by Robert Gluck
At dinner Wenslawe joined in when they spoke Latin. When they spoke English he sat with his big hands folded. He was overly sensitive of his body, its inexpressiveness. He wore a hood with a liripipe and chewed on the left side. They ate duck stuffed with ground duck, parmesan, pine nuts, and raisins. In August, eight months earlier, he’d cracked a molar biting on a stone in a dish of lentils while dining with his mother for the last time before she died. The darkness of centuries surrounded his bright shocks of pain. The devil invented teeth, he thought grimly.
Margery related the story of Elisha and the she-bear. When questioned, Wenslawe repeated the story in Latin because he understood English only from Margery. She could speak with anyone. So thank you, Jesus, you made a foreigner understand her when her own countrymen abandoned her because she never stopped weeping and talking about you.
On Easter, 1415, the priest from England gave her enough money to return to Lynn. Margery said good-bye to Wenslawe and to her maid. The maid’s moment of intensity was over; she stepped back to look like and die with her ancestors.
Margery sailed to Zealand. In Zealand they had a good wind to cross the channel, but they couldn’t find a ship—only a little smack that had a well for live fish. The sailor at the helm became notes as he sang them. Margery wished she could sing as well; she was a little drunk on motion and spray. The wet brunt of the wind erased her problems. Drops struck her skin like beads of light. They lost sight of shore, the sky was gray, black; green waves pitched the tiny boat.
PART THREE
Her Being Was Hurtling
Sende down sum reyn er sum wedyr that may throw thi mercy qwenchyn this fyre and esyn myn hert.
32
Margery landed in Yarmouth without a single penny. She did not want to be recognized because she was wearing a filthy canvas sheet. She held a handkerchief in front of her face until she could arrange a loan and buy some clothes. Then she walked quickly on the road to Norwich as though trying to keep up with Jesus. It was April; a woodpecker’s drumming and its yelping cry. Pilgrims gave her a few coins for these stories:
•
A man drowns his pregnant wife in a pond, drags her out, and then has the cruelty to watch the motion of the infant still warm in her womb. The devil puts him up to it, appearing in a flash of lightning, and showing him where to find a hay spade to bury her with in a shallow grave by the pond. Easter Tuesday following, a man watering a quickset hedge not far from his home, as he is going for a second pailful, an apparition before him sits on the grave: she seems to dandle something in her lap that looks like a white bag; she is pale, with her teeth visible but no gums. The man runs away so fast he yanks at the air.
•
Two ladies of quality love each other entirely. One of them falls sick with plague and desires to see the other, who will not come, fearing catching it. The afflicted at last dies, and has not been buried very long when she appears at the other’s house dressed in mourning (for her own life). She asks for her friend, who is at cards, but sends down her maid to know her business, who tells her, I must impart it to none but your lady, who, receiving this answer, bids her maid to show her guest into a room, and asks her to wait till the game is done. Downstairs the lady comes to the apparition to know her business. Madame, says the ghost, turning up her veil (her face appearing full of craters), you know very well, you and I loved entirely, and your not coming to see me, I took it so hard, at your hands, that I could never rest, till I had seen you, and now I am come, to tell you, that you have not long, to live, therefore, prepare to die, and when you are at a feast, and make the thirteenth person, in number, remember my words.
33
Margery sent for John to meet her in Norwich. While waiting for him, she visited the Vicar of St. Stephen’s. He had two years left to live as she had foretold nine years earlier. Still, Margery was shocked to find him wasting, his face small and dark, bony as a monkey’s. He couldn’t get warm; blue lids hooded his eyes. He thought, Wisdom is just subtraction. Her mirth filled him with longing for a world he was shrinking away from, and he could not reconcile her stamina with the sanctity of his death, his weighty marble sarcophagus.
He haunted his memories and hopes, rushing through them in a whisper. But sometimes his body gave him a moment of peace that could also be described as a whiff of sweet decay, like a dead mouse found in a trap. Then the world was artificial and his physical being seemed a less precious part of a richer and more compelling adventure. Sometimes he saw the spirit of a little boy jumping up and down on the bed. No sound, but shadows.
Margery said, “Jesus told me to buy a white mantle and robe.”
The Vicar breathed, “Told you . . . ?” The conversation ended as he climbed onto wobbly legs.
So Margery said, “Jesus, send me a sign for white clothes.” She could not recognize herself apart from simple cues, the golden headdress of her youth or the mantle of lightning, thunder, and rain.
Early in the morning as she lay in bed, she saw the lightning, heard the thunder. A larch was instantly reduced to ashes. The first drops fell in pellets that sat on top of the hard dirt. Veins of lightning tangled in the distance. Mules sank in mud up to their pasterns; they brayed and lurched with their haunches. The tepid air went through an electrical cleansing. After the storm the decisive light laid a hand on her. No actual light could deliver such promise.
“But Jesus, I have no money to buy clothes.”
He replied, “I’ll buy them for you.” Jesus always got money from someone else. He does own everything, she reasoned, but she had given her life and spent her fortune following him around, while nothing he gave made a difference in his life. In response, she grew more animated; that repelled Jesus, who took it as a demand. His somber character really didn’t suit her; he barked orders and walked ahead. How long could she put up with that?
•
John set out from Lynn to take Margery home. He knew something was wrong—he pictured Jesus too clearly, saw Margery tipping onto him, two bodies then, and Jesus feels her weight which is given lightness by her breathing; she slides down a little, the tender flesh of her ass, two handfuls, the twin dimples at the base of her spine where muscles play; she nudges apart his long legs with small motions of her legs.
John thought, The world is getting smaller but not less frightening. Sheep, flies, and mosquitoes. He thought, Jesus is the devil. A scarecrow like an archer drew his bow. The smell of sun-baked dung. The chirping of the field insects ended as he entered the woods. Bright preindustrial blue through the trees. Families and journeymen, tramping or riding, carried their pieces of cloth to market. A goose raised its head for grain as a farmer swung his scythe—in the dust its yellow beak parted hopefully. Hawthorn bushes flowered and the sun arched over the open heaths. A blackbird with a yellow bill ran in a crouch.
Margery met John on the street outside her inn—a spring dusk of lilting clarity. He had not seen her in over a year: he swung around her like a dancing bear and beamed love that was consoling and hard to endure. She was very glad to see him. John didn’t care about judgments or personalities, his own or others’.
John believed in sensation and agreement. Agreement led him to farmers markets and dog races, to parties where everyone said hello and started jumping halfway to the dance floor. Sensation led him to alcohol and bodies. He thought if drink didn’t bloat him it would have been a wonderful invention—perhaps the only one—of Mother Nature. He slept with women who looked like Margery, ruddy and small: that was the form his vow of chastity had taken. He couldn’t come till he cried I love you in his mind. He’d lie still, blackness passing upwards, feet jiggling as though he were being hanged.
They ate in a tavern fumy with dry sherry and wine. Margery stuck out in her white mantle. She described marrying Jesus in a voice that was too bright. John sagged against her; he looked sick; he finally understood they would not be together. His face broke open. His wide mouth gaped, the muscles stood rigid on his neck, and his big f
orehead sank onto her shoulder—the huge doleful head of a steer. He cried strongly, imagining himself curled in a ball. Sobs jerked his body. Margery stroked his thick hair; she was also sad.
Margery considered the mahogany hair that swept down his forearms. She was forty-one and John was over fifty. “John, why do you love me?” It was a thoughtless question, cruel.
John’s hand brushed hers; warmth rippled from forefinger to elbow. She had been unhappy so long she wondered what part of themselves happy lovers give up. John replied hopefully, “You are beautiful, and your little teeth, and intelligent, your nipples, and you have a great sense of—” Margery cut him off. She knew the list. It didn’t touch her terror or the Margery who needed proof that she would not be abandoned.
•
In Lynn she noted who was still alive; she fell ill and lay immobile, profoundly inside her body, painfully apart from it. Her skin prickled down her front from scalp to toes: it was a form of anticipation. Each minute she thought, This might be it.
34
Instead of moving upwards as it recedes, the ground rushes straight into me. Now there’s a racket like an uproar of birds from some mechanism in the rear. Then a second high whine. I haven’t developed an aesthetic of patience the way others do as they age. Lights come on, all dark outside, our heads erect against our upright seats. The blue lights of the landing strip and the distant, radiant terminal. The forward momentum of my longing becomes a form of velocity, membranes and aspirations surging towards a foreign airport, its degraded earth empty of meaning except direction towards a hotel room where I erotically dismantle him. Heaven is the total presence at once of my self and my body. It’s my own skin I travel towards—its entire arousal a homecoming, effortless freedom.
•
Almost two years had passed since Margery returned from Rome. She was poor and in debt. Three feet of snow covered Lynn; Margery was so cold she became bewildered; she heard the trilling shree of a waxwing. The wind deprived her of breath and swatted tears off her face. Some said she had epilepsy because she turned blue as lead. They spat at her in horror of disease. Some said she howled like a dog.
Margery wanted to see the shrine of St. James at Santiago Compostela. She told her friends, “Jesus will give me money,” but he delayed until midsummer.
•
Lynn’s gardens abounded with solstitial flowers: roses, cornflags, orange lilies, pinks, and yellow honeysuckles so fragrant they perfumed the street. Willow down filled the air. A linnet warbled in a tuft of hazel trees. The yellow wheat, the fresh grass. A couple sheared sheep; brown wool accumulated at their feet. The horizon lacked incident, an irrigation ditch, a wash of clouds only slightly whiter than the sky.
She arrived in Bristol on May 26, 1417, and waited six weeks. Henry V had requisitioned all ships for his second expedition. The beach seemed pressured, empty; the small waves exasperated Margery with their demand for attention that, once given, offered nothing to attend. Fishermen laid out nets to dry in the wind. Mobility and chance were beginning. Sanderlings pattered along the foamy edge. Moving randomly through the world canceled the agreement between space, time, and Margery’s body. Jesus taught her to make angels; they lay on their backs and dragged their arms in the sand to shape wings. Then they turned over, serious and happy, groins and faces pressed into the warmth.
The city was full of soldiers; there was a campaign to suppress heretics before the attack on France. Margery said a prayer before bed to give her unconscious a list of problems to work on.
•
A ship was ready to sail to Compostela—a little galley high of prow and stern. The sailors believed Margery controlled the weather so one of them warned her they intended to throw her overboard if a storm hit. Dark clouds covered the sky; the water was lumpy as flint. Pale fulmars followed the ship in stiff flight for seven days.
Margery and Jesus stayed two weeks in Compostela. Rain fell steadily on the city’s head; water spilled down stone gutters and into the granite streets. Glittering drops in Jesus’s hair and lashes. Margery was never dry. They watched a white goose in a maze, its head bobbing just above the box hedge. It waddled forlornly in the rain, turning corners, backtracking, until it sauntered out of the puzzle.
No matter how fast Margery trotted on her short legs to catch up, Jesus strode a yard ahead with the preoccupied frown of someone late, face tossed back as though from the speed. He denied Margery the companionship he was providing. Later he let her drink rain off his skin. When the sun appeared for an hour of immensity, canaries trilled vehemently in their little cages on the windowsills.
•
L. and I face a large lawn. He protests, “I show affection in different ways—” I consider the possibilities: his hand on my shoulder guided me around a corner, his knee fell against mine—were they more than I thought? Our union makes more sense to L. outside New York and San Francisco, an isolation in which he feels tenderness and separation at the same time.
The lawn has a head of grass that has attained Flamboyant Gothic consciousness, bunched up against the foundation of an arbor. The gardener, unaware, smooths out the alarmed head and flattens it beneath the arbor. The grass thinks, This is fine, calming itself, but realizes that no sun can reach it: I will slowly die.
While I daydream, L. talks about his art, a friend’s memorial—nothing I can focus on. His actual life moves too slowly.
We eat yellow pepper soup, mushroom salad, and chocolate pine-nut cake. People in the restaurant look at him. Later he strips and blindfolds me. He runs a fingertip across my cock creating and denying expectation till I float in a cosmos of emptiness and touch. When I leave our bed I crouch a little, hoping the dimples on my ass will disappear. The extremes are captivating: exalting pleasure and the harshest judgment in that my own contempt works in his name. My legs are shaky. I step into the big room. The air is oddly empty. By contrast, I’m aware of my flesh and the thick stew it’s been for an hour or more.
35
Margery landed in Bristol on July 9. The weather was good, and travel itself was an authentic place to speak from—where events unfold, the crest of duration. She stopped in Leicester on her way home and found a room at an inn.
As Margery entered the church, Jesus pushed past her through the door; he knocked her off balance and gloated over his shoulder as though he’d won a contest. She had not seen him since Compostela. They sat down. Her desire to be young conflated with his cruel immaturity, as though rough manners were a promise of youth. Margery was forty-three. But Jesus didn’t lead a youth gang; he was thirty-one, so he was lying too. She held the corner of her cloak elegantly to alert Jesus to each finger’s tapering. He could have told her the gesture was out-of-date.
Four girls squatted in the corner projecting their world onto little half-naked bodies which they twisted intently; then one of the girls held her doll up, suddenly animate, so it could speak to the others.
What is there to these dolls besides moments of arousal followed by emptiness? Jesus announced in a stern parental voice, “There is much sorrow coming to you.”
Margery was silent. Is pain more convincing than pleasure? The best prophet is the assassin. She couldn’t see into the assassin’s face—eyes blank, mouth drawn downwards.
Margery experienced the camaraderie of the dolls as remorse without an object. Jesus shrugged, “If you don’t want my love . . .” She was bewildered. With John, Margery had duplicated her parents’ marriage, so Margery was strong; Jesus shrank her down to a child, adoring and lost, perhaps unloved. He called for unconditional surrender—but to what? Raising his palm in an oddly formal salute, he disappeared.
Margery would have been surprised to learn how badly assembled Jesus was. Lacking all external criticism, he was vague even to himself. His visits should have replaced the stream of life with something conclusive—or was his incoherence the attraction? She foresaw the catastrophe though no words passed. In fantasies Jesus showed need and intent in his touch but his
actual hands lay lifeless and she tried to prop them up over her back. She made it into a game, “Jesus the Puppet.” If he didn’t respond to her body, he might respond to her joke?
Even when Margery bathed him, he wouldn’t let her caress his nipples or his gleaming belly. It’s painful to describe. She used shrewdness to hide her humiliation from both of them. His coldness was a greater problem than any believable solution; she preferred fraud and Jesus, yet she complained constantly.
No, but I was torn up with loneliness—I say as my puppet says it too. A still beam of sunlight pierces a dark tumultuous fountain, a kind of exultation I can only grasp through the pleasure it might give L. I can’t know it except through him. I have no position—what can I reject? My body seems large, my skin blushes and reaches in every direction for contact with L.’s skin. I raise my eyes to a dark window seven stories high where L. lives in New York. The window is lit, he is flesh and blood, he leans into another man in amusement and then warmth. I whisper his name to elevate this story with the strength of my sexuality.
36
In Leicester on a porch invaded by honeysuckle the ostler’s in-a-blue-shift daughter made a circle with her hands and brought them over her head without unclasping. Margery knew that the girl had recently acquired an acute sense of smell and was almost always aware of the scent of her own cunt. Open, blood, fold. When the girl saw her sister’s clitoris she said, “Mine’s bigger than hers.”
Eggs began drifting through fallopian wastelands. The girl liked to stroke her newly growing breasts but when she lay on her stomach they hurt. She was always tempted to run away; she got to the front gate and looked up through wild eyes at Margery, who told her she would have a lot of pleasure in life if she lasted that long.