supplicium post mortem

It can take a long time, even years, but eventually things on the white board have a way of getting done. Thus, the following: GU4CDM, which means (obviously!) grown-up for cdm. [Find one.] It sits above the other pefectly obvious box about Mark owing Casey $38, minus half of the $11 he spent on something shared. Death cancels all debt, but it’s the last bit of his writing on the board, and I haven’t erased it yet.

whiteboard in the kitchen

People say grief just hits you – you’re going along fine, and then something “sets you off”. On the one hand, this popular notion enrages me because it isn’t true. Grief isn’t some untripped sensitivity. It’s a catastrophic injury, like amputation. Sometimes you temporarily forget about it – your morphine kicks in, and you focus on something else for a little while; maybe you briefly imagine you’re normal again, that life is normal. Then the morphine wears off, or you shift in your seat and wake up the pain, and then – oh, boy. So no, I say to people, you don’t need to worry about saying the wrong thing or making me feel bad. Say what you want. Nothing can make me feel worse.

That said, sometimes aspects of it hit me harder than expected, or in unexpected ways. A couple of months ago I was riding my bike through Gotham, a sunny, cold day, listening to my ipod. (RP always disapproved of Casey riding her bike in traffic and wearing her iopd.) The Kate Bush song “Under the Ivy” came on, and suddenly without warning I was sobbing my eyes out, still peddling across Broadway dodging traffic, thinking: What if someone else comes along to find Casey? What if she is found again, found twice? Could such a thing be possible?

“Under the Ivy” always seemed to be about Casey -  retreating to a hiding place, but wanting to be found by the right person:

It wouldn’t take me long
To tell you how to find it
To tell you where we’ll meet
This little girl inside me
Is retreating to her favourite place

Go into the garden
Go under the ivy
Under the leaves
Away from the party
Go right to the rose
Go right to the white rose
(For me)

I sit here in the thunder
The green on the grey
I feel it all around me
And it’s not easy for me
To give away a secret
It’s not safe

But go into the garden
Go under the ivy
Go under the leaves with me
Go right to the rose
Go right to the white rose
I’ll be waiting for you

Marky found her first, and M. They even showed her to me, protected her from me, and such a secret place it was, though once the emails started, it took nothing at all to tell him where to find her. I didn’t even know I was doing it, but after only seven emails, (was it only that many?) he wrote her a story that revealed he knew her through and through – Marky crashing through the ivy to the place she’d hidden for so long, longer than anyone knew.

Is it possible – in the world of miracles, in the biggest, hardest heart of God – to be found a second time?

—

I posted Marky’s story “The Benefit of the Doubt” under Stories. It isn’t new (obviously). It’s really difficult to open those files. (“Really difficult” would be a herioc understatement.) I also posted Casey’s response…

So I’m reading a run-of-the-mill story by Robert Wilson (over on MMSA) and it makes particular note of The Chesterfield, meaning the headmaster’s armchair (or perhaps sofa). Click over to google images, and we find:

wonderfully well-used

Suffice to say I lost interest in the story and started thinking about all kinds of things…

and for across-the-knee:

• How RP used to insist on giving Casey a hand spanking across his knee after administering any implement. This was to reinforce the closeness of the relationship and to overcome whatever false stoicism or independence the implement had caused.
• How, in the early days and even later, he would insist she sit on his knee after, especially when her instinct was to go and hide somewhere.
• After remembering 1 + 2, a vague sense of happiness came over me, or was it contentment? Security? Hope? It was  the feeling I used to get knowing M would be home soon from Englandland, home and able to take care of Casey as she so profoundly needed, and as no one else on the earth could propose to, or want to.
• Then, a breath later, the abyss – in fact, just as I realized the feeling of safety, it vanished, like every other awakening since last spring. When he was alive, I sometimes had nightmares that he was dying or dead, and I’d wake up to the most profound reprieve, and reach for him in the bed and weep with relief that it had only been a dream. Now that’s reversed. Is all hope now located in error? Can I only feel hope and goodness in mistakenly imagining he’s coming back, like all those dreams where he has come back? (He was only shipwrecked! He was only on a trip! We were only divorced! It’s not as though he was dead – )
• Then I physically longed – so powerfully – to put my arms around him and hold him. I’d never let him go again if he would only come back. Later, in the park with the dogs, I broke down sobbing. Was it the “O Salutaris Hostia” on my ipod? The “Ubi Caritas”? Oh, da robur! Fer auxillium!
• Earlier that night there had been a dream about a tgi liason with a guy I didn’t know, on the 11th floor of some big, modern building with complicated elevators. I don’t think I ever got there.
• And a dream fragment in which one of my RW students had the idea that I deserved the strap, and so gave it to me. It didn’t hurt, though, and several strokes outright missed. I almost laughed. When it came time for his punishment I said, You aren’t going to like this. I lined up the tawse to strike. This is actually going to hurt, so prepare yourself.

Last month I printed out and re-read “In Wine” and “In Wrath”, both by Ripping Yarns. The former was Mark-centered (Mark Aken, not my Mark): Hold-in Mark, age 18, feels guilty for getting drunk and asks for the whack, which Dad gives until the Hold-in lets the guilt go and starts to cry, cf. Jack Radcliffe in “First Half at Keene’s”, cf. all the hold-ins we know. In the second story, “In Wrath”, Dan mouths off to a neighbor and over the course of the story is moved from temper to repentance. Both stories are classic in that the climax is the same: the switch from Dad in the bedroom; and both are narrated by Dad, which seems to be how that series gets started. Both I read slowly and closely, more so than usually happens when I read on the screen. In both stories I was 100% with the author at every word. It felt as if I had written them, or M had written them, certainly someone who knew us that well. In some ways this dad had an edge over RP (I can’t believe I’m being disloyal enough to write that) because he was less coercive and calmer, although just as firm. Still, he doesn’t have RP’s playfulness or his lucky-dippy demeanor. But look, it’s no good comparing them because they’re so different; plus one is fictional and the other’s dead.

But I’m attracted to this character of Rip’s, to his unswerving moral compass; to his compassion and firmness which co-exist without conflict, in fact in service of each other; to his persistence; to his even-tempered nature; to his honesty; to his huge dependability. Even as a p.o.v. character, he is focused on his sons and their needs (which makes him perhaps a bit unrealistic?).

I don’t remember if I ever discussed Rip’s “In…” stories with M. I remember discussing “Keene’s” briefly and him saying it wasn’t his thing exactly but that he could see it was mine. He liked a more severe, non-con quality in his stories and fantasies, veering into the sexual. Less of the emotional stuff that I like. I can’t see him being too interested in these two stories whose implement is a very unaesthetic nylon cane/switch. Marky would also find them very wet because there are all these tears, but no marks from the whacking – s-nore, he’d say. Yet, M. would have liked this family, I think, and approved of a lot of it. Would we have been that kind of parents if we’d had kids? I wonder if he ever did read those stories and what he thought. I can’t quite grasp the reality that I’m not ever going to know.

So just as we finish writing about that CS Lewis passage about the lover’s pinch that hurts as it is desired, we find the referent (Anthony and Cleopatra) line as a NYTimes Sunday crossword clue. How about that, kids? Imagine my surprise, then, when I look up the line to find out the answer to the clue (its stroke is as the lover’s pinch….):

If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
Which hurts, and is desired.

(Anthony and Cleopatra 5.2.342-44)

In case you’re confused, the 5-letter answer is death. Ugh…