S

Days later. Prolonging the sad pleasure, the Beautifully Sorrowful. I do enjoy writing to you, old dear. "Maybe it's your silence I.enjoy-no scolding word about the state of the drapes or dust in the bookcase or about the house going to pot inside while I dug in the garden or wasted half the day at yoga. You hated my yoga, but maybe Midge will lead you along the Eightfold Path. Really, it's just stretching exercises and an attempt to still the mind, to quiet the ego and let something other than its clamoring be heard.

Now I wonder if my reactions to you and Midge haven't been selfish and non-non-attached. After all, I did leave, and can't really imagine coming back. We've had our Krishna-Radha week in Marigot. How old were we? I would have been twenty-six, and you twenty-eight. The perfect age to play at being gods. If there is-as various patriarchal religions keep suggesting-a divinity in whoredom, I touched it that week. I wasn't just me, I was you, your sukra and my rajas indivisible. You got so brown, I remember, all but your cute pale tight fa

Charles, I can't express how serene and benign I feel about you-and me. Parting is an illusion. Loss is an illusion, just as is gain. We shed our skins but something naked and white and amara slithers out and is always the same. I think I eventually will go to Holland and help Pearl bear our grandchild. These Dutch brewers have at least the charm of money-guilders, isn't it, over there? It all-sa grossesse et tout-seemed a little soon, but then everything does, I suppose, from being born to dying. I've dropped a note to Ducky asking him to try to work it out with Oilman. Did it bother you to hear on the tapes that I had a flirtation of sorts with Ducky, before he knew that he was gay? Poor Gloria, how terrible to realize that your supposed feminine charm is an unloaded gun, so to speak. There was something challenging about Ducky for a woman and I suppose that was it. Anyway, your flings with those flat-heeled nurses (how can you medical people who know so much about the body's ins and outs still get excited making love?-or does that expertise make it more so?) did bother me, however lightly you took them. They were klishta. They sullied me and you-wounded us, really. Things can't always be undone, it would seem. There is a grain to prakriti, an arrow of time. We get tired. Do remember and remind the despicable Gilman that whether or not this divorce goes through is to me a matter of utter indifference. Having known the Arhat's divine love I am not in the market (unlike needy old you) for any further attachments. I need to be still and feel now I have acquired the means to be still.

As I wrote you last spring, I have the Price salver and teapot and the Peabody flatware and candlesticks and Daddy's Milton and Do

Ever,

S.

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