Final Vinyl Days (18 page)

Now he floats on his back, arms and legs spread. He stares at the stained glass above him. Against a solid wall, it is illuminated from behind with electric light and gives the effect of eternal sunshine. There kneels Jesus holding a lamb close to his chest.
I am the life. I am the life
. He holds his position, letting the words filter. He thinks of the crucifixion. He thinks of da Vinci's
Anatomy of Man
. He thinks of William Holden facedown in the pool in
Sunset Boulevard
. The point-of-view problem always bothers him—narration by a dead man. So? Call it the resurrected voice. The movie is too good to reject. The afterlife. He thinks of Jay Gatsby floating in
his
pool.

He imagines he hears one of the big front doors opening. Impossible. Churches are no longer left unlocked. They offer no place for the weary to creep and take refuge. If the door were left unlocked, there'd be people huddled in the vestibule, carts from Winn-Dixie parked outside, greasy paper sacks with scraps of food, Merita bread bags knotted like purses, torn blankets mildewed and lice-infected.

Why
is
he here, locked inside?

Marianne was sixteen when he was eight. She was the girl next door. He marveled at her high school life. She invited him to sit and listen to her records while her world spun in fast gear. He loved her in her cut-off jeans, great big rollers in her hair until the very last minute when her boyfriend rang the doorbell. He was told to ask the boyfriend to sit down and wait. And then she would appear, the perfect vision of what a girl should be, in her miniskirt and draped sweater. Her dark hair reached her waist. It swung as she walked away. It was the end of summer. She had wanted to hear “See You in September” over and over. It had been his job to lift the arm of the record player and put it back in the first groove of the forty-five. She ruffled his hair in passing, told him what great eyelashes he had—
a girl would just die for those
! He loved her. She was beautiful. When he watched her walk away, he saw her shrouded in darkness, a cloak of sadness that settled and stuck, its edges limned in sparkling light.

The women he wants, the women who spark his blood, shy away from him. Does a commitment to God mean he can't be choosy? Can't wish for sleek bare skin, sweat and leather? Didn't David choose Bathsheba? He murdered to get her. Imagine David on trial. He didn't kill
directly
, his lawyer might say. Convict this one of man
slaughter. And what of Abraham, who carried Isaac off to the mountain to murder him for God. Wouldn't Abraham be proclaimed psychotic and hauled off for heavy medication and lessons in arts and crafts?

One woman in the congregation cannot look him in the eye. He can see her unhappiness, feel it, when her slick young husband, a deacon, slips into the pew beside her and she sits rigidly. She is someone in need of salvation, but what attention does she get? It's not her soul that is in doubt but her everyday life, approved and blessed by all.

He thinks of her often. Just try to stop the thoughts from coming. Surely King David was no stranger to such thoughts. Surely everyone has a fantasy? His is that she appears at the baptismal in a white bikini and steps in. Her red toenails—blood red burgundy—with lips to match are the crimson of communion wine, her skin as papery white and fragile as the unleavened wafers. He tells her that he can make her weep with joy; he can teach her to speak in foreign tongues. Then she pours out a confession to him that freezes his blood. She might then as well be an old woman shriveled with age. He changes the setting, finds a Jacuzzi in a tropical resort for the two of them, but he hears coughs all around him. He can see infrared germs. There is a deep wash of sadness.

Dear God.

As a boy he had played a game at church. The rules: open the hymnal and read every title adding “in bed.” Just As I Am in Bed. How Great Thou Art in Bed. Blessed Be the Tie that Binds in Bed. Love Lifted Me in Bed.

The church doors should be opened. Charity begins at home. Charity is color-blind. Charity does not attach strings. His arguments are lost in the shuffle. In the past there has been vandalism. They need to build new buildings, not spend money reclaiming the ones they already have. They need new buses and paved courtyards.

When he was in college and planning to teach religion, he met a self-proclaimed preacher who paced the brick pit in front of the student union like an animal. He wore a terry cloth robe of many colors and condemned his hecklers to hell. By the end of a week he had condemned everyone to hell who had not added their names to his meager little list of disciples; by then it was public knowledge that the preacher's robe came from an expensive men's store in the mall and that the preacher's Porsche was parked over on the far side of downtown, so that everyone would think that he had walked into town from Jerusalem when instead he had driven in from another state where he lived in an expensive condominium.

Be ye not deceived, he had whispered to his girlfriend, a sorority girl who loved nothing better than to shag, drink beer, and laugh at his dirty jokes.

The story of Joseph was his favorite. The forgiveness Joseph gave to his brothers, the love of Joseph's father, the mystical aspect of the story, Joseph's visions and dreams, and the way his brothers turned against him. They didn't want to hear that the sheaves they had bound in the field bowed down to his; they would rather sell Joseph off to the Egyptians. As a graduate student he had written a paper about dysfunction in biblical lines; about how revising it, straightening it out, so that everybody did the right thing, you'd have a very different story. If Abraham hadn't scared the hell out of Isaac, Isaac might not have been the same fellow, might not have wound up with Jacob and Esau (another story to prove that the world is not always just given that Jacob got where he got by betraying his father into giving up his brother's birthright). But if not for that weakness, Jacob might not have learned what he did when he was forgiven by Esau, might not have had the sons he did, including Joseph. And so on. You cannot untangle one line from another; it just keeps reaching and reaching to who begat whom and how it all occurred.

Was that what led him here, to this profession, to this town? There was no significant moment that turned him this way; rather, it was a lifetime of little choices and movements. The thought
a hiding place
comes to mind; words like
sanctuary
reinforce the idea that he can lead a sheltered and protected life and still reach out to other places in life. A double life. A split life. Has that concept always been in place?

His childhood hiding place was inside an oldfashioned wardrobe in the guest room. The piece was (in his mother's words) an eyesore, but because it had a family history, she kept it. It smelled of cedar and mothballs, and he liked to sit on a folded quilt his grandmother had made from gray and black flannel, scraps of clothing from men long deceased. His mother called it the funeral quilt, but in the darkness of the wardrobe with a sliver of light coming through the crack in the door, it was a comforting quilt. He liked to sit for long periods of time until his forehead perspired and he got drowsy. Only then would he swing the door open and suck in a wonderful breath of fresh air, and squint against the afternoon sunlight that filled that room at the back of his mother's house. The room had once been a porch and still had a tin roof. The memory of rain falling on that roof lulls him into a great sense of peace. It is a feeling much like what he feels floating
here on his back, his ears immersed so that every thought keeps rhythm with the beating of his own heart.

Once, he kicked open the wardrobe door and jumped into the room to find his uncle perched on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped and wringing. The relatives were already saying, “He'll have to go back.”

“Abracadabra,” his uncle said. “I made a boy appear.”

He laughed and moved to the bed when his uncle patted the space beside him. It seemed they sat there for a long time without speaking, and then his uncle began to talk in a low whisper. It wasn't fair for him to be tapped into so much knowledge, he said. To be chosen in such a way is, he said, both a blessing and a curse.
Ignorance is bliss
, he whispered and bent down close. His eyes were like a cat's—amber, like something prehistoric. His uncle spent much of his life studying maps and could name every capital and country; he knew populations, and he knew the average temperatures and what pests (killer bees, poisonous snakes and spiders) plagued each place. Visitors were often entertained by his knowledge and found him quite charming. And he was, it was true, very handsome—tall and lean, with his dark, curly hair and amber eyes. People quizzed him, tried to stump him on this capital or that; his uncle was never stumped. But inevitably he would turn with a look of horror and point out into the
yard or up at the ceiling or at the scalp of the visitor.
My God
, he would mutter and step back. Then he would describe what he saw in great detail.

Should I deny what I see as truth
? his uncle asked him that day when they sat side by side on the bed.
Should I pretend that none of what I see and hear is happening
? His uncle searched his expression then the same way he searched his maps, committing to memory every pore on his face. It was as if his uncle was reading him. “You believe me, don't you?” his uncle whispered. How could he not believe him?

Now as he floats he pictures his uncle's much older, tormented face. These days there would be medicine. These days he would not have (as his relatives say)
crossed the line
, or if he did cross it they would be able to call him back. All those years his uncle remembered his face; his uncle remembered the day that he leapt from the cedar wardrobe into the light of day. He would say,
I know you
. He would say,
You believe me, don't you
? And wasn't his uncle right about so much?
People do not wash their hands
, his uncle had whispered to him once when the grownups were pretending he wasn't there.
The human touch can be a deadly thing
.

Marianne walks into this church one Sunday morning. Her skin has aged, damp and soured, as if alcohol
seeps from every pore. As he speaks (youth group car wash and cookout in the park) he grieves at her spidery arms, white and heavily veined; at her dress that is too large and hangs from her shoulders like an old rag. What he heard is that she has never gotten her life on track—one bad choice begetting another. He'd sung along with her to her stack of forty-fives. Everything about her seemed perfect. Now he turns his gaze to a young woman near the front, her perfect suit, shoes, hair, makeup, the big man beside her stretching himself, one fancy foot in the aisle, arms claiming the whole pew. What a fine line we all walk. She is perched and waiting. Fly, fall, or simply wait in sadness?

After the service he stands down front and waits while Marianne moves toward him. He steps forward to meet her and hugs her close, her bony chest fragile and raspy. He could squeeze her to death with very little effort. He smells her fear and desperation as he holds her close, perhaps too close. The music director stares. The music director has very strict opinions about what is suitable. Clapping in church is a sin, for example, and women should not bring children into the sanctuary unless they can behave and sit quietly and silently. One of these times he will turn and agree with her and get everyone's attention. He will say, “If Jesus were here he would take that
child outside and wear his butt out. Jesus would knock some manners into him, wouldn't he?”

“Suffer the children,” she will say, with smug authority, flat lips cutting a straight line across her broad face. “To come unto me.”

“Yes,” he will answer. “Could you translate?”

“Make them behave before they come to my house of worship!”

“What about
let
them come,
allow
them to come?”

You can't always believe what people say
, his uncle whispered.
People will ask that you believe the strangest things
.

“So how do you know what to believe?” he had asked, and his uncle laughed. He laughed until tears ran from his eyes, until a team of nurses dashed in to check his restraints, afraid he would rip out his oxygen and IV line again. And what was in the laughter? Was he saying, “What? You're asking me, the family nutcase?” Or was the laughter saying, “Such a silly, silly question.” The only time his uncle mentioned religion was when he once recalled with great fondness a girl he liked in junior high school, back in the days when he was a quiet, studious boy without any idea of what lay ahead of him. The girl, his uncle told him, always wore socks that matched her
sweater, and she drove three towns over on Friday nights for services. She played Torah Tic-Tac-Toe and Hebrew baseball, which the uncle said sounded about like those old Bible drills he hated. He said she spoke just enough Hebrew to set his heart on fire.

Marianne steps back. “We're so proud of you,” she says, her quiet voice as broken as her body.

He pulls her back close again, and to the shock of the music director and all of the choir members clustered about and all of the children clamoring to ask if they can bring friends to the cookout—
absolutely
—he kisses her forehead, cheeks, nose, lips. He holds her hands and kisses them, opens her sweaty palms and takes the bulletin folded and wadded there. “I always loved you,” he says. “My dream girl,” he tells the group around him. “A young boy's perfect dream.”

Now as he floats, drifting in and out of sleep, he feels unworthy. He feels like a failure, someone who somewhere along the line has stopped paying attention.
It is important that I DO something
, his uncle had cried when they found him burning the field to rid it of swarms of flies, possibly killer bees, maybe even locusts.
If you don't do something
, he said,
your beliefs are worthless
.