lickhaven

After he made his first million, Henry Fletter quit his indifferent executive position and established a quiet existence. He drifted from here to there on various means of transportation, but without hurry or ostentation. He was not photographed by the press and considered too boring by those who set the tone of social trends. He often had his nose in a book and his feet up. He refused to be ruffled by externals or attempt to achieve emotional highs through drugs or hectic activity. He threw occasional small-scale gatherings for friends who actually liked Henry, but he did not attend public bashes.

Then one day he noticed that most of the million was gone. How? He had done little that seemed to him rash or extravagant. But the figures from his accounts and investments were plain: He had frittered – he imagined a great green pancake on a greased griddle – had frittered it away, just as though he had bounced about laughing and screaming and buying useless antiques.

With this change in situation Henry had a sudden urge to take tai chi classes – to “find his center.” His million had built up through solid, unspectacular investment of his mid-level salary at a company that designed computer software. He had been an expert programmer, a natural talent, but by the age of 26 found himself shuffling staff arrangements on a chalkboard and overseeing tortuous meetings. Now, out on his own, his organizational ability had betrayed him when it came to financial management.

Perhaps a million is simply not enough these days, he mused. “A millionaire!” Though the high gloss had worn off that catchword of the Horatio Alger era, what thin sheen it retained had inflated his mind’s expectant vision. But the million had fled as though it were any paltry sum. 

In a narrow store stacked with counter-culture tidbits, he bought a pair of slight, black Chinese shoes and a loose-fitting top for his first tai chi class. The instructor, a young American, led everyone in that uncomfortable sprung-knees stance that Henry recalled from Japanese samurai movies. He was told to let tension and desire flee, and in their place find latency, the upcoursing of potential energy.

His thighs ached.

As the session progressed, his arms and swaying body learned to execute motions of such slow exaggeration that he felt like a dog straining against an invisible leash. But at the same time, an internal vision arose. While he hung suspended, a marionette whose pivot lay somewhere below his hams, he saw, set within a yellow-green plane of light, the profile of a medieval Japanese warrior – it, like Henry, hunched in the position of potential. It wore the strange padded-cloth armor of that age.

The lesson dew to a close with the seven initiates manipulating a ball of energy between their hands through excruciatingly restrained twisting of the forearms.

Henry’s arms also ached.

At each succeeding lesson, the envisioned samurai held that same position, the stance of becoming. Yet as Henry neared completion of the 22 primary moves of tai chi, the restraint holding both warrior and viewer in strained contention dissolved. They could relax now, together – into eternity if need be.

By then, Henry’s million had fully absconded. He owed amounts on his credit cards of which he would not, previously, have taken note. He put his large house on the market but could find no buyer, and so moved into a small apartment whose rent (along with food and clothing) was covered by leasing the large house to a communal group that paid good money but did a fair amount of damage to the walls and woodwork. Yet when he visited these former precincts, he was strangely untouched by their disarray. The warrior’s active passivity had taught him well.

In the classroom – a second-floor loft cleared of partitions, leaving small holes in the floor that snagged the smooth slide of the narrow black shoes – he became interested in a slim, fey woman who was returning to the lessons after some absence. He learned from her that she had mastered the full regimen, including a second tier that encompassed 105 further movements, but had let her concentration slide.

The  instructor adopted her as a model, or demonstration dummy. Her hands Mia Farrowed the air, trailing ether from the fingertips, but Henry found them somehow graceless and imprecise Why did the instructor hold her up for emulation when she failed the exactitude he championed? Possibly she alone of the students knew all the forms? Equally possibly, they were romantically or sexually involved. Her restrained adoration could be seen as a statement of personal attraction, or as appreciation of a higher-level exponent of the art.

Henry was initially repulsed by her weak, yielding mouth, yet his sexual fantasies became increasingly graphic, even to pushing the visionary warrior from his perch. He considered inviting her for an after-class indulgence at the Chinese restaurant on the street floor, below the classroom. But what could they talk about? Surely, she was deep into mystical things and must find the material world a necessary evil. Certainly she would not eat meat; no one with such an unengaging mouth ate meat or discussed society pragmatically.

As he slipped back into his street shoes, he noticed that their meagre piles of belongings had snuggled side by side in a lonely corner of the room. When she stooped to pick up her coat, he said, for no clear reason, “I’ve lost a million dollars.”

“Oh. Goodness. Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could I help you look for it?”

Henry’s laugh rose like the minor precursor to a volcanic eruption, then overflowed into orange-red lava. Together they would scour the world in search of his squandered cash. They would visit Singapore, Nairobi, Cape Town, Inner Magnolia, Haberdashistan, then return to discover a pot of gold behind a boulder in Kansas. Throwing back his head, he closed his eyes and was amazed to see the warrior likewise wracked with mirth.

He shook himself loose from both vision and hilarity to explain that the million had not been casually mislaid, but scattered by time to the financial winds. She listened in Bambi seriousness, her mouth releasing an occasional lopsided smile not shared by her eyes. Henry’s erotic fantasy, wallowing beneath the surface, disgusted him. This  stripped-down model of unadorned Woman, wraithlike and insubstantial, was a Munch scream tamed to an urban mew.

What had gotten into his loins?

In the Chinese restaurant, she ordered the predicted vegetable dish, a Szechuan tongue-sizzler that he sampled tentatively but could not imagine fully ingesting. Famished, as always, from 45 minutes of aped asceticism, he ordered shrimp egg fu yung and a plate of wor shu duck, dispatching both in non-stop slurps. The woman, Carole, masticated her fried hot peppers without comment or apparent discomfort. He did not attempt to pay her bill – the proper, liberated approach to equality.

They were headed in opposite directions that night, both by means of public transportation (Henry had put his various wheeled extravagances on the block long ago), so he could dredge up no reason to prolong their evening. He watched her walk down the street, straight-shanked and minimalist, and felt the visual perspective torque, sucking her into the distance where she might, truly, merge into the vanishing point.

For the first time in his life, he had an erection in a public place.

“Would you want it back?” she asked of his evaporated million following their next session.

“Of course.”

This evening he offered no Chinese enticement. Their steps led in the same direction from the simple expedient of Henry lying about his directional intentions. Do tai chi masters lie? he inquired of his half-squatting warrior. It may have shaken its head, but that was difficult to ascertain in profile.

“Doesn’t that feel, oh, materialistic?” she asked.

“To want it back? It seems realistic. I’m going to tai chi and practicing twice a day at home, reading Eastern philosophy and trying to understand unfamiliar diets, and that’s only possible for me to do because I have a pittance-plus left from renting my house and selling everything I can get my hands on. When that’s gone, the pittance, I’ll find some damned stupid job and stop reading and practicing and, eventually, coming to class.”

“You don’t have to.” Her mouth drooped as though the last restraint had fled the resiliency of her lips. He wanted to bite holes in her face, do her limp visage immense sexual damage.

“I don’t have to, but I will. That’s how I’m put together. I left being an executive because, whatever I am at any moment, I’m just that, no time left over to be anything else. Making money was an extension of being an executive, because an executive always thinks and talks work and money. Now I think only about mystical moves and spiritual expansion, no mental opening left for money. So I’ll be dead broke in about a month unless I can sell the damned house, in which case I’ll be dead broke in six months. The rent I got for the house the other day I’ve already spent at the bookstore on yoga treatises. And they all read exactly the same – you can speed-read down the middle of any page, absorb the mystical buzz words in passing, and you’ll know everything the books have to say. When I’ve read them all and spent it all, then my mind will flip back to money. The cycle will repeat.” (The warrior nodded agreement, or was perhaps shooing a fly.)

Carole’s fawn eyes widened. “You couldn’t have spent the whole rent money at a bookstore.”

“And Indian music. Thirteen CDs by people like Ravi Shankar, the one the Beatles liked. So far, they hurt my ears.” He did not look at her, would not again embarrass himself below the belt. No other woman, ever, had so directly excited him. Yet he could not envision her naked. And penetrating her through her loose black pantaloons… he dare not imagine it.

In bed with her, at last naked beside him, he tried to remember her clothed, swerving to the tai chi movements, her thin knees more nimble than his. No erection answered. So he told her he was mortally tired, on the rim of a magnificent exhaustion. Perhaps she accepted this as true, more likely not. Either way, she did not call him on it. As he fell beside her into pseudo-sleep, his mind focused on how to retrieve that lost million, not a thought of her body remaining, clothed or naked. 

His lost million.

Awake to a gloomy day, he played a morning raga by Ali Akbar Khan while she gazed as though he were something vaguely familiar if not quite comprehensible. He knew he had made a mistake. How major a mistake?

Was there no way out of it that would not include self-betrayal? “Should I kill myself?” he asked.

“My goodness! Why would you consider that?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why are you talking about it?”

“It’s exploratory.”

“I should leave.”

“Yes.”

She grabbed haphazardly for her clothes. “You are a disgrace, a peculiar disgrace.”

“That’s a good way to see it. I wouldn’t have thought of it in those, in that term. You won’t, then, trek the world with me to recover my lost million?”

“I would not now go to the street-corner with you to buy a newspaper.”

“Ah.” He stood, strangely dejected. He had made breakfast for them both, toast mostly, with things to put on the toast. “And tai chi?”

“One of us must leave the class. I would rather it wasn’t me.”

“I’d rather that too. You belong there. I’m somewhere else – not the place where the million dollars went. I’m just making noise, I have no centered being. Get some toast before you leave. I’ll be quiet, silent if you want, inconsequential otherwise.”

She dressed quickly, mis-setting buttons and having to redo them, glancing at him and quickly away. He wondered if she would cry or spit or… no, she would not scream imprecations or cry or spit. Her center – her pretend center? – would hold.

“Stay,” he said.

“You asked me to leave.”

“I acquiesced to your desire to leave.”

“Why are you talking like a thesaurus?”

He laughed, confused. “Maybe because it would take too long to talk like an encyclopedia.”

She waved her Chinese slipper, the last item yet to adorn her leaving-taking body. “You’re either a nobody or everybody who ever lived.”

“I’m the third son, the folktale failed son of a late-proliferating couple.”

“I could like you. I wish I did.” She inserted her foot in the slipper. “I almost do.”

There was no comeback to that. Had she made an offer of hope only to assure him it would be abandoned?

As she reached the door, he placed a hand on her shoulder, not in restraint or affection.

“We couldn’t have found it, searching for it together, what I lost. It’s not the kind of thing you put down somewhere and pick up again. It’s lost in dribs and drabs. You have to recreate it, to multiply it for the next time, so that when it’s lost again it’s just part of something larger and doesn’t really matter. It can stay gone that second time yet be replaced again. And again. And again. That’s an assumption. Some people’s assumption. And it works for them. An investor’s assumption. I think it could work for me. If I continue to care. I care about this first loss, but not sure I could care the second time or a third. First loss, first love? I didn’t love that million, I just lost it. I’m pissed at my carelessness. Wouldn’t you be, to lose a million of anything? That much money is intangible anyway, so why should it become more important if it’s more money or more often or a longer time that it’s lost? Whatever we might have done together, the looking wouldn’t be pointed just to that, to retrieving the lost million, maybe not to that at all. Hard to say, wouldn’t you say?. Eh?”

Carole spun the doorknob a quarter turn. “How big a load of manure is that?”

“Half a ton. About. No more than that.”

She released the knob. “So if we weren’t to look for it directly, the money itself, we could perhaps replace the million? Together?”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“Likely?”

“That would be stretching it unreasonably.”

In time, the million came back, not invading as a big gruff bear, but softly as a thousand skittering mice that nested in a questioning cosiness. Henry has his house again (still), and Carole shares it with him. Would they want a second million to keep the first company? Unlikely, because they were not looking for the million while they found it, they were following the ages-dead warrior, unskilled in the battles of today, but a giant at finding. Pennies he scoured from under couch cushions, dimes from decommissioned parking meters, quarters from the ghosts of pay phones. Dollars that floated in the breeze, unremarked by common mammon hunters, the warrior sliced into his armor with his samurai sword, leaving no stray change.

The house has antiques now, not those of great fashion, but grubby leftovers from deserted alleys, gifts from sympathetic tai chi classmates, misaligned thrift-shop oddities that rest on slanting shelves. Are they happy, Carole and Henry, Henry and Carole? If happiness is things, things such as piles of bills and coins, they are likely neither joyous or sad. If it is a state of being, a space where questions lie without seeking easy answers, they may be happy. They very well could be.

Knock on their door and ask them.