by Robert Gluck
Into our most intense union the opposite feeling enters—disorder, the strangeness of what’s happening to me. Tears don’t stop but convulsions do. The more I need you, the deeper the estrangement, the stronger my desire—a defect in the movement of love.
I’m so tired of being alone. I swim through my tears to the back of my head to observe this, my crying regular as a swimmer’s breath. That retreat allows ghosts to enter: you stumble towards me as a rickety man, one leg keeps caving in; you say with complete understanding, “If it weren’t for my body I could go on forever.” We fall into each other’s arms and as we grieve I rejoice, a welling feeling of life which now even pain stimulates. I become aroused as a flat sweet odor makes my gorge rise. I promise that I will save you—your eyes darken and your face rolls away. The stench of decay spreads as I make the pledge. Your tongue is stiff as the metal clapper of a bell, purple-brown like burnt iron. Everything wasted. I witness my anguish with excitement—who would reject more life?
In my bleak monotonous weeping, I wonder at the very terms of suffering’s argument: that you are, my love is, you die, flesh is—a baffling confirmation—it’s not pain or joy until wept out as fiery tears. That outburst causes a tooth of pleasure to bite hard. Currents travel through me to the distance. When I finish crying I’m empty, exalted.
Withdraw my tears and I do not enjoy food, drink, or talk; there is no flavor until I weep again.
10
A moonless night, the snow frozen over so our footsteps crunch. A fifth of B&B stands in my pocket. The waterfall doesn’t make a sound—a huge sheet of mid-flight ice. L.’s flashlight beam finds an oval that melted or never froze and through that hole we see a black torrent endlessly spill. L.’s voice says, “It’s frightening.” Why is that, I wonder?
We share the flask, a mouthful of potent fumy syrup. I lean out of the light against a trunk, sluggish with the desire to be kissed. Cold lips, tongue fiery with brandy. His fragile heat is a dull fear embedded in deep winter. “Too bad life isn’t a cafeteria: pay first, eat without dreading the bill.”
“No,” he answers, “the cost is so appalling you couldn’t stand the food.” I’m impressed by his bitterness, a moment of harmony between us. The beam picks out the hole which conveys a beckoning vitality—the rictus of a corpse announcing that the present is dead.
•
When Margery prayed for confirmation of her union with Jesus, she heard a loud rumbling. A stone and a chunk of wood dislodged from under a rafter of St. Margaret’s vault. They hovered, each rotating on its own. The stone fell on Margery’s head with a crack and the wood struck her back with a thud. His cruelty offered a breach through which to hurl herself into the fullness of life. She staggered forwards and sprawled on the floor, screaming, “Mercy, Jesus!”
Master Allyn, a doctor of divinity at Cambridge and an indexer of miracles and prophecies, arrived next day and weighed the stone: 3 lbs., June 12, 1413. (During puberty Master Allyn resented nature when it fiddled with his body: the real past under the official one.) He snatched the beam end out of the fire: 6 lbs. He pursed his lips as he measured Margery’s head, “to do a service for eternity.” She became aware of her breasts hanging foolishly.
Margery invited Master Allyn to dinner—bream from the Fens. He took a bite and looked down at a pamphlet but never finished reading a sentence because his eyes returned too quickly to the food. He was unique, a perfect example of a type. Margery laughed: there’s something juvenile about striving so explicitly to be an intellectual. Master Allyn was stiff as a board; his ponderous explanations affected everyone. Later John did an impression. “Master Allyn, Master Allyn, first you squeeeeze your asshole,” and he jerked upright.
John was happy; he couldn’t see what was in store. He wore his hair short for his class as though rejecting ambition and his smile was intense, a child’s drawing, all teeth. He put his huge arms around his wife while she averted her face like a face card and folded her hands, touching only herself. She couldn’t marry Jesus till she freed herself from John and obtained a license to dress in white like a saint.
Margery needed to be heard to shore up her own belief in herself. She and John went to Canterbury looking for people in authority to help her advance as a saint and avoid being burnt as a Lollard. The Lollards were a sect that attacked the corrupt clergy. They rejected miracles and stressed missionary work, making converts as they preached from village to village. Margery brought to the countryside only the drama of her romance with Jesus. The Lollards were a sign of the times; next year, in 1414, they would attempt a revolution.
Margery lived during the Hundred Years War, the collapse of feudal systems, and the plague. Towns had walls; at night the gates shut. At the beginning of modernity the world and otherworld lay in shambles. Margery was an individual in a recognizable nightmare: the twentieth century will also be called a hundred years war. A simpler individual, she went by her first name except once before a high court. The same individual who now disintegrates. Inner life is a kind of greed, desire a form of personal profit. She pushes out of the flat pictorial plane into personality and suspense, illusion of escape, while I go back to the ruins of overall pattern and to the somber murmur of the already known.
•
Margery impressed Jesus who in turn motivated her. She challenged a monk in high office in Canterbury. “Sir, I accuse you of lechery, despair, and keeping worldly goods.” She was assertive, credible. She stood too close, depriving him of the space he needed to marshal arguments.
(Three decades earlier, some men the monk met in a latrine invited him to a party. One of them had eaten a very hot meal with a lot of pepper. He asked, “Is that okay?” The monk didn’t understand until he kissed the man, licked him, fucked him, found that every orifice was peppery, a prickly sensation, wildly stimulating. The man could twist into any position yet keep the monk’s cock in his ass, heretic in a fire. The monk didn’t know if his desire to be revealed in excitement could be touched let alone satisfied. His knees clamped together, then flew apart; his body arched backwards from his navel in a taut bow of flesh. The others stared in admiration. The odor of penetration, the serious air.)
The monk asked, “Say, with wives or single women?” He would not look at her directly.
“Neither, Sir.”
The monk was fearful and assertive by turns. He followed Margery out. “We’ll burn you, false Lollard. Here’s a cartful of thorns ready for you, and a barrel to burn you with!” They had already burnt two heretics under barrels—their muffled screams remained in the square. Other people took up the cry, running to the scene, arms raised, and two boys started pelting Margery with mud.
Margery couldn’t find John—he hated conflict. She fell to her knees and cried till her ribs hurt. “I cry your mercy, Jesus, for all my enemies, for all that are sick, for all lepers—” Sweat streaked her blue-as-lead face so the crowd recoiled in horror of disease. She prayed to keep them from everlasting damnation so they spat to scare the devil. The tide of belief was still high and few could wonder if Margery was fake. In her tears and threats the crowd caught a whiff of disaster that transcended everything.
A stocky black-whiskered man felt contempt for anything unusual. He pushed his sour face into Margery’s. “We’ll drown you in tears,” his lifeless voice more frightening than screams. Two handsome men offered to escort her to her inn but Margery couldn’t remember where it was, only that a German ran it. She wept so fiercely it was amazing that eyes survived or heart endured (heretic in flames).
11
The weather turned mushy, rosebuds rotted on the trellises. On June 23, Margery and John set off on a pilgrimage to Bridlington. They traveled through the Fens and then on a road through barley and rye fields cultivated for centuries. The grain was just coming into ear and the fields were dotted with vermilion poppies. Margery and John’s brown ponies stepped reluctantly in the mud and sometimes stopped, eyes rolling in distaste.
A farmer planting wint
er forage followed his plow; his pubic hair itched and his muddy hose hung over the side of his hoggers. His wife walked ahead with a long goad; she wore a clouted coat cut short to the knee. A loose flock of blackbirds pecked at the newly sown seeds. She shrugged and remarked to the ox that it looked like rain. The road was lined with boulders that resembled huge slabs of marbled meat.
•
Another mile and the road divided. The landscape is my longing materialized; there is no more world; the sentence that describes landscape, clothes, and food goes nowhere—it’s already aroused, a heaven where L. and I are making love. My lyricism is my tenderness for L.
•
On the corner stood a cottage next to a mountain of garbage; in the garden a girl scooped peat-black soil with a piece of slate. Her mother had been unable to satisfy a craving for oysters, so black oyster shells covered the child’s hands and feet. Flowers and birds shone with individual life and identification with their species, an elaborate and finicky charm. A rufous woodcock flew fast and the undulating hills stretched back into unusual depth.
The pilgrims stopped near a roofless hut circled by the stone wall of a garden run wild. Wrens warbled and a small flock of goldfinches pecked along the hedgerows and cried deedelit from a patch of thistles. John stooped on a slimy footstone to drink from a well covered by ferns. He had little control over his life but in bed his confidence was magisterial. When he was sixteen his body had made itself known in a rush of exhilaration. He took long walks, had continuous sex, masturbated; he peaked for days and barely slept.
Margery, the more powerful citizen, became abandoned and frenzied in sex. She carried a bottle of ale and John had a loaf tucked against his chest. John removed his riding huke and slung it over a branch. The somber buzzing insects made them aware of the silence.
When they had finished eating, John laid his head on Margery’s chest, his throat extended, face tilted back. He was surprised by her heartbeat. His stomach felt tight; small signals beeped in his cock and thighs and merged with the lavish ache of needing to shit. He was clinging to the moment. Soft heat raked the treetops, the sharp tang of resin and a woodwarbler’s shivering call. “If a man with a sword chopped off my head unless we made love . . .”
Margery protested, “We’ve been chaste eight weeks.”
“. . . . . .”
“I would rather se thow be slayn,” as Margery wrote.
Shock raised John’s eyebrows. He considered the endless renewable pleasure in her nipples; their aureoles were wide, a wealth of dark-pink tissue. He had a friendly attitude towards humanity.
“When we touch, I get so scared I’m paralyzed. You’re a dragon, a fire breather.”
“Admit it,” she laughed, “I shed more water than fire.”
“It’s the beer.”
Margery snorted, “Through my eyes.”
She looked at John; he was recognizable. Margery found she was a tourist at heart; without a backward glance she abandoned a sex life most people would be grateful for. She was tired of his hairy butt, his big feet, and the way he laughed with his mouth wide open. He was not satisfying to quarrel with since he didn’t mind being wrong.
As though defending himself, John cried, “How can you be a teacher when you never listen?”—a strange grievance since he didn’t speak for hours on end. “Grant my desires and I’ll grant yours. First, sleep with me in one bed. Second, pay my debts. Third, eat and drink with me on Friday.” He held a petty municipal office; their money came from her side of the family.
“No, I’ll never break my fast.” But John lost the contest by offering to negotiate. He wore the pleading expression and searching eyes of a beggar. Margery was moved and slightly repelled. His humility conveyed the depth of a love she was rejecting.
Jesus was a breath of crushed strawberries: “That’s why I ordered you to fast—to trade it for your chastity.”
So Margery made a counteroffer. “If you take a vow of chastity at a bishop’s hand, I will pay your debts and eat with you on Friday.”
John’s acceptance contained the end of his marriage, poverty, senility, and death.
12
Jesus was already more beautiful than a man could be, but Margery wanted to adorn him with her own grief in order to possess by giving. So it was a joy to be punished for speaking of Jesus; she wanted to be murdered for his sake. She imagined the easiest death so she wouldn’t back down at the last moment: her head and feet were tied to a stake and her neck was severed with an axe so sharp she felt only the gust of an opening door. The blade flashed: a moment of elated appetite.
Jesus said “thank you” rather mildly. L.’s half-smile guarded Jesus’s lack of definition; he would not be named by Margery’s desire. He avoided her eye and, entering St. Margaret’s, he slammed the wicket door in her face. It banged against her forehead and sent her staggering backwards down two stone steps into the airy summer morning. She was confused by her own unreality and broke into parts that looked around slackjawed as though they were in a strange place instead of a strange situation. She heard the crusty whistle of a hawk and slowly reunited in the blinking sunlight.
She found Jesus sitting in a dark side-chapel unwrapping a walnut cake. He offered some fondly as though he hadn’t seen her in days. Margery loved pastry, loved to eat.
He said, “I have a late birthday gift for you.” He stood and let his tunic drop to his feet. They both took in his clavicle’s architecture, his solid belly with its tiny navel, the veins in his arms and legs. Margery wore a goofy grin. She liked skinny men and wanted to climb his body like a ladder. Just a head, a cock, and a backbone to keep them apart.
Jesus shoved two fingers between the lips of the wound in his side. He was not in pain; he aimed his tight excitement at Margery as he exposed himself. She responded with lust so direct it was also wonder. Jesus fished a blue cuff trimmed with vair from deep inside and continued pulling the sleeve and bodice till he yanked the entire garment free of his body and shook it out with a feeling of volume. He helped her on with it, a gown of heavy brocade, close-fitting right up to the chin.
She interpreted his gift as an apology because its blue matched her pale eyes. Between bites of the walnut cake she asked, “Why did you slam the door in my face?” The cake was sweetened with honey and figs, seedy and prickly on her tongue.
“I don’t know,” Jesus replied, as though that were an explanation. He smoothed the back of her gown and dropped to one knee. Margery saw the top, front, and rear of his skinny body, and his awkward position seemed to give her access. She could have raised him like a doll in the palm of her hand with the power of a tenderness that was avid, predatory. She wanted to suck his bones.
“It’s a nice dress,” Jesus stated. He was surprised—who questioned him this way? He basted the hem, pins held between lips, face tipped back from the conflict. If Jesus considered what was fair, where could he stop? He was the world: whatever he did was accurate.
His certainty compelled Margery. “Am I over-reacting?”
Jesus said regretfully, “There’s nothing I can say.” His small features vanished. His gift-giving retreat was an invitation to pursue. That made sense to Margery because his straight back and supple body were beyond her means. She wondered what his words meant detached from the clarinet of his voice.
“Tears are the most secure gift. No one can take them from you.”
13
The thick drunken histamine ache of needing to shit; L. can’t find a toilet in time; his face convulses; it makes me feel awe. Jesus doesn’t have a conscience. Like L., whatever he does is normal.
•
I try to locate drama in L.’s face where drama is purposefully withdrawn. We look at art. We talk about neutral things. We visit old gardens where he identifies trees and flowers. We give each other rich objects produced for Edwardians which amplify my idea of him—extensions of desire and aspiration, like Mme. Arnoux’s furniture and Mme. Bovary’s clothes which Flaubert lovingly descri
bed.
My cousin says L. has an actor’s voice. I think beautiful, modulated, but perhaps he means L. projects intimacy. L. says “Bob” rather than “hello.” After a few moments with him, a friend whispers, “He’s a cloud. If you push, he’ll just disappear.” How does she see that? L. speaks on any subject. I’m proud but critical: the world is his. He might leave his house, city, or country without his wallet or passport, while I check money and I.D. every few minutes. L. is prevented from renting a car because he forgot his license; when the manager sees L.’s family name, he restores L.’s exalted mobility.
I see my own inertia—I haven’t budged for decades. L. snaps his fingers and we are standing on the terrace of a grand hotel, a blue view of mountains and ocean. It’s not even visual—I feel my way across the landscape, the hard heat of youth.
L.’s relatives are the legendary robber barons, but he lives austerely, rich in feeling. He’s hazy about his own money which he also regards as something to nurture. The importance of art, his lack of accomplishment, and the size of the art world overwhelm him. That’s acceptable because he’s so young. I can help with these problems.
Six A.M. We slide out of mist and cross a mirror lake; we whisper. L. is showing me a pair of loons he’s watched for years. They are shy, eggs unguarded on the bare ground, tender hooting of ghosts, straw beaks.
Greed for more life spoils the life in front of me. I want promotion to the more real universe of freedom and protection from the bill. I can’t strive anymore: we choose between the Adirondacks or the Cape, which would be convenient. My emotions lack precision—I “wake up” to the fear of death, the drive to be heard.