The Crystal Child (28 page)

“Buddhist?”

“Study in life of illusion,” he replied.  “Deeper than Buddha.  Buddhist teaching  says all illusion is disease, must be cured.  But Cervantes shows: life without illusion is impossible.  No Don Quixote, no Sancho Panza  So we have paradox.  Cannot live with illusion, cannot live without.”

Under his prodding, Julia agreed to read the book, which then became the basis — or the excuse — for long conversations that might last far into the night.  She enjoyed these literary trysts, but even more she was drawn to what he told her about his travels, which took him to cities around the world.  He was used to moving in elite circles, but always with a keenly sardonic eye for the follies of those who hired him.  Though he displayed no arrogance, he regarded most of the VIPs he met as great fools.   Often he saw his own work, including the projects that had won him international acclaim, as no less foolish.  “One in ten people I build for can I respect,” he told her.  “Others are hopeless.  No point in fighting.  Give them what they want.  Crazy buildings.  Big, ugly, stupid.  Ego structures.”  And then he burst into laughter.  “Build for fools, make fool of myself, and what happens?  People look at building, say ‘Ah! A great Isobe!’  And so Isobe wins glittering prizes, bigger commissions.”  That was the attitude he took toward DeLeon.  Whenever they talked, he had scorning words for Tlaloc, for its extravagance and grandiosity.  In his presence, as he mocked DeLeon’s boorishness and the bad taste of all those who made him rich and famous, Julia found herself laughing for the first time since her misadventures with Aaron began.  And Isobe in turn appreciated her amusement, as if he saw in her someone who shared his sense of the ridiculous.  For had she not spent years of her life pursuing the most treacherous of all illusions — eternal youth?  And had she not seen her career turn to ashes?  He was sure this had given her a unique insight into the emptiness of success.  “Not many,” he once said, “have enjoyed the benefit of disaster.  You are lucky woman.”  Before she quite realized what was happening, he had succeeded in eroding the self-pity in which she had clothed herself.  He saw her as nobody else did, someone savvy in the ways of a mad world, a wise survivor.  She was being won over to his sense of human folly — and, without thinking twice, she let that happen.  She liked what he saw in her.  He had taught her a healing lesson: the ability to see what she had suffered — the heart-breaking loss of her reputation, her marriage, her professional achievements — as just possibly comic.

***

As much as she insisted she was no longer a doctor, Julia could not help keeping a close professional eye on Aaron.  Since she took most of her meals with him, she began to wonder how he sustained himself.  For days at a time, he seemed to be fasting, taking nothing but water.  She could not be sure about his eating habits — she did not wish to make it seem she was spying on him — but once, for nearly a week, he had not come to dinner, nor had she seen food delivered to his room.  “May I ask about your diet?” she finally asked.  “Just as a matter of professional curiosity?”

“Vegan,” Aaron replied casually.  “And I try to avoid coarse grains, starches, vegetables that need cooking. No nuts or oils.  No spices or stimulants, needless to say.”

“What does that leave besides air and water?”

“Quite a bit, actually,” he laughed.  “If you recall, it was you who took me off meat and potatoes.”

“What are you willing to eat, then?”

“Fruits, if they’re not too fibrous.  But the less potassium, the better.”

“This is something you worked out on your own, I gather.”

“You might say so.  It’s all very intuitive.  I let my taste govern.  There’s a lot I can’t stomach any more — literally so.”

“You must know that the diet you’ve described can’t possibly provide basic nourishment.”

“And yet, here I am, Doctor.  Fit as a fiddle.”

He was right about that.  Though he seemed to be growing thinner, he seemed neither weak nor listless.  His eyes were bright, his skin clear, even glowing in that peculiar way that suggested he had been rubbed down with pearl dust.  He was energetic as he moved around his quarters.  She had seen him moving heavy furniture and lifting stacks of books with ease. Where did his strength come from?  Beyond a half-hour or so of early-morning yoga, his only physical activity was an occasional midnight swim.  Julia often swam with him, using the large pool outside her room.  Aaron was a far better swimmer than she was; he could do thirty or forty fast laps, leaving her well behind. He swam nude, which allowed her to observe his physique: straight, well-formed, hairless, smooth-muscled.  After he had finished swimming, he would lie under the stars, his eyes half-closed, falling into a deep reverie that might last an hour.  Several times she stayed beside him in the night, gazing at him — his face, his body, his small, bud-like penis always in repose.  This was the boy she had made love with — it seemed a hundred years ago.  Memories that were more physical sensations than images came back to her, leaving her faintly aroused.  Would she yield to him again?  She did not trust herself to say no, but the occasion never arose.  Though she too was nude and only inches away, Aaron showed no interest in her.  Sometimes he spoke about the stars, usually recounting the myths that various cultures told about the constellations.  He was to all appearances a pubescent boy, but he never spoke of sex, kept no books on the subject, hinted at no need.  Was it possible that his encounter with Julia was his only sexual experience? Had that exhausted his appetite and his interest — one swift, poignant sample?

Julia began to keep closer track of his diet.  When she inquired in the kitchen about the food somebody must be preparing for Aaron, one of the Mexican cooks told her the
muchacho
had strange tastes.  He liked juices with a few drops of filtered honey.  What kind of juices?  Clear juices was the answer.  Nothing too acidic.  Apple, grape, pear, cherry, mango — all well-strained. No seeds, no pulp. Lately a great deal of
granadilla.

“Passion fruit?”

“
Si
.”

All very healthy, but hardly enough to keep body and soul together.  When she asked again about his eating habits, Aaron grew annoyed. “My diet is mythologically correct,” he said as if that put an end to it.

“I don’t understand.  Mythologically correct … meaning ?”

“What did the gods live on?  Ambrosia.  Fruit nectars, honey.”

“But, Aaron, you’re not a god.”

“Not yet, perhaps,” he smirked.  “Give me time.  Food makes the man.”

“Please, be serious.”

“All right.  Something tells me to avoid things that cloud my system.”

“In what sense ‘clouds’?”

“Anything light can’t strike through. Anything that makes me less able to open and take in.  Like sex.”  He laughed.  “Amazing how obsessed people are with sex.  Chained to their reproductive duty.”

“That’s all you see in it?  Nothing that amounts to love?”

“Love as they understand it is a detour, a distraction.”  He was showing the same impatience he displayed whenever he could not explain about himself.  “There are teachings you should look into.  I’ll find you some books.”

“What teachings?”

“About our original condition.  We were creatures of light, you know.  The primal body cast no shadow.”  Suddenly, with a mischievous wink, he added, “They say Jesus never shat.  Did you know that?  And how would a gastroenterologist diagnose that?  Why, of course, as constipation.”  He doubled over laughing.

***

For long periods of time, while they sat together, Aaron, as if in a waking trance, wandered in some hidden landscape of the mind.  Through their first several weeks together, the closest he came to explaining his behavior was to call it “exploring.” On a few occasions he would turn to her to ask a question, as if he were trying to confirm a puzzling experience, something that might be a private delusion.  “Did we have a visitor from someplace cold?  The far north?” or “Did you hear me call out just then?” There had been no visitor, nor had he called out.  Once he asked, “Who were the people we saw from the window yesterday? What were their names?”  There had been no people.  Or again: “The light in the sky last night … do you remember in which direction we were facing?”  There had been no light.  He asked these questions, not as if he feared he was losing touch, but as if he were inquiring about casual matters of fact. When she corrected him, he nodded his agreement.  At times he was clearly perplexed by his own perceptions and was seeking to adjust them.  He was like a blind man who had been given back his sight and needed to learn to see.  He might ask, “Is that red?” Or  “Is that my face in the mirror?”

Though his behavior was eccentric, Julia never felt she was in the company of a deranged person.  Rather she was with someone who kept going in and out of focus: boy-man, man-boy.  He could at times be severely analytical, comparing something he had read with his own experience.  For most of each day, he carried on with her as if he were her peer, a companion her age or even older.  His conversation had that sobering level of maturity.  And beyond maturity there was undeniable brilliance.  In the year they had been apart, he had kept so closely abreast of research in genetics that she would have been hard-pressed to keep up with him, even if she had cared to.  But she quickly made it clear that she had no interest in medicine.  “Medicine belongs downstairs,” she told him, dismissing the subject.  He studied her for a moment, then agreed as if he shared the same inner geography of Tlaloc as she did.

“Yes, downstairs.” He accepted that.  Like Julia, he regarded science as an amusement, almost a folly in which others had lost their way.  If he referred to biology at all, it was with a wry dismissiveness.  He had gone on to other things.

From his own studies and from the tutors his parents had hired, Aaron had gained a reading background well beyond his years.  He had read any number of classics, several major works of philosophy, and had picked up a reading knowledge of French.  His conversation was studded with references that went beyond Julia’s reach.  Whatever she had learned in college about Virgil and Dante, Voltaire and Goethe was a long way behind her and badly blurred with the passage of time.  More than ever she realized that her career had made her one of those doctors who knew more about the endocrine gland than Shakespeare.  Without medicine to fall back upon as her calling in life, she was shamefully illiterate.  In Aaron’s presence, she sometimes had to confess to being embarrassingly undereducated, so much so that she was willing to endure long silences rather than risk revealing her ignorance. Feeling so intimidated by someone who looked like a child still kept her off-balance.  When they had last known each other, she was still his doctor, a figure of some authority.  Now he had no need of her in that capacity; as far as she could tell, he had no need of her at all, though he insisted that he did.  “But why?” she asked.

“I want you here until the end.  There will be an end, you know.”

“You expect to die?”

“I expect to … pass away.  Of all the euphemisms, that one makes the most sense.”

In her loneliness, Julia turned to the vast collection of art books that Sylvana had accumulated.  Most were coffee-table editions of classic works.  Had Sylvana ever looked at them?  Probably not; some were stacked in closets or on shelves still in their cellophane wrappings.   Despite her social airs, Sylvana was not a highly educated woman. Like DeLeon, she valued the art with which she furnished the house for its cash value.  In conversation she often could not remember the names of works or artists that hung in plain sight of the dinner table.   Julia made no claim to being more aesthetically literate.  Her interest was single-minded.  She rapidly thumbed through each volume she came upon, searching for pictures that illustrated the myths of Eros.  These she studied at great length, poring over every detail as if she were decoding a hidden message.  In picture after picture, the god of love appeared as a youth, if not an infant.  But the child often appeared in the company of a voluptuous Venus, a sleeping goddess waiting for sex or preening herself for the act of love.  The pairing was a convention of western art, but seen with a fresh eye, the combination was jarring.  Venus, the fecund lover so enticingly voluptuous, attended by the innocent, still unformed boy at her side or asleep in her arms, a boy who was usually identified as her son.  In “The Toilet of Venus” by Reubens, the buxom, well-fleshed seductress admires herself in a mirror held by the little boy.  Have they just awakened from a night of passion?  Could such a youth satisfy the goddess of love?  In “Venus and Cupid” by Grimaldi, the lovers frolic in a landscape.  Again, Venus is the motherly female, Eros the immature youth.  In a Titian painting, Venus covers the eyes of the child Eros.  The usual interpretation reads that as meaning love is blind.  But it might also be the beginning of a sado-masochistic episode, the lovers binding and blindfolding one another.  In LeSueur’s “Sleeping Venus,” the boy watches over the naked and recumbent female in a post-coital interlude.  Il Bronzino’s canvas was the most shocking.  It shows the boy Eros groping Venus’s bosom, leaning so awkwardly to kiss her that this might be his first lesson in love.   In the background, a fierce-faced Cronos glowers.  Why?  Because the adoring couple will escape the bounds of time?

Old, young.  Mother, child.  Why did the world accept this scandalously unnatural coupling?  Was this a theme that resounded in the depths of the soul — that Eros must be a child, the emblem of a presexual or nonsexual or transsexual love?  Did these images reveal a longing for a purity and innocence that sex could not defile? Was there another eroticism that had nothing to do with physical intercourse, something beyond man and woman, lust and love?

The picture that stuck most in her mind was a cloyingly sentimental Victorian painting that now looked like little better than a magazine-cover illustration.  It was called “Love Locked Out.”  There was a single figure, a nude boy.  He was faced away, but his body, lithe and beautifully shaped, suggested he was pre-pubescent.  Aaron’s age.  If a man had painted the picture, it would have radiated homoerotic intentions.  But the painter was a woman, a very proper lady.  Why, Julia wondered, did that make the picture less erotic?  Perhaps because the artist offered a chaste interpretation of her work, insisting it had a higher spiritual significance.  She said it showed Cupid — as usual, a boy — standing mournfully at the door of a tomb.  The meaning?  That love must end with death.  But Julia was certain the artist was covering up.  She wondered if the door did not symbolize the imprisoning passions of man and woman from which innocent love must be turned away.  Love locked out, sent into exile, was on the path to some higher pleasure.  Was that not the root meaning of “ecstasy”?  To stand
out of
the body, free of its mortality?