The Bride is led in, heavily veiled. Jangling silver bracelets weight down her wrists and arms. She enters barefoot like a slave, reeking of ether. The Bridegroom’s clan has formed a group, the youngest squatting in the first row, the little patriarchs in the back standing on stools, they pose for a classroom picture. The Bride kneels down, her hands crossed behind her back, waiting to be beheaded while the Groom chants in a high falsetto: “You are my pride and glory! Without you I’m a beggar...” The kinsmen file past, grunting approval. Each places an iron collar around her neck till her head buckles. The Bridegroom joins kinsmen as they chant.
The Bride is placed in a coffin lined with pink satin. The Groom invites the menfolk to enjoy her in turn. All the children press around the coffin to watch. The men clamber in with their boots, the patriarch first, down to the youngest nephew, a boy with a girl’s face and the smile of a gentle clown, while the Bridegroom blows smoke rings up to the ceiling. Soft as silk, the little nephew says, and they have to drag him away. Indignant women replace the coffin lid. The wedding has been consummated. The guests adjourn to the terrace where there is a reception for a famous actress.
The children have propped up the lid of the coffin with the handle of a rake. Now the little girls climb in and out. A head suddenly emerges from the coffin to deliver a speech: “Woman is part less than human, part more than human and part human.”
The Bride and the Groom are playing “It” in the garden. She staggers around uncertainly, blindfolded, her arms stretched before her, and embraces a tree trunk passionately.
• • •
In a wall panel quite high and to the left practically behind her, a scribe or an angel is writing; perhaps a reproduction from a book, her eye caught only the gesture of the moving hand overlarge, violent...one of the Evangelists? An angel with a message for her, she persists in believing, because of his troubling presence, not bookish at all, grimacing and gesticulating to catch her attention. It’s a bearded angel with a comic Jew-face, bible in hand, that changes into a cherub on a Renaissance fountain, then a faun...
How did Ezra get in?
•
How did Ezra do it? She wonders dimly, as she walks toward the kitchen still half asleep. It’s past four. She will have a cup of tea.
How did Ezra get in, by what fraud, cunning or magic, when her door was locked? She always said no; to all men; to Ezra. Her look, her walk, the way she dressed, spoke, or kept silence, stated it clearly. She was waiting for someone else. Or perhaps for no man. She meant it when she told Ezra that she could not marry him because she was about to resolve something; she was not yet resolved. Ezra understood; it was his right to try to persuade her otherwise, to dissuade her from walking this path alone, wherever it led—she said she did not know in her confessed state of ignorance where her paths would lead. But Ezra was sure. She remembers only that he kept translating both her words and silences into another language, dazzling, polyglot; the foreign phrases from Greek, German, Latin, Hebrew, French; verses from the Old Testament. She was trying to make out his features in the dark: the face changing like reflections in water; the hands now in her hair, now fingers groping between blouse and skirt, skirt and slip, then lightly up her thigh; the voice, breath weaving, brushing over cheek, ears, throat; the fingers, cat-like, padding through her bush and before she knew it her palm came down over his hand and she had said, I want the real thing.
And lay smiling, pleased as if it had been done already while he asked anxiously, Are you sure you really want to, and What if I give you a baby, It hurts the first time; already driving in, having propped her up, mounted, and whispering in her ear while she clutched his head. It is not easy work deflowering a woman, he said. Then she let go, her hands falling away, her head rolling to the side, eyes open, saw the room in the sweep of a full circle: his shoe with his wallet in it on the floor to the left where her head was turned; the patch of dawning light in the window to the furthest right, and in the center Ezra straddled upright his knees hugging her ribs, tall and erect, looking out, out far, riding over miles of steppes, and still driving, she thought he would break straight through her skull, then breathing once more, breathing comfortably now, full of pleasure, the warm liquid trickling down her thigh his member slipping out, resting on her thigh, after rider and mount tumbled and fell together, and they both went to sleep.
It was something else she wanted. They both struggled against their own dreams and inclinations. Ezra wanted to be different, she, perhaps, wanted simply to stop dreaming, waiting, virginal; he lying that he wanted her, still wanting what he could not wean himself from; wanting to believe himself, her to believe him: that he wanted her; lying himself into believing. She, silent, still holding truth dearest like a last coin in her palm—perhaps a worthless coin—in the twinkling of an eye she flung it away, leaving her so empty-handed that Ezra could.
Scenes from another life played over, of no value now, she thinks while sipping her tea. She lies in bed, quietly watching the window. In two hours the alarm clock will ring.
The deception is endless. To laugh. To cry. To curse. To breathe is actually most that she can manage. The night is paling.
