16

THE BOHEMIAN CLUB MET FORMALLY EVERY SUNDAY, and every week, the gatherings seemed to grow. It was the closest Bellinas came to offering dinner and a show. The table we’d eaten at on our first night lengthened by yards and yards, but it was never short of food or guests. From their own expensive homes in cities near and far, an assortment of the young and beautiful and influential arrived early to Rose Manor and stayed late. They were invited by Mia or Manny—if not via the wind, then I can only assume by some illicit device. In addition to the nonsense of Manny’s sermons, there was always talk of future artistic projects. Of important business connections. In that way, the gatherings were not unlike parties in New York. Palms are greased just as easily in the woods. Guy was most attentive to me in the group setting, prompted to affection by the other couples, whose hand-holding and other small touches were as contagious as a yawn. I found myself going every week, if only for the chance to feel his affection. Neither of us could bring ourselves to touch the other alone after the shock of my reaction to him that first morning.

As the men spoke aloud their visions, the women flitted between preparing food and drinks in the kitchen and sitting cross-legged on the blankets, woven by Aster, that spread across the floor in beautiful geometry to nurse their babies. When Manny decided it was time to begin, everyone gathered at the feet of their leader. Guy often sat with Aster, and I was happy to see him chatting with my new friend.

“Please, please,” said Manny to any newcomers at the start of each session, “tonight, I am Father M.”

He implored us then to close our eyes while he launched into their ridiculous prayer and a sermon, for want of a better word. He called them “listen-in sessions” and implored us to do so, while bowing his head and pointing to his heart. They could also have been just “listening sessions.” I never bothered to ask. “Look around at the beauty, the splendor, of where we are.” Pause for congregants to look out the windows offering ocean views, to admire each other’s style and symmetry. “Take it from me. Thoughts are the ultimate technology. Feelings are a powerful technology.” Laughter. Tears. “Have you ever noticed that profit”—here he pulled out a dollar bill from a fold in his T-shirt sleeve—“and prophet are the same word?” Murmuring. Awe. “I’ve been called a genius, but you made all of this.” He emphasized the “you” and the “made” and the “this.” All of it, I guess. “I know what you must be thinking, but try this: Don’t think. Just appreciate. Because thinking can get in the way sometimes, right?” More laughter. More tears. “But whatever you’re crying about, you made it happen. You thought it into being, the same way you thought this place—even me—into being. It’s all your sphere of consciousness.” And so on and so forth. Your thoughts make reality. But don’t think too much. When it got too confusing, I found myself drinking cup after cup of tea.

The few older residents of Bellinas usually attended, though it was unclear to me if their attendance was required or expected. They lined up in front of Father M to ask for favors only he could grant, as if he were a feudal lord and they, the townspeople, were his subjects. In fairness, and as relayed by Aster, it seemed that what little he had not yet taken control of in Bellinas really was in terrible shape. These residents would not subjugate themselves if he offered nothing.

“I need some help with the property taxes this year,” said the owner of the general store, a hunching older man who had been born above the bar on Main Street, which he’d owned at one time. He was Wyatt’s father, long a widower. Also, an informer, I suspect. How else would my purchases and queries about sugar and coffee be known to the Roses?

“Bro, you know I would love to help you out,” Father M said to this gentleman with the lined face and patchy gray beard. “Maybe we could arrange a selling price for the land out by . . .,” said Mann—excuse me, Father M. He did not change his garments, awkward in any social context. Only his countenance was altered, and barely at that, so used to the expectation of unwavering authority from his time in Silicon Valley, or simply from his time in the world as a man. As Father M, when his hands were not raised to bless his followers, seated as he stood in front of them underneath Mia’s portrait, they were pressed together in prayer in front of his basketball T-shirt.

“Our fishing dock is about to collapse . . .,” muttered an older woman, formerly the mayor for some decades. Her white hair had all but escaped from a bun, and she walked in short limps with the help of a cane.

“I live to serve the community,” said Manny, extending a palm to her head and dislodging the last strands of white from her bun. “Why don’t we talk about the little island you own in the center of the lagoon.” She hobbled away, hair pins landing between Father M’s seated admirers until she reached the door.

“I heard you paid our museum a little visit the other day. Hella neat,” Manny said to me at one Sunday meeting, after the townspeople left. His exhale stuck to my hair. The soft jingling of the bells had not alerted me to his approach, and I lurched forward in alarm. Thinking myself only startled, I found it hard to breathe with him so near. I reverted to slow, counted breaths before I could respond. One. Two. Three. Four. I turned around to face him, arms wrapping around my chest and fingers covering my ribs, no longer painful to the touch, but healing in long strokes of bilious yellow. “How cool is that coelacanth fossil?”

“It is. Very cool . . . I didn’t learn much about the Mission Trail in school on the East Coast. All the new history here is so interesting, but it does seem sort of dark. Dangerous or something. Did you say at dinner before that there were Druids? Or something about the Synanon people? I didn’t see anything about that kind of history.”

“Oh, yeah. Near the main entrance to the Hidden Coast. Used to be a hall for guys where they dressed in robes and did a bunch of pagan shit. Super cool. Growing up here, you hear stories about how this place has been a magnet for counterculture and groups looking for their own way for forever. It had kind of a bad reputation for a while. Lots of suicides off the cliffs. Camps of drunks and ghost stories about shipwrecks.” He reached for a ruffle on my dress’s sleeve. “When I was a kid, the county had most of the cliff trails blocked off for a while, but, like, I didn’t want any of that in the museum. I don’t want the bad stuff remembered in Bellinas. That’s why we’re so important. We’re trying to make it a better place and be an example for the world. The Bohemian Club is all about high vibes, you know? Turning darkness into light.” He extended his hand as he spoke, his open palm coming to hover a few inches above my head.

“That brings me to what I wanted to talk about tonight. You know, I hear you’re having some trouble adjusting. I see it. I’m stoked you’re hanging out with the girls and helping Aster with her weaving, but I think we need to get you into your body more.”

“Am I not in my body now?” I took a step backward as I asked, my arms still folded across my chest.

“There’s no trust in a question, is there? You’re all up here,” he said, removing his hand from its blessing position to point to his temple. Then, slowly, he pushed his finger against my temple.

“Is that such a bad thing?” I am sure that my voice wavered. The fading bruises on my sides throbbed as I took a long, slow breath and then another.

“Not for everyone. Not if you can handle it. Women are built for so much more than what normal society lets them want. Right, Tansy?”

The worst part of what he was saying was that a small part of it was true for me. I wanted more than anything the motherhood that he implied my body was for. I could not avoid the truth that I had given up my chance to be an academic, and then any chance of ascending at the fashion magazine, to start a family with a man who lately touched me only in the company of others.

“I’m going to recommend some things for you, Tansy. Well, for you and Guy.” He smiled as he said this, shifting his body slightly. “Really, this goes for everyone.” He raised his voice, and I was suddenly aware that I was the show that night. Guy, I noticed, had his hand on Aster’s knee. The entire congregation of several dozen, my husband included, had been listening to our conversation. They all watched us. Well, they mostly watched Father M. More than one mouth hung open to collect his wisdom. “Now, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, but when you just let yourself feel good, Tansy, that is when the magic starts to happen.” He shook his head at his own profundity. I looked around and saw everyone else nodding their heads, too.

“I think you need to enjoy your body more,” he continued. “You get what I’m saying to you, Tansy? Make yourself feel good. And make your husband feel good, too. We’re not bound by a lot of the moral mumbo-jumbo that society traps people with. The most important thing a woman can be is a creator of life. A creator of pleasure for her husband. For her community. That’s when women are most empowered. Empowerment. That’s the name of the game. That’s what we’re all about here. Worshipping women as the goddesses they are. Best way to be a goddess, to be your most powerful self, is to let your husband worship you, too.”

I had closed my eyes by this point. One. Two. Three. Four. I heard some clapping. A cup of fragrant tea was in my hand suddenly, and my wariness—mortification, really—transformed into the slightly euphoric detachment of the hot springs night. Their tea had a palliative, or medicinal, effect. I was soothed by the warmth and fragrance, and slid gradually into woozy relief. The effects are very subtle. Until I was let in on the secret of their tea, I knew only that it appeared in my hands, like magic, when I needed it most.

I had several more cups in quick succession, my breath easing after every sip. I was the lecture that Sunday, an object lesson for the congregants from near and far to contemplate my failures as a woman and as a wife. One. Two. Three. Four. The only way for it to have been any worse would have been for me to acknowledge his effect on me. A consuming rage. If not for their fragrant tea, I might now be accused of committing additional crimes in Bellinas.

Mia came to my rescue, softly announcing what passed as dessert. The women had set out simple plates of sliced fruit, and the nonresidents began to leave. Eventually, it was time for us to go too. We walked the short distance back to our bungalow buffeted by the cold wind, and I was grateful for her presence. Something must have clicked for Guy during the session. Had the other men not clapped his back and punched his arms as we left? They were sending him off to bring his wife back into her body. Did they not wink at him when I wasn’t looking the entire evening? As usual, the door appeared to open on its own. We practically surfed up the stairs, my hand in Guy’s, but I pushed him away in panicked breaths.

“No, please, another time, Guy,” I pleaded.

“You say you want a baby, Tansy, and then you won’t let me come near you.” He threw my hand back to me. His raised voice sounded as loud as the wind. Or perhaps it was the wind, the nightly howls amplifying his anger. I sometimes accused him of raising his voice, when we were fighting, but he would tell me that was just how he spoke. That I was too sensitive. That my hearing had been affected by how emotional I was.

But I wanted a child, that was true. This was typically the way to go about it. “I’m sorry, Guy. Come back. I’ll be better,” I called out to him. For the first and what would be the only time in Bellinas, my husband and I came together. I didn’t know it then, but it was already too late.