On the other hand, it was I, without the knowledge that I was doing so, who illuminated for her the inexpressible difference between good fucking and making love. Bathsheba gave me credit for that in words I never wish to forget.
This isn't fucking' was the way she propounded her philosophical article of faith, in a hushed and startled exclamation, as her rattled pale blue eyes rolled steadily back into focus. Her damp, reddened face stared up at me adoringly. 'This is making love. '
Ever the innocent in such matters esoteric, I inquired; 'What's the difference? How can you tell?'
She nodded wisely. 'That knowledge,' she informed me, tapping the bone between her breasts and regarding me still with that same slaked expression of over-indulgence, 'comes from the source.' The differing pallors of her milky skin undulated and dissolved in the flickering lamplight from my cedar walls. 'It comes right from the heart.'
I was all at once filled with an uncontainable joy more gratifying than any I had experienced in my whole life. My hair was drenched with perspiration. I lay my tousled head upon her chest and I thrust my mouth against her breastbone as though to caress with my tongue and lips that same precious heart whose sturdy beat I could feel and hear only an inch beneath, like a sanctified and reassuring roar.
But that was after, so long after, the day of my killing of Goliath. My ordeals with Saul were over and nothing presaged the misfortunes in store. There was no Absalom driving me from the city. Who would have thought such a thing could happen? That a son would rebel against a father with weapons and troops? That the people would flock to him in such large numbers and race toward my city as though borne on the wings of the wind? Someone must have been telling lies about me. Forced labor and high taxation might have had something to do with it. And if that were not heartbreaking enough, then came that ugly Shimei to harangue me obscenely as I fled--Shimei, that repulsive gnome with bent legs and arms and toothless raw-red gums. Vile distant kinsman in the house of Saul, he came bounding out of his hut in Bahurim with sadistic glee as we trudged past in retreat from Jerusalem, to defame me with his gloating taunts and malignant insults.
'Thou bloody man, come out, come out, ' he howled.
Oh, the impious things that cackling animal said to me. He drew near enough to fling stones at me, even dust. On me, David, our first great king--was there ever a second? At one point, my nephew, faithful Abishai, gripped his sword and asked permission to step off the road to decapitate him. I would not allow that. I had enemies enough. I wanted no more gratuitous acts of violence to enlarge the numbers already convinced I had been treacherous to Saul or wishing me deposed for other reasons. It's a very tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
I spared Shimei that day as I proceeded miserably with my entourage of refugees downward in defeat toward the plain of the wilderness that lies between the mountainous terrain of Jerusalem and the skimpy river Jordan. When I was safely across the river with all of the loyal troops accompanying me, I knew that the outcome of the whole turbulent business was going to be ours. And as soon as that certainty settled within me, I began to sorrow over the ruin in store for my poor son Absalom. His goose was cooked. Poor boy, I mourned. Poor, poor impetuous boy.
My heart sank further when later I found myself brooding on both the stark temerity of Shimei's attack and the substance of his barbarous vilifications. A bloody man, he'd called me. Me? The poet who had lauded Saul so generously in my famous elegy? And mentioned none of his faults? Against Saul and his three legitimate sons I had never raised a weapon. Is it my fault they were all killed at Gilboa and there was no one eligible left alive with a bona fide relationship to the royal family but me, the son-in-law? Who told him to fight when he had no chance of winning?
I was in Ziklag when that happened, serving Achish of Gath in his southern territory with the small private army with which I had fled from Saul to the protection of the Philistines. I sent booty to Achish regularly and spoke of raids upon Hebrews. With commendably sagacious foresight, I sneaked spoils as well to the elders of key Judean cities whose good will I was cultivating for the future--and told them of bountiful forays against Bedouin tribes and desert caravans of wealth. Where did it all really come from? Who remembers! But even while outlawed in the barren sands of Philistia, I made sure that no grass grew under my feet.
And when Saul died, I was ready.
5 Arms and the Man
Everybody's death, I have written, simplifies life for someone, and I will not pretend that the death of Saul and his three legitimate sons did not simplify mine. But don't get the idea I was glad. Of course I grieved. And then I wrote my famous elegy.
Now, frankly, we artists do not normally write well when we are distraught, if we can bestir ourselves to write at all. But my famous elegy is a glorious exception. Though composed rapidly, it's a better elegy than Milton's to Edward King or Shelley's on the death of John Keats, which is pure dreck--revolting, sentimental dreck. 'Oh, weep for Adonais, he is dead.' What kind of shit is that? Adonais instead of Adonis? Shelley needed that extra syllable? I worked with simple English names like Saul and Jonathan and never had any trouble. And everyone in the world knows the words to mine. But do me a favor and don't take them all as gospel. Forget the ones about Jonathan that gave rise to all those denigrating insinuations about homosexuality that plague me even into the present and will probably dog me to my grave. I wish I could forget them. It is unjust and outrageous that impressionable young people like Abishag the Shunammite might be led to believe I really was gay. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of my private life would know that Jonathan's 'love' definitely was not more wonderful to me than the love of women! Count my wives. Consider my carnal involvement with Bathsheba. I loved Jonathan as a brother, that's all I meant. But no, people would rather snicker and wallow in smut at someone else's expense, wouldn't they? And how come, if there's even one iota of truth underlying those base rumors, you find me mixed up only with women for the rest of my life and never again linked in that disgusting fashion with any other fellow?
Let me tell you something straight from the shoulder: good name in man or woman is the immediate jewel of their soul. A good name is better than precious ointment. Who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed, and I wish I could set the record straight on this matter of Jonathan and me once and for all. Certainly we were close--do I deny that?--and sure I was flattered when he embraced me so warmly with his avowals of undying friendship right after I killed Goliath and settled in Gibeah. Who wouldn't be? Jonathan was older, legendary, cosmopolitan, and not bad-looking. He was a popular man-about-town in Gibeah. He was the hero of the battle of Michmash, for which he was looked up to by everyone but Saul, who was to remain, until the day they both died, uncontrollably jealous of the initiative shown by his son there. Jonathan told me the story. With me Jonathan held nothing back. He did tend to be effusive on occasion and often expressed himself in a florid way I found disconcerting and even incomprehensible--frankly, I hadn't the slightest idea what he meant when he told me that his soul was knit with my soul, and I still don't. But I can tell you this: we were never fags. Not even once. You want to know who was a fag? King James the First of England was a fag, that's who was a fag. His court was full of fags. And that's why his scholars relied more on Greek sources than Hebrew for their Authorized Version of the Bible. What would you expect them to come up with? They weren't much good with Hebrew, and they weren't much better with English, either. Go figure out what they're saying half the time. I'll tell you honestly that I did not know what was in Jonathan's mind when he told me he loved me as his own soul and then stripped off the robe that was on him and other garments and gave them to me, along with his sword and his bow and his girdle. But I do know what was in mine. I was glad to get them.
Sure, we may have hugged and kissed a little once or twice, and we did cry together; but that was mainly when I was in
trouble and we were parting, as friends --just friends--for what we believed would be forever. He had sounded out Saul for me and brought back word that his father was resolved to kill me, had fiercely berated him for stupidity in failing to recognize that he could never establish his own kingdom as long as the son of Jesse, meaning me, lived. And then Saul had hurled a javelin at him!
What is it with these fathers who want to destroy their children? Whence comes this royal and noble willingness to spill the blood of their own offspring? Saul and Jonathan. Saturn and Chronus, then Chronus and Zeus. Abraham and Isaac, Laius and Oedipus, Agamemnon and Iphigenia, Jephthah and his daughter --the list is long. I never hated Absalom. I know if I were God and possessed His powers, I would sooner obliterate the world I had created than allow any child of mine to be killed in it, for any reason whatsoever. I would have given my own life to save my baby's, and even to spare Absalom's. But that may be because I am Jewish, and God is not.
Jonathan alerted me to my peril when we met secretly in a field outside the city the next morning. My return to Gibeah had been in vain. Crazy Saul. He was mad as a hatter but close to the truth in his irrational belief that I was fated to succeed him and that two of his children were closer to me than they were to him. I saw Jonathan but one more time after I fled for good, when he sought me out in the wilderness of Ziph to cede to me his hereditary right to be king. Crazy Saul guessed right on that one too: Jonathan was not going to establish his kingdom as long as I, the son of Jesse, lived.
It was beginning to look as though more and more people were discovering that Said had feet of clay. He was as unstable as water, and when Samuel departed and took God with him, he left Israel's first king with no high source of guidance, without traditions for governing or even much of a religion. The truth is that we Jews did not have much of a religion at that time, and we don't have one now. We've got altars and forbidden idols, and we sacrifice lambs, and that's just about it. In that kind of moral void, Saul, selected more for his height than his intelligence, was alone and despairing and had no vision of discerning what was right, or even what was good. He talked to God. He got no answer. Now there's a hollow state to be in, isn't it--to believe in God and get no sign that He's there. No wonder he went crazy.
How revealing the difference between Saul's feelings toward his children and my feelings toward mine, even toward Absalom when I was dragging myself away from Jerusalem with my vanished pomp and aching heart. Panting messengers arriving from the city brought compelling exhortations that I lodge not the night in the plains of the wilderness but speedily pass over the waters of Jordan, lest I and all the people with me be overtaken and swallowed up. We plodded onward until we reached the bank of the narrow river and there was not a one of us that was not gone over Jordan. We arose the next morning with the voice of the first bird. And only then was the ghastly truth at the core of my plight driven home to me: Absalom meant to kill me.
How ironic the difference between me and my beloved son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means for overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. 'Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom,' were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. 'Beware that none touch the young man Absalom,' I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me.
If only the young man Absalom had waited. What was his hurry, except a volcanic desire to depose me that overmastered his wish to inherit and govern? How proud of him I would be now, how gratified by reports that it was he, not that vain and simpleminded fop Adonijah, who was riding about the city grandly in his chariot with fifty runners going before him. Or it was he who was bruiting it about, with his princely dark head thrown back in impudent laughter, that he was going to be king. If Absalom were alive, I would not be saddled now with this petty choice I must make between vacuous Adonijah, who puts too much faith in his affable nature and his many friends, and industrious, saturnine Solomon, who glumly detects that he has not too much of either.
With less and less discretion, Adonijah blithely gads about exalting himself, and assumes, because I have not spoken to curb him, that he is not displeasing me. He has taken of late to ogling my precious servant girl Abishag with the rude and self-esteeming eye of one of those despicable roues whom no person of any discrimination can stand. He is an even bigger dolt than I rate him if he supposes I will permit that, or that his stepmother Bathsheba will allow me to.
Much of the derogatory information I receive about him is given me by Bathsheba. I confess to a weakness: I am invariably pleased by her distress, just as I invariably used to be sexually stimulated by our quarrels. I relish the sight of her tiny bright eyes flashing angrily and her blood rising with emotion to color her cheeks with splashes of carmine.
'Adonijah,' she complains with agitated movements, 'is still going about saying that he will be king. He is also saying that he plans to make important announcements from you at that big outdoor luncheon feast of his. Solomon would never be so tactless, never so heartless, not my Solomon. Hasn't anyone else told you what I'm saying? It's lucky you have someone like me to look out for your own good.'
She takes long steps rapidly, first in one direction and then in the opposite, passing very close to my bed. If I possessed but a fraction of the dexterity and strength of former days, I could seize her suddenly by the crotch and hold her firmly enough to draw her to me. God knows I want to. Today she is clad in a loose pearly robe with a very low neck and a flaring long slit up one side past the plump contour of her hip almost into her narrowing waist. When she halts and whirls in her violent hurry or flings herself into her chair and draws her legs in to start up again, I get frequent, head-on views of her ash-blonde snatch and much of the curving flesh of the exposed half of her backside. The hair of my tall blonde wife is a luminescent yellow today, and her toes are clean. She is wearing a sweet pomade that exudes an essence of lavender fixed in a vaguely acrid underbase.
'You don't seem to be wearing your underwear anymore,' I notice.
'Now that I'm sick of love,' she mutters abstractedly, 'I don't always have to look sexy.' We all know underwear never caught on. And Bathsheba had tasted once again the disappointment of creative failure. 'You promised,' she says, scolding me sharply, 'that you were going to stop him.'
'You said I was going to stop him,' I correct her with good humor, making no effort to conceal my mirth when our gazes for a moment lock.
'Why should he be making proclamations that he will be king?'
'Proclamations?' I question her closely.
She gives ground a little. 'Well, they're almost proclamations, the way he goes riding around his chariot telling everyone he will be king.'
'Adonijah probably will be king. Why shouldn't he make proclamations?'
'You want him to make proclamations?'
'He shouldn't be making proclamations?'
'That he's going to be king?'
'When I die, he will be.'
'Do you want him to be king now? And why does it have to be him?'
'He's the oldest, that's why.'
'Again the oldest?' Bathsheba stares at me with disgust. 'Show me where it's written. We're Jews, not Mesopotamians. Wasn't Reuben Jacob's oldest son? Look how he was dumped.'
'You've been meeting with Nathan again, haven't you?' I charge. 'Reuben was as unstable as water.'
'By you,' Bathsheba scoffs, 'everybody is as unstable as water. Adonijah is stable? Wasn't Reuben passed over because he slept with one of his father's women? Haven't you noticed the way Adonijah has been staring at Abishag? And winking? Believe me, he doesn't want to wait until you die before he goes in unto her. She kn
ows what I'm talking about.' Bathsheba looks toward the modest servant girl, who is seated with her cosmetic pots before a mirror of polished metal, creaming the surfaces of bone circling her eyes and applying a violet dye to her upper lids. 'Don't you, child?' Abishag nods with a smile, blushing slightly. 'What has he done to you, what has he said?'
'He looks at me straight and giggles a lot,' says Abishag. 'He winks his eye.'
'Has he told you he will be king?'
'He tells me he will be king,' answers Abishag, 'and asks me to be nice to him now. Will Adonijah be king, my lord?'
'You see?' cries Bathsheba. 'Would my Solomon do something like that?'
'Send in Solomon,' I decide.
Bathsheba heaves a sigh. 'You'll never regret a minute you spend with my Solomon,' she exclaims. 'He's such a joy, my Solomon. A jewel. He'll make you proud.'
'Solomon,' I begin very tolerantly with the best intentions, endeavoring one more time to plumb the depths of this our son if ever I should be so blessed as to find any. After all, is Adonijah such an Einstein? 'You know--even you know--' I falter and have to break off, wincing beneath the discomforting weight of his transfixed attention. As usual, he sits listening stolidly to me, his stylus and clay tablet at the ready, his somber head inclined toward me with a deference that is almost offensive, as though all my words ought immediately to be recorded on stone. 'Solomon,' I resume even more patiently in a softer tone, after wetting my tongue with some water from a cruse, 'even you know about Shimei the son of Gera--remember?--who cursed me grievously that day as I fled from Jerusalem to Mahanaim. But he came down to meet me in penitence when I returned to Jordan. And I swore to him by the Lord that I would not put him to death with the sword. Now ,mark me well.' Solomon nods once gravely to show he is marking me well and bends still closer with his rigid expression. I wish it were possible for me to recoil from him farther. His breath is repulsive, much too sweet, and I judge he is using some kind of obnoxious male cologne on his face and beneath his arms. But I did not swear that you wouldn't put him to death, did I?' I conclude with sly emphasis, smacking my tongue, and I cannot restrain myself from chortling at130 own cleverness. 'You get my meaning, don't you?'