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The morning after the ladies' circle Arthur sat in the sun in the courtyard with his new stone on the sheepskin between his calves. Lee had been told it was a materialization of love for him, and indeed it was a symbol of love regardless of whence it had come. The past week love had been lavished on him. Lee had massaged him, Carol had massaged him, Alice had massaged him, Sandra had massaged him, Gentility had touched him, Anne Arons had sent distant healing, and last night the women’s group had focused on his well being. It was warm in the sun. By not focusing on the stone or any other specific point but on the whole of his field of vision he saw that the field was itself eye-shaped. The world looks in at us as we look out at it, he thought.
Lucia Gammersley came out of her house; she was in a hurry, on her way to a kinesiology workshop.
"Elvis?" Arthur said.
She rolled her eyes but he knew that her underlying certainty had not been shaken. He thought about her after she had left. They agreed about little but cared fiercely for one another.
Lucia's healing studies, begun at Wurts Farm, had accelerated a year ago after she had suffered a miscarriage. Shell’s response to her losing their baby had irreparably damaged their intimate relationship, and the next month she, Shell, and Arthur had moved from the house they'd rented together in October to the Mabel Street house, just three bocks from where Arthur now sat, which they had rented with Tame and Uncle Dave. Soon after the move Lucia had discovered a diet that she wanted Arthur to try.
“Do you remember saying to me in October that you could do anything for six months?" she said to him.
"I do," he said. "And the way you're looking at me makes me think I shouldn't have."
"I want you to go on a diet for six months,” she said.
"What kind of diet?"
"It's a cleansing diet. Do you want to know how I think it will help you?"
"Maybe later; first, how much won't I like it?"
"It is fairly strict, but there's a lot you'll be able to eat."
"Bread?"
"No."
"Cheese and butter?"
"No."
"Ham? Bacon? Chicken?"
"No."
Arthur had been allergic all his life to nuts, eggs, fish, seafood, and all mammal meat except ham and bacon; peanuts had nearly killed him several times, most recently two years ago, and even to be near their shells made him sick. With the new diet's prohibitions his already-limited diet would be restricted to herbal teas, yogurt, and specific grains, fruits, and vegetables; one day a week, he would eat only fruit.
"There's good news though," Lucia said.
Arthur compressed his lips and raised an interrogative eyebrow.
"You can have coffee the evening of your fruit-fast day."
"I can drink coffee?" Arthur said, grinning as though he'd learned that after all there is a Santa Claus.
Lucia delivered her punch line with mock regret.
"Well, no. You can't drink it. It's poisonous to drink; you know that. But a coffee enema is a wonderful liver flush, Tony. You'll be amazed how good you'll feel."
"This is a joke, right?"
It wasn't a joke, though Lucia knew it was funny. In the weeks and months that followed Arthur was frustrated, bored, and irritable every fruit-fast day no matter how he tried to trick himself, coddle himself, mock himself, ignore himself, love himself, accept himself, cajole himself, or be himself. It didn’t help that he was eating as he was because he had told Lucia he could and then said he would, not because he believed in the diet’s efficacy. When asked from time to time, usually by friends on the same regimen (they included Lucia, Lulu, Lee, Sandra, Alice, Peg, and Jan) whether he felt better than he had when his diet had been less rigorously alive and nourishing, he did not conceal that he did not.
Arthur did not like the diet because of all it disallowed, but he also disliked it because he thought that, on it, he would lose weight. Quadriplegics are susceptible to pressure sores because they don't unconsciously shift their weight to protect bony prominences, and Arthur worried that the thinner he was the likelier it was his skin would ulcerate. Lucia thought Arthur's weight would reach a low and then rise to what was best for him, and she knew (in his case wrongly, Arthur thought) that healthy skin would not break down. As the weeks and months passed he wondered why he found it so emotionally difficult one day a week to eat only fruit; he never found an answer that satisfied him. He did not abandon the diet and his skin did not break down.
Lucia had been devastated by her miscarriage, but it had catalyzed her sense that she had a calling to be a healer. He remembered her talking to him about her calling one February day as he was spinning his power chair in circles in the dirt front yard of their Mabel Street house. She had then been studying iridology and had showed him eye charts and asked to read his eyes. He had learned that sexual perversion is revealed at eleven o'clock and the state of the spirit at twelve. He could not define sexual perversion but assumed he would have a revealing lesion at eleven, and he did. He suspected another lesion at twelve and when Lucia looked for it she saw it.
Did he too have a calling? If he did, it was to write. At his age Jack Kerouac considered what he had written important and the loss the world's if it ignored his work; Keats and myriad others were dead; Thomas Wolfe had died at thirty-seven. At thirty-five and -six Arthur thought he had written nothing unslight, nothing finished. He’d drafted and several times redrafted A Better Front, an experimental autobiographical novel that he sometimes almost liked, but in his heart he knew it not even a footnote to a silence.
Two days after the Ladies’ Circle Lulu parked her truck Harmony in the vacant lot on the corner next to Lee and Arthur's, turned her off, told her she was a fine woman, got out, walked around to the covered-wagon camper-back that she and Detroit Squint had built with Rusty's tools, climbed inside, found the bag of Mona's 9-herb fomentation that she knew would benefit Arthur's spine, climbed out, walked toward the house, ascended the ramp, and knocked on the pressed-cardboard door, which was ripped and when knocked upon sounded much as a sturdy cardboard carton might have.
Lee and Arthur were in bed. "Come in," Lee called; the door as usual was unlocked. Lulu came in and stood in her friends' bedroom door.
"You bums," she said. "Still lying around."
"No bums, no bums," Arthur said, keeping his eyes resolutely closed and waving his arm as though to make Lulu go away.
"Looooloooo," Lee crooned.
Lulu was one of nine children born to Mexican American parents living in Michigan. Arthur didn’t know how they’d gotten to Michigan nor why she and her sister Aradne had come to Arizona, where he had met them the summer of 1974 through their men, Detroit and Love 22, of whom a bit more later. Lulu was angry at Detroit this morning, as he was with her. Detroit was twenty-five, she twenty-four. He was a Virgo, which was of significance to Lulu, who was an Aries. She thought him cynical, which he was, and he thought she didn't understand him, about which he was right. Their marriage was volatile and doomed but often good.
During the past summer Detroit had fallen in love with Lee. He had finally cornered her in her trailer one morning and declared himself. "I can't sleep nights," he said. "I think about you every day, all the time. I fell off my ladder yesterday thinking about you. You can't imagine--"
Lee couldn't, nor did she want to. She thought he wanted to f*@k her, which he certainly did. She thought he would get over whatever was wrong with him quickly and treated his profession of love as a joke.
"You're not serious," she said, and laughed, skirting embarrassment.
"I've never been more serious. I want to marry you. I want to live with you forever and have children with you."
"Detroit!" she said. But weren't those tears in his squinty eyes behind his garish glasses (white frames with black diagonal lines every quarter inch or so)? Lulu had warned Lee that Detroit had the hots for her. Not that Lulu and Detroit tried, like Lee and Arthur, to accept one another's other loves and expressions of other-directed sexuality; they didn't. Yes, they were tears. Detroit was on his knees and crying. He was off his knees and trying to hold her, trying to kiss her. "Please, please," he implored, beer-breathed. She pushed him out her trailer's door into the empty-without-her world. He let her push him, wouldn't use his strength in opposition to her. He was serious, but he'd seen she was, too.
"Aren't you bums up yet?" said Lulu, standing in their bedroom door. Lee got out of bed and pulled on her clothes, then went into the bathroom and filled a basin of water. She sudsed Arthur's crotch and his cock got hard, its head red and swollen and covered with foam. "Some service," said Lulu, watching from the door. "What a lot of guys'd give for that each morning!"
She asked Arthur if there had been any sign of healing yet and, involuntarily, he made a face. "Still doubting, eh?" she said. She thought his doubts stupid, stubborn, and self-destructive. She believed in faith. In the living room after he was out of bed she asked Arthur if she might massage his feet and he said yes. He wondered if she felt his hostility; he rejected his dislike of her, which he didn’t think ran deep. He suspected that a single night together would melt it, and did not hope for such a night in spite of her long face's extraordinary beauty at certain angles, her flat large nose and soft brown eyes, her small breasts and hungry hips.
She visualized a 5-pointed star above her head. Even before she touched him she felt the power in her fingertips. She anointed his feet with oil and then began rubbing his right foot where it would stimulate his bowels and ready them to relieve his body of whatever toxins she might loosen. He watched her strong brown hands on his white foot. She worked for many minutes, awed at the delicacy of his bones under his paper-thin skin, and when she had finished raised her eyes to look at him. He seemed so beautiful to her she felt tears brimming in her eyes.
"Thank you," she said, and then again, "Thank you. I really needed that." She felt refreshed. He thanked her and they hugged each other. "You're going to be better, you know," she said, "no matter what you think."
On his right great toe, he noticed, there was a nasty looking blood blister. She saw it too.
"Did I do that?" she said, dismayed.
"It's all right," Arthur said. "I should have warned you. My skin's so thin."
He feared this healing effort, and he hoped that a blister on his toe would be the worst that came of it. Faith without knowledge, applied, he feared. And knowledge of the pathological effects of fourteen years' paralysis he did not think widely disseminated. He would not stop his friends from massaging him, or a revered healer from taking him from his chair and laying him on the ground and realigning his skeleton so it was straighter, but he assumed what was being done likelier to hurt him than to help him. It might be a risk to be worked on, but he thought it wasn't necessarily an undue risk. He only rarely and when he thought it truly necessary tried to temper his friends' fervor in his cause by articulating the harm he imagined they might do. Too tender to him were their good intentions, their foolish sweet attachment to the idea that the world would be a better place if he were otherwise and that with their help and love he would be.
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To go to the next part of THE HEALING click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
This post has been edited by Coach: 09 March 2006 - 07:59 PM
