8
Sunday afternoon was Peter’s last chance to have a hot tub before his workshop began. After several visits, the sulphurous stench of the baths had gradually become delicious. Associated with unknotting muscles, heavy eyelids and blameless drowsiness, the atmosphere of rotting eggs now assailed him with an invitation to pleasure. The nudity no longer disconcerted him either; he even enjoyed watching the subsiding thermometer of his self-consciousness.
As he soaked in the tub, purgative sweat started breaking out on his forehead and trickling down his cheeks. He sank lower in the water, allowing it to cover his shoulders, and rested his back against the gritty wall of the bath, sighing with relief. Slipping his head under the water, his heart pumping hard and his cheeks swollen, he felt his hair sway, like seaweed in a current, in the current of his paddling hands.
As he broke the surface and gasped for air, he saw her stepping into the bath. Politely refusing to linger on her slender legs or try to make out the colour of her pubic hair in the murky light, he shifted into the corner.
She smiled at him. He knew it was not seduction but ease that made her smile, ease that was more seductive than anything. Holding her nose, she arched backwards into the water, her belly gleaming for a moment like the back of a diving whale. He noticed the ring in her navel and wanted to reach out and touch it, touch it with the tip of his curving tongue.
Where was his loyalty to Sabine? Maybe she had been the pretext for launching him on a quite different adventure, Peter reflected. He might be better off with this sexy girl opposite him in the tub.
Mad thoughts, fainting heat, sulphurous fumes. Peter clambered out of the bath and steadied himself for a while. He wanted to go over to one of the massage tables and cool off.
Sitting down naked in front of the Pacific, cross-legged on a padded white table, he watched the sea foam violently below. As it broke over the black and orange rocks, it yielded flashes of purple, like liquid sparks. He looked further out and saw waves unfurling southwards along the curve of the bay. Under an inky sky, silver streaking the horizon, an opening in the clouds conjured up a floodlit stadium far out to sea. He half expected Prospero or the Grateful Dead to come splashing onto this aquatic stage. The air was already electric with the promise of a storm.
The stage faded again and he closed his eyes, feeling dizzy as his body cooled off in the breeze. He let loose a deep staggered sigh, as if he’d exhumed himself from a long burial, and suddenly his chest seemed to burst open like a torpedoed ship and flood him with nameless emotion. From behind the double darkness of lids and clouds, his eyes swivelled searchingly like the restless upturned eyes of the blind, and his mind disappeared by flashing too brightly, like a sword catching the sun. Between his pounding heart and the pounding waves, between his hissing blood and the electric air, between the spinning galaxies of his molecular structure and the spinning galaxy which his molecular structure inhabited, the membrane of his skin grew translucent and all distinctions dissolved in the light of their resemblance.
What was happening to him?
He felt a moment of pure bliss, and then as he clutched at it, trying to repeat the mental process that seemed to have led there, he watched it recede. He was almost grateful for the disappointment, feeling that the filament of his sense of self was not designed to carry such a current.
What had happened to him? Words and explanations rushed towards the emergency of an incomprehensible experience, their sirens wailing. It was the change of temperature; he had been ‘enlightened’; he shouldn’t be eating so many salads; his mother was right, he was cracking up; he had suddenly been liberated from a false model of himself he’d been carrying round for years … but none of these paramedics could perform the vital operation of describing what had happened. Changes of temperature usually gave him a cold, and ‘enlightenment’ raised more questions than it answered. The experience preserved an exciting mystery, it was a flash of something other which he must protect from the glare of analysis. Shivering now from the cold, he hurried back to the hot tub.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the girl with the navel ring. ‘You look kinda stunned.’
Oh God, not conversation, not after that. Like a man hurrying out of a curfewed city with a hungry infant under his cloak, he was not inclined to chat with strangers. Still, he’d never been good at lying, despite countless attempts, and he’d fallen into the habit of answering questions honestly.
‘Well, I was sitting on the table and I felt very, um … open.’
Open? Open? A door could be open, a shop could be open, a public lavatory could be open. How could he force what had just happened to share a descriptive label with these achingly trite situations?
She smiled at him encouragingly as if she knew exactly what had happened, despite the thinness of his adjective. She was pretty too, and maybe she knew where he could find Sabine. Maybe she could replace Sabine after all this time. He cancelled the thought hastily, but it drifted guiltlessly back into his mind.
‘Are you here in a workshop?’ she asked.
‘Ya, I’m in the Martha Goldenstein workshop tonight.’
‘Oh, too bad we’re not in the same group. I’m doing Dzogchen meditation, “A Week of Noble Silence”.’
‘That sounds perfect,’ he said. ‘I wish I was facing a week of noble silence instead of what will no doubt turn out to be a week of ignoble chatter. Ever since I can remember I’ve been trying to avoid making a fool of myself in front of groups of strangers; now it’s become a way of life.’
She laughed. She was really adorable, he decided.
‘How come you booked for a week of ignoble chatter?’ she asked.
‘Well, to be honest, I didn’t really look very carefully at the catalogue. I just wanted to stay on here for another week. It’s a long story…’ He paused.
He felt excited and confessional but the strategic part of his mind threw up a few flimsy barriers to a full disclosure. What sort of buffoon would she think he was if he told her that he’d given up his job in order to spend three months pursuing a woman he’d only known for three days?
‘I’m looking for a friend of mine I’ve lost touch with,’ he said. ‘She used to mention this place and I thought I might find some traces of her here.’
‘Is this someone you’re totally in love with?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said cautiously, and then decided to play the role of the wry Englishman with which he had had some success during his travels. ‘I mean I was in a fairly gloomy state about the whole love business. I thought, “I won’t bother with romance or marriage any more, just find a woman who hates me and buy her a house.”’
‘Sure,’ she laughed, ‘but you still have to find the right woman.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Crystal’
‘With a C or a K?’
‘A C.’
‘Well, I’m Peter with a P,’ he said. ‘The thing about Sabine,’ he added, ‘is that I saw her so briefly, and haven’t seen her for so long that perhaps I’m no longer pursuing her so much as the hope she gave me.’
He’d never said this before, but didn’t want to give this charming woman the impression that he was completely unavailable.
Some new people started to climb into the tub.
‘Hi,’ said a white-haired man with glaring blue eyes that seemed determined to defy insincerity even in the gathering darkness.
‘Hi,’ said Crystal.
Stepping into the tub behind Blue-Eyes was a woman whose blonde hair, tortured into the tightest curls, seemed to be a homage to Africa, and a whimsical gesture of regret at not being black herself. Peter was shocked to find himself irritated by Crystal’s friendliness towards the newcomers. Although these people had as much right as he had to be in the communal tub, they were interrupting his conversation with her.