William Gass - Omensetter’s Luck

Intercourse, he could have shouted in that silence — adultery. Piss even? Yes. Piss too. He could have cried piss at the steeple and been applauded during tea. Nevertheless there'd be no use, no sense to it. That's what they payed for, the rich in their rich houses with those deep pile carpets and the drapes of velvet he so vividly imagined. Titillation. The wealthy ladies would come from church excited and while they slept beside their obese husbands dream of the hard distended penis of their coachman hung with jewelry. In the privacy of thought and through the secrecy of image, they would enjoy each sin his preaching had suggested. They would wallow safely in the worst sensations; conceive the most obscene devices; place him, their preacher, in vulgar postures; ravish him on ornate altars or on the floors of pews; urge upon him the caresses of small boys, naked under choir gowns, still moist and warm from baths.

Furber stretched, yawning and rising on his toes. Once these had been his secret fancies too. In former times. In good old bygone days. He remembered rolling on the floor, wrapped in them, in pain, in ecstasy. He'd fled them here and so his ministry was here, here in the wilderness of conscience; this sodden dorp and river midden where he preached each week from a teepee as the Reverend Andrew Pike had doubtless done, shaking a crucifix like a tomahawk, stamping his feet, and in every appropriate way playing missionary to the forsaken and savage Gileans. Let bygones be. No use. He'd fled his childhood here, all those flowers and sweet honey, his fears, the evil smell of ink, the shriek of print… no use. The wealthy women he was presently imagining would love as much exhibiting their naked souls as their naked bodies, and Furber was aware that he himself as often in his dreams found a naked soul to be a naked body that he took them now together in one glance. For terror you looked to the teeth. Rage lay in the muscles of the legs and arms, hypocrisy weighed on the lids of the eyes, while other dishonesties rang around the pupils like shoes thrown true to the stake.

The ladies egged him on; in Eve's name, they dared him; so he made love with discreet verbs and light nouns, delicate conjunctions. They begged; they defied him to define… define everything. They could not be scandalized — impossible, they said. Indecent prepositions such as in, on, up, merely made them smile, and the roundest exclamation broke upon them like a bubble's kiss, a butterfly's. Smooth and creamy adjectives enabled them to lick their lips upon the crudest story. How charmingly you speak, Reverend Furber, how much you've seen of this wicked world, and how alive you are to it, they said. And with Mrs. Kinsman he had gotten to a point where, by speaking indirectly, he could… well. . say anything. The missionaries, madame, when they reached this remote and isolated place, found the natives given over entirely to the most horrible indecencies, utterly sunk in them… They ran about naked for one thing. It was quite a task, let me tell you, to win them for Christ. They practiced the most elaborate ritual competitions which they pretended were also highly magical and religious. A man, to reach the inner councils of the king and be a priest, during the moon's dark quarter, had to bring a maiden honestly and safely on through seven tourneys undertaken over seven nights until she felt the seven separate excitements, heights, and swooning conclusions that were considered customary; these blissful moments to be accomplished on a consecrated canvas dais under smoking public lights, and the ravishing fulfillments come to in each of the seven now celebrated ceremonial ways which the earliest tribal sages, no doubt divinely guided, had somehow hit on and in moving rhymes then movingly indited: that is, by posture, speech, eyes, hands, tongue, feet, and finally uninserted member; thus leaving her as much a maiden at the end as she had been in the beginning. When you know further, madame, that the virgin in the contest was always the same — an angular, man-hating hag — alas, completely incorruptible — and that she had been performing in the round arena forty years already when the mission beached its boats upon the island, you will understand no ordinary cozy clip or buss or prance or greasy squeeze could move her. Truly, in that country, the priesthood was a peerless calling, and guaranteed the king should always be advised by the noblest, best and wisest men the little nation could command. As I've said, it was quite a task to win them for Christ, but praise the Lord and the strength of the Faith, for it was done. Here's how: it occurred immediately to one of the mission, a strapping young cleric named Frederick, that if the Christians could only come up with a champion of their own, one who had outdoughtied all others, they should then have a man near the ear of the king who could claim his skill and vigor from his baptism. Conversion would follow hard upon. To achieve this extraordinary end, young Frederick had a plan. This is how he put it into play… And then she had offered up that knee, frightfully scarred, and he had gone so far as to touch it. A kiss upon that spot, a healing kiss, and he could have marched along her thigh to bliss — such as bliss is. These words of his — for her they were only the prelude to Lohengrin, but for him they were the thing, the actual opera, itself. It was just like a woman to want the performance.

Yet he was like them, the rich ones not the real ones, he, the Reverend — with darkness for his dress. In the theater of his head, in the privacy of Philly Furber's Fancy FotoCabinet — what thrilling horrors were enacted, what lascivious scenes encranked. Come to the skull show, honey. Gets no babies out of it, just fun… fun thin as tish-ee paper, and all rumply crumply.

The difference as it lies these days, professor, between the Christians and the early Greeks? Christians soap their balls, I think — correct, my boy, quite right — whereas the pagans, it is my opinion, always olive-oiled their penises. Yes, lad, yes, and the reason for that is, you see, that in our modern world, we, with wider horizons, steamships, copra, chemistry… There was a time, I believe, when a Christian didn't dare to wash downstairs for fear he'd find some pleasure in it. He didn't care to, either, I suspect. His sort was not disposed to water. They drew their substance mostly from the baser, denser, massier elements, and one brief wade and gentle sprinkle was enough for them. Go on, go on, that's shrewd; though Gibbon said it, still it's shrewd. Well all danger of pleasure's past, there's no risk now. The Christians, too, always imitating Jews, though always poorly I'm afraid, though they were always Jews, these Christians were, though fallen I fear, have lately cut the ends of their cocks off with consecrated scissors. I should like to put it to the class, sir: what Greek would countenance disfigurement like that, and encourage such a loss of feeling in a fellow? Only that damn Jew, Antisthenes, perhaps. Certainly not Socrates — with his ambidextrous bat and balls. You'll go far, Furby. You've a head, child. All the lines on those amphora would go wrong, sir — how they'd uglify. Amphor ae —all the lines on those amphorae — don't forget one subject while reciting on another. Besides that, Master Furber, uglify is a barbaric and ugly word. Besides that there's nothing in Robertson or Hume or Gibbon on this subject, Master Furber, watch your step. The penis in repose, professor, with that little hat of skin, why it's a lovely childlike thing, and each man's gentle babyhood is in it. Nor Voltaire, Macaulay, or Carlyle. Please get on. Nor Michelet. But continue. Nor any of the Germans. I remember reading how on one amphora a satyr is depicted balancing, what? — a cup? bowl? plate? one of these, at any rate, upon the point of his prick. Where are your authorities? Prescott? Parkman? dumb. It's not in Renan, surely? Aren't you forgetting Tacitus is silent, Cornelius Nepos equally, and Thucydides likewise? Xenophon notes nothing, nothing. Even Herodotus, or gossips like Plutarch and the Plinys… I'd pay a thousand drachmas to see a trick like that, and sell my soul a thousand times not to feel ashamed attempting it myself.