I know the exorbitant price of a passion like the one Heath Lawler and I could share. I learned firsthand down in Texas. When Glen and I were living in Dallas, I met this boy Randy at my yoga class. He was twenty and I was twenty-two. Randy had a shotgun Pentecostal wedding when he was nineteen. It turned out the gun wasn’t loaded. The girl wasn’t pregnant. She tricked him. Her father had a lot of money. Her mother spent ten hours a day in church. She and Randy lived in a trailer on their property. Randy was going to Bible college.
He had long, thick chestnut hair that fell over his shoulders. He played folk guitar and wrote songs. He made and sold silver and turquoise Indian style jewelry part time at a hippie store near downtown. I thought he was the end of the world.
It has often been rightfully said about me that I’ll tell a lie when the truth works a whole lot better. I’m telling the truth about this. I went to that yoga class hoping something like that might happen.
I was bored witless with Glen six months after I married him. Glen has God and the Universe wadded up in his shirt pocket. Glen knows the reason for everything. If Glen doesn’t understand, it’s not to be pondered. I’m no intellectual. However, I’m curious about things. People like Glen won’t live with unanswered questions. They race through this life like scared little rabbits. They have the world screwed on backwards and they worship their own worst fears.
On the first night of yoga class, Randy sat next to me. He knew a lot about yoga. He kept showing me how to take positions. We fell into talking after class. He took me to a coffeehouse. I had my first cup of espresso. We talked about life and philosophy. I made him laugh. It was strange. I was saying things that would set Glen off and he was amused by them. Of course Randy did most of the
talking. I was too busy praying silently that he wouldn’t say it was time to go. If I had been paying more attention, I would have asked myself why a married man in Bible college was sitting there talking to me about love and freedom and honesty. All I wanted that night was to roll myself up into a ball to crawl inside his chest and sleep.
I knew by eleven o’clock that Glen would be frantic. I didn’t care. Sometime after midnight the place closed. It had started to rain. To this day I don’t know where he took me in his van. I remember the sound of the rain. I remember when he kissed me I stopped hurting. It was a shock because until that nameless ache suddenly ceased, I had been unaware of it. He said he loved my boldness and my humor. I was completely captivated by his tenderness. I had never had a gentle lover. He called me a miracle. I cried with happiness. We laughed a lot. Then the sky was gray and pink in the east. I was certain Glen had the police out looking for me. It didn’t matter. There was love in his eyes when he told me good-bye. All the way home I kept trying to make myself plan what I’d say to Glen. I wouldn’t let those thoughts intrude upon my happiness. To this day I can’t remember exactly what I told him. It was something about a girl in class needing a ride home. I think I said she lived way out in the country and that we’d had car trouble miles from the nearest phone. Whatever it was it relieved him. Glen was all over me, kissing me in that selfish, gnawing manner he confuses with passion. I let him take me to bed. I let him kiss me in that rough way he has of convincing himself he’s all lover. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud when he told me I smelled nice. I was reeking of Randy’s sweat and cologne. When it started to hurt, I pulled way back into my mind and pretended that Glen was Randy. Randy was making love to me the way Glen did as a joke. Then it really started hurting. I couldn’t pretend anything anymore. All I could do was lie there and look at his thick, selfish face all scrunched up as he worked his way to the finish line and wonder who he thought he was loving.
I come from cold, hollow people who were raised up in Old Testament righteousness. We had the minister to Sunday dinner a lot. It was all Jesus, niggers, communists and Jews over deep-fat
fried chicken at our house. I despised it from the day I was born. I could turn on the television and see it wasn’t like that in other places. I made Glen promise we’d move out west or up north before I’d sleep with him. “Up north” was a bald-faced lie and “out west” turned into computer school in Dallas. I was thinking more like San Francisco or Seattle. Dallas is Alabama stretched out with a little more money.
Glen was the first halfway respectable boy who asked me out. He was solid and surefooted and I thought he’d keep me out of mischief. I’ve been in one kind of trouble or another most of my life. I was very grateful when Glen started paying attention to me.
The problem is you can suffocate on gratitude. There’s only so long you can whisper “I love you” between the sheets and sigh and moan when the truth is he’s hurting you because he comes at you all at once and he’s done and asleep in a minute and you’re lying there with a throbbing headache wondering how much more you can take.
Randy was Lord Byron in a denim jacket. Randy would always read to me first. Sometimes it was a poem he’d written. Sometimes it was from one of the little books I brought him. He would give me a glass of wine and lay my head on his chest and stroke my hair. His voice and all those beautiful words were better than wine. Sometimes our talking would get so deep and involved that we’d forget making love altogether. Randy let me love him back. I fell one thousand and ten percent in love with Randy.
Glen has all kind of names for what was taking place between Randy and me. To Glen a thing like we had is sordid, trashy and soap operatic. It’s common, immoral, dirty and beneath contempt. How Glen loves to grit his teeth and say, “Beneath contempt.”
Glen’s ego wouldn’t allow him to embrace what was going on right under his nose, in his bed. Glen could suspect, but he couldn’t really imagine Randy drinking his wine, laying his head on his pillow, using his razor, his rubbers, his deodorant and once, because Randy had a class, his shirt.
I didn’t do it to hurt Glen. I had nothing specific against Glen. It would have been a whole lot easier on me if I had. I felt tremendous
guilt about it, but not enough to stop me. To this good day Glen Pembroke will go into a mood and demand that I tell him all about Randy and me in detail. He likes to beat himself up with it. I honestly think if I’d take a rubber hose and beat Glen silly he’d be the happiest man on earth.
Six months after Randy and I were together for the first time, his wife saw his car at my house. We had to start using motels, which was complicated because I had to explain my absences and motels get expensive. That little Pentecost woman was determined. She hired a detective. He followed us. He got pictures, license plate numbers, the whole sordid mess.
One Saturday Glen was sitting in the den watching a football game. A deputy sheriff rang the doorbell and handed him a subpoena. She was suing Randy for a divorce and me for something called alienation of affection. I was scared to death. I think we were both just too tense to talk. I packed and got out of there as quickly as I could. I found a little house up on Lake Grapevine which I could rent by the week. I drained Glen’s checking account and hauled all his credit cards to cash machines for the money to get Randy and me through. I told myself it was the price of love.
Randy left his wife and moved in with me; but it was already different between us. I was costing him more than he had to spend. He tried not to resent me for that. But he did. Randy still looked me in the eye, but I could see a wall building back there in his head. He was trying to hold back a gathering storm he didn’t want to share with me.
I knew the court date was coming up, and I kept saying that we should get out of Texas while we had the money to do it, and he kept putting me off. One day I came home from the grocery store and Randy and his things were gone. I rode by her mama and daddy’s place, and I saw his car in the driveway.
It took me a few weeks of torment, but I finally put it all together. It ended that way because it had never really existed. I invented Randy that first night at yoga class. I turned an ordinary kid with no direction into a prince out of a fable. I lifted his station. I imbued him with a hundred kinds of poetry he would never possess. When
Randy looked into my eyes he saw that fantastic creature of my invention. I gave him a part he loved to play. What man with a grain of honesty doesn’t want to think of himself as a shining warrior? For Randy that was a hundred times more pleasant than being himself, an unsure kid married to a woman he didn’t love, attending a school he despised—all in the name of inheriting her father’s money. Playing my prince was an illusion Randy couldn’t sustain. That same core of decency that attracted me to him made it impossible for him to lie to himself or me forever. He had to get back to who and where he really was. He had to move up or down from there.
I called Mama and begged a plane ticket. I went home to Alabama and put up with her condemnations for a few weeks. All I needed was a place to lay my head until I could find a job and a place of my own. At least I was away from Glen Pembroke. I knew I’d be all right. Then I realized that I was pregnant. I hadn’t slept with Glen in three months by that time, so I knew it was Randy’s. Mama said I couldn’t stay there. She wasn’t about to help me raise a baby when Glen had all he had and he was crazy about me. She isn’t about to help anybody if she can possibly avoid it. Mama is the sanctimonious, cold, smiling Sunday school type who gives Christians everywhere their bad reputation.
Today I’d beg, borrow or steal the money and have an abortion if I was in a mess like that. I wouldn’t create unwanted children. I wouldn’t bring helpless little burdens into a situation like mine and Glen’s. I don’t want them and their father doesn’t know what they are. It gives them too much to overcome. I feel so guilty for believing that I bend double to spoil my children with kindness when a loving parent would give them guidance and parameters. How much better it would have been to save their souls for a sane mother who wanted them. Kids get shafted in this world. It warps them. They grow into adults who turn around and shaft their kids.
I suppose it was guilt. I had hurt myself and Glen. I hurt Randy too. Mama was tossing me out. I didn’t have the guts to be pregnant and divorced and trying to make it in this world. I went back to Dallas, to Glen, to hell. The only relief I’ve known since then was
a few hours with Heath Lawler. I won’t do to Heath Lawler what I did to Randy. I won’t create in him someone we both know he’ll never be. Better to hurt him and myself now. Let him think I’m shallow and fickle. Let him blame me now and get over it. I’m accustomed to the strangeness in this house.
I won’t stretch it any farther. I won’t test the bounds of Glen’s sanity. It’s a twisted game with us. He deliberately chose a woman like me. He wants me to provide him an excuse to act out the cruel, perverse agenda he guards from public view. He’s on a mission. As dark as it gets for me sometimes, as much as I long for a different path, I know Glen’s unarticulated torments lead him alone into sulphurous pits of despair I can’t even imagine.
There’s no place in all this for Heath. He’s worth more than that. I’ve told him everything. I’ve explained it. Heath says I’m just afraid of an honest love. He’s right, of course. He’s not twisted like Glen or weak like Randy. He’s too decent for me. I’m afraid of a man I can’t hold at arm’s length. There’s only so vulnerable I’ll allow myself to be. I’m terrified of giving myself completely. If I wasn’t careful, Heath could swallow me up. He’d absorb me. I’d dissolve and disappear into him.
I
t was burning hot in the sun, but the air was laced with damp. A chill seeped out of the ground and permeated the iron chair where he had been sketching most of the afternoon. His mind kept drifting away, his heart listening.
There are eternal things that thump between opaque leaves and yellow blotches of sun when no men are there to disturb them. There are living rings of purple and pulsing swirls of red that float between the air and the eye and reveal themselves to the Chosen. These are the harbingers of change, the revelations of the deepest truths, the answers that will not and yet suddenly and finally come.
That was Beauty B. as clear as the dying sunlight that shone through the roses as he sat in the garden that separated the convent from the infirmary.
It had been a slow recovery with many setbacks. The fever would disappear for a day, then the aching and the sore eyes would greet him when he woke the next morning. It had taken weeks to collect the strength to walk from his room to the little sun porch where the nurses, most of them starched white nuns like Sister Margaret Helen, ate their egg salad sandwiches and sipped tea.
The U.S. Army, a typewritten letter informed him, placed no value whatsoever on a colored boy with a rheumatic heart. He was
honorably discharged. Sister Margaret Helen was enraptured when he informed her he had read the Dickens and the Defoe she borrowed for him from the school library. She treated as a divine gift the discovery that he was for the most part fairly well educated. She considered the completion of his education her solemn duty, enlisting the aid of the principal, Brother Willamen, a corpulent monk who spoke with a thick German accent. He brought Hez an algebra workbook and another containing grammar exercises. When he had successfully completed them, he was rewarded with a Latin primer and a biology text. Brother Willamen and Sister Margaret Helen became determined to heal him, mind, body and soul. Their investment in him was thorough and for the most part genuine. All they wanted in return was to render one faithful Catholic to Rome.
However, church history, hierarchy and, most of all, dogma, seemed a million miles away from the basic ideas for living to which they bore exemplary witness. They lent far too much credence to church rules and the ever changing orders handed down from Rome. Stained glass houses of worship and alabaster statues of the saints were superfluous. Beauty B.’s pulpit had been a stump in the woods, her cathedral a clump of dry cedars that pointed towards heaven. Sister Margaret was as wrong about his suitability for membership in the Holy Church of Rome as she was right when she said that God had brought him back because he had things for Hez to do in this world.