Margery Kempe

by Robert Gluck

  It’s 2 A.M. his time; I’m in bed in San Francisco. His presence wouldn’t cure my loneliness. My life occurs on the heavy satin of his skin yet he won’t let me be the cause of stimulation. My egotism is turned upside down. I give him an ultimatum: We’ve been dating for three years. Let’s live together or break up.

  L. thinks it over a few months; he has the self-confidence to reject me. I write a blistering letter and show it to my friend Kathy. She advises me to delete the anger and beg: “The only thing I understand is holding you, arousing you, seducing you with tenderness and witnessing your face soften and open, a disheveled openness, your lips swelling, and I am gazing into your blue-geode eyes.”

  “Well,” he replies, “I can’t say I would necessarily object to seeing each other, but I also wonder how it could be done . . .”

  •

  Margery tried to kiss a leper on the street but he drew back offended. She knelt in a puddle of yellow mud and cried, “Let them lay me naked on a hurdle for all men to wonder at and let them throw slime and spit at me.” She was afraid of disease but more terrified of her own unhappiness.

  As Jesus withdrew, her flights towards him grew longer; she found a house where leprous women lived. The need to be heard at any cost became a horror of life. One had an ulcer on her breast that ate the surrounding flesh—it fermented and stank like decaying blood. This woman was amazed when Margery pressed her mouth and nose on the festering mess and drank water used to clean it in which flesh had come away.

  •

  John was over sixty years old; his hair was silver. He was so drunk that deep in darkness it was bright around him. He leaned against a wall, experiencing its flatness, then the surprising curve of his spine, how he could no longer straighten it. John never asked for much, but to be deprived of his posture seemed like the last straw. He stumbled and laughed, desolate and amused. “I guess it’s for the best.”

  He left his room barefoot and barelegged and his feet coiled in the stairs. John had the sensation of rolling down grassy knolls, slow concussions. He tumbled to the first floor, twisting his head beneath him. Neighbors heard the crash and found him lying alone half dead and streaked with blood.

  They said it was Margery’s fault because she had moved away to a boarding house. Some said she howled like a dog and ruined her husband. They said if he died she deserved to be hanged. But when Margery and John lived together, people said they broke their vows of chastity; when they went on a pilgrimage, people said they had sex in the forests, groves, and valleys.

  John was sewn up and five linen plugs were inserted in the wounds to help them drain. Margery nursed him but after he fell on his head he became self-absorbed, hard to distract; he grew impatient and protested “I’m thinking,” as though Margery never used her brain. Should she humor him, demand a reply? He invented memories to lend substance to a mind that sabotaged itself: gifts he had given her, luxurious trips.

  A few months later she saw an old man in a shabby black mantle sitting by the road. It was John. He had fainted. She asked if he was sick. “No, no, nothing a doctor can do.” He looked downwards, still dazed. “The only healthy people are in the graveyard.” Finally he became senile and shit in his linen underwear as he sat by the hearth. The wood was green—water sizzled and steamed out of it. Once she’d had inordinate lust for his body. She worked hard, washing and wringing; it was expensive to keep the fire going all day.

  46

  All we know of the external world is our own shit, piss, tears, sweat, spit, snot, come, pus, babies, and sometimes blood. Margery said, “For your love I would be chopped up as stew meat for the pot.” Her lips parted in sexual hunger. Flesh was not all flesh but partly appetite.

  Before she met Jesus, Margery had appeared refined to herself: she was a mayor’s daughter. She had recognized in Jesus her own aristocracy. Little by little she adopted vulgar manners to conform to Jesus’s view of her; her words retreated to where substances and bodies pass into the world, like this stew-meat image used by the young roofer who rejected her—like the dream of my carcass chopped up in a tub!

  I aimed at L. the longing for seduction and credence I had aimed at the world. Naked in bed, he praised my writing—the one thing a stranger could like. He called me and my friends The Writers Who Love Too Much—giddy laughter. Smoothing a wrinkle by my ear, he experimented with my age and aging itself. I felt a surge of hope but the skin sank back to its position.

  •

  Margery couldn’t catch her breath. Her life was husked away—friends, husband, children, city, house, the temporal order of her community. No one met her with even the smallest portion of her suffering and excitement, no one suspected what she put into her waiting. She felt she was running out of material. All that remained was for Jesus to abandon her. Margery steps into modernity so empty she needs an autobiography.

  “Margery, here are some handsome people; they will die before a year is up.” Jesus told her when the plague would occur. “I have ordained you to be a mirror and to sorrow.” So image and loss are one—an addiction, round and empty in that nothing reflected back but the absence of her own self. She could not materialize.

  “Ah, Jesus, you are all generosity.”

  PART FOUR

  Margery’s Passion

  A-non aperyd verily to hir syght an awngel al clothyd in white beryng an howge boke be-forn hym.

  47

  Jesus walked towards his Passion with a preoccupied frown. The world grew pale. Mary fell in a dead faint. Jesus lifted her head; she looked up amazed and whispered, “How can I suffer this much sorrow? Let me die before you . . . never let me suffer this day of sorrow . . . I can never bear the sorrow I will have from your death. No one can comfort me but you.”

  Jesus kissed her lips as though she were his little girl. “I will be King, you will be Queen. You will have power over devils—they will be afraid of you, and you never of them. Queen of Heaven, Empress of Hell, and Lady of the World.”

  Mary could not speak another word so Margery claimed the emotion; she collapsed next to them and caught his ankle, crying, “Kill me rather than abandon me!”

  Jesus hissed, “Be still, Margery.” His enemies seized him. They dragged him to the ground and pushed him forward so his face hit the pavement and his teeth were dashed together. They spit at him. Jesus smiled foolishly. He took off his own clothes and wrapped his arms around the narrow stone pillar. The freshness of his body could be seen in his skin, milky gold except for some red pimples scattered across his ass.

  When the lash struck, he flinched as though it were cold. Something finally happened to his body: the wounds went in one direction and furrowed his skin like patterned cloth. His ribs appeared; he melted like a candle. The switches broke and littered the floor. The spot where he stood filled with blood and he wiped blood from his eyes. He turned to his clothes but his enemies did not give him time to dress. They hurried him along—naked with a rope around his waist. He put his arms in the sleeves and wiped away blood from his face with his tunic. Wherever he stepped he left footprints stained with blood.

  Margery and Mary went round on a different path. A white-bearded peasant in a gray surcoat held a plow handle in one hand and goaded a pair of red oxen with his other. He had a wen inside his cheek as big as a pullet’s egg. His plowshare turned earth covered by faded winter grass. Margery and Mary could hear the thud of violent blows; they saw Jesus stagger, the cross so heavy he could hardly lift it. They pulled their cloaks over their foreheads like mourning scarfs.

  Mary said, “Ah, Jesus . . . that heavy cross . . .” She fainted, still as the dead. Jesus knelt by Mary to comfort her. Margery fell down too and threw back her head because she couldn’t catch her breath. Screams tore her jaws apart, her feeling of constraint dividing over and over as though lavishly blooming.

  48

  Margery went up to Calvary. Music, soldiers, gambling, silence in the buzzing flies, vendors selling candy and wine. The rocky landscape rose in
perspective to a walled hilltop town. A soldier pointed to a tree where Judas hung, intestines spilling from his gaping belly. The Jews tore from Jesus’s body a silk cloth that dried blood had glued to his flesh. Jesus saw his dead self and gave up the urge to create relation. His wounds opened and blood ran on every side.

  The Jews laid him on the cross. They set a long nail on one palm where the bone was most solid and drove it through with such force it extended far beyond the wood. He was pinned down, mortal. He lost his gold dust, his lips turned blue, his wounds showed purple against chalky skin. All his sinews and veins drew together and his jaw worked in horror. Pain shrank his sinews so his other hand would not reach the hole drilled for it. The Jews fastened ropes to it and pulled. They drew his feet the same way. They crucified his right foot with one nail and over it the left foot with another so that the nerves and veins were extended and broken.

  Mary whispered, “Ah, St. Stephen wore a short doublet . . . black for humility . . .” She was just a few molecules waked by a breeze.

  Margery shoved her aside. “You accursed Jews, why are you killing Jesus? Kill me instead and let him go!”

  They made a loud shout as they hoisted the cross with Jesus hanging from it a foot or more above the ground and let it drop into the mortise. Jesus shuddered, all his joints burst apart, blood ran down from his wounds. They drove wooden pegs on all sides so the cross would stand firm. The only cloud in the sky hid the sun, making the cloud bright and the sky yellow. Jesus’s eyes darkened; he couldn’t see except when he expelled blood by squeezing his eyelids. His face grew chalky from loss of blood, his hair and eyes were filled with blood, his ears stopped up with blood.

  He tried to stretch himself on the cross to relieve the bitter pain in his arms. The color of death came on, his cheeks hung pale, his ribs could be numbered, his belly collapsed on his back as though he had no stomach, and his nostrils were pinched. His heart was breaking from the pain. He raised his head slightly, inclined to the right. Flies had converged on his face. His pale lips opened and his tongue and teeth were coated with blood.

  Terror lifted Margery’s amorphous head up through the silence. Her heart thudded slowly. She shrieked in his face, “Don’t abandon me!” With that Jesus died, his human career ended. His death can’t be understood inside the argument of life or the system of Margery’s attraction. His hands shrank a little from the nail holes and his feet bore more of his weight. Mary fainted; the sky convulsed in a bruised aqua without moisture and the dry land erupted under their feet. Margery ran in a crouch, ducking bombs and horn blasts from pre-eternity. Sche cryid, sche roryd & wept sor that many man on hir wonderyd. Though she expected his death, it was still a shock.

  A soldier rode up bearing a lance tipped with iron. The soldier’s hair was cropped so close Margery couldn’t tell what color it was. When she saw what he intended to do, she picked up a stone and hit the blade from an amazing distance. She kept throwing stones.

  The soldier laughed—it was a game to him. He drove his lance into Jesus’s side with such force it came out the back. When he withdrew the lance its point was bright red, showing that the heart had been pierced. The soldier’s face quickened as a river of dark arterial blood gushed from the wound. The entire scene strobed or flickered, the uncertain light caused by Margery’s own eyelids batting. She fell on her knees next to Mary and screamed, “Cease from your sorrowing—I will sorrow for you!”

  Joseph of Arimathea lowered Jesus’s body from the cross and laid it before Mary on a marble slab. The eyes were sunken and full of blood, mouth cold, arms so stiff that the hands could not be raised above the navel. Mary kissed the mouth. Mary Magdalene said, “Let me kiss the feet.” Mary’s sisters took both hands and kissed them. They clung to Jesus’s body, a small raft, but what the infinite means is that we are already in it. Margery ran back and forth; she wanted Jesus for herself; she screamed with awareness till her voice was a pale whistle.

  49

  Margery was in a state of shock close to wonder; for the moment she knew total freedom. She was ripped in two: half of her was the absent Jesus. It was too soon to bind this injury with strands of language—to make it inevitable, normal. She was just a wound. She fell apart, or opened up.

  She lay on her side, rigid, breathing quickly through her nose, making surprised sounds of small hurts. Brittle fear of death replaced endless talk. In Jesus’s blank nonrelation she saw her grave, a loss deprived of purpose, unrevealed, unhidden, uninterpreted.

  She began the night with her eyes wide open, her senses entirely awake, cold light in the darkness; at dawn she was still focused, wild and cold. Daylight was crisp and weak, celery green. She felt numb; she lost the will to divide inside from outside. She waited for the night and her sorrow to recommence.

  •

  She woke at midnight with such heavy grief she was amazed by some deeper Margery who encountered feelings below. She had to wearily reiterate the wooden shutters, her cup on the sill, the stool, the blue covers, the bed. “I can never live through this hour alone”—and then chimes brought the next hour. The air was cold so Margery was cold.

  Chimes dragged her unwillingly through the second night. Her muscles hurt. She could not draw into herself enough to sleep. She became the hour of three in the morning, four in the morning. When she journeyed towards the old clock, she was Jesus walking down the corridor and the emptiness stopped assaulting her. She said hello, copied his voice like a birdcall: two notes rising, one sinking halfway. She rehearsed the tension in his jaw. His elegant features jumped expressions under the clear sky of his brow.

  When information circulates it transforms; she looked from a gold face through strong blue eyes; she walked on long legs with an athlete’s pleasure and became the forward stiff-legged gait, the awareness of ass in the short tunic. She abandoned her breasts and belly for a flat expanse of skin. She had lived like a pendulum whose constant travel in space gets it nothing except the loss of a measure of time. She stopped the farcical ticking to establish inaction. The pendulum batted her palms. The terror of the corridor was avoided.

  •

  She lurched upright in bed. Her own shout took her by surprise. Her breath was quick, her chest heavy, throat closed off. She tested parts of her body, thinking wild pain must be accompanied by a visible disease or rupture. It amazed her that grief could be pitched so high in a body undefined and slack. She experienced herself most deeply in her love for Jesus. The more she was excluded from that depth, the more she was aware of it. He deprived her of depth without allowing her to be shallow. She tore long welts on her forearms to summon insanity but relentless consciousness was the madness that arrived.

  “I’ve gone crazy,” she told herself. “Being mad with grief doesn’t mean thrashing around or any activity that puts you in motion or relation. It means lying on your side frozen in one position as hours pass.” Margery was grounded. The upward prayer of belief turned back on itself, pinning her to the bed: silence descends. The town slept; she heard the rush of water, a torrent pouring through a sluice, and the foggy cry of bitterns from the salt marshes. “It means the story is over.” With first light the roosters; with sunrise the dogs.

  50

  Margery said, “You must comfort yourself and stop sorrowing.”

  “Ah, where will I go . . . St. Barbara . . . hem of blue and silver . . .” Margery diced carrots and turnips on the trestle table and cooked them in a soup with bread and beer. “Take it away, dear Margery. Give me no food but my own child.” Margery saw that Mary’s tender smile and courtesy were forms of condescension; Mary’s kindness meant to exclude. She comforted Margery but would not allow Margery to comfort her.

  A thousand years passed till the third day came. A knock at the door. “It’s I, St. Peter, who abandoned Jesus.” He fell to his knees, racked with sobs.

  Mary consoled him. “Jesus will cheer us up. That child was the best shit I ever had!” Everyone laughed; the hair rose on Margery’s neck.


  •

  Mary lay in bed sleeping; she smelled like scorched hair. Margery lay beside her, fists clenched against her temples. The hut had no windows; the appalling midday heat stunned her. Mary Magdalene was looking for Jesus at his grave. A blackbird stood with its head to one side listening for worms. Jesus walked stiffly because his flesh had been dead. He stopped behind her. “Why are you crying?”

  Mary Magdalene jumped and spun around; she did not recognize Jesus dressed like a gardener in a jerkin and straw hat. He said, “Mary.” His voice was full of dirt, gritty. She felt her eyeballs swell in her head. She bent to kiss his feet but Jesus rasped, “Don’t touch me.”

  Mary Magdalene looked miserable. Margery thought if Jesus cried Touch me not to her, she would crumble along with the rest of her meager story.

  51

  Margery, Mary, Peter, Thomas, and Mary’s sisters all stood up when Jesus stepped into the sweltering bunker. He shuffled woodenly and brought into the terrible shack a flat stench. He said in the gravelly whisper of the undead, “Hello, mother.”

  The skin prickled on Thomas’s back; he guarded his throat in an instinctive gesture. Jesus grabbed Thomas’s fingers and jammed them into the wound in his chest with a look of rapture. Jesus gritted his teeth like L. does during orgasm, desiring sensation but unwilling to be moved by it. Peter gaped in horror at the risen dead and met its enthusiasm with revulsion. Margery fell backwards onto her chair. She thought her cries were drowned by organ music. Others remember Margery as a frenetic dog.

  Jesus said, “Will someone put her out?” She smelled the wounds, the shredded hands.