I [I1] don't know what it was set me off, really. Nobody likes somebody trying to rape them, especially after insulting their pussy, but in a strange way it had to do with forces beyond that, with this boy's-Yajna, his name is, we've made up a little since, he even tried apologizing, he said his head was in a bad space that day, and I had to tell him it was all all right, I felt very motherly toward him, and his mother, wherever she is, no doubt loves him and is worried to death about his being here with what she imagines are terrible creepy people-as I was saying, with this boy's being a man and not being a man quite either, my brain waves or whatever they are oscillated between these two poles-his being and his not being, his maleness and his immaturity, his bully-power (I was terrified, remember) and yet his pimply shaved-headed callowness-and I just got more and more indignant. If I had had the strength, I would have torn him to bits and ground the pieces into the mat, the way you do a wasp that's been annoying you all afternoon, you know how in the fall they come out of the windows on the sills somehow on sunny afternoons and bumble around on the bedspread and the kitchen table so stupidly and into your half-empty coffee cup-I just bate it!
Of course, we can't all go around all the time getting hit on the jaw and trying to tear somebody's ears off, but I must say it did wake me up. That's a phrase the group leaders and encounter therapists around here use all the time-"waking up." "Getting rid of the garbage" is another thing they say. That oscillation I felt inside my head got me to thinking about men in general, my feelings about them. It must all go back to Daddy, who just basically on weekends and bank holidays if he didn't go off to play golf at Brookline hid in the library reading Thornton Wilder or those dreary Metaphysicals. Maybe I'm angry, deep down, because, though I loved him and knew he loved me, he wouldn't come out. But then this rapist-boy did in a manner of speaking come out, and I don't seem to like that either. And then, even more confusingly, Fritz looked me over afterwards to see if I had been damaged and should go to the ashram infirmary, and on the way walking back to my trailer to get my jeans and sun hat and work shoes-this was all around nine in the morning, just beginning to get hot-we went to his A-frame and I slept with him. It was nice, Midge. Nice. Though with Germans there's a distance, they have difficulty showing their feelings. His eyes are so pale they seem transparent, you can look right through them into nothing. He told me what his name means: it's a modality of consciousness halfway between total confusion and total concentration. I love that part of it here, learning all these new things, and not just with your brain but your body, with your spirit and whole self-with your atman. You should have seen me, though, that afternoon: big blue swollen jaw and one eye half shut and a lot of stiffness around the neck and shoulders from when all the rage came out. I looked so dreadful they left me off from the artichokes two hours early-I think they do treat me with kid gloves a little, compared to some of the. younger, more trampy women-and next day I was told I had been transferred from fieldwork to construction assistant at the Hall of a Millionfold Joys-people call it Joy-Six-Oh, the Arhat likes jokes and encourages everybody to make them. The work is right at the Chakra, which makes it handier for me and Fritz to steal the odd half-hour. He's so efficient. I hadn't slept with a man except Charles for so many years-that thing with Ducky Bradford you were all so curious about never got past a few stilted luncheons downstairs at the Ritz, there was something missing, I'm not sure he isn't a bit gay, it would help explain why Gloria always seems so skittish when the girl-talk gets gutsy-for so many years, I felt a bit shaky at first, but so far, if I do say so myself, it seems to go just fine. I was afraid of seeming too old, but he's very complimentary about my figure and the ojas shakti expressed by my glossy hair-it's the supplements, Midge, vitamins A and E-complex and the zinc and that evening-primrose oil!-: and says he's bored silly with these twenty-year-old guru groupies, as he calls them. He says they have perfect bodies but no real spirit, and maithuna is above all a spiritual act. He himself is older than he looks, thirty-seven. He was with the Arhat in India, at the first ashram, in Ellora. He says he was really one of the founders-it was his idea to combine encounter therapy with tantric yoga. He shares this A-frame with only one other man, Savitri, who's out on the road a lot of the time, giving interviews and selling the Arhat's books and tapes and meditation aids, and there's a whirlpool bath, one of those you can sit in up to your neck, instead of just a trailer shower the size of a mailing tube where you keep bumping your elbows on the soap rack and treading in everybody else's germy wet towels that they just leave where they dropped them. Disgusting!
I [I2] know you won't, but you mustn't tell Charles about Fritz-my hunch is he's going to start "suing me. Charles, I mean. About Vikshipta: a lot of the people here, actually, are well into their thirties and forties, with Ph.D.s and jobs they left in city planning or architectural offices or legal firms-they're not crazies, the place really runs, we really are accomplishing things. Joy-Six-Oh will be up by the end of the summer, with air-conditioning throughout and all the electricity solar-generated from panels on the roof. Is that what they call a zero-sum situation? Today, for the first time, they let me drive a backhoe. It's such a darling machine. It lifts this big obliging hydraulic arm with its elbow up in the air and instead of a hand it has a scoop or bucket they call it, with these four pointy fingers shiny from gouging at the ground-they're replaceable, I never realized that-and you sit there in this shaking cab scared to pick the wrong lever because this huge mechanical animal under you, that feels so gentle and plodding and patient, has so much blind power it could crush somebody just as easily as it picks up a boulder. I adored it, being allowed to run it. Its controls are all sticks, so it's almost more natural than a car. Everybody, including the foreman, who used to be a Mormon, said I was very good-J really have the touch. It's like I become the backhoe's spirit, its jiva.
Forgive me, Midge, the way my mind is flipping around, but everything here is so energizing I said to Fritz I don't see how the Arhat does it, all of us feeding off him this intensely spiritual way. He said-Vikshipta, I must learn to use his real name-that's why he must conserve himself and needs all these women to hide behind, living so withdrawn you hardly ever see him except at darshan and when he drives by in his limo. We drink his silence the way he drinks Brahman's, Vikshipta said.
How can I describe to you how I feel here? Tender and open as if I've shed an old skin, Midge. Everything makes such an impression-the rocks I'm sitting among, and the sunset in its love colors like some great slanted fragmentary walkway we're seeing from underneath, and a breeze that stirs up the resiny smell in the cypress and reminds me of a smell from my childhood, some deep secret kitcheny scent out of a grandmother's drawer, and this little lizard who's been keeping me company. He's like a perfect little living jewel. He's been absolutely frozen as my voice rattles on and on. I'm getting hoarse. And just then, when I cleared my throat, up he stood and raced away on his two hind legs like a tiny man with a long green tail! He had a collar around his neck and for all I know a bow tie! He was-how can I say?-one with me, as the buzzards overhead riding the air currents home are one with me, and my birth and death, and you are one with me, dear Midge, and my lover is one with me when we can find a half-hour. Vikshipta's hair is nearly as long as mine and utterly bleached on top from being out in the sun. When he isn't leading therapy sessions he helps on the crew that's building a ring road to keep cars out of the Chakra, looking ahead to the time when this will be a real city of many thousands, a thriving alternative to the atrocious way people live now.