Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  Ernie waited. He stayed away, he tried to stay away but the tether wouldn’t let him go very far and so he sat on the grass, ten feet away, and he tried not to listen. But he couldn’t help it. It was his voice, wasn’t it? His voice. Ernie hated the sound of his own voice, hated listening to the message he had set up on his answering machine but this, this voice, it was still his, he knew that, but there was something to it, something deeper, resonant, a gentle purr to the way his body—he—spoke. Ernie had a moment of almost visceral jealousy to hear his voice doing that—a jealousy that went beyond seeing what his body had done with Celia, and how she had responded. This was something else. This went deeper. And Ernie listened. And then, slowly, he felt himself being drawn back into the body, into his body, and as he did there was a feeling of recognition, as if he were passing someone in a crowded hallway, someone from high school, someone he had met a long time ago. He opened his eyes, and they were his eyes again, and Celia was already looking away.

  “Celia,” he said, and he realized it was the first time he had said her name out loud. She looked startled.

  “It’s not—” she started, but then she stopped. Changed her mind. “The guards, they’ll be coming. They don’t like trespassers.” She paused, looking at him uncertainly. “So, hurry, please, if you don’t mind.”

  Ernie slipped into his jeans once again, and he tucked away the flopping penis. A thin layer of sweat slicked his chest and his neck so that the wind suckled heat from him in quiet little bursts. There was a crunch of gravel somewhere in the distance, and he tensed. Celia was moving slowly, and her eyes seemed wide and angry; she was trying to hook up the back of her bra behind her, but she couldn’t quite manage to snag the clasps. Her fingers were shaking. There was more crunching—closer this time. Her fingers continued to shake. She arched her shoulders backwards in frustration, a parenthesis with no partner.

  “Do you hear it?” she whispered. “Damn it, damn it all!” Ernie leaned in close, caught her fingers in his. Tentatively, she let go and Ernie hooked the bra. The noise was closer now. It couldn’t be more than ten, twenty feet. “We have to go now. They won’t be happy to find me here again. Or you either, I imagine.”

  The two of them bolted across the lawn, dodging headstones and weaving toward the gate drunkenly. Celia hadn’t managed to put her shirt on; her shoulders were like marble, they looked like they belonged in this place, where every word was written in capitals. She charged through the gate, and it rattled and shook with a fierce grinding sound. A thing coming to life. A thing being slammed back into stillness. Then they were out, and they were running, and neither of them knew why anymore but sometime during the process, Ernie found that he had taken Celia’s hand, and they were running together, down the deserted street.

  “Tell me,” he said when they were both leaning up against a brick wall, heaving the air in and out. Celia was giggling, but she was shivering as she giggled. Ernie put an arm around her, and the word came out in a puff of white, evaporating breath between whooping, heavy intakes.

  Celia said nothing for a moment, but she seemed to burrow into his chest, pulling the edges of his jacket around her. After a moment: “I don’t wuh-w-want to. You . . . you wuh-w-wouldn’t believe me.” She stuttered, and her teeth clicked together. “It’s crazy. Just . . . don’t ask.”

  With the elation beginning to dim in his mind, Ernie felt something curious and sad stealing into its place, and he half-wondered if that thing would push him out as well, leave him standing ten feet away, watching his body comfort and warm this beautiful, beautiful girl. “I’m asking,” Ernie said, and he pulled his arms tighter around her as if by doing that he could keep hold of himself, keep his soul firmly anchored, hooked inside his body.

  “It’s the name, you see—Bunhill,” she had told him after that, laughing and shivering as her fingers twitched, wanting to stub out a cigarette she hadn’t lit yet, sitting across from him at an late-licensed pub. “They say it’s from Bone Hill. They used to dump cartloads of the things here in the sixteenth century, just dropped them on the moor and sprinkled on a bit of soil to could free up the space at St. Paul’s.” Another giggle. “Everyone wanted to be buried in St. Paul’s. They’ve got Donne over there for Chrissake, and, God, if you’ve ever read any Donne you’d understand . . . but,” she said thoughtfully, “tonight isn’t a good night for St. Paul’s. For Donne.”

  She had been beautiful then, but in a completely different way than she had been in the bar. Ernie had wrapped his jacket around her, but he could still see hollow of white flesh beneath her throat, palpitating as she spoke, as she inhaled and exhaled. “I like to fuck the dead, Ernie. That’s the truth of it, plain and simple.” Her hair glinted a coppery gold where it was plastered in thin lines against her forehead. He said nothing. He tried to imagine his face at this pronouncement. Did he look surprised? He wasn’t, not really—he had felt it after all, and there way maybe a bit of relief in knowing, in knowing what it was and in knowing that she was telling him what it was.

  “It’s out of fashion to like dead white men, did you know that? Dead white men. What a ridiculous thing to call them.” Her nostrils flared beautifully, opening up like sails. They were marvellous, Ernie thought, that nose was the most beautiful nose he had ever seen.

  “Have you ever been in love?” Celia asked suddenly, maybe because of the look on his face, maybe because he still had not spoken. She looked at him in such a way that Ernie almost said “yes” right then because, he knew it, he was in love. He was in love with that nose and that moving throat and the latticework of her ribs covered by his oversized jacket, with the way her fingers twitched, and her eyes stuttered, the way she never looked at him while they were talking, only after, as if she was addressing the speech to someone else and he was just the audience, lost in the shadows beyond the stage. He shook his head.

  “No,” she said, “I didn’t think so. But I’m in love. I’m in love right now.” Her voice went soft and intense: “I will tell you that it is the grandest, most glorious thing in the entire world and it never, ever goes out of fashion. Love is the one thing that never gets tired or old, not real love, not love like mine. You should be in love . . . Ernie, isn’t it? Yes, that’s right. Ernie. You should fall in love, Ernie. Go find some nice woman and fall in love. You’ll be happier. Whoever it is you’re looking for, she’s not me. “

  And he thought that maybe she was wrong.

  That night, Ernie went home and wrote down the things that he had learned from the conversation. Ernie had never really written much, besides the odd scrawl of his phone number on lunchtime receipts and expensive, abstract-looking business cards. He found he liked the appearance of his handwriting, he liked the way it lined up in the neat, authoritative spaces between the lines of the notebook. He liked the way that the words did exactly what he wanted them to do, unlike the words in his mouth, which needed to be coaxed and wheedled. And these are the things Ernie learned:

  a) That “dead white men” was a derogatory term that referred to a purportedly disproportionate academic focus on contributions to historical and contemporary Western civilization made by European males.

  b) That Celia was, herself, an academic of the sort who might know what contribution had or had not been allegedly made to historical and contemporary Western civilization by said dead white men.

  c) That a large number of her colleagues who questioned the sexuality of certain writers were demonstrably wrong, although she did not say which ones—colleagues or writers—but Ernie found himself impressed nonetheless.

  d) That he, Ernie Wheeler, was in love with Celia.

  e) That Celia did not appear in any way to be in love with the aforementioned Ernie Wheeler.

  f) That neither of the two points mattered in the slightest when it came to the possibility of future relations, provided, of course, that they took place at a time and place of her choosing.

  ST. NICHOLAS CHURCH, DEPTFORD


  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

  1564-1593

  And so Ernie began to read about those dead white men. He knew it was stupid. He knew he should go find a regular girl, a girl of crooked teeth and reasonable attractiveness who nevertheless wanted to sleep with him—or at least the reasonable facsimile of him that came with low lighting and alcohol—but all he could think about was Celia. And all Celia could think about, it seemed, were them. And so Ernie would think about them as well. He would learn what it was they had said, why they had said it, and what special power they had that they could still return, all these years later, and possess the hearts of women like Celia. Ernie had read admittedly little up until this point in his life beyond the odd John Grisham novel found abandoned on the Tube, and he had a sneaking suspicion that the kind of writing he would find in the books of the dead white men would bear very little resemblance to the kind of books you found, dog-eared, hidden underneath discarded newspapers and cardboard burger boxes.

  And Ernie discovered that most of what it was the dead white men said had to do with sex. Take Marvell for instance: for all the fancy wordplay, all he really talked about was how to get a woman in the sack, and once in the sack, what she looked like in the sack. Ernie thought there was probably not much difference, really, between Marvell and himself. Not when it came down to it. Not when you stripped away the iambic pentameter.

  But as he continued to read, as he scoured the libraries and jumble sales, as he very quietly began to amass his own personal library of books written by the dead white men, he began to see that maybe there was something to it after all. Because he found he wanted to say things to Celia. And the things he wanted to say were things he had never wanted to say to another woman before. He wanted to tell her that the most beautiful sound he had ever heard was the sound of her breathing, and that sometimes his desire was like air and filled his lungs, and he dreamed it might whisper out of his mouth and into her; and sometimes his desire was like water and he knew what it meant to be a fish with the sides of him aching and split open and dying to breathe. He wanted to tell her his desire was shapeless and formless but as potent as a lightning bolt, shot through with colour and a sound that came ten seconds too late. He wanted to tell her his desire, even when it was just the barest spark, had a weight and a substance to it so that he could wrap himself around it over and over again until it grew large and round and pearlescent and perfect.

  But he never told her anything like this.

  And he wondered what they told her—Marvell and Blake and all the great lovers, all the dead white men that paraded through him and paraded through her.

  There had been one night when he had agreed to take her to Greenwich by riverboat. They had shared a glass of overpriced wine while they bobbed along the Thames and watched the city drift by, as self-absorbed and self-deluded as both New York and Palo Alto had been but with a kind of extraordinary, shabby European charm nonetheless. He had paid for the wine. He was used to paying for drinks for women and the habit still came to him naturally, so he over-tipped the bartender, who had the look of the type he normally left a business card with, but he refrained from doing so this time and instead wandered, drink-laden, back to the seat. Celia was still looking out the window, and the last of the evening light slanted down so that it touched the edge of her nose and her lips and her chin. Ernie was actually taken aback by how beautiful she was. He slid the glass up to her, and their fingers brushed. She still did not look at him, but she was humming something soft and sweet under her breath.

  For a moment Ernie was terribly happy.

  And then he was terribly sad.

  He was terribly sad because he knew that Celia was not humming for him, that they would not go to Greenwich with its riverside pleasantness, the postcard architecture of the Old Royal Naval College and the Queen’s House, as the bartender might have. They would not walk hand and hand along the curving street with a hundred other couples, buy ice cream or watch the water from the hill of the observatory. Instead they would disembark at the South Dock and then they would walk along the wharf; at some point, Celia would tug at his jacket and they would head south to a churchyard whose gates, he had learned, were adorned with two quite famous skulls-and-bones, whose pictures he had found on the Internet: ghastly things, with long, drawn-out jaws and sadly arched eye sockets. Beyond those gates, there would be a plaque and somewhere nearby, the unmarked grave of Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe, Ernie had learned, had died when he was twenty-nine, and George Peele had called him, “Marley, the Muses’ darling,” and he had written six plays, at least, that had survived, of which Ernie had liked Doctor Faustus best but had sympathised with Lust’s Dominion most (which he had, after the reading, learned was probably not written by Marlowe after all); or perhaps he had not died at all then, under mysterious circumstances in a Deptford house, perhaps he had been Shakespeare, in which case, he had written approximately another thirty-seven plays and Celia was in for a disappointment.

  Ernie himself was twenty-nine, and he thought maybe there were a few people who might remember him should he die. And he said, “How many times have you been this way?”

  And Celia did not look at him, her eyes locked on the passing buildings.

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell.”

  And Ernie asked her, “Do you love him?”

  Celia took the glass of wine to her lips, face still beautiful in tableau, now with the wine caught in the light. “I love them all, Ernie. I don’t know why, all I know is I do. That’s what makes them great men.”

  POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY, LONDON

  GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1343-1400), ET AL.

  And that was when Ernie began to fight back. That was when Ernie decided he had had enough; that although he had now read his way through the majority of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, had, in fact, fucked his way through it and half the cemeteries of London and the surrounding counties, he had decided that he wasn’t impressed; that all these men, no matter how great they might have been, they were all dead while he, Ernie Wheeler, was most definitely alive, and what was the point of being alive if you felt like a ghost haunting your own body?

  For her birthday, they decided to spend seven consecutive nights in Westminster Abbey. It took weeks of planning—oh yes—and Celia’s not inconsiderable skill with lockpicks along with, in at least one case, out-and-out bribery. But when all was said and done they had managed to eke out for themselves a period of no more than two hours a night of total privacy in one of the most famous landmarks in England, a place of kings and queens, where only a year ago William and Kate had tied the knot (as well as tying up the traffic of most of downtown London) in a lavish ceremony fit to bankrupt the royal coffers.

  On the first night, they began at the cramped and awkward tumulus of Geoffrey Chaucer—where Ernie had been sure he would brain himself on the low-hanging statuary—and worked their way toward the to the equally awkward if less dangerous marble monument to Edmund Spencer. Over the next several days it was Kipling and Dickens, Dryden and Hardy—Ernie had to be careful, the placement precise, lest the writhing or a sudden change of position evict one great man and usher in another. Ernie felt as if his body had become the King’s Cross Station of the English canon, with departures and arrivals scheduled meticulously and choreographed by an invisible traffic director.

  But when they came he was ready for them, and when they pushed, he pushed back. He had decided he would not go gently into that dark night, and so he raged, he raged against Chaucer and Spenser and Kipling and Dickens and Dryden and Eliot and Hopkins and Hardy and Browning and Tennyson and Drayton and Garrick and once, accidentally, John Roberts, Esq. (the very faithful servant of the right honourable Henry Pelham, Minister of State, died 1776) who hardly put up a fight at all. But the others did. They came with their cold, grasping fingers and their hot, hot passions and their words, most of all, their words—the words that Ernie now knew, had admired, had read for months upon month
s in preparation. Not just their words, either, but the essays and monographs that had followed upon them, the books of scholars that performed autopsies and dissections and cut them into tiny pieces, and, from those pieces, reassembled them and breathed new life into these oh-so-very dead white men. And the grunts and shrieks of Celia’s orgasms sounded off the South Transept, and still Ernie fought, and sometimes he lost, but sometimes, sometimes, he won, and then it was his orgasmic joy that rang out alongside hers.

  When it was finished, when they lay sweat-soaked and cold, Celia turned to Ernie.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry this isn’t working.” She was beautiful even then, though Ernie could still read the faint etching of “1756-1826” on her arm. She was always beautiful. “It’s not you,” she said, stopped, and scrunched up her brow, her nostrils flaring as they did when she was deep in thought, a look that Ernie had come to know and to love. “It is you, isn’t it? That’s the problem. It’s you.”

  POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY, LONDON (REPRISE)

  Ernie did not see Celia again. He did what any self-respecting man would do. He went back to his apartment and he burned the books, burned all of them, burned the Norton Anthology, the Cambridge Guide, the Oxford Illustrated Guide; he burned English Literature: Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World. He burned the very expensive editions of the complete works of William Shakespeare, purchased from a down-and-out graduate student who had decided to give up a life of solitude and learning in favour of dentistry. He burned every book he owned, every book except the notebook he had started after that night in the Bunhill Cemetery.