I don’t know what it was like anywhere else. I do know this. If you don’t play to win in America, you usually lose. At least I don’t see how you can continue to grow up being what you were born to be, and still lead a normal life in the true sense of the word from the beginning, without winning. The pressures are too great to win. Too great for the average weak social animal to resist. Even those meant to be with us, in both the familial and cosmic sense, are also being influenced by the ‘vise’ of American life, tempted too to play with the slippery teeth of American society, go hide and seek, merge and leave, making their lives either too neat or too messy, in an attempt to reconcile their nature with this society; forever, digesting new food, new quarry. So, much of the unenlightened information that reaches us is advanced, not in true knowledge of your essence — very few are capable of interpreting essence — but from their own projections about society. They look at what you do as either tending to move toward ‘making it’ or ‘tearing it’ down, depending on whether they are an establishment or anti-establishment person. Nothing is coincidental. Remember that big row the word ‘anti-establishmentarianism’ made on national T.V. in the Fifties, on some quiz show? In grade school, then, we thought it was because the word was the longest we had ever heard and a challenging task to spell. When we mastered the spelling of it, the idea was to spell it faster than anyone else could. It was a real tongue tripper. Well, anti-establishment has become a big word. It negates society because of the anti-values outside of society too. Neither point of view looks at an individual realistically. Or encompasses everything an individual is.
Communication is the network that strings all our teeth together. Gossip stains them. Pure thoughts produce pure smiles, the real shining brightness. I’ve been there, where truth is a suspect. In the typical business office those jaws tighten when I tell a truth. The jaws are all waiting for me to enter their dark tunnel. If I float down the office corridor seemingly obscure and cloud/bent, it is not that I am out of touch with reality, Ms. Chorister. In all walks of life people’s minds gravitate towards gossip, but in its lowest form, and unenlightened with good intentions, it is malicious. When I get to the floating stage in the office, or should I add, despite the office, it’s because my level of well being is rising: refrigerator is well/stocked, wardrobe levitates with new Jag denim and silk blouses, my children grow child/like again on the steady diet of a semi-weekly paycheck. When the fringe benefits of working begin to pile up, an interesting thing happens, I begin to forget fear. I forget what my life condition was before I started the job. I forget the pressures that brought me to the job interview, and in my amnesia of relaxation, forget essential on-the-job training — fear acts like a built-in burglar alarm system in a robot, that protects Truth from breaking and entering at a moment’s notice — at some unpropitious moment. At least in the jobs I have had, I begin to slip away from the tight constrictions of those jaws, like a dinghy extricated from its moorings, noose untied from the mossy plank.
Dingbat, they say in algae/like clusters. What was she laughing about anyway, that was so funny?
Whenever I sail away while completing my daily round of tasks, it is true, I confess, I have forgotten the mail at five, and the Xerox meter card at the end of the month. In actuality, my little lapses are usually due to being overworked, too much to do and too little time, but because of my laughing and too objective view of human frailties, despite my compassion, the impression remains that as a secretary, my presence threatened to give them lockjaw.
Mouths gaped when I said to Janice, as she walked into the maize room of secretarial service,
We’ve just been talking about you.
It was true, and I saw no way out of the conversation a copywriter, the bookkeeper and myself had been having about her, except to expose ourselves. She had a strange look in her eyes, and it hardly seemed likely that she hadn’t heard the tail end of my company’s words as she was running around the corner, at such a fast clip, I doubt her mind had time to catch up and abort her entrance. Ellen had just declared in a loud voice that you-know-who was butting in on conversations all the time and it seemed could hear them through doors. I was silently giving her credit for her keen senses, if she could indeed do that, but had already stuck my neck out on the side of religion, in the supreme sense, and the occult world of feeling in general.
So, in order to reconcile both sides, at the appearance of Janice’s face, I said,
— We’ve just been talking about you.
— Oh, yeah, she said with lingering strangeness.
— Ummm. Lance and Ellen were saying that you can walk into a room and finish a thought or conversation as though you’d been there all the time, like you have extrasensory perception.
I said this with all the enthusiasm and admiration I could muster and felt that ultimately it eased Janice’s subconscious mind, which had probably heard the slander. It also seemed that in this instance, at least, Janice’s extrasensory perceptions had not been at work.
Janice started talking quickly as she usually did when butting into a conversation, if you want to put it that way, and as I looked sideways at Lance and Ellen saw their deathly white fearful faces. Their jaws just quietly, almost without notice, dropped off into their chins, out through the open door. Within seconds, they were gone. Truth will always scare away the burglars of human motive. Truth will always leave the truthful alone.
The little fish always want to attack the Bold One. So one or two of the troublemakers, go to their Leader.
— Oh Great One, we’ll lose business with this nincompoop on the switchboard. What shall we do if she refuses to tell us when she is going to turn her back on us, they ask with their white palms raised in air.
Some persons feel you are betraying them if you make their enemy feel good, or even if you like their enemy. I understand it, feeling insecure, they don’t see how you could like them, too. As though they and their enemy were two different persons, like black and white. In fact, the enemy is the one and the same — you. What you can’t accept about yourself, you will not tolerate in others, in its more vivid manifestations.
Sometimes it is the big fish, the President of this company put his fingers on the bottom of my new straight skirt and said, — Gabardine. That’s nice, Madelaine. He gave me a knowing look.
This might sound silly, but I said to avoid further confrontation,
— Yes. Black Gabardine.
He liked it of course. Thank you. It was at this stage of evolutionary development that I always got fired, as the tributaries of fraud merged into one stream of complaints. Of course, the charges are always different. But I suspect that as I start to ‘get it together,’ whether I am doing a good job or a bad job, I act suspiciously high!
What is known of poverty, is what may be known of gain.
In the meantime, tension is pulling my scalp, a heavy presence over my eyes, like extra eyebrows. As I try to relax, I can feel it peeling back like a skull cap.
If I lay around the house in a great-looking bathrobe, the mess around me takes on an air of glamorous confusion. Flowers and telegrams mingle on the coffeetable. Mail-o-grams from the May Company asking for January’s payment, lie, like important documents, beside my journal notes, short stories, and poems. I am Elizabeth Taylor in her cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel, my aurora brings clarity to the diamond star illuminating each object, until each object becomes a collage of china mugs, Pentels, coleus, notebooks, lacquered boxes, and fragrant bottles from the dressing table.
I feel the texture of brown velvet on my Eames chair, the gracious plumpness of my grand old flowered easy chair, the integrity of my square little kitchen table. I only notice the essence of each beloved object, not its specified form.
I go to the mailbox downstairs in my great-looking bathrobe, a black satin wrap, made by an acquaintance in California, sold as a Lord & Taylor boutique item in New York. Though recent financial blunders are wearing me down, in the freedom of unemployment, my assumed identity as Elizabeth Taylor carries with it a faint suggestion of floating as I bring the mail back upstairs. I open up my phone bill and see Elizabeth Taylor numbers staring back at me, a long list of long-distance calls. $170! And that was just for the first half of Matthew’s visit. Suddenly, I see a seam splitting open on the corner cushion of my Eames chair, I notice that old broken leg propped up under the flowered easy chair, I feel the broken springs under me on the yellow sofa and look at a leaf of the pine table, dropping when it’s supposed to be up.
As I leap up, ready to take action, I hear a seam ripping in my black satin Great One; my last bastion of glamour was wearing out. Suddenly, the delivery of some numbers has wiped out my perceptions of beauty. Where I saw essence/ness I now see misshapen/ness. Royal thoughts decay. I wonder if I should give up the distant king across the country working on his own music career and start looking for the popular ‘old man’ of California contemporary legend. Maybe I should get right back to the steady nothing job. Or a civil service position like my Mother started recommending when I was 29.
When some people flash those ABC’s at you, the images die hard. How is it possible to win, I ask? Being me. I want to stay at home and write. I’m going further into debt. The phone will even be cut off if I don’t come up with the daily bread — Money. I can get along without a replacement for the Great One, without any leader at all, pulling me out of bed in the morning, except our almighty leader in the sky, but no phone? I don’t think I can go through the funkiness of having no phone again. My last move (from Topanga Canyon) was preceded by a disconnected phone. It really complicates things when you have to hustle to survive. Suddenly, all the things I don’t have swim into view, as tears spring to my eyes: I think, I don’t have a new car (but I don’t have to make payments), I don’t have a bed. I sleep on the 4/foot couch, I don’t have money to buy the boys jeans without holes in them — nor a marriage, nor a million other things one can name. But I still have myself!
The more I think about this, the tighter the skull cap gets, as though with carpet nails it is tacking memory in place. Everything is getting tacky. Including the quality of my thoughts.
I feel I need help. I don’t know how to ask anymore, which may be why I am in this predicament. Help used to walk in the door before I even knew I needed it. Or money, or new nerve, or old nerve. I put my hands to my head, and yank at the seam between hair and skin. I smooth my forehead as the tender fingers of my knight would do, when I am being good. I try to accept gracefully my lot in life — as a single woman with multidimensional goals and an inner drive to be taken care of. As a dynamo I seem to turn people off, at least the people I like to be around, but how do I get a grip on that grit inside, without giving up my spirit of surrender to the powers that be. In other words, how do I move ahead, without giving up? How do I finally catch up with that essential Woman, giving me so much trouble all these years.
I’ve been writing for days, and I attribute the tension to the process of going back to my brain, the greater responsibility I now have, of not working for someone else, but for myself. Being a secretary starts to look like a breeze compared to this.
Should I take off my thinking hat?
After tripping out like that, I couldn’t even relax on some Valium left over from the party. Every time I smoked, every time I cried, drank beer, slept, talked to a friend or did anything to elevate my spirits, I would rise like self-starting bread, and float over to my typewriter. I didn’t even possess myself anymore! Come to think of it.
I didn’t own insurance. In the form of prayer and praise to the All/Mighty, to God, I had taken out insurance, in the spring. I thanked him for big and little favors. In the wake of my income tax check I thanked him for my two new pairs of shoes, even though I couldn’t decide which pair to buy, and felt it was an imperfect decision, reflecting some state of consciousness. In my present state of self-awareness, this worried me for weeks afterwards, and to an infinitesimal extent, through Matthew’s visit. I ended up taking one pair back. Still, I thanked him, perhaps not as fervently as I should have, if I had gotten the pair that were all sold out at Joseph Magnin’s in Century City, just weeks after their arrival. I thanked him for french dishtowels, a plum-colored potholder from San Francisco, for running into a real person one day in Beverly Hills. This former blind date didn’t recognize me with my new frosted hair-do, and platform shoes . . . after provoking his memory he told me if I wanted people to remember me, I shouldn’t go around in disguise. In an odd way, this was real/assuring. The truth, the truth — is like a beacon along the way.
Then I thanked God for my bi/annual pilgrimage to the shrine of my youth — that distant place where Ego still controls the universe, and I was able to say with conviction, Crazy Means Right On! I am sane. Somehow I knew it, and my not caring what those others thought did not stop me from caring about them. Little things like this gave me the courage to go on being myself, as the eyes of disillusionment cast their cold glances on my job record, on the lamp of illumination in my eyes, the other/worldly look, which enlightenment, an unburdening of the truth, had brought to my face, only to be dismissed as ‘weird.’
At one time I wanted to put a sign over my desk saying, ‘Weirdness is in the eye of the beholder.’ My sidekick happened to belong in a commune whose goal was happiness, and she was even more persecuted than I, because I had already been in a commune, and so smoothed out a few more of the kinks that unknotting process puts you through. I mean, in the beginning stages of studying the Truth, you look pretty schizophrenic. Well, one day she brought pureed zucchini to work for lunch, in a plastic container. When some others in the office saw this they reacted with that same look of horror as to the truth, as to the lentil bean salad I was eating one day, although I prefer sweetrolls. Weird. Weird. Shortly — say about ½ way through the zucchini, our boss came into the office and asked her to please not eat out front where customers could see. Nobody objected when we munched chocolates all day!
— It’s all right, as my son and his grade school friends are fond of saying all day, it gets them through the routine of school.
The closer to the Truth you get, the more far/out you look to the passers/by on the road of life. I admit, when I go to the office in a French cotton thrift/store skirt and final/final clearance sale blouse from Magnin’s I must look a little seedy in their eyes. I wouldn’t have wanted to be around me now, 10 years ago. Crisp was never my style though. Rumpled elegance, glamorous confusion, there is a lot of slack in the pleats of my mind. It must resemble one of those accordion/folded skirts which look so terrible on me. I am happy when I do not have to pay much attention to the sharp pressing of those knife/pleats in real life, though I need the discipline of ironing.
Mine, if it happens, will be a success of passion, built on sparks, faulty wiring, in the do/it/yourself success-or-survival kit the U.S. Customs Bureau mailed me. I had to wait 10 years for my soul to get clearance at the Gate. Maybe this is what others call ‘paying dues.’ It prompted me to teach wherever I went, to the most unlikely disciples: fellow employees who thought because I was very pretty and a secretary, though obviously intelligent, I couldn’t know anything that would be relevant. It prompted me to sneak in little preachings to would-be suitors, and boyfriends, thus losing the moment-to-moment intensity of ignorant passion. I offered my wisdom — say, knowledge gained of my first husband — to his new love and future wife, even as I pondered what I wanted yet. I advised people to give up their jealousies and possessiveness, people who with the help of their shrink were learning to like, not only themselves, but the bad qualities, a fatal direction, I felt. I loved other men and always, when it looked like either she would have to go or me, I backed down, feeling sorry for her. I guess a person knows what’s theirs. As much as I might have felt a man at the time made life much more pleasant, there was still the nagging doubt that I would be taking something that wasn’t mine. With the inability to make certain survival connections, lose jobs, going in debt, I left suitors dangling, made bad loans, took in the wrong houseguests, ran up $500 phone bills, and paid for my true love’s planefare home, when he had a jealous wife, separated, but waiting. This was inexcusable. I really wanted this man. I feel this man belongs to me, not her.
My success, if it happens, will be founded on bondage to General Telephone, Pacific Telephone and National Airlines, the fertile delta of inspiration right now.
I wrote Matthew realizing now it was not wrong to have another woman’s husband, but to have him as a non/paying houseguest was foolhardy. I wrote him almost every day. I felt that my over-enthusiastic hostessing while living off the pittance of unemployment was my own undoing, and therefore should not be a charge brought to bear against the romance itself, or Matthew specifically. I tried to keep the long range goal in mind, rather than dwell on the temporary injustices of life. I told myself I wouldn’t let it happen again. In the meantime, I remembered those good feelings of our being together.
I told him it was the high/spot of my day when I wrote him and pointed out that if I wrote him first thing in the morning, I would be high all day. I told him, like Superman, he could see everything, so he was smart enough to detect my many subtleterranean moods. In other words, and I confess I didn’t think about the implications of this — he could see what wasn’t so apparent to others!
— See me! I said. I can fly! At the typewriter my wings start to flap. I want to fly to you! I want to leave my nest! I am preparing manuscripts and will act in them when you come. For you. I am Me.
Yes. I said all this.
I was freaking out over the money. It was the pure & simple. Evidence of aged generosity was pouring in: the phone bill, holes in all the boys’ jeans, a ‘disheveled appearance’ on job interviews, spaghettini with garlic oil every night for dinner, notices arriving with increasing frequency politely asking if there were some kind of mistake, the $236.00 check to National Airlines had bounced, and Matthew had not bounced back with the promised money to cover it. I had spent all my money on food and loaned him some money in addition, and now I couldn’t even pay the rent.
I went on job interviews feverishly. The prospect of money put everything right when I rode elevators up and down Beverly Hills office buildings.
Subconscious conflicts disappeared, before I got any job. Just the prospect. It no longer mattered whether Matthew was the man of my dreams, the man I had waited all my life for, or whether it was Jake, a previous soul/mate and more earnest caretaker of my fragile feminine side, seeing to it that I ate, got my car fixed, etc. Jake and Matthew met when Matthew was here hustling his music in Hollywood. While Matthew was hustling his music, Jake was hustling me, and might have been successful if he himself hadn’t been so overwhelmed by Matthew’s talent and presence itself.
My second chief conflict was about the money Matthew promised to return immediately. Should I hound him, write it off (literally) to losses or overhead, in the treatment of romantic fiction, or treat it as my price in the attempt of two divided twin-souls to find a time and place for merging. I no longer needed to worry about it. I would take care of myself.
Third, was it wrong of me to perpetuate this romance, when it came to pass that he had the unresolved knotty problem of a wife at home. For he was there and I was here. Would I continue to be punished for my now/knowing part of this triangle? It no longer mattered. I would not interfere. I could afford to be aloof, non-manipulative, until he made his final choice. I had City National — hopefully.
When a silver/haired man recently transferred from New York extolled the ‘benefits’ of working in his company, the old string of ‘benefits’ came alive as never before: MEDICAL — 100% coverage; DENTAL — a real bonus; DISABILITY — life-long in case of accident or injury, disease; PROFIT-SHARING — and it was here my heart leaped, as the idea of profit-sharing was introduced to me personally for the first time. This conscientious man took me through the arithmetic for computing that on a secretary’s salary of about $9,000 a year, at the end of a year, $1,200 would be accrued in the profit-sharing plan, and at the end of ten years of dedicated service, allowing for increases in salary, etc., this amount would be well, you can see a hefty sum. My knees were weak. I quivered with the blessings of security jumping over hurdles in my mind, like sheep. Then, I was escorted to a small room across the hall for a typing test. When it was done, and the man whom I would work for came in and greeted me, reality came alive as I had never experienced it before. This boss was young, blond, sunny accepting, and had an infectious laugh. But, more than that, the energy between our eyes created a solarium of rhythmic jokes in the dark closet space. Why, it would be like going to work for your soul/mate. Obviously, I had set my sights too low, in the past. Not content with just a soul/mate, I wanted him to be incorporated into the necessary path of my life.
By the time I got home, I was wondering if Matthew would be hurt. Everything went smoothly that night as I entertained the children like a hostess, tucked them in, their loving beautiful mother, and went back out into the living room, feeling a bit like Natalie Wood circa 1977 with two kids, in a new musical. Going up and up and up. When I looked in the mirror the perfection of my life had removed all wrinkles.
The next morning I told my agency I really liked this prospective boss. They didn’t understand what that meant in my book. They were casual. Well, oh yes, but can’t wait around for the right job, we’ve got something else we want to send you out on in the meantime. After the second interview, I was somewhat more let down. I began to criticize my interview the day before, from hindsight. I would have looked much younger and prettier in a new dress. I was too fat. I smoked too much. In short, I was unprepared.
Later that afternoon, the agency called. They loved me, Barbara said, but hired from within the company. And, by the way, the silver/haired man from New York said something about your ‘disheveled appearance.’ There were a few more job interviews. Please cut your hair! enjoined the agency. My hair was still standing on end, from the funkier rock and roll drama weeks previous. Too much. Do you think I could get a job at a record company, I asked.
— Oh, Madelaine, you don’t want to work in those seedy little places. They’re not very nice, for you, said my many mothers.
Betwixt and Between.
Everybody liked me, but either I was not aggressive enough, or I smoked incessantly (when I smoked) or I needed a matching pantsuit, or I was too deep. The Deep was the most threatening. Old wounds were being further excised by Apcoa parking costs on the ground of these silly extravaganzas.
I was poor. I was finally out of the mainstream. I must stop interviewing. I got my hair cut and still no job. I returned to my natural roles, Mother, woman, writer. For which I was being paid very little. I sat home and wrote. I clocked myself and figured I had put in a 40-hour week. Without the compensatory paycheck, I was more tired than usual Friday night. Beneficial Finance called and asked if I would like to borrow some more money now that my old debt of three years was paid off this month. I succumbed. I started letting everything but the phone bill go. I got a notice from the landlord that they were going on vacation June 1 and to send my check to their son. That got me off the hook for 20 days.
I felt the pleats widening, like dried clay on a riverbank, and feared I would fall into one of the crevices developing in my mind. I tried using all the old mental tricks: the truth of self/fulfilling prophecy reminding myself I am in control, am having the experience I want, so don’t panic. It was a repeat of the first fear of middle age crisis I had, at 27 when my husband and I separated. In some ways it was worse, because I was older, and in some ways better, because I was more experienced, and at least had created my own reality in the past five years, rather than attaching myself to someone else’s. But, no matter what I tried, it was old hat.
A writing teacher came by and said — Your face looks strange.
After she left, this threw me into a panic. I didn’t want to be beautiful on the inside if I was going to get old on the outside. I was objecting, having had it both ways. When I looked in the mirror, there was not a wrinkle on it, it was smooth as a cupie doll, and I felt one or two sizes larger. I wondered if I had just gained a lot of weight because of my immobilization, or whether when your body swells up in size, it also feels like it is going to burst. I was ready to pop.
— I will not let them take paradise from me, I thought as I lay on the yellow couch, listing down and ate toast and jam for brunch; listening to gay birds in the tree outside, writing to myself,
— In LA., Pioneer Sourdough Bread is one of the few things left that can give you heart.
It was the days of ice cream cones without the ice cream, a thin sort of passion left in a box on the shelf, after Matthew’s visit. Everytime I went to the cupboard and pulled out a cone, as I bit down on some morsel of truth, there was the vacant crush of chipped cone, melting, sliding down my throat.
Now I either laugh or cry. I am having a great time being hysterical. The extremes have widened. A chasm exists where cracks formed the Saturday after. My heart and brain are closely linked.
Even Jake, who understands such things, says
— You’re crazy.
Maybe so. Out of context some scenes are sublimely ridiculous.
Out of the molten nothingness of an empty cone box, a volcano of insights erupts. I can feel what each person, each object, each particle of nature, is, and still stand beyond it. Part of, but separate. You can’t explain this, great feeling. In laughing, it is like throwing a lasso and hoping someone catches a loop of it, without having to understand. Because two people rarely, if ever, can intellectually understand every ramification of someone else’s experience.
Part of some cosmic joke, I take my mundane place in affairs, of business.
II
Two weeks ago I woke up at 4 a.m. from my berth on the floor. Jake was still asleep on My Couch. I went into the kitchen looking for something to eat. In the refrigerator, there were a head of lettuce, two tomatoes, the carcass of an old roasted chicken, two lemon/halves in cellophane, and four baby jars of Best Foods mayonnaise. (Every time Jake took me out to Malibu we had a picnic in front of Cowboy Bob’s shopping center.) Tin foil covering its shelves was rusty and torn. Some large Creative Playthings blocks were propping the freezer up; large chunks of ice on the side further helped keep the unit intact.
There are times when it is not worth it to be inventive. I would sustain myself with thought. I sat down at the kitchen table and began writing. I filled sheets of white paper with the heady Man/Woman insights flashing across my perpetual screen when Matthew was here, and I had figuratively gone back into the surf. My greatest insight — what I felt had been divine revelation — was that when you find the ‘right man’ you have also got your guru for life, no other instructions, mentors, etc., are necessary when the osmosis of your love allows for the transmission of life’s everyday secrets. This reduction, as though the ‘right man’ was a computer of all the world’s great teachings, seemed like the most practical of nature’s plans. I could stay enlightened on the couch. I saw the good in everything when he was here. I wrote that if you see the good you understand the divine purpose of everything that happens, both to yourself and others.
Now I felt like I was still sitting on the edge of some lifeboat, with that nothing feeling around, that you get when moving through sea/air back to shore, not yet having emptied myself of grief, I was going through death again. Being a natural born student and romantic, it was hard for me to give up Matthew to the divine purpose of the universe. What if there were no divine purpose, what if it were just her purpose. No, I knew better, when you feel good, you know.
Suddenly from the catacombs of his own misery, which had gotten pretty much perennial, Jake woke up and said,
— Let’s go over to my place and get something to eat, for God’s sake.
— O.K.!
I jumped into my Bonwit Teller boots with the new Purex bleach spots and jeans, and threw on a loose fitting mandarin velvet jacket (for mid-evening) and we ‘split’ as they say in the vernacular around here.
Slowly I pulled my car out into the street. After a few blocks the mystical June night of Mid-City, Los Angeles overcame the vehicle. A cool mist dissipated architecture. There was nothing to hurry from or towards. Matthew was gone, the hustlers had departed, the music left town, and Jake and I together created a mutual stillness in the expansion of time. Eternity, without the kisses and hugs of a year ago. We were going to go raid his refrigerator. I liked that idea. I was vaguely aware, that as vast as the world seemed without Matthew, our hospitality during his visit still flowed over into Jake’s and my activities, his presence wrapped the mediocre intelligence of nightlife in Los Angeles, with clarity,
— This is too slow. You’re taking forever, Jake said.
Precisely, I think. This is the content of Forever. A total absence of memory. We were in a vast container of mid-night blue space, two atoms of unique identities, Jake and Madelaine they might be called, riding in the tide of early morning. I was content with the always/ness of Daniel, Jake, food, mist/air, summer, design labels, poetry. I thought I would be safe giving Jake an overall personal statement, with no specific content.
— It gives me time to think, I said.
— I don’t need to think. I know what I want.
Even as I recognized the wrench being applied to the screws left just inside my heart, holding me here, I thought, ‘pretty smart.’ It was old truth again, breaking and entering my sanctuary.
I could see a track being laid at an off/angle and it wanted to take me off on a trip as to the validity of my own thought processes. The steel/edged tracks began to oil my brain with the first lead: “is thinking just a state of limbo, keeping you from attacking the objects of your purpose, and desires, leading you to further not know what you want, or confuse. Have you forgotten in the delicacies of thinking things through, the single-minded efficiency of knowing what you want and going after it with that instinct of rightness.”
Jake was right. The truth would prevail. But I dismissed it tonight, so I could enjoy whatever slow processes were guiding me. I let the truth go like an assailant in the night, without further conjecture as to his identity or possible merit. I was content with my free flowing membership in the universe of abstract wishes. I did not want to think about my enjoyment of thinking. Jake was too far out for me. In fact, I was still cooling out from our death-wish ride on the freeways and byways from L.A. to Malibu and back. Jake had come over to fix a flat tire on my car, which got off to a bad start when I didn’t have the 12-inch screw that takes tires off. He had to walk to the nearest gas station and back, before the project could even begin. Then, the screws were too tight, because some machine had put them on. Oh, yes, when he got back from the gas station I was sitting inside the car, which was propped up on the jack, forgetting that he was in the midst of changing my tire. All I could remember were the words from my old commune, ‘look pretty, so he won’t mind doing the work.’ I was trying extra hard to make this a pleasant experience, but something in the intrinsic merit of work, Jake would never admittedly warm to. It was a miracle that he was changing the tire for me so when he afterwards assumed ownership of the car I felt protest would be disheartening.
It was true, I didn’t need to think tonight. I had let Jake take command of the wheel. Jake wanted to go to his old bank in Malibu, in a matter of minutes, we were on the Santa Monica Freeway. As used as I am to big risk-takers I started to feel anxiety, then jeopardy, as he swung to the right and left, as though there shouldn’t be any cars anywhere near, though occasionally there were. Some close calls made me wonder if the situation was even worse than I realized. What was he trying to do to us, I wondered. An hour before he had walked into my house, ready for the mechanic’s duty, a sweet smile on his face, and now he was possessed, at the wheel of my ’63 Ford Falcon convertible.
Using force of reality, I tried the usual. Asked him to slow down, pointing out bad brakes, informing him of lack of insurance, age of vehicle, and finally, resorted to petting my son’s arm in the backseat. Yet every few feet of open pavement, he would gun the motor of my 6-cylinder engine and at the last minute raced near the rearend of the preceding car and slammed on the brakes.
If there was any possibility of changing lanes, right or left, he would do this instead of slowing down. Psychologically, I felt we had cut the corners from cars — lots of them. I tried appealing to the spiritual laws of acceptance or total surrender, feeling in the event of an accident I, my son, and yes, Jake too, would at least land on some roadside cushion with the flexibility of ragdolls.
He was drunk. I felt the necessary level of satori to be reached, in order to outweigh the power-packed demons in control of his behavior, was unattainable. The very idea of elevating my consciousness in the midst of such terror, seemed sacrilegious, as though I too were so irresponsible and ignorantly carefree, I could laugh my way along, as my son smiled beatifically in the backseat, having fewer judgments of right and wrong, danger and safety. I seemed stuck with my prudence. Jake swore at other drivers for their rotten driving. The longer we zigged and zagged, the more close calls we had, the harder it was to tell whether they were out of rhythm with the universe with their jerky fearful driving, or Jake indeed with his flashy split-second terrorism.
I decided to make it all meaningless. I pulled a silver tube of lipstick out of my purse and watched the light shine off it. I tried to catch a glimpse of my lips in the opaque mirror swirls, leaping up from the bottom of tube, like flames. I opened it up, and rolled the ‘chocolate mousse’ out of its refrigerator. I looked up.
In a surrealistic sweep, I saw us moving slow/motion straight into the left rear corner of a pristine little pale yellow Fiat. Something in me jarred loose, the unmetaphysical seized control, and a primal scream came soaring out of my chest or stomach, or wherever they congest, and it made a JAKE scream. A JAKE scream is the best. It can probably out/decibel a primal scream any day of the week, and has the added advantage of surprise attack, giving it increased sincerity. You don’t know you’re going somewhere special to scream. It is convenient, occurring in the ordinary workings of daily life.
Jake, the author of my JAKE scream, swerved adroitly in response, as though I had just asked the time, and he had looked down at his watch, causing a slight quiver in the straight arrow of the car. I knew such was not the case, but I began to question my own sanity.
— Well, I must be the crazy one, I said sincerely.
Were the hallucinations I had been having with my guru distortions of reality, rather than intensifications of it? How had Jake lifted the car at 70 mph from behind the fender of this Fiat in the righthand lane, avoiding collision ¼ inch from contact, and then put us back on the right course in seconds. Or had I jumped the gun. As it were, jumped out of the car and ahead in time to see the inevitable fate that would have been ours, if I hadn’t screamed. Or, was my scream coincidental with his own last minute survival reflex. After a few minutes I decided to investigate the mystery attached to my scream.
— Didn’t you see that car? I asked humbly.
— Sure, he said with tight lips.
It’s dead, I thought. As we got off the freeway, I breathed a grateful sigh. I thought perhaps the narrow roads of Santa Monica would constrain him. Only slightly. By the time we landed, like children going over a dirt bluff to the ground below in a cardboard box, on the Pacific Coast Highway beneath Santa Monica’s low canyon, I announced — Everybody’s staring at us.
— That’s because we’re so beautiful and they’re jealous, he said.
Pure raw feeling permeated the plastic blue interior of the convertible. Our identities were stripped away. We were reborn. Air blew at us from every direction. In our death-wish joyride, we were babes in the dark forest, or underwater, somewhere that Mercedes Benzes never got. My hair was all messed up. Jake sang the popular line, ‘We’re just prisoners here of our own device,’ as though it were his own.
Less frequently, he threw occult glances at the other prisoners beside us on the road. Within, I was busy sorting out food packages, medicine bottles, prescriptions of pills and beer cans, as he emptied them. We were throwing out signals, the heavy vibrations of a direct experience — ‘something happening.’
My JAKE scream congealed the whole orgy of sin.
We reeked of innocence. I said to Jake,
— I don’t think they know they’re envious. So they’re not, for all practical purposes.
Jake agreed in a way that almost implied obtusity on my part.
— Sure, it’s subconscious. But what difference does that make? They know.
Jake was smarter, in that he took certain things for granted, that I felt needed spelling out. That meant smarter. I could make love to it, but the male point of view that runs this world, ran it very well, and would continue to elude me. Bluebells.
My recollection of yesterday dimmed, as Jake’s house appeared ahead from the cross street. I pulled the car over to the curb in front of it, a vapor trailing male scents in the middle of the night. We got out and Jake elbowing his way first through the side path of overgrown rosebushes, we reached the back kitchen entrance of the old Frank Lloyd Wright house. Inside its service porch, he yanked open a freezer door and withdrew boxes of food for me to cook at. I am to liven up frozen cube steak, tater tots and frozen mixed vegetables.
I stood in front of the old gas range ready to tune it up. I coordinated burners and their on-off knobs with searching glances that criss-crossed my eyes, as in amnesia or loss of memory, there is a resulting economy of movement. I wanted to orchestrate this meal with my mind and mood. Then, it became effortless. The frozen food seemed to reinforce my leisurely approach. Jake, by my side, was tearing open the boxes, impatient with my mental preparations. Corners crumpled, paper dripping from the waxy cartons.
— Start cooking, Jake ordered to my too efficient ghost.
What he meant was “I want you to slave over my meal.”
This occurred to me later. At the time, it didn’t ring a bell, because I was enjoying the opposite of slaving in the kitchen for Matthew and our guests, including Jake. Then I had been cooking for anywhere from 4 to 8 people, and the amount of money it was costing me to feed everyone was making me sweat as much as anything. Jake had noticed my glistening face though, and wanted it to glisten over food for him. If I had remembered my former existence as wife, mother, hostess, it might have contributed toward our understanding of one another. But, tonight I was a cool cookie with no memory.
Tater tots dropped on the floor one by one, a soft thumping/ness on the spackled linoleum, when I looked down I laughed and laughed. The Paul Klee touch without melodrama. Then he tore open a box of rice & vegetables (in addition to the Plain Mixed Vegetables) and instead of substantial thumping, minute grains of rice showered our feet, and tapped against the floor. The vegetable (senile-looking peas) rolled up against their curt slivers. I laughed uncontrollably.
I take life seriously, Jake said.
I laughed some more.
— You’re crazy, he said. I couldn’t get him to laugh, except slightly, but my laughter was tranquilizing him. Anyway, I didn’t care! That’s how good I felt. I didn’t care if a masked bandit walked in the room, I was guaranteed for a few minutes at least, a good laugh, and not even the masked bandit could stop it from happening. John smiled a bit.
As soon as he gained control of the packages, he emptied the various foods into pots and frying pans and micro-wave ovens. I continued to stand nearby, simmering it with my dreamy gaze. He stepped inside the service porch and emerged with a half gallon of butter brickle ice cream. He measured out six scoops.
— I like to use this scoop, he announced.
He pulled the metal strap back and forth. It slid around the metal curve precisely. He has a great mind.
— We should have six guests to dinner, then, I said.
He looked at me strangely and said,
— I have no idea what that means.
This was my chance. Something I said really interested him. I said that if we had six guests and each guest had six scoops of ice cream then he would have a chance to scoop it 36 times. He would get to use the scoop a lot.
He seemed slightly intrigued, but the essential part — that of my good will, evaded him, and so he would need explanation.
— You know, how people like the Kemperers in Pasadena have dinner parties. You know, dinner parties. Where you invite people over.
I thought about the ramifications of people like the Kemperers in Pasadena having dinner parties at which a host like Jake wished only to wield the power of a lowly ice cream scoop, and justify its use at the same time.
My original simple statement had gained momentum in my mind, in seconds, and reached the terrifying proportions of a complex thought.
I thought of the normal expectations of people who have and who go to dinner parties. In making this thing real, I saw a discrepancy between the goal of spontaneous festivity and the reality — what we do in the real world to have that freedom to have fun. Usually among such people who agree to be present at the same place, at the same time, it is customary to serve two scoops of ice cream, if indeed ice cream is served. After a large meal (already we were in dangerous territory, since Jake likes to eat his dessert before the main course), it is often difficult for people (who are used to eating in a prescribed fashion, at prescribed times) to imagine going over the prescribed limit of 2, possibly 3, scoops of ice cream, if they imagine it at all. But, in order to fulfill the purpose of the party, our format might make them uncomfortable: that is, having to (or thinking they might have to) eat six scoops of ice cream, or at least 3 or 4.
Even though Jake and I might explain that we were doing this for ourselves, and it made no difference how little or how much ice cream they ate, but that it gave him great happiness just to be able to scoop that much ice cream out, they would smile and nod O.K. — we won’t eat to be polite. They would try to be breezy and casual like us, but inside feel we were just trying to be nice, like them, or in their style. It is true a lot of women are hurt when you don’t eat their food, and it is hard these days to know when the host and hostess don’t give a damn, except for your company. They could not let go of the habitual paranoia of dinner guests, that we were aiming to please their appetites. They might feel compelled to apply zeal to the six scoops, not to be freaked about all this talk of Jake’s scooping obsession. If they took a chance with displeasing the hostess and let it go, nagging guilt might creep into the dessert process.
Being astute hosts we might try to waylay the predicted outcome. Suppose we got insistent about our self-serving motives. If the high pitch of our protest didn’t reinforce their belief we were just being nice, it might have the opposite effect. What bores we were to consider only ourselves, and put our guests in this kind of predicament. They could never understand the total dedication of such selfishness. If we underplayed the fact that there were six scoops of ice cream being served for dinner tonight, hoping our confidence in carrying out our original ideals would speak for itself, and exemplify the spirit of self-actualization we strived for, taken to extremes, it might appear to be a sort of oriental coercion. The awkwardness of expectation might forever separate us from our guests.
I knew in my head I’d had a nice idea, but when I attempted to apply it to the ordinary reality, what a tangled web emerged. If we were reassuring hosts, we were doomed, just as if we let it happen. When I thought of the glee with which I first expressed the concept, my teeth rattled back and forth on the conveyor of communication.
It was hard to create reality with more than one person at a time. It was difficult enough to find one person who was both sincere and aware of the meaning of his words. You needed agreement to create reality. The fact that our society was cluttered with relative agreement made me nervous. That meant most of the time it was not real. That meant we could not have a real dinner party. Only what Matthew and I had, which was Mother’s version of the all-day restaurant.
Jake picked at his plate heaped with food and opened the microwave oven, which contained the tater tots. Like the fast-cooking oven, the link between our brain waves, though differently expressed, intensified the cooking of mental experience. I had to let go of my thinking again, and so let the juices of our beings lift me up high, like atlas on his finger. It was the kinetic charm of Jake’s energy. With fewer words, his presence took me way out. It was the moment of ease.
I think it was something like this ease that Fitzgerald studied in the rich.
But, the study of ease was only a study of form when limited to the rich. The real ease lay in the content of thought — and one must lay themselves open to all classes — the middle class and the poor, among whom there were some notable aristocrats of the senses, like Jake and Matthew.
My ease in connecting with their energy sources was in a class of its own. This was the true democracy.
Trust your man, I thought, as more guru/like thoughts filtered through the oblivion. Jake and I took our plates of food into the sunken living room, and each took a large square easy chair on either side of the fireplace at the far end. I pulled an afghan over myself.
I like this feeling.
I want more of it. Sometimes it is necessary to protect the thought processes from getting thread-bare with a few well-pronounced luxuries: Charles Jourdan boots, custom made wrap dresses, a few of the things that give accent to an otherwise oddly assorted wardrobe.
So, I think about going back to work. My agency calls, and sends me on a few more interviews. Another phone bill arrives, as big as the one before it. Help arrives, a loan from a friend.
I try to stick it out through the summer. I am giving up the illusion of ease. It is hard either way you do it. I am staying home to write and be with my kids.
It too protects you from thinking like an old lady, mending seams.
But the seams are still there, torn, in need of mending. America is still too green, and the smart ones know it. Jake and Matthew are gone again, still young enough to believe in the rainbow. Their finely-tuned senses still cannot bear the fragility of wealth, the uncertainty of no money, in these times.
Soulmates are no different than anybody else. If anything, it takes them longer to propose.
This story originally appeared in the December 1977 issue of New magazine, published by the Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1630 W. Washington Blvd., Venice CA 90291.
