* * *
It wasn’t the first time we met, but close to the first time. I had gone to Morgan’s house. She lived in the back of her store, and the store was closed but as usual there were some people there, men and women, and one of the women was you. A bottle of bourbon was being passed around and there were bottles of beer. Everyone was guzzling and I remembered sitting around a fire. There couldn’t have been a fire, not in the middle of a downtown store, but there was some focal point and, at least gesturally, people were warming their hands around whatever it was. And then the people began to leave. After a while it was just two couples, Morgan and her friend, plus you and your new friend — which was me — and we moved to the bedroom, which was just a bed against the wall in the back of the store. One thing led to something else and kissing was involved. We were showing each other, first our legs and then our buttocks, and you were eager to show your butt. You wanted to have a butt contest where we’d all show our butts. In a contest of butts you were sure you could win. Morgan’s friend was getting excited and I was getting moderately excited, and then the something else led to hands on bodies and pressure on bodies and although mostly our clothes stayed on, desire was established. And enough of it so that the pull of desire brought us together, brought me across that gulf or membrane, and together the chain of events led us to live with each other, to fall in love and live whatever that love, and the pleasure of that love, would be.
3
I found Linda and her two friends, Geoff and Lisa, sitting on a picnic bench in front of a large canvas yurt. Linda stood up when she saw me approaching and met me on the dirt road leading to the yurt. I could tell that something was going on, that a familial powwow was in progress, and that this probably wasn’t a very good time to talk.
But I wanted to talk. “I was looking for you,” I said.
“I’m glad you made it,” she said.
“This is nice,” I said, turning and looking generally around the area.
We stood there, and I have to say it was slightly awkward. She looked at me and she seemed glad to see me, but the conversation didn’t seem to go anywhere.
“How was the drive?” I said.
“It was fine,” she said.
She smiled at me in an apologetic way, and I could tell she felt impelled to get back to her friends, so I told her I’d see her later, at the party.
“Definitely,” she said, and we both turned and walked away.
By the time I got back to the house the celebration had already started. People on the porch were playing guitars and singing, and there was a punch bowl and people were drinking and dancing, swaying and twirling to the music. I drank from the bowl and I was introduced — or introduced myself — to a number of people, all from the same social tribe, all wearing loose-fitting garments and carefully uncared-for hair. Smiling, and not just outwardly, these friends — the community of people that lived in and around the tents and the house — were living a kind of cliché, but as I stood with them, in the middle of it, they didn’t seem at all false or pretentious.
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.