Chapter 7 #3
Another path involved going on as three.
I had polyamorous friends who recommended this kind of arrangement.
They claimed all love was good love. They argued that no love ever subtracted from another love, that all love could peacefully coexist in the same giant love blob.
They believed the only answer to a problem of love was more love.
But their way of thinking had always struck me as wishful, at best. In real life, love destroyed love.
Love ate love. The fact was, we’d sent an exterminating love into Phil’s life and he was awakening to the terror of his loss.
What did that leave? Sarah and I could go forward together alone, leaving Phil behind, mangled in the dust. We could rent a place in Ashland or somewhere else, and then what?
I had no idea. This was an option almost too scary to contemplate.
We didn’t even know each other very well.
It seemed too fast, too deep. I wasn’t sure Sarah and I truly trusted each other yet.
Sarah was obviously a person capable of deceiving her most intimate partner.
And what was I? A writer, a professional sneak.
Somehow we’d entered into a conspiracy without vetting each other. Now we were stuck together, mid-heist.
In the end, I realized I couldn’t plot any of these courses by myself.
So much depended on what Sarah wanted, what Sarah felt.
To know what I wanted, I needed to know what she wanted, and only then could we create any kind of plan.
So I drove onward, the wind pouring through the car like the breath of some devil on the other side of the mountains, shaking the crowns of the trees on the shoulder.
All the way down the highway, I bobbed in and out of my fiery pit, hating myself, forgiving myself, explaining myself, apologizing, rationalizing, and trying my best to ignore that other, buried part of me that felt so powerfully alive, like some raging monkey beating his chest.
I skirted the Santiam River, speeding past the towns of Sublimity and Mill City, and headed up the throat of the valley to Detroit Lake, which was practically empty.
I turned at the marina, now a dry dock, and followed the roads as they narrowed and darkened with evergreens.
Soon, I was pulling into a dirt parking lot filled with Subarus and Priuses coated in dust, and opening the door into the quiet of the forest. The carpet of needles was fragrant and soft, the shadows cool even in the day’s broiling heat.
I pulled my backpack from the trunk, along with my computer, which I knew I wouldn’t be touching anytime soon.
I walked through the familiar neighborhood of clapboard guest cabins, where I’d spent many serene evenings over the years, and entered the grand alley of cedars and Douglas firs leading to the main lodge.
The trees parted, and there it was, a beautiful, many-windowed mansion dating from the 1920s, circled by a grand, wraparound deck, studded with dormers, topped by a lightning bolt weathervane.
On the lawn in front of the mansion’s stately wings were children playing, sunbathers reading, couples talking.
Half-naked guests ambled the trails with their towels, shuffling to the hot springs that dotted the landscape, or to the saunas, or to the hidden gazebos and yurts where the healing workshops were held.
On the edge of the lawn, near a bed of ruffled foxglove and snapdragons, sat a wide circle of people engaged in some kind of sharing. They were passing a beach ball around, which seemed to confer speaking powers. In the circle was Sarah.
I stood in the shade of the cedars, watching her group.
It looked like she was having a fun time, laughing, listening, nodding along.
I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, but I could tell by the way the attention moved around the perimeter that the leader was talented.
He kept the flow going. He was as charming and attractive as Phil had reported, a young-looking guy with a swimmer’s build, long chestnut hair, a regal nose. I felt threatened by him not at all.
When the beach ball came to Sarah, she batted it away and fell backward, laughing.
And when the ball came back again she held it in her lap and talked easily for a while, getting some laughs.
I hated to spoil her special week, but I didn’t see any way around it.
As soon as I caught her alone, I’d make my approach.
At last, Sarah felt my eyes on her and glanced my way.
A look of surprise crossed her face. Was something wrong?
her eyes seemed to ask. Had I come with some kind of terrible news?
I gave her a shrug and a shake of the head that said, Don’t worry, nothing too dire, no one is dead.
She seemed to understand, more or less, and went back to the group, turning toward me again a few seconds later with another curious expression.
This time I gave her a look that said, It isn’t nothing, either, we have to talk.
Sarah was too enmeshed in her group to break away just yet, and thus it was almost dusk, after I’d checked into my cabin, when I saw her again, in hot spring number 7, the silent pool.
She was soaking with a few women from her group, winding down after a long day of sharing.
Wisps of steam coiled around their shoulders, the refractions of light underwater turning their naked bodies into scrambles.
I disrobed and rinsed off in the outdoor shower and climbed into the pool, taking a place on the edge of the rocky basin overlooking a field of dry grass.
The river wasn’t visible, but you could hear the current shushing the landscape, mixed with the rasp of the wind in the tan pasture.
Beyond a curtain of riverside poplars, the mountain’s dirt peak rose in the twilight, burnished with orange.
We weren’t allowed to speak in the silent pool and thus Sarah and I were left to communicate by significant looks.
I tried to express the gravity of the news again, and she manufactured an expression of appropriate worry mixed with a warning that she couldn’t just up and exit the pool with a strange man.
The other women in her group were Ashland people, after all, and Ashland people talked.
I turned away and looked at the sky, breathing with the passing clouds.
I could feel Sarah watching me for any additional clues, but we both knew I couldn’t explain anything without words.
All we could do was soak in each other’s emotional proximity.
At last, her group got up and left. I watched as she climbed the stairs and showered along with the other women, and wrapped her body in a clean, white towel.
Then she walked away with a final, lingering, querulous glance that I answered with a frustrated grimace.
A few minutes later, I rose from the pool as well, and left the silent waters to the next bathers.
An hour later, at dinner, I finally caught her alone at the buffet.
The first wave of diners had passed through the line and people were returning for seconds of collard greens and quinoa pilaf.
Sarah was grazing the trays, loitering, and I took a place next to her, allowing the low murmur of conversation to mask our talk.
“What are you doing here?” she said, scooping some pilaf onto her plate.
“I have to talk to you,” I said, accepting the spoon and taking my own scoop. “It’s important.”
“What’s it about?” she said.
“I don’t think this is a good place to talk about it,” I said. “Too many people.”
“I have a session after dinner,” she said. “I’m not free ’til eleven.”
“Can you skip it?” I said.
“Laura Baldwin recognized you,” she said. “She asked me if we were friends. In a way I didn’t like. I don’t think I can miss the session now.”
“How about after the session?” I said.
“Where?” she said.
“The Sunrise Yurt,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, and drifted to rejoin her group at the center of the room.
I got to the yurt first. It was on the outer edge of the resort’s grounds, bowered in a grove of cedars, buffered by beds of maidenhair fern.
During the day, it hosted meditation sessions and group encounters, but at night it was empty, a clean, sheltered womb ideal for a secret rendezvous.
Tonight, the air in the yurt was stifling hot, perfumed by the cottony scent of the padded flooring, mixed with notes of cedar armature and canvas wall, plus a strong hint of sandalwood incense.
I closed the portal door behind me and waited in the pitch darkness, already sweating profusely.
At last, I heard her footsteps on the earthen path and she entered the dome.
“Are you in here?” she whispered.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Where?”
“In the middle.”
She crawled toward me until she touched my arm and found my hand. Our fingers clasped and we held each other for a moment, and kissed, returning ourselves to each other’s possession.
“It’s so hot in here,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Maybe there’s somewhere else we can go,” she said.
“No, this is a good place,” I said. “We don’t want anyone seeing us.”
“So what’s going on?” she said, catching my graveness. “Tell me.”
I didn’t know how to break the news to her except bluntly. “Phil knows something is going on,” I said.
“Fuck,” she said, with more resignation than anything else. The word didn’t come as any great surprise. How could it? For months, we’d been sneaking around, having sex in Phil’s own house, right under his nose. It had only been a matter of time before he started putting things together.
“He doesn’t know it’s between you and me, though,” I said. “He thinks it’s between you and somebody else.”
“Who does he think it is?” she said, mildly offended.
“He thinks you’re seeing your group leader up here,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” she scoffed.