God Game

by Andrew M. Greeley

  One time when he had delivered himself of an oracular, ponderous, and obscure observation about the deteriorating peace negotiations, she barked at him, “The difference between communications from you, ’Vau, and those from the Lord Our God is that He would speak more clearly.”

  The remark didn’t seem to displease him at all. Apparently he thought he was worthy of comparison with the Lord Our God. (Their God and probably our God too, God knows, but I’ll use their form throughout this story.)

  Whenever he paraded solemnly by the spot Ranora had picked to listen to the negotiations, she blew a nasty, slightly off-key, pompous tune on her tin whistle. That sailed over his head too.

  His insensitive arrogance wouldn’t have bothered me, except that if these poor people were going to work out some kind of peace they needed his intelligence and political skills—characteristics which he occasionally displayed when he wasn’t busy parading his massive dignity. I had no intention to become involved in his personal life. I didn’t want to know about it. I followed him home because I wanted to jolt him into a constructive peace process. What happened after that was my doing, but not part of my original intention.

  (To give the poor man his due, it seemed that his family were the oldest nobility in either kingdom and that he had been raised to believe in his own inherent superiority.)

  B’Mella screamed at him the day I decided to follow him home. “Stop acting and start thinking, the Lord Our God condemn you!” (the strongest curse of which they seemed capable). “I’m a warrior not a thinker; how can I end this terrible bloodletting if you don’t do some thinking for me?”

  “I am always ready for my lady’s command.” He bowed superciliously.

  “My command,” she reached for the dagger she carried at her belt, a symbolic gesture rather than a real threat, I had come to realize (well, most of the time not a real threat), “is that you tell me how to end this foolish and boastful chatter.”

  “I will give it very serious thought.” He bowed again.

  I couldn’t figure out whether the handsome, silver-haired bastard didn’t have a clue or whether he was waiting for the negotiations to break down completely before he rushed in to save the day and become a hero, as his family image demanded he be. I suspected that he was angry that the Duchess had called a truce without consulting him. This may have been an enormous affront to his dignity.

  “I do not know how N’Rasia puts up with your pomposity, ’Vau.” The Duchess pounded on her table, a portable wood frame covered with the blue-green cloth which was her color. “Do you require that she kneel and adore you every morning? Does she pray to you at night and not to the Lord Our God?”

  Pretty rough stuff by the standards of their world. You could call poor Lenrau an impotent pervert and no one thought anything of it. But with your own people you were supposed to be courteous and respectful. When B’Mella was upset, however, she could insult anyone.

  “N’Rasia understands her position fully,” he bowed again, “and embraces it willingly.”

  “She is a fool. I would not tolerate your pretensions to superiority for a minute.”

  “How fortunate it is, then, that we are not mated. Perhaps, the Duke Lenrau will be respectful of you.”

  Very dirty pool, I thought.

  “The Duke Lenrau is an upstart, a pervert, and a pig,” she said automatically, much the way kids used to mumble the act of contrition in the old days when we processed them through the confessional on the Thursdays before First Fridays. “From him I expect nothing, from a man with your heritage I would expect humility rather than arrogance.”

  There was something regal about her all right; alas, if it were only matched by stability of character, she would be an effective ruler. Nonetheless not bad for a woman whose first husband was killed when she was sixteen, as I had learned, and whose second died, just when he had apparently recovered, after a long convalescence from wounds. It was hard to tell whether she had loved either of them, but such traumas were enough to explain some instability and win her some sympathy.

  Apparently the latter was not part of their rules: the death of young spouses was a common occurrence, a matter of course in their society.

  She picked up no sympathy from that miserable so-and-so Malvau.

  “I will advise you, my lady, on affairs of government.” He bowed yet again. “I will not seek your advice on my personal relationships or demeanor.”

  “So much the worse for you,” she fired back hotly. “Now leave me and go home to your poor adoring wife.”

  To give ’Vau full credit, however, he had quickly and vigorously supported her decision to call the truce. Therefore he was not a complete fool. I needed to know more about him before I could figure out what I should require him to do.

  It was obvious around B’Mella’s pavilion that the man was a bit of a lecher, though sufficiently charming and restrained about it as to not quite make it into the dirty-old-man category. Many of the young women deftly avoided his pinches and caresses; others seemed to enjoy them. A few were undoubtedly “intimate” with him, though at times and places I couldn’t figure out and didn’t want to anyway.

  The Duchess clearly disapproved; her thin lips became thinner and her flashing brown eyes flashed more vigorously when Malvau made one of his passes. She said nothing, however, apparently respecting everyone’s freedom.

  One point for B’Mella: a hot-tempered, fierce warrior aristocrat, she was nonetheless gentle, almost maternal with her staff and servants. In response, men and women both seemed to like her, enjoy her company, and occasionally risk a joke at her expense. She had, I decided, distinct possibilities.

  So I instructed my machine, FOLLOW MALVAU HOME.

  It complied without protest. I hope it’s clear, by the way, that, as much as I respected his political acumen and as important for the peace process as I knew him to be, I had a strong distaste for the man. I’m experienced enough in dealing with characters like him to know that behind the arrogance there lurks a terrible feeling of worthlessness and self-rejection. They are pathetic, not proud; they play lord of the mountain who doesn’t need to be loved because they’re afraid that if they let down the barriers, no one will love them. Such understanding, however, is not much help if you’re trying to help them salvage their marriage or their life. They continue to be unattractive boors encased in armorplate which will resist anything short of a direct hit with a sixteen-inch shell.

  So you feel sorry for them and wish that they could escape from the armor of hate with which their mother (usually) had messed up their characters and pray that God will jolt them out of their stupid defense mechanisms, but you don’t have much hope that you can do anything to help them.

  Because you’re not God, right?

  But what if you apparently have picked up some Godlike powers in a story you’re coauthoring with a sixteen-bit computer?

  Anyway we (the Intel 80286 microprocessor and I) followed him home.

  These people had the interesting custom of moving their homes when they moved, even for something short term like a peace conference. They stacked their room-divider screens, let the air out of their furniture, dismantled their colorful pavilions, folded their garments in neat piles, closed their ingenious sanitary and bathing facilities, carefully packed their portable lamps and loaded the whole business on flat-bottomed red wagons with thick, cushioned tires and compartments for each of their packages, hitched four white horselike creatures to each wagon and bounced casually and comfortably away. I watched one of these operations and calculated that it took a family of four—mom, pop, teenager, and brat—two hours and forty-five minutes to complete the whole process and even less time to unpack and set up camp at the other end of the line.

  Travel light they certainly did. It sure solved the second-home problem. It was made possible of course by the incredibly light but durable multi-use fabrics that their mills ground out, apparently from the flaxlike material which was left over when they had extrac
ted the food from their crops.

  A word about the horselike creatures. They were shorter, faster, and sturdier than our counterparts. It’s hard to estimate speeds from the perspective of a TV screen, even a large one, but the animals seemed capable of sustained speeds with full loads of perhaps forty miles an hour. So who needed automobiles?

  Oh yes, they reproduced by laying eggs. I’m serious. So did most of the other animals which lived in the forests and on the mountains. I’m not kidding.

  The humans? If we can use that word? I don’t think so, though I wasn’t around for any childbirth scenes. The pregnant women that I did observe seemed to be “normally” pregnant, though the biologists who watched our tapes up at Lakeside were not absolutely certain.

  Anyway we soon arrived at Malvau’s pavilion, a rich purple one, matching his garment of course, located in the woods behind the peace meadow where the upper echelons of B’Mella’s staff were gathered, on the shore of one of the many attractive, silver-smooth lakes which dotted the forests.

  He began complaining upon arrival. The food was not ready, and when it was, it was not cooked properly. The garden in front of the pavilion was not adequately tended, the house itself was fit only for pigs (their pigs laid eggs too, honest), the wine had begun to sour, the servants and his teenaged daughter were not prompt enough in responding to his requests, and his wife was, as usual, an incompetent housekeeper, mother, administrator, and moreover was unworthy to bear the distinguished name of his family, certainly in no way comparable with his own mother.

  Know him?

  Sure. They’re a dime a dozen. You’d like to punch the bastard. It was this sort of grown-up little boy that my poor B’Mella had to lean on for advice. Note that, like all characters in a story, she belongs already to the author. Not that I owned her. The Lord Our God forbid that I or anyone try to own that one. She was mine in the sense that I had begun to love her and to feel responsible and protective about her. Soon like John Fowles’s Mantissa, she would haunt my dreams, day as well as night.

  She would not, however, give me a hard time in my dreams as some of the others would. But that anticipates.

  Well, if Proust can do it, so can I!

  While my B’Mella was moderately attractive, she didn’t compare with the gorgeous Irish Catholic heroines of my other stories who cavort, haremlike, through my dreams.

  Does God have fantasies about His creatures with whom She falls in love—and again if we are to believe the indications available to us, S/He falls in love with everyone? My guess is that, if you’re God, you don’t need to fantasize because your reality is good enough as is.

  Presumably the Other Person had some affection for Malvau. If She did, She was the only one. His family and servants ignored his self-pitying monologue, the way a mother learns to ignore a child’s crying which is for the record and not a real protest. They tuned him out with routine and untroubled disgust.

  His wife was blond, younger than him by maybe ten years, a bit overweight perhaps, round bland face, expressionless eyes, an unimpressive woman whom you could easily ignore at first sight. Only if you looked a second time would you notice that she was the kind of woman that most men would be perfectly delighted to have next to them in bed at night. Then you’d wonder why you hadn’t noticed that before, and would probably conclude that her external boredom had become a protective armor with which she walked through life.

  Nonetheless, when an insensitive dummy of the Malvau type washes up on the rectory beach with a wife like that, the professional celibate, having been forced to take a second look, thinks to himself that if he was involved with a woman that attractive, he’d certainly learn to be reasonably thoughtful and considerate with her, if only to assure himself some pleasant times in bed. The husband of course has never thought of it that way because he is too frightened of women to be thoughtful and considerate to one of them.

  The professional celibate is wrong if he thinks there’s any guarantee he would be different from the dummy if the circumstances were reversed or if, with or without permission of the Vatican, he takes unto himself a wife. He is on the other hand dead right to think that the species is organized in such a way that women require some relatively modest displays of thoughtfulness and consideration and that, failing all else, the sexual urge is designed to facilitate such attentions.

  I didn’t like N’Rasia any more than I liked her husband. I would dread being burdened with such a superficial flake for the rest of my life. But from the security of my position I thought to myself that she was attractive enough that, flake or no flake, I would certainly work at being nice to her if only to keep the passion going.

  That is, mind you, a minimalist approach. Obviously love demands much more. On the other hand, there are times in any relationship when you are thankful (presumably to the Other Person) for providing you with the minimum on which, you should excuse the expression, to fall back.

  Presentable physical charms notwithstanding, ’Rasia would have been hard to put up with outside of the bedroom. Like her husband, she was a complainer, a nagger, an unhappy, frustrated, and dissatisfied woman. Her beef was that the prolonged peace negotiations were interfering with the social season back in the city and the plans for her daughter’s first official dance (that’s what they called it). She was uninterested in and did not care about the deadly serious issues of war and peace with which her husband was preoccupied.

  “Will this foolish nonsense never end?” she complained. “There have always been wars. There will always be wars. That’s what we have warriors for. What will they do if there is peace? That foolish girl will get herself killed eventually just like her mother and father and husbands. We should be thankful that our children are not of the warrior class. But why should their foolishness interfere with our children’s lives? There is so little time for a girl to find a proper husband.”

  And on and on and on.

  You know that type too?

  Right.

  He complains and she whines. He moans and she bitches. And they haven’t listened to a word the other has said for a long time, years perhaps. The Lord made them, as the Irish put it, and the divil matched them.

  But once they had been in love with one another or at least thought they were. A storyteller, unless he’s writing for university professors and book reviewers, would perhaps want to bring them to some self-understanding if not renewed love. You can get just so much fun out of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (God be good to him) shouting at each other just so long before it becomes a drag. God who is a romantic, on the basis of the evidence, and indeed a passionate one, almost certainly will settle for nothing less than romantic passion between the two once and future lovers.

  (A pig of a priest once patronized something my sister wrote on the ground that it seemed quite strange for a married woman, mother of seven children, to believe in romantic love. My sister in reply wisely observed that if you are married and the mother of seven that’s the only kind of love that matters.)

  Your parish priest does his best to prevent spouses like Malvau and N’Rasia from killing each other and perhaps even to keep the marriage together, though often it is not altogether clear why. If you’re playing storyteller/God, you figure why not go for broke.

  OK, so ’Vau gets his jollies with the young women around the Duchess, those that are interested anyway. And, as it happens, ’Rasia has an occasional stud on the line too. An adjustment, not a perfect adjustment, mind you, but it functions more or less, the best, if you will, of a bad situation. The Other Person in Her wisdom may choose to leave it that way, knowing, Grand Improviser that He is, that any alternative strategy will make a bad situation worse.

  A novice at the God Game will rush in where angels fear to tread and muck things up considerably.

  As I have reported before, the people in this neighbor world have interesting late-night customs: they remove their outer garment, folding it with the care that sister sacristans (in the old days when we ha
d them) used to fold Mass vestments. Then in their undergarments they kneel to pray to the Lord Our God, either silently or aloud, and if they are married, either together or separately.

  Their undergarments, as I noted before, are limited in scope but highly effective in function. I cannot testify for the fantasies of women, but the “unmentionables” of the womenfolk in this cosmos next door would delight the fantasy of the adolescent male that lurks in all of us. Moreover, N’Rasia is the kind of woman who improves as clothes are shed. It is possible to kneel next to a womanly body like that, communicate intensely with your Maker, and not feel the slightest twinge of desire. Possible, but you’d really have to work at it. Alas, as we all know, a lot of men manage to put in the work as their marriages deteriorate.

  The next step in their bedtime practices is to bathe naked and together in the elegant and spacious portable bath which is next to every bed, and almost as big as the bed. These people are into bathing rituals with almost the same fanaticism as the ancient Irish or the folks who assembled around the Wadi Kumran near the Dead Sea. There’s ritual significance in the custom, a bath is always associated with some sort of prayer to the Lord Our God. Moreover, you could make the case that the culture displays considerable wisdom to put the naked bodies of lovers together in warm water before they go to bed. Like the ancient Irish, they have a fetish about personal cleanliness and domestic cleanliness too, a trait which the ancient Irish and, according to some, the modern Irish and Irish Americans lack. Their pavilions are neat enough and clean enough to win approval of the most rigorous Eastern European homemakers on the Southwest side of Chicago.

  OK, then they get out of the tub, wrap themselves in a vast towel to dry off (all the gestures seemed to be determined by a ritual as timeless and as unconscious as were the motions by which a priest used to remove vestments after Mass), discard the towel, replace it with a kiltlike garment at the waist and slip rapidly under the covers (the women have taken care of their hair before the process begins).