Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (3 page)

It is, isn’t it? she’d said, after a long pause. And the blue of your sky! she said.

He’d turned over in bed, happy not to have a wife beside him to disturb, and lit a cigarette. The habit of smoking (terrible, dumber than stupid, he knew) had taught him about emptiness, the need to fill internal space, the huge internal space existing within all of us, with Something. He was grateful he could smoke. Though he knew there were women who dismissed him the instant they saw him light up, because they could not imagine kissing him.

Do you know what O’Keeffe says about blue? he asked her, blowing out a cloud of smoke, warming to her voice, though he did not remember her face clearly from the opening night’s exhibition.

What?

That it is the color that will remain after everything is destroyed.

He could feel her thinking. Savoring this idea. Her mind carrying her into the far reaches of the heavens, of space, long after there was no more earth.

But if we’re not here to see it, she finally asked, will it still be blue?

He laughed, and asked her where she lived.

He recognized her immediately when he saw her again. And what he recognized was her energy, which seemed to precede her. As if her spirit were thrusting itself forward, into the unknown; dazzled, charmed, challenged, hopeful, happy to be energized by the mysterious, loving the adrenaline rush of surprise.

She was some years older than him and made no pretense of being younger. Her hair was graying; she would tell him later she was the sort who forgot to dye it, even when she tried to remember. She also felt humiliated to be eradicating some part of her hard-won existence. Don’t people who try to look younger miss part of their lives? she queried, seriously. She also held a superstition she didn’t tell him: that if you lied about your age, the number of years you took off were subtracted by the Universe. That’s why so many people died sooner than they thought they would. She had her adequate cushion of estrogen fat on tummy and hips; her full breasts swung lower than ever before; her eyes sparkled to find herself still vitally alive. An artist who was passionately enchanted by the real, however odd or
singular
it might be, he felt, almost at once, a sense of home. They stood, at that first meeting, simply measuring each other with their eyes. They were nearly equal in height. He thought, immediately, of what a boon that would be for kissing. If, in fact, she deigned to kiss a smoker. He thought it might prove a boon for other things. But he was modest, and tried, unsuccessfully, not to go there.

She offered him tea. And a peach that seemed to materialize, like a hare from a hat, out of the green velvet sleeve of her embroidered shirt.

And it had begun.

We met, really, she would tell friends later, laughing, over nothing. Over emptiness. Space. I couldn’t believe how much of it he managed to get into his paintings, or how at home I felt in it.

He’d smiled to hear her describe it.

The moment I stood in front of any one of his paintings, she elaborated, my bird nature became activated. I felt I could fly!

Her bird nature? Where had he been, and with whom had he been, not to know there were people, women, who talked this way?

She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering.

River Run

Perhaps on the first day of any river travel one is apprehensive, one feels fear. She sat with her African-Eurasian friend Avoa, deep in the boat, not liking the heaviness of the life preserver, poppy orange, around her neck. The river, at the place they put on, was placid. Nonetheless she could feel its power in the swiftness with which the vehicles that brought their gear disappeared, as did, very soon, the flat and gravelly shore.

Large birds flew ahead of them toward the canyons, wheeling as they appeared and disappeared from view. Tentatively she placed a hand in the water. Icy cold. While overhead the sun rose higher in the sky, already warm, almost hot.

They were to be on the river nearly three weeks, long enough to traverse its entire length. Who would she be at the end of this journey?

Why are you going? her therapist had asked.

And she had sat looking behind her therapist’s head, scanning the posters of horses on the wall, and replied:

I cannot believe my dry river, that we have been discussing for months, and that is inside me, is unconnected to a wet one somewhere on the earth. I am being called, she said.

But the Colorado? Isn’t it man-made?

In the beginning, no, she said, laughing to think of early man creating so mysterious and powerful a thing as a river. It is the river after all that carved the Grand Canyon.

But now, pursued the therapist, isn’t it controlled by dams?

Controlled? I think not. Regulated? Maybe. Though she did not know this either. She admitted to being the kind of traveler who didn’t prepare much before taking off. She’d found something to enjoy in her own ignorance. Oh, that’s who’s in that tomb! That’s why they wear waist beads! Oh, now I understand all those thick dark garments in this heat. It’s like carrying your own shadow and your shade! In the back of her mind she was already wondering if she would learn anything about how the Colorado’s water managed to fill the bathtubs and swimming pools in Los Angeles. How was that possible? And what happens to a river—even a man-enhanced one—that flows continuously to a desert?

On the fourth day, and after experiencing her first rapids—her boat pitched higher than a house—she became ill. As the boat pitched and plunged down the river she felt herself slipping into the surrealness of a life lived now in a tiny bobbing space, very narrow, within the steep reddish canyon walls. Rushing madly, irresistibly onward, no stopping it. Yet at the end of each day they did stop. And on the evening of this particular day they stopped longer than usual to confer with her. Her temperature was 104. Did she wish to be evacuated? They could manage somehow to get a helicopter for her. Did she wish to go home?

The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even while the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn’t quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they’d made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up.

All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion.

Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid, alarming Avoa and the oarswomen. Soon, exhausted, she was done.

No, she had said weakly, I don’t want to go home. I’ll be all right now.

Avoa’s eyes were huge. Kate realized she must look a fright. She took the electrolyted water offered her, and later on, a tepid broth.

Really, she said, attempting to smile. I’ll be fine.

All the women looked skeptical, but helped Avoa set up a proper camp.

He Wondered

He wondered, wandering about the house, how she knew what to throw out and what to keep. Her house had a bare look. There was nothing extra. Yet she was one of those people who seemed to attract gifts and to buy them for herself. Nothing, however, stuck for long.

The rug rolled up by the door, for instance. A rug given her by a friend from Yugoslavia, when the people still had a country and enough of their wits about them to make traditional handmade rugs. A rug she’d loved for years. But now did not.

How did this happen?

He was the kind of person who kept things forever. His smaller house, a few blocks from hers, was filled with clutter. Each year for Kwanza she’d given him the same present: a book called
Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui.
Each year he read it from start to finish. Each year he agreed with everything its author said—from the necessity of clearing one’s front entrance, in order that a cleaner, more brisk energy might sweep through one’s life—to the need to completely void and scrub out the colon, so that fresh life could sweep through the body. Think of all the old shit everyone’s carrying around! she might say, raising her eyebrows in concern.

They might lie on the sofa—a large, overstuffed one built for two, their feet touching. Each reading silently. He might feel her eyes on him as he read, sometimes marking a page by turning back a corner. She might smile knowingly, hopefully. He might feel a surge of determination. Indeed, reading of all the ill effects of clutter—procrastination, lost items, fuzzy thinking—he might imagine his house already clutter-free.

And then he would return to his house and freshly see his clutter. The exercise bike that was covered in dust, the back issues of
Prevention
and
Utne Reader
resting beside the door. Bundles of clothes almost on their way to Goodwill. Chipped dishes. He did not use these things anymore, and yet, the thought of letting them go made him sad. He felt they represented times in his life he could not recall without their presence. They represented stories.

For had he not bought the exercise bike when he was in love with a leggy Swede and wanted to impress her with his fitness? Without the dusty machine to remind him, these days he’d never think of her. And that time too had been a real and vivid part of his life. At least at the time. And when he’d suddenly realized his body was changing. Aging. Perhaps needing supplements and vitamins, and he’d subscribed to
Prevention.
And then not long after had felt his disconnection from “the news” and the voices of “the media,” and he’d subscribed to
Utne Reader.
And for a time had read it cover to cover every month. He was the only man he knew who owned a twelve-year-tall stack of
Ms.
magazine. The very first issue, in the early seventies, with a bluish painting of Shakti, her seven or so arms spinning, had caught his attention. He’d stood at a newsstand in New York City, furtively reading the thoughts of women, realizing he’d never known a thing about women his whole life. Looking back to that moment, he could not imagine becoming the man in Kate’s bed without that experience.

He owned several clocks. For when their batteries failed he forgot that was the reason they stopped. Seeing some other clock and fancying it, he bought it. He bought shoes he already had. Underwear too.

Deep down he actually thought time had stopped. The clocks, then, were mementos, trinkets. Curios. Reminders of a time when people still lived and behaved as if they were going somewhere. Somewhere important. We are the Kings of the Universe was the internal mantra of almost everyone. And we are on a mission to Something, Someplace, better.

Not so. And now most people knew. Would the end be brutish and short? Or would it be long and drawn out? People dying slowly of every illness under the sun. From viruses that seeped from under jungle rocks. From infections received while making love. From fratricide. Genocide. Hatred that intensified over decades, centuries, until nothing could stop its rolling over and flattening entire peoples, races, continents. Would the passion and joy of future generations be expressed in acts of hate, as acts of “sex” were now routinely expressed in acts of violence?

The indigenous Australians thought Time was synonymous with Forever and that therefore it was ridiculous to wear it on your arm. Or to think one’s short present lifetime made much of an impression on Time at all.

It was over, he thought, the kind of Time watches measured. We should all throw them away. He didn’t though. He bought more. So that when he looked about his cluttered rooms, with their assortment of rundown clocks, he understood he had, by buying them, been attempting to preserve time, to hoard it.

I am a fool, he thought, observing this. And yet he continued to buy any timepiece that appealed to him.

While she was regurgitating over her left forearm into the yellowed grass and dusty olive green bushes, she thought of a serving dish her first husband and their child had given her for Valentine’s Day. It had been a lively red and covered with white flowers. It was these white flowers, dozens of them, that now poured from her mouth. At the time of the gift she’d stuffed her disappointment. That she was now perceived as someone who, on a day especially set aside to celebrate lovers, could be enraptured to receive a serving dish.

Look at the roses! the child had cried.

Her husband had beamed at her. They’d chosen it together, he declared.

She had forced a smile she drew out of the thin air just behind her head. And she had said patiently, with kindness, to the child: No, they are daisies.

And he had said: Aren’t they vibrant?

And she had replied: Yes, they are.

But all the time she was thinking: Am I so old now? Is the life that has Cupid in it, not to mention Eros, over for me?

And she began to think of the labor it sometimes was for her now to make love.

A lump had risen in her throat. Of sadness. Of disappointment. Anger that she had entered the unromantic era of life, so soon! That her child was in cahoots with her father in giving her this awful gift, this mirror in which she saw herself as someone whom time was passing by.

More years passed, and she stayed with them, and she saw how they ceased to really see her. They saw instead a service, a servant. And she’d gazed into their greedy eyes and saw the rest of her life being sucked away. And she had swallowed and swallowed.

Well. There it lay now, stinking in the sun beside one of the mightiest rivers on earth. The mass of rotten, once vibrant but artificial flowers, thrust upon her as a compliment when she had, in her soul, felt much too young, much too alive in her subterranean depths, to receive them. The pretense had been heavy as a car.

And to think how she had lain under him, night after night, dreaming of getting away; of being high on a hillside in the sun. Her wings grown back, her brows smooth and black above eyes that welcomed space, nothingness, in place of the domesticated, bourgeois life of a way that no longer fit.

The women were gentle with her. Placing all her small belongings—toothbrush and paste, soap, eyeglasses—within her reach.

Of what are you thinking? asked Avoa.

I am thinking of the moment something dies and how we instinctively know it. And of how we try not to know what we know because we do not yet understand how we are to negotiate change.

From death back into life?

From death, being dead, back into life, yes, she said.

Each night the crew set up the Porta Potti latrine in the most exquisite location imaginable. Tonight, under a huge canopy of stars, she sat like a queen, the flashing, roaring river silver in the moonlight. She thought of how diligently she’d worked to free herself. Difficult because of the shock she was in, discovering she was trapped. Captured most of all by possessions.

They’d bought a fairly large house, two floors, seven rooms, every one of which had to be filled. She groaned, now on the toilet, thinking about it. And yet they’d both rushed to the task. Buying things. It had excited them. Rug after perfect rug they’d bought. They’d bought silver. And linens. Chairs. A dining set. At some point, she thought, but wasn’t sure, an electric knife. Now she couldn’t imagine owning or using one. And they’d bought couches and lamps and footrests and stools and more art than she cared to recall. She had loved it, the art, more than anything else. Yet when she knew she must leave, the art became the heaviest purchase. He loved it too. And how do you divide a Matisse, even if it is only a print?

The heaving sickness past, her nausea gone, her bodily fluids replaced, she felt the lightness of being in the open space around her. Her walls the canyon’s walls, she owned them not at all; her floor, the river beach. Her view, the heavens. It was, this freedom she was in, the longed-for cathedral of her dreams.

You will come back so different, Yolo had said, before she left on her journey, holding her loosely about the waist and gazing down at her. For months he’d felt, every time he held her, a kind of humming coming from her body. A buzzing. Energy being amassed, stored, building to the bursting point. And yet, when he mentioned this to her she said she felt no such activity. She felt instead dull, lethargic, as though she were solid, stuck.

Not so, he’d insisted. Your molecules are singing.

I don’t hear them, she’d drily replied.

And if I change? she’d asked, looking at him intently, wanting to catch his most instinctive response. What will that mean to you? To herself she was thinking: Of course I will change; at least I hope so. Pray so. Without changing I will be doomed to stay my present self and I’m so weary of that!

I will still adore you, he said, kissing the top of her head. Only more so, probably.

She laughed. As he did so often, he’d offered the best possible response. It freed her. Now she could imagine a return. She saw herself flying back home, swooping in through a window, a large black bird. Transformed. Still welcome. Now she could go.

She mentioned to the oarswomen, but no more than that, the diarrhea. As her body spasmed and cramped and the precious fluids she was being given by Avoa disappeared into the elegantly situated latrine, she thought of the French characterization (she’d read it in an Englishman’s book) of the English as people with a “talent” for diarrhea. Always, when they travel, getting it, having it, or looking for a place to have it. It humanized the English in a way that tickled her and so she smiled, even as she felt concern about her dizziness. She would not go home, though. Returning before ending her sojourn on the river was out of the question.

She left the latrine, gazed with adoration at the full moon rising just above the canyon’s rim, leaning for several moments on her stick, and felt a peace—fleeting—she had not felt in years.

For her life, like human life everywhere on the planet, had speeded up and speeded up until peace was rarely possible. Always there was movement, noise, inevitable and constant distraction. Even if you managed to steal a day of quiet and expected no one to call the quiet place you had chosen, there would be the harsh ring of the phone you forgot to unplug and a solicitous voice—not the voice of one’s children or lover—asking you to subscribe to a newspaper or to change your telephone service. A madness had seized earth. The madness of speed. As if to speed things up meant to actually go somewhere. And where, after all, was there to go? The present is all there ever is, no matter how you lean forward or back. Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two “presents.” One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment—the “moment” that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer “present” that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.

A straw had stuck in one of her waterproof sandals. She bent to pull it out. It was the sundried spike of a yellow flower. The voice of her body urged her to put it into her mouth. To chew it. She did so. Immediately her stomach calmed. The dizziness left her.

Was it wild chamomile, she wondered.

What is this called? she asked the oarswoman of their boat.

At the moment that she asked, the woman, frowning, did not recall the flower’s name.

And she realized she did not care. She did not need to know the name humans had given the flower. To herself she called it friend and from then on looked for it along the banks of the river and felt concern for its health.

That husband had shoved her in the back when she told him she was leaving. They had been hiking in the mountains when she told him; she was just ahead of him on a particularly rough part of the trail. Jagged rocks had been pushed up during the last winter; some so sharp she felt they might pierce the soles of her stout walking boots. They skirted a ravine, and a drop of more than two hundred feet was to their immediate right. She had been working up to telling him gradually; later on she would almost smile to think how like a coward she’d started out feigning cheerfulness down in the flatland, near the parking lot. She’d even rapped their trusty gray Dodge smartly as they were leaving, a signal that it was to be there, trusty as ever, when they returned. He’d smiled at her good-luck knock, and they’d felt companionable; at least she had felt that way. She’d wanted to talk, she’d said, and he’d suggested combining it with a hike through mountains they’d hiked often before the children came.