The Empty Chair (25 page)

As I said—this I know I
did
tell you—Kura remained on Mogul Lane and environs for seven years. During satsang he could always be found in the exact spot he alit upon that first morning. He became fluent in the same duties the American had been entrusted by his own teacher.

Me? I lasted about four months, four very
long
months—I was young, and bored with the company. The ashram diehards and devotees were either putzes or major dicks and that last category included women. I did some fooling around (I was an equal gender employer) but Kura didn't seem to give a shit. He'd lost the urge. I tried not to take it personally. After the head-rush of Bombay wore off, I grew restive. He had enough sense to give me a long leash. He was too caught up in the annihilation of the Self to be bothered.

I went through a manic month of buying rare fabrics. I became addicted to the markets that sold them, whole cities unto themselves where transactions were conducted over dreamily aromatic tea in hidden rooms looking out on acres of silk, linen, cotton, muslin. I made day trips in search of obscure ayurvedic treatments, though what I really wanted was a massage that would never end—I wanted to massage
my way to nirvana. The longer I stayed, the stranger my pursuits. I uncovered an infamous cult of sacred prostitutes who taught me their bittersweet songs. (That's another story.) Day trips became overnights, overnights turned into weekends, weekends into extended stays. I actually loved India but discovered I didn't enjoy traveling by myself, which was a new one because I so cherished and protected my autonomy. Now I see what I couldn't see then: I was furious at the American for stealing my man. I could handle the abstinence part but not having him in bed with me was a bear. He insisted on sleeping alone, something having to do with his “subtle body.” I think I was probably going through withdrawal because sex with us was
definitely
a drug. I kept our suite at the Taj and Kura rented a disgusting little room much closer to Mogul Lane. Each time I returned from one of my forays, I fantasized he'd appear at the hotel to apologize for his behavior, and come to his senses by announcing we were leaving for Paris
at once
—or Morocco, Ibiza, Timbuktu—
if
I'd have him. (At this point in the fantasy, he was still down on his knees.) In reality, he was sullen and displeased. Which was immensely disconcerting to a wild child like myself who was accustomed to a
man's affections compounding in ratio to the amount of time I'd blown him off. I'd always heard that gurus were notorious for taking their students to bed, but my efforts to seduce the American were a dismal failure. Finally, I worked up the courage to tell Kura I wanted to go home. Wherever that
was . . . the Marais I suppose. I didn't get the reaction I'd hoped.

One day, he showed up at the pool while I was doing my club sandwich thing. (I always order triple-deckers at hotel pools, it's a Queenie tradition.) I was on a chaise longue fooling around with a rich kid whose parents had taken the train to Goa without him. Out of nowhere Kura grabbed my arm. The boy hightailed it—so blind was Kura's anger I don't even think he noticed. He began to shout about how he'd made a mistake bringing me there, how I was an albatross around his neck, that at long last he found what he'd been searching for and was hereby firing himself from the job of
nanny . . .
I kept a stiff upper lip, not easy under the circumstances. I said I was happy for him and didn't
need
a nanny, thank you very much. I must have been talking through my tears but it wouldn't have mattered. He wasn't listening. He said he wasn't going to waste his time on a spoiled little cunt doomed to perpetual adolescence and that I was “spitting at God,” flushing my only chance at self-liberation like so much
shite
down the toilet. In mid-tirade, he grabbed my hand by the wrist and raised it up as if to present its amputated fingers to the jury as Exhibit A. I recall a jolly waiter striding triumphantly toward us with my club, fries and sundae held high on a tray. When he saw what was going down, he neatly swiveled and departed. I was still seated and Kura was standing; he held my wrist so high that my shoulder flirted with dislocation. As hurtful as it was, and as poorly handled, I understood where Kura was coming from.
His
life had been dislocated too, in the most gorgeous way, and he'd generously wanted me to have the same experience. I had my doubts about his new relationship. At the time, I felt he was determined to meet a guru,
any
guru, it just turned out that the American was the
handiest
, with the best provenance.
I never thought it would last—and believe me, when he crawled back to me I wasn't planning on being there to pick up the karma. So I pretty much handled his rage-out, until he said something that wounded me to my core.

“Why didn't I just let you die?”

O, Bruce! I think I
did
die—right then—died
again
—as I searched the eyes of my killer—my killer by default, or do I mean omission?—the killer I loved before knowing what love is—searched his eyes for a sign of mercy
 . . .

I held his gaze but none was forthcoming.

He came to my room while I was packing. I thought he was going to hit me. That's how far from love we had come. He gave me $25,000 worth of francs and enough damp, stinky rupees to buy myself a soda at the airport. I went back to Paris and stayed at the George V for a month. I was
not
in good shape. Had a wicked parasite too, not to mention a few stowaway demons of lower caste.

That was the last I saw or heard of him until that day he called my apartment in New York, seven years ago. There are so many “sevens,” do you notice? Sevens and elevens . . . they really do seem to come up more than other numbers. O! Now I remember his last words to me in Bombay:

He said, “I shan't be saving you again.”

I was dreaming of New York, in quiet conversation with a gargoyle, when the voice of a stewardess whispered, “We're beginning our descent.”

I nudged the drape aside to look out the window.

The great orange dust cloud of Delhi lay before me.

We resumed the following day.

What happened next is a blur.

I debarked into those rioting molecules of shit, perfume, death and rebirth that belong not just to Delhi but every Indian necropolis. Two golf carts raced toward us on the tarmac, holding porters and customs officials—and Kura with two bodyguards! He hugged me and I almost fainted dead away. How my old lover looked! And my tear-streaked
self
watching
him
watch
me
,
seeing how
I
looked! We took each other in, sizing up like tailors for our three-piece eternity suits—that magnificent
ache
that embraced all coming-togethers and coming-aparts, and touched the exquisite sorrow that is the shadow of existence itself.

His smile was big as a catcher's mitt.

He looked strikingly presidential in his Muga silk threads. Arms intertwined, our whole beings clutched, fussed and melded as we rode to the hotel in the small motorcade. We hardly said a word. Kura had a flair for the grandiose; the other cars were carrying “muscle.” (And the elusive doctor.) I was tongue-tied except for the powerful, almost jokey urge to ask how the hell he made a living these days. But I didn't, discretion being the better part of valor. However the saying goes.

We had dinner in one of those dark, gaudy, empty restaurants that tend to live on the ground floor of 5-star Indian hotels. Wait a while though . . . did we go to a private club? Why am I thinking of this particular club? Maybe that was Bangalore . . . or Bangkok. Or Chicago! Memory's failing me . . . a club? I actually don't
think
so—no, probably not. Though he kept the details mysterious, Kura implied we had quite a journey ahead and I doubt he'd have wanted to trek off-campus on the eve of our departure, because we were slated to leave the next day. Though it
is
possible, more
than possible that we took our meal in his room. Or should I say rooms, in that they occupied the entire penthouse. The Presidential Suite, indeed.

I told you this part was blurry. Starting the next morning, everything sharpens.

We had breakfast at a corner table in the coffee shop off the lobby. We'd slept well and allowed ourselves the exquisite luxury of enjoying each other's company
in the moment
, unencumbered by the odd circumstances of our reunion. We were brighter than the day that was about to enfold us, we threw off sparks and made spunky prayers of thanks to the gods of Whatever for arranging things thus. Kura had gained a bit of weight but not too much—some whiteness and thinning of hair—a slight tremor when he lifted his glass. Yes, he still had the
hôtel particulier
in the Marais on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. (Glory be!) Yes, he was single. (
Hmm.
) His father was dead coming up on twenty years but his mother had just celebrated her 100th. When British citizens reach their centennial, the Queen mails them a congratulatory card; an anti-royalist all her life, Mum secretly ate it up. As for his current line of work, he knew I'd be curious and threw me a bone—“I am in the recycling business.” I almost laughed, because it sounded so mafia.

We spoke in shallow generalities, packaging the broader strokes of our lives and exchanging them as gifts. At the end of the preliminaries, something shifted in him. He looked positively ancient—more battered pharaoh than beleaguered king.

“I remember everything about the day you left Bombay . . . a horrible,
terrible
day. A day that hurt me—as they say—more than it hurt you. I
flogged
myself for treating you so shabbily. Please accept my belated amends. ‘It's been a long time coming, it's going to be a long time gone.' Do you remember how we used to sing that song?

“After you departed, I realized something I had been unable to voice or admit, even to myself.
I was in love with you.
There! I said it. O, how I suffered, Queenie! How I grieved. And all the while, I told myself such torment was unavoidable, that it was the anguish of the old, attached Self, an unhealthy aspect of the ‘me' I was struggling to snuff out for good. After all, I had just begun my love affair with
the renunciate's way
,
my foolhardy fling with enlightenment. Ah, but enlightenment turned out to be a bigger tease than you ever were!

“As soon as you returned to Paris, I became very, very ill. Do you remember how sick I was when we first arrived, the night before going to Mogul Lane?
That
was merely a foreshadowing, the appetizer if you will. The entree came after you'd gone. Looking back, it's clear I'd acquired that sickness unto death diagnosed by a certain melancholy Dane, the fear and trembling that accompany the realization the Self must die—this walking, talking collection of vanities, addictions and absurdities calling itself ‘Kura' must die. As you may well know, my love, one has never been truly ill unless one has been ill in India!
You lay in your sweaty bed of nails, riveted by the ceiling stains, scanning them like tea leaves for meaning—and none of the outcomes are good. One's mood becomes quite dire. The American sent two ladies of a certain age to take care of me. The fever raged for two weeks. I hallucinated freely—mad dogs and midday sun but alas, no Englishmen. I was certain I would die, which in effect I did. Between visions I thought,
What fatal idiocy to have journeyed all this way!
I'd traveled thousands of miles to reach here—
you
traveled with me—to finally meet the Great Guru, the man I dreamed would consent to be my teacher. Astonishingly, I'd failed to give any credence to the rather ominous detail that I'd pinned the tail of my spiritual aspirations on a corpse! The aunties sponged me down with cold rags while my troubled mind wandered this way and that, like an imbecile in top hat and tails on a serious errand . . . and all of it came to nothing. In the end, I stood before pride's funhouse mirrors and took my full measure. What reflected back was my obsession with the goal not the journey—ergo, finding my guru—and in that febrile moment, it became painfully obvious the adventure had been doomed to failure. My fate was sealed! How could I have been so blind? So you see I couldn't very well run away and follow
you
, not after all the metaphysical ruckus I'd raised. I was like a mountain climber so close to summiting that he defies that inner voice telling him the weather has turned and he must descend if he is to live—the devil take it, he summits anyway! Now it was too late. I was near the summit, freezing, without oxygen . . . dying in a cheap room in Bombay, far from Paris, far from anyplace called home, far—oh
so
far, my Queen!—from the realm of Pure Land Rebirth. The fever raged, scorching the earth of the American, when I had no reason to fault him—not as yet. Fire and brimstone! I surmised that it was not a mountain I had tried to summit but a
mountebank
—and an American one, to boot! My descent would not be to the foothills but down, down, to the hell of Hungry Ghosts! And to make things worse, if that were possible, I'd chased off my lady. Whilst casting about for false gods I had excommunicated the
real
one, the yogini in front of my very nose! I tell you, Queenie, those were miserable times!