Umbrellas, Poisons, and Umbilical Knots
Umbrellas first.
It was raining Friday morning, and I was carrying one, open, above my head, rushing through the traffic of the puddly mid-town streets, trying not to be late, in order to avoid the cold scolding Albert Faslo thought it his right to administer as my department supervisor.
So I did not see anything. Certainly I did not see Brent Marius as head lowered, bull-like plowing forward against the wind, I knocked into him.
You ought not think because I use his name that I knew it then when I bumped into him in the rain.
I didn't.
I felt a hand on my arm steadying both me and him, and I heard his voice, as if talking to a colt.
Whoa, steady pretty boy. You don't want to go knocking old men about.
I'm sorry, I said, catching myself.
But what he meant by the words old men was beyond me. Undoubtedly he was a few years older than I was, but he could hardly pass muster as an old man. As for pretty boy, well, actually it wasn't that strange for people to call me that.
What's the rush? he said.
My boss, I answered.
A bastard?
It comes with the territory.
Do you?
Do I what?
Come with the territory.
He meant did my boss hire the right to reprimand me when he hired me. At least that's what it seemed to me it meant. But then, I couldn't be sure. Maybe he meant something else.
I can set my own scedule and get all my work done. On time! I said.
Good boy, he said, slapping my upper arm several times and laughing, it felt like, at me.
You want to prove it by playing hooky today?
Sure, I said with a sudden gleam in my eye and whipping out my cell phone.
Common courtesy, I said when I saw his frown.
Common, he repeated as I thumbed the numbers.
Shut your umbrella, he said as I pocketed my phone.
But it's raining.
Shut the umbrella.
We'll get wet.
He took a deep breath and I shut the umbrella.
The rain, in fact, had let up.
How did you do that? I said.
That's just a hint of what I can do, he said, wrapping his arm around my shoulders.
I believed him.
Albert Faslo was not pleased Monday morning.
Nice of you to come in, sugar.
Sugar?
It melts in the rain. Just like you.
Give me a break.
A break he wants. I tell you what, he said, looking around to see the office was empty but for us.
You're not my type, I said, trying to keep it light.
Next on the menu is poison. Hope you've built up a tolerance.
There is a love that is beyond everything and swallows everything and is the spur of destruction more surely than any animosity can be. It is a devouring love that chews you up and chews up everything in its path in order to get to you and get you. It is the love that fills you so that you abandon everything and leave everything behind. It is the kind of love that cleans you out and takes you away. It is the kind of love which is guaranteed to kill you.
It is a passionate love and it is worth more than life. When it ends in death everything is well. The opera concludes on the dying pillows of dream-dead sound. The story ends with two beautiful and lifeless bodies joined in death. But when life outlives that kind of love, and death remains, yet some years off, despite love's death, then love is a poison which brings death in life: the memory of a kind of love that cannot endure and yet is stubbornly eternal.
And there is a poisoner, the one who brings you to that rage of love but once he gets you there, walks out on you, leaves you there alone, without him.
The waterfall of my heart flows into the basin of your love, Brent said fixing me with his eyes.
I smiled at the beauty of his words and kissed the sweetness on his lips. He was beyond adoration. I needed to give myself even more, to tear myself open to have him that much inside of me, deep, deep within me that I could enclose myself around him and become one breath with him.
We walked along the shore of the Hudson and kissed as we looked at what was gone and what had replaced it.
His friends thought I was wonderful. I thought they were too. We all danced together and kissed each other and tweaked each other on the nipple and brought our lips freely to each other's cocks and opened ourselves to each other.
Alone with Brent, I had no time for speaking or even thinking. I only could breathe and tremble and shake and explode as he played on me.
Aren't you dressed yet, he returned, himself only wearing his little black boxer mini-briefs that clung to his skin. You are a slow girl, he said handing me one of the cups of Turkish coffee he was holding. But you have beautiful eye lashes, he said, tasting the first sip of coffee on my lips with his own.
My body became like a bar of iron and trembled.
Umbrellas again.
Remember to take the umbrella, Brent said.
I have it, I said, exasperated at being told to do the thing I had already thought of doing myself.
It had been raining on and off for the past three days. Although it was not as we were leaving the apartment, it was threatening to.
We had on identical trench coats, but I had the umbrella, which I opened when we got outside and walked down the steps away from the cut and frosted paneled-glass front door of his brownstone. I held the umbrella over both of us and we snuggled as we walked.
We walked through the park, the grass emerald green and full before the summer and the summer crowds. The land rolled up in gentle hills that flowed out into slopes and valleys from its modest crest. He took me in his arms and kissed me.
I've never been so happy, I said.
At that moment I was enough under enchantment's spell not to realize such a sentence had to be a portent of its opposite.
Brent smiled as he shook his head and it seemed to indicate to me an overflood of love, an uncontainable frothing of affection.
The day he told me to leave it was raining.
A. E. Houseman: poor quiet don of Oxford; his eye for his boys had to be guarded; his major joys were his lunchtime porter, his afternoon walks, and watching himself shaving in the mornings, waiting to see if something might come into his head to make his whiskers bristle; he will serve for commentator on what affect it had on me, his casting me out, away.
There was a king reigned in the East: There, when kings will sit to feast, They get their fill before they think With poisoned meat and poisoned drink. He gathered all that springs to birth >From the many-venomed earth; First a little, thence to more, He sampled all her killing store; And easy, smiling, seasoned sound, Sate the king when healths went round. They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up: They shook, they stared as white's their shirt: Them it was their poison hurt. --I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.
Share with me now love's poison and perhaps it will strengthen each of us.
Umbilical knots.
They are at the root, they are the roots of our independence.
We are cut off from the source of nourishment. Each must provide for himself on his own.
The wages of dependency is death. It is dangerous to be dependent on a source if that source is not present.
Dependency is passivity's active form. But what is essential for us, if we are to survive, because our umbilical cords are cut and knotted and, consequently, we lack all and any connection to an internally nourishing source, is activity, not passivity. We must capture and master a nourishing source from outside and draw sustenance from it.
Consequently, dependency only works if someone else is present to consent to our dependency with his sustenance. There is usually a price. Such dependency costs the scorn that the patron feels instinctively for the beggar.
But that is not the price.
The price is the cruelty with which the patron treats the dependent and the pain he can inflict on him in order to ease his own contempt for weakness, the weakness, the dependency in himself he has conquered. He will make his weak subordinate strong even if it is only strong in bearing his cruelty. And his subordinate feels that strengthening and it feeds his pride.
But there is another connection to the nurturing source beside the umbilical one, essential, since the umbilical connection has been severed and sealed with a knot.
Through something intangible, chemistry or emotion or electrical in-tune-ment, the right complementary charges, or I don't know what, people make passage ways and viaducts through which they draw energy from and provide energy to each other.
Brent held me down by the wrists and looked into my eyes with a frightening kind of love.
You are nothing, he slowly whispered, stressing ever word and syllable, and I am everything. Say that. Say that you are nothing. Say you know that you only live with my permission.
I wanted to say those words, but to say them then and there, despite all the times I had fantasized a scene like this became impossible. There was something like a knot in my throat, which blocked my ability to speak.
He slapped me.
I tensed.
But I remained silent.
Brent pulled himself out of me.
Get out of here, he said.
No, I said.
It's over, He said.
But I can't live without you, I said.
We'll see, he said.
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