One of the first nights we had to turn on Casa Deus’ big clanking metal radiators, Sascha and I were in bed. I was smoking up a big joint and Sascha was taking some designer drug that made him feel woozy and convinced him he saw vague primary-color tapestries behind his eyelids.
"Tell me a secret," I said. "Tell me something about yourself you’re too embarrassed to talk about normally."
Sascha giggled. "You know," he said thoughtfully, "there’s nothing about my life that I’m embarrassed by. If you took everyone’s information about me and compiled it, you’d have 100% of my biography. Fact: this is actually a good idea, if you plan on ever being biographized." He paused, musing. "‘Biographized’? Is that a real word? I might be one of those people who die early, so it’s vital that all pertinent information get disseminated correctly. I don’t want to die with any secrets hidden from people. Anyway, I don’t hide anything, or repress it; I just sort of conveniently---forget it, I guess."
"Like conveniently forgetting that you had slept with that woman we met at Bread & Circus until she asked me if I had cured your problem of falling asleep thirty seconds afterwards?"
"I didn’t forget about her," murmured Sascha. "She just wasn’t, well, memorable. Why do you think I fell asleep in 30 seconds?"
He sat up suddenly. "Hey, speaking of secrets, how about going over to my friend Elia Kopf’s tomorrow morning? She’s really great. I think you’ll really like her. She was the one doing magick at our wedding."
"She’s a programmer, right? And you’ve slept with her, right? I just need this information disseminated to me, if you know what I mean."
"Elia’s a programmer at Digital. But she’s also a sculptor and sort of a Wiccan diva. She’s said several times that she’s wanted to meet you for real and get to know you better. You’re sort of a project she wants to work on. Not that she doesn’t think that you and I could be good for each other. But she’s sort of surprised I chose someone like you to marry. She thinks you could use some modification and some mellowing out. Don’t take that in a demeaning way, though. Elia likes everybody."
I took a big hit and stubbed out the joint in an ashtray made out of a giant clam shell. "And I’m not supposed to be offended by this?"
"Oh, I’ve slept with her. That was a trip. But in the grand scheme of things our affair was minor. Elia’s the one who got me out of my uptight little box and into the Scene. I would know barely anyone in the group without her---basically, I wouldn’t have been able to put together this company. And she’s responsible for most of the stuff that’s comes into the house."
"Yeah? She turned you into Mr. Magic Mushroom?"
"More than that. She opened up my mind in bigger ways than just the drugs. I mean, Daphne tried pretty hard to get me to see things from a different perspective. But number one it had to be from her perspective, which isn’t always the happiest one. Number two, I was such a twit then, and it’s really easy to be an even bigger twit in front of your older sister. And number three, Daph is just a big butch. She has no concept of what it’s like to wear a flowing robe with flowers in your hair and worship the Goddess until dawn."
"You’ve done that?"
"Let’s just say that I have been the satyr to a group of Pagan nymphs...let’s say, further, that I have spent a number of nights literally swinging naked from the rafters. Ah, to be skyclad and tripping..."
"You’re telling me this just to piss me off, right?"
A maliciously adolescent smile surfaced on Sascha’s face. "You know the scene in the movie The Doors where Jim Morrison and Patricia Kinnealey get really fucked up and dance around her apartment to the tune of ‘Carmina Burana’?"
"Yeah? You’ve been Jim Morrison, too?"
"Something like that. Hand me the phone. I’m going to call Elia and ask if we can come to her house for breakfast."
I threw him the cordless receiver. I was either hungry or nauseous, but too stoned to figure out which.
"Hey Elia!" gushed Sascha. "Hi hon! How are you? Can you do breakfast with me and my lovely bride tomorrow? At your house---ten o’clock? I want Sara to see your sculpture garden. Have you sold any of it over your Web site yet? Cool. What? Am I tripping? I can’t answer that, Elia---you know our phones are tapped. Yeah. Sleep well, darling. We’ll make it over by ten."
"Elia makes homemade sushi, by the way," he said as he hung up.
I was feeling distinctly pissy. "Not at ten on a Sunday morning, I hope."
*
We rode our bikes out to Arlington the next morning, which was uncomfortably cold and blustery. Arlington is only about three or so miles from Casa Deus, and a fair number of computer people live there, especially those with connections to the large firms on Route 128 and west of the city. But it’s decidedly middle-class, and free from the free-floating extremism that pervades Cambridge. In fact, as you ride down Mass. Ave. towards the Arlington line, you’ll notice that all the standard accouterments of middle-class life missing in most of Cambridge---used-car dealerships, restaurants with parking lots, dentists’ offices in prefab brick buildings---have been shunted into this corner of town.
A few blocks into Arlington, we turned onto a side street of neat two-family frame houses. Suddenly, I heard a series of loud whooshes, followed by metallic clanging.
"That’s Elia," said Sascha proudly. "She’s already working."
We pulled up into a driveway. The small scrubby backyard was dominated by a giant semi-molten lump of bronze. A big woman in jeans and a sweater was aiming a blowtorch at the metal, shaping it, and then cutting off the loose ends with a hammer and chisel. The lump of metal looked like it might turn into the figure of a voluptuous woman.
"Elia!" shouted Sascha during a quiet moment. "We’re here!"
"What?" Elia turned around and pulled a pair of ear plugs out of her ears. She was wearing a giant pair of welding goggles. Her curly hair was tied back with a paisley ribbon. "Oh!" she shouted back. "You’re here! Put the bikes in the garage. I’ll be right with you."
The garage and the backyard were densely populated with finished and unfinished sculptures. Some were made out of bronze; others looked like plaster casts; still others were carved out of wood. They ranged between about six inches and six feet. Most of them looked as if they were representations of the same woman---long, streaming hair, wide hips, a turned-inward smile. Sascha had one of Elia’s sculptures in our living room, I realized now, about two feet tall and made of some kind of black stone. Sascha’s woman was seated with her legs curled around her, exhibitionistic but protective, looking at you with a small, contemplative smile, her hair cascading down her back.
Sascha ran out of the garage straight at Elia, throwing his arms around her and giving her a big juicy kiss. I walked towards them more slowly, irritated and jealous of his indiscriminate familiarity. "Hi," I said, sticking out my hand. "I’m Sara. I’m glad to finally meet you. It really mattered to Sascha that you were officiating our wedding behind our backs. Thanks for inviting us over---that is if Sascha didn’t insinuate himself over here too much---"
I didn’t have a chance to finish. Elia zoomed past my hand and caught me in a body block.
"Oh Sara!" she squealed. "I’m so glad that you’re here! Welcome to the family. Please come in. I have lots of stuff for you guys to eat. Although---" she looked at me doubtfully--- "it doesn’t look like you eat too much."
"Sure I do," I said cheerfully. "I just exercise it all off."
"Sascha said something about you being a swimmer. I was on my high school swim team. It’s still a fun thing for me to do, now that I’m too fat for any other sport."
Elia wrapped one big arm around each of our shoulders and led us into her house, a fantasy of tapestries, hanging plants, crystals, miniature Zen gardens, fish tanks, more sculpture, white carpeting, and incense. There was a strange bubbling sound; I finally figured out that it came from a CD of a flowing stream, spilling out from a number of strategically placed miniature speakers. About four cats---it was hard to tell---meandered about. How nice it must be to have some money, live alone, and be able to decorate your place however the hell you want, I thought.
Elia plopped us down to quiche, strawberry shortcake, and excellent coffee. "How’s your Web site?" Sascha asked.
"Seems to be working out really well," Elia said with her mouth full. "Right now I’ve got the server in my office, and a bunch of other artists are advertising their stuff on it as well. I’ve even written a chat script so that we have other people to turn to when things are especially good or bad. I’ve personally sold almost $10K worth of sculpture and photos so far---mostly to people who don’t even know me. It’s really gratifying."
"What about your work at DEC?"
"Oh, honey, do you want to write a JPEG compression algorithm for me? I’m starting to feel like such a dinosaur, even there. Everything is ‘Internet, multimedia, Alpha, NT, bottom line.’ Like they forgot what a VAX was. I thought running my own Web site would get me some points. It doesn’t. And I’m really tired of driving out to the middle of nowhere to be a corporate drone. I want to do nonprofit stuff---you know, set up a Web site for a halfway house, or for an inner-city arts project. Maybe go to art school. Anybody can do computers now. They don’t need me anymore---especially since my skills are so antiquated."
Elia swallowed and took a big swig of coffee. "Oh by the way, I’ve quit drugs. I don’t need ‘em. I’ll still give you anything you want, but really, sweetie, I don’t encourage you to use them any more either. Besides, I’m thinking about having kids. I don’t know who with, but that doesn’t matter so much. Someone will appear and oblige; I’ve been doing solo Tantra to figure out who the person is. Anyway, I’ll need something to do once we have another industry crash."
Sascha pouted. "Don’t say stuff like that about the industry or about yourself. It scares me. Do you want to come work for us?"
Elia laughed. "And do what? Design your jewel boxes? No, honey, I want to be free. Maybe I’ll become a massage therapist. Or do professional Tarot readings. You should think about doing the same thing. Your day is going to be over soon, too, you know that."
"What?"
"Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it---not to mention planning for it---for a while. And don’t freak out, lamb. If you freak out, I’m going to have to give you a B-12 injection and a foot massage."
Elia leaned her large curly head intimately towards him. "Sascha, you know what I mean. You’ve seen the people running IS departments these days, You can’t tell the difference between them and the CEOs. And every company in the world has some kind of communications system. Most of them are Windows-based. They don’t need ExCom. Also, now that having a system makes you barely functional instead of bleeding edge, do you think that the average uptight capitalist is going to hire some $250/hour snotty, longhaired hacker to set up a client/server system for them? Especially with the kind of rep that hackers have in the mainstream media? They can get kids to do that kind of basic work for them now. Kids get the job done without most of the attitude and definitely without the price. If I were you I’d write some Windows program that will make you a million bucks, sell it, and get out of the business end of it entirely."
"And then do what? Leave Cambridge and buy a sheep farm somewhere?" Sascha was obviously stunned.
"Write a magazine column. Translate drug-awareness books into HTML. Hack some cellular phone code. Start a MUD. Buy a sailboat. Teach a class. Be free."
"Elia! I always thought you knew me better than that! I can’t be free if I’m not hacking. I can’t be free if I ever have to worry about money. I’m one of those capitalists---I can’t pretend anything different. Sometimes I really hate computers. And I see where the industry is going. You know, they used to say to me ‘Sascha, you’re such a brilliant boy. You’ll be able to do anything you want.’ Except that I haven’t been doing anything except hacking for years, and I’m not good at anything else anymore. I’m a failure. I might as well give up and die." He dropped his fork on the table and looked down. I felt sort of bad for him.
Elia reached over the quiche and lifted Sascha’s chin with her big hand. "Sascha, my menschele," she said sadly. "You always take things so personally. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Here. You and Sara take your coffee and come upstairs with me. I’ll give you a healing."
Elia’s room had three prominent objects in it: her enormous frilly white bed; a nearly life-size black sculpture of the woman, standing decorously in a corner; and a strangely carved table in the center of the room, draped with dried flowers and scarred with the wax of the many candles on top of it.
"My altar," said Elia, without my asking. "Here. Sit on the bed." One of her cats got up and stretched suspiciously as we sank down into the mattress. I figured that Sascha and Elia had been involved such a long time ago that Elia had bought another bed since, but I looked sideways at Sascha anyway to see how familiar he seemed with it. This was not an entirely fair thing to do, I admit. He had probably been on her bed many times under purely platonic circumstances. Shit, I was a jealous woman. Was this one of the things Elia wanted to "change" about me?
Elia drew the shade and lit some candles. "I can’t make the software industry better, but I think I can do a bit more for you." She turned to me. "What about you, Sara? You want a spell?"
"Sure," I said. My whole life these days seemed to be a crash-course in alternative lifestyles.
Elia brought out a dropper bottle and a tiny jar that looked like it was filled with jam. "Here," she said to me, pulling out the dropper. "This is five-flower calming extract from England. Open your mouth, lift up your tongue, and let it sit there for five seconds."
I obediently did what I was told. Sascha’s mouth was already open, like a baby bird’s. Elia put the dropper in my mouth, and I suddenly felt a flowery, burning sensation. Lots of alcohol, I guessed. I held and swallowed. Elia lit some incense that smelled like sage and vanilla, murmuring to herself and pushing the smoke over in our direction.
She opened the jar. "Siberian ginseng, pressed into raw organic honey. You’ll love it."
She fed us the stuff with something that looked suspiciously like a jeweled cocaine spoon. I was actually starting to feel a little calmer from the flower essence---even placebo effects are fine with me---but the ginseng perked me up. Within five minutes, as Elia put on some Windham Hill-esque flowery music and hauled out her crystal collection, I felt like I often did after a good swim.
Elia spent what seemed like a long time with Sascha. She waved various crystals in front of him, let him hold others in his hands, chanted something at him and let him chant back at her. I was completely shut out from them. Sascha had clearly done this before, so I made a point to set aside my perpetual possessiveness and let him get what he needed. I looked idly around the room: at the many little photographs in cutesy frames, the garlands of dried flowers, the shelf of feminist spirituality books. Across the room, I noticed arty black-and-white photographs of the same woman who was the subject of Elia’s sculptures.
I didn’t know anything about Elia’s sexual orientation. In the past, I always assumed people straight unless proven otherwise; these days I didn’t know what to assume. Ordinarily, I’d think Elia was basically heterosexual. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine anyone being so obsessed with one person unless they were in love with them.
Elia and Sascha were still engrossed. Both of their faces were pink. I leaned back against the wall and smacked my head on a picture frame. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
The photograph was an erotic nude. The woman was wrapped in her own hair, but with nipple- and belly-button rings clearly showing. She had a barbaric-looking tattoo around one ankle. Her face, which I could see clearly for the first time, was painted pale and her expression was world-weary and madonna-like. Her lips were nearly black.
The woman was Crystal.
The cumulative effect of this knowledge took a few seconds to hit. Nearly every piece of artwork in Elia’s house was created in homage to Crystal. The House of Crystal, right here in Family-Channel Arlington. Even our lovely little living room sculpture was Crystal. Sascha hadn’t even had either the decency or the awareness to remove it when we got married.
Crystal and Elia had been lovers (they had to have been, considering Crystal’s predilections). Crystal and Sascha had been lovers. Elia and Sascha had been lovers. I was sure there had been a fourth configuration---Sascha, Crystal, and Elia all in bed together---but the horror of this scenario was a little much for me right then.
Flushed with fury, I pressed my nails into my fingertips until Elia and Sascha finished their little Pagan game. My loathing for Crystal and everything I knew about her and her world---their whole goddamn little world---was going to warp the speech I would give them when they were done. I didn’t care.
Sascha finally turned to me, flushed and quiet. "Hi Sara," he said softly. "I love you."
At that moment, I felt that he could have not said anything more hypocritical. "What is the deal with this woman?" I practically shouted. Both looked shocked, but neither asked who I was talking about.
I sensed a surge of curse words coming on. "She is so fucked up and so amoral and yet all of you want to fuck her anyway. My God, Elia, she’s your fucking muse! Did she really make you come that hard? Or did she give you lots of drugs or tie you up or let you tie her up or what? She’s such a fucking little opportunist. Or should I say a not-so-little opportunist. Her ass is big enough. Or is she just the goddess that everyone worships?"
My venom turned towards Sascha. "Oh, yeah, and you just fucked her like everyone else fucked her. You couldn’t find anyone else corrupt enough to get off on? Then, you like give her money, get her a job---I heard, by the way, from a very reputable source that she basically put your friend Troll out of business---you personally give her a job, you give her bitter incompetent little lover a job, you bail her out of fucking jail because she knows you’ll come save her ass. Am I wrong? Did you get the idea of fucking in the bathtub from her? Or was she just living in our bedroom or what? Do you keep her statue there so you can jerk off in front of it when I’m not around? I cannot believe your lack of sensitivity. Do you like having little momentoes of your exes---or your whatevers---around the house? Does it give you pleasure? Have you had fantasies about me fucking her too?"
"I think you should stop now," said Sascha in a low voice. "You have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t even know the story."
"I know what you’ve told me," I said, shrilly. "Have you not been telling the truth?"
"I owe my life to Crystal. If you can’t understand that yet, maybe I’m not ready to explain it to you."
I sulked furiously, not caring about the awkwardness I was causing. Elia clearly had not been expecting this from me. Maybe Sascha should have warned her first or something; maybe Sascha should have warned me before we came over that documenting Crystal’s sexuality was Elia’s lifetime artistic ambition.
"Sara," she said, a bit too nice to be genuine. "A lot of people really love Crystal and are happy to do things for her. I admit, she’s sometimes hard to deal with. But you have to admire her---she is absolutely free. She doesn’t care about any kind of restrictive social conventions. If you’re not free---and forgive me for saying this, Sara, but you definitely are not---it’s hard to understand. But if we were all as free as Crystal, if we all chose to break societal norms and lived and loved and believed as we wished, the world would be a much gentler and more communitarian place. Crystal, if you want to think about it that way, is the fulfillment of the Aquarian Age."
Whoa, what decade are you from, girl, I thought. So sleeping with everyone in sight and using people and being wasted all the time and running away and coming and going as you pleased was the ultimate goal of the hippie ethic? Or the ultimate goal of the Pagan ethic, or what? Not like I really understood either one, but right now it was their job to explain it to me. Anyway, I thought it best to save up my vituperation for something that really mattered.
"You know how Sascha and Crystal met," said Elia, not including a question mark in her sentence because the answer must be old news to me. I shook my head, still not trusting myself to open my tight lips and speak.
"The summer between my sophomore and junior year at MIT," said Sascha, putting his arm around me, a gesture I submitted to sullenly, "I was visiting my parents in Ohio. My sister Daphne, who was around 30 at that point, brought home Crystal one night. Crystal was 17 and a runaway. Daphne had found her in a lesbian bar, trying to get a bed for the night.
"So Crystal spent a week at our house. The Strathmore parents were understandably not excited about the idea. Crystal talked a lot about her sexual preferences and habits (more women than men, with bondage featuring heavily), smoked weed, stole some small things, and raided my mother’s Valium stash---please don’t say anything Sara, not yet. My parents---it’s amazing that this was the one week during the summer they decided to stay home---demanded that Crystal be sent back to her own family. Daphne begged with them: Crystal had run away because her parents had abused her physically and emotionally for being gay. They’d just hurt her or toss her back out on the street if she came home.
"I was really crazy about her; she was so beautiful and desperate. But I wouldn’t lay a finger on her. Daphne had told me flat out that she, Daphne, would kick my butt and destroy all the files on my computer. The discrepancies in their ages didn’t seem to bother either Daphne or Crystal; on the other hand, I couldn’t tell for sure whether they were physically involved or not. But Crystal was Daphne’s in any case. So I tried to help out by teaching her to program a little; it seemed like it would be a good skill for her to have. She wasn’t really interested. Usually I found this to be a sign of someone who was really banal and apathetic. But in Crystal’s case, I felt differently.
"My parents and Daphne struck a deal: I would drive Crystal back to Boston and put her in a teen half-way house that would not contact her parents except to tell them that she was OK. I followed their orders---I wanted Crystal to be safe. But it was frustrating to be so intimate with her and be ordered to stay away from her. If I touched her, Daphne told me, she’d never get her life back together.
"Crystal flirted with me incessantly the whole way back. I guess she had been too afraid to do this while Daphne was around. She told me, graphically, about some of the sex she’d had. She wanted me to do drugs with her---which of course at the time I would never do, since I wanted to work as a systems designer for the CIA or NSA, or something even more secret. When she said she had the drugs with her in the truck, I nearly flipped.
"I finally dropped her off at the half-way house. It was like breaking up with her. I would have called her every day, but there seemed to be rules against that. So I sent her lots of little presents instead. After a while, they started getting returned to me. Crystal had turned 18, and was on her own again. I was crushed.
"My senior year in college, while I was being turned on by Elia, Elia mentioned this woman she was madly in love with but was afraid to sully. The woman turned out to be Crystal. But I guess that Crystal was ready to be sullied. One night the three of us had a drugged threesome. I was in heaven---sex was still a pretty new thing to me then anyway. Crystal wrote back to Daphne, with whom she had kept in touch, that she had had sex with me. Daphne wrote to me to tell me she was never going to speak to me again for such an amoral betrayal. Then she left for Botswana. I basically haven’t been in touch with her since."
Sascha paused, as if to be rewarded for his honesty. He wasn’t going to get any prizes. I knew there were lots more chapters in this saga, and I didn’t want to hear them. I burst into overloaded tears. Right there on Elia’s cushy, hedonistic bed.
Sascha put his arms around me and kissed me. I kept on crying, venting the jealousy and alienation I had tried to keep bottled up since we got married. "Sara," he whispered. "Why are you so upset? There’s no one but you. I won’t love anybody but you ever again. Please understand that. I’d shut down the company for you. I’d quit hacking. I’d throw all my machines out the window. What do you want from me?"
"I want to feel safe," I blubbered.
"You’re safe with all of us, if you let yourself be," Elia said, putting her arms around me also. "Be free." She pushed a crystal into my hand. "Take this home with you. It’ll help you feel safe." She thrust out her arm, scrabbled in her altar drawer, and came out with a little bottle filled with white powder, which she handed over to Sascha. "This should make you pretty free too. Don’t use it all in one place."
Sascha put the bottle in his pocket. "Take her home and love her to death," said Elia. "Make her happy again."
"I will," said Sascha.
*
We biked home silently into the cold wind. I was just as happy not to talk. Instead I chewed on the edges of what had just happened without really facing up to it too much. I turned to Sascha a couple of times, with a tight not-quite-apologetic smile. He smiled back at me, but he was somewhere else, and I imagined I saw the lines of code run like ticker-tape across his forehead.
We were almost home when his cell phone blurped in his pocket. How typical, I thought. Everything we do gets interrupted by a damn phone call. He motioned for me to stop. I circled my bike back to where he was artfully backpedaling to keep his own bike vertical and stationary.
"Sascha here," he said, flipping open the phone. I zipped my windbreaker all the way to the top and stared vacantly at the purple three-decker across the street while I waited for him to finish wheeling and dealing.
It wasn’t a business call. "Oh, hi," he said ingratiatingly. "How are you?" He looked at me significantly. I looked back at him blankly. "Yeah, we were just over at Elia’s---we were talking about you."
This couldn’t be happening, I thought.
"Oh, yeah, sure I remember Lark," he said blithely. "Does she still have the stereo I gave her?...I see...Oh well. But she still thinks of me fondly for the two grams of lab quality?...She wants to know if I have more?...Tell her I’m on a cell phone and anyone can listen in if they feel like it...How long? A week?...Lark and Tituba?...Well, I don’t think it’s a problem, but let me check with my wife first....Yeah, yeah, I know that’s one of the problems with monogamy, you’re not so self-determined anymore..."
He turned to me. "It’s Crystal! Her ex-lover Lark, who’s been a friend of mine, is in town, and Lark and her cat Tituba need a place to stay. I’d really like to see her, and I was wondering if we could put them up for a bit. I thought I’d double check with you, though, since Crystal is not one of your favorite people right now."
Ever get whacked really hard, bleed mightily, start to scab over, and then that brand-new scab gets rriiipped right off? That’s the closest I can describe to what I felt like right then.
"No," I said loudly, looking into the iron sky for help.
"What do you mean, ‘no’?"
"I mean, no."
"It’s not Crystal. It’s just her friend. Crystal doesn’t even need to come over."
"You don’t understand anything, do you?"
"I understand about sticking by your friends, which is clearly a concept you lack. Just as, I might add, you lack friends. Could there be a causal connection between the two?"
That stung. "Did you ever sleep with this Lark person?" I asked dully.
"Umm...no, but that’s not the point. I guess the answer’s no, then."
It had started to rain. "Me---or them. Take your pick." I got back on my bike. "I’m going home. If in fact Casa Deus is a place I can consider home." I shot off down the street through the wet leaves, abandoning Sascha to his cell phone and his endless list of unacceptables.
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