"But it's risky," I said.
"Driving on the Golden Gate Bridge is risky. Do you know that Yellow Cabs are not allowed—I mean, not allowed by Yellow Cab, not the police—to drive in the fast lane on the Golden Gate Bridge? What they call 'suicide lane.' If a driver is caught driving in that lane he is fired. But people drive in the fast lane on the Golden Gate Bridge constantly. Maybe that's a poor analogy."
"No, it's a good one," I said.
"Do you drive in the fast lane on the Golden Gate Bridge?"
After a pause I said, "Sometimes."
"What if I came to you and sat you down and started lecturing you about it? Wouldn't you think I was treating you as a child, not an adult? Do you follow what I'm saying? When an adult does something you don't approve of, you discuss the matter with him or her. I'm willing to discuss my relationship with Kirsten with you because, for one thing, you're my daughter-in-law, but much more important, you're someone I know and care about and love. I think that's the salient term, here; it's the key to Paul's thinking. Agape in the Greek. Translated into Latin, it's caritas, from which we get the word 'caring,' to be concerned about someone. As you're concerned about me now, myself and your friend Kirsten. You care about us."
"That's right," I said. "That's why I'm here."
"Then for you, caring is important."
"Yes," I said. "Obviously."
"You can call it agape or you can call it caritas or love or caring about another person, but whatever you call it—let me read from Paul. Bishop Archer again opened his big Bible; he flipped through the pages rapidly, knowing exactly where he was going. "First Corinthians, chapter thirteen. 'If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding—'"
"Yes, you quoted that at the Bad Luck," I interrupted.
"And I will quote it again." His voice was brisk. "'If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatever.' Now listen to this. 'Love does not come to an end. But if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail; or the gift of languages, it will not continue for ever; and knowledge—for this, too, the time will come when it must fail. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophesying is imperfect, but once perfection comes, all imperfect things will disappear. When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and think like a child, and argue like a child, but now I am a man, all childish ways are put behind me.'"
The phone on his big desk rang, then.
Looking annoyed, Bishop Archer set down his Bible, open. "Excuse me." He went to get the phone.
As I sat, waiting for him to finish his phone conversation, I looked over the passage he had been reading. It was a passage familiar to me, but in the King James translation. This Bible, I saw, was the Jerusalem Bible. I had never seen it before. I read on past the point at which he had stopped.
His phone conversation finished, Bishop Archer returned. "I have to be off. There's an African bishop waiting to see me; they just brought him here from the airport."
"It says," I said, putting my finger on the passage in his big Bible, "that all we see is a dim reflection."
"It also says, 'In short there are three things that last: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.' I would point out to you that that sums up the kerygma of our Lord."
"What if Kirsten tells people?"
"I think she can be counted on to be discreet." He had already reached the door of his office; reflexively, I rose to my feet and followed after him.
"She told me."
"You're my son's wife."
"Yeah, well—"
"I'm sorry I have to run off like this." Bishop Archer shut and locked his office door behind us. "God bless." He kissed me on the forehead. "We want to have you over when we're set up. Kirsten found an apartment today, in the Tenderloin. I haven't seen it. I'm leaving that up to her." And off he strode, leaving me standing there. He got me on a technicality, I realized. I had adultery confused with fornication. I keep forgetting he was a lawyer. I entered his large office with something to say and never said it; I went in smart and came out stupid. With nothing in between.
Maybe if I didn't smoke dope I could argue better. He won; I lost. No: he lost; I lost; we both lost. Shit.
I never said love was bad. I never knocked agape. That was not the point, the fucking point. Not getting caught is the point. Bolting your feet down to the floor is the point, the floor we call reality.
As I started toward the street, I thought: I am passing judgment on one of the most successful men in the world. I will never be known as he is known; I will never influence opinion. I did not put away my pectoral cross for the duration of the Vietnam War as Tim did. Who the fuck am I?
4
NOT LONG THEREAFTER, Jeff and I received an invitation to visit the Bishop of California and his mistress at their hideout in the Tenderloin. It turned out to be a sort of party. Kirsten had fixed canapés and hors d'oeuvres; we could smell food cooking in the kitchen ... Tim had me drive him to a nearby liquor store to get wine; they had forgotten. I chose the wine. Tim stood blankly, as if abstracted, while I paid the clerk. I guess when you've been a member of AA, you learn to phase out in a liquor store.
Back at the apartment, in the medicine cabinet of the bathroom, I found a vast bottle of Dexamyl, the size bottle they give you when you're going on a long trip. Kirsten doing speed? I asked myself. Making no noise, I took down the bottle. The bishop's name was on the prescription label. Well, I thought. Off booze and onto speed. Aren't they supposed to warn you about that in AA? I flushed the toilet—so as to create some sound—and while the water gurgled I opened the bottle and stuck a few of the Dex tablets in my pocket. This is something you automatically do if you live in Berkeley; no one thinks anything about it. On the other hand, no one in Berkeley leaves their dope in the bathroom.
Presently, the four of us sat around the modest living room, relaxing. Everyone but Tim held a drink. Tim wore a red shirt and permapress slacks. He did not look like a bishop. He looked like Kirsten Lundborg's lover.
"This is a really nice place," I said.
On the way home from the liquor store, Tim had talked about private detectives and how they go about finding you. They sneak into your apartment while you're gone and go through all the dresser drawers. The way you catch on to this is by taping a human hair to every outer door. I think Tim had seen that in a movie.
"If you come back and find the hair gone or broken," he informed me as we walked from the car to the apartment, "you know you're being watched." He narrated, then, the history of the FBI in regard to Dr. King. It was a story everyone in Berkeley knew. I listened politely.
In the living room of their hideout that evening, I first heard about the Zadokite Documents. Now, of course, you can buy the Doubleday Anchor book, the Patton, Myers and Abré translation, which is complete. With the Helen James introduction dealing with mysticism, comparing and contrasting the Zadokites with, for example, the Qumran people, who presumably were Essenes, although that has really never been established,
"I feel," Tim said, "that this may prove more important than even the Nag Hammadi Library. We already have a fair working knowledge of Gnosticism, but we know nothing about the Zadokites, except for the fact that they were Jews."
"What is the approximate date on the Zadokite scrolls?" Jeff asked.
"They have made a preliminary estimate of about two hundred B.C.E.," Tim said.
"Then they could have influenced Jesus," Jeff said.
"It's not likely," Tim said. "I'll be flying over there to London in March; I'll have a chance to talk to the translators. I wish John Allegro were involved, but he's not." He talked for a while about Allegro's work in connection with the Qumran scrolls, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls.
"Wouldn't it be interesting," Kirsten said, "if the—" She hesitated. "Zadokite Documents turned out to contain Christian material."
"Christianity is, after all, bas
ed on Judaism," Tim said.
"I mean specific sayings attributed to Jesus," Kirsten said.
"There is not that clear a break in the rabbinical tradition," Tim said. "You find Hillel expressing some of the ideas we consider basic to the New Testament. And of course Matthew understood everything that Jesus did and said as a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. Matthew wrote to Jews and for Jews and, essentially, as a Jew. God's plan set forth in the Old Testament is brought to completion by Jesus. The term 'Christianity' was not in use at his time; by and large, apostolic Christians simply spoke of 'the Way.' Thus they stressed its naturalness and universality." After a pause he added, "And you find the expression 'the word of the Lord.' That appears in Acts, six. 'The word of the Lord continued to spread; the number of disciples in Jerusalem was greatly increased.'"
"What does 'Zadokite' derive from?" Kirsten asked.
"Zadok, a priest of Israel, about the time of David," Tim said. "He founded a priestly house, the Zadokites. They were of the house of Eleazar. There is mention of Zadok in the Qumran scrolls. Let me check." He rose to go get a book from a still-unpacked carton. "First Chronicles, chapter twenty-four. 'These also, side by side with their kinsmen the sons of Aaron, cast lots in the presence of Kind David, Zadok—' There he is mentioned." Tim shut the book. It was another Bible.
"But I guess now we're going to find out a lot more," Jeff said.
"Yes, I hope so," Tim said. "When I'm in London." He now, as was his custom, abruptly shifted mental gears. "I'm commissioning a rock mass to be given at Grace this Christmas." Scrutinizing me he said, "What is your opinion about Frank Zappa?"
I was at a loss for an answer.
"We would arrange for the actual service to be recorded," Tim continued. "So it could be released as an album. Captain Beefheart has also been recommended to me. And there were several other names offered. Where could I get a Frank Zappa album to listen to?"
"At a record store," Jeff said.
"Is Frank Zappa black?" Tim asked.
"I don't see that that matters," Kirsten said. "To me, that is inverse prejudice."
Tim said, "I was just curious. This is an area I know nothing about. Does any of you have an opinion about Marc Bolan?"
"He's dead," I said. "You're talking about T.Rex."
"Marc Bolan is dead?" Jeff said. He looked amazed.
"I could be wrong," I said. "I suggest Ray Davies. He writes the Kinks' stuff. He's very good."
"Would you look into it for me?" Tim said, speaking both to Jeff and me.
"I wouldn't know how to go about doing that," I said.
Kirsten said quietly, "I'll take care of it."
"You could get Paul Kantner and Gracie Slick," I said. "They just live over at Bolinas in Marin County."
"I know," Kirsten said, nodding placidly and with the air of total confidence.
Bullshit, I thought. You don't even know who I'm talking about. Already you're in charge, just from being set up in this apartment. It isn't even that much of an apartment.
Tim said, "I would like Janis Joplin to sing at Grace."
"She died in 1970," I said.
"Then whom do you recommend in her place?" Tim asked. He waited expectantly.
"'In Janis Joplin's place,'" I said. "'In Janis Joplin's place.' I'll have to think that over. I really can't come up with a name off the top of my head. That will take some time."
Kirsten regarded me with a mixture of expressions. Mostly disapproval. "I think what she's trying to say," Kirsten said, "is that no one can or ever will take Joplin's place."
"Where would I get one of her records?" Tim said.
"At a record store," Jeff said.
"Would you do that for me?" his father said.
"Jeff and I have all her records," I said. "There aren't that many. We'll bring them over,"
"Ralph McTell," Kirsten said.
"I want all these suggestions written down," Tim said. "A rock mass at Grace Cathedral is going to attract a good deal of attention."
I thought: There is no such person as Ralph McTell. From across the room Kirsten smiled at me, a complicated smile. She had me; I couldn't be sure one way or another.
"He's on the Paramount label," Kirsten said. Her smile increased.
"I had really hoped to get Janis Joplin," Tim said, half to himself. He seemed puzzled. "They were playing a song with her—perhaps she didn't write it—on the car radio this morning. She's black, isn't she?"
"She is white," Jeff said, "and she is dead."
"I hope somebody is writing this down," Tim said.
My husband's emotional involvement with Kirsten Lundborg did not begin at one particular moment on a certain day, at least so far as I could discern. Initially, he maintained that Kirsten was good for the bishop; she had enough practical realism to keep both of them anchored, not floating endlessly upward. It is necessary, in evaluating these things, to distinguish your awareness from that of which you are aware. I can say when I noticed it but that is all I can say.
Considering her age, Kirsten still managed to emit tolerable amounts of sexually stimulating waves. That was how Jeff saw her. From my standpoint she remained an older female friend who now, by virtue of her relationship with Bishop Archer, outranked me. The degree of erotic provocativeness in a woman has no interest for me; I do not swing both ways, as the expression goes. Nor for me is it a threat. Until, of course, my own husband is involved. But the problem is with him, then.
While I worked at the law office and candle shop, seeing to it that drug dealers got out of trouble as fast as they got in, Jeff bothered his head with a series of extension courses at the University of California. We in Northern California had not quite reached the point of offering survey courses in how to compose your own mantras; that belonged to the Southland, totally despised by everyone in the Bay Area. Jeff had enrolled in a serious project: tracing the ills of modern Europe back to the Thirty Years War which had devastated Germany (circa 1648), caused the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and culminated in the rise of Nazism and Hitler's Third Reich. Above and beyond the courses pertaining to this, Jeff now advanced his own theory as to the root of it all. Upon reading Schiller's Wallenstein Trilogy, Jeff leaped to the intuitive insight that had the great general not gotten involved with astrology the imperial cause would have triumphed, and, as a result, World War Two would never have come into being.
The third play in Schiller's trilogy, The Death of Wallenstein, profoundly affected my husband. He regarded the play as equal to any of Shakespeare's and a whole lot better than most. Moreover, no one had read it—at least insofar as he could tell—except himself. To him, Wallenstein loomed as one of the ultimate enigmas of Western history. Jeff noted that Hitler, like Wallenstein, relied in times of crisis on the occult rather than on reason. In Jeff's view this all added up to something significant, but he could not fathom just what. Hitler and Wallenstein had had so many traits in common—Jeff maintained—that the resemblance bordered on the uncanny. Both were great but eccentric generals and both had utterly wrecked Germany. Jeff hoped to do a paper on the coincidences, extracting from the evidence the conclusion that the abandoning of Christianity for the occult opened the door to universal ruin. Jesus and Simon Magus (as Jeff saw it) stood as the bipolarities, absolute and distinct.
I couldn't have cared less.
You see, this is what going to school forever and ever does to you. While I slaved away at the law office and candle shop, Jeff read everything in the U.C. Berkeley Library on, for instance, the Battle of Lützen (November 16, 1632) at which time and place Wallenstein's fortunes were decided. Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden, died at Lützen, but the Swedes won anyhow. The real significance of this victory lay, of course, in the fact that at no time again would the Catholic powers be in a position to crush the Protestant cause. Jeff, however, viewed it all in terms of Wallenstein. He reread and reread Schiller's trilogy and tried to reconstruct from it—and from more accurate historical accounts—t
he precise moment when Wallenstein lost touch with reality.
"It's like with Hitler," Jeff said to me. "Can you say he was always crazy? Can you say he was crazy at all? And if he was crazy but not always crazy, when did he become crazy and what caused him to become crazy? Why should a successful man who holds really an enormous amount of power, a staggering amount of power, power to determine human history—why should he drift off like that? Okay; with Hitler it was probably paranoid schizophrenia and those injections that quack doctor was giving him. But neither factor was involved in Wallenstein's case."
Kirsten, being Norwegian, took a sympathetic interest in Jeff's preoccupation with Gustavus Adolphus' campaign into Central Europe. In between telling Swede jokes she revealed great pride in the role that the great Protestant King had played in the Thirty Years War. Also, she knew something about all this, which I did not. Both she and Jeff agreed that the Thirty Years War had been, up until World War One, the most dreadful war since the Huns sacked Rome. Germany had been reduced to cannibalism. Soldiers on both sides had regularly skewered bodies and roasted them. Jeff's reference books hinted at even more abominations too dreadful to detail. Everything connected with that period in time and place had been dreadful.
"We are still paying the price today," Jeff said, "for that war."
"Yeah, I guess it really was dreadful," I said, seated by myself in a corner of our living room reading a current issue of Howard the Duck.
Jeff said, "I don't think you're particularly interested."
Glancing up, I said, "I get tired from bailing out heroin dealers. I'm always the one they send over to the bail bondsman. I'm sorry if I don't take the Thirty Years War as seriously as you and Kirsten do."
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (Valis) Page 5