Slow Hand (27 page)

She skipped vespers and dinner again, telling herself aloud that she should lay off her knee as much as possible, not telling herself but knowing that she did not want to see Anne or Lisa. She wrapped the knee thickly in winter wools and wished she had hot water to soak it in. As she feared or as she hoped, Anne came knocking on her cabin door about seven. Karen didn’t
answer the first knock or the second. She knew Anne was there, of course; she knew Anne wouldn’t come in unasked; she knew from the absence of footsteps that Anne was waiting and from the absence of any sound at all that Anne was waiting patiently, humbly, apologetically, wearily, and defiantly outside her door. She didn’t get up from her reading chair (“I must stay off my knee,” she said to herself by way of excuse) but called out, “Come in.”

She hardened her heart when Anne hugged and held her. She said “What do you want?” When Anne didn’t answer, she said, “Why, Anne, why?” and looked out the window so that she wouldn’t cry again.

“Because I love her.”

“You’re infatuated with her.”

“How do you know that”? Anne asked.

“Because she’s not your type” was the first thing that Karen said, and then she said a lot of other things about Lisa—how loud she was, how obnoxious, how disruptive, how careless, how intrusive, how self-centered, how lacking in self-control, how immature, how ill-suited to life at Julian Pines—before she repeated the observation “She’s not your type.” Karen said all these things in a measured, calm voice, all the time looking out the window. She waited for Anne’s explosion, hoped for it, longed for it in some part of herself (probably in the fat that lay around her left ventricle) she thought she had melted off running.

Anne reached her neck around Karen’s face so that Karen had to look at her, but she didn’t yell that it was none of her goddamn business and she didn’t kick the desk and she didn’t pound her fists on the wall, any or all of which Karen waited for, hoped for, longed for, expected. Instead she brushed her cheek against Karen’s and so forced her to pull away for the second time. She said, “Who is my type, Karen? You?”

“Of course, me. Me. Me. I love you. I’ve loved you for seven years. I go out every day and run you off, and just when I think I might be getting somewhere, you pull this. My God, Anne, look what you’ve done to my knee.”

• • •

They talked late into the night, in and out of a circle the circumference of which was Anne’s contention that they would be lovers still and always if Karen hadn’t decided that their attachment was somehow inimical to the community life they were trying to lead and Karen’s conviction that in spite of her unspeakable sorrow—it felt like the end of the world—she was, after all, right. Inside the circle was this new relationship which, Karen said, was equally inimical, which, Karen thought several times but only said once, was really much
more
inimical because Lisa was herself inimical to the whole spirit of Julian Pines Abbey, a place of silence, order, peace, prayer, and simple pleasures. Inside the circle, too, was Anne’s desire for sex, which Anne wanted (but Karen didn’t) to include among the simple pleasures, to make a congenial companion to or (when her argument became most intense and emphatic) a necessary component of silence, order, peace, and prayer. At that Karen snorted, but the conversation proceeded amicably and, it must be admitted, predictably, given the other conversations, theological, philosophical, literary, political, and psychological that Anne and Karen had had, usually late into the night, during those five years of daily runs. Conversations that were as often as not about lust, love, and community life.

Somewhere around 2:00 A.M. Anne advanced the theory (and Karen expressed skepticism of it, though later she began to think it had some merit) that the essence of life at Julian Pines, what made it different from other monasteries, what made it a place where women like she and Karen (and, yes, Lisa) could survive and flourish, was the blank pageness of it, the way you had to invent life every day and eschew the hierarchical assumption that peace is a higher good than passion or the clichéd assumption that peace and passion were mutually exclusive. Karen’s refutation descended from these lofty heights to a more personal level at which point Anne accused her of seriously undervaluing Lisa, a brilliant and beautiful woman, and Karen charged Anne with so blatantly overvaluing brilliance and beauty (Anne insisting here that “beautiful” referred not to any physical traits but to a wide spectrum of virtues) that they blinded her to the presence of serious defects.

Somewhere in the midst of all this heady (though Karen could feel it in her throbbing limb) talk, somewhere, that is, around three, came frantic knocking at the door, and, without waiting for Karen’s response, Lisa threw the door open and stumbled in, face dirty and tearful, long hair wildly knotted, shoulders defeated, voice distraught. “Oh my God, Anne, where have you been? I’m a mess. I’ve looked everywhere. Do you have any idea what time it is? I was afraid you were lost in these fucking mountains.” She took Anne in her arms. “Oh how could you do this to me? Anne, darling, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Karen, wondering at the extravagance of the drama, cynically admiring Lisa’s convincing performance, and trying to figure out if Anne were so deeply deluded that she didn’t detect the artifice, forbore repeating Lisa’s question and said, quietly, calmly, as though soothing an overwrought child, “We were talking, Lisa, but we’re finished now.”

Anne looked a bit bewildered, from one woman to the other, then kissed Lisa on the cheek and said, “Go back home, dear one. I’m fine. Karen and I are talking, and we’re
not
finished.” This firmness reassured Karen that Anne smitten was still Anne, but she noted unhappily the longing in Anne’s fingers as Lisa let go of them and left. “Quite a scene,” Karen said.

“Did she ever tell you,” Anne asked, “that her mother worked for the American Theatre Company?”

“No,” Karen said, “she told me that her mother was a gypsy.”

Although they talked until dawn, Karen didn’t manage to convince Anne that Lisa’s flamboyant immaturity was, in fact, flamboyant immaturity and hardly conducive to a decent, much less elevating, relationship. Nor did Anne manage to convince Karen that licking Lisa’s labia did, in fact, contribute to her own growth, to the mission of the abbey community, to the spiritual renewal of the universe. Lisa left Julian Pines a month later that year (as Karen knew she would), wanting loudly and melodramatically to take Anne with her, but Anne, in spite of an anguish that she, too, expressed rather too vociferously for
Karen’s taste, stayed and Karen’s knee healed, slowly, over time. Although the conversations changed somewhat—Anne’s rhetoric, for example, became a bit less grandiose, and Karen’s dismissal of Anne’s defense of lust and love a bit less adamant—they continued dense, long, loving, and repetitive. Karen had hopes, unspoken even to herself, that Anne would settle down, embrace celibacy, and cease in general to agitate quite so severely her, Karen’s, life. Endorphin highs were nice, but running was dangerous.

The hopes persisted for years, seemed, in fact, fulfilled, until Teresa came. And then Karen let them go, because you couldn’t make the same objections to Teresa that you made to Lisa. It was actually hard to make any objection at all except that she was sometimes vague and never raised her voice at the end of a question. She loved Teresa. Everyone loved Teresa. And Teresa’s sexual relationship with Anne seemed so quiet, simple, and joyful that you almost, sometimes, might think that Anne was, at least partly, right about lust and love. You might even romanticize the relationship, you might say to yourself, well, Anne has settled down, to monogamy if not celibacy. Karen did all these things, and thought that she had finally come to terms with both the issues and personalities involved, when she, engaged one night with Anne in late talk and mutual comforting, felt desire, and Anne, too, wanted more than holding. And suddenly, though she walked away still longing, the hard edges of Karen’s hardly won clarity blurred, and when that night she ran her hands down the inside of her thighs to stop the longing, she felt a certain blurriness there, too, and thought, for the first time in a long while, of running again.

By this time, though, Karen was the priest at Julian Pines (Beatrice had argued against using that word, so concretely did it conjure up a male human being, a hierarchy, a corrupt church, in the imaginations of all who heard it, but Anne had countered, cogently, most of them thought, and voted accordingly, that the very contrast between those expectations and the reality of
their
priest—a woman who conceived her priest part as just that, a part, no more or less important than other parts, she could play in the group—was itself salutary both for themselves
and for their many visitors and correspondents) and spent the hours she wasn’t painting and tending roses talking through troubles, fitting words to music and music to words, laying on hands. And in this way more time passed without Karen taking up again her weird and long-winded sport.

Late October in the Sierras can be starkly dry with pine needles and cones crunching underfoot, giving off the scent of mountain forest and holiday greens. Halloween day reached eighty-six degrees by midafternoon, was seventy at dusk, and plunged to forty by nine. As soon as it began to get dark, mountain friends brought children, theirs and neighbors’, to the abbey’s common house for tricks and treats. For treats, Jan made hot chocolate, Kathleen baked black-bottomed cupcakes, and Karen caramelized small apples from the orchard. For tricks there were witches’ incantations.
Good
witches, the nuns carefully explained to the children (and hoped the parents would absorb, too), as most witches were, and are. Anne, Jan, Karen, Teresa, and Beatrice dressed the parts in costumes culled from twenty-five years’ rummaging through used clothes sent, unsolicited, by supporters of the contemplative life. “Pray for me,” said the letters accompanying the clothes, and so the community did, in their fashion, even as they pulled ruffled polyester blouses, barely wrinkled, out of bottomless boxes. Those they sent on, along with most of the skirts, coats, nightgowns, belts, dresses, and handbags, to local thrift stores and shelters. What they kept were jeans, wool and flannel shirts, fabric remnants, and occasionally attire suitable for dressing up, down, or different. Donna had discovered a gray bodysuit in a recent box which she wore this hallowed eve with oddly shaped corduroy ears. “Coyote,” she whispered in response to a young questioner. Louise and Kathleen, having declared themselves weary of witches, wore, respectively, a dramatically colored and designed Renaissance gown, somewhat too large and badly stained, and a huge brown paper garment stuffed with cereal boxes collected from a neighbor’s trash. “A bag of groceries, of course.” Sharon came late and didn’t dress, and Karen realized that probably no one had thought to warn the
relative newcomer of the coming chaos or to point out the cupboard where accumulated costumes lay ready for play or party.

The children laughed gratifyingly at the cackling but not particularly scary women and at the overexcited dog, Kiera, who ran in circles and licked their sticky faces. They shifted in their seats in the middle of Jan’s ghost story, sign not so much, Karen thought, of boredom as of longing for more conventionally sweet pastures of miniature Hershey bars and full-sized Snickers. After they left, Karen sighed at the mess made in less than an hour and took the largest broom to the common room floor while Louise and Beatrice shook crumbs out of the rugs and wiped up the brownish stains. Donna reported a puddle of pee in one corner, and Kathleen seemed to remember a small boy huddled there. “I’ll bet his mother told him not to ask to use the toilet,” she said, “either because she thinks we don’t have one or because it seemed to her unseemly to mention such an object in a house of prayer.”

Jan drew the curtains, dimmed the lights, and chose carefully from her collection of tapes. Before her arrival at Julian Pines, the good nuns, under Louise’s tutelage, did contra and Irish folk dancing on Halloween and other celebratory occasions. But Jan had brought rock music and amazing dance skills that she insisted could be easily learned, and soon she had all but Louise convinced of their cathartic capabilities. Louise she won over by incorporating lower back exercises and learning with great enthusiasm the folk steps for less raucous entertainment. Karen was not, on either contra or rock nights, a very enthusiastic dancer, but some times, Halloween usually one of them, she let herself be pulled, always by Anne, to the middle of the floor, where she abandoned herself to the pounding rhythms and lost for an hour or two that persistent sense of herself (though it was, of course, less acute now, less pervasive than it had been at seventeen) as too tall for grace.

She had used that phrase once, “too tall for grace”—it had been her Aunt Pearl’s pronouncement on Karen-at-fourteen-years-and-almost-six-feet—when she and Anne were first experimenting with sex. She had felt so, well, limby and jerky
next to Anne, who moved smoothly over Karen’s stretched-out body and who, Karen had thought with awe and unstinting tenderness, moved like a dancer even when she came. “You may be,” Anne had said, “too tall for Grace, but you’re not too tall for me.” In that sweet and silly pun (wordplay being one of Anne’s many addictions and attractions) was, Karen recognized, the beginning of her long, slow, and sometimes painful process of standing up straight.

The witches left their costumes on and were the first to dance; Karen liked the long skirt at her calves and found softly erotic her circle of four—Beatrice seemed to have disappeared—black-outfitted women shaking, stretching, rolling, waving, and bending their witch-clothed bodies. “We look like nuns,” Teresa shouted above the music, and they all laughed. Beatrice reappeared and joined the circle, which after a few minutes broke into a circle of three and a pair, Anne and Teresa. Damn them, Karen thought, oh, damn them both.

On another night she might have scolded the voice, called up her less belligerent spirits, repeated, incantationlike, the numerous virtues of the two witches dancing alone. But it was Halloween, there was mischief in the air, and she let the curse stand without censure, without comment, without even wondering what she meant by it. She just kept dancing. Both circles widened again, by the addition of the now uncostumed, though Donna left on her coyote ears. A weird woman, Karen thought, even weirder than the rest of us.