Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  I prayed forgiveness, after. Prayed my heart and body would tend always and only toward Thomas. Prayed the Psalms: Cleanse me with hyssop, wash this whitewashed tomb, this painted sepulcher, create in me a clean heart, renew a steadfast spirit. Prayed the Buddhist prayer: Liberate me from taints through clinging no more. Prayed, like Saint Augustine entangled with his outward beauties, for God to pluck me out like a coal from the fire. Pluckest me out O my God.

  But Brothers, Sisters: What if that’s the wrong prayer? What if the right prayer is Let me burn, only walk beside me in the flames? Remember the Israelites wandering the Sinai Desert led by a pillar of fire. Remember the three men thrown into the fiery furnace, the fourth who appeared among them, looking like a son of the gods, and how the men emerged unsinged. Remember Moses in the desert, Take off your sandals, God speaking from within an unconsuming fire.

  Listen: in paintings and mosaics of the transfiguration Jesus stands in the mouth of a blue mandorla. I read this in a book about the color blue. The mandorla, the blue author says, is an almond-shaped image that in pagan times symbolized Venus and the vulva. I do not know the reason for this blue pussy, the author writes. But I do feel its color is right.

  It’s the shape that seems right to me. Christ enfolded in a woman’s flesh. To know me you must know this—the pleasure, and the pain, of Incarnation. The tripartite Godhead contained in almond-shaped vulva—Eros as necessary to access the Divine. Yet how are we to learn Eros, or hold on to it in our physical bodies, within the confines of monogamous marriage, in which erotic desire dies off? “We are permitted romantic love with its bounty and half-life of two years,” Jack Gilbert writes. And then we begin to yearn for what is forbidden. Other men, other women. This is the hopeless condition into which we are born and the central fact—original sin—upon which our faith is built.

  But what if (Brothers, Sisters, bear with me) the institution of marriage was given to us as an intentional breeding ground for illicit desire? What if God, in His Divine wisdom—infinite, unfathomable—ordained marriage not primarily for the propagation of the species, nor to ensure the cultural and financial stability of the particular societies in which it flourishes, but to place us into a condition in which erotic desire might thrive?

  Hear: without the prohibitions against fornication and infidelity, we would sate and sate and sate again, looking always for the next object in which to find fulfillment, we would gratify our longings until we had nothing left to long for, and the ability to long itself died off.

  (Exactly, you might say. Nirvana, you might say.)

  Apart from the Law we are all addicts.

  Apart from the Law there is no Eros.

  But obedient to the Law—faithful inside it—we learn to long acutely. And longing, unsatisfied, lifts the gaze. Flesh to spirit, material to immaterial. Forbidden love as tutelage. As if God wants us to feel it, requires it, in order to reach us. With this much yearning, with this kind of reckless abandon, you are to pursue me. I am the only end for which you were created, your food and drink and satisfaction—the fuel upon which the human machine runs, the home and far-off country you’ve forgotten.

  I know what you’re thinking. Backsliding. Lapsarian. To ask God, in prayer, to be allowed to remain in a state of lust? Conformist, subsumed by the culture! You will talk of the sacrament of marriage, keep the marital bed pure, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife, what God has joined together etc. etc….

  You will say I am condoning sin. Constructing an intellectual scaffolding to justify what should be renounced. But I am only saying what C. S. Lewis said: one can renounce the harmful aspects of a particular love without disparaging the love itself.

  I have spent a lifetime renouncing, Brothers and Sisters. You, we, a lifetime of renunciation, and if you would call me aberrant, my words evidence of a diseased mind inhabiting a dying planet, I would say that here are intimations of immortality, here are reminders of the glory whence we came, the unified beings we will again become. A dying planet’s reach toward home.

  So let me burn.

  When she gets back to the room Thomas is sitting on the bed. He’s dressed in slacks and a collared shirt, his hair wet and combed. He looks scrubbed, as if ready for church, the flush of sunburn in his cheeks.

  Let me talk first, he says when she walks in.

  I need to tell you something—

  No, I want to get this out. Whatever you two had—I drove you to it.

  And now he’s on his knees, his arms wrapped around her thighs, his head against her stomach.

  Get up, Maggie says. I need to look you in the eyes when I say this.

  Thomas stands.

  I fell in love with him, Maggie says. James Abbott.

  I know, Thomas says. I mean, I suspected.

  We cut it off in Chicago. We haven’t spoken for over a year.

  I figured that too. You were different when you got home.

  Why didn’t you say anything?

  I worried you’d lie. I worried I’d push you away if I asked you about it. I worried you’d leave. In the end I decided to trust you to work it out.

  He separated from his wife, before Chicago, Maggie says.

  Thomas takes a step backward.

  Did he fall in love with you?

  I don’t know.

  Are you still in love with him?

  I don’t know.

  You didn’t sleep with him, though, right? he says.

  And she is on the cusp of saying it, she is moving the words from the back of her throat—Yes, I slept with him, I fucked was fucked by made love was made love to and it was the best thing in all my life the very best thing—but Thomas swipes the air as if clearing away smoke.

  Don’t answer that. I’m such a fuckup. You’ve always loved me so well and I’ve just fucked it up. Here. You never saw the real gift.

  He hands her the drawstring bag. At the bottom is a tiny silver bracelet—impossibly thin sterling links with a cut-diamond clasp.

  It’s beautiful, Maggie says.

  I feel ridiculous giving it to you now, Thomas says.

  I didn’t sleep with him, Maggie says. We never even touched each other.

  Thank God, Thomas says, falling backward onto the bed.

  You’re the better man, she says, sinking to the mattress and sitting beside him.

  Thomas puts his hand on the small of her back.

  Can you ever forgive me? he asks.

  So this is where you’re going to land? James a lure toward the eternal?

  I must land here. The end of this story depends on it.

  You can have any ending you want. You’re still in the middle.

  No matter which ending I choose, all ends in loss. The only end worth pursuing is God.

  What if you’re wrong? What if, for all these years, “God” has been just a beautiful, and terrifying, fairy tale? What if theology is, after all, just poetry?

  Then think of Moby Dick. The Whiteness of the Whale, the Lockean end point of the chapter: color as a secondary quality, created by one’s perception and the refraction of light. Strip away the lie of color and the palsied universe lies before us a leper. Transfer this idea to love, to James. Could I see him rightly, there would be only blankness. Light itself would be the only real thing left to pursue.

  You forget Ishmael’s conclusion: as light is in itself no color, yet physically is comprised of all colors in the spectrum, light is an apt symbol for a godless world, all material things combining to form a dumb blankness. In other words, light is the enlightenment of atheism.

  I’m no Ishmael. Whose side are you on anyhow?

  I am on no side.

  Who are you?

  The voice of one behind you, saying, This is the way, walk in it.

  But I’m the one who’s going to tell you how this ends.

  You can’t know how the future will play out.

  Fine. How I want it to end.

  There will be gr
andchildren. Trips to Europe, an Alaskan cruise with helicopter tours of the shriveled glaciers. Funerals for her parents, both retired and still living in Phoenix, dead within six months of one another, cancer. (How proud you’ve always made us, her mother’s last words to her, on the phone.) A move to a cottage on Monteagle Mountain, not far from Nashville, the quiet college where Maggie teaches and from which she will retire.

  The cottage will be on a pond with a walking path around its perimeter. It is here they will begin to wait. The giving-away, throwing-away, earmarking for relatives, a gradual winnowing of objects. She will keep no jewelry other than her wedding band and engagement ring. Thomas will keep handwritten cards from Kate and Tommy, a few print photographs they saved and framed. Sometimes, when she’s alone, Maggie will turn the frames facedown and practice imagining everyone she loves dead. Maybe it’s not so difficult to leave a life behind, she’ll think. The life one actually lived, the consummated moments, the ones allowed to bloom across the body, slide into memory and fade into forgetting.

  It’s the unlived life you end up keeping, Maggie will think. The secret life. It should have been the family that lasted. A poem, she can no longer remember whose. Should have been my sister and my peasant mother. But it was not. They were the affection, not the journey.

  She will read the New York Times, still in print. One week she’ll see, on the front page of the Arts section, that James has come out with a memoir. Sentimental, the review will say. A blight on an otherwise impeccable body of work.

  She will never read the memoir. Maybe she’s a part of it, maybe she isn’t, either way she couldn’t bear it.

  James will die the following year. Blood clot. She’s seventy-four. They are. She never imagined outliving him. She will buy his Collected Poems and put it, unopened, on a shelf. Once upon a time she thought there might be a letter, held in trust, to be sent to her upon his death—some final profession, a parting statement acknowledging the imprint of their shared experience on his life. Months will pass, a year, there will be nothing.

  Still, she will find herself thinking—fleetingly—of his torso curling into her back. In the car, driving, she’ll be caught off guard by the memory of that moment of acquiescence. Spreading of legs, split-second moan. Something she will never feel again, she is resigned to this now. There it sits in her past: the breach in the harmony of things, single melody split into two, antiphonal. Her life after Chicago became a movement through the middle of two opposing songs, listening for moments of union: as when she was on her back on the chaise in Naples, Thomas’s mouth on her thighs, recalling the first time in his dorm room—their pure past (it was pure, she will think; what a mess, all that guilt) fusing with the present moment on the chaise, and with the memory of James in the room at the Hyatt, showing her what he could do, simultaneously, with his nose, tongue, and fingers.

  She’ll dream of him only once. The two of them walking side by side in the dark. She can see nothing, only sense his presence beside her. He’s in a hurry, about to give an important reading—a prose poem about a corporate scandal—but there is time enough, before he leaves, for him to pause and pull her against him. She moans, hears herself making the sound she made when he kissed her at the airport in Chicago. The sound of water over rock, the agony of erosion—not the fact of the wearing-away but the time it will take.

  Wear me down but do it quickly this time, she will think.

  He pulls away, and in the sudden widening of dreamscapes, she sees that all along they have been on a path in the Himalayan foothills. They’ve arrived at a Tibetan refugee camp, monks playing a game like kick-the-can, lifting the hems of their robes, prayer flags flapping above. A place she visited, or maybe only planned to visit, in another lifetime.

  I have to go now, James says.

  When will I see you again? she asks.

  A deliberate silence and narrowing of his eyes that means, Never. She spins away and runs up the trail. Ahead, beside a waterfall, a withered woman beckons, repeating a word in Lepcha: Daughter.

  Get to her, Maggie will think. If I can just get to her.

  Take us to the Hyatt.

  At three a.m. we realized how hungry we were. We ordered room service and told them to leave it for us, then took the stairs down to a dark ballroom where earlier I’d glimpsed a concert-sized grand piano. I was wearing his shirt and my pencil skirt. James had on nothing but a robe. He lay beneath the piano while I played the gigue.

  God I love that piece, he said.

  I stopped playing.

  I have a confession, I said. When you told me it was your favorite and I said I knew how to play it—that was a lie. I’d never even heard it. I bought the music and practiced for hours so I could record it for you.

  Get down here, he said.

  I slipped out of my clothing. Crawled beneath the piano, untied his robe, sat overtop of him and moved. His hands on my hips, my head brushing the piano’s ribbed underbelly.

  Careful, he said.

  How is this possible, I said, pausing; then, how is it possible, moving again.

  If we could keep this, he said. If we could just walk out of here together and merge our lives with no fallout.

  We might turn into the same person, I said.

  Darling, he said, pulling my forehead down to his. We already are.

  On the way to the airport we drank our coffees without speaking. I finished mine, crumpled the cup, and threw it out the window, then—recklessly—lay across James’s lap. Behind my ear his fingers tucked, untucked, and retucked a loose strand of my hair. We told the driver to drop us at different terminals.

  You know that Linda Gregg poem, I said, the one where she and her lover say goodbye at the train station?

  “Asking for Directions,” James said.

  That’s the one. I’m thinking of how she looks through the dirty window and he’s looking up at her—the line about how she would take that look into the future—

  That moment is what I will tell of as proof that you loved me permanently?

  Yes.

  Maggie. I’m only going to ask once.

  No. We’d end up loathing each other.

  I know.

  That’s it then.

  We’ll never tell anyone.

  Never.

  We won’t write or call.

  I know.

  We pulled up to the terminal, I lifted my backpack, slung my purse over my shoulder. There was nothing more to say. I got my luggage out of the trunk. James came around to the curb.

  You getting out here after all? the cabdriver called to James through the window.

  I need terminal three, James said. Give me a second.

  I feel like I should have something profound to say, I said.

  James took off his glasses and reached into his shirt pocket. Patted his pants.

  I handed him his handkerchief.

  I took it, I said. In the hotel. Proof.

  He shoved the handkerchief back into my purse and gripped my upper arms.

  I’m going to kiss you now, he said.

  In the security line I felt as if something should be done with me. That I should be found out, exposed as the bearer of some evidence: a stashed fragment of bone, a capsule sewn into lining. The agent marked my boarding pass with a highlighter. I unzipped the suede boots and laid them in a bin. Removed my outer garment, unscrolled my scarf, and stepped into the scanner. Bleared, bleary, blearing with exhaustion. A bell ringing somewhere. What day was it? Sunday. God.

  God. Who neither slumbers nor sleeps, who looks not as man looks, who sees the guiltiest swervings of the weaving heart: You never loved me as you did last night. As you do now.

  What if you woke one day to discover the corpse of Christ had been identified definitively? That an irrefutable, airtight scientific study had been devised to disprove the existence of God, and the study had—beyond any conceivable doubt—proved he did not exist? What would you feel?

  Despair.

  Can I sing ab
out what’s waiting on the far side of fidelity? The wide door-swing, the unfurling sky?

  Sometimes I see them walking on the path around the small pond in Monteagle. Their backs are turned, they are holding hands. He is stooped with a full head of hair, blue-white, smooth; she is upright, still lithe, her long steel hair brittle. She refuses to cut it short like other women her age. He is the gentle one, she the fighter. What hurt them through life, after her affair—the volatility, quickness to anger, the startling sharp tugs toward random bodies, full breasts beneath a loose shirt, glimpse of hair above a navel, outline of pectorals; even, during a conversation with a friend, the swell of lips around certain words; how she would get close to the fire and retreat, crucify those sudden onsets of lust for something or someone else, contain, contain, then give what was left to her husband (though many days it was just her, alone on the marital bed, sometimes four, six times in a row)—this passion is now what saves her, and him. She fights against what time is doing to his ability to inhabit the present, rages to hold every day within the framework of past happinesses, to force his memories to enter and transform the moment. Remember the walks we used to take in the old neighborhood, the husband will say, how the children ran ahead of us, remember how we hid plastic toys in the rock wall—but the wife will refuse the lapse into nostalgia, will take him outside, when he’s strong, to hear the tinny sound of rain in the magnolia leaves. On his weak days she’ll stand him beside the sink so he can listen to the sounds the cat makes as it laps water from the spigot—her delicate clipped swallows—and the airplane-like hum of the space heater in the mornings, and he will tell her, again, how the kids used to crowd around it, They called it the Hot Peter and the slight stickiness on the round wood table where for fifty-three years they’ve had breakfast and coffee and dinner conversation, where they played Monopoly and blackjack with the children (for money when they were teenagers; the endings in arguments) and where she’d scrubbed away the green globs of melted fruit snacks (science experiment, microwave)—she is fighting to get it all in, not as memory but as something still living. To crystallize each scene from the past into an object they can hold, now, together.