God Knows

  'Will it be all right? Am I allowed?'

  'Of course you're allowed. Ain't you the king?'

  'Doesn't the law say no?'

  'If the law says no to that, the law is an ass. Male and female He created you, didn't He?'

  'What should I do?'

  'What you want. Go ahead. Get her. Shove it in. Stick it in her ear.'

  Who was I to argue?

  Who could resist such subtle persuasions?

  So I sent messengers and they took her into a room in my palace through a side door; in compliance with their directives, she wore a veil and a mantle. And I lay with her that same day, for she was purified from her uncleanliness, and when I returned her unto her house I missed her, so I lay with her again the next day, and the next day, and the next, because each time she went away I missed her more strongly and wanted her back. We simply took it for granted each time she came to me that she was purified from her uncleanliness. Or else we didn't care. Clean, unclean, what did it matter? We were doing such things anyway. For seven days I lay with her, and then I lay with her for seven more. The fact is, I could not stop thinking about her or wanting to be with her, and wanting even to listen to her. I could not stop craving her. I could not get her out of my mind. At all hours, during all kinds of other activities, she was spinning and glittering in my brain. I could concentrate on nothing else for long.

  'I have never felt this way before,' I was candid enough to admit with a sigh of surrender.

  So I had her brought to me each morning and again in the afternoon, for I found I wanted always to have her in my hands, and have her wet lips on my mouth, and her warm breath on my neck, and in almost no time at all, as it happened, she was asking for myriads of things no woman had ever requested from me before.

  'Now, David,' she was addressing me strictly by the end of the first week, 'what are we going to do? You have to decide.'

  'About what?' We were standing face to face, and I hadn't the dimmest idea what she meant.

  'About us. You're not going to want to do without me, you know. No man ever has.'

  Until Uriah, as it turned out to my extreme chagrin.

  'I'll make you a concubine.'

  'I won't be a concubine. You're forgetting I'm married. What will you do when Uriah is back?'

  'I'll make him a captain of a million and send him away again.'

  'And another thing I don't like is the way you try to pretend we're strangers whenever they bring me here. You never touch me or kiss me when anyone else is around. You never say you love me except when we're alone.'

  'Are you crazy?' I exclaimed, virtually unable to believe my ears. 'I'm a married man! I don't want Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maccah, Haggith, Abital, or Eglah to find out about us.'

  'What difference would it make?' she argued crossly. 'Don't you think all the rest of your people know why you bring me here?'

  'You could be stoned, for adultery.'

  'So could you.'

  'I'm a man. And I'm also the king. And I don't want a word of scandal about this.'

  'Then give me my own place and you come there. You'll be surprised how often you'll want to be with me.'

  I wanted to be with her more often than either of us could have imagined. Occasionally, she chided me for barging in without notice and interfering with her work. I think it's true--I liked my women very much more than they liked me, and I enjoyed lying with them more than they enjoyed having me with them, until Bathsheba. She was a hot one. She wanted it at least as much as I did, and I soon discovered something else eccentric about her: if I didn't come as swiftly as I hoped I would, she herself would eventually go off like a string of firecrackers hung from the tail of a vixen, exploding in a climax of her own with those marvelous and shocking tumults that are incomparably titillating and began causing talk through the whole neighborhood. Who'd ever heard of a thing like that? She called it her orgasm. She awarded me points for giving her multiples.

  'I make such noises when I'm with you,' she'd frequently observe in a kind of puzzled and contented exhaustion, her fair and tawny face flushed pink still. 'Whew!'

  She had the knack of making me feel good. This is a priceless quality in a woman and added another extra dimension to our heady sexual commerce, as did her precious accolade that I was built like an Egyptian with a member as large as that of an ass and had an issue like the issue of horses. It isn't every day a man is treated to an exaggeration like that.

  'I first saw it,' she confessed, to my considerable surprise, 'the day you played before the Lord and were dancing with all your might at the head of that parade and showing yourself to the whole world. I took a good look. I had to believe that your wife was a lucky woman. I envied her. I couldn't get over how well hung you were. It was then that I made up my mind to meet you. A king and all that too--who could resist? So I began bathing on my roof every evening to attract you.' Hers was undoubtedly the best rinsed body in Israel by the time I laid eyes on her.

  We broke so many laws in those first happy days of sinful, thrusting frenzy. So many hours so often we drenched ourselves to the waist in perspiration. Our hair was lank and tangled and thickly matted with oil, sweat, and perfume. Her belly was as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires, her cheeks like a bed of spices, as sweet flowers, her lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh. This was my beloved, who introduced me to so much and filled my soul with such ineffable sweetness--she taught me to say T love you' and mean it, and to put my hand upon her delicately, though others were looking on. I was insatiable. When it was almost time for us to be with one another again, I would go into a.frenetic state of anticipation and could not wait to come into her garden once more and eat her pleasant fruits, to gorge myself and never surfeit. She, more than I, was astounded to discover that she soon became the person more likely to ask, 'When will I see you again? Will it be soon?'

  It was mainly always soon in the beginning. I enjoyed her more than any other woman I had ever known. She clearly thought she was in love with me then, and does not deny that even now. And I was in love with her. And I felt so splendidly good about myself for knowing that I was. Her skin alone, that porous, luminous membrane delineating her unique identity for me, was for me the most beautiful of miracles. Here and there was a mark--a mole, a scratch, a pimple--unlike my perfect Abishag, who is utterly without spot. That did not matter. I idolized the fact of her. I cherished touching her. I gazed and gazed; and she in turn gazed back, drank me in with her eyes. Even the bones of her knees were thrilling, as was the curvature of her shins and her large feet, as though she alone on earth possessed such ungainly queer-shaped features. I liked to stare at her naked. I loved to study her engrossed in embroidery in her nightgown or bloomers, with her spectacles on and the hoop of wool steady in her fingers. Most of all, I loved to peer into her small face, into her mischievous, plotting blue eyes, to lose myself in the decoding of the shimmering nuances of calculation in her unconscious half smile. I treasured that weight and arousing rotundity of her ass. I could not believe or get used to the tenderness of the emotions I experienced for her. I was suffused with reveries of her. My first desire upon awaking each dawn was to telephone my adored one and leave messages of worship and lewd endearment on her answering machine, but, of course, we had no telephones back then, nor had we recording machines. For hours and hours at a stretch, I embraced her and just took it for granted that I would lie with her at will every day of my life that I chose, until that fateful day broke when the sickness of women was already upon her and I began to apostrophize aloud to the fates in despair at the necessity to abstain. She was mildly surprised at first by the attitude of aversion to her condition that I unconsciously evinced; then she treated me, as she heard me go on, to that look of humoring derision one normally reserves for an oafish prig.

  'Whatever you want,' she said.

  So lofty was her depreciatory manner that I felt myself gauche and was put on the defensive. 'You'll be unwell,' I protested lamely.

>   'So what?' she said.

  'We're really allowed?'

  'Who's to stop us?'

  'We'd be cut off from the people if anyone found out. For seven days.'

  'Who would find out? And we'd have more time together if anyone did.'

  'It's really possible?' I asked naively. 'During your period?'

  'Would there be a law against it if it weren't?'

  'It isn't gross?'

  'It isn't gross.'

  'You've done it before?'

  'Is everyone squeamish?'

  'Suppose your flowers be upon me?'

  'You'll wash.'

  'I'd be unclean for seven days.'

  'Don't noise it around.'

  'And all of the bed on which I lay would be unclean.'

  'Don't noise that around either.'

  'I'm not sure I want to.'

  'Have it your way.' She turned from me torpidly and left me feeling foolish.

  This time I had it her way, in the missionary position again, of course, and exulted so greatly in the mere knowledge of what I was doing--mirabile dictu, I was not struck dead, nor was I cut off from the people-- that I could not wait for her menstrual cycle to come around the next time so I could do it her way again. Alas, it was not to be, for the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a-gley. Passover came and went without observance, believe it or not, and then, instead of her period appearing on schedule, there arrived from her instead those four little words that rarely fail to incite a melodramatic reaction in even the blandest of extramarital affairs. Bathsheba sent to me and said:

  'I am with child.'

  'Holy shit!' was the fashion in which I gave screaming utterance to mine.

  There I was with a pregnant girlfriend on my hands. Well, abortion was illegal then, of course, and Bathsheba was not the self-sacrificing kind to put her safety at risk for mine. She had not lain with her husband for nearly three months. This could prove a bigger embarrassment for me than the killing of Abner. What was I to do?

  'This time,' I warned her, 'they may really stone you. You committed adultery.'

  'They'll stone you too,' she answered. 'You committed adultery also, and you even coveted your neighbor's wife.'

  'I'm a man. They don't stone men for that.'

  'You think that will help? It's written that a man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely both be put to death. That means you.'

  'How come you know so much about it?'

  'Don't you think I looked it up? I like to know my rights. You're in just as much trouble as I am. If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they shall both of them die. You'll find that written too. You'd better think of something fast.'

  'Well, I'm also the king, and I decide who's stoned and who isn't.'

  'You think you'll survive?'

  'You wouldn't name me.'

  'Don't bet on it!'

  'Get me Uriah!' I have to admit I believe it was I who let out that shout.

  And thereby ensued that grisly contretemps of a Restoration farce that deteriorated inexorably into pathos, and then into a tragedy in which I was stricken with unbearable grief and made prostrate with that most awful knowledge that my newborn baby was sick and doomed to early death because of me. So said Nathan. The poor little thing was burning with fever and perishing of thirst and starvation. He was drying up and withering away and I could not watch, just as Hagar a millennium earlier could not watch, and set the boy Ishmael beneath one of the shrubs and sat herself down a good bowshot away, because she could not look on and see him die. And Ishmael was already past thirteen, old enough to scorn and endanger Isaac. My baby boy was just tiny and red. His unopened eyes were like useless gills. A thousand times in seven days there echoed in my head those ancient, touching words of that Egyptian servant girl Hagar, expelled with her young son out of Abraham's bosom into the wilderness of Beersheba with just some bread and a bottle of water that soon was spent.

  'Let me not see the death of the child.'

  But God answered Hagar with the gift of survival.

  'Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand,' He called to Hagar out of heaven. 'For I will make him a great nation.'

  A great nation, God promised, whose hand would always be against every man.

  To me He would not give the time of day. He made my baby die. He was working again in one of His mysterious ways. How could I ever forget? Nathan told me He would. I still have not forgiven Him for that, although I feel I need my God now more than ever before, and miss Him more than I would care to let Him know. And I do not believe that He has forgotten me.

  It was not with harmful intentions that I sent to Joab to return Uriah the Hittite from the battlefields of Ammon on the pretext of filling me in on what was going on. All I wanted Uriah to do was sleep with Bathsheba. If I could do it, why couldn't he? My plan was to award him a hero's welcome, fire him up with a little wine, and turn him loose atop his wife, my exciting mistress. What could be more benign than that? In this way did I plot to conceal our embarrassing indiscretions from anyone left in the city who was still not cognizant of the true state of our affair. It was a peach of an idea--for someone other than Uriah. The fallacy in my inspiration was the self-deceptive notion, not uncommon among men newly in love, that every other breathing male was as sex-starved as I was for the object of my passion. Uriah was not. Go figure.

  It was hard to look him straight in the eye when he was brought before me. 'Come in, my friend, come in, my boy,' I hailed him with an effusive cordiality with which I wanted to put him entirely at ease. 'Come in, my good Uriah, and wash thy feet. I could not tell you how pleased I am to have you here.' That much was true. 'Tell me all, tell me what is happening at Rabbah in Ammon. Am I needed?' I could not have cared less about what I requested he relate, and barely listened as he zealously told me how well my people did and how our fortunes, though slowly, were prospering. Couriers with news ran back and forth several times a day, even on the Sabbath. 'Good, good, good,' I urged him on to finish more rapidly, as eager to cast him into bed with Bathsheba as I so often was to be with her myself. 'Have some wine now. You have brought me the reports I wanted to hear and have made me happy. Now rest, take a load off thy feet. Soak them some more?'

  'I think they're clean enough.'

  'So do I. Go down to thy house now and rest. Have some fun. I'm sending a mess of meat from my kitchen for you and your wife to feast on.'

  'Not me,' said Uriah emphatically, giving me quite a fright.

  'Why not?' I cried.

  'No while I'm on duty in your service.'

  'Consider yourself relieved for this night of duty in my service,' I said, with an uneasy laugh. 'You like the wine? Drink more. Take the whole flask. I'll send more bottles when I send the meat. Go home now, Uriah. They tell me you have a lovely wife. Go down to thy house now and shtupp her. Give her a good boff or two. You've earned the right. Leave me now and go home to your wife.'

  You think he leaped at the chance? Out of my presence he finally plodded after drinking some more, tilting heavily to leeward as though drunk and footsore. I heaved a sigh when he was gone and took a good belt of wine from a flask myself. But instead of quitting the palace as I expected, the contrary son of a bitch settled himself for the night on the floor near one of the portals with the rest of my soldiers on station there. I sped right to him when I found that out, no longer congratulating myself so extravagantly.

  'Uriah, get up, go home.' I began to harangue him, in a magisterial tone of command that degenerated wholly on the second or third word into a pathetic shambles of abject pleading. 'Why be uncomfortable here?'

  He was reeking of wine and puffed out his chest when he answered. 'Not while my comrades from Israel and Judah abide in tents,' he declared, to my amazement.

  'What good does it do them for you to abide here?' I reasoned with him. 'Go to your home, to a good soft bed. To a plump, warm wife. I've alread
y sent victuals and bottles of strong wine. Why be a schmuck?'

  'Not,' Uriah declared blearily, 'while my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open fields. Shall I then go into mine house--'

  'Yes, go into thy house,' I answered.

  '--to eat and drink, and to lie with my wife? As thou livest,' he vowed, 'and as thy soul livest, I will not do this thing.'

  'Do this thing, please do this thing,' I begged, withholding myself only with a gigantic effort of selfdiscipline from grabbing him by the throat and shaking him to death, or taking my own thick hair in my hands and pulling it all out in a seizure of helpless frustration. 'Uriah, please go home,' I whimpered. 'Your comrades-in-arms would want you to have a good time. For there is no better thing a man can do with himself than to eat and to drink and be merry. Don't you know that? Have more wine,' I threw in at the end when he did not move to comply.

  Getting him drunk proved a huge mistake. I should have remembered that in matters of sex, liquor quickens desire but weakens performance. My mind went reeling as he took a herculean draught and smacked his lips noisily. After a second big swig, he let out a jolly cheer, and propelled himself into a lurching sailor's hornpipe, emitting hilarious cries as he danced, until he tripped himself up and almost toppled over on his noodle. I was going mad. He took another huge drink, and then I beheld the sodden blockhead lose touch with everything concerning me. With sinking heart, I could only stand by as he lowered himself exhaustedly to the floor midway through a ribald ballad he was rendering off key about a girl somewhere who once had let him play with her ring-dang-doo.

  'A ring-dang-doo? Pray what is that?'

  But he'd already passed out, leaving me not a whit the wiser.

  Bathsheba was put in very bad humor by this reversal in our fortunes. How else should a flamboyant sexpot feel when faced with the fact of a husband who did not want to lie with her after a deprivation of some three months?

  'Shicka is a goy,' was the tight-lipped snub of vindication she proposed, while I looked her over circumspectly for any flaws in her person that could have eluded my attention, and of which Uriah the Hittite, through longer familiarity with her body, was aware. 'Do you think he could have another woman with him out there in Ammon? I'll bet he does.'