She wondered how to make ready for such a choice — to “forgive”—if it even was a choice. How does one prepare? And how hard, how desolate, how barren was the land on which the road to forgiveness, that royal road to the sovereign indifference of love, how long and how wide, how impossible to cross, was the avenue that led to the songbird’s destination?
That snaked its way toward that travesty of a word: freedom …
“Imagine wearing the outfit of ‘Whole Foods customer,’” the pastor was saying, “and they don’t have the item you want in the cookie section. So you take off that outfit and go elsewhere. You run into a friend on your way to Trader Joe’s and that friend hands you a gift — the very cookies you were shopping for. So you take off the ‘Trader Joe’s customer’ outfit and put on the ‘friend’ outfit — and receive the treats. And if you grow vegetables in your garden, the ‘customer’ and ‘friend’ outfits come off and you put on the outfit of ‘self’—and harvest the food. You take it from the Universe. If we allow God to move through us, using more than just the roles and outfits we’re comfortable with — good son/bad son, miserly man/generous man, lover/hater, Christian/Muslim/Jew — the congestion clears. Thousands of outfits are available, we design them! As a young man I did missionary work in India and tried on many. Savior, tourist, seeker, student, teacher, American, consumer… I was always wearing something. And all that we’re trying to do with these outfits is express love. But we get stuck. By getting stuck with twenty, with ten, with three, even one, we limit ourselves. In trying to make those outfits work as expressions of who we are, we end up hurting people.”
What was her role in the marriage? What were the outfits she wore now? “Wife betrayed,” “the abandoned innocent,” “she who lost her religion”—because Allegra had always been certain it was God that brought them together, it was God who’d arranged their union, she knew it was so! Yet what could the consequences be, what was the meaning of such divinity, if not that of redemption bestowed by the sovereign indifference of love supreme? Surely God could be interested in nothing else! What was it she’d been seeking all these years? Security? Status? Ownership (of another)? And with what costume had she insisted her wife be adorned? Had she really expected Dusty — either one of them — to be faithful, forever and always? How to even begin to define “faithful,” “faithless”? No — it was time to lead by example. She must be steady, impersonal, godly… If Dusty could see her wife stripped of the will toward judgment, shorn of everything but all-encompassing love, indifferent and sovereign, she’d have no choice but to become naked as well. And if she chose to reply to such selfless virtue by trying on something else—“divorcee,” “elder free spirit,” “she who fell out of love and is now with another”—what difference should it make?
When days passed without Allegra hearing from her, the migraines she had as a girl returned.
She raced down PCH to a laid-back new urgent care in Malibu. The doctor said, “Do you need a big shot or a little shot? I can give you a shot then top you off with a second. If your experience is that doctors take a look and say, ‘She’s so shrimpy,’ and don’t give you enough, we can give you a big shot. Have you ever had Dilaudid? I’m not the narcotics police. If you come every few months, we’d love to see you. If you come every week, that’s a problem. We have lots of lovelies who come in and we make them feel like princesses. Do you know what the lovelies all say? That compared to Saint John’s, we’re Heaven! Because we don’t make you wait and wait and wait. We give you a shot, then off you go to have your princess time at home.”
—
She finally had lunch with Jeremy.
They hadn’t seen each other since she’d spewed her sordid chicaneries at the beach-blanket Buddhist bingo party. He did leave a voicemail blaming his MIA-ness on work, which was “super-jammy,” plus his boyfriend’s dad being back in the hospital and maybe dying, yadda yadda, but Allegra thought it was all jive. She knew she was a little crazy right now and that Jeremy had a life, everyone (but Allegra) had a life (a wife?), though it sure the fuck felt like the whole world was conscientiously saying its good-byes. And yes, she was working on being okay with that, getting comfortable with her new outfitless outfit, but she just couldn’t get the thing to fit. It didn’t go with any of her shoes either.
Oh well…
She’d been out of touch with Dusty for almost two weeks now, which had never happened, ever. After that bullshit email about quiet time and the “house” in Big Sur, Allegra ate a lot of Adderall and embraced her inner Nancy Drew. First she called Esalen and the Post Ranch Inn, asking for Dusty by her road aliases — Beatrix Potter, Eve Harrington, Jonah Feldstein — before covering NYC: the Mercer, the Lowell, the Mandarin Oriental. (Even the Gansevoort.) She phoned Buvette, their fave romantic spot in the Village, lying to the maître d’ about Dusty maybe having made a reservation in the hope he’d say she was there the night before or had just left or was there right now. “Allegra, hi! Yes yes yes, we have her down for lunch tomorrow—you’re going to surprise her? Of course I won’t tell her you called. And how are you!” She didn’t dare get in touch with any of their mutual friends but obsessively checked the Internet for sightings, comments, images. There was nothing. Tried the aliases again with Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe (disguising her voice because all the employees knew her and she didn’t want anyone thinking something was amiss) and was about to start on Europe before saying fuck it. Smoked some dope and ate a giant blueberry cobbler from Sweet Lady Jane instead. Topped it off with a chunk of Reddi-Wip the size of a preemie. Disconsolate, loaded, ruined… crying and moaning, staccato-burst yelping like some favela street mongrel after a hit-and-run. Faced the corner of the room à la Blair Witch and meditated to calm her breath. Thought of maybe emailing Elise, then got a brighter idea and left a vmail for Ginevra. Micro consult session aside, she would definitely rate a courtesy callback. But a few days went by — nada. How rude. I mean, she was still Mrs. Wilding.
Wasn’t she?
“Hey now.”
He was already sitting in the booth.
“Hey, stranger,” she said, with a bite.
“Aw, don’t be like that, Lego.”
“Like what. I’ve been chasing you for weeks.”
“I told you, Tristen’s dad is dying. He’s been a total train wreck.”
“Whatever.”
“Whatever?” he said, zero to sixty riled. “Okay, ‘whatever.’ Don’t you already know everything anyway?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you already know the details? I mean, doesn’t Larissa, like, fill you in on shit?”
“I don’t talk to Larissa. And what the fuck do you mean, Jeremy?”