And All Our Wounds Forgiven (21 page)

Once you reach a certain age, each death demands a reliving of the previous deaths in your life. I pity you that your parents are still living. No wonder you can’t grow up. As long as you are a son or daughter, you cannot occupy your own place in the world. The deaths of our parents is the fortuitous loss that forces us to fill this raw and new emptiness with ourselves — whoever that is.

I know one of the reasons you wanted to marry me was because I had been a part of history. You were proud to have as your wife the woman who had been John Calvin Marshall’s personal secretary. I was amused and I shouldn’t have been. If I had known better, I would have been outraged that you dared put your fantasies on my life. But I was amused. Maybe I was even flattered. I was important in your eyes. I had been an intimate part of the life of one of the great men of the twentieth century. I’m not sure anymore how true that is. I’m not sure if it was ever true. I wonder if I have not been a fantasy in my own life.

You probably think Andrea and I were close because I came to be with her as she lay dying. We were not. During the years I worked for Cal, I don’t know that all the sentences Andrea and I exchanged would make a page of double-spaced text. There were weeks when I was in and out of her house daily. Cal’s office was in the basement but it was like a separate apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. I could hear Andrea moving around upstairs. She could hear me on the typewriter in the basement or see my truck in the driveway.

Yet, Andrea and I had something in common no one else had — Cal. That was never acknowledged openly between us. I did not want her to die without our meeting and talking.

I think I was wrong.

Forgive me but it is 2:30. I am going to bed.

Being open and honest with one’s spouse is exhausting.

Friday, 9
A.M.

Bobby called at seven this morning, crying, pleading with me to help him with the arrangements for Andrea’s funeral. I almost said yes. How do you refuse someone who needs you? And that’s the lure that gets you into the trap.

I felt guilty for saying no to him. I feared saying yes, however, feared it would only be the first of many assents as Bobby desperately sought a replacement for Andrea and I am the only candidate because he and I shared the same beginning.

“Why don’t you call Kathy? She and Adisa would love to help you, Bobby.”

The suggestion startled him, but I think he might take it. He feels incapable of doing all that must be done to properly inter the widow of John Calvin Marshall. Bobby will have to make the decisions about who speaks at the funeral and who sits where and who sings what. He will have to say no to most and offend many for whom an appearance at Andrea’s funeral is a major career move.

The funeral will be Monday. I will go only to the cemetery. I am never convinced someone is dead until I see the casket put into the ground. When Jessica died, the funeral director didn’t want me to stay for the lowering of the casket. I suppose that is the hardest moment for most survivors, the moment when you know, without a doubt, that there is now an emptiness in your life. If hysteria is going to be unleashed, I would imagine it is at that moment. So, he wanted me to go.

No one else was there. When Jessica died, there was no funeral. There was no one to say any words. There was only me. You offered to come but I didn’t want you to. You would not have understood why my eyes were not only dry but glowing.

I told the funeral director I wasn’t going anywhere until the burial was complete, and, in fact, if he could find an extra shovel, I would pitch in. I think it was then that he looked in my eyes and became afraid. I would not have been surprised if he had a momentary thought to call the police and to order an autopsy on the body to make sure she had died of natural causes.

But where is it written that we are to love our parents? Honor, yes. Love? How do you love someone when you had no say in creating the relationship? Love must be a choice. It was a choice Jessica and I did not make.

I did not love my mother, and for a simple reason. My mother did not love me. Generally, we love those who love us. Or, we think we do. You and me, for example.

I will go to the cemetery and see Andrea buried and that will be the end. And then, I don’t know. Even though there’s new snow at home, there’s also snow in Colorado and New Mexico. I won’t really know until I see her casket resting in the earth. Then, for the first time in my life, I think I will be free.

1
P.M.

I had not planned to write so much. My original thought had been to simply tell you what the silence at my core has been. That is proving to be harder than I thought. But I also find that I want you to understand, which is a surprise. But I owe you that. You have loved a woman who thought she loved you and found that she didn’t but not because of you.

Do you remember a few years ago we were in the post office in Newport and I asked for some first-class stamps and the clerk gave me some with Cal’s picture on it? They had just been issued. I shoved them back and asked for others. Afterwards, you said what I did seemed racist. I laughed and you were a little annoyed. And before that, the first year there was the national holiday named after Cal, you were angry that I wouldn’t go to Burlington with you to attend a gathering at some church where I would have to listen to speeches by a whole lot of people who never knew him? You hinted again that my refusal “to honor the memory of John Calvin Marshall” made me a racist.

I can’t tell you how sick I am of black people and their white sycophants shouting racism whenever they don’t get their way. If there is anything more tyrannical than the tyranny of the oppressor, it is the tyranny of the oppressed and their fellow travelers.

Why didn’t you ask me, Gregory, why I didn’t want those stamps? Why didn’t you ask me why I didn’t want to “honor” Cal’s memory by observing the holiday in his name?

Forgive me. I want it both ways, don’t I? I berate you for wanting to understand me, for using the word, why, in my presence, and then I ask you to ask me why. What I really want is for you and me to live in such intimacy that you
know
when I need to be asked why and when I don’t. How are you supposed to know the difference? What else is a husband supposed to know?

Gregory, the least that a husband and wife can expect is that they be kind to each other. Regardless of what else happens, kindness must prevail. If they can be kind even when they hate each other, the love will return as surely as a cat will when it runs and hides from the slamming of a door. But if there is no kindness, there is no ground for weary feet to stand on.

I have been unkind, Gregory, and I am sorry. Since the day we met I have chosen the silence of my own self-centeredness. Of course you have the right to ask why. Of course you have the right to seek to understand me. Understanding the ways of another helps us live with what would otherwise be unacceptable. I have made it impossible for you to understand. I have made it impossible for you to accept. (Being in Nashville, one tends to start thinking in Country and Western lyrics. I just thought of one that would describe what I’ve done to you: “Like a hound dog, I’ve kept you tied in the back yard of my life.”)

“I envied you,” Bobby said to me one night.

“Why?”

“Because you were with Cal more than anyone. God, I loved that man.”

“Is that why you moved back here to work for Andrea?”

He shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it like that. I don’t know. But I have a feeling you’re trying to change the subject, or at least deflect it from yourself.”

I had to smile. “There might be a measure of truth to that.”

“I wish you would write a book about him. Nobody is more qualified. I read all the books about him and there is never any mention of you.”

“Oh, they come with their tape recorders and notepads and smiles. Do they think I will tell them the truth merely because they want to know? And what makes them think they would recognize truth? What makes them think they have the capacity to understand and describe Cal?

“They ask their questions and I say nothing. They accuse me of withholding information. They remind me of my obligation to history, of what will be lost to posterity if what I know about John Calvin Marshall goes to the grave with me. I say nothing and eventually they leave. I read their books and I underline this and that and write angry rebuttals in the margins but I will not talk to them and I will not write my own book.”

“I wanted Andrea to talk to you about her book. She responded rather cooly to the suggestion.”

I have not told him why.

In the post office that day, I shoved the stamps back because I couldn’t imagine licking a stamp on which was the image of the man whose penis I had licked for seven years. I saw Cal’s picture on the stamp and immediately there came the image of his penis, long and thick and hard as a diamond. It was black, blacker than anything else on his body as if it had taken on the darkness of the inside of the vagina. The books say women don’t care what size a man’s penis is. That is because the only penises they have seen have been small. Believe me, it makes a difference. So, I’m looking at his likeness on a stamp and remembering his penis and my tongue and I try to imagine licking the gum on the back of the stamp but I see myself licking the semen as it flowed down the side of his penis, and, well, it was a little too much to deal with standing in the post office in Newport, Vermont.

Cal’s penis was magnificent. If it had been a horse, it would have been a black Arabian stallion. If it had been a bird, it would have been an eagle. If it had been in the sea, it would have been a whale.

The penis is divine. Maybe not tiny ones like yours, but with Cal’s I understood why, in India, lingams are set up at crossroads and women lavish them with lotion. The penis is divine because it is the instrument of life. Through it passes the seed of human existence. Through it, male and female are renewed spiritually. When sex is good, male and female arise from the bed with a new understanding of human existence. This new understanding never lasts long, however, which is why we want sex as often as possible. It is the means given to each and everyone of us to be more than we are.

Think about the penis, Gregory. What does it do? What is its function, really? It connects. Couple is a noun. It is also a verb. To couple is to make a connection whereby two who have been separate become one. That is what the penis does; it banishes loneliness, or it has that potential. Unfortunately, men are stupid. They think the penis penetrates. They think the penis is meant to thrust and jab and batter and so they bang and bluster and huff and puff until they have their orgasms, spill their seed and go to sleep, and then wonder why they harvest women’s anger.

I am happy that Cal’s last act in this life was using his penis. When the coroner stripped his body for the autopsy, his penis was still moist from the wetness of my vagina. Strands of semen hung from his penis like tiny ribbons.

I feel foolish telling you about his penis. But maybe, maybe if I share with you what I love, emotion will return color to the images and I will come back and live inside my body, even when I am not on skis.

I was a virgin when Cal and I first slept together. He was to be commencement speaker at my graduation. I was not surprised when the phone rang in my room at school late one evening about a week before commencement. I recognized his voice immediately.

“Elizabeth.” No, “Hello.” No, “How are you?” Just my name.

“Hi.”

It was as if two years had not passed with no words between us. There was no chitchat. He gave me his flight number and I said I would meet him. I asked him what hotel he was staying at. He said he thought he was supposed to be staying at the president of the college’s house, but he would prefer not to.

Cal was comfortable with me because I was not awed by him, not even then. Which is not to say that I don’t think he was the most amazing man I’ve ever known or that I didn’t admire him. I did and he needed that. But more, he needed someone who, at the most inappropriate moment, would whisper in his ear, “I am going to suck your dick so good tonight.”

I know I never said that to you or did it. But a couple creates the modes of sexual expression appropriate for them. What would have sounded vulgar between you and me was exciting for me and Cal.

I didn’t know if Cal wanted to see the press when he got off the plane. I thought not because he was flying out two days before he had to and had asked me to meet him at the airport. I called the airline, pretended I was a representative of the college and asked if it would be possible to drive onto the airfield and pick Cal up directly from the plane rather than have him come through the terminal? No problem. I asked Daddy if he could arrange for me to have a limo at Cal’s disposal. And by the way, was anybody using his company’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel? I called the college president’s office, pretended to be Cal’s secretary and told him that Dr. Marshall had a series of private meetings set up and would not be staying at the president’s home.

I perceived needs Cal did not know he had and it gave me delight to satisfy them.

Love is simple, Gregory. There is nothing mysterious or difficult about it. Love is the taking delight in the existence of the other.

We never did that, did we? I don’t know that you knew it was possible. But I did and I did not tell you.

It is just as well, perhaps, because I am not sure that any of what I’ve written about me and Cal is true. I am not sure that what I have written with such confidence was shared experience or imagined. I am not sure that my life, from the day I met Cal until this day has not been a fantasy, a deliberate lie because I was afraid the truth would shatter me.

Until ten days ago I had never spoken aloud one syllable about me and Cal. That’s against the nature of love, isn’t it? Love wants to be known. I was silent for thirty-two years about the central experience of my life.

I should have told you before we married. Maybe I was afraid you would call it off. No. I knew you wouldn’t do that. I was more afraid you would be proud to be married to the mistress of John Calvin Marshall. No marriage stands a chance if it fears truth.