Flowers for the Tomb of Hafiz Part I

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I called Wai and she said she's been back for almost a week! She said she thought that I had forgotten her. She invited me to dinner and she cooked a marvelous Chinese dinner, but something had changed. After we ate, I asked her if something was wrong. She said, "remember when you said that I should find someone else, someone exactly like you, except someone who is available? Well, I did. A friend said that maybe he knew someone who would loan us 250 dollars and we ran into him on the street and he was a Berkeley professor." I was surprised. I didn't remember that I had said that so clearly but the words roared back to me and then, in a flash of sadness, I remembered. I didn't believe her story, literally. She didn't expect me to. It was a truth for US. We kissed several times and held each other for a long time. Then we bade each other soulful farewell. The beauty that I saw that first day in class had returned to her face. My exquisite Chinese Communist flower. A woman who represents an entire lifetime and destiny for me. The pain that she has bestowed on me is the profoundest proof of the existence of free will. It is the deepest pain and proof of true, irremediable loss that I possess. The loss of something infinitely precious, through the free choice of something else infinitely precious.

The feeling of paradox persists: the paradox that I am free, but that my fate is sealed. I WILL not allow myself to betray Judy. And Yet I MUST to be free. How perfect she seemed.

Twenty Seven

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We spent the whole afternoon together. I can't begin to describe it. We ended up in Sausalito. We were lost in each other. We walked and talked and sat and held hands all day. I hardly noticed anyone else. Now and then I looked up to see ironic looks from women and smirks from men. They seemed funny to me, as if they summarized Man's Fallen Condition. We seemed to just "end up" in Sausalito and then I remembered the key. She said, twice, that she loves me but insisted that it is impossible. Well, the first time she did, anyway. She seemed to say that she wants to leave her husband but that she won’t be able to. I think she wants me to free her in some heroic way but she herself says there's no way. That she is going to be forced to go back to Iran. But she wants me to intercede. She didn't say it directly. But every look said it. It was agonizing. At one point, I held her hair and looked into her eyes as if she were the only being on earth and I felt that if I looked away, I would lose her forever. There is something about the San Francisco Marina. The seagulls and sailboats and the view of Alcatraz. We held hands and kissed so much that my lips are sore and my nose hurts. My face is terribly sun burned and my butt hurts from sitting on so many rocks and so much grass and so many benches. And I still see her eyes, pleading, so full of emotion. I can't get her out of my mind, as the song says. And it's telling the truth. I can't. And Judy will be back from Europe in yes, just about exactly one week.

Twenty Eight

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I couldn't bear to write anything all week. I walked around Lake Merritt and wandered around Oakland and Berkeley and I cried all day when I found out that she had gone back to Iran. It's been almost a week and I'm finally coming back to life. Judy and Andy are returning tomorrow night. It's exciting. But all week, I've been dead.

When Judy returned, we made love greedily, like starving hermits coming out of a desert. We made love as if we had both been abstinent for three months. It was a horrible lesson in the mechanics of adultery. The tooth of doubt gnaws at me, and even without a reason, I doubt Judy. I didn't know that it would be possible for me to feel so strongly about her after I had made love to Leila. And to Wai.

There are so many snares. Love is not enough. I don't understand myself and why I need this ...

The Chairman wants me to sit in on some computer science classes next quarter so I'll have a better idea of how to teach them for the first time. Oh well, at least I don't have to take them for credit. And I won't have any teaching responsibilities this fall.