“That’s not how you acted.”
“Well, I didn’t know for sure. He said he was a guide.”
Terry is one of the smartest people I have ever met, but when it suits her, she can be utterly obtuse. “Terry, he was obviously not a guide. What the hell were you thinking of?”
“I wanted to help. You needed help.”
“Jesus Christ, Terry, that was a very destructive thing to do, getting involved with that guy.”
“You’re right,” she says. “It was pretty stupid. You’re right. I admit it.”
“Now you’re being a lawyer. I’m not trying to win the case, I’m trying to understand.”
“Well, I’ve admitted that you are right and I’ve offered to buy you a new Casio; I don’t know what else I can do.”
“Just don’t do it again!”
She looks at me as if I am crazy. Slowly it dawns on her. “You think I did that on purpose?”
Well, of course I did think so. And we had another furious argument about that—about whether she had.
But I consider behavior purposeful, whether the purpose is acknowledged or not. Behavior is not random; it can be analyzed from the standpoint of purpose; it can be understood from the standpoint of purpose. And it seemed to me that Terry had deliberately invited a man into our lives for the purpose of making me uncomfortable. Or worse.
Terry kept insisting that Lester wouldn’t have really harmed us, that he was all talk and all show with what she called “that knife of his.”
But the threat was real; the next day in the Daily Gleaner there was a report of two German tourists whose bodies had been found some days after they were reported missing on an excursion to the Spanish Town area. The newspaper didn’t say how the tourists had died, but the story seemed to suggest that the tourists had wandered into rough areas where tourists didn’t usually go.
I showed Terry the story. She put the paper aside, without comment. We never discussed the Lester incident again, except when we got back home and she asked me if I wanted the Casio replaced; I said I didn’t.
But I was also a participant in this episode, and in subsequent weeks I tried to understand my own behavior—in particular why, when I first saw Lester in my car, I hadn’t simply let the policeman come over, gotten Lester out of the car under the eye of the cop, and gone on about my business.
All things considered, it seemed to me that I had been a passive victim in this affair with Lester. I had let it drag on, allowing the dangerous situation to continue. Why? Everything I could accuse Terry of, I could also accuse myself of. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that, if Terry had contrived this situation to make me uncomfortable, then I had prolonged the same situation in order to prove that Terry was bad, that she was wrong. We had both put ourselves in a dangerous situation in order to get at each other.
That seemed to verify, if verification were necessary, that our relationship had an unhealthy, neurotic basis. I expected that as soon as I got back to California I would break from Terry once and for all. Perhaps even in the airport, right after clearing customs. I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could.
But we didn’t separate. We continued to see each other all spring. We were miserable. I kept thinking, Why is this still going on?
There were no answers; this unhappy relationship just continued. I couldn’t get rid of it, the way I couldn’t get rid of Lester—and for the same reason. I was involved, whether I admitted it or not. Eventually I just gave in to the relationship, and waited for the end to come. It didn’t come.
Finally we took a short trip to Mexico in April. Terry decided she didn’t like the hotel, and she didn’t like the way I was behaving. She became angry and withdrawn.
And something happened then, something just clicked—I withdrew psychologically, I uncoupled, and left her alone. I decided that I would be happy, even though she was angry and withdrawn.
So I became happy. But it was not easy to do this; it felt very awkward. It felt like heartily eating a dinner and smacking your lips, really liking that dinner, while across the table sat a starving person. An accusing, starving person.
It took all my effort to be happy under these circumstances, with Terry being so unhappy.
We changed hotels, but she remained unhappy—uncommunicative, sullen during meals—for four days straight. I worked hard on myself all this time, staying happy, not getting mad at her, not joining her mood. I was working as hard as if I were running a race, all day long. Constant effort to maintain my own mood, not to give in.
Each morning I would get up and meditate for an hour to keep my inner tranquillity. On the fourth morning, I went to the beach to meditate just as the sun rose, and after a time Terry woke up and came out to the beach looking for me, and when she saw me she ran toward me, and in my peaceful meditative state I turned and saw her coming toward me, her face distorted, upset and angry, her body tense, and suddenly I really saw her. Not in terms of what I wanted from her, or how she was affecting me, or how disappointing she was to me. Not in terms of anything to do with me at all. I just saw her. Another person, entirely separate from me. It was startling.
Terry must have seen something in my face, too, because she stopped running. She just looked at me for a minute, and then she turned, and went back into the hotel. And as I watched her go, I thought, No kidding. That’s the end.
Because that moment—that moment of seeing each other, the moment everything stopped on the sand—was the real moment of uncoupling, and it marked the end of the relationship. There wasn’t any great flash of insight. There was just … something. Something shifted. Something was seen. A month later we separated for good.
A Human Light Show
“Linda,” said my friend Kate, “is very powerful. Linda glows in colors when she meditates. You should see her. She’s a human light show.”
Kate was young, and Kate was naïve. And Kate’s friend Linda lived in San Diego, two hours by car. It was easy to postpone it.
Finally, one day, Kate said, “I’m going down to see Linda tomorrow. Do you want to come?”
My day was free. It would be good to get out of town. “Sure,” I said.
On the way down, Kate explained that Linda was a San Diego schoolteacher in her thirties. Linda had started meditating only a year ago, but she was already very powerful. Recently a few people had begun to consult her. Poor Linda didn’t know what to do about this; she was uncomfortable in her new role as a guru, still feeling her way; she didn’t charge for her sessions, but Kate thought she eventually would. In fact, she thought Linda would eventually quit her job at school and become a full-time psychic. She sounded like an interesting person.
Furthermore, Kate again said, to meditate with Linda was remarkable, because Linda glowed in visible colors during the meditation. Sometimes other things happened, too. Sometimes she appeared to be of different ages, very old or very young. Sometimes parts of her body disappeared. Sometimes her body seemed to be moving or twisting. All sorts of optical effects were experienced by people meditating with Linda.
I listened to all this with private reservations. But I’d see for myself, soon enough.
Linda lived in a nondescript apartment on Mission Bay Road, in a beach area of San Diego. Inside, it was furnished with photos she had taken during vacations all over the world; like me, she had a fondness for travel. Linda was a smiling, diffident, pleasant woman. She said she would meditate with us separately. I went first.
In an adjacent bedroom, Linda sat by one wall, I sat by the bed, and we started. I hadn’t meditated much since Brugh Joy’s conference two years earlier. I closed my eyes to try and get centered, to block out the rumble of traffic on the street outside, the honking horns, the shouts of pedestrians.
Suddenly I felt a wave of warmth, as if somebody across the room had opened an oven door. I immediately recognized it—it was the same peaceful, warm feeling I had experienced during the group energy work at Brugh’s. But that h
ad been a group. Could she be doing this all by herself?
I opened my eyes.
Linda was sitting cross-legged, staring at me. She was vibrant. I didn’t see colors, but there was great intensity about her, and the warmth that filled the room was astonishing in strength. She immediately inducted me into a powerful meditation. I felt myself expand, like a balloon inflating. It was a wonderful, tranquil feeling. Linda was staring at me. I stared back.
Linda’s face was turning gray. In a few seconds it became difficult to see her features. The nose, the eyes, the mouth, were gone. It was as if somebody had pulled a gray stocking over her face. She was sitting right there, but I could no longer see her face.
I began to have trouble seeing her left shoulder, then the whole left side of her body. But the right side was fine. I found all this fascinating but not at all frightening. It was just something that was happening.
Suddenly I could see all her body again. Just as quickly, I began to see a stroboscopic phenomenon. Linda would be brightly lit, and the wall behind her would go black. Then she would be black, and the wall behind her would appear white. The image reversal continued back and forth in a steady, pulsating rhythm. Like breathing.
The pulsations stopped, and everything was normal for a while. Then I saw her face grow older, the cheeks sagging, the chin drooping, the eyes drained, the hair gray. She was sad and elderly for a few minutes. Then that went away.
Next her body appeared to ripple on the left side. It was as if she were water and a wave moved up it. The rippling continued for a time. I had plenty of opportunity to wonder where these illusions came from—her or me?—and what explanation there might be for them. Was this a consequence of a strong meditative state? Was this something that she had worked on? Was this merely suggestion I was responding to?
Suddenly Linda said, “You have no choice.”
I paused.
“You need to realize that there is no drug you can take, no trip to another place in the world, no new person to have a relationship with. None of these things will get you where you want to go. What you are looking for isn’t out there. You must stop looking outside. You must go in.”
It was pretty standard stuff, but something about the way she said it gave it new impact. Anyway, I’d long ago learned that the words are always the same, it’s just whether or not you’re able to hear them. The trick was to find somebody who knew how to reach you.
Something about Linda, a schoolteacher whose life was being altered like a pinball on a tilt table, made me listen to her. And the sensation of meditating with her, the peaceful, calm, detached, warm feeling, was somehow strongly confirming. It was good to feel this way.
Afterward I went to dinner with Linda and several of her friends, young people who meditated with her. They were all impressed by the visual displays you experienced with Linda. They kept talking about that. Whereas I thought the light show was a side effect. I was much more impressed with what was happening to her life, and the changes that were occurring, how it was taking place, how she was handling it. Because when you see a less experienced person, you are reminded that there is a continuum of abilities, that skills are developed, and that everyone must learn to do what they do. So, whenever I would see Linda, I would feel a particular gratitude for the opportunity to watch her develop and grow into her new work.
They
I was on my own again in 1983, after more than a decade spent in marriage or otherwise exclusive relationships. Suddenly I was playing the field. It was a shock to discover how much had changed.
I was having lunch with my agent in a restaurant when a woman walked up, slapped her business card on the table, and said, “Call me.” Then she turned on her heel and walked off. She was an attractive woman in her late twenties, wearing a business suit.
“Wow,” I said, after she had gone. Nothing so brazen had ever happened to me.
“It’s a new world,” my agent said, shaking his head.
The incident was exciting, but it was also a little unnerving, so I didn’t call this woman for a while. Eventually curiosity overcame me, and I called and made a date.
We met for dinner in a sushi bar. Andrea was twenty-eight; she had a degree in business administration and she worked for a commercial real-estate company. She was ambitious and levelheaded about her work; she had it all figured out, how long she would stay in this company, when she would leave, what she would do next.
She didn’t ask me much about myself, and in fact didn’t seem very interested in me, except to ask where I lived, and whether my house was close to the restaurant. She was impatient during dinner, restless. I couldn’t figure out why.
Finally the meal was over and I asked if she wanted tea or coffee. She shook her head. “Can’t we have it at your house?”
And then I understood her impatience, her hurried indifference toward me. I was being rushed to the bedroom. Amazing! Andrea was doing to me what men supposedly did to women. I was being treated as a sex object.
At my house she announced she didn’t want coffee but wanted a tour instead; she saw the bedroom and the Jacuzzi.
“Nice Jacuzzi,” she said, starting to take off her clothes. “Want to join me?”
Things were going very fast. I had the strangest sense of trying to catch up, to accommodate this new pace of the eighties. It seemed we had hardly gotten into the Jacuzzi before we were in the bedroom, and it seemed that we had hardly gotten to the bedroom when she was up and getting dressed, and I was still lying there on the bed, and to my astonishment I heard myself say: “When will I see you again?”
“I’ll give you a call,” she said, buckling her belt.
It seemed to me she was dressing with undue haste. Did she have another date after leaving me?
“You have to go now?” I said.
“Yeah. I hate to fuck and run, but … big day tomorrow, I have to get my rest.”
So I lay there in the bed, feeling worse and worse, while she got dressed, and pretty soon she waved goodbye, and then I heard the door slam and her car back down the driveway, and I thought, I feel used.
Well, I had been out of the action for a decade. My friend David had been single all during that time. The next time we played racquetball, I told him about my experience, which still troubled me.
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve had that, too. Where you find yourself asking her, ‘When will I see you again?’ You feel used after she’s gone.…”
“Yes,” I said. “I really did. I felt used. Seduced and abandoned. All of that.”
“I know,” David said, shaking his head. “It’s a new world, Michael. It’s all changed.”
It was David’s theory that feminism and the sexual revolution had actually had the effect of reversing traditional sex roles.
“Look,” he said, “all of my male friends want to get married and settle down. But the women don’t. The men want babies. The women don’t. The men want meaningful relationships. The women want quick sex and then they want to get right back to their careers.”
In keeping with this idea of reversal, David had a term for the behavior of women like Andrea: “feminine macho.” David’s idea was that women had seen the past years as an opportunity to behave like men—but that, in taking up certain traditional forms of male behavior, they had sometimes modified the form without understanding its underlying purpose.
“See,” David said, “women think that, when men behave romantically on a one-night stand, that’s hypocritical. So women won’t do that. When a woman intends to have a one-night stand, she lets you know it. Bam! No illusions from her. But that doesn’t feel like honesty to a man, it feels like brutality. Because, let’s face it, men are the romantics. We’re the ones who need the romance.”
Here I am in the locker room with my friend David, who has been a Hollywood bachelor for two decades, who has gone out with so many models and actresses that he’s good friends with the people who run the model agencies—here’s David, suave man of the world,
telling me that men are the romantics, and not women.
“No, no, no, David,” I protested. “Women are romantic. Women want flowers and candy and all that stuff.”
“No, they don’t,” David said. “Women want the respect and admiration of a man, and they know flowers are a sign of respect from a man. But they don’t care about the flowers; they don’t moon and ooh and aah and sigh, except for our benefit. They don’t have any of those romantic feelings men think they do. Men have the romantic feelings. Women’re much colder and more practical.”
I disagreed.
“Okay,” David said. “We’re sitting in the locker room, right?”
“Right.”
“Have you ever had a locker-room conversation about women—you know, the way women think we do, talking in explicit detail about what we did with our dates the night before?”
“No,” I said. “I never have.”
“Neither have I,” David said. “But you’ve been accused of having such conversations by a woman?”
“Yes, sure.” I couldn’t count the number of times a woman had said she didn’t want me talking about her to my male friends.
“You know why women think we have these explicit conversations? Because they do, that’s why. Women talk about everything.”
I knew this was true. I had long ago learned of the frankness of women among themselves, and of their tendency to assume that men were equally frank, when, as far as I could tell, men were actually quite discreet.
“You see,” David said, “each sex assumes the opposite sex is just the way they are. So women think men are explicit, and men think women are romantic. Eventually that becomes a stereotype that nobody questions. But it’s not accurate at all.”
David insisted on his view: women were stronger, tougher, more pragmatic, more interested in money and security, more focused on the underlying realities of any situation. Men were weaker, more romantic, more interested in the symbols than the reality—in short, living out a fantasy.