We looked good together.
I fancied myself not the absent-minded nerd, which I sometimes was, but instead the emerging poet, this despite the fact that in my entire life I’d written only one poem, and that a sonnet to Maggie.
(By the way, I knew even then that “face” and “bus” did not rhyme. But I considered their mating a sort of slant rhyme, if you will. Besides, I felt I had more than compensated for this truly slight lapse with the internal “raced” rhyme that followed in the last line of the stanza.)
(I also liked the sort of internal “yes” and “yet” rhyme in the closing couplet. All in all, I felt I’d written a fair example of a sonnet, twelve lines, iambic pentameter, ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, with a rhyming GG couplet at the end. Perfect. Except it was lousy. To everyone but Maggie. She thought it was magnificent. So let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.)
It was Maggie who kept insisting that I write. This was another good reason to get married. Her own self-imposed hours at the shop were horrendous, which gave me a lot of time to myself. I spent that time writing. In the year before our marriage, I must have written two dozen short stories and three chapters to a novel I never finished. During that time, my sister was in India again.
She wasn’t even home for our wedding.
The family was beginning to recognize that Annie was a world traveler. Moreover, there seemed to be a pattern to her comings and goings. She would fly off hither and yon, stay in one place for a month or two, move on to another place where she would live for a while on the money my mother kept sending her, and then move on again in search of yet another guru or yet another location for the jewelry shops she opened and closed with alarming frequency. At last, she would come back to New York to settle in with my mother again, something Mama began to appreciate less and less as the years went by. Her longest trip — her second one to India — ended in the spring of 1990.
One sunny Saturday morning, Annie took a taxi from my mother’s apartment, where she’d been staying for the past several weeks, and showed up at our apartment with a suitcase. She hugged us both, told us how we should be seeing more of each other now that she was home, and then asked if it would be all right if she spent a few days with us before “heading up to Maine to see what it’s like up there.”
The next day, we learned why she was really there.
“You can do a promotion linking my work to the Kama-sutra,” she told Maggie. “Build like a pyramid of books with my jewelry displayed in front of it.”
“Gee, Annie, I don’t think that would work for my shop,” Maggie said. “I don’t even carry the Kama-sutra.”
“I’m sure you can order copies. You’d probably sell a ton of them. And you’d be helping me a lot, too.”
“It’s just that my space is limited...”
“Oh, come on, we can always find space.”
“And my clientele isn’t into... uh... you know, Oriental religions.”
“How about jewelry? Are they into jewelry? We can forget the Kama-sutra, if that’s what’s bothering you. Just let me set up a little table someplace in the shop.”
“It’s just that I’ve never sold jewelry before, Annie. Volumes and Tomes is a book shop, you see. It would seem odd if I suddenly started selling jewelry.”
“Well, gee, I don’t really think my jewelry is odd.”
“No, no, neither do I. My selling it would be odd. In a book shop. People don’t normally look for jewelry in a book shop.”
“What’s so abnormal about putting up a small table with jewelry on it? Look, if it’s the content of the work...”
“The content is a bit explicit, but...”
“Well, you don’t have to be condescending, really. If it’s the erotic content that’s bothering you...”
“No, that has nothing to do with...”
“... you can shake hands with the rest of the world, believe me. I’ve had people walk into my shop, and look around, and then turn up their noses when they recognize a penis or a vagina. If that’s the case here, just say so, I won’t be offended, really.”
“It’s just I’m a small independent bookseller...”
“Oh, sure, forget it. But Tantra isn’t all about sex, you know, it’s not some kind of free-love cult. Tantra is a Sanskrit word, in fact. It means to expand or extend, to manifest, to release a cosmic weave into the universe. By inspiring our innate sensual spirituality, Tantra awakens and liberates upwardly-motivated energies, allowing us to realize worldly ambitions. So this wouldn’t be some kind of uninhibited sex show, Maggie, on the contrary. But look, forget it. We probably wouldn’t have time to do it, anyway. I’ll be leaving for Maine in a few days.”
The few days stretched into a week and then ten days, and Annie was still with us. Maggie and I were living at the time in a small apartment above Volumes and Tomes. You entered into a tiny foyer and then there was a pocket kitchen on the left and a small dining room dead ahead, and then a living room and two bedrooms beyond. Our bedroom faced the building’s back yard. The adjoining second bedroom — which also doubled as a storeroom for books — was where we put up Annie. The three of us shared a bathroom nestled between the two bedrooms.
At night, as Maggie and I lay side by side in bed, we could hear my sister next door, reciting her mantras, repeating over and over again what sounded to us like nonsense syllables, but which she said served to concentrate and redirect spiritual energy by eliminating or silencing the mind.
“Om Mani Padme Aum,” we heard over and again, coming through the paper thin walls, “Om Mani Padme Aum, Om Mani...”
Which Annie literally translated for us as “The jewel is in the lotus.” Or, in other words, “The lingam is in the yoni.” Or, more simply put, “The penis is in the vulva.” But, hey, Tantra wasn’t all about sex, right?
“I know you love your sister,” Maggie whispered in my ear, “but I’m not sure I can stand another minute of this.”
“She’ll be gone in a few days,” I whispered.
But she wasn’t.
Under the best of circumstances, Annie would not have been an ideal house guest. She left dirty bras and panties on the bathroom floor, presumably hoping Maggie would toss them into the wash whenever she laundered her own. She never washed her own dirty dishes either, eating whatever meal she’d cooked for herself, and then leaving dishes and utensils on the dining room table, dirty pots and pans in the sink. Nor did she ever volunteer to do the marketing or take out the garbage, or clean the apartment, even though both Maggie and I were out working all day long.