In the morning, Ralph has taken up his post by the swimming pool. He sits on a Hooters beach towel, in dirty red swim trunks. His bare feet dangle in the water. Beside him on the concrete poolside lies a shopping bag full of dope. He’s smoking and smoking. I can smell it from upstairs. He throws the spent roaches in the pool.
If anyone tries to talk to him, he ducks his head and seethes. The anger comes off him in palpable waves, it’s frightening. He won’t talk/look up/move. Left alone, he is absolutely still, but when someone approaches, he trembles with rage. Gradually, unconsciously, his hands form taut fists. His bloodshot eyes narrow.
I give myself an hour’s rest time between tries. I go out to him with glasses of water and juice. I place them beside him carefully, to rub in my patient goodness. Then:
– “You realize this was all I had, and you’re just destroying it? But I guess that’s hardly important to anyone.”
– “I loved you, anyway. I loved you so much, once.”
– “Are you okay, Ralph? I’m only worried that you’re not okay. Though you treat me as a ridiculous patsy.”
– “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean anything I say. I don’t know anything. I’m so sorry.”
When he drinks the water, I feel vindictive glee. It’s all I can do not to jeer at his capitulation. Once, I bring him a cheese sandwich, diagonally halved on a folded napkin, hinting at the one he brought me, when it was me crazy. He knocks it into the pool, seeing through my feeble ploy.
Finally I see myself as a buzzard, greedily pecking at the dying man. Then I make myself stop trying. I send Kate Higgins out with two cartons of orange juice. The fact that it’s Kate is my parting shot, and I’m left with a lingering, toxic craving to apologize because it was Kate.
Sometime toward evening of the first day, Ralph empties the bag of dope into the water. Then he just sits. The dry grass floats out and looks like leaf-fall, it gives the pool the incongruous look of a pond in late autumn. From time to time, Ralph raises a foot from the water, and inspects the clinging shreds there. He gets up, from time to time, and shambles to the bathroom, graceless as he never was, and seeming much shorter.
The second day, it rains on him for hours.
The guests gather in tense huddles, they slink from place to place. No one showers, and the cooking rota has failed. The men wear three-day beards. They have a shifty-eyed look, like ambivalent mourners, who have wished Papa dead too many times. But even more, they are hungry: their meal has abandoned them. They are hollow-eyed and restless with the need of their cruel meal. Shrinking from them, I’m unhappily reminded of the cannibal starving children I once tried to hallucinate. I tried too hard, and now I have been punished by my dream made flesh.
When I pass, they whisper: then they send a representative. “Is Ralph okay? What’s going on? Is this a teaching?”
I say I don’t know. I’m perilously tempted to hint that Ralph, like Shakyamuni Buddha, has sat down for forty days to garner enlightenment. My voice quavers, saying I don’t know.
In solitary fantasies, I explain to them how the School really came about, Eddie’s cockamamie scheme, the slippery stages to the false reality. I say, “It’s all really a macrocosmic projection of Ralph’s personality disorder.” I promise to sell the house and return all donations. I confess in self-defense that I, too, was duped. I explain it all again to Jackson Pollock, who would understand.
Another day passes, taking several years to pass. We have all aged: Ralph is wet and gnarled like vegetation. Looking in the mirror, I notice that my sense of humor is entirely gone. Getting myself a Coke, I watch myself in curiosity: here she is, getting a Coke as if drinking matters. I walk past the-pool-and-Ralph like it’s an oil painting of my lover’s brutal death. Then I’m angry again, wondering how he can possibly blame me for this disaster.