Only Begotten Daughter

by James Morrow

  “Might I trouble you for one of those?” Roger asked cautiously.

  “Sure,” said Phoebe.

  “Saw you on the court last Tuesday.” Lucius served Julie her Black Russian. “You looked good.”

  “Julie always looks good,” said Roger, smiling stupidly.

  “Sixty-four to thirty-one, that sucks,” said Julie, sipping. Sweet, sinful, exquisite.

  “Julie can get a basket whenever she wants.” Phoebe swizzled Roger’s drink with the crazed competence of the mad scientist in Ten Thousand Psychotics. “She’s tuned in on the cosmos.”

  Lucius opened the bedroom door, its back panel decorated with Playboy centerfolds. Julie pondered a certain Miss March. What an incalculable debt she owed whichever playmate had inspired the donation that was her gateway to flesh. Still, Miss March seemed pathetic. Why did males find breasts erotic, why did these mongrel solids drive them crazy? Yes, there were far too many unwanted pregnancies around Brigantine High, but certainly her mother shared some of the blame, wiring up guys’ penises like that.

  “Don’t worry.” Lucius winked lewdly. “Around here we knock first.”

  Roger led her into the little boudoir and set their Black Russians on the nightstand. Lucius closed the door. Julie and Roger jumped simultaneously. What a couple of overbred dogs we are, she thought, what a pair of skittish virgins.

  The Winnebago’s engine snorted to life. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Julie called.

  “What’s going on?” shouted Roger.

  Phoebe’s voice zagged out of the bedroom loudspeaker. “This is your captain speaking.” The van chattered and rolled. “Next stop, a deserted and romantic section of Dune Island.”

  Steadying their drinks, Roger called, “Do me a favor, Phoebe.” Always so polite. “Go slowly.”

  “Do her a favor, Roger,” came Phoebe’s amplified reply. “Go slowly.”

  “You shouldn’t be driving,” said Julie.

  “Should I help you ravish Roger instead?”

  Julie wasn’t sure how much of her dizziness traced to the Winnebago’s movement, how much to the Black Russian. She drew a deep breath, sipped her drink. A private bedroom with a pornographic door. Well, well. A mattress jutting from the wall, white sheets wrapped around it, tight as drumheads. Well, well, well. Did she really want Roger inside her, pushing and stabbing? Would her chunky body suffice to make it work?

  He didn’t wait for Dune Island. Like a soldier ducking machine-gun fire, he hit the mattress, pulling her down with him. His fingers were everywhere at once, massaging her blouse, tugging at her jeans.

  Julie drew away.

  “Sorry,” said Roger. His favorite word.

  “Ground rules. We need some—”

  “We’ll use this.” Roger pulled a condom from his corduroys, flashing it like a press pass. “If that’s all right.”

  “I meant our relationship.” Beyond curiosity, beyond her need to provoke God, the night had to be what Aunt Georgina would call cosmic. “Do you love me, Roger?”

  “Of course.”

  “Truly?”

  “I truly love you, Julie. It doesn’t bother me a bit you’re Jewish.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Say I love you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love you.”

  Good. They weren’t just satisfying their respective longings for defiance and ejaculation. This was devotion, ecstasy, mutual worship. “Attention, passengers,” crackled Phoebe. “Unfasten your seat belts and everything else you can get your hands on.”

  Julie helped him remove her blouse and bra. Her heart seemed to have doubled in size. Would it be wonderful? Gross? What was she doing here? “I want to go to the stars,” she’d told Phoebe that afternoon. “First time out,” Phoebe had replied, “you won’t get past the asteroid belt.” The Winnebago’s rumblings wove through her. Her jeans and loafers melted away, so that only her underpants stood between herself and spiting God. We didn’t invent this preposterous stuff, she thought as she popped the button on Roger’s corduroys. The two of them were innocent. Everyone was innocent. The universe was a place of blameless urges and morally neutral hydraulics.

  “Shit!”

  Phoebe.

  The Winnebago listed like a ship in a typhoon, pitching them off the mattress.

  “Fuck!”

  Lucius.

  The remainder of their Black Russians splashed onto the carpet, ice cubes rolling like dice. The door burst open and Phoebe swung in, her hand locked on the knob, her dark face bleached to the color of tobacco. “Help!”

  “Get out of here!” Julie snarled.

  “Aren’t you driving?” Roger asked.

  “Emergency!” shouted Phoebe. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry!”

  Julie extricated herself from the fleshy pile and, throwing on her blouse and jeans, followed Phoebe into the cab.

  Solid mud greeted her view. Across the windshield, against the side windows: mud, a worm’s cosmos.

  “She drove off the fucking bridge!” Lucius stood on the passenger seat, palms against the roof, feeling for leaks. “I can’t believe it!” Tears glistened on his zits. “Phoebe’s such an asshole!”

  Again the Winnebago tilted, hurling the three of them against the passenger door. Silt oozed from the air vents. Buried alive. Sinking. The week before, twenty-five thousand Colombians had died in a mud floe, children suffocated, adults both righteous and wicked strangled by the impartial earth. Only that was merely news, another clipping for Julie’s temple.

  “What’s the commotion?” Roger stumbled into the cab, hitching up his corduroys.

  A urine stain bloomed on Lucius’s crotch. “We’re going to die!”

  “Do it, Katz!” Like a sailor closing hatches on a submarine, Phoebe threw the vent levers to off.

  “Do what?” said Lucius.

  “This girl has powers!” said Phoebe. “She’s God’s favorite daughter!”

  “God’s what?” said Roger.

  “She’ll save us—won’t you, Julie?”

  “Of course she will!” moaned Lucius.

  “Of course she will!” gasped Phoebe.

  Julie rolled her eyes heavenward. Of course she’d abandon her principles? Of course she’d be a hypocrite, rescuing Phoebe and the others while all the Herb Melchiors died of lung cancer? Of course she’d be self-centered, raising up Ramblin’ Girl while the surrounding planet bled?

  No! She was better than that! “Mother,” she rasped. The Winnebago descended. “Mother, it’s in your hands.”

  “My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee,” Roger recited, dropping to his knees, “and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all—”

  “Mother!” Julie’s voice made a hot breeze in her throat. “Mother, you owe me this!”

  Phoebe seized Julie’s arm. “No time to get religious on us—do it!”

  “Mother, this is your last chance!”

  “Do it!” screamed Lucius.

  “Do it!” urged Roger.

  Do it? Julie hauled herself behind the steering wheel, pressing her palms against the rubbery plastic. “Mother, I’m warning you!” She whipped the wheel hard. “Mother!”

  And there was light.

  Everywhere, light, enveloping the van as if the mud had transmuted into molten gold. The wheel became a halo, the gear shift a flaming sword, the speedometer a comet. “Mother, is that you? You?” A time-twisted universe suffused the cab. Ceramic fragments congealed into teapots, blossoms imploded into buds, clocks spun north to west…and, like a mammoth breaking free of a tar pit, the Winnebago struggled upward through the tiers of gunk and silt. “Mother!” Oh, yes, no question, the Primal Hermaphrodite had arrived, peeling away New Jersey’s gravity like a farmer shucking corn. “Thank you, Mother! I love you, Mother!” Within a minute, Ramblin’ Girl had cleared the trees and was hovering above the bridge like a helicopter.

  “Unbelievable!” gaspe
d Lucius.

  “Jesus!” shouted Roger.

  “Warm,” said Phoebe.

  The Winnebago became a domain of unfathomable gentleness: yolks left their shells and tumbled unbroken into frying pans; sleeping babies were lowered undisturbed into cribs. With a subtle bump, the van landed on the bridge and rolled to a halt. Hysterical cheers filled the cab, kissing Julie’s eardrums.

  “Unfuckinbelievable!”

  “Mother of God!”

  “Warmer.”

  Shivering with epiphany, Julie turned the ignition key, and in a cunning little coda to the miracle the mud-packed engine started up. “Where to?” she asked, smiling hugely.

  “The beach.” Phoebe beamed with wonderment and pride. God’s daughter’s best friend. “Go left here.”

  “Folks, I have no idea what just happened”—Lucius eyed his soggy crotch—“but I know I’ll be spending the rest of my life thinking about it.” He touched Julie’s elbow tentatively, as if expecting an electric shock. “I don’t suppose you could, er…”

  “What?”

  “Get the van cleaned up?”

  “Nope.”

  “I just thought—”

  “No way.”

  The coarse whisper of surf filled the night as Julie drove onto the sand and parked. Rolling down the driver’s window, she let the mud flop onto her jeans. Her blood was on fire, an internal oil spill, smoking, burning. Curing some stupid blind kid was nothing compared with finally finding your mother.

  “I’d like some fresh air.” Phoebe smothered Lucius with the kind of grand, sensual kiss she’d given Julie in her temple. “You would too, Lucius.”

  “You nearly got us killed, Phoebe,” Lucius grunted. “It’ll take days to wash this mud off. Days.”

  “She did get us killed,” gasped Roger. “And then Julie…”

  Quickly Lucius and Phoebe assembled their orgy—condoms, six-pack, beach blanket—and, jumping from the Winnebago, ran across the sand. The April night swallowed them. So they felt it too, Julie realized, the erotic thrill of near oblivion fused with the kick of epiphany. And Roger over there, sitting dumbfounded on the barstool, was he likewise aroused? She lurched out of the driver’s seat and dove into him, wedging herself between his legs. She was desirable, gorgeous, a deity whose mother cared!

  Roger pushed her away.

  “Huh?”

  “God’s daughter,” he replied, sweat marring his beautiful goy-Jesus face. “Phoebe said—”

  “I thought you wanted to—”

  “I can’t do that with God’s daughter!”

  And suddenly she smelled it. A piercing stench, the acrid molecules of his adoration. The evening, she realized, had ended. Very well. Fine. She could lose it some other time—this was the night God got in touch!

  She stumbled to the bedroom, snatched up her bra and loafers, and returned through the fumes of reverence.

  “I thought the Church might call me back,” Roger panted, tear ducts spasming with revelation, “but never this way, oh, no, never this way…” His awe was a mass of snakes, slithering over her body, driving her out of the van. “An amazing lady, the Church. Just amazing.”

  She opened the passenger door and, jumping onto the beach, began reassembling herself, bra, blouse, loafers.

  The night was cool and moonless. Tree frogs chirped like a thousand preschoolers testing their bicycle bells. Joyously she ran to the sea, its edge lathery with foam and horseshoe crab semen.

  “Hello, child.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said hello.”

  The sweet, spherical odor of fresh oranges reached Julie’s nostrils, and suddenly she was a ten-year-old stumbling upon a supernatural stranger in the Deauville Hotel.

  “Mr. Wyvern, the most wonderful thing just happened! God saved me!”

  Her mother’s friend stepped from behind a trembling cluster of cat-o’-nine-tails. He held a kerosene lantern aloft, its glow spreading into the channel, revealing a black brooding schooner afloat near Dune Island. “Ah, you remember me,” he said, each word a staccato pluck of his tongue. “Good.” A frock coat flowed down from his trim shoulders. The flame reddened his eyes and gilded his beard. “God?” He snorted like an asthmatic pig. “Did you say God? I’m sorry, Julie, but God had nothing to do with it. I’m the one who saved you.”

  “You?” Julie’s throat grew suddenly dry. Her knees buckled, her intestines tightened. “No, God did. My mother did.”

  “It was I. Sorry.”

  “No!” Her collapse was instantaneous: one moment she stood, the next she lay sprawled in the wet sand, crying as hard as when Pop had slapped her for reviving the crab. “Noooo!”

  “I couldn’t very well let you spend your prime years at the bottom of a salt marsh waiting for you-know-who. Sheer insanity, that.”

  “You’re lying. It was God.”

  “Nope.”

  Taking her hand, Wyvern pulled her upright and guided her to a clump of spartina grass. He flicked a tear from her cheek.

  Julie stomped the ground, as if the whole planet were a disgusting bug, stomp, squish. No doubt it was all true, no doubt she mattered more to the devil than to her own mother. “You are the devil, aren’t you?”

  Wyvern made a quick bow. “Thanks to my efforts, Atlantic City will run in the black forever.”

  “You said you were my mother’s friend.”

  “‘Now there was a day when the sons of God came before the Lord,’” he quoted, “‘and Satan also came among them.’ A better age, Julie. Gone forever.”

  She sniffed the mucus back into her nose. “I’ve been good, I’ve been bad—nothing gets her attention. What am I supposed to do, sacrifice a goat?”

  “Perhaps you should start a religion. You know—reveal your mother to the world.”

  “How can I reveal her when I don’t know what she’s like?”

  “Use your imagination. Everybody else does.”

  Julie pulled off her left loafer, emptied the sand. “Be honest, Mr. Wyvern—God doesn’t talk to you either. Curing that Timothy kid was your idea.”

  “True, true,” the devil confessed.

  “You…swindler.”

  “I’ve been called worse.” Wyvern lifted back his frock coat and removed his silver cigarette case. “We’re on our own, aren’t we, child? Two lost soul-catchers. A couple of ad-libbers.”

  “Why’d you want Timothy cured?”

  Wyvern flipped open the cigarette case, holding it before Julie’s teary eyes. “Virtue is of great interest to me. I was curious to see what would happen. Look…” Inside the mirror, a shadowy figure stood on a pulpit and boomed a sermon to a packed church. “Timothy’s father. You wouldn’t like him. Major fanatic. Confuses migraine headaches with God.” The preacher stalked up and down the aisle, showing his congregation what looked like a purple nightgown. “For years he worried that his visions might simply be in his mind, but then his son got those two new eyes, and now he’s really inspired. Believe me, this man will do something wicked one day.”

  “How wicked?”

  “Entirely wicked.”

  “And my miracle, it…?”

  “Inspired him.”

  “I’ll never cure anybody again.”

  “Good for you.” The devil grinned. His golden teeth glittered in the lantern light.

  “I’m going to have a life. Marriage, children, career, all of it.”

  “Of course you will. Such a heritage, sired by a good smart Jew out of God. Got a college picked out?”

  “Princeton.”

  “If I can ever help, just ask.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No problems? No questions? Need a recommendation?” Wyvern closed his cigarette case. “I can tell you why the universe is composed of matter and not antimatter. I can tell you why the electron has its particular charge. I can tell you—”

  “There is one thing.”

  “Shoot.”

  “My mother…”

  Wyver
n began retracting the wick. The flame grew translucent.

  And so did he.

  “It always comes down to her, doesn’t it?”

  “Why doesn’t she care about people?” The spring air dried Julie’s tears. “Why all the diseases and earthquakes?”

  With a final twist of the knob, Wyvern’s body became a gaseous haze. The dead lantern hit the beach, dug into the sand. “The Colombian mud floes?”

  “Yeah. The Colombian mud floes.”

  “Actually, the answer’s quite simple.” Two red eyes floated in the mist.

  “Really? Tell me. Why does God allow evil?”

  The red eyes vanished, leaving only the lantern and the night. “Because power corrupts,” said Wyvern’s disembodied voice. “And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ♦

  ♦

  ♦

  Princeton University rejected God’s daughter, but she did receive acceptances from Wesleyan, Antioch, and the University of Pennsylvania, plus notification that Vassar had placed her on its waiting list.

  Although Julie favored Penn—Ivy League, big city, close to home—her father was still making ends meet by donating to the resurrected and relocated Preservation Institute, and the idea of pursuing the lofty agenda of college while he whacked off down the hall gave her considerable pause. Her quandary ended the instant Penn’s financial assistance office promised her a full-tuition scholarship coupled to a job at the university’s bookstore. She would become, like her father, a shelver of books. One week after her birthday, she and Murray loaded the Saab with the collected detritus of her ill-defined life—her basketball, CD player, curling iron, all of it—and crossed the grim and matted Delaware into Philadelphia.