Endless Things (46 page)

Brother Lewis closed his hands together before him with great slow care, and for a moment Pierce thought he might pray. But he still only looked at Pierce, maybe a shade more interrogatively.

"It's when I seem to myself to find some clear reason—in biology, or history, or psychology, or language—for
why
a religious belief, or a notion about God, might be pervasive, or convincing to people, even though it's really insupportable, or even dumb—that's when I feel I've hit the truth. That I'm on the path. Mostly."

This felt like a great relief to say, here, and Pierce even fetched a sigh when he had done. Brother Lewis nodded, then propped his cheek on his fist, which seemed a very unmonklike, or lay, gesture.

"Has it occurred to you that this might be work toward God as well?” he asked.

Pierce said nothing.

"I mean the discreating of false creations about God? Refuting false statements, rumors you might say, skeptically? It is, in fact, a way toward God, or it can be. Many mystics have understood this. Saint Thomas himself said that it is proper and right to say that God is
not
: not good, not big, not wise, not loving. Because these things limit God to the definitions of those words. And God is beyond all definitions."

"The
via negativa
,” Pierce said.

"You've heard of it.” Brother Lewis said this indulgently, as you might to someone who had tossed out
extravehicular activity
or
death row
or
cast away
. So that Pierce made no nod in return. “I wonder if you have thought how hard a way it is, though. Very lonely, for a long time, as God loses his familiarity.
Not loving, not good
. Maybe you know."

No answer.

"In our spiritual practice,” Brother Lewis said, “we sometimes are filled with sensations, of love, of goodness, of sweetness. Of
rightness
. All problems seem resolved, all matters clear. Tears of joy. God's love for you. And a spiritual director might say to you then, well you're very fortunate to have these moments, and you should be grateful for them. But the goal lies farther on, and has little to do with any of this. And when it's reached there will be nothing at all to say."

No answer. Either (Pierce thought) this is so, and I have gone partway without knowing it, and will never truly rest till I go on, or I'm not doing anything like the thing these guys do, whatever exactly that is, and never have.

God.

"Well, tell me,” Brother Lewis said, and crossed one leg over the other, which made his beads rattle, “tell me a little of yourself. Your circumstances."

"Ah. Well. I'm, a teacher. History and literature. In a community college. And."

"Are you married?"

"Yes. I have two daughters. Adopted."

Brother Lewis seemed neither to approve nor disapprove.

"I am actually my wife's second husband,” Pierce said. “She was married once before. Very briefly and unfortunately."

"Oh?” Brother Lewis's attention was caught. His vulture's head bent closer to Pierce. “So you weren't married in the church."

"Well, no. She's divorced, and..."

"You aren't then truly married. You're living in sin."

Hard to tell if Brother Lewis was shocked, but it was evident he was certain.

"Um,” Pierce said, and lifted his hands in a miniature got-me-there gesture.

"You can't continue to live with her,” Brother Lewis said. “You can urge her to return to her former husband, to whom, of course, she's still married. I don't need to quote Scripture to you. In any case you are doing her a great wrong."

"Ah well,” Pierce said.

"I'm obliged to say this."

"Ah. Well."

Before Pierce could address the matter, Brother Lewis, one knee clasped in his hands, looked upward, thinking; and he said:

"You could of course go on living with her, but as brother and sister. That would be acceptable. But it might not be easy."

"No,” Pierce said. “Maybe not."

"This is where prayer comes in,” Brother Lewis said.

Pierce made no answer. The sweetness he had at first perceived in Brother Lewis, that stilled fear and revulsion, hadn't ceased flowing, but Pierce wondered if maybe it was coming not from the monk but from himself, the layman. He almost laughed aloud, as though the flow of it outward were ticklish. Brother Lewis put his long strange old hand over Pierce's where it lay.

"You'll be in my prayers,” he said. “Be certain of that."

After a certain time, as it was meant to do when it had had no command from him, Pierce's Zenith computer shut its eye and went to sleep. Pierce returning from Brother Lewis's room looked at the blankness of it, not sleepy himself. He regarded his bed, his chair, his open bag not yet and never to be unpacked. A pint of Scotch beneath the extra jammies. His watch told him it was near nine, or Compline. He drank from his bottle, shuddering. Then he took his coat, checked for his keys and wallet, went out into the hall, closing his door softly behind him, not knowing where he would go but unwilling suddenly to sit or lie. All silent; distant sounds of washing up in the refectory. Brother Lewis's door now shut.

The ironbound door to the outside was huge. The night was clear and cold. Orion, though tumbling over slightly now, was still aloft. Pierce saluted him: Hey, big guy. You'll be gone soon. Gone to sleep in the nether waters, while Scorpio rises every night and the year grows, from leaf to flower and flower to fruit. All the same as always.

He got in his car, the number two car; the capacious new wagon had been left for Roo and the kids; this one irremediably filthy, cookie crumbs and worse down in every crevice too deep for any vacuum.

The long drive down the mountain was easy and broad, and completely dark; no habitations but the monks’ for miles. Not until the road leveled and debouched onto a state highway did the world begin again.

And the flesh. And the devil. Pierce taking a left onto the highway came almost immediately on a neon-lit roadhouse: the Paradise Lounge. On its sign a palm tree and a pineapple, a pair of conga drums, and a female figure as iconic as an African sculpture, all breast and behind, but with a cheerful smile and Barbie ponytail. The Paradise Lounge offered Exotic Dancers.

Surely this place hadn't been here at the mountain's foot when he arrived. But surely it looked different in daylight. He turned in, and parked his car in a row of mostly pickups and older sedans, and sat for a moment hearing faint drumbeats and wondering if he actually meant to go in.

He had, always had had, a squeamish and sheltered boy's fear of squalor and affront, and never had liked joining his sexual feelings with those of other men in public places; maybe he didn't like thinking that his were like, even interchangeable with, theirs. So he hadn't often gone into places like this even when he'd lived in the city and they were common.

He went in.

They—places like this—had changed, it seemed, or maybe the country edition or version was different. The Paradise Lounge was a long low room with a bar at one end and a raised platform like a fashion-show runway, around which men sat as at a banquet, with their drinks, looking up, bathed in a pinkish light. He was asked for a five-dollar cover charge by a polite but large man, who then offered him the place with a hand. All yours. Smells of smoke and sweet liquor, or something. On the runway a naked woman moved with a kind of acrobatic lasciviousness to characterless rock. Entirely naked, even to her shoes, which he thought always remained. A silver stud in her navel the only manmade thing upon her. Her pubic hair removed. She seemed very young, and shockingly beautiful, nothing he had expected.

He ordered a beer from another woman, clothed, who approached him, smiling in welcome. For a time he only watched, standing at a narrow counter that ran around the room's perimeter, meant for the shy, it seemed, and now and then lifted the bottle to his lips. A vast emotion filled him that he couldn't identify. He observed that there were precise rules for what went on between customer and girl. She came on her circuit before each of them, but if you put down a bill on the counter for her, she stayed a while longer before you, made her motions for you, as the rest waited; she came close with her nakedness, brought it calculated inches from your face, front and rear; smiling and answering if you spoke, bending over you and offering her breasts like fruit, even draping over you her hair. No one else spoke, and no one, not the object of her attention nor any of the other men, called out any of the coarse exhortations Pierce supposed he might have expected: on some faces there was a beatific grin, on others a perfect sweet mammalian blank. And no one touched. No one—not at this hour on this day anyway—so much as lifted a hand from the brown bottle it held. The rules and the reasons were otherwise. But what were the reasons? Why pay to be offered and at the same time forbidden? No, something different or other than that.

A small dark man in a wool shirt and gimme hat vacated a seat at the runway, and Pierce took it. Now he too looked upward into the body of the woman displayed, or would when she came to him. He took from his wallet a wrinkled bill—how much? It seemed, strangely, that a single would do; it was all that others had put down.

Edenic. Maybe what he felt was awe. It was so shameless as to precede shame, to precede Eros even, like playing doctor, which the bare pubes also suggested. Show me yours. He and all of them swallowing down the sight of her so utterly offered. Pierce's brain, spinning along somewhat independently of his full soul, tried to think of that word, a vowel-less Sanskrit word, that Barr in one of his books said meant the entirety of nature, expressed in the revelation of female nakedness to awestruck males.

The eye is the mouth of the heart. What they were all shown here wasn't temptation followed by privation; no. What they saw fed them, he just didn't know how.

Here she was before him, his turn.

"How are you?” he asked.

"I'm real good,” she said gently. “I want to know how you are."

"I'm forty-nine years old,” he said, astonishing himself.

"Well. You thinking of quitting?"

She turned before him, squatting and extending gracefully. It was possible to study, in her actuality, those soft spreadings and minute tremblings that were absent from the glossy near-naked women whose images were ubiquitous now on television and in magazines, their flesh honed, machined, like something put on over flesh rather than flesh itself. Smoothed with unguents and depilated this body was, but there was no denying (why would he be tempted to deny?) that this was flesh.

"I do,” he said. “Sometimes I do."

"Betcha you won't,” she said, turning. “Not for years yet."

Her hair fell over him, odorous and fine. Her dark eyes on his, most unashamed of all. He felt a wave of gratitude and immense privilege, like great good luck. “You're so nice,” he said. No tax on asininity here.

"I'm not nice,” she said. “I'm bad."

"No,” he said. “Nice."

She gazed at him from beneath her black brows, and, smiling, shook her head minutely, what's to be done with this guy; meanwhile she had begun to move away from him, his meter on empty.

"When you get to Hell,” she said, “mention my name. You'll get a good deal."

"I'll remember that,” he said.

"No, you won't,” she said.

She was done, pretty soon after that, with her set or stint, and after a few vacant moments another woman began hers, inserting into a boom box on the stage her own special recorded selections, little different to Pierce's ear. She wore cowboy boots, a hat, and a rudimentary vest, but these last were soon discarded; the ecdysiastic art was reduced here to a gesture or two. Softer and less defined than the earlier dark pale woman, her parts smaller and more secret, she reminded Pierce of the first woman he had been naked with, how he had felt faintly embarrassed for her, so undressed, which had not caused him to cease his attentions to her; no more than to this one, striking poses over them in her boots, soft thighs quivering a little. Beyond her at the stage's edge a third woman sat waiting on a stool, bare legs crossed, cigarette in hand, a sort of vampiric or devil-doll one, but really no different, just another young woman. Pierce folded his hands before him. Since there was no end to it, only repetition, there was no reason to leave at any time, and no reason to stay longer than now. He thought of waiting till his original friend came around again, and it occurred to him that it was after all possible to spend a lot of money here. At last he was lifted up as by some external hand, and propelled toward the door. He passed the first woman, sitting at the bar, drinking with chums, now minimally clothed; she lifted her dark brows and trilled her fingers at him, so long.
And when thou descendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterrene place, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and raigning in the deep profundity of Styx, thou shalt worship me, as one that hath been favourable to thee.

He felt oddly triumphant, faintly atremble, erect generally but not specifically. He was as though rinsed in something, something delightful and right yet equally unfamiliar. He wondered if this was what the ancient Gnostic worshippers felt in their chaste naked prelapsarian orgies: that by this nakedness the rules, the iron rules of the Archons who made the world, could be broken, shuffled off, and the world and the self experienced, if only for that moment, as though the rules didn't exist. Not just the social or cultural rules that any outlaw can flout but rules a lot deeper than that: species-specific rules of courting, mating and bonding, male and female, competition and procreation, the million-year-old mammalian rules that
can't
be broken, that underlie endlessly mutating human culture and all society, tight or loose.

That was what Rose Ryder wanted, he thought. To be carried, by the breaking of the rules, by the making of other rules absurd in their strictness, to that limit beyond which everything could be forgotten, every physical constraint and fear; there to be naked and enwrapped, filled and hungry, at once and endlessly, beyond will, beyond pleasure, beyond even the limits of the flesh that bore it. He hadn't had her wild mad courage, but what he had sought in her for himself, and not only in her, what he had bent his heart and strength toward in all the multiplying beds and hearts and cunts in all his former life, what he had so often traded whatever he had for, without any deal, it was the same—not to overpower or win or have or achieve or succeed or know or even love but to
escape
, to reach escape velocity, flee through the only cleft or crack (!) that was open in the closed universe he found himself in.