Abandon (29 page)

There was a quote from
Othello
at the bottom of the last caption, and he thought of Iago and Desdemona fighting for the Moor’s soul, in Venice. The one whispering in the foreigner’s ear, to doubt everything he knew; the other, almost wordlessly, urging him to be worthy of his native majesty.

She was still in bed when he got back, but it was dark, and when he lit the candle by the bed, he saw for a moment a face from one of the last paintings. Then, blowing out the candle, he lay beside her in the bed and put his arms around the dark.

A few hours later, she awoke, and at some point in the night that followed the two of them disappeared. No he or she, any more; no cause or effect. Just the sound of the ocean outside the window, the moon occasionally catching something on the water.

She reached for him where he lay, and then turned back to light the candle on the bedside table. Outside, through the window, the lonely single light of the derrick out to sea.

“When did you first know, do you think?”

“I didn’t know. It never began.”

“But when did you first think?”

“As soon as I said goodbye.”

A little later, there was more darkness around them. The last planes had come in to land by now, and there was only the shape of their shadows, coming together, moving apart, on the wall.

“Are you warm? Are you cold?”

“Not warm. Not cold. Not anything.”

“But you’re shivering? You’re shaking.”

“Not shaking. Just breathing.”

“You’re frightened in some way?”

“How can I not be terrified?”

Then, as the light began to seep into the room again—she blew out the candle, and they were just shapes in the dark, nobody they could easily recognize—

“Lie still. Just there. Don’t move.”

“Hang on. Don’t stop. Just there.”

“Let go. Go wild. Don’t stop.”

“I’m gone.”

It was afternoon by the time he got up, and Debra’s seminar was due to begin in twenty minutes. He got ready quickly and cycled across campus in a kind of trance, hardly noticing the figures on the beach, the dogs with twigs in their mouths, the smudge of tar on the sand, but seeming to see everything that was inside them or around them, the networks that were part of them. He wasn’t himself, he felt, and his feet weren’t touching solid ground: a box of lightbulbs stands on a factory floor—he’d met the image in a book by McCarthy—and the bulbs are all individual, mortal; but turn them on, and the light they transmit is not particular to any one of them.

Debra had chosen to talk of Zen mindlessness—“no mind,” as she chose to call it—and as she spoke, all he could see (the lover’s self-absorption, he imagined) was his own poems, translated into a different tongue. The Zen student, she was saying, seeks to set a torch to every image or abstraction behind which he might hide: the long nights of meditation, the crack on the shoulder with the wooden stick, the mindless repetition of routine—it was all a way of trying to break through the mind to what lay beyond it. “If you see the Buddha along the road, you must kill him.”

“You could almost say the Zen monks are Sufis who never move,” he said when she was finished, and there was laughter around the room. But he’d been serious. At some level, as with all these disciplines around the world, the names were not important.

“That might be a useful beginning,” said Debra, taking his comment and already putting it into the tidy frame of her thesis. “But for the Zen student, as for the Buddhist—hence the confusion between the two—the ultimate truth is emptiness:
shunyata.
Whereas, for your Sufis, from what you told us in your enlightening presentation” (she was laying the ground for a compliment in return), “it’s more a case of affirmation. They believe in something, it’s just a something so far beyond their categories they don’t have words for it. Except ‘the Beloved.’ ”

Yet what, he thought, as he cycled home, did any of it have to do with the shadows on the wall, the candle she’d set back so they wouldn’t knock it over? He thought of his father, working so selflessly year after year for a company that would repay his faith only with occasional bonuses. Giving himself so fully to what he knew could never sustain him that when he woke up it was as if he’d dreamed through all his life.

Along the ocean, as the light began to fade, a woman in a black catsuit was walking along to the distant point, a surfboard under her arm. A prehistoric ruler, he thought, in his altered state, off to lay her offerings on an altar for the gods.

When he walked into the house, she was getting her things ready, to go back to L.A. again—fearful, he guessed, of how far they were going. “I’ve got to work on something at home,” she said. “I can’t tell you because you’re a part of it.”

He followed her out to the car and watched her drive off into the distance. “Mysteries are not to be solved”—it had been his favorite line in Rumi once upon a time. “The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.”

He had to track some books down before the Sufi came up next week—if only so he could know what questions to ask—so, getting in the car, he drove towards Chaucer’s. He sped through town, and then, looking up, realized he’d missed the turn; the places he knew were remade for him now, and he in them a stranger.

He turned around and doubled back, feeling foolish, and when he got to the bookstore parking lot, found it full as ever. Edging along to find a place, he suddenly saw someone he thought he recognized.

“Alex,” he called out, rolling down the window. “Is that you?”

“John.” His friend didn’t look pleased.

“Hang on. I’ll be there in a minute.” He went round the corner, and parked in the handicapped zone near the post office—apter than he knew, he thought—and then ran back to check in with his friend. He’d felt bad that he’d been ducking him ever since Alex had said something about
“folie à deux.”

Then, coming up to where he’d seen him, he realized something else had been going on. She was very young, with bright red lipstick, wearing a thick fur jacket even on the unbuttoned California afternoon. Her short blond hair peeped out from underneath a small black cap.

“It’s been a while,” he said to Alex, and when he got back nothing but a shrug—Alex, too, didn’t seem himself today—he realized he would have to take the initiative himself. “John Macmillan,” he said, extending a hand towards the stranger.

“Enchanted. Sophie Rajavi.” She offered in return a soft and ring-less hand, a jangle of gold bracelets dancing around her wrist.

“Now I know why Alex has been so busy,” he said, though nothing came back from his friend but a tight smile.

“This must be the friend you’ve been telling me about,” said Sophie, not ready to be deterred by her companion’s silence. “The one who keeps you sane.”

“Of course,” said Alex strangely. The pressed jeans, the cashmere scarf, the leather jacket were all as they always were; but the figure inside them seemed fraudulent somehow, as if he’d got into the wrong self today.

“You’re just visiting?” he asked the girl.

“For my vacations. Six weeks.”

“And you’re friends from France, I take it.”

“From USC,” she said, looking sharply up at Alex as if he’d let her down. “Alejandro must have told you.”

“He did, of course,” he said, recovering too late, as always. “The European girl who was keeping him from his studies.”

“No,” she said. “That was the one before me.” She skipped around misunderstandings as gaily as a girl in a sunlit meadow. “What was her name, Alejandro? The one before?”

Their friend said nothing.

“From Denmark. Catrina. Candida.”

“Camilla?” he tried, and she rewarded him with a smile, poking Alex in the ribs for his silence. “Camilla, yes. She was the one before me.”

“It looks like John is busy,” said Alex. “I think we should let him go.”

“Of course,” she said, popping forwards, and kissing him lightly on each cheek.

“I hope you enjoy your stay here.”

“I will,” she said.
“Ciao.”
And, hooking Alex by the arm, led him off to their next adventure.

He walked towards Chaucer’s and then, when they were out of sight, turned back and went to the car. But when he got in, he went nowhere. Whenever they’d talked about her, Alex had seemed to know everything: the Latin philosopher of love, as he’d implied. “You sound like you’re in love with her poignancy, not her.” “You can’t make yourself weak for a picture of a tiger.” But he’d never mentioned the picture of the tiger, he thought now; he’d never betray her in that way.

He drove home, hardly watching for the police as he accelerated, and, as soon as he got in, went to the desk and began making notes. It was like the time Sefadhi had said something about how he couldn’t explain the poems until he’d decided whether they were addressing a “mystery” or a “Mystery,” and suddenly he’d seen everything he thought he knew transformed. Now, going back over their conversations, he wondered what Alex had really been talking about when he spoke of the “sad and lonely victim of New World possibility.” Or the time when he’d suddenly asked him what he thought of the coming star Gwyneth Paltrow, in the new Jane Austen movie.

“It’s nothing,” his friend had said on Halloween—it must have been two years before, the waitresses at Houlihan’s dressed like Marilyn Monroe, with red tails on their backs, while the men who were drinking were got up like vampires or ghouls. “I thought I saw something there, but I was wrong.” And yet the way he’d said it suggested that he hadn’t been wrong so much as wronged; he’d given up the opportunity only once it had passed him by.

Every time she’d said she was on her way back to Los Angeles, he thought now, she might have been driving only a few blocks away, to Embarcadero; and the time Alex had called to invite him to a movie— the first night she was due to visit: maybe it had been a test of some kind (devised by him, or her, or both of them?). In private, he decided crazily, they discussed their common English friend in Spanish.

After a long while, he picked up the phone, and began to dial his friend’s number, and then he saw Sophie on the couch, reaching out a long, tanned, slender arm to answer, and put the phone down again. He picked up a piece of paper and began writing a letter to her, and then wondered what it was he was really saying. “You can’t take a leap of faith by degrees.” It had been he who had said that to her (over and over).

He picked up the phone again, to call her, and then, without planning to, or knowing what he was doing, he dialed a somewhat longer number, one he hadn’t known he had by heart, and was rewarded with a strange, old-fashioned jingle, and then a bleary voice, clearly not happy to be disturbed.

“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, and he saw eyes closed, a darkened room.

“Hello,” he said. “I realize it’s the middle of the night there, and this is probably the last voice you expected to hear. . . .”

“What time is it? Where are you?”

“It’s late afternoon; I’m here in California. I’m sorry to wake you; I was sure your answering machine would be getting rid of me.”

“Then why call in the middle of the night? Some of us have jobs to go to, you know.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call back later if you like.”

“I’d not like, frankly. Having been got up in the dead of night, I’d much rather you didn’t.”

He felt reassured in some way: the almost instantaneous alertness, the empty bed beside her, the refusal to let him off too easily. “Anyway, what is it? Why are you calling?”

“I wanted to wish you a happy New Year. And to thank you for your letter; it meant a lot to me. I tried to call from Heathrow, a couple of times, but both times I wasn’t sure you’d be happy to hear from me.”

“What makes you think differently now?”

“Nothing. In fact, I have good reason to think I was right. I suppose—I suppose I just wanted to hear your voice again. And I wanted to tell you: I did go to the Taj, just as you told me to. You were right.”

“You did? You went there?” Something softened in her voice, and he came closer to the person he knew, as if she’d opened the door at least, and let him into the hallway.

“A few days ago. It was amazing.”

“You saw the vault, the place down the steps?”

“I saw it all. Just as you told me to.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d remember.”

“I always did remember the wrong things.”

“Yes. I do seem to recall that.” It felt now as if he were back in the living room, though for a moment she’d thought of leading him down the hall. “How’s California after all this time?”

“I don’t know,” he said, thinking of the person who’d come to stand for the orphaned state around her. “Complicated, I suppose.”

“But that’s what you wanted!”

“I suppose so. But it’s easier to imagine than actually to meet.” There was no sound at the other end. “You get to Paradise, and you begin to think it’s probably the last place in the world where humans can actually live.”

“I see.” She’d never been very impressed by his moments of wisdom. “You’re not getting all religious, are you? Nicki was a bit concerned.”

“The opposite.”

“What’s the opposite of religious?”