Reunion (3 page)

“Like old shoes,” she'd said, “What you get used to … ”

Although he was exactly the opposite, thrived on novelty and change.

Tradition versus innovation.

Sometimes he wondered how they ever stayed together, had ever gotten together in the first place. A quick visit to her office to have a wart taken off, and she'd wanted to learn English (“So many medical books in English”) and English had led to coffee and coffee had led to …

“Beautiful day, huh?” she said as she came out and pulled on a black suede coat lined with fuzzy fake fur, which he felt she really didn't need, but he wasn't about to say anything about.

“Great!” he said, opened the door for her, and as she got in bent down and kissed her on the neck, she went for his lips, he suddenly felt The Big Urge, would just have well have gone right back into the house and done it right then and there if he hadn't lost his sexual nerve, but every time he tried and failed was a minor crucifixion for his ego, so he merely kissed back, closed the door, the image of her perfect legs sheathed in Lycra-tight black, resonating inside him for a moment.

She always wore black lace underthings. They were as normal for her as brushing her teeth fifteen times a day.

She got up in the morning, and summer, winter, spring, fall, on came on the black pantyhose and black lace and Lycra unitard.

He liked to imagine her doing surgery, all dressed in surgical greens, and under it all sleekly sheathed in black lace and Lycra. Ever since their last trip to Karachi (a wedding) the summer before, she'd started having a thing about earrings and little gold chains and bracelets, especially rubies and garnets. The red and the black, rouge et noir, with her perfect sallow skin and black hair, always the highest possible heels, as if she liked to be on point full time, as if life were a full-time dance of the seven (black) veils …

And him “wounded” ever since he'd gone to the Grand Junction Super-Mall (10 stores) and the Regis Beauty Parlor was having an introductory offer on haircuts and he'd gone in and sat down, actually told the hair-person “Just a light trim, I'm like Samson, my strength is in my hair,” and then he'd sat back and “dozed off,” and woke up with a start when he felt his ears suddenly go bare, unshielded by the hair that he liked to wear
long, not feminine, but feminoid, youngish, a full bush of hair around his ears, not like his steel-rimmed, Nazi-cut colleagues, Clint Eastman, the Whitman specialist, who made old Walt sound like Mein Kampf.

Oh, my god, does everything have to be controversial, aren't there any neutral, safe-haven zones left?

And he'd gotten up from the barber chair and the hair-person asked him coyly “How do you like it?,” enjoying his shock, his surprise, his trauma.

Monster bitch! She knew! She'd done it on purpose!

And ever since then he hadn't been able to get it up.

“It'll grow back,” Hannah had said when he'd talked to her in Tel Aviv the week before, “your hair grows fast …” only one call a week, as if they were on some sort of tight, barbed-wire budget whereas their biggest problem was that they had so much the government scooped it all off the top like it was whipped cream. It wasn't like the old days when you made it you kept it and built a string of mansions from Newport, Rhode Island to West Palm Beach …

“What a day,” he said as he pulled out into the street. Even if they only had an hour left of light. If that.

Funny old street. Victorian houses.

He would have loved it if it all wasn't 100% student ghetto.

Right next to the university. The old core of the town. But then everyone had gotten yuppyish and moved out into new suburbs/estate-development areas, which meant gouging out a piece of forest and sticking down fake English Tudor and French Loire Valley imitations made out of plastic and plywood.

Their own house built in 1904. All oak woodwork. As if the world were one endless inexhaustible forest.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, “I'm just going to let the car do the talking. Wither thou goest I go, my people shall be your people … ”

“You're so sweet,” she said, unclasped her seatbelt and snuggled up against him.

Which he should have protested against, stopped and proclaimed “No seatbelt, no go!”

But didn't.

She was such a snuggle-puppy, and he loved her so much, loved her family so much, her sister Nilifer where they always stayed in Karachi. Six kids. Husband a microbiology professor at the university. Always cramped but you were made to feel you could stay there a thousand and one nights instead of just the usual two weeks they stayed, the summer before there for the wedding of one of Nilifer's daughters. And that's when she'd started getting so interested in gems.

Odd, the older she got, the sexier, breasts larger, body “tougher,” her eyes more slanted and seductive, every movement full of promises, which she always kept, even if he didn't … couldn't …

It was so goofy.

He'd had polio when he was a kid, before they had vaccines.

In fact he was one of the first people they tried the new vaccines on.

Sarah Morse Hospital, Chicago.

And the vaccines had worked, only had left him with all sorts of lower-body problems, a hyperactive bowel, urinary tract problems, and, as she so medically put it “a somewhat atrophied penis.”

Which he'd never been aware of until, in the last few years, as a kind of “sexual aid,” he'd started watching porn films and seen all these monster dongs like howitzers, battering rams, the bottle-noses of bottle-nosed dolphins, salamis, summer sausages, bratwursts, flagpoles … well, let's not exaggerate …

But he was like Gulliver in giant-land.

Here he was with a woman made out of cobras and hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Flesh of the Gods, a nightwoman who wafted across you like a breeze off the Caribbean, and they'd shorn him and turned him into a hopeless eunuch.

“It'll grow back, your hair grows fast!”

Sure!

At night he'd lie awake and talk to his hair: “Grow, you bastards, you fucking faggot follicles!”

Little by little, micron by micron slowly coming back into full foliage, slowly, oh, so slowly, beginning to feel more and more like his true Samson (ite) Self …

What a day! So crisp! And such a variety of leaf-colors, lots of elms, yellow as canaries, and bloody-looking oaks, the maples like chicken livers fried with pomegranates and red peppers, the boring pines looking like boring pines.

His lips actually chapped, it was that dry.

Going past the university, a big banner at the entrance—GO STATE. The only trouble being that they hadn't won a game for
16 years. Too much concentration on engineering. It was Nerd Tech, really. The biggest businesses in town the eye-doctors and glass-places. Horn-rimmed heaven. Horn-rims and sweatshirts. As predictable as prison-garb.

It would be noisy as hell for the first week when everyone just came back. Parties and guitars and car stereos with basses so low and loud that they'd rattle your fillings, unexpected macho crack-screams at 4 A.M., sometimes women, you'd think it was mayhem everywhere outside, but all it was was letting off steam, fucking around … and then a month into the term it was as quiet as the Gobi, they were all in the libraries playing with computers, cell phones, E-mail, Web chat, papers to write, deadlines to meet, the horrible, cellular transformation into Corporate Clones …

The sun hot.

He opened the window.

Out past Gino's Pizza, Sir Pizza, the Pizza Palace, Tammy's Tanning Parlor, Wendy's, Burger King, McDonald's, The Student Bookstore … now there was an original name … The Student Bookstore … what were you going to call it, Gnomelore, or Occult Equations, how about someone's name, like Granny Smith's Books … or something noble like Barnes and Nobel … The Book Chateau …

Down Division Street which didn't seem to divide anything, out toward the farms. It was amazing, a hop, skip and a jump and you left all the signs and bustle behind and you were out into rolling hills and harvested cornfields already planted with bright green winter wheat, stands of bright forests at the ends of the fields, some new houses in all their pretentious plasticity, but
still some honest old brick farmhouses left at the sides of the road.

“Where are we going?” she asked, sitting up and looking out, enthralled at the sweep and expanse of the landscape, as if Space itself had been rolled back like a carpet.

“Trust me!” he said.

“I do! I wish Nilifer could come and visit some time at this time of the year. She'd love it. Such a sense of … ‘opening' … ”

“‘Openness,'” he corrected her.

“Well, it could be a gerund instead of a noun,” she protested.

“Whatever … ”

He wasn't sure what a gerund was …

Concentrating even more intently on the landscape now. He could almost hear voices calling to him out of the forests at the ends of the harvested fields, “Come in, here is where we are!”

Pulling over to the side of the road for a moment. Turned off the engine. Opened the door

The forest right up to the road itself here, all the light filtered through red and yellow leaves, no trains, no cars for a moment, just the rustle of the leaves.

“Open your door too,” he whispered.

She did.

“And … ?”

A smudge of cynicism in her voice.

“The Wamani, you can almost hear them,” he whispered even softer, reverentially.

“The who?”

“In Japanese Kami, Quechua Wamani, like the Makiritare Wanadi … Wanadi, Wamani, Kami … the ‘gods' … they're right here … ”

She quietly closed the door, sat back, closed her eyes.

“You really have problems with monotheism, don't you?”

“OK, over the river and through the trees, to grandmother's house we go,” he said and started up again, further and further out, fewer and fewer new houses, until it became more a trip through time than space, came to a four-way stop sign: Junction Road, a big sign saying Y
OU
A
RE
L
EAVING
G
RAND
J
UNCTION,
and then another sign on the other side of the road saying Y
OU
A
RE
E
NTERING
L
ITTLE
J
UNCTION.
Abstractions. When all it really was was uninterrupted slopes of fields and copses of fiery trees.

Across the road. He was going to go down to the city park in Little Junction, the county seat, this fin de siècle little park just in front of the nineteenth century courthouse, all these knobby, complicated park benches and lots of carefully tended grass under ancient oaks, at this time of the day at this time of year usually deserted.

Only he saw a sign on a dirt road that said D
EAD
E
ND
—N
O
O
UTLET,
and on an impulse make a quick swerve to the left …

“Where are we going?” Just a touch of terror in her voice.

Was he going to take her out into the wilds and slit her throat, drink her blood and eat her liver, he the phantom-, were-jaguar, inhabitant of strange, primitive Kami-Wanami worlds of psychedelic, hallucinogenic trips into the realm of the ‘presences' that he felt always surrounded him? Although it was thirty years
since he'd eaten a hallucinogenic mushroom. It was something you never really ‘recovered' from.

“I'm just following what the car wants,” he said, about two hundred yards down the road this house appearing over to the left, garage open, empty, one of the doors ripped off its hinges. Nobody inside the house. All the furniture gone. Totally empty. Although the windows were all propped open a little so the place wouldn't get all musty and mouldy.

On an impulse he pulled into the driveway.

“We can't stop here!” she objected, “It's private property.”

“Trust me!” he whispered and got out, went into the trunk and found this big old comforter that had seen better days but had now reached the stage of being really comforting, as flexible and soft as limp lettuce, last week's orchids … spread it out under the Mother of all Willows, still green and lacily graceful.

“Look at the hornet's nest!” he said, pointing to a twisted old oak next to the willow. A big grey distended bubble, all plastered and daubed to perfection.

Enter the gods again.

“I don't want to get attacked,” she answered, reluctant to get out of the car at all.

“It looks just as empty as the house,” he said, and then noticed on top of the roof, near the side gutters, in a slice of setting sunlight, a whole swarm of wasps busy with something (stagnant water in the gutter?), a real wasp convention … but no interest in them, no scouts out, all self-contained in doing whatever it was they were doing. They weren't going to bother them, no …

Went and got the food basket out of the car, spread everything out.

“Come on! Soup's on!”

“Soup?”

“It's just an expression … ”

Opening up the chicken and tearing off a well barbecued, caramelised leg, a little creamy potato-salad, some homus, tabouli, pocket-bread, strawberry juice (her favorite).

“You don't think anyone's going to come out of the house and shoot us or anything?”

“Nah, it's deserted, who knows why, someone died and didn't leave any heirs. Wouldn't you love to live out here, a nice bedroom looking out on the forest … ?”

“And all the Wanami … what did you call them?” she asked, sitting down, opening up her coat.

“Wamani! The mountain gods of the Quechua … ”

“It really is beautiful. It really almost does speak, doesn't it? I mean there are some sacred places where God seems to concentrate more than in others, I believe that. Like the Kaaba in Mecca …” taking off her coat altogether, lifting up the plate he'd prepared for her, biting into the chicken, “It's really good today, this chicken … and I love strawberry drink … tell me the truth, did you already know about this place?”