The Varieties of Erotic Experience, Page 3

words could be. It was an impossible scene she had seen with her own eyes many times over the years.

  She hoped that He would give her partial credit for her warm feelings toward Sam. She might even say she loved Sam, after a fashion. Certainly she was used to him. She treated him as another son and had even come to think of him that way.

  At the same time, she was constantly aware that Sam wasn't really family. Real family was blood; blood was all. Blood was a brute biological fact. Philip was her son, her blood, and Sam was not. Therefore it did not matter that she was ambivalent about Philip and was fond of Sam. Sam could be many things, but he could never be to her what Philip was, just as Philip could never not be whatever he was to her. He was her son, for better and for worse and forever.

  "Do you think Philip and Sam are family?" He asked her.

  "I think they think they are."

  He smiled. Would He laugh? He was always so grouchy in the Bible.

  "You don't think that's possible," He said. “Family is blood, that's what you're thinking, and blood is thicker than water."

  "That is what I'm thinking," she said. "Is it a sin? Does it make me primitive?"

  "No," He said. "Well, yes. People are primitive. There’s no getting away from it. I do wish they were less tribal. That impulse seems to be a bit overstated. That’s my fault there, I suppose. I eagerly await the day when people aren’t quite so much that way. But I'm not holding my breath."

  The word tribal startled her. Urbane, cosmopolitan, educated ladies were not tribal, yet here He was implying that she was tribal! She stifled a sense of annoyance.

  "Families aren't tribal," she said.

  He laughed. “Of course they are!” He said. "But tribalism isn't all bad. It esteems loyalty and stability, and these are important values in any civilization. But they're not the high values. The high values," He went on, intuiting her question, "are honesty, integrity, independence, and a willingness to do what's right in the face of disapproval. And so much social disapproval is tribal! Tribes don't approve of members who go their own way or who opt out of the tribe. Those people are the loneliest, most vulnerable souls of all, and also the bravest. I honor them for their bravery and for showing the way."

  At these words she thought of Philip, as He intended. She might have her doubts about Philip, but there was no doubting his independence of mind, his courage, and his nerve. These qualities had often galled her, but now that He had spoken, she saw them as proof of moral hardiness and an irrepressible sense of self.

  It must somehow be to her credit that she'd raised a son with these qualities, even if she'd fought to stamp them out while failing to detect them in herself. In the shadow of His words she saw herself as petty, vain, and insecure. She was too aware of what others said and thought about her. She was too caught up in her own trials and obsessions to notice that everyone else had them too.

  Philip, not she, had to carry the burden of his being different. He had done so as a child and adolescent without guidance or support. How had he done it? What had it been like? She could not imagine, and she felt a sudden warm wash of shame on her cheeks. Her role had been confined to being surprised by and disappointed in her son. She'd played those cards for all they were worth until she saw they weren't worth much. She'd been defeated by Philip's quiet resoluteness, his determination to live his own life by his own lights. He had defeated her not for the sake of defeating her but because doing so was the only way for him to get where he’d needed to go. He’d had to push her out of the way.

  No wonder she found him so irritating. He'd been right and she'd been wrong. Being right was unforgivable. Being honest was unforgivable. Being honest about being right was beyond description. Being something the tribe did not want you to be and had no use for made you a pariah and expendable. The tribe communicated this message through its trustiest agents, parents. The tribe spoke through parents. Parents spoke the language and wisdom of the tribe. Parents embodied the tribe.

  How had Philip learned to be gay? She found herself wondering about this. He hadn't been brought up to be gay; she knew that to a moral certainty. There had been no gay figures in his youthful world she'd been aware of. Maybe she should have been more attentive. Had some twisted adult, some teacher or coach or family friend camouflaged by heterosexual marriage and institutional authority, secretly molested him?

  He must know the answers to all these questions, but He didn't seem inclined to clue her in. Instead He just stared at her. She would have found this rude if anyone else had done it, and she disapproved of rudeness and indeed of rude people. Maybe disapproval was a sin; maybe being rude was. All the dark feelings, so enlivening on earth, became problematic in this spare, tranquil, cloud-colored setting.

  No wonder Philip had turned to the church as an adult. She had once thought it was Sam's doing. She also suspected political opportunism, since any would-be leader had to have at least a nominal faith. But she understood now that the lure was more profound. It was a need more elemental than accommodating a companion or positioning oneself for approval from the body politic. He had saved Philip. He had delivered him, and Philip was grateful and wished to show his gratitude.

  He had laid a heavy burden on Philip. It was a terrible fate for a child not merely to differ in the most intimate of ways from most people but from his family. These were the people nearest to him. They were the people into whose care he'd been born. But Philip had also found, or been given, the strength to bear that burden. Along Philip's path appeared people to help him, to encourage and enlighten, to love, honor and cherish.

  These luminous figures were people outside the family. They were not part of the clan or of the tribe. Philip had found his life with and through them. He'd made his own family. She was a part of his birth family and his chosen family too, but the latter membership was by his grace. He'd chosen her when he didn't have to and even though he must have been as ambivalent about her as she was about him and maybe more so. Why should it have been otherwise? Children were as perceptive as dogs, and dogs always knew how people felt about them. Yet somehow Philip had pardoned her.

  She couldn't blame him for his feelings about her. She probably would have felt the same way about her if she’d been him. And she couldn't blame Him for proposing to cast her into the abyss, to rejoin Theo in the stinky bottomlands of eternity. That would be hell, truly. But she was resigned to it.

  Hopelessness felt like flatness. It was a featureless plain under a leaden sky neither dark nor bright. It had no smell or temperature. It was an absence, an emptiness. And why was He smiling at her as she thought these terrible thoughts? He had nice teeth.

  "He doesn't blame you," He said. "He's his own man, and isn't that what you always wished for him, really? Isn’t that the point of being a parent?"

  She nodded. When in doubt, nod.

  "And he and Sam found each other, and Sam has a loving mother," He continued. "You made room for her in your house and life. You healed a rift. You found an important piece to the puzzle and figured out where it belonged."

  "I think Caricia took better care of me than I did of her," she said. "I know she did."

  "She took good care of you," He agreed.

  II.

  Caricia did take good care of June. Increasingly she did everything, as June declined. The decline was sharp and unexpected, not at all what the medical savants had forecast. The disease, like a guerrilla force with a wily, seasoned leader, refused to be defeated. It resisted the scalpel, the radiation beam, and the regimen of chemotherapy. It took casualties but managed to survive. It regrouped and renewed its campaign. The siege of the city tightened. Walls began to crumble and gates buckle.

  At some point the slashing, burning, and poisoning of the afflicted person became so obviously counterproductive and barbarous that even the gung-ho in their counterinsurgency uniforms, hospital smocks, were forced to concede that these
methods should no longer be used. Further resistance was futile. The sack of the city would proceed. The conquest could be deferred but not deflected, and it couldn’t be deferred for much longer.

  The self of the afflicted person became ghostly. Strength ebbed, and will waned. The body would no longer do what it was asked to do. June was the lone passenger on a disabled boat drifting toward a waterfall. She could see what was happening. She could see people waving to her from the distant bank. She understood what was happening and could anticipate it, but she was helpless to do anything about it except try to estimate when the current would carry her over the brink. This at least gave her something to do, and the waterfall did represent resolution. It did have an awful beauty. Its roar grew steadily in her ears even as she slept. She slept a little more every day.

  Patiently Caricia helped her, from morning to night. Her initial week's visit became two weeks, then three. At first there had been the shared pleasure of being pensioners together: walks, fires on the hearth, dinner with the boys, church, rented movies, even a neighborhood gathering or two. They were a female Odd Couple, and, in a city of odd couplings, theirs did not stand out.

  But the week before Valentine's Day June suffered another tumble. It was a bad one that