Soulmates (14 page)

Ray was waiting for me at the empty airport. He looked exactly like he had the last time I saw him—he was possibly even wearing the same shirt, though I think all plaid shirts look the same. This was a point of contention between Ethan and me during better times. He maintained that there were many, many different kinds of plaid. “This shirt has a tartan print, and this one is a tattersall,” he'd say, faux-serious, picking up two blue shirts that looked identical. I smiled at the memory.

“Hi, Dana, good to see you,” Ray said. I searched his face for evidence of grief but found none. Then again, his face was always drawn and slightly dour, with crow's-feet that extended downward. It occurred to me for the first time that perhaps he'd been grieving since Rosemary died.

“Hi, Ray, thanks for letting me come.”

Ray took my suitcase wordlessly. I used to be put off by his old-fashioned cowboy chivalry, which I saw as an affront
to modern feminism, but now I appreciated it. We drove the seventy-five minutes back to his remote log cabin mostly in silence. I looked out the window at the mountains. The immensity of the landscape was a relief, the opposite of New York's claustrophobic streets and buildings.

Halfway home Ray turned on the radio. I remembered from my last visit to Montana that for large stretches of driving the only stations you can get are Christian radio and NPR, reflecting the divided culture of the state. Ray turned the dial to a Christian station that also played old country music, and filled the silent car with Gene Autry's sweet voice.

It was dinnertime when we drove up the dirt road to Ray's cabin. He brought my suitcase into the living room and went into the kitchen.

“Do you need help with dinner?” I asked as I watched Ray take out a cutting board and a sharp knife.

“No, honey. You've had a long trip. You should take a load off.”

“You won't even let me set the table or something?” I asked.

Ray shook his head. “Nope. Get outta here.”

I went out onto the back deck wrapped in a blanket I found lying on a couch. The sun was already hidden behind the mountains, and I shivered listening to the rustling leaves that surrounded me. I could smell the savory scent of whatever Ray was cooking. We always stayed with Ethan's aunt Mary when we'd come out to Montana for holidays. She had a big house, and she loved to decorate and cook and fuss over us. She liked fussing over Ray, especially. She didn't know what else to do about Ray's grief, so she stuffed him with food and took him to church.

So I was shocked that Ray knew how to cook something that smelled so good. Ethan always made it sound like he had lived like a feral child after Rosemary died.

“Dinner,” Ray called. Inside, the table was set simply but elegantly, with place mats and decent silverware. Ray even had a handmade ceramic vase filled with dried flowers as a centerpiece. There was a plump chicken breast on my plate, with a wild rice salad next to it. I took a bite and was pleasantly surprised. “Wow, Ray, this is delicious! Where did you learn to cook like this?”

“My friend Linda taught me some things,” Ray said, shifting awkwardly in his seat.

“Is Linda your girlfriend?” I couldn't stop myself from asking.

“You could say that,” Ray said even more uncomfortably.

Seeing how ill at ease Ray was made it hard to figure out what to say next. We ate without speaking for a while. I could hear both of us chewing and swallowing. I drank the water that was set out for me and almost choked on it. I was sputtering and wiping my mouth when Ray finally broke the quiet.

“I know you want to hear more about Ethan, but there's not much to say.” He looked so sad, I wanted to break through the discomfort between us, but I didn't know how.

“Can you tell me what little there is to say?” I said. “I'm just trying to figure out how Ethan became . . . whatever this thing is he became.”

Ray looked down at his lap. Realizing that my straightforward questioning was putting him off, I tried a softer tactic. It was manipulative to tear at Ray's heartstrings, but I didn't care.
“I haven't been the same since he left, Ray. And getting whatever scraps of Ethan I can at this point will really help me move on. I know you know what this is like, when a spouse is gone.”

Ray pushed his rice around on his plate and didn't say anything. But I could tell he was taking me seriously. I tried to concentrate on my dinner to give him time to think, but I could barely get down a few bites.

“Let me sleep on it,” he said at last. He got up from the table and dumped the rest of his dinner in the garbage. Then he washed the plate and put it on a pristine dish rack. “The bed's made for you in Ethan's room. I hope it's comfy.” With that he walked to the back of the cabin. He was in good shape, but the way he shuffled across the floor made him seem like an old, broken man. A moment later I could hear his bedroom door shutting and locking.

Though it was early evening, I suddenly felt exhausted from the travel. After washing my own plate and adding it to the dish rack next to Ray's, I opened the door to Ethan's room slowly, as if a bogeyman might leap out at me. Instead I saw a cat that had presumably been asleep on Ethan's twin bed and was rustled awake by the door. She looked at me, pissed off, and scurried out of the room as soon as I turned on the light.

Ethan's room was a cultural tomb, permanently fixed in the nineties when he left for college. Posters of the Pixies and Nirvana were hung on the walls, Kurt Cobain vamping in women's cat's-eye sunglasses. The desk was strewn with ancient totems—bobblehead dolls of Minnesota Vikings and a collage of different photos cut from
Spin
magazine. A dun-colored plaid flannel bedspread that I remembered from previous
visits still covered the bed. At first glance, the only evidence that Ethan had been there recently was a small dream catcher tacked above the bed.

I started snooping through Ethan's things. It felt like an intimate privacy violation—a teenager's bedroom is so sacrosanct. I had to keep reminding myself that this teenager didn't exist anymore, and that it was necessary prying. His shelves contained all his old books: guides to the indigenous species of Yellowstone, hiking trails of Glacier, and manly fiction of the Hemingway variety. I searched the titles for anything New Age or yogic, anything he could have left when he was last here, but the closest I came was a decaying paperback of
Linda Goodman's Sun Signs
from 1972. When I opened it up part of the cover came off in my hand. Ethan's mother had written her name on the title page. It was the seventies, after all—everyone, even my straitlaced, skeptical mother, had a copy of
Sun Signs
.

I turned to Ethan's desk. One drawer contained all his high school mementos: writing awards, National Merit Scholarship recognition, and a track and field participation certificate. Another contained his college diploma, still in its puffy frame, and a friendship bracelet I had made for him in a regressive spurt of boredom one summer. I picked up the bracelet and touched its frayed tassels. I felt tears start to collect in the corners of my eyes.

In another drawer I found outtakes of our wedding photos, which I couldn't bear to look at. Underneath those was a slender book with a red and gold illustration of an unfamiliar deity on the cover. The title, in gold lettering, was
Aztec Cosmology: An Exploration of the Ancient Rituals
. I grabbed the book
and opened it. It had a
LIVINGSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
stamp on the inner flap, and a date that would have corresponded with Ethan's visit. I thumbed through its crisp pages—apparently the denizens of southern Montana did not have much interest in Aztec religion, as the book felt new. I found a bookmark left in a chapter about the butterfly goddess, Itzpapalotl. I skimmed a page and it read like one of Yoni's goofy parables—the goddess with her sharp obsidian wings and her despotic leadership over a mystical world filled with birds. I put it aside and kept pawing around.

Finally I found a drawer with Ethan's childhood relics. I picked up a ceramic plaque with Ethan's handprint, his name, and the date—October 6, 1983—on it. He would have been five then, and I figured his name was written in his mother's fine cursive hand. Ethan had told me that Rosemary was very creative. She was always doing art projects with Ethan and Travis that involved pieces of fabric picked up at the Bozeman Craftacular scrap bin and lots of pipe cleaners.

At the bottom of the drawer I found a familiar-looking dark-blue necklace with an asterisk on it. It had a surprisingly hefty feel, like a paperweight that had been repurposed. I rubbed the asterisk with my thumb, as if feeling the etching would reveal something to me. Had I seen this before when Ethan and I had visited Ray together? Was it one of the trinkets sold at Montana flea markets? Had the Grateful Dead followers in my dorm at college worn it?

Oh, right, I remembered where I had seen it: on Lo, at the retreat. Maybe it was something they gave all the staffers at Zuni, and Ethan had brought it with him when he visited Ray
a few months ago. I put everything back in the drawers except the necklace, which I placed on a side table next to the bed.

I lay down on Ethan's narrow bed and pulled his flannel cover up around my ears. There was no top sheet: typical of a house full of motherless men. Encased in warmth and dark, surrounded by the absolute silence of the country, I felt like I was in a sarcophagus. I didn't feel like I was dead, no, not exactly. I felt like I was preparing for my afterlife.

My dream that night took place in an M. C. Escher version of Ethan's room. When I entered his closet, there was a staircase descending down and down and down into a pile of moth-eaten flannels. I was searching for something underneath the flannel, and I threw the plaid this way and that until I pulled out that blue necklace. I brought it up to my face to examine it closely, and it exploded. The explosion woke me up with a start.

I sat up in bed and looked over at the necklace, which was still in one piece. That was when I remembered where else I had seen that blue asterisk. On Rosemary. She was wearing it in that photograph of her with baby Ethan in her tummy that he kept at our apartment, the one I couldn't bear to throw away. I felt dizzy, like I was back in the dream, back on that twisty staircase. I lay back down on the pillows.

I heard Ray banging around in the kitchen. I was lightheaded when I got up, and I felt like I was floating down the hallway, like my body was still observing dream logic and any minute the floor might give way. I went to find Ray with the necklace in my hand.

When I entered the kitchen, Ray's back was to me. He was
making coffee, pouring the water into the well. I watched him put the carafe back in its place before turning around to look at me. His eye went to the necklace in my hand, and he sighed. He turned back around and pushed the On button on the coffeemaker. Then he walked over to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and said, “Take a seat. We should talk.”

I told the sheriff about all this already. About Rosemary's involvement.

Why didn't I tell you? Because it was none of your goddamn business. You're not solving the crime. You're not putting anyone in jail. I promised Rosemary a long time ago that we'd put her past behind us.

But since you already know what you know, I guess I'll start at San Francisco. That's where I met Rosie. After my second tour in Vietnam was over, I told my CO I would re-up, but only if I could get stationed in California. I grew up in King City, a sleepy, dusty farm town a ways outside San Francisco. My dad had passed while I was in high school, and my mom wasn't in the best health, so I wanted to be closer to her.

I got stationed in the Presidio when the war was winding down, probably '75 or '76. It was like living in a dream. King City was just a few hours south, but I grew up so poor I'd only been to San Francisco once, when I was about eleven. All I remembered was the wind whipping off the Pacific. King City was so stifling in every way—I was trapped by the stink of farm animals
and the lack of opportunity for me there. I wanted to live in that clean, eucalyptus-scented air.

I was posted with the Military Intelligence Group, and my office overlooked the Golden Gate Bridge. Sometimes I would just stare at it for hours, watching the fog roll in and out. At night, I'd be lulled to sleep by the repetitive sounds of the foghorns. Those were the first good nights of sleep I'd had since I joined the army right out of high school in 1970.

No, the war wasn't so hard on me. It wasn't a goddamn tea party, but it was my job to serve my country and I did it to the best of my ability. I was not affected in any major way, at least not compared to some of the other guys I came across. I saw some of the worst cases coming into Letterman hospital in the Presidio. Guys so mentally messed up I didn't think they'd ever get back to regular society. They'd pass through the Presidio and then end up on the streets of San Francisco, where they were vulnerable to guys like John Brooks.

What? Hold your horses, I'll come back to him in a minute.

I did love being in San Francisco, but I was a little lonely. A lot of guys on the base were married and starting families. There was one neighborhood nicknamed “Diaper Gulch” because there were so many kiddos running around. I had a few girlfriends here and there, one who worked with me at the base. But nothing serious, even though I was ready to settle down and really start my life.

Most evenings, I would go over to a bar right outside the Presidio gates with some of my buddies. The bar was called Yacht Harbor. It had an old maritime theme and was festooned with
rusting anchors and musty circular life buoys. There was even some nasty old netting here and there. Don't get me wrong: despite the nice name, the place was a dump. But we were comfortable there. Most of the gals I met there were employed by the base in some way, usually by the hospital. Which is why when I saw Rosie, it was such a shock.

Rosie was wearing a hippie-kinda dress, a dirty purple thing that nearly dragged on the floor because she was so petite. She had a single long blond braid that snaked around her left shoulder. It sounds silly to say, but she glowed. Her skin just had this freshness and newness. It wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before. And her face was just so beautiful, and she looked so scared.

I wasn't usually very good at talking to women. My buddies had to push me into it, and I'd only let them after a coupla beers. But I was just drawn to Rosie. She sat down at a table near the front of the bar, and I figured some guy was going to sit down with her any minute. But no one did. And the one big thing that being in Vietnam had taught me was to seize opportunity, because you don't know when your time is up. So I took a shot and went over to say hello.

I never believed in it before, but it was love at first sight. From the second Rosie looked up at me and said, “Oh, hello,” I was smitten. She was so sweet and gentle. I thought she might want to leave, because she kept looking out the front window of the bar. But she stayed and talked to me for a very long time.

What did we talk about? Oh, a lot of things. She talked about a dog she'd had as a kid, named Chief, and how she missed him.
We talked about Jefferson Starship. I don't know. It wasn't so much what was said as how it was said. We just had a bond from the get-go.

Eventually it was getting late and I had to get up at zero six hundred. So I asked Rosie for her number, and she clammed up. “I don't have a phone right now,” she said.

“Well, can I come by your place and take you out sometime?” I asked. This was much bolder than I usually was, but I just couldn't let her vanish into the fog.

She hemmed and hawed in that sweet, high voice of hers, and eventually admitted that she had no place to stay.

I told her she had to stay with me that night. At first she refused, she said she was perfectly happy sleeping in Golden Gate Park. But I was not about to let her spend another night homeless. I snuck her into my room on base, just for the evening. I let her take the bed while I slept on the floor. To this day I can still sleep anywhere, in any situation. Ethan used to make fun of me because I would fall asleep standing up at his orchestra recitals in high school.

C'mon now, you can't get that run-over-puppy look every time I mention the boy's name. That was meant to be funny.

I couldn't keep Rosie hidden in my room, so the next morning I asked a civilian gal working at Letterman if Rosie could stay with her for a little bit, just so she could get on her feet again. She had a sweet little apartment in Cow Hollow and she said sure, she had a Murphy bed that Rosie could sleep on. I went over there every night to take Rosie out. We ate Chinese food in Chinatown and Mexican food in the Mission, and went to North Beach to hear music. I'd try—gently—to get Rosie to
tell me what brought her to San Francisco, why she didn't have any place to stay. But whenever I tried to pry, her mouth would crumple like Charlie Brown's. So I backed off. I was happy just to spend time with her. There was a lightness about her, a singular joy. I can be a real grump, and I was the same as a young man. Rosie made me laugh at myself.

After two weeks, my friend in Cow Hollow said Rosie had to find her own place. Her sister was supposed to visit, and I guessed Rosie was cramping her style. Rosie still hadn't been able to find a job, and I didn't have any money to pay for her to get her own place. When I told Rosie we'd have to come up with another option for her, she was trying to fight back tears. “I have no options,” she kept repeating, getting more frantic each time she said it.

I couldn't stand to see her feel so trapped, so without really thinking about it, I got down on my knee and said, “You do have options. You could marry me and come live on the base.”

She laughed it off at first, but I realized I was dead serious, and told her so. I was head over heels for her. She said she was in love with me, too, but she didn't want to rush into anything. “I spent a lot of time not being my own person,” she explained. I asked her what she meant, and she shook her head and went silent.

“How's this,” I said. “We'll get married, just so you have a place to stay. We'll get married housing, which is much nicer than the sorry little room I've got now. You don't have to stay any longer than you want. You don't even have to sleep in the same bed with me. I'll sleep on the couch. Hell, I'll sleep on the floor, like the first night.”

It took a few hours of pleading, but finally Rosie agreed. We
made plans to get married that weekend at the Presidio Post Chapel. I know it sounds hasty, but you have to understand it was a different time. Lots of people got hitched after knowing each other for only a little while. I had a buddy in Vietnam who married a local woman after spending a single night with her.

To celebrate our engagement, I got us a hotel room where Rosie could stay the night, though I had to be back on the base before my morning call. We made love for the first time that night, and when we were lying there after, Rosie started to cry. She finally broke down and told me where she'd been for the past several years. It wasn't at all what I had expected.

Rosie grew up in Sacramento. Her mom and dad were Catholics, but not the fuzzy, gregarious kind. They were conservative in every possible way, especially sexually. When Rosie turned twelve, her mother started measuring her skirts before she left the house. If they were more than a quarter inch above the knee, she was sent upstairs to change. She was not allowed to wear modern bathing suits, even at the beach. Her mother found a 1920s bathing costume at a thrift store and made her wear it for years. Rosie ultimately burned it in a trash can on her way to school.

Rosie graduated from high school in 1970 and left home the next day. She had one friend who had moved to San Francisco, a gal named Sandra, who promised to give Rosie a place to stay if she could just get a bus ride out there. Sandra had written Rosie a letter inviting her to come on down to visit. Said she was living with some guy in the Haight who she said had “blown her
mind.” After eighteen years in that household, Rosie was ready to get her mind blown.

She showed up at 715 Haight Street with her little Samsonite suitcase that matched the white shift dress she had picked out for her first day as a grown-up. I remember the address even now, because Rosie took me by once, to show me her past. It was an unremarkable Victorian, slightly shabby like the other buildings in the neighborhood, and painted a dark green. Rosie remembered the dress she was wearing that day vividly because she had spent so much time fantasizing about leaving Sacramento, and because she felt so silly when Sandra opened the door.

Sandra had gone fully counterculture. She had grown her hair long and stopped shaving her armpits. As Rosie remembered it, Sandra basically answered the door wearing underwear. Rosie almost turned around and ran back to Sacramento, but she had put so much stock in this moment that she pressed on into the house, determined to adjust to her new surroundings.

That very first night, not wanting to ruffle any feathers, she smoked pot with Sandra and her man. The guy seemed really interested in her thoughts and feelings, much more so than any other guy—or, hell, anyone else at all—had ever been before. They talked about philosophy and religion, and how her parents' conservative values were inimical to spiritual progress. He made her feel like the light of the world was shining on her face. Rosie was nervous that Sandra would be upset that her boyfriend was paying so much attention to Rosie, but when she glanced at her friend, Sandra nodded
encouragingly. Sandra's boyfriend even kissed Rosie, and Sandra just watched, smiling, as it happened.

Yes, it does sound creepy. But you have to understand that Rosie was real naive when it happened. She'd barely left her parents' house before. I remember she told me, “I thought this was just how people in the city behaved.” She was also a teenager hell-bent on rebelling. So the last thing she wanted to do was embarrass herself in front of her old friend by making a fuss.

A few men and a bunch of women lived at 715 Haight, and Sandra's boyfriend was their leader. Rosie realized this pretty quick. The women all hung on his every word, and the men acted like they were his bodyguards. You know where this is going. The guy's name was Aries at the time. I don't think Rosie knew his real name was John Brooks until after things went sour and she filed those charges.

At first, being part of the communal living experiment at 715 Haight was incredibly freeing for Rosie. She bought into what Aries was selling, hook, line, and sinker. He was big on free love, which wasn't that original back at that time in San Francisco. But Aries was building something bigger than most of the street preachers back then. He claimed he was starting a full-blown utopian society, which he was calling Aries' Children.

But Aries couldn't create his new utopia with the few resources he had. So he convinced all new followers that they needed to sell their worldly possessions and start fresh. Conveniently, he said that the commune needed the funds from their personal yard sales to keep the community going. For the greater good and all.

One of the ways he got those followers was by sending pretty
young girls like Rosie and Sandra out on fishing missions for men. They'd seduce guys and bring them back to the commune.

What? I'm not going to tell you what kind of sex! Was it “weird”? Well, I reckon it was. I didn't really want to know the gory details about that one, Dana, as I'm sure you can imagine.

I don't want you to think that Rosie was a total fool, though. She said she loved the fishing at first. It made her feel in control of her body and her life for the first time. Of course, she wasn't really in control. Aries was the one pulling the strings of the whole operation. He even gave her a new name. He gave everyone new names, because he said that being part of the utopia meant shedding not just your possessions but also your old identity.

Rosie embraced the illusion fully. To Aries's credit, he was a very successful community builder. His acolytes were varying degrees of faithful—the ones who lived at the commune, like Rosie, were the most devoted—but a thousand people had given Aries some kind of money, which earned them official status as Aries's children. Their official status was marked by that necklace you found, the blue one with the asterisk.

By this time Rosie had become a true believer. She thought they were building an important new society, a respite from the judgmental world of her parents and Richard Nixon. So Rosie followed Aries without question when he said they had to leave San Francisco in the middle of the night for some land he had purchased in Mendocino County. He said that the San Francisco police were persecuting them because of their unconventional beliefs, and that the only way to continue their beautiful, intentional community was to leave the city.