Kenneth thought unceasingly about Streamism. It was a concept so pregnant with undivulged glamour that he refused to stoop to the pedantry of recording his reflections. If his mind started to wander while he read Lao-tzu, or studied baseball on TV, he couldn’t help concluding that a wandering mind was the most uninhibited expression of Streamism, and allowing his thoughts to run dimpling all the way.
In the face of such a comprehensive excitement, he forgave himself for taking Brooke’s money and offering her nothing concrete in exchange. (How un-Streamist that would have been, and yet, on the other hand, how Streamist.) He did, however, wince at the memory of his feigned passion for her. It would have been so convenient to find her attractive, but sexual hypocrisy was notoriously difficult for a man to sustain. All the same, he couldn’t help feeling a troubling fondness for her. The rich always thought they were being exploited, and here was Brooke challenging that fear with one cheque after another. It was really very plucky.
‘I’ll be able to pay you back,’ he explained while she wrote another cheque for five thousand dollars. ‘There’ll be the book, and the tapes and a series of pamphlets for people with busy lives, “Streamism and sexuality”, “Streamism in the office”, “Streamism and your children” …’
She was a little worried about Kenneth’s pamphlets, but then not everyone could have the privilege of knowing Kenneth personally. She just didn’t want Streamism to become vulgar.
‘It couldn’t be made any more vulgar than it already is,’ Adam had snapped.
Honestly, those boys, they were so competitive. She must do something to make them better friends. Maybe they could join a men’s group and go to a sweat lodge together. Robert Bly could recommend the best way for them to have a male bonding experience. It was madness for them to fall out, because they really wanted the same thing: to save the world from self-destruction.
Brooke also paid for Adam’s apartment in San Francisco. He made sure that this arrangement didn’t corrupt him by peppering his flattery with sharp remarks, and occasionally changing his phone number to make sure she didn’t imagine she owned him. Hadn’t Joyce had his Miss Weaver? And who would remember Miss Weaver without him? Mantegna had had his Sforzas. Their silly intrigues looked very thin now, but his paintings repaid the compliment of their patronage with the far greater compliment of his immortality. And the monks of South-East Asia who survived on the generosity, the dana, of the local population, properly understood, bestowed a blessing on those who supported them. No, Adam was completely at ease with the situation, but he wasn’t going to allow the fact that Brooke wanted to help him fulfil his God-given purpose to prevent him from gently teasing her now and again.
‘I hope I die before you,’ he had said that morning after she had bored him with a further list of her good works. ‘I want to see heaven before you’ve improved it.’
‘I’ll give a party for you when you arrive,’ said Brooke, for whom ‘networking’ had become an uncontrollable habit.
‘If you’re giving cocktail parties, darling, I’ll know I haven’t arrived,’ he answered.
‘Don’t be mean,’ she said, as she seemed to say more and more often these days.
‘Brooke’s getting very full of herself,’ Adam had said to Yves after he hung up. ‘She’ll start thinking she’s the Divine Mother next.’
‘Ah, non,’ said Yves sulkily, ‘not another one. Je ne crois pas que je pourrais supporter encore une Mère Divine.’
Brooke’s possible future claims to divinity had been set aside by the time Adam and Yves arrived in her drawing room. Adam’s inky unkempt hair flowed down to his flaming jacket which in turn flared over his wide hips and black trousers. Yves, wearing a jacket of the same cut but decorated with swirling sea colours, created a relatively soothing impression. They represented the complementarity of turquoise and orange, the marriage of fire and water, of Yin and Yang, of Rumi and Shams; but only they knew that. To everyone else they looked like a couple of clowns.
Adam, who was deeply suspicious of Kenneth, approached him first. He had recently found out that before his incarnation as a would-be guru, Kenneth had worked for a rock band as ‘ambience director’, the euphemistic title he gave to his role as pimp and drug courier.
‘Hello, Kenneth, what’s our lesson for this evening?’
‘Humility, Adam, and it’s specially for you.’
‘Oh,’ said Adam, looking around the room as if it were an empty landscape. ‘And who’s teaching it?’
‘Life,’ said Kenneth serenely, ‘if you’re open to it.’
‘The Bumper Sticker has spoken,’ said Adam in mock awe.
Yves giggled and accepted a glass of champagne from the black butler.
Brooke was still upstairs when Adam and Yves arrrived. Some rumours that had reached her about her mother’s behaviour (‘Always likes to keep folks waitin’,’ Mammy used to say) had not been detached by the scrubbing brush of Dr Bukowski’s silence, or the laser surgery of Kenneth’s teachings.
She was contemplating all the fascinating people she had invited to dinner, ‘gurus’ as she might have called them five years ago. Now they were just her dearest friends. There were some new faces tonight, new names as well. Her secretary had made a list of them and left it in the bedroom on what Brooke called her ‘emergency desk’, the one she used when she couldn’t get to her study, or office, or library. There was a marvellous environmental campaigner, a fiercely magnetic Irish woman who said we could save the planet by planting bamboo in all the devastated rainforests.
‘It’s quite important, actually,’ she had told Brooke with a patronizing smile. ‘We are talking about the lungs of the planet.’
The lungs of the planet! We were giving lung cancer to Mother Earth. No doubt the chainsaw operators and timber merchants were heavy smokers. The way we treated ourselves and the way we treated our environment all tied in. Some of her Buddhist friends were particularly good on that theme. Gaia was the Greek goddess of the Earth, and Gaya was the name of the village in northern India where Buddha had achieved enlightenment. How about that? It all tied in. Brooke hurtled on in an associative frenzy.
She also had a marine biologist coming tonight who had discovered that whales were suffering from AIDS. New plagues were springing up in a world out of balance. Marburg, Ebola, Sin Nombre — her secretary had written them down; it was the marine biologist’s first time and she had him on her left at dinner — bursting on to the scene from the untamed expansion of human populations. It was like that old Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’
Realizing she was late, but unable to move from her dressing table, Brooke ran through the gallery of what had by now become apocalyptic platitudes, almost soothing in their familiarity.
‘Always likes to keep folks waitin’,’ she heard Mammy’s voice say again.
‘Oh God, I’m turning into my mother,’ she screamed with sudden savagery, throwing down her lipstick and then hastily picking it up again. Her face was almost as wrinkled now as her mother’s had been when her father died. Adam had called her a ‘menopausal mystic’ during their most violent squabble. That had almost finished them off, but after a long conversation with Kenneth about the meaning of forgiveness she had given a special dinner for Adam.
‘That man’s like a nuclear winter,’ said Kenneth when he learned who she was forgiving. ‘All he can do is fall out with people. That makes it, eh, even more of a privilege,’ he added soothingly, ‘to have helped reconcile you.’