On the Edge A Novel (16 page)

‘It was love that brought you round.’

‘Love and boredom,’ admitted Peter.

‘I didn’t know what unconditional love was until I met my wife,’ said Frank.

‘Is she here?’

‘No, I came here for me and, also, she needed her own space this week. When we found each other, we just sat around at home for a long time and cried about our unmet needs.’

‘Are you still…’

‘No, we’re over that phase.’

‘Oh, good, it’s nice to get out occasionally.’

‘Change!’ shouted Martha.

‘Can I see your treasure?’ asked Peter.

‘No,’ said Frank.

‘But I showed you mine.’

‘Sucker.’

‘Well, I don’t think that’s very fair.’

‘You’re four years old and you don’t know the world’s unfair yet? Wise up,’ said Frank.

‘You little bastard, I thought we were supposed to be best friends.’

‘We are, but this is my treasure.’

‘I love you,’ said Peter disgustedly.

‘You do?’ said Frank, suddenly wide-eyed and vulnerable.

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ said Frank, opening his cupped hands with histrionic tenderness.

The two men subsided into idleness. Peter was annoyed at having deployed the word ‘love’ like a password in a computer game. Frank was looking round to see if they were the only ones to have found this exit from the loop Martha had condemned them to. Only one other couple seemed to be in repose.

‘I have to admit, I’ve done this workshop before,’ said Frank. ‘I knew we were really meant to show our treasure.’

‘You’ve moved on and let go before?’

‘Yes, but Martha says that you can always come back because you can always go deeper,’ said Frank.

‘Ah-ha.’

‘OK,’ shouted Martha. ‘Time’s up! Which one of you showed the treasure?’

Peter and Frank, Karen and Blue-Eyes put up their hands.

‘Only four of you,’ said Martha.

‘But you told us not to,’ said some protesters.

‘And who told you to obey the rules?’ said Martha. ‘Your parents? Your teachers?’

‘I wanted to,’ a number of people cried out in self-defence.

‘No,’ said a woman’s voice over the hubbub of excuses. ‘I’m pleased I didn’t show my treasure.’

Peter looked at her carefully: she was in her sixties with a kind, maternal face.

‘And what’s your name?’ asked Martha.

‘Carol.’

‘Why are you pleased you didn’t show your treasure, Carol?’

‘It was my gift to myself; I’ve had to learn a lot about my boundaries,’ said Carol. ‘I was giving it away until two years ago,’ she groaned.

Everyone laughed, not least Martha and Carlos.

‘I read
Women Who Love Too Much
and it really changed my life,’ said Carol.

‘Well, we’ve certainly learned something about Carol, haven’t we?’ said Martha with relish. ‘She’s been “giving it away” until two years ago. But don’t you feel you may be overcompensating, dear, by not showing your treasure to your best friend? You “give it away” to a stranger, but you share with a best friend. The Middle Way is the path of the heart. We don’t want to be a spendthrift or a miser.’

‘No,’ said Carol firmly. ‘I feel really good about not showing it. I wasn’t just giving it away to strangers, I was giving it away to my children and my husband. I don’t blame him, we were just playing the roles we’d been taught, but when he passed away two years ago I was completely lost because I had no way of living except through serving others.’

‘But maybe now,’ said Carlos, ‘you look at the situation with the eyes of someone who realizes that she has given away too much. Abraham Maslow used to say that if you only have a hammer, every problem in the world looks like a nail. One reason why we asked you to imagine you were four years old is so that you could come to the problem freshly.’

‘Ya,’ said Carol, ‘I see what you’re saying, but we’re all individuals, right?’

‘Yes,’ said Carlos, without sparing a thought for what the other Carl might have said on the subject.

‘And maybe what I did wasn’t what you and Martha wanted to show, but maybe it was right for me.’

‘We’ll see how you feel about it at the end of the week, dear,’ said Martha, cutting short this rebellion. ‘Now, the ones that showed your treasure, why did you do that? What’s your name?’ she asked Blue-Eyes.

‘Paul.’

‘And why did you show your treasure, Paul?’

‘Well, you know,’ said Paul, rubbing Karen’s back, ‘Karen reminds me of my mom, and she was such a great lady I couldn’t refuse her anything.’

‘Oh-oh-oh,’ wailed Karen, ‘I think I’m going to cry.’

‘Plus,’ said Paul, ‘I’m pretty active in my local Zen centre in LA and I’ve taken vows of generosity…’

‘Well, it’s great when we can act from principles,’ said Martha, ‘but when we can do what’s right spontaneously, that’s even better.’

Her fingers meshed again, but this time on a vertical axis, the right hand swooping down to meet the rising spread of her left hand.

‘How about you?’ she asked Jason. ‘The great communicator.’ She turned to the group and wrinkled her nose humorously.

‘You’re the great communicator,’ said Jason. ‘Forget women who love too much. What about women who talk too much?’

A simmering disapproval passed through the group.

‘What about arrogant British men who shoot their mouths off?’ shouted Flavia.

‘This is typical Jason,’ said Haley, sensing the opportunity to graft her grievances onto the group’s burgeoning hostility. ‘I give up, I really do.’

‘You know,’ said Martha to Jason, ‘there’s a lot of aggression in what you’re saying.’

‘God, they didn’t give you that psychology degree for nothing,’ said Jason. ‘You do have a psychology degree, don’t you?’

‘My background is in Gestalt and EST,’ said Martha proudly. ‘I also trained as a chiropractor.’

‘Oh, well, we’re going to be all right from the neck down,’ said Jason. ‘It’s just from the neck up that I’m worried.’

‘What are you worried about in particular?’

‘Well, for a start, we were meant to end at ten o’clock and it’s already ten-thirty…’

‘Big deal,’ said Flavia. ‘Jesus, you should be grateful that Martha and Carlos are giving us so much of their time.’

‘No, no,’ said Martha, ‘I want to thank Jason for pointing that out. I’m not very good with time and anybody who wants to leave at the advertised time can do so. If I get excited and I see that things are cooking, I just like to stay with it as long as anybody needs me.

‘But tell me, Jason,’ Martha went on, ‘what are ya really mad at? Remember, the way you behave here is the way you behave in life, so what are ya getting in touch with here? Is it your relationship?’ she said, pointing to Haley. ‘Is it your parents? Is it your work?’

‘No,’ said Jason breezily. ‘As Haley’ll tell you, I’m a very superficial person, and I’m angry with what’s happening right
now.
’

‘Well, that’s great. You know, a lot of people have a problem with living in the present. But as I like to say, it’s a real gift, and that’s why it’s called “the present”.’

Several people expressed their wonder at the insight afforded by this pun. The African Queen strained to catch Paul’s eye, hoping for acknowledgement that she had already quoted Martha’s self-quotation to him in the hot tub, but Paul was still pondering whether Martha had been rebuking him for lack of spontaneity. He felt that he was a pretty go-with-the-flow, spontaneous type of guy, and he didn’t want the group to think that he was some kind of Zen robot.

Failing to connect with Paul, the African Queen sank back into the exasperation of realizing that if she hadn’t been a man in a previous lifetime, the flow of sacred feminine energy would have been strong enough to free her from the patriarchal cringe which had made her obey Martha’s deceptive authority instead of following her own perfect instincts.

‘Yeah,’ said Jason, ‘but sometimes “the present” is the spiritual equivalent of the archetypal pair of socks your granny gives you for Christmas.’

‘Have you got an issue with your grandmother?’ said Martha.

‘No,’ said Jason, temporarily thrown.

‘Ya see,’ said Martha, ‘I don’t believe it when you say that your anger isn’t rooted in the past.’

‘You sort of win the argument in advance by using the word “rooted”, don’t you?’ said Jason. ‘Where else can anything be rooted?’

‘According to Terence McKenna,’ said Flavia, ‘who happens to be a genius, instead of an arrogant British jerk, history is rooted in the future.’

‘What’s your fucking problem?’ said Jason. ‘Your English boyfriend walk out on you? He must be a happy man.’

‘You bastard,’ said Flavia.

‘Children!’ said Martha.

‘All I’m saying—’ shouted Jason.

‘Go, go, go, Jason,’ said Martha, ‘get in touch with that anger.’

‘All I was saying,’ Jason resumed, ‘is that I was in a perfectly good mood until I had to listen to you and Carlos Jung here blathering on past my bedtime.’

‘You have a bedtime at your age?’ asked Martha. ‘Or is it Little Jason who has a bedtime, and Little Jason who’s mad at us?’

‘I was interested that you use the word “archetypal” about your grandmother’s socks,’ said Carlos.

‘I wasn’t talking about my grandmother’s socks,’ protested Jason.

‘Sometimes we are correct to resist the idea of a personal crisis,’ explained Carlos, ‘because what we are in fact experiencing is a
transpersonal
crisis.’

‘Listen, Yungos,’ said Jason, ‘I’m not experiencing any sort of crisis, except that I’m about to gag from listening to the two of you.’

‘Why is Little Jason being such a bad boy?’ said Martha. ‘Does he wanna be spanked?’

‘Not by you, darling,’ said Jason with a curt laugh.

‘This is real dynamic,’ said Martha excitedly. ‘We don’t normally get the energy moving this much on the first session. I wanna thank Jason for getting us all stirred up.’

‘Any time,’ mumbled Jason.

‘Now is it past everybody’s bedtime,’ asked Martha ironically, ‘or do we wanna play one more game?’

‘Let’s play,’ replied a number of voices, now united against Jason.

‘You know,’ said Martha, ‘when we’re children we know how to play but we need to learn how to work. Now we know how to work but we need to learn how to play.’

‘But this play,’ said Carlos, ‘
is
work.’

‘Don’t tell them that,’ said Martha in mock consternation.

In the next game they paired up again and the shorter person had to start as many sentences as possible with the phrase ‘One thing I don’t want you to know about me is…’ Then they would swap again.

People milled about the room looking for new combinations. Carol, seeing Jason shunned, went over to his side and offered to play with him.

Haley, furious with Jason, attached herself to Paul, who she thought was attractive in a sincere sort of American way.

Peter couldn’t help agreeing with Jason that the session should end at ten o’clock, but he also found himself embarrassed by Jason’s manners and more conscious, because he had been mercifully free of this consideration for some time, of how much he was conditioned to react to other English accents. If he couldn’t throw off this habit, the most superficial layer of opacity, how could he hope to see clearly? Perhaps all he could hope to do was to see clearly why he couldn’t see clearly – was that the limit to freedom? He refused to believe it, but then why had his wild mind-annihilating passage on the massage table left this sociological tic untouched?

He was suddenly revolted by the idea of England, like an impacted tooth collapsed on itself and rotting. The prospect of returning there filled him with depression and impatience. Leaving Martha’s workshop was an incentive, but he could do that by stepping outside and standing on the edge of that mysterious ocean whose other shore was China, under the named and the unnamed stars, the pulse of Crystal’s presence as unmistakable as spring in the branches of a cherry tree.

There was only a sleepy old man in a tracksuit left to play with, and so Peter went over to Stan’s side and smiled at him weakly.

‘One thing I don’t want you to know about me,’ said Peter, who was slightly smaller than Stan, ‘is that I think I must be a very superficial person because I keep falling in love with different women. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that I had the most amazing experience this afternoon and I’m already murdering it with sceptical analysis, but at the same time I want to give the irrational an intelligible place in the scheme of things. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that although my childhood wasn’t bad it was dull, dull, dull, and sometimes I worry that I must be fundamentally dull as well. There wasn’t any cruelty but there wasn’t any magic either; perhaps that’s why the sort of thing that happened this afternoon feels like an alien invasion. One thing…’

‘Swap!’ shouted Martha.

‘One thing I don’t want you to know about me,’ said Stan eagerly, ‘is that I’m impotent. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that I sometimes wish my wife would take it easy with some of this New Age stuff. One thing I don’t want you to know about me is that, that, well, that I don’t wanna die. I’m not allowed to say that at home ’cause I just get an audio book about being over-attached to my earth suit, but I wanna say it now: I’m real scared of dying.’

Stan swayed a little on his feet, as if he’d been punched in the face by his own honesty. Peter was pierced for a moment by compassion.

‘Time’s up,’ shouted Martha. ‘Now listen up! We haven’t got time to process this work tonight, so I want ya all ta remember what you said and how it felt to trust another person. Trust is a real big issue for most of us and we’ll be looking at that tomorrow morning. At eleven o’clock we’ve got an appointment with some of the body work staff down in the baths. For those of you who haven’t been to Esalen before, nudity might be an issue for you, so if you wanna raise it in the group tomorrow I’d encourage you to do that.’

‘And also,’ said Carlos, ‘try to write down any dreams you have tonight. Remember your unconscious is your best friend.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Jason.

‘That’s right,’ said Martha. ‘And we’ve got a storm system coming in right now, so there’s gonna be a lot of negative ions in the atmosphere which means real exciting dreams.’