S. by John Updike

fine. I was afraid of seeming too old, but he’s very complimentary about my figure and the ojas shakti expressed by my glossy hair—it’s the supplements, Midge, vitamins A and E-complex and the zinc and that evening-primrose oil!—and says he’s bored silly with these twenty-year-old guru groupies, as he calls them. He says they have perfect bodies but no real spirit, and maithuna is above all a spiritual act. He himself is older than he looks, thirty-seven. He was with the Arhat in India, at the first ashram, in Ellora. He says he was really one of the founders—it was his idea to combine encounter therapy with tantric yoga. He shares this A-frame with only one other man, Savitri, who’s out on the road a lot of the time, giving interviews and selling the Arhat’s books and tapes and meditation aids, and there’s a whirlpool bath, one of those you can sit in up to your neck, instead of just a trailer shower the size of a mailing tube where you keep bumping your elbows on the soap rack and treading in everybody else’s germy wet towels that they just leave where they dropped them. Disgusting!
    I know you won’t, but you
must
n’t tell Charles about Fritz—my hunch is he’s going to start suing me. Charles, I mean. About Vikshipta: a lot of the people here, actually, arewell into their thirties and forties, with Ph.D.s and jobs they left in city planning or architectural offices or legal firms—they’re not crazies, the place really runs, we really
are
accomplishing things. Joy-Six-Oh will be up by the end of the summer, with air-conditioning throughout and all the electricity solar-generated from panels on the roof. Is that what they call a zero-sum situation? Today, for the first time, they let me drive a backhoe. It’s such a darling machine. It lifts this big obliging hydraulic arm with its elbow up in the air and instead of a hand it has a scoop or bucket they call it, with these four pointy fingers shiny from gouging at the ground—they’re replaceable, I never realized that—and you sit there in this shaking cab scared to pick the wrong lever because this huge mechanical animal under you, that feels so gentle and plodding and patient, has so much blind power it could crush somebody just as easily as it picks up a boulder. I adored it, being allowed to run it. Its controls are all sticks, so it’s almost more natural than a car. Everybody, including the foreman, who used to be a Mormon, said I was very good—I really have the touch. It’s like I become the backhoe’s spirit, its jiva.
    Forgive me, Midge, the way my mind is flipping around, but everything here is so energizing I said to Fritz I don’t see how the Arhat does it, all of us feeding off him this intensely spiritual way. He said—Vikshipta, I must learn to use his real name—that’s why he must conserve himself and needs all these women to hide behind, living so withdrawn you hardly ever see him except at darshan and when he drives by in his limo. We drink his silence the way he drinks Brahman’s, Vikshipta said.
    How can I describe to you how I feel here? Tender and open as if I’ve shed an old skin, Midge. Everything makes such an im
pres
sion—the rocks I’m sitting among, and the sunset in its love colors like some great slanted fragmentarywalkway we’re seeing from underneath, and a breeze that stirs up the resiny smell in the cypress and reminds me of a smell from my childhood, some deep secret kitcheny scent out of a grandmother’s drawer, and this little lizard who’s been keeping me company. He’s like a perfect little living jewel. He’s been absolutely frozen as my voice rattles on and on. I’m getting hoarse. And just
then
, when I cleared my throat, up he stood and raced away on his two hind legs like a tiny man with a long green tail! He had a collar around his neck and for all I know a bow tie! He was—how can I say?—
one
with me, as the buzzards overhead riding the air currents home are one with me, and