She emailed with her daughter only once — a text would have felt too intimate, a phone call anathema. Dusty said she’d been working through “some unexpected issues” in the wake of Reina’s death and that Ginevra, whom she saw in New York, was guiding her in the painful process. She was taking some “quiet time” in Big Sur. Dusty balked when Allegra ventured to ask, Are you at Esalen or Post Ranch? “At a house,” she answered.
She only left her rooms at night, when she took long drives, parking in quiet, affluent neighborhoods before going on a ramble. Just after sunset, the desert was cool and divinely aloof. The choppy, analeptic winds spoke to her, and brought strange succor. She felt disembodied, as if watching herself with a drone’s hovering eye, a demigod looking down upon that soft, sad ambulatory machine called Dusty Wilding — martyr, warrior, abomination. Slouching toward Trousdale with no plan in sight, she prayed some sort of liberation was at hand. She wanted to blame Jupiter, who, according to Chakrapani, was exalted; she wanted to blame Venus, the planet of love. She was tired of blaming herself… Maybe the stars and planets had aligned to rape her into selflessness and resurrection. She needed an illusion of purpose because anything was an improvement over the brimstone damnation she now suffered, the exquisite nonstop hurt whose insult she had begun to believe she might grow accustomed to, and even endure.
As she walked, she told the winds she’d break it off. I’ll end it and she’ll kick and scream but then she’ll understand. I’ll sell the house on Carla Ridge and give her Point Dume, and anything else she needs or asks for — it’s hers anyway, all hers. Yes, that’s what I’ll do… I’ll go see her and we’ll talk and talk and it will be all right, everything will be all right, and we’ll find new loves. Eventually. Both of us. We’ll find ourselves and be set free. And in time, we’ll come together again: friends and old souls, just like we’ve always been. I’ll be there for her like a mother (like always), and it won’t even matter if I’m the only one who knows—
But the winds shouted her down.
“Tell her,” they said.
—
She was in a state.
On the day that Dusty left for New York, Allegra went back to tracing a whorehouse of parfum miniatures in her sketchbook, in an attempt to conjure the winning silhouette of the vessel entrusted to spray the pheromones of her bitch lying wife onto thousands of women’s bodies.
She felt like a pimp; she felt like a cuckold.
At night, she dreamed of owls killing barnyard mice.
She took solace in a book of Sufi parables — one of them drove her to tears. It was the story of a wealthy merchant who kidnapped a songbird and kept her in an emerald-encrusted cage. The songbird grew to love its captor. One day, he was leaving on business to the very place she was stolen from. He told her that if she wished, he would search for her family and pass on a message. “Tell them I am with one who loves me,” she said. “And my heart is full and I want for nothing. The one who adores me sees to my every need.” The merchant went to that faraway place, and when his work was done found her brother on the high branches of a tree. He shouted up the captive sister’s message. After listening, the bird fell dead from its perch. When the merchant got home, he went straight to the cage of his beloved with the unhappy news. “I told your brother you wished him to know that your heart was full. And that you wanted for nothing because the one who loves you saw to your every need. He listened, then fell from the tree and was dead.” At that very moment she tumbled lifelessly off her golden perch. Horrified, he opened the door to revive her but she flew from the cage and straight out the window.
The peerless songbird circled back for a parting word.
“My brother showed me what it would take to be free.”
But Allegra was not free; she hadn’t the courage yet to die, so she might live.
What must she do, to take flight? It was a pretty metaphor but she was no Persian peacock, no mystic songbird — she was a Looney Tunes buzzard, feeding on its own flesh. If she died this moment she’d have no interest in reincarnation; why would she want to be reborn into the miscarried, adulterous world? When she thought of killing herself, the comfort — the hopefulness—came in the notion of remaining dead.
Jealousy, bewilderment, and fury had made her psychotic.
During yoga meditation, she heard a voice: You must embrace the sovereign indifference of Love. Why not just let Dusty be? Perhaps that was the answer! She and her wife were holy, sovereign creations with discrete sovereign paths. Those paths would naturally diverge but their love, if it were true (and she sort of knew it was), would endure.
Yet each time she inched toward the bejeweled cage’s door, she froze.
She went on long drives and took solace in churches.
A pastor in Sylmar recited Ruth’s words to Naomi—
Entreat me not to leave thee or turn away from thee, for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where you die, I shall die, and there I will be buried.
She wondered if it were possible for a person to truly surrender, in utter humility — maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just an eternal ideal — then mused over whether an imperfect but sustained acquiescence would be sufficient to set one free. And when does the very idea of “forgiveness” no longer matter? When does the act become an ethereal concept, finding its proper place in the sacred, no longer earthbound, dream… because shouldn’t a person be able to go beyond such a thing? I mean, if one was able to truly forgive something awful, it would seem that one might have advanced far enough, and had evolved to such a… but how, how to forgive Dusty for what she’d done? Only weeks ago, she couldn’t even have imagined her wife having an anomalous emotional affair, let alone actively being with someone else… what was “forgiveness,” anyway? Allegra scoured the Internet for those courtroom videos of families acidly dressing down prisoners after verdicts were read — the “victim impact statements” at the end of a trial. The cathartic public shaming when mothers and daughters and fathers and sons formally vilified those who took away that which was most precious. The clichéd, hectoring redundancy of the futile rebukes was heartbreaking; there were only so many ways to say You will have Christmas but my husband will not and I hope you rot in hell. Now and then, a family member faced the unrepentant monster and said, “I forgive you.” I forgive you — for raping and strangling my bride. I forgive you for sodomizing and burying my child alive… and here am I, whining because Bunny came with Larissa! (And God only knows how many others. And I don’t give a shit if that makes me look like a fool, because what she’s done is the same as murder, it’s the same, the same, the same!) Some of the convicted showered their forgivers with threats and obscenities. Others cried and said they were sorry. (There were only so many ways to say, If I could give up my life so that he could live, I would.) Sometimes the forgivers actually went to the jails for special meetings and tearful embraces. Allegra imagined herself in court. I forgive you for sleeping with her and lying to my face like I was a piece of shit. I forgive you for filling your heart and your holes with her fingers and cunt juice and for obliterating my name and my memory with your wanton whorefuck treasons—