We So Seldom Look on Love (19 page)

By the time I was sixteen I wanted human corpses. Men. (That way I’m straight.) I got my chauffeur’s licence, but I had to wait until I was finished high school before Mr. Wallis would hire me as a hearse driver at the funeral home.

Mr. Wallis knew me because he bought bereavement flowers at my father’s store. Now
there
was a weird man. He would take a trocar, which is the big needle you use to draw out a cadaver’s fluids, and he would push it up the penises of dead men to make them look semi-erect, and then he’d sodomize them. I caught him at it once, and he tried to tell me that he’d been urinating in the hopper. I pretended to believe him. I was upset though, because I knew that dead men were just dead flesh to him. One minute he’d be locked up with a young male corpse, having his way with him, and the next minute he’d be embalming him as if nothing had happened, and making sick jokes about him, pretending to find evidence of rampant homosexuality—colons stalagmited with dried semen, and so on.

None of this joking ever happened in front of me. I heard about it from the crazy old man who did the mopping up. He was also a necrophile, I’m almost certain, but no longer active. He called dead women Madonnas. He rhapsodized about the beautiful Madonnas he’d had the privilege of seeing in the 1940s, about how much more womanly and feminine the Madonnas were twenty years before.

I just listened. I never let on what I was feeling, and I don’t think anyone suspected. Necrophiles aren’t supposed to be blond and pretty, let alone female. When I’d been working at the funeral home for about a year, a committee from the town council tried to get me to enter the Milk Marketer’s Beauty Pageant. They knew about my job, and they knew I was studying embalming at night, but I had told people I was preparing myself for medical school, and I guess the council believed me.
For fifteen years, ever since Matt died, people have been asking me how a woman makes love to a corpse.

Matt was the only person who figured it out. He was a medical student, so he knew that if you apply pressure to the chest of certain fresh corpses, they purge blood out of their mouths.

Matt was smart. I wish I could have loved him with more than sisterly love. He was tall and thin. My type. We met at the doughnut shop across from the medical library, got to talking, and liked each other immediately, an unusual experience for both of us. After about an hour I knew that he loved me and that his love was unconditional. When I told him where I worked and what I was studying, he asked why.

“Because I’m a necrophile,” I said.

He lifted his head and stared at me. He had eyes like highresolution monitors. Almost too vivid. Normally I don’t like looking people in the eye, but I found myself staring back. I could see that he believed me.

“I’ve never told anyone else,” I said.

“With men or women?” he asked.

“Men. Young men.”

“How?”

“Cunnilingus.”

“Fresh corpses?”

“If I can get them.”

“What do you do, climb on top of them?”

“Yes.”

“You’re turned on by blood.”

“It’s a lubricant,” I said. “It’s colourful. Stimulating. It’s the ultimate bodily fluid.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “When you think about it. Sperm propagates life. But blood sustains it. Blood is primary.”

He kept asking questions, and I answered them as truthfully as I could. Having confessed what I was, I felt myself driven to testing his intellectual rigour and the strength of his love at first sight. Throwing rocks at him without any expectation that he’d stay standing. He did, though. He caught the whole arsenal and asked for more. It began to excite me.

We went back to his place. He had a basement apartment in an old rundown building. There were books in orange-crate shelves, in piles on the floor, all over the bed. On the wall above his desk was a poster of Doris Day in the movie
Tea for Two.
Matt said she looked like me.

“Do you want to dance first?” he asked, heading for his record player. I’d told him about how I danced before climbing on corpses.

“No.”

He swept the books off the bed. Then he undressed me. He had an erection until I told him I was a virgin. “Don’t worry,” he said, sliding his head down my stomach. “Lie still.”

The next morning he phoned me at work. I was hungover and blue from the night before. After leaving his place I’d gone straight to the funeral home and made love to an autopsy case. Then I’d got drunk in a seedy country-and-western bar and debated going back to the funeral home and suctioning out my own blood until I lost consciousness.

It had finally hit me that I was incapable of falling in love with a man who wasn’t dead. I kept thinking, “I’m not normal.” I’d never faced this before. Obviously, making love to corpses isn’t normal, but while I was still a virgin I must have been assuming that I could give it up any time I liked. Get married, have babies. I must have been banking on a future that I didn’t even want, let alone have access to.

Matt was phoning to get me to come around again after work.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You had a good time. Didn’t you?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“I think you’re fascinating,” he said.

I sighed.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

A few nights later I went to his apartment. From then on we started to meet every Tuesday and Thursday evening after my embalming class, and as soon as I left his place, if I knew there was a corpse at the mortuary—any male corpse, young or old—I went straight there and climbed in a basement window.

Entering the prep room, especially at night when there was nobody else around, was like diving into a lake. Sudden cold and silence, and the sensation of penetrating a new element where the rules of other elements don’t apply. Being with Matt was like lying on the beach of the lake. Matt had warm, dry skin. His apartment was overheated and noisy. I lay on Matt’s bed and soaked him up, but only to make the moment when I entered the prep room even more overpowering.

If the cadaver was freshly embalmed, I could usually smell him from the basement. The smell is like a hospital and old cheese. For me, it’s the smell of danger and permission, it used to key me up like amphetamine, so that by the time I reached the prep room, tremors were running up and down my legs. I locked the door behind me and broke into a wild dance, tearing my clothes off, spinning around, pulling at my hair. I’m not sure what this was all about, whether or not I was trying to take part in the chaos of the corpse’s disintegration, as Matt suggested. Maybe I was prostrating myself, I don’t know.

Once the dancing was over I was always very calm, almost entranced. I drew back the sheet. This was the most exquisite moment. I felt as if I were being blasted by white light. Almost blinded, I climbed onto the table and straddled the corpse. I ran my hands over his skin. My hands and the insides of my thighs
burned as if I were touching dry ice. After a few minutes I lay down and pulled the sheet up over my head. I began to kiss his mouth. By now he might be drooling blood. A corpse’s blood is thick, cool and sweet. My head roared.

I was no longer depressed. Far from it, I felt better, more confident, than I had ever felt in my life. I had discovered myself to be irredeemably abnormal. I could either slit my throat or surrender—wholeheartedly now—to my obsession. I surrendered. And what happened was that obsession began to storm through me, as if I were a tunnel. I became the medium of obsession as well as both ends of it. With Matt, when we made love, I was the receiving end, I was the cadaver. When I left him and went to the funeral home, I was the lover. Through me Matt’s love poured into the cadavers at the funeral home, and through me the cadavers filled Matt with explosive energy.

He quickly got addicted to this energy. The minute I arrived at his apartment, he had to hear every detail about the last corpse I’d been with. For a month or so I had him pegged as a latent homosexual necrophile voyeur, but then I began to see that it wasn’t the corpses themselves that excited him, it was my passion for them. It was the power that went into that passion and that came back, doubled, for his pleasure. He kept asking, “How did you feel? Why do you think you felt that way?” And then, because the source of all this power disturbed him, he’d try to prove that my feelings were delusory.

“A corpse shows simultaneous extremes of character,” I told him. “Wisdom and innocence, happiness and grief, and so on.”

“Therefore all corpses are alike,” he said. “Once you’ve had one you’ve had them all.”

“No, no. They’re all different. Each corpse contains his own extremes. Each corpse is only as wise and as innocent as the living person could have been.”

He said, “You’re drafting personalities onto corpses in order to have power over them.”

“In that case,” I said, “I’m pretty imaginative, since I’ve never met two corpses who were alike.”

“You
could
be that imaginative,” he argued. “Schizophrenics are capable of manufacturing dozens of complex personalities.”

I didn’t mind these attacks. There was no malice in them, and there was no way they could touch me, either. It was as if I were luxuriously pouring my heart out to a very clever, very concerned, very tormented analyst. I felt sorry for him. I understood his twisted desire to turn me into somebody else (somebody who might love him). I used to fall madly in love with cadavers and then cry because they were dead. The difference between Matt and me was that I had become philosophical. I was all right.

I thought that he was, too. He was in pain, yes, but he seemed confident that what he was going through was temporary and not unnatural. “I am excessively curious,” he said. “My fascination is any curious man’s fascination with the unusual.” He said that by feeding his lust through mine, he would eventually saturate it, then turn it to disgust.

I told him to go ahead, give it a try. So he began to scour the newspapers for my cadavers’ obituaries and to go to their funerals and memorial services. He made charts of my preferences and the frequency of my morgue encounters. He followed me to the morgue at night and waited outside so that he could get a replay while I was still in an erotic haze. He sniffed my skin. He pulled me over to streetlights and examined the blood on my face and hands.

I suppose I shouldn’t have encouraged him. I can’t really say why I did, except that in the beginning I saw his obsession as the outer edge of my own obsession, a place I didn’t have to visit as long as he was there. And then later, and despite his increasingly erratic behaviour, I started to have doubts about an obsession that could come on so suddenly and that could come through me.

One night he announced that he might as well face it, he was going to have to make love to corpses, male corpses. The idea nauseated him, he said, but he said that secretly, deep down, unknown even to himself, making love to male corpses was clearly the target of his desire. I blew up. I told him that necrophilia wasn’t something you forced yourself to do. You longed to do it, you needed to do it. You were born to do it.

He wasn’t listening. He was glued to the dresser mirror. In the last weeks of his life he stared at himself in the mirror without the least self-consciousness. He focused on his face, even though what was going on from the neck down was the arresting part. He had begun to wear incredibly weird outfits. Velvet capes, pantaloons, high-heeled red boots. When we made love, he kept these outfits on. He stared into my eyes, riveted (it later occurred to me) by his own reflection.

Matt committed suicide, there was never any doubt about that. As for the necrophilia, it wasn’t a crime, not fifteen years ago. So even though I was caught in the act, naked and straddling an unmistakably dead body, even though the newspapers found out about it and made it front-page news, there was nothing the police could charge me with.

In spite of which I made a full confession. It was crucial to me that the official report contain more than the detective’s bleak observations. I wanted two things on record: one, that Matt was ravished by a reverential expert; two, that his cadaver blasted the energy of a star.

“Did this energy blast happen before or after he died?” the detective asked.

“After,” I said, adding quickly that I couldn’t have foreseen such a blast. The one tricky area was why I hadn’t stopped the suicide. Why I hadn’t talked, or cut, Matt down.

I lied. I said that as soon as I entered Matt’s room, he kicked
away the ladder. Nobody could prove otherwise. But I’ve often wondered how much time actually passed between when I opened the door and when his neck broke. In crises, a minute isn’t a minute. There’s the same chaos you get at the instant of death, with time and form breaking free, and everything magnifying and coming apart.

Matt must have been in a state of crisis for days, maybe weeks before he died. All that staring in mirrors, thinking, “Is this my face?” Watching as his face separated into its infinitesimal particles and reassembled into a strange new face. The night before he died, he had a mask on. A Dracula mask, but he wasn’t joking. He wanted to wear the mask while I made love to him as if he were a cadaver. No way, I said. The whole point, I reminded him, was that
I
played the cadaver. He begged me, and I laughed because of the mask and with relief. If he wanted to turn the game around, then it was over between us, and I was suddenly aware of how much I liked that idea.

The next night he phoned me at my parents’ and said, “I love you,” then hung up.

I don’t know how I knew, but I did. A gun, I thought. Men always use guns. And then I thought, no, poison, cyanide. He was a medical student and had access to drugs. When I arrived at his apartment, the door was open. Across from the door, taped to the wall, was a note: “
dead person in bedroom
.”

But he wasn’t dead. He was standing on a stepladder. He was naked. An impressively knotted noose, attached to a pipe that ran across the ceiling, was looped around his neck.

He smiled tenderly. “I knew you’d come,” he said.

“So why the note?” I demanded.

“Pull away the ladder,” he crooned. “My beloved.”