“Why don’t you call Kathy? She and Adisa would love to help you, Bobby.”
The suggestion startled him, but I think he might take it. He feels incapable of doing all that must be done to properly inter the widow of John Calvin Marshall. Bobby will have to make the decisions about who speaks at the funeral and who sits where and who sings what. He will have to say no to most and offend many for whom an appearance at Andrea’s funeral is a major career move.
The funeral will be Monday. I will go only to the cemetery. I am never convinced someone is dead until I see the casket put into the ground. When Jessica died, the funeral director didn’t want me to stay for the lowering of the casket. I suppose that is the hardest moment for most survivors, the moment when you know, without a doubt, that there is now an emptiness in your life. If hysteria is going to be unleashed, I would imagine it is at that moment. So, he wanted me to go.
No one else was there. When Jessica died, there was no funeral. There was no one to say any words. There was only me. You offered to come but I didn’t want you to. You would not have understood why my eyes were not only dry but glowing.
I told the funeral director I wasn’t going anywhere until the burial was complete, and, in fact, if he could find an extra shovel, I would pitch in. I think it was then that he looked in my eyes and became afraid. I would not have been surprised if he had a momentary thought to call the police and to order an autopsy on the body to make sure she had died of natural causes.
But where is it written that we are to love our parents? Honor, yes. Love? How do you love someone when you had no say in creating the relationship? Love must be a choice. It was a choice Jessica and I did not make.
I did not love my mother, and for a simple reason. My mother did not love me. Generally, we love those who love us. Or, we think we do. You and me, for example.
I will go to the cemetery and see Andrea buried and that will be the end. And then, I don’t know. Even though there’s new snow at home, there’s also snow in Colorado and New Mexico. I won’t really know until I see her casket resting in the earth. Then, for the first time in my life, I think I will be free.
1 P.M.
I had not planned to write so much. My original thought had been to simply tell you what the silence at my core has been. That is proving to be harder than I thought. But I also find that I want you to understand, which is a surprise. But I owe you that. You have loved a woman who thought she loved you and found that she didn’t but not because of you.
Do you remember a few years ago we were in the post office in Newport and I asked for some first-class stamps and the clerk gave me some with Cal’s picture on it? They had just been issued. I shoved them back and asked for others. Afterwards, you said what I did seemed racist. I laughed and you were a little annoyed. And before that, the first year there was the national holiday named after Cal, you were angry that I wouldn’t go to Burlington with you to attend a gathering at some church where I would have to listen to speeches by a whole lot of people who never knew him? You hinted again that my refusal “to honor the memory of John Calvin Marshall” made me a racist.
I can’t tell you how sick I am of black people and their white sycophants shouting racism whenever they don’t get their way. If there is anything more tyrannical than the tyranny of the oppressor, it is the tyranny of the oppressed and their fellow travelers.
Why didn’t you ask me, Gregory, why I didn’t want those stamps? Why didn’t you ask me why I didn’t want to “honor” Cal’s memory by observing the holiday in his name?
Forgive me. I want it both ways, don’t I? I berate you for wanting to understand me, for using the word, why, in my presence, and then I ask you to ask me why. What I really want is for you and me to live in such intimacy that you know when I need to be asked why and when I don’t. How are you supposed to know the difference? What else is a husband supposed to know?
Gregory, the least that a husband and wife can expect is that they be kind to each other. Regardless of what else happens, kindness must prevail. If they can be kind even when they hate each other, the love will return as surely as a cat will when it runs and hides from the slamming of a door. But if there is no kindness, there is no ground for weary feet to stand on.
I have been unkind, Gregory, and I am sorry. Since the day we met I have chosen the silence of my own self-centeredness. Of course you have the right to ask why. Of course you have the right to seek to understand me. Understanding the ways of another helps us live with what would otherwise be unacceptable. I have made it impossible for you to understand. I have made it impossible for you to accept. (Being in Nashville, one tends to start thinking in Country and Western lyrics. I just thought of one that would describe what I’ve done to you: “Like a hound dog, I’ve kept you tied in the back yard of my life.”)
“I envied you,” Bobby said to me one night.
“Why?”
“Because you were with Cal more than anyone. God, I loved that man.”
“Is that why you moved back here to work for Andrea?”
He shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it like that. I don’t know. But I have a feeling you’re trying to change the subject, or at least deflect it from yourself.”
I had to smile. “There might be a measure of truth to that.”
“I wish you would write a book about him. Nobody is more qualified. I read all the books about him and there is never any mention of you.”
“Oh, they come with their tape recorders and notepads and smiles. Do they think I will tell them the truth merely because they want to know? And what makes them think they would recognize truth? What makes them think they have the capacity to understand and describe Cal?
“They ask their questions and I say nothing. They accuse me of withholding information. They remind me of my obligation to history, of what will be lost to posterity if what I know about John Calvin Marshall goes to the grave with me. I say nothing and eventually they leave. I read their books and I underline this and that and write angry rebuttals in the margins but I will not talk to them and I will not write my own book.”
“I wanted Andrea to talk to you about her book. She responded rather cooly to the suggestion.”
I have not told him why.
In the post office that day, I shoved the stamps back because I couldn’t imagine licking a stamp on which was the image of the man whose penis I had licked for seven years. I saw Cal’s picture on the stamp and immediately there came the image of his penis, long and thick and hard as a diamond. It was black, blacker than anything else on his body as if it had taken on the darkness of the inside of the vagina. The books say women don’t care what size a man’s penis is. That is because the only penises they have seen have been small. Believe me, it makes a difference. So, I’m looking at his likeness on a stamp and remembering his penis and my tongue and I try to imagine licking the gum on the back of the stamp but I see myself licking the semen as it flowed down the side of his penis, and, well, it was a little too much to deal with standing in the post office in Newport, Vermont.
Cal’s penis was magnificent. If it had been a horse, it would have been a black Arabian stallion. If it had been a bird, it would have been an eagle. If it had been in the sea, it would have been a whale.
The penis is divine. Maybe not tiny ones like yours, but with Cal’s I understood why, in India, lingams are set up at crossroads and women lavish them with lotion. The penis is divine because it is the instrument of life. Through it passes the seed of human existence. Through it, male and female are renewed spiritually. When sex is good, male and female arise from the bed with a new understanding of human existence. This new understanding never lasts long, however, which is why we want sex as often as possible. It is the means given to each and everyone of us to be more than we are.
Think about the penis, Gregory. What does it do? What is its function, really? It connects. Couple is a noun. It is also a verb. To couple is to make a connection whereby two who have been sepa
rate become one. That is what the penis does; it banishes loneliness, or it has that potential. Unfortunately, men are stupid. They think the penis penetrates. They think the penis is meant to thrust and jab and batter and so they bang and bluster and huff and puff until they have their orgasms, spill their seed and go to sleep, and then wonder why they harvest women’s anger.
I am happy that Cal’s last act in this life was using his penis. When the coroner stripped his body for the autopsy, his penis was still moist from the wetness of my vagina. Strands of semen hung from his penis like tiny ribbons.
I feel foolish telling you about his penis. But maybe, maybe if I share with you what I love, emotion will return color to the images and I will come back and live inside my body, even when I am not on skis.
I was a virgin when Cal and I first slept together. He was to be commencement speaker at my graduation. I was not surprised when the phone rang in my room at school late one evening about a week before commencement. I recognized his voice immediately.
“Elizabeth.” No, “Hello.” No, “How are you?” Just my name.
“Hi.”
It was as if two years had not passed with no words between us. There was no chitchat. He gave me his flight number and I said I would meet him. I asked him what hotel he was staying at. He said he thought he was supposed to be staying at the president of the college’s house, but he would prefer not to.
Cal was comfortable with me because I was not awed by him, not even then. Which is not to say that I don’t think he was the most amazing man I’ve ever known or that I didn’t admire him. I did and he needed that. But more, he needed someone who, at the most inappropriate moment, would whisper in his ear, “I am going to suck your dick so good tonight.”
I know I never said that to you or did it. But a couple creates the modes of sexual expression appropriate for them. What would have sounded vulgar between you and me was exciting for me and Cal.
I didn’t know if Cal wanted to see the press when he got off the plane. I thought not because he was flying out two days before he had to and had asked me to meet him at the airport. I called the airline, pretended I was a representative of the college and asked if it would be possible to drive onto the airfield and pick Cal up directly from the plane rather than have him come through the terminal? No problem. I asked Daddy if he could arrange for me to have a limo at Cal’s disposal. And by the way, was anybody using his company’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel? I called the college president’s office, pretended to be Cal’s secretary and told him that Dr. Marshall had a series of private meetings set up and would not be staying at the president’s home.
I perceived needs Cal did not know he had and it gave me delight to satisfy them.
Love is simple, Gregory. There is nothing mysterious or difficult about it. Love is the taking delight in the existence of the other.
We never did that, did we? I don’t know that you knew it was possible. But I did and I did not tell you.
It is just as well, perhaps, because I am not sure that any of what I’ve written about me and Cal is true. I am not sure that what I have written with such confidence was shared experience or imagined. I am not sure that my life, from the day I met Cal until this day has not been a fantasy, a deliberate lie because I was afraid the truth would shatter me.
Until ten days ago I had never spoken aloud one syllable about me and Cal. That’s against the nature of love, isn’t it? Love wants to be known. I was silent for thirty-two years about the central experience of my life.
I should have told you before we married. Maybe I was afraid you would call it off. No. I knew you wouldn’t do that. I was more afraid you would be proud to be married to the mistress of John Calvin Marshall. No marriage stands a chance if it fears truth.
But what are the odds for a life that fears truth? Maybe Andrea was merely an excuse and it was time to stop lying. If you sit beside the bed of a comatose person and talk aloud for ten days, it becomes obvious quickly that it’s yourself you need to talk to.
Like now. This moment. Am I talking to you, or am I continuing the conversation with myself? Am I using you to hear myself?
Perhaps it is both.
Speaking aloud is different than saying words to oneself. To speak aloud is to make the effort to couple with the other. What is important is to make the effort. Trying is its own success even if the loneliness is not bridged.
A few nights before Andrea died, Bobby and I sat in her house. It was a typical American ranch with a finished basement, which would have been the rec room if they had had children. I still had my key to the basement where Cal’s private office had been.
Bobby wanted me to look at the manuscript, to tell him what I thought, and, I think, to feel me out about finishing it if Andrea should die.
There was scarcely anything to finish. Fifty pages of piety whose sweetness would have compelled readers to kick their children and shoot their dogs as the only means to restore a semblance of psychic balance.
There was no hint that John Calvin Marshall had had a relationship with another woman for most of his public career. According to Andrea, he was a devoted husband.
She might be right. The way she wrote of intimate conversations they had over coffee in the mornings and in the kitchen late at night, of phone calls when he would talk over problems and concerns he had about the civil rights movement, how to deal with presidents Kennedy and later Johnson, and his increasing agony over the Vietnam War.
I remembered clipping articles about the war and giving them to him from late sixty-two on. I read books and wrote precis for him. When Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam, was killed in a coup, I suggested to him that there might be CIA involvement. I was the one who first mentioned that one could not fight for civil rights at home and support a government depriving a nation in Southeast Asia of its right to choose its own destiny.
Why had he discussed all this with her and not me? I felt betrayed, as if he had had an affair with his own wife. He wasn’t supposed to be talking with her about matters he would not have known about if not for me. He wasn’t supposed to be talking to her about anything that mattered to him, about anything that mattered at all
He never told me about his conversations with Kennedy and Johnson. I have been trying to remember what we did talk about? I can’t remember anything. Maybe that is why I am silent with his biographers. I have nothing to say. Maybe I talk so much about his penis because that is all I knew of him.
I try to convince myself that Andrea was lying, that she was creating a public fiction. For some reason I know she was not. Cal had to have a confidante, someone whom he could use as his sounding board. I was so self-centered that it never occurred to me that it would be his own wife. That’s logical, right? That makes sense, doesn’t it?
I feel so stupid.
Yet, his tears were not a lie. He may have shared his musings with her, but I was the one who lanced his pain and healed his soul.
I do not like myself very much at this moment. I read over what I have just written and I am ashamed. I am upset because I had fancied that I was the only one in the life of John Calvin Marshall and maybe I wasn’t. Or maybe I was the only one in one part of his life and not another. Maybe he simply used me. Well, I was obviously anxious to be used.
No.
That is not how it was. Maybe what she wrote is true. Maybe it isn’t. But lust cannot last seven years. No man sleeps with a woman for that many years from physical desire alone.
But at this moment, I am not sure.
Saturday — Evening
I have just returned from the cemetery. It is the first time I have seen where Cal is buried. Although it is not the setting I would have put him in, it is appropriate.
He is buried in a large cemetery near a shopping mall. His grave stone is a block of granite, and not having been here before, I was surprised by the words on his tombstone. “God’s Gonna Trouble The Waters,” they read. I would not have given Andrea credit for
such insight. The words are from a spiritual called “Wade in the Water.”
Wade in the water
Wade in the water, children
Wade in the water
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Who’s that yonder all dressed in red?
God’s gonna trouble the water.
It must be the children Moses led
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Who’s that yonder all dressed in white?
God’s gonna trouble the water.
It must be the children of the Israelites
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Who’s that yonder all dressed in black?
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Must be the hypocrites getting back
God’s gonna trouble the water.
At large mass meetings Cal would end his speech by breaking into that song. It was a familiar spiritual all across the South, and all he had to do was sing the first word and every black voice in the church would come in on the second. It would send chills through me every time because it was as if I was hearing not only their voices but the voices of their ancestors going back in time to that absurd moment white people made the decision that it was in their best interests to import dark-skinned people from halfway across the globe and enslave them. (And there are those who want to argue that white people aren’t insane.)
I don’t know that I ever understood the song as much as I loved it. What did it mean that God was going to trouble the water? Such a strange and unusual use of the word, trouble. Was it a corruption and was the line originally that God was going to tremble the water? It bothered me so much that I finally went to a library and looked it up and much to my surprise, I learned that there is a definition that means ‘To disturb, agitate, ruffle (water, air, etc.); esp. to stir up (water) so as to make it thick or muddy.”
One night I asked Cal, “Why would God want to trouble the water?”
And All Our Wounds Forgiven Page 16
