Abandon (38 page)

The next night, when he slept, he was walking by some holy place beside a river—Greece, perhaps, with its great rocks and high blue skies—and then, for some reason, the person he was with, trying to make patterns out of words, was gone. He could see the answer she’d been looking for, and he hurried to go and tell her. But by the time he stepped into her room, she was gone. And he was left with a curious knelling sense about him. The same dream as before, in Damascus: he’d had the answer, but it had come too late.

When he drifted back into his waking self, he knew, with the certainty of dream logic, that they were over. They couldn’t be together. He looked across to where she slept, her hair spread out beneath her (she didn’t tie it up here), a faint smile on her pale face, and saw her perfectly at peace. The straps of her nightdress had slipped off her shoulder blades, and they looked so pale, so vulnerable in the faint light that he went over and kissed them, one time each.

She stirred in her sleep but didn’t wake, reached for his hand, and clasped it to the space between her breasts. Her skin was warm there, and he didn’t know how much she was in the room, how much somewhere else. He stood by the bed, his hand on her chest, her hand on his, and then, suddenly, bells were ringing everywhere, marking vigils.

He went out into the dark, she still asleep, and saw the single line of monks, in white, all hooded, walking towards their prayer.

Their last night there, both calm and happy to forget what awaited them when they got home, they went to the rock they had appointed as their own and looked up at the stars, across to the mountains, following the trail of the silver stream for as far as it would take them. “On this rock I build my church,” he said, half joking, but serious, too, because the words were catching here. “That’s what I need,” she said. “Not a church necessarily; but a rock.”

The silence fell between them, they heard movement in the brush. It was the first time, he thought, they’d been out in the world together, presented themselves to others as a couple. This was not the real world so much as its annulment—its transcendence—and yet it was a start; they had the beginnings of a public life outside themselves now.

She had begun throwing pebbles into the stream, and it was he now who put a hand on her arm, lightly, to point out the star shooting across the skies. The pebbles, one after another, sent ripples all the way out to the bank, and then there was no room for anything but stillness; they were her way of saying she was happy, didn’t want to go. The place had not cured her fidgetiness, her habit of looking this way and that, so life wouldn’t catch up with her; in a sense it had agitated it, as if by reminding her of what she didn’t have. But she had been transfigured in the light—there was no other word for it— and a whole face she carried with her, of anxiety, had fallen away.

“It’s amazing,” she said at last, throwing the pebbles into the stream, again and again, watching the moonlight shake. “I feel really moved to be here, privileged in some way.”

“I’m glad. You’re moved by the place?”

“By the place. By you, by me, by everything.”

“By me?”

“I get to see you in your element here; what you’re like when you’re alone. I get to see the person who sits at his desk and prays for everything to work out right. And really believes it will.”

She looked across to him from where she sat, the world black and silver around them.

“But you look worried somehow?”

“Of course I’m worried.”

He reached a hand towards her. “Can I do anything to help?”

“No. You’re the problem.”

“But you said a minute ago . . .”

“I know I did. I said I was touched, and I am. Deeply touched, by everything I can’t be myself. I see you here, and you’re so content— yourself—so full of things you want to do, so free, and it makes me feel like a rock around your neck. Petty and unworthy and clinging. You don’t need me.”

“Of course I do. That’s why I brought you to a place I’d always thought I’d come to by myself.”

She looked at him, aghast.

“How can I take you away from this? You’re happy here. You need your time alone.”

“I’m happy with you.”

She went back to throwing pebbles in the stream, and he thought that the person whom he could speak to best in her—womanly and full and calm—was the one who was calm enough to see they couldn’t make it.

“It isn’t you. I mean, it is you. But it isn’t only you; it’s everything. I feel opened up here—I can say anything. And when I can, I see . . .”

She let the thought trail, as did he. In their cell that night they lay, each in a narrow bed alone, facing the same direction.

The next day, when they stopped in at the bookstore to say their goodbyes and offer thanks, she started talking to the monk on duty, and he could see that she was trying to do anything she could to keep them here. This more than ever for her a departure from what she saw as Eden.

“I feel stupid asking you this,” she said, though the monk was clearly not surprised, and was used to seeing people sorry to go back into the world, “but I couldn’t help thinking. You live here all the time, so I guess it’s not Paradise for you, but, I know it sounds crazy, and I’ll bet everyone asks you this . . .”

“They do,” he said, “and you’re right. I do miss things in the world. As much as you would; more, perhaps.” His face was tanned, but the glow in him seemed to come from something else. His words came out distinct and clear as pebbles he’d pulled out from the stream. “I’m not the master of all our disciplines. I never will be. Sometimes I wish we could sleep in. I wish there were more people to help out around the refectory, the store. This isn’t a peaceful place or an easy place, however it may seem to you. I have all the usual human wishes.” The sentences had been polished by the silence all around them.

“But”—now he looked almost embarrassed, for the first time— “if you asked me what I really miss, more than anything, I’d have to say, the chance to share the blessings of this place with someone I care about. There are all the brothers, of course, and the prior—we see him on a regular basis. But they have blessings of their own. I wish there were some way I could transmit this—whatever it is—to the people who need it most.”

“That’s where we come in,” he said, because he felt the monk had said all he wanted to.

“You do. Come in again. And drive safely home.”

After they reached the main road, and turned back in the direction of the interstate, they said nothing for a long time. Not out of emptiness, but the opposite: a fullness that doesn’t want to be disturbed. They were back on the early drives, he felt, up in the hills, or in the early nights, long, wandering explorations till the light came up. In the part where they were silent, there’d never be any difficulties between them.

They were still in the desert when night fell—it was a long, long drive—and at times they couldn’t see any other lights in the night around them. When they reached California, and the narrow roads of orchards and artichoke stands, she rolled down a window and let the wind come in, extending her legs into the darkness as they drove.

When he touched her thighs, as they passed through darkened villages, she raised her hips, so more of her was available to him.

As they arrived at the coast, however, and turned north, the lights, the signs growing more familiar, they could feel their daily selves waiting to take them in, devouring and unstoppable as in-laws, waiting to pull them back into the old pleasantries and arguments. “It’s like when you’re young, not wanting to go home again,” he said, and she said, “Not only when you’re young.”

At last they saw the small light of his house, fragile against the large expanse behind it, and, parking on the street, began taking out the boxes. “We can do it in the morning,” he said, because they were tired, and the air of finality would be too clangorous. When they went in, the red light was blinking, desperate, and there were letters on the table collected by the man next door.

“Welcome home,” she said, as if to say that the end had now begun.

The desert had cleared something out in them, even if it had left them in a seeming emptiness with no external props or supports. “It’s funny,” she’d said, as soon as the sanctuary began to fade from view behind them. “It’s like being lonely together. Except there it’s okay, because you’re not alone.” “I know what you mean,” he’d answered, for it was true: in the company of bells and monks and high, vaulting skies—the cliff itself a place of worship—it felt as if they were companioned in the deepest sense. But by the time they’d entered his house, their lives were cluttered again, and there was no way of being in this room (where the books lay, the thesis, and any foreseeable future) and that one (she sprawled across the sheets) at once.

When he turned towards her in the bed that night, she was flame, her skin so hot he thought she might be running a fever; but afterwards, when he turned away to sleep, he felt ice everywhere. As if the fever had passed from her to him.

“I ought to go to the library,” he said next morning, seeing her still in bed, and she, in her instinctual way, burrowed deeper into her hole of blankets and pillows and sheets. “And there’s the seminar this afternoon. Do you think you’ll be here when I get back?”

She had buried herself under the covers.

“I just want to know, so I’ll know whether to hurry home or not.”

“No need to hurry.” The voice came up to him from her hiding place. “I have something in L.A.” After all this time, back in the wariness of the first afternoon, when each of them made up appointments that didn’t exist, as if afraid to step out into a clearing. Though now the wariness was not habitual, but earned.

“If you could just leave the key by the stove when you go.”

“Will do. Have a good seminar.”

He tried to find the perfect line from the poets, to make them laugh, to sweeten the moment. But nothing came to mind.

He had nothing really to do once he got to the library—it was just a way to be away—and when he arrived, the thesis further away from him than ever, he went up to the eighth floor, where no one thought of Sufis, and sat in one of the chairs overlooking the sea nearby. “In space things touch, in time they pass,” he thought, though why Adela Quested was coming to him now, just after the shock of the Marabar Caves, he couldn’t tell. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” When they’d learned the famous line at school, none of them had known the first thing about love or loss: it had been easy to quote Yeats.

Sefadhi had sent a message, through Eileen—he’d always choose to apply pressure indirectly—that an article in the
Persian Review
assessed the state of Iranian studies in the light of all the new materials that had come to light, now that the community was global. Texts had even been dug up in Italy, of all places, and there was an expectation that more would show up in California; but, having seen how his adviser frowned on such possibilities before, he knew it would be a mistake to rise to the bait now.

He looked out at the great open spaces that lay before him—what had brought him here, in a way. California had never learned what to do with limit; and yet without limit there was no faith. It was the loss of Shams that had caused Rumi to find faith in the truest way, not just the finding of Shams. It’s not dreams that belief gives us—that’s the easy part—it’s the strength to deal with the abolition of dreams.

Anyway, Rumi had never had to see his love grow old—or his Beloved; the death had saved them both from that. And then, looking at his watch, he saw it was two-fifty-eight. The seminar would be beginning in two minutes.

He raced down the steps, taking them two at a time, down eight floors, and sprinted across the campus, past the lazy clusters of kids at picnic tables, looking up at him in surprise from their yawning days. By the time he’d run up to the fourth-floor conference room, too much in a hurry even to wait for the elevator, Kevin was already well embarked on his talk on “Religion as a Grown-up Fairy Tale,” drawing, no doubt, on his years with Bettelheim.

“Even as children,” Kevin was saying as he came in, looking around for a spare chair, “even as children,” underlining with his repetition the intrusion brought upon them by the latecomer, “we have some intimation of a world beyond our own, another realm behind the garden wall, as you might say. We do not have to see it or describe it; we feel it in our bones. We are captive to what you might call ‘metaphysical nostalgia.’ The longing, as C. S. Lewis might have said, for the far side of the wardrobe.”

He looked around so all could fully appreciate the wisdom, and then prepared to continue. But just as he was starting up, the disheveled intruder suddenly broke in. “Children haven’t been told to act as if this is the only truth there is,” he said, and he saw several heads look up, as if startled. The rules of the seminar were so well known they didn’t need to be spelled out. The speaker read his paper, and only when he was finished did questions or rebuttals begin. As the interruption subsided, looks stole around the room: “John Macmillan’s well and truly lost it.”

“We might therefore provisionally assert,” Kevin began again, trying to find his footing, “that religion is at some level a sanctioned fairy tale through which society transmits its lessons to the young. It is the story told around the campfire, by which the elders pass on and down their customs and beliefs.”