by Robert Gluck
The Rule of L.
I am thy loue & shal be thy loue wyth-owtyn ende.
1
Can I interpret Love’s canceled flights with only the language of canceled flights, his delayed arrivals with the language of delay?
•
In the 1430s, Margery Kempe wrote the first autobiography in English. She replaced existence with the desire to exist. A man drew water from a well while a child played around its edge. Beyond the city walls lay square orchards, wattled enclosures, and sheep folds. Clear blue sky, whitish at the horizon.
•
The moment Margery felt a separate consciousness inside her body was overwhelmingly bizarre. The certainty of her own death swam through her. After the child was born, devils pawed at Margery and tossed her around. Devils opened their mouths—an exasperating nudity appeared. One demon knelt like a suitor; it caught her ankle and tears spurted from its round blue eyes. In the wheedling voice of burlesque piety it implored Margery to deny God and the saints, her mother and father, and her own self. Margery tore the skin on her breast. She lost faith in the world and shrieked a tilted laugh. What sane person could afford such laughter? She roared at her husband John and her neighbors. Her periods stopped; her saliva tasted bitter. She wanted to kill herself and be reconceived in hell and as proof she bit so deep into her palms that crescents remained there for the rest of her life. Finally John tied her up.
•
Half yer viii wekys & odde days later, as Margery wrote, she lay so wide awake in the early dawn that the outside was pushed into sleep. She couldn’t move; she was united with the weak light that passed through her shutters and glinted on coins, gleamed on a latch. She heard rustling from above, the bare feet of servants, and a magpie’s rasping chatter.
Jesus was sitting next to her. He was birdlike, with a short pointed nose and complete arches over his eyes. He had bone-tipped shoulders and she recognized in his ideal posture and long neck her own “hidden” aristocracy. Sandy brown hair fell across his lofty forehead but he was a blond. His beauty seemed intentional because she desired it. He wore a short purple tunic. Tiny pink nipples were visible on his milky breast.
Jesus gazed up past his brow at Margery. His irises were disorganized blue geodes. He had been crying all weekend—it was Monday morning and he was still crying. He whispered, “I’m so abandoned.” He raised his head in sadness and his face held the slow joy of deep sky above the sun.
He stood and turned on the balls of his feet and began to ascend. Margery fell half asleep when she saw the deity turn away. She felt the strongest sensation of her life, a welling of aspiration and desire embodied in the blur of dusty gold, the long smeared shadow of neck and spine, his broad hips, the semicircles of his ass, his long slightly knock-kneed legs. He rotated near the ceiling; she became conscious of the weight of her breasts and the hair down her back. The splayed tips of his long toes floated past her eyes. He raised his arm as darkness closed in. Later she concluded he was pointing to heaven.
Margery’s ropes lay unknotted. She climbed out of bed and pulled back the heavy shutters. It was not dawn at all—plain light flooded the room without fanfare along with bird chatter and salty wind. An afternoon in Lynn, 1396.
2
Margery and John lay in a high bed covered in blue buckram with blue hangings. She raised her watery eyes as though someone were walking across the roof. She had opened a brewery in Lynn; it failed in four years. John snored a faint rasp and wind sighed in the reed beds. Encountering resistance, Margery regrouped and set a higher goal. She became a miller and failed even sooner. John snored lightly; he was ten years older than Margery. He had auburn hair, thick arms and thighs. The hair on his chest was black cashmere, the nipples hard to find. His hair was part of the darkness.
John gathered the covers in sleep and bunched them under his chin. Margery listened; behind her boredom, a wash of ecstasy. She heard along with the silence and snoring a delectable music. Margery was thirty-one and Jesus was thirteen years younger; his welling choir cheered in her body. Flames from the pit of her stomach fanned through joints and membranes, a suggestion of wings in brilliant cobalt space, fiery stars where bodies should have been. John raised his big head reluctantly as Margery jumped down from their bed, shouting: “Ecstasy in heaven!”
•
Margery sewed a hairshirt into her dress to pitch herself to the edge of exasperation. She kept nothing else secret, talking to relive her intensity: Je pushed out, then sus, inward and under her tongue. She repeated bliss and ecstasy, words that looked beautiful in books by St. Bridget and St. Catherine. She’d had no peace of mind to begin with and she was not able to imagine a break from the world she knew.
•
At that time there were three popes. The financial control of the world and eternity was up for grabs, so people were burnt to discourage personal reckonings of experience. People of humble birth were vulnerable. Margery was not eager to die; she did not want liberation but a cosmic shortcut, the satisfaction of a greed for more life.
•
Margery spent two years in a state of arousal and despair. Jesus was a wish. She waited actively as though feeling the air quicken before rain, imminent saturation. His translucent skin—a milky wash over a base coat of gold dust. She conjured long conversations tremulous with sincerity and avowal—or he was describing her to Mary or God. She sat up and looked around, surprised he didn’t appear in the creak of an opening door. She debated with bent treetops and the motionless bright horizon where clouds streamed into the sky. Her feet rubbed together, her tongue and mouth tingled, her membranes clanged with emptiness.
Margery was caught in the prison of six or seven positions, repeated hopelessly through the night. She expected compensation for the pain of his absence. Her excitement was sickening against the gray dawn and the house sparrows’ insipid chirps.
She watched the world take shape. On her neighbor’s roof a young man carried slate tiles up to his boss, his father possibly. Every time the young man laid down the stones, he hitched up his hose on his hipless torso and looked in her window.
They were separated by a few yards. He was shirtless; it was late July but it would not be hot for a few hours. His chest was smooth and white though he worked in the sun. He had long muscles in his arms and back, and black curls above a long haggard face. Swallows whose nests he had disturbed darted around him, shrilling tsink, tsink, tsink. She brought back a pear to bed and cut slices; the pear was crisp, with more fragrance than flavor. Margery liked her rosy curves and caverns and strength: she outdistanced John going uphill. The roofer whistled to get her attention.
Later she found him in front of her house wearing his doublet and apron. She imagined blunt acts. Above these fantasies, Jesus’s face pitched in amazed spasms. She asked, “Do you know Jesus?”
The roofer stood with his legs apart. On the job his body felt efficient, concise; confronted by someone who expressed herself with a flourish and rich intonation, he was rooted to the spot. “If we don’t fuck now, we’ll do it later.” He didn’t even whisper.
Margery saw him at St. Margaret’s that evensong. She was the daughter of the mayor. She wore a horned headdress of gold pipes with a wired-up veil. Her hair was entirely hidden; her hairline, eyebrows, and temples were plucked to produce a broad forehead. Margery identified with fabrics: she wore a cranberry silk gown with a flat white collar and trailing funnel-shaped sleeves, cinched above the waist with a soft milk-chocolate belt.
The roofer lounged against the west wall, waiting for Margery, one leg crossed over the other. He wanted to be typical, alienated under the eye of his master. Margery’s longing for existence took the form of obsessive sexuality. The roofer was fifteen years old, so young his orgasms didn’t matter. She re-aimed her entire self at a mercer she used to know. His shoulders were wide, his face heavy with problems, and when he came he hooted softly like an owl.
Margery lost the game of temptation as soon as she began
to view her desire from every angle. If Jesus had not abandoned her, would she be so vehemently attracted? The silk moving around her body created an environment to walk through. The mercer grinned foolishly, looking right and left of a well-to-do woman of thirty-three with ruddy skin, a broad face, light-blue pop eyes, a turned-up nose, and small teeth. She was short but her eyes sought relation. He ran a finger down the crest of her nose and turned away.
As though completing one gesture, Margery hurried to bed, plowed through the night, and jumped up next morning. When she found the roofer her face sank in lust, her mouth an O. She asked him directly to have sex. “I’d rather be chopped up for stew-meat in a pot,” he drawled with lazy malice. A wave of nausea warped the air around her. With a nod Margery understood that failure was intrinsic, success merely an exception.
3
L.’s summer house on Cape Cod: we choose a little square room—the only bedroom that has heat. Midmorning, early spring. The heater produces a tropical climate. L. kneels on the bed and I stand behind him. Veins run beneath the skin of his white-gold limbs like the web in insect wings. I draw his bony jaw over his shoulder and we kiss, then I withdraw except where we are joined. His own humility excites him. The motion of his ass makes me simple. Its hunger seems ageless. I raise my fingers in amazement. I’m entirely awake, all systems go. My skin intensifies as though the front of my body whirls. Incredibly, he whispers “Hold me,” and I caress his chest and belly as he comes.
Later he drives me to Logan Airport. Wipers have left semicircles of dirt on the windshield of his Rabbit. We are speeding—late for my plane—but our sex has made us horny and I want to squeeze orgasms out of him. We pull off the highway and park, wriggle through a wire fence, and trek into a young forest of birch and pine. The woods look oddly beat up, broken branches strew the ground. We stop in a clearing that seems more pressured.
“Well . . .” He cocks his head in mild amusement. His features are a landscape that invites keenness of sight in that each element—cloud, lake, tree—tips towards me. He’s the perfection of my type: a waif who dominates. We hear the harsh cheet-cheet of a crossbill. It’s an honor to unbutton his pants. A page of porn lies at our feet—a faded torso, her thighs akimbo in the dirt. In all the miles of highway and forest we chose a chosen spot. I’m so drunk with love that coincidence rings with purpose. When L. blows me, wind in the treetops links it to fate. Then we kiss while he jacks us off; I expose my tongue and cock to the cool air.
We are extremely late but rigid beneath thin red skin. My orgasm is a small surprise, like stepping on a stick till it cracks. I come as easily as I blush. Inconsequential drops fall on the soft earth. L. bends over, pumping the log between his legs, eyebrows raised and jaw thrust forward as though he’s riding a bike. I want his orgasm: he comes long ropy strings. I want to throw my head into the branches in repulsion and gratitude. I want to surround him but hold back, subsiding, feeling a little seedy.
•
I reach across distance—when I see L.’s handwriting my senses jump. His script resembles mine (that’s a good sign); it has more velocity, more space between words.
Dear Bob,
Spending the weekend with G.’s parents during my favorite time of year. House wrens warble like crazy, their songs bubbling out from under the eaves, the air muffled under the shifting beech, elm, and honey locust. Sumptuous dinners, interesting company—I feel more comfortable here than in my parents’ home—this is so much more the way they are supposed to live. A pack of corgies tumbling around the house, beautiful antiques from some great-aunt that are slightly beaten up, parents who are well-read, excellent hosts. And sensing also how this very graciousness muffles some adventurousness (or perhaps curiosity to absorb contradictions and accept the incompleteness of our century), realizing how I feel slightly more capable of doing so. Blessing or booby prize? Thinking about sucking your nipples and developing new fetishes.
XOXOXOXO The Nurse of Love
•
His letter doesn’t console me for his absence because it conveys little interest in seeing me, just in being seen: his melancholy, his beautiful youth. I shrug, weakened, empty of promise. I’m still in bed; it’s rush hour, eight in the morning. Cars boom as they pass below my window. No one knows what I put into my waiting.
I read his letter again, wondering how to match my charming, horny correspondent, whose wit enters from the side, with the man whose attributes I analyze in a plenitude that goes against understanding, naming them as reverently as a god’s—silky, strong, frail. What characterizes a god? His larger existence, an imperative that meaning stay with him, the mobility to retreat from the deep surrender he inspires. He governs my fantasies—his golden face convulses as it never does. I rustle and groan, a shallow orgasm with his approval in the form of his arousal. As I age I clench over my spasms instead of arching backwards from them. His naked skin expresses mortality and compassion. My last word when I die will be his name—to say it in the grandest setting.
•
I need L. to be only mine; for that to happen I must exhibit him and my desire. I call Tom, I call Kathy, I call my old friend Ed. In the theaters of their consciousness I stage my drama. That my love for L. is possible, actual. That my joy exists. Interaction shifts the ground of the finite. They create belief by responding to my story when I meet them in cafés, on street corners, on the phone; Margery turns the cosmos into the witness of her love.
Ed is breathless; he will die before long and I feel ruthless using up his strength, but he listens to my boastful grievances and amazement. (I kept Margery in mind for twenty-five years but couldn’t enter her love until I also loved a young man who was above me.) L. won’t say I miss you. He did say I love you. He gives me clothes and presents whose accuracy is a higher form of speech. His family acts without prudery, naked all day above the servants, grooming each other at the lake. I wake at night expecting L. to be in my bed in San Francisco. His rich person’s problems create a mood of unreality even in himself. I know him, his dilemmas—does that oppress him?
Ed is still listening. He says, “L.’s features are so polished, they’re almost overdone.” I eagerly agree. L. is wide open, tender, remote, precise, serious, unsure . . . First I fought for meaning, now I have too much of it. I disappear from a position too full or empty to reveal the extent of my need. I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.
4
Margery prayed on the stone floor of a side-chapel at St. Margaret’s the Friday before Christmas, 1406; little statues made of rye dough adorned the altar. She prayed on one knee, arms outstretched like a crucifix. Jesus delayed and Margery was weary, overcome by desire. She thought her suffering was the result of bad luck which good luck could reverse. Daydreams of acknowledgment took shape in the beyond. A priest, young and handsome, held the sacrament over his head. A keening in his chest never stopped. The sacrament shok & flekeryd to & fro, as Margery wrote—a white dove calling turrr turrr and batting its wings as blue sky burst through the roof.
Jesus pictured Margery carrying fruit in her apron in a small orchard her family owned behind her house: she’s squinting in the sun and he can smell her sweat. They roll on top of hard pears. She laughs at moments that surprise him—her irony frames these wholesome images.
When he returned to Margery it was nothing like that. He materialized, barefoot on the wood, goosebumps on his thighs and arms. She had not seen him for ten years. His hair was browner than she remembered. He wore a sweet gaunt smile that pulled downwards, and his skin moved her with the fact of his birth. Margery’s round face surged forwards; her eyes sought to rush him over the bridge they created. Her love of his fresh body was accompanied by—even based on—a horror of decay. He stepped backwards into the table in Margery’s bedroom. Jesus had L.’s Scottish face—high narrow brow with smooth features crowded beneath, eyebrows defined more by delicate bones than hair.
&nbs
p; The table dented the flesh of his ass and, as he turned, the long nape of his neck discharged a jolt of beauty in Margery. She fell to her knees. He felt he had done enough, that she had altered the situation—perhaps unfairly—by needing to give all her love away.
Jesus’s strong sense of occasion took over. He knelt and kissed her, pleasure needling his inner walls. He whispered her name. Once sex was entered, his eyes shut and his mouth gaped like a baby bird’s. Margery struggled between closing her eyes and gazing through the bony architecture of his face to its virginal dazzle.
When Jesus slid his finger into Margery, he knew she’d had lots of penetration. They had the same smell—a good sign. It’s obvious when men become aroused; women must be expressive: she threw her head from side to side.
They pushed fingers inside each other and strummed as though trying notes till they located the nerve of an exact turmoil: the frazzled eyes and slack jaws. They gazed at the dire implosions that half belong to the one who causes them. Jesus’s asshole seemed like a flaw that drew her attention more than the beauty it marred, till finally the flaw became an expression of herself by dint of her struggle. She fingerfucked him urgently. “Slow down.” His mild voice came from his other end. She rotated the finger. Ummmm—a sound to revive later in the distance.
Jesus was the world and Margery rode panting on top. He spread her lips far apart until her clit rubbed against him. A thrill lit its tip and burned into her belly. The orgasm pushed her features as though she were traveling into a strong wind. The past slid away from the wealth of the present, sheen and felicity that can’t be saved. The muscles in his long passive legs reacted to pleasure with little twitches. “I spasmed eleven times,” he mused. He’d been counting absentmindedly. He withdrew slowly, a shiny slug. He was beginning to depend on Margery; she had more faith in him than he had in himself.