The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  Every physical thing has a spiritual counterpart, the Secretus Secretorum had told us. There are two suns: the outer, natural sun and the bright spirit sun, the vivifying fire.

  And two kinds of architecture. Terrestrial and Celestial. That all houses had their celestial counterparts, just like each human being had a body and a soul. And where was the counterpart of this house? This is where he must be hiding from me. I would wait. I would slip through the seam when it opened. When the curtain of air parted, I told myself, I would meet him there.

  Thirteen

  For one week I sat from dawn to dusk in my small back room.

  It felt as if something shimmering awaited me in the corridors, on the point of appearing, something both beautiful and terrible, threatening to sweep in like a belt of weather from across Ireland.

  On the seventh day after the girls had gone, the postman brought three letters. I watched from a shadow near the turn of the stairs while Mrs. Daley received them at the door, leaving two on the side table for me and taking the other into Manus’s study. I heard a drawer open and close. When she disappeared again into the kitchen I retrieved mine, one from each of my girls. I tore them open and read, relieved and amazed by the mundane contents of each: complaints about days of rain, requests for me to send certain articles of clothing, various books.

  I went quietly into Manus’s study, a room I rarely entered. It was originally meant to be a parlor, but Mrs. O’Breen had decorated it with lithographs of priests and generals. An artillery infantryman’s jacket was displayed on a wicker bust in one corner, next to a trooper’s tunic. The heavy suite of furniture made the air smell of leather. A delicate chair covered in crimson velvet stood against one wall, neglected, out of its element in a room meant for a man.

  I opened his drawer. The letter was postmarked Kenmare, from his mother. I slipped it into my pocket, and when Mrs. Daley went upstairs to dust, I took it to the kitchen and steamed it open over the kettle. It was a thick letter, five pages in Mrs. O’Breen’s florid, but compact, hand. She said that the girls were happy, busy swimming and riding the mares. I raked the pages looking for more news of them, but much of the letter belabored properties and family business. I was about to fold it and put it away again when I saw my own name.

  It is Deirdre’s duty to give you children. You must not forget that. Be diligent with her, gentle but firm. There are more children meant for the two of you. With the girls gone she’ll focus more on you. There is a boy to come to you yet, Manus. It is a sin for her to refuse you. If she goes on doing so you must have Father Finbar speak to her again. She’s good to bear children for another ten years. Thirty-three is a good age for a woman to bear a child. I was thirty-three when you were conceived.

  I listened for Mrs. Daley, then returned to Manus’s study, where I put spirit gum on the envelope, sealed it, and put it away.

  That night when Manus came home I stood in the shadow of the stairwell, listening as he opened his top drawer and read the letter. I walked past his door, haunting the vestibule. He quieted, as if he heard me there.

  At the meal he was pensive. I knew his mother’s words were in his thoughts.

  When he finished eating, he put down his fork and knife and sighed. The tightness at his jaw was not there. He stared at the window and watched the trees moving in the porchlight.

  In that moment the Beloved flashed in his face. It was a moment that passed in the blinking of an eye, but such moments I had learned over the years to memorize, to keep alive inside myself. The Beloved managed to appear when Manus was tired, and he seemed tired now in a way he had not seemed to be when he’d walked in the door. I wished then that there was no wall between us; no animosity. He inclined his head into his hand, and I sensed the Beloved here in this moment, ajar of Manus, causing the light to change at the window. He was the shadow cast from the soup tureen on the table. The gust that rushed by the side of my face as Mrs. Daley passed me with the water pitcher. Manus stared now at the table before him. The Beloved moved closer and closer to him, hungry to return, as in exile from him as I was.

  Feeling my eyes on him, he broke from his daydream, tension coming back into his jaw. “Mrs. Daley,” he said. “Can you bring the whiskey in to me?”

  She placed it on the table before him, and he poured half a glass and drank it down, the color come up on his skin. After a second he looked at me with a certain baffled determination. The whiskey was fortifying him, driving away the vulnerable presence of his true self.

  Any moment he might have stood and taken me by the arm. Fearful over his clenched jaw, I left the table and went into the little back room and locked the door.

  I remembered the first time I’d seen the Blasket from Ventry Harbour, the distance of it; how strange it had looked to me, as if I had not lived on those rocks my entire life. That same feeling of hopelessness seized me in that dark hour as I thought of my girls. I could not conjure their faces clearly.

  I found myself filled with a pervasive sense of loss, and of the tides raging at the rock. The great uncertainty of the world.

  I opened the Secretus Secretorum and read.

  Where is this golden Mercury, this radical moisture which dissolved in sulphur and salt becomes the animated seed of the metals? He is incarcerated and held so fast that even nature can not release him from the harsh prison…. An intervention is what is required. Radical moisture. Dew that appears like a miracle.

  Every night for five nights Manus and I went through the same routine. He drank at the evening meal to strengthen the oppressor, and always, before Mrs. Daley left, I eluded him, locked him out of my small back room. He usually knocked, tried the door; then swore at me and left. I knew that he was, in a sense, relieved, or he never would have stood for it each night. The Beloved within him could not bear the violence he had once committed against me; could not bear the prospect of hurting me again, and I knew that was why he suffered.

  But on the fifth night Manus leaned on the door and wept. That time I was standing pressed to the other side of the door and I almost opened it, but the anger rose up in him suddenly and he punched the door with his fist so I felt the shock of the blow in my shoulder. After that I heard him on the landing, his breathing drunk and confused as he climbed the stairs.

  Very quietly I unlocked my door, following him at a distance. From the darkened stairs I could hear him in the bedroom undressing. He threw one of his shoes against the wall, and I heard the noise of metal against metal as he unhooked his belt and dropped it, with his pants, to the floor. For a moment it was quiet, and I imagined him struggling with his shirt buttons. “Bloody hell!” he sighed, and the bedsprings sounded.

  It was only moments before his breathing grew long and drawn in sleep. I peered in. The curtains were wide open, and it was just beginning to rain. The streetlamp threw its colorless patina over part of the bed and floor. He had gone down now like a shipwreck, dismantled, broken apart, the hard mortar that had held him in place having dis-integrated with alcohol and exhaustion.

  I stepped in and stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at him. In the strangeness of the light, I saw him in his earlier incarnation. The boy I’d married with the intense, vulnerable face. Memory of all intervening years seemed, in that moment, insignificant, and I felt a paroxysm of love and excitement wash over me. The real Manus, the Lost One, murmured, and I wanted to know what he was saying. I moved close. “What is it?” I whispered. “What is it?” He sighed as if he were in pain. Tears crowded my eyes. He threw his arm back across the bed, turning from one side onto the other. He flailed his arms, fighting the cover irritably, and a shudder ran through him as he shifted posture again, ending on his back. The drunken sleep would set in soon. The sleep from which the Oppressor was forced to submit for three or four hours at least. The sleep of helplessness.

  The Lost Manus was here, closer to the surface. He turned his face uneasily. A furrow of emotion crossed his brow.

  I took candles down from the shelf, casting
glances at him as I lit them and placed them around the room until seven or eight of them burned. I knelt on the floor at the bedside and kissed the air around his face. I was very close to him now, struggling to control my breathing and my whispers, struggling not to touch my lips to his skin and to his mouth, which was open slightly. I rose and went to the foot of the bed and pulled the blankets away slowly. He had mananged to unbutton his shirt but not to get it off, but his body below was bare.

  I sensed the awareness of the Beloved as I got on the bed and knelt between his open legs. As if with anticipation, he stretched a thigh further open and my heart raced. With very gentle fingertips I touched the sinuous stretch of muscle on his inner thigh, grazing his skin slowly up toward his velvety parts. I bent over him and breathed warm breath over his cock, the thick hair that surrounded it like a mat of fragrant silk thread. It began to harden, and under its velvet sheath, it twitched and tensed. His own breathing quickened, his naval rising and falling. With a few gentle touches of my hand, his cock was transformed. Tight and hard like a ripe fruit about to burst its skin. A single droplet appeared and gleamed on its head. I remembered the way he’d weakened when I used to suck and furtively lick him, while rubbing my spit softly over his balls. I restrained the urge to take him into my mouth, afraid that my tongue would jar him awake. I kept touching him softly with my fingertips until they burned.

  The rain intensified outside, hitting the window like a wall of water. I remembered the days we’d spent in the hidden garden room, the way he’d watched my face as he’d made love to me. His aggressive, physical candor, his tireless athleticism. “Call me Stag,” he had said. “Call me Mercury.” There was an entire list of virile gods and animals he’d wanted to be called. And I’d whispered the desired name, and he’d gritted his teeth with pleasure.

  In an impulse I bent over him again, a loose strand of my hair tickling his thigh, and he stirred suddenly and opened his eyes and I started, terrified. But it was the Beloved who gazed back at me, as if from somewhere hopelessly far away. He did not move, still under the dominion of his captor.

  “My love,” I said to him. “My Stag. My Eagle. Manus of the Ruffled Cuffs.”

  His eyes closed slowly. If only I could have put him inside me without waking the other.

  But I couldn’t. I knelt there and looked at him, holding back my caresses, my breaths singeing the air. After a few minutes he stirred and caught the sheet with one toe as he turned, pulling the humid train of it over him as he went on his side, facing away from me.

  I lay all that night in bed beside him. When dawn came into the sky, the darkness tinged with pink, I heard the clatter of horses leading the milk lorries in the street below. Manus turned toward me in sleep, one of his arms falling at an angle over my stomach, the other arm up over his head, that hand in a fist.

  I shifted a small bit under the hand that lay heavily on my belly until it lay between my legs, only the satin of my slip between his skin and mine. With subtle, concentrated movements, I brushed against his hand.

  I managed to pull the slip up from between us and pressed his hand gradually, irresistibly, until he cupped me with his palm and two fingers slipped inside me, a sound escaping on my breath. I moved twice or thrice and came.

  I put my fist to my mouth, struggling to quiet my breathing.

  Through the tears in my eyes he appeared to be looking at me.

  A few minutes later he awakened, stirred from sleep, sensing something. He turned and looked at me lying there, curled into myself, my eyes only partly open. I was humid, breathing, recovering from the tremulous night of yearning, which had been relieved at last by the burst and wash of love. It had not been random, I told myself, Manus having turned, his arm having landed upon me. It had been the Beloved, the gargantuan effort of the repressed soul to come into union with me.

  Manus sat up, looking at himself, the sheet in a twist around his hips and thighs, his shirt hopelessly wrinkled. I saw the thought come to him. He lifted his hand to his nose and smelled me on his fingers. He looked faintly stunned. He dropped his hand to his lap and seemed to be considering, imagining. After a beat he turned and faced me thoughtfully, and I saw something soften in his expression. I struggled to read the look over a course of moments in which it underwent nuanced shifts and changes.

  He stood and looked at me again, and I sensed him opening further. I lay perfectly still as he moved about the room, gathering his things for work, then went into the lavatory, the sounds of him pouring water from the pitcher into the bowl, the opening and closing of the cabinet soothing me, the rapture having effected a peacefulness in me, though in the course of the day with Manus gone, I would start again and again from sleep, exhilarated, sensing the coming of the Beloved, the presage of him like the coming of summer, the wind sending its message, exciting the trees.

  I believed that I had brought him back.

  In the afternoon I hid from Mrs. Daley. I walked quietly and purposefully through the halls in silent communion with myself.

  When I closed my eyes I saw my parents standing thigh deep in the sea, embracing. My father’s back and arms articulated with muscle. My mother gracefully reposing her head on his chest near his neck, her long hair blowing slowly like the tail of a comet. A boat went by on the waves, and I saw then how tall they both were, high as Skellig Michael, gulls screeching and mewing, circling them like small white flies, the curragh of men going past, small and insignificant. The music, Donal na Grainne.

  But late in the day I fell from the heights of elation. The night before and the early morning hours took on the aftertaste of a potent dream. I felt exhausted and afraid of the intensity of my feelings, and of what I had done.

  When at last Manus came in late that afternoon, he was with McMartin, who went ahead of him to the study while Manus went to hang their jackets in the vestibule closet. Congenial from his interaction with McMartin, there was light in his face. Turning and finding me watching him from the bottom of the stairs, I saw the memory of what he’d realized this morning come to him; a spark of the Beloved. On his way back in to McMartin, I moved toward him, stopping him and embracing him. Surprised, he kissed my forehead and was breaking the embrace when I clasped him hard around the waist, holding him back.

  “Send him away, Manus,” I murmured.

  “For Christ’s sake, Deirdre,” he said, grabbing my wrists and thrusting my arms aside. “Christ!” His eyes were stern under the dark brush of his brows.

  He went in to McMartin and closed the door.

  I stood panting with fury, poised to knock, my knuckles white. I smelled the pipe smoke, heard the low boom of McMartin’s voice. I picked up the framed photograph of Manus’s father, prominently displayed on the long marble side table, and threw it to the floor.

  Manus came out at the crash.

  “What happened?”

  He stared at the picture, then bent down and turned it over to find the glass cracked over his father’s face. A hurt look passed over his features.

  I immediately regretted having broken this particular picture. Why had I not picked up some useless piece of bric-a-brac placed there by his mother? I breathed hard, gritting my teeth. Instead of sternness, it was the Beloved that flashed in Manus’s face. I remembered, in that moment, that the days we’d spent together in the hidden garden room had been preceded by a fit of my anger, when I had broken the bottle of attar of roses.

  “We’ll get a new frame,” he said.

  I stared at him, still too upset with him to answer. My anger a forceful thing, streaming hot, an indication of a passion held too long in abeyance.

  He picked up the pieces carefully and placed them back on the marble side table. He remained, seeming forgetful of McMartin. I watched him closely, knowing that in this moment he could have gone in and dismissed McMartin. “Maybe in the attic,” he said, arranging the pieces with a shaking hand. “We might find one that will suit.”

  He tore his eyes from mine, stared hard at the shi
ne on the floor, and went back in to McMartin.

  For a protracted amount of time, I did not move from the hallway, until the afternoon light began to dim and the gloom became a strain on my eyes. When at last I knew he was not sending his friend away, I retreated to the back room.

  In my memory I was following her as she paced a hill on the island, her eyes a glassy, fevered blue, watching every bit of flotsam riding the backs of the waves like it might be the remains of the man she was waiting for. If she spoke it was not to me but to the air. I followed her breathlessly to the sacred precincts of the screes, where they had made a bed in one of the grotto caves. After this, we visited every marriage bed they’d made on the island, each one marked with blue stones, and it seemed to me at the time that I could discern the impressions their bodies had made in the grassy furrows where they’d lain.

  His leaving had always hurt her, and the longer he stayed away, the more certain she was that the ocean had taken him from her.

  She swore at the uneasy sea, or into the haze, a sky threatening rain that would not come. She swore that she would not forgive him. She swore her undying hatred of him, that she’d tear him limb from limb, leave bits of him all over the island. She foamed at the mouth and she cried, spat and almost choked on her own breath. I hid my head in my arms and turned wild circles. How old was I?

  And at the hour we saw him coming again in his own time, striding easily up the hill from the White Strand. You’d think he’d only been taking a stroll. She stood, staring, afraid to look away, as if he might disappear, and when she was sure that she was not hallucinating, her body racked itself with tremors. She ran at him, beat him; she tore hair from his head. She was like a vicious bitch dog; he defended himself against her. She rent a gash across his temple with a stone, and there was blood on everything and he was off, stumbling, holding his wound with his hands. I ran away toward the crossroads where men were returning from the sea, and I heard them talking about the man and the woman, saying that neither was full human.