The T Room by Victoria Lilienthal

Author:Victoria Lilienthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press

17

VERA

I lean back in my seat and look up out of my sunroof at the blue and limitless sky. This text is bait on the end of a karmic hook. If I respond with a lie, I am compromising myself. If I tell the truth, I engage in a dialogue that I don’t want to have. I decide to do neither and throw my phone next to the card on the passenger seat next to the card. I drive up the coast, feeling like I am unwinding some old pattern instead.

I’m almost a hundred percent sure Jean knows all about our affair. What I can’t understand is why she doesn’t just keep up the ruse and pretend that she hasn’t seen me, which would make it all so much easier. As I think it through, however, I realize that she is trying to corroborate the evidence. I mean, she wouldn’t need verification if she trusted what she’s seen, right? From my perspective, she is double-checking because she doesn’t entirely trust her intuition.

Until yesterday, my initial response would have been to create a cover story. Like so many women, I am a fucking professional when it comes to holding other people’s feelings. I’ve been socialized to perform for love and protection. I mean, just hold up the flaming hoop, and I’ll dive on in naked sans sunscreen.

I have compassion for Jean’s predicament. But, actually, it’s her responsibility to have a truthful conversation with her husband, not mine. I pull over a little south of my destination onto the shoulder. I text an honest: HEY YES I AM ON A PILGRIMAGE.

The second part is a kind of random thing to say, but this drive up the coast feels like some form of one; it’s just that this pilgrimage isn’t one I yet fully understand.

My chore accomplished, I continue until I come to a stop in front of the gate. I wait for it to open as if magically before slowly driving along the gravel driveway to park my car across from his man-yurt.

In the rearview mirror I watch Ernesto emerge from his cave. Luna bounds toward me as he comes over to open my car door. Ever the gentleman, he pulls me out into his muscular arms, kissing me before picking me up bride-style and carrying me back over the threshold into his lair.

He puts me down in front of a wood-burning stove and says, “I made something for you.” I consider interrupting him to tell him that his wife has just seen me on the road as I watch him pick up an old, hand-forged metal tool. He holds it vertically, displaying a large brass coin emblazoned with a Chinese character. The coin is laced with copper wire and welded onto the surface of the implement. He hands it to me. It is heavy as hell.

Immediately, I know what it is. A spear. I Googled somewhere in my recent research on White Tara that Tibetan Buddhists consider the point of the spear to symbolize the piercing or impaling of all false notions or distorted ideas.

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