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Memior

Lana speaks rapidly into the phone in a throaty, aristocratic English-Scottish accent. On her desk is a globe that shows the world as it was known in the 17th century. In the living room is a glass case the size and shape of a coffin, and it's full of sea shells she's collected from beaches all over the world. On the mantel is a brown ceremonial cup made from the skull of a Tibetan child.

* * *

Her passion is language, words, word play. As a child she stuttered, and so she composed long lists of synonyms. If one word wouldn't come out, then perhaps another would. "Evil spelled backwards is live," she says. "Love is contained in evolution. Lust is tsul. Tsu. Tsunami, a great sea wave formed by earthquake or volcanic eruption! A word might contain its exact opposite, or a vastly different meaning. Everything can be turned upside down, or inside out!"

* * *

The scent of furniture polish and incense. Black and white photographs in antique silver and rosewood frames. Smiling men on a palm-shaded veranda, mountains in the distance. A young woman in a white dress and wide-brimmed straw hat with hanging ribbons, on top of an elephant. Books scattered everywhere, on the floor near chairs, on the shiny black Steinway grand, and in floor-to-ceiling shelves, some of them very old with leather bindings and gold lettering on their spines. A grandfather clock, the sun and the moon on its face, a gold disc pendulum swinging slowly back and forth. Its tick-tocks are solemn.

We share a settee near a low table with a bronze ashtray. She smokes Larks. Unfiltered Pall Malls are my brand. A red-haired maid in a black dress with white collar and cuffs from time to time discreetly and silently refills Lana's silver coffee pot.

At the moment her lover is in China. Or India, or Spain, or Tasmania, God knows, he is always traveling. This time he'll be gone two, three months. He loves to fly in his airplane. He also loves sex with carefully selected young women, whom he has installed in apartments and houses and villas he owns or rents in London, Madrid, London, Rome, Sydney. "The man is absolutely insatiable," Lana says, grinning. "He always says-and I agree completely-that one may have many sexual objects, but only one love object."

The rest of the time her lover surrounds himself with old men-former cabinet officers, senators, governors, corporate board members, all those dreadfully humorless people. Why? Perhaps because they make him feel more important than he is, or they are themselves so powerful. "But all that has always been to me awfully boring," she says.

* * *

A book is open in her hands. "It's not for nothing Tahiti was known as the New Cythera, the abode of Venus," she says. "Listen. 'The native islanders organized an amusement for Cook and his ship's officers. They watched a naked six-foot Tahitian man copulate with a slender fourteen-year-old girl, and the Captain noted that neither was embarrassed-indeed, the young girl was skilled in the arts of love.' Isn't that marvelous?"

"Yes."

"Culture gives license, also imposes taboos, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"What did Paul say? 'Before the law there was no sin.' Now, God created us as sexual beings long before taboos were conceived. And there is a deep connection between sex and religion. The power of sex can sweep aside all established hierarchies of age, sex, caste, power and wealth. Sex can be seen as an expression of our yearning for the divine, a need to belong to, be possessed by, something greater and more ancient than ourselves. Not so?"

* * *

Soft lights, warmth, the echoing of Vivaldi. Rain makes a rushing sound against the windows. Lana rises, leaves the room. She comes back with an engraved silver box, in which are glass ampoules covered with roughly woven pale yellow cloth. She says, "Just relax, darling."

She crushes an ampoule then places it beneath my nose. I inhale the scent of dirty socks. Then comes an enormously pleasant, warm, oceanic rush.

An hour later a gentle chiming bell, the sound of a door opening. Footsteps in the hallway. Then a voice in a soft West Indian English accent. I open my eyes. Lana's daughter, Sylvia, enters the room. Her long golden hair is parted in the middle and falls down both sides of her face. She wears a private school's blue blazer with gold buttons, a gold embroidered crowned crest on the pocket. White blouse, plaid skirt, white knee socks.

Her eyes: large jet-black pupils ringed by crystalline blue, a pale transparent blue, the blue of a wood hyacinth blossom. When she bows her head, her face disappears into the soft gold cascade.

Lana makes no move to hide the silver box and the spent ampoules. Sylvia sees nothing out of the ordinary. She calls Lana "Mummy." She curtsies at Lana's introduction.

"Ever so pleasant to meet you, sir," she says.

* * *

Lana sits in a leather chair opposite mine, leans forward, rests her chin on her fists. "Let me guess, John. Like me you are drawn to words and language because very early on someone-a fearful and powerful force-had forbidden you to speak. Yes?"

I nod, trying hard to mask my surprise.

"There are many very disturbing things that ought to be talked about, acknowledged, and revealed. But yet you know you are expected to remain silent. Surely you can relate to this."

"Yes, very much so."

"Descartes had it only partly right. It is not thinking that is proof of our existence, but speaking. Because the linguists tell us there is no thought without language. If you do not use language, you are effectively annihilated. It is fear of annihilation that drives you to speak. And to write."

"Yes, absolutely."

"Like me you find enormous solace in the language because there are words-hundreds, thousands of them-that describe and fully affirm what you have seen and felt. A means of speaking about all those things they have said were unspeakable. Yes?"

I nod.

"We achieve great comfort in having at our fingertips-or at the tip of our tongues-such solid, irrefutable and sometimes even lyrical proofs of our own existence. Not so?"

"Yes."

"Well, then," she smiles broadly. "We are very much alike."

"Nevertheless we come from entirely different worlds!" I say.

Lana laughs. "Oh, yes, there are differences. But for every difference there is a similarity. The universe is a duality, after all, as a word may be spelled forward and backwards. Live. Evil."

* * *

"Where were you reared?" she said. "In Idaho, didn't you say?"

"No, Pennsylvania," I said.

"So tell me what you remember as a child."

I told her about the house I grew up in, on the side of a hill, overlooking a valley where the steel mill's Bessemer converters spewed out huge columns of flame toward the sky. Those roaring flames illuminated the low night clouds, made them glow a reddish orange, and also turned the adjacent piles of iron ore into an incandescent Etruscan ochre.

"Oh, yes!" Lana whispered. "A huge column of fire! The Holi of Krishna, on the full moon of every March, in New Dehli, where I lived for many years. It is a noisy, topsy-turvy carnival, where everybody switches places. All social roles are reversed. In the celebration they make an enormous, a huge bonfire!"

She said the pyre is made of planks, boards, broken furniture, all piled on a ring of dried cow-dung patties covered with straw. When the pyre is lit with a torch there is a great whoooshhh and the flames rush upward. Snapping sparks, curling locks of fire spiral into the sky.

"And that always reminds me of the bonfires of autumn leaves on our family estate in Scotland. Those wonderful leaf-burning and wood-burning scents, the smoke that hovered low to the ground. Also I loved to watch the ritual burning of piles of St. John's Wort to drive away all the evil spirits, to protect the land and the people from harm! So you see, John? We share a past of great fires. Now tell me. What other images have always remained in your memory?"

"All right," I said. "In the winter snow drifts covered the sloping front yard of the house, sometimes five, six feet deep. The milkman arrived before dawn, put a white bottle next to the door on the porch. One morning when I went out, I was surprised to see the milk had frozen, and expanded. The cream had risen up out of the wide mouth of the bottle into a squat white column, the cardboard cap resting on top."

"Marvelous!" Lana said. "Absolutely marvelous. Go on!"

"A tall, thin man stands in front of a mirror in the kitchen beside the pantry door. He takes great care with the narrow blades of the scissors as he trims his moustache, which he then darkens with a pencil. He goes to the dining room, and removes a folded, starched shirt from a brown wrapping. He tears off the narrow blue paper band that keeps the shirt folded. My father."

"The mirror," Lana says. "It's another shared image. When my father died I watched my mum at a vestibule mirror, calmly adjusting her veil. I asked her if she missed daddy terribly. I surely did, because he and I had the sweetest, most tender and special relationship you can ever imagine. And I asked my mum, aren't you ever so sad that Daddy just died? 'Oh, no, dear,' she said, 'Now there will be so much more room!' She turned to me, and said, 'How do I look in my widow's weeds?'"

* * *

When she was a little girl she waded into the sea and somehow got entangled in a thick, tight and slippery rope, and the rope and the crashing waves and the surging undertow pulled her down deep into the green gurgling water, and she was strangling and gasping, while her nanny sat on the shore, mistaking Lana's frantic waving and shouting as showing off. Little Lana could not speak! The words were stuck in her throat. She gagged and coughed, but no matter how hard she tried she could not spit those words out.

* * *

Lana's laugh is loud, throaty, exuberant. "Naturally we try so hard to be different from our parents," she says. "But nevertheless I'm much like my mum. Both she and I found it ever so hard to conceive of daughters who were not extensions of ourselves. Sylvia is more like me than I am like my mother, yet surrounding the whole thing is-um, shall we say-an awful agenbite of inwit. Do you know what that means? No? It's remorse of conscience, from Joyce's Ulysses.

"Anyway. I deeply regret that my daughter has inherited my bad traits, as I inherited the bad traits of my mother. But we cling to expectations of better things, no? Better appearance, better behavior, better thoughts. What did your father expect of you?"

"To work in his shop."

"Oh, how utterly horrid!"

The clock chimes. "It is late," I say. "I must go."

"Nonsense, " she says. "You must sleep here tonight."

She heads toward the bedroom, disappears inside. I remain where I am, thinking that I will use the couch. She reappears. "Come!"

I follow her into the bedroom. Five dozen bulging white pillows are leaning against a huge antique carved wood headboard. The bed is enormous. She says, "Please excuse me, darling, I'll be right back. Why don't you undress?"

With great self-consciousness I take off my clothes and slip under the light but warm down-filled quilt. I hear the tick-tocking of an ornate silver clock on a small cabinet beside the bed. There are faint traffic sounds from Fifth Avenue six storeys below.

Lana returns, nude, with a teak wood tray. There is the engraved silver box. And two white handle-less cups. She gives me one. "It's hot," she says as she carefully pulls aside the cover, and with small motions settles beside me.

The liquid is sweet, pungent. "A drink from India," she says. "Dahi."

"It tastes of almonds."

"Yes, almonds and anise. And bhang. Ground hemp leaves."

She lights candles, sticks of incense. I drink deeply from the cup. The liquid burns at my center, and spreads outward.

I remain very still. I await Lana's instructions, her commands.

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