Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

After a while it became difficult. Perhaps she had gotten too good at it, or thought on it a bit too much. Somehow, the relativity and arbitrariness of her own passions increased as she consulted for so many others. Everything grew quotes around it, and she found she started to give clients more perverse and obscure style advice. As her judgments became more divorced from actual feeling, she found herself increasingly mannered and overwrought. Her own fascination had pushed to a level of circular antitaste. She soon regarded her established passions as tacky and boring. She full-circled in such a singular pursuit of style that she started to forge strange ironies within her own already ironic pursuit of taste. She no longer recalled the chains of reference. She genuinely admired formerly despised things — the fat oakiness of a California Chardonnay, for instance, seemed witty to her. She loved, suddenly and deeply, the slyness of bombastic, terrifyingly dated seventies prog rock. She thought John Grisham novels would be so unexpected andunusual. She assured her charges that Paul McCartney was the coolest Beatle — his solo stuff, even better. She made them buy five-year-old hip-hop records. No more Kiehl’s men’s products, instead she recommended Dial soap, Aramis cologne. Finally, she found that her own taste was indistinguishable from her clients’. It had become hopeless; the men began seeming perfect as they were, so delightfully unstyled, chicly unconsulted, and she wanted to make lists of their books and records. She was desperate to hear what movies they saw and admired. She couldn’t help them at all anymore, and she had ceased to enjoy any of it — a record or a book or a steak. She had to quit consulting, end her career as a life-stylist, Lorene having finally become so stark and minimalist, so desperate for simplicity and purity, that if she continued she’d need a stylist herself, someone to fill in her own blanks with confidence, focus, and consistency.

“Is that better?” Beryl asked.

Lorene had stopped, taken time to recover — spent a year infatuated with undyed rice-paper screens, felt a sort of ecstatic thrill throwing things in the garbage, listened only to Pakistani Qawwali chants, and cut her hair way too short.

Lorene sighed.

And now it had come to this, hadn’t it? Lorene needed to hire someone named Beryl to touch her. She was more Joseph than Joseph now. It was worse than hiring someone to buy your art. It was paying someone to help you be yourself. Somehow, your confidence disappears. You need to loosen the tightness in your head, to make silent the colors in your body, to feel the low beating of your heart that seemed so alien and distant. Somehow find your way to some — what?

She had totally failed to meditate past red. Again.

She had an appointment with her contractors at Vanity and Vexation. She had to hurry.

He didn’t die in a mangled car wreck. He wasn’t stabbed or drowned in some sex-drenched confusion. No pills or rope or last pleas for help. He hadn’t even really “disappeared.”

He lived in a yurt in Ojai.

Mina held the phone in her hand, ready to call Lorene. There was a high-pitched tone and a message saying the cellular customer she was calling was not available or had traveled outside the coverage area. She listened to the message twice.

Since their divorce, Mina’s mother always referred to him as “your father.” How is your father? Tell your father I saw one of his films, or, Your father didn’t like it when I cut your hair short. Never “Jack.” She has never heard her mother say his name. She would even say to her current boyfriend, When I was living with Mina’s father. . Aside from her refusal to say his name, her resentment never surfaced. It was as if she were speaking of a small child or an elderly person. Perhaps because of her mother’s habit, it never occurred to her until recently that he was not merely her father, but her mother’s ex-husband. Despite what Mina had learned, years after the fact from her brother, her mother never betrayed any low esteem for him. She was graceful in her privacy, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore since he wasn’t in the running in a real way. Or maybe (as her brother claimed) she merely forgave him. Mina, evidently, had not.

Mina suddenly and with no apparent hostility or self-awareness stopped calling him “Dad.” He was “Jack.” Even to his face, Jack.

Jack had amassed colossal debt. As much as he once had, it was double (triple) that he now didn’t have. The debt loomed, tumefied and metastasized. Negative money is a powerful force. It grows unseen, becomes an ever-reproducing intestinal parasite, unfelt, or a self-replicating retrovirus, autoimmune, insinuating itself into the DNA of things, growing with you as it destroys you, and, most important, it would never stop.

Jack lived (perversely unaffected, Mina felt) in his yurt in Ojai — a placid, modest existence in the mountains with his new female companion, Melissa. When Mina last visited, she couldn’t take her eyes off Melissa’s large, braless, and preternaturally perky breasts. Melissa was all long legs and lips and tits. The silicone must have been from an earlier, more material phase of her life, because now she was feather-draped and yoga-poised, crystal-crusted and spiritually sanguine.

Mina rose before dawn, creeping out of the yurt while they slept. She was alone and anxious. The Santa Ana — surely it was one of those — was blowing from the northeast. It was a dulling predawn gale. Mina waited for them to get up, had a hazy glimpse of Michael waking in a room somewhere unfamiliar, and then she heard strange moans from within the yurt.

Mina realized, with enormous relief, their moans were controlled and in unison, of some meditative nature, not caused by exertions Mina would have found wholly inappropriate in the vicinity of the visiting daughter.

Jack and Melissa paid close attention to their breathing.

The dawn was upon them, the wind dying down as the sun rose.

Mina found herself helping Melissa sweep the yurt out in the early morning mountain light, a batted-eyelash, mottled dawn light, flirting through tree branches and from behindleaves and stone ledges, until the whole world had a gold-flecked glow. Mina wondered if Melissa always smoked pot first thing in the morning. Melissa did a classic, familiar mid-inhale gesture of drug sharing. How, Mina wondered, do we learn these exact gestures? How did drug culture develop protocol, actual cliché?

“No thanks, I’ll stick to nicotine.” Mina sat outside the yurt shamelessly smoking. “Outside the yurt, endlessly, shamelessly smoking,” she said aloud. She loved saying “the yurt”; she inserted it into every sentence she could during her visit. “I’m going in the yurt for a lie-down.” “Is there a feng shui direction I should sleep in the yurt?” “Is this a nonsmoking yurt?” “Do you have yurt-owner’s insurance?” Jack and Melissa took these questions with surprising good cheer. They did everything with pacific, smiling faces. Melissa sometimes tried to talk to Mina. She sat next to Mina, crossed her long legs, and smiled one of those million-dollar California-girl smiles. Who could blame Jack?

“Where did you grow up, Melissa?” Mina asked.

“Boise, Idaho,” she said. “You thought maybe Hermosa Beach?” And she winked at Mina, her crystal earrings glimmering in the dawn light. She had undeniably a new-age sort of guileless charm. Melissa was looking for the moon in the morning sky. She felt her menstrual cycles were connected to the cycles of the moon. Melissa, certainly, was connected to the moon in important ways. But no way more profoundly than menstrually. She discussed her cycle at length. “Your cycle,” she explained, “can tell you things.” She examined it, like entrails, for wisdom.