The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace Read online

  By such climbs something was created: at the top of the stairs, in the wall or ceiling, a door would appear; and through it our climbers would go. They found, as they had hoped privately and for so long, that these secret stairs led to a room in another house. In fact, all the secret stairs in the world led to one or another room in this special house. This being so, during their visit our climbers met people from distant lands, who, by a natural development of commonsense skills of living, had done the central, necessary thing—they had rid themselves of themselves. In doing so, they had thrown off the melancholy and bitterness that in our day pass for marks of a serious mind. So were they able to have new lives of impeccable kindness, easygoing clairvoyance, and powerful account. Some of these people, it is said, were librarians who could read your mind when they shook your hand, and then would know how, mischievously, to be most helpful to you. Some traveled along with the wind because there are ideas we can earn only if we are invisible and far-rambling. Some of them, called upon to live for a spell of time in deep space, had learned how to garden among the stars. Others who worked as marine biologists might carry all the oceans in the pockets of an old coat.

  In this house, all these people shared just such common capacities and taught one another a way of gift-giving that was bound up with blessings and adventure.

  Now from the many doors of this meeting-house (which was nowhere, since it could only be entered by means of stairways that led nowhere) a person could leave and find herself in many different parts of the world, following almost any occupation. And some would do so, and in that way of traveling take up new lives of secret purposes. The rest would return down the old stairs to their old houses and resume a life that was apparently the same, but was never the same.

  As for the original builders, they prospered greatly and secretly, and all of them are now retired. Some of the climbers of the special stairways have taken up the work the builders are now too old to do. There are now, for example, in many cities, streets you will not find on any map, which lead to other interesting and habitable planets; and factories that do not seem to produce a visible product, because they produce winks, tricks, dances, and metaphors. We should mention, as well, a house on a superbly hidden street, where a woman is writing a sacred text that will be used to correct and update, at long last, all the sacred texts we presently have.

  And there have been some special projects: in the sealed basement of an old house it once became necessary to construct a chain of tropical islands set in a luminous and merciful sea. One descendant of the original builder, it is said, has even constructed an entire university between two petals of a flower.

  Of course, many people, especially the men who own rival construction firms, claim that such things do not exist because, just like the magical stairs, they are not useful to everyone. The female contractors, though, just carry on with their indispensable, hidden work. And they express certain doubts about the virtues of self-evident usefulness.

  For example, the hearts of men, are they useful? And if they are not useful, do they exist? And if they do exist, where are they all?

  The Book of Genesis, of course, exists in many versions; and creation stories in the Near East, and worldwide, have now been much studied. In New Orleans I attended some talks at a gathering of theologians, who seem to have, as a group, an abiding affection for gumbo and rum drinks.

  I asked a scholar of the Bible what understanding she had developed of the actions of Eve; and she told me this story.

  EVE: WHY WE LOVE HER SO MUCH

  She was mostly alone in the world, which was not a bad thing, because of the intricate and tranquil detonation of beauty everywhere around her. She studied the flora in all the minutiae of its divinity—she loved the garden. And in order to show that love, she asked the help of the animals.

  She asked Adam, but he was not always curious. He was, in fact, rather satisfied with himself and his own conceptions, and sometimes had no particular inclination to engage with the garden; or, in fact, to explore what kind of outlandish collaborations of mind he might have with his companion. Eve, as someone who could conceive and bring forth life, knew what he could never know—she knew that risking your life is necessary and obvious. She knew that they should study their home grounds, that beauty is conceived and sustained by adventures in love, that perfection of place is a natural complement and outcome of the completion of soul.

  She knew that if they learned, urgently and everywhere, all they could in the garden, then whatever their fate, they would have a better chance.

  So when the snake, who knew life when she saw it, and would have helped Eve in anything, told her the location of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she ate of its fruit and became wise. She even gave some to Adam, who, in his desultory way, ate some: and so they were wise together.

  And what then did they do, this wise woman and man? They made aprons of fig leaves. And why? Contrary to what we have heard, it was not because they were ashamed—a ridiculous, unsupported idea. It was partly because they wanted to make something for one another; but it was mostly because each of them, having tasted of the fruit, saw that the other was beautiful. They wanted to cover this beauty, so as to make its uncovering more various, more teasing, more storied; because, being wise, they saw how the good world may be kept alive in the playfulness of a couple in love.

  Into this happy scene came God, trudging along, in a bad mood. He called for them, and Adam, who still could get nervous, and like men everywhere wanted to please the boss, went ahead and spilled the whole story. Whereupon God, seized by the most unfortunate temper tantrum in history, started hollering.

  After He had finished with a whole set piece of excited pyrotechnics and rousing calumny, He came to His senses and recognized that He should get down to business, because He had real problems: if this thoughtful and adventurous pair, already wise, and delighted with one another, ate now of the Tree of Life, they would be as gods! Yikes! What were they thinking? Didn’t they understand that only He could be the one cockerel, the one swashbuckler, the one cloud-draped protagonist in this story? Worst of all, what if they discovered the truth about Him? That His Name referred to a knowledge that, by means of their work and love, could belong to them? That it was their origin and destiny? As gods! Then what would He do?

  So, wanting to protect His recently conjured theological monopoly, He hustled them from the garden with appropriate curses and arranged for the fragrant and lovely floral center of creation to be protected by angels and flaming swords. Adam and Eve, left alone at last, went straight to bed; and the rest is history.

  But some have pointed out that Eden was not forbidden to anyone else, and that the beauties of Eden were protected forever. Others have noted that although the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden to Adam and Eve, the Tree of Life was never forbidden. And some say that before eating of the forbidden fruit, one of our couple had already eaten of the Tree of Life.

  Which is why women have that smile.

  One of the stories told by a woman about herself. She was irresistibly intelligent, sexually effervescent, and for years afterward, on sunny afternoons, when I closed my eyes, even briefly, I would see her. She lives in the Dutch Antilles. I have simply never known anyone with such an easygoing, offbeat genius for life.

  THE WINDSWEPT MORNING OF JULIANA

  Juliana, who lived on a tropical island near the beach, was not contaminated by the pessimism that turns up everywhere, like a dash of arsenic in all our food. She never had known the rank poison of despair. Rather, her days rolled along with the standard joys and certainties, stopped only by moments of amused clairvoyance: sometimes, grains of beach sand looked to her recognizably like planets full of the most bounteous life.

  Her boyfriend, she had sent away, for being too goal-directed. But at least he had sought the midmost of her pleasures, and wanted to dwell at length in those blessed regions; so that she remembered with thankfulness how, after his devoti
ons in the moist nights, she had lain loose and shining in the moonlight.

  In the morning, every morning, she swam in the ocean. She loved the cool green water, the sting of the salt, the sense of envelopment and welcome and relief.

  In other words, an ordinary woman.

  And so it was, in her ordinary way, Juliana woke up one morning and thought: Wait a minute! This business about heaven, what if it’s all a trick, to tempt us to look far away? What if the next world was here, right under our noses? What if it’s in the kitchen, on the front porch, or comes by with the birds? And she leapt out of bed and went to see.

  As she was doing so, she heard a knock on the door. It was a man claiming to have answers to her questions.

  “And who the hell are you?” she asked in her circumspect way as she threw open the door.

  “I am a cyclone,” he answered amiably. And, barging right in and turning before her eyes into a miniature version of the huge coiled storms that passed over her island, the man rotated through the house, swishing the bedclothes, blowing her skirts all over the place, knocking over cups, and nearly stripping from her the light robe she was wearing, beneath which she was naked as the sun and moon. All this he did with a roaring that, she noted, had a kind of surly playfulness.

  Metamorphosed again into a man, he stood before her.

  “Now you know,” he said.

  “What do I know?” she asked, hanging onto her robe.

  “You’ve cracked the riddle,” he said.

  “Have we been properly introduced?” she asked.

  “You’ve gotten the joke!” he added triumphantly.

  “Is this whole show some kind of offbeat amorous overture?” she wondered aloud.

  “Yes indeed,” he said, “the whole show.” And he kissed her full on the mouth, a kiss of salt, wind, and moving skies. A girl could not help but be a little intrigued.

  She meditated on her next move. She looked at the cyclone before her. He grinned.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” she said, and she threw off her robe and took him straight to bed, where as she had guessed he proved to have a sustained and cyclonic style.

  Pleasure, Juliana thought, was meant to be just this rough, spiritous movement, the turning and building, the fine, enfolding, irresistible light, the upwelling power with a peace at its center.

  As they lay in bed later that morning, she asked him:

  “What riddle?”

  “The trick, the joke; the simple thing, the hope,” he answered, and she noted acerbically to herself how, after love, all men get vague.

  “It appears,” she said intemperately, “that the distinctions we have heretofore taken for granted, such as those between heaven and earth, nature and culture, man and woman, love and knowledge, are no more than mere habit, sloth, assumption, and plain stupefaction; and have no logical necessity, nor ontological legitimacy. This being so,” she concluded, “everything is changed.”

  And he grinned at her once more, and so their conversation went, until she slipped over on top of him and over his face let loose a stream of kisses—long ones, of real suavity and spiciness.

  And that is why it is said everywhere: any knock at the door means the world is looking for you.

  And that is why it is said everywhere: if you are ready, everything is ready.

  And that is why it is said everywhere: religion begins at home.

  A translation of the shortest story told to me by a Maroon—a healer who is a descendant of escaped slaves—in the tropical forest of the Blue Mountains in Jamaica. The range is full of fireflies. Some nights it seemed as if the whole forest was weightless with their luminous weaving.

  Like most of her compatriots, the Maroon was a student of the traveling light around her.

  I cherish this story because, so long ago, it marked the beginning of all these stories.

  WHERE ARE YOU GOING?

  The earth receives a windfall of light, an extravagant, storytelling fortune of light, every day; but little of it falls upon any one man.

  Every day, the people of this earth attend with great skill, study, and deliberation to what they presume to be their personal and important affairs.

  They presume so out of a belief that because they can see and appreciate what they are themselves doing, they do not need to learn where the light is going.

  In the narrow canyons of northern California, the Feather River falls from the Sierra with otherworldly exuberance. The woman who told me this story was a river guide, and so she knew the water’s work and ideas.

  WHAT SHE MEANT

  Our friend Emily was known as an eccentric, so we think it important you hear her story. Her eccentricity goes back to a time when as a young woman she walked every day at dusk along a river near her home, almost as if she were by her dedication trying to be the accomplice of the clear currents. She would take her walks to meditate upon the events of the day, which, like all the human world, she found usually to be a mixture of tomfoolery, useless complication, and impressive savagery. That is to say, she viewed things as do all young people, and people not so young, who have not been pinioned by the practical world—she walked along and wondered how she would ever be truly useful.

  As she walked, she would talk incessantly to herself, and those who happened by her would think that her insanity was so well-controlled and inoffensive that it could almost be called quaint. And when, after three years, she went quiet, the people accustomed to her talking thought that maturity had finally applied the usual correction to the errant young woman. But, to tell the truth, Emily was beset by another destiny entirely: a new voice had come to her, a new voice inaudible to most of the others walking by the river—which was comical, since it was the voice of the river itself.

  “Emily,” said the river, “I thank you for stopping your monolog.”

  “Then you were listening,” said Emily, in tears of relief that her secret hope had not been held so close, for so long, in vain.

  “I thought I would never get a word in,” said the river.

  “I wanted to make sure you would hear me,” said Emily.

  “Come with me now,” said the river.

  And it was then, moving to a rhythm drawn from the accumulated music of her walking, using finally the energy that she had learned from the shining that marked everywhere the waters—it was then she walked to the river’s edge, paused, put one foot into the currents, and felt, step by step, as she walked, the founding of a path; as she turned, step by step, into water.

  She had always hoped a woman could learn from a river; she needed to know what a river knows. The long travels of snowflakes and raindrops moved through her understanding, and she was taught, as she tossed her way along, the histories of all the rocks, and their futures. She was the straight stream and the reluctant eddy, learning to pirouette before the rising bank and uncoil midway into the mainstream; to stretch out with power in the narrows and then quiet into wide, clear currents; to bear all the images of city and countryside, so as to mix them into her moving story. She learned the perfect hymns brought by passing waters; she saw the way the river, by masterful whimsy of running on, directs an ancient puppetry of driftwood. And she herself ran on, doing the ordinary work of rivers: fanning into a screen that might bear miniature rainbows, and polishing pebbles on the riverbed.

  Best of all were the rapids: to break up and be always the same; to burst on high and lose her way, knowing she could find it again down in the decisive currents.

  And so, chaotic and lawful, broken and healed, at peace and aglide, she stepped out of the river and walked home.

  Everyone thought Emily eccentric. We thought she was too, because we didn’t know her story until much later, and then a lot of things made sense. We remembered her saying to us: my friends, my friends, I will love you as long as the river runs; and it’s nice, now, to know what she meant.

  Some years ago I took a bus from Boston to New York City. For a time I sat next to a woman, recently widowed,
who gave me this brief account in a slow, reflective way, the way honey spills from a jar. That is, she spoke with a rare combination of regret and joy.

  HOUSEHOLD AFFAIRS

  Some people save all their odds and ends by putting them in a big closet. Then, when the seeker opens the door, he may with luck and patience find in the irregular, teetering galaxy of things there, some long-lost and desperately sought-after item.

  One man, against the advice of his wife, stored all the truths he discovered in a big closet. When he opened the door one day, he was destroyed by a boiling-forth of terrible fires.

  That is why it is said everywhere: while things can be saved, the truth must be used.

  This woman told me this story long after I had met her. It explained many curious things about her, especially her uncanny clarity, her daily search for beauty, and her feral seriousness. She told me this story in Dublin, in Ireland—a country that has had its share of apocalypse.

  MAN, WOMAN, DOG: A LOVE STORY

  Because of my boyfriend’s pet, my house was destroyed in a terrible explosion, and I have killed someone. We had moved in together, and he had brought his dog. I had misgivings about our love affair, but I could not trace them to any source. Now, of course, I know better.

  The dog, whom he had named Constantine, was a raucous little mutt, muscular and confident. One day we discovered a small bleeding rash on Constantine’s back. It was odd, the blood, because the rash was in a position where the dog could not reach it with his claws or teeth, so there was no obvious explanation for its being so raw. The rash was small.

  I wanted to take the dog to be treated, but my boyfriend refused.