Immediate relief from said agony was not forthcoming, but one day, after finishing up our lessons, Prudence and I were sauntering along the shore when she offered a suggestion that would at least alleviate, in its stead, some measure of a comparable anguish of the soul.
I carried the Bible under my arm while she hovered at my side waving her paper fan.
“Well, now, Adamiah, you’ve been here in Eden for some time now.”
“Mm-hmm.”
We strolled further.
Something was clearly pestering her thoughts.
“It’s been such a blessing to have you back. Why, I pray thanks to God every night when I go to bed.”
I took her free hand in my own, giving it a tender little squeeze. Watching her sidelong, I could tell she was working on something. She chewed at her lip and seemed to be fairly fidgeting with nerves. Finally, she stopped walking and turned my way.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Oh, Adamiah.”
“What?”
“Well, I was just thinking it might be a good idea if we got to know each other a little better. You know, in a closer way.”
I gulped and stifled a grin. The possibilities for what she had just suggested spilled forth in my simpleton’s brain like an upturned cornucopia of pleasurable possibility. “Uh,” I stammered. “What do you have in mind?”
She blushed. “Well, we don’t have to do it if you don’t think we should…”
My heart began to gallop.
“…but I was thinking we could…”
My breathing stopped.
“Well, I was just thinking that since we’re about to be married up anyways, we could…”
Oh, man!
“Well…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I was thinking it might be a good time for us to make our confessions to each other.”
“Confessions?”
“Uh-huh. I know you most likely ain’t done no sinning. That’s just the kind of good person you’ve always been. Why, I could see it in you even when you was just a boy. But… I’m just saying… maybe you have secrets you want to share with me. Maybe you made some mistakes along the way that I should know about.”
“Oh.”
A trickle of moisture worked along the skin in front of her ear.
“I could do the same,” she offered. “In fact, well, truth be told, I’d like to tell you something private that maybe you should know about me before we’re married up.”
*****
Now the list of my bygone turpitudinal deeds was undeniably quite lengthy. I am shamefaced to admit, but I had pretty much broken all the Commandments in the Christian tradition, as well as violated most of society’s moral codes for good measure. Albeit, these transgressions had been committed in my previous life as Didier Rain, and so since I was now a new person, I reckoned that my accrued sin and its umbrage had been largely expunged. Surely I was starting anew with a soul slate pure as a rain-washed sky. By such reasoning, I figured, I had nothing to confess.
And yet…
There is a human tendency I have noticed in my two-legged fellows – a bedeviling of the mind that disturbs one’s sleep and generally torments one’s waking hours besides. I would like to say I was above such plebian irritation, but I was not. For although some delusional romantics claim that Love is what makes the world turn round, I have learned that Guilt, and the quest for its ultimate alleviation, is the more powerful and pervasive force spinning our folly-laden globe through the cosmos.
With such a cathartic opportunity before me, I grappled in my thoughts as to what sins I would most like to confess.
It did not take long to decide.
WHEN I FIRST TRAVELED to America from France, it was under the threat of impending duress. I was a young man at the time, innocent as a nincompoop child, and pitifully under-educated in complex affairs of the heart. After circumstances had suddenly gone to hell with a certain lopsided courtship I had been involved in, I was forced to flee my homeland.
My mother, bless her soul, had been my only ally during my escape. In the confusion of the moment, she had the good sense to sneak me onto a ship that was about to set sail for the new world.
It was a drizzly dawn.
The sailors were already unhooking the dock lines, hoisting the steerage sails, and readying to disembark for the cold black Atlantic.
With tears of sorrow, my mother and I embraced for a final time.
Her fragrance mixed with the briny aroma of the sea.
And then she thrust a purse inside my jacket.
“For your new life,” she told me in French. “Pour mon petit poète.”
She spun away and hurried down the quay, fading like mist into the dark cobbled streets of Cherbourg.
*****
Once at sea, I hid away belowdecks and peeked inside the purse. I could hardly believe what I found. A small fortune! My mother was a simple seamstress. Where had she gotten so much money? I deduced that it had been her secret savings, accumulated over years of frugal diligence. I also suspected that it was all she had owned, and that it was with this money that she had planned on navigating the years of her someday lonely dotage.
My hands shook.
My whole being.
I felt a great weight of responsibility descend onto my shoulders.
In that exact moment, bolstered by my mother’s selfless love, I vowed that I would go to America, learn its idiom, hole up in a cut-rate garret, and write an epic poem to rival Mister Milton himself. It would surely make me rich, and then soon after I would send for my mother, repaying her for the faith she had shown in me, and giving her a life of comfort and contentment until the end of her days.
“As the gods are my witness!”
I nodded out my porthole window at the indifferent waves.
“So may it come to pass.”
*****
Gotham proved intimidating.
Manhattan.
I soon found the economical quarters I had envisioned, but after noting the rats sniggering in the stairwell, and being assaulted by the sewerish miasma permeating the dim and thug-ridden halls, I decided that the romantic allure of squalor was largely overrated.
“Why, for just a few dollars more, I can have clean linens, a private bath, and a window offering me sunlight and a view.”
Surely my mother would not have me to suffer too dearly for my art. I was, after all, already measurably miserable with homesickly nostalgia. Besides, how was I to compose a masterwork if my fingers were too frozen to write? How was I to think brilliant thoughts with drunken neighbors distracting me at all hours with their bickering beyond my parchment-thin walls?
With such sound reasoning, I took a room in a somewhat more than middling hotel near the center of the city. The curtains were edged with lace, it had a fireplace, and the bed was luxuriously wide and soft, and I told myself that it was worth the greater price since the quarters were Miltonian to the nth, and just what I required to get at task.
I bought a ream of blank paper, some pens, and a dozen jars of hopeful ink.
“Alors!” I determined. “Here I go.”
*****
Whereas Love and Guilt may well be prime movers in the macrocosm’s general gearworks, I soon discovered that Loneliness, by contrast, is entropy incarnate.
After many weeks of staring idly out my window, I had been unable to compose a single heroic couplet. Desperation, it turns out, is a poor muse, and it was just such despair that was compounding exponentially with my every unproductive day.
The task I had set for myself seemed too huge.
My brain became stymied with the mortifying possibility of failure.
Ennui replaced my otherwise enthusiasm as angst squashed my initial resolve like a grape beneath a boot heel.
Finally, after a fit of melancholia, I was struck with an idea for how to cure my mental blockage. With said good idea in mind, I tucked a gold coin into my pocket, bobbed my head with resolu
tion, and went out to prowl the streets.
*****
Now I was (with the exception of one very confusing encounter I was doing my best to forget) still a virgin. And it had occurred to me that the very life force of an epic poem is surely held within the experiential underpinnings and soul-shuddering raptures brought about during the physical act of love. (At least, that is what I told myself at the time.) Without such knowledge I was surely lost on the proverbial sea. If I were to ever join the esteemed league of romantic poets and troubadours – so famed in the world for their sonneticated passions – I needed to dispense with my innocence and gain some lucidity.
For surely, unstopping one’s penis would, likewise, unstop one’s faltering pen.
To this end, I entered rather anxiously into the sweet-smelling vestibule of one of the city’s more reputable houses of ill repute.
I will not go into the details, as they are predictable and somewhat banal. Suffice it to say, I found the encounter to be just what I thought I needed. After relaxing me with some rather pricey Bordeaux, my ample-haunched hostess led me to her boudoir and skillfully set about satisfying my needs.
Afterwards, I fairly skipped back to my desk and set to work.
“Hoo-boy!”
The floodgates had been opened!
Epiphanies flocked like eager birds!
Insights sailed by like leaping fish!
I scribbled well into the dawn, quaffing more wine, madly penning the most original poetry ever written. It was at once happy and sad, common and cultured, quotidian and phantasmagorical.
It was all things!
An entire distilled universe!
A fabulous somethingness conjured magically from a chaos of nothingness!
“Ha-ha!” I laughed at my genius. “A-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
Once spent, I collapsed onto my bed, passing out with weariness and glee, satisfied that I had just written the best prelude to an epic the world had ever seen.
*****
Daylight revealed the brutal truth.
With an overriding nausea and throbbing topknob, I eagerly reviewed what I had written the night before. I rubbed my bleared eyes with my knuckles.
“No!” I choked. “This cannot be.”
It was as if someone had gone in and changed it all around. There was not a single intelligent rhyme to the meter, nary a comprehensive reason to the work’s overriding argument for supernatural intercourse between men and angels. What I had thought to be a nimble masterwork turned out to have no more worth than so much wipeage for one’s arse.
I was stunned by the realization.
I slumped on my rug before the fireplace, nursing the dregs of a bottle of wine, feeding my chagrin-fraught pages into the flames.
*****
Days passed.
I fairly pissed them away in a head-hung torpor.
I could not make myself pick up my pen.
My room was some five stories off the street below. Could I, if I landed squarely on my head, have it over with by flinging myself from the window?
I proved too cowardly to find out.
My life became a gray and pointless limbo.
I stared into the cold ashes of my fireplace for hours at a time. I shivered with an ague of shame, thinking of my mother.
“My little poet,” she had called me.
Her voice came to me like whale song over the ocean. Her scent. Somehow, in a small way, this bolstered me.
I do not know if it was truly my dear maman, or a demon, or some well-meaning goddess, but by way of that faraway voice I was granted an insightful simile.
Your penis is like a flued chimney, went my invisible helper’s reasoning. You can hardly expect to blow clear a lifetime of poesy-stifling soot with just one single encounter.
With such clear guidance directing me, I sprang to my feet, cleaned my teeth, and ventured forth. This time I took two gold coins. For I figured that if one vivacious chimney sweep could be a cure to my blockage, then maybe two would prove even more so.
*****
It was not to be.
And neither did three sweeps at a go prove any more helpful.
Nor four.
My post-coital pages grew only more muddled.
Still, I carried on with all the blind determination of a satyr.
I tried finer wines, hoping that Bacchus might lend me a hand if I paid him devotion.
I tried opium, hoping that the god of said substance might grant me a blessing and talent.
Alas, nothing worked. My purse grew evermore light. Still, I continued my cycle of misguided effort. I felt to be trapped on a downward-spiraling wheel; round and down and round it went.
When and where would it stop?
I did not dare to guess.
*****
As my wealth dwindled, so, too, did the quality of my licentious encounters.
Cleanliness became less of a requisite.
Alleyways replaced perfumed boudoirs.
I traded in expensive wine for wood alcohol, as I found that the resultant escape into temporary oblivion proved about the same. I stole bread to feed myself. I pilfered the pockets of my fellow derelicts as they collapsed, insensible, in the gutters.
I was forced to move from my hotel to a dank flophouse over the wharf. When I was unable to pay out the two cents rent for those quarters, I took to sleeping in barns.
It was in just such an abode that I tossed the last shreds of my hope and dignity.
It was on a hapless night, in the slim warmth of a dairyman’s manure-laden stable, that I took solace in the degraded comforts offered by one of this world’s most multipurpose beings.
What I came to call, within all my moral decay, goaty girls.
I STOOD NOW, ALL these years later, before fair Prudence – my sweet confessor.
She waited for me to bare my soul.
The birds ceased chirping. The sea tranquilated. Even the sharks stopped their cruising, as if curious to hear what I had to say for myself.
I swallowed at the fishbone caught suddenly sideways in my voice.
“I… Well, I have not led a perfect life.”
Prudence nodded expectantly.
“You must surely understand…” I readjusted the Bible under my arm and sorted my words. “There have been many temptations along my way.”
She bobbed her head again, even more expectantly, and then stepped closer, folding her fan and placing her fingers on my chest.
Oh man!
I pictured the raindrop tattoo hiding between those delicate fingertips and my well-battered heart. Would that that dark mark and its shameful flotsam could be washed away with some soap and water! Would that all traces of Didier Rain – that manimal I once had been – could be scrubbed away to make me clean as baby Adam on the day Eve brought him forth from the depths of her hallowed womb!
Gazing into Prudence’s face, I saw a possible route to such spotlessness. It flashed like a well-lit map glimpsed through rain-streaked glass.
Yes.
The way to redemption seemed clear enough; the prodigal son could correct his transgressions in one soul-cleansing swoop. Relief would at long last be mine. An unburdened life awaited. I needed only to fess up to this angel before me, this feminine manifestation of purity and mercy, this blue-eyed vicar of God.
But then I faltered.
A shudder of hesitance seized me just at the verge of pouring forth my confession.
Of a sudden, it seemed a very complicated situation to sort out. The threads of Rain’s past were so intricately interwoven with those of Linklater. The risk of inadvertently unraveling all my hopes for comfort and contentment appeared great. Yes. I could see a problem. From whose point of view was I confessing? Didier’s? Or Adamiah’s? If I did not approach this opportunity with the utmost in strategic dexterity, I could easily give away my ruse and make myself look like an even more devious two-faced goat-humping charlatan and miserably failed alcoholic poet than I actually was.
Prudence waited.
I weighed the options.
And then, like a boneless milksop, I said, “I’m sure there are things I have done wrong along the way.” I pretended to be considering my dubious past. “But I can’t for the life of me think what those things might be.”
The lady sighed and patted my breastbone. “Oh, Adamiah.” She wiped a sweat droplet from her jaw. “I figured as much. You’re just so good. It doesn’t surprise me a bit you kept yourself clean as a shiny new nickel.” She laughed timidly. “You’re doubtless the purest man to come along since Jesus.”
This did not feel to be an entirely accurate statement, but I shrugged anyway, as if humbly apologizing for my boundless virtue.
But then Prudence’s expression grew more concerned. She turned and stepped away from me, looking through the trees to the lagoon. “I just wish I could say the same for myself.”
“Oh, dear one,” I chuckled, “I’m sure there’s nothing you could have done that’s so terrible.”
“You don’t know, Adamiah.” She was clearly troubled. “You don’t know how hard it’s been, always waiting for you, never knowing for sure if my old dream about us marrying up someday was a for sure thing or just some little girl’s trick I was playing on myself.” She stood with her back to me. “The Devil put some doubtful dark thinking in my head sometimes.”
“That’s understandable. It was real good of you to keep waiting for me all those years. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.”
“But you don’t know how weak I was, how I failed so many times, and what terrible things I did to get by in my miserableness.”
I was becoming intrigued. Whatever had this innocent done that could even marginally compare with my own multifarious indiscretions?
Fortuna and the Scapegrace Page 21