On the Edge A Novel (25 page)

‘She’s in the can,’ said Crystal, accepting Peter’s hand and letting him pull her gently to her feet.

*   *   *

‘One of the sisters in our circle was raped at gunpoint,’ said Karen. ‘It was just so upsetting to hear her…’

‘Gee,’ said Stan solemnly.

‘One of the other sisters said that we should take a moment to grieve for all the women who had been raped in the history of the world. I thought it would be nice if we could take a moment to grieve for the woman who was right there in front of us, crying.’

Karen rarely allowed herself to question another’s path, but she had to admit that she had taken a dislike to the hawk-eyed sister, or stepsister, who had stolen and generalized the suffering of the rape victim. Her face was lean and angry and her jaw muscles spoke of an Olympic dedication to clenched teeth.

Now, nobody was more planet-minded than Karen, but sometimes you had to be practical, and so she had gone to fetch a Kleenex box, only to find that it had been emptied during John’s demonstration of the loosening and opening effects of the sacred spot massage. The empty Kleenex box now symbolized the perfectly liberated
yoni
, and the pile of tissues, which Karen soon located, stood for the discarded layers of shame, guilt and fear. She hesitated to offer this pile of toxic emotions to her weeping sister. Everybody else in the room seemed to be channelling the female predicament since the eclipse of the Goddess had cast the shadow of war, industrialization and rape over the Earth. Sensing the insult of this transpersonal sorrow Karen, heartbroken and precise, picked up a handful of pale-orange tissues and sat next to the crying woman.

‘I want to honour your courage in sharing that,’ said the muscle-jawed woman, noticing the counter-attack of personal sympathy. ‘It gives me hope for all the other women who’ve suffered a similar experience.’

‘There was a man in our men’s group,’ said Stan, interrupting Karen’s memory of this incident, ‘who was caught masturbating by his parents, and got sent to a psychiatrist.’

Karen came to a halt and let loose a deep sigh.

‘That poor man. Can you imagine the effect that had on him?’

‘I didn’t have to imagine it, I could see it.’

‘We are so privileged to be in this workshop,’ said Karen, shaking her head. ‘Just talking about sexuality in an open way is a healing process. Our generation was given such double messages. What was it that John said? “Sex is dirty: save it for the one you love.”’

‘Right!’ said Stan. ‘Can you believe that?’

Stan and Karen drifted back to their room, hand in hand. Stan felt the calm depths of a forty-year marriage being stirred by the influx of new perspectives. He loved Karen and had always been faithful to her (except that one time at the insurance conference in Oklahoma City) but the idea of sexual passion with his aged wife was a challenge he had barely considered. Now he felt ashamed of the rift between devotion and excitement which scarred his sexual nature. Could the tranquillizing familiarities of their marriage be transformed into the conscious intimacy which, according to John, was the fuel of sexual ecstasy? John had even deprived Stan of the painful refuge of his impotence, when he had talked about sex with no goals, and non-ejaculatory orgasms, and the pleasure a man could give his beloved with a soft-on.

Stan was confused and apprehensive, but also excited, as he opened the door of their room.

‘This isn’t our bedroom any more,’ said Karen.

‘It isn’t?’ said Stan, thinking his wife had planned a surprise.

‘It’s our love temple,’ said Karen.

‘Oh, right,’ said Stan bashfully, descending deeper into his mixed emotions.

*   *   *

Jerome was standing on his head in lime-green boxer shorts, his legs slowly scissoring the air. Standing on her feet in the bathroom, Sabine looked quizzically at her red and gold sari. That
shakti
red was guaranteed to make her feel like the ultimate temple dancer. On the other hand, Jerome had seen it before. The alternative, which Jerome had not seen, was a kind of tattered suede wrap, hardly big enough to polish a windowpane. Very cavewoman at the dawn of history, it was devastatingly sexy, with its rough edges effortlessly failing to hide her freshly groomed
yoni.
The trouble was that it lacked any obvious spiritual quality, and Sabine wanted Jerome’s soul, not just his
lingam.

She finally made her decision and went through into the bedroom.

‘Shall we chant?’ she asked, walking past Jerome with a little spin.

‘Woah!’ said Jerome, leaping back onto his feet. The only mantra that goes with that rag is “Yabadabadoo”.’

As if inspired by the laws of cartoonland, he threw himself on to the bed in one smooth gesture, his head already resting in his palm as he hit the mattress. He raised one knee and lay there in the posture of a feasting Roman.

I knew I should have worn the sari, thought Sabine.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, pretending to pull a few strands of suede over her pubic mound.

‘You bought your own nakedness at a clothes store,’ said Jerome. ‘That’s what I call capitalism.’

Sabine joined her hands together in prayer and bowed to Jerome.

‘Yabadabadoo,’ said Jerome.

‘You are a silly man,’ said Sabine, beginning to be irritated. ‘This is supposed to be a meditation.’

‘Meditate on this,’ said Jerome, clasping the silken bulge in his boxer shorts.

‘Be serious,’ shouted Sabine, stamping her foot.

‘You come in dressed in a couple of moose sinews, and you want me to behave like I’m in church.’

‘My God,’ said Sabine, ‘what are you doing in a Tantra seminar if you are making a separation between sexuality and spirituality?’

‘Lighten up, will you?’ said Jerome.

‘I think you’re the one who needs to relax,’ said Sabine, getting up and stepping into a pair of jeans. ‘I’m going for a walk, maybe when I get back we can start again.’

‘Start what again?’ said Jerome. ‘Your process?’

‘
My
process? You know, John warned us about this: one person starts an argument because they’re afraid.’

‘So what are you afraid of?’ asked Jerome.

‘Don’t try that cheap trick on me,’ said Sabine, buttoning up her trousers. ‘You know, with you I’ve always had this feeling that Tantra was just a way of learning some fancy moves so that Mr Irresistible could go on getting cool young chicks into bed. For me, it’s part of my spiritual journey. Like John says, “Don’t be afraid of inviting God into the bedroom.”’

‘John’s the one you’re inviting into the bedroom,’ said Jerome. ‘Are you going to quote him all night?’

‘You’re jealous of John and you’re afraid of inviting God into the bedroom,’ Sabine taunted him. ‘What if somebody else was in charge of the energy? What if Jerome wasn’t running the show? You wouldn’t like that so much, huh?’

‘Cut the psychology,’ said Jerome contemptuously.

‘When you’ve worked out your little problem, why don’t you come and fetch me in the hot tubs? I need to be with my own body right now.’

‘I’m not afraid of inviting God into the bedroom,’ Jerome called out as Sabine swept towards the door. ‘I just don’t want Her to come dressed as Wilma Flintstone.’

‘How do you expect God to dress? In fluorescent green shorts, like some low-class gigolo?’

‘They’re Italian silk,’ shouted Jerome. ‘These shorts cost me a fortune.’

Sabine walked out, leaving the door open. Jerome collapsed onto the bed with a loud groan.

*   *   *

Both Brooke and Kenneth felt tense as they headed north on Route One. They had switched workshops. The drumming in their ritual workshop had been so powerful and transformational they had decided to leave and try sex again. Three years earlier there had been a fumbling encounter between them, initiated by Kenneth when he was first establishing the subsidy for his book. It had almost lost him Brooke’s support. She knew that he wanted to blame her unattractiveness for what she had described to Adam as a ‘catastrophe’, but if he found her unattractive, what had he been doing in bed with her in the first place? He had never really been honest about the confusion, his motives for taking her to bed, and the backlash of his revulsion. Perhaps it was too horrible to go into. Their friendship had survived with its sails torn, and now they were risking another storm. This time Kenneth had not taken the initiative. He had agreed, though, and agreed at a time when the subsidy he had first courted was in danger of extinction.

Brooke had taken a room in the Post Ranch Inn, a small house in fact, overlooking the ocean from a thousand-foot cliff. The rooms in Esalen, with their Ivory soap and their bewildering lack of maids, were just a little too alien for her to quest in.

‘So, what d’ya think of this non-ejaculatory orgasm?’ said Brooke, taking a hairpin bend.

‘I guess I’m pleased my father wasn’t a practitioner,’ growled Kenneth. ‘Why would Nature make it feel so good if we weren’t supposed to ejaculate? It sounds counter-evolutionary to me.’

‘According to John you’ll feel even better if you don’t ejaculate. Maybe Nature wants us to know that right now. Even evolution’s got to evolve.’

‘I’ve got nothing against
delaying
orgasm,’ said Kenneth.

‘For how many weeks?’ asked Brooke.

‘Oh,’ Kenneth pondered for a while, ‘just over half a per cent of one week.’

‘How long is that?’

‘Almost an hour.’

‘That’s not bad.’

Brooke paused and wondered whether to say what was on her mind.

‘You know, this is hard for me after what happened.’

‘I know,’ said Kenneth, with the alacrity of someone who has been dreading talking about a subject. ‘But it’s not the same,’ he went on. ‘We’ve been through a lot, and this is a way for us to explore a new level of intimacy.’

Feeling that he was drifting, he switched abruptly to declamation.

‘The point is not to try to sanctify the genitals by giving them foreign names like
yoni
and
lingam
, but to be able to say “cunt” with such a radical sense of wonder that the word is restored to its ancient … I want to say “virginity”.’

‘Well, try to resist,’ said Brooke, laughing.

‘But seriously,’ said Kenneth, removing himself further from the awkwardness of the personal. ‘For me this is connected with something that came out of Adam’s class: the point is not that sperm is like holy water, but that it’s
sperm
, which is quite wonderful enough. Lightning isn’t the emanation of some Divine mood, it’s
lightning
, which is quite wonderful enough.’

The road became more precipitous, a ribbon of perpetual vertigo carved in a cliff.

‘Well, Professor,’ said Brooke, with uncharacteristic boldness, ‘I guess the question I ought to ask, the one with the radical sense of wonder, is, “Do you want my cunt?”’

Kenneth coughed sharply.

‘Yes,’ he said, sympathizing with the view, ‘yes, I do.’

*   *   *

‘I don’t like the word
lingam
,’ said Jason. ‘It doesn’t rhyme with anything. Unlike “prick”, which rhymes with – well, “dick” for a start. Or “cock”, which rhymes with “wok” and, eh … “sock”.’

‘“My cock is in my wok”, is that the kind of lyric you want to write?’ asked Angela.

‘Well, it’s better than “My
lingam
’s in my wok”, isn’t it?’ said Jason with a lively sense of justice.

‘It’s hard to judge,’ said Angela. ‘It might be better to keep the wok and the cock entirely separate.’

‘In an ideal world,’ admitted Jason. ‘But sometimes the chemistry is just overwhelming,’ he said, grinning at Angela.

‘Like John says,’ said Angela seriously, ‘Tantra is about replacing chemistry with alchemy.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jason. ‘It’s certainly having an alchemical effect on my writing. Tantra, yantra, mantra.’

Jason had often written lyrics about himself in the third person. Now that he was with Angela songs were pouring out of him in the third person plural. That was love for you. ‘They’, the token of crowded anonymity, of paranoid conviction, of midnight grudges, the parasite of a beleaguered ego, had become the pronoun of confessed love.

‘You know, I’ve done a lot of personal growth work,’ said Angela with unquiet pride. ‘I’ve lived in communal situations, I’ve worn crystals and I’ve prayed to Navajo gods, but I don’t need to prove that I’m cool any more.’

‘Right,’ said Jason.

‘I trust my intuition now and go with what comes up, if it feels right.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Jason, daydreaming about his career.

‘When I heard about this Tantric workshop, I started getting this tingling all over my body and these little mystical events in my life. I hadn’t even met you, but I knew that I would be doing the workshop with someone totally appropriate.’

‘That’s me,’ said Jason, ‘Mr Totally Appropriate.’

‘It was like the first time I heard about the Goddess,’ said Angela.

Jason tended to glaze over at the mention of the Goddess. If there was one thing that worried him about Angela, it was this Wiccan trip she was on. He really had no idea what it was about but his imagination was seized by disturbing images of neo-pagan harvest festivals, of chicken’s blood irrigating blazing straw effigies on a rainy night, of body-painted mudwomen moon-dancing around windblown coals, empowered by the music of dry beans in a pig’s bladder.

‘What’s so great about the Goddess is that she has so many faces,’ said Angela. ‘I was into this Gaian model which identifies the Feminine with the Earth. I’m still totally into that, but now, thanks to Tantra, I’ve met her as a sky dancer. So she’s in the Sky too, which is
really
cool.’

‘She’s everywhere,’ said Jason uneasily.

‘Definitely,’ said Angela. ‘I really appreciate being with a man who understands that.’

She skipped around him laughing and waving the edges of her skirt.

*   *   *

Jerome had been darting through the garden with a pair of nail scissors and a torch, collecting flowers to garland himself for his beloved. He wore a bedraggled crown of Mexican daisies, a mayoral sash of Californian poppies, a couple of lupin bracelets and a snapdragon behind his ear. Like a heavily medicated King Lear, too serene to notice his own madness, he wandered naked through the baths, holding in each hand a fistful of petals to strew on the sulphurous waters in which he expected to find Sabine.