Roger's Version (20 page)

Prospect was one-way the right way now. I drove down it, past the semi-abandoned houses and the towering ginkgo, which had lost all its leaves. Back up the boulevard two blocks, she had said, and then to the left, at the railroad tracks. And there
was
a street here, devoid of houses, that led into an industrial limbo, surviving perhaps from an era when this section lay on the edge of the city, a nest of mills later engulfed and isolated, a wilderness of rusting sheds and cinder-block warehouses, of factories whose painted names had left ghosts of letters on the brick, in the ornate style of the last century—vast shelters long since fallen away from their original purpose of manufacture, rented and resold and reused in fractions of floor space, and dropping ever lower on the rotting rungs of capitalism. An old coalyard lingered in here, its tilted bins glistening with lumps of graded size, and a sand-and-gravel company that had created its own miniature gray mountains, had moved mountains not through faith but with a rickety tall tramway of triangular buckets on wheels. The asphalt beneath the Audi crumbled away, and the road became a chain of puddles and hard-packed spots in an earth saturated with oil and cinders and gypsum, with flattened containers and towering dry tufts of God’s toughest, wiriest weeds. Yet this road—scarcely a road, a black path—kept going, and from the rear approached fenced acres of a lumberyard that fronted on a less informal street, with streetlights and gas stations though no
visible pedestrians. G
ROVE
, a modest orange sign proclaimed, scarcely legibly, for the day was turning to evening. Already electric lights burned in the sales office and in the tall sheds, roofed in corrugated iron, that housed the racks of lumber.

I turned into an opening in the woven-wire fence and parked well away from the bright office and crept out into the dusk, which was indeed turning cold enough to make me grateful for my sheepskin coat. Smells of pine, fir, spruce—resiny fresh corpses from the north, stacked in their horizontal phalanxes of two-by-fours, four-by-fours, four-by-sixes, some knottier than others, as with books and lives, but almost none without knots, without those dark resinous oblongs that, no matter how we shellac and paint and overpaint, weep through. I detected a faint holy whiff of cedar, of shingles and clapboards bundled with steel ribbons, and heard a distant stir of men banging wood and talking to one another within echoing spaces, toward the end of a weary day. I feared that Dale might be on duty. Above Grove’s sheds and the shabby neighborhood, some of the university’s science buildings, including that newish monstrosity, that nine-storied concrete bunker called the Cube, loomed surprisingly near—tall Argus-eyed beasts which by some twist of the city’s geography had been allowed to creep close, and might pounce.

A bare bulb burned thinly in a far small stall. A circular saw blade gleamed beneath an apparatus of giant leather straps, the glint of its teeth regular as ticks of an atomic clock. Sawdust, its virginal aroma, permeated the crystallizing black air, and a multitude of straight shadows hurled transversely from within the open framework of the lumber racks suggested a silent diagonal toppling of trees.
Fear not
. I felt surrounded by a blessing, by a fragrant benignity, and yet with criminal haste hurried back into my car when a shadow of a man approached and asked if he could help me.

III

i

Q
uem
enim naturae usum, quem mundi fructum, quem elementorum saporem non per carnem anima depascitur?
For what use of Nature, what enjoyment of the world, what taste of the elements is not consumed by the soul
per carnem
—by the agency of the flesh? Tertullian wrote these words in
De resurrectione carnis
around 208, well after he had fallen away from orthodoxy into Montanism. Still, I could sniff out nothing unorthodox in his ardent exposition; on the contrary, the resurrection of the flesh is the most emphatic and intrinsic of orthodox doctrines, though in our present twilight of faith the most difficult to believe. Yet how incontrovertibly and with what excited eloquence does Tertullian build up his argument that the flesh cannot be dispensed with by the soul!
Quidni?
he asks—how not, how could it be otherwise?
Per quam omni instrumento sensuum fulciatur, visu, auditu, gustu, odoratu, contactu?
By its means all the apparatus of sense is supported—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Then a rather delicate, Saussurian argument, linking the power of effectuation,
glorified as a
divina potestas
, to the faculty of speech, in turn dependent upon a physical organ:
Per quam divina potestate respersa est, nihil non sermone perficiens, vel tacite praemisso? Et sermo enim de organo carnis est
. The
vel tacite praemisso
(literally, “even if only advanced in silence,” i.e., tacitly indicated by the existence of speech, of words) seemed an especially scrupulous touch, and it occurred to me that
perficiens
above might be read as conceptualization, so that the Heavenly mystery of the Logos was made to descend, by means of a Platonic scaffolding of degrees of ideality, down into reality via ultimate dependence upon that repulsive muscle housed among our salivating mouth membranes and rotting teeth—the eyeless, granular, tireless tongue.
De organo carnis
indeed. The arts, too, rest on this slippery foundation:
Artes per carnem, studia, ingenia
(confirming my thesis above)
per carnem, opera, negotia, officia
(we must take a body to the office, every day)
per carnem, atque adeo totum vivere animae carnis est, ut non vivere animae nil aliud sit quam a carne divertere
. Did he mean to go quite so far, to assert that so totally is the soul’s life derived from the flesh that for it to be separated is none other than death? To deny us, that is, O furious Tertullian, even the wispiest hope of a harp-strumming ghost in our machine, of an ethereal escape clause in this terrible binding contract with eyeballs, nostril hairs, ear bones, and edible gray brain cells, a contract that after all we never signed, which our ubiquitous agent Dan N. (for Nobodaddy) Amino initialled for us, without consultation? We want to break the contract, help! But our Carthaginian lawyer in his mad faith careers on, ever more zealously committing himself and us to an impossible miracle:
Porro si universa per carnem subiacent animae, carni quoque subiacent
. Further, if all things are subject to the soul
per carnem
, through the flesh, then they are also subject to the
flesh. He knits us, soul and flesh, ever tighter, toward some smiling courtroom reversal. But the suspense is keen.
Per quod utaris, cum eo utaris necesse est
. That compression of old Latin: links of pounded iron; to paraphrase is to weaken the chain. What you use, with that you must use:
utor
here must have, like
fruor
above, the sense of “enjoy”—our poor body, used for our (the soul’s, his implication is: we are, notice,
anima
and not
caro
after all) enjoyment, necessarily partakes of that enjoyment. Dear Flesh: Do come to the party. Signed, your pal, the Soul.
Ita caro, dum ministra et famula animae deputatur, consors et cohaeres invenitur
. So the flesh, up to now deputed the soul’s minister and servant, is found to be its consort and co-heir.
Si temporalium, cur non et aeternorum?
If temporarily, why not eternally? Why not indeed? The thought of all our pale and rancid bodies jostling perpetually in some eternal locker room of a Heaven sickened me. And yet beyond the depressing mechanics of it, the general dim idea of our eternal survival, much as we are, athlete’s feet and all, does lift up the heart. The old fanatic’s logic and fervor and right grasp of our situation cannot be denied. Always, remember, he had Marcion on his mind—Marcion, who believed that Christ had been a phantom, a kind of holograph, on Earth and that no God worth worshipping could have dirtied His hands in the creation of this vile swamp of excrement and semen.

By finding ridiculous and sickening Tertullian’s blessing of everlastingness upon our poor shuffling flesh, I was one with the heretics and heathens (
ethnici
) whose plausible objections he had outlined a few books earlier:
An aliud prius vel magis audias tam ab haeretico quam ab ethnico? et non protinus et non ubique convicium carnis, in originem, in materiam, in casum, in omnem exitum eius, immundae a primordio ex faecibus terrae, immundioris deinceps ex seminis sui limo, frivolae, infirmae, criminosae, onerosae, molestae, et post totum ignobilitatis elogium caducae in originem terram et cadaveris nomen, et de isto quoque nomine periturae in nullum inde iam nomen, in omnis iam vocabuli mortem?
It is, that is, the heathens and not (as preening hedonists and mockers from Nero on would have it) the Christians who make an outcry against the flesh—its origin, its substance, its causality, its end—who accuse it of being unclean from its first formation out of Earth’s feces and then uncleaner still from the slime of its semen, of being paltry (frivolous in its root sense of “weightless”), infirm, guilty (not so much criminal as covered with accusation, with slander), burdensome, troublesome. And then (according to the
ethnici
), after all this litany of ignobility, falling into its original earth and the name of a cadaver, and from this name certain to dwindle into no name, into the death of all designation. How terrible and true. Tertullian, like Barth, took his stand on the only ground where he could: the flesh is man. “All of him is flesh and by nature ought to perish,” Barth roundly wrote, in his pleasant
Die christliche Lehre nach dem Heidelberger Katechismus
.

Weary of translating, I closed my eyes. I pictured a white shaft: tense, pure, with dim blue broad veins and darker thinner purple ones and a pink-mauve head like the head of a mushroom set by the Creator upon a swollen stem nearly as thick as itself, just the merest little lip or rounded eaves,
the corona glandis
, overhanging the bluish stretched semi-epiderm where pagan foreskin once was, and a drop of transparent nectar in the little wide-awake slit of an eye at its velvety suffused tip. Esther’s studious rapt face descends, huge as in a motion picture, to drink the bitter nectar and then to slide her lips as far down the shaft as they will go, again and again, down past the
corpus spongiosum
to the magnificent twin
corpora cavernosa
in their sheath of fibrous tissue and silk-smooth membrane,
their areolar spaces flooded and stuffed stiff by lust; her expert action shows a calculated tenderness, guarding against her teeth grazing, care on one side and trust on another emerging
per carnem
, her avid cool saliva making Dale’s prick shine in the attic light. For of course they have gone to her third-floor room, her seldom-used studio, the safest, most distant place, in case our awful clattering bell breaks into their rapture, and a place removed, too, from our second-floor bedrooms, which are haunted by the ghosts of her husband, his clothes, his shoes, his shaving lotion, his pipey smell, his bedside paperback
Kirchliche Dogmatik III
, and of their son, flesh of their flesh, his bedroom an innocent adolescent chaos of old homework papers and model spaceships and dropped underwear and rumpled
Playboys
and
Clubs
. Esther’s paintings—big, slashing, angular, gobby, a far cry in education and sophistication from Verna’s timid, pencilly, petal-by-petal watercolors—surround the lovers like a dappled forest, like patches of camouflage hiding them from the eye of Heaven, though from the third-floor windows they themselves can see ample of the world: the neighborhood rooftops and exiguous back yards and in this leafless season the twinkling distant heart of the city, and beyond the majestic skyscrapers the airplanes slanting downward toward the airport reclaimed from tidal marsh. January this year has been monotonously cold, so cold the inaugural parade was cancelled in Washington. Esther has an electric heater up here, and an old stained mattress dragged from a dusty storage space at the back, beyond her easels and canvases and some broken floor lamps and a faded velvet easy chair not worth re-covering. This junk has been transformed into the furniture of a room cozier than any below. The heater’s bright orange bar with its parabolic reflective shield casts a sharp arid heat onto their bare skins; their reflected pale
bodies swim in the polished metal along with the glowing coil. The circumambient attic chill is no match for the coursing of their aroused blood; like their danger, their sin, it invigorates. She and Dale have already fucked once this afternoon on the filthy mattress. They sit upon it facing each other, legs crossed in yoga fashion, drinking white wine from squeezable plastic glasses. Then the willing wench, as porn novels say, takes note of his revived erection and puts aside her wine to bend her lips to its inviting hard-softness, its tacit standing homage to her. Esther loves being sluttish with this boy; he is so purely grateful and astounded and would never think to use it against her, to turn a gift into a demand and then a grievance in the manner of her gloomy, scowling husband. Also, she is thirty-eight and her womanhood won’t be there forever to use.
Per quod utaris, cum eo utaris necesse est
. Her necessary time has come. This tall bony youth of shining skin and thrilling phallus has been somehow delivered to her. She gorges herself on his flesh until her jaws ache. In the respite, gasping and wiping her lips, she croons, “So big. Too big for my mouth.”