Margery Kempe

by Robert Gluck

  Mary said, “Art yu my swete Sone, Ihesu?”

  “I am your son.” He lifted and kissed her. Mary searched his body as though she had lost her place. She took his hand and pressed it to her lips. Her cheek retained his blood and a dangling ribbon of flesh. Mary’s eyes glinted with sardonic humor which she shared with Jesus—their eyebrows raised in amusement—as she turned her gory face for everyone to see.

  Margery was entirely gazing, so terrified she didn’t swallow her spit. She became aware that she was stranded in a remote desert in a stifling concrete bunker. Its tin roof cracked in the heat. She felt the weight of the arbitrary setting: an unlimited desert came into view, entered without clothes or memory. Her vision began to strobe; Mary and Jesus crackled with beams of winter light raying out sovereignty, casting faint shadows. Then they were shabby derelicts, one in grimy blue rags, the other in a stiff shroud reeking of decaying blood.

  52

  “All my pain is gone. Mother, ask me anything.” Jesus answered her questions.

  Margery rose to embrace Jesus but he raised his arm against her, his palm flat as a door. Her desire for conclusion was intensely gratified. You could say Jesus created her in that instant: through him she glimpsed a Margery too abandoned to imagine on her own. Stiff with panic, she threw out her arms hopelessly as though warding off a wrecking ball. Her chest felt sore and heavy. Margery had not understood the stakes in the first place—she would rot in the dirt.

  She didn’t doubt there were saints in heaven who had never seen the terrible expression Jesus wore: coldly sympathetic. Each saint touched one version of Jesus; hers was a charming reserved brown-haired blond with bone-tipped shoulders, brilliant skin whose chest hairs could be counted, tiny pink nipples, tiny navel, broad hips, and long blond legs.

  Mary brought Margery a bowl of her own soup. Margery set the spoon down. Jesus tried to comfort her too. He felt newly tender now that the issue of eternity was behind them. Her life broke into withering ironies. “Do you want to meet in a half hour?” Jesus asked mildly, with a clarity that sees pain as decoration.

  When they met, he said, “Your blue eyes are beautiful.” He felt their relationship was her creation. Still, he reminded her of adventures they’d had together in Italy, as though looking through photos and inviting her to share a tremulous nostalgia: he added gold to the highlights on folds of mountain and cloth. Every image was a farewell to what it portrayed. He retained the pleasant stories and left the cruel ones to her.

  He didn’t look at her. “Well, Margery . . .” His eyes crumpled and his lips gave way. His head dropped a few inches and he began to cry a little. Jesus reduced Margery’s bid for transcendence to a scrapbook of experiences. Her eyes remained dry; she’d already given her tears away. She asked to see more of him but he said he was too busy, as though he had to work.

  The gods weren’t counting on Margery; they offered no strong belief in the value of life. Their lack of faith made her doubt herself from childhood to that instant. It was no use going back to yesterday since she had been a different person then.

  Jesus discarded her dumb love and abandoned her. From there, Margery might have advanced to real faith—a vocation begun in tears, cracked open as she was, left for dead as she was. I don’t know what that faith would be. Margery did not accept this emptiness; instead, she dilated on the point of rejection.

  53

  Margery woke before dawn when she had nothing. She pulled a blanket over her body as though she were sick but she was also the disease, a noxious failure she wanted to hide. She covered her eyes from shame. She had been abandoned forever, a verdict passed for the first time each second. She couldn’t speak. During the day her surroundings and companions joined in her broad prosaic failure but the fact of rejection startled her as though she were falling down a stairway.

  Anxious desolation of the day became anxious desire at night. She had come to a halt but her being was still hurtling. Her membranes rang with anticipation. Her muscles twitched and tugged and when she came her body slowly curled towards the hateful excitement like paper towards a flame. The soft explosions could not consume the tenderness she felt for Jesus. She had made an impossible wish. Now she had nothing but vehement desire that was so exasperated she turned her face and threw out her hands as though to a witness.

  Because she desired Jesus she didn’t realize that in their separation he got what he wanted. Her cunt dripped like the shinbone of a saint that weeps in continuous relation to God. Her hips rolled, her nipples hardened, her tissues hurt with pleasure. Her body was still his lover. Ecstasies boiled up and popped just under her skin in steady bursts, the physical evidence of destitution. She rubbed herself wearily. What gesture indicates the desire for more life? When she heard a creak, she thought it was his foot on the tread.

  His voice, a clarinet; his eyes, blue geodes; the tilt of his head; the hair tumbling down his brow; his dazzled expression; his small translucent teeth; his pointed tongue; his straight back; the vein running down his inner thigh; the ankle and the arch. He is already breaking into parts. More than that: Margery’s urge to strip Jesus, to complete him, to uncover, to make him respond and respond. There is no body that precedes his body yet it is overwhelmingly passive. Panicked, she looks for it in continual expectation of making love. She separates his knees, opens his crotch; her hand on his hip rotates his torso; she shoves his knees to his ears, his asshole contracts, the amazing flesh moves as the floor slides out from under her. She tips his head back, exposes his throat. Trying to explain him she dismantles a complex of refinements—ropy strands of sperm—there won’t be any Jesus after Margery outdoes the cross.

  •

  The mirror sickened her. Her features hung from a billowing curtain; her hair was gray, thin, her lips had thinned, and her mouth pulled downwards, stale and dishonest. Injustice without remedy. The skin on her hands and face had gleamed with indestructible youth but Jesus withdrew the body’s beauty.

  In her descent each basement gave way to a deeper one. How do we bear the loss of opportunity and life? She recoiled with crisp fear from elderly friends: they dragged her into the grave. She turned away from young people; their tight juicy skin was a brutal assault, was a darkness, future as past. Friends spasmed with pleasure as their bodies faltered, saw the last light as they sifted into dust. Death weakened Margery because she no longer held a belief that could survive its spotlight—neither do I.

  Towards the end of the night, Margery climbed in with John. He propped his head on his elbow and gazed at her; he didn’t exactly know her but she couldn’t cry until she’d felt some warmth. John dangled his fingers over hers and rubbed his rather thick pinky nail against the tip of her thumb as his father used to do for hours when John lay in his crib. The torrent flowed and John whimpered in sympathetic desolation, everything concentrated in the friction of nail on skin. He thought it was his own sorrow and his caresses were aware, his heart blinking in the early dawn. His affection was comforting and hard to bear. Insidiously, the old pleasure fanned out like wings until the fact of rejection startled her with a sickening shift and a jolt of adrenaline dried her tears.

  •

  Everything she knew was against her. Her perilous journeys had been conversations with Jesus. There were sea captains to guide her and bishops to vanquish like small dragons. Death had become a task to perform, an achievement. The problem was stupid: How do you find your way in empty desert when you have become that desert? She wanted to shed the knowledge of life and death now that such knowledge could not lead outside itself, could not be used to improve her position. Margery fell back with a feeling of vertigo. She looked at her open fingers.

  54

  Margery rolled on her back; she lay musing, suddenly very comfortable, laughing, imagining long conversations and the weight of his head on her shoulder. She straightened her legs—a moment of relief. All day near and distant shutters banged open and closed; she heard the flat-footed voice of a child. She wanted to
amuse Jesus and to describe her nights. His withdrawal was a story, like all her stories, for him.

  She kindled hope so she could love unimpeded for another hour. Moist air blurred the moon’s edge. He’s testing her—because rejection is the sentiment of the era. She imagined reconciliations; they had happened before. He’s not sure how to approach her—Margery, is it too late for us to start again?

  She saw him talking through a steady smile, eyes lowered, lashes’ gold dust, features painful with meaning. She held her arms out in the intensity of contradiction. “You couldn’t stand the intimacy we shared if you didn’t love me. I am always aroused, which proves my point.”

  She had become a contradiction so she stated it with hectic energy to save herself, as though Jesus would have to return once it was clearly put: “Your ability to change my life, your unwillingness to do so.”

  •

  What quality did she love in Jesus? “An elegant loneliness which I desire.”

  Margery wakes before dawn so furious that Jesus is a bitter taste in her mouth. Under a strange sky, in the middle of nowhere, only her fury is familiar. She wants to hurl her life at him like a bomb. She has to number her grievances as she lies rigid in the dark, knocking her feet together. She finally calls him a prick, reluctantly losing grandeur and scale. Jesus pretends to die, then lets her die for real. She mentally shouts Get away! as though he’s attacking.

  Light pushes through, wan and gray; for an hour bird chatter dominates the city. She tries to protect herself by attacking him. She abandons Jesus.

  “Your hips are too wide, you are knock-kneed. Your nipples are too small, you have pimples on your ass.” She drags farts out of him, his ignorant seagull expression as people look up and sniff and her insides roll with joy. She doesn’t know how to diminish him. “He’s just a boy, but extremely beautiful,” she adds, puzzled. She could never deface that beauty but she pulls his soul apart like tissue.

  •

  She tries again to steady and enclose the catastrophe. A boy, a charming boy who is tender, cruel, who treats me any way he likes. Who never endorses me, whose rapture breaks with everything, moments of innocence and intoxication, who arrives with gifts . . .

  In her bed she sees them from above. Jesus strides too fast down the gray muddy road, his beauty, his clothes, her crude white gown, her clumsy gestures, questions. She follows like a servant (he relates to servants). She looks dwarfish, the huge white clown head, the frowning clown’s farce of self-advancement.

  “You will never know anything till you have to work for a living. You bought me clothes and took me to Italy—you never gave me a penny of real support.”

  In her mind her voice rings but Jesus’s half-smile challenges these facts by not responding to them. She can’t wound him anymore than she could heal him—a block of wood failed to become a boy. Her grievances are old and feeble in their infancy. At whatever level she rejects him, she sees that her love exists below that level. She can’t get to a bedrock beneath her love or to a Margery that hasn’t already been abandoned. Jesus will not be transformed by Margery’s anger. She throws up an arm to ward him off. “Get away from me!”—as though he assaults her in a nightmare.

  55

  The sun rose, house wrens sang below the eaves, dogs barked. I describe Margery’s suffering as though it lasted a few days instead of years. We are in the middle of our lives and we are breaking down. Although I think only of L., my senses jump when I see his image, name, or handwriting as though something is about to happen. What remains?

  Through the window, only a few feet away, a rat perched on a decayed fence; its fur was the same gray as the weathered cedar. It drew its legs under its body like a sphinx; its beady eyes wore the peace of authority at the top of a long mule face. Her desire for transcendence was leaching into nostalgia for the view, her cup, the blue covers.

  There was a haze or mist, the sky seemed sooty a long way off—farmers burning land? Margery recoiled from the voice in her head as it talked to her. No use trying to be two people, she thought. She was lonely for company and longed to be even in the hearing of other voices.

  •

  She had no happiness or faith as complete as her rich, obsessive grief. Reluctantly she abandoned grief and later its repetitions droning on and on, so arid that language was exhausted. Without Jesus, Margery’s story was open ended. She began to accept interim life and the lie of the partial truth.

  •

  Jesus returned twice to Margery. He gave her ten pounds towards her support, a large sum at that time, which she was glad to have.

  Later he said, “I always felt guilty about desiring other people. If that was my negation of you, was the fault mine? My ambivalence and your demands were part of the erotics of our relationship. I didn’t always treat you well—I never tried to hurt you.” But Jesus couldn’t do or say anything to alter the figure always turning away in her imagination.

  56

  A flock of angels wear the wide eyes of departure; their gold hair is longer and curlier than strictly fashionable. Their wings open in a trance: powder blue fading to black banded in chestnut, the plumage believable the more unbelievable it looks.

  A woman famous for her tears turned a corner in the 1430s and wrote the story of her life. I respond to the failure that permeates her book: Margery lacked a criterion for the discernment of spirits.

  She didn’t lack faith in prayer or anecdote. She took for granted the belief that a pear has flavor, all the ecstasy of description. The angels have full lips; their features are soft but their heavy necks seem masculine. I have less faith in existence than Margery so I describe it more thoroughly.

  Margery tried to change her future by recasting herself in the medium where she was strong. Her book opens an argument so final judgment can’t be passed; it rebuilds the exterior that love had erected, purveys an endless continuity, recreates the promise of life-as-it-is.

  She turned her second-rate obsession into her last bid for endless response, a self asserted just as the world withdrew its support. She fell for so long she lost the sensation. Margery still loved the strength of words but she had no world to use them on. Let Jesus float forever, a wicked god condemned to her shifting currents of language that leave him dependent. She acknowledged an interrupted feeling, belief withdrew and entered on a higher level as doubt.

  •

  Margery sees she is abandoned, that she will age and die alone, but only in a story. When her character knows that, what does it know? Emptiness is contained in the work. She’s writing in the early morning. Suddenly she’s aware of her body, its being underneath her, heavy and contorted. Her left leg crosses over the right, toes press against the floor for stability. Her neck aches. Her cunt is minimal. The skin on the back of her hands is thin and dry. Her hair hangs in her eyes and her mouth tastes like rust. But to note all this is to track her awareness shifting through a remote terrain.

  A hornet hovers next to the windowpane, bouncing against it. That’s Jesus trying to get in, Margery tells herself without conviction. She’s comfortable for the moment—for the moment that lives and dies.

  She had access to the body of Jesus—that is, belief in the value of life and such ecstasy as my corruptible tongue cannot express. I reconstruct the memory of that access as a ruin, a hollow space inside meaning, a vehicle for travel. Still, Jesus can lift me out of time to be his lover.

  •

  I leave Margery in a suspended moment as the inevitability of L. subsides along with my fear of dying. I dreamt that Margery wants to see me. Who would know to pass himself off as her? Only L., I surmise, because I asked him not to contact me. Now I am the god of nonrelation. If he takes my place as Margery, do I take his place as Jesus? At last my position is not so fixed. I feel the anguish of rejecting him, but I’m not sure I do—a quandary of wanting and not wanting.

  A failed saint turns to autobiography. Love amazes me; I exult in my luck, in our sex; L. exasperates me; I am exasperating
; I am abandoned. I want to contain my rambling story in a few words.

  exult, exasperate, abandon, amaze

  MY MARGERY, MARGERY’S BOB

  Margery Kempe is a novel of obsession, grief, and farce, loss of self and excess of self. The unrequitedness of life in general is conveyed through the specifics of a love story. A woman who lived in the first part of the fifteenth century tries and fails to become a saint. Her steamy romance with Jesus is framed by Bob’s obsessive love for a young man, L., until the two stories merge to become one: “Bob” becomes Margery, L. becomes Jesus. Bob’s ability to enter the fifteenth century is “underwritten” by Margery’s own travel through time to the events of Jesus’ life.

  I did not want Margery to be an historical novel, a genre that hardly interests me (unless executed by Flaubert and a few others). What is an historical novel? A time machine that seems to restore another era and give us access to its citizens. That is, we get to know Alexander the Great. There’s a lie involved, but is that lie different from the lie fiction generally tells? An historical novel describes people and events we are already loyal to because they occur in the world we inhabit, yet they are unapproachable for that very reason. Alexander the Great will always be unknowable, his story beyond my control.

  I wanted to use Margery’s story, but also to let it alone, to retain the Margery who coextends—however distantly—with the world the reader inhabits. What drew me to Margery’s life could only be known by us in the present: the difference between her high aspiration and her failure. In a way, my book is about what Margery could not know about herself—the mix of periods her story embodies (medieval, modern). I feel this describes my own condition—a mix of periods in which scales of judgment, of interpretation, do not jibe. Will the future understand this disparity?