at secrets and reserves of worldliness. He is actually thin in a seriously ill way. He pauses beside my bench, indicates the seat next to me, asks, “Any chance?”
Without a word, I move the backpack off the seat and he all but collapses onto it.
He is surprised when I ask, “How long have you been sick?”
“Do I look that bad?”
“You don’t look good.”
“How do you know that this isn’t the way I always look?”
“I don’t think you’d be alive.”
“Good point.”
I ask about symptoms. He is nonchalant. He has Siddhartha in his backpack; he is above caring about “the physical apparatus.”
I diagnose gastroenteritis and dip into the traveling pharmacy that Bobbi Mac insisted I take with me. I press tablets of Imodium into his hand and warn, “It may be amoebic dysentery. If it is you will have to go to a doctor and get a prescription for Flagyl.” I make him drink the mint tea I buy from the vendor walking the aisle.
“Drink it all,” I coax. “You need to rehydrate and there’s lots of sugar in there to get your glucose levels back up. You know, if it is dysentery, you could always eat fresh camel dung.”
“Did you just tell me to eat shit?”
“My grandmother was an army nurse in North Africa in World War Two. She had a bedouin wardman who told her that cure.” I want to impress him, and my World War II army-nurse grandmother is the most impressive thing about me. “After the invasion of Sicily, they ran out of everything. Morphine, bandages, sulfa powder. So some of the boys who were the worst off, the ones who might have died, tried the camel dung, and it worked. Olive oil is also good.”
“Excellent. Some camel shit with an olive-oil chaser.” He puts his arm over the back of the seat. He smells like really good pot. He scoots closer, whispers in my ear, “The old lady’s tattoos …” He nods toward the bedouin grandmother sitting on the bench seat across from us. A series of dots the color of strong green tea drip from her bottom lip down her chin. They are faded and almost lost in wrinkles elephant-hide deep.
“They were done when she was a little girl to give her strength, power. To protect her. If her parents had wanted to enhance her attractiveness to a prospective husband, she might be tattooed along here.…” Martin traces his finger along an imaginary necklace across the tops of my breasts. “The designs would have all been geometric.” He draws cross-my-heart marks along the necklace. “The tattoos on her hands are hints, samples of the delights to come.”
We both know that we will sleep together. All that is left for me to decide is how much it will mean and how I will make it mean that.
After we drink mint tea with extra sugar, Martin fishes out his battered copy of Siddhartha. I lie and say that I love the book. One of my all-time favorites. Right up there with … with … As I know he will, Martin prompts, “The Tao Te Ching? The Gnostic Gospels? The Bhagavad Gita?”
“All of the above.” I don’t know what makes me stop pretending that I, too, love books about spirituality. That we “share an interest.” Probably the calculation that I’d already made that we are going to be together, and figuring in how long I can act like a scholar of religious texts, then adding in that, even more than most men, he appears to like to be the one with the answers. I compute all of that and admit, “I don’t know. I’ve never read any of them.”
“So you just said that? About loving Siddhartha…?”
“To impress you? Yeah. Pretty much. Did it work?”
“Absolutely. Would you be impressed if I read your favorite book to you?”
And so, reciting from memory more than from the page open in front of him, Martin tells me the story of the handsome son of the Brahman, Siddhartha, his shoulders tanned from performing sacred ablutions in the river, his forehead surrounded by the glow of his clear-thinking spirit, who left his family and all his riches to search for enlightenment.
I hear the words in my head again, in Martin’s caress of a voice carried on a breeze scented with rosemary and cedar: “ ‘In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree …’ ”