S

Sarah Worth

Dec. 12

Dear Shirlee & Marcus & Foster & Annette-

You've got your troubles, I've got mine. Isn't that an old Beatles song? Don't know why it keeps running through my head. Actually this island is a little paradise. I swim at the beginning and end of every day and my hair keeps bushing out from the saltwater and standing up as if in punk spikes. I'm letting it grow long again. Happy holidays,

Sarah Worth

Dear Myron-

How strange you must think this, hearing from me after all these years! And I write inhibited not only by shyness but by the fear that my letter and these two enclosures will never reach you in care of a television station in Los Angeles. But over a month ago, when I was still living in the Arizona desert northwest of Forrest, as part of a religious commune you may have yourself heard about-seen about, I suppose one should say-on television, I was watching with the guru, who constantly hoped to see himself on the evening news, and I saw your name amid the credits scrolling (isn't that the word?) past after a fascinating and rather tragic PBS show about nature, mostly the California condor and its stupidity about not becoming extinct, even to pecking open its own eggs, that we had tuned in the tag end of. The scrolling was very fast but your dear name jumped out at me like a snatch of an old song and I remembered that the last thing I had heard about you, about five years ago, from Liz Bellingham, whom you may dimly remember from those college days and who later with her husband-he works for a mutual fund-moved to quite near me and my former husband on the North Shore, was that you were doing television scripts in Los Angeles. I was so pleased and proud to hear it-you were always so funny and quick, in this totally non-cruel way, and if you can't be Delmore Schwartz or Norman Mailer (your idols, as I recall) what nicer than to mingle your sparkle in with the great electronic bloodstream of America?

So I thought it bad to be you-the coincidence would be too great. I do hope I am right, and that the simple number of the channel is enough for the post office, and then that you are important enough for the channel to find you and hand you the envelope. It all seems rather a long shot, but everything in nature is a long shot, from our father's sperm breaking into our mother's egg to the California condor hatching its own eggs. Your mother may be still living in Dorchester but, to be honest, I've quite forgotten the number, though I remember the street-Juliette, my Romeo. It seemed likely that on the wings of your Hollywood affluence-not that condors are Bill Cosby, exactly-she had flown to a gray-shingled cottage in Quincy or perhaps Nahant, where my ancestors used to summer, when it was the North Shore and everything beyond it the forest primeval. I do hope she is happy and well. She used to be so nice to me, so cheerfully overriding my egregious goyishness, always asking after my parents as if she knew them, and as if they weren't a pair of insufferable Wasp pricks. Those little macaroons with the half-cherry in the center she used to force on me, saying I was too thin (my own mother constantly telling me I was too fat), and that nice blackberry-flavored tea she said was good for colds and cramps, and your little sister with the deep shadows below her eyes-such a solemn wraithlike relief from my jokey snobby towheaded brother-and your dead father, in his several framed pictures scattered around, somehow more there, emotionally, than my own father, who was certifiably alive at the time. Confession: it was not just you I was infatuated with, it was your family, tucked with all those others in this hilly wooden three-decker part of Boston I had never been to before, and that overheated long floor-through so different from the chilly bare Dedham house, so full of wallpaper patterns and kinds of plush and fat friendly knobby furniture and embroidered doilies and doodads still savoring of Europe, Europe as a place of actual living life and not just a vague distant source of authenticity and privilege. I used to love to step onto your tippy back porch, with its drying wash and cat and dog dishes and view of the gas tanks and Squantum and the harbor, and feel dizzy, as if I was on the prow of a ship that was moving, that was just docking in the New World. Your porch always felt thrillingly untied to anything, and there was this tumbling feeling in your apartment-words, cookies, souvenirs, meanings crowded one upon the other with this cheerful exalting intimate (though of course you weren't rich) abundance, a sweetly crammed feeling that made me feel crammed with my own existence, alive to all my corners and cherished or at least forgiven for being myself, my womanly self, into which I had rather recently grown and which I felt was something of a vexation for my own family, a kind of competitive messiness my mother didn't need. Puritanism in my parents had dwindled to a sort of housekeeping whose most characteristic gesture was to take something to the attic because it was undistinguished or vaguely reminiscent of some relative we preferred to forget. And I was so tall, and pungently healthy, and oddly dark-my skin was my father's but my mother often said she didn't know where I had gotten such broad hips, and blamed some aunt of my father's she had never liked, a poor soul from Bridgeport whose husband had given her syphilis and who died quite insane while he lived on forever, with a little pain in his spine but nothing more, it was said in the family that' a Ziegfeld girl in New York had given it to him-I felt as if my femaleness was embarrassing to everybody and until you I had nowhere to put it, no place but your funny home in which I was at home. Don't be offended if I say that I think your Jewishness, though of course very bouncy and with its huge tragic history rather majestic, was the least of it-at that point in my life any family, Italian or Armenian or even Irish, would have struck me as a haven, a blessed relief from the terrible sparsity in which I had been raised, the curious correct emptiness of our lives as if half the normal human baggage had been left back in Suffolk, England, in 1630. Or did I say all this at the time? Dear old Myron, can you really be baldish now, and with a potbelly, and three ex-wives, and wear safari jackets and sport shirts with an open neck and a gleaming gold chain? I try to picture it and still see that wiry bright-eyed fast-talking Harvard scholarship sophomore with a comic way of tipping his head back and half-closing his lids, as though I were some kind of blinding treasure who couldn't be appraised all at one go. Forgive me, now, for going on at such length, but if I have you-if you are at that channel-I don't want to let you go too soon. I have a great deal of time here, in my seaside cabana. Other guests at this strung-out hotel go down to the beach all day and noisily play at wind-surfing and pedalboats, but I'm determined not to get all pruny and full of keratoses like my mother, who is having a second girlhood in Florida even sillier than her first. I sit inside and embroider my letters and read. Even so, just taking a dip early mornings and late afternoons, I've become brown as a Polynesian, and my hair is like thatch, stiff with saltwater. I wish you could see me. You'd be proud of how I've struggled to keep my figure and dignity, my feminine gentility, though I've stopped using Clairol and'some gray shows now, amid the gleams of reflected sunlight.

This place, Samana Cay, is where some recent experts, working from the logs, think Columbus really landed, not Watling Island sixty miles to the northwest of here, and the locals hope to make a great thing of it, with monuments and a replica of the Santa Maria as a nightclub wing for the hotel and special postage stamps and so on. They want to take the name San Salvador, which Columbus gave his first island, whichever it was, from Watling, but I think the Bahamas government in Nassau is cool to the idea, at least until more evidence emerges. But what evidence do they expect?-things as they happen are always more confusing than they should be-maya is full of these airy holes-and it seems strange that if Columbus was to discover a whole new world he would blunder around in these Bahamas which all look pretty much alike and are just glorified sandbars really. When they taught us in school about October 12, 1492, I pictured the three ships just rolling right up to the East Coast, probably the pier at Atlantic City, and not fiddling around way out here on the edge of nowhere, where the Western Hemisphere thins out to almost nothing. Columbus called his island flat and green and that pretty well says it for Samana Cay. The only cash crops are dried conch meats and cascarilla bark, which is used to flavor Campari. The Indian name for the place, according to Columbus's log, was Guanahand, and a little group of Indians gathered on the beach when the Pinta went ashore and were, according to the log, "naked as their mother bore them" and had the widest heads and foreheads Columbus had ever seen, because of the Lucayan custom of head-binding. The Spaniards evidently traded glass beads and falconry bells for live parrots and native spears tipped with fish teeth. Myron, what language did they talk to make these trades? These poor Indians, who were all to go extinct in a few more decades thanks to our diseases and guns, had never seen anything like European men and clothes and ships and yet didn't seem terribly surprised-it's as if somebody else, anonymously, had already been there, and paved the way. There are these ghosts all through the history of discovery, softening its shocks-a shadowy person who has been there before the ones who get their names in all the history books, a kind of nameless aura men throw ahead of them.

So mysterious encounters are the way of the world, including ours. Yours and mine. With our impossibly broad faces we were exchanging glass beads for live parrots. Weren't those nice times we had? Remember Elsie's, that big black man behind the counter we called "Heavy" for "heavy on the dressing" on the Elsie's Specials, and the Hayes-Bick at two in the morning, and the folk-singing at Club 47 before it got too protesty, and downstairs at the Casablanca, where we felt we were somehow stepping into the movie itself, and Peter Lorre might sidle up to the bar in a white jacket at any minute, or Sydney Greenstreet in a fez or Claude Rains in a kepi, while time kept going by on the piano and Bogie and Bergman locked eyes in lost love forever? Can you remember how you used to adore me? I do remember, and in a sense have sailed through life ever since on the love you gave me then, though I suppose any post-adolescent young male would have done something like it-voted for me as I was, solid and sweaty, and not for some wispy docile entity caught in the webs of family and finance and whatever else gave me reality and justified my existence in society's eyes. I wish now I had given my virginity to you. We were like Columbus in a way, poking from island to island and never reaching the mainland. Maybe it was better; I used to feel you come through all our tangled clothes and be so proud of myself. Can it really be that nothing will ever bring us back, Shiva and Shakti for the first time in our lives, and that the overheated interior of that aquamarine Bel Air you used to borrow from your roommate has melted for keeps into the cold cosmic void, into past time? Our pastimes. I loved you then and would love you now and am truly sorry I didn't have the courage to defy my family and all that inherited silver and go off with you and be your woman forever.

I would like Hollywood, I do believe. I have read somehow that it's a woman's town-the only town in America where women wield real power, though they tend of course by their sexist conditioning to hand it back to the male agents and those deplorable weak and grabby hanger-on husbands they choose-the stars, the gossip columnists, the porn queens even, enslaving themselves to these deplorable men when there seems no reason. Why are we-women-such a dependent and self-destructive lot? The act of childbirth is such a risk, I suppose, we build prapatti (self-surrender) in. The reading matter around here is rather limited (I've already given you the gist of a pamphlet they hand out about this being where Columbus landed) even though there is a so-called bookstore right in the middle of the village-hardly a village, just six or so tin-roofed shanties with this one new posh-rustic hotel and a few attached shops for the Americans and Canadians and this bookstore with almost nothing in it but last year's bestsellers and loads of Oriental mysticism-I've been driven to read a battered old college textbook on zoology some island-hopping camper left in the hotel lobby to lighten his backpack. The book talks about "the simultaneous eagerness of the female for sexual stimulation and her inherent fear of body contact with any other animal, including a male of her own species." I found that so touching. The story of my life and all our lives really. Scared of our species. It goes on to talk about how lady gray squirrels-and if you've ever seen them chasing around trees you'll know just what it means-"feel torn between two powerful instincts: they want to escape and at the same time they want to greet the male."

And so, having escaped over, twenty years ago, I still greet you. I wanted to apologize to you for letting everybody bully me into marrying Charles Worth when you did more for my blood, my rajas, my ego, and the atman that lies beyond and within the ego. (My marriage, as you can guess, is kaput, though it produced one lovely child-a fair-haired daughter-and twenty-two years' worth of distractions and genteel pretense.) I wanted you to know, in case I die here or am put into prison for some technical reasons I won't bore you with, how your texture, your voice (so quick, and sensitive, and yet sweetly tentative, and even lulling), your chest with all its downy hair, and the milky musty smell of us entwined together were woven into my nerves and will never be unwoven. Having apologized, dear Myron, and having mailed you this rather heavy-breathing bit of the past (scientists, I just read in the Samana Cay Gazette, are doing things with "old air" captured inside hollow brass buttons and tightly corked bottles), let me ask you for two tiny favors: please stamp and mail the enclosed two letters. Again for technical reasons, I don't want the recipients to have any idea where I am, and a Los Angeles postmark would be. a wonderful parting gift to

Your unextinguished old flame,

Sarah née Price

Revered Master-

To quote the blessed Dhammapada: "I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving. I myself found the way. Whom shall I call Teacher? Whom shall I teach?"

Forgive me for leaving unceremoniously. Our farewell was implicit in our every encounter, and within the cycles of karma meetings and partings are hardly to be distinguished. If Nitya Kalpana is now recovered enough to resume supervision of the Treasury of Enlightenment, kindly explain to her that any apparent discrepancies she notices in the books must be blamed upon the irregular methods of accounting which I, having never attended business school, had to improvise; and if that does not explain everything, blame the diabolic machinations of the perfidious Durga. In return for this courtesy, rest assured that our personal relations and whatever revelations they brought are sealed in my vasanas, to remain there as speechless vidya forever. If not, not-if you take my meaning. Neti neti, that is to say, or iti iti. I think our mutual reticence forms a beautiful harmony-a balance of sublime negativities-and pray that you will agree. At our last, and frankest, discussion there was a tape recorder between my breasts, my breasts which you were always kind enough to admire! In my allocation of recently received artha, more than half has been left in your discretionary fund. 300 K ain't hay. May the ashram prosper, along the lines of Hinayana as you mentioned.

Where am I? I feel you asking "Where are you?" much as I was asked, on arriving at the ashram three seasons ago, "Who are you?" We know now who I am: I am Kundalini, the energy-serpent that rises. Master, I have come to that place which always interested me-where purusha, in its eternity, immutability, and utter freedom, very slightly wrinkles (as I picture it) and makes the infinitesimal concession whereby it permits itself to be wed to prakriti in all its tragic tumult of phenomenality and flux. Or perhaps (the distinction, like so many in your teachings, remained a bit obscure to me) I have merely come to that site within prakriti whereby the three gunas are ever so delicately jostled out of their perfect equilibrium and precipitate mahat, which then evolves into ahamkara, the first rude perception, the first dim ego, which then bifurcates into the subjective and the objective, in the latter of which, asl recall, the five tanmatras, subtle and potential, give rise to the relatively coarse paramanu and sthula-bhutani-atoms and molecules! The subjective equivalent would be (as I conceived it) the chittavrittis, the eddies of consciousness it is the purpose of yoga to suppress.

I fear I was a bad sannyasin, for all the flattery and tutorial zeal you and Alinga and Vikshipta lavished upon me, because I was never able quite to let go of my chittavrittis-I was afraid of the void beneath them. For what is life, this illusion which we live and wish to sustain, but this very same skin of fluctuating awareness, of unsteady and no doubt unworthy nibbles and glimmer and halted thoughts and half-sensations? Isn't this, this thin impalpable skin of color and flicker, this and only this the ecstasy of existence that we wish to prolong forever, to prolong beyond that palya after which even the shining protons of the diamond-strewn Buddha Field fall into decay? The terrible unending stillness of samadhi was for me indistinguishable from death, and I dreaded falling into it inadvertently while in some asana-I was terrified that moksha would swoop down and render me blank. In these last several weeks I have often reflected upon you and conclude that you are not, as I may in a moment of female pique have implied, a fraud: no, truly you are a jivan-mukta, a living blank who simultaneously sustains the chitta-vrittis while locating his being beneath them, in that utter indifference which is purusha and the atman. Just so, the body of a man on death row mysteriously continues its operations-its fluid exchanges and molecular haggling-even to the grotesque extent that on the evening of his execution this body falls asleep and in the morning it consumes breakfast, a meal its enzymes and digestive juices are still busily attacking when the electric current fatally surges through and melts all connections. You have relocated your life, Master, and that is what I am still seeking to do.

When I came to the desert I thought my environment greatly simplified, but it was a seething crowded place compared with where I am now. In most directions there is merely the line where samsara makes its vast sad horizon with nirvana. Sattva, rajas, and tamas are all in such nearly perfect balance here that the merest smudge in the sky serves for a cloud, a single small yellow-breasted bird for a flock, and a trip to the local bookstore for an adventure, a pilgrimage. Your books and your posters are on display, and my love for you is slowly being restored to the love it was before reality intervened. For, yes, we do wish to live entirely in our chittavrittis yet cheat them by hoping they are not all there is, and any demonstration we can make of our ideality-loving a man on a poster, for instance-natters this hope. The pleasure of love, you taught me, lies in love's stalling, in vajrolimudra. How you did wickedly delight in my dying again and again while impaled on your inflexible ungiving all-giving vajra, your darling thunder-jewel! For a woman, the equivalent of such nivritti-since our female instrument of love is the entire body, even to the eyelashes and the toenails-is removal, denial, betrayal even: love's expression must become absence and silence.

My absence you already have, the silence will follow this letter. I fear you will not greatly care. Mahima will make my void her plenum. There are many Shaktis. And the human hunger for a god will always reward those with the temerity-the inner density and vacuity-to call themselves gods. Something like that happens whenever a woman falls for a man. But the suffering a woman endures for the same mute Shiva, the same stony linga, over and over! My entire subtle body aches; I awake to this ache and fall asleep impaled upon it. Also, I have caught a cold, as I tend to when I travel. These ignoble constant sniffles and sore throats of ours, and twinges in the teeth-are they, do you suppose, scratches that as it were geologically remember prak-riti's being extracted from purusha?

In all those blissful months, even while wimpy Yajna whacked miy jaw and Vikshipta turned sadistic and the shots were ringing out during Durga's last stand, your spirit sheltered me and I felt no fear. Now I feel fear. Master,-having already bestowed upon me the mudra of dama (your boon more generous than perhaps you knew), do not withhold your abhayamudra. Fear not!-what all the gods say, like so many suns burning through the mists of circumstance.

[unsigned]

Dear Charles-

The disgusting news that you are to marry Midge Hibbens knocked me for a loop, I confess. She babbled away blithely about it in the last of these tapes we've been exchanging-as of course you know. You know everything, it turns out, though I must say the image of you and Midge holding hands and God knows what all-heavy petting, let's call it-while listening to your poor betrayed wife's gushing taped confessions is one of the least appetizing images of courtship I have ever entertained. With her really remarkable insensitivity, Midge assumed I'd be pleased by her news! She said she'd been detecting all sorts of guilt in my references to you and this should ease it! She bad mumbled a bit in her tape before the last one about her and Ed "having troubles" (of course leaving out that the main trouble was her wish to switch over to you), and in response to that I girlishly mentioned this dream in which you and I were making love, and it must have been in response to that that she popped her gladsome tidings. I do think she took a fright of jealousy from just my dreaming about you! Talk about possessive!! And not even in legal possession yet.

I wonder how much you really understand about Midge. She is crass, Charles. She is lively but not sensitive. In our sessions with Irving she has never shown the slightest grasp or interest in the philosophy and cosmology underlying hatha-yoga. As far as she's concerned it's just a slimming exercise-which she does need, granted-but as far as spiritual energy goes she might as well be doing aerobics to the Bee Gees. I'm sure she's wonderful in bed-any woman is, when there's a conquest to be made-but aren't you going to get tired of that brassy laugh, those unreal paprika-colored curls, the way she says "doggie" instead of "dog" and "din-din" instead of "dinner"? It wasn't just Ed who was the loudmouth in that couple-remember how we used to come away from their house with decibel headaches? Midge has the kind of mind that honestly thinks the sayings on barbecue aprons and big fat coffee mugs are cute. And whose house are you proposing to live in?-not ours, that would be a sacrilege, and their split-level is much too tacky for a man in your position-that shag-carpet rumpus room Ed put in the basement with all that pine panelling and Shelves for his bowling trophies was fine^for the yoga group but can you imagine yourself sitting down there of an evening in the Barca-lounger reading through their stacks of old Smitbsonians? And what are your snobby MGH neurosurgeon friends going to say when Midge in one of those lurid loose splashy dresses she wears to confuse the weight issue breaks into her shrill giggle and asks the host if there's a little-girls' room where she can wash her hands? Darling, you're going to have a decibel headache day and night. I just can't bear to think of her in our bouse or even in our garden-she'll just put plaster toads and bunnies everywhere and choke the bed with marigolds and salvia-she has absolutely no eye-in fact I've often wondered if she isn't hiding color blindness, the way she dresses and the way her slipcovers go with her wallpapers-hideous! She does wear contact lenses, you know-one time doing Shirsasana one of them came out and we never did find it in the rug so it must have slipped back into her brain and may still be there.

I love Midge, of course. She has very little negativity, and for another woman that's a great plus, since we tend as a sex toward depression. Many's the time I went over there vaguely desperate and came away laughing, full of cottage cheese and fruit salad and white-wine silliness. It was like going to some unisex health club where you leave your intelligence in the locker room. But for a man, who wants a partner who can give him back some res &nance at every level, it will be like living with Pearl at age twelve and a half, only not so pretty and with no prospect of growth. There is something sweet but arrested about Midge-she has always been so vain of her dainty hands and feet, in rather insistent contrast to mine especially-she was always having us compare shoes, and professing astonishment that mine were so much like rowboats, and always touching or patting me with her little stubby "paws as if to call attention to them, with all their preposterous eye-catching clunky rings and really very tawdry fingernail polish, those plummy reds and baby pinks and even, I remember one Saint Patrick's Day, an unbelievable parsley green. And her feet, squeezed like rising dough into these poor creaking pumps-I mean, as women supposedly head into the twenty-first century, are bound feet what we need?

But I forget that you must be a man in love, enchanted, bewitched, and that even my most innocuous observation will strike you as sheer spite. Not at all-you two deserve each other. But before I leave the subject: Have you ever listened to her eat? Listened, I mean-she makes little happy humming noises with every bite, and pats her lips together in a kind of tiny applause all the way up from her stomach. Perhaps she makes the same noises in bed-that's for you to know-lucky you. For her, of course, you are a great step up-Ed called himself a security-systems analyst but he was really just a glorified electrician installing these futile burglar alarms, whereas you are in one of the hallowed professions-the only hallowed one, actually, since teaching and preaching and lawyering are all known now to be con games. I must say I can't bear it, imagining her humming and smacking her lips over you in the dark-your betrayals had become old hat to me and had male thoughtlessness and brutishness to exonerate them up to a point, but Midge inside that doggie piggie brain of hers must have known it was somehow not nice to steal a woman's husband while that same woman was trustfully giving and giving of herself on these tapes, those utterly confiding and trusting Maxells. Burn them, in all decency. Not in our fireplace-they'll stink and melt and stick fast to the andirons and the bricks. How about in Ed's old barbecue pit? One thing I have decided: you are not going to live with that hateful ridiculous woman in my lovely house with the view of the sea and the rocks and those English-style border beds I brought back from the absolute weed-patches that old Mrs. Pyncheon had allowed to grow up everywhere. You will sell the house and give me my half of the proceeds if in fact I don't have Ducky ask for all of it, 100%-women usually get the house, they were supposedly the homemakers-even your hatchet man Gil-man will tell you that.

And what of little Pearl? Suppose the news gives her a miscarriage?

Later. Another day. Calmer now. Peace, Charles. I realize this morning that Midge is only rising to a higher level of socioeconomic energy and should not be blamed. And I suppose honestly there was nothing in my tapes to indicate that you weren't fair game, though a person with even a little sensitivity-but I can't rouse myself to even enough indignation to complete the sentence. What matters really and always has is us-you and I. I've taken time to think and meditate and just relax into the space I'm in, and I've decided I don't believe in divorce and will write and tell Ducky to make no terms at all. You and your roly-poly little suburban pudding can do whatever you want-retire to her rumpus room and leave adulterous stains all over the shag carpet. Your infatuation will wear itself out with or without my blessing. I'm doing you a great favor, blocking a marriage that no sane man, and certainly not my straitlaced thrifty Charles (you know how Midge spends-Ed was always bragging/complaining), would really want. No, what you really want is to skim from Midge that demonic erotic courtship energy women can produce for short spurts and then abandon her emotionally just as you did me.

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.

Charles, I can't express how serene and benign I feel about you-and me. Parting is an illusion. Loss is an illusion, just as is gain. We shed our skins but something naked and white and amara slithers out and is always the same. I think I eventually will go to Holland and help Pearl bear our grandchild. These Dutch brewers have at least the charm of money-guilders, isn't it, over there? It all-sa grossesse et tout-seemed a little soon, but then everything does, I suppose, from being born to dying. I've dropped a note to Ducky asking him to try to work it out with Oilman. Did it bother you to hear on the tapes that I had a flirtation of sorts with Ducky, before he knew that he was gay? Poor Gloria, how terrible to realize that your supposed feminine charm is an unloaded gun, so to speak. There was something challenging about Ducky for a woman and I suppose that was it. Anyway, your flings with those flat-heeled nurses (how can you medical people who know so much about the body's ins and outs still get excited making love?-or does that expertise make it more so?) did bother me, however lightly you took them. They were klishta. They sullied me and you-wounded us, really. Things can't always be undone, it would seem. There is a grain to prakriti, an arrow of time. We get tired. Do remember and remind the despicable Gilman that whether or not this divorce goes through is to me a matter of utter indifference. Having known the Arhat's divine love I am not in the market (unlike needy old you) for any further attachments. I need to be still and feel now I have acquired the means to be still.

As I wrote you last spring, I have the Price salver and teapot and the Peabody flatware and candlesticks and Daddy's Milton and Donne and Herbert and Vaughan and Marvell. You can't begrudge me those, and I've willed them to the Houghton Library in any case. The stocks that I impulsively sold on the advice of Irving 's astrology I do apologize for-who would have thought the market could keep rising the nonsensical way it has? It's the terrible trade imbalance-the Japanese and Arabs and Germans have to do something with all their deterioratingdollars, and so they toss them back at us. In compensation, you can have the New Hampshire land-I don't think the Loon condos are going to come that way in this century-and I lavishly waive more than half of the assessed present value of our house and the Cape property. I would think the former would be worth a million now, with its view, so it should be easy to figure what you owe me if you and Midge have such poor taste as to want to live there, with my ghost sneaking around every corner, rose clippers in hand. I certainly can't picture even so gross a duo as you two humping away in our old fourposter, so when you sell it point out to the dealer that the carving is by William Lemon of Salem and the gilding by Daggett of Boston-these names add hundreds to the value. The Chippendale dining table and matching eight chairs with the diamond-and-scroll back splats came from the Perkinses and should go eventually to Pearl, along with the carved sea chest that accompanied Daddy's great-granddaddy back and forth to China countless times and the dear little blackened salt-and-pepper shakers handed down through. Mother's mother's mother's people the Prynnes. The Worth things are of course yours, though I confess I would love to have, here in my lonely cottage by the sea, the flame-stitch wing chair I used to sit in waiting for you to come home, stitching away at those hateful to-be-mono-, grammed place mats your tiresome Aunt Hilda inflicted on us as a wedding present-of the twelve, I think I did only three plus half of one more W over the course of twenty-two years. In most wing chairs I feel slightly repressed but that flame-stitch one had just the right gentle grip. Where I am now, the winter days are about the length of spring days in New England, and for that first half-hour of the dark as I sit reading zoology or cosmology or just staring into space I catch myself listening for the grinding sound of the garage door sliding up, in obedience to its own inner eye.

Ever,

S.

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