Laura draped her coat over her seatback in row two, a clack as a button brushed metal. He did the same, gazing back at the rising sweep of attendees, noting how animated their faces were, yet how subdued their chatter. This, he thought, was how church ought to be but never was.
“You’re really going to like him, Travis.”
Sweet woman, her face so vibrant and alive. “I like him already,” he said, and gave Laura a squeeze.
Marcie hummed as she bumsteaded her sandwich, habits both she’d picked up from her father, a man chubby-not-fat who favored a puttering hum over silence in the car. Hand on meat drawer, drew it open, packaged sliced turkey ready for unsealing; salami, the same; tuppered ham on one shelf still looking worthy; lettuce head with a few hacks out of it, snatched up; jars of mayo and dill spears precariously balanced at her breasts. She brought her armful of prizes to the table, arrayed them, and dove in, rye slices peeled open waiting on the plate.
As her hands worked, she wondered if she should check on baby Jenny. Time enough for that later. Laura, lovely pert-nosed Laura, was such a hoverer, it would probably do the kid good to suffer a little neglect. She and Travis’d moved in, going on two years now, and it had been a relief and a blessing after the beer-guzzling, once-overing, trio of scum-buddies who’d lived here before. They’d been away at a hockey game in Toronto the weekend Pierre brought her here and had committed them to a lease.
Pierre again. Bring him up, even fleetingly, and his residue lingered and spread, reviving the sweet and bitter ache of times buried and buried and buried again. Stopped over the table, knife in hand, kitchen clock relentless in its forward hurtle.
Brought up Freya Cole, leggy sad-eyed sandy-haired first-chair violist she had found solace with for a while: a quiet, caressive time, very few words, two lives lived, one here in seeming isolation, one there idle and indolent on Freya’s bed, her Scandinavian fingers sure and angular and rich drawing tone from her viola, then dry and light and loving on Marcie’s freshly inflicted wounds. It died away. Trombonist dork Kyle Kinney pursued his pet violist with bizarre gifts, won her, took them both off to Chicago under Maestro Solti’s baton.
Hey, what could you do? Heartache sucked, and there were plenty of people out there willing to leech off your grief. Go on, sniff the air, keep your bullshit detector in fresh batteries: That was the way to get by.
Stupid lump stood in her throat. Wasn’t fair. If she were a drinking woman, she’d be drunk. Instead, she lifted the triple-decker to her lips, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and chomped the biggest bite of meat and bread and bitter sorrow she could manage.
He left-armed Laura’s coat-bulged seatback and craned about to scan the crowd. Odd how gatherings culled from a city this size a mini-population of like-minded souls. He felt (grand illusion, that) immediate kinship here; rebuke followed instantly, no call for cynicism, there could be a grand gathering of these same people, one massive handfast to bind them all, spark to spark—enduring fascination and interest here, if they wanted it enough. These people, he fancied, lived, like him at his best, aside and apart from the weary fray of illusion, not tangled up in the snags of samsara, or not often, or with sufficient awareness to put a spin of redemptive humor on the human predicament.
“Elephant-shitting again?” Laura asked, knuckling his left temple playfully.
Fritz Perls’ term. “Yep.”
“Know you pretty well, don’t I?”
“What can I say?” Travis returned her smile. “I’m an outie, you’re an innie.”
It was enough. Laura tucked her cross-legged ankles tighter under her buttsplit, rocking to rectify them, and rested her hands, palm up and thumb-to-index-finger, upon her knees. Seemed affected to him, but what the hell, if it got her through the night, it was good.
He observed the trickle of aisle activity, new folks scanning or pointing or scarf-sweeping their hunched-over, side-swaggling, pardon-my-heels-on-your-toes way toward a brass-ring grab at enlightenment. Man four rows back was scratching his face, listening to a companion. A cluster of incandescent young women, mid-auditorium, set his mind-cock afrisking for an instant, then he veered off them in deference to their privacy and on to a couple of executive types, glint-eyed from the backglow of money in their day-to-day lives, he thought, Jacob Needleman readers who were easy straddling both worlds.
A quick movement, or jarring. The man scratching his face looked sallow, no great complexion to begin with, but his scratching wasn’t helping any. His fingernails seemed to be tracing welts from cheek to jaw, but then Travis saw runnels of blood down to the first knuckle and realized he wasn’t seeing welts but gouges and that they weren’t being traced but opened. When the man’s glance started to shift forward, Travis took quick refuge in the cluster of cuties further back.
But now their skin too, which had blushed a lively vivacity like reddish glows on golden apples, slung wan and dead from fish-glimmered eyes. Feeling the spread come down like a wave of sun over a windy field, he turned to shield himself and his woman from the impact; but Laura whiffed into his nostrils, and Laura clutched his arm, and Laura quick-leaned her puffed purple face, its reeky mouth glistening open, in toward his neck.
Moving from the wise old executives to the scratcher, he wondered if the fellow had a thing about his face. Did he unwax his earholes with an idle pinkie? Did he pry out boogers when no one was about, or chisel up layers of dead skin beneath his hair, opening and tormenting scalp wounds as his body mounted a slow steady assault upon itself?
Laura nudged him. He looked her way and she eyed him toward the stage. There was a stirring at the curtain off stage right. Then a tall blond-bearded man in Deva pants, whom Travis had seen somewhere before, came out far enough to step backward into the heavy red billow of the curtain, making way for the short Indian man who ambled out, hands cupped prayerfully before him as he walked. The tall man seemed stricken, though Travis couldn’t tell if his state reflected agony or ecstasy.
Seats flipped up behind them in the auditorium. His wife dug into her coat pocket and brought forth the baggie of rose petals she’d plucked from a bought bouquet an hour before. They went out her side, him feeling a little like a fool following her. Someone from McGill saw him, they’d hound him forever. Well, fuck ’em. Anybody in a position to see him was as blackmailable as he was. Laura put some petals in his palm and for the next many seconds, the tall air was filled with silent tiddlywink flurries of pink and white and red petals, flinging up and drifting down around the holy man’s upstretched arms and face. When the gentle rain was done, he lowered them and Travis had a first good glimpse of his eyes.
No one there, everyone there, a guru trick he’d seen before but never like this: the dark dead glint hinted of tarnished brass, and behind it lay at once the calm of total resignation and assent and the agitation of a star about to go nova. But he couldn’t be certain of that—it was one of the things he liked about Indian fakir types—and the man’s gaze had made its profound impression on him and moved on.
Hands thrust past Travis’s either shoulder stretched out to touch the swami. Devotees lightly laughed as they leaned by him to touch the moving hand. A few arms pulled away, a few laughs died on the vine, but mostly it was an ineffable grasp at joy. Travis figured what the hell, who was he to hold back. He leaned out, Laura’s patient white palm next to his, and two dark hands gripped them and held for an instant.