You think I always knew what I was talking about? It made no difference. Down on her back she would go every time in a flow of sighs, spreading wide her legs and lifting her knees, opening her arms in her enraptured swoon as though to hug me inside herself.
'Oh, David, David,' I would hear her moan. 'Where do you get such wonderful words?'
'Out of the blue.'
'Out of the blue?'
'They come to me right out of the blue.'
'Oh, that's so lovely also.'
Nowadays I lie here shivering in bleak and friendless longing, and all she does when bored, my self-absorbed wife, is gaze at Abishag with heavy, painted lids and ply the unspoiled girl with worldly questions and homely bits of female wisdom.
'Don't be so good a cook,' Bathsheba advises my servant girl. 'Why should you work so hard when you don't have to? Don't comb his hair so carefully or keep him so clean. Hurt him once in a while, let him get dirty. Don't make such good meals, don't be so good around the house. Who needs it? He never finishes what you give him anyway. Let his lamp go out once in a while. Only learn to do well the things you enjoy doing. Do you want to lose your looks?'
Abishag answers, 'I enjoy cooking and cleaning for him. I like to see him with his hair combed. I have always enjoyed doing housework.'
'Such a pity. Such a waste.' Bathsheba frowns in commiseration and pauses a moment, respectfully. 'A lot of men go for small dark women like you. You look a little bit Korean. I sometimes had trouble because I was so tall and had this pale skin I still can't stand. And I have these weird blue eyes. You wouldn't believe it, but a lot of people never could understand what he saw in me. A lot of people never could appreciate why he wanted to make me queen. Right?'
'I never wanted to make you queen.'
You think she always waits for an answer when she asks a question, or listens when I give her one? She is already addressing Abishag. 'It's a shame you're cooped up inside this stinking palace when you're still so young and pretty. Have you ever smelled so many odors? I'm sure none come from me. You're wearing those same robes of divers colors--that's the first thing I look for when I come here every day, you know. I'll let you in on something. As long as you're a virgin, you can still get out. You're not his wife and you're not really his concubine. Make him let you out. Nag him, bother him, aggravate him. Spill hot tea on him. A girl so nice, with such cute tits and such a nice black pubic patch, you should be outside enjoying yourself and learning tricks from other men and from Canaanite whores. Canaanite women know how to get pleasure as well as give it. It's a pity you had to come in here as a servant. Why are you even still a virgin, a sweet girl like you? When I was your age, my closest friends were harlots. That's how I got so smart. The first time I married, Uriah didn't know what hit him. Neither did this one when we first started doing it, did you? And he'd already been married seven times. He never even had his cock sucked until he met me, can you imagine? Once I moved in, I never had to do another stitch of housework. My hands never touched hot water again. Abigail was the dumb one who just kept working. She aged overnight, practically, and her hair turned ugly gray.'
'Her hair was pewter and it was beautiful.'
Then how come you kept sleeping with me? He'd go to her to eat and to pour out his troubles. Right off the bat I got an alabaster bathtub, ivory ointment boxes, and one of the largest apartments in the palace, didn't I? I had western exposure from the beginning and got a beautiful breeze from the sea every evening.'
It was Bathsheba, of course, from whom I derived my universal axiom that a bad reputation never hurt anybody.
'Leave her alone,' I butt in now to the unprincipled mother of my dead baby and my son Solomon. 'She does beautifully all she will ever be expected to do. She can have all the maids and kitchen help she wants. What are you bothering her for?'
'You should have waited,' Bathsheba comments to Abishag, 'and come in here as a queen. You should at least make him marry you before you bathe him again or cook him another meal. Then you would be a queen too, and never have to work again. Let him shiver, let him go hungry and get bedsores if he doesn't want to marry you or let you go.'
'We don't have queens,' I remind her. 'Who says you're a queen?'
'I'm the wife of a king,' she tells me. 'What do you think that makes me?'
The wife of a king,' I instruct her, 'and that's all. Where do you think you are, England? You're starting to sound like Michal.'
That's just what I did,' Bathsheba states placidly to Abishag, dismissing my firm objections of a few seconds earlier. 'I came in as a queen. You should have done the same. And soon I'm going to be the mother of a king.'
The audacity of this enlivens me with a rush of adrenaline I do not frequently experience anymore.
'Yeah?' I say. 'And just how do you figure that's going to come about?'
'Solomon,' she answers, resting her gaze on me. 'Solomon?' The ridicule in my voice is practically a guffaw.
'No?'
'God forbid.'
'Why not?'
'You're trying to make me laugh.'
'Isn't it better for the future of the country?'
'Over my dead body.'
'That,' says Bathsheba, 'is the sequence in which it usually takes place, isn't it. Except with Adonijah. Your pride and your joy. Adonijah doesn't like to wait until you die, does he? Adonijah thinks he doesn't have to wait.'
'What's this about Adonijah?' I inquire with concern. 'What are you talking about?'
Bathsheba's breasts shift sensually inside her golden robe with the exaggerated sigh of exasperation she heaves. Her breasts have gotten fuller with age, more shapely and pendulous. My fingers itch to squeeze them. 'Don't you know?' she asks, with affected disdain. 'Must I be the one to tell you everything? And you say I'm not a queen? Your son Adonijah exalts himself all over the city by saying he will be king. Nobody's told you that? And they say you do nothing to displease him by asking him why he has done so. Have you done anything to displease him by asking him why he has done so?'
'All Adonijah wants is to give an outdoor feast to celebrate the fact that he's next in line, and that he's already willing to pitch in by representing me.' I give this explanation rather feebly, hoping to obscure the disturbing effects the points she is scoring are having upon me.
'And isn't that just how Absalom began his rebellion, by representing you?' Bathsheba hits home again with a tenacity and quickness of mind she has demonstrated in the past when pursuing her own interests. 'Oh, David, David, don't be a sap. Can't you ever learn? Adonijah will exalt himself once again at his fancy luncheon by saying he will be king and behaving as though he already is. Would Solomon do that? Your subjects will become his subjects. Have you done anything to displease Adonijah,' persists Bathsheba, 'by asking him why he is doing so?'
'Why should I do anything to displease Adonijah?' is my reply. 'Adonijah will be king and Solomon won't. Adonijah is the oldest.'
'That doesn't have to count.' The alacrity with which she is counter-punching infuses me with the vexing notion that she has been coached. 'You weren't the oldest, were you?'
'You think I got where I am as a gift from my father?'
'You think Jacob was the oldest?' she answers with a question, aggressively. 'Was Joseph? Was his son Ephraim? But Ephraim got the blessing from Jacob, didn't he? Even though Joseph wanted it to go to Manasseh. That big-shot ancestor of yours, Judah, wasn't the oldest either, was he, and neither was his twin son, Pharez, about whom you also like to boast so much. That's some scandal with Judah you've got back there in your family closet, haven't you? Never mind me and my wild parties with my Canaanites before I was married. Judah doing it with his own daughter-in- law? Oh, boy! A man must not lie with the wife of his son, didn't he know that?'
'She was a widow,' I cry out in protest. 'And she dressed up as a harlot to trick him. Listen, how come you all of a sudden know so much? You never read a good book in your whole life.'
'I've been brushing up. I'v
e been reading my Bible. I've got nothing else to do.'
'Horseshit.' I know my dearest sweetheart too well to fall for that one. 'That's a barefaced lie. You've been listening to Nathan, haven't you? He's the one who's been sending you in here with all those things to say, isn't he?'
Bathsheba looks all the more winning when her face colors a bit. 'So where's the lie?' she replies at last. 'Listening to Nathan is a lot harder than reading the Bible, isn't it?'
'You said it,' I agree, and eye her appreciatively. 'Remarks like that remind me of why I still do love you, my darling. Come to me.'
Bathsheba gives a peremptory shake of her head. 'I am sick of love.'
'Then tell your son Solomon to go pee up a rope.'
'Are you going to punish the kingdom just because I refuse to do dirty things with you at my age?'
'What's dirty about them? You didn't used to think they were dirty.'
'I always thought they were dirty. That's why we enjoyed doing them, you simpleton. Men are so naive, always.'
'And what's all this about punishing the kingdom?' I demand belatedly. 'Adonijah is a very goodly man and popular with the people.'
'Solomon is wise.'
'As my foot.'
'The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.'
'Don't butter me up. Let him learn from Adonijah, if you think he's so wise, instead of lurking around my hallways all the time with his stylus and his tablet, trying to get in to see me. Why does he have to write everything down? Can't he remember? People believe that Adonijah will be king because he goes about behaving as though he already is.'
'How can Solomon exalt himself by saying he will be king?' Bathsheba argues. 'Isn't Adonijah the older?'
'You see?' I answer on a soft note of triumph. 'Primogeniture does make a difference, doesn't it? Let Solomon try something else, if you're so determined. Why doesn't he start a rebellion? Solomon's so stingy he's probably got enough saved up by now to finance a popular rebellion.'
Bathsheba hangs her head moodily. 'Solomon isn't popular.'
'So there you are.'
'And he loves you too much,' she says with a sudden flash of invention, 'ever to oppose you in anything.'
'Was I born yesterday?'
'It's true. Solomon lives only to find out what you wish and make sure it's done.'
'In that case, he would never let me set eyes on him again.'
'Have dinner with him tonight, my dearest David. Hear it from his own lips.'
'Not,' I reply genially with a redundancy more in Nathan's character than mine, 'for all the tea in China, the perfumes in Arabia, the camphire in Engedi, and the coffee in Brazil. I never want to eat with that penny-pinching imbecile again.'
'He'll pay for the food.'
'That will be the day.'
'I'll make him promise. Solomon does whatever his mother tells him to.'
'I can't stand him.'
'He's our flesh and blood.'
'Don't rub it in.'
Solomon keeps records scrupulously. He rarely smiles and never laughs. He has the pinched, drab soul of a landlord with diversified stingy investments who interprets every piddling reverse as a catastrophe uniquely his own. 'A pill,' was the way my dashing Absalom described him. 'The pits. He never laughs. He curses deaf people and places obstacles in the path of the blind. Even then he doesn't laugh. He just looks on. Whatever he gives, he always takes back. Yesterday, I stopped him in the street and asked him to share some raisins with me. By the time I arrived home, he was already waiting at my door with a cup to borrow some lentils.' If we had a word for prick then, we would have called him one.
'Solomon,' I used to counsel him when I still assumed--preposterously, as it turned out--that every living being has some potential for salutary intellectual change, 'there is really no better thing a man hath to do under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry, for who can tell when the silver cord shall be loosed and the golden bowl be broken and our dust be returned to the earth as it was?'
The prick wrote it down studiously, pausing with the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth before requesting me to please repeat the one about the silver cord. And soon he was noising these words of mine about the city as his own. Solomon writes down on his clay ledger everything I say, as though the ramifications of knowledge were coins to be gained and husbanded avariciously, instead of liberating influences to expand and gladden the psyche.
'Shlomo,' I address him familiarly, in a heavyhearted attempt to feed him something that will sink in. 'Life is short. The sooner man begins to spend his wealth, the better he uses it. You should learn to spend.'
There followed one of the few times in both our lives that I was privileged to see his face brighten. 'Last week, my lord, just last week I spent a good deal to buy silver amulets and marble idols from Moab that are already worth more than three times what I paid for them.'
'That was saving, Shlomo,' I explain, as though talking to a child with a learning disability. 'You don't seem able to enjoy the difference between spending and saving.'
'I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it a lot,' says Solomon soberly. 'I Jewed them down.'
'You did what?'
'I Jewed them down.'
'Solomon.' I am forced to break off for a second. 'Shlomo, your mother tells me you are very wise. Do you believe that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree?'
'I don't know what that means.'
'Write it down anyway, just keep writing everything down. Put it in your book of proverbs. Every wise man should have a book of proverbs.'
The prick keeps writing.
Just about all he does know is how little I think of him. He is abashed in the royal presence; but he perseveres in seeking it. He will tense and hang back for safety as though there were a viper at his feet each time he witnesses some glitter of private merriment illuminating my countenance. Sometimes, maliciously, I may smile to myself even when I have nothing more to smile about than the predictable delight of watching his face blanch. He inevitably fears the worst, guessing with good reason that I deplore him for his wooden dullness and uncharitable stupidity. He is one of these dry-natured Jewish men who never want to go out with Jewish girls, or with short ones. He is somewhat notorious already for his predilection for the strange women of Gilead, Ammon, Moab, and Edom, an attraction which in itself would not be so exceptional. It is said, however, that he is equally drawn to their strange gods. I know that not even he can be that stupid, but there are whispers of altars to Ashtoreth and Milcom built by him while he was away on his secretive debauches, and he invariably returns from these desert sprees with more amulets, idols, and models of occult towers to augment his treasured collection. He has told us he would like many wives. He has a bent for accumulation. How many? He isn't sure. Maybe a thousand, he says, without cracking a smile.
'A thousand?' I ask with surprise. He nods. 'Why so many?
'He doesn't know, but he really means it. Not in my day has Solomon been noted for intelligence, humor, or good fellowship.
Adonijah, his older half brother, is a vain and convivial popinjay with the complacency of a man who feels he has already come into his estate, and he must surely believe I am brimming inside with uncritical approval every time he observes some pleased expression light briefly on my features. Let him recall, for contrast, the doting love with which I used to gaze on Absalom for a timeless example of undying fatherly devotion. My time of attachment to my children is past; it terminated, I believe, with the death of Absalom in the wood of Ephraim and the arrival of the two runners with reports of the battle. The first to reach me brought tidings of victory. The next brought news of inconsolable loss. I went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. As with the death of my baby, I felt in my heart that my punishment was greater than I could bear.
Since, then I've not felt much for anyone but myself, not until Abishag the Shunammite was ushered into my rooms and began endearing herself to me, and not until Bathsheba began com
ing to my quarters each day to wheedle in her devious ways, and by doing so reawaken my distant memories of the exquisite lust and lewdness we once shared. I want her ass in my hands again. I swear by everything important left to me--which isn't much, I know--that I could swive her mightily at least one more time, from stem to stern and keel to topmast, if she'd just lie down beside me and extend the physical cooperation I'd need. She might have to help me a lot.
She does not mean less to me now because she is heavier. She has a weakness for honeyed grains and dried fish. She does not know how the sight of her flesh now inflames me with a wistful desire to lay myself upon her again. She has stopped wearing bloomers every day, now that she no longer cares to be seductive, and there is more of her bare body to see in the folds and slits of her smocks and negligees. I stare shamelessly, up her carelessly parted thighs and down her unbound bosom, at the clear blue veins beneath the milky, translucent skin of the front of her hips to the livid little venous knots in her calves and ankles. I love those extra sags of age-ripened flesh, I respond to those purple varicose defects, to the chronic edemas I identify in her feet. She has always been human, animal, and real. What I have always relished most about her, I believe, were her blatant and spontaneous indelicacies. She never claimed refinement. All these signs of degenerating, natural, wholesome, breathing life are startlingly appropriate, reminding me bluntly of impermanence; they draw me to my beloved with the old and nearly overwhelming hunger to fling and force my disheveled masculine body atop her disheveled female one as I used to do, and say to her yet again, 'I want you, my darling. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.'
I am injured when she murmurs mechanically in reply that she is sick of love. I am so incensed I could roar, so humbled I could cry.
It was Bathsheba who exemplified to me for all time the vast and telling difference between spilling seed and good fucking. It was she who put that into words for me in a jesting retort to my playful baiting. It was Bathsheba also who told me I have--or had--a big cock. Of course, only Bathsheba among all my women had exposed herself to an adequate sample for valid comparisons.