Another Insane Devotion (8 page)

I left the room while F. read to the boys from a book about a farting dog. When I came back, Bitey was lying at the foot of Wilfredo's bed; it was really a folding cot we'd borrowed from someone. She lay facing away from him with her paws straight out before her, like a little sphinx, her eyes slitted. “What's that cat's name?” Wilfredo asked. F. told him, and he announced, “Bitey loves me.” His mother hadn't packed pajamas for him (later we'd learn he didn't own any); he was wearing underpants and some team's T-shirt. I don't think we knew yet that he was only six, but still it struck me that he was just a little boy who might be away from home for the first time in his life. The night yawning around the house was so much darker than the
night he was used to, and alive with digestive chirps and gulps and stridulations. But the cat had come to him. F. told him it was because Bitey was a good judge of character. I beamed at her. We'd done good.

Of course, this was usually my bedroom, so Bitey was used to sleeping in it, and if she lay down on Wilfredo's cot instead of on the bed with Cedric, it may have been because she was drawn to the younger boy's particular smell of hot dogs, ketchup, bug spray, and bath soap, with a faint, interesting undernote of piss.

 

Back when I was teaching comp in grad school and despairing over the blandness of the suggested essay topics, I hit on having students write about their last girlfriend or boyfriend. They had to begin by telling how they'd met, what had attracted them to the other person, and the kinds of things they'd enjoyed doing together (I didn't tell them that they couldn't write about sex, but nobody ever did). In the concluding paragraphs, they had to draw on those examples to define what makes a good girlfriend or boyfriend. I still remember some of the kids' responses:

 

To me, a good boyfriend is somebody who cares.

No one in my recollection said anything about love. This may be due to the same reticence that kept the kids from writing about sex (unless that's what the last author meant by “a good time”). Maybe they thought it was creepy of me to even
be asking them about their girlfriends and boyfriends. But maybe they already knew that love has about as much to do with what makes someone a good girlfriend or boyfriend as it does with what makes someone a good wife or husband, which is not a whole lot. More, in the second case, but even there the relation is not so much necessary as contingent.

Love is a feeling, and girlfriend or boyfriend, like wife or husband, is a function, or maybe a job; you could think of a date as a job interview. My students were trying to define the qualifications for that job the way personnel directors might mull over the requisite skill set of a CEO or a die-punch operator. You could argue with some parts of this analogy: employees, for one thing, usually get paid. But you choose the people you go out with the same way you choose the ones who work for you, down to the guy with a van you hire for a couple hours to move a bookcase. That's why you find notices for both on Craig's List:

What's striking about these ads is the way they combine specificity and generality, skepticism and idealism: only somebody very idealistic expects to find unconditional love in adulthood. Their specificity is the specificity of the educated consumer who knows what she wants or, more commonly, what she doesn't want (e.g., a smoker, an FWB, or an NSA relationship). Even so, consumers may sometimes be overwhelmed by the abundance of choices available to them, and the variety, the latter suggested by such categories as Strictly Platonic, Men Seeking Women, Women Seeking Men, Men Seeking Men, Women Seeking Women, Casual Encounters, and Misc. Romance. This vertigo, the vertigo of the shopper staring dazedly into the ice cream freezer at the supermarket, may be the source of the posters' vagueness. And, of course, much of the language they use has no agreed-on definition. Is a “casual encounter” the same thing as a one-night stand, and
if not, how many encounters can you have before they stop being casual? Does “LTR” mean a lifetime relationship or just a long-term one, and how long is long-term? And is “lifetime relationship” an anachronism, as meaningless as the wish for someone who will love us to the end of time?

There were no personal ads in the Middle Ages. To the extent that people chose at all, they chose spouses from a narrow pool of neighbors or, more likely, had spouses chosen for them by their fathers or male guardians. (Doubtless, there were also casual encounters and misc. romances back then; that's why we have the fabliaux.) It was the difference between shopping at the Whole Foods and at the local farmers' market, your dad standing beside you at the produce stand, reaching over you to squeeze the plums. “He'll take these.” What did those people want, our great-great-many-times-great grandparents, with their bad hygiene and their lives brief as a struck match? In the case of the upper classes, we know what their fathers wanted. It was they who drew up the marriage contracts:

Beyond the exchange of property, there was some doubt as to what a marriage was or how it was delimited, especially in the early Middle Ages, when the church hadn't yet elevated it to a sacrament. As late as the fifteenth century, a lawsuit arose in Troyes over whether a young couple could have their union performed by one of their friends, in the street, or whether they needed a public figure, a schoolmaster, to do it, or a real priest,
or whether they could just as legitimately take the vows on their own, without anybody officiating. The vows might be short; for example: “I swear to thee, Marguerite, that I will love no other woman but thee to the day of my death.” “Paul, I pledge my word that I will have no other husband than you to the day of my death.” (In the French, Paul addresses his fi-ancée in the familiar second person,
tu
; Marguerite uses the formal
vous.
) Symbolic gifts would be exchanged. The couple would shake hands or kiss. Sometimes, the boy would seal his commitment by putting his tongue in his beloved's mouth, announcing that he was doing it “in the name of marriage.”

The last gesture suggests a popular attempt to resolve an old theological debate as to whether marriage was defined by a sexual act or a verbal one: by fucking or an oath. The first definition justified abducting and raping the young woman who caught your fancy, which explains those peasant ceremonies in which the groom and his friends pretended to kidnap the bride, who pretended to be upset about it. But it seemed like something was missing. In the twelfth century, Gratian formulated a two-part definition of marriage:

Other churchmen argued that all that was needed was the verbal consent of both parties, two people saying, “I do.” After
all, if sex was what made a marriage, one could say that Mary and Joseph had lived in sin.

It's startling to see how matter-of-fact the medieval church could be about sex, down to earnest discussions of the morality of the female orgasm and whether a woman whose husband came before she did was allowed to fondle herself: fourteen out of seventeen theologians said she could. It was a practical application of Paul's teaching: “The husband must give the wife what is due to her, and the wife equally must give her husband his due” (1 Cor. 7, 1–3). The idea of the debt, or
debitum,
informed all of marriage, gave shape to it the way the skeleton gives shape to the human body. It was the simple counterpart to elaborate contracts like the one between Guy and Jocelin, made not between two fathers but between a wife and a husband and governing not the division of property but the sharing of duty and pleasure. The poor had no property, but they could have orgasms, and people took it for granted that wives as well as husbands were entitled to them.
Just give me my propers when you get home.
Both Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” and both their versions are considered definitive.

It makes sense that the church would concern itself with the pleasure of the married couple. A marriage in which both spouses get their propers will be fecund and stable, producing children for the glory of God and the increase of Mother Church. Satisfied spouses are less likely to go splashing around in the concupiscent puddles of the flesh. The sex the church sanctioned wasn't concupiscent. It was temperate, cheerful, orderly, the payment of a debitum. Who gets hot and
bothered writing out the month's checks? Marriage was chiefly an economic relationship. Its purpose was to increase the property of propertied families or to maximize the labor of two individuals—and more, when children came—by joining them in a common domestic enterprise. In medieval art, the common people are often depicted laboring, the men in the fields, the women in the house. There's a painting I like in which three housewives stand proudly amid dozens of perfect cannonballs of dough they've rolled and patted into shape and are now feeding into a brick oven on an immense paddle. In their spotless dresses, they look as improbably put-together as June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels. Sometimes they work together, as in the images that show men and women picking cabbages (the man carries his in a basket balanced on his head) or harvesting olives.

The work wasn't easy. Think of the strength and endurance it took to cut wheat with a sickle and bind it into sheaves and heap up the sheaves in stooks, all day long, day after day in harvest time, beneath a sun that filled the entire sky. Think of the labor of shaking the olives from every tree in the grove, the leaves hissing and flashing silver, the tedium of gathering the fallen fruit and pressing it into oil. “Cursed is the ground because of you,” God tells the first, fallen couple. “In toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.” These are the words that make Masaccio's Adam cover his face and weep. Yet in most of the medieval images, the men and women look happy or, if not happy, content. This may be testimony to the value of the debitum, not just the sexual debitum but the entire system of mutual credit and debit, boon and obligation, that formed the
economy of marriage. Beyond its harsh beginnings, the haggling and ritual rape (and sometimes real rape, too, which the victim was expected to forget once the rapist did right by her), the system was pretty fair. And there was probably added comfort in the simple fact that wife and husband worked together—sometimes side by side—and not alone.