The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2008

Laurel Eberharter

  Charles Haddox

           The largest “God’s eye” ever constructed hung from the front porch eaves on the house where Laurel and her roommates lived, bright stripes of yarn wound around an asterisk of straight, polished tree branches that were as thick as flagpoles. It welcomed people into a comfortable, casually furnished house that had been left to a physics professor by his parents, who had lived there only a few months before their almost simultaneous passing. Feeling no attachment to the place, he naïvely rented it out to a group of foreign students, believing that they would be better behaved than the native variety. It quickly became a venue for the wildest, most extreme assortment of parties in the history of the university. I got to know Laurel at one of those parties, a crowded affair featuring a live (not to mention naked) band in the living room and lots of cheap wine. She was sitting by herself in the peaceful back yard—an island of refuge in the sea of excess—under a huge acacia tree covered with dried, skin-colored seed pods that hissed and shook like rattlesnakes. The tree sheltered a small grape arbor.    

Upon arriving at the party at about ten o’clock, I quickly and unobtrusively made my way out to the backyard, in the warm fall night, desperate to escape a crush of revelers that was growing larger by the minute. In particular, I was evading a philosophy student who was trying to convince me that Robert Pinget’s L’Inquisitoire was the most important book of the twentieth century (it was huge in 1973). At that time, I belonged to a clique within the university’s English department who considered objectivists, cubists and all nouveau roman scum the enemies of true literature. Pinget, because of his later work, was anathema to us.  I decided to take refuge in the quiet back yard and seat myself on a lawn chair next to pretty foreign student Laurel, whom I had previously met at an English department Christmas party, rather than risk the consequences of an argument with the drunken Inquisitoire enthusiast. Laurel looked like a peasant lass relaxing after a long day in the fields as she sat serenely under the billowing acacia tree, surrounded by a vine-covered arbor decked with teeming black clusters of Fredonia grapes. She was barefoot and wore a simple white San Tonito dress. The bodice of her dress was embroidered with tiny scarlet and turquoise birds. Her dark, wavy hair was long and loose, and partially covered her face. She was completely absorbed with the task of writing in a small, cloth-covered notebook. A few moments passed before she noticed me sitting beside her.  

“Oh, hello,” she finally said, in accented but confident English.

Her pale face glittered in the glow of tiki torches and twinkle lights strung between quince and crab apple trees heavy with red and yellow fruit. The scent of cheap vanilla incense from Woolworth’s, emitted by handfuls of sticks that someone had propped up in a green tin sand-pail, hung languidly in the night air.

“Are you Swiss—by any chance?” I asked her.

“No.”

“I’m sorry, you’re Laurel, aren’t you? I’m Chaji.”

“I’m from Austria, not Switzerland. Why did you think I was Swiss?”

“I was having a problem with someone and I wanted…do you know the work of Robert Pinget? I don’t know if you remember me, but we met at a party in the basement of Liberal Arts last year.”

“Pinget is now a French citizen, I believe.”

“He’s not Swiss?”

“Not any more.”

Laurel Eberharter. I had found her—or been found by her—in the same way that those beachcombers had found the crates of bottles, washed up on a beach, the gift of dark Providence. They whooped it up as they opened the bottles, drank from them, sharing, dancing, laughing with joy and intoxication. But the elixir was methanol, not ethanol, and they all died horrible deaths, burned alive from the inside out.

The vanilla-scented night surrounding us continued to echo with the sound of partying that became more and more animated. Insouciant revelers were draining gallons of cheap sangria, Rhine wine and homemade burgundy. Laurel and I sat in our secluded corner talking like old friends.

“Have you ever noticed that people are different in the dark?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if we had met somewhere in the middle of the day it would not have been so easy to start a conversation. But here, in the night, under these fairy lights, well, I think there’s less self-consciousness. Next time you’re sitting at an outdoor concert look around you. As soon as the sun goes down strangers start talking. It becomes okay to strike up a casual conversation or share a bottle of wine or some smoke. I don’t know why it is, but people are different.”

“I suppose it’s true. When I met you at the faculty Christmas party I couldn’t start a conversation with you, even with help of eggnog.”

“Is that what they call that disgusting stuff they were serving?”

“Maybe you would have liked it better in the dark,” I said, laughing, and she laughed too.

I had known that Laurel Eberharter was a graduate student from Austria, in her last year of studying in the United States. Now I learned that she hated living in El Paso, hated living in the U.S., hated living in what was perhaps the most popular party spot that existed anywhere on earth.  She had a daughter back in Austria who was living with her parents while she was in graduate school. She missed her child terribly.

As the bright empyrean wheeled over our heads, constellations of September marked the hours. Under the march of Hercules, Lyra, Cygnus, Pegasus and Andromeda, all the way to Taurus and sleepless Aldebaran (that had terrified me as a child), I listened to Laurel’s almost flawless English, which was like the music of the spheres. Bright and benevolent Jupiter was in conjunction with Antares; it flickered like a red flame amid the other stars of giant Scorpio. Good omens in the sky, and good conversation in a garden.  I was being lulled, like one of Eichendorff’s heroes, into a Romantic dream.

“Wie spät ist es, bitte?” I finally asked in my tentative German.  I knew that the hour was growing late.

Looking at her watch, she answered, “Est ist Zwei Uhr nachts.” She smiled, and added in English, “I don’t see how I’ll get any rest with this bacchanal still going on around me, but I’m going to try. It’s late for me. And now I’ll say goodnight.”

I stood beside her and took her hands, trying to pull her toward me. She untangled herself from my intended embrace and said, “No,” softly.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her, a little taken aback. “Are you involved with somebody?”

“No. It’s not that. It’s just that—well—I’m only here for a short time longer and I don’t think it would be good—you know, to start seeing someone.”

“I understand.  Maybe we can just be friends?”

“Okay. Friends. Thank you for letting me talk your ears off.”

“Maybe we can do something together, one of these days?  You know, just as friends?”

“Okay. Gute Nacht.”

That would be the beginning, the descent. I had fallen in love with Laurel Eberharter. I should never have tried to see her again. Even in that first instant, the moment of falling, I already knew that romance was out of the question. There could be no future for us together. I was in no position to move to Austria, and she had no plans to stay in the U.S. a day longer than she had to. She had made it clear from the beginning that our relationship could be no more than friendship, and never so much as let me kiss her (except for that one terrible stolen kiss), but that didn’t stop me from eventually treating her like a beloved with whom I would most certainly live happily ever after.

At first the ardor of my worship set off alarms in her, and she tried to discourage me, but over time it would take too much effort to hold me back. Our relationship officially remained platonic, but I found a number of other ways to continually show affection. I am certain that she enjoyed my friendship, and the attention was flattering. 

Our first “date” was lunch at the Campus Queen, a burger joint a few blocks from the university. We sat at the chrome and blue formica counter, on chrome and blue vinyl stools, surrounded by odors of coffee and grease so intense that by the time we finished our meals, our eyes were watering. Two of my fellow graduate assistants in English were already seated at the counter, and they hardly paused in their discussion of Hermann Hesse (of whom they were disciples) to shake my hand as I introduced Laurel. One of them, Edgar, had been eating a cookie and was covered with crumbs. The other, whose name I no longer recall, was obviously hung-over and in need of a shave.

“This is Laurel,” I said to them, “a graduate student who has some class.”

She extended one of her hands to each of them.

“Guten Tag,” she said softly.

“We are on die Morgenlandfahrt,” Edgar said to her.

Laurel eyed the disheveled appearance of the two would-be Morgenlandfahrers.

“Then you must not be much of a morning person,” she answered with a smile, gently nudging his shoulder.

We took our seats—our stools—and Edgar wandered back to his conversation, lost in confusion, thoroughly defeated.

From the very first hour that we spent together, Laurel stood above my fellow university students in every way imaginable. I took all of the opportunities that arose to tell her how intelligent she was, and it was not idle flattery.  From her almost perfect English (only one of several languages she had mastered), to her vast store of specialized knowledge in areas outside her own field of study, she was constantly surprising me, constantly surpassing what I had come to expect from a graduate student.

I spent most of our lunch, which for me consisted of a hamburger and fries and for her a bag of potato chips, listening to her talk and telling her how beautiful she was; how clever, how kind.

Compliments were to be a substitute for the physical affection that was forbidden. 

“I love your hair,” I said to her.

She had cut her hair since I had last seen her.

“Thank you,” she said in her lovely voice. “I’m really insecure about my looks and it’s wonderful to hear something nice.”

She offered me a potato chip from her little bag.

“Did you get that problem with your fellowship straightened out?” I asked. 

“Well, sort of—actually no. They’re still refusing to pay for a textbook that I need. I’ve absolutely got to have it for this class, and they don’t even have any copies at the library.  They’re saying that it’s not a required text. It will cost me almost a hundred dollars, and I don’t have that kind of money.  I have no idea what to do.”

That afternoon I purchased Laurel’s textbook.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she said to me when I presented it to her.

Because I was motivated by mad love, I was able to hold out longer than she could, and Laurel ended up taking the book.

She was constantly struggling with her finances. The fellowship that she received to pay for her studies in the U.S. barely covered tuition and textbooks. Her parents sent her money, which paid for rent and her part of the household food bill, but there was little left for extras. Until she met me, she never dined out. When her daughter Andrea had her second birthday, Laurel had no money to send her a present.  I went out and bought a carload of toys.

Laurel Eberharter, serious student and yearning mother, temporary exile from home and life, could, or so I thought, have never imagined what an object of desire she had become for me. How was it possible for her to understand my intentions? On the one hand, I honored my pledge of platonic friendship. On the other, I was constantly violating boundaries. She was lonely, penurious, a stranger in a strange land. Could I blame her if she took with both hands what I offered?

The crisis finally came when she contracted the ’flu.

She lay on the couch in the living room of the house with the colossal “God’s eye,” feeling feverish and achy and weak.  When I walked in I noticed that the room still smelled from a party that had taken place a few days earlier—the scents of tobacco and pot and cheap wine hovered in the air like a bad hangover.  Laurel’s pale face was flushed; her green-eyes-rimmed-with-brown looked huge.

“Hello,” she whispered as I sat down beside her, on the floor next to the couch. 

“Hi, princess,” I said, gently brushing back a lock of hair from her face.  “How are you feeling?”

“Not good.  I ache all over.”

“Do you want me to give you a back rub?  Would it make you feel better?”

“Sure.”

She turned on her stomach. I pulled her shirt up around her shoulders, exposing the hot, pink, desirable, but above all desired, skin of her back. She cringed a little when I first touched her, but was soon sighing with satisfaction.

The feel of her skin was beyond pleasure, beyond satisfaction, beyond fulfillment. My mouth actually hurt as I struggled with the impulse to kiss her.

“Will you rub my tummy?” she asked.

She rolled over, and exposed the skin of her belly.  I tenderly ran my hand over it with a careful, circular motion.  Desire, like a wave, surged over me, and losing control of myself, I put my hands on her face. Before I fully realized what I was doing, my lips were passionately kissing hers. 

“I love you,” I whispered. “I can’t stand it, I love you so much.”

She pushed my head, my lips, away from her face.

“Stop it,” she said, in a sharp, hoarse voice. “Are you crazy?”

I stood up and glared down at her. 

“My God, I love you so much. Can’t you understand that?”

“No. This can’t happen. What are you thinking? What do you want me to do? Forget about my daughter? Forget about my home? Do you want me to turn everything inside out because you think you’re in love with me? Gott im Himmel!  What do you want, huh? To sleep with me? So I can make another baby that never sees its father? I thought that you understood everything that’s going on with me. I thought you were like this brother, yes, this brother that I could share things with that I couldn’t even share with a lover. I thought we were best friends.”

“We could be more than friends. I’d be willing to go anywhere and to do whatever it takes.”

“No. There’s nothing to do. Anyway, I don’t want you to get sick, so maybe you should leave for now. Just call me later.”

I did call Laurel a few days later, and on the surface our relationship continued to be as it had been before her bout with the ’flu. On the inside, however, hidden from Laurel and the rest of the world, I was in torment. It was as if touching her feverish skin had left me on fire. I felt pyretic and shaky all the time, angry and argumentative with everyone around me except Laurel, and unable to keep my mind on anything. I continued to shower her with presents, compliments and dinners. Our moments together, when I was allowed to worship, but not possess her, brought me no relief—in fact, they simply inflamed me all the more—but I needed them, nevertheless. I kept myself in hell for her sake, and hid my sacrifice from her, never again letting her see the real cost of our friendship.

I felt that the whole situation had become a classic Thom’s Fold Catastrophe. Despite the frustration inherent in the very nature of our relationship, being with Laurel before the ’flu incident had always brought me more joy than pain, inducing a kind of status raptus in me. I had fooled myself into believing that loving her was enough, but with that one spurned kiss (the critical point), love and desire turned to agony, to despair. I could have graphed my emotional life on coordinate axes: it was a perfect v=x³ + ax.

The idea of my love for Laurel as mathematical theorem occurred to me one afternoon as we sat together in a bar not far from the college. A sprinkle of rain was falling outside the windows, but the sun was shining. It was a warm, early spring day. Sprigs of maple in vases adorned the bar tables; they were covered with tiny, delicate, new-sprung leaves and green flower clusters. Classical Indian music was playing on a speaker, Northern Indian ragas and kayals, sitar and tabla in ever more complex dialogue and dance, the waving hand, clear nectar, a million shining lamps, an echo of the Unstruck Music. Laurel and I were drinking delicious Irish coffees and eating chocolate-chip ice cream. She wore a casual sundress, and looked scorchingly beautiful. 

“You’re quiet,” Laurel said to me solicitously, through a mouthful of ice cream.

“So are you.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“What my life’s going to be like when you leave,” I answered.

“Haven’t these days we’ve spent together been fun?  They’ve been like a beautiful vacation. A six-month vacation. But we’ve both got our lives to go back to.”

You are my life, I thought to myself, and fell silent again.

Laurel picked up a magazine that she had been reading and read aloud to me.

“In the West, it happened at some point early in the Christian era, perhaps with Origen at his most Gnostic and least evangelical: the separation of analogy and anagogy (the symbolic meaning and the mystical meaning of things) into separate modes. What began as a hermeneutic device produced by a mind, or minds, overly given to speculation, became a way of viewing spiritual realities…”

“Who made that giant ‘God’s eye’ hanging on your porch?” I interrupted her.

“What?  The ojo de Dios?  The big one? I don’t know.  Professor Godwin, maybe. It was there when I moved in.”

“What does it mean?”

“I think that it originated with the Huichol Indians in Mexico, and has something to do with peyote.”

“No. What does it mean to you all? To Godwin and the rest of you? Why is it there?”

“It just is. It’s decorative, nothing else. You think everything means more than it does. Things aren’t like that.  So it fades, or breaks, or gets stolen. It’s crazy to want to hold on to things, to make them more than they are. Just enjoy them while they last, without asking what everything means. Things are what they are, and then they’re gone.  Remember what Mozart said: ‘Bey einer opera muβ schlechterdings die Poesie der Musick gehorsame Tochter seyn.’”

I looked down at a little coffee spill on the polished wood table, feeling frustrated and hurt. It didn’t help that my German wasn’t good enough to allow me to get more than the gist of her outlandishly erudite quotation—something about “the music being more important than the words.” I traced the equation v=x³+ax on a napkin with my finger, using spilled coffee as ink.

On May fifteenth, 1974, I picked Laurel up for the last time at the house with the great “God’s eye.” We drove in silence to the airport, where she would catch a flight to Vienna Schwechat via New York and London.

It was a windy day, and sand from the Chihuahuan Desert that surrounded us—El Paso being no more than an outpost in the parched, exhausted emptiness—transformed the sky into a gray-brown curtain, hiding the mountains, the harsh sun, the muddy Rio Grande and clay hills of Mexico that lay just beyond it.

“I hate this place,” I said under my breath.

“That makes two of us,” Laurel sighed.

I waited with her at the airport until her boarding call came. She read a letter from home, and I sat with my hands folded on my lap and looked at my shoes. When her boarding group was called she stood up, and I stood as well.  Laurel gave me a hug and I hugged her back, but the only words that were spoken came from me.

“Thank you,” I whispered in Laurel Eberharter’s ear, “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

She slipped out of my grasp and headed toward the gate.  In a few moments she would be above the mesquite humps, the trails made by tanks and other army vehicles that used land surrounding the airport for practice maneuvers, and waterless, orange, barren sand dunes, a desolate, overgrazed, failed landscape, unreal, like a mathematical theorem, like a meaningless symbol, with nothing that could fix itself in memory, or love.