Temple of My Familiar (48 page)

“‘We work together now.’

“He raises an eyebrow. A thin one.

“‘As musicians.’

“‘Oh,’ he says.

“‘When I saw you at the door, I was on my way down to the studio to work.’

“‘I’m sorry if I diverted you,’ he says.

“‘Want to come see?’ I ask. For though I have been temporarily diverted, I still need a peek at my companions, my babies, my instruments. Just to be sure they are there. Mine. And, no matter how long it takes, waiting for me.

“‘What a lovely smell,’ Suwelo comments, sniffing, as we go down the stairs.

“‘Arveyda bakes every Saturday,’ I say. ‘At least every Saturday we’re not on the road. It relaxes him.’

“‘
Umm
,’ says Suwelo. ‘How much bread does he bake?’

“‘There’s no set amount,’ I say, as we pass the nice big picture of James Baldwin, where he looks like an angel who loves fresh bread, smiling down on all who enter the hall. ‘He just gets up in the morning, puts on his Miles Davis, Roberta Flack, Bob Marley, or Aretha Franklin tapes, and starts in. He can bake all morning or he can bake most of the weekend. He always bakes just enough.’

“‘But,’ says Suwelo, looking with skepticism at my skinniness, ‘four people can’t eat so much bread!’

“‘More than four people live on the streets of Berkeley,’ I say. ‘There is never the slightest
problema
.’

“Now we are in the studio: the big room with the smaller glass room inside it that I love better than any room in the world. I love all the instruments, the lights, the booths. I especially love my own instruments, which I lead Suwelo over to see.

“He is surprised. Puzzled. He looks out at the view. He looks where I’m standing.

“‘So many bells!’ he exclaims, looking at them. ‘So many chimes!’

“He does not think these are the instruments he’s been brought down to the studio to see. He looks over at the piano, the xylophone, the twelve guitars hanging on the wall, the cello, the drums, the flutes, and even the tambourines! We do have everything, I think proudly, and sometimes Arveyda
does
play gospel music. But actually I am about to consider the tambourine a bell.

“‘These are my instruments,’ I say, striking a wind chime with its own clapper, a wind chime that hangs in a row of several dozen. There are wind chimes of all sizes, colors, and descriptions. Some are made of sandal or balsa wood, some of bamboo, some of metal. They are all beautiful, with sweet, clear tones. Then there are my hundreds of bells—reindeer-harness bells, cowbells, school bells, every kind of bell. From all over the world. I run through a dozen bells and chimes quickly, with a hardwood stick, and the whole room vibrates with the beautiful, clear, and gentle sounds.

“‘You are smiling,’ says Suwelo. ‘You are happy!’

“‘Yes,’ I say. I do not stop smiling or being happy just because he’s noticed it. I run through some more chimes with another little stick I have, and the sound makes me happier still.
Oh,
I think to myself,
when he leaves!

“But he does not leave.

“He tells me he has come to make amends. To ask my forgiveness for the way he treated me.

“I almost have no memory of the way he treated me. He was only an episode in my life. But it is true, when he dropped me—and he did drop me—I was so destroyed, I was angry enough to kill.”

“W
HY IS
M
ILES
D
AVIS
so absolutely gorgeous, even though he looks like the devil,” says Arveyda. He is holding up a record album that has a picture of his idol (one of many musicians that he loves) staring out, moodily, at the world. “It really is a puzzle,” he says, almost inaudibly. “Now, if he were a very large man, and you met him somewhere at night, and he glowered at you like that—” he shivers—“he’d frighten you.”

Carlotta laughs. “Are you sure?” she asks.

Arveyda has finished his baking for the day, and his dirty apron and chef’s hat are in a heap on the floor beside the door.

He cuts large slices of whole-wheat bread for them and pushes the butter and jam closer to Suwelo’s elbow.

Suwelo is rapidly overcoming his case of being star-struck. Besides, the wonderful smell of the bread is really making the saliva flow. He glances around the kitchen, which opens out into the dining and living rooms and on out to a deck. From where he sits, he can see most of the Bay, all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge; he is appreciative of the view as he takes his first bite of the delicious bread, as good as it smells.

“I’ve heard ... a bit about you,” says Arveyda. He does not remember what he’s heard. He connects this man somehow with massage—Carlotta has learned to give massages, and massages him frequently. It is a skill he is himself learning, and enjoying, and one that permits him to touch Carlotta intimately without always pressuring her to make love. This has relieved a lot of the tension there used to be between them, because he has discovered that when a musician is working, he or she is already making love.

Suwelo looks across at Carlotta. She is still such a shock to him. Her hair is cut so short it must feel prickly to the touch. And she is so thin; even her breasts are smaller. But she is happy. This is the biggest surprise of all. Where is that wailing he remembered? the insecurity? the wringing of hands? the prayer? the gnashing of teeth?

She is taking out her gum—she pops it a couple of times to say good-bye—and begins to butter, thinly, a minuscule slice of bread.

“We were colleagues,” says Suwelo, “on a certain academic plantation. By the way,” he says to Carlotta, “you don’t still teach ... or do you?”

“No,” she says, chewing, “I gave it up.” She frowns slightly. “I grew frustrated,
and so fat.
” She tosses her head the way she used to when she had lots of hair. Suwelo catches a glimpse of her old self. Carlotta continues. “It’s too late to teach people what they need to know by the methods that are used in colleges.”

This is such an unexpected response from Carlotta that Suwelo laughs. She has even found a sense of humor!

“Cómo?” asks Arveyda, looking attentively at Carlotta. Having never been to college, he thinks it is something everyone prizes. That unless you’ve been to college you don’t really know anything. You have experience only, he thinks, but without facts. This means that at dinner with college-trained people your stomach turns over and over.

“Oh,” says Carlotta, “who needs more of the kind of people colleges produce? They’re all consumers, really. No matter what they study, what they’re successful at is shopping.”

“What about your own courses?” asks Suwelo.

“It’s true,” she says, “I loved them. I love teaching women’s literature. But I got tired of teaching it there. I wanted to teach it—if I continued teaching it—sitting in a circle in a meadow, where cows could just casually come up and look. Even join in.”

“I’m learning carpentry now, myself,” says Suwelo. “Though there the question is how does the carpenter relate to the worldwide exploitation, slaughter, and waste of trees.”

“What do you mean?” asks Carlotta.

“Well, wood comes from trees. Trees are alive. They have a purpose separate from becoming houseboats, firewood, and decks.”

“What did you teach?” asks Arveyda.

“American history,” says Suwelo. He chuckles. “But I had to be stoned or drunk to pass on such lies. It was really a no-win situation.”

“But you were a guerrilla historian,” says Carlotta, loyally. “The same way I was a guerrilla literaturist. It isn’t impossible to teach the alternative reality, especially when it’s your own.”

“But exhausting,” says Suwelo. “And I was always mad. Think of the history books I’ve read that say, in so many words, these are all the folks you need to know about to understand America; and there’s no one in them who relates to what you personally know of reality in any way.”

“You always lost your Indian students,” muses Carlotta. “I know I did. I finally began to say, at the very first class, ‘Go out and find a story or poem by Joy Harjo or Leslie Silko. This class will study these writers before we’re done, I promise you.’ “

Arveyda laughs, admiring Carlotta. He reaches over and pulls her foot up in his lap; he has to walk his stool over to hers in order to do this.

“I don’t know much about literature, or history,” he says apologetically, and sounds enough like an old Sam Cooke song that all three burst out laughing. “I read and read but I’m such a slow reader! I will never catch up!”

He is rubbing the back of Carlotta’s leg. She is as contented as a cat.

Carlotta smiles. “Don’t worry about it, chico mio,” she says. “What all of us are trying to learn is what you already know.”

Suwelo looks at him, this humble man who gives pleasure, unasked, to so many. Of the three of them he’s the only one who has gained, not lost, weight. This comfortable, rather short, almost
little
man. With his kind eyes and graying, flyaway hair. Yes, Suwelo thinks, that is true. Perhaps.

“W
HAT IS TRULY REGRETTABLE
is how, as a musician, you tend to lose people as you go along. They want you to keep playing music that made them feel something once, something they think your old music will help them recapture. But really, if you are at all alive as an artist, you are somewhere else, other than where you were, almost constantly.”

As he talks, Arveyda flings a glob of dough on the counter with shocking gusto. Flour flies up and dusts his beard. Opposite him, Suwelo lifts his lump of dough and brings it down just as hard. He is wearing a Bugs Bunny T-shirt and a red-and-black FSLN bandanna on his head. His jeans have slipped a bit and hang just at the level of his hip bones. He is also covered with flour and has an expression of severe and earnest intent.

“Relax,” says Arveyda, taking a sip of fresh grape juice. “This is serious work, it’s true; but, you know, most serious work can be fun.”

Suwelo thinks of making love to Fanny. How there is always a point now at which she laughs.

Arveyda is moving about the messy kitchen, tossing eggshells into the compost pot, mopping up spills, clearing a space on the counter next to the oven, greasing bread pans, and continuing to mutter, to whistle, and to talk.

He puts on a tape that is all bells and chimes and hums a bit as he resumes pounding his loaf. There is a heavy yeast smell in the air. And then, from pure whimsy it seems to Suwelo, Arveyda reaches into a bin and pulls out raisins and walnuts and begins folding them into the dough.

Suwelo, happily conscious of being an apprentice, follows suit.

“They say, ‘Oh, you have betrayed us! Why don’t you play the stuff we’re used to and that we expect from you? This shit you play now sounds like Elton John! What about your fucking roots?’”

Arveyda pounds his loaf and glances off down the living room. It is a foggy day and the splendid view of the Bay is simply not there. He listens for the sounds of the children, but they’re off at the movies with Carlotta and Fanny. He thinks of Carlotta and Fanny and the children and imagines what Carlotta is saying to Fanny, at a moment when the children leave them some peace. “Well,” he imagines her saying, “when I was seeing your husband I was really going through a period of such trauma as a woman that the only way I could deal with it was to become someone other than myself. I became a female impersonator.”

Suwelo holds up his loaf. Arveyda notes the well-distributed raisins and nutmeats, and nods.

“Now check this out,” he says. “If you write songs, the ones you wrote when you were nineteen are the ones they want you to write at forty-five. Because”—he laughs—“you’re supposed to help a lot of forty-five-year-olds stay nineteen. And besides, you’re supposed to help them justify the scummy relationships they have with women, which are just as fucked up today as they were when they heard your first song. Only they were young then, and new at the game, and couldn’t see that what they had and what they were doing was fucked up.”

Suwelo considers this. He thinks of how long ago it was that he and Fanny were married. Hippies at heart, they’d been married barefoot, in the spring, underneath blossoming apple trees. They had had live—and stoned—musicians. But what song had been their favorite? What song had been sung or played? Shit, he couldn’t even remember. But when they got their divorce they were both in love with Ono and Lennon’s
Double Fantasy
album. They played it all the time. “Give me somethin’ that’s not
hard
, come on, come on ...” Fanny would mimic Yoko’s insistent, knowledgeable woman’s voice, and, having pushed him down onto the bed, bank of the river, beach, forest plain, or floor, she would proceed to kiss him breathless.

“There are songs that people want you to sing today,” says Arveyda, thinking vaguely of the unbearably repetitive crooning of Sinatra, and placing first his loaf and then Suwelo’s into the oven, “that are just inappropriate to the times. Because men and women, the ones that have any kind of life, are simply somewhere else from where they were when they were nineteen. Thank goodness.” He laughs.

Suwelo looks at him questioningly.

“I suddenly remembered,” says Arveyda, still smiling, “the exact moment that I knew it was time to retire even my own version of the old-fashioned ‘love ballad,’ in which the woman sits by the window pining while the guy strolls off into the world. One night, after a concert, a young woman fought her way up to the stage for an autograph, and as I was signing her arm—typically, she had neither record, ticket, nor even a scrap of paper from the floor—I glanced at her breasts and inadvertently read her T-shirt. It said: ‘A Woman without a Man Is like a Fish without a Bicycle.’”

“I
WAS
A FEMALE
impersonator,” Carlotta says to Fanny, as she drives down a nearly perpendicular hill in San Francisco. It is so steep Cedrico and Angelita, who’ve been talking a mile a minute in the back seat, are quiet out of sheer terror.

“That’s why it’s so hard to remember anything that happened. Though I guess I thought I loved Suwelo. I know I wanted to marry him; that would have blotted out the marriage I had. But what I did was, I just dressed myself up like a tart and trundled my tits on out there. I thought every man that ever lived—except, possibly, for Leonard Woolf—was a fool, but I wanted them to look at me. ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,’ I used to hum under my breath, but I never bothered to think why.”