Robert Butler - Tabloid Dreams

There is enough of my daddy’s sense of the world in me to understand after two in a row that something was happening here that was providential. Not that I didn’t test it some more. Not that my own improvised half-theology didn’t cling to the notion of a God who would look on the yearning of a woman and a man to touch and take solace — or even a woman and a woman — any two people who found themselves in the terror and isolation of this life they did not choose — I half imagined a God who would look on such creatures and pity them and love them and try very hard to show Himself in those moments when the two people, whoever they were, were letting go of their own selfishness and fears and faithlessness and trying to find a way to cling hard and long and permanently to each other. And if they failed at that, God would see just the yearning for it as worthy of a gift of all the grace a God could give.

So I kissed another man I liked and wanted to love, a man with a life already rich in things. I kissed him one late afternoon in my place, kissed him and lay with him, and he left my bed because he had to be somewhere else and he had to hurry and I began to think it was okay, I was silly ever to wonder about this, and ten minutes later my phone rang. He was calling me on his cellular phone from his BMW convertible and he said, “I had to call. I had to tell you that I have many things in my life, but your kiss is very special.” And then, I figured out from the police reports, he went around a bend on the Dan Ryan Expressway, perhaps with his eyes drifting out to the east, over the lake, to a moon still pale from the verging sun, and he ran right under a stalled semitrailer.

And the bathroom door swings open and Philip steps out and he stops and he is looking at me. His linen pants and his linen collarless shirt hang loose on him and I sense his body inside there, naked and soft, and my heart is pounding and my lips feel tumescent, as if they have their own separate yearning and they are filling for him. With what? A kind of venom utterly new to this world? A plague from God? Or not so grand as that, after all. A plague simply from some sick, mutant monkey in some dark jungle in Africa. He kissed a sleeping traveler on safari who kissed a flight attendant who kissed a businessman from Chicago who kissed his secretary at the Merchandise Mart who kissed a mail boy who kissed me a happy new year at an office party. Perhaps it is as blandly horrific as that. Or maybe I am the scourge of the Old Testament, a modern harlot who dares love a man on terms quite different from a bunch of desert dwellers three and a half millennia ago and eight thousand miles away and so is doomed herself and destined only to bring doom.

Philip says, “I love you.”

He’s not said this before. Still, though we’ve known each other only the briefest of times, I’ve sensed it. We met at the Merchandise Mart. He brought some product drawings to show at a fair and he was lost in the building and he stopped me and he asked for directions. We spoke and I never even looked at his drawings. I showed him the way and gave him my phone number, in spite of what I knew about myself. In spite of that. He looked me in the eyes, he looked at me and did not look away and I gave him my number, and when he called me, before anything else, I told him. I told him all that I knew about myself. So he came here and he was dressed in linen and he is standing now before me and his eyes are soft on me.

“Are you afraid?” I say.

“Yes.”

I feel a lifting in me, a warm rushing feeling about him because he loves me and because he believes me, and though this makes him afraid, he is here. He has dressed in white for me and I have dressed in white in this new and empty place where I live. I want this to be pure. I want to sit here with him on the floor and I don’t know what it is that we will do, but it will be in a place without tapestries and without carved work and without myrrh and aloe and cinnamon. The linen is all right. They wrapped the dead body of Jesus in linen. He was killed by a kiss and then they wrapped him in linen.

He believes me when I tell him about this curse. I did not fully believe it myself even after the phone went dead from the Dan Ryan. I promise that it was still partly my disbelief that made me stop on Dearborn at noon a few weeks later. I was passing a construction site, and a worker there in a T-shirt and a hard hat was calling out to all the women going by. “Oh man,” he cries as I pass. “That’s just enough for me. Give me a kiss, honey.”

And I stopped and some part of me still couldn’t believe. But it’s true that part of me did. And that part was thoroughly pissed at this man. He sought not solace. He sought not love. He would use the signs of those yearnings in order to control and demean and cast away. And so I turned and I moved into this space of unlaid stone and churning cement mixers and he was sitting beneath a web of steel beams and a half-risen wall and I went to him and his eyes widened and he flinched, expecting a blow, but I took his face in my hands and kissed him on the mouth, a kiss full of wrath. And I turned and walked away and I had not reached the end of the block before I heard a creaking of steel and a crumbling of mortar and then a long roar of falling concrete and beams. There was no doubt left in my mind.

It is tempting now, to send Philip away and to accept this role. I have eyes to see and ears to hear. I know easily from the pages of the newspapers every day that there are men who do evil and would ask for my kiss and all that I would do is comply with their wishes. I have done this once and I could do it often again. I have kissed in anger and killed. But surely only the wicked can consciously do that, can turn this act of love into death. And what does that suggest about a God who has brought these things into the world? Not to kiss in anger but in tenderness, in the yearning for closeness and care, and from this to kill. Is that not more wicked still?

Philip sits down now in front of me. “I’m afraid too,” I say.

“That you will hurt me?”

“Yes. That. And another thing.”

“What is it?”

I see my father’s face in me, rising above his pulpit. He was right. On earth, the father is the image of God.

“I hated my father,” I say.

“That frightens you?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

I say, “I’m afraid that God is as loveless as he was.”

He says, “Your father was not God.”

“God gave me this evil.”

“No. Not him. Did any of the men you kissed know the risk?”

“None of them.”

“I do.”

“Yes.”

Philip draws his face near to me. “Then kiss me,” he says.

“I want to kiss you. I want to. I want to touch.”

“I understand. Kiss me. I’m asking you.”

“We can stay here afterwards,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Will we be safe?”

“We will,” he says. “I’ll fill the room with furniture. I am a carpenter.”

Then I kiss him.

So we settle in at this new place in Westwood called “Coffee, Beer and Irony” and it’s a Saturday afternoon, there’s practically a whole weekend left ahead of us. I’m thinking I could stay here the entire time. When you find a place with a TV over the bar and a lot of light and hazelnut coffee, which is my favorite, and beer the color of Evian, you can almost think that the world isn’t so bad after all. And the place even has tables with umbrellas out in the back, away from all the traffic. The Zima Garden. And I’ve got forty-two hours before I have to put on my suit and tie and go out and tread water for a while. I say I “have to” do that, but I choose to. It’s a choice I make. I’m in my Converse high-tops today and that’s me, but I’m no slacker. Not that anybody is pushing me to be. Tolerance is the word. Even Janis doesn’t get after me about the job. She understands, in a certain way. The thing that’s happening between us on this otherwise-should-be-fine Saturday afternoon isn’t about my job, exactly.