Ideas of Heaven Read online

  I met Peggy in a pub in London, and when I first picked her up I thought she was hard-edged and cold. She was a pretty woman with odd features—blade-like bones and round eyes—and I didn’t know how to read her expressions then. She was from Chicago, and she and her girlfriend had just been hitchhiking through France. She was surprised when I asked if anyone had given them trouble on the road. Why would they have trouble? “Little French twerps,” she said. Leaning on her elbow at the bar, she listened to my stories without much apparent interest. She drank more gin than I did, and then we went back to my hotel and stayed up all night having relentless and happy sex, and we were together every day and night after that.

  Maybe it was odd of us to be together like that as soon as we met. I had lived with different women through most of that decade, so it didn’t seem odd to me. Peggy too had hardly been alone. Moving in with people was easy for us because we were selfish and didn’t flinch at saying what we wanted and what was out of the question. Peggy was especially blunt. And I had an offhand way of being implacable.

  I wasn’t smitten right away. I liked Peggy fine, but it wasn’t until we had been together a few weeks that the stories she told about herself began to burrow into me. How she dropped out of college to run off to Miami, how she had a biker boyfriend in high school, how her mother wouldn’t send her money when she was stranded in Alabama. All this information made a nest in me. I traded back certain tales of various women I had been through love with; my life had no adventures but these. Peggy took my side in most of the incidents, even when I made a point of blaming myself.

  I never thought of Peggy as a warm person—she had a distinctly sharp tongue with tram conductors and newsmen. But she was now and then suddenly tender. She’d grab my hand and kiss it while we were walking down the street, or she’d decide to slip into the tub with me in the hotel’s bathroom, down the hall from our room.

  Those surprises undid me. In bed I would feel a terrible mellowness in my heart. When her head was resting on my chest or we were lying flat under the covers, holding hands, I would drift off to sleep and hear myself think, thank you for this. Whom did I think I was thanking? There was no God I believed in at the time, but I must have been floating on reverence.

  WE HAD EACH been traveling for as long as we could on as little money as we could. Our goal was to stay in London until the cash ran out, and sometimes we argued about whether tandoori takeout was too expensive or whether underground trains were a rip-off, but most of what we wanted then wasn’t hard to agree on. And we had a lot of free time to spend in bed. In our poky and dismal hotel, the cleaning staff was always walking in on us. There was no time of day that the room was safe for them.

  Right before we finally had to go home, we walked around in a tense glow, two people about to jump off a cloud together. We didn’t even talk much about what lay ahead. Peggy’s symptom here was to go steal a leather jacket for me from a very hip and expensive store on High Street Kensington. I’d always liked that store. It was a stunning gesture on her part, and it moved me greatly, despite the fact that she was caught walking out the door with the jacket in her tote bag and I had to talk the manager out of having her arrested.

  Then we flew back to the States on our last dime, and settled in New York, which was my city, not hers. I got us jobs working for an antiques gallery run by people I knew. I don’t know how I got us two jobs, but Peggy and I did everything together then. And they were not bad jobs either. We started off packing up the furniture that the owners took in their truck to antiques fairs all over the Atlantic seaboard, and then when I got a little more conversant with the pieces, they put me out on the floor with customers. Peggy did a lot of phone work. She could be efficient when she wanted to be, and she was good at reaching people who put her off.

  Peggy liked New York (I had thought she would), and we went out almost every night, drinking and meeting people and taking the occasional drug that anyone offered, adding a needed shimmer to our days. Our days would not have made sense to us without that. One night we came out of a bar after many hours, and I had such an expansive drunk on, I was in love with anyone who passed us on the street—how interesting and complicated they all were, what worlds of teeming detail they all contained—but I loved Peggy the most. The two of us were hanging on to each other, and I led us into the recessed doorway of an office building, where we kissed for so long that my hands moved naturally under her clothes and I wanted us to make love right then and there but I was too drunk to manage it. Peggy was laughing, the whole thing struck us as hilarious. Later, after we were back in the apartment, I lay in bed still half-dressed, with Peggy naked and asleep next to me, and I stared through a window that overlooked an air shaft, illumined by one beam of light. It was an elementary vista, and it pleased me to recognize its beauty. I felt utterly powerful, utterly at home.

  WHY DID WE want to travel again, when things were good for us in New York? Well, we did want to. We talked about it quite a lot. Peggy was hungry to be all over the place, to have place as her occupation. She didn’t want to miss anything. I too wanted to have those landscapes in me, those silhouettes on the walls of my psyche. And I still think: even when you can’t wait to get out of some hellhole you’ve chosen to visit, later you’re never sorry you were there.

  It wasn’t that hard then to save some money up, if you had a cheap apartment. So we worked for a year and we went back to Europe, to Rome this time and up to Venice and then down the other side of the Adriatic to Split and from Dubrovnik by boat over to Corfu. We stopped when we got to Turkey, and Peggy complained because we didn’t have the money to go farther into Asia, now that we were at its threshold. She was a good traveler because she was fearless, and a bad one because she could take an instant dislike to a place if it displeased her right away. I was more curious, better at picking up languages and bits of handy information, but I was the one who had harebrained schemes for getting to unreachable spots.

  Peggy was good at making observations. She said, “No one has ever actually said excuse me in Serbo-Croatian” and “The light in Greece makes travelers believe they’re intelligent.” These were not often wrong, but she was a conceited traveler—her own remarks were all she needed from a place. I had other needs. I wanted to be changed forever by what I took in, a voyager returned with visionary glints in his eyes. But what I was going to do with myself then? I must have pictured my later self as rich in something I couldn’t spend.

  We had fine times in Turkey, but getting back was less fun. Peggy was crabby about having to go by bus all the way back through Central Europe. In Zagreb, where we stopped overnight, she got into a quarrel with a man who was selling cheese at a marketplace. Peggy was bargaining for the cheese by letting the man write down numbers—usually a good-humored process—but here she thought the man was mocking her. She thought he drew the 8 as the figure of a nude woman and the 9 as a penis. She shouted to me to witness his drawing. The numerals looked ordinary to me, penciled in European script on a paper bag. The man did laugh meanly once he saw she was not going to buy anything.

  “He’s a scumbag,” she said. Fortunately this word was outside whatever English he had. When I told her to keep her voice down, she turned and darted away from me. Where did she go? I lost sight of her at once. I walked through every boulevard and alley in that part of the city, for hours and hours. It was a handsome city, rich in stately Baroque hulks and Gothic churches with painted tile roofs and medieval stone gates, but I didn’t care about any of it then.

  At the end of the afternoon I suddenly saw her—Peggy herself, drinking a glass of canned plum juice at a streetside counter. “The man was a thief,” she said, but I knew she was glad to see me.

  I did not admire Peggy when she acted this way. Suspicion, scorn, hotheadedness about money: these were not traits I admired. I had left other women over behavior much more subtle than this. But I saw that I didn’t care when Peggy was dead wrong. My feelings for her were independent of any opinion. The
y ran in a different channel, they had their own route. It was an odd, heady sensation to know this. I kissed her neck, in full sincerity.

  She was queenly under my kisses. “Get me out of this country,” she said.

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  Afterward she referred to this as the time we faced down those Croats, and that may have been how she really remembered it.

  AND THERE WERE beautiful things in that part of the world too. From the bus on the highway, in Slovenia, we saw a man in a cart driving an ox to plow his field. The field was surrounded by deep hills—dry dirt bordered by high grasses—and the ox was solid brown, a lumbering creature intent on his task. It seemed miraculous to me that the ox was moving matter-of-factly across the landscape, an action so ancient. The man worked alone, in a dirt-smeared shirt and workpants, his face hidden by a cap. Peggy and I watched for as long as he and the yoked ox remained in sight. There were unplowed hills all around, slopes of scrub-brush and gnarled trees. The field seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Where was the man’s house? Where was his barn, the rest of his farm? It was all unknowable. I was taking it in, nonetheless.

  What did I think I was doing with this ox, this hoarded experience? I was spinning matter into thought, making a cocoon I could carry with me. Nothing seemed more necessary. Peggy and I held hands, after the ox had passed.

  It is always hard to explain to people what I actually did all day when I was traveling. And would I have gone so many places if I’d never met Peggy? Probably not. It was an appetite we acted out together. Parts of every trip were disappointing and humiliating. Parts were so full of our own stupidities that they could not be talked about at all later on. This did not curb our zeal. We came home and worked, oh, for a year or so, always with the idea that we were about to leave sometime soon. It seemed that our task was to go and view extraordinary things—we told people we were going to “go take a look.”

  PEGGY MUST HAVE gotten pregnant when we were in Bangkok, on a night after we’d been fighting. It had been Peggy’s idea to see more of Asia, but I liked Thailand better than she did. We had trouble keeping expenses down when we first got there, cheap though everything was. One morning we had a pointless argument about who smoked more cigarettes and wasted money on them, and she went off without me. “Just let me do what I want,” she said. “Is that too much to ask?”

  I lay in bed, slowly eating a rose-apple I had bought the day before and reading Rilke’s poems.

  And yet, when you have survived

  the terror of the first glances, the longing at the window,

  and the first walk together, only once, through the garden:

  lovers, are you the same? When you lift yourselves up

  to each other’s mouth and your lips join, drink against drink:

  oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.

  I got up then and walked around the city. I wasn’t used to seeing any place without Peggy, although I should have been glad to be without her. The air, for all its industrial smells, felt balmy and soft. But there were too many people, why were there so many people? Just for a taste of quiet, I slipped into a walled court, a green and palmy spot, where I walked around a temple compound and stood for a while looking at yet another statue of the Buddha.

  It was an especially exquisite statue. The figure was entirely gold, and his head was framed by the pointed arch of a flame, a flame that meant both the passions burning out and the blaze of enlightenment. Around me people were coming and going, as they did in Thai temples, lighting incense sticks and setting down intricate necklaces of flowers in front of different altars. It was just before noon, the monks’ last meal of the day.

  What’s the point of eating so seldom? I thought, and the question was a knot I carried with me for the rest of the day, all through my own delicious lunch of catfish over rice from a curry shop and the snack of fried peanut cookies I had later on with Guy, a Californian from our hotel whom I ran into on the street. Are they in this world or not, those skinny monks? What do they think they’re doing?

  Guy said, “Are you planning to become a monk?”

  “All these young Thai men do it,” I said. “They take vows and then they come back out again after a few months. It’s very usual.”

  “I know,” Guy said. “It’s an interesting country.”

  “The country’s full of people who’ve done time as monks the way other people go into the army. I’ve never heard of such a thing anywhere.”

  “Personally,” he said, “I think you should move here. It suits you.”

  It was just a passing remark, but I was enormously flattered that anyone would say such a thing. I walked home through the thronged and noisy streets, through this city that always felt like a future too dense to be lived in, and I was high as a kite on my sudden affinity for the place. The neon signs in Thai and the dinky motorcycle taxis that sounded like buzz saws and the sudden glimpse of boats on the canals all struck me with an owner’s rapture. I was in the right part of the world.

  When I came back to our room in the guest house, there were two sky-blue packs of Gauloises on the pillow, which Peggy had left as a peace offering to me. She had put an orchid blossom, magenta centered with white, next to these, so that the colors leaped against each other in the light. Peggy herself was lying with her head on the other pillow, her short hair in childish tufts and her eyes just opening as I came in. So much is given to me, I thought.

  She seemed happy to see me, relieved that I wasn’t holding a grudge as I sometimes did. When I lay down next to her and we turned toward each other on the bed, my craving for her came up from very deep in me, so that the peak of arousal was close to heartbreak.

  IF THAT WAS when our son was conceived, we didn’t know for a while. We were distracted by a number of things—what happened to our luggage in Chumphon and why we couldn’t find the right hotel in Hat Yai. On the bus ride down the Malay peninsulas we disagreed about whether the country of Thailand was being ruined by capitalist greed (Peggy said yes, I said that was a simplistic idea), and we got too annoyed to be able to look into each other’s faces for the whole ride. Peggy gazed out the window and I read my books, although the scenery was spectacular. Green rice paddies, distant hills, thick rainforest, shining rivers. When I bothered to look up, I was enchanted.

  If only we too could discover a pure, contained

  human place, our own strip of fruit-bearing soil

  between river and rock. For our own heart always exceeds us.

  I was reading Rilke on the bus. Peggy slept a lot. The bus was an open-sided truck with rows of seats and it stopped at every town along the way.

  At one stop an English-speaking couple got on, and I was thrilled to have people to talk to. But I thought Peggy paid too much attention to the husband from Brisbane. “I can’t even flirt,” she said to me later. “You can’t stand even a basic human activity like that.”

  “You can’t flirt,” I said. “There’s no distance between flirting and fucking for you.”

  We left them outside Penang, but the Australian husband did send Peggy a postcard in the U.S. some time later. Remember me? it said. Our paths could cross again. I hope.

  The monsoon season started while we were on a different bus. Out the window (this bus had windows) sheets of rain fell and afterward a steamy vapor rose from the land. Peggy didn’t exactly know when she’d had her last period, but she thought the delay was just from the rigors of traveling and from not eating as well as she should have been. Certain realities were not very vivid to us to then. It wasn’t until we came back to the States that we knew, and she was into her fourth month by then. So we had to go with it. Perhaps that was what we both wanted to do anyway.

  We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

  like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken,

  we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

  and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

  How could I not h
ave known? We slept naked next to each other every night, we talked about our every digestive upheaval and bug bite. I kept close to anything Peggy did, even when we quarreled. What biosphere were we living in? The sack of our feelings, the pocket of our “relationship.” All that emotion, and we forgot about the rules of nature.

  What would I have said to her if I had known for certain earlier on that she was carrying a child? Don’t do it, Peggy. You’ll lose your footing, you’ll slip and fall and reap havoc. You’ll be sorry.

  I wouldn’t have said that. I loved Peggy. I was excited, in a blurred sort of way, about being a father. I didn’t have the skill to look too far ahead. People seemed glad they had kids, and I had all I could do to get used to the idea. I was a man, so it was still an idea to me. Part of me probably thought that Peggy had made it up.

  Peggy was pretty volatile during her pregnancy. Sometimes she gloated and bragged and was ethereally smug. “A pregnant woman,” she’d say, “can see right through people.” And sometimes she referred to herself as knocked up and went back to smoking cigarettes. “Will you put that out?” I’d say, but we were too young to truly worry about safety.

  And we were right. The birth, although it was harrowing to both of us, was in fact very straightforward, we were told. I was white with fright at the spectacle of Peggy doing something so unlike her, submitting to round after round of torment for an outcome she had not even asked for. The heroics forced on her astounded me. Peggy herself cursed through most of it. “Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” she said to the doctor.

  She was subdued and chastened by the time we brought the baby home, as if the three days in the hospital had involved more punishing shocks. My son Eli was a lump of flesh wrapped in white flannel, a wailing and wriggling biped with features just starting to be human. I loved him from the first, but I could not believe they were leaving us alone with him.