womanhood. The strange thing about womanhood is that it goes on and on—the same daily burden of constant vague expectation and of everything being just
slightly
disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It’s rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won’t quite catch fire, isn’t it? Though every day when the sun shines in the branches outside the window or the fruit in the bowl matches the color of the tablecloth or your favorite Mozart concerto pours out of WGBH at the very moment when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, you feel as if you
are
catching or
have
caught, after all—somebody held the match in the right place at last. Really I shouldn’t be putting being a woman down—it has its duhkha but I wouldn’t be a man for anything, they really are
numb
, relatively, wrapped in a uniform or plate armor even when their clothes are off—or so it has seemed to me in my limited experience. And I sometimes wonder if my limitedexperience, limited really to your father for twenty-odd years and a bit of hand-holding and snuggling before that, wasn’t enough after all, and if for your generation more wasn’t less. I mean, we all only have so much romantic energy with which to rise to the occasion, whether one man or two dozen makes up the occasion. Of course your Jan seems to you to be a fully feeling and responsive human being now, just as Fritz did to me a month ago. But afterwards, if you can bear to talk to them—these meaningful men—it turns out that their minds even at the
height
of the involvement were totally elsewhere—were not really in the relationship at all! They were only and entirely what we in our poor fevers made of them.
From my tone you might gather that I have moved out of Vikshipta’s and Savitri’s A-frame. I am living instead in a nicer, newer one, with two of the women I work with in the ashram offices—Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa (tall, but without your beautiful generous figure with its long swimmer’s muscles and your lovely
push
) and Nitya, who is the head accountant here. Nitya is rather small and dark and nervous and has been quite sickly lately. I can’t quite tell if she and Alinga are lovers or just like sisters, but they spend a lot of time in the tiny kitchen, with the curtain that separates it from the room where I’m sitting drawn, murmuring and even arguing about this other woman called Durga and drinking jasmine tea. Vikshipta was furious when I told him I was leaving and—don’t be alarmed, my sweet—became a bit violent. It turns out that far from being Durga’s lover as I once imagined, he
hates
her for having (he imagines) corrupted the Arhat and shifted the emphasis away from hardcore psychotherapy to large-scale utopianism. He was always going on about the good old days in Ellora before the Arhat became so soft, when they were really making breakthroughsin consciousness-smashing, using Jung and tantra and human potential and “cathartic physicality,” which seems to mean people got beaten up. Besotted as I was with love—a woman’s drug—I slowly realized that he was really sounding very compulsive and fanatic about it. I said to myself,
This man is a Hun. He can’t tell tantra from a tantrum
. He had a lot of unresolved anger and, looking back at that first encounter (did I tell you about it, or was that Midge?), I wonder if Yajna wasn’t acting out Vikshipta’s desires, in trying to break my jaw and the rest of it. (If this is news to you, don’t worry about it, darling, I feel fine now, never better in fact, though I was afraid for a while my molars were shaken loose and I’d have to fly back to dear fussy Dr. Podhoretz.) I’ve gotten to know Yajna a lot better now and he’s extremely suggestible—just a boy, though he’s something like twenty-three or -four, perfect for you, in a way—his family is nice old railroad money from Saint Louis and I think if his head weren’t
slightly
disappointing compared with what one knows one has inside oneself waiting to be touched off. It’s rather like being a set of pretty little logs that won’t quite catch fire, isn’t it? Though every day when the sun shines in the branches outside the window or the fruit in the bowl matches the color of the tablecloth or your favorite Mozart concerto pours out of WGBH at the very moment when you pour yourself a cup of coffee, you feel as if you
are
catching or
have
caught, after all—somebody held the match in the right place at last. Really I shouldn’t be putting being a woman down—it has its duhkha but I wouldn’t be a man for anything, they really are
numb
, relatively, wrapped in a uniform or plate armor even when their clothes are off—or so it has seemed to me in my limited experience. And I sometimes wonder if my limitedexperience, limited really to your father for twenty-odd years and a bit of hand-holding and snuggling before that, wasn’t enough after all, and if for your generation more wasn’t less. I mean, we all only have so much romantic energy with which to rise to the occasion, whether one man or two dozen makes up the occasion. Of course your Jan seems to you to be a fully feeling and responsive human being now, just as Fritz did to me a month ago. But afterwards, if you can bear to talk to them—these meaningful men—it turns out that their minds even at the
height
of the involvement were totally elsewhere—were not really in the relationship at all! They were only and entirely what we in our poor fevers made of them.
From my tone you might gather that I have moved out of Vikshipta’s and Savitri’s A-frame. I am living instead in a nicer, newer one, with two of the women I work with in the ashram offices—Alinga, a tall blonde from Iowa (tall, but without your beautiful generous figure with its long swimmer’s muscles and your lovely
push
) and Nitya, who is the head accountant here. Nitya is rather small and dark and nervous and has been quite sickly lately. I can’t quite tell if she and Alinga are lovers or just like sisters, but they spend a lot of time in the tiny kitchen, with the curtain that separates it from the room where I’m sitting drawn, murmuring and even arguing about this other woman called Durga and drinking jasmine tea. Vikshipta was furious when I told him I was leaving and—don’t be alarmed, my sweet—became a bit violent. It turns out that far from being Durga’s lover as I once imagined, he
hates
her for having (he imagines) corrupted the Arhat and shifted the emphasis away from hardcore psychotherapy to large-scale utopianism. He was always going on about the good old days in Ellora before the Arhat became so soft, when they were really making breakthroughsin consciousness-smashing, using Jung and tantra and human potential and “cathartic physicality,” which seems to mean people got beaten up. Besotted as I was with love—a woman’s drug—I slowly realized that he was really sounding very compulsive and fanatic about it. I said to myself,
This man is a Hun. He can’t tell tantra from a tantrum
. He had a lot of unresolved anger and, looking back at that first encounter (did I tell you about it, or was that Midge?), I wonder if Yajna wasn’t acting out Vikshipta’s desires, in trying to break my jaw and the rest of it. (If this is news to you, don’t worry about it, darling, I feel fine now, never better in fact, though I was afraid for a while my molars were shaken loose and I’d have to fly back to dear fussy Dr. Podhoretz.) I’ve gotten to know Yajna a lot better now and he’s extremely suggestible—just a boy, though he’s something like twenty-three or -four, perfect for you, in a way—his family is nice old railroad money from Saint Louis and I think if his head weren’t
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