Bed of Roses
On the first Thursday after Christmas we drove to Palm Springs.
The roads were vacant, except for the odd car going the other way, as a dusky blue light stole through the sand, gravel, and gas stations.
We stopped at various Taco Bells to change and feed our three-month-old daughter, Lola. Michelle had booked a cheap hotel on the same road as the hotel we wanted to stay at but couldn’t afford. The plan was to sneak into the plush hotel during the day and enjoy the food and pool there, before retiring to the cheap hotel at night.
The roads paralleled the sky, seeming to blend into one vision of color, passing off into nothing. The sky turned blue, then gold, then pink, then a very dark blue; I felt our consciousness shift, spreading into the meridian of the hemisphere, the waves of the sand, the cool, dry climate and the earthly parameters of the desert.
“The sky’s so pretty,” Michelle said.
“I know,” I said, “something else isn’t it?”
Lola cooed in the back seat. The tires and the wind funneled like a soothing binaural hum on a headset. It was meditative, and I felt the mud heap of the past, its thick, tangled traffic of visceral images and growths, begin to surface up to the now, like a winter tree cracking through the dirt. When we arrived, I parked and went into the lobby to check-in. Michelle decided to stay in the car, as Lola was sleeping.
Inside, the stillness of the reception unnerved me slightly. The desk was unmanned. There was no hum or buzz of a television or an electrical unit. Just a surprising undisturbed absence that you wouldn’t hear in LA.
The bell was there, but I decided not to press it. “Hello?” I called.
A man appeared and greeted me in a friendly enough way. He was probably younger than he looked. He had a ginger mustache and wore a stained lime green golf shirt.
“Hi there. Did you have a booking?”
“Yes, it should be under the name Clout.”
“Okay, here you are.” He passed me a laminated card. “Just make sure to give it a firm swipe. There’s a free breakfast in the morning here in the lobby. You can use the pool anytime, but the sauna’s out of order; the holiday season’s starting to die down now though so—” he smothered a belch “—it shouldn’t be too crowded.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah… Enjoy your stay.”
On the way out I noticed a fish tank near the exit. I paused, observing the depressed looking fish. The scales, the closer I inspected, resembled the links of rusted silver chainmail. The eyes of the fish were large and made out of a tougher texture than that of human eyes. There was a cheap coffee machine next to the tank. A stack of polystyrene cups sat beside it. Sachets of white sugar. A mug of plastic stirrers.
When I returned to the car, I closed the door and instinctively shut my eyes. In my mind, I thanked whatever it was—maybe randomness, maybe god—for Lola and Michelle.
The room was shabby but the bed was made well and the sheets looked clean. In one corner, near the door, a small television stood on a stand. I switched it on with the remote and searched through the cable channels. News anchors, detective shows, life insurance advertisements. Michelle opened some of the sliding windows, and the early evening light flocked toward the beige walls. She got into bed with Lola and rested her head on my chest. Lola grieved for the breast with her tiny fat fists. Michelle unbuckled her sports bra and began to feed Lola who made calm, deep breaths through her nose. Suddenly, Michelle burst out laughing.
“Look at that thing,” she said. I looked at the TV.
“No, in the corner — that light on that piece of rope.”
I turned my head. In the corner of the room, an incongruous bulb hung from a piece of anchor rope, attached sloppily to the hinges of the ceiling panel, near the bathroom.
“I know,” I said. I looked at it some more and began to laugh with Michelle. “What the fuck is that thing?”
“They’re trying to be like the hotel next door.” “It looks odd.”
“They’re failing so hard right now.”
We moved our bodies closer together. Michelle adjusted herself and returned her gaze to the television. I noticed the grim stains etched across the ceiling, the patchiness of the walls and the windows, the strange cheapness of the place, the lowliness of it, and suddenly I had the sense of being pushed underneath the threshold of something, like one of those fish trapped in the tank, pushed further down on the life scale.
The spiritual, in America, exists in the material, I thought to myself; there is nothing else. We decided to walk down to the swimming pool in the hotel at which we were officially staying for the night, rather than sneak over to the fancier place across the road; we could always scope that one out tomorrow. It was late then, about 9 o’clock, and it wouldn’t be too crowded. I pushed the gate open and we walked through. A rectangular pool bordered by loungers and parasols pressed into the center, balconies of the same shape and size — divided between each other by blurred glass — lay stacked around the edges. I looked up at them. There were no guests stargazing or conversing, only a few stray iridescent lights pouring from the glass doors, the faint monotone distortion of a television set. Above it all, the sky spun like a dark blue roundtable of studded marble. The sustained blanket drone of the desert throbbed beyond the parameters of the vicinity.
There was an older lady doing gentle laps in the pool. She must have sensed us come in through the gate—I didn’t see her look up at us—because she soon climbed slowly out the pool by the ladder. Picking up a towel on the recliner, she patted her face dry and then walked toward one of the blocks. She wore a swimming cap and goggles, and at first sight, cut a lonely figure. I couldn’t help but notice her solemn disposition. The way she waddled forward, hunched, head bowed piously, like a pilgrim on a mission; and how this—in combination with the plainness of her bathing suit, the cellulite, and streaks of light blue veins running down her legs—suddenly made her appear insurmountably strong. Then a tinge of fear needled through me, and I perceived her in a different light: I saw how inseparable she was from the sand, from birth, from the cycle, and how I, myself, in some way, were unchained, removed from the solar system, in it, but by no means an organic, purposeful portion of it. Was it the natural order for the female to be connected, for the male to be simply lost? The dream caromed off into the sky and sand as Michelle prompted:
“Climb in first, and then I’ll hand you Lola.”
I dunked my feet in the hot tub—the water a good temperature.
“Alright, pass the bundle over,” I said, as I maneuvered myself to the side of the tub.
Michelle gently offered Lola to me and I clutched her chubby form with new-parent urgency. Sidling in circles around the tub, I secured Lola, so only her feet and legs dangled through the water. The sound of the bubbles, their perpetual rumble, calmed her into a trance. She appeared at one with the world. She looked at the place at which she’d come to now, for all that it simply was—drifting, circling, gliding—her lips ajar, her eyes wide open, collecting all the atoms and minerals in things without resistance, her complete and silent awe glowing from her pink cherubim face, under the steady flow of bone white light, steeped from the moon like milk. We glided, and circled, and drifted—through the heavy troves of water, and her fascination for the world became my own. And through her eyes alone, I returned to the place from which I’d strayed, and strayed so far—I realized then—and for so long, and how marvelous it was to have been brought back to earth by an infant’s eternal wisdom, to have returned, momentarily, to a state of harmony.
When Michelle climbed into the tub, she drifted to the side, plunged her face into the water, flicked her dark wet locks of hair back against her shoulders, mascara dripping from her radiant, profound composition. She looked at the sky, the stars, then at Lola and myself stirring through the water, and she smiled. There was a gravity in her now that I hadn’t seen before the birth; something had changed, matured; an understanding which remained mysterious to me had been reformulated as clear to her. She had fathomed a presence. She appeared to me now as someone who’d seen things, felt the ache and bend of pure light, its pulsating rhythms, known the shape of its mercy—a beautiful and rare event—someone who’d travelled to the ends of womanhood and come back again stronger for it; someone who’d snuffed the clammy moisture of death in the center of a life; someone who’d grappled with a serious pressure, which many would have believed to be the force of a god.
I turned to Lola, admiring her joyful blue eyes and toothless smile. The purity of her being washed through me, and I felt a twinge, a movement in my stomach. The dark sky turned, and Michelle narrowed her eyelids and smiled. There was the pull of love between us all. I thought of those, like my father, who could no longer feel the pull, and how that pull was the thing which moved people, kept them going. Then, like salt in a neti pot, the clarity of the moment was stung through with a coarse measure of mnemonic pain: I couldn’t get my father out of my head, and I understood for perhaps the first time the longing to share joy between and beyond the threshold of the generations, the desire to affirm the links, to celebrate the tug and pull of their astonishing movements.
I thought of the complex and difficult relationship I have with my mother. She had lost her daughter a few years back — my sister Natasha — and that had wrecked everybody and everything.
Death, so unforgiving and fierce, leaving its mark on you forever. As though the two sides — life and death — lacked alignment to the human perception of things, positioned neither to expectation nor desire, eternally out of step. And this bred such a sadness in the human body — where people store their grief. This, surely, why such a terrible pain in growing is inevitable: the gradual, dawning realization that the world’s not how one hoped or imagined it would be; that in fact the world was only air, incapable of tenderness; that it didn’t matter which way the wind blew, only that it kept on blowing. After this point of realization, nothing came easy, and everything — simply being — became an insurmountable peak one could not see clearly, let alone reach.
Lola showed me her gums and giggled. The tub rumbled and she found the bubbles amusing, splashing her hands in the water ecstatically. She remained in that sacred place where she could glide with phenomena like a river over the rocks. I kissed her soft, pink cheeks and held her head against mine, and wished to keep her in that place for as long as possible, knowing it would end.
I swam over to Michelle and gave her a kiss too, passing our chubby, gurgling baby into her out-stretched arms.
Michelle cradled Lola close to her chest, and we admired her remarkable moon face, as her eyes began to close.
“We should probably think about taking her inside, I don’t want her getting too warm,” I said.
“She’s okay, just a few more minutes.”
Michelle hovered through the tub in circles, whispering to Lola, kissing her on the nose, her eyes large and certain with deep, maternal affection, hair drawn down her back. Those eyes, again: full of strength and mystery. They had unlocked things in me, too — sensations, secrets, epiphanies.
We had met in Switzerland — in Bern — at an artist’s residency, we its only participants. The air ran thin and cold, the climate clean and icy. This, along with the isolation of the experience, drew us together, enabled us to talk to each other with a freedom we did not have in our hometowns, under the mild, unsaid obligation to continue being, year after year, a falser version of ourselves in some ugly, day job community existence.
The host family were gentle and kind. They kept out of our way, fed us, helped us build and light our fires in the cabins after dark. At night, when we had finished for the day all we could do was talk. We’d rid ourselves of phones, laptops — all connections to our past selves — so there was only the air to breathe, the serenity of the landscape to absorb, and conversation.
We’d go out on to the veranda overlooking the white snow—the white mist piling over the dark pines — and we’d open up. Sometimes, when you break from your routine and the society in which you’re entangled, you can, if you’re lucky, find yourself again. That’s what happened with us: free to be ourselves as we were, to see an other for who they truly were. And so, two cabins became one; two visions collided into a life. I looked up at the glittering stars, seeming to inch closer across the desert, feeling the soft vibration of the tub. We were alone again, with another of earth’s majestic, eccentric atmospheres. Michelle came over and kissed me on the cheek gently, her eyes softly closing.
“Let’s get back to the room,” she whispered, “it’s getting late.”
I considered telling Michelle about the dream I’d had through the night — or what I could remember of it:
Bleak cemetery. Not quite a funeral. A gathering for tribal matters. Dark green stripes across an elongated lawn. Rows of blueish seats, like those in a baseball stadium, in which sat insensitive children and their parents. The children climbing down from the chairs and turning to face the grave, following one behind the other like plastic gnomes. Paying no attention to the service. Mother at the rose bed, tending to the flowers in the soil; wearing a straw hat and a black gown, with a navy and white symmetrical pattern at the collar.
The patchwork quilt of a dream continues in mourning. In silence, she goes on with her work — oblivious to the children, to the parents planting roses in the dirt bed — set on her important task, as the boisterous ones slur and play fight around the grave, the row of red flowers. I am stood at the side of the grave, at an angle, watching her.
I notice that scrambled television sets have appeared and are hovering in the sky around her; still, she continues, unfazed by their white noise. I see that I am now dressed properly for the occasion: black suit, black tie, white shirt. Perhaps I am a little wiser than before, mature, sincere. I lecture the children — respect the ceremony — but they ignore me as loudly they have the others. My mother continues tending only to her thread, not even a raise of the head to acknowledge such commotion.
Then a line of academics appears at the side, hissing in whispers — doubtlessly theorizing on the act in which my mother is engrossed. I scorn the pedantic ones — in my own way. And then: I can’t focus—the scholars continue with their heartless, arrogant, ignorant dialect and the children continue to make a mess; they are melting in their sloppiness—and both groups bother and distract me considerably. As mother kneels by the flower bed, and tends to rose, after rose, after rose, calm and measured, each visceral blood red bloom planted in honor of Natasha’s short, boundless existence.
Later, we found our way into the expensive hotel and got a spot by the pool, put our towels on the loungers, and adjusted the parasol to keep Lola out of the sun. A server, dressed in a kind of tennis getup and wayfarers waddled over to us with a salver rested on his upturned palm. He looked new on the job.
“Do you want anything, honey?” Michelle asked.
“Uh—you order first,” I said. I was preoccupied, adjusting to the chrome, champagne blare of the hotel. Something about being there made me uneasy. The more I looked around, the more it became clear to me that I was not alone in this feeling. I looked past the server and beyond the pool. Sandy gravel mountains veiled by a very thin mist. Sun high and bright. The guests slotted imperfectly into this glitzy, unhinged slice of luxury living. A drone of fear hovered here, a preternatural, unheard discord behind all the material. Despite the swish of expensive cocktails, the beautiful glamorous young things, the serene desert beacon of sunlight, this underlying wave of dread spread out like cellophane stretched across everything, perforated just so for the animals beneath.
“Honey?”
“Oh, yeah — I’ll get a Coke. Lots of ice. And um — maybe a club sandwich.”
“Sure, I’ll bring it right over.” The server waddled back to the tiki bar.
Every voice seemed to echo here, slap back against the walls, across this modern wilderness. A guard by a metallic fence admired a woman in oversized shades slathering sun cream on her arms and shoulders; beyond, a man dived into the pool.
“I’m gonna go for a dip,” Michelle said.
She picked up Lola and tiptoed into the pool with her, angling among the oversized floats and doggy paddlers. In the hot tub, bronze bodies nursed cocktails amidst anecdotal trails, gossip. Tall, thin women strutted around edges. They looked like flamingoes to me. Sipping dinky martinis, screwing up their noses in mutual agreement.
Opposite, there was this trio on loungers engaged in conversation. They looked nervous, perhaps overly keen to impress. A ginger haired girl sat in the center in a glittery swimsuit, two guys beside her with wavy hair covering mouths with hands whenever she said something that caused them to wince and/or giggle — or perhaps, caused them to feel as though they should wince and/or giggle.
False smiles glistened, features reflecting in the peculiar undulating shimmer of the pool. A desperate want for acceptance infected the cool, laidback charm the hotel had made such obvious and sustained efforts to promote: a hyper-desire to be integrated; to be a limb hanging off the illusional body of the known, photo-cropped, brass chic; to be in.
Mouths moved from one hyperbolic shape to the next, accentuated by oversized designer sunglasses on angled, sallow faces. Quick glances to and from points of interest. They held on too tightly to their idea of social etiquette, it seemed to me, which in the end only seemed to limit them: their experience of life; their potential — a damper on their true nature. The want to please, then, to fit the mold, became a form of oppression. Acceptance to those threaded within its suffocating fabric more important than authenticity. It was sad to observe, yet also, somehow, kind of funny. In fact, I thought to myself, the claustrophobic, clammy desire to fit in — from where I sat — looked as crippling as any leg of the Divine Comedy.
Some of these people — perhaps through no fault of their own, but rather a result of the hard squeeze of cultural hypnotism — looked almost plastic. Mannequins. Crash test dummies. Not a single nerve pulsed at the wrong rhythm. Knees to their chests, they smiled at the right moments, their mannerisms uncannily coordinated.
Shit, I thought to myself, will I — have I — become like them?
The negative cloud dispersed as I picked up Lola, told Michelle I’d be in the tub with her, lounging in thea noontide rays.
Clambering into the waves of heated water, I intuitively harbored to the side — a string of bubbles ballooned and burst in a pattern of death and rebirth.
I lifted Lola and studied, with both admiration, and, perhaps, envy, of her entirely unselfconscious gaze. Of — according to her — the open world. Being so young, I thought, must be pure enlightenment. Infants cannot have anxiety, being, as they are, at one with both themselves and the world—as though the two were not separate after all. And maybe they aren’t; indeed, maybe this divine knowledge could be the end of suffering, if only such knowledge — or lack thereof — could be regained.
Self-consciousness, that is to say, growing into yourself — into your ego, as some would put it — also defeats something precious, something god-like.
Lola suffered none of this. In time, like everyone else, she would. For now, she enjoyed the bliss of unknowing. And in the, shall we say, knowledge of this, for a ridiculous, irrational moment, I closed my eyes and prayed. To what? I don’t know. But I prayed. I implored the heavens or the universe that my daughter would never feel the pain of social conformity, the pressure and all the other shit that comes with growing and fitting in. Not that I wished her to live as an outcast or die young, god forbid, but if only to avoid some of the corruptions to the primitive vision that come with growth; that as soon as the insidious mold of exterior perception began to grip her, she could just as soon shake it off as if it were the water in which he swam even now — and really, it was, a sort of nothing — so that the world, with every look she made it in its direction, with every experience it provided, would always appear to her, at the very least, as — clear. I took off my sunglasses and thumbed specks of water from their frames. I put them back on. They were a great utility, with which to stare at people — not only to judge, but to assess.
So much of the time, we feel we must avert our eyes, because we have been conditioned to be afraid of each other, of who we truly are, of what we might see if we just looked. But Lola had no reason to avert her gaze or hide behind a pair of shades. All she had to do was look, and things to her eyes would appear as clean and pure as if the world itself, and all the life contained within it, were free, brand new. With such a pair of eyes, she could perhaps see nothing more or less than the world itself.
Opposite me, in the tub, three young girls soaked in exotic bikinis. In their own way, they did appear to have a good time. Their supple, youthful legs dangled above the glistening water, as they threw their heads back toward the blue sky and laughed. Then, something about the whistle and hum of the tub — or the clean and colorless stripes of sunlight — made me look at them again. They appeared different now. Odd, out-of-sync with the vibrations, mechanical. A nightmare in the daylight; a brief and disturbing hallucination. I knew these girls were beautiful, perhaps harmless, but in that soluble moment, I saw only smiles, electric razor blades reflected in the speared swords of sunlight dropping in over the sepia mountains, heard only voices, invisible snakes hovering through the air to nowhere in particular. And I wondered what was wrong with me, if, in fact, I was not unlike — or becoming like — these people at all; but someone plagued with a condition much worse, someone quite ill.
And I saw then the strange value of superficiality married to community and by extension the fragile nature of us all; the links we yearn for; the things we crave and cling to and — I think — why. I inhaled the thin, dusky air, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the hallucinatory intoxication had dispersed. I looked up at the serene, dry hills, sand-grey behind a tendril of foggy heat. I touched the side of the tub with my palm, felt the overflowing water drain through the grille, tried to stay present. I looked again at the girls, still wading across from me, passing off shakes and spasms as laughter.
One in particular caught my attention; she laughed very loudly — too loudly, I thought. I was taken by the odd quirk of her mouth, along with her sound that cut through all other noise. There was something sharp about her, though the edge pointed inward. She was less fit, and less orange. I realized then, with a great and sudden wake of sadness, a heaviness — like something flying at me, tough and raw as a slab of tarmac — that she was trying to prove something, herself, to the others, the more fit, more orange ones. And the further I tuned into that laugh, the more it seemed like some leash, or whip, thrashing out, then inward again, returning to her body, stronger with each blow than the force from which it had been deployed, to strike her, again, from within.
In the corner, I noticed for the first time an older man drinking alone behind the dew of his grey beard. The longer I looked at his smiling face, the more I saw deep, animalistic pain, determined to appear — if only to himself — to enjoy the party.
I glanced around, the sun dipping now, sighing into its low evening color. Gliding in circles with Lola, I cradled her, held her close to my chest. The bossa nova of voices, the pristine, celestial light, all of it stretched across the guests, the hotel, the untouched sand beyond. I looked at Michelle and kissed Lola on her soft, bald head and tried to be grateful for this present. Even as I saw, felt — under the stir and the glow and the sound — our temporary cauldron, our tomb, all the love hidden beneath smiles, the desperate, delicate, needy body, the fearful, boundless soul.