Intercourse

by Robert Olen Butler

  ATTILA

  47, Khan of the Huns

  ILDICO

  17, his twelfth wife

  in his bed in Pannonia, on their wedding night, as he simultaneously dies from ruptured esophageal varices, AD 453

  ATTILA

  a sudden warmth deep in my throat like the bloom on the chest of an enemy as the arrow flies in and I cannot draw a breath and I lift up and try again and again and there is nothing but the old man, the Shaman of Rome, the Papa called Leo, and I am on horseback at the ford of the River Mincius and he comes on foot and I dismount because he wears golden robes and I know he carries invisible arrows, though I can still take his life, my hand moves to the hilt of the Sword of Mars, which came to me long ago as a sign of my greatness, and this man in gold pleads quietly that I do not press on from this place to his Rome to sack it and burn it and he says Do not think that you deal simply with Valentinian, for my Emperor is not of this world and I do not understand, but my hand wants to kill him at once and take his golden robe for spoil and I would advance on his city, but then another man appears, assembling himself from the empty air beside the Shaman, and my horse knows to mutter and rear and this man is lank and draped in linen and he has an uneven beard and dark quiet wounds in his side and he wears a crown of thorns and he advances, and though he carries no weapon I begin to tremble, and he says very softly I am his Emperor and he stops before me and he angles his head backward and to the side and he offers his naked throat, and I know that if I cut it I am lost

  ILDICO

  I cannot stop my legs from shaking, my chest from trembling, even with the weight of him on me, and the root of every hair in my head burns from the ceremonial dragging to his bed, and outside, his warriors vibrate their tongues, filling the air with cries like birds of prey come to wait beyond this canopy of white linen, wait in the flicker of pine torch, wait until he is done with me to pick the flesh from my bones, and now he rears like a horse and gasps and gasps, though I can tell he is not finished inside me, and now he falls heavily upon me again and he grows still, and lo, he is suddenly weak, he is gentle suddenly, and a sweet hopeful surging comes into me, for I see there is a side to my fierce new husband that perhaps will let me hold him close, and I put my arms about him

  IZUMI SHIKIBU

  29, lady of the court, poet

  PRINCE ATSUMICHI

  31, nobleman of the court, poet, husband of Princess Atsumichi

  in Izumi’s rooms in the King’s North Palace, Kyoto, Japan, 1003

  PRINCE ATSUMICHI

  she looks at the moon

  I see the same moon alone

  her poem arrives:

  wild geese fly in a night white

  with moonlight pure as her heart

  IZUMI

  what he gives is white

  the sea calm then rising up

  then coming to shore

  the wave rushes and churns thick:

  white of the moon, you are dull

  LUCREZIA BORGIA

  21, daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia

  ALFONSO D’ESTE

  25, her husband, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara

  in their bridal chamber at the Castello Estense, Ferrara, 1502

  LUCREZIA

  almost married to Valencia at age eleven, almost married to Naples at twelve, married to Milan at thirteen, a man of twenty-seven years with strong teeth and a limp member, and I wore red velvet trimmed in ermine and woven with gold thread, and when he was useless to the Borgia men—as he was to me—they could have slit his throat and thrown him into the Tiber and I would not have cried, but they simply annulled him and I was married at seventeen to Naples, to Alfonso of Bisceglie, who was seventeen, and we were one in mind and body as well as years and his skin was smooth as Travertine marble and I wore black velvet and I was a night sky of rubies and diamonds and I wore a girdle of pearls and a diadem of chased gold, and when he was useless to the Borgia men—though I loved him desperately still—my brother had him stabbed and beaten and then my brother strangled him to death with his own hands, and today I wore a gown of gold with purple satin stripes and sleeves of ermine and a cloak of ermine and I give my body now to Ferrara and he is accustomed to whores and he is accustomed to artillery but he has taken me away from Rome at last, far away, far from Rome at last, and at last I no longer have to look at the face of my father, the face of Christ’s Church on earth, for my father took my body to himself when I was eight and in the dark he whispered You will always be married to me

  ALFONSO

  it is whispered in certain places that she poisoned the last one, some boy, and it is whispered she nightly fucks her father on the altar of St. Peter and it is whispered she had his bastard son, a creature with horns and a cloven hoof they had to burn at the stake before the sunset of its first day, but my father says she is a crucial alliance with Rome and she is the city of Cento and the city of Pieve and the harbor of Cesenatico and she is a dowry of a hundred thousand ducats and for these things she is not a murderer and she is not a slut to her father, and I did not truly know what she was until I rode out to her procession a day early and caught her just arrived for the night at Castel Bentivoglio and she came to me in the courtyard brushing the road dust from her riding dress and her golden hair was falling about her shoulders and she surely was unhappy at my seeing her for the first time like this and she lifted her long face to me and her pale blue eyes fixed on me and she smiled a smile like the muzzle flash of a cannon and I took her hand and bent low to kiss it and she whispered I am your wife and I knew that she was

  HENRY VIII

  44, King of England

  ANNE BOLEYN

  34, Queen of England

  at the house of Sir William Sandys near Basingstoke, England, October 1535

  HENRY

  he conjures himself corporeal from the very air: imperious dark eyes and cropped auburn hair and a small mouth shaping kisses and pouts and commands and his shoulders are broad and his limbs are long and his fingertips flare above the vast dark ocean on one side and the wide cold sea on the other and he steps forward with first one foot upon the cliffs of Cornwall and then the other upon Dover and he bestrides the land and he looks out to the wide world beyond, my son, my sweet son, and as I am England now, he will be England then, and by the prickish essence I give yet again to this woman, I will be England once more. Or else

  ANNE

  I alone made England’s alliance with France and I lifted the worldly evils of the papacy from our peoples’ religious life and I bestowed all the wisdom of Cromwell upon the king and I established the right of a commoner to become a noble by his own thoughts and deeds and I gave more alms to the poor of the land than any highborn in history, and it all comes to this: a bejeweled codpiece falls and from a slash in a pair of breeches comes a too-small prick attached to a fat and distracted man and if its fluids do not blend with mine such to create a boy, I will sure be cast aside, or worse, and all that I am, all that I ever can be, is my cunt

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  29, poet and playwright

  HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, THIRD EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

  20, courtier and literary patron

  in Shakespeare’s rooms in St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, London, 1593

  WILLIAM

  proud Nature humbled by the work of its own hand: his azure eye, his auburn tress, the chest it hangs on white as the sun can seem when veiled in silken cloud, his silken doublet white as cloud cast off to bare the fire beneath, and if his heart be sun and his chest be sky then his eye be heaven and his earth below be forested lush around a great high oak that stands stripped clean of limbs from lightning strike: I give my limbs to this land and touch his beating heart and burn, and yet he is night as well as day, a well as well as tree, a well dug deep and dark and I send my vessel down: he is, in flesh, the world inconsonant made one: my young man, my dark lady

  HENRY

  I soon will lie alone and he will cross the room and s
it at his table and once again he will take up his goose quill and find it blunt and take up his knife and bend and squint and turn slightly to the light from the window and begin his sweet circumcision, playing at the tip with the blade, making it less blunt, then sharp, then sharper still, and he will pause and touch the tip to his tongue and he will pull the ink pot nearer to him and dip the pen, dip it deep, the tip growing wet and dark, and he will withdraw and let it drip and drip till it stops, and then he will bend to his paper and his words will come and the tiny scratch of his quill will shudder its way up my thighs and I am pen and I am ink and I am his words

  COTTON MATHER

  56, clergyman and author

  LYDIA LEE MATHER

  45, his third wife

  in their home in Boston, 1719

  COTTON

  O Heavenly Father, please let this madness lift from her, my sweet Consort, my temporal delight, my Wife, for I know she is merely mad, I acknowledge the errors of my youth when I spoke and wrote to condone the hunt for witches in Salem, the nineteen hanged and the four who died awaiting the gallows and the one pressed to death by stones all hover about my soul and, to their credit, mercifully hold their tongues, but I feel them there and I acknowledge my sins against them for they were at worst mad, and if one or two were what was feared, then it would have been better that those go free than that the innocently deranged, Your children in need, be persecuted, and You are teaching me still, O stern and loving Father: she hissed and she wailed and she threw an ink pot and she ripped my sermon and she stood trembling in the kitchen and cursed me and cursed the hearth and cursed the broom and cursed the veal and the butter and the pickled barberries and yet abruptly these paroxysms ended, as they always do, and then she humbled her body before me in tender entreaties and ardent praises and sweet pleadings for us to enact the meek and abject yielding that is her proper place in the world that You have created, and I beg You, O Heavenly Father, to forgive these worldly acts we presently perform and to transform them into a healing of her affliction

  LYDIA

  O pudding, O pudding for my husband, O pudding I dance you, my pudding, I sing you, my pudding, for you are my life, my pudding of hog’s liver, my Lord and husband’s favorite, I will take a nice fat liver and I will work it in my hands for a time and I will parboil it and I will shred it small, very small, so it will soften sweetly and it will give forth its juices, and I will beat the pieces very fine in a mortar and mix them in my earthen pot with the thickest and sweetest cream and I will strain it and into the liver I will put six yolks of eggs and two whites of eggs and the grated crumbs of a penny whiteloaf and then currants and dates and cloves and mace and coarse-grain sugar and saffron and salt and an excellent swine suet, but before the boiling and before the laying of it all on the iron grid over the coals for broiling, when, my sweet pudding, you are still raw and redolent of organ and spices and blood, I will add a tittle of wormwood and a minim of henbane and the eye of a freshly killed newt

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

  31, composer

  NANCY STORACE

  21, soprano

  in her rooms at the Hotel Belvedere in Vienna, after the premiere of his aria “Ch’io mi scordi di te,” written for her, on the eve of her permanent departure to her home country of England, February 23, 1787

  WOLFGANG

  I leap onto her lap and into her arms and I am six years old and she is the Empress and I am a genius I am a miracle the fingers of my left hand are still tingling from the violin strings and they find first the rope of pearls along her waist and then the embedded diamonds upon her stomacher and the ruffle along her bodice and at last ever so delicately the flesh of her in the treble cleft of breasts and chest and as my hand moves I kiss her throat a long run of demisemiquaver kisses and I am but a little boy, she thinks, as she lifts my offending hand and kisses its palm and perhaps I am but I am a genius and her flesh smells of musk and upon it are the smells of orange blossom and sandalwood and rose and she laughs a trilling laugh and holds me close and later, beyond her sight and the Emperor’s, I stand beside Maria Antonia Josefa Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen their daughter and her eyes are an arpeggio of gray and blue and her lower lip is pouting all the time and we have counted it out that she is but eighty-six days older than me and I put my hand in hers and I begin to finger the Bach D-Minor Chaconne in her palm and she angles her head a little in my direction I will marry you I say but I did not and now my fingers fly upon soprano-flesh encoring my farewell to Nancy this night: I play the pianoforte upon her, modulating from the G minor of the recitative to the E-flat major of the aria, and though she fills the room with the trilling of her laughter I can hear her singing

  NANCY

  I have filled my mouth with him, with his music, and I sing him even now in my head where my voice does not have to keep up, where I do not have to sing actual words, it is all nota e parola, every note a sound, and so I cling with an infant’s babble to his back and we rise up and float out the window and we fly, as only composers can fly, on pure senses, just the sound itself, no words at all, no meanings, and I cling to him and his bones are fragile as a bird’s and his heart beats fast as a bird’s and we fly above Vienna and out into the mountains and I look higher into the night sky and my mind slows and the lights burn at the edge of the stage and I lift my face toward the Emperor in his gilded box and I sing actual words Stelle barbare, stelle spietate and I sing this now to the sky outside our window Oh brutal stars, oh pitiless stars in the morning I will leave this tiny man with the bad skin and his ravening restlessness and whose genius presently animates his hands upon me: your music is perfect, my little Wolfgangerl, but for this, there are too many notes

  LOUIS XVI

  23, King of France

  MARIA ANTONIA JOSEFA JOHANNA VON HABSBURG-LOTHRINGEN, KNOWN IN FRANCE AS MARIE ANTOINETTE,

  21, Queen of France

  for the first time, on the eve of their seventh wedding anniversary, in the royal bedroom at Versailles, May 15, 1777

  LOUIS

  she doesn’t like me smelling of coal fire from my forge where I have just repaired a beautiful old Beddington lock and she narrows her little pig eyes at me and pouts out even farther her Habsburg lower lip and her hair is poufed up high and appears to have tiny birds living in it along with their nest and parts of a tree, and her brother has arrived from Austria and is about to insult me, and if I were my father, if I actually wanted to be what I am, I would have this man’s head cut off with a blunt ax after he walks me through the grounds of the Trianon and asks if my member is working properly, and now I must try to understand that this matter is about a key and a lock: her warded lock, full of hidden obstructions, cylinders and flat metal plates with tiny separations that must all be entered at precise angles and all at once, and my key must somehow fit, and perhaps it is true that the future of France depends on this thing I am now doing but I would much prefer to put my member in the forge until it is yellow-hot from the flame and then pound it on an anvil with a hammer

  MARIE

  I turn my face away and angle my head down and against my shoulder and I try to smell myself and not the royal blacksmith who has somehow found his way to my bed in place of the king who vanished long ago, and I smell of jasmine and iris and orange blossom and tuberose and cedar and I am but a little girl and my mother the queen’s own fingertip draws a cool line of scent behind my ear and now she and I are listening to a little boy playing his violin and even as his one hand moves quickly on the neck of his instrument and the other draws the bow slowly he lifts his eyes to me and they are blue-gray just like mine and now we are standing apart and I feel his hand slip into mine and he begins to touch me there: his fingers run about my palm as if I were his violin and he begins to hum a sweet soft tune so that only I can hear and I know he loves me and I think to lean over and kiss him but my mother looks my way from across the room and lifts her hand to call me to her and I do not kiss him, but now yes, but now yes, I turn m
y face and I lean close and I kiss my Wolfgang Amadeus on the cheek and I whisper Marry me

  THOMAS JEFFERSON

  45, U.S. Ambassador to France

  SALLY HEMINGS

  16, slave, half-sister to Jefferson’s dead wife