Jesus and Margery act out my love. Is that a problem? Every star in every galaxy spurts in joyful public salute to my orgasms with L. But I look for the Jew from Cleveland and he confuses me. A photo from 1988: L.’s sisters, their mates, L., and myself on a wooden bench in L.’s family’s compound in the Adirondacks. I am jolted to see five sleek WASPs smiling into the camera and a visitor from an alternative universe—pallid, averted, big headed, un-American. I recognize my isolation, a mix of longing and hostility.

Margery held a mistaken belief in the value of her experience. A tradition I can claim as my own links me to her—of farce and uncertainty, the broad comedy of terror, the fable a community of doubt tells itself: “The Pardoner’s Tale,” the Talmud, The Ship of Fools, Kafka’s slapstick, Freud’s case histories, the sarcasm of Marx, Brecht, Fassbinder—

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I’m in a wooden tub. Face slack, thoughtless, half submerged, neck severed, trunk and limbs hacked apart and soaking in rotting blood and gore. That seems appropriate, a feeling of accuracy and fulfillment overrides the horror of having been murdered in some derelict industrial subbasement. Poignancy in the disheveled air. The whole atmosphere lives with joyous expectation of a visit from L., who wears a black cape in the dream.

27

Margery went out to beg from the Romans. A woman’s body blocked traffic, legs thrown apart, head cocked against a stucco wall where she had died. A naked baby howled on his back and a three-legged nursing stool lay toppled beside him. Margery watched fleas jump off the mother’s cooling body; a dead flea jumped back to life when Margery touched it. The screaming baby waved his arms and legs in all directions and Margery felt her breasts swell. The baby was hot, sticky, and sour; he bucked and squealed like a little pig. Margery could hardly hold him and set him down next to his mother, then moved the woman’s limp hand onto her child’s belly to comfort him. The baby’s eyes filmed over; he grew silent and passed through the moment’s small doorway with a contorted face as though he kept crying in the beyond. Margery dropped a penny in his mouth.

Margery met a handsome man and told him the story of her life up to that moment, as though it held unique, coherent importance. A linear narrative, tunnel vision caused by fear. She was short but looked in his eyes. He was stirred like a lake by a deep current. Although his friends had died, plague and war enlarged his desire to stay alive. When this man had sex, he rocked inside, tipping back and forth rather than sliding in and out. He placed enough money in her palm for a few days.

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