The War Between the Tates: A Novel (44 page)

Erica looks at Zed, unsure if he is joking or asking for sympathy. “But you know much more than astrology. The bookshop—Your lectures—”

“That depends what you mean by knowledge.” Zed takes a heavy breath. “Essentially I haven’t got to first base. I’ve tried, of course. I’ve read a lot of books, done a lot of exercises.”

“But it takes time, you said that yourself. Years sometimes.” She covers a yawn.

“I’ve been at it for years.”

Erica registers the tremor in his voice; she sits forward and tries to attend. “Since you were in Japan.”

“Longer than that. I began reading and studying before I went to California. By 1964 I thought I was really getting somewhere, only I needed more time to concentrate. So I quit my job, sold my car, gave away most of my possessions, and moved into one room in West Hollywood.” Zed grins ironically. “I found out what most students find out; that it’s not so easy to detach yourself from the material. You give up money and success—wanting to own a convertible and a good stereo system, and make tenure and win the American Philosophical Association award. Great. You feel very proud of yourself. Then you find you’re consumed with desire for something really petty, like a hot dog or a hot bath. You try to meditate, but you’re pulled back down to earth by bodily needs—because you have hay fever, or your legs ache in the lotus position.”

“Mm.” Erica leans back against the batik pillows of the day bed, sleepier, than ever.

“But I got past all that—or at least used to it—in Japan,” Zed continues. “I worked hard all year there, and when I got back to America I wanted to take the next step. I wanted enlightenment; I felt entitled to it, even—I had a fairly good opinion of myself then. I decided I was going to go somewhere and meditate seriously: try to go into the Silence, to unite with the All—or however you want to put it.

“So first I went home to see my family, and then I hitched to Cambridge and shut myself up in an apartment some friends had lent me. It was a propitious time—a weekend in August; the phone was turned off, and everybody I knew was out of town.

“So I locked the door and sat down on the carpet and began meditating. I sat there for about two hours, first going through various exercises and then just waiting. Everything was really quiet. I’d lost consciousness of the street outside, of the room, my body; I was concentrating on a smooth blank field, a field of whiteness, expanding infinitely in time and space.

“Then something loud and violent crossed this field, very close to me. I opened my eyes without meaning to and saw it was a big housefly. It buzzed around the room four or five times while I tried to pay no attention to it, and then it flew straight for the window behind me.

“I was very glad of that, because I thought it would get out. But it was too stupid. If it had climbed up a few inches it would have been free; but instead it stayed between the glass and the screen, buzzing. I knew I had to forget about it. I thought of all I had read about enlightenment, all I had learned. I told myself that the fly represented everything I had to get clear of—that its pain and stupid confusion were unreal, part of the world of false appearances. I told myself it was a demon sent to test me. I regulated my breathing and began counting backward from three hundred, trying to turn all external sensory awareness off, to see nothing and hear nothing. I concentrated on whiteness, smoothness, extension, infinity ...And finally—I don’t know how soon, maybe it was only ten minutes, maybe half an hour—something began to happen. There was a kind of focusing, a closing in—

“But then I heard my fly again. It was still there, buzzing and bumping against the glass, and against the screen. Only a tiny sound now, but I felt it here in my stomach: thud, thud. Ow, ow, ow. I was licked. I had to unfold my legs and get up and let the fly out. I raised the screen, and it flew away unevenly into the sun, dizzy with fatigue and surprise and relief, and I said to myself, ‘There go your spiritual ambitions, Sandy.’” He smiles wanly. “And I was right.”

“Didn’t you try again after the fly was gone?”

“Oh sure; I tried. For the next forty-eight hours, day and night. And for months afterward. But it wasn’t any good. I couldn’t get within five miles of where I was that afternoon.”

“But you still meditate,” Erica says, recalling past conversations.

“Yes.” Zed has turned his head away and is speaking to a spot on the green tweed rug. “Only it doesn’t work. I can detach myself from the world all right, but I can’t get to God. I’m stuck in the middle. I’m like that fly, only there’s nobody to open the screen.”

“But Sandy, I don’t see—” Erica frowns. “Why shouldn’t you have let the fly out?” Zed does not answer. “It was kind of you, if it was suffering.” She looks at the window, rises, then sits down again. “Oh. That’s funny. I thought there was a fly here too, behind the glass. But it’s only part of the tree outside.”

“You’re starting to get high.”

“I don’t feel high. The room looks just the same.”

“That’s because you haven’t noticed. See that yellow ashtray there, that’s like a flower?”

“I—Well yes, sort of.” Erica gazes at a shallow clay bowl with round notches in the rim for cigarette butts, which at the same time, without ceasing for a moment to be a small ashtray, is a large golden flower. “You’re right. That’s nice: it’s a primrose, I think. Or maybe a marigold, with those square petals.” She puts out her hand and touches one petal of the ashtray; it feels warm and soft, cold and hard, simultaneously—or rather in rapid alternation.

“And look at Krishna dancing.” Zed gestures at the poster above the day bed.

“Where? Yes, I see—No. He’s not dancing; but he’s waving his arms at us. The blue ones. Only they’re not moving. Well, of course they’re not moving; it’s just a picture.” With a sense of effort, Erica sits up. “I don’t see it now ...Yes, there, again, for a moment. Now, it’s stopped. What’s happening? Why does he do that?”

“It’s the gift of the drug. The world is what you say it is.” Zed’s voice seems to come from nearer than the other end of the day bed.

“I do feel sort of peculiar. When I move my head, the room goes all sideways. Do you feel strange, Sandy? Can you see the poster moving and things like that?”

“Not now. I might see them if I wanted to.”

“Why not? Aren’t you affected at all?”

“Yes. But I’ve had more experience with this sort of thing than you. And I’m not such a visual type.” He shuts his eyes, opens them. “I’m more likely to hear things. I don’t now; but last time I got high here, toward dawn, Ralph and I both heard the pigeons on the roof outside speaking in tongues.” He laughs. “They were crying out to the Lord in artificial foreign languages, like a revival meeting.”

“I don’t hear anything outside at all,” Erica says, glancing toward the window. “It’s all muffled and far away ...But the design of the curtains is weaving,” she adds. “The plaid—Those green stripes like loose basket-work. They’re weaving and woving over and under each other, very quietly and neatly. Do you see that? It’s really lovely.” She does not wait for or hear Zed’s answer; she is watching the rug now: all its different tweed greens. Moss, and grass, and lichen.

“It’s growing together in jigsaw puzzles,” she exclaims, laughing. She doesn’t actually see “grass” or “puzzles”—only an ordinary rug; but one which is silently alive, motionlessly moving, constantly and gloriously renewing itself in existence. The world is alive, she thinks. I must remember that. Everything is alive in every detail. And it comes to her that she is having the experience she wanted to give Sandy, of the goodness and truth of the real world.

“You must look at the rug, Sandy!” she cries. It’s so beautiful, because it’s really there, and it’s a rug.”

“That’s nice.” But he doesn’t even glance at the rug; he looks at her, with his usual abstract smile.

“You’re not looking. But it’s true. Everything in the room is real, and in the right place, and that’s why it’s beautiful. Everything in this room is beautiful.”

“Everything?” Zed says finally, making a gesture that includes himself. Erica does not see it, but she hears him and unfixes her gaze from the contemplation of a very nice green lampshade which has perched on the lamp to her left and is holding the bulb neatly and politely with its circular wire claw.

“Yes.” She looks around. “No. That’s ugly, there.” She points at the jelly glass from which they had drunk their ginger ale. “It’s all lumpy and snotty, with loud smudges. Ugh. It’s horrid. I’m going to hide it.” She leans forward and takes the glass fastidiously by its extreme rim.

“Wait—watch out,” he cautions.

The floor rises with Erica as she rises, and tilts slightly toward her; the walls flutter and circle. “Oh! It’s okay. I just want to get rid of. This thing. Put it where it can’t see us—Golly, the whole room’s dizzy.”

Slowly, holding the glass at arm’s length (it grows uglier every second), Erica negotiates her way across the jigsaw carpet, which is becoming semiliquid, and around a stuffed chair (it supports her in a kindly bearlike way). “Thank you. There.” Reaching the bathroom, she sets the nasty object down, turns. A face is looking at her through a peeling yellow window frame only a foot away: an old woman’s face, blank, white, creased—Recognizing it, she groans. She tries to turn her head away. Cannot. Groans louder.

“Erica?” Zed stands, with difficulty. “Are you all right in there?” He lurches across the room, catches her arm. “Come back and sit down. Christ, the floor’s full of waves ...Here. You all right?”

“Yes. No.” She laughs shudderingly.

“Lean on me: Breathe slowly ...That’s better. You shouldn’t get up so fast. Not good when you’re high.”

Erica breathes several times more. She looks around the room, but it has ceased to be alive or nice. Instead everything is flat and dead; the curtains, the pictures, the rug, the windows seem to have been badly painted onto the walls and floor, like cheap scenery.

“What I saw in the bathroom,” she says abruptly. “In the mirror picture. It’s not just the drug. I keep seeing her anyhow-where, this awful old woman. Only it’s me. I’m turning into her. I’m forty already, isn’t that horrible?”

“No,” Zed says after a considerable pause. “You’ve lived forty years. If you didn’t age, that would be horrible. Like those old film stars you see in L.A., made into plastic mummies of themselves.”

“Yes—But—” Erica hears her voice; a thin disembodied wailing sound. “I’m not used to it,” this voice continues. “You know I used to be very pretty, and wherever I went I looked well. A man came up to me once when I was sitting in front of Emerson Hall and he said I added to the beauty of the scene, the yellow leaves. Like the sun, and the yellow leaves. And wherever. But now I don’t any more. Pretty soon I’ll be like that disgusting jelly glass, spoiling the landscape everywhere. I hate getting old and ugly, I hate it. I hate It!” The wailing turns to sobbing. “Somebody’s crying,” she remarks. “I think it’s me.”

“Right. All right.” Zed is holding her, her face against his shirt, stroking her. The crying fades.

“That’s weird,” Erica says, swallowing a last sob. “I was crying, but not exactly.”

“It’s all right.”

“Thank you.” She hugs him and sits back. “But do you feel that too? Do you hate getting ugly and old?”

A pause. “It’s different for me,” Zed says finally. “I’ve always been ugly. Age doesn’t change that much. What I don’t like is the way time runs out. Knowing there are things I won’t do in this life, places I won’t see. People dying.”

Erica looks around the room, which is no longer flat like scenery but insubstantially three-dimensional, full of colored shadows. “Dying, I’m not afraid of that,” she says finally. “It’s behaving badly at the end. Wearing out weak and whiny and disgusting. I’d like to escape in a car accident, so I won’t have to go through the bad last part of my life. Sometimes I drive fast to help it along, especially when the icy roads last winter. But I might just be crippled for life, so I drive slower.

“I thought it would be nice for it to happen right after Christmas when I was going to fly to Boston,” she adds, watching the shadows slide. “The plane could fall down, so quick and easy. But it snowed too hard, all the flights were folded.” She laughs. “I was very disappointed. Not so much now ...Did you ever feel that?”

A long silence. Erica watches the shadows ducking and sliding.

“Did you ask me something?” Zed says finally.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. I want to answer you. I was thinking about it, but then I forgot ...What was the question?”

This time it is Erica who does not reply. She is absorbed in watching the shadows advance and retreat as the ceiling fixture sways on invisible streams of air. In the circle of brighter light beneath the bird lampshade, skeins of dust swirl like pale silk and then slowly settle through air which is a thin lukewarm blue substance, with levels and currents. Behind it the figure of Zed seems to wobble and fluctuate.

“All the air is full of water,” she says. “You’re very far away ...Why are you so far away in the water?”

“It’s because I’m a double Pisces.” Zed smiles. From a great distance he puts out his long arms to Erica, and around her, pulling her toward him. Oceans of air flow out between them. “Is that better?”

“Yes.” She leans against
him,
sighing. “I guess I’m really high now ...How long will this last?”

“Not long. It’s a short trip. The housewife’s special. We should start coming down fairly soon.”

“I like it. I feel all floaty, as if I were swimming. Diving, da you?”

Zed replies, or does not reply; she is not sure. She is watching the walls of the swimming pool standing up around them tall and white like three angels spreading out their wide white wings to one another. The fourth is sloping in to meet them, alighting his face, the dormer window, is streaked with tears of rain from all the sorrow he has seen outside. Yet she isn’t hallucinating in the conventional sense. She sees only walls; but she knows them to be angels. “The walls are white angels,” she informs Zed.

“That’s’ nice. What are they doing?”

“I don’t know. I think they’re protecting us, as long as we stay here.” She relaxes against him, laughing gently. “I like it here. Let’s stay forever.”