Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  But I did. A gin daisy could only mean that Mary Baker Eddy had hit town; yet in Corinth she had distincdy said that we would next meet at Golgotha during the Crucifixion, an event that took place only the one time shordy before my birth. Now that I've seen old Dr. Cuder's Polaroid, it is plain that I am going to find my way back to Golgotha one of these days, but as I don't recall being there as of now, that time hasn't come—on this tape anyway, the only tape I have.

  Sudden thought. I am now over sixty years old in the year 96 after the birth of our Lord and I have not yet been to Golgotha. So this means that almost any day now I'll be making the trip back. But how.>

  The last rays of the autumnal sun were warm on the back of my neck. "I'd sure like to stay here, setde here," I said, more to myself than to Apollos, who couldn't have cared one way or the other what I had in mind career-wise.

  "You must see Alexandria one day." He shook his head with pleasure at the thought: Diamonds chattered fi-om double-pierced lobes rouged to a fare-thee-well. The effect was very exciting and powerfully masculine.

  Priscilla came into the atrium, a huge stack of invoices in her hands. She was all business until she saw Apollos; then she became all Pontusine temptress. "Apollos! What a joy to see you here! Do have some Falernian wine ox faux egyftim beer or . . ."

  "I'm all right, Priscilla." The earrings chattered. "I've been telling Tim here about Alexandria. ..."

  78 Gore Vidal

  ^^Quelle citeV^ Priscilla tinkled like a dozen earrings. "Years ago I was offered a contract by the Temple of Isis Dance Company for a season in Alexandria. But maman^ my mother," she translated, "wouldn't hear of it. Anyway, our dear little Ephesus has its charms." I duly noted that Ephesus was now "ours," which meant hers.

  While the two talked business in the exotic purple conversation pit that she herself had designed, I wandered onto the loggia and looked down on the marble city of so many dreams, some of them mine. As the Ephesians say, he who is tired of Ephesus is in need of a good night's sleep.

  A pair of powerful arms encircled me from the back and something brutal and hard prodded my butt. "You son of a bitch." I twisted out of the grip of Alexander the bronze-maker, a lay-Christian of Jewish origin whose idea of the perfect lay was me. "I'm a top," I growled.

  Alex, when not in pursuit of me, was a well-known figure in the art world of Ephesus. He was one of the two or three top bronze-makers in town and every winter he always won second prize at the Academy of Fine Arts. Never first, Alex hated being second but that's the way it was back then when Ephesus was a serious cultural capital with room at the top for only one and that one was not Alex. So, like many of life's born failures, he became a Christian. "The Academy of Fine Arts of Ephesus," he used to say, "is not for me. My Academy of Fine Arts is not of this art world." Thanks to our wonderful Message, a lot of people feel like that because we really do make your average creep feel pretty happy with himself. As Saint used to say, there's plenty of room at the bottom, with Jesus.

  "Tell me," I asked, "what's going on at the Temple.^"

  "Trouble." Alex shook his head. "Oh, I know how Paul says 'To the Jews first,' but I can't believe that even

  Jesus ever thought those idiots would ever convert. Eternal life, frankly, is too good for them."

  "I meant," I said, "the Temple of Diana . . ."

  Like so many Jews he could not really relate to anything non-Jewish. On the other hand, Alex was not a Zionist, which was a plus back then. "Oh, that temple," he said. "Well, let's see. I've just done some bronze work for the side chapel in the living quarters of the priestesses. ..."

  "Now you're cooking with virgin olive oil!" I was excited—^who wouldn't be.> "Do you ever get to see Stephanie, high priestess number two.^"

  "Mmm-huh." Alex was not about to fix me up with the beautiful priestess without my quid for her gorgeous quo. This was a high price, but then a good robbery is no sale. "You want to get it on with Steph, do you.>"

  "Mmmm-huh." It was my turn to yokelize.

  "I can arrange it. For a price." The hawklike eyes were on my buns, now tightened to a marblelike density at the thought of invasion from that quarter. "She receives every Friday at sundown in her tastefully appointed apartment overlooking the waterfront. Naturally, the eunuchs are always with her."

  "Except when they're not."

  "Mmm-huh."

  Friday at sundown. That was all I needed to know. But I strung him along. "I wouldn't mind some matching bronze armlets for my muscular arms." Casually I made a muscle and he moaned as he saw the fair white skin of my biceps bulge. He was hooked all right.

  Priscilla gave me a knowing look when we rejoined her and ApoUos in the atrium. "There's trouble in Corinth," she announced.

  "What trouble now?" I was thinking only of Stephanie.

  80 Gore Vidal

  Lust. Mea culpa. Why docs it sound so much better in Latin than Greek.> Naturally, all that I am now writing is simply to cleanse my memory of my own sin. It has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with the Message as preached by Paul, and in a minor but no less authorized way by me, Timmy-wimmy . . . Timothy. A demon has taken over my stylus! Well, I knew there would be days like this when I set out on the Yellow Brick Road to stardom. Demons everywhere. Temptation. Saint invading my dreams. Both Dr. Cuders at large. Chet. Stephanie. What a darling! Those legs . . .

  I did not see Stephanie on Friday at sundown because Alex had lied. Stephanie's "at home" was always Saturday at midnight after the last Temple show when, weary but exalted from her inevitable triumph, Stephanie made herself at home to those fans who knew how to bribe a eunuch, no bowl of cherries if you're a stud. So I had to put out. It was rough, eunuchs being what they are, particularly then. They don't make them like that nowadays. That's for sure.

  Anyway, I was finally admitted to her apartments in the sea palace that is connected by a tunnel to the great Temple theater where, that night, she danced only for me, or so I thought, bedazzled by the glittering metal scales of her gown, the flashing colored lights, the legs . . . The legs.

  "How are your legs?" I asked stupidly when I was presented to her by the chief eunuch.

  Stephanie was munching on the thighbone of some large bird. She made a gagging sound and rolled her eyes, to the delight of her gathered fans, thirty or forty of the best-dressed young men of Ephesus—the eunuchs had a stern dress code and you had to pass muster sartorially as well as genitally if you wanted to be admitted to her presence. "I'm sorry," I mumbled. But Stephanie had turned her long sinuous back on me.

  The second high priestess's apartment was a long room with arched windows overlooking the full-moonlit sea. Be-wdtched, I stood at one of the windows and watched the girl of my dreams flirt with her fans while the eunuchs kept close watch not on her but on the handsomer fans.

  Suddenly, as I was about to despair of ever getting her attention, she was beside me. The eyes were molten silver in the full moonlight. I could smell the rare unguents on her bod. "Hi, there," I said, with a come-hither wink. Oh, the crudeness of your average Asia Minor boy! My cheeks are aflame as I write.

  "From under what flat rock did you crawl, sonny.^" Unlike most dancers, Stephanie had a velvety speaking voice. As for the knockers . . . I'm afraid the boob tube is beginning to affect my prose. I wonder if Mark is having the same problem as, half a world away, he indites the wondrous tale of Our Lord.>

  "Stephanie!" I was eloquent. "I think you are absolutely the greatest ever since I saw you do the Dance of the One Thousand and One Days of Chaste Diana. Count them," I whispered, made giddy by her closeness, my large Asia Minor hands inadvertendy opening and shutting as if to play her astonishing body like some intricate lute or xylophone.

  "It's a good number." She was noncommittal. "Which show did you catch.>"

  I told her, told her what she meant to me, what I might mean to her, given half a chance, which she proceeded to give a half of a half of in the form of a key on a chain drawn from smoldering cleavage.

&nb
sp; "OK, kiddo. You're on. Southwest tower, opposite the parking lot. Hour before the dawn. Quality time. But I got to warn you. You better be good."

  82 Gore Vidal

  It was good, better than good. The southwest tower shook and quaked with my every thrust. Then, all nerves atingle, we lay in one another's arms, as the pale tentacles of the dawn clawed at the room's darkness, tearing even the thickest shadows to bright ribbons like a metal comb—or do I mean garden rake.> Which is larger.^

  We murmured sweet nothings to one another. "Not bad for a beginner," she smiled through tangled auburn-hennaed locks.

  "You on some kind of pill or magical potion.^" Like all normal Asia Minor boys I was curious about the hygiene of your average high priestess of Diana.

  "No, dummy." She was tender. "They tie off the tubes shordy after your first booking as a soloist." Fascinated, I listened as she talked inner-high-priestess talk by the yard, including such forbidden subjects as clitoral circumcision, depilatories, and of course, inevitably, accident insurance and liability.

  "Now," she said, mischievously, "you know everything and you'll go and tell Priscilla all our little secrets."

  I was stunned. "How do you know Priscilla.^"

  "Everyone knows Miss Priss." Stephanie reached for a pomegranate on the night table. She was like a cat, I thought, ensorcelled by her catness. "She's the talk of Ephesus with her gang of pseudo-intellectuals, all jabbering away in that purple-painted conversation pit of hers." Stephanie's white teeth were now as purple with pomegranate juice as Priscilla's tasteful conversation pit.

  "You've actually been to her house?"

  "No." Stephanie spat seeds in the air. "Glaucon's ex-wife has just joined the company. She's my understudy. She knows Miss Priss. She's told me everything."

  A light shone beneath my hyacinthine curls. "You mean

  Ms Glaucon's gone and joined the Diana of Ephesus Dance Company?"

  "I don't know if it's what I meany but it's certainly what I said. Once her big affair with Priscilla had run out of olive oil, she showed up at an open call for dancers, without an a£ienty the kiss of death. But she was really hot. She was hired. She's still hot. She's also got all the numbers. . . ."

  "Dance numbers.^"

  "No. Tour numbers. I got them over there. By the bidet. Your box-office receipts for the last quarter." Stephanie combed her hair, accurately, without a mirror. "There's a lot of papering going on, but even so you're making money. Well, I got news for you, Tim boy. Not 'good news' like you like to peddle but bad news. If you start cutting real deep into our gross here in Ephesus, you won't know what hit you."

  I feigned innocence; chewed an imaginary straw. Stephanie stretched, voluptuously. "We audit your books, you know, and I gotta hand it to you. Bookkeeping-wise, you got one sweet operation going, but triple entry or not, once you pass a certain figure—^which is for us to know and you to find out—there wdll be no more Jesus Christ in Ephesus. You read me, big boy.>"

  For answer, I flung myself upon her, and we were as much one as four legs and four arms can ever be said to be one this side of that grand old cupcake Plato's simile for the desire and pursuit of the whole in one.

  "This," said a familiar voice, "is a pretty how-de-do." I froze in the saddle, pomegranate juice on my lips as well as on my organ of generation.

  But it was not, thank God, Priscilla. It was Glaucon's wife, who had taken to imitating Priscilla's faux Pontusine voice and mannerisms in the hope—^vain, it would seem—of

  84 Gore Vidal

  attracting not only Glaucon but Priscilla, her solipsister under the skin.

  "This is not," said Stephanie, in a very good humor, "the understudies' rehearsal." Then she pulled her understudy onto the bed and a three-way was not rehearsed but marvelously performed until the chief eunuch, masseur, and re£jisseur appeared to announce the running of the bath and dawn's rosy arrival and the necessity for all studs to get lost.

  Ms Glaucon had a parting word for me. "Tell Glaucon and Priscilla that I've never been happier than I am now with the Temple of Diana corps de ballet, where I have found a place for myself that I could never have achieved in the church of Pauline Jesus Christ. Until I joined the company I let others use me. But now I am a complete woman. I flow from the center like a great river from top to delta, surging, surging with a uterine power that has at last been tapped for the first time not by man-the-useless or by woman-the-user—Priscilla—but by Stephanie, who is the feminine principle writ in stars upon the night sky of my many-chambered heart. Oh, completion!" She howled while Stephanie simply purred and plucked pomegranate seeds from between her—Stephanie's—teeth. "Glaucon could never ftilfill me. He was Western instead of Mideastem union whenever he entered me. Oh, he is a genius, yes, but doesn't life take precedence over art.>"

  From a corner of the room I heard what I thought was an echo of "Yes, yes, yes." I turned and saw a shadowy woman. She was standing in the corner—tall, long-limbed like Stephanie, with short red hair and a gamine face. She wore a bright green leotard. I could tell that she was a dancer not only by her whole stance but by the way she stood there, in a perfect fifiJi position, staring intentiy at the three of us.

  "She's back!" Stephanie leapt from her bed and con-

  fronted the beautiful shadowy lady, whose three-pointed smile was so like in each and every one of its points Stephanie's own triangulated superstar glow. "You're so beautiful." Stephanie was torn between adoration and fear. "But, please, why do you spy on me like this?"

  "Because she's a private detective!" Glaucon's wife was terrified by the apparition. "You know, Pinkerton is hiring women agents now, more deadly than the male, according to Glaucon, who knows. But I don't care. True, ours is a love that has no name. ..."

  "Shut up, dyke." Stephanie y/as smooth, oh, so smooth, as she turned now to the mystery beauty all in green for lover-riding. "I believe I've seen you some place before. Are you by any chance the goddess Diana.^"

  The beautiful shadowy creature nodded, wrinkling her retrousse nose, the very image of Stephanie's own super-kitten button.

  "I'm getting through," said the adorable phantom. "I'm really getting through. I got to tell Kevin."

  "Ours," said Glaucon's wife to the mystery guest, "is the purest, the most intense of all relationships. I know Saint Paul and Glaucon have paid Pinkerton a pretty penny to set us up like this for blackmail, but there is not a court in Asia Minor that would find Stephanie and me guilty of anything except the deepest, truest, purest passion. ..."

  But Stephanie was not listening to her hysterical understudy. Enraptured, she addressed the gorgeous creature in the shadowy comer where a thousand tiny lights seemed suddenly to be twinkling all at once. "You watch me a lot, don't you.>"

  The beautiful apparition nodded.

  "I know who you are!" Stephanie's eyes were now very wide, gray-blue cat's eyes.

  86 Gore Vidal

  But then I knew, too. In a flash, I knew.

  "You're me! I'm you!" Stephanie was shouting now.

  The creature nodded. "You're me in a past life," the vision said softly. "I've channeled in because there's going to be trouble here where I was once the high priestess of Diana. ..."

  ''Second high priestess." Stephanie was always a stickler when it came to billing. "Where are you—^that is, me—right now?"

  "In the New Age," said the lovely gamine ghost. "The age of Aquarius, soon to change to . . ." But she had begun to fade, until only a few hundred points of light were flashing on and off as her voice became so much musical breath.

  "Who are you?" Stephanie cried.

  "Shirley MacLaine," I said, not meaning to say anything.

  The shadowy corner was now empty except for shadows and a thousand points of darkness. "Who the hell is Shirley MacLaine?" Stephanie rounded on me just like her New Age self.

  "She's you—^in the future," I said, wondering what on earth I was talking about because I had never seen the television then.

  "S
he's a Mormon," said Glaucon's ex-wife unexpectedly.

  "No." I was precise. "You're thinking of Mary Baker Eddy, who's a Christian Scientist. ..."

  Stephanie threw the remains of the pomegranate at me. "Get out! Both of you."

  Question: Did I really see adorable Shirley then, when I had not met Claypoole or the doctors Cutler and knew zilch about television? Or am I now in the act of writing this episde to the New Age being inspired by congruent forces inside as well as outside my ken?

  88 Gore Vidal

  Ephesus was there; even Saint had taken time off from his busy schedule to be present. He sat in a marble chair with the ever-present Corinthian file on his lap—^this was the bad time when the Church of Corinth was in financial chaos thanks to the crookedness of some of our most trusted associates and accountants.

  Apollos and Aquila sat on either side of Saint while everyone else either squatted on the floor or stood at the back. Torches strategically located gave Priscilla that pink look she so valued because it took a decade off her age and shortened, as it were, every single tooth while making the black gum glow purple.

  "Oh, Diary!" she moaned. ''''Quel jourl I knew when I wrapped the cerise scarf about my neck that I had never looked more adorable and vulnerable. Are the two one.> So, have I let slip some clue to my nature unknown even to me, complete in my womanhood as I am.> Aquila does not want to be mentioned in this journal." All eyes in the atrium shifted to Aquila, who was smiling to himself in his sleep. Priscilla had this effect on him.

  She made her belly go round clockwise—"Thus, the body frowns," she liked to say, and demonstrate.

  "Poor Aquila. Little does he know that the diary confers immortality. Otherwise what resident of that promised land. Posterity, will ever know how I—^through building up his sense of his own masculinity—am responsible for the success of the Pauline presence in Ephesus?"

  I have the Alexandrian edition of Priscilla's diaries on my desk. Currendy, she is having a great posthumous vogue, thanks to the blurb she got from the emperor Domitian which is to be found on each volume: "Priscilla has gone deeper and further into woman's interior than anyone since Jupiter himself nailed Leda the bird-girl."