supplicium post mortem

How did I know he loved me? I figured it from the second serious story he wrote for me, Jigsaw. I don’t believe I’ve ever shared this one; he said it was just for us. He wrote it before we met in person, sometime in July that summer. It imagined a school weekend, casey and mark with Mr. Penn, and it ended with the two of them putting the pieces together, working out that this was the real deal, life-mangling, life-restoring.

He was married. Jigsaw called the bluff on our ostensibly platonic friendship. My parents’ marriage had ended in divorce; I refused to be an Other Woman. I remember falling on my knees in my study, sobbing and imploring God to help, somehow. I was not religious at this point, so this impulse was as spontaneous as it was extraordinary. Here I was—here we were—being vivisected by this love, yet I did not want to help destroy anyone’s marriage. I had no idea what the near or distant future held, I only knew it was utterly insane to feel as though my entire existence—all 26 years of it—had been permanently rearranged by this Englishman I had never met face-to-face.

I remember the calm that came over me, not lessening the acute emotion, but muting it for a moment, and I remember the irrational certainty, like a rumbling in my stomach, that if I merely sat back and waited, doing nothing, all would be well, and all would be well, and all manner of means would be well…

Arrgh…again, not quite fiction. And a topic that deserves much more thorough dealing. Half-way through writing it, I wanted to delete it and start again. However, I have this…attitude?…philosophy? that once something starts to write itself, one really ought not to give up on it, or censure it. In a way, those are the rules. I’m not sure I would stick with them in all circumstances, but I did today. Forgive any flippancy this 250-word treatment suggests. And please, if you can, refrain from drawing conclusions about me. I was, at that time, astoundingly naive.

What is Flash Fiction Friday?
Read the other folks writing this week:

• Marie - welcome!
• Graham
• Rafi
• Mija - welcome also!!
• PapaTomLA

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead, it seemed. Her stomach clenched, a passing fancy, and she stretched her arm across to see that he was still breathing. His chest did, in fact, move. He wasn’t to die yet, though when he did, he would look the same as that twilight on their bed.

The Pervy Hour had past. He lay naked, the duvet twisted at his feet. She still wore a shirt. The room cold now, she pulled the covers over them, as much against the air as against her own eyes. What had seemed a part of them now felt incongruous, like Adam and Eve felt towards each other after eating the knowledge.

Was it part of their fallen inheritance that she should always feel naked after? She had no Puritan admonition against making love with her husband, but always, after – either quickly or some time later – a self-consciousness would come over her, turning their acts into something faintly repellent. Before the arrival of the observing mind, the relentless panopticon, she could love him with her body, as she had promised at the altar; but, that Eden always fled, like a fawn, before the cold gaze of reason.

He jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath and turned to her, resting his head on her chest, curling a knee across her, his arm encircling her as if to keep her from rising, then or ever. Life had been long, so long for both of them, before they finally found each other.

“You were late,” he would tease, “as usual.”

They had been together before, in the distant past. “Last time,” he said, “I think I was the girl.” Or was the last time when they had both been boys? It was hard to remember precisely. Once, visiting the chapel of his Public School, she had been possessed of an eerie familiarity, as if she were recalling long ago, before her childhood, as if the memory resided just behind her eyeballs, if only she could see it there.

Later, once he actually was dead, she would discover that Anglican belief did not include reincarnation as such. “What do you make of it, then?” she would ask her theologian curate. “We both thought we remembered the same thing.”

The theologian would touch his index fingers to his lips and look at the ceiling, silent for a spell. “I think,” he would reply, “that it was a kind of spiritual gift, a blanket of Grace, perhaps.”

The blanket of Grace was large enough to cover the two of them that twilight, to extend the unspeaking respite. Holding him and being held by him was like being able finally to breathe, like stepping down into fresh, thick air after a lifetime at altitude. They exchanged no words, but the way he held her fingers said more than conversation. They were thinking the same thoughts, the same thought, as it sometimes seemed they would dream the same dream, not separately in their own heads, but tandem, one mind.

Twilight gave way to evening. Soon the dog would need dinner. Soon the phone would ring, and the traffic would resume outside the window. Soon they would resume ordinary living, side by side. For this moment, though, his arm still around her, his heart still pumping against her side, his cheek warm on her chest, duvet covering them, for this moment they lingered, ignorant of everything except each other. She breathed, sinking against him, no words, no self-regarding. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi – yay!
• Tom - yay!

The dreams don’t stop. Neither does the hope that he’ll be upstairs when I come in the door, that I’ll hear his footsteps clumping along the floorboards and down the spiral stairs. It will be such a relief, as it always is when he comes home. Like stepping into air conditioning from a brutal, New York summer.

People don’t talk about him as much as they used to. Everyone else seems to have repaired the colossal tear in the matrix that his disappearance caused. His job has been filled. It is no longer tasteful to think on him.

I cannot tell you… I cannot tell you—anything. I know…I know. Everyone has part of their life which is now in the past. I am no different from any single person still walking this planet. I don’t like the word unfair. But how come I have to keep living when he didn’t?

The card I gave him on our last anniversary is still in the bedside drawer that used to be his, its message a kind of steganography:

xoxoxo me

h&l&nt & tc4mh, l&h ohbb uhc, h-h, & ont4cdm b/c sagg.

I asked him if he understood, and he read the whole thing confidently aloud: hugs and love and nice things, and the cane for marky, long and hard on his bare bottom, ha-ha, and only nice things for casey because she’s a good girl.

There is no one to talk to this way anymore. Even the dogs don’t get it.

God, help me.

This really was a bumper crop for 3F. Don’t know if it is fall industriousness or the thrill of a hard challenge, but these writers deserve a big hand (won’t say what kind or where) or at the very least nice comments on their blogs. Read on, Macduff!

• Rafi
• Sandy
• Abby
• Nettagyrl
• PapaTomLA

Life can be so routine that you imagine nothing will ever happen. Six o’clock, evening commute, people funneling out of the subway, alongside the health-food store, back to their apartments. Me, going roundie-mcblock with the dogs; you, emerging from the train. We exchanged glances as one does with a thousand strangers in this town. A mere detail in the unchanging monotony of too-slow life.

What stood out was your Aran sweater. It’s September, and no one’s wearing sweaters yet. I’ve always liked woolen sweaters on tall men, the way they sit upon a broad, flat chest. You were tall, slim but not lanky. You noticed my wolfhound, then me. We exchanged an almost-smile, the shy grimace of urban passings. Your sweater had already entranced me, making my mind pucker – like lemon, salt, and tequila to a mouth – at the bizarre sight of those leather elbow pads sewn into it.

Rounding the corner amidst hipsters and their phones, I imagined how it might feel to be across your knee. No role suggested itself, curiously, just the palpable urge to be held quite firmly by someone tall and fit, your woolen sleeve across my waist, a foretaste of rock-solidness. I imagined how your bear hug might feel. Does it show, how very hug-deprived I am? Last night I remembered the safety and satisfaction of sinking into bed with my husband. Rock-solidness now a dream, recalled by you and your sweater in the corridor of a nondescript evening commute.

Read other missed connections this week:

• Jessica wrote a post today which described an awesome midweek missed connection, though I’m sure she wasn’t attempting this challenge.
• PapaTomLA

Sometimes people are listening, and hearing, more than you imagine. A week or so ago I had a cookout for some friends from church who had known M well. They are very kind, but I can’t say I know them that well outside church. Then yesterday, at the end of a highly frustrating and quite emotional day, I got around to sifting through the mail, which I typically find oppressive, and found a card from one of the people who’d been to my house. It was a very beautiful handmade thing and inside was a piece of paper with this poem on it:

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

– Galway Kinnell

I’ve never heard of this poet or read this poem, but as you can imagine I was in tears, not merely because it is a moving poem, but from the surprise of it arriving as and when it did. And I realized the sender had seen me more truly than I recognized, or perhaps saw the love that still lingers in this house, and then through an act of compassion came to feel with me. The card said nothing more than xxooxx + a signature. I do pray everyday for help, big help. Sometimes it comes, and turns out to have been on its way for some time.

Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Their memories are what give them the need for other hands…

I had poster’s remorse as soon as I clicked Publish last night. A murder of worries descended: in clearing up my nationality, have I become less appealing? Less mysterious? Less interesting? Or, more to the point, less authentic?

My father, a son of the industrial mid-west, has always been scathing about posers. You should hear him excoriate his cousin (my “aunt”), who raised her children in the UK and whom he accuses of being “a big phony” and “more British than the British.” By confessing my American upbringing, have I made it impossible for people to read my UK-set pieces without thinking, faker?

The subject for today’s exegesis (Quick! Click away!): How to regard being drawn to an alien thing that on some level you feel you are? In this case, let us speak of the English schoolboy. To persist with writing them would appear to be monstrously inauthentic. How dare an American girl pretend to know them? Yet, they have been with me more than half my life.

Cue timeline of my tgi imagination: Little House on the Prairie (which debuted when I was 5), followed by the Orphanage (after seeing Annie at age 9), eventually succeeded by the English boys’ school (zapped whilst watching Stalky & Co. at age 16). There were of course other influences, then and now, but the imagination has moved on little since eleventh grade.

David Parfitt & Robert Addie as Beetle & Stalky

Cue, perhaps, digression into the idle coveting of my brother’s willy, on the grounds that it would be so much less effort to wank with it. This was before Judy Blume or whoever informed me of erections. Before I blundered onto English schoolboys (perhaps not incidentally after achieving my driver’s license – “You’re becoming a tiger!” my driver’s ed teacher exclaimed with relief after weeks of me driving like an agoraphobic mouse), before that moment of gazing, slack-jawed at Robert Addie on A&E, I disliked boys as a category. Boys were bad, noisy, dirty, perverted, insensitive, got into big trouble deservedly, and made life a lot less nice when they were around. (Note: crushes, and boys with whom I was momentarily “going”, though not kissing, were excluded from this estimation.) Boys, in short, scared me, especially their sexuality, though I couldn’t have put my finger on that. I did know, in high school, that boys only wanted one thing, and on some level I thought that if I kissed a boy, that meant I was agreeing to sex. My junior year in college, on the eve of my first kiss, I asked my wild roommate if that was true. She said, Of course not! but I didn’t quite believe her. Later, having discovered a.s.s. but not yet M, I assumed that letting a man spank me was tantamount to saying, You may fuck me, or at least grope me. What a relief to learn that this need not be so. Of course, back then my mind labored to Discover the Rules, rather than to articulate my own boundaries. Sigh.

FYI for you, the first days I spent with M on his first visit to Gotham did involve kissing and a few other activities that would have shocked my teenage self (though not fucking); however, this did not mix with tgi. M and I may have made out on the futon, but Marky and Mr. Prior were scrupulously chaste. I got all those bruises with only 12 strokes of the cane through Calvin Klein boxer briefs and school trousers. RP only touched Casey to pull the tail of her shirt out of her trousers (a purely dramatic gesture, as it makes zero difference re. padding), and to shake her hand afterwards. I don’t think they were even on hugging terms then.

M did later introduce me to the workings of the male anatomy, and to a delight in dirty English schoolboys. His was an unrepressed, joyful sexuality. Sex was Fun and Nice, a Nice Thing. He loved his willy, and if other people wanted to look at it, it was no surprise to him. This, you might imagine, was alluring and foreign to my mind.

This mind – to insert yet more exegesis – had by age 26 become so thoroughly warped by the toxic combination of WASP prudery and Ivy League feminism that it had imprisoned me in a complacent academic aloofness guarded by sheer unconscious terror. (See Equity Day Off, the dialogue with Judy, ha ha). My party line was that I was All For Sex, any sex (so long as it was Safe); in all likelihood, I thought, I was even bisexual. Sex was No Big Deal; it was a choice, a creative expression of my most actualized personhood. I liked wanking, therefore I must want wild sex, like my friends and fellow peer-counselors in college. This particular peer counseling group was for sexual concerns. We did all-night shifts manning a phone line where people would call to ask about condoms, or to chat through the dilemma of having a crush on their roommate. We led them through being Straight, Gay, Bi, or Questioning. If I had gone to school a little later, the whole universe of Queer would have necessitated a longer training course, ha ha.

McTurk, Stalky, & Beetle

The point is I talked a good talk, but – gosh – I just couldn’t manage to get any guys to like me as anything other than a friend. Maybe you’re starting to get the picture. The narrator in Equity Day Off is a pretty accurate portrait, except that I never in college got anywhere near to admitting my real interests. My obsession with England was, at best, picturesque and Anglophile. My obsession with English schoolboys (being them, loving them) was too puzzling and unnerving to contemplate with my full mind. Hence Gender Politics, Feminist Theater, Cultural Discourse, blah fucking blah.

After spending a lot of time in England (biking, hiking, writing for a travel book), some of the attraction became clearer. There was a way that English people’s neuroses were like my own. I understood them instinctively in a way I didn’t understand Americans back home. It was like discovering a whole life I’d forgotten about through amnesia.

It would take a book, or more, to trace my love and hate affair with England (+ Scotland, Wales, Ireland). And the thing with being married is that to a certain extent you become merged with your spouse. Not just in sexual intercourse, or in name (actually I kept my surname), but in vocabulary, habit, and so many, many things. So, in ways intrinsic and extrinsic to that marriage, I have absorbed many things English, words being only part of it. Certain pronunciations, for instance, send shudders down my spine: our pronounced are rather than hour; wrath with a flat, twangy a vs. a deeper sound rhyming with Roth. Also, arse pronounced properly (soft r) turns me on like no tomorrow, whereas ass leaves me ice-cold. FYI for anyone attempting to talk dirty to me, ha ha.

All this exegesis and still, perhaps, I come off as an Anglophile fraud. Know that I am no Anglophile. I  detest the English on many grounds. I possess no twee, cultish fascination with tea and scones and things that are “so British.” Ugh.

What, then? Is it an attachment to the home of the English Vice? And overdose of strong literature at an impressionable age? The lingering effects of marriage? Or is it in some fashion the English schoolboy stowaway in me, recognizing scents of home when the sea winds blow that way?

She just plays one on tv. LOL.

A couple of people have asked recently, whether I’m of British extraction, and while that’s almost as flattering as having people think I’m a boy, I won’t fib.

I was born & raised in the mid-western USA. Thankfully, I don’t talk like that any more. Also thankfully, I don’t talk in a Gotham accent. And unless I’m in Englandland trying to blend in somewhere, I don’t talk in any of their accents either.

I was married to an Englishman. Certainly that had a big impact on my imagination and ideolect, but less than you might think. The schoolboys, for instance, already existed when I met him.

I do write in that world in my regular life, so I guess it has developed over time. I don’t know if it’s got much to do with skill, though. These people just appear, and I listen to them. So thanks, people, for appearing.

I miss his voice, by the way. His accent had softened drastically since moving here, but – God – I would give anything to hear him talk to me now, to hear him whisper the things he used to whisper in the dark. Or in the light. I miss his expressions, and the way he was always making up new ones. I miss his often manic playing with words. I miss the language jokes we had. I miss all the jokes. I miss the ways he said Casey: “Case-ey.” “Casey!” “cdm-cdm-cdm.” I miss the way he said my real name. I miss how he called me Sweetheart. How, when I said, “It’s me,” he said, “Hello, me.” I miss his whistling. I miss his snoring. I miss what he’d say when he came through the door. I miss what he said in our first phone call: “You need a lot of looking after…”

I saw you reading a magazine, your sleeves rolled up, waiting for the allergy shots to take, or whatever it is that they do. You wore black, your hair held off your face with sunglasses, cross visible when I looked too far down your top. You almost scowled at your reading, as is your fashion, even for glossy girl mags. Your skirt came just below the knee. I wanted to lift it, expose those legs of yours, and touch that bottom. Allergy jabs in the arm are tosh, as I’ve always said. A girl Casey’s age ought to have them in her bottom, and when it was time to have it looked at, the nurse would lift her skirt right there in the waiting room, and only return her knickers when everything was clear.

I saw you waiting at that Japanese massage place. Is that spot in your lower back still putting off enough heat to fry an egg? Oh, I know, you’re not tense; you’ve been carrying a heavy bag. Those girls can walk on your back all day long, but we both know something different is required to correct the holding in.

I saw you in the waiting room on that day you want to forget, waiting for that tosser of a social worker to stop diddling you about. I saw you even then. I see you even now. Don’t worry, Sweetheart, really…truly… Has anyone ever mentioned that you have the most beautiful nose?

Come write your own missed connection – real or fantasy, who will know? Post the link today (Wednesday) here or on Twitter (@caseydamnmorgan). What is Midweek Missed Connections?

Check out other missed connections this week:

• PapaTomLA
• Travis King

I feel despair, more than sometimes, at the prospect of ever finding a second husband. One thing that makes it seem even more hopeless is contemplating how non-overlapping certain aspects of my character are. This venn diagram shows what I mean (not to scale):

This doesn’t take into account the many other factors that make someone’s sensibility, humor, heart, intellect, habits, playfulness and imagination compatible with mine, let alone age, availability, location, etc. You can be friends with plenty of people who don’t share your politics, religion, and/or sexuality, but can you marry them? For me at least, I think there has to be a lot of overlap.

You probably already know I am infatuated with James McAvoy. He’s cute (though I have the feeling he doesn’t think so), is the real deal as an actor, has a vibrant, spontaneous, naughty sense of humor, once thought about becoming a priest, and reminds me of M in many ways. However, he is happily married, so unless something tragic happens to him, there’s no hope for us. (Of course, if something tragic were to happen, we’d quickly meet and he’d realize I was perfect for him – ha ha!).

All of which is a rambling introduction. This spring’s interview with him in The Guardian made me fancy him even more. So, since I can’t have Jamsie, here’s what happened when his interviewer phoned me (not!).

p.s. Unlike Jamsie’s photo shooot, mine (using the  PowerShot G9) isn’t that flattering. Oh, well…

Casey Morgan

When were you happiest?

June 7, 1995 – May 14, 2008, from the day I first met my husband until the day he died. Before this, the couple of months of my first romance (age 13), before my parents got divorced.

What is your greatest fear?

That it’s never going to get any better than this, and that I’m unwittingly messing up my life.

What was your most embarrassing moment?

not really my hands

I was on a family vacation to Morocco (Marrakesh), and we’d been invited to lunch at the home of a young, hot drum-seller called Abdel. After lunch, his sisters offered to henna my hands and the hands of my sister. My sister had only one hand done, but I had both. Afterwards, your hands have cotton stuck all over them and you can’t touch or hold anything for a few hours. In the street outside the house, the safety pin that was holding up my skirt popped open, so my skirt literally started falling down off my hips (it was an elasticated waist, and the elastic was broken). My sister had to hold it up with her free hand while we walked. Two girls alone in the banlieu of this Muslim country, hands in bondage to henna, skirt falling down. For real.

Aside from a property, what’s the most expensive thing you’ve bought?

My first car? A used 1987 Toyota Corolla.

What is your most treasured possession?

The rings M was wearing when he died.

What would your super power be?

Like Jonathan Darrow in Susan Howatch’s Starbridge series – charisma combined with foreknowledge.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

My waist.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?

A widespread acceptance of sane corporal punishment, especially in schools.

What is your favourite book?

Bleak House.

What is your most unappealing habit?

Procrastination of things that scare me.

What would be your fancy dress costume of choice?

Boy prefect, 1914. Or one of those cute Japanese sailor-suit school uniforms.

What do you owe your parents?

The tgi gene, my education, plus much more than I can enumerate here.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?

To M, for letting my neurotic duty-driven overwork take the fun out of years of our marriage.

What does love feel like?

Like the most delicious and excruciating pain, like being ripped open.

What was the best kiss of your life?

The one I imagined having from M the other day.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

You’d have to ask the people forced to listen to me.

What is the worst job you’ve done?

Being a theater intern for a megamaniacal artistic director and her power-hungry assistant, all the while thinking I needed their approval and patronage.

If you could edit your past, what would you change?

I’d have networked with more people from university, especially faculty.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

1931.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Finishing my second novel.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

“The King of Love My Shepard Is” (to St. Columba)

Tell us a secret

Isn’t that what I’m doing all the time on this blog? …Another one? Ok: I firmly believe that corporal punishment correctly administered can be highly beneficial for some real life children. Please don’t flame me, now.