Only Joshua and Caleb of the twenty-four taking part in that first exploration had confidence enough in the destiny proclaimed by the Deity to wish to move forward. The people balked at the black picture painted by the others.
'Push on, push on,' the Lord sought to rouse them when He found them mired in consternation. 'I will send hornets before thee. I promise. The dukes of Edom will be amazed, the mighty men of Moab will tremble, the inhabitants of Canaan will melt away. Fear and dread shall fall upon them and they'll all be still as stone. You'll drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites and Jebusites too. They'll turn their backs and run. Nothing can stop you. I give you My word.
'Nobody budged. The Lord resolved to strike them dead on the spot. He was livid. He was wroth.
'I'll kill them all!' He roared to Moses. 'You think I'm joking? How much more do you think I'm going to be provoked by these people and do nothing? How many more signs do I have to show them before they begin to believe? I did it before, once with a flood, once with fire and brimstone. Stand back, Moses.'
'Can't we reason together?' Moses began trying earnestly to deter Him, emphasizing that God would become a laughingstock to the Egyptians for destroying His chosen people after taking them so far and promising them so much. 'And they will tell the people of other lands, who will laugh at You also and no longer fear You. They will say we were killed because You were57 unable to lead us in, not because we were unable to follow. They will believe you failed, not us.'
'All right,' relented God, who did not wish to become a laughingstock in Egypt. But He aimed his thumb over His shoulder in a jerking motion and commanded, 'Start walking. Hit the road.'
And back into the wilderness of Paran near Kadeshbarnea they went for another thirty-eight years, until all who had murmured against God then had given up the ghost and one generation had passed away and another generation had come. If God is ever remembered, it certainly won't be for His patience and human kindness, will it? Of all who had traveled from Egypt, Joshua and Caleb were the only ones allowed to enter the Promised Land. When the Lord said, 'Hear, O Israel, thou art to pass over Jordan this day,' Joshua and Caleb led their forces across the Jordan to Jericho and embarked upon the conquest of Palestine that nobody till me was able to complete. The land of Palestine is still a vigorous place of diverse and mutually enriching cultures. The difference now is that all of it is mine.
But don't ever get the idea He made things easy for me. Life as one of God's chosen has never been a bed of roses. Ask Adam, ask Eve. Give a look at what He did to Moses, at what happened to Saul. God might have set things up for my encounter with Goliath, but I still was the one who had to kill him. I had to work and suffer like a dog almost all my life. I was nearly forty years old before I reigned in Jerusalem, and everything I got I earned by the sweat of my brow.
Joseph sheltered and preserved us, Moses brought us to the border, and Joshua took us in. But I'm the one who finished God's job. And God knows, I think, that He owes me at least something for the part I played in helping Him reach His goal.
Imagine how He would rate today if we'd never even got here or been exterminated after we did. And He58 also knows I expect to be rewarded before I die, not after. He owes me an apology too--at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments He chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?
God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes upon other people, doesn't he? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue, so to speak, and levies upon him tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, and then charges us for His error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is. He did that with Moses. He did it with me. He was gravely disappointed in Saul. But He sure guessed right with Abraham, didn't He, our first patriarch.
Now Abraham was a prize, and I am proud to be his descendant, for reasons having little to do with his covenant with God or his being the first of our patriarchs. He himself did little bragging about either. Sarah, his wife, is a favorite of mine too, for her laugh and her lie. Abraham laughed also. Abraham laughed so hard he fell down on his face upon hearing from God that Sarah would bear a son, for she was already past ninety, and it had long ceased to be with her after the manner of women. Sarah lied to God when he asked her why she'd laughed and she reminds me of Bathsheba at her best with her laughter and her lie, her penchant for mirth and her fondness for lively deceit. A convivial beauty in youth, Sarah was a hellcat with other women when it came to protecting her own. Bathsheba was that way too, and I would like to put my arms about her waist again and cling with my head resting upon her.
Abraham dumbfounds me still for having performed with apparent ease a feat of incredible difficulty. He circumcised himself. Now this is not an easy thing to do--try it sometime and see. As you surely must know, I speak with extensive, irrefutable knowledge of some of the mechanics of circumcision, acquired in the days of my betrothal to Michal, when I went merrily sauntering down from the hills with my nephew Joab and a band of stouthearted singing volunteers to collect those hundred Philistine foreskins to pay to Saul in exchange of her. It takes six strong Israelites, we figured, to circumcise one live Philistine. The job turned easier after I finally got used to the idea of killing the Philistines first. It did not cross my uncomplicated mind that Saul was setting a snare for me. It did not occur to him I might survive. Each of us had underrated the other, and he was more wary of me than ever after that, I had a wife and he had the big advantage: he knew he wanted to kill me, and I did not.
Even with the passage of so many years, and even with the knowledge that she helped me escape the blades of Saul's assassins, I am unable to retrieve a single fond recollection from my long marriage to Michal. Instead, welling up within me each time I remember her name is the same vindictive resentment I experienced for her the day she marred my triumph after I had finally brought the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem in a national and holy celebration about which everyone in Israel but her felt glorious jubilation. What a festival that was! What a parade I led! But she was a baneful person who spoiled my good days and rejoiced in my bad and who would never allow herself to extol or admire me or to view me as most others did in the mythic dimensions of a hero king, or as a huge, monumental figure immortalized on a great pedestal of white marble, and that's another thing that pisses me off about the Michelangelo statue of me in Florence. He's got me standing there uncircumcised! Who the fuck did he think I was?
If anything, the Michelangelo statue of Moses in Rome looks more like me in my prime than the one in Florence does of me at any phase of my life. Everybody says so. I wasn't that large, naturally, and I'm not made of marble. I have no scar on my shin or horns jutting from my head. But I had that same superior and sublimely articulated physique and that same unquestionable aura of immortal greatness and strength until I began to lessen with age and they would let me go no more out to battle.
My weight has shrunken since. My hair is thinner and my beard is white, and my fingers palpitate with these recurring freezing seizures that often make my jaws chatter and that even Abishag the Shunammite, in all her virginal, firm, congenial loveliness, is powerless to alleviate while they run their raging course inside me, though she blankets me tenderly with all her body and rubs me everywhere with her hands and soft face. I wonder if she is old enough to know how majestic and virile I used to appear before my muscles wasted and I began to wither with age. Beneath the lotions scented with calamus and cassia with which she freshens herself and the fragrance of aloes and cinnamon with which my servants perfume my bed, I can smell the coarse magnetic secretions of the natural human woman, and I want her. I want her, yet I d
on't get hard. The heat from her pores does not suffuse into mine. Her compact female form is shaped perfectly, her breasts so fresh and full, with long, dark nipples, her flesh shimmering and smooth in the flickering light from my oil lamps and utterly without a mark. Where did they find for me so remarkable a skin lacking even the tiniest mole and faintest freckle? Abishag. Abishag. Abishag?
'Abishag!'
Lately, I have taken to calling her to lie with me even when I'm not cold. I feel better with someone than I do61 alone. Now that I've grown used to her, I am starting to notice things. Certainly her kisses are sweet. Her mouth is flavored with honey. Against my knee, then upon my thigh, which I struggle to brace in order to increase the sensation, I can feel those bristling, black hairs in her neatly trimmed pubic mound, all of them crisp, curling, and springy. I love the healthy swell of her belly. Recently, just once, and for the very first time, I put my arm out to touch her. I spread my hand at last on the curve of her hip. She is smooth. There is not one ounce of superfluous flesh. All is as firm and silken as I supposed. Bathsheba, changing normally with time, is heavier now and shaped with less definition in face and body than when younger. She still proudly has all her front teeth, which are small, crooked and crowded upon each other, and chipped slightly at some of the corners. She was a child, unfortunately, before we Jews took so naturally to orthodontia. It would not matter to me if she lacked some front teeth, for I am in love with Bathsheba and desire her love more than wine, as much as ever before. Bathsheba could still warm me, bring heat to my veins with a healing rush of blood. Bathsheba could excite me most easily if she wished to, but she doesn't believe so and doesn't want to. She may not want to because she doesn't know she can. If I am seventy, she is somewhere between fifty-two and sixty, according to which one of the lies she habitually told was true. With the circumscribed and subjective vision of a self-centered courtesan, she cannot believe for a second that I would want to fuck her when I can have Abishag the Shunammite. The truth is that I can't fuck Abishag the Shunammite and probably can fuck her. I get my rudimentary stirrings of an erection only when she is with me or when I find myself hoping she is on the way to plead for her life again in her indirect manner and will sit for a while with her head slightly lowered in make-believe deference while she tries to think of things to say to prolong her visit. I62 aid her at times with teasing bits of information when I see her at a loss. She bites her lip, she bites the side of her finger. Often, I do want her to stay longer. It was I, for example, who first let her know, with a concealed spasm of malicious delight, of Adonijah's idea for his public feast. Slouching listlessly on her cushioned bench, with her long, slender legs, sprawling outward in different directions and her finger absently winding her yellow hair, she pricked up her ears at that, improved her posture a bit, and concentrated tensely. The wicked flee when no man pursueth, the cynical see only cynicism in others, the guileful find guile when there is no guile.
We both take it for granted that my death, though approaching, will not come without warning or without leaving me sufficient time for final announcements. It is much to her advantage to keep me alive until I change my mind. Her long hair is golden again this week and deepens almost daily a shade closer to the ash gray that is her natural color and that she will abruptly decide to obliterate by bleaching her whole head bright again. Not for my Bathsheba the wily tinting or delicate touching up with gossamer brushes. For three or four days there might be no word from her. Then she will come breezing in a flaring blonde again, the only one in all Christendom. The thin-spun hairs on her forearms she must color to invisibility too. The hair on her legs she removes with hardened coatings of melted wax. She uses scissors under her arms.
She is as cuckoo and self-seeking as ever, and I am in love with her still. I don't believe now that she was ever in love with me, although she used to say she was, and I do believe she thought she was. Always, I believe, she was more in love with the idea of being in love, and especially, of course, with the idea of being in love with David the king. That much she admitted when she disclosed that her bathing each dusk on her roof in a place observable from my own had the premeditated goal of evoking my fancy and having me send for her. She hit the bull's eye, that girl, the first time I laid eyes on her.
We certainly did have a rousing good time of it together those first three wild years, the ghastly bad blending incredibly with the carefree and tempestuous good until Uriah and my baby were both dead and she gave birth to Solomon. Then it was over. Her lasciviousness cooled. And she found instead the purpose of her life she had long been seeking, the career for which she had been hunting and unknowingly preparing herself.
'Let's name him King,' she actually did suggest, when delivered successfully of our second child, a bouncing baby boy.
God had relented and forgiven us. But I have not relented and forgiven Him.
My eighth wife, Bathsheba, was the first of the only two people I have ever known who were able to assimilate the terminologies of love into their normal vocabularies with such fluency that even the most mawkish banalities and lurid obscenities rapidly acquired an appreciating verbal currency of shared and precious meaning. I was the second. Bathsheba shamelessly taught me how. She taught me to say things, to make disclosures, to whisper and sigh adoringly and even rhapsodically of responses I was enjoying for the first time, and to ask questions freely about womanly things that have always been mysterious and forbidden and wrapped in darkest secrecy. She proved I could learn to do what I would have staked my life was beyond my masculine capacity to do, that I could someday learn to say 'I love you' without hesitating and to say it without quailing or smirking, without feeling so faint my knees might knock, and that, without feeling effeminate, I would want to say 'I love you' to her and be able to say 'I love you' to her without faltering with embarrassment, fright, humiliation, or shame.
'I love you, Bathsheba,' I can remember saying to her in utter sincerity shortly after we began, as we lay one afternoon recuperating in each other's arms, 'and I so much wish that I didn't.'
'That's good.' She smiled, a tutor proud of all benchmarks of progress.
'I love you, Bathsheba,' I was telling her but a murmur or two later, 'and I'm so glad that I do.'
'That's better,' she judged, rewarding me richly with the beam of pleasure in her bright blue eyes.
Recollections of that sort warm my heart and bones more fervently than Abishag the Shunammite has been able to do yet with all her flourishing beauty and soft caresses. Thank God my burly nephew Joab was never present to hear me say 'I love you' to Bathsheba and is not in possession of knowledge like that to add to the belittling surmises about me implanted first in his mind by my devotion to music when we were boys growing up together in Bethlehem, and furthered by my companionship with Jonathan and the assortment of smutty fabrications surrounding that friendship of ours like a polluted garden of rank weeds. But I simply do have to kill Joab, don't I? He has never thought as highly of me as I have thought of myself. That would be reason enough, for the knowledge that he doesn't is more than a king should bear and has gnawed at my vitals for almost a lifetime. And what about Nathan? Nathan, that hypocrite, that prophet, must have known from the outset that I was after Bathsheba's ass and getting it every morning, noon, and night, but never said a word to dissuade me until after her husband was killed and he found he had something real on me. Jerusalem is a very small town. And Bathsheba was a very loud woman. Maybe even Uriah knew.
By releasing me from inhibition and forcing me to say pretty things, Bathsheba uncovered in me a dormant aptitude for romantic eloquence that I applied successfully for years afterward to bewitch and65 seduce even her after she had resolved she would no longer allow me to. I gloried in doing it once she taught me how. I would use words--pure, poetic, rapturous words--to turn even Bathsheba's head, overcoming attitudes of rigid objection without conceding anything practical she wanted in return. I enjoyed exploiting her old weaknesses unscrupulously with the ta
lents she had given me. I would talk in torrents, use words in flowing cascades, to dissolve and overcome her forthright determination to hold me at arm's length and her passions to herself.
'Now just one minute, David, keep back, you just keep back,' she would command with severity, in that manner she had learned to adopt upon fixing her sights resolutely on some meaningful compact she had illusions of arranging with me. 'You're going to have to come across with something concrete if you want me to love you. I want a genuine commitment.'
'Amethyst?'
'I want Solomon to be king.'
'This is my beloved,' I would answer, going on the attack by talking to her as fast as I could. My hands on her shoulders would meanwhile be urging her backward. 'She feedeth among the lilies,' I might say. 'My beloved is mine, and I am hers. Your breasts are like two young roes that are twins. Your hair is like a flock of goats, your teeth like sheep that are even shorn. Thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair. Oooooh, you bastard. Oooooh, ooooh, ooooh, you bastard.' All I did was let myself speak the truth.
'Oh, David, David,' she would sigh loudly in an astonishment of ecstasy, melting backward willingly to the couch with her eyes already skewing about in their sockets. 'Where do you get words like that?'
'I make them up.'
'Do you want to stick it in?'
Bathsheba was the only one of my wives and concubines who came. With what I know now, Abishag will66 be the second, if I'm ever lucky enough to put together the will and the stamina. Abigail enjoyed having me near and blossomed in that surcease from loneliness, fear, and solitude against which my large hands around her back were as a dependable and protective wall. Michelangelo was right in giving me enormous hands. Abigail would have welcomed my sleeping with her every night but was too considerate a human ever to ask. Abigail was the one woman in my life who really did love me. I miss her now. Each dawn now, I find myself missing her more than I did the daybreak before. Mornings are my very worst hours. Abigail would have been distraught to know how poorly I sleep and how isolated I feel. She would seek some way to relieve that wordless melancholy with which I am afflicted when I can't sleep or when I do sleep and awake from dull and dimly remembered dreams in which nothing untoward occurs but which leave me despairing nonetheless. Bathsheba, of my three real wives, would explode in bed like a Canaanite or a howling monkey, or like one of those lustful Moabite or Midianite women Moses found impossible to keep distant from his encampment. I was alarmed the first few times by those unexpected paroxysms of cresting noise and unchecked heaving and writhing. 'Ooooh, ooh, ooooh, you bastard!' was a blissful and poetic expression I first heard from her.