Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

They all laugh at that, but the little roly-poly narrow-eyed ex-mayor with the big nose says, “Easy, Burt. That’s enough.”

Not quite: “I bet you look pretty cute all tangled up in your tutus.”

“Did he say where he was going?” she asks, handing the barman a bill still crisp from the bank and pointing at the slice of lemon meringue pie in the glass case on the counter. She knows she will suffer more mocking laughter as she leaves, but perhaps she can deflect it somehow.

“For here?” the proprietor asks, and she nods.

“Said he needed a bath,” the mayor bellows. “We let him know he could use a shave and a haircut, too.”

“We told him he could also give that inner dummy he was talking to a good soaking,” growls Burt through their sour snickering. “Maybe he could hold him under and drown the sonuvabitch.”

She is somewhat alarmed by this news but hides her emotions behind a dancer’s expressionless mask. She takes the slice of pie off the plate and holds it in the palm of her hand and gazes contemplatively at it as a mystic might gaze at a leaf or a feather, finding the mysteries of the universe contained within it, or as a jeweler might scrutinize a diamond or a pearl. Or Salome, the Baptist’s head, its awesome truth. Slowly she begins to sway, letting her upraised palm trail after her body motion as if it were the head of a snake, she its charmer, only hoping the wooziness she has been suffering of late doesn’t return. She does an adagio glissade toward their table, still swaying, still focused on the pie, and there, while the men make self-conscious remarks about her nuttiness and back off, she mimes the effort to stick a finger from her other hand in it, though it always seems just out of reach. She leans toward it, her tongue out and doing a petit battement of its own, the hand pulling away whenever the tongue approaches. She straightens up, head high, attempts a little fouetté in her street shoes, and swirls gracefully to the opposite side of the room, where she begins to sway again, eyes closed, as though falling into a trance. The mayor applauds and guffaws, setting Jim off again, and once he finally stops his braying, she again glissades, swaying, toward the table, their eyes wholly on her now, watching her hips move, big boyish grins on their greasy faces. “She’s stupid,” she hears Burt say, though really she can hear and see very little, so intensely is she immersed in her performance. She mimes again the attempt to reach the pie with her finger and her tongue, leaning toward the mayor, so that he can see closely the teasing little dance her tongue makes with its étendre movement, quivering toward the elusive pie. He rolls his eyes comically, and as the other two lean close, trying to see what the mayor sees, she moves her arm fluidly from the third ballet position to the fourth and slaps the pie— whop! — in Burt Robbins’ smirking face. He sputters and roars an obscenity and lurches blindly to his feet, the chair crashing against the wall, while she executes a rapid little pas de bourrée en arrière, tippytoeing backwards out of the bar, enjoying now the howling laughter she had earlier so dreaded.

As he steps into the bath, Wesley is thinking about Bergson’s notion that all our perceptions are outside us in the things we perceive, not inside us. Connie Dreyer used it to illustrate the difficulty we have in glimpsing Being through the unreliable scrim of Becoming, which is the world of our sensations, but not the world itself, since our perceptions can never equal the perceived. The only way to see Being truly is by way of direct intuition or inspiration. Revelation. Connie’s defense of faith by way of the likes of Plotinus, Augustine, that Areopagite character. Wesley was able to chip in a remark about John Scotus Eriugena, about whom he had once written a pretty good B-minus paper, but his heart was not in it, as his inner Christ has more or less disabused him of all notions of uroboric wholes common to these flaky Platonic dreamers. Faith, Connie said, is a kind of power: the power to appreciate revelations, which are facts in a way that what we call facts are not. Though one can reason about revelations, they are not a matter of reason but are simply received. In the way, Wesley asked, somewhat testily since he was not being taken seriously, that he has received his indwelling Christ? Connie puffed on his bent briar and said he was thinking of something a bit more abstract and all-encompassing. But the point is (his buttocks are now kissing the hot surface), Bergson uses the sensation of light as his demonstration of the distance between us and our own perceptions, seeing being the closest of the senses to thinking, and as Wesley sinks gratefully into the tubful of hot water (Jesus says: Yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!), he concludes that there has been too little thought about the contiguous and instantaneous tactile perceptions of the flesh, which in the case of a hot tub bath anyway, come close to being the same as the perceived. And, if not, does that place our flesh outside us as well? The whiskey, he feels, is making him quite brilliant.

His route into the manse was via its nether regions, though not by choice. They had changed the locks, both front and back, but not the padlock on the old cellar door. Such a door on his father’s farm led to their tornado and bomb shelter, and Wesley as a boy often used it as his hideaway. He kept secret provisions there in the way of candy bars and jawbreakers, and he did so here in the manse as well: a bottle of bourbon on the pantry shelves behind the paint tins, still nearly half full. While he was down there, he switched on the electricity and the hot water heater. The door at the top of the stairs was secured only with a hook and eye, easy to snap with a little push.

While he waited for the water to heat up, he strolled the darkening manse, stripped of all small and personal items, though still with most of its furniture, some covered with sheets, while outside the fresh rumbles of thunder drew nearer. The eggs, he saw, were gone from the kitchen walls, but not the yellow stains they left. No glasses, so he drank from the neck of the bourbon bottle, Jesus cautioning against it, lest he be filled with drunkenness and unable to find his way out of here and back to the studio again. “Well, you are right,” Wesley said. “I won’t have any. You may have it all.” And he tipped the bottle back, Jesus remarking, with no little irony, Hah! the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? Although everything in the manse was familiar, it was also unfamiliar, for his life had changed and was still changing and bore no relation any longer to these ancient philistine spaces. He could find no towels, but he pulled an old sheet off an easy chair which will do just fine.

The whiskey has indeed put Jesus in a mellow mood, that and Wesley’s decision that they will, yes, return to Prissy and the studio. Jesus is now humming an old church tune, “Where the Healing Waters Flow,” though he seems to be turning it into a kind of torch song: “O, this precious, perfect love! How it keeps the heart aglow!” Women were always important to Jesus and they are important to him now. His intimacy with prostitutes, whose sins he forgave as if they were not sins, got him in trouble with the Pharisees, and his ministry was benefacted by faithful women of means, all women who loved him one way or another. Some bathed his feet in their tears or splashed spikenard on his head, others just hung out with him like love-stricken camp followers. If two lie together, then they have heat, Jesus has said in his ecclesiastical style, speaking from within Wesley’s recumbent body on the studio exercise mats that serve there as their bed (now here in the hot bath Christ has fallen blissfully silent), but how can one be warm alone? From Magdalene, his favorite, he expelled seven demons, and what he said about it was, Yeah, that was a lot of fun. We got on well. And now it is Priscilla. Wesley does not wholly understand his mission, but he knows that Prissy and her studio are part of it. That became transparent to him on his walk today through this hostile wilderness of a town in which he cannot survive alone and from which he cannot alone escape. For the moment he and Jesus are safe here in the manse, for outside a violent storm is brewing and no one will be out in it, but sooner or later they will have to brave it and make their way back to their mirrored refuge and to its peculiar rhythms. Which can be pretty strenuous. He sleeps a lot when Prissy’s not around, just getting over when she is. Sleeps well. Better than he ever slept before.