Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  These past years I have fancied that my ideas about the changeability of life were progressing—for of course metaphors for poets are very fine. From broken threads to broken books, from everlasting fire to an hojarasca, a scattering of leaves. From panes of crudely painted glass to the projections of a camera obscura as detailed and complete as anything a mirror receives. But I have had occasion to wonder if this is really the way to part the veil over one’s destiny—to cut the threads of the past only to become tangled up in them, and perhaps stumble on someone else’s path.

  †bundle, muddle

  †Aquinas

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  THE SCEPTRE OF SAINT JOSEPH

  B. Limosneros, trans.

  INTELLIGENCE:

  … that Woman, who but through sin

  entered my dominions,

  should then vanquish me,

  and, a Slave, crush me beneath her heel….21

  What mystifying veil does God cast

  over a secret so stupendous

  as to outsoar my grasp,

  yet not quite my awareness?

  LUCERO:

  Worse, so far from seizing it in your talons

  you have it barely sighted,

  as by your lights one descries

  how distinct are the objects it symbolises:

  since Philosophy has, by her various sciences,

  assigned it the symbol for Innocence,

  and for Liberty made it the most dread

  hieroglyph in Egypt—while for Victory

  no less, in other nations. Oh memory!

  How it afflicts my Intelligence to divine

  liberty, victory, and innocence,

  in one glyph signified.

  Conjecture, what do you make of this?

  CONJECTURE:

  Much and nothing.

  ENVY:

  Whereas I, as is meet, quite outdo myself

  in impugning its qualities. And thus to its undoing

  let us hasten.

  LUCERO:

  This I do intend.

  But so as to build its ruin on a solid foundation,

  show me, Intelligence, another scene,

  and let us see what new quarry your prowess takes in.

  SEA COW

  IF BEULAH AT DINNER, over our Chateaubriand, had just expressed a few of the things she was to write in her journal afterwards, maybe matters could have taken a different turn. On that night and others. I do remember her saying something she has omitted from her account. Something she said at the car, on our way to the motel.

  It was a clear winter evening, the sky heavy with stars. I had never seen her before in a dress. Over it she was wearing just a light coat, and shivered slightly as she spoke. “I bet people like you …”

  “People like me,” I said, agreeably, as I bent to unlock her door.

  “… see all that dark,” her voice came softly now with her head craned back, “see all that night as just absence of light.”

  Here at least was a topic more congenial to the occasion of Valentine’s. Yet I found I had no answer.

  She had, I’ll admit, a sharp eye for the conflicts and contradictions my accidental career had led me into. Early success took me in directions I couldn’t have expected, wouldn’t have chosen or wanted. Mark Twain had been one of my best sources for a wry look at James Fenimore Cooper. But though on Cooper’s failings as a writer Twain was devastating, his critique of Cooper as historian ultimately revealed more of Twain’s biases than Cooper’s. So I found myself quickly backing away from that aspect of my study about which I’d been in earnest—Cooper as liar—and while opportunity still knocked got serious instead about what had been pure knavery on my part: literature as negative way to truth. I had Mark Twain to thank for what came next.

  People in distressing numbers assumed that I valued and even enjoyed the good yarn, the tall tale, the whopper. I can’t begin to count the number of keynote addresses I firmly declined to give at conventions of oral historians and storytellers. A personal low point was my invitation to be a race marshal at the Calaveras County Fair. At first I felt affronted, then simply annoyed—no doubt these people imagine the forensic psychiatrist chooses his field out of affection for homicidal mania. Or the virologist because he likes a good, brisk pandemic.

  Over the years such ressentiments passed.

  And she was perceptive about my special dislike of a certain brand of fiction. Eliot was quite right that Joyce had spoiled poetry for ladies. If only he had done half so much for fiction’s kitsches of the past. The stagy accents, the ‘lexical curiositie shoppes’—though I don’t recall putting it quite so colourfully—and more distasteful still, all the nodding and winking and the chest-thumping pieties over lying with one’s facts straight. Her citing Shakespeare as a practitioner of historical fiction, or as an argument for truth in anachronism, changes nothing. The gentle folk who really cannot wait for the mini-series will still insist on taking such fictions as History lite.

  All this pales, however, beside my horror of magical realism. The whimsies of Imagination’s triumph over rolled steel, all the fabulist tigers in the pantry, the retreat into private worlds—Truth slowly reduced to rose-garden psychosis. Even the colossal fabulations of a Melville at least are a massed force in the field, whereas, yes, rooting out the lie in Latin America means bringing the battle house to house. That much she recorded accurately.

  All of the foregoing to say that I am a scholar, or was. So, where possible, I prefer to approach certain aspects of Beulah’s story as one would an accident reconstruction. Scientifically, methodically. Tarmac conditions and weather bulletins, witness statements and pathology reports, flight plans and scatter grids—these are my materials—her journals, the fragments. I can only assemble them for you, put them in some order. Somewhere in the wreckage lies a black box….

  Mirrors do not always conceal the horror beneath.22

  19 Mar 93 [Calgary]

  SeaCow rises through thermoclines of hot and cold. Sails steams drifts, a continent through dark waters. A vast, blubbery seaslug sub—Leviathan—flabbiest float in the mayday mayday parade, the manatee idylls in the shallows, oil-slick eddy coiling in her wake….

  Wake slow from dream, reluctant, nauseated, nauseous—light filters weak, thin, through green polyshades drawn tight against sun. Glance down over bulbous form swelling in-gloom, roll out, rolypoly igloo. Press dimply knees for purchase, push to stand. Pull nightie down, waddle to bathroom. How soaringmorningglorious it would be to soak it off in a vast scalding bath. Look with disgust at the tiny tub. But how graceful we seem in a tank, how frolicsome there the dugong/sport.

  And on waterbeds.

  Run the shower, cold, colder—feel the invigorating shock—colder.

  Lufa sere and stern behind broad neck, under meaty arms, across pendulous breasts, abrading tips. Do not flinch. Single out navel and soft netherfolds of interthigh for special care. Tender hinterland. Scour for clues and errors. Under the cold flood everything burns. Rub softened scabs off fingers, study all pink wounds for signs of life. What’s happened to your hands? he asked, refilling a goblet.

  Turn off shower, step out. Feel queasy belch escape lips, watch darksome blur slouch across the glass. Through a swipe across the misted surface stares back his eentsy debauchée—su libertina bailarina—bloodshot eyes, pigpink cuts. See the blotchy body scrubbed a mottled pink in broadclawd strokes—cruel Miss Strawberry in the kindergarten play. Pinchpinchpinch—there and there—a pound there, another here.

  From the bedroom’s half-dark a counter digital owlblinks baleful orange. Hit playback, start to strip the wine-stained sheets.

  Hello? Beulah? Honey, it’s me. I promised not to call so much, I know. I’ve been good, haven’t I? It’s just—I want to take you out for lunch. Something simple. Jonas is out of town, I feel like a little company. Say it Grace—you can’t bear to be alone. Just a simple meal. I promise. Call me back if you’d like to come. I’ll just let
you call me, this time. Please call….

  Such a feast we shall lay you, your Royal Thymus—sweetbreads of hearts and spleen, our gall’s ripest harvest … spiced with humorous asides phlegmatic nods enchanting philtres to decant our bile. Rotted pots of ripened flesh laid bare / fresh-gummed parsley for our halitosis / flowers for our hair. And so we’ll sit and sit—blades whetted, blood-wed to bone-handles daintily clutched, flint hearts on plates / a waxen sheen on each sallow face. My sapper’s dissent just one wafer-thin membrane from blowing full migraine—a radioactive bloodspot in the yoke of your sunny subjugation.

  God bless the family meal—blud-simple gut-thick. Gutappetit mine heirs! Grand unifying theory of the nuclear family / blood thicker than deuterium. Gut-blocked plague vector that is this family flea circus.

  Say grace—give thanks for your surfeit and my lack. Let’s raise a toast—goblets clenched by knucklebone stems—hoistem high! two high hearts furiously beating. Callow the youth, craven the elder—resonant glugs from copious cups of resin and mead. God bless this meal—the tithes that bind the lies that blind. Thanksgiving for our harvest. God bless this meal that gobbles us, his daily bread—gullet-stuffing delectable well-fed. Gobbets we—all abob in his giant crop. Lord lord it over us with a riding crop.

  Art thou meekly meetly swallowing whole?

  God blast this meal.

  MUMMY

  21 Mar [1993 Calgary]

  BEULAH, HONEY, IT’S YOUR MOTHER. Insistent visitant mother of all migraines pounding pouting at the door. Beulah? Beulah please. A little louder why not so everyone can hear. The trouble with letting mummies in is you never know who you’re opening up to—mummy capaz or mummy capo. Can’t know till she comes unravelled.

  Beulah I know you’re in there—please don’t make me stand out here disturbing the neighbours.

  Crack the door to the chain end—Why didn’t she phone? Hello darling. She didn’t phone first—that was the agreement—no she didn’t, because I wouldn’t have answered, wasn’t that so, wasn’t that true? It drove her mad it really did, what if there were an emergency—but Mummy there always is—god forfend her fable should end.

  Okay she was sorry, she should have, but there was a good reason. Was I going to keep my dear old mother standing out there forever in the hall? Open up—yes time to get this over with. What good reason—and what the hell is that for? A little TV—television silly they invented it in the fifties, I’d heard of it? Here.

  No.

  Take it for company. I’d rather die. It isn’t my birthday. She knew that, who would know better than she? Give your mother a kiss—were those cold sores again honey you never had them as a kid. Christmas either—why is she here?

  She just knew this would be upsetting for me … but we were going to have to put our crucifixion dinner on hold. For just this Easter. She promised. Promise #1, here we go.

  My fath—Jonas was taking her on a cruise—to the Levant!

  Oh mummy le vaunted Levaunt. Turkey Syria Palestine Israel—mummy’s own unchosen people—book a day trip a faery passage a Joppa-hop to Tarshish. Meanwhile I could just find myself a substitute family—on TV. Why didn’t she do this twenty years ago? When it might have done us some good, she could have remarried a TV.

  Here, let’s just put it there, move the coffee table—My, what a lovely view of the park from here but this apartment—sorry hon but what a dump so dark. All these books everywhere, it looked like a riot in a library. At least let her throw out these plants—her dear daughter, the brownest thumb in history—how was it going, my thesis my … book?

  Swimmingly.

  They’d always known I would do something extraordinary—something dread strange uncanny she meant—but look at overworked me—my colour was good but those eyes I couldn’t be sleeping well. Here, take a few of her sleeping pills—the doctor’s wife, my somnambulant dispensary. I had to get more rest. Really honey. Tender motherlook nurture-hand raised to cheek, caressy. Beulah, honey, if you could see what I see …

  If she could only see what I feel.

  White-blond hair almost natural but for the blondrusted peroxidated superannuated tips, and thin! that Grace was grace itself so thin her name was destiny. Haunches stairmastered, flanks tanned, ultrasuede-jacketed—no dowdy dowager she—nay aging Gracefully, sloely, courtesy of gin. Matron’s veins natron-thinned, inner weather bombayed and balmy. Just the faintest whiff of camphor and balsam but such an exquisite corpse had the bride of doctor Frankincest—his addled and bridled bride all stitched, faintly riddled with a fine-welterwork of tummy tucks liposucks and lifts. Why for doctor daddy cardiology was such a waste, with all this cosmetic surgery spruce up so close to the back forty.

  If she could only feel what I see….

  Never mind all that now, dear. She was here to spend the afternoon together it’d be our Easter. Let’s have lunch come now don’t pull that face. So many good restaurants near here. Come now young lady, even scholars had to eat occasionally didn’t they? No lunch. All right all right you win Beulah as always. How about a walk? She was not leaving here without spending quality time. Fresh air, come, please? pretty please, contact with the outside world, that couldn’t be such a bad thing could it for a writer? Reality—life …?

  A walk then. Down to the Bow banks our unmusical procession—buzz of grasswhips, moan of mowers—past boxy little houses, window washers in kerchiefs. Smileygreetings between strangers—howdy neighbour, incredible weather, init? Blame it on El Niño again, blame it on The Child. Nay we see naught sinister in March’s green grasses and trees full-leaft.

  Come on, Beulah, let’s run for it!—bolts over to the river across four lanes of traffic big horsey laugh leaving all in her wake. Such good fun so tenniscourt nimble so full of sport is nimbussed blond-haloed Grace. She looks back at me from the far side of the street, smile fading face paling. She’s still scared of what I might do.

  Sky a psychopathic blue, the riverpath a Grimm freakshow of bikers skaters weaving—you call this in-line?—stay on your side. Blank-faced joggers on endorphin drips scuttling to fix. Skateboarders—flailing grunge-herons on asphalt dream quests. With each heathen faceplant, another tattooed communicant kisses Stonehenge.

  Lonely as immigrants we the few walkers. In the park now we are the foreigners—among the strange-tongued families lolling around barbeque spits. How can kids so beautiful look so sad? Toddlers chasing goslings—insideous sinus hiss of geese. Starlings an oily weave of colours like cheap plastic wallets. Two black squirrels—bushy-tailed golems, their clockworks overwound.

  Rodent frenzy, manic horror in the grass.

  Come on—just two more blocks—let’s do some serious window shopping. Right, quality time it was her dime her loonie her dying afternoon.

  Kensington—urban planning’s village idiot—slackjawed, adrool, oxymoronic. Toyshops loveshops health food humidors lumped under awnings in promiscuous congress. Let us stroll now you and I, scrawl doubt across the neon sky like a pornqueen bowdlerized in a stable. Let us wrinkle lordly turned-up noses at glo-bowlization’s rich smorgasbord: gimmicked Greek restaurants, a Vietnamese sweatshop back of each gleaming Acropolis.

  Let’s go in. What here? A walk she said. She promised me. Promise #2. It was okay they had a salad bar. How did she know that—she phoned ahead didn’t she? So did we have a reservation already, something cosy for two? At last she unveils: ever our mistress of fun and diversions, Mummy capo, ever the camp doctor’s collaborator. O arbiter of tabled entreaties, architect of the imaginal line—black underground pipeline siphoning off the rank swamps of our family romance. Eat what your stepfather oh so logistical has provisioned—four place settings, four players on an edible altar. Doctor daddy’s two square metres of European soil under a chessboard tablecloth—checked aggression, advantage to white. Spanish Conquest of the New World same channel at six each night—provecho, take profit from your meal—provecho eat if you know what’s good for you eat if you love your mother eat….

/>   Mother and child walk on, lost in their reveries, stop down the block before a little prairie church between the parking lots. Oh look honey, they haven’t torn this one down yet. Chapel of Abundant Living. Looks like some kind of cult now.

  I had only to say the word and she’d cancel their cruise just one word we’d all spend Easter together. And miss le Levaunt! And spoil such a nice coincidence? Wouldn’t hear of it, vouldn’t vant that at all. Don’t cancel for me no please take an extra week or century. Bye-bye, mum, gotta run. Say so long. No don’t cry mummy too graceful for tears too old for new tricks. Thank U4 dTV, thanks for the day, thanks for the memorex. No really, gotta go now. LuvU2.

  Where were you then mum?—swamp-hid twenty years cowering in the delta sunkdrunk in the family muck. Eat, child, what I have prepared for you. Garbage in, garbage out.

  I will not eat in your house.

  The local-colour cruises, disasters of the month in four-colour separation / racial harmony by Benetton. The rhinestone volunteerism on the sadsad soup-lines one day a month. The heartfelt human interest stories, all the seize-the-day literature all the bittersweet inspiration—when I hear the word lifestyle I think handgun, I think hangin, reach for my lasso. FUCK your penny-epiphanies isn’t life a marvel, turn the page.

  Never met a pagan I couldn’t make my best friend at the stake.