The Devil Tree (3 page)

When I awoke in the morning, Barbara was already up and dressed. “Where is Mrs. Llewellyn?” she asked.

“I don’t know. She’s not back yet.”

“But we heard her come home last night, and you said you were going to help her. Now she’s not in her room, and her car isn’t here.”

“I told you she hasn’t come back,” I insisted. “We heard someone else’s car, that’s all.”

She became angry. “Stop playing games. Where is Mrs. Llewellyn?”

“I suppose she’s somewhere. Everybody is. If I were you,” I said deliberately, “I wouldn’t bother about her anymore. No one will notice if she doesn’t come back. The place is ours now.”

Barbara stormed out of the house, slamming the front door. Through the bedroom window I watched her examining the unpaved driveway for car tracks and searching the adjoining garden. She came back, visibly upset, asking, “Where is she? What did you do to her, Jonathan?”

“Stop it. Let’s go swimming,” I said calmly.

Barbara put her hands on my shoulders. “What have you done to her?” she asked.

“Please, forget it,” I said, pulling her toward me and kissing the inside of her ear.

She pushed me gently toward the bed.

“How did you—? Was it. . . was it quick?” she whispered. “What if they find the body?”

“Stop talking about her. This isn’t a Hollywood horror movie.”

“If I’d known you meant it, I never would have—”

“Let’s go swimming,” I said.

When we came out of the pool, naked, and I pointed to the cabana, Barbara followed me inside. Impatient, she threw some pool towels on the floor and lay down on them, her legs spread apart, her arms held up to me. I went down on my knees, my hands rubbing her thighs, searching her flesh. She was in a frenzy, trembling and shaking, her movements quickening as, urging me to take her, she arched off the floor, then fell back, then arched again.

“Don’t—don’t be gentle,” she moaned. “Please be rough, Jonathan.” For the first time in our lovemaking she was abandoned, no longer suppressing the desire that opium had heightened, probing my body, eager to feel me hardened. Thrashing under me, she yanked my hair, reached for my groin, tightened her grip on my flesh, bit my shoulder. Her orgasms came one after another, and she went limp and calmed down only after I reached mine.

No longer expecting to be interrupted by the return of Mrs. Llewellyn, we became comfortable hermits, for whom smoking opium was not a routine of slavery but a ritual corresponding to the rhythm of our life.

We smoked two pipes in the morning, one at midday, two in the afternoon, one in the early evening, and two or three at night, sleeping, eating, and playing with each other in between. We were attended to by two sons of my opium dealer, and these boys prepared our pipes, lit the lamps, and cooked our food. Our life had become smooth, effortless, and physically salutary.

Aroused by the opium, Barbara often provoked me. She would reach for my testicles and squeeze them until I smacked her. Then she would hit me back, and screaming abuses, she would stand up against the wall, smudging obscene words on her body in bright red lipstick. With no masking of what she wanted, she would encourage me to attack her. I would pull her down by her legs, and when she fumbled over me, we would struggle, each one trying
to overcome the other. I left her alone only when, spent and exhausted, she could no longer move or moan. In the morning she would show me her bruises and insist that—to make up for the pain I had caused her—I tell her how I had killed and disposed of Mrs. Llewellyn.

In her opium haze, she kept recalling something I had once told her. I had visited a bordello on the outskirts of the city. There, as I sat among pubescent girls made up to look like young women and young women dressed to resemble pubescent girls, the madam noticed me glancing at an old woman, her face swollen and twisted, her disfigured body ravaged by opium addiction. “Do you fancy her, mister?” asked the madam, pointing at the woman. “I’m sorry for her,” I said; “at one time she must have been as beautiful and fresh as these little girls.” “She was,” agreed the madam. “She lost her looks, but believe me, in bed she is still as hot as they are. Tell me, young man,” she whispered, taking me aside, her perfumed breath warming my neck, “have you ever fucked a whore to death?” I laughed at her metaphor. “Don’t laugh. You can do it here!” she said. “For two hundred additional American dollars, you can do anything you want with her.” She pointed again at the old woman. “Anything at all.” She paused. “Don’t you say in English, ‘till death do us part’? If you like her, you can part with her with your part,” she said, pinching my loins. “At least she won’t rot away, and she’ll die like a human being—with enough money for a decent burial. I have a quiet cellar, ideal for such parting.”

Now, thinking of the old woman, Barbara wanted to know whether I had taken Mrs. Llewellyn to that cellar. “Did you kill here there?” she asked. “Did you fuck her to death? Did you pay the madam to get rid of her body?”

Barbara began to suffer from insomnia and to smoke even more pipes than I. The pipe was her life, abolishing the difference between minutes and hours, between morning and evening. She lived surrounded by an invisible fence,
and she wanted me inside it only to make love to her. Even in lovemaking she was eager to obliterate the confines of strict sex roles; she wanted to be both bait and baited. She liked to submit, to have her will expanded by surrendering to the will of her lover. Then she would change roles. Anchored behind me, she would tie my hands with one of her stockings, and holding me facedown she would excite me agonizingly slowly by letting her lips and tongue brush the base of my spine, halting just before my orgasm. Then, when I pleaded with her to continue, she would force me to lick her. When I slowed down or bit her, she would straddle my head. My face dampened by her groin, her nipples prickly upon my belly, she would run her hands down the length of my body, her fingers rough and unforgiving, yanking, rubbing, and jerking my flesh until, against my will, breathless in her own excitement, she brought me to an orgasm.

Opium and sex were our loves, but opium was the more possessive. It insisted on regimen, and on an even rhythm of activity and sleep, on hours set aside for the pleasure of food and the peace of the pipe. Our lovemaking steadily upset this required regimen and rhythm. We were betraying the opium, and the opium would punish us for our betrayal. It was time to quit smoking.

One morning, hearing a car pull into the driveway, we got up from the bed and dragged ourselves to the window. There was Mrs. Llewellyn, struggling to drag her large suitcase through the front door. Barbara tried to suppress her anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she cried.

“Tell you what?” I asked. “That I gave the old lady money for a vacation in England?”

•   •   •

Back in the hotel, I was cold and sweaty. My heart fluttered and my pulse slowed. My body itched. I trembled. I oscillated between diarrhea and vomiting. Barbara’s face was flushed, her pupils dilated; moistness blanketed her body. Her touch left my skin cold and damp. When we kissed, her tongue seemed swollen. Like me, she was ill. I was confused, not organized enough to summon help at first.

A few days later I called the hospital and asked for the ambulance to take us there.

•   •   •

After I was disintoxicated and released from the hospital, Barbara remained there, steadily receding under a sheet that was drawn tight across her shoulders, looking as though her head were separated from her body.

Her face was puffed and her body shrunken; her thin neck seemed unable to support her head. Her eyelids closed slowly, as if sticking to her eyeballs.

She murmured that she wanted to die, to take a needle and plunge it into her heart or, failing that, to jump off a tall building.

Even though I had provided and paid for the most competent doctors, Barbara died a month later from complications caused by her addiction. No members of her family in Nebraska could afford to come to her funeral, and at their request her body was to be cremated, her ashes sent home. A minister officiated at the brief ceremony, which was attended by one of Barbara’s doctors, two nurses, Mrs. Llewellyn and her servants, and a minor official from the American consulate, who, knowing who I was, kept eyeing me with obvious interest.

The minister, an oldish, grayish American whose manner
reminded me of my father’s, spoke eloquently about those who, making their beds in hell, unable to rejoice or to seek salvation through their own spirituality, are in danger of being forever lost.

The essence of human life, he said, is as invisible as the meaning of a sermon or a book, or a notion of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, of love and hate. This essence cannot be depicted; it can only be hinted at and expressed through actions and objects, things that can be seen or handled.

Our consciousness, the minister said, is our sole spiritual compass; time and space merely provide a framework for the unfolding of our personal life—its suffering, sacrifice, hope, joy, and despair, which are our only reality. Only by accepting our spirituality as invisible, and the world as its expression, are we able to acknowledge the overwhelming presence of God, Himself an invisible power behind the visible universe—a power for whom space and time are, as they are for each one of us, forms of spiritual expression.

As I was listening to the minister, a single thought took possession of me: I’ve allowed myself to betray and mock life, to play hide-and-seek with the very essence of myself. For reasons obscure to me, I have failed to extract from my Protestant heritage its only prophetic and creative truths: that for as long as I live and in every situation, I must protest against the sin of distortion and the limitations of human existence, including the distortion and limitations of my own life and nature; that such protest contains both the hope of my spiritual rebirth and moral resurrection and the peril of uncertainty and personal confusion. Until now I’ve betrayed my sacred calling.

And I realized that in order to respond to this calling, I would have to begin with myself, with my own life. I would have to return home.

•   •   •

Whenever I am with Karen in a public place, among strangers, I feel an urge to touch her, to confirm my hold over her. At the same time, detached from the reality of the moment, I envision Karen and myself making love in the most outlandish manner, defying the taboos of society as well as the rituals we both still follow. Only Karen triggers in me a state in which I watch my own being as if from a distance.

•   •   •

Photography has never interested me, and that’s why, instead of collecting pictures of myself, I collect and write down my memories and impressions. I expect Karen to do the same: after all, how much can I learn about her from her fashion photographs?

I still keep a letter Karen once wrote me.

To live in secrecy, Jonathan, is to fear yourself, to deny your own existence. You have made such a maze of your life that finally you no longer know what is satisfying: you live in an exile of your own making, excluding almost everyone, venturing out only in the name of exploration and expansion. Your psyche is your own POW camp and Barbara, the opium cipher, your prisoner. A woman who loves a man enough to give up a life of her own—but, denied his love, is given only sex—is dying inside.

That you have separated your love from your sexuality is what makes both your mind so keen and your life so tragic. You have risked many things, but not, it seems, your heart, and risking one’s heart is the greatest risk of all. I have risked little, but with you I did gamble with my heart, and it was broken. With you gone I feel as if you were never here. You told me once that I was invulnerable, yet you set about to prove that I wasn’t. When, finally, I succumbed to you, you blamed me for not being invulnerable—for caring about you and wanting you to care about me. And so you began to play that God-giveth-and-God-taketh-away Whalen game: get on your clothes, I don’t want you anymore, you’re getting out; sorry, I do need you, you’re staying on; no, you’re not staying, you’re leaving now. You once said that with someone dumber than I, you would have been, as you termed it, “emotionally dishonest.” For me, you said, you reserved your “spiritual truth”—which, to me, is nothing but a constant and cruel change of your mind. But in my short life I have discovered that truth is infinite and involves use of the heart. To illustrate: I love you, Jonathan. Has it ever occurred to you that your own heart has been ignored, denied, and subverted? Maybe your heart doesn’t want to play any more Whalen games; maybe it just wants to be loved.

You know what pleases me: my modeling, being the best and the highest paid, travel, chocolate chip cookies, fucking someone I love—you—and hearing you talk about what it is that you would really want to do with me if I agreed to become your slave. But then I was weaned on
peanut butter and jelly—salty goo and sweet mush: I’m an infant seer. I was never meant to be a slave, to be just fucked. I can’t handle it. I don’t know what it means. Mr. Prolong, the Don Juan of American virility and stay-hard bedroom power, whose only desire is to hear a woman scream either “More!” or “Enough!” makes me mute and frightened. My voice comes from mother’s milk, from affection and warmth and support.

•   •   •

Karen measures love by its endurance and intensity. The spiritual loyalty of true lovers to each other has, in her eyes, nothing to do with their sexual faithfulness to each other, which she denounces as a dishonest state enforced by jealousy, a bondage of spirit, a reluctant acceptance of sexual inertia.

I recall that spring day when Karen and I lay on the grass in New Haven, kissing, reading, pulling up blades of grass. The wind scattered the long-winged nuts from the maples onto our faces, rippled through our clothes, blew Karen’s hair across my face. Then suddenly Karen told me we were finished. She said she didn’t want to see me anymore.