John Updike - S

But do sell that preposterous Visage and put everything into a 6% savings account. Even under your mattress would be better. Don't discuss money with this ancient mariner. Or if you do, ask about his money-find out if he has enough of his own so that he isn't after yours. Do take your vitamins, especially A to combat aging and brain-cell loss. Niacin can be very effective in reversing delusional thinking. A lot of Alzheimer's, they think now, is caused by aluminum salts in the blood. Aluminum turns out to be in everything -toothpaste, aspirin, water. And of course you cook with pots of it. I forgot-you don't cook any more, you and the Admiral eat out, champagne and oysters and chocolate cake every night. I told the Arhat what you were up to, and he laughed and laughed and said, "Women are the gods!" He joins me in sending you strivyatireka (love).

Sare

Dearest Alinga-

Tena tyaktena bhunjithah. I fear, my darling, we have reached our quota. These months living with you have been the happiest of my life, as far as cohabitation goes-the most harmonious, as if we were two upright notes, one blond and one dark, forming a single chord. No pulling and hauling, no serving and being served-or, rather, both, so carelessly and lightly blended that there was no knowing where the serving left off and the being served began. Our time together has in my mind a precious fine fragility, a crackled gold-rimmed right-ness, that makes me hold my breath as I try to set it down.

This break with you is, as I conceive it, a delicate one, scarcely perceptible but to us. We will still share the ashram, and our love of the Arhat, and our work in the Uma Room, and why not then some hours of private talk and even rasa as before? Do please keep thinking of me as your lover-your dark and stormy prince,-you once called me.

But I must feel free, to continue what let's call my ascent toward the unconditioned. I do not want to make you my prison warder as I did Charles-the guardian of habit, of limits, the enforcer, albeit for my good and out of affection-he was affectionate, I can admit that now-of a system in which my function is simply to bold still, to be the'same day after day. Durga's madness and the siege from outside have thinned the population of the ashram so that there are plenty of empty beds. Vik-shipta's old A-frame is vacant, though my moving in there risks stirring up ugly memories, like some dust rich in allergens. He wonderfully managed to make heterosexuality ugly and yet for me this hard, silent other (shunya = void = diamond = vajra = thunderbolt = linga) with whom we must share our species still retains the fascination of a challenge, the task set for us, the basic duty. In this sense perhaps I was always a bit unfaithful to you, harbored a bit of reservation, so that all we enacted together, gracious and blissful as it was, had a certain quality of foreplay, of something less than full seriousness, the seriousness that leads, biologically, to that tremendous bloody ego-splitting death-defying bearing of a child.

Now I fear I have set down the gold-rimmed vase with a crash. But honestly, didn't it ever feel to you as though I was nothing but a strangely weak man? Of course we must honor those who stand aside-the sexual saints, the little roundish men who would rather collect books or jade elephants, and the handsome Hepburnesque women not meant to be mothers-many of whom, so unfortunately (I think of my serenely selfish own), become mothers anyway. Actually, this ego-splitting I seem to extol doubles rather than halves our natural selfishness and selfish frenzy. Without a child, women are free to mother others-you, for instance, mothered me. And what a child I seem to be!-willful, needy, exhibitionistic, compliment-seeking, petty, jealous. Jealous, as we have discussed, of you and Durga in the time before I came here, when she was to you something of what you have been to me-an initiator, an apsaras, an avatar of Shakti. Even now as she in her drug-riddled fury brings down the paradise that the Arhat's beautiful energy crystallized, I feel in you a certain lackadaisical fondness for our Celtic destroyer, a passive willingness to "let it all go" as one more meaningless ripple of maya. Your energy exchange with Durga, in other words, still proceeds, though you find yourselves in opposite camps during all this scheming, feuding, poisoning, and mutual manipulation as the implacable outer world closes in.

This is not a complaint, but a halting explanation, much longer than I meant it to be. I know how you hate to read, how content you were to betrance yourself in front of our feeble old Zenith with its ghost images shuddering as if the mountains between here and Phoenix were always in motion. I love you. But not only you, so I can no longer accept your roof, your A-frame. I am writing you in the rock garden, and will miss this shady spot beneath the box elder-the nirgundi, you taught me it is called in Sanskrit-and the garden's crowd of funny little scrunched-up cactus-faces, like the rumpled faces of pug dogs or of whiskery cartoon cats. The tree's seeds spin down on me, the wings of the twin samaras not outspread as in the energetic flaming maples of New England but folded down, as if still asleep and dreaming of, instead of experiencing, flight. And the rising sun like a vast high press squeezes from the air that desert spiciness, that very fine powder in the air like the substance of purusha and like something-some dim closeted seasoning-I used to smell in my grandmother's kitchen in Medford.

Darling, it is nothing you have done-you can do nothing wrong, because in a deep and very soothing way you are beyond attempting to do anything right. You accept In the sthula sphere you were all padma and I the mani, the flawed jewel to your perfect lotus. The way you would let me brush your silky long hair on and on in the dark as the blue sparks flew about your head and my hands. And the way the top of your head would show an utterly straight parting, like a chalk-line, scalp-white, when in morning light you would shadowily kneel to give me a "tummy kiss." It is nothing you have done and nothing I am doing-it is Kali, dearest, time undoing and destroying so that the new weave can be begun. Kali who moves through all our passions, momentous as they seem, and tugs them toward the wheel's next turn. My worst fear as I write-how close I am to tearing all this up and sparing myself the pain of packing and saying goodbye to the rooms where, once frowny twitchy guilty Nitya's discordant note was gone, we made our harmony!-my fear is that you will shrug me off, you will shed me, that is what we do with one another, all of us, but it never seems right, never seems natural, though it is the most natural thing in the world.

Be a lamp unto yourself,

K.

Charles-

I am living alone again and unable to sleep tonight. Your barrage of Gilmanesque legalese has left me unimpressed. If you can arrange my arrest, go to it. Pearl can add to her distinctions that of her mother being put in jail by her father. Actually, you never hear of that, do you? Halves of a couple can murder and desert'each other easily enough but legally I believe we are somehow one and therefore have oddly little legal recourse. Anyway the courts are bored with couples. The whole world for that matter is bored with couples, and if a couple doesn't take an interest in itself no one else will. All these lawyerly threats and bluff I take to be your stiff and clumsy way of expressing continued interest in me. But I would never do as your wife again, having so wildly fallen. To my derelictions I have recently added a lesbian romance-delicious and comforting but rather, for my Yankee tastes, lacking in fiber. It did helpfully clarify what men see in women. The lady, in posture and offhand affect and even in a certain disarming flatness of accent, reminded me of Marcelene Rabinowitz-remember her? Women of course are divine energy-without Shakti, as they say here, Shiva is a corpse-but, so satisfactorily endowed by the cosmos, they tend to be conservative-reconciled to the cycle, hypnotized by the days, the days in all their rasas (shades, feelings, bliss). The days go on without you. I seem myself to be involved in an ascent, or at least moving down a one-way street. Women do tempt the pilgrim to rest and that is why holy men have tended to hate them. Holy men-not the gods. Zeus, Christ, Buddha loved women. But not their philosopher-followers. No? I see you, dear Charles, as something of a holy man, really, with your white lab coat and your hands chilly from their last scrubbing.