by Robert Gluck
“Be thankful, St. Bridget never saw me fluttering like a dove.”
“What does it mean?” Jealousy kept her alert.
“Tell whoever you wish: I turn your heart upside down.” Margery was thrilled; she rippled, sucking him back in, released from the prison of striving simply by getting what she wanted. She tightened her grip and foamy syrup seeped out. He added, “You’re pregnant.”
She had already guessed—her breasts were swollen and she was often tired. “Who will look after this child?”
“I’ll arrange it.” She awakened his self-esteem. He took in her naked body and billowing red hair. Her nipples were raw, exposed, sensitive as foreskin. He said, “We look like statues.”
Margery considered his broad hips and jumble of limbs. She said, “One goddess and one cow dropped from heaven.”
Her insult was an experiment; he laughed and drew her down as though they were a couple.
•
Snow fell during the night. Jesus woke with a hard-on so powerful it clunked when Margery rapped it. He said, “Here’s a penny from my heart to put in your purse.” In the midst of scalding pleasure her eyes opened on a patch of his skin bunched between her thumb and finger, and she was held by its fine wrinkles. Later they looked out at the white hush; they thought about breakfast. It burned to piss. Her skin wrinkled, her stomach swelled, her navel flattened, silvery stretch marks appeared on her belly.
5
The following August, a few weeks after the baby was born, Jesus asked Margery to go with him to Norwich to meet the Vicar of St. Stephen’s. Travel would come to equal the adventure of loving him. He strode ahead on long legs as though leading a troupe, making decisions without her, his nose in the air, turning down lanes past carts loaded with grain, dung, or salt from the local salt pans. Cottages stood vacant, emptied by plague. Fields of lavender bloomed with lilting fragrance in the clayey soil.
Jesus had the forward stiff-legged gait of an athletic woman. He wore a short green brocade gown with bagpipe sleeves and a high dagged collar; his beaver hat was lined with vermilion velvet and bore a plume of gold threads. His feet felt cunning in expensive boots; like other rich people, he was pious about such luxuries and thought their excellence was a kind of justice in itself. His tall figure stood out in fantastic elegance against fields and open heaths.
Margery followed on short legs in cheaper shoes, wearing a mantle of black wool. Her breath whistled and a stitch rode high in her side. The lane was deeply rutted and in places centuries of traffic had worn through the strata of freestone so it looked more like a water course bedded with naked rag. Her shoes were ponderous with gray mud. A partridge called in the fields, a high creaking keeve, keev-it, it, it, it. Jesus did not slow down on hills. “Why are you walking so fast?” He looked back, eyebrows raised.
The world was spread out, offered to the view. The sun was at the meridian; to the south the heaths glared through yellow steam. A blond dog too old to chase the grazing hares barked at them with joy, each bark so full it lifted the front of her body off the ground. She was broad abeam and trotted alongside Margery and Jesus on stiff arthritic legs. She caught Margery’s eye, a gleeful camaraderie.
The dog tried to keep up, panting and thrusting her neck forwards as though she were pulling a cart. For her Jesus slowed down on the inclines; he called her Poochkins—exasperating. Margery was thirteen years older than Jesus and she had just given birth. She felt explosions in her chest. A nimbus of gnats and horseflies wailed around her perishable face, the face of Thumbelina drawn with the burnt tip of a match. Her suffering didn’t diminish her desire for Jesus—confusion implied more life.
Near dusk Norwich rose out of bedrock, a hat on a table—its spires, walls, guildhalls, minster clock, and castle—so clean it moved towards them on the plain. Merchants and farmers streamed through the city gate; a peasant drove a pig from market with a goad, the peasant’s alcoholic face so bright with need that Margery responded with unwilling arousal; a blind man begged on the grass; a young woman stared shyly at the retreating back of a lady with coiled yellow hair—she wanted to press that lady’s low-slung breasts together and suck both nipples at once. The lady was escorted by a cavalier on whose wrist perched a kestrel with a blue-gray head and spotted chestnut mantle.
Norwich was in the midst of a summer festival. Doorways were decorated with Saint-John’s-wort, lilies, and lanterns hung to burn all night. Near the bonfires wealthy citizens set meat and drink for their neighbors. The streets were so crowded that any cranny of emptiness was immediately filled by bodies and going forwards a few yards was a victory.
Margery and Jesus breathed air dense with sweat and perfume; they felt touched by the ephemeral: they had remarkably similar takes on goods and people, the jugglers and the bear. When they last saw Poochkins she was at attention, transfixed by a rib roast on a plank, eyes misty and tail rotating behind. Jesus said, “Her hunger seems ageless.” She ignored their calls.
On Thursday a little before noon Margery entered St. Stephen’s. The Vicar wore a mantle of fine black shank. He sat down with her in the church. Coins from his purse dropped onto the back of his chair. As he stood to collect them his gloves fell out of his lap. As he bent to retrieve them his glasses fell off. Margery covered her face—she felt wind on her nipples though she was wearing a wool gown.
She was nervous. “Jesus told me to speak with you.”
“Explain that,” the Vicar said.
So Margery began telling him about the time she first saw Jesus, gaining courage as she felt the potential rise in her clear voice: her vanity, her obstinacy, her envy, her horrible temptations. The Vicar was gaining weight; he was aware of his belly bulging against his chest and his breasts drooping onto the skin beneath. He wondered if Margery was conscious of her body touching itself there or her cunt lips touching each other.
When she spoke of Jesus, the ground emitted organ music that seemed to have a shouting crowd in it; vibrations weakened her arms and legs. She lay still for a long time, then told the Vicar he would die in nine years. “The warning is that your nose will bleed: in three days you will be stark dead.” The Vicar sat with his hands folded, too amazed to move. He felt dead already and abandoned the sense of going forwards, and he wondered how others sustain the momentum to plan their tombs.
Margery recounted conversations with Jesus more exalted than Stimulus Amoris or Incendium Amoris. She had a rare rose and there were not enough ears in the world to hear of the paradise of its bloom.
The Vicar saw himself twisted and crumpled forwards although he sat immobile; he wished for silence. All his appetite and striving would come to nothing. It dawned on him that he didn’t know himself, had never taken the trouble because it meant facing all his sluggish, stubborn unhappiness. That he didn’t like himself, wasn’t likable. She showed him the cries and gestures—inordinate sobbing, Have mercy, Jesus and I die—how people slandered her, claiming a spirit tormented her, or that she was sick.
6
My book depends on the tension between maintaining an impersonation and breaking it—I interject an aside in the deepest possible voice: L. and I were introduced in 1987 by mutual friends when L. considered moving to San Francisco. It was raining. He sat on my Mission chair with his arms crossed, and I wondered actively what it was like to be blond and lanky and withheld. I began an examination of L. which came to equal my own aims and ends. I had been alone for four years—so lonely I was afraid. I was about to turn forty and he was twenty-six.
In clothes he was blank but during our first love-making he clung for dear life. We clung to each other. I laughed with confusion when he confessed he was extremely rich. When I describe L. my language is sleepy—I can’t wake it up.
My love for L. restored a faith that had become as polluted as the air and water. He wrote, “After meeting you in January, I went out again to reclaim my history, my relationships, things that define me. Your attention forced this blossoming. My feeling of belongin
g in New York has revived.”
•
Huge days and nights. Movement is pointless; sight is muddy. I can only believe that the force of my waiting will change him. I hear—even before L.’s greeting—the echo and hiss of a long-distance connection. Then I know the taste of victory and joy rains down like ticker tape on that narrow electrical street.
I make two wishes: to be L.’s lover and to have the freedom to write. I wait a moment for the wishes to come true; at the end of the moment I am older and so separate from others that I feel mutilated. L.’s voice is bright, charming the distance away. “What’s new and different?” His tone assumes it’s obvious to both of us that he can’t be with me.
I complain about my job—demanding, exhausting. He says, “Possession of a condom in a New York jail is a misdemeanor. The commissioner says they can be filled with sand and used as weapons.” L. has joined ACT UP and does AIDS graphics. I encourage, approve—he needs some human scale in his life. I also take part in political demonstrations, but I aim my desire for freedom at myself and L. in the form of total arousal. As though one thought leads to the next he says he’s trying to establish a connection with his father. I wish all his efforts would lead to me. He asks after my dog Lily, gentle and foggy in old age.
In his absence I lose track of who he is, in the psychological sense. I abandon my ordinariness and leave the rickety shelter of my own self which, being vacant, attracts ghosts and obsessions. On Valentine’s Day a card arrives: almost identical black-and-white photos printed vertically on glossy paper. He stands with his back to the camera, wearing only black socks; he holds up a flag of black cloth by its corners so his body glows in front. Long nape, intricate shoulders, narrow back, and simple semicircles of his butt. He stitched hearts into both images with red thread; the hearts outline and frame the blank slate of his ass. from L. (aka Tabula Rasa) XOXOXO—
7
Jesus lowered his eyes and said, “Like a mother I give you my breast to suck.” The strongest wave of life’s attraction to itself carried Margery forwards. She gazed at his chest, smooth and eventless as a teenager’s, and at his tiny nipples, expecting a miracle: she attained the rhapsodic mobility of the wealthy and immortal—the time and allowance to travel. Her ecstasy was so condensed she felt separate from the moment, ready to faint.
As though to amplify the theme of breast feeding, Jesus asked Margery to help nurse him. Margery felt residual twinges of pleasure; she heard the whickering trill of a grebe. She moved through the resistance of time—her mantle billows backwards into the future as her forehead met the past.
It’s painful that I can’t be present in every moment of L.’s life. Margery saw the sky, landscape, architectural background, then foreground, figures, heads, and faces. She moved through divided space to warm linen by the fire with other servants.
Jesus’s mother was slim, with bright gold hair, delicate hands, and her son’s tall forehead. Mary had barely materialized and spoke in rushed whispers. Margery bent towards her. “Executioners were naked . . . A tavern nearby . . . In those days . . . Yellow awning when the heat . . . Little tavern made clams . . . With plenty of . . .” Mary wrinkled her forehead, expecting an answer to a hard question; her face suffused with tenderness as though the answer had been given.
Joseph wore a peaked turban to emphasize the oriental locale. He danced a jig as a little mess of a cat attacked his ankles. Mary’s robe was so thin her swollen belly was visible. “The angel’s shadow startled me. Plaid mantle and a . . . bronze . . .” She was sensitive to color as a defense against sadness; she wished her periods would stop. A desert finch lit at their feet and took its ten or twelve positions in the twinkling of an eye.
Margery led Mary and Joseph towards Bethlehem. They couldn’t reach town in time so they camped in an abandoned stable whose thatched roof was supported on one side by a stone wall and on the other by the rooted trunk of a dead cypress. They were filthy, tired, and hungry. Joseph tethered the ox and donkey and set a taper between the stones that spilled its thick flame upwards. He went to the city to find a midwife.
Margery removed Mary’s shoes and veil. Mary raised her palms in piety and her belly moved. She felt contractions in her back rather than her stomach. Pushing Jesus out was like shitting, but euphoria replaced that feeling the instant he was born.
When Joseph returned with two midwives Margery had already cut the tiny umbilical cord with her dagger. The two women took the liberty of confirming Mary’s virginity. They were somber and amazed, their wimples and veils made of thick black fustian.
“St. Andrew took his clothes off . . . gave them to his executioner . . .” Mary’s blathering was an unbreakable silence. Margery wondered, Is the whole family simple-minded? She snatched up the baby, who seemed to need her, and wrapped him in fayr whyte clothys & kerchys that she had brought along.
There was no pain or blood, little to hinder Mary’s descent from vision to daydream. She seemed to forget about her son on his birthday. The virgin-mother contradiction was only medical; she didn’t feel like a virgin or a mother. For her the body already hung upside down, flayed and exposed. She rejected subject matter per se, even though Jesus had palmed Margery off on her.
Margery found them lodgings in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph squatted naked, combing each other for nits, cracking lice between fingernails. Physical life was new to the gods; deity had no shame. The tips of Mary’s nipples were long and Joseph’s cock was a length of rotten rope below a pad of gray curls. Being human was a costume party—dressing up in flesh and blood. All they brought was hard bread and a pot of stale beer so Margery made a soup called beer-bread.
8
John caressed Margery on April 26, 1413. By then Margery had fourteen children and that’s as much as she tells us about them. It was a fresh watery afternoon. It moved John that her cunt was a soft-lipped entrance at the very bottom of her torso, just where he desired it to be. He lay his head on her chest. When he touched her clit it replied with heartbeats. He gained color and reality. He always forgot and then recognized the smell of apricots in the sweat between her breasts; he tended her nipples—in exciting them he made himself writhe and moan.
Margery knew what kind of sex John wanted—recognition, perfection of the moment—because she sought it herself with Jesus. Sadly she turned from John by closing her eyes, refusing to honor their arousal or make it symbolic. Through her pleasure she screamed “Jesus, help me!” and John’s erection melted. John became fixed, two dimensional. He blew and fluttered, splayed open, tearing into ragged pieces with a tender hapless expression. What a mess, Margery said to herself.
•
At the market in Bethlehem, the vegetable woman threw carrots, celery, parsley, and a head of garlic into the meagerest purchase. Margery raised her hands for more and became that gesture. The odd shape of her packages forced her to hurry.
She added cold to the tub and sprinkled a few drops on her wrist. Jesus splashed and clapped, soaking Margery while she kissed a tiny to-be-wounded foot. “I will not bind you too tight—I know your painful death.” The prick of the milk on Margery’s nipple, her bliss, the sore and swollen feeling as milk engorged each breast, her sadness preceding the arrival of the little teeth. Tears flowed as though she could never die.
Joseph complained, “Be still, daughter.” Margery smoothed their sheets and raised her cracked bowl to strangers.
Even in her own visions the gods ignored Margery while she found lodging for them every night and begged for white clothes for Jesus. The humming in her ear grew deep, an owl’s oo-heu, and brighter, a bunting’s high-pitched jangle. She leaned over the fire, stirring milk and barley as Mary’s brittle fingers drifted through loose galaxies above the bubbling cauldron. Mary’s nails were cracked and dirty. Her blue mantle of Flanders cloth hugged her shoulders, fell in large bowl shapes to her waist, then straight downwards. She lifted the corner elegantly; the weighty abundance of folds expressed feminine eternity while her body inside
remained untouched.
•
Jesus didn’t want his afternoon nap. The sun beat through the shades. A quiver of pleasure and then the current running through his little cock entertained him. The air was so hot his piss didn’t cool off. He filled his diaper and painted a mural with shit to surprise his mother. Mary leaned close to the wall and sniffed—then threw her head back and sputtered with laughter.
An angel hurtled out of the blue. It glided over the ground towards the family, its silver wings slightly canted and sharp as scissors. “Look out,” Joseph squawked, “in two seconds they’ll cut your head off.” Their clothes caught the wind and puffed out as the angel skidded to a halt. Its lips were parted and it breathed through its mouth from exertion.
The angel cried, “Mary and Joseph, go to Egypt.” The ground was bare and the road hard and dry; grass sprouted from clefts in the rocks. Mary stopped to rest, dangling Jesus upside down from her lap. He watched a trader lead a string of ostriches that were bridled and saddled. His heart thudded in his ears. There was a fragrance in the air like sage, hot and dry, that would always turn him upside down again. Margery wrung her hands and wept slowly for hours at a time.
9
Jesus, when I feel the difference between my stale life and the ecstasy of life with you, I revive the desolation I felt before meeting you in order to coax your appearance. I begin crying so intently my voice sounds hoarse and strange. My face is rigid, my arms and legs are weak, and civilization grows tender and sensitive to pain. There is a bleating in my chest, a sixth sense, the continuous awareness of your body. I enlarge myself by equating your tenderness towards me with the pain of your death. My jaws lock open and tears and mucus spool off my face.
I’m on my stomach in a side chapel at St. Margaret’s. My hipbones press against the floor, gas moves through the side of my gut, my hot cheek grinds on the stone. My crying is choked; I curl into a ball and clench, an impossible shape. I put myself in your body. Its frequency is so high it heaves upwards. You need me as you did at first.