the care of some evangelical monster like Mrs. Van Liew or that girl from Needham whose boyfriends tried to keep us quiet with tokes of pot. Think of it if she gets married again—Daddy’s ashes whirling in their grave, and all those lovely Perkins and Price and Peabody antiques distributed among our step-siblings, of whom I’m sure the admiral will supply a greedy passel. I’d go myself but I’m very tied up here—I’ve become rather important in running the place, funnily enough.

Happy Independence Day, if you remember what that is, and
devoción mucho
to Esmeralda and the six little ones from their loving
tía
and
hermana política
. The Latin element you see in the Southwest isn’t as classy as your set in Monte Avila. Actually, Jere, you’d like it here—lots of after-hours action, and more opportunities for wheeling and dealing than you might imagine.

Fondly in spite of all wrongs past and present,

Sis

[
tape
]

Oh my goodness, dear Midge, what a time we’ve been having!
Loved
hearing all your news, it brought me back to the
real world. How awful that Irving’s framing shop was robbed! Well, as you say, it should strengthen his non-attachment. Thank God he never has any
real
works of art in there. And how sad about Donna’s husband! They really had no warning? It’s hard to believe we’re all getting to that age, when the wheel of karma takes us for another spin. Of course, he
was
ten years older than she, and Donna a bit elderly herself. I used to worry about her noisy breathing during the Sun Salutations—it was rather distracting, to be frank. As to Ducky Bradford, I’m not surprised. There was always something not quite
right
there, even when he and I were closest and I suppose you could say I was in love with him. I wouldn’t have admitted that four months ago, but needless to say I’ve shed some inhibitions. Tell Gloria being left for a gay is no worse than being left for another woman, in fact it’s better, since it shows you were fighting a losing game all along. Foolish is what she must feel, mostly—men
do
make you feel foolish, unless you watch your step with them every
inch
. What a woman has to realize is that as far as she’s concerned
she’s
number one, too, just like a man. I don’t mean number one-two, I mean number one also. You know—we’ve conditioned to think of ourselves as number two, like Eve and Avis.

Where was I when we left off? I can’t believe I was still in love with Vikshipta and bumping around on a backhoe. I’m living now with two other women—one other woman, really, since the third woman, Nitya, has had a kind of nervous breakdown or overdose of something and is in the infirmary here. She was the head accountant and juggled all the finances—you have no idea, Midge; they have investments everywhere, and Kali Club discos in places like West Germany and Israel, and meditation-and-massage centers, and of course bookstores and video outlets in a lot of malls and
downtowns now across the entire U.S., around the world in fact—there’s a very important bookstore in the Bahamas, on one of the outer islands where you wouldn’t think people would read much, but apparently they must, or maybe it’s mostly mail-order business. The way it seems to function, the publishing end of it, including all the tapes of the Arhat like the one I sent to Irving—evidently free of charge since I haven’t received any check from you yet—and the therapy and yoga lessons you can take from video cassettes, all this end of it does its accounts through this one store because banking in the Bahamas is somehow easier, I guess because, being so tiny, it doesn’t have all the usual oppressive regulations and wants to encourage dollars. As a businessman, the Arhat is wonderfully open and permissive—whenever a group of sannyasins start up a car-wash business or a restaurant or an escort service, he lets them use his name and picture and the sunset colors. I guess anybody could put on a purple jumpsuit and a mala and perform the same services, but people like to see the Arhat’s name on the front door or up in lights or wherever, because it signifies that the people—the people operating the businesses—are always so serene and cheerful and don’t drink or do street drugs, and of course, because work for us is worship instead of slave-wage labor, we can charge a little less. It’s a beautiful philosophy, as you can see from the fact that it
works
. I mean, it works in the world as well as here.

Anyway, poor dear little Nitya, who used to be a stock analyst in Seattle before she saw the Arhat being interviewed on “Donahue,” has been under the weather mentally, and the various medications that Ma Prapti—she’s the head of the clinic here, and a
very
impressive woman, absolutely dedicated and the direct opposite of all Charles’s money-hungry pretentious colleagues at MGH—the different pills and injections she
was giving Nitya to keep her on an even keel began to work at cross-purposes, and my friend Alinga, I think I mentioned her briefly before, is training
me
to take over. You know I used to be good at numbers, I used to do all of Charles’s billings and insurance-claim forms, before he got a secretary to take over, that slut Marcelene Rabinowitz as it turned out. Well, I’m all over that now, and beyond anger, really, of any sort, or any emotion except love and acceptance. Charles now just seems impossibly small, like one of those bugs you see crawling across a piece of paper or a bathroom tile and though it looks like a mere dot you know if it was magnified enough would show fangs and hairy legs and long pokey things, but who wants to bother? He’s been rather quiet since he went to spy on Pearl—I bet she told him off. Do tell me if he approaches you again, and don’t not be rude to him for
my
sake. You can be as rude as you want.

I’m sitting here in my office, it used to be Alinga’s but she’s moved up to Nitya’s, which is next to where Durga, when she’s here and not on the road doing talk shows and promotion, has a kind of anteroom to the Arhat’s ranch house, which I think I told you about last time, with all this silvery fat cheap furniture in it, and the bleached-wood desk. Everybody else is off for their siesta but, you know me, I never could take a nap in the middle of the day, I’m too hyper—Irving used to say my subtle body was tuned up too high for my sthula one. Also there’s a lot of sludge to work through in Nitya’s account books and records—
heaps
of papers and figures, and nothing quite matching up, as far as I can see—it’s really too much for anyone to make total sense of. I shouldn’t talk, I guess, even to you, about the finances, but, in a nutshell, on the one hand there really
are
substantial assets and income and some very generous donors, mostly these women and
widows who either live in Beverly Hills or in Canada, oddly enough, which you don’t think of as much of a place normally either for money or for Buddhism, and then on the other side of the ledger a lot of leakages that aren’t just the Arhat’s limousines and diamond wristwatch bands. Even though everybody works free as a form of worship, the ashram still didn’t come out of thin air; there were millions spent on the A-frames and the trailers and the mall and now the Hall of a Millionfold Joys—the steel is all in place but they’re waiting now for the sunset-colored vinyl panels—and all the kinds of construction—just one backhoe costs sixty thousand dollars, did you know that!—and the irrigation and septic systems, even though both could be better, let me tell you, especially the latter. Now that the really hot months are here, there’s a stink comes up from where they buried the septic tanks, and the creek is so low they’ve turned off the Fountain of Karma except for half-hours at sunset and dawn, and the fields are baking hard as clay even though Hanuman, our agricultural supervisor, who used to teach plant synergy at Michigan State, bought miles and miles of gauze and had the artichokes and hybrid tomatoes and experimental poppies covered with it to make shade. Also all the fencing and armaments and surveillance equipment our security forces need costs more than a penny, believe me, Midge. Their chief, this nice young man Agni, is very close to Durga and in her office all the time, murmuring and shouting and laughing, and I suppose there can be no arguing that we do need all this security, there is so much hatred in the world against simple love and peace. The lawsuits are another expense—these various pompous self-important authorities are pretending we’ve infringed water rights, zoning laws, land-use regulations, even immigration laws—they want to send Fritz back to Germany and the Arhat
back to India! Really, this is what you get nowadays for making the desert bloom and offering our poor poisoned world an example of life-style a notch or two above the rat race. I’m telling you all just so you’ll have an idea of the tangle I’m trying to deal with in my new capacity.

You ask about the Arhat. What can I say you don’t already know from his publicity?—except that, up close, he seems a little sad, and I have this ridiculous instinct to mother him. I see him quite often now, usually along with Alinga or Durga or Satya, who’s in charge of PR, and it seems often they have to put the words in his mouth, since he does nothing when they describe this or that emergency to him but smile and look as if he wishes he were elsewhere. Of course, he
is
a jivan-mukta, which means he’s really in nirvana and is staying on earth only to be polite, in a way—about the only thing that perks him up is getting more publicity for the ashram, even publicity that seems adverse to the rest of us. For instance, he insists on being driven every afternoon way over to Forrest to get a Diet Coke from the machine in the bus station there—not actually a station, just a cement shelter next to the motel—and every time he does it there are more picketing people there, local rednecks and Pentecostal Chicanos angry about one thing or another and most of all about the Arhat’s being so simply
beautiful
, and so now Agni has to send a vanful of security personnel along in case there’s an attack, which in turn brings out more rednecks, with shotguns and clubs and ropes—it’s not as if we don’t have Diet Coke right here at the ashram, but when Durga pointed out all this to him he just smiled and said—I
wish
I could do his accent—“We must rup the bastards’ noshes in it. It amushes me and it amushes Buddha.”

[
Leaving off attempted accent and becoming conspiratorial
.]
Midge. I just had the most ex
cit
ing i
de
a. It’s
scary
, it’s so exciting. If the next time I go in to see him I could carry this little tape recorder in my bra under my sari, so the little grid that picks up sound sticks up so only the one layer of silk is in the way, maybe I can get something of his actual casual conversation for you and Irving and the girls to hear! It would be strictly private, of course—you mustn’t make or sell duplicates or anything—but I
do
so want to share with you his precious presence while I still can. It would also be for history—I don’t really think,
entre
just
nous
, the ashram is going to last forever. I think it’s too big a step up for the way the world is now. The outside pressure—all these lawyers and reporters and visiting firemen and county officials in suits, they’ve become so common around the Chakra we don’t even chant and shake tambourines at them any more—all this outside pressure is beginning to tell, everybody acts antsy and spooked—Ma Prapti says she has no more beds for bad drug trips, and Durga goes around with this icy-white face and staring green eyes looking like the Gorgon, and my dear friend Alinga spaces out more and more—sometimes, honestly, I feel I’m the only sane one left. The heat, no kidding, is terrific! A hundred twenty, twenty-five every day from eleven to four. That place I used to go out to by the red rocks to be by myself is like an oven now, even after the sun goes down. I don’t know how the lizards keep from getting fried. Be grateful for your sea breeze and all those leafy oaks and maples. To think, we used to sleep under a puff even this time of year! If I sound homesick, maybe I am. I miss the sea and also frankly I could do sometimes with a pop of Jack Daniel’s, the way we used to do after yoga, to settle the shakti and stirred-up vrittis, after Irving had left. Oops. I shouldn’t have put that on tape, in case you play it for him. And I’ve never figured out how to
erase. Well, anyway, I’ve said plenty for now, let’s leave some tape for later, for what I said.

[
Breathlessly
] O.K., Midge, here we go. [
Noise. Amplified cloth and finger friction. Underlying rustling that may be heartbeat. Much ensuing silence and some unintelligibility. Female voices, difficult to distinguish. One male voice, indicated below by italics
.] Shanti, guru.