The Face Thief (8 page)

Chapter Sixteen

S
omething either wondrous or horrible had happened, depending on your point of view. He had resisted at the last minute. Already in the bolting sexual flow of it, with her tongue in his mouth and the blood pounding in his body, something in him had retracted back, sharply, and with a kind of sorrowing regret, he’d said, “No, I don’t think so.” He’d gently pressed her away from him, stood up and said, “I’m just feeling this is all wrong and I can’t do it, sorry.”

“Really?” She was astonished. And in the wake of that he saw her composure crack; a kind of gashed look of surprise came over her, and she shook her head wonderingly. That wonder soon hardened into a look of contempt. She started to say something, thought the better of it. Then she stood up, shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Whatever, snatched up her computer, and while he watched, marched stiffly out of the room.

She left behind a furious kind of odor in the air, as of excited molecules and her perfume mixed, and he sat there for a moment, breathing this in while he collected his thoughts. What had just happened to him, he believed, had been a test of a sort, sent winging into his life from the far reaches of the universe. And in response, after some initial slippage, he’d done the right thing. But there was something else there as well. Because this girl was a player, or a “polyhedral” as he sometimes privately called such types of people in recognition of their many-sidedness (or fraudulence), she had an ulterior motive of some sort. That being the case, what did she want?

Whatever it was, the important point, he thought, getting to his feet, his blood subsiding, was that he’d unmistakably dodged a bullet with this chick; or more than a bullet, a train full of fury and light that had just blown by an inch away from his face and left his hair still hanging sideways in the breeze.

As best he could, he washed the traces of her off himself in the cramped office bathroom and drove home with the sense of the ordinary daily operations of his life haloed with a light of reprieve.

The front of his house, as he pulled up—how peaceful it looked! And the small breast of lawn, as he got out and stood on it—how easily he could have lain down and fallen asleep on it! The positive
thunk
of the front door seemed to signal a final separation from himself and the kingdom of the mad. And the air of the house, the very atoms of it, were deeply, reassuringly familiar.

“Glyn?” His voice went out tentatively.

“Oh, hi!” His wife turned a corner and stood smiling at him from five feet way. “You look tired, honey.”

“Do I? Nothing a drink wouldn’t cure.”

Spectacularly, incredibly, she did nothing at all aside from saying, “I think we can accommodate that. Give me a few minutes to finish something up first, and then let’s go sit in the garden, okay?” And with that, and a wink, she turned around and went into the kitchen.

And Lawrence walked very carefully to his study, then plopped down in his easy chair and felt an iceberg of remorse calving gracefully off his body and landing with a splash hundreds of feet below.

Over the next few days, he found himself unnaturally cautious about the operations of his own life. Already organized by nature, he became obsessively so. He was on a break between seminars of a few weeks, and he drew up an exhaustive schedule of home improvement tasks and decided to advance some of the periodic maintenance as well. He didn’t want to think. He wanted to busy himself in small jobs dedicated to improving the state of his home, and by extension, his marriage. By passing his waking hours patching, painting, stripping, caulking, and at night, plotting the next day’s work in his Day-Timer, he allowed himself as little as possible time for introspection, and he found this arrangement agreeing with him.

One evening around this time, his wife and he were having dinner in the garden. As luck would have it, Glynis had made one of his favorite seasonal meals: steamed haricots verts from the garden, along with spring lamb, broiled with rosemary and garlic, accompanied by a big round Italian red. They were seated at the small round table in the garden, amid a bower of the flowering plants and vines that it had been her pride to cultivate.

Very casually, she said, “So I was thinking of something.”

“Really?” He looked up at her with his fork poised. “What was that, honey?”

“Randolph Crisp,” she said.

“Oh, really? Why?”

Randolph Crisp was a man they’d both heard of through mutual friends who was the founder of something called Sexual Yoga. A cult figure of a sort, he toured the country doing workshops in an arrangement not entirely dissimilar to those of Lawrence’s: a hundred or two hundred or so people in a room together for a weekend. The subject of his work was the polarity between a man and a woman, and his workshops promised “renewed emotional attachment, deepened ability to love, and the rekindling of sexual sparks.”

“Oh, you know.” She looked at him, blushing, and he noticed that she’d put on lipstick—she had Cupid’s bow lips.

“I’m touched,” he was smiling, “that you’re thinking like that, honey. But it can get a little wild, can’t it?”

“Maybe, but a woman in my book group was talking about it, and she said it was ‘rejuvenating.’ ”

“Is that what you talk about in those groups?”

Her blush was deepening. On top of that, certain muscles around her mouth were now activating. This was the signal, in the face he knew better than any other in the world, that she was playfully overriding her own reservations about something for the sake of the greater good of their togetherness. Love, experienced as heat, widened in his chest.

“Don’t you think?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

He made the reservations later that night. A day and a half later, bags packed, they were threading their car deep into New York State up Route 17, and then, after two hours, pulling off the main highway and entering a series of secondary roads. Around a turn they suddenly noticed a large compound with panoramic views set high on a nearby hill. The curving driveway led past a sign that said
LEAVE YOUR VICES HERE
, with an arrow indicating a nearby trash can. The place as they entered it had the air of a highly structured summer camp. There was an outdoor registration desk and about a hundred or so people were strolling the enormous lawns. Many of them walked hand in hand. Lawrence and Glynis signed in, unpacked in their upstairs room in the giant rambling mansion and watched out their window as Crisp arrived in a van. Aside from some blurry clandestinely shot YouTube videos, Crisp had rarely been seen by anyone, except at his seminars. The van first debouched at least six beautiful female attendants wearing identical sweatpants and skimpy white T-shirts before Crisp followed them. He was thin, with long center-parted hair, chinos and an unnaturally erect posture. He acknowledged no one and was hustled immediately indoors and out of sight.

“The guru doth underwhelm,” said Glynis, who was standing alongside him at the window. They both laughed.

Later that afternoon, after a vegetarian lunch served in a wood-paneled dining hall, they all convened in a kind of large home theater, which a hand-lettered sign indicated was the
KIVA.
The attendees were segregated by sex and grouped sitting on the carpeted floor in a rough semicircle around a small elevated stage. Crisp strode onto this stage and stood before them, smiling, now dressed in brown cargo pants, a chambray shirt, and sandals over wool socks. His hair was gathered in a ponytail.

“We’re here today to talk about sex, death and love,” he said. “Any questions?”

Everyone laughed, Lawrence included. When silence fell, Crisp looked out at them and slowly swept his gaze from side to side before beginning to speak in his real voice, which was soft and hypnotic.

“What you once loved as a child has already been forgotten by you. And that which you love now even passionately will eventually dwindle and disappear. The bulb of the flower already contains within it the precise directions for that flower’s death. But eternity is knowable in the here and now, my friends. That eternity is found in understanding your deepest purpose. It consists in giving the world the gift you were born to give. And in traveling through the cosmic portal of sex into the heart of that thing which makes us crucially human: love.”

Without looking at her, Lawrence knew that his wife was sitting primly across the room, staring outward with that expression on her face of somewhat sad containment which she often adopted in public. He felt closer to her at that moment, separated and in an alien setting, than he could remember feeling in a long time.

“Women,” Randolph said, surveying the female side of the room, “we adore and worship you. We understand that when you’re relaxed in your heart, you are the apex of God’s creation, filled to the brim with life and as wide and open, as changeable and deep, as the ocean.”

“Men,” he said, turning to the other side of the room and making a face of obvious distaste, “you’re a disappointment. When faced with the oceanic beauty of women, you usually attempt to turn it into a swimming pool. You wall it off, cheapen it whenever possible, and try to make of it something you can control and cross with the boat of your will.”

He turned back to the center. Light on his feet, he swayed in one direction and then another before raising a hand straight in the air and lowering it until it was pointing directly in front of him like a rifle.

“You,” he said.

The man sitting next to Lawrence stiffened.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Could you come up here, please?”

The man got to his feet. Balding and thin, wearing khakis and a black T-shirt, he sported a trim pencil mustache.

“What’s your name?” Randolph asked him as he made his way onto the stage.

“Clarence.”

“Clarence,” Randolph said, “is trying to appeal to women by showing us through the mustache on his face just how virile he can be. Well, Clarence, here’s your chance. I want you right now to put on your sexiest face, the one you give to a woman who you want to seduce, and I want you to give us your best bedroom line.

“Ladies,” he went on as he turned away from the now-frowning Clarence to the women’s side of the room, “I want you to respond by making the sound that his approach elicits in you.”

Clarence’s frown deepened. He looked physically ill for a moment before lowering his head to prepare himself. A moment later he flung it back up while putting his hands on his hips and thrusting his chest out. He drew his lips into the rictus of a man trying to initiate a particularly stubborn bowel movement.

“Hello, baby,” he said, “can I draw you a hot bath?”

A high, long, derisive groan met this line. The women hooted at the now-crimsoning Clarence. He stopped. He seemed to shrink onstage.

“How would you describe the size of your penis about now?” asked Randolph to an eruption of laughter.

“See,” said Randolph, as Clarence slunk back to his spot next to Lawrence, “this is exactly what I’m talking about. Men have no idea what women want, and our Clarence was basically spouting lines he’d seen on a television show or in some silly self-help book. He was doing what men do best: follow the script rather than walk through life with their eyes open. When a man stands in his power, the woman is attracted. It’s a law of nature, like gravity or entropy. But when a man merely mouths empty platitudes at a woman while he waits for her to take his clothes off, then that man is doomed to failure.”

Lawrence noted how, differently from himself, Randolph was an orator, a person adept at producing rhetorical effects and placing his audience in a kind of trance. Studying him more carefully, he observed that despite the apparent warmth, Randolph had unnaturally straight lower eyelids, indicating that he privileged logic over feeling, and the rounded, bulbous nose of a pleasure-seeker.

Pleasure—of the carnal variety—was the order of the day’s discussion, and that night, in their room, Lawrence and Glynis fell upon each other with the kind of unfettered passion that had been missing from their marriage for years. After they were done, while lying in bed, through the thin walls of the house they heard the unmistakable sounds of others carrying on similarly.

The next day, the exercises began. The couples were split up and the partners reassigned. Each of them was then asked to flirt with his or her new partner as both a man and a woman. Lawrence found this well outside his comfort zone, but good-naturedly tried to comply, batting his eyes in a grotesque parody of female wiles and jutting his hips. He also tried to comply when he and Glynis were reunited and sat with their eyes shut, knees touching and fingers lightly resting on each other’s hands as they drew collaborative shapes in the air with these hands at Randolph’s command. This apparently innocent exercise contained a wicked undertow. As it went on, Lawrence found the entire emotional curvature of their marriage replicated in miniature in the dance of their fingers: he needing to save her and she responding with ambivalence at this gallantry; she refusing to catch him when he fell, and he, despite his avowed self-sufficiency, feeling abandonment at those moments. This apparently innocent series of micromovements eventually enraged both of them.

As the day drew on, Lawrence began quite clearly to see the bigger picture, and the deeper outlook behind Randolph’s apparently eccentric exercises. Simply, by putting one’s sexuality on the line, one regenerated some of that sexuality, and regenerated as well the polarity between a man and a woman that was crossed in sex.

“What a strange, smart man he is,” said Glynis, at lunch.

Again, that night, following an afternoon of “fire-breathing” exercises designed to simulate orgasm, he found himself making love to his wife for hours.

The next morning Randolph met the attendees at breakfast and mingled. A celebratory ease was in the air. This small encampment two hours north of Manhattan had hosted a twenty-four-hour marathon of riotous sex, and it showed in the calmly unprotected way everyone spoke with one another and the expanded feeling of bonhomie in the air. Lawrence stared at his wife across the table as she ate lunch with a newly fresh shyness to her motions that was her inherent modesty and was particularly striking after her sexual abandon of the night before. He adored her for it. He adored her strength equally as much as he loved her gentle reserve.