The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (56 page)

“It is not mystical.”

He is in his old neighborhood, though he never thought of it as a neighborhood, more like some kind of accident that just happened, he but a passing witness. He had always known that his mission in life, as his mother had often reminded him, transcended neighborhoods, transcended towns, really, even nations, though sometimes it was hard to remember that during board wranglings or disorderly teenage Sunday School classes or rodent problems in the church basement. There are a lot of churches in this neighborhood, as there are in all others, here mostly made of stone or brick in accordance with the construction principles of the third little piggy. Trinity Lutheran is a limestone church with a heavy Teutonic entranceway, probably built about the same time as the lodge out at the church camp. Dark and damp inside, as he recalls, but pleasingly resonant for a preacher’s voice.

“Paul said, Christ lives in me. Does he live in you, Connie?”

Connie meditates on that. He lights up a pipe, so Wesley does likewise despite Jesus’ complaints that he is being asphyxiated. “Well, sure, Wes, in the sense that we all partake of the holy spirit. The ground of all being resonates through us all.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know, but I have to answer you in the way I best know how. I am less inclined to personalize the manifestations of the Absolute than are you. It is hard to speak of this, because as Dionysius the Areopagite has said: the finite cannot express encounters with the infinite. The created cannot do justice to the Creator. But I always feel that the spirit of God is within me, that God Himself is the ground of the soul and there is an inward way to Him. When I pray, I am not speaking to some outside other, but to the God within.”

“Yeah, well, does he ever talk back?”

“I believe my prayers are sometimes answered.”

“No, I mean, does he coach you in what to say and make you do things you weren’t planning to do and say things like ‘Where am I? Turn on the lights!’ or ‘Salute one another with a holy kiss,’ or ‘Hey, let me see your vengeance on them?’”

Connie chuckles around his pipestem. “What’s that from? Jeremiah? Lamentations?”

“His remarks are not always original, but given the context, it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time.” The more words, the more vanity, Jesus is saying now. He has been grumpy ever since they left the studio. Is there no end to windy words? “Right now he is saying, Is there no end to windy words?”

“Job, probably. No, that is not the sort of conversation, if it can be called that, that I have with the transcendent cause of all things. It is more like the immersion of my finite self within the infinite self that is God.”

“You know what? I think you’re just kidding yourself, Connie.”

Priscilla falters at the door of the Italian bar and grill. She can hear men hooting and barking with laughter inside and assumes they are laughing at poor Wesley. He is about all there is to laugh at in this town nowadays. She doesn’t want to do this, but she must. Only she can rescue him. Her dance will be one of great suffering, but the suffering should not show on her face, for it would only be cause for more cruel laughter. She steels herself (she has a little dance for this) and pushes on in, half blinded by fear and shame. The mayor is in there, the former mayor, and two of the church trustees who voted for Wesley’s incarceration, Burt Robbins and Jim Elliott, and they are looking at her with wild grins on their faces. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Wesley is not among them.

“Hey, Prissy!” Jim shouts as though from mountaintop to mountaintop, then heehaws like a donkey and falls off his barstool, bringing fresh whoops of laughter from the others. That her name alone evokes such merriment means they’ve been talking about her.

“If you’re looking for your loony loverboy,” Burt says, unable to speak without snarling through his beak, “he and whoever he was talking to just left.”

“Without paying,” the mayor adds in his booming voice, and the big flat-faced man behind the bar, a squeaky piccolo to the mayor’s bass, concurs.

“I’ll pay his bill,” she says, reaching into her purse, and they all think this is funny, too.

“So, how’s Ralph, Prissy?” Burt asks pointedly, and she decides to ignore that, preferring that they laugh at her silence rather than anything she might say. Jim is still on the floor but able still to emit donkey sounds. “You guys all dancing together now?”

They all laugh at that, but the little roly-poly narrow-eyed ex-mayor with the big nose says, “Easy, Burt. That’s enough.”

Not quite: “I bet you look pretty cute all tangled up in your tutus.”

“Did he say where he was going?” she asks, handing the barman a bill still crisp from the bank and pointing at the slice of lemon meringue pie in the glass case on the counter. She knows she will suffer more mocking laughter as she leaves, but perhaps she can deflect it somehow.

“For here?” the proprietor asks, and she nods.

“Said he needed a bath,” the mayor bellows. “We let him know he could use a shave and a haircut, too.”

“We told him he could also give that inner dummy he was talking to a good soaking,” growls Burt through their sour snickering. “Maybe he could hold him under and drown the sonuvabitch.”

She is somewhat alarmed by this news but hides her emotions behind a dancer’s expressionless mask. She takes the slice of pie off the plate and holds it in the palm of her hand and gazes contemplatively at it as a mystic might gaze at a leaf or a feather, finding the mysteries of the universe contained within it, or as a jeweler might scrutinize a diamond or a pearl. Or Salome, the Baptist’s head, its awesome truth. Slowly she begins to sway, letting her upraised palm trail after her body motion as if it were the head of a snake, she its charmer, only hoping the wooziness she has been suffering of late doesn’t return. She does an adagio glissade toward their table, still swaying, still focused on the pie, and there, while the men make self-conscious remarks about her nuttiness and back off, she mimes the effort to stick a finger from her other hand in it, though it always seems just out of reach. She leans toward it, her tongue out and doing a petit battement of its own, the hand pulling away whenever the tongue approaches. She straightens up, head high, attempts a little fouetté in her street shoes, and swirls gracefully to the opposite side of the room, where she begins to sway again, eyes closed, as though falling into a trance. The mayor applauds and guffaws, setting Jim off again, and once he finally stops his braying, she again glissades, swaying, toward the table, their eyes wholly on her now, watching her hips move, big boyish grins on their greasy faces. “She’s stupid,” she hears Burt say, though really she can hear and see very little, so intensely is she immersed in her performance. She mimes again the attempt to reach the pie with her finger and her tongue, leaning toward the mayor, so that he can see closely the teasing little dance her tongue makes with its étendre movement, quivering toward the elusive pie. He rolls his eyes comically, and as the other two lean close, trying to see what the mayor sees, she moves her arm fluidly from the third ballet position to the fourth and slaps the pie—
whop!—
in Burt Robbins’ smirking face. He sputters and roars an obscenity and lurches blindly to his feet, the chair crashing against the wall, while she executes a rapid little pas de bourrée en arrière, tippytoeing backwards out of the bar, enjoying now the howling laughter she had earlier so dreaded.

As he steps into the bath, Wesley is thinking about Bergson’s notion that all our perceptions are outside us in the things we perceive, not inside us. Connie Dreyer used it to illustrate the difficulty we have in glimpsing Being through the unreliable scrim of Becoming, which is the world of our sensations, but not the world itself, since our perceptions can never equal the perceived. The only way to see Being truly is by way of direct intuition or inspiration. Revelation. Connie’s defense of faith by way of the likes of Plotinus, Augustine, that Areopagite character. Wesley was able to chip in a remark about John Scotus Eriugena, about whom he had once written a pretty good B-minus paper, but his heart was not in it, as his inner Christ has more or less disabused him of all notions of uroboric wholes common to these flaky Platonic dreamers. Faith, Connie said, is a kind of power: the power to appreciate revelations, which are facts in a way that what we call facts are not. Though one can reason about revelations, they are not a matter of reason but are simply received. In the way, Wesley asked, somewhat testily since he was not being taken seriously, that he has received his indwelling Christ? Connie puffed on his bent briar and said he was thinking of something a bit more abstract and all-encompassing. But the point is (his buttocks are now kissing the hot surface), Bergson uses the sensation of light as his demonstration of the distance between us and our own perceptions, seeing being the closest of the senses to thinking, and as Wesley sinks gratefully into the tubful of hot water (Jesus says: Yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!), he concludes that there has been too little thought about the contiguous and instantaneous tactile perceptions of the flesh, which in the case of a hot tub bath anyway, come close to being the same as the perceived. And, if not, does that place our flesh outside us as well? The whiskey, he feels, is making him quite brilliant.

His route into the manse was via its nether regions, though not by choice. They had changed the locks, both front and back, but not the padlock on the old cellar door. Such a door on his father’s farm led to their tornado and bomb shelter, and Wesley as a boy often used it as his hideaway. He kept secret provisions there in the way of candy bars and jawbreakers, and he did so here in the manse as well: a bottle of bourbon on the pantry shelves behind the paint tins, still nearly half full. While he was down there, he switched on the electricity and the hot water heater. The door at the top of the stairs was secured only with a hook and eye, easy to snap with a little push.

While he waited for the water to heat up, he strolled the darkening manse, stripped of all small and personal items, though still with most of its furniture, some covered with sheets, while outside the fresh rumbles of thunder drew nearer. The eggs, he saw, were gone from the kitchen walls, but not the yellow stains they left. No glasses, so he drank from the neck of the bourbon bottle, Jesus cautioning against it, lest he be filled with drunkenness and unable to find his way out of here and back to the studio again. “Well, you are right,” Wesley said. “I won’t have any. You may have it all.” And he tipped the bottle back, Jesus remarking, with no little irony, Hah! the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? Although everything in the manse was familiar, it was also unfamiliar, for his life had changed and was still changing and bore no relation any longer to these ancient philistine spaces. He could find no towels, but he pulled an old sheet off an easy chair which will do just fine.

The whiskey has indeed put Jesus in a mellow mood, that and Wesley’s decision that they will, yes, return to Prissy and the studio. Jesus is now humming an old church tune, “Where the Healing Waters Flow,” though he seems to be turning it into a kind of torch song: “O, this precious, perfect love! How it keeps the heart aglow!” Women were always important to Jesus and they are important to him now. His intimacy with prostitutes, whose sins he forgave as if they were not sins, got him in trouble with the Pharisees, and his ministry was benefacted by faithful women of means, all women who loved him one way or another. Some bathed his feet in their tears or splashed spikenard on his head, others just hung out with him like love-stricken camp followers. If two lie together, then they have heat, Jesus has said in his ecclesiastical style, speaking from within Wesley’s recumbent body on the studio exercise mats that serve there as their bed (now here in the hot bath Christ has fallen blissfully silent), but how can one be warm alone? From Magdalene, his favorite, he expelled seven demons, and what he said about it was, Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We got on well. And now it is Priscilla. Wesley does not wholly understand his mission, but he knows that Prissy and her studio are part of it. That became transparent to him on his walk today through this hostile wilderness of a town in which he cannot survive alone and from which he cannot alone escape. For the moment he and Jesus are safe here in the manse, for outside a violent storm is brewing and no one will be out in it, but sooner or later they will have to brave it and make their way back to their mirrored refuge and to its peculiar rhythms. Which can be pretty strenuous. He sleeps a lot when Prissy’s not around, just getting over when she is. Sleeps well. Better than he ever slept before.

Priscilla found Wesley’s inner Jesus, whether real or imaginary (imaginary, she assumed then—symbolic, perhaps a way of expressing his prophetic insights), pretty disconcerting at first. Even with his head between her legs, Wesley would go on talking to him, describing what he saw there or arguing with Jesus’ instructions about what to do with his hands or reciting passages from the Bible about perfumes and kisses and gardens (“His branch shooteth forth in his garden” was one of his favorites, his or Jesus’—it was hard to tell). But over time she has come to believe in this Jesus and to wish to please him and to desire him just as she desires Wesley, even if it does make their mating dances feel a bit like group sex. It also raises paternity issues. She is only a week late and she can be irregular, but she just
knows
through an inner knowing that cannot be denied. Her tender breasts tell her so.

That the conception almost certainly took place here that night of the freak snowfall, and that by chance or some kind of design beyond her understanding they are back here now, and that there is a storm raging outside as though to hide them from the world, all means that her revelatory May Day dance will probably be different than originally choreographed. A pity she didn’t bring the flowers along, but she left in such a panic, fearing she would lose him to those who mean him harm. And, anyway, they will find a use for them back at the studio, perhaps in a kind of sequel, a ritual confirmation of the miracle (call it that: she had always supposed herself congenitally barren until now); dear Wesley is so responsive and so unflagging, a virility she now attributes in part to his ardent indwelling Christ.