CHAPTER 21
…he wakes to a burial of flowers: hundreds of rose petals, hundreds of baby’s breaths, hundreds of carnations plucked, blanketing him...he is perfumed, fragranced, honeyed, sweetened—before him she stands, in funereal black, missal in hand, crushing ancient Latin phrases, pressing out their vinegar...around the bed she walks, waving one of his thick cigars smoking: incense…“I want you to have my baby,” Bertha pleads with Frank. “Seriously,” she implores…half-kneeling upon a bed filled with raspberry Jello, they flip and flop and flounder and flail. “If I dip you in moon-blood, you’ll get pregnant.” …Must’ve been the acid, Frank mused, slight laughter, but he, soberly, knew it as 69—a most power-filled vintage.
So, at twenty-four, the question seemed appropriate: “Will you marry me?”
Asked; then Frank died.
Not killed. Not slain. Not battered and bruised. Just died—like the Earth sucked him back down.
Died...receded, decayed, disintegrated, withered—witheringly.
Actually, Bertha sucked him back down—rather, back-up, up her ass...this is how Frank visualizes her response: He is being sucked up her ass.
“Fuck only you?” And he knew she wasn’t drunk or stoned.
She paused. Watched. Observed. Registered in her mind the withering disappearance—vaporization of Frank. Subsiding and vanishing more quickly than his blown cock.
Her question mark conveys surprise, innuendo, shock, anger, incredulity, amusement…shame. It was shame more than anything which sucked Frank’s essence from his plottable place in Newton’s world of being.
“Man, you didn’t ask her that?”
Displaying his characteristic compassion: “God, what an asshole!”
Somehow it all made sense. The world’s crap! Frank’s monologuing to a quart of Johnny Walker Red. Red and a thick Churchill of a cigar. Sitting. Lying. Moseying. Floating. Around his house. Alone. But in a quite new sense of alone. One so novel that it doesn’t even come into his mind.
Shit. “All I’m’s shit!”
The empty thunks the carpet-less floor.
Frank twitches, bends and vomits—volcanically—splattering himself. After a sleeve to his mouth and a spit or two he drops, rolls back down onto the couch.
Shit. Might as well just be shit!
That all of this had occurred on Christmas Day only registered with Frank years later.
That it had all been just inside the house never became more than an unimagined hint.
That he was no longer alone, as in “only Frank,” this he did know with all the conscious pain of a slowly pressed scalpel moving by torturing seconds into and through his heart.
He comforted himself with this insight: “She couldn’t handle it!” Mute—Bitch!
She didn’t say the words.
She did nothing but look at him. Not beholding him. Not by the gravity of her desire pulling him to her.
When she had done so in the past, Frank had answered...ripped off his clothes, postured in manly ways, comically pranced with visual dick jokes which she especially liked, pleasured her eyes in so many ways, but not this time.
This time was the time she had been waiting for, planning for, working towards.
She knew that it was the house.
Aware that they had never made love or just fucked outside of the house.
It was the house which had sustained the year. And as the year ended, she knew that her life’s voyage lay ahead. Not behind. Not here.
She was eager to disembark.
It is The Moment Bertha had sought—faithfully, heedlessly, recklessly...relentlessly. Now, she can escape the house; is escaping.
Bertha escapes.
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