“They were a gift from my Sir.”
“But they’re so heavy! I saw the marks they made on your ankle. And people stare…”
“Do you know the poem ‘The Bells’?” she interjected — as if to dismiss his inconsequential remarks.
“Poe?”
“That’s right. When I first read it, I nearly blacked out. I’d just turned twelve. Suddenly, into that very ordinary life I described, came something abnormal, unruly, something fabulous, forbidding, exalted! To say I memorized it would be the palest truth; I embodied it, it resided in every cell. I breathed those stanzas, they coursed through my veins! That poem was the prayer that set me off to sleep — I recited it in my sleep, and awakened to its words upon my lips. During the day it was uttered with each breath, as pilgrims do their guru-given mantras. But why? I asked myself that just once and got no answer. For when one has a first love, there can be no interrogation.
“They told us in school that ‘The Bells’ was about a man who met his first love. He married her then witnessed her death by fire, and perished of grief soon after. The poem tells the story of what happened to my parents; it prefigured their deaths. I never thought of myself as morbid, but there’s darkness in all children and some of that Gothic metaphor took hold years before it came true. Something else mesmerized me, though, less earthbound — I was like a young shepherdess, following the sound of the bells of a lost animal, one she thought was hers yet belonged to nothing and no one. That celestial sound belonged to Silence! My teacher told me that the instant I encountered the poem, I unwittingly entered the world of the esoteric, for which I was well-suited and predisposed.
“I believe that if Mother hadn’t died, I would have fulfilled my goal and become a doctor, only to abandon the profession for the path of the seeker. (But by then, it may have been too late.) My Sir told me I was in search of one thing only since I was small—‘the only thing worthy of discovery’—Silence. He said true Silence resides everywhere, except in one place: the very bells that seekers insist upon ringing! ‘Bells entertain the monkeys,’ he likes to say. (He’s very funny, you know.) Many times my guru has told me that when he sees the energetic bodies of human beings with his third eye, they uncannily resemble the shape of a bell. The Source formed us that way — the Source, who delights in that first wild clanging of shrieks that pour from the throat when we’re born — the Source, who cries out joyously at life’s end too, when the scream of Self and its tintinnabulation of vanities, having rung, pealed, tolled, tickled, tinkled, and gonged its alarum on our breath for a lifespan, returns to the Silence whence it came. So you see, it isn’t at all true one can’t unring a bell. We are all bells, yearning to be unrung — monkeys craving Silence!
“It’s the habit of human beings to muddle a simple thing. Take a belclass="underline" we convert the ineffable into a crude call to faithless prayer, an echo of the ego, unable or unwilling to apprehend that its ‘sound’ represents an entreaty to soundlessness and nothing more. We leach out the mysterium tremendum of its instruction, for it’s our blockheaded nature to make convenient signs and symbols from the Unknowable. The bell’s original purpose loses its way, like a love letter in a littered ghetto — just as they say one cannot see a forest for the trees, we cannot see the face of God for the bells. We insist on reminders to summon us to worship, as if love is a mess hall to which we’re subpoenaed only when hungry… My Sir has also made the comparison of a prizefighter: punch-drunk in the ring, we feint, wobble, and reel, each round marked by a profane cacophony of bells — and for what? What is the boxer’s true prize? A bowdlerized Silence that gives rest from his struggles between rounds, in timed segments so deformed and desecrated they’ve lost all meaning. Money, power, and perverted love is what we hear ringing… The cracked clarion is even on our currency! We troop schoolchildren to see that golden calf: ‘Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ How true that is! Yet still we miss how close the broken bell is to the mark, for divinity sees glory in the fissure running through it. Would that cast-iron ruin was our sole legal tender — for a bell that cannot be rung is a cousin to Silence!
“The cliché of all seekers is to stubbornly believe that as long as they hear the airy, rippling magic of a bell, they’re on the path. Its music, melancholy and light, is seductive no doubt, but the sound is mere incense in a temple. One may enjoy it, even be saturated in it, yet it will not lead to Silence. Like Judas, it may even lead one away…
“When I grew older, the poem stayed with me, even influencing the school that I chose. Loyola was Jesuit, and it is said that Poe, living in the Bronx, wrote ‘The Bells’ after hearing them ring in the tower at Fordham, a Jesuit college. When Mother died in that fire — Dad tried to save her but was overcome — the poem became prophecy, a mandala containing all things. My Sir said it was the compassion of the Source that allowed me as a little girl to perceive the bells as messengers of Silence, not harbingers of doom and sorrow; that would have been too ugly and cynical a burden for someone so young. But I wasn’t strong and hadn’t yet found my teacher. After the death of my parents, the ringing of the bells grew violent and too much to endure. The tinnitus would have been fatal but for the birth of my daughter, which quelled all sound — and the intervention of my guru, my teacher, my love.”
Without segue, Devi cheerily asked Jeremy about his life. It was jarring. In an instant, the woman who’d channeled a daft, pantheistic discourse was gone. Caught off-guard, he confessed to the recent stab at fatherhood and his ambition to try again. He felt vulnerable and surreal, as if they’d been thrown together in a Red Cross tent, sharing intimacies amidst an unfolding disaster. Content to follow his nose and his gut (the only two organs that never failed him), he allowed himself to acquiesce, and let the mysterious goings-on guide the way. He really did sense something might be born of such lunacies.
When Devi told him that she and her consort had walked to the restaurant, he offered a ride.
As they drove up PCH, he expected to drop them on some forgotten Topanga utility road leading to a communal encampment. Perhaps they’d wash their faces in a stream before trudging into the helter-skelter woods. When Devi told him to pull into the driveway of a faultlessly manicured beach house off Malibu Road, he thought it was a joke — even when she produced a key that opened the front door.
That was when her cohort uttered his only words of the night.
“Two hundred and twenty-five thousand a month I give ’em! Ain’t that a pretty penny?”
—
Tessa, the Marilyn stand-in, stopped by Larissa’s for a drink. She was on her way to Pump because the man she was dating said that his good friend Lisa Vanderpump told him “Katniss” was having dinner there tonight. (Apparently, Jay-law was all about flaunting her serious reality-show love and insisted on chowing at Pump whenever she was in town.) He was a man of certain means who relished creating a mystique around his wealth — of the L.A. variety who liked to foggily “present” as billionaires. They wore the bullshit, self-aggrandizing rumor like aftershave and were legion. They chose Bentleys over Teslas. Teslas were for schmucks.