Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

That summer, my mother made one too many demands on Luís and he decided at long last, with much apology and probably genuine sorrow, to put an end to their romance, right at the time Sandie, my stripper girlfriend, ran off with the bass player in the club band. My mother and I had odd, dry, sad little conversations about how things would get better eventually. We were both ripped to shreds. My mother took refuge in Miller Lite and TV and weekly bridge games. I went to Zen meditation groups and Sufi concerts and Sikh Dharma talks. There was a lot of that around and some of it helped me, with its elaborated reiterations that there was more to care about than any Sandie.

One night I was sitting on the floor in the basement of a bookstore, watching Sufi dervishes twirl around and around, their white robes flaring like sails, their arms outstretched. They were mostly just plain old Americans like me, but they wore high brownish caps someone told me were tombs for the ego, and they pivoted on soft boots, circling in place, while the music was plucked and blown and beaten by musicians. All of this was designed to take them on an inner journey from which they emerged no longer caring about petty crap. I knew that much, which was not a lot. I sank into it enough to say afterward, “Hey! Amazing!” to the guy next to me, who was going out for a beer with some other people, and that was how I met Adinah.

There were maybe ten of us, filing into a smoky bar, and we got reshuffled so that this small-faced woman with fuzzy tendrils of pale hair was looking up at me. “I’m still dazed from watching those guys,” I said.

“Is this your first time?” she said. Probably this wasn’t the pickup line it sounded like.

“I plan to come back,” I said.

But it turned out her allegiance was to another Sufi group that had music but none of this whirling. “If you’re repeating God’s name inside, you don’t need to have this performance ,” she said.

“Don’t be a bigot,” one of the women said. “I hate it when you get like that, Adinah. You’re so sectarian.”

“They have to focus when they twirl,” some guy said. “If they have worldly thoughts while they’re doing it, they get dizzy and collapse.”

“Adinah just likes her own fucking group,” another woman said.

“This is like the Middle Ages!” I said. “I’m in the middle of warring religious factions.”

I said this out of feeling uncomfortable, but to my surprise Adinah thought it was funny. “We are such assholes,” she said cheerfully.

I had ordered a big pile of gooey nachos for the table, and she turned out to be one of those skinny girls who ate very slowly and neatly. She worked, she said, as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant. “I bet they’re not big tippers, those veges,” I said.

“You guessed right,” she said. She didn’t look like someone who could have worked in a bar for real cash. Too skittish and big-eyed.

“What’s your favorite vegetable?” somebody at the table asked.

Everybody nominated a favorite sexy shape — the women picked giant zucchini, the guys went fruitarian and chose melons, with pantomimes to suggest the breastiness of them. Adinah just laughed, with her hand over her mouth.

This same shyness kept her from going home with me at the end of the night, although I thought she liked me. I gave her and about five other people a squished ride home in my old VW Beetle and I made sure to drop her off last. “To be continued,” she said, looking straight at me when I took her hand, but she got herself out of the car fast. I could see she was someone I had to go slow with.

So how could I be with someone like her after being with Sandie? I had no trouble, even in the early stages, intuiting the intensity of Adinah, the nuclear heat under the wispy flutter. She was quiet but she was never really mild. The soft pitch of her voice had the cadence of a strong will. And there was a fearless streak, as yet just a streak. Of the two of us, I was the more moderate, the more deliberating.

I went with her to classes given by her own particular Sufi group — their founder was from India, not Turkey — and I didn’t just do this in hopes of getting laid. I had other hopes too, of getting out of myself, of slipping into something larger than where I’d always lived. It was harder than I’d thought. There I was, apologizing to God for my separation from Him, when I didn’t exactly believe in God. But I had glimpses of another realm I might rise to later, if I could get more adept. It was interesting. I was very interested in the progress of my fate.

At the Sufi classes we moved our heads, swaying them to the right and then nodding down, saying no to petty bullshit and yes to God, over and over, while someone played an amazing giant lute called a tamboura and sang chants. He was still called Allah in the chants, and why not? We breathed in and out, we opened our hearts to God’s presence. I drove Adinah home across the Bay after the classes, and she’d sit talking to me in the car before she went in.

By the time Adinah and I became lovers, we had, in some way, beaten each other down. I had shaken off some of my boy-bluster, and she had grown more pliant, more hopeful. She muttered a prayer before she got into bed with me! I didn’t know what it was (she made it up), and it spooked me before my body decided, on its own, to be sublimely flattered. How naked she was, all of a sudden, turning to me, how familiarly female. I was sure I could carry us where we wanted to go. She muttered my name, nothing new in that, but it was a new and ardent form of Adinah.

She hadn’t had more than four lovers before me, but she knew herself better than some women do. She had great freedom in her, great ease, and then later, when we woke from our shared sleep and I watched her dress, putting on her dainty cotton underwear, a certain shyness came back and she was gawky as a chicken. Look at her , I thought. I could not have been more susceptible.

It was only the week before we first slept together that I’d heard she was from a family of Orthodox Jews. All her schooling had been in Jewish girls’ schools until college — and then she’d gone to Berkeley, of all places. Berserkly, as we liked to call it. She hadn’t been home to New York in three years. Her parents’ phone calls were still full of anger and pleading. “You’re all mixed up,” they said, sometimes with tears.

“They won’t give up,” she said. “They can’t.”

No, they didn’t know she went to any Sufi group. They already thought she was wild and promiscuous (ha) and addled with drugs. The Sufi group we followed was no longer attached to Islam anyway and proclaimed itself universal and tolerant. This explanation, Adinah said, would have gone nowhere with her parents. They would have shrieked to hear it. I wasn’t used to parents like that — I thought they were part of a world that had faded long since and was surprised they were so powerful to Adinah.

I told my own mother about Adinah and my mother said, “So she’s on her own now. They won’t make it easy.” My mother knew more about it than I did. After Adinah had sort of moved in with me, my mother liked to chat with her. Whether California had better weather than Florida, what Adinah made us for dinner. “Your mother has a nice personality,” Adinah said.

My own philosophical conflict with Adinah had to do with her being a vegetarian. She said what I ate was my own business, but the smell of meat made her nauseous. I didn’t really mind eating eggplant parmigiana or even soybean loaf for dinner, but I was naturally wary of being pussy-whipped. So we worked out some elaborate treaty, whereby I could store cooked meat (like bologna or liverwurst) in one corner of the fridge if I didn’t eat it in front of her. Like most compromises, this made neither of us happy, but we bragged of it so much to friends we began to believe we were peacemakers in love. Which was not untrue.