Forbidden Fruit (7 page)

Love was pure and everlasting, and it surely happened only once if at all in any lifetime. In my gratitude at having found
it, at having begun to understand it, I outflew the birds. So effortless the soaring sea-gulling of the heart in love.

But did Eamonn feel, as I did, that our meeting was part of a common destiny? And even if he did love me, would he ever feel
free to express it?

I do not mean by kissing me passionately. That had to be a mistake on his part, never to be repeated, but at least it proved
the strength of his feelings for me. Still less did I mean it sexually—he was committed to living a celibate life. What
I had in mind was, rather, a lifelong sharing of intimate thoughts, hopes, dreams that neither time nor distance could obliterate.
In his absence abroad, I had absolute confidence in a oneness of the spirit, his and mine, that would overcome all obstacles.

Calling to mind his sweet face, I realized that lately he had lost much of his former calm and self-assurance. Seeing him
in a mirror when he thought I was not looking, I had caught him frowning uncharacteristically, as if he had a burden he would
like to share. Often, while talking over the fire at night, this precise man had become entangled in a sentence that grew
ever more complex until he had to stop and shake his head as if to clear it. He wanted to tell me something but either lacked
the words or the courage to do so.

Was he, too, stumbling toward the discovery of a path that led to the magic and eternity of love?

I prayed that he would find some way of communicating with me, some way of opening his heart to me as I had begun to open
myself to him. He would not find it easy, that was obvious. He knew more of charity than of love. He was expert at giving;
receiving was far harder. He had schooled himself through years of service to offer sympathy, not to accept it. His vocation
in life was to appear strong for the sake of others, not to show the weakness and need that accompany love among equals.

That day and the days that followed were the first test for my new existence. Eamonn never left my mind nor did distance separate
us. I no longer had the slightest doubt that he was the one person with whom I could share everything and be completely me,
if only he would allow it.

Something else was special about him. He was the one man whom I trusted physically. Others had abused me terribly. Eamonn
never would. In this respect, his celibacy was a help, not a hindrance to our love.

I was in such a peaceful frame of mind I was totally unprepared for the manner of his homecoming.

Late in the evening, I heard his car on the drive, but so slow I realized something was wrong. I wanted to rush out of my
room, fling open the front door, and embrace him, but it was Mary’s job to greet him, not mine.

I sensed something terrible had happened. Maybe he had met up with a fellow bishop, made a confession of his sins and returned
home determined to cast me out of his life forever.

In fact, he was ill. I could tell that by his slow tread as he went via the hallway into the living room. He was ill enough
to have gone straight to bed; he had chosen to go instead to a public place where I could tend him.

I walked nonchalantly out of my room and ran into Mary.

“The Bishop’s ill, Annie. I’m making him a cup of tea.”

I went into the living room and, in spite of the loving appeal in his eyes, I was shocked at his appearance.

He held out his hand to me. I kissed it briefly and took his racing pulse. His pupils also told me something was badly wrong
with him.

“Eamonn, I’m going to ask Mary to call a doctor.”

He shook his head. He said he had caught amoebic dysentery on a trip to Africa the year before and it kept recurring in the
form of colitis. He had just had a bad bout of it in Germany and been hospitalized. He only needed rest.

“No, no, no,” I said.

With all that liquid gone from him and the loss of potassium salts, I feared he might go into shock. I raced to the kitchen
and, while Mary called a doctor, I carried in the tray with the pot of tea. By the time the doctor arrived, Eamonn was in
bed.

Mary told me afterward that he had been given an injection and further medication. The doctor said that in two or three days
he should be as right as rain.

I thought of only him for forty-eight hours. I longed to go and sit by his bed. For two days, Mary said, he slept practically
without waking. For a man who prided himself on making do with four or five hours a night, that was a new experience.

I was in bed when a storm blew up. The sea dashed against the rocks. The trees in the garden creaked and the bushes brushed
eerily against my window. The wild wind made all the indoor shutters bang and rattle in their boxes. I tried to free my shutters
and draw them across, but they were nailed down. Then came rain, hissing against the glass.

I switched on my bedside lamp and read a few pages from
You Can’t Go Home Again
, but my mind refused to focus. I switched off the light and went to sleep about one o’clock. But only for a few minutes,
because I woke with a start to what I thought was my door banging closed in the wind.

I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but I was aware I was not alone in the room.

I switched the light on and there he was.

I was too shaken to utter a word.

His clericals were smart and new, always the crease in the pants and polished black leather shoes. But his nightclothes were
old and worn. Over his pajamas he had on a frayed blue bathrobe. His unshaven face was flushed from a long sleep, and his
eyes were narrowed owing to drugs.

His presence at once took away my fear of the storm. I expected him to sit beside me or at the foot of my bed, but he stood
shaky and in a kind of daze in the middle of the floor.

Out of clerical garb, he was different, less in command.

“Eamonn,” I squeezed out, “you shouldn’t have got up.”

His answer was to kick off his old brown flip-flop leather slippers, untie the cord round his robe, and slip it off his shoulders.

I pitied him from my heart, he was so vulnerable. I did not want things to be like this. He was fragile. His glassy eyes suggested he did not fully know what he was doing.

“You’re ill, Eamonn,” I whispered.

“I know what I’m doing,” he muttered. “Know what I want. Know why I’m here.”

“But the doctor —”

He took off his faded blue pajama top with the white piping and let it fall behind his back. With fumbling fingers, he dropped
and stepped shakily out of his pajama pants.

There stood the Bishop, my love, without clerical collar or crucifix or ring, without covering of any kind. The great showman
had unwrapped himself. Christmas of all Christmases.

This was for me more of a wonder than all the mountains, lark-song, and heather-scents of Ireland. He stood before me, his
only uniform the common flesh of humanity. There were black hairs on his lower arms and in a band across his chest. His legs
were sturdy but shapely; on and around his left knee was a big faint birthmark like a coffee stain.

He looked forlorn, almost like a child lost in a dark wood. I could see his love for me stirring, coming literally alive in
that part of him till then unshown, the sacred part of him that could not lie about his feelings. I looked on mesmerized as
he hardened below a black fringe of curls.

Since I still did not make a move, was too terrified to, he shuffled over and almost fell across my bed. He whipped my nightdress
over my head, neither gentle nor rough. Then he opened the covers and heaved his overheated body in beside me.

Once he was lying down his thrashing matched the fierce disruptive rhythms of the storm.

I did not mind him sleeping in my bed, it was big enough. I wanted him as near as possible so I could give him solace, help
him get well, but he had only one thing on his mind. What possessed me was my willingness to let him take from me whatever
he needed.

I witnessed a great hunger. This was an Irish Famine of the flesh. Here was a man releasing energies and feelings pent up
for over twenty-five adult years.

Panting heavily, his mouth and lips covered and then explored mine. He fondled and kissed my breasts, and ran hands, strong
in spite of his fever, over every inch of me, hands that had spoken to me so eloquently of the wonders of Ireland, hands that
could calm a runaway horse.

I still hoped that nothing would happen. It would break my heart if he acted under the influence of drugs. I felt like a man
who has taken advantage of a woman.

Besides, he might regret it. He might even blame me as he blamed me when he nearly ran into the Ford van on the road. I did
not want to be the cliff’s edge for his flying feet.

I looked up and stroked him softly with both hands round his bristly cheeks. I murmured sweet words to him, enjoyed the sheer
weight of him and his passionate caresses.

It struck me that, aside from his delight in the smells and smoothness of feminine skin, this all-knowing cleric and completely
inexperienced man did not really have a language of sex. He might have kissed a woman, maybe many. But I was surely the first
woman whose flesh had met the fullness of his naked flesh.

The more than twenty-year difference between us did not matter now. He was a novice lover. He did not begin to understand
the geography of my body and in his hurry to discover it he came too early. I felt the sticky odorous wetness running down
the inside of my thighs. So, while he was old enough to be my father, he seemed, in the end, young enough to be my son.

For a woman, there are many ways to explore a man and express love. I did not need to have him climax inside me to know he
was mine. I did not even want it.

In the past, I had kidded men, my husband included, that I had not taken precautions against pregnancy when I had. It was
a ruse to make them withdraw from me without leaving their seed behind to blend with the juices inside me and leave an odor
and a texture that I could not bear.

The reason for my dislike went back to when I was seventeen. I was in my last year at school. Don, my boyfriend, had a reputation
for being sexy, but I thought it only meant he liked kissing girls. He was the first to arouse me; and when he kissed me I
thought I was on fire.

One spring—mimosa, oleander, lantana in blossom—we were at school when a tornado struck a half mile away. Susan, my closest
buddy, and I went under the desk for shelter. The noise was terrifying, I was shaking violently, convinced my last hour had
come. Susan took out a metal hip flask and introduced me to rum. Rum and I were instant best friends. The tornado passed and,
happy to be alive, we went out to celebrate.

One guy let me drink beer out of his ten-gallon hat and we danced on a picnic table. Don was jealous. He knocked my dance
partner out with one punch to the jaw, grabbed me off the table, and, piling me into his black Pontiac sports car, drove me
to the lake. There we scrambled, as usual, into the backseat. But he had a black glassy possessive look in his eye I had not
seen before, and sweat pumped out of the pores of his nose.

He ripped my dress open, tore off my bra, and started biting me. I yelled at him to stop, but he wouldn’t. I scratched his
face so he recoiled, giving me just enough time to jump out of the car.

I ran screaming but he caught up with me, threw me to the ground, and bent over me, beating me.

“Please
don’t
,’ I said. “I’m a virgin.”

He stuck his fingers inside me. “My God,” he said, “you
are
. Okay, get up.”

I stood up and he carried me back to the car and threw me in the front seat. Sitting beside me, he grabbed my hair and pulled
me toward him as if he were insane.

“Do something for me or I’ll rape you, virgin or not.”

I said, “Okay, name it.”

He opened his pants and out popped this dun-colored snake, with rearing head and giant twitching mouth, swinging back and
forth like a windshield wiper.

Never having seen anything this gross, I put my head in my hands and laughed hysterically. “What d’ya want me to do with
that
?”

“Jerk it, dope,” he said, “jerk me off.”

I tried, but my hand got stuck on that thing.

“Use some saliva,” he said, but my mouth was too dry.

“Faster,” he ordered, brutally elbowing my left side, “faster.”

After what seemed forever, there was a kind of spitting and the inverted milking turned into a snow shower that went everywhere.
It landed on my hand, my lips, my hair, and it clung so I couldn’t get it off. The rancid smell of it in that confined space
filled my lungs like a sewer. I begged him to take me home.

Once there, breathless, enraged, with, in my chest, a sense of impending doom, I scissored all my clothes into little bits
and crouched in the corner of the shower like a spider, for the first time showering in the dark. I thought:

To some men, women are not people. They picnic on our bodies, on our feelings, and, sated, pass on. We women are but the litter
of their so-called love
.

Water, cold water ran all over me as I tried in vain—I’m still trying—to wash off me the stains and the godawful smells.

Next morning, Daddy loomed over my bed. “Get up, Annie.”

He lifted my nightdress with the black cane he used after his leg was amputated.

That cane reminded me of the snake in the car.

I screamed, “What the hell, Daddy?”

Two crystal tears ran a close race down his cheeks.

“You’re bruised all over. Someone rape you? Did they?”

“You crazy, we played touch football and I was tackled real heavy.”

That was the first time I lied to save a man’s skin. I did it as easy as breathing. Daddy gave me a couple of tablets, which
brought oblivion. No gift more gratefully received in my entire life.

Next day, I told Susan. I was with our crowd including a newcomer named Jeff Fox, and when they saw my bruises, they went
in search of Don and kicked his guts in and broke his arm. Jeff took me to hospital to have my ribs wrapped. He became my
mentor and next boyfriend—that’s another story with the usual picnic ending.