Paradise Park (22 page)

“You came by the department today? I didn’t see you,” said Rich.

“I hate to say it, but we need to discuss the oven,” Kathryn was saying.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Will.

“Jeez, you’d think he’d have the courtesy just to print,” I burst out. I kept trying to read the card. I squinted up my eyes. I held it to the light. All I came up with was: “If I can be in our massage, markthing on a guest then only be thinking of you and histories we have slaved. You’ll been such a fiend. Love, Gary.”

I started passing the card around, and we all put our heads together to try to figure the damn thing out, but to no avail. Kathryn got a few words: “It’s ’You’ve been such a
friend
,’” she said. “It’s ‘histories we have
shared.’
” But that was as much as she could do. “What’s this return address?” Kathryn was sounding it out. “Torah-Or Yerusalami.”

“It sounds like a deli,” said Tom.

“You gonna write back?” Rich asked me.

I took the postcard from Kathryn. I started bending it in my fingers.

“Can’t we hold off on the oven?” Will asked Kathryn.

“We’ve got Rich’s party next week!” she said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Shit,” said Tom.

There wasn’t any way around that. We were having this huge blowout house party coming up, and there was no way to put it off. Rich had actually finished his thesis. A week from Friday—after eleven years—he was finally defending.

T
HE
theme was Mexican. We were having vegetarian enchiladas and re-fried beans and rice and bag after bag of chips and salsa, not to mention a couple of kegs of beer. And we were having a home-baked chocolate-frosted yellow layer cake—so it was a good thing we’d got the oven fixed. After Rich defended, he was going to come home with his whole committee and then we’d party. Kathryn planned the whole thing like a military operation. The morning of the big day we had the whole house bedecked with streamers and balloons. At minus four hours the cake went into the oven. At minus three hours Marlon ran to the neighbors and hid in the crawl space under their back stairs.

Minus two hours, Tom was setting up folding chairs in all the common spaces. We’d actually moved the living-room furniture to the bedrooms. Will was at work. Kathryn was in the shower. That quiet-before-the-mob feeling came over the house. I started walking around the place. Just bopping a balloon here, tweaking a streamer there. What would I say to Brian when he showed up? I couldn’t look him in the eye, let alone Imo! Maybe I should go away. Maybe I should just disappear for a while. I wondered if in the hubbub anyone would even notice.

I went into my room and shut the door. I sat down cross-legged on the pocked white tile floor. If I’d still had my guitar I could have played some. If I’d still had Grandpa’s watch, I could have held it at least. What I ended up doing was taking out some notebook paper and writing back to Gary.

P.S. Next time could you please type?

I heard excited voices outside my door. People were cranking the stereo up. So I folded my letter and stuffed it in an envelope and addressed it. Then I realized I had no stamps. I knew where Kathryn kept the house roll, but somehow I couldn’t leave my room. I sat and I sat. I took my citronella candle and my punk coil that I kept there and I lit them up, since my screens were ripped and I had mosquitoes. I watched the punk slowly burn. The end turned white. Millimeter by millimeter the coil was smoldering and crumbling. The party was growing louder outside, yet still I stayed. I was starting to get that weirdly satisfying mellow melancholy feeling of being forgotten. Like there I was, citronella Cinderella, having worked and slaved behind the scenes to get stuff ready, and then I had to stay home from the ball. Except actually I hadn’t done anything for the party except chop vegetables. Kathryn was the one who’d really put in the effort.

For around forty-five minutes I hid out, until Will came to find me.

Knock, knock, knock. “Sharon?”

“What?”

“Sharon?”

“What?”

He opened my door and stuck his head in. “Aren’t you coming out?” he asked. He wore these little wire-rimmed aviator glasses. His face looked so gentle and mild yet surprised. “What’s wrong?”

“I just don’t feel like I’m in such a partying mood.”

“How come?”

I shrugged.

“Oh, honey,” said Will, and he hugged me.

His hug squeezed a few tears from my eyes.

“Are you feeling left out?”

I nodded and wiped my face with my hand. Then I smiled at him. “But I don’t know why,” I said.

So he took my hand and we moved on out into the huge mob of people that were filling the house. And he got me a couple of drinks and stood next to me until I was okay on my own.

Outside in the yard by the food, which was arrayed on a camp table, Rich was standing with Kathryn, and she was beaming. She was wearing a really small turquoise dress, and pumps on her feet without stockings. Rich had on a new aloha shirt, and he had a whole bunch of leis piled on his neck. His beard was trimmed and his hair cut. This patina of mellow handsomeness was covering Rich, which I guess is what monogamy and a degree at long last will bring. All around Rich and Kathryn was the zoology department drinking beer, and Kathryn’s Greenpeace friends, and buddies from Kathryn’s canoeing club. But I didn’t see Brian at all. So I just went out and hugged Rich and hugged Kathryn and then bent over the casserole dish and loosened up a couple of enchiladas. As I straightened up I nearly bumped heads with Imo.

“Hey!” I said.

“Sharon!” She bestowed a smile. “How are you?”

“I’m good,” I said loudly above the roar of the crowd.

Her tan was lighter than I remembered. I guess she’d been ashore more. She still had the short hair, and those sharp black eyes, but she was looking at me kindly.

All my blood rushed to my head. I smiled at her like crazy. I was backing away, and she was asking, “What have you been up to? How have you been?”

I just kept backing up with my plate wobbling in one hand and my beer in the other. We ended up standing inside, practically in the
kitchen, with me telling her all about my life in the monastery, and various jobs like Crack Seed World. The great gig I had now at Shirokiya.

She knit her brow and leaned in toward me so she could hear. “You’ve done a lot of different kinds of things.” She spoke so politely, like we had just met for the first time.

“Well, if it’s one thing I’ve learned,” I said, “it’s that everything you do is connected. It’s like this whole chain or circle—but that’s how you learn, right?”

Imo said, “I thought the plan was for you to go back to school.”

“Hey, school is just one form of education,” I said.

“A useful one.”

I looked through the louver window toward Rich, who was going to be starting his postdoc in the fall. His stack of leis was higher now that more guests had arrived. He was walking around chin deep in carnations, orchids of all colors. Wherever he went he left a scent of ginger flowers and gardenias. “Useful for what?” I asked.

Imo smiled.

“It’s not like I don’t respect Rich for all the work he did, but the kind of education I want to do is more on the inside. I mean, you can study to be a doctor or an accountant or even maybe some kinds of scientist, but I feel like what you’re studying can only be the surface. It’s like the tip of the iceberg! And the actual delving you need to do, and diving down below the surface—how can some degree give you that?”

“Well,” Imo said, “isn’t the idea to acquire tools? And to learn techniques? The point is to avoid reinventing the wheel.”

“But you know, spiritwise every wheel is different,” I retorted. My head was buzzing a little bit from drinking after being relatively abstemious for a long while. “And, see, being identical to some standard wheel—is that all you get from degrees?”

Brian had walked in. He was way off in the far corner of the living room, but I sensed him all the way over there. My heart was racing. I wanted to turn and run, but somehow now that I’d started talking I couldn’t stop. I kept going, louder, faster. The words were pumping. “What about truth?” I brandished my fork at Imo. “And I don’t mean window dressing—or just some academic game universities put on. I mean TRUTH. The whole enchilada. What about enlightenment? What about transcendence? What do you major in for that?”

Imo cocked her head.

“Mmm,” she said. You could actually hear her voice crisping up, like the Imo of old—delicate and crunchy like colonialist toast.

Then all of a sudden she said one of the single most important things that up to that time anyone had ever said to me in my whole life. “Religion, of course,” said Imo. “You would major in religion for that.”

Magnetic Currencies

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my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you: I go to prepare a place for you.”

Jesus lifted his bare arms toward us there in Galilee. He was telling us not to be afraid, even though he knew he was going to die. All of a sudden I couldn’t take notes anymore. I’d heard Professor Flanagan was good, but now I knew. Because he stood up there in his white robe with his long hair and no notes, and he spoke to us, and his voice was so tender, and the words so pure. Listening to him you forgot this was a class at all, and you couldn’t see the books and the loose leafs and the rows of student desks. You couldn’t think about lunch or getting to your job, or any of that. There was Professor Flanagan dressed in a simple white robe, and he made it true, what he said. “Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.”

Since I worked, I could only take one class each semester, but Intro Religion was a doozy. You had to enter a lottery just to get in, because the course was so popular. And that wasn’t just because instead of a final exam or research paper you submitted a journal of a personal religious investigation. It was because of the prof himself. Not for nothing did Flanagan have a joint appointment in the drama department. In Intro
Religion, Professor Flanagan came to each class dressed up in the style of the whatever prophet he was teaching, and actually took on that figure’s voice and personality. So he gave all his lectures in the first person. He was Buddha, and Moses, and Jesus, and Mohammad—except my year was the last time he did Mohammad, because a sophomore who was an Omani prince started offering the Muslim Students’ Association a large reward for bumping off Flanagan for blaspheming the Prophet.

“I will not leave you comfortless; I will come to you,” Flanagan said. “Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more; but you will see me. And because I live, you shall live also.”

I sat in the second row of the class. I was chewing on the top of my ballpoint, but I didn’t even know. I only saw later that the plastic was all chewed up. That was Flanagan’s charisma. It was as if he were inventing this stuff on the spot. It was as if he were standing there before you, coining the golden rule. And suddenly coming up with all the inspirational sayings, so that you listened to the Sermon on the Mount, and you felt like you were hearing it for the first time. And actually, in my case, I was.

When he ended, he stood in silence. For a long moment nobody breathed. Then applause rang out through the whole room. I stood on my feet, and the whole class was standing with me.

When we all drifted out into the sunshine we blinked our eyes. It was like coming out from a great movie. I pretty much floated to work. At Shirokiya I saw the customers come and go, and it was as if I was looking at them through glass—like they were great silent fish in an aquarium, and when they spoke the words escaped their mouths like bubbles. Until all of a sudden one big guy in a hurry cornered me. He demanded the price on a black Samsonite suitcase, and I was so shocked to be accosted like that I nearly turned my back on him before I remembered I was actually working in the luggage department.

This was the most studious period of my life. This was the time I became almost scholastic, because I was so infatuated with the idea of academic rigor. My housemates saw the difference in me now that I was back in school. I would hole up in my room and read the Koran. I would sit in the living room in our bowl-shaped papa-san chair and highlight Exodus in my Holy Bible—the King James edition. I copied quotes into my black composition book. Sometimes I quoted my
quotes aloud—just to meditate on them. For example, I would be sitting in the papa-san cross-legged and I would say “I have told you, O man, what is good. Only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God.” And I would chant the verse, and I would rearrange it and shuffle it around—but with respect—just the way you would turn a jewel in the light. “I have told you, human, what is good. Only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk wholly with thy God. I have told you, woman, what is good….”