S

I love Midge, of course. She has very little negativity, and for another woman that's a great plus, since we tend as a sex toward depression. Many's the time I went over there vaguely desperate and came away laughing, full of cottage cheese and fruit salad and white-wine silliness. It was like going to some unisex health club where you leave your intelligence in the locker room. But for a man, who wants a partner who can give him back some res &nance at every level, it will be like living with Pearl at age twelve and a half, only not so pretty and with no prospect of growth. There is something sweet but arrested about Midge-she has always been so vain of her dainty hands and feet, in rather insistent contrast to mine especially-she was always having us compare shoes, and professing astonishment that mine were so much like rowboats, and always touching or patting me with her little stubby "paws as if to call attention to them, with all their preposterous eye-catching clunky rings and really very tawdry fingernail polish, those plummy reds and baby pinks and even, I remember one Saint Patrick's Day, an unbelievable parsley green. And her feet, squeezed like rising dough into these poor creaking pumps-I mean, as women supposedly head into the twenty-first century, are bound feet what we need?

But I forget that you must be a man in love, enchanted, bewitched, and that even my most i

And what of little Pearl? Suppose the news gives her a miscarriage?

Later. Another day. Calmer now. Peace, Charles. I realize this morning that Midge is only rising to a higher level of socioeconomic energy and should not be blamed. And I suppose honestly there was nothing in my tapes to indicate that you weren't fair game, though a person with even a little sensitivity-but I can't rouse myself to even enough indignation to complete the sentence. What matters really and always has is us-you and I. I've taken time to think and meditate and just relax into the space I'm in, and I've decided I don't believe in divorce and will write and tell Ducky to make no terms at all. You and your roly-poly little suburban pudding can do whatever you want-retire to her rumpus room and leave adulterous stains all over the shag carpet. Your infatuation will wear itself out with or without my blessing. I'm doing you a great favor, blocking a marriage that no sane man, and certainly not my straitlaced thrifty Charles (you know how Midge spends-Ed was always bragging/complaining), would really want. No, what you really want is to skim from Midge that demonic erotic courtship energy women can produce for short spurts and then abandon her emotionally just as you did me.

Did you know that the Jains reckon time in palyas, a palya being "a period of countless years," and that 100,000,000 times 100,000,000 palyas equals an "ocean of years"? They say furthermore that the age before ours lasted 100,000,000,000,000 oceans of years (approximately) and saw people shrink from a thousand yards tall, with thirty-two ribs, to only nine and a half feet in height? The age was called the duhshama-sushama, which means Very Beautifully Sorrowful, and our age is simply the Sorrowful (duhshama) and will be succeeded by the last, the Sorrowfully Sorrowful (duh-shama-duhshama). I give these facts (transcribing them from a book I obtained at the local bookstore, where I have a little charge account) to suggest the conceptual context in which I am presently operating, and to convey the tranquillity and serenity of my state of mind. You can see why the Jains don't like to inhale gnats-from their perspective we are all just gnats, at best.

I have left the ashram. Midge's gloating gleeful news and some local disillusionments made me realize that this phase of my progress was over. The love that I left you for has been sublimated-literally turned into radiant etheric vapor at a location called Sahasrara a few inches above my head. Rare Sarah, I have now become. Where I am now geographically suits my rarefied condition. I can't give it away, lest Gilman come swooping in in a biplane with all sorts of writs and handcuffs. It is as near nowhere as you can imagine and yet somewhere, if you know what I mean. With its own little historical distinctions, export crops, and atmospheric flavor. The flavor is in my nostrils night and day and the atmosphere rests on my skin and keeps reminding me of the time in about 1970 or '71 (Pearl I know had begun at that Episcopalian kindergarten and was big enough so we thought we could leave her for a week with my parents-you hadn't had a vacation since begi