On the Edge A Novel (2 page)

‘If
you’re
giving cocktail parties, darling, I’ll know I
haven’t
arrived,’ he answered.

‘Don’t be mean,’ she said, as she seemed to say more and more often these days.

‘Brooke’s getting very full of herself,’ Adam had said to Yves after he hung up. ‘She’ll start thinking she’s the Divine Mother next.’

‘Ah,
non
,’ said Yves sulkily, ‘not another one.
Je ne crois pas que je pourrais supporter encore une Mère Divine.
’

Brooke’s possible future claims to divinity had been set aside by the time Adam and Yves arrived in her drawing room. Adam’s inky unkempt hair flowed down to his flaming jacket which in turn flared over his wide hips and black trousers. Yves, wearing a jacket of the same cut but decorated with swirling sea colours, created a relatively soothing impression. They represented the complementarity of turquoise and orange, the marriage of fire and water, of Yin and Yang, of Rumi and Shams; but only they knew that. To everyone else they looked like a couple of clowns.

Adam, who was deeply suspicious of Kenneth, approached him first. He had recently found out that before his incarnation as a would-be guru, Kenneth had worked for a rock band as ‘ambience director’, the euphemistic title he gave to his role as pimp and drug courier.

‘Hello, Kenneth, what’s our lesson for this evening?’

‘Humility, Adam, and it’s specially for you.’

‘Oh,’ said Adam, looking around the room as if it were an empty landscape. ‘And who’s teaching it?’

‘Life,’ said Kenneth serenely, ‘if you’re open to it.’

‘The Bumper Sticker has spoken,’ said Adam in mock awe.

Yves giggled and accepted a glass of champagne from the black butler.

Brooke was still upstairs when Adam and Yves arrrived. Some rumours that had reached her about her mother’s behaviour (‘Always likes to keep folks waitin’,’ Mammy used to say) had not been detached by the scrubbing brush of Dr Bukowski’s silence, or the laser surgery of Kenneth’s teachings.

She was contemplating all the fascinating people she had invited to dinner, ‘gurus’ as she might have called them five years ago. Now they were just her dearest friends. There were some new faces tonight, new names as well. Her secretary had made a list of them and left it in the bedroom on what Brooke called her ‘emergency desk’, the one she used when she couldn’t get to her study, or office, or library. There was a marvellous environmental campaigner, a fiercely magnetic Irish woman who said we could save the planet by planting bamboo in all the devastated rainforests.

‘It’s quite important, actually,’ she had told Brooke with a patronizing smile. ‘We
are
talking about the lungs of the planet.’

The lungs of the planet! We were giving lung cancer to Mother Earth. No doubt the chainsaw operators and timber merchants were heavy smokers. The way we treated ourselves and the way we treated our environment all tied in. Some of her Buddhist friends were particularly good on that theme. Gaia was the Greek goddess of the Earth, and Gaya was the name of the village in northern India where Buddha had achieved enlightenment. How about that? It all tied in. Brooke hurtled on in an associative frenzy.

She also had a marine biologist coming tonight who had discovered that whales were suffering from AIDS. New plagues were springing up in a world out of balance. Marburg, Ebola, Sin Nombre – her secretary had written them down; it was the marine biologist’s first time and she had him on her left at dinner – bursting on to the scene from the untamed expansion of human populations. It was like that old Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’

Realizing she was late, but unable to move from her dressing table, Brooke ran through the gallery of what had by now become apocalyptic platitudes, almost soothing in their familiarity.

‘Always likes to keep folks waitin’,’ she heard Mammy’s voice say again.

‘Oh God, I’m turning into my mother,’ she screamed with sudden savagery, throwing down her lipstick and then hastily picking it up again. Her face was almost as wrinkled now as her mother’s had been when her father died. Adam had called her a ‘menopausal mystic’ during their most violent squabble. That had almost finished them off, but after a long conversation with Kenneth about the meaning of forgiveness she had given a special dinner for Adam.

‘That man’s like a nuclear winter,’ said Kenneth when he learned who she was forgiving. ‘All he can do is fall out with people. That makes it, eh, even more of a privilege,’ he added soothingly, ‘to have helped reconcile you.’

Brooke unglued herself from the dressing table and, with a last toss of her head, as if the mirror had insulted her in some way that was beneath her attention, headed out of her bedroom grabbing the list of new names. She was worried about the late arrival of her house guest Crystal Bukowski. Yes, she was the daughter of old Dr Bukowski, now dead it turned out, and they had met three weeks ago in New York at a fascinating gathering given by some people
very
close to the Dalai Lama.

What a coincidence, she would have said in the old days, but now she only used the S words, serendipity and synchronicity. Crystal’s mother, her hostess had told her, had been one of her father’s patients who had become accidentally pregnant and then, realizing that he wasn’t going to leave his family but was prepared to pay her not to ruin his practice, she had joined a series of weird cults, taking little Crystal with her.

Crystal was just emerging from a very difficult romance with a Frenchman and Brooke already felt protective towards her, although there was going to be an ugly gap on Adam’s right if she didn’t turn up soon. Still, Crystal had a kind of honorary familial status due to being Dr Bukowski’s daughter. If not a black servant, he was at least a Jewish employee, most of whose family had been wiped out in concentration camps, and on whom she had showered vast sums of money during seven years of analysis.

They’d had to look long and hard at the pleasure she got from paying for missed sessions. It had enabled her to spend money in two places at the same time; it all tied in with having two homes. Really, he had helped her a lot, but in those days she had been so self-obsessed; now she was working for the world. She didn’t regret the years with Dr Bukowski. ‘You have to have your feet on the ground to touch the sky,’ as Kenneth said.

*   *   *

Crystal Bukowski was in fact on board a delayed flight from New York and had no chance of making it to Brooke’s dinner. Not that she was going to California to hang out with Brooke, but to attend the Dzogchen meditation retreat at the Esalen Institute.

She knew she was headed for the right place when she started fantasizing about sliding a chainsaw through the thick trunk of her neighbour’s neck. With a face of unfathomable stupidity which could only have emerged from the most deeply inbred valleys of Kentucky, perfected by generations of blood feuds and wood alcohol, with a haircut that had just come out of a Marine shearing shop, and a pair of jeans so tight they offered every hope that he would be the last of his line, this hillbilly from hell had writhed in his seat, scratched his balls and tugged at his trousers from the moment the plane left New York. At other times she might have taken refuge in a pair of headphones and a cool chanting tape, but he nudged her with his elbow each time he had a scratch, and now she was obsessed.

What was her anger telling her? That she was feeling hostile towards men right now? That she wanted to scratch her own genitals? That she was feeling dumb about the way things had turned out with Jean-Paul? That she was guilty about being so restless, about burning up her father’s surprise legacy to continue her mother’s soul-searching migrations? Yes, yes, yes, yes. So her mind was projecting again – left to its own devices that was pretty much all it ever did – but she was so bored with catching herself out, she just wanted to go with the aggression today, give in to the hatred she felt for the Caliban beside her.

Crystal closed her eyes and breathed deeply, concentrating her attention on her hara, her navel chakra.

She tried to quiet the part of her mind that kept flashing little analytic mirrors. It had been bad enough having an absent father who had been an analyst without falling for a French philosopher who was training to become one.

Last month she had persuaded Jean-Paul to take psychedelics with her in the wilderness, figuring he needed a rocket launch to lift him into the dimensions beyond his busy intellect. Psychedelics cut through the analytic tic which was currently wasting her time, and took her into the zone where meaning was immanent, tangible and numinous. Unfortunately the mescalin and the magic mushrooms seemed to have the opposite effect on Jean-Paul.

The worst part was what had happened afterwards. Somewhere below the plane Jean-Paul was galloping across the wastes of a North Dakota reservation pretending to be a Lakoda brave, something even the Lakoda had trouble doing. He was living in one of those Third World rubbish dumps which the Federal government had offered the Native Americans, like a mugger tossing a subway token at his bleeding victim. He had even written to the passport authorities in France to say that he wanted to change his name to Little Elk. They had not complied.

It was no use blaming their guide, Robert, he was just a suburban kid from Sausalito who thought he was the reincarnation of a Hopi elder. In any case he said that the Hopis came ‘originally’ from Tibet, so he had all the options covered.

In the end she blamed herself for giving Jean-Paul the psychedelics. He had been enthusiastic, of course, as an anthropologist. He had read Huxley and Leary and so forth; he’d done a lot of reading in his life, he just hadn’t done much else.

Jean-Paul had even started lecturing her on the value and function of psychedelics in primitive and developed societies, on their way from Moab to Canyonlands in their Cherokee four-wheel drive – no doubt Robert would have hired a Hopi four-wheel drive had there been one, although he had said that he ‘honoured the Cherokee Nation’ when she had made a mild joke to that effect.

With her eyes still closed and her arms pressed to her sides, out of range of Caliban, Crystal reluctantly replayed the movie of her trip with Jean-Paul. She had gone over it before, but like a tongue nagging at a fragment of trapped food, her memory returned again and again to those events in the hope of dislodging the truth of what had happened.

Almost immediately Crystal’s thoughts were interrupted by another violent nudge from her neighbour. Caliban had just had a particularly vigorous tug at his jeans. She opened her eyes angrily and scowled at his apparently unconcerned profile. Part of her was relieved to be interrupted. Perhaps she had made him nudge her.

‘I’m sorry to be so moving in my seat,’ said her neighbour in broken English.

He wasn’t a hillbilly at all, he was a Swede or a German.

‘I have, um, problem with the skin. I come to California for doctors.’

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ said Crystal, as much in apology as sympathy. ‘I hope you get the help you need.’

‘Thank you,’ he smiled. Really, he had very nice eyes, and she seemed to see in them a glint of pained intelligence, showing that he’d picked up what she’d been thinking about him.

What a teaching, thought Crystal, as the plane landed at San Francisco airport. ‘What a teaching,’ she murmured in the baggage-claim area. What an incredible teaching, she mused contentedly in the taxi, nodding her head in gratitude, incredulity and embarrassment.

*   *   *

Brooke had relaxed a little about her dinner party. Moses was taking the herb tea around, and everyone was evidently having a marvellous time. They were mostly a little drunk or high and agreeing with each other about things they already knew they agreed about, and planning fresh opportunities to discuss saving the world at each other’s seminars, conferences, workshops and performances. Brooke was talking to Dave, the marine biologist. She had just delivered her list of plagues bursting from their ‘natural reservoirs’ – she was very proud of that phrase – on to the human scene. Unfortunately, with so many new names to remember, she had included the Irish environmentalist.

‘Isn’t it dreadful about Ebola, Marburg and O’Hara?’ she had said, shaking her head sadly.

Dave didn’t seem to notice the mistake.

‘There’s a symmetry there,’ he said, looking at her from within the parentheses of his sunbleached blond hair. ‘We have a viral relationship with our habitat and we become the habitat of the viral.’

‘But isn’t that like saying that AIDS is divine retribution?’ said Brooke, who knew it wasn’t but felt like beating up some fundamentalist white trash.

‘Not really,’ said Dave politely. ‘It’s just like saying that what goes around comes around. Karma is not retribution, it’s just the way things are. At another level, the reality we inhabit is a function of the paradigms we use to describe it. Most of those paradigms are way too reductionist.’

‘But isn’t there something real underneath it all?’ said Brooke, fascinated.

‘Sure, there’s the energy which takes the form of matter, light and everything else.’

‘But I don’t want to think of this table as an energy field,’ said Brooke, removing her elbows in mock alarm.

‘Why not?’ said Dave. ‘It’s cool.’

Why not? thought Brooke. She smiled at Dave. Dave smiled at her. She was learning so much.

Adam rose to his feet, tears streaming down his cheeks. Everyone fell silent.

‘The whales have AIDS,’ he sobbed. He had only learned this from Dave half an hour before, speaking across the gap of Crystal’s absence, but he had already appropriated it as his own tragedy. ‘What are we doing to this beautiful planet?’

He paused and made a visible effort to remain calm.

‘The people in this room, gathered here by…’ Part of him wanted to say ‘the Madame Verdurin of the New Age’ but the wine and the fire won over and he said, ‘our Eleanor of Aquitaine…’

Brooke, who had been expecting Guidobaldo, was lost for a moment, but could tell from the smiles that the comparison was flattering. She must get a research assistant to deal with Adam’s conversation, her poor secretary had enough to do already.