Between the Bridge and the River (20 page)

“Hi . . . er . . . Bob,” said Saul. “What’s going on?”

“Oh, hi to you too . . . Bob,” spluttered Leon with all the improvisational aplomb of a bucket of lard. “I was just telling our friend here that Jesus loves him.”

“Oh, that he does, that he does.” Saul smiled at the driver.

“You’re both named Bob?” the driver asked suspiciously.

“We’re brothers!” blurted Leon, panicking.

Saul winced. The driver looked confused.

“We’re trainee monks,” explained Saul.

“And you’re both named Bob?”

“Yes, it’s a coincidence. God’s way of remaining anonymous, huh?”

“Oh, yeah, I suppose.” The driver nodded. “Monks, well, that’s . . . nice. I suppose you want money,” he said, rummaging in his pockets for change.

Saul took a chance. He hated sitting in the back of the truck. “Actually, no, God bless you. We were going to ask you for a ride.”

The driver thought for a moment. He did get very bored on the road and occasionally would pick up a hitchhiker. These kids looked harmless enough. The skinny one looked like he might blow over in a strong wind and the fat one could hardly move without getting out of breath. Plus they were Christians.

“Where you headed?” asked the driver.

“West,” said Saul. “Under the Lord’s guidance. We’re traveling west as part of our missionary work.”

“Well, I’m going to Phoenix to deliver my load and then on to Palm Springs to see my girlfriend. Deliver another load when I see her.”

He laughed, his dark, broken teeth showing against his ashy skin, making him look like a photographic negative.

Both Leon and Saul were slightly surprised by the idea of this odd-looking creature having a romantic partner but they made no comment.

“Then I guess the Lord wants us in Palm Springs,” said Saul.

“Yeah, well, if He does, you must have pissed Him off some. Still, it’s your funeral.”

And with that, they were in. They got to sit up front in the cab and talk to the driver and look out the window.

The driver was Mungo, named for a saint. He was French Canadian originally, from Montreal, but had come to the U.S. after falling in love with a girl from Birmingham, Alabama. The romance had fizzled out but Mungo had stayed on in America, it seemed too much trouble to go home.

Jeez, so this guy has been laid at least twice, thought Leon. Women will do anything.

Mungo had a huge collection of hardcore pornographic magazines in the cab of the truck and encouraged the boys to help themselves. He got a thrill out of seeing the young men enjoy the pictures, although it was Saul who loved the porn. Leon preferred live women but then again he wasn’t afraid of them and didn’t deify them. He didn’t even romanticize women, like most men. He saw them for what they are. Human. Therefore objectification didn’t come easy to him. He had never confided in anyone, not even his brother, that he thought the Virgin Mary had been lying her ass off about the whole Immaculate Conception thing. Saul would have been disgusted, he would have said the Virgin Mary was the only woman, including their mother, you could even halfway trust.

Saul loved the porn, he drooled over the murkiest stuff, and was particularly fascinated by a spread of a chubby young lady with dead eyes being mounted by a moth-eaten and oddly sardonic German Shepherd.

Mungo thought it was hysterical.

Leon thought they were both fucked up.

When the porn was put away the Bible came out.

Mungo was the proud owner of a magnificent black leather James VI version that he had bought from a yard sale after a Negro church had burned down in Louisiana. The congregation had sold everything they could to pay for rebuilding.

The church was set on fire by Dagwood Batters, an untreated schizophrenic who thought that black people were the lackeys of Old Nick.

The boys took turns reading passages from the Bible out loud to Mungo, who nodded and smiled or frowned in the appropriate places.

And so, like the pioneers of old, armed with the Good Book that they had grabbed at a bargain from the misery of others and split-beaver misogyny, they ate up the miles to the American West.

Mungo dropped them in front of a coffee shop on the main drag in Palm Springs and then headed off to his assignation with his girlfriend, Apples, a retired dental hygienist from Orange County, who had her own condo right on the third hole of the Heavenly Gates estate.

She had paid for it with the proceeds from her second divorce.

The boys looked up and down the street, at the nasty little souvenir stores, the crappy restaurants, and the curiously unattractive populace. They felt the oppressive one-hundred-degree desert heat beat down on them in sharp contrast to the chilly air-conditioned cab.

They thought what many do when they find themselves in Palm Springs for the first time: We have got to get out of here.

Only the elderly want to stay in Palm Springs and that’s only because the alternative is even less appealing.

Saul and Leon got a sign from God.

It was written on the front of a Greyhound bus.

LAS VEGAS
.

AFTER THE DEATH OF HER LAST LOVER
, Bruce, the Australian diplomat who had drunkenly stumbled in front of a Metro train, Claudette had felt she had to clean out her life and make it simple to the point of monastic.

She had lived in the large, rambling apartment she had inherited from Guillame, and over the years she had filled it with knickknacks and books and sofas and paintings and elastic bands and cotton buds and pieces of string and pamphlets and all the other rubbish that builds up in a home the longer one stays in it.

When Bruce died, she rented a room at the nearby Hôtel l’Abbaye and had contractors come and put all of her possessions, except for one framed photograph of each of her lovers, and all of her furniture into the back of a truck and take them away and sell them or burn them or dump them, she didn’t care.

She just wanted everything gone.

Guillame had left her wealthy and she hadn’t been foolish enough to give away the money. She loved the apartment and could not bear to part with it, so once it was cleaned out, she hired a decorator, Monsieur Garrido, a dark, squat man who was originally from Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, to completely redecorate the place under very strict instructions.

The floors were sanded, the walls painted white, and she bought one large comfortable bed that she never slept in with any man. Her sheets were expensive white linen. She had one dining-room table with one chair, one bookcase, one reading lamp, one easy chair, one knife, one fork, one spoon. One cup.

She had one wall decoration. A wooden crucifix that she had bought in one of the many neighborhood stores that catered to the pilgrims who flocked to the nearby Saint-Sulpice. It hung above her bed.

Long, thick white curtains hung on each of the tall windows. The effect was meant to be stark and sad. Claudette wanted to enhance her solitude, she wanted the place to look as bleak as she felt, but in fact the result was completely the opposite. The old French apartment was so artfully constructed and had been lived in so much that Claudette’s spartan style change had only improved it. It was breathtaking. Without clutter, the cornicing on the ceilings stood out, the marble of the fireplaces shone, and the sanded wooden parquets looked rich and warm.

Claudette’s enforced period of minimalist solitude had only made everything more beautiful.

They kissed all the way to the fifth floor—the tiny elevator familiar to many old Parisian buildings seemed to insist on it—and when Claudette unlocked her door and let George enter, he felt a rush of adrenaline and approbation.

The Paris night filled the apartment with a dreamlike glow.

What they both failed to see was the ghost of Guillame, who had haunted his old home for the years since his death. He had been standing by the window in the living room, and when he saw Claudette enter with George, he smiled softly to himself, blew a kiss to the new lovers, and left, never to return. George and Claudette kissed in the hallway and the heat and joy of their passion began to turn to sex. Somehow, awkwardly and with some laughter and stumbling, they managed to make their way down the narrow hallway to the bedroom and remove their clothes at the same time. They both lost breath at the feel of each other’s flesh for the first time, then they inhaled each other, and when Claudette put her small, cool hand around George’s hot,
hard cock, he had an overwhelming feeling of safety. Which surprised him a little but delighted him more.

Claudette parted from George and crossed the room. She drew the thick curtains closed and George gazed at her body, the most desirable and most female sight he had ever seen, backlit in the drape-muted halogen glow from the street. She turned and smiled at him and as she walked toward him he felt thrilled and nervous.

Claudette felt potent and fragile all at the same time. She could see the effect she was having on George and she could feel the effect he had on her. She had been wet since her hand touched his in Les Deux Magots.

Somehow this was to be her first time and somehow this was to be his first time.

They were hopelessly aroused and tumbling deeply into the physical manifestation of the biggest love either one of them would or could ever experience.

They were Holy Virgins.

All the ghosts of Paris gathered that night.

In the moonlit gardens of Luxembourg, the dead waited for the consummation of the Passion of Claudette and George. They stood by the statues or in the fountains, on the rides in the children’s playground, or on the water of the large octagonal boating pond in front of the palace itself. The sweet suicide girls of the Resistance, the missing Jews, the Protestant heretics, the Catholic philosophers, the soldiers, the pox-ridden prostitutes, the betrayed revolutionaries, the murdered aristocrats, and the neglected children. The drunken drivers and the car-crash princesses. The divine Danton and the crones of the guillotine. The vomit-covered rock stars and the true Communists from the barricades.

All of Claudette’s lovers.

Guillame Maupassant stood among them at last.

George’s parents drifted shyly through the big green iron gates into the garden and took their place with the others.

And in the darkness and the silence as George and Claudette came together, the dead were set free.

* * *

Lovemaking took hold of George and Claudette and became like a third entity. They kept changing position and going through the moves that they had both learned in their respective sex lives but the lovemaking kept returning them to the missionary position, where they could look each other in the eyes as they climaxed.

They fucked and rested for a few moments, and fucked again, then rested, then fucked again. They made love three times before cock crow, when they both eventually lay exhausted, wrapped in each other.

Morpheus transported Claudette to the shadows and peace and dopamine-inducing, restorative slumber of God’s favorites, whereas George began a tumble into dreamland.

As the lovers slept, millions of George’s sperm died in Claudette’s vagina and fallopian tubes.

Millions.

But not all.

IN HIS LIFETIME
, Carl Jung purchased a small tower on the shore of Lake Zurich, and as the years passed he added rooms and wings to it until eventually the place was much more elaborate and grand than it had been originally but it always remained his private place, his haven, his getaway from the world with all its questioning neurotics and judgmental academics. It was where he felt most at home.

Fraser read a biography of Jung after he started meeting him in dreams, and he identified very strongly with the doctor’s desire to build a safe haven, a place of refuge from trouble. When Fraser was exposed as a kinky sex maniac in the tabloid press, he had wished he had his own little Bollingen to run off to, so he felt strangely at home as he walked along the shoreline of the lake with the poet Virgil as they headed to Jung’s tower.

It seemed, as they got closer, that the tower was in the simple condition it had been when Jung purchased it, and Fraser saw that they were not in fact on the shore of Lake Zurich but actually on the edge of Hogganfield Loch, a small, shallow man-made boating pond in the downscale Riddrie area of Glasgow.

As they approached the door it was flung open by a delighted and slightly tipsy Jung, who had resumed his easily identifiable elder
statesman guise. He strode purposely across the lawn and gave Fraser a bear hug.

“Fraser! How delightful! How delightful! I was wondering if Virgil would ever get you here.” He winked at the poet, who laughed.

“He’s a grumpy little spud, isn’t he?” chuckled the poet, nodding at Fraser.

“He can be,” agreed Jung, “but he doesn’t mean it. He’s just conflicted.” Jung held out his hands as if trying to gauge the weight of two very similar-sized grapefruits.

“Sacred . . . profane . . . sacred . . . profane.”

Jung and Virgil both had a good laugh at that and Fraser felt excluded. Jung noticed.

“Oh come, Fraser, don’t pout! Come in, come in, both of you. I’ve made blackberry wine, and Toni and Emma are off hang-gliding, we have the place to ourselves. Just the boys.”

“I can’t,” said Virgil. “I’ve got a doctor arriving. You know how arrogant they can be.”

“Watch it, cheeky,” laughed Jung, and the two great men hugged before Virgil took his leave.

Before he left, Virgil also hugged Fraser, who noticed the poet was now a full foot taller than him and at least ten years younger.

“See you.” Virgil smiled through his now-perfect white teeth. “Don’t be too tough on yourself, okay?”

Fraser nodded dumbly and the poet was gone.

Jung put an arm around Fraser’s shoulder and ushered him into the tower.

Fraser and Carl sat in leather armchairs facing each other in front of the blazing log fire burning in the grate. The flames crackled theatrically but didn’t give off much heat, and Fraser still felt cold in the circular, bare-brick-walled room.