Earthly Powers (105 page)

       "Younger than I."

       "Ah, but time hasn't been good to him, dear. You, on the other hand, the enemy has positively coddled. Still, he looks very distinguished and venerable in his robes."

       "Oh Christ, is he an autocephalic archbishop?"

       "You'll see him this afternoon if you come." Naturally he made the word sound like an ejaculation. "You are cordially invited to a bout of holy matrimony, or perhaps it ought to be patrimony. Loads of champers at their stitely aum awfterwards. Both William and Evelyn are well oiled or is it heeled? Oiled as well."

       "Let's eat," Lab rick said.

CHAPTER 74

So I was taken that afternoon to the wedding of two young men in the Church of John the Beloved Disciple. There seemed to be two or three autocephalic archbishops officiating, but Val Wrigley was very senior, crotchety and authoritative. I was interested in the form of the service, which asked William if he would take Evelyn to be his wedded husband in the sight of God, and asked Evelyn if he would take William to be the same thing in the same perspective. Both said I do in powerful cowboy tones. Everybody in the church, which was positively loaded with lilies, was very well dressed, and there were tears from the sentimental and labile. The organ played "Promise Me" and, for some reason, Debussy's Clair de Lune. I was tremulous with mixed emotions when Archbishop Wrigley declaimed a good deal of my perverted Genesis, once put out by the Black Sun Press in Paris in a limited edition and now, it seemed, an aspect of anglophone homosexual folklore. Geoffrey, who sat next to me, said, "You all right, dear? You seem affected."

       "I wrote that," I said.

       Geoffrey said, "You clearly need to be very well looked after. Do you think I will like it in Tangier?"

       "I wrote that, I tell you. A long time ago, but I wrote it."

       "It would have to be a very long time ago, wouldn't it, dear?" Shakespeare had merely gotten his name into the Bible (Psalm 46); I had actually written a book of it. I said nothing. The congregation began to sing a kind of recessional hymn, tune the "Old Hundredth," words by, I presumed, the senior autocephalic archbishop: "O God who made us what we are Shine down thy love upon our love Illumine it with sun and star And dub it with the choirs above Released from biologic ends It soars to seek the heavenly sphere The golden ecstasy of friends A song attuned to thine ear In thee at last our loves shall meet All loving faces in thy face Eternal spendings shall be sweet Yet never spent in thine embrace"

       Geoffrey made a soaring descant out of the Amen. Then we left the church, his arm on my elbow, and went to the reception at the fine house on Alfred Douglas Avenue. There was too much campy play under the influence of the champagne and I looked sourly upon it.

       Geoffrey saw this and said: "I quite understand, my dear. A very artificial atmosphere, isn't it? I mean, too much set up. A certain lack not only of dignity but of danger. Do what thou wilt and so on. No disapproval to provoke, except perhaps from Archbish Wrigley over there, but with him it's only sacerdotal camp. Do tell me all about those dirty brown boys in Tangier."

       "What's your job? What have you been doing with Labrick?"

       "Lubricious Labrick, yes. Oh, helping, you know. I'm rather a good secretary. I type terribly fast for one thing. Very fast all round they tell me I am. I'm used to the literary as well as the illiterate, which is what Lubrick really is, all visual and motor sensations, my dear—look at him now with that horrible little slut who plays Alcibiades, as you shall see later. I worked for Irving Pollard, you know, till he got ratty. Daylong sipping I can tolerate, but, my dear, with him it was gulp gulp gulp all the time."

       "What did he get ratty about?"

       "Oh, everything. Nothing was right. I wet my pillow frequently, frustration, you know. Then I was companion to dear Boyd Chilling. Well named, I can tell you. Fair crackled with ice he did. I want home, my dear. I'm a European, I fancy our great blue mother the Med and our indulgent dad the sun, sweat trickling down into my tummybutton. Of course, there's plenty of sun here, but it's all enrobed in dirty smog. A day on the beach and I feel my little body positively inquinated. I'm an African too, of course, if that is required."

       "Don't mention Africa to me."

       "Suffered, have you? Hm, I can tell. Say no more. I can be whatever is wanted. I leave dirty Labrick tomorrow. I'm all yours. Just say the dickybird." Val Wrigley came up to me. He had changed out of his robes into shimmering black barathea with a dog collar. He held a chalice of gin and tonic. He did not bless me.

       I said, "Quite the little Cardinal Newman. Lead kindly light and all that sort of thing. When do you write your Dream of Gerontius?"

       "You were always," he said, "a mocker."

       "I stood up for you," I said. "I got no thanks."

       He had effected the change well from Walt Whitman to a kind of Gerard Manley Hopkins grown, which Hopkins never had, old.

       "You never could understand," he said, "things like faith and trust and unity. We are all members of one another. For me you did nothing." A fair-haired youth came round with canapes of p‰té and caviar, all exqusitely tailored. "Do you have such a thing," Val asked him, "as some stewed corned beef with onions?" The youth, whose mouth was full, negated prettily.

       "That's cruel, Val, that's desperately cruel."

       "We all carry the cross," he said. "Those who belong to the Church Militant at length become members of the Church Triumphant. You never had the stuff of the martyr in you."

       I could not clearly understand my angry tears. "Blasphemer," I said. "Bloody fucking blasphemer." He turned his back on me and began to give spiritual advice of great gravity to a bulky young man with very sweet lips. "I'm going," I said to Geoffrey. "I have to lie down for a while. What time is the film?"

       "Oh, I'll come and pick you up about seven-thirty. Are you sure you're all right alone? You seem terribly shaken."

       "I'm all right alone. For now at least. I'll tell you about Tangier tomorrow."

       The film was shown in the Erato Cinema, a private showing, of course, since the public morality of the State of California applied even in this pornotopia. Geoffrey sat next to me and held my hand, or tried to. My hands were in fact much concerned with gestures of distaste and even horror. Socrates, played by the ugly snub-nosed Athenian Pericles Anthropophagoi or something like it, began the film as a brave soldier, saving the life of Alcibiades at Potidaea and then very explicitly pedicating him. Dubious about the morality of homosexual love, Socrates married Xanthippe, a comic shrew played by Timothy Rhinestone (present, like most of the cast, in the audience), who fed him on cold stewed lentils and threw the contents of the pisspot at him. Disenchanted with marriage, the philosopher now sought the company of handsome young men and taught them wisdom by the Socratic method, which consisted in conducting simple catechisms during the sexual act. Everybody was buggered by or buggered Socrates, including Plato, and at the Symposium all possible positions and combinations were tried out to the Laocoontic limit. As for the wisdom Socrates purveyed, it was to do with seeking virtue and truth and justice. Hated by the archons of Athens for his fearless condemnation of municipal graft, he was hypocritically arraigned on a charge of corrupting Athenian youth. His wife Xanthippe, as well as the evil leather-seller Meletus, were to the fore as witnesses for the prosecution. He sinned, they said, against Nature as well as the polity. Socrates defended himself with spirit, spoke up for love between man and man, asserting that the cold abstractions of the enquiring mind had to be balanced by the warmth of fleshly embraces, man being a mixed creature in which opposed elements must be reconciled, but he was nevertheless condemned to death. Xanthippe relented of her harshness and Meletus hanged himself. The hemlock drinking scene was sentimentally rather than fiercely carnal. When Socrates whispered that he owed a cock to Aesculapius, Alcibiades said that he owed a cock to nobody. Death and transfiguration. The end.

       Geoffrey tried to still my shaking with both hands as the lights came up to cheers and congratulatory embraces, Labrick, with smiling lips and cold eyes, bowing and bowing. "Let me get out of here," I whimpered. "Sex, sex, sex, Christ, is there to be nothing in this world but bloody sex?"

       "You have to admit, dear, that parts of it were very very moving."

       "Yes yes, flesh moving, bloody hoi phalloi never bloody still, is that what the world's coming to?"

       "I think," Geoffrey said, as we stood outside on the street, the exiting audience milling their way off to a party somewhere, "you consider yourself to be past all that kind of thing. You consider yourself to have come through to a plateau of fleshly renunciation. I think you may well have to be taught that such a location exists in no known gazetteer. Am I or am I not to be with you?"

       "I don't want anybody. I want to be left alone."

       "Yes, that's your feeling now. A feeling that will change. See, I have written down my telephone number. I'm staying temporarily with Robin Cathcart, who played Plato. Call me tomorrow. Without fail. I have to know, you see, dear."

       I went back to the Holiday Inn, which was only a couple of blocks away, and raged for a time quietly in my room over the bottle of scotch which was part of my luggage. A message, I noticed, had come through from Kilduff in Washington. I had given him this number in New York, having found waiting for me at the Algonquin a confirmation of my booking here. The message said: OKAY ANYTIME TOMORROW.

       I slept fitfully having asked for an early call, then caught the dawn flight to Los Angeles. The Quartz agency at the airport provided me with a car and driver to take me to Redfern Valley. We travelled east through smog and architectural vulgarity toward Mojave. Scrub and sand and commercial hoardings and filling stations. "This," the driver said, an expatriate from Sydney NSW,.4 "seems to be the puce." He meant a decayed village where the vestiges of failed enterprise were beaten by brassy sun and a dry wind—Ye Jollie Olde Enaglisshe Pubbe, a chicken farm, a reptile store, a flapjack parlour. The army had been near here but now the army had gone. The Children of God supported no commercial substructure. The driver found the camp with no difficulty, about two miles southeast. The physical atmosphere was still military—a periphery of high tough woven wire, huts, even a guardroom. Above the closed metal gate was a huge arc of metal, on which the name of the community had been painted in cartoon lettering. In the vast enclosure, where grass was losing a war with sand drifts, I could see what looked like a dispirited platoon, men, women, whites, blacks, browns, marching off with hoes and spades to hopeless agricultural work. I heard the massed grunting of hogs some way off. "Rather you than me," the driver said. "You want me to wite?"

       "Come back in two hours or thereabouts. Get yourself some lunch."

       "Lunch, for Christ's sake where?"

       "There's bound to be a McDonalds somewhere. Even in this bloody desert."

       He went off, his exhaust snorting, and I went to the guardroom. There were three blacks in a kind of uniform with COG brassards. All were armed with pistols, and there was a small armoury of rifles against a wall. "Guns," I said with fearful jocularity, "in a holy place?"

       "God," the senior black said kindly, "he got lotta threats from nuts and commies and suchlike." He telephoned somebody from a wall telephone. A portrait of Godfrey Manning looked at me with calculation: a handsome forty-odd, lustrous sideburns, sensuous mouth, eyes wideset like a dog's and narrowed to the divine light. "He say The Times. He say he got an appointment. Yeah. Yeah." Then to me, "Jed here take you to the big house. They waiting for you." Jed was exophthalmic and limped. "I do that," he said. "You come longa me." The big house referred to had not been visible from the entrance. The way to it was by a path on which Johnny-jump-up grew through the sand, past plain wooden huts which doubly encircled it. Nobody seemed to be in the huts at this hour of the late morning. The house was of white clapboard, twostoried with a mansard roof, a verandah all about, a surrounding garden, the soil evidently imported, forsythia and bougainvillaea flourishing. A young lithe man with dark glasses, dressed in white as for overseeing toiling coolies, got up from a swingseat as I approached. He came down the steps with vigour, welcoming hand out.

       "Hi," he said, "I'm Jim Swinney. You go back now, Jed."

       "Toomey of The Times," I said. "Great interest in your ah community in my country. Thank you, ah Jed." I then saw Professor Bucolo in my head and wondered why. Of course, God Manning, a sort of preacher creature. "Some years ago, when I was lecturing in Indiana, I was introduced to his ah book. Hence my personal interest. I am myself a writer of books. I am not actually an employee of The Times. Toomey," I said. "Kenneth M. Toomey. Author myself of a ah theological work."

       "Fine fine, just fine." He had clearly never heard of me. "Of course, we've come a long way since those days of the wandering. This is the Promised Land of the Children of God. Come unto me all ye et cetera. God is due back about noon from Los Angeles, business in the mission there, you've seen it of course, the Temple, eighteen fifty-nine Sunset Boulevard. This is our Mecca. This is where we are."

       "Yes," I said, "so I can see."

       "Fifteen hundred disciples," he said. "The number's growing. The sick and the lonely. He cures the sick and he comforts the lonely." He was leading the way toward what looked like a small aircraft hangar.

       "He cures the sick? Literally?"

       "Fifty-five cures where all doctors failed. Killing cancers. Leukaemia. Jesus said go ye and do likewise. This afternoon after lunch you'll see. This is our Place of Prayer." He meant the hangar. We went in, meeting in the vestibule a high gesso statue of the Lord holding out wounded hands: the face, unbearded, was not unlike the one I had seen in the guardroom. The hail itself was like a theatre, with fixed bucket seats and a curtained stage. Spots and floods, blind at present, were everywhere. The house lights were dim and religious but, I had no doubt, could be cunningly modified on an electronic board to stimulate, with the aid of the electronic organ near the front at the left, whatever emotional atmosphere was required. "Holds two thousand," Jim Swinney said. "Sometimes we show devotional movies. We have our own choir. You'll know the album God Is with You. Sold two million."