The Church Lady

The day had barely muttered grayly through the closed window, had barely whispered in the tunnel of her pink ear, had only rolled once to stretch its clouded back and try to dim the sun with ash-cover that would deny the hour, when she knew. She guessed by the still of the apartment, by the strength of her own breathing, by the lack of a certain damp warmth against the question mark of her curved body.

Caleb was gone.

She opened her eyes wide when the thought dinned, cracked through the swollen, tired tissue of brain, and ached to find signs. The closet was tightly closed, a shut mouth with secrets. She saw no scatter of clothing, no comfortable chaos of comb, brush, and hair-gel on the surface of the dresser. She closed her eyes again and felt a moan quiver through the tumult of her body.

She knew. He was gone.

There was the sound of early morning buses in the early morning gray. She opened her eyes and willed her body to rise, conscious of each limb making its way through her cloud of mind, conscious of touching the sides of the bed to hoist herself, conscious of the metal feel of bed-sides underneath her fingers. All too conscious. She wondered if there was wine life, if there was anything to dull the ache of awareness, the ache of knowing the inevitable.

Maybe – she thought – maybe he'd gone for newspapers, for coffee.

But that was a thought from a magazine, from a television sit-com. Caleb never read newspapers, nor did he drink coffee. Caleb was restless enough without stimulus from the outside, without the heavy jolt of caffeine. No, she was the one who did those things, who always tried to assimilate some of the machinery of the everyday world into their daily existence, which sometimes seemed too surreal to bear.

She made her way to the refrigerator. It was 7:00 a.m. She poured a glass of cheap Zinfandel from the bottle on the shelf. The apartment was in its usual state of tangled suspension. Some of Caleb's unfinished sculptures littered the floor, body parts poised, juxtaposed in ways that jolted the viewer, that seemed, somehow, as if they were cast from someone who had just leaped off a building or been thrown from a car.

They were the physical manifestations of Caleb's violent restlessness, kept tightly under sullen lock and key. Part of his attraction, she had to admit, part of his attraction. She remembered Caleb the first time she had seen him, leaning heavily on a table at his own art exhibit. He had a glass of wine in his hand, but he was not drinking. Occasionally, he would bring the glass to his full lips, always thrust forward in his prominent pout, but the red line of the wine never got any lower, and she had thought he was spitting it back out. And so he was. Later, she would discover that he never quite trusted himself, that alcohol encouraged that part of himself, that tight, loaded-cannon part, of which he was terrified. It was his dark child, the one he kept firmly hidden in the cloak of his skin. His little Heathcliff, she thought now, ruefully. And it was this part of him, she knew, that would, one day, one hour, compel him to leave. Not too close, she had thought, I won't get too close and then he won't have an excuse to leave. I will be good, I will be quiet, I will not pry. I will let him be.

Now, she saw it did not matter. Would he return for the sculpture? Presumably, he still had the key. Yes, she thought, he would return, but when he could be sure she was not home. She knew, unequivocally, that she would not see him again.

She drained the wine glass and tried to decide how she felt. There was no furniture in the apartment, just mobiles of body parts turning softly in the great city breeze. She missed him already, missed him horribly, could feel the hole his absence would tear into her skin and into her body. She tried to think of what she would miss, tried to give it substance, so that she could give herself a proper form of grieving, a proper burial. Yet, she noticed a certain tension had lifted from her skin, the tension she had felt since she and Caleb had moved in together, the tension that, when she left herself think about it, made her body, skin, limbs, feel like the limbs of Caleb's statues, of his mobiles, the ones that were, somehow, out of joint, or kept in check with thin, strong fish wire.

She thought about this, and glanced at the drained glass. Well, she thought leave it to a glass of cheap white Zin at 7:00 a.m.

Still, she knew that was not it. Then she laughed. She suddenly thought of Caleb in his black trench coat, in his sneakers, in his wire rims and long hair. He's the one, she thought, whose body is out of whack, he's the one. Then, aloud, "Damned artists." And again, she laughed.

She left the apartment, knowing she had to get out of the shadow of Caleb's twisted, twisting torsos.

She walked down Second Street, ignoring the homeless who reached out their hands, palms outstretched and wavering. She shuddered, as she always did, at the sound of the buses, with the feeling that she was too close to the street, that the driver would not see her, that she would, inexplicably, become a part of the gray belly of the machine, and the gaseous animal would drive off, ignorant of consuming her.

She walked by Our Lady of Something-Or-Other, the Church that always seemed to be belching strong incense into the smells of the street. Abruptly, once she had passed it, she returned and stood outside its gates. There was a lush patch of lawn inside the iron gates, and she looked at it with envy. It was so rare in this city, with its houses pressed close, its tiny yards patches of burnt, brown weeds. There was singing, hymns, coming through the open door -- Vestry? -- she thought oddly -- Was that what church-doors were called?

She walked in. The interior of the church was dark wood, and there was, somewhere, red, though she would have been hard pressed to identify where. She saw to her relief that there was no service, just the church choir practicing in front of the church. She saw the black cowl of a nun's habit dotting the small crowd of women. What would it be like, she thought, What would it be like to be married to God? She thought of a scene from a movie she had seen when she was younger - - of a nun, taking her vows, taking her veil and her new name, lying prostrate in front of a priest. There had been something, she remembered, vaguely sexual in the scene, in the obvious submission of the nun, in the lordly, voyeuristic way the priest had conducted the rite.

They did, she knew, wear wedding rings.

As quietly as she could, she walked to a pew in the back the church. To her relief, no one looked up from the hymnbook, no one raced ahead to kick her out or to shout "Heretic."

She sat down and looked around, at the stained-glass windows that held Cubist-looking pictures of Crucifixion, of Christ falling, of his whipping, of the thorns that seemed to make his head bleed as big rosy drops of glass. The windows reminded her of Caleb's sculpture, and she imagined for a minute the mobiles from the apartment suspended from the ceiling, the sculptures placed in the four corners of the church. They would not, she thought, seem out of place.

She noticed a red cover of the hymnal, tucked in a holder on the back of the pew directly in front of her. She picked it up, thumbed through it. The sound of the choir soared, occasionally broken by an out-of-tune singer, or someone in the wrong key. There was a pipe organ, and the sounds bellowed through the cavern of the building. Idly, she tried to find the hymn they were practicing, but could not. She focused on the words, picked up something about the color blue, something about the son.

She closed her eyes, hymnbook in lap. The sounds soared again, and she imagined clouds, treble clefs in the sky, and a picture came to her -- for years, her grandmother had, stuck with a magnet on her refrigerator, a picture of a handsome Jesus, a laughing Jesus. He had brown hair, she remembered, and it was long - - the picture must been created in the 1970s because he looked like an Israeli hippie. She felt the warm haze of the wine she had drunk, smelled the incense that burned through the wood of the church, felt the music of the nuns lifting her arms, straightening and soothing them back into natural contours.

Her hands fell to the hymnbook in her lap. Almost unaware of her own actions, she pressed the book between her legs, felt her pubis throb against red leather. The color of blood, she thought, though her eyes were closed, The color of blood. Her hips were writhing now, and she felt the hard nub of her clitoris rise to meet the package of words, the book that held the songs that soared, like birds, around her numbed mind. She felt the rush of panic when for a minute the cloud cleared and she realized what she was doing. But, she thought, it's dark, and anyway, Caleb's gone. She pressed the hymnbook more tightly against her denims, and touched her face lightly with one of her fingers, letting it slide lightly over her lips, her eyes, enjoying the feel of her face, of her skin, in a manner that Caleb never had. She imagined the Jesus of her Grandma's picture, and he was before her, laughing, and his robe was open. She wanted to laugh with him too, wanted to ask him to run naked in the rain with her, wanted to drink wine -- maybe he could make some? – with him. She felt the chuckle burgeoning from her chest and she wondered, somewhere, when she had last chuckled. She threw her head against the back of the pew, heard the swell of the choir, and felt herself shudder in restrained violence. He was holding her, her Grandma's Jesus, holding her, touching her face and her breasts and the swollen lips of her vagina, her engorged clitoris, and she thought, for a minute, that she must be Mary Magdalene. He made her come, concentrating only on her, on her body, her needs, on the wonderful deluge of fluids she felt seeping through the crotch of her jeans. Caleb never touched me like this, she heard herself confess to Jesus, He never really touched me at all...

She noticed the silence.

She opened her eyes and saw that the choir had gone, that she was alone with the hymnbook, with the wood interior, with the lingering thoughts of her Jesus, the Jesus that have given her hope, had given her, somehow, herself.

Knowing this, she stood up, let the hymnbook fall to the floor with the soft thump of leather against wood, and walked out of the church, into the day that had now brightened and burned off the gray.