American Purgatorio (14 page)

Someone had built a sweat lodge just down a trail from the house, and people would leave the area around the house and then return later, hair wet and faces flushed. I joined a group—one man had a flashlight—walking down to this sweat lodge and what it was was a stick structure like an igloo, covered in plastic, with a fire outside. Red-hot rocks were brought from the fire into the tent and doused with water. About six or eight people were sitting cross-legged in the sweat lodge, all naked and sweating, and when I saw Feather standing at the entrance, steam rising off her body, her hair braided like the famous Indian chief she was emulating, I didn't fall in love because I was still thinking about Anne. But I saw her beauty. Even from a sidelong view her nakedness revealed a beauty of purity, or a purity of beauty, and yes, Anne had purity, and she also had a sense of humor, but while Anne was uppermost in my mind, I was somewhere else, not in the upper regions, but somewhere below that, in my belly, which was feeling unusually taut as I took off my shirt and my shoes. When I was completely undressed and about to step into the tent, expecting to see Feather either fully or partially dressed, there she was, still naked, still standing outside the igloo entrance, still dripping from the steam. She was standing in front of me with her cowlick hair, and I was just bringing my eyes down from her hair to her face when she kissed me. She sort of jumped up quickly, and kissed me on the lips, and then she walked away.

What that kiss had meant was something I tried to figure out, turning it around in my mind. And when I took my turn in the steam tent, sat in the circle, watching the rocks glowing in the center of the circle, and when I thought of the person who'd kissed me, when I pictured her, it was Anne. As the heat radiated off the rocks, the images that came into my mind were images of Anne. One image especially, of her, innocently standing on the rocks at a tide pool, letting herself get splashed by a wave, and her thin yellow shirt getting wet and transparent, and then her turning to me.

After the sweat lodge I went back to the main celebration, stood with my cup of punch, a little away from the main group physically, yet feeling oddly connected to the general hubbub.

And not just to the people.

I wandered down a pine needle path away from the house, wandering along until I came to a tree. Slowly, I approached the tree, stood close enough to smell the tree, and listen, and look at the tree, not as a thing but as another life. I began to feel a tenderness for the tree. The old gnarled bark seemed beautiful to me, expanding and contracting in front of me, and the life of the tree (the force that through the green fuse moved) seemed visible to me, and when I touched the tree, put my hand against the hard bark, I could feel the yearning and sadness of the tree.

Or my own yearning and sadness.

Whatever it was it seemed to be pure. I wanted to talk to the tree. I knew that talking to a tree was not a normal thing to do, and yet I felt like reassuring the tree, comforting the tree as it stood before me. Longing is the desire for something unattainable, and while I couldn't afford to long for Anne, because that implied unattainability, I could—and did—feel longing for the tree.

I stayed there awhile and then I walked back to the tent. Feather and Fletcher were inside the tent, sitting cross-legged on the sleeping bags, their hands on each other's thighs. They invited me in and Fletcher told me about the LSD in the punch. Which didn't matter to me. I sat down, also cross-legged, creating a triangle inside the tent, and we didn't speak. The party voices were audible in the distance.

Fletcher turned toward Feather and looked at her. And then he looked at me. I looked at him and she looked at me, and we were all looking at each other in a way that made it unclear who was looking at who, or whom. Either way, there was a lot of looking going on. And at some point Fletcher slid across the sleeping bags, and with his fingertips, he began touching the base of my neck, pressing against my spine and spiraling his fingers down the bones of my back.

In the car, when they'd talked about sexuality, they'd talked about a desire that transcended mental and emotional and even physical accoutrements. They'd talked about the possibility of reaching that place of untainted desire, and now it seemed they were practicing it.

My encounter with the tree—the smell of the pine sap was still sticking to my fingers—had left me calm and surprisingly peaceful. As Fletcher continued kneading my back I was facing Feather, who was sitting very still, looking at me, letting me look at her, and something in her look, or the permission in her look, let me change her, or try to change her, into something else. And it wasn't that Feather became Anne, or that the bones in her wrist and the hairs on her arm became Anne's bones and Anne's hairs, but because I wanted Anne, even though she was Feather, I was feeling the excitement of being with Anne.

That's when Fletcher left the tent. He nodded to me as if he was giving me something, giving me an experience or a wish, or giving me Feather. He seemed aware of what was happening. He said, “If that's what you want,” and what he was doing by saying “If that's what you want” was stepping aside. I don't imagine it was easy for him, but he was trying, I think bravely, to live the principles he advocated. Then he left the tent.

When he was gone Feather turned so that she was facing me directly. When she'd adjusted her position so that she was sitting close enough to reach out, she did. Our eyes were fixed on each other and she reached out, took my hand, and placed it on her heart. It wasn't exactly her heart because it was higher than her actual heart and more toward the edge of her chest, so that beneath the material of her shirt—between my hand and her heart—I could feel the outline of her breast. She was saying, “Feel my heart,” and although that was something Anne would never say, I wanted to feel the heart, and feel the person, or radiance even, emanating from that heart.

Because in my mind it was partially Anne's heart, it was also Anne's breast, and I felt something stirring. I felt the stirring of desire, but every time I tried—or thought about—acting on this desire, I thought of Anne, and then the desire faded. And Feather seemed to understand this. It didn't seem to be a problem for her. I was all part of weeding out impurities. She was willing to accept whatever my so-called impurities might be, without judgment. And because human experience is full of complexity it's possible to have simultaneously conflicting impulses.

Which I did.

I say conflicting because certain of these impulses—about what I should do, or ought to do (or about Anne)—were holding me back, separating me from where part of me wanted to go. And the reason I didn't follow these impulses and break through any membrane was that I wasn't convinced I wanted to go there. I was dreaming of passing through to the other side, but at the same time I wanted to stay on the side I was already on. I was still with Anne or the memory of Anne. I knew that memories get superseded by desire, and because I was worried about losing Anne, I held on to her memory, in my mind. And I wouldn't say that I was fighting a battle between memory and desire, because memory also was desire.

All the time I was thinking this my hand was shivering.

“It's just a breast,” she said.

“I'm fine,” I said.

And something about my saying that brought my attention back to my hand, feeling the heat from her body, the softness of the flesh, and the structural framework of the body beneath that flesh.

But I didn't cross to the other side. She's there, I thought, on one side and I'm on the other side. And yes, I could have gone over and joined her except for the membrane. The thing about the sexual membrane is, once you're on one side, the other side seems very far away.

We sat like that for what seemed like a long time, and although I was looking into her eyes and she was looking into mine, what our eyes were saying were different things. I didn't know about my eyes, but her eyes were saying, “You almost made it. Almost, but not quite.”

4.

Feather, still looking into my eyes, raised a finger and tapped me on my chest, gently pressing her finger into my breastbone. I felt the sensation passing through my skin and through my breastbone, and I didn't think I'd asked any question but, as if answering a question, she took my hand and led me along a path in the pine trees to a Volkswagen van parked on a dirt road in the middle of a clearing. Fletcher was already in the van, the door open, eating rice from a bowl, using chopsticks. The whole back of the van was a platform with a foam pad and sheets, and when Feather and Fletcher began taking off their clothes, I assumed that they would want to be together when whatever was going to happen started happening. Which was fine with me. And when it did start to happen—first some light touching of feet, then rubbing of feet and ankles and lower legs—I was ready to go. As I started to squeeze past Feather she took my hand and placed it on Fletcher's foot. She grabbed his other foot herself and together we began rubbing. I imitated her massaging style, using my fingers and the knuckles of my fingers to dig as deeply as I could into the emotion-filled muscles and fascia of the ball of his foot. I could hear raindrops hitting the roof of the van when Fletcher sat up, took me by my shoulders, and positioned me so that I found myself straddling Feather, who was lying on her stomach. My hands were kneading her large gluteus muscle, and Fletcher was behind me, rubbing my back through my shirt. I still had my clothes on, unlike Feather, who turned over, so that I was now massaging her neck and her legs and everything between.

The whole interweaving dance had a mind of its own, and it continued until, at a certain point, Fletcher was massaging my back, and Feather was massaging Fletcher's back, and the only person not massaging was me, flat on my stomach, face tilted to one side, eyes closed, feeling the skin of my neck and back and buttocks exposed to the air. I could feel my belt being unbuckled and I knew that hands were touching me but I couldn't tell whose hands they were. And when I heard the metal doors of the van swing open I couldn't tell who left or who came until I heard Fletcher's voice asking me to turn over. And when I did I could see that Feather was gone. I could see that I was aroused, and I could feel it, but I was too relaxed or too lost in experience to do anything but notice.

One aspect of the sexual membrane is that once you're on the sexual side, you don't really care what happens next. In a sense I'd gone to a movie, and I was watching the movie, and at some point—I didn't know when—the movie became a different movie, and by the end of the movie I was enjoying whatever movie I was watching, and had forgotten a switch had occurred.

And as Fletcher continued massaging, the distinction between sexual organ and other organs—skin, say, or brain—disappeared, and in the middle of that disappearance I experienced something. I wouldn't call it cataclysmic, because it was effortless and sudden, and while I and my body were experiencing all the physiological things that happened in the aftermath of that, Fletcher unrolled some toilet paper. Even wiping my stomach was a kind of massage, and it wasn't absolutely clear if clean-shaven Fletcher, his hair tied out of his face, was being sexual. There was no sign of that. It was only clear that he was attempting to be kind, and for me, at the receiving end, there wasn't any difference between attempting to be kind and being kind itself.

Of course when it was all over I went back to the other side of the membrane, the nonsexual side. Fletcher became no longer a pair of practiced hands dancing the dance of pleasure; now he was a stringy-haired hippie manqué, and while I still liked him, as a human being, I didn't want to be with him. So I decided to take a walk.

There was a trail that led up from the van into the hills and I walked on that trail up the hill until I came to a wooden ladder over what might have been an electric fence. I stepped over that, walked out into a field, and in the middle of this field I came to the proverbial two roads diverging. Actually they were two
trails
diverging, an unused fire road and a smaller trail worn into the hillside grass.

Normally it wouldn't have been a question. I would have just picked a trail and kept walking. But I'd been thinking about desire and the twin poles that comprised desire: want and need. There was moment-to-moment craving on the one hand, and on the other, something that led to long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Like everyone else, I believed I wanted satisfaction and fulfillment, so I stood at this junction, looking at the two roads, one less traveled than the other, and I knew it wasn't just the two roads, it was the
meaning
of the two roads. I somehow imagined that my choice would determine, not only where I went, but by virtue of that choice, what my world would be. It wasn't that one road was Anne and one road was Feather; both roads were going in the same direction. It was merely a question of knowing what it was I needed, and based on that, where I needed to go.

When Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, he didn't say how long the road would be, or which road it was, and so I stood, not transfixed, but not moving forward, looking at these two brown roads.

I'd read in a book one time that a way to break through a barrier is to talk to yourself, in a mirror, on LSD. I had no mirror, but I stood in this meadow, a green grassy meadow. Clouds were obscuring the moon but there was light enough to see, and there was one big tree sitting in the middle of this meadow and I went up to this tree and started talking. Not talking. I knew the tree couldn't talk, but I tried to imagine, if it did, how would the tree communicate? I tried to talk with the tree. I stood in front of the tree, sending signals, sending vibrations, trying to receive something, or hear something, to have the tree, not tell me what to do, but show me, so that I might know. And because it was spring some seeds were falling, and one seed came down like a whirligig and landed on my head. I brushed it off. That wasn't what I wanted. I was trying to communicate. I was trying to communicate with this tree.