A Pall of Organdy

after Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

and Jack Clayton's The Innocents, 1961

2009

    And would they understand?
    Perhaps it didn’t matter.
    She knew he’d stop at the sight of blood. At the point he drew blood, he’d cease, it was like an invisible red hand reaching out and stilling his own. In this way, it became tolerable, a sort of prelude to the pleasure, her body learning to adjust to the (mercifully) ephemeral discomfort (as it had learned to adjust to the initial, swollen, overpowering urgency of him). Yes, over time, the sharp crenelated edges between pain and ecstasy indeed began to blur, crumble away into dust, nothingness...
    Innately now, every fiber of her mental and physical being had appropriated him like well-lubricated clockwork. Not just his fearfully large, swollen sex sheathed inside her, taut and throbbing and somehow possessed of a stark brutality of its own, but the mere weight of his hand in consistently prior, heated moments, its stinging slap jarring her senses, her womb tingling in response. Once, he’d swirled his finger in the wine-dark trickle from her nose and anointed her lips with it, his mouth descending on hers in a vampiric kiss as he pinioned her arms, fluttering at her sides as if she were some small, pathetic bird, caged, helpless.
    But they would look at her with piteous eyes, knowing. How to make them understand?
    In truth, she didn’t care. She needed nothing but him.
    Don’t you realize? It is contact, pure and simple, the absence of the horrid, unthinkable, other absence: silence, indifference. How surprisingly easy was the process of justification when one required it badly enough, the serene, blank-faced easing like music over tiny inconsequential truths (by themselves trifling, though formidable if unified). It had a sinuous rhythm of its own, the ways a woman could so easily forget, forgive. Surely, a force so violent, so incendiary, so insurmountable as his must, by law, equate with passion. Surely it was love, these two irrevocable states of being in him with nothing in between.
    And so bittersweet, acutely galvanic to her senses, the mindless simmering euphoria of yearning, her perpetual ache to be with him, near him. The actions of the day she went numbingly through like an automaton, a zombie. The children like fey iridescent fairies, dancing motes of light at the periphery of her vision. No, Miles, don’t touch that, she’d hear herself say, her voice tinny and echoing as if caught in some strange tunnel. No, Flora, you musn’t eat that cricket, it could harm you, it might not die on the way down your throat, constricting and convulsing immediately but instead lingering on in your frail, impossibly pure-white, cherubic belly, writhing eternally like some blackly fluttering, bile-oozing entity of wickedness... The children might have even tried to drown themselves in the silver-shimmering Sea of Azof and she wouldn’t really care, she’d lie listless on the bank, white pinafore skirts fanning out around her, paralyzed with dizzy sunlight and yearning, saying in her tinny, echoing, giddy voice, No you musn’t, children. Come now, it’s getting dark, it’s time for dinner, then our prayers, no we mustn’t keep God waiting...
    (No one need tell her that God must be much like him, with his coldly authoritative assent or angry vengeance, his taunting malevolent condescension rapidly alternating to cruel banishment - no, anything but that!). Instinctively she knelt, in her pristine room of lace and mahogany, Flora’s little organdy bed nestled in the corner, in supplication, in much the same way he would take her at the rawest moments, on hands and knees, practically shackled like an animal, in the most base, thorough way possible, the keen-reeling splintering pleasure of it only heightened by her searing sense of shame and abasement.
    Sometimes, out of nowhere, the rush of memory, its hot exigency centering in the dark wet crux between her legs, rippling through her womb, snaking out to her limbs, the tips of her fingers, toes. At mealtimes, in church. In the schoolroom. The house, the grounds, where increasingly yet unnoticeably, the once well-delineated edges of history and childhood, of property lines and Copernican theory under chalk and grotesquely lush corporeal statuary and etiquette books were beginning to blur under the drippingly disfigured pools of evening light cast by the long tapered candles. Sometimes, she’d be floating through the house, drunk on staircases, entranced into strange, unfathomable ecstasies by the mere sight of delicate Wedgwood blue roses sewn painstakingly by hand onto the satin draperies... Soft moans and creaks in the floorboards, the roses in their vases trembling with her faint passing, their plump, silk-white, gibbous petals descending in slight whispers of motion, sometimes onto her hand as she caressed the long-fondled gilded cover of her Bible. Then, as if a gust of icy wind had blown in and seized her, the soundless scream catching in her throat at the vision of a close-curling, blood-red shock of hair, the long, white-leering face at the window, its peculiar eerie beauty, sniffing her scent like a hound, moisture beading from his hot breath at the glass. Quint. Like a curse, a slap, the harsh sound of the name issuing silently from her moist, trembling lips.
    Much later, in darkened, decrepit, un-aired rooms, the doors unlocked, his brutal searing love, its wracking, soul-wrenching sweetness. Within the sempiternal whir of tumult and violence he seemed always silhouetted in shadow, enveloped by a thin scrim of fog, and at times, oddly detached though at the brink of such a pinnacle of physical ecstasy which convinced her that yes, her time with her family before, her brief time in the world as that cringing loathsome child, as a separate being was nothing but a lie, a shade, a fabrication-horror worthy of the fieriest pit of sinners’ hell; she would wonder if he was truly real or some living specter though she could always smell the raw, swarthy scent of him, the earthy tang of his skin still clinging to her lips and tongue, the slightly acrid breath with its faint traces of whiskey and tobacco, rendered sweeter by its very sourness.
    Pinning her against the dust-licked walls, he’d rip at her bodice, breasts spilling out like overripe fruit, swollen with arousal, into the hard-callused cups of his eager hands, his hawk-like mouth swooping to kiss and bite the tender flesh of her exposed neckline. Always taking, taking. The violence of his coupling never failing to stun her, slim yet powerful haunches heaving into her as if he might tear her slight, small-boned body asunder. Great fists of her dark curling hair knotting in his hands, her eyes stinging with tears, every pore of her being opening, welcoming him.
    Somehow, he’d always known. Known what she’d wanted, yearned for from the very beginning, even if she hadn’t herself known. You’re all whores, he’d say, in the base accent which made her shiver so deliciously, the horrid commonality of it, everything she had been led as a child and adolescent to loathe, to view as a direct affront to God and decent Christian fortitude, so very beneath her (how she hated him, truly!), a guttural atonal coarse wailing rising up to drown out the canary-song of her own blessed inner voice, her painstakingly rendered birthright, education, edification. Harsh, hurtful, filthy pernicious words issuing from the obscenely beautiful mouth, the pearl-white, even teeth, finely honed with surprisingly sharp incisors. I know it’s what you want, damned hussy, bitch-whore of Babylon, don’t try to pretend otherwise...
    Long ago she’d stopped questioning, haunted by the fear yet knowing intrinsically he was right.
    For when it all came down to it, wasn’t love itself, in essence, a haunting?
    Still, somehow, he’d always known.