Did you know that the Jains reckon time in palyas, a palya being "a period of countless years," and that 100,000,000 times 100,000,000 palyas equals an "ocean of years"? They say furthermore that the age before ours lasted 100,000,000,000,000 oceans of years (approximately) and saw people shrink from a thousand yards tall, with thirty-two ribs, to only nine and a half feet in height? The age was called the duhshama-sushama, which means Very Beautifully Sorrowful, and our age is simply the Sorrowful (duhshama) and will be succeeded by the last, the Sorrowfully Sorrowful (duh-shama-duhshama). I give these facts (transcribing them from a book I obtained at the local bookstore, where I have a little charge account) to suggest the conceptual context in which I am presently operating, and to convey the tranquillity and serenity of my state of mind. You can see why the Jains don't like to inhale gnats-from their perspective we are all just gnats, at best.
I have left the ashram. Midge's gloating gleeful news and some local disillusionments made me realize that this phase of my progress was over. The love that I left you for has been sublimated-literally turned into radiant etheric vapor at a location called Sahasrara a few inches above my head. Rare Sarah, I have now become. Where I am now geographically suits my rarefied condition. I can't give it away, lest Gilman come swooping in in a biplane with all sorts of writs and handcuffs. It is as near nowhere as you can imagine and yet somewhere, if you know what I mean. With its own little historical distinctions, export crops, and atmospheric flavor. The flavor is in my nostrils night and day and the atmosphere rests on my skin and keeps reminding me of the time in about 1970 or '71 (Pearl I know had begun at that Episcopalian kindergarten and was big enough so we thought we could leave her for a week with my parents-you hadn't had a vacation since beginning internship and were thin as a rail) when we flew to Saint Martin, the French side, because I thought I could practice my French, but their accent was quite different and, everybody in all the shops spoke English anyway, and in the jet down we had daiquiris, and after our second ones, what with the rum and the relief at being away from work, you got passionate and began murmuring to me all the things you were going to do to me, all the sexual things, and I kept nodding and giggling and hoping the people in the seats around us couldn't hear, and felt the rum heating up my face; and when we got there, this perfectly darling little run-down and not especially clean hotel off the main street in Marigot, with filigreed wooden balconies and our room overlooking the quaint old cemetery full of whitewashed broken tombs and the greeny-blue violet-striped sea beyond, we did them all, we made a systematic job of it, a little high every night on wine and the liqueurs that were so cheap duty-free, and then in the mornings too, after eating the slices of green melon and the crumby hard rolls and the bitter good coffee the girl brought, the nine-o'clock sun coming in through the louvers at an angle making warm stripes on the straw rug beside the bed, and then in the mid-afternoon too, after our hours on the beach with the pina coladas for lunch at the little thatched bar there, the sun now having moved around and the room shadowy and cool with the stripes from the louvers beginning to climb the wall over in the far corner, and the noon's sunburn settling into our shoulders and thighs, we worked through our list, everything you had said in the airplane; and though some of the things we had never done before and when it came down to doing them you were shy of hurting or abusing me I made you go through with them, I thought you should have everything I could give be-, cause you'd been working so hard and were so boyishly thin and this was our holiday. Dear Charles, after the first nights I smelled of your semen all the time, my hands and face and between my breasts where you came that way once-nothing, not the saltwater at the beach or the soap in the shower could wash it off, this faint lingering semi-sour smell of you somehow worked into my pores; I wondered if other people, the slim black girls in the wristwatch shops and the waiters bending over us at the evening meal with its hibiscus on the table and little candle-bowl guttering and even the staring men hanging around at the old cement dock, could smell it-I was terrified they could but also I liked smelling that way, just soaked in your seed, floating along in this little faintly rancid cloud of sex smell, there in the sunshine where nobody knew us. We worked your list through, we did it all the ways we could think of or had read about in books and I felt so married to you, so yours, exuding this spunky aroma and-aching a bit in the intimate places. I never have known why I didn't get pregnant that time, my cycle was right and we took no precautions, I was sure we would go back having started a little brother for Pearl but it wasn't to be-how odd when the time we did make a baby was one of those awful almost virginal times when you came much too soon and I didn't come at all and we both felt embarrassed and inadequate afterwards. That week in Saint Martin I loved you so much for trusting me with all that seed of yours, the sperm all furiously thrashing and swimming to reach my egg, my egg that I was made to carry, my whole intricate body and spirit simply its package and wrapping really, you didn't hold it back as some men do to give a woman and themselves pleasure, for us it was more than pleasure, there was a rigor to it, a duty, a ruthless and thorough mutual exploitation, a union at that solemn level where I unwashably smelled-that funny helpless hollowish smell semen has-and where I would always be yours. So, with the atmosphere of that week in my mouth and nostrils and soft on my skin all day where I am now you can see why I don't believe in divorce and brush away Midge as the bothersome gnat she is.
Days later. Prolonging the sad pleasure, the Beautifully Sorrowful. I do enjoy writing to you, old dear. "Maybe it's your silence I.enjoy-no scolding word about the state of the drapes or dust in the bookcase or about the house going to pot inside while I dug in the garden or wasted half the day at yoga. You hated my yoga, but maybe Midge will lead you along the Eightfold Path. Really, it's just stretching exercises and an attempt to still the mind, to quiet the ego and let something other than its clamoring be heard.
Now I wonder if my reactions to you and Midge haven't been selfish and non-non-attached. After all, I did leave, and can't really imagine coming back. We've had our Krishna-Radha week in Marigot. How old were we? I would have been twenty-six, and you twenty-eight. The perfect age to play at being gods. If there is-as various patriarchal religions keep suggesting-a divinity in whoredom, I touched it that week. I wasn't just me, I was you, your sukra and my rajas indivisible. You got so brown, I remember, all but your cute pale tight fanny, and your body was like something harder than flesh, your chest leaning above me flat and hairless like a-what? A primitive lean-to, a piece of slanty attic roof that a child likes to huddle under while it rains. That must have been behind the dream of mine that I suppose Midge played for you. She really has come between us, hasn't she? In a way the Arhat never did. He belonged to my subtle body and you to my gross earthly sthula body-my real body, I suppose you'd say. I felt big enough for you both, if I can claim that without appearing immodest.