by Ladies
“Here’s a joke: You know how old people always say how life goes by too fast? Well, people also say that when you are waiting in line, it is as though time hardly moves at all. So why don’t we make all the old people who are ready to die stand in line? Life will then pass so slowly that they might have the illusion of staving off death indefinitely.”
Michal did not respond. Not with words or with laughter. Several minutes later the newlyweds had dry, mechanical sex.
When David told Michal jokes she never laughed. The best he ever got was an “Oh, that’s cute.” Or a “You’re so weird.”
Daughter of the king or not, thought David, the girl has no sense of humor.
In short order David became unsatisfied and so in the evenings he played harp and tried to keep his eye on the prize. As the years wore on, he took for himself several more wives, none of whom “got” him or his jokes; but one made a delicious horehound-spiced camel cheese, and another played a shofar that sobered him down to his toes and so for David, that had to be enough.
David was becoming the most popular and successful military chief in the king’s army. He was clear-headed, confident, and able—so able, in fact, that as Saul started to get old he chose David, rather than his own son, to succeed him.
The passing of the crown was not a simple business, though. Saul could not help constantly trying to murder his would-be successor.
“The way your dad is always trying to kill me,” David complained to Michal, “it’s so undermining.”
It was only after trying to assassinate David for thirty days running—once by restringing his harp with poison vines—that Saul finally gave up and gave in to the whole we-love-David vibe. After all, if the Lord was with him, the Lord was with him, and Saul, like everyone else, needed to keep on the Lord’s good side. It just made good business sense.
David proved a good king, and what made him so good was how little being the king meant to him. Even being a good king wasn’t as important to David as being a funny king. And so he tried to make jokes to the people, and the people laughed, but they laughed out of fear. He could tell. They laughed the way people had laughed at Goliath’s jock jokes.
David dreamed of one day going out disguised among the citizenry to tell jokes and see if he was really funny, rather than just scary. It would be a pleasant way to pass the afternoon. He could find out how people felt about him in general.
“What do you think of King David?” he would ask an old man.
“He sure ain’t no King Saul,” the old man might answer.
But he never seemed to have the time. There was so much to do as a ruler and most of it was very unfunny business.
That’s what happens, he thought. Gone are the carefree days of slaying giants. As you get older you strip away the things you don’t have time for, and then you are left only with the things you have time for. Your life gets skinnier and skinnier until you wonder why you go on. You go on because there are things that must get done. You become no longer a person so much as a place, an unfunny place where things come to get done.
And in this way, the place called King David lived its life until one day, while meditating on his palace balcony, David’s heart made itself known to him. He saw a woman bathing on the roof of her house. She was naked, except for her sandals, which somehow only made her seem more naked. She was the nakedest, most beautiful person David had ever seen.
He said to himself, “One day I shall marry this naked sandaled woman who stirs my heart to life.” He had heard the story of how his father had met his mother, and that was how it had all started: His father had made a simple pledge to himself. It was from there that the courtship proceeded. David had always wanted to say this thing to himself, too, but he never had. When he was ten or so he used to look at girls while saying it under his breath for practice, just for fun, but then his life went by and he never got the chance to say it for real. And now here he was, saying it for real. The only thing was, the woman on the roof was already married to a soldier in David’s army, a Hittite named Uriah. David had missed his chance. Everything was too late.
* * *
The woman’s name was Bathsheba and after seeing her bathing, a strange thing happened. King David went to bed fully upraised, and when he woke up he was still upraised. He was to stay this way, crisp and yearning, for one hundred days.
At the end of the first day he thought, What a story to tell our grandchildren one day, but by the end of the week, he thought, Schmuck, what’s the matter with you? No matter what he did—long cold showers, ball leeches, imagining his mother-in-law shucking corn in the nude—his staff would not crumble.
“This attraction is supernatural,” he lied to himself, “and sanctioned by God.”
During those one hundred days, David kept mostly to himself, trying to figure it all out. The more he thought about it, the more he could not stop thinking about it. Was she aware how sexy wearing only sandals made her appear? Did it make her feel sexy? His thoughts fed off each other, each thought provoking more thoughts, and each thought making his hardee-har-har hardier. It was endless. He thought and thought and did so while masturbating with great vigor.
It’s okay to self-serve, he thought. It keeps me from hurting anyone. It allows one to build a perfect universe made of Bathsheba, and then enter it. Wishing cannot make something so, but wishing while fisting the pharoh comes close.
When David had to receive company he remained seated behind a table. If he had to go somewhere, he did so while walking hunched over, carrying a harp. No one asked any questions, which was one of the good things about being the king.
He didn’t know what it was about her. Maybe it was the way she bent over, her legs pressed so tightly together. Maybe it was the look on her face, the tip of her tongue stuck out, touching her nose in concentration, like washing her leg was a very intellectual undertaking. Maybe it was the way her mouth always seemed just about to blossom into a smile—in response to some joke, yet untold, that David would one day tell her. He was able to remember her face so well, too. There were some people who he’d meet over and over and was still never sure if he knew them or not. But her face was burned into him. When he closed his eyes there it was, like the sun.
In his mind he wore her sandals like a mask. He was convinced that smelling Bathsheba’s footwear would reveal some great, unimaginable truth—a filthy, sexy truth that would change his life forever, but in spite of his furious determination to manually self-know, there were still things about her that he could not know. Just the same, his desire to know drove him to obsession.
At night, he thought about Bathsheba’s sandals. He thought about her feet, too. The idea that Bathsheba had something as mundane—as common—as toes was enough to make him swoon. From the roof he would watch her do laundry and while looking at her face, he would think about her pinkie toes—so human, so tiny and vulnerable.
At night he dreamed her baby toe had come to life. Freed of the body, all by itself, it came to him. He had willed it to visit through the force of his desire.
In the dream, the baby toe’s name is Goldberg. Goldberg crawls in under the door as David is lying in bed.
“Am I catching you at a bad time?” Goldberg asks.
David recognizes him immediately.
“For Bathsheba’s baby toe it is never a bad time.”
He bends down onto the floor and scoops the little tot up in his hands. He squeezes and rubs him. He brings Goldberg up to his nose. He inhales. Goldberg giggles. He brings him closer, to the outside rim of his left nostril. Goldberg smells like the ocean. David pushes him into his nostril like a cork.
Suddenly King David was awake, asphyxiating.
He caught his breath and rolled over. He kissed a wife’s shoulder, trying to regain his footing in the world.
In the dream he possessed a love for the toe that was stronger than any he had ever felt for anyone. If offered, he would give up his kingdom to lick the morning dew from under its nail. Un
fortunately, no one was making such an offer.
The day he appeared on her roof, he got there before she did. When she saw him, she did not drop her laundry. She just did this thing with her head where she turned it to the side and laughed. Like she was embarrassed. Like she had just been thinking about him. Like the whole world knew what she was thinking. It was a weird thing she did with her head. It was spasmodic, like them just being in the same world together, breathing the same air, was too sexy not to get the shakes.
“Are you here for Uriah?” she asked.
He knew Uriah would not be there. Uriah was away in battle. “It isn’t for Uriah that I come,” he said. Standing there talking with Bathsheba, David realized he had not been so exhilarated since his confrontation with Goliath.
He was about to say “Here’s a joke,” for he had planned out in advance many jokes to tell—to get things started—but things started without jokes, and they started very suddenly.
As they did it on the roof she kept her sandals on. He watched it, the left one, as he moved back and forth within her, and as he was just about to end it all, he grabbed her sandaled foot to his face and drew in a sharp breath. He could smell nothing.
Again, his heart had fooled him. But it was too late: David had made her pregnant.
What choice do I have now? thought David.
Uriah had to be removed from the picture. This David knew.
When David took Bathsheba for his wife, God was displeased. The prophet Nathan had told him, “Heads up: this thing you did with Bathsheba—God hates it. A lot.” It was the way David had gone about it—sending her husband Uriah to the front, to certain death, just to get him out of the way.
In the first weeks of his illegitimate baby’s life, David spent all of his day praying. He prayed so hard he felt like his head was going to explode. He prayed like he was a little kid pounding on a door screaming his head off. Then the pounding turned to scratching and the screaming turned to hyperventilating, and still he prayed, folded on the floor, his chin pressed into his chest. When the baby died he stopped praying. He didn’t even say kaddish, and when those around him asked why, David asked back: What is the point? He had prayed to change God’s mind, but now it was over and no amount of prayer could change that.
* * *
In David’s grief, he became backward-looking, spending a lot of time caught up in the old days, thinking about girls he had made laugh and giants he had slain. Bathsheba’s father had been there the day David had killed Goliath and he would tell Bathsheba about it. As a young girl, she never got tired of hearing the story. David and Bathsheba spent a lot of time talking about it, too. But after the baby died, the tone of these conversations changed.
“When your father told the story,” David asked, “did you think it was funny, a little?”
“Funny?” she asked. “Funny how?”
“Like a little guy bonking a big guy?”
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” she said.
“Maybe it was how he told it.”
Bathsheba ground her teeth and David continued.
“Did your father say that David slew the giant, or did he say that David and God slew the giant or did he just say that the giant was slain?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
David began to ask another question, but Bathsheba told him to stop dwelling. David responded by telling her that all of human history is dwelling and that without dwelling there is nothing and as David spoke, Bathsheba ground her teeth.
David had hoped that Bathsheba, unlike his other wives, might one day come to find him funny, but because of the rocky start to their marriage, there was never any room for jokes. He still hoped that one day, from out of their grief, there might grow a certain comedy and on some days, David believed that routines were already starting to take shape—routines that would eventually help them to speak through their sadness. One of these nascent routines was the drinking routine. In it, David and Bathsheba eat olives. While he chews each one carefully, she pops them by the fistful. David says she shouldn’t do that because she could choke and die and Bathsheba asks, So what? David says, Oh, nothing. Then there is the sound of chewing. Then she laughs. Then he laughs. Then she stops laughing. David continues to laugh. David continues still. And so on, until she tells him to shut up. David says, Why would you say something like that? He is not sure if he is breaking character. She says nothing. David says, Eh? And again, she tells the King of Israel to shut his royal hole. He says that he doesn’t like that, that someone might overhear her.
Eventually these routines would blossom into something quite hilarious.
David began to keep mostly to himself, spending a lot of time with his war souvenirs.
He still kept Goliath’s head on a shelf.
“You should think about getting rid of that thing,” said Bathsheba.
“It’s not the kind of thing you can get rid of,” said David.
“It stinks. I can’t even clean near it without gagging.”
Bathsheba came to know David very well and she used this knowledge to push his buttons.
“When you killed Goliath,” Bathsheba asked, “how much do you think God was helping? Did he use a pinkie or did he use a fist?”
“Hard to say. I really had my eye on his forehead. Right on the spot I hit. What the world saw as a single shot was really the product of years of great training.”
“I heard that Goliath in his prime was a whole other story,” she said. “By the time you guys tangoed he was fat from too much drink and obsessed with entertaining his troops with repartee.”
David nodded his head, as though considering what she was saying. In his mind, though, he was pitching her off a roof.
“I heard he really wasn’t that bad,” Bathsheba went on. “That he was mostly talk. That he did a lot of work with lame Philistine children.”
It was all about timing. If someone called you a name, said that you were a bad king, cared more about committing adultery than ruling, you could pause a beat. Pause two beats or even three. Pause an entire evening of beats. Even two days of beats. Then, after all your beats, show up at their door with an army and brain them with a stick. That is comedy, your face a grimace of satisfaction. But with your wife, all you have is what is in your mind.
“Because you know,” Bathsheba continued, breaking his train of thought, “you’re not just a little schmo when you have God on your side. When you stop and think about it, it was poor God-less Goliath who was at a disadvantage, no?”
Her body draped over your shoulders, slowly being lifted over your head, her sandaled feet kicking, and then over, off the roof and into sweet oblivion. These were not funny thoughts and David did not want to be thinking them, but there they were, as real and powerful as his memories, or his belief in God.
David did not know what to say.
“Here’s a joke,” he said, his mind a complete blank.
Part III: Absalom
David began to see that ruling the nation was affecting his chops negatively, so he summoned his royal coterie before him so that he could have someone with whom to kibitz.
“God wants to make a universe,” he began. “He then makes a universe and the universe is everything, right? Everything that there can be. So where is God? Inside his own creation like a carpenter who climbs into the coffin he has made?”
Titters. A half swallow.
David began to see that he would never be able to be both a joke maker and a king. The problem was, he thought, that you are only given one life.
At first he thought a sidekick might help, some minor dignitary—an adviser with a humorous stutter— someone to play off of, but whenever he thought he had found someone, they would say the wrong thing, mess with his timing—start to showboat—and he’d end up having to beat them across the back with his scepter.
David was too out of touch with the concerns of the citizenry. He lived such a privileged and isolated existence that the things he though
t were funny were actually mean and bizarre—or funny only to other kings, and he was at war with almost all of them, so that wasn’t good for much.
Pacing back and forth across the palace floor, he would ask, “What’s up with those guys you pay to wipe your ass?”
Besides, people just wanted to respect and fear a king, so he gave up telling jokes in favor of talking about jokes. David felt that his greatest comedic contributions might be made as a theoretician—a man who could impart his ideas about comedy to the next generation of jesters, clowns, merrymakers, tipplers, and want-wits. He also wanted to spend as much time away from his wives as possible.
“In the caveman days,” he would instruct, “there was much pain and violence. Man had to develop a way to make himself feel marginally better. ‘How can we release pleasure particles to better handle the nightmare of existence?’ the caveman wondered. He found that by breaking up his howls of agony, turning them into a series of ejaculatory barks—to make the ‘ahhh!’ into ‘ah-hah-ah-hah’—it eased the pain. You see, each laugh is composed of an ‘ah’ and a ‘hah.’ By going ‘ah’ and ‘hah’ they were able to lift the unrelenting pain of their dark, bestial days into something more recreational. It is only through the godly gift of humor that man endures the horror. What other faculty allows you to turn pain into triumph? Tears of sadness into tears of laughing too hard?”
One of King David’s greatest joys was having the melancholic brought before his throne. He would cure them with the gift of comedy. David would make jokes—but only for the purpose of academic example and instruction. That way, if there were no laughs, it did not punish his soul. Education became his safety net.
“Laughter is a medicine that tastes like candy,” he would start by saying. The melancholic would then erupt into hysterical, panic-stricken laughter. A guard would then poke him in the ribs. “Idiot!” the guard would whisper. “Wait for the jokes.”