Sun House, page 19
Bewildered by what had happened, Trey started to wander off, then recalled his eight-thousand-meter vow, spun on his heels, returned to the table, and leaned so abruptly back down that the couple startled and the poet leaned away with a frown.
“Sorry!” Trey said. “But…does ‘inscribed’ mean you sign the book to somebody?”
When Snyder nodded, Trey handed Axe Handles back to him. “Man, thanks! You’re, like…my wife’s total hero. So if you could sign it to her, please? Plus, there’s this five-word magic formula, your formula, we both love so much, me and her both, that it’d be amazing if you could add our magic words.”
Looking harassed by all the directives, Snyder asked, “What formula is that?”
In a clear, at-last-confident voice, Trey said, “‘The mountains are your mind.’”
A confusing thing then happened: hearing the words, Snyder looked up into Trey’s eyes, sending him the most wide-open, uncanny, soul-to-soul smile Trey had ever received from anyone but Lorilee. But the very next instant (In reaction to what? Trey thought. My face?) the smile folded inscrutably in on itself and vanished, never to return. It was as if an origami called “Beaming Poet Face” had been created by invisible hands, then uncreated so completely it ended with the paper’s disappearance. More confused than ever, Trey looked down at the book. Above Snyder’s original signature it now said:
The mountains are your mind.
! !
—Gary Snyder
It did not say “for Lorilee.” But the poet was talking with the couple Trey had already alarmed, and the vanished origami somehow made it impossible to interrupt again.
Trey carried the books to his car, set them carefully down on the seat, started the sorry-sounding engine, heaved a sigh rife with leaking exhaust fumes, and down-climbed the two hundred moonlit miles home.
Making Love, Making Home, Making Culture
THE NEXT NIGHT, Cinco de Mayo, an exhausted Lorilee dragged herself home from Grubstake Realty at 8:30, opened the front door of the grim garage apartment—and was greeted by candlelight and a barrage of fabulous smells.
“Happy anniversary!” Trey called. He was darting amongst pots, pans, cutting boards, and stove burners in tight jeans and one of the sleeveless little white T-shirts Lore called “Guido shirts,” beaming like a feral but inarguably sexy mountain elf.
Lore’s first reaction was mild horror. She’d just spent ten hours dodging a libidinous jerkwad who, though painstakingly trained never to touch her, left her feeling sexually slimed. She’d felt queasy all day. Ovulating maybe. But Trey was a very good cook. Lorilee smelled, without even trying, roasting game hens, garlic, fresh basil, basmati rice, cardamom, and her favorite squash soup made with coconut milk. But meals like this also created post-meal expectations. When Trey charmingly invited her to take a long hot shower in the stall he had so notoriously retiled, she felt like a pre-Columbian virgin being prepared for sacrifice, though she managed, with effort, not to show it.
In the shower she began to revive a little—till she heard the door open. “Privacy!” she barked, fearing Trey was coming for her already. But when she peeked, there was no one.
She stayed in the shower till the water heater emptied, stepped out into the steam, and discovered the cause of the door opening and closing: a package, gift wrapped in handmade coarse brown paper, sporting a little card that said: “OPEN NOW!” Command form. How loaded could a message be? But she couldn’t figure out how not to obey.
Inside: a green and red kaftan. Handmade in Turkey. Stunning geometric embroidery at the throat and sleeves. Just her size. Lorilee sighed. A dozen red roses, a refinished pine table, and a Cuisinart on his credit card in the past month alone. And an anniversary snowboard for Trey, purchased on her card, stashed in the trunk of her car. Years of penury ahead. And now: this stunning kaftan.
But when she slipped into it, toweled the steam from the mirror, and considered herself, Lorilee saw beauty. Nothing less. She hadn’t seen this in herself in months.
Next, a private debate: Is dressed in nothing but a kaftan dressed enough?
Only half of her heart answered yes. But this was the half she’d always gambled on. And how adorable Trey looked, when she stepped out of the bathroom, in his Guido shirt and sinews and muscle-sculpted jeans, dimple-cheeked, radar-eyed, struck speechless by the sight of her in the kaftan. “Thanks,” she said, with a tiny cock of the hip.
Trey took Lorilee’s elbow, seated her at a rose-petal-strewn and candlelit table, kissed the top of her head the way one kisses a child’s, whispered, “Right back!” then darted out of the house. She looked round the room. The tiny space was spotless. Even the walls looked fresh-washed. Every pot and pan they owned had been deployed for the impending meal. The fragrances were intoxicating. How had he found time for all this?
She could feel herself melting a little when Trey stepped back inside, hands behind his back, looking so fluttery and shy he seemed effeminate—a rarity in her iron-bodied man. During what she’d come to think of as their Lost Glory Days, when Trey would try to surprise her with some small gift his flutteriness sometimes grew so intense that, even if the gift failed to appeal, he pleased her with his twitterpatedness. Seeing him aflutter once more, their Lost Glory Days didn’t seem so lost. She melted a little more.
“Well?” Lore said as he beamed and quivered. “Whatcha got back there, fella?”
With his right arm Trey swung round a French Côtes du Rhône, which he presented with an awkward bow. Reading the ten-year-old date on the label, Lorilee had to stifle another monetary sigh. Then round Trey’s left side came the second gift—a little brown paper quadrangle. A book of some kind? How unlike him. Yet look at him beaming.
He presented the gift with a trembling that hadn’t accompanied the presentation of the wine, stepped behind her chair, rested his hands on her chairback, and waited. But Lore felt reluctant to move. This moment. Just as it is. The meal he’d made. The incredible cleaning he’d done. And now a Brown Paper Something given with so much expectancy and hope that her chair was trembling a little in his hands. What, more than this, could she want?
Then she began to wonder what sort of book would so appeal to Trey. Yikes. A compendium of mountain-climber aphorisms? One of those chicken-soup-for-dummies anthologies? A hand-bound journal in which Trey tried, with dreadful earnestness, to pen something about the Cruxes, Climbing Lines, Glare Ice, and Ice Axes of Love? How reluctantly she opened the brown paper. Then, there in her lap: Axe Handles.
She felt Trey fibrillating. Heard him whisper, “Look inside.”
When Lore beheld the way Snyder’s neat hand had inscribed their five magic words, she drew a sharp breath. Each of the two exclamation points gave her a chill. When a tear from overhead then landed on the shoulder of her kaftan, splashing her collarbone, she spun in her chair—and saw that every visible inch of Trey had broken out in goose bumps. Entirely melted now, she wrapped her free arm round his back, buried her face in his abdomen and felt how the strength, always evident in his hard belly, had given way to something so trembly and fragile she wanted to shelter it like a little bird. She then realized what this something was: Trey’s terribly fragile hope for their marriage.
The fragility, even more than the hope, touched her core. A huge wave of love and first swoon of lust swashed through her. Pressing her lips into his belly, Lorilee said, “Would you like to know what your name is tonight?”
She felt, in Trey’s abs, a faint shimmy from his eager nodding. Her free hand slid round to his buttocks. Pulling his belly tight to her lips, she said, “Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect!” rolling the r on and on, feeling his muscles writhe with pleasure at the sensation. Fluttering her lashes into his abs, keeping her grip on his butt, she said, “Under the cirrrrrrrrrrrrrcumstances, I see no alterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnative but to change the name of the dude, formerly known as Trey, to Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect!”
He pulled himself free. “Before I go back to being Imperrrrrrfect, let’s drink to that!”
He opened the wine, then filled two pricey-looking new long-stemmed wineglasses. Lorilee let that go. They locked eyes: clink! When she tasted the wine, her coo was involuntary. She then tilted her head back, inviting Trey to kiss her wine-wet lips. Bending gallantly, he did so—but only briefly. When she felt how disappointed her body felt, she realized the smutty residue of the day’s Grubstake sales had vanished.
“Hungry?” Trey asked, his baby blues blazing down at her, his body so statuesque, smile so boyish, face so blithely unaware of the off-center erection in the front of his jeans, that Lorilee suddenly couldn’t get enough of him. She pulled him to her, replanted her lips on his belly, and repeated, “Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect!”
Somehow missing this gargantuan come-on, Trey pulled away, stepped over to the tiny counter, and proceeded to hand-build two honey-toasted-pecan, pear, and gorgonzola salads as lovely as the kaftan, the signed book, the fibrillating bronze-skinned man.
When he turned back to her, salads in hand, Lorilee was pleased to see that, despite his chef duties, the off-center erection remained intact. He presented her salad, fetched their plastic fake-wood grinder, and offered her freshly ground pepper.
Lorilee’s hand shot out, hooking a belt loop of his jeans. “First listen,” she said, opening Axe Handles to the first page. She then launched into the twenty-five-century-old Shih Ching folk song Snyder had placed on page one. Holding the book behind Trey so she could see it, she spoke not to his face but straight into the muscle and skin of his belly:
How do you shape an axe handle?
Without an axe, it can’t be done.
How do you take a wife?
Without a go-between, you can’t get one.
Shape a handle, shape a handle,
the pattern is not far off.
And here’s a girl I know,
the wine and food in rows…
That’s as far as the reading got. Pulling Perrrrfect closer, Lorilee set aside the book, opened three buttons of his jeans, and reached deftly in, whispering, “shape a handle, shape a handle.” The fifth-yearly-weds then decided, spur of the moment, to redecorate the apartment. Trey began by peeling his jeans down his godlike legs with his feet and kicking them up onto a rafter to serve as the forthcoming festivity’s banner. In nothing but his Guido shirt, his prong a stylish match for the pepper grinder he’d forgotten to set aside, Trey looked so good to Lorilee that her kaftan lit out after the jeans, becoming their second banner. Then she too flew, with total trust even as the pepper grinder fell to the floor, up into the mighty arms that caught and held her with such ease that, right there in the air, she offered all she owned. Trey sampled her nakedness as he spun her in his arms, both of them laughing, then not laughing as the vapor pressure within the beings known as Lorilee and Trey surpassed atmospheric pressure, physics morphed into metaphysics, the fresh-vacuumed fake Oriental rug transmogrified into the loveliest bed imaginable, and Lore was all over Trey was all over Lore, lips on lips, chest on breasts, lips on breasts, tongue on tongue, tongues on thighs, dive down canyons, the wet warm winding, kiss the veins that pulse, siphon skin where it peaks, breath entering, bliss rising, bodies fusing, bloodstreams in rows, here’s a girl I know oh ohhhhhhh, squash soup congealing, feast charring in oven, salads wilting on table, legs sliding across and around, lips and tongues everywhere, arms-mouths-hands-entwining-ribs-breasts-thighs, so many cruxes to up-and-down-climb, portals to open, fluids and metaphors to mix, credit cards to max, forms of physical and financial gravity to defy, exactitudes and perfections to thank, convexities and concavities to bliss-nuke, toe knuckles to crack, ecstasies to moan, table shaking, candles quaking, perrrrrrrfect handle entering perrrrrrrrfect holder, shape! shape! shape! Trey swooning on vertical mind-planes, Lore singing more lost, more lost, Snyder’s reputation fuckin’ soaring, Trey and Lorilee on the floor of the half-converted garage in Pipestone, CO, making poetry fuck you debt, making song fuck you fmog and fmush, making love, making home, making culture,
without a condom.
Ah, Blue Ridge Mountains.
Ah, Carolina folk fests.
Ah, truths triggered with rhyme. So long, so long, so long.
Old Mountain’s Advice to Young Father
NINE MONTHS LATER, in a world again gone frigid, Lorilee’s legs again opened, this time under the fluorescent lights of Pipestone Community Hospital, and Japheth Joshu Jantz slid alliteratively into this world to the tune of all two thousand of the baby-shower bucks that had constituted his parents’ sole hope of a safer used car.
The newborn proved healthy. Nor were the patterns that shape, shape, shaped him far off. He had his father’s perfect skin, strong resolve, and handle. He had his mother’s small, fine-tuned body, calm nature, and exceptionally bright whites, though Japhy’s irises were bright blue with a dark rim of indigo rather than the black rimming Lorilee’s gray.
TO AVOID THE cost of an all-night stay, Trey slipped out to the hospital parking lot around midnight, warmed the rusted-out twelve-year-old Celica that was the safer of their two bombs, opened the windows enough to clear the worst of the exhaust fumes that now leaked constantly up through the floorboards, then gathered the weakened Lorilee—holding the baby, helped by a nurse—out of the wheelchair and into the car.
He drove madonna and child home to the half-converted garage. He helped them inside, where they’d prepped a “nursery” half the size of a cut-rate hot tub. Trey then returned to the car for the rest of the baby gear, but as his arms filled with the stuff, he envisioned the bodily joy it always gave him, when prepping for an expedition, when his arms filled for the first time with everything he’d be carrying, to test its weight. The baby gear, in comparison, looked so deadly to his passion that, like a man who sees an inescapable avalanche coming, he sank to his knees. The baby crap fell to the driveway. With a sound close to a sob Trey threw himself forward like a Muslim at prayer. Eyes closed, forehead to the ice, he began groping for some shield or shelter or battle cry that might alter his sense of doom. When his hand lit instead upon a bloated bale of baby diapers, revulsion filled him. “Noooo!” he groaned. “This is not my path, not my fate, not my life!”
Realizing Lore might hear him, he gathered the baby things and got back on his feet. But when he turned toward the tiny house with his family inside, he felt he was facing the avalanche itself. Unable to take a step, he lifted his gaze to the one visible manifestation of the gods he worshipped. “Two Medicine!” he gasped. “Please! Help me!”
Looming over the tiny garage apartment, a silent, star-blotting blackness, the mountain gave Trey not the faintest signal, hope, or clue.
Three J’s First Mountain
UNDER THE INFLUENCE of Gary Snyder, Lorilee had begun to think of herself as a Buddhist even before she met Trey. That was how she’d come to name their son after the Zen patriarch Joshu and the Snyder-inspired “Japhy Ryder” in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. Trey read enough of The Dharma Bums, during Lorilee’s pregnancy, to approve her choice of name. But when faced with an actual bald-headed baby whose clear, gray-eyed gaze bore a disconcerting resemblance to the shaved-headed Zen teachers Lorilee had begun to study, Japheth Joshu Jantz struck Trey as far too highfalutin a name for a boy to tote around lowfalutin Pipestone. So he began to call the baby “Three J.”
“Please,” Lorilee said. “You make him sound like a cattle ranch!”
“Okay,” Trey said amiably. “Let’s make it plain Three.”
“Making you Trey, father of Three?” Lorilee asked.
“Sure!” he said with a grin. “Shape, shape, shape! The pattern is not far off!”
His reference to the poem that had more or less impregnated her made Lore smile. The thought of a son named Three did not. “We agreed to call him Japhy, so that’s what I’m going to call him,” she said.
Trey said, “To each his own,” stuck with “Three J” and “Three,” and the baby began to experience himself as an entirely different being with each parent. Lack of confidence followed. Japhy proved clingy, afraid of strangers, afraid of being left alone in his crib, and utterly addicted to Lorilee’s quiet voice, gentle care, and milky breasts.
Not liking the long-term implications of this, Trey obeyed an impulse one cold winter’s morn: stepping over to the futon couch where madonna and child had long lain attached, he plucked his sated son up off Lorilee’s chest. When the mouth-to-tit suction broke, there was an audible pop and rubbery breast bounce that fascinated Trey in a variety of ways. Lorilee was too shocked to speak.
Holding Japhy face-to-face, Trey told him, “There’s an understanding we need to get started on, Three. Come on.” He opened the back door of the apartment, carried the baby out into the frigid air, raised his chin with a finger till his tiny face was more or less aimed at Two Medicine Peak, pointed, and loudly said, “MOUNTAIN.”
The baby’s tongue protruded, stuck in nipple-cupping position. His mouth corners dribbled milk. His head was wobbling like a bobblehead doll. His blue eyes had been half closed and glazed with comfort. They were now wide-open and blinking fast in the cold.
Trey liked these changes. “That big sucker right there, my boy, is a mountain. Let’s hear you say it. MOUNTAIN!”
Winter poured in the door. “Bring him in!” Lorilee called.
“MOUNTAIN,” Trey repeated.
“He’s eight weeks old!” Lorilee shouted.
“Just let me see you think it,” Trey urged. “Come on. MOUNTAIN.”
The baby hung in the cold, gasping.
“You’re young,” Trey conceded. “But there’s two things you need to know. First thing. Huge and scary looking as those beasts are, with one little footstep and handhold at a time, you can climb ’em all the way to the top. Second thing. Believe it or not, baby boy, those icy giants are your mind. Your very own ever-lovin’ mind.”
