The book I asked if you would get for us a few months back, that you say you now have and are only waiting on a messenger to bring it across … you know the one, on the floating and sinking of all sorts of bodies. It might be best not to send it for a while. The climate, just now, is not good for ice.
I cannot tell when we will be able to write in the old way again, or publish Sappho’s lines, but for the next letter or two let us make little songs of prayer for fair weather, and sing blessings over the land.
Love,
día 22 de junio, Anno Domini 1690
de este convento de San Jerónimo,
de la Ciudad de México,
Nueva España
†Hebrew war trumpets of ram’s horn
†cockpits and bullrings
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
Alan Trueblood, trans.
Replying to a Peruvian gentleman who sent a poetic gift of clay vessels and the advice that she become a man.
…. Regarding the advice you proffer,
I’ll take it as part of the bargain
and do myself violence, although
no violence can make me a Tarquin.
Hereabouts there’s no spring of Salmacis,34
whose crystalline waters, I’m told,
possessed some magic or other
from which masculine powers flowed.
Such things are not my concern;
with one thought I came to this spot:
to be rid of those who’d inquire
whether I am a woman or not.
In Latin it’s just of the married
that uxor, or woman, is said.
A virgin has no sex at all—
or indeed she has both, being unwed.
So the man who looks upon me
as a woman, shows want of respect,
since one embracing my state
is foreclosed to the other sex.
Of one thing I’m sure: that my body
disinclined to this man or that,
serves only to house the soul—
you might call it neuter or abstract.
And leaving this question aside
as more fit for others to probe—
since it’s wrong to apply my mind
to things I shouldn’t know—
rest assured, my generous stranger,
you’ve not left lustrous Lima behind
when your homesick heart can emote in
a style so Peruvianly refined …
IVORY TOWER
BEULAH’S PROFOUNDEST PASSIONS were otherworldly, mine are not. It makes me somewhat vulnerable to attack. But if I’m to take on the role she offers—her goat god, whatever—if I’m to play Beulah’s comic foil effectively, we need a closer look at her godlike professor on the make, this mighty hero she happened to see strolling by the river with his mate. An unpleasant way to learn about my wife’s pregnancy, I admit. There are other such scenes Beulah was not privy to, however hard she might have tried to imagine them. It falls to me, then, as a penitent form of amusement, to bridge certain gaps. But how? She had attended my classes, observed details, heard things. How might it please her to see my currency debased? Not content to make her attacks personal, clearly she intended to mix business with pleasure, and make them professional as well.
So though it be jarring, unseemly, even a touch obscene, it’s well past time we had a peek under the scholar’s gown, if you will, at his much shrunken divinity….
To begin.
Comedy ends in marriage.
Mrs. Madeleine Gregory is a successful child psychologist. She once liked to say it was what attracted her to her eventual husband. She works in early developmental education and has never practised clinical psychology. This has not prevented her from dispensing free analysis, though in his case only. Psycho-babble infuriates him. His basic problem, he has been recently told, is compensatory guilt and shame: too much success too fast. That is, for someone of his background. Yes, their backgrounds: heiress of a construction baron weds princeling of the trailer courts.
She’d come to him through an introductory English course, his fifth year of teaching. His classes were still popular back then. She sat near the back of the lecture hall. By the time her turn came she knew perfectly well what she was in for. This academic year’s co-ed number six.
Firm knock at his office door. Mistaking it for a graduate student’s, he calls out to come in. The confused freshman’s knock is tentative, half-hoping to be inaudible. The willing co-ed’s trails off lingeringly.
These last he likes to meet at the threshold. Overall, his office has become a fine place to meet young people.
He has been running over in his mind the stirring conclusion to today’s class, the final one of his course. Art, love and healing. It amuses him to think of this as the scholarly equivalent of a song by someone, say, like Marvin Gaye. He likes to save it for the final day, a kind of lazy trolling, and will continue to do this until near the end of his career. But already he is choosier than in the early years, more sporting, likelier to throw the little ones back …
… The schism between thinking and feeling runs as a mildly psychotic thread through the warp of Western civilization. So rare and strange it is for us to feel intense emotion attaching to an idea that we tend to experience it as rapture, riot, epiphany. Like love itself, perhaps—do we not visualize our beloved and our union with him as a kind of blinding and rapturous idée fixe? Aristotle believed it the province of art to heal this split, this rawest of wounds. To create moments that fuse the most intense passion with the most profound ideas …
He paused to send a mystic glance down at all the pretty maids in the front row, and thought of his own art as more akin to the snake charmer’s. To weave a spell of complicity out of the cold stuff of distance and diffidence and respect. To charm intimacy from the chaste cobra of discretion and pudeur …
And looking out into this lecture theatre today, I feel sure of seeing many discriminating and generous practitioners of the loving arts …
She catches him leaning backwards in his chair, his feet up on the desk. As the office door swings open he swings his feet down and hunches forward, clasps grave, modest fingers over his mons of scholarly briefs and folios. He notes she is a few years older than the others, about halfway to his own age. She has never sat in the front row. She takes a seat now, uninvited. Not the one for students—the straight fiddleback across the desk—but instead the stuffed armchair in the corner, reserved for sober reading and one or two esteemed colleagues.
“Word’s out on you.”
“Word?”
What comes next she says with a deliberation oddly softened by a note of Western twang. Madeleine never lets her smiling eyes leave his.
“The word, Doctor Gregory, is that you’re a pussy hound.”
Hearing something like this today, he would have hit the ground running for the exits. But ten years ago, well, that was a simpler time. Even five. The idiom, not much used in his circles, still charms—though perhaps it doesn’t just yet, in that precise instant, as she watches him duck behind the fig leaf of a frowning rectitude.
“Maybe you prefer ‘womanizer,’” she adds amiably.
Opportunity here, certainly, but exactly how much dignity is it going to cost?
“Skirt chaser?”
“There’s synecdoche in its favour, certainly….” he concedes. He allows himself a last, speculative stroke of the philosopher’s beard before yielding himself up entirely to her ice-breaker. “Or, is that metonymy, do you think?”
“Cunt-struck.”
“The hero laid low. Good, but too …”
“Too Beowulf,” she suggests.
“I see what you mean.”
“Sex addict, then.”
“Exculpatory,” he cautions, “boastful.”
“Philanderer.”
“This is better—aura of a Greek curse. Classical. But, for my money your … ‘pussy hound’ is as nice as any.
A certain waggish inevitability. Dog meets cat.” Suppressing what must be a smile she raises a coral-tipped index finger to her small, upturned nose. “Which would seem,” he adds gravely, “to bring us round to you. You’re one of my undergrads.”
“You know who I am.”
Perfectly true. Also true: her grades are fine and it is end of term. Not a compromise in sight, he thinks, but then his apprenticeship is only just beginning. The woman lighting up a corner of his office is evidently from the hardy faction of campus perennials given to wearing absurdly little clothing at the slightest upturn in weather. Though April now and sunny, it is hardly mild. Yet bared for his delectation are two finely muscled shoulders, slender arms and—converging enchantingly towards an abbreviated jean skirt—hard, tanned thighs suggestive of immoderate amounts of spring skiing. Better yet, bareback riding. Yes, much better.
Her soft blond hair—frost-tipped then to a pinnacle of Nordic authenticity—is parted to fall aslant one blue-grey eye. He has schooled himself to take any veiling of the eyes or mouth as favourable indices.
“You’re some kind of undergrad Argonaut,” he offers, “a cartographer of erotic odysseys, perhaps. As I myself am on occasion.”
“I work as a nurse.”
“Yes, precisely.”
“I’m not an English major.”
“Perfect score so far … Madeleine?”
“Educational psychology. I want to work with children.” No objections, at least none of the slightest concern to him.
“And you just happen to be free this evening….”
Certain gaps in the story, especially as they concern me, I insist on being free to fill in any way I please. It is still my fucking life, after all.
My fight for an open marriage would turn out to be a non-event. Madeleine raised not the slightest objection. I doubt I’m the first man unable to enjoy to the full the fruits of such an arrangement. Nothing more deflating of the myth of animal priapism than your wife offering to let you bring your little friends for a sleepover. While more than one candidate was game enough, the breakfast theatre of post-coital détente—Madeleine’s serenity, my furtive satiation, the girl’s triumphal arrival on the shores of sexual sophistication—turned out to be more than I could face. At least after the first few times.
Nor, in the end, did I care to meet let alone share even one more of the post-apocalyptic primitives that Madeleine had begun to take as antidotes to me. Another African drummer, another dancer. Fluid orientations—moral, postural and sexual—suited Madeleine’s purpose best. Which was to smoke me out.
The open marriage experiment lasted less than a year. In the nine years since, our marriage has flourished on a strict regimen of secrecy and discreet cunning. To the principled ones I say Madeleine and I have an understanding. To the bold I hint at a breakdown in marital communication. The crazies, I tell as little as possible. But to none would I admit to having an active sex life with my wife.
Beulah was the last. Omega. No more covert dinners in fashionable clothes my wife had lovingly picked out for me. No more weekends in charming trysting places Madeleine would never visit. I had the impression I’d begun to repeat myself with these girls, and anyway the arrival of our first child would have complicated things further.
During the sexual abstinence that descends briefly on new parents I thought of Beulah often, and of the change I was now committed to. October, 1993. It had been finished between us by then for over two months. Since a meltdown in Banff that summer.
Fitful nights. Madeleine’s exhaustion. Catherine’s hungry cries and breathless silences. Confusing dreams. Flashes of the birthing, sex with Beulah—am I making that connection just now, or did it already occur to me more subtly then?
In lovemaking as in other things, there is something four-square about Madeleine. A rootedness, straight up from the pit of her. An acute and refreshing contrast to my own inner parentheticals and obliquities. She managed—will manage still I hope, with someone—to be startlingly forthright about her need yet light-hearted about her pleasure. Part of a Swedish inheritance on her mother’s side that three generations in Canada have done nothing to erase. There was nothing—no role, no pose, no prop—that Madeleine would hesitate to try. My sex genie ever prompting me, Tonight, Donald, who do you want us to be?
In writing of this I can only affect a certain light-heartedness myself, as marginally preferable to involuntary self-parody.
Madeleine used to take a perverse joy in dragging me, thrilled but protestant, to a love boutique in a strip mall near our home, to shop sex like a fishwife. Tips, discounts, free samples, demonstrations. To duel at close range in unbuttoned candours and naked curiosities—canny and veteran testimonials—with the proprietress, a heavy-lidded dominatrix with a predilection for snakeskin, who’d taken to meeting us at the door with a childlike eagerness.
I am given to worldly pleasures. As I say, it makes me an easy target. I am tempted to gloss over what follows, mask it at least in a codpiece of delicacy, but is this not to be the parody of a rapture? Better the parody intended than the one unseen. Describe the scene, describe the scene …
Typical Friday night at the mall. Family car parked in the sputtering glow of red neon. Window displays in the rich, red satin of casket linings and Halloween capes. To the proprietress Madeleine spins out a ‘longtime fantasy of ours’ that was still news to her bookish mate. While he stands in the next aisle, numb with fascination and thumbing something rubbery, she specifies dimensions, declensions, proclivities. When the kit is complete she will take it home to try out on him, sharing out shock-resistant attachments and modelling slotted lingeries without the slightest reserve or trace of nervous over-acting.
As the specifications become ever more fantastic he makes his way towards the back of the store, past snap-on clamps, collapsing o-rings. He goes deeper, ever deeper … through a bristling of upstart prongs, the pucker of leather pursings, only to fetch up against a back wall of trusses, teetering towards the geriatric …
My wife is a gifted sexual comedienne, with a sharp eye for the farcical, implausible indignities that collaborating on the sex act calls for. All the swellings, gropings and clapping conjunctions—the creakings, jigglings and abject dribblings were just part of the game, the whole far-fetched package. She thought it was what I wanted. What we all wanted.
I did, Madeleine, it is.
I loved sex with my wife. I would never have given it up for anyone.
Catherine’s arrival only added a deeper dimension. Madeleine put off weaning her for weeks. The pleasure of nursing was intense. Her eyes would roll mock-incredulous at the criminal ecstasies and tortures of being so barbarically suckled. She loved to be penetrated while she nursed. My function was to remain still, acting as a lightning rod to draw her pleasure down to a more decent seat.
Are you laughing somewhere still, Madeleine?
PAZ
MAYBE QUITTING SCHOOL wasn’t so terribly difficult for Beulah. She would have missed the Library’s borrowing privileges but she didn’t cultivate friendships. I can’t think of a single friend I might have seen her with or heard her mention. Most people found her mind and manner intimidating. She loved music, it turns out, but discussing the latest pop stars or sitcoms would have provoked feelings of not just awkwardness but something like rage. I believe she saw herself as from another time. She pushed people away, perhaps for fear they would come to see her as she saw herself. Certainly she would not miss the overtly curious and overly sympathetic stares she occasionally received from people she’d shared a class with and who now had their own cautious graduate projects well in hand.
The only person in her life she admitted to caring about was her half-brother, Gavin, who’d put several hundred miles between himself and their parents by enrolling at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Well-heeled parents happy to keep their studious children’s bank accounts topped up and considering the resulting tranquillity of their own lives more than worth the
investment. At least, this seemed to be Beulah’s point of view.
Did she tell them she’d quit school? Far from certain. For several months, she said nothing about having seen me out walking with my wife, about four months pregnant at the time. It was a discovery to which Beulah attached a more than casual importance.
There were many things she proved capable of concealing. Not that she seemed ordinary, but I wasn’t the only one who failed to notice, to really see. Your first impressions were not of her beauty, but rather its mutability. Vitally to wanly luminous from one day to the next. Icy to darkly erotic just as quickly…. Fine features, skin easily bruised. A full-lipped mouth with a determined set, as though in rebuff to its own sensuality. The changeability was mostly in her eyes I suppose, ranging from hazel to grey, flecked with green and gold. Ojos de miel, a Spanish term. It all depended on her inner weather.
There was a susceptibility to cold sores … and yes she’d lost some weight. But when a man of forty discovers that his exquisite twenty-year-old lover is developing the body of a small runway model he can be forgiven, perhaps, for being just a bit slow to investigate. Or perhaps not.
Either way, if I’m to pursue a little while longer this fiction of the redemptive value of truth, I must be prepared to submit myself to a full accounting, even if the testimony may at times seem harsh. How in god’s name could I not see what was happening to her? First, no one guessed, not for a long time. Second, we were already seeing one another less often. By the time she left school we’d decided it was mostly about sex, anyway. And leading up to that time, I had a strong suspicion that her threatening to drop out was calculated to manipulate me—calculation, not anguish, not affliction, not the approaches of madness. Why didn’t I do anything? some of the same crowd will ask. Others would reply that I’d already done quite enough.
I gave her the wrong advice. I refused to help. Rather I offered her only the help I wanted her to have, not what she needed. I failed her as a lover and teacher. I was a fool. There. A few hard truths I’m determined not to turn away from. For the record.
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