by Robert Gluck
L. quotes my writing, yet now my lack of time to write seems like a character flaw, earning a living like the result of bad planning. My job puts me at the center of so much trouble that I never get out of the center. L. protests, “You only talk about yourself.” He must have been patient for a long time.
He’s warm in letters and on the phone. Leaving a room, he turns off the light as though I don’t exist. I witness this event more than once but doubt its reality: I sit in the dark, my misery throwing itself against the shadows. In darkness I start over, trying to figure it out. By what alchemy does L. complete me when he’s so sketchy himself?
How can the two halves of this novel ever be closed or complete? Or the book is a triptych: I follow L. on the left, Margery follows Jesus on the right, and in the center my fear hollows out “an empty space that I can’t fill.” (That’s how Ed describes his death.)
14
Margery needed to talk to everyone now that she was estranged from her life in Lynn.
In late August she traveled with John to take a vow of chastity before Philip, Bishop of Lincoln. The road was flat and straight as the roads of the Fens tend to be; it ran beside a sluggish green canal. Canals and shallow ponds continued the flat plane in stronger greens. The summer’s broad emptiness dwarfed the invented world. Margery felt excited, empty handed as a windmill. She wanted Jesus and longed to be rid of sensation.
An old woman nodded in the sun by a tiny mud cottage. At her feet a dog—a bitch for chasing spirits. A rowboat, dainty as a toy, moored to the bank. Margery longed for resolution. The plop of a rising fish, the creck creck of a moorhen.
They waited most of September at the Bishop’s gate. Then Philip said, “I’ve long wanted to speak with you.” He seemed happy to see Margery, happier to see John. Philip held a yellow apple. Margery asked if, after he had eaten, they could speak for a few hours about Jesus.
Philip lifted his hands and face in wild speculation. “You can talk for two hours about Jesus? I won’t be able to eat a thing till I hear what you say!” He concluded the sentence but sustained his gesture like a mannequin, both hands raised towards Margery. Philip had a square Irish face, a beaky nose, and he spoke with such exaggerated courtesy Margery wondered if he was ridiculing her, or the idea of manners.
A sliver of peel wedged itself between Philip’s molar and gum. He couldn’t get it out with his finger; the tip of his dagger released the coppery taste of blood. John wore a short velvet robe with open sleeves; he sat with his ankles crossed delicately and his enormous chest curved over his lap. Margery told Philip the secrets of the living and dead. “You should write a book,” he enthused. He listened with a spellbound smile though Margery could see it was John who enchanted him—John’s powerful sweetness and gravity.
John knelt, gazing without reserve into Philip’s eyes, and put his hands between Philip’s in a vow of chastity. John said, “May her body be as open to Jesus as it was to me.”
•
Another day Margery went to dinner at the Bishop’s palace. Her fingertips skimmed the handrail; her jaw dropped in wonder as she floated gently upwards without touching the treads. Philip wore a musty ocelot vest; he distributed thirteen pence and thirteen loaves to thirteen poor men on their grateful knees in a semicircle. Jesus handed Margery some bunched-up paper. She opened it and found only trash inside. He gloated like a tomboy who’d won a bet. Horror of the unexpected amplified her tears. Margery wept so hard that the Bishop’s household’s foreheads wrinkled in disbelief.
She sat with clerks, priests, and squires, and ate chicken broth thickened with pounded almonds and flavored with cloves, coriander, and thyme; black pudding and sausage; lampreys and herring; meat potages; and tiny local shrimp whose flavor was surprisingly full bodied. From the high table, the Bishop sent her wine and roasted mutton sauced with raisins and nuts and served with quince preserves.
Philip was so sociable that when his face relaxed it grinned. His judgment was based on how much fun he was having because society was falling apart, but his clerks grilled Margery. They were amazed she answered so well. She loved to be examined and ratified.
After dinner Margery said, “I am commanded to tell you to clothe me all in white.”
Philip hesitated. “First prove yourself and become recognized.”
To prove herself, she told him a story: “A bishop sees a floating bladder; he follows it over hedgerows and fences, through sties and meadows, till he comes to a witch. The bladder stops and sinks to the ground. The bishop says, ‘Is this your bladder?’ The witch replies, ‘Yes.’ The bishop says, ‘How do you make it float?’ The witch says, ‘It’s easy.’ ‘Could I do it?’ ‘Certainly, go ahead.’ He tries but nothing happens.”
Philip asked, “Why not?”
“That’s what the bishop in the story asks. ‘Because you have no faith.’”
Philip stared a moment, then laughed and danced a little jig. He decided to send Margery to Lambeth Palace, to Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury—“And pray him to give me leave to grant your request.”
15
Margery and John entered the hall at Lambeth Palace in the afternoon. The walls were painted in blue and gold diamonds and a sideboard stood at the back. Clerks and yeomen swore oaths that tortured Jesus’s golden flesh. Margery took sins against language personally.
“Do you know how God was made?” A squire pumped his finger into his fist. “Fucking and shitting!”
Margery said, “You will go straight to hell!” She harangued the crowd with images of ruin and begged Jesus for mercy on their behalf. They gaped at her as though towers were already toppling. A Spanish woman lurched forward; she had black eyebrows and wore heavy silver jewelry. The woman felt sick; a skull jeered its way through her flesh. “I wish you were in Smithfield—and I would bring a bundle of sticks to burn you with!”
Margery stood trembling. Whenever the Spanish woman had a problem she looked for a devil to blame. She singled Margery out and led the mob. (Later she took a turn for the worse and leprosy broke out all over her body. She wanted to hold up a lantern in the darkness to isolate Margery’s face.)
Just then the Archbishop sent for Margery. The Spanish woman stretched her arms towards heaven and fell on her knees. The police state was just beginning and she assumed Margery was meeting her doom.
Arundel was a prelate of royal blood. Twelve years earlier, in 1401, he’d rushed an act through Parliament that authorized the burning of heretics. Nine days before the act became law, he burnt a priest from St. Margaret’s, Margery’s church, for saying good men are holier than angels. Later, in 1410, he burnt Bradly the Tailor, a Lollard who said a spider and a toad are worth more than the consecrated host since they are alive.
Arundel invited Margery to sit in his garden. He had chalky skin and a red nose, the patrician bearing and tight gray ringlets of a schoolmarm.
A bee backed out of a lily trumpet. A turtle walked resolutely across the path, shifting attitudes of attention. Margery started small. She asked Arundel for permission to receive communion every Sunday—unusual at that time but not exceptional. He consented with a nod. His gray eyes drifted, diluted in thick lenses. Thus established, Margery asked him for authority to wear white clothes—to confirm her affair with Jesus. Her voice was a clear bell that broke at the highs with a scratch of emphasis. He approved. Margery exulted; she warned him to restrain his household, especially from swearing oaths on the body of Jesus. Margery talked so fast the Archbishop could hear her gasp between sentences. “You will answer for it, unless you correct them or put them out of your service.”
Arundel looked up when he cleaned his lenses. He responded mildly and their conversation continued through the autumn dusk. When his retainers annoyed him with questions asked in weak voices, annihilation woke in his huge distorted eyes and Margery saw the Arundel who burnt heretics. He barked a series of commands; the last—“Put your heads down!”—canceled all the others. He told Margery, “Nothing like a lit
tle Law to cow the ruffians, my dear!”
The retainers crept away and laid their heads on their folded arms; soon their bodies softened with boredom and they fell asleep on the lawn and the turf seats, alone or draped over each other like hamsters. Arundel sat on his stone throne, his tall hat naked on a cloth next to him, while Margery paced back and forth. Her hands went first, outlining in the dark her entire life up to that moment. They talked till stars appeared above the elms.
16
Margery lost her friends. A community is founded on finitude; there can be no community of immortal beings. Here’s a typical story: Jesus sends her to Catherine Hungerford, a respectable lady whose husband died at sea two years before, in 1411. In welcome, Catherine touches her heart with both hands, fingers spread like fans. She feels her mother’s voice and gestures in herself as gracefulness.
Eternity is organized as a warm October evening, so it’s odd and perhaps beautiful that the lady has a thick fire burning. She has a large supply of wood at hand for processing dyes. Margery takes in the cut of Catherine’s sleeve, the length of the hem. Margery makes impossible wishes—for someone’s age, money, talent, clothes, eyes—then waits a pressured moment to give the wish time. Finally she states, “Madame, your husband is in purgatory. He will be saved but he will take a long while to get to heaven.”
Catherine’s husband was a good man and she misses him; she watches her desires yellow into problems and fall from the branch. Why has Margery denied her own husband to pursue the indefinite Jesus with an endless monologue?
Catherine is angry but also worried about Margery. She sends her daughter Jane to Margery’s anchorite confessor, asking him to abandon Margery. Jane wears a net of gold mesh through which strands of gold hair gleam. Her cunt lips hang and her swelling hips feel as though they belong to someone else—enormous, round, good to put her hands on. She has her grandmother’s figure. The anchorite declines.
Margery confronts Catherine. “Your husband has thirty years in purgatory unless he has better friends on earth. You must pay three or four pounds for him in masses and charity.”
Four pounds is a lot of money and thirty years not such a long time. Catherine tells Margery not to visit her again. In Catherine’s contempt Margery regains contact with Jesus, but she frets about the heinous Spanish woman at Lambeth Palace. Jesus wants to marry her, Philip and Arundel think she’s exemplary. Why does the charge of mismanagement slide under her happiness and subvert it?
Jesus perched naked on a banquette, eating a pear tart, rejoicing in bland fragrant sweetness. He offered a slice to Margery, who never refused pastry. He tucked his cock between his legs and wore a flushed, mocking face. He crossed his legs tighter, displaying only sparse brown hair. The ground slid away; Margery’s dirty laugh hovered over an empty space because the joke was against her.
Jesus got dressed as a knight. His purple doublet was padded over the chest; he fastened the four-petaled buttons and set a heavy gold belt around his hips. The tension between masculine-feminine and inside-outside pervades all levels of my community. Margery’s nose lifted to catch his scent as he passed. “Jesus, did you miss me?” He felt helpless, weak. To regain control he rolled his eyes as though he’d been dragged through the subject a thousand times and sheltered her in his arms in paternal exasperation.
“Ask what you wish. I shall say to you, my own beloved spouse, ‘Welcome to me, here to dwell with me and never to depart from me, but ever to dwell with me in joy and bliss.’”
•
If I say I love you too often, it’s partly amazement at the strength of my desire.
Jesus does not miss Margery though he seems to need her. Before storms she feels intolerable expectation.
Confronted by my demands, L. extinguishes all response. His feelings flatten into a wall of mute, introspective despair.
I learn it’s exquisite to be fucked by a big cock because it stays pliable till the moment of orgasm. Because of the pleasure I’m beautiful, poised on my fingertips and the balls of my feet like a runner at the starting line.
Jesus kisses her too quickly, jamming his tongue down her throat; he says, “I’m horny.”
I perform my story by lip-synching Margery’s loud longing but I wonder if that visible self-erasure is just a failure to face L. I want to be a woman and a man penetrating him, his inner walls rolling around me like satin drenched in hot oil, and I want to be the woman and man he continually fucks. I want to be where total freedom is. I push myself under the surface of Margery’s story, holding my breath for a happy ending to my own.
In this novel every sentence is a discrete image of promise. A car door slams; I think it must be L.
Margery is traveling.
•
“Margery, I’d like to send you to Jerusalem and to Rome.”
“Jesus, where will I get the money?”
He stammered, “I’ll be going too . . . We’ll meet in Jerusalem. I’d like to dress you for the trip.” He dropped a stack of coins on the table, enough for a white gown of worsted wool like people wear in heaven, and a veil and wimple. He slid a gold band on her finger and retreated to a three-legged stool to observe the effects of his generosity.
Waving her hand above her head like a flag, Margery laughed with victory. At that time, a visit to Jerusalem guaranteed direct admission to heaven, so what could tear Margery and Jesus apart? She was intensely relieved and ready for all kinds of action. This trip would be their honeymoon. She was traveling towards the youth of her own body, towards freedom and fame. Her joy welled up, so potent she had to lie down and attend it, dizzy and drunk. Jesus didn’t like his life; she would know what to do with his beauty and wealth and in the process make both of them happy.
•
Margery settled her debts and also John’s, as she had agreed to do. She said good-bye to John, who wept bitterly, and to her anchorite confessor, who raised a crooked finger and predicted she would have trouble with her maid but a broken-backed man would escort her wherever she wanted to go—and it did happen that way.
It was early January, 1414. Margery joined a regular party of pilgrims because it was not safe to travel alone. They went to Norwich and then on to Yarmouth. The clouds were only slightly lighter and larger than the boulders they resembled and they rumbled across the sky. The pilgrims booked passage across the North Sea. Africans made up a quarter of the crew. Vs of pelicans slid through the air. The group planned to go overland to Venice, from there sail to Jerusalem and back again, and then head south to Rome. Tours to the Holy Land were well organized. The ship docked next day in a town called Zierikzee, in Zealand.
PART TWO
The Jerusalem Journey
Thou hast gouyn me drynkyn ful many tymes wyth teerys of thyn eye.
17
Margery and the other pilgrims sat down to dinner in a tavern so bright and noisy it revolved on itself like a gyroscope. Blasts of icy air interrupted the stifling heat. The pilgrims were in high spirits, looking forward to the trip. An old woman took their order; she acted slow because she had huge deaf ears. The pilgrims laughed while a little boy stared at them.
Margery’s maid was shy and ambitious; she hung back, laughing with the rest. The maid was so thin her hip bones stuck out like handle bars: she felt ideal and aerated. She needed privacy and scrutinized people’s expressions as they approached.
A priest made a quick blessing over beans and vegetable soup served by the grandmother. She had been a woman of great sophistication. When she fucked a man, she would elevate one of her legs vertically. A lamp full of oil, wick burning, was set on her foot, and while he rammed her she kept the flame steady.
They all drew their knives and began eating. Margery started to whimper; her ovaries were sponges that soaked up energy from people and situations. The pilgrims were concerned. A widow asked, “Don’t you like our company?” She remembered the arrogant young woman Margery had been.
Margery wore the open eyes of blunt wonder: Jesus was
exploding her social circle. “I welcome the twelve apostles, the holy virgins, martyrs—Jesus sleeps in my bed, he calls me his dear darling!”
The pilgrims were stunned. The priest said, “Be quiet, Margery. Jesus died long ago.” Wine had given him the sensation of emptiness.
Margery couldn’t stop talking: she sought recognition in the theater of her voice. “I cry you mercy, Ihesu, for al the pepil in this world, that you make ther sinnys to me.” Her love for Jesus isolated her so she pursued any reaction to it—hostility or praise. She had a sore throat and enjoyed the rawness as if heat were biting her. “Jesus sits on a red cushion. I could never requite his love though I were slain a thousand—”
The priest cried, “I hope the devil’s death overtakes you soon and quickly!”
“I have as great a reason to speak of Jesus here as in England.” She felt valid when she said his name.
The pilgrims threw up their hands. Her white clothes were a continual affront. If she was not Jesus’s bride, her hypocrisy dismantled the entire world; if she was supernatural, she attracted the extreme: pestilence and hunger, steeples toppling, trees ripped out of the earth. “You cannot go any farther with us and we intend to keep your maid.” The young woman remained silent.
Next morning one of the pilgrims advised Margery to find the others and behave meekly. They took her with them, following the Rhine valley across Europe, but they cut her white gown so short it hung only a little below her knees, made her wear a white canvas apron like a fool, and sat her at the bottom of the table, below everyone.
•
In Constance, the pilgrims washed their hands of her. They returned her money, about twenty pounds—sixteen pounds were wrongfully withheld—and they kept her maid, who had promised never to abandon her.
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