The Honeymoon's Over: True Stories of Love, Marriage, and Divorce

Daniela Kuper
It's 1971 and Ram Dass has recently come out with Be Here Now. You read it in the Chevy to the sound of sweat plopping on plain brown pages in the unbreathable southern Illinois summer. You read the whole thing without stopping, easy because it's mostly pictures and thoughts you've never seen words for.
This is what you take from the book: Underneath this life, which is mostly ego and lies, sits another life that smells like sweet peas--a dormant life that smells like Dad when he was in one of his good moods doing magic tricks for the family. He could take his thumb apart, wiggle both halves, and make cousin Johnny cry till he cemented it back together. He could put the lit part of a cigar inside his mouth and puff. Sometimes he'd make it disappear. He was a traveling chocolate salesman, who once gave his paycheck to an Indian with a sad story. He brought home two gifts you remember: a box of Sputnik bubble gum that turned your tongue aqua, and silk days-of-the-week panties. Your mother takes the panties. She says they'll give you an infection, then bawls out your father in Yiddish. You steal Thursday, though. Thursday will be yours forever.
Dad says when you're good enough, there's a present waiting in the vault of Harris Trust and Savings Bank on La Salle Street in Chicago. He says it's a ring of truth, a band with so much light coming from it, they had to put it in a sealed box for dangerous substances.
"When you get it, you won't need electricity and strangers will come to you," he says.
You have no idea what he's talking about, but you want the thing bad.
"Aw, you'll know when you got it. I had it a coupla years. Sold everything I lugged around. Stillicious syrup, Eskimo pie coating, Kayo by the truck. Guy tried to buy my hat off me once. I was a big ball of everything they ever wanted. Get it, kid?"
Sure, Dad.
You're eight. You want to know more. Rubies? Opals? You don't give up on that ring till you're fourteen and tired of his mercurial Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not wear Maybelline. Thou shalt never read dirty books including the poetry of that Russian, Yevtushenko. If God wanted you to sleep over at Judy Cohen's, he wouldn't have given you a decent bed.
You don't go to basement parties with the kids on Friday night, you go to B'nai Zion temple wearing Mom's black coat, her stand-in, waiting for something to happen on that pulpit. But nothing happens, and nothing will happen until college when you're reading that Ram Dass book, a relic now with its clunky drawings of big-hipped women, that fringe-shirted man running down the church aisle yelling, "Listen to those words you're saying" to a stupefied congregation. A cult joke, that book, if you can even find it anymore.
You're nineteen and perspiring on words that read like the godmother who never showed up. Yes dear! Yes dear! Here's the life. Smell those sweet peas. Come and get it.
After college, you sell the Smith Corona, winter coat, anything to get to the Bay Area and meet people like in the book. You work as a secretary in the Law Department at Berkeley, go Sufi dancing, meditate, grow out your leg hair.
Sufi dancing is where you meet Jesse. He's tall with a good body and hair thick to his shoulders. A stunning blond man on stage with a stunning blonde woman. It's not clear what they're doing up there looking more like kingdoms than people, but Jesse is holding the room. Right then you want to marry him and become a kingdom. He takes you camping by the ocean in Bolinas, stars falling into waves. You can see his face in the dark. You can see his face when it isn't there. He smells like sandalwood and tells stories with the intensity of a dying man. His voice is Alabama homeboy, and it touches you down there.
Strangers ask him personal questions. He takes as much time as they need; that's how giving he is. He gives and gives.