Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Now he is sliding back and forth in her with measured strokes, still gazing down upon her with a look of intense fascination in his eyes, as though he cannot see enough. And then he kisses her, tenderly yet hungrily, his tongue licking her lips and exploring the recesses of her mouth, while his thrusts become more urgent and his fingers reach for her other opening down below, sending electric tremors of pleasure and mad desire racing through her, and she rises to meet him in a moment of uncontrolled passion, crying out in her delight. When she was a little girl she had once heard her parents say of a friend of theirs who was not married but was expecting a child that she had been touched by the finger of God, and though the grownups seemed to think that was funny, it made Angela recall that painting in St. Peter’s in Rome of God’s finger, the one touching Adam. There was something so mighty and awesome about that finger, frightening even, and she had never forgotten it. That’s what it feels like inside her now. The finger of God.

Snow is falling outside her window, recalling for her a long-ago walk through a snowy campus, a night of such exquisite purity, the flakes dropping past the lamps overhead like big soft petals. It was the first night he said he loved her, and during the long goodnight kisses outside her sorority, she let his hands cup her breasts. Such strong masculine hands — as was he in all respects — and so handsome, so passionate, and yet so kind and gentle. So loving. In the spring, she accepted his fraternity pin (his brothers serenaded her, singing the song with her name in it) and, trusting him implicitly, she surrendered to him before they separated for the Easter holidays. Which were agonizing days for both of them. Mail was slow and phone calls difficult and expensive, so he drove all the way to her parents’ house to see her, and they walked hand in hand along the river, and he made love to her standing up against a secluded tree, and though it was all so new to her, she was able to laugh at the awkwardness of it, and then, still joined together, she cried. As she is crying now, and without him here to comfort her. Nor wanting him, for he is no comfort. She shudders and calls for the home care nurse Bernice, asks her to bring her one of her photo albums. The long white one.

The Presbyterian manse lights are off and the curtains are open on this first night of April, and Prissy Tindle, who should perhaps at this moment be known by her stage name of Priscilla Parsons, is dancing the “Dance of the Annunciation” for Reverend Wesley Edwards by the pale glow of the unseasonable snow falling outside. She has been thinking about it and choreographing it in her mind all day, ever since she saw the shimmering white dove preening itself in much balmier weather outside her kitchen window this morning. Her horoscope encouraged artistic endeavor and suggested that she foster new relationships with imagination and transparency. Which she took to mean she should dance with her clothes off. Wesley’s record collection leaves much to be desired (it is probably his wife Debra’s, that silly woman, he seemed to know nothing about it), but at least she was able to find Debussy’s Nocturnes , the “Clouds” piece being both texturally and thematically appropriate for the angel Gabriel descending from Heaven while the dove of the Holy Spirit casts its fertilizing beam upon the magical scene. The mystery of mysteries. Forget your risen Christ, this is it.

Priscilla has chosen to interpret that mystery, not from the perspective of one of the three protagonists, but as an expression of the exchange occurring between them, including the respectful but lordly intrusion of the messenger, Mary’s bewilderment and disbelief, and the dove’s sweet feathery aggression, focusing, as the album cover notes say about the nocturne, on “an instant of pure beauty,” which is also of course an instant of pure terror. All of this is, simultaneously, in her dance. Further nuances of gesture have been suggested by other album notes regarding the melting of juxtaposed discords into impressions of lucent sonorities, the rich languorous tone of the English horn set against the undulating background of the other instruments (languorous undulation is one of her best moves), and Debussy’s own remark that the music he desired “must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams,” which describes perfectly her own lifelong aspirations as a dancer.

Suppleness perhaps comes less easily to her now, her body being less lithe than it once was, her feet no longer quite leaving the floor in her little springs, but time claims its little victories, what can you do. Not that she is any heavier, she has always been careful about that, dieting and exercising regularly, but her flesh has rearranged itself subtly, adding a touch of texture here and there, as she thinks of it, and in what she hopes is an opulent and intriguing way. And she can still touch the floor with her palms without bending her knees, a gesture that always gives Wesley particular delight (he has often kissed her then highest parts in respectful gratitude). Wesley, too, is naked, for she has explained to him that he will join her in her dance, or at least be part of it. And, semitumescent, he has been watching her and commenting on her performance and on her beauty with his indwelling Christ, who claims to feel quite abashed (Wesley’s translation) at this celebration of his conception. With his, or their, eyes upon her she feels flushed with anticipation. The room is sweetly perfumed as if with incense, adding to the sacred aura, for the three of them have been using Wesley’s briar pipe to smoke the marijuana she brought, the teeth marks on the stem giving her a sense of profound intimacy. Like sharing a toothbrush.

Priscilla can empathize with Wesley’s Christ within. She herself has always felt there to be another dancer inside her, trying to express herself — or itself — in a body that is, alas, never wholly responsive to its demands. In effect, this inner dancer represents the distance between the way she imagines herself dancing and the way it actually turns out. Although Prissy has held no two-sided conversations with this dancer within, she has sometimes spoken to her, or it, usually in exasperation or apology, much as one speaks to one’s conscience, and sometimes “listens” to it, too, if not literally or with much compliance. Her husband Ralph, with whom she danced in her early days, used to complain about her muttering while dancing, saying that it broke his concentration while communing with the music, which for him was a sacred connection, her muttering therefore a kind of sacrilege. All she could say to the pompous ass was he just didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t understand, which is the sort of philistine incomprehension poor dear Wesley is now enduring in this town. Reviled and ridiculed, abandoned, expelled from his pulpit and facing eviction from his home and, as she discovered today when trying to bank for him what’s probably his last paycheck (though she hasn’t told him, won’t, for fear of what he might do or ask her to do), pauperized by his traitorous wife, no doubt in collusion with his worst enemy, the bank owner. He has his rights, he cannot be evicted without due process, cannot be arrested for he has committed no crime, and he seems determined to stay put and fight his oppressors, but Prissy knows this is too dangerous. If the deacons can get him certified, as they intend, the men in little white suits will come to get him and he’ll be straitjacketed and locked away where she cannot help him.

Immediately after her “Water Dance of the Megalopsychoi” on Sunday night, their hair still wet and shoes not yet on, Wesley wanted her to drive him out to the church camp so that he might confront Debra with all her crimes against him, including something having to do with his golfclubs which Prissy didn’t understand, and to demand of her that she not sign any papers presented to her by the church deacons and that she give him his stolen car back. She felt complete sympathy with the poor man from the bottom of her heart, but she couldn’t do it. She was afraid. Of the scandal, sure, and of having to face Debra, and of Wesley’s currently explosive temperament which might land them in all sorts of horrible trouble, but mostly she was afraid of those strange violent people with their diabolic visions of ultimate catastrophes. She had been afraid to go out to the stormy mine hill when they were waiting for the end to come, though she had witnessed their bizarre frenzies on live television while doing her morning exercises, never having seen so much exposed flesh on the screen before. Later, the networks censored most of it, but that morning it was all on display, all the fat wet bottoms and flopping breasts and all the screaming and whipping and the mad muddy brawl that followed, the beatings and the arrests — it was a nightmare, she couldn’t bear it, she had to turn it off. She’d had no idea until church on Easter morning that those awful people were back, so she was in a state of alarm and anticipation even before everything else that had happened. Her horoscope that morning had urged her to take bold advantage of any unforeseen circumstances, and, well, she did.