Chapter 8: Last night before
Char’s room is Spartan, mostly window light nourishing several huge potted plants. Jared has come to be at home here. The simplicity comforts his spiritual sense. It’s unencumbered, a free sense, like the meeting place of security and death. Tonight, amid the shadows of swiftly clouding moons, he has passed towards the point of departure.
He hasn’t told her of the other woman whose specter has recently blown in on moonlight. It’s something kept down inside him, caught between guilt and his fear of losing her, of providing an excuse for her to abandon him. She could never be unfaithful, is relentlessly there for him. But he knows that his infidelity, though only spiritual at this point, could conjure a chasm she could never leap. Such a chasm, he fears will be created by prison.
He leans over and tips a fifth of rotgut whiskey his way. Its power obliterates these confessional thoughts. He wants this night to be The Night he can dream about for a long time, from now through prison time.
Off and on he props himself up on an elbow and strains to hear the anticipated sounds of her presence. But she isn't there. He’s mistaken again. The chorale of street noises harmonizes with one loudly humming streetlight. He lies back onto a pillow, turns onto his right side, thinks about sleep, something short, thirty z’s maybe. He wants to be rested when she does come. But nothing lulls him. His mind’s a dazzle of images, his body a milling mob of emotions. Soon, he dreads, only too soon he will be sleeping back in a cage. That’s merely a matter of hours. Merely—Christ, how he has dreaded this night. The night before surrender. How often he’s wondered how he would feel this night. Whether he could carry off the matter.
The bitter whiskey stings but it helps his mind become merciful. The moments and hours begin to fill with nostalgic remembrances of Char. He had met her just after his father's death— she had simply appeared, as if she was to be there for him now that Dad was gone. She didn't like him at first. All that to him seemed romantic and manly she spurned as bombastic and juvenile. His sharp wit she assessed as humiliating sarcasm. His bodily strength and vigor wearied her—just another onslaught by a bullying male, stalking her, primed to snag her and pin her with his name tag. “God, you're a damn man-eater!” She hadn’t like that remark.
A bemused “Hmmm. Ha!” marks his recall of their first confrontation. Jared prided himself on his cleverness and imagination. He besieged her with flowers and “love cards” gushing with volcanic emotions and protestations of unquenchable desires. He played all his male tricks. She rejected all of them and him!
Cleverly, he had tried to throw her off with the highly charged “man-eater!” which he thought was a most damning stereotype. It was a calculated trick—he expected her to be horrified by this unfeminine label and fly back into his arms. But Char had not rebounded. She didn’t even reject the stereotype. Just said, in her distinctive, maddeningly gentle way, “I am a man-eater. What of it?”
To say that Jared was staggered is to fail to capture the reverberations within his psyche. “Why should I marry you? So you can eat me?”
Jared didn’t have an answer for that then, and he doesn't have one yet. “You’re right about that, I want to eat you!” is what he could have said, wanted to say, feels like saying tonight, but he senses that it was and is the wrong answer.
A man needs to feel that his woman is his, with the same feeling and satisfaction of rubbing his belly after a great feast! is what he truly believes. What’s wrong about that? He senses that Aaren would agree. He just knows that she wants to be eaten.
But Char . . . Char, god how you have turned everything upside down! For the past several years she has chewed up every male thing Jared has done. She was a feminist before the word was coined. It was instinctual with her because, Jared avers, “She’s instinctually just.”
What he means is that she can sense an injustice, spy its most ghostly outline before it’s apparent to others. While in college at St. Clare's, an all-women’s Catholic school in southern Minnesota—a sister college to his own central Minnesota all-male College of Saint Clement—she was an early supporter of draft resistance. It wasn't the abstract issue of violence versus nonviolence that engaged her, as initially it had Jared. Rather, she was against all types of wars: political, psychological, and spiritual. What her Catholic background had given her, and something that is ever at her lips, is an unforgiving respect for every person, each of whom is a child of God, all of whom are members of the Communion of Saints.
Char's theology is more practical than reflective. From the driest, most abstract theological principle, she draws forth its nurturing spirit. She lives from her heart and will put up with no foolishness of the mind that would sanction a “Just War” against anyone.
When Jared met her she was working on a health project for migrant laborers. During the prior decade Mexicans and other Hispanics became the mainstay of the migrating crews that swarm the North Country during planting-to-harvest time. They cluster in the oldest and poorest parts of town. Char was spearheading an unpopular campaign to make their presence known and to provide community-based health care. Within that cause she confronted, for the first time, the depths and complexity of injustices to women. “Mexican Catholicism gets them with a double whammy. They're supposed to be both the Virgin Mother and the cathouse whore.”
Cut from a different cloth, Jared was born in high gear. Folks who meet him either strongly like him or can barely tolerate him. There’s little middle ground. He attracts and repels with intensity.
Intense. Intensifying. These are the words everyone would agree define Jared. Vortex. Maelstrom. Even in times of passivity he’s a luring sinkhole, capturing people like he does ideas, almost organically; he ingests them.
As such, his inability to quickly understand Char, to inhale her, consume her, to make her part of himself, frustrated the living hell out of him. It went against all he had thought was properly male. He had expected her to be his woman, his “future wife,” to “win” her over and assimilate her within his life, on the spot. But it’s still not going that way. “Why do you stay with me?” he often asks after their bouts. She never gives him a satisfactory answer. Yet somehow, Char is stuck on him. Splattered inside him and breathing his breaths. He, likewise.
Typical of the times, it is with S-E-X—largely written in capitals across the era—that they struggle. Early on, the sheer athletic vigor of Jared's coupling hewed them. Char had never encountered such frenzy on the intimately physical level. At first she found his hard pressings on her, his exploration of her every part a bit comical, as if he were a mad potter endlessly kneading his throw. Yet the sheer exhaustion induced by his relentless erotic explorations yielded a sense of drenched satisfaction that she came, in time, to eagerly desire—despite her post-coital aches and pains.
As they both became more familiar and easy with one another, Char perceived the deeper character of Jared’s raw yearning. He sought transcendence within her. Desired to pray her. Sex for him was a communion that was more than the linkage of two— it was a whole greater than the tally of its parts.
“I want this!” expresses his desire, which her eyes silently celebrate. It is to this raw yearning that she so passionately responds. It unleashes “her intoxicating presence.” Together they get drunk each with the other.
Physically, Char is tall, as tall as an average man, taller than most women, with an Appalachian slenderness that belies the strength of her grip and embrace. She possesses a dancer's grace that both protects her from Jared's often mislaid ferocity and enables her to artfully pleasure him by small movements.
For Jared, Char is the canvas. Together they are an expression, an artistic creation. Char, while not a Free Love advocate, is more open to that cause. She’s drawn by its element of freedom for the individual but equally by its exposure of sexual injustices. She made pioneer contact with the oppression suffered by battered and lesbian women. In such settings she learned more about what she did no
t want than about what she did. More, she also discovered—at times with a flood of blush—about what others actually did!
She heard tales of horror and humor, all the time marveling at all that her Catholic education had not told her about men and women. She muses, “They never offered a course in Sexual Athletics,” and shakes her head in bewildered laughter as she tries to picture Sister Benedicta marching out her famous audio-visual aids for such a lecture.
The first time she stayed on top—all night long!—it opened an avenue for unmapped communication. It spiritually reorganized things for Jared such that he was dumbstruck. It had, quite literally, turned their world upside down. It was a small gesture, something she had asked him to consider. Oh, Jesus, it is the little things she asks me to do that turn me inside out, upend my world! He remembers the moment ever so clearly.
“Just lie back. Relax,” she says, and he cooperates. But every fiber of his mind and soul howls with a fear of slow death through torture. He moves, glacially, from resigned acceptance of the gesture to a yanking revulsion as she drives herself onto him, slowly, patiently, with total control. He squirms and sweats, imagines ejecting her – blast! splat! – up to the ceiling as he feels a loss of sensation in his penis, which is mocked by her gentle whisper, “Who has the cock now? Who’s fucking who?”
“Just lie back. Relax!” This and so many other little things she says that rock him: “I’m not a housekeeper!” “I will always keep my last name!” “I can open doors for myself!” “You go shave your legs!”
Just lie back … It’s an act only trivialized by comparing it to the effect Jared felt in church when the altar was turned towards the people showing if not the face of God at least the face of the priest—the visage of the sacred. “Who has the cock now?” Yes, yes, at that moment he sees the face of this woman as if she were Goddess. Awesome! He becomes Earth, she Sky.
Ever since that moment he has struggled mightily to express how majestic she is, but words mightily fail him. He knows only this as absolute truth—sexual intimacy with Char is an act of worship.
Jared admits only to himself that Char is his equal in most every way and superior in what he holds is his forte—the realm of the spiritual. She’s two steps ahead towards where he wants to go, if he'll ever get there. Humbled is how he feels. But he’s too embarrassed to voice this – Pride? Stupid macho ego?
Oh he so deeply knows that he needs her, wants her so badly regardless of how painful her truths can be. She even—and during the trial, goddamn her!—began criticizing the Resistance as a male movement, not just in terms of bodies but in terms of its power vision. “Cowboys and John Wayne, that's all you guys are!”
This slashed him deeper than she knows. God, what do we agree on?
Protectively, for this special night, he banishes that thought. Forbids the whispers of memory from Bruiser and Dikbar to defile the moonlight. He searches for some more pleasurable remembrances. But nostalgia has deserted him. The haunting fears about whether he can handle prison return.
Throughout this special day, and intensifying with the darkening, those fears have settled upon him; piled up. And here on his last night of freedom . . . Freedom? What a queer word. But freedom in a very real sense. Free to dress as he likes, to speak where he’s invited, to sleep with Char . . . truly, very many freedoms. But a profound doubt, accusatory, rips through him now as it did after every preachment. “Is all that I’m doing a subtle suicide?”
Such thoughts cease as the dark suddenly murmurs a familiar metallic whisper. Char is fumbling with her keys in the broken-light hallway.
Char’s dark shape wavers within moonframe. Slowly, towards him, shifting sideways and upwards as scarf, jacket, hat are removed, a dress drops to the floor, crouching discards a shoe. Her face clears only when she kneels close to him.
“Jared, are you awake?” in a whisper.
“Yeah, babe, I am,” steady and solemn.
Her voice is weary but strong. “Good. I was afraid you'd be sound asleep. Tomorrow will be such a hard day for you.”
Hard day for me? Gentlemen of the Council, fathers, brothers, can you feel my pain? Oh, my heart once again is stabbed. Fathers, brothers, can such a woman as this be justified? Is she fit for bearing our seed? Listen closely to her vile intentions.
“It's already a hard day for me.” He sucks in a long breath. “It's probably 2:30 and you're just fucking and truckin’ home!”
“Stop it!”
“Bullshit, I won't stop it!” He sits up in anger. “Why should I? You've never stopped it.”
“What?”
Fathers, brothers she is beautiful I'll grant, but . . .
“Don't fuck with me woman, you're a cool mean bitch.” The words lie upon him in pain. “I've been here all night waiting for you, waiting for some tenderness,” he sneers at himself. “What a fucked up nostalgic shithead am I—oh Christ!”
Gentlemen, fathers, brothers, these tears of mine are weighted in stone.
It is no longer night. The darkness has no more to say. The moon is not noticed. All is merely the bed and he and she.
“Jared, I love you.” Pause. “Why do I always have to tell you that? Over and over? Why tonight? Why every night?”
“Fuck it, Char, fuck it all. Fuck it all! You and I simply don't live on the same planet. Jesus, woman, tomorrow I'm going to prison and all you care, all you fucking do, is go to meetings.” Then he gets downright nasty. “Ratting and tatting with your bitchy queer friends.”
“Stop it! Stop it!” Char stands and grasps a window's ledge. No light comes to her eyes, but the warmth of darkness soothes her. A jagged silence vibrates between them.
“Jared,” spoken smoothly and firmly, announced, “I love my Sisters and I want to be, will be, with them for a long time. It’s real, you're going to prison but—but we are in prison. I have always been in prison.”
“Aw, fuck that shit.” He flips over backside towards her. She lingers within moonframe, and its lunatic power holds them both—burns this moment of departure into his memory.
The plants may have recorded this night, their leaves forever marked with the pain, but for him and her the event would ever be an incomplete memory. In the small awakenings of restless sleep they touch in the fear of departure. Fathers, brothers, be not misled by her sense of duty! There is no hesitation in her acceptance. She responds to him openly, accepts him within a shared imprisonment. She senses that together they are inside the Iron Cage. He, a new inmate. She, in the process of escaping her captors. Jared's mind labors, processing the ancient symbols. He desires to quench his thirst with familiar wine, feast on god in familiar bread. He needs to plow, she to be his field. He needs to hammer, she to be soft wood. He needs to smear her smell and taste, gasp and groan, push and grab all over the body of his memory. He needs his nakedness defined in terms of the Old Way. Fearful is he of forgetting, of being unfaithful to their newfound creations of intimacy. He needs to eat. Consume. Satiate.
Char accepts.
Jared’s lips suck hard upon her mouth. The strength of his tongue excites her. To this familiar place, once more, she will go. From within her desire speaks to be claimed. Ever hungered again and again he leaps from darkness into her fire. Such eyes to probe! Mystifying soft-green, almost sad, alluring in innocence. Deeply he plunges, all his bearing unmarked yet with hands and thighs following familiar scents. To breasts with softness sucked through his lips, swallowing her gentle nurture, spinning his thoughts to Mother and moving in worship to her folds, moist gates of redemption.
Accepting his weight, preparing for his search, her hips cradle him, embrace his hard driving, his wrenching throttling of her skeletal self. She desires to flow through him. Pore to pore, seeping into this man who might well be her only child. So the Sisters had encouraged and approved this dutiful resignation.
As he was blind at birth, so the man-child fumbles at his departure, wrenching sublime joys amid heartfelt pains of sad fare
well. He arouses the token of her maleness and shakes it, storm and thunder, ground shudders and rivers burst. Breaths like electric gasps. Thighs liquefying, splattering succulent juice. Arms braced against backboard she wraps him with her legs, cloaks him. Waves foaming onto shore, all light shattered, his sagging and moist skin within her. Without pause, passion's gravity forlorn, he journeys down the spice of face, lingering in scent of breast, licks across the sweat of belly and the pit of coupling. He kisses her muff. Tongues her deeply, thrusting, merging lips of Earth and Sky, to savor the fragrance of departure. Gently to her thighs, a kiss to her calf, her foot, her toes, he salutes her, departing in the feeble light of sunrise.
Jared sleeps, the desperate sleep of the caged. Already, she realizes, he is in prison. She, whom he calls Soothing Water, touches him. Watches the fire seep from his flesh and encircle her hand. She loves his intensity, is nurtured by his decisiveness. She will miss their differences, for she, like him, needs flint to strike fire. But most of all she will miss his zaniness and his compassion.
She remembers—Jared putting light shades on his head, hoisting an imitation Fidel Havana cigar and lampooning so, so serious Marxists—at an SDS meeting! And Jared playing with kids! The big galoot just loves kids and he's on the floor crawling around, making weird popping noises with his mouth, blowing their bellies, playing the giant and swinging them high and low, throwing them up like baseballs and catching them amid the giggles and giddy laughter that Jared always seems to bring out from kids and even jaded intellectuals.
More, she remembers that he is a gate-crasher, a boundary breaker, in his own way a serious comic. It’s curious, so she has found, that he bounds from the comic always to the sacred—or at least with her from the comic to the sexual to the sacred. “Gosh, I'll really miss his laughter!” And my own, she realizes.
Yet how hard all this will be on her is a thought she sees as too selfish to ponder tonight. She prefers to think about the thousand ways he has intruded on her life. Positive ways. Manly ways. Helping her with this and that. And never seriously threatening her. In fact, he's so much the little puppy, always looking at her for approval. “God, how his eyes just glow and swell with just a little thanks . . . always wanting to seal it with a kiss!”
San Francisco. How could San Francisco not come to mind tonight? It was the time when she knew they were specially made for each other. He so impressed her. She—who as a nurse seemed always prepared for such things—had forgotten to pack her monthly equipment. And here they were, a most beautiful night, splurging on a week by the Bay and she flowing like lava. Can she ever forget? It was late at night and he walked with her, chatting and being playful, through neighborhoods neither knew, trying to find a store, any type, for it was almost midnight. He asks, “Are you okay? Want to sit down? Need a coke?” How strange. Who would believe this story? He ministers to her. She knows that that night she became his goddess.
And he would come to her. Anytime. Wade into the River of Blood to meet her. Always looking for his pleasure through her pleasure. Oh, how lost, she knows, he will be!
Such stories would perplex those who habitually comment on how oddly coupled they are. They see him as all brash and bluster, jock and wild-eyed heretic. She as soothing and nurturing, a healer and calm visionary of a Sisterly New Order. Few see him as she does. But such is their peculiar bond.
It’s a bond that does have its oddly coupled side. Truly, as tonight, it’s a bond that has almost always to be forged, to be re-created in the mist of red-hot iron being tempered by cool, sizzling water. She knows he calls her Soothing Water and this stirs her as she visualizes a final ritual. Around him and above him she hovers, dripping her flesh, puddling him, making a cast of her flesh in spirit water upon his muscles, bones, breathing. She will never not be with him now and forever.
At breakfast neither speaks much. Their embraces are few, nostalgic and routine. The ritual of spouses. The clock time comes as often it has over coffee cups and newsprint. There is nothing for him to take along. It’s a journey without any luggage.
At the anticipated time both rise and step towards the door. Jared turns towards her, reaches and grasps her hands, raises and holds them close to her eyes, moist, misted—in tears, sparkling flickers of peridot—and kisses them. “I love you,” opens the door and moves on. His imprisonment is begun.
As his footsteps fade to silence and the door creaks no more, Char weeps, softly and slowly, leaning her slender length against the hard wooden doorframe. She is now separated from him but she is not alone. Fulfilling his greatest desire, she has joined with him in spirit of memory and dream. That she could not tell him this is but her acceptance of their shared imprisonment. Such is the wrench of yoking that is communion.
Char crosses her palms upon her slight belly and mentally prays that there soon will be two with whom she is about to be born anew. She is his body, he is hers. She wants it to be so, wants a child who will be them both—we. If they are so blessed, the child will be the bridge between their long time apart, a gangway between their prison cells, that under which Soothing Water will flow and heal them both.
Kill the dove! Page 8