Mother and The Lama: Part III

On July sixteenths, Mary and I drive Sonny to the cemetery and leave flowers for his wife and beside her, for his mother. I am embarrassed that Drummer is gone, it makes me too much older than Sonny. Yet it is inevitable. I will no longer go with them to

see George, the realities are too naked. George understands this I am sure. Mary and Sonny do not. They call me selfish. I allow it, I accept it, I know the truth. Protestation is irrelevant, lessons are only learned through death. But with Mary away, with Jason away, I remember loneliness, for even on the top rung, there is loneliness. 

I have a boil on my chin which I refuse to have removed. It could be easily done, but secretly I want Mary to touch it first. She pretends she does not care about it, yet, even in intimacy, she subtly, delicately, beautifully, avoids it––moving fingers, lips, arms, gently around it, tracing my face with fingertips of purity. She climbs trees and avoids the poison oak, she picks wild roses without danger, she dances around cobras leaving them senseless and alone, this, she has learned.

George has several growths on his body. A goiter I call the Buddha belly falls over his collar, its manifestation is undisguisable. Before I stopped visiting, I stroked the flesh of the belly to drive away the loneliness it caused. I know George appreciated the gesture, yet Mary tells me he has yet to opt to have it removed. This I do not understand, but I am not George yet: I give him the benefit of the doubt.

Mary and I often go to the theater and listen to the symphony. This habit we developed after Jason left. It fills the spaces, somewhat. Once we attended a 

performance of Mahler’s 8th,The Symphony of a Thousand. Mary was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the production, by the brass behind us, by the four woodwinds far to our left, by the violins in the balcony, by the children’s voices. I was caught in the Faust, in the end of knowledge, the end of music. Leonard Bernstein said that Mahler’s symphonies lose popularity not because of their difficult scores, nor their lengths, but because, their agonizing message is simply too true, telling something too dreadful to hear. Watching the conductor turn to us, the audience, for the purpose of cuing the various musicians spread among us, I understood the loneliness of community, I understood what music could not do.