Sourland Page 9

  Tillich was a Christian, he says, for whom Christianity wasn’t an encoded religion but living, vital. So too Tyrell is a Christian in principle though he finds it difficult to believe in either Jesus Christ or in God.

  “‘By their fruits shall ye know them, not by their roots.’”

  These beautiful words! I wonder if they are from the Bible—the Old Testament, or the New.

  I ask Tyrell do these words mean it’s what people do that matters, & not what people are, or in what state they are born; & Tyrell squeezes my hand, awkwardly & eagerly as my fingers grip the crutch—“Yes, Jane. That is exactly what that means.”

  He has called me Jane. His hand lingers on mine, as if to steady me, or himself.

  By this time it’s beyond dusk—nearly nighttime. We didn’t walk to the bus stop but as if by mutual consent we made our way behind the library parking lot along a path through tall rushes & dune grass & spindly wild rose & descended to the wide hard-crusted beach where a harsh wet wind whips at our faces & clothing. Here is the Atlantic Ocean—moving walls of jagged slate-colored waves—exactly the waves painted by Winslow Homer so precisely & obsessively, farther north along the Maine shore—in these waves a ferocious wish to sweep over us, to devour us.

  Tyrell sees that I am shivering. Tyrell leans close to me, his arm around my shoulders. How clumsy we are, walking together! A man, a girl, a pair of crutches.

  I ask him why he’d dropped out of the seminary & he says he was in despair, badly he’d wanted to be a “man of God”—to help others—while believing neither in God nor in others—& at last he realized that his desperation was to help himself—& so he quit. Living alone then in a single room on 113th Street, New York City—he’d broken off with his family in Barnegat Sound—went for days sometimes without speaking to anyone—took night courses at Columbia—found solace in his secular courses, psychology & linguistics—did research into the “secret language of twins”—the “social construction of twinness” & the “psychic ontology of twins”—its reception in the world.

  “In some primitive cultures, twins are sacred. In others, twins are demonic and must be destroyed.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Why? No one knows why.”

  From the subject of twins Tyrell shifts to the subject of the Hebrew Bible he’d studied—“deconstructed”—in the seminary; the compendium of writings—crude, inspired, primitive, surpassingly beautiful & terrifying—of an ancient people possessed by the idea that they are the chosen of God & hence their fate is God’s fate for them & never mere accident lacking in meaning.

  “Essentially there are two ontologies: the accidental & the necessary. In the one, we are free. In the other, we are fated.”

  “Are we! You sound very sure of yourself.”

  “Don’t laugh at me, Jane! Please.”

  “But why are you telling me these things? I don’t even know you.”

  “Of course you know me, Jane.”

  “No!”

  “And you know why I’m telling you these things, Jane.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we are twins, Jane.”

  “Twins! Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The man’s calmness frightens me. His matter-of-fact speech. Though the wind is whipping at our faces, making our eyes tear. I want to think He’s mad. This is madness.

  “Twins: in our souls. You know that.”

  “I don’t know any such thing.”

  “Yes. You know that, Jane. It’s clearer to me than any mystic identity of oneness in the universe. Just—us. We are oneness.”

  “Oneness! That’s so—”

  I want to say ridiculous, mad. Instead, my voice trails off. I’m overcome by a fit of shivering & Tyrell grips my arm at the elbow, his fingers strong through the fabric of my coat.

  Oblivious of our surroundings we’ve been hiking on the winter beach—a mile? Two miles? We turn back & retrace our steps in the hard-crusted sand.

  The man’s heavy footprints, my smaller footprints & the slash-like prints made by my crutches.

  No one could identify us, studying these prints. No one could guess at us.

  The winter beach is littered with storm debris. Python-sized strips of brine, swaths of frozen & crusted ocean froth resembling spittle, or semen. Through a tear in the cloud-mass is a pale glaring moon like a mad eye winking.

  The next time he asks, I will say Yes. You may carry me.

  No one can understand how we are perfect together.

  My stumps, fitted into the shallows at the base of his thighs.

  My pale-pink skin, the most secret skin of my stumps, so soft, a man touching this skin exclaims as if he has been scalded. Oh! My God.

  How do such things happen you ask & the answer is Quickly!

  Those weeks of late-winter, early spring at the Jersey shore at Barnegat. Those weeks when Tyrell Beckmann entered my life. For there was no way to prevent him.

  Saying Jane you are perfect. I adore you.

  Saying I was born imperfect—“damaged.” There is something wrong with my body, no one can see except me.

  It was so: Tyrell inhabited his body as if at an awkward distance from it. As if he had difficulty coordinating the motions of his legs as he walked & his arms that hung stiffly at his sides. Almost you might think Here is a man in the wrong body.

  Confiding in me as I lay in his arms fitted into his body like a key in a lock.

  So often in those weeks Tyrell came to me at the library, once I asked him where was his wife? & he said his wife was at home & in the mildest way of taunting I asked didn’t she wonder where he was on those evenings he was with me & he said she would suppose he was at the community college & I said oh but not every night!—& not so late on those nights—& it was then he said in a voice of male smugness: “She doesn’t want to know.”

  Hearing this I felt a small stab of pleasure. Resenting as always the very syllable wife & certainly any thought of Tyrell’s wife until seeing now that this man was the prince of his household, very likely—the marriage, the family life, was centered upon him.

  In any love-relationship there is the stronger person, & there is the weaker. There is the one who loves, & the one who is loved.

  Loved, & therefore feared.

  As often as he could come to me, he came. Arriving a half hour before the library closed. Or breathless & flush-faced arriving a scant five minutes before closing time. Sometimes Tyrell came directly from work—as he called it, without wishing to elaborate—as if the subject of his work in a family-owned local business was painful to him—& wore a sport coat or a suit, white shirt & necktie & black dress shoes like any professional man; at other times he wore corduroy trousers, the herringbone-tweed coat with leather elbow-patches, salt-stained running shoes.

  Never did I look for the man. Never did I betray surprise or even (evident) pleasure glancing up & seeing the man looming over me with his tense tight smile, at the circulation desk.

  There is the hunter, and there is the hunted.

  Power resides not in the hunter—as you might think—but in the hunted.

  In his hand a book as a prop. A book as a pretext. A book to be checked out of the Barnegat Public Library by the librarian at the circulation desk.

  “Jane! Hello.”

  It was not forbidden that Tyrell call me Jane. Many of the library patrons knew me & called me Jane.

  It was not forbidden that Tyrell smile at me. Every patron known to me at the library was likely to smile at me.

  It was forbidden that Tyrell touch me in public. Not even a handshake. Not even a brushing of his fingers against mine when I handed him back his plastic library card. Nor did I allow Tyrell to stare at me, in that way of his that was raw, ravenous. I had a horror of others knowing of us, or guessing. I had a horror of being talked-of, whispered-about.

  Though it gave me a childish pleasure to lie in my bed in the early morning—amid my bedclothes tousled & rumpled from the man’s perspiring
body of the previous night—& languidly to think yes probably others had noticed Tyrell lingering in my vicinity, or waiting for me when the library closed; very likely, some had seen us walking together on the deserted winter beach. Jane Erdley & that man—that tall man who comes into the library so much & is always hovering over her. The other librarians on the staff who are so sharp-eyed & our supervisor Mr. McCarren whose particular project Jane Erdley has been.

  We are committed to hiring the disabled here, Ms. Erdley. This was the Barnegat mandate long before it was a directive of the State of New Jersey.

  Oh thank you! Mr. McCarren that is so—kind.

  I did not like it that others might wonder of us & gossip but I did like it that Tyrell revealed so plainly in his face the desire he felt for me. I liked it that the older, married man should be so reckless, desperate.

  It pleased me perversely to think that he was the prince of his household. He was a man of thirty-seven who retained the youth & cruel naivete of a man a decade younger, or more—& so his maleness, his sexuality, withheld from the woman who was his wife, would aggrieve her. Not a syllable of reproach would pass the wife’s lips—so I imagined!—yet her hurt, her woundedness, her anxiety would be considerable. It is natural that a husband hold his wife in disdain, for she is his possession, available to him & known to him utterly as Jane Erdley would never be fully known.

  Oh God! So beautiful.

  Beneath the red plaid flannel skirt flared & short as a schoolgirl’s—beneath the schoolgirl white-woolen stockings worn with shiny red ankle-high boots—the (expensive, clumsy) prosthetic limbs: pink-plastic, with aluminum trim, lewd & ludicrous & to remove these, to unbuckle these, the man’s fingers trembling & the man’s face heated with desire, or dread—the first stage of the act of love—the act of sex-love—that will bind us, close as twins.

  “Has there been any other—? Any other who—like this?”

  “No. No one.”

  “Am I the first?”

  “Yes. The first.”

  Seeing the look in the man’s face, the adoration in the man’s eyes I burst into laughter, it was not a malicious laughter but a child’s laughter of delight & playfulness & tears spilled from my eyes—a rarity for Jane Erdley does not cry even stricken with phantom-pain in her lower limbs—& I kissed the man hard on the lips as I had never kissed anyone in my life & I said, “Yes you are the first & you will always be the first.”

  Throbbing veins & nerve-endings in the stumps. The stumps of what had once been my legs, my thighs—years ago in my old, lost life. Spidery red veins, thicker blue arteries deep inside the flesh. Where the stumps break off—where the amputation occurred—about six inches below the fine-curly-red-haired = of my groin—there is a delicious shiny near-transparent skin, an utterly poreless skin, onion-skin-thin, an infant’s skin; in wonderment you would want to stroke this skin, & lick it with your tongue yet in fact this skin isn’t only just soft but strangely sturdy, resilient—a kind of cuticle, a protective outer layer as of something shimmering & unspeakable.

  “And you, Jane—you will always be my first.”

  On Shore Island in his station wagon he kissed me. That first night shyly asking permission & several nights in succession I told him No—that isn’t a good idea & at last as he persisted I said Well—all right. But just once for the man knew that I would say Yes finally, from the first he’d known.

  On Shore Island in my (small, sparely furnished) apartment he first kissed me there. Undressed me & unbuckled the plastic legs & kissed me many times there.

  On Shore Island overlooking marshland: six-foot rushes that swayed & thrashed in the wind, a brackish odor of rotting things & at dawn a crazed choir of gulls, crows, marsh birds shrieking in derision, or in warning.

  Kissing & sucking. For long delirious minutes that became half hours, & hours. Shivering & moaning & kissing/sucking the stumps, the soft infant-skin at the end of the stumps, so excited I could feel the blood rush into his penis, in my hand his penis was a kind of stump, immediately erect & smallish then filling out with blood leech-like filling with blood & hardening with blood & at last a hard yearning stump with a blunt blind soft head that seemed wondrous to me, so vulnerable & beautiful—a ludicrous thing, yet beautiful—as the stumps that are all that remain of my girl-legs are ludicrous, ugly & yet to this man’s eyes beautiful, as I am beautiful—the female torso, the upper limbs, the spread-open thighs, stump-thighs, & the openness between the thighs, moist & slash-like in the flesh, thrumming with heat & life & yearning—I will love you forever, there is no one like you my darling Jane you are so beautiful, my darling! Love love love love you—& in his delirium he seemed not to comprehend how I did not claim to love him.

  For to be loved is to bask in your power, like a coiled snake sunning itself on a rock.

  To love is weakness. This weakness must be overcome.

  “I first saw you with some other women. I think they were your colleagues. The other librarians. You were walking into town”—this would be a distance of only a few blocks, on Holland Street leading into Barnegat Avenue where there is a very good inexpensive restaurant named Wheatsheaf—“you were laughing, & so beautiful—the braces just visible beneath your skirt shining, your crutches—the other women were just—so—ordinary—plain & heavy-footed—they were just walking. All the light was on you, & you were flying. Your beautiful shimmering-red hair, your beautiful face, all the light was on you & you seemed almost to be seeing me—taking note of me, & smiling—at me!—you passed by so close on the sidewalk, I could have reached out & touched you…I felt faint, I stared after you, I had never seen anyone like you—beside you all other women are maimed, their legs are clumsy, their feet are ugly. I could have reached out & touched you…”

  “Why didn’t you touch me?”

  I laugh in his arms. I am very happy. In the man’s arms, my thigh-stumps lifted to fit in that special place. He is caressing, kissing, the pit of my belly. My tiny slant-eye belly button. With his tongue. & my shoulder tucked into the crook of his arm. So snugly we fit together, like tree-roots that have grown together. & this not over a period of years but at once, all but overnight as by a miracle.

  “Because one touch would not have been enough for me. That’s why.”

  At the Jersey shore spring is slow to arrive. Still in early April there are dark-glowering days spitting icy rain. Fierce swirling snowflakes & ice-pellets—flotillas of snow-clouds like gigantic clipper ships blown overhead—yet by degrees with the passing of days even the storm-sky begins to remain light later & later—until at last at 6 P.M.—the library’s closing time, weekdays—the sky above the ocean, visible through the broad bay window at the front of the library, was no longer dark. “Jane! Your friend is waiting at the front desk.”

  “My friend? My friend—who?”

  My face flushed hot with blood. My eyes welled with tears of distress. So it must have been known to them, casually known to the other librarians, that crippled Jane Erdley had a friend; that the tall, taciturn slightly older man who came frequently to the library was Jane Erdley’s special friend.

  This was a day I was working at the rear of the library doing book orders on a computer. Another librarian had taken over the circulation desk.

  “He—isn’t my friend. He’s a relative—a cousin—a distant cousin—he lives over in Barnegat Sound.”

  I did not meet the woman’s eye. My voice was husky, wavering.

  Though I was smiling, or trying to smile. A flash of a smile lighting up my face, in defiance of pity, sympathy. Whatever you are offering me, I am not in need of.

  On this windy April day I was wearing a pleated skirt made of cream-colored wool flannel, that resembled a high school cheerleader’s skirt, & I was wearing a crimson satin blouse with a V-neckline glittering with thin gold chains & small crystal beads, & if you dared to lean over, to peer at my legs, or what was meant to represent my “legs,” you would see the twin prostheses, shiny plastic artificial legs & ste
el pins & on my (small) feet eyelet stockings & black patent leather “ballerina slippers.”

  My crutches were nearby. My crutches have a look of having been flung gaily aside, as of little consequence.

  “Well. He seems very nice—gentlemanly. He’s obviously very fond of you.”

  The woman spoke in a voice of mild reproach. A chill passed over me. She knows! They all know, & are disgusted.

  This was clear to me, suddenly. & there was no pleasure in it, only a shared disgust, dismay.

  & so that evening I told Tyrell I did not want to see him anymore, I thought it was best for us not to see each other after this night. In his station wagon he was driving us along the ocean highway to Shore Island & gripping the steering wheel tight in his left hand so the knuckles glared white & with his other hand he held my left hand & spread his fingers wide grasping my upper thigh, that was my “stump”—the living flesh that abutted the plastic prostheses, so strangely—compulsively he was squeezing the pleats of my skirt & the tip of his middle finger pressed against the pit of my belly; it was past 6:30 P.M. but not yet dusk, the eastern sky above the ocean was streaked with horizontal strips of clouds of the color of bruised rotted fruit & quietly I told him I did not think that this was a good idea—“seeing each other the way we do”—I told him that people were beginning to talk of us in Barnegat—& eventually, his family would find out—his wife…