Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [47]
Nervous only like a squadron leader going into battle. Logistics, contour maps, streets to master: San Francisco as house-to-house combat. I had buildings and parking lots to locate on the city map, shortcuts to plot.
“Okay,” I heard myself say. I wanted to say, Hey, you’re a widow! Daddy’s dead, no fear he’ll pop up and ruin your life. We know what men who’ve shared the same woman are like, but what are women who’ve shared the same man like? I led the way to the Middle Grounds.
There in the smart, bright, busy neighborhood hangout, with music from an FM station piped overhead and thumbed paperbacks of Calvino and Eco on tabletops, I learned the story of one such woman. Jess presented it as her invitation to concubinely bonding; I heard it as a cautionary tale against mindless passion.
Jess had dropped out of Baba Lalji’s ashram and dropped into Asia in the late fall of 1968. She had hit all the usual hippie highs and lows in the next six years, and then it had happened. Karma, she called it. Her karma revealed itself in a village named Laxmipur. The year was 1974, Jess twenty-eight.
Where’s that? Give me a country. A quadrant. Desert or jungle. Wet or dry.
What does it matter? It happened. It happened in a season so dry the soil cracks open wide enough to swallow dying cattle and children.
All right, so Jess was twenty-eight, the war was over and back in America the bile was receding, but in a village where the wells were choked with bodies and the fields aged like bruises, yellow-brown, it was still hard to be an American and a romantic.
And how do you protest the war by doing dope on an alien continent? That didn’t make sense.
It had to Jess in her twenties; still did. It made all the sense in the world to anyone her age, Ham’s age, Fred’s age, those who had survived and owned up to what the war’d really done for them, how it’d freed them to be themselves, to curse and fuck and burn and loot, to kill or die, to feel superior while having fun. The war didn’t change you, that was Jess’s point. The war leveled the playing field for girls like her. When she talked of her hopeless childhood out in Fresno, I thought: Whoa! That’s Grandma and Gramps!
“Why are you always smiling?” she demanded.
“It’s so fascinating!” I said.
Jess’d overlanded to India shortly after she’d broken up with Ham. There, she got that out of the way. I admired her directness, and added, funny thing about Ham, wasn’t it, that he couldn’t let go of his women, he needed to hang on to every last one of them. Jess relaxed. She said, Yeah, the exes, the one-night stands, even the nut who shaved her head for him.
The one with the hat at Vito’s?
The trouble was that Ham’s wildness was Berkeley wildness. Jess sighed. A familiar wildness. The same with the Haight. A sad, shabby, funky, show-offy Look-Ma-Number-One kind of wildness. You had to leave the country, chuck logic, fuck reason, screw Enlightenment if you wanted more than that.
Translated into Fonglish, Jess was confessing to a bad case of needs.
Young Jess made her way through England and France, Greece and Turkey and Afghanistan, sharing rides with the world’s waifs, strays, seekers, sickos, sensualists, and stopped for a while in the Indian village of Laxmipur in a rainless month. She tossed her backpack on the blistered soil, lay down under a shade tree with brittle, wrinkled leaves, looked into a sky sheer as muslin and recited in a voice that was sure and strong.
“ ‘Zero at the bone,’ ” she said.
“Dickinson,” I exclaimed. “Isn’t it?”
“You are a quick study.” She ordered lattes. “They should ration such moments. One per lifetime.”
“Mr. Bullock, he was my English teacher back east, he was big on Frost too.”
Jess was back under the muslin-thin sky in Laxmipur, communing with Emily Dickinson.
“ ‘The Grass divides as with a Comb / A spotted shaft is seen,’ and wham! There was this … apparition!”
She invoked this thing, this snake-thing. This snake-god or snake-devil, whatever it was, just rose right out of the cracks in the dry soil and rocked