"She moved out of the bedroom and into the back half of the house. Then she moved out altogether. Some of our friends thought surely this meant we'd separated. And they knew nothing of the divorce. But no, separate spaces increased our harmony. Eventually. I don't mean to make this sound easier than it was. It was often hell. We'd begun to get a glimmer of a way of life that gave us both direct sunlight, in a manner of speaking. Neither of us wanted to overshade the other. Yet we wanted a degree of stability, a degree of coziness. We wanted to be the forest and the tree. Separate development that enhanced whatever we were creating separately and together in our ... journey; that is what we were after.
"Marriage simply hadn't fit us. Fanny thought it probably didn't fit anybody. She thought it unnatural. I wasn't so sure, being a man within a patriarchal system. I could see some privileges. She thought the words 'whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder' spoken at weddings missed the point. To her, 'marriage' was a bonding of souls that was eternal, anyway; it was presumptuous, therefore, for anyone to think it could be put asunder. Then there was the preacher standing in front of people as they were married, pretending to represent 'God,' but in fact representing the state. She was insulted by the hypocrisy. Besides, in her view, joining with another was such a sacred affair there was almost no way it could be done with other people present, a good number of them strangers, friends of friends, relatives you didn't like, and others who couldn't possibly appreciate the significance of the moment.
"From this you can easily see how Fanny and I never lacked topics of conversation. Sometimes we were so far apart in our ideas that I became quite exasperated. She always seemed to be putting people down, their little customs, their little ways. Behind every little custom, every little way, she saw an institution, and one she herself would never have devised. 'Why do you even love me, if you do love me?' I'd cry. And she'd think a moment and say, 'I love you for your breath.' Typically, the least substantial thing about me! 'Also the least colonized,' she'd say sweetly. Something unseen, indeed, invisible. Not my brains, not my cock, not my heart--no, my breath. But to her, as she explained it to me, my breath represented not only my life, but also the life force itself; and what this boiled down to in day-to-day reality is that she could, and did, kiss me all the time. We kissed for hours. Hours. She'd hold my tongue in her mouth and, with a shiver of pleasure that unfailingly caused me to rise almost beyond the occasion, she'd draw in my breath. Her own breath, sweet, delicious, the very essence of her soul's vitality, would enter me. I'd had no idea, before being with Fanny, how steadily, increasingly seductive this kind of kissing is. We started out kissing like everyone else, a minute or two at a time, but then ... It is a bond based on air, on nothing; nothing you can see, or save or take off or put on, in any event; and I found it to be the strongest bond of all. It was really funny, and we laughed about how much we both loved to kiss. The mingling of our breaths as we kissed for that second half hour, as we liked to joke, could nearly bring us to ... ah ... climax."
"Some of us have heard of that," said Miss Lissie wryly, and Mr. Hal laughed.
Part Five
The Gospel According to Shug
HELPED ARE THOSE who are enemies of their own racism: they shall live in harmony with the citizens of this world, and not with those of the world of their ancestors, which has passed away, and which they shall never see again.
HELPED are those born from love: conceived in their father's tenderness and their mother's orgasm, for they shall be those--numbers of whom will be called "illegitimate"--whose spirits shall know no boundaries, even between heaven and earth, and whose eyes shall reveal the spark of the love that was their own creation. They shall know joy equal to their suffering and they will lead multitudes into dancing and Peace.
HELPED are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.
HELPED are those who find something in Creation to admire each and every hour. Their days will overflow with beauty and the darkest dungeon will offer gifts.
HELPED are those who receive only to give; always in their house will be the circular energy of generosity; and in their hearts a beginning of a new age on Earth: when no keys will be needed to unlock the heart and no locks will be needed on the doors.
HELPED are those who love the stranger; in this they reflect the heart of the Creator and that of the Mother.
HELPED are those who those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with trees.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are those who risk themselves for others' sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the world in which no one's gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves shall be despised.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another--plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness.
HELPED are those who know.
ARVEYDA READ THE PAMPHLET The Gospel According to Shug over and over again. Carlotta sat quietly by his side. She did not think she still loved him; she did not even want to consider it. She was attracted, she felt, to wha
t he knew and to how he knew it; and to his music, always. She was visiting him at the new house he'd bought on his return from Central and South America: a spacious, low-slung acoustically perfect bungalow that jutted out of the hills over Berkeley and had been inspired by houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. There was a soundproof, state-of-the-art recording studio on the bottom floor, from whose windows could be seen the Golden Gate Bridge in its misty splendor, and the sunsets from all three levels of the house were spectacular. By comparison, her own house seemed viewless, cluttered, run-down, and, for three people, absurdly small. It was also in less fashionable Oakland. He had invited her to move in with him, and also the children, but she wouldn't hear of it. She found she enjoyed living in her own, and the children's, mess.
"Who's Shug?" asked Arveyda. One foot was raised and crossed over his knee. He had a habit of jiggling the raised foot, which made him seem impatient.
Carlotta kicked off her shoes and tucked one foot underneath her. She enjoyed these visits, which were similar, she imagined, to the visits one might make to a father or an older brother. As always, Arveyda offered luxurious surroundings and fresh, healthful food. Both children were in school from eight-thirty to three-thirty these days, and, because of spring recess, she was free from teaching for the week.
"While you were gone," she said, "I used to go to a place called Fanny's Massage Parlor. It was near the campus. Fanny gave very good massages."
She drew in her breath; but why should she hesitate or be in the least afraid? "She was the wife of the man I was interested in, the one about whose existence you once inquired, whose name is Suwelo."
"Suwelo?" said Arveyda. "Same as the rune?"
"Yes," said Carlotta. "The rune for wholeness. But I don't think it applied to Suwelo--not, anyway, when I knew him."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he was in fragments."
Arveyda gave her a quizzical look, which Carlotta ignored. In her own time, perhaps, she would tell him all about her intimate experiences with another. But not now.
"Shug, as near as I could understand it, was Fanny's grandmother, or something like that. Like your mother, she founded a church." What exactly did that mean, she wondered now. She tried to picture Arveyda's mother, who had named him after a bar of soap. Was she a big, dark woman like some of the aging black women she saw on the street? No; he'd said something about her stylishness. Well, but big, dark women were often the most stylish of all. Did she have a church, a real church, with stained-glass windows and everything? Carlotta had never been to church of her own volition. Zede had taken her to the Catholic church around the corner from their house when she was growing up. They'd understood little of the sermons and had gradually stopped going. Zede never conceded that there were any such people as heathens. So much for Catholicism.
Arveyda was smiling at her as she thought about those days. "Well," he said, "but my mother never wrote her own beatitudes!"
"I went to Fanny because I had known her at the college. Not known her, exactly, but I saw her from time to time. She'd moved to the Bay Area from New York, along with Suwelo. They were both teachers. He taught American history, she taught women's studies. But then she got frustrated teaching and moved on to administration. Why she thought that would be easier, I can't imagine. Of course it wasn't. She walked around with a look of such unmistakable distress it was almost comical. Then next thing I knew she'd quit the college altogether and enrolled in the San Francisco School of Massage. She opened her own little parlor down the street from the college, and many of her former colleagues, laboring under the stress she'd left, became her clients.
"From the moment I learned about you and Zede I had a migraine, and the whole of my body was one clenched knot of pain." Carlotta said this very slowly, in an almost inaudible voice. Now she speeded up, her voice firm and casual. "In the beginning I had no designs on her husband--he wasn't actually her husband any longer, but I didn't know that. They were always together. Where you saw one you almost always saw the other." Carlotta giggled. "I was attracted to their closeness. I see that now. How absurd life is! Together they represented home, a family, warmth, a place to belong. Her massage parlor was convenient," she went on soberly, "her prices were reasonable. She passed out free gift certificates to her friends and people from the college. I went. She treated me the same way she treated everyone else. After one two-hour massage that included forty-five minutes of acupressure, I was addicted.
"She was in a little cottage, the 'mother-in-law's cottage,' at the back of someone's house. You got there by following a curving flagstone path through flowering shrubs and vines--hibiscus and jasmine, I think. I remember bright colors and a lovely scent; though these two just might not bloom at the same time. I know nothing about flowers. But I liked it that she had them. Her massage table was encircled by trailing green plants that formed a living curtain and made me think of the out-of-doors, of a waterfall. There was a tiny wood-burning stove in the corner on which she occasionally laid a stick of sandalwood incense or into which she poked a braid of sweet grass. She laid a huge crystal at your head and smaller ones at your feet. I didn't know a thing about crystals at the time, and when she talked about their soothing or healing qualities the information went right past me. I was connected to nothing, you see. Not to my own body, not to the children, not, certainly, to inanimate objects. 'When you are better,' she said, putting a small amethyst crystal in my hand, 'you will be able to feel its vibration.' This kind of talk seemed the very babble of witches to me. We never became friends, or even particularly friendly. We were cordial, I guess you could say. I couldn't understand why she'd taken such a service-oriented, low-prestige job when she had such solid academic credentials. I asked her this once, politely, without the bluntness of my bewilderment. She shrugged and said, 'Oh, academia?' That was all.
"'Why did you take up this particular work?' I asked her another day as she worked to loosen the cramped tendons in my legs.
"Her answer seemed impossible, given the serenity of her surroundings and her own calm expression: 'I took it up so that I would be forced to touch people, even those I might not like, in gentleness, and be forced to acknowledge both their bodily reality as people and also their pain. Otherwise,' she said, 'I am afraid I might start murdering them.'
"I'm sure my body stiffened perceptibly. Whose wouldn't have? There I was, naked in her hands. With designs on her man; not that she ever seemed to think of Suwelo that way. But who knew? Maybe she suspected that he and I were starting to have a lot of chance meetings at the water cooler.
"Regardless of this, she kept working on my legs and attempting to flex my nearly rigid toes. My bent toes were so ugly. I'd never noticed before.
"'You should throw out those high heels, you know,' she said.
"But she'd said that before.
"'I know,' I said, just as I'd said before.
"'You're doing penance, huh?' she asked.
"'I don't understand what you mean,' I said. What could she mean? She didn't know you, didn't know us. Didn't know Zede. Would never have dreamed what had happened. Still, I wasn't sure. Sometimes I felt people could tell what had happened just by looking at me. I felt I'd been in a terrible accident that had scarred me; often I assured myself my scars were at least invisible. But what is invisible to a masseuse?
"'Oh,' she said, 'women wear things that hurt them to atone for the sin of loving someone they'd rather not. Someone they may actually consider unworthy of them. It's sometimes called "seduction,"' she added grimly.
"Maybe it was true, I thought. I wore the kind of shoes you'd liked me to wear, though they hurt and you'd left me for my mother, who always wore flats." This was funny, and Carlotta laughed. "It's like an episode from Soap," she said. "It didn't make any sense, wearing the shoes. They were killers. But even if they destroyed my feet and crippled my legs, I knew I wasn't giving them up. I liked the way men looked at me in high heels. The look in their eyes made me forget how lonely
I was. How discarded."
"And what did you see when you looked back at them?" Arveyda interjected, sadly.
"Oh, God," said Carlotta, "I wasn't going to think about that... . Fanny would massage you, and soon your body would feel yours again. And she would look satisfied, as if she'd achieved a sweet, if temporary, victory, and you'd wonder if you'd really heard this mild woman say anything about murdering anybody.
"Once, later, I asked Suwelo about it. He was evasive. He said she was seeing a therapist, but that essentially she was one of those victims of racism who is extremely sensitive and who grows too conscious of it. It had become like a scale or a web over her eyes. Everywhere she looked, she saw it. Racism turned her thoughts to violence. Violence made her sick. She was working on it.
"Anyway, she had this stack of pamphlets on a table by the door. Everyone who came in was encouraged to take one. I felt sorry for her, that she had apparently fallen back into the grip of her grandmother's religion. And was able to find peace doing work that was almost menial, in the smallest possible space. Yes, I pitied her; if I was doing penance by wearing high-heeled shoes, she was doing it in spades, working on my cramped legs and toes. Still, I like parts of Shug's gospel; at least she doesn't go on about blessed are the poor. And I love the next to the last line, where she talks about blessed are those who love and support diversity because, in their differentness, they shall be secure. But the last line baffles me. Blessed are those who know. Know what, I ask myself. And then I think of how I don't, in fact, know, and wonder if I ever will." Carlotta said this with almost childish petulance.
Arveyda looked at his wife, who had, without intending it, given the mystery of his own mother back to him; and to whom, despite the existence of their children, he felt he had never made love; and he thought, simply because of the magic she had just performed, in conjuring up an almost forgotten Katherine Degos, that she could not fail.