ON BALANCE

by Tim Farrington

      Dilige, et quod vis fac, wrote Augustine of Hippo--literally, Love, and do what you want. Or as I translated it, perhaps too liberally, In the name of Love, do what you will. From the moment I came upon the passage, I knew my life was about to fall apart. Balanced precariously as I was, between finely honed ambitions and a wild libido, this phrase might as well have been an earthquake.
      I was 21, building a career in the classics, brick by careful brick, in the graduate school of religious studies at the University of Virginia. It was April in the year of Our Lord nineteen and seventy-eight, and I was conscious of the nearness of mania. In fact, I had undertaken my reading of Augustine precisely as a kind of sobering yoke--for discipline, as it were. Contrary to my expectations, however, Augustine, that notoriously stern keeper of the beast within, shook down the walls and set the circus animals free.
      At the time of my initial misreading of the dilige et quod vis fac, I had been engaged for a year and a half to Felicia Stepnovich, a biology major from Pittsburgh. We were to marry when--well, the timing was vague. When I had tenure, perhaps--so demure was our pace. I know we both assumed we would have sex some time after that. Felicia was a gorgeous, lengthy woman, but she believed in protracted engagements and the solemnity of the wedding night. And so did I.
      We did make out, according to a strict Catholic code involving displacement of underclothing but no actual removal. On spring break we would drive to the North Carolina beaches and rent two hotel rooms, like Victorians. During those lubricated days of baking on the sand, Felicia in her orange-and-gold bikini, with its firm bra structure and high waist, would make me crazy. She tanned exquisitely, like blond toast. I oiled her devotedly. We were high-minded and congenial with each other. We ate ham sandwiches and talked about the difficult tasks still facing the Church after Vatican II, about Teilhard de Chardin and Cardinal Newman, about the paradox of Stravinsky's orthodoxy (I maintained even then that true belief can only be radical), and about Orestes Brownson, that transcendentalist turned Catholic who had so irritated Emerson (with whom Felicia believed her great-great-grandmother had had an affair, or at least a high flirtation, the most glamorous sin her lineage could claim).
      Once, in the water, Felicia's bikini top came off under my attentions, and her wondrous pale breasts floated free and firm before me, but we both understood that this had occurred offshore and did not need to be confessed. I believe we may have been the only two Catholics in the country under the age of 50 who still went to Confession every Saturday.

      Felicia and I spent the long Memorial Day weekend that year at her parents' house in Pennsylvania, and I took the opportunity to make a shambles of my life and hers.
      The Stepnoviches lived in a hilly suburb of Pittsburgh. Felicia's father, Adam, ran an appliance empire, selling blenders, waffle irons, and electric ca n-openers up and down the East Coast in a chain of stores cleverly designed to look like toasters. The neon signs at every Poppa's Pop-In Appliance Palace mimed a piece of perfectly browned bread leaping upward; the store facades were painted enamel white and the doors were decorated with knobs the customers could actually set to "light," "medium," or "dark." Felicia's father himself was something of a local celebrity, appearing pervasively on his own TV commercials as a sort of caricature of himself. To be brutally honest, he was the laughingstock of the mid- Atlantic viewing audience. Nonetheless, off camera, Adam was a nice guy and a passionate golfer who had begun to teach me the game as soon as Felicia and I made our engagement known; he was clearly grooming me as a son-in-law.
      He normally shot in the nineties and the Saturday before Memorial Day was the first time that I broke a hundred. Yet I had an unprecedented chance to beat him on the 18th. We came to it all even, but I hit the green in two, while Adam tailed his approach into the right-hand bunker.
      As it turned out, Adam almost holed out his wedge, while I three-putted. His relief as my second putt rimmed out was blatant.
      "Oh, that's a shame, a damned shame, Morgan," he said.
      "Sic transit gloria mundi," I said. The high-water mark of our camaraderie had clearly been reached.

      When we got back to the house that afternoon, it was almost four o'clock. The place was empty. A note on the kitchen table indicated that Felicia and her mother were out shopping, as was their wont, and wouldn't be back until six. If we wanted anything to eat before then, Felicia's impeccable Catholic girls' school script informed us archly, we were "on our own."
      Adam and I began a cautious drink together on that note; I believe we had both counted on the women being there. In the face of our suddenly uneasy truce, the interval before their return loomed very large. We turned the TV on and settled gratefully in front of the Knicks having an easy time of it with the Bulls. Not even the continued application of alcohol and sports could cure everything that ailed us, but fortunately the phone rang, and Adam hurried off to smooth out some snag in the preparations for the Memorial Day Super Sale, still wearing his hideous plaid golf slacks.
      I was left in the rec room with the Knicks and my half-finished bourbon full of melting ice. On the wall above my intended father-in-law's faux mahogany bar was a set of crossed Polish dueling pistols from the 19th century. Some ancestor of Adam's had killed two men with the left-hand gun, as Adam had told me many times; the other gun, as far as I knew, had never done more than maim. The rec room floor was carpeted with AstroTurf and served as a putting green. It was a 15-yard par 3 from the dining room door; you could use the bookshelf for a bank shot to negotiate the dogleg left past the Naugahyde recliner. Your second shot would then be slightly uphill with a break to the right.
      As I stood with the by now quite seriously diluted bourbon in my hand, looking at the dueling pistols and the rec room fairway, the Knicks and Bulls cavorting across the silent television screen, the sliding-glass back door eased open and Felicia's sister, Aster, came in. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a baggy gray T-shirt with an unflattering caricature of Kierkegaard on it.
      "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know anyone was here."
      "I hardly count," I said. "And I'm about to drink myself into oblivion in any case." For credibility's sake, I took a healthy swig of the bourbon.
      Aster looked interested at this. I had rarely seen her perk up at anything before. She was a year and a half younger than Felicia and had decided after high school that the world was irredeemably false. In this false world she had refused to go to Villanova on a music scholarship. Instead, she had moved into a seedy studio in South Philly and taken a job as a waitress. Waitressing, it seemed, had an element of truth. Still, she came home for the major holidays and lounged sullenly by the pool, reading existentialists and eating her mother's cooking.
      She was considered the plain sister of the family, because her features did not have Felicia's classic lines, nor her thin body Felicia's elegant long voluptuousness; but this was bourgeois nonsense. Aster was a beauty. She wore her jet black hair loose, in existential fashion. She wore no makeup and she did not shop and she had not gone to Villanova. I had been aware for some time of my thunderous visceral response to Aster, but had assumed that the forces of social order, as well as her natural aversion to me personally, would suffice to keep it in check.
      She held Kaufmann's paperback translation of Jenseits von Gut und Böse in her hand in such a way as to make it a possible factor in a conversation we might have. Primed by incipient drunkenness to clear observation, I noted that she, too, seemed disposed to shape a relationship with the world through texts. Aster and I were simply shoring up our ruins with different fragments.
      "Do you feel that Nietzsche's critique of transcendent values is itself absolute?" I said.
      She laughed. "You're drunk."
      "Not drunk enough, I'm afraid."
      "No?" she said, in such a way that my heart began to crash inside my chest. She set her book on the end of the bar. It began to seem to me that I might be drunk enough. I set down my drink beneath the dueling pistols.
      At first, her skin tasted faintly of chlorine--I suppose she had been swimming in the pool that afternoon--but it sweetened quickly at the touch of my tongue. I began so high on her forehead, and so tentatively, that I might have been kissing a distant relative. But Aster was in no hurry, and when her lips at last met mine, my theories of the straightforward equation of delight and truth seemed abundantly confirmed. All the universe clarified in the soft warm meeting of our faces. Beneath the gray imprint of Kierkegaard on her T-shirt, her breasts seemed to rise to my touch; her stiffening nipples gave his grim, contemplative visage aspects I might have spent decades recalling.
      As I kissed her, Aster slipped one slim thigh between my legs and drew it up to my crotch. I recall my appreciation of her effortless balance, and the weakening of my knees. It was still impossibly abstract to me that my virginity might be approaching an end. But her cutoffs slipped away easily, and we troubled ourselves only to get my khaki slacks down to my knees. Aster's pubic hair, too, was black, a lovely dense tangle. I realized that given our policy of touch-but-don't-look, I had never seen Felicia's and that I had no idea what color it was. Then, as Aster and I found our way to the prickly green putting surface, I realized that it was almost certain now that I never would.

      About a week after the catastrophe, Felicia herself came by my rented room on Cherry Avenue in Charlottesville, to return her engagement ring.
      The dignity of this gesture, and the grace with which she performed it, shamed me inexpressibly. Worse still, at that crucial moment, through a subtle inflection and a vulnerable pause, Felicia held out the possibility, after all, of forgiveness, of taking me back and letting my sins be past. She gave me to understand, with exquisite tact, that we might make our true life together anew. I was forced to indicate that I preferred to continue on my path of debauchery.

      That summer I drove up i-95 to Philadelphia every weekend, and Aster and I pursued a violent existential passion. We had the driving time after my last Friday seminar down more or less to the minute: I could get to her place by midnight, barring encounters with the law. Aster would be waiting for me when I came in the door. She would frankly pounce, slashing away my coat, my shirt, my belt. I felt at times more disembowelled than disrobed. She had a way of tearing my left shoe off--I don't know quite how to convey it, but it was only the left shoe. She was passionate but not thorough. Often it would be hours before we got around to my right shoe.
      For my part, I was determined to die in her arms. We would spend the weekend on her mattress, sweaty, amid cartons of Chinese food. Intermittently we ate, or haggled over fine points of Sein und Zeit and Heidegger's enigmatic relationship to the Nazis, but mostly our explorations of being and time were visceral. Language animals that we were, we managed to grant each other the miracle of a breathless inarticulacy. The world resolved itself into hands and flesh, tongues and murmurs, for hours at a time, for days.
      Outside was traffic noise, and the occasional gunshot. The ceiling of the room in which we lay was scarred black from some old fire. On the wall opposite the mattress was a cheap print of a late Monet, a heap of gleams and piercing shards of color that was supposed to resolve itself into a shimmering haystack. Aster smelled of balsam and tasted of salt.

      Inevitably, I proposed. It was, despite my conversion to the path of the flesh, what I continued to believe one did with love of such intensity: turned it into marriage. Aster had the grace to laugh.
      "What?" I said, hurt. "I'm not good enough for you?"
      "You're too good, darling," she said, and lit a cigarette. It was one of her affectations to smoke in bed. Aster actually hated the smell of cigarettes, but she loved the snap and flare of the match, the musical punctuation smoking provided. And she loved being able to see her breath. It comforted her to watch her words dissolve before her.
      Now she blew three perfect smoke rings toward Monet's haystack and lay back on the pillow.
      "Too good?" I said.
      "Much too good," she said, with finality.
      Above us the ineffectual ceiling fan, missing a blade, spun lopsidedly. Aster's latest smoke ring, finding the currents uneven there, eddied and broke up. She chuckled, heartened, I suppose, at yet another illustration of some basic principle.
      I said, "I'm serious, Aster."
      "Oh, Morgan, for God's sake, calm down. You're in the demonic grip of an idea. I mean, really, marriage. To me. Have you lost your mind?"
      This seemed entirely possible.
      "I'm in full possession of all my faculties," I told her, with what I felt was a measured dignity. "I just..."
      "God, listen to you, you have lost your mind," she said. She sat up and laid her cigarette in the jar-top ash tray on the floor, apparently to signify her resignation to facing the emergency. "O.K., look, just relax and breathe, sweetheart. Just breathe deeply and slowly. Ride it through. O.K.? Just breeeeathe...."
      I laughed at that: her trying to talk me through this sudden urge to consecrate our relationship, as if it were some kind of seizure. In addition to her sophisticated critique of western culture as so many smoke rings, Aster maintained a childlike faith that simply breathing right could resolve almost any of the dilemmas inherent in the human condition, from birth through marriage and death and cramps. It was a sort of yogic intuition with her; it transcended even her angst and her gift for gnarled debate.
      A tractor-trailer rig rumbled by outside just then, rendering conversation momentarily impossible.
      I got out of the bed, petulantly, and stood by the window. Aster lay on the bed and watched me, waiting for the spasm of my conventionality to pass. She looked like something out of a black- and-white French movie, which of course was her intention.
      "It's better to marry than to burn," I said, at last, tentatively.
      "Nonsense," Aster said. "It's much better to burn." She stubbed her cigarette out in the jar top and held up her arms. "Morgan, dear, for God's sake come back over here. You're making me nervous standing there. You're blocking the light."
      I returned reluctantly to the bed, and would have continued the discussion there, but Aster silenced me with her lips, and soon enough I was lost to the unanswerable argument of the flesh.

      That summer was a kind of dying to the life I had known. Everything that St. Augustine had said about love for God seemed true of my love for Aster. All created things paled in comparison. I was moved to effortless renunciations. I felt freed from mundane concerns and obligations. I felt my life had culminated, as Augustine had suggested it should, in an intimate relationship with the ultimate source of all being. That this source of being lived in a seedy apartment in south Philly and couldn't afford a bed did not deter me in the least.
      My studies deteriorated. It was hard to take academic conventions seriously while maintaining a relationship with Aster. I let my hair grow long and drank too much. Mondays and most of every Tuesday were invariably spent recovering from the weekend; Fridays, for the most part, were wasted in anticipation.
      I toyed with the idea of joining the circus; it seemed appropriate somehow. As a five-year-old, I had cherished the idea of making a career on the high wire. In fact, the only reason I could find, that August, for not abandoning my academic career immediately, was that joining the circus might take me too much away from Aster.
      As autumn came and the leaves began to turn, I stopped going to my classes and seminars entirely. I spent my days walking UVa's familiar brick paths as a stranger, watching the once-beloved campus fade into irrelevance. The brick walls and contemplative gardens and groves and meadows, the Jeffersonian Greek buildings I had once seen as the architecture of an earthly paradise, now seemed like the lingering relics of an impossible, remembered beauty, receding, unattainable across a dream-like gulf.
      One day in October, I saw Aster's sister, Felicia, to whom I had so recently been engaged, walking with a transparently eligible male, a fresh diamond ring on her shapely hand. I felt a grief I had no right to feel. She looked right through me as she passed, without allowing herself even a flicker of recognition. Dying into the mysteries of love--or at least of lust--I had become a ghost amid the old solidities.
      I might as well have called my tuition that fall a philanthropic donation. I left Charlottesville for the last time at dawn, circling the campus once before I hit the open road. The old Toyota sank low on its axles with the ludicrous weight of my library. How the collected Church fathers and their pagan contemporaries would continue to serve me, I had no idea, but their sheer mass was still comforting. I thought of Augustine & Co. as a kind of ballast.
      The drive north had a psychedelic quality. Everything seemed unnaturally bright, the air was crisp, and the dewy green countryside glistened in the fresh sun. I realized that I had never made the trip to Aster's in daylight. Always I had gone up Friday evening, after my last seminar, and come back on Monday before dawn. The luxury of a journey in the full light of day was astonishing.
      I slanted west to drive along the Blue Ridge, then northward, surviving the Beltway and the Turnpike to arrive in Philly during rush hour. The last mile took an hour and a half. Nonetheless, I was six hours ahead of my usual schedule.
      I found a parking place closer to her apartment than I ever had before--one further sign that I had been blessed with my new freedom. I mounted the badly lit stairs, breathing the urine-scented air. Even the stench made me cheerful, as it always did, perversely: I contrasted it with the heavenly human smell of Aster's bed, which awaited me beyond.
      Reaching the dark landing with its broken bulb, I slipped my key into the beloved lock and entered to find Aster in bed with a slim young man. They both looked up.
      "Oh, Morgan, how could you not call, if you were going to show up early?" Aster said.
      Her companion had the grace to look uneasy. He wore a bad goatee. It endeared him to me, and assuaged my vivid urge to kill him. The sight of his pale white ass between her thighs, however, was nauseating in a deeply existential way.

      In retrospect, the shock of finding Aster in bed with someone not myself was like a perfectly placed explosive. It demolished my initial conception of the quod vis fac. I had embraced this Augustinian exhortation under the assumption that following my whims would lead to truth. But my notion of where the path of indulgence would lead had been short-sighted, as was now obvious. It had never occurred to me that Aster, too, might do as she liked, and that I might not like that.
      In any case, I took this fiasco as a message from God and fell back into a ferocious asceticism. I managed to avow renunciation and, at the same time, continue my obsession with Aster. It was a simple enough matter to rent an apartment in her building: for $300 a month I could remain at the scene of the crime. Divine justice being what it is, I ended up in the studio directly below Aster's, and so part of my ongoing penance became to hear the creak of the floorboards beneath her mattress. It turned out that she received a fairly steady stream of male visitors. Day and night. She was fucking her way through this phase of her life in an exuberant manner, a truth I would no doubt have come to realize months earlier had I not been so locked into my own fantasies about the nature of the ground of being.
      For her part, Aster saw no reason why our relationship should be damaged. It had never been her intention to save her soul through her relationship with me, anyway. She liked me, as she said--she had always said it. We were "good together." There was a ruthless innocence in her view of the world. Indeed, she continued to hold out the prospect of renewed carnal affections, a notion I resisted as being incompatible with all that was good, true, and beautiful. The multitude in which I would take my place also appalled me.
      Still, within the bounds of my renunciations, Aster and I became friends. We were, as it turned out, good together. She would call me at nine or ten o'clock almost every morning, after her nighttime lover had left and before the afternoon guy arrived, and I would go up to her place for coffee and gossip. On mornings when the nighttime lover had been a particular bust, she would call me up at dawn, for breakfast, using me as a sort of shoehorn to get the other guy out of her space. At first I chafed at being used in this way, but eventually I came to enjoy my role as court eunuch. We would drink her French roast and eat the candies her lovers brought and discuss everything, from our original common ground in the problems posed by modernity to the grill politics at the nearby restaurant where I was working nights as a dishwasher.
      My new line was that I was a student of civilization. As a student of this sort, I saw myself in training to watch Rome fall, as Augustine had, from a safe, celibate distance. The convulsions of Rome, of Babylon, of the West--the agonies of the City of the World, I mean--are ever the birth throes of the New Jerusalem, the City of God. The two cities struggle eternally, as Augustine said, linked in constant dialectic.
      "Constant dialectic, my ass," Aster said.
      "I'm serious," I said.
      "Yes, and your seriousness is the terrified cover-up for a lack of existential courage. You want to dwell on Babylon's decline and fall, because you're too frightened to consider your own mortality."
      This was true, of course. At this point in our past conversations I might have conceded a deep dread and fallen into bed with her. That option, however, had been closed off forever.

      Meanwhile, I practiced tightrope walking. As I have mentioned, I had cherished an image of circus life for years, ever since I first attempted to walk across the top of my nursery school's swing set at the age of five and acquired the first of several serious scars. From that point on, I had been unable to resist a clothesline, fence top, or roof peak. Significant portions of my childhood had been spent in emergency rooms getting stitches or splints. I had papered my room with Ringling Bros. posters, and followed the careers of acrobats the way most kids followed baseball.
      The urge to the high wire had eventually been eclipsed by the balancing acts of puberty and propriety, by ambition and by lust, and then, as you know, by St. Augustine, but it had re-emerged now in my fallen state and I was determined to master the art at last. It seemed to me that I had put it off far too long.
      The roof of our building had a set of rusted old clothesline poles, neglected for years, on which I strung some good-quality mountain-climbers' rope. I set up three old mattresses beneath, two of which I'd bought from Goodwill and one of which I'd bought from Aster. Yes, I actually bought her famous mattress from her, as if I had not fallen onto it enough already.

      From the undizzying height of six feet, I fell onto the mattress hundreds of times a day. From time to time Aster would come up to the roof and watch me. Her presence, in fact, made me fall even faster than usual. I always seemed to fall to the side away from her, no doubt to compensate for my basic, internal tendency to fall toward her. Neither direction, of course, was balance, which is what I craved.
      Although ostensibly patient and supportive, Aster was amused by my falls. I believe she approved of my futility, seeing it as vaguely Sisyphean. She'd sit there with her coffee and The Plague and Cosmopolitan (which she claimed to read for its crystallization of all she despised) and applaud my more spectacular tumbles.

      The fact that I was so bad at my particular art was the merest detail: already I was caught by a vision of what it might mean to walk that fine line perfectly. There are ten million ways to fall off a tightrope, but only one way not to. It was those brief glimpses of doing it right that kept me going. Beyond what I can only describe as fear of lightness--that panicked sense of visceral disbelief that baffles you as you step out on the wire--I was beginning to have the occasional glimmer of what it might mean to actually take a step in balance. It would feel a lot like freedom.

      Aster took me out to dinner on my birthday and offered yet again to sleep with me. Over grilled eels and sushi, we had a profound discussion of why I had taken the high road of renunciation. Aster admitted that she too felt the stirrings of an urge to experience more than the transitory shiver. She was wearying, it seemed, at last, of the same old games. I made sure to let her know that my commitment to purity, while severe, was not absolute: I would pursue a layman's path of marital fulfillment with the proper soul. Aster acknowledged this with lowered eyes, apparently moved by the fact that I might, in due course, renounce renunciation for her.
      Two days later, she accepted the marriage proposal of the lead guitarist in Death Etiquette, a guy who passed her a note from the stage during the second set at a downtown club. Moved, perhaps, by his percussive accompaniments, Aster accepted on the spot. They had sex two hours later in the band's van, a clear indication (the lengthy delay before consummation, I mean) of their relationship's depth and meaning.
      No doubt I sound bitter even in retrospect. I confess that I handled the matter badly. A season of celibacy--and the rhetoric of celibacy in the service of a hidden agenda--had done little to prepare me for so thorough a chastisement.
      Aster broke the news to me at our next kaffee-klatch.
      "You what?" I said.
      "I'm going to marry Bobby Parkinson. You know, that guitar player who..."
      "Wait a minute," I said. "You're getting married? To a man named after a disease?"
      "Mor-gan."
      "What happened to transient mutual pleasures and the meaningless exchange of bodily fluids?"
      "This is different," she said. "He's an artist. God, you should hear him play. And the poetry of his lyrics..."
      I was silent. I literally bit my tongue. The coppery taste of blood in my mouth sobered me. I saw, yet again, that I had built on sand.
      "I want you to be the maid of honor," Aster said.
      "We can joke about this soon, Aster," I said. "Very soon--even in a year or two, say. But not yet."
      "No, I'm serious, darling, it's a concept thing. Bobby wants one of his old girlfriends to be best man. To point up the essential arbitrariness of the whole shtick, you see?"
      "I don't see why you're getting married at all, if it's all so damned arbitrary," I said. "Speaking conceptually, of course."
      "Because I'm in love."
      " It will only last five months," I said. "That's all it lasted with me. You've told me that five months is all it lasts with anyone, for you."
      "This is different," she said. "God, Morgan, what's that on your teeth? It looks like--my God, it is, you're bleeding!"
      "I may have bit my tongue," I conceded, and sipped my coffee to rinse. I cannot begin to describe the flavor that resulted, except to say that the French roast lost a little something, mingling with the blood. In any case, it has lingered vividly in my memory as the taste of Aster embracing monogamy.

      Aster and Bobby honeymooned in New Orleans, spending three weeks in the French Quarter, where Death Etiquette had a gig at a Cajun bar that was branching out. Aster sent me postcards almost every day--in lieu, I suppose, of our kaffee-klatch, or perhaps from a misguided sense of compassion. I sent postcards back--I worked my way methodically through the 17 postcards of the Blue Ridge I had bought on my way up to Philadelphia the day I left school. By the time I'd sent the last one, I felt I had completed a sort of penance, a circuit of the Stations of the Cross of Delusion. I began, for the first time in my life, to seriously consider the un-American notion that the City of God might not be of this world.

      As I had predicted, Aster's marriage lasted less than half a year--almost five months to the day, in fact. I suppose I could have taken some comfort from my prescience, but to my credit I didn't.
      The news of the divorce came on a postcard Aster sent from Reno, which arrived by coincidence on the day I was moving out of my apartment in Philadelphia. The seedy old building was definitely not the same without Aster making my ceiling creak, and I had decided to move on.
      In that same batch of mail was a bill from the University of Virginia--I still owed an exorbitant withdrawal fee for my aborted semester the year before. I sent them a check, scrupulously, though I could ill afford the luxury of fiscal honesty. But it seemed quite fitting to me--symbolic, if you will: a final payment of tuition for my post-doctoral education in Aster.
      The day before, I had taken my first real step on the clothesline tightrope. I had stood astounded, trembling and amazed above the weather-seasoned mattress. And I had not fallen. I was sure that in some way my dead-end detour on the troubled road to love had changed my relationship to gravity itself.

      In Victorian times that would have been the end of it. I drove out to San Francisco and joined Humberto's Circus of the Absurd, headquartered in a dilapidated warehouse along the road to the graveyards of Colma, south of the city, and Aster settled in Los Angeles, a safe ten hours south of me, with a jazz flutist.
      But one day about a year after we had both settled on the West Coast, Aster came to San Francisco to visit. I had recently fallen from the tightrope and broken my right arm, which was still in a sling. Aster showed no sympathy whatsoever. This only endeared her to me more: I cherished her ruthless indifference to professional hazards. My heart leaped, indeed, at the sight of her, but Aster had other things on her mind. Her current boyfriend had worked himself into a frenzy over her trip north, and had laid down an ultimatum: when she got back, he wanted an answer, yes or no, on his proposal. She had managed to drink enough on the short flight up to convince herself that she didn't give a damn, but it was obvious to me that her vacation had been co-opted. Aster did give a damn.
      She got off the plane drunk, stunning in a sleeveless sundress and sandals, suntanned and stressed out, her toenails painted pink, hair cut short. She had lost weight, which sharpened her thin frame painfully, and there was a new jittery quality to her eyes. Also, she had not brought enough warm clothes. She did not, apparently, even own warm clothes anymore; according to Aster, she had discarded them all as relics of an era she preferred to forget. Since many of my own best memories of Aster involved Pittsburgh Steeler sweatshirts and hooded parkas, I felt the poignancy of her burning the bridges that had brought her to Southern California. Still, I loaned her a flannel shirt and a jacket. It gave me great pleasure to see her in my clothes.
      As I had promised, we went immediately to Muir Woods for a picnic. Sitting on a blanket, beneath a majestic redwood that had been a sapling at the time of Charlemagne, I was horrified to find myself beginning to toy with the notion that I was in love with her again.
      The afternoon sun gave way to fog. Ants found the remnants of our bread and cheese. I busied myself with cleanning up.
      "Why didn't you and I ever get any farther than we did?" Aster said at last.
      "Farther?" I said.
      "You know--in love."
      I felt that she had certainly read my mind. I shrugged uneasily.
      "I don't know. Gravity, maybe--what goes up, must come down. We had an extremely vertical relationship."
      "And now?"
      "Now we have a horizontal one, I suppose."
      Aster smiled. "You make it sound like Flatland."
      "Well, it's those extra dimensions that are tricky."
      She was silent a moment. I poured the last of the wine into our plastic cups. Above us the fog streamed.
      Aster said, "I think I may still be in love with you, actually."
      "That's the wine," I said. "I've been having the same sensation. Give it a while, for the alcohol to pass through our systems."
      "No, it's true. I think maybe you were the only one I ever loved."
      "Aster, we've done that. It lasted five months. It lasted five months with Bobby. Now you've been with Chet five months. You need another partner on the merry-go-round." I cleared my throat, struggling for clarity. "Just because I've been wallowing in loneliness and isolation, and making a fool of myself with strangers, it doesn't mean..."
      "You don't think I'm sincere?"
      "I don't think sincere can possibly have anything to do with it any more."
      "No?"
      "No. You and I are ruined. We always have been. The failure of transcendent values has irreparably damaged our capacity for love."
      Aster blinked. One of the things I loved most about her was her capacity to take lines like that in stride. "You can't possibly believe that," she said. "You couldn't live, if you really believed that."
      "It amounts to self-knowledge. I've examined my heart."
      "God, listen to you," Aster said. "And you used to be such a romantic."
      I considered that briefly. It did not seem to be true; I had always been an Augustinian. But perhaps she had a point. I said, "Well, a romantic with lust in his heart is a menace to humanity."
      "No, no, admit it, you love me, too."
      "Of course I love you."
      "Well?"
      "For what it's worth, is what I'm trying to convey."
      "Well, what is anything worth, for that matter?"
      "Don't get nihilistic on me when I'm trying to make a point."
      "Morgan--"
      "Aster, cherish the moment," I said. "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, fog, and thou--this is lovely. But it's sand. We can't build on it."
      Again she was silent. Then she said, almost plaintively, "So you're saying I should marry Chet?"
      "God, no."
      "So? What should I do?"
      "Jesus, I don't know," I said. "Say ten thousand Hail Marys and a good Act of Contrition. And devote yourself to the flute. Be kind to children and small animals. Buy yourself a decent sweater. Stop already with the cocaine."
      "That's all a big help."
      "We aim to please," I said, and pretended to concentrate on the dregs of my wine. I was unsettled, I confess. It had never occurred to me that Aster might actually require solace. She had always seemed so secure in her whims.
      Just then there was a movement to our left. We both looked up, and there, standing heroically on the matted forest floor, peering at us cautiously but calmly, was an enormous deer, an eight-point buck, less than 20 feet away. His wide black eyes blinked; his ruminant jaw worked once, then again. "It's a visitation," Aster breathed.
      And so it was. That buck might as well have been an angel. A sense of the sacred had descended on us. The woods were still, and alive with presence. I looked at Aster and she looked at me. It was an instant to base a life on. It had never seemed clearer to me that we were kindred souls on an incomprehensible journey home to God.
      I'd like to say the moment awed us both into real humility and wisdom and that our lives from that point on unfolded as a continuation of grace, but the fact is that I had Aster's top three buttons undone before the deer had disappeared. Even with a broken right arm, I was extraordinarily dextrous. We began mauling each other like high school kids. Her tongue itself seemed a superior sort of revelation. I almost wept, I had so missed the sweetness of her kiss.

      Aster got back on the plane that night rather than risk confusing the real issues any further with a sleepover. I waved good-bye to her at gate 18 with a sense that I had probably pushed her into Chet's eager marital embrace.
      And so it turned out. Three weeks later I got a sketch of that stag in the mail, along with a wedding invitation. Aster had not, I noted, asked me to be maid of honor this time.

      An epilogue of sorts: about a month ago, I went south, as I had been meaning to for almost five years, to visit Aster. What with one thing and another, she and I had not seen each other since we made out that afternoon in the redwoods.
      I found her ten pounds heavier and decidedly happier than I had ever seen her, living in a hilly suburb of Los Angeles, in a house much like her family's home above the Monongahela. She was wearing a Dodgers sweatshirt.
      As I stood that evening in her gorgeous green back yard, among the delphiniums and the daffodils, drinking most of a six-pack while her husband grilled steaks, I realized that I actually liked him. Not just as a guy, but as a mate for Aster. Watching Chet handle Aster, I was amazed and then a little awestruck. He was genuinely, deeply good with her, in a way I had never been. Chet was gifted, he had a talent for Aster. Only someone who had made as many mistakes with her as I had could have appreciated it, I suppose, but by the time the steaks were done, I had seen Chet negotiate two or three difficult passages with Aster that would in the past have ruined an entire evening between the two of us. And he had done so with effortless skill, making her laugh as he went. The two of them talked together as if they were jamming on clarinet and flute (which they did, later in the evening, playing one of Aster's latest, quite lovely, efforts).
      I knew that I was watching a master at work.

      Most of our falls in any endeavor are falls of habit: we expect to fall. I mean, it soothes us to fall, it makes us feel we know what is going on. Balance, then, is the renunciation of the familiar events of imbalance, the little failures and glitches, the daily catastrophes by which we recognize our world. In perfect balance, terrifyingly, almost nothing happens. And this leads to the second reason for falling: the need to believe we are doing something important, something noble and somehow heroic. A moment of uneventful balance and we tend to find ourselves longing for the old drama of our teetering, the waving of arms, the thrills and chills.
      Balance itself--balance achieved, balance attained, balance perfected--is effortless and well-nigh imperceptible. What we actually feel, struggling nobly for balance, is imbalance. But this remains incomprehensible to us. We grow accustomed to seeing heroism in the fascinating face of failure, mistaking the battle for the result.

Tim Farrington lives in San Francisco. His first novel, The California Book of the Dead, will be published by Pocket Books in May. E-mail: timfarr@sirius.com