Authors: John Updike
You will find here a number of state-employed clerical workers and conscientious bureaucrats who are supervising the legal exactions made upon our properties. These alien personnel are non-threatening and, increasingly, sympathetic; indeed, a number of them have expressed interest in my halting preachments and in more than one case have succumbed to the inexorable appeal of the Eightfold Path. The Hall of a Millionfold Joys, whose foundations were merely a hole in the earth when you were led astray by the delusions of Presbyterianism, is now being dismantled because of alleged violations of the Arizona laws pertaining to zoned ranchland use, insurable electrical wiring, and required number of emergency fire exits. A small glass-roofed shed, however, will be allowed to remain, in the position of the present entrance foyer, to be used as a combination agricultural greenhouse, tractor garage, and emergency meditation space.
The Fountain of Karma, which you will recall in all its multi-colored, round-the-clock glory, now plays for half an hour at dawn and at sunset, when the sannyasins, passing to meditation, darshan, and aerobic exercises, may contemplate its symbolism of endlessly restless prakriti. The other twenty-three hours, it rests, and allows the Sachchidananda River to replenish its depleted flow. To quote the sacred Upanishads: “This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth. This water is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this water.” Although unusually severe climatic conditions this past summer reduced our anticipated
artichoke harvest, our agricultural expert Hanuman has exciting new plans for acres of xerophilous, oil-rich jojoba and therapeutic mescal bean.
You will find a great choice of accommodations when you arrive. Many former pilgrims have deserted the Eightfold Path for the vanities of secular life. A number of others have been restored to their native lands. Commodious trailers and air-conditioned A-frames stand empty for you; I recommend that you take up residence close to my abode, and to the Uma Room, where you will be working to help administer the revised fortunes of the ashram. Our sister Alinga, our brother Vajna, our vigilant accountant Nitya Kalpana, the delightful and energetic Satya and Nagga and many others await your healing presence and guiding counsel. Above all I await you. We shall resume, dearest Melissa, your ascent to samadhi where it was regrettably arrested at the third, or Manipura, chakra. Since this is the “gem center,” the thought has crossed my mind that if you were to divest yourself of your own gems, secluding them within the impassive bosom of our Treasury of Enlightenment, you might be freed of the klishta they represent. Consulting your records, I am now inclined to believe that the burning sensation you often reported was the vain effort by your subtle body to remove this granthi with tapas, the cleansing ascetic fire. Lightened of the impure weight of personally retained jewelry, you should quickly rise up the sushumna nadi to the fourth chakra, Anahata, whose element is air and whose principle is touch and whose presiding deity is Isha. After that, as the sages say, “Ko veda?”—“Who knows?”
Anticipation of the bliss that will be assuredly yours fills me with immeasurable satisfaction. My colleagues at the ashram are of like mind. Even our little river seems to play a merrier tune and once again to merit its name. To quote once more
the invaluable Dhammapada: “He [or she] who in this world has gone beyond good and evil and both, who, free from sorrows, is free from passions and is pure—him [or her] I call a Brahmin.” I am eager to embrace you.
Yours most faithfully,
Shri Arhat Mindadali
Head, Ashram Arhat
/k
le 3 décembre
Cher monsieur,
Je vous envoie ci-joint un chèque pour cent mille dollars des États-Unis ($100,000 U.S.)—le déposez à mon compte. Ma nouvelle adresse suivra bientôt. Je ne me trouverai pas encore dans The Babbling Brook Motel.
Agréez, je vous prie,
l’expression de mes sentiments très amicaux,
#4723-9001-7469-8666
December 3
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find a check for $100,000 to be paid into my account with your bookshop. The address on this stationery will no longer be valid—in fact, I very much look forward to visiting Samana Cay in the near future, and perhaps taking up residence there. So you will know me when you see me—I am rather tall for a woman, with dark and abundant hair, touched with gray as yet but lightly, and with what has
been kindly described as “a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale.” Actually, I don’t weigh a pound over one hundred thirty-five, which is still a bit heavier than perfection. I look forward very much to browsing in your store, drawing upon some of my considerable credit with you, and acquainting myself with your island and its idyllic (I have every reason to expect) climate.
Yours in keen anticipation,
Sarah P. Worth
December 3
Dear Jerry—
Please take this tape and put it in the safest place in Caracas—your lockbox at the bank if you have one, otherwise somewhere around the hacienda, maybe with your kids’ rock tapes, like the purloined letter in that idiotic Poe story they used to make us read at Concord Academy. I don’t hope ever to have to use it but there may be unpleasant developments where its evidence could be useful.
Don’t listen to it
—it won’t make much sense to you and doesn’t show your sister at her best. And Esmeralda might be shocked—she’s such a Latin lady.
I’ve decided to leave the ashram. I think the winter here is worth skipping—they tell me it’s brief but raw, and there’s nothing worse to a New Englander than a winter that doesn’t pack any kind of picturesque punch but doesn’t let you enjoy the outdoors either. I’m thinking of an island—just being on the same continent with the men in my life makes me feel crowded and harassed. Charles has been rather quiet, but now that I know the reason why, it’s worse than the harassment.
I’ll get over it, of course. People get over everything, and that’s the secret of all the persisting religions—God or whatever they call it gets credit for our animal numbness and reflexive stoicism and antibodies and healing processes, or else we die and that shuts us up as effectively as an answered prayer.
I’m sorry, I don’t want you to think you have a bitter sister. But one of the things you as a male will never have to know is how much a woman can
suffer
—jealousy, humiliation, panic, sense of betrayal—such a churning would shake a man to pieces; his nuts would come off his bolts, and all the studs out of his dress shirt. I’ve had some disappointments and reversals lately, but not along the lines of your scoffing jeering letter last summer. The Asian part of my experience has been perfect—a whole new vocabulary to frame the perennial problems in, and a way of looking at them that makes them almost vanish, like those holograms—remember, the postcards we thought were so risqué from that variety store in Roslindale?—that are somehow printed onto tiny iridescent ridges and show you different things or the same thing from a different angle when you very slightly move your head. Just as changing your head on the pillow gives you the strong sensation for a minute that you’re about to go to sleep.
Mother, I’ve decided, is just beyond me. Why don’t you fly up with some of the grandchildren? You could combine it with Disney World and Epcot Center. She’s playing these wild games with Daddy’s stodgy old blue chips and last month actually made a killing of sorts, so you can bet she’s going to keep at it until she loses everything. I hope you weren’t counting on much of an inheritance—I’m sure not. Some of the Price and Peabody silver should be yours eventually but I’ll keep what I have for the time being—at
least it’s not tarnishing black as lead like all that wonderful old Perkins stuff she has sitting around on her wrought-iron glass tables just
drinking
in the salt air and the acid rain from all those space shots that now at least they’ve stopped trying. Whether or not she marries this utterly senile-sounding admiral depends I think on how senile
she
becomes and how successful
his
children are at preventing it. I think there are three, all in their fifties and no doubt with expensive habits and stalled careers. She ever so slightly mentioned them in one of her letters as being “rather materialistic,” and I dare say they see Mother as a fortune-hunting vamp. Maybe she is, in this newest incarnation. We all have a number of skins, especially women I think, because society makes us wriggle more. Do you remember how she used to go on and on about the
hateful
Prices and how her mother-in-law had once commented about the décolletage of some dress she wore going out to some dance or dinner with Daddy before they were married—this must have been in the Thirties, but I don’t think there was still Prohibition—being rather too “staring,” meaning there was too much bare skin showing, and Mother never forgot or forgave it, and used to tell us over and over how that remark ruined not only that dress and that evening for her but the whole idea of
ever
going out with Daddy and having a good time, and how she always got excited telling us about it, saying the word “staring” with this terrible mother-in-law hiss? These odd little passing hurts that echo down through families like cannon balls. I’ve tried so hard
not
to raise Pearl, as I’m sure you have your six, your dear little niños and chicas, so these petty old snubs and slights become grotesque be-alls and end-alls—the way, for instance, Mummy wouldn’t let Daddy join his uncle over at Stillman, Ames, Hannicker & Price because she didn’t want
him under the influence of—to be
indebted
to—his own awful family, and made him stay on as a trust officer at the 5¢ Savings Bank where you and I know he never was happy or his talents, really, appreciated—that lovely intuitive mind of his which had to make do with the Metaphysicals since no
creative
investment decisions were ever entrusted to him, just buttering up widows and second sons—all going back to her décolletage being possibly “staring,” when of course if you remember Mother as a youngish woman that was a perfectly apt description—she was always looking for excuses to take her clothes off. Not just on the Vineyard with those Socialist nudists or up in Maine at Great-granddaddy’s lake but I can remember her standing around in simply her girdle for hours before they were giving some party, so that these poor caterers’ men dragging in these boxes and boxes of liquor had to keep averting their eyes, and as late as the Myron Stern days I remember him coming one time to the house for me and being embarrassed by this gray-haired—probably not much older than I am now, come to think of it—woman in that rather short terrycloth robe with no buttons, just a loose belt that kept coming untied, that she liked to sweep around the house in after having a bath, and his having to make some joke about it, to relieve his tension, out in the old blue Bel Air he used to borrow from his roommate. Now she’s probably the oldest bimbo in a polka-dot bikini on the beach, giving herself skin cancer, and God knows how she lured this poor Admiral into her sun porch. She said he kept tapping on her hurricane shutters but if I know Mother those shutters were up and all the lights blazing.
Didn’t mean to run on nostalgically like this—the cassette’s the thing. Guard it with
su vida
, as they say. You won’t see this grotesque stationery with its faux-naïve logo any more, unless
I steal some when I leave. I’m actually staying the night, tonight, which feels strange, since I’ve been using the dreary lobby, full of gun magazines, off and on these past months as a place to conduct my business. Some four-footed beastie keeps snarling and scratching and whining outside my sealed window, but if you turn the air-conditioner up to high it pretty well drowns him (or her—why do we always think predators are male?) out. The whole town of Forrest is sinister, in fact—the flattened-out flatness of it, the stagnant brook with its cottonwoods, and then in the distance these abrupt wrinkled mountains that seem pieces of another world. Pearl seems to be committed to a foolish marriage to some foppish young Dutchman—but who can say what marriage is more foolish than another? All have their merits and demerits and wear out before we do. Except in your case, of course. Maybe the language barrier you and Esmeralda had at first has lent a permanent touch of romance. It’s really not wise for married people (or lovers) to understand each other too well—communication, I fear, is hideously overrated. An
abrazo
for the two of you, and six kisses to the little ones from their rather frazzled
Tía Sarah
December 7
Dear Ducky—
On the run, but I’ve been wondering how you’re doing. I bet sometimes you long to be back in the closet. I know I do. Can you let Charles know ever so minimally, in that wonderful grunting way men have of communicating, that we’re ready to talk if he is? As you know better than I, he is highly
motivated now, and we can make the terms. I’ll settle for half of everything but begin by asking for it all—the properties and securities, that is. On my alimony—would four thousand a month be too reasonable? I caught a cold in the Kansas City airport (semicircular, and drafty) and feel dismal. Let’s have lunch again, when we’re two totally different people.
Love (warmed over),
Sarah
Dec. 12
Dear Martin—
The conch is a big food down here as well as a pretty shell. When I have an address I can give you, I’d love to hear if there’s anything
nice
you can say about prison. Security? Lack of responsibility? Friendships forged in difficult circumstances? I meant to answer your last good long letter but was
very
busy.
My best wishes,
Sarah Worth
Dec. 12
Dear Eldridge—
These are palm trees, common as telephone poles in this area. Their seeds are
entire coconuts
that ride across the ocean from island to island and take root. Isn’t that amazing? The island I’m on is small but pleasant. I bet Boston is freezing now. But bells and lights everywhere! Merry Xmas,
Sarah Worth
Dec. 12
Dear Shirlee & Marcus & Foster & Annette—