Fever (27 page)

“Not entirely, but to a large extent that’s true. My parents did divorce when I was eleven or twelve and when my mother remarried—she doesn’t remarry in the play—I went to live with my father.”

“That’s pretty unusual, I think, isn’t it?” Bill asks Alexis. “That a child should live with his father instead of his mother? How did that happen?”

Alexis pauses, wondering what she should say, she hadn’t expected to have to talk about their real life, but only about the play. They aren’t the same thing, she wants to point out, but doesn’t, since they had decided ahead of time that in order to get the publicity that would bring the play an audience, they would play up the mother-son, autobiographical angle. Bill is looking impatient, so she speaks.

“I was going to live on an isolated ranch.” She keeps her voice matter-of-fact, but she is caught between bewilderment and anger, that she should find herself telling this, the truth, because she has been caught off-guard. “As the time for the wedding
approached I could see Jamie getting more and more unhappy. Finally I asked him what was wrong. He said he didn’t want to live in the country, he didn’t want to leave all his friends, he especially didn’t want to leave his father.” She swallows, then goes on. “So, I had to choose, and I chose to go, and to leave him with his father.” How she feels must be written on her face, because Bill doesn’t look at her, but turns to Jamie.

“Is this how you remember it, James?” he asks, and Alexis is surprised at the question.

Jamie shifts his gaze to the tabletop, frowns, then says, “Well, I don’t remember …” What? Alexis thinks, what? “But, anyway, that’s not what happens in the play. In the play the mother is an artist and she leaves her family so she can pursue her life as a writer.” She hears this with only a part of her mind. My god, she is thinking, if he doesn’t remember that, that critical moment that is so clear to her, that she has clung to all these years, what does he think happened? “The son feels betrayed and abandoned,” Jamie says. “He can’t get over it.”

For the first time it occurs to Alexis that she and her son might have different stories about what happened between them.

The ashram was situated on a hilly ten acres, the road up to it narrow and winding with a sheer drop off one side. From the small parking lot she could see a big, two-storey, ranch style house with a blue-painted roof. She said, “Do you live there?”

“No,” he said, she thought he was avoiding looking at her, “only couples live there. I live in another, smaller house with the other single men.”

“It sounds like there’s lots of you.”

“Sometimes there’s too many,” he answered. “But right now there’s about two dozen of us.” He led her from the parking lot up an asphalt path past the back door of the big house. A thin
young woman, twenty years old or so, was standing near the door watching two toddlers who stood silently and watched Alexis and Jamie pass by.

“Hi, Lucinda,” Jamie said, cheerfully, but didn’t introduce Alexis or stop. The girl nodded her head, but didn’t speak or even smile. When they had passed out of earshot, Alexis said, “Are those her children?”

“Just the little one,” Jamie said. Alexis looked back over her shoulder and saw that Lucinda had picked up the smallest child and was holding him on her hip while the other child was still watching them. It seemed to Alexis that an air of unhappiness hung around the woman and she felt sorry for her, seeing perhaps echoes of herself years before, and then for the curiously silent children. It was the children who worried her, but, she thought, trying to shrug off her uneasy feeling, I’m probably just imagining it. It’s a bad time, just before lunch, the kids are probably cranky because they’re hungry.

To her right, down among some stunted, gnarled trees that she couldn’t identify, she saw what looked like an Indian teepee with bright paintings decorating its canvas.

“A place for the kids to play?” she asked, remembering a tent that had been pitched on the grounds of a school Jamie had once gone to.

“No,” he said and smiled at the idea, but she could see how nervous he was, growing more so every minute, his face pale, a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead, although here near the mountains it was not hot at all, was cool even. She wanted to stop him and say—whatever you want, anything you want, if you choose this, I accept it—but these were words that were not sayable, and emotion had risen up so hard in her throat that her eyes had begun to water. She took off her glasses and wiped
them with the back of her hand, then yawned ostentatiously.

“I never sleep well when I’m travelling,” she said.

“I know what you mean,” Jamie said, “I’m the same way.” He went on a few steps further, then stopped at a point on the path where they had a clear view of the tent below them. “That’s where Irina lives. She’s a clairvoyant.” He said this last carefully, after an almost imperceptible pause, and she recognized that he had determined, as was his way, to lay everything bare before her, to hide nothing from her. When she said nothing, his honesty had silenced any comment she might have made, he went on almost eagerly. “She’s gifted. She just has to close her eyes and she’s in another space.”

“Surely she doesn’t live there in winter, too?” Alexis said. “What about snakes and scorpions and black widow spiders?”

“She says there’s never been any insect or snake or anything like that in there. She’s lived in it a couple of years now, winters too, she has a little heater she uses when it gets cold.” They moved on up the path, Alexis again casting a last glance over her shoulder at the teepee down among the trees.

The ground around them was bare and stony between the few cactuses, other dry, thorny-looking bushes that she didn’t recognize, and the clumps of sage. He had told her that this was once Apache country, the scene of much bloodshed and death and that people said the souls of dead Apache warriors still roamed the rough, ancient-looking countryside. Again she wiped her cheeks below her glasses, casually, as if she were only brushing something annoying away.

“This place was once a private school,” Jamie explained and showed her the small swimming pool where no one was swimming and the tennis court where no one was playing tennis. She could hear the sound of hammering and sawing and the whine of
power tools coming from a low, log building to the right of the tennis court.

“That’s the workshop,” Jamie said. “It’s where I work most of the time.” Alexis knew that the ashram survived on its cabinet-making business and this still surprised her somehow, it was so mundane, as if she had thought their spiritual interests should be enough to feed them.

The workshop had once been a stable, its wide doors were open to the sun, but now it was full of wood-working equipment—saws and lathes—and heaps of sweet-smelling, curled, white wood-shavings lay about. A muscled young man, his long, thick hair held back with a red headband, stripped to the waist, was bent over the white wood of a new cabinet, sanding it by hand with careful attention.

“Mom, this is Jeremy,” Jamie said, stopping.

“Hi, Jeremy,” Alexis said, smiling. Jeremy stopped sanding only long enough to lift his head and say a quick ‘hi’ to her and to flash her a smile that she saw at once was far too bright to be genuine. She saw then that everybody in the ashram felt on trial because she was there, a parent, somebody bound to disapprove, even to scoff. Jamie led her quickly away without taking her inside where other young men were moving about.

“It’s still an hour till lunch. Would you like to see where I sleep?”

“Oh, yes,” she said quickly. They followed another curving, gravelled path through the trees upward to where an unpainted wooden, dome-shaped building squatted in a clearing, its shingles weathered and grey. They went inside and Alexis saw the bare boards of the unfinished interior, some cupboards along one wall, a Franklin stove, a sofa in a corner and a ladder leading straight up to a loft. Jamie sat down on the sofa, and she was
about to sit beside him when he said, still smiling, although she thought he was beginning to seem tired, “Why don’t you go upstairs and see where I sleep?”

Alexis hesitated, looking at the ladder which was set perpendicular to the floor, wondering if her sandals would slip on the narrow rungs. But no, she decided, I’ve come all this way, I’ll see everything, I won’t hold back now. She went to the ladder, gingerly putting her foot on the first rung, then turned to Jamie, laughing, and said, “You know, in Borneo the shamans climb a ladder to the sky during their ecstasies.” She began to climb and went up through the rectangular opening in the ceiling.

The roof upstairs was low and angled, the walls unlined. Pallets, that was the word that came to her mind as she saw the foam pads with sleeping bags or bedding stretched over them. She stared around, trying to think, trying to be reasonable, but the thin pallets on the bare wooden floor, the absence of bedding on most of them, the books left open beside them, the frayed remnants of carpet placed on the unfinished board floor beside a couple of the beds hurt her, gave her an actual pain in her chest. Her eyes were blurring again and she took a few deep breaths, then called downstairs, keeping her voice light and strong-sounding, “Which one is yours?”

“Third one on your right.” It was one of the ones with a flannel sheet and a blanket spread on it and folded neatly on it, she recognized the quilt she had given him when he had left after high school eighteen months before. She took off her glasses and bent over to wipe her eyes and cheeks using the hem of her cotton skirt, put her glasses back on and began to climb carefully down the ladder. When she reached the bottom, she went to sit beside Jamie on the couch. Neither of them spoke. Her eyes and cheeks needed wiping again, but she resisted.

She noticed then that framed, colour photographs hung here
and there around the walls and she got up, pretending to be interested in them. When she got close, she saw that all of them were pictures of the same man, a dark-skinned, frizzy-haired man with a big nose. In each picture he was dressed in a flowing white robe, staring intently at the camera, and in most of the pictures his image had been artificially blurred and softened to give him an otherworldly appearance, a sort of halo around him. Shocked, she began, “But what …” Jamie broke in quickly, in a voice she could hear him struggling to keep casual, and she felt such pity for him, that she was here, requiring explanations he knew she would never be able to accept.

“They’re just here to remind us of what we’re supposed to be doing here, that’s all.”

“But, who is it?” she asked, although once again this was not at all what she wanted to say.

“Michael, our … leader.” She had a feeling he had been going to say ‘guru.’ But so what, she told herself, she knew they had one, knew even that he lived upstairs in the big house in a private apartment with his wife and child, that he didn’t even eat with the others. Her carefully tamped anger was rising, but before she could say anything, Jamie said, “Those pictures upset most people who come here.” Again he wasn’t looking at her and she could hear how hard he was working to keep his tone even. “But they’re just supposed to … remind us of things,” he repeated, now sounding as if he knew it would be useless to say anything more.

She could not help herself, but turned to look at him, and seeing how pale he was, paler even than he had been all morning, she found it impossible to speak and went instead to sit beside him again, taking his hand in hers, holding it loosely at the wrist, his fingers spread out across her palm. She wanted to hug him hard, to tell him she loved him, that she loved him so much that
even her fingertips ached with her love for him, but these weren’t things that could be said and it occurred to her that she mustn’t ever let him know how much she loved him, that it would be too much for him, for anyone to bear.

She thought about all the people who had urged her to come here and take Jamie away, to rescue him by whatever means, to kidnap him if necessary, anything to get him away from this place which they were sure was evil and where he was surely being kept by coercion, however hidden.

She had argued with them, saying first, what better thing could a young man do than to go out in search of answers to spiritual questions? Then, but don’t you see, he chose that, it’s his choice. And finally, he has to find his own way. That much she knew and clung to, but in the end, she had had to at least come, to see for herself.

Despite all this, which she went over silently, she heard herself say, “If you want to go to college or to theatre school, I’ll find the money. If you just want to take some time and travel, I’ll give you the money.” She looked into his face, she knew he had been looking at her, but he turned away quickly.

“Oh, Mom,” he said, irritated, “don’t you know everybody’s parents’ offers them money and trips?”

He took her then to the big house for lunch where the members of the community ate their meals together seated on benches at long wooden tables. Jamie sat on one side of her and Irina, the clairvoyant who lived in the tent, came voluntarily and sat on the other side. She turned out to be older and very intelligent and articulate with a quick sense of humour and she made Alexis laugh so that even Jamie relaxed a little and joined in the conversation which was mostly about what Alexis had seen and done since her arrival.

Alexis’s eyes wouldn’t stop watering though and every once
in a while, even while she was laughing, she had to take off her glasses and wipe away the hot fluid that kept seeping from them, steaming up her glasses and wetting her cheeks.

Embarrassed, she offered her excuse again, “I couldn’t sleep last night—my eyes always water when I haven’t had enough sleep.” She pushed her brown rice around her plate and picked up a carrot stick, sniffing and laughing a little at herself at the same time.

“I bet it’s an allergy,” Irina said to her, while Alexis mopped her cheeks again with a thin paper napkin Jamie had given her. Her hand over her eyes, Alexis replied, “It probably is. It’s probably just an allergy.”

The interviewer changes his tack, thinking perhaps it would be taking the two of them further than even he wants to go in the intimate perusal of their lives.