The Marriage Bed Read online

  “And here,” he said. He ran his finger along the shoulders of the garments, then drew out a creamy white silk with a wide, billowing skirt. I hid behind the dresser door, disrobed, and then slipped on the silk dress. I paraded around the room, long trains of the hems weighted in little ice-colored jewels, catching at the carpet.

  The rich air from the garden flooded the room. Birds twittered and flicked through the festoons of weeds and wildflowers.

  Manus ransacked a drawer and threw various articles of clothing onto the bed.

  “Look at these,” he said. “False sleeves.” The same excited energy that had filled him the day of the horseback ride filled him now. He caught his breath boyishly, guilelessly, so I could not help but feel moved and confused.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his jacket sleeves pushed up to the elbow, struggling to button the false sleeves along his forearms.

  “Will you help me?” he asked.

  He offered his forearm submissively, and I moved to him and stood buttoning each tiny shell button, then pulled the jacket sleeve down around it so only the soft, ruffled cuffs showed at the wrists. His hair was unkempt over his forehead. He looked up and met my eyes, a thrill passing between us. He pressed his face between my breasts and I put my palms lightly on his shoulders, and through the silk of the dress I could feel the heat of his breathing and the grazing of his lips and the sudden wetness of his tongue as he licked the silk. He began to suck one of my nipples through the silk with a slow patience. One of his palms pressed itself to my stomach and slowly down my navel and one finger found the cleft of my sex, and grazed the silk of the gown against it again and again. As he withdrew his mouth from my breast, a thread of saliva connected him to the wet silk, and when it broke he looked up into my face, his dark blue eyes catching the facets of the windows, and he wavered, and caught his breath, and that sweetness in his look and that tension at the corners of his mouth made a jet of desire fountain up in me.

  Thunder sounded outside and the sky went dark, but no rain fell. He withdrew from me suddenly and went out into the garden. I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, and called out his name when he was a few minutes gone. The light deepened another shade and I went out to find him. The darkened air turned the white dress I wore a silvery blue. The cool, caressing breeze contrasted sharply with the hot, agitated pulsing between my legs. I saw him hiding from me behind a tree, and as I crossed the weeds and flowers, the dress huskily breathed, as if it were toiling as much as I to get to him.

  He peered out and smiled at me, then moved toward me in his blue jacket and his ruffled cuffs. We kissed and pulled at each other and wrestled our way to the ground, until he was on his back and I climbed over him, the skirt of the dress settling slowly, exhaling as it went down.

  His hand traveled up under the tent of the dress and nudged my thighs open, his fingers gently drawing me apart like the petals of a flower.

  “What did she say to you last night?” he asked.

  “She told me not to look at you.”

  He lay back, pulling me firm in place. “Look at me the entire time,” he said, a half smile on his mouth.

  He drew in his breath as he guided himself into me. For a few moments neither of us moved. I watched his eyes roll faintly at the almost indetectable tension and shiver of my muscles around him.

  I made slippery, uncharted movements, testing the feel of him inside me, testing the borders of our flesh together, feeling the tickle of the ruffled cuffs on my hips. The ice-cold timepiece attached to his pants pocket pressed at my inner thigh. He held my hips and we began lapping at each other; lapping as steadily as water, the weeds brushing and scratching at the heavy drapery of the dress. And when my muscles quavered, I leaned over him, my hands smashing tiny bluebells in the grass.

  “Is braithim as titim an saol,” I uttered, the unanticipated cry infusing euphoria with sadness.

  “Is braithim…,” he repeated and let out a rapturous, surprised laugh. “…as titim an saol,” his voice soft, fogged by ether. A seraphic look passed over his face before he squeezed his eyes closed, half in agony. Lying breathless on top of him in the aftermath, dampness rose up from the overgrowth beneath us.

  For three days we would not leave those garden rooms.

  It rained intermittently that first afternoon, and when it wasn’t raining, pink petals wandered slowly down from the trees as if through heavy liquid. Our stomachs ached for food.

  “Couldn’t we go back and get food and bring it here?” I asked.

  But Manus looked upset at the idea. “No,” he said. “We might not be able to come back if we leave now.”

  “Why?” I asked, but he wouldn’t answer. He climbed the wall into a separate garden, where he shook early pears from a tree. We ate as much as we could stomach of the hard, sour fruit. Then he brought in baskets of the pink petals that had fallen, and though they had a bitter, vernal taste, they were far more palatable than the pears, and they quelled our hunger and induced a dreamy, aphrodisiac effect.

  We reveled and rested all afternoon into night, moving between rapt stillness and dreamless sleep, to slowly intensifying vigor. A mist came into the room from the garden so the walls, the drapery, the bed-clothes held infinitesimal beads of moisture.

  The next morning I opened a dresser drawer and found inside a massive tome; the leather binding, which was cracked at the corners, appeared to be crocodile, or the skin of some other amphibious dragon. Engraved upon it were the words Secretus Secretorum.

  “Look at this!” I cried.

  “Christ!” he said and unearthed the heavy volume from the drawer, then dropped it onto the bed.

  It proved to be an arcane alchemical text, thrilling to Manus, and filled with elaborate engravings, similar to the one he had found in the Dublin antique market. We lay on our bellies on the bed, turning the pages, the images within marvelous and strange: a green lion swallowing the sun; a mermaid harnessing a dolphin; a tree whose trunk was the body of a naked woman, her upheld arms laden with fruit and leaves.

  The most marvelous and intricately detailed of all was of a handsome god wading thigh deep against the tide, holding aloft in one hand a globe with a caduceus impaled upon it. Beneath, the words Mercury, Mystery Bearer and Transformative Force of Alchemy.

  Manus read a passage aloud: “ ‘Inside each of us there is a heaven and a hell. There is a universe, just as there is heaven and hell and a universe outside of us. The human imagination mirrors the vastness of the starry cosmos. We are made of the four elements. The sun and the moon and the planets and the stars. And all the order and all the chaos of the universe exist inside the human heart. Through studying the metals and the moods and humours of the elements, we might come to understand the nature of ourselves.’ ”

  I opened upon an image of a fountain with two plumes of smoke rising off from it in separate directions. I read to him: “ ‘The created world began with a separation of opposites, the tearing apart of the united opposites. Injustice is incurred by the existence of separate things.’ ”

  Turning another page, we were amazed to discover the words The Courtship of Sol and Luna, followed by an etching similar to the one that Manus had found in Dublin. In a banner above Sol and Luna were the words Materia Prima…Lapidis Philosophorum, The Courtship of the Red King and his White Queen.

  One of the engravings depicted Luna taking off her dress, looking at her naked body in the glass, while Sol peered at her through the window.

  Manus read from the text: “ ‘I am hot and dry Sol and you Luna are cold and moist.’ ”

  In the next image Sol climbed in the window while Luna stood naked, reaching her arm out to him.

  I read Luna’s words: “ ‘When we couple and come together I will with flattery take your soul from you.’ ”

  In the third image a dove came in through the window while Sol revealed his erection to Luna.

  “ ‘I am possessed by an ever-agitated god,’ ” Manus read, and we laughed.
r />   In the fourth image Luna lay back on the bed with open thighs while Sol, with his swollen organ, penetrated the pink waves of her flesh.

  “ ‘With the powerful rod of Mercury I will transform you and be myself transformed.’ ”

  In the fifth image, the bed had become a bath, and Sol was completely submerged under the water while Luna, who straddled him, was sitting. From the waist up she was in the air, the expression on her face rhapsodic.

  I read Luna’s words: “ ‘Sol, you are now enclosed, poured over with mercurio philosophrum.’ ”

  Turning the page, I was stunned to see the words “The death of Sol and Luna,” the two lying on a slab inside a fiery oven, naked and embracing. “We don’t want to look at that!” Manus said, disconcerted, and turned back to the first image of intercourse. He took my index finger and rubbed it over the illustration where the two sexes met. Then he climbed up over me and, reading phrases from the margins, began to recite: “ ‘The red king shines like the sun…’ ” He lifted my gown and entered me, “ ‘…clear as the car-bunc-le…’ ” he thrust three times, once for each syllable of the word, and we both laughed. But now, as he went on, thrusting in time to some of the words, his excitement burned into me with a kind of gravity, so I held onto his hair to keep him close to me. “ ‘Impetuously fluid…like-a-wax, resis-tant to fire, penetrating and con-tain-ing living quicksilver.’ ”

  Once, opening my eyes, it must have been in one of the mirrors that I saw the brokenhearted image of his mother. But it was gone in a moment, like a reflection in water. He teased me, feeling my urgency, and each time he’d stop I’d weep and wait…wait…until the next time he pushed.

  When I was on the verge of rapture he pulled loose of me and said, “Injustice is incurred…,” his words broken by short sighs, “by the existence of separate things…”

  “No injustice,” I murmured, struggling to join his body again with mine, and when I finally succeeded we held hard to each other, eyes tightly closed, moving faster and faster, as if we were riding away on Ivanhoe, riding far away, galloping, conjuring the smell of sea wrack, a wet, amniotic dialogue, currents swaying and turning. I held back a laugh, which finally escaped me and ended in a sob.

  I awakened near evening with a gasp. I sat up in bed to discover that the blanket that covered us had grown a velvety green mold.

  A dream residue had followed me out of sleep, a feeling of my father’s presence, a faint echo of his weeping, so it amazed me when Manus said, “Tell me about your own mother and father.”

  I watched the shadow of leaves moving on the wall.

  “My mother used to taunt my father by talking about a boy named Macdarragh who she’d once been in love with,” I whispered slowly. “A boy who died.”

  “Why did she do that?” he asked me.

  I sighed. “I think she wanted something from my father.”

  “What?”

  “She was restless. Dailiness wore on her.” It surprised me how clearly the answers came from my mouth; how transparent my mother’s motivations seemed to me at that moment. “They loved each other, but they wanted so much from each other. Neither believed enough in the other’s love. They flailed and fought…. It could be terrible between them, the way they hurt one another.”

  Manus went up on his elbow and looked into my face. “Let’s never hurt one another,” he said.

  He kissed my temple, and as he looked at me I remembered my father saying to my mother, “You’re leading me the life of the damned.” And she answering, “It’s you, Liam. You’d wear the heart out of a stone.”

  In that moment I wished that Manus would ask me how my parents had died. I wanted to find words for it, to try to say it, so safe as I felt here in these hidden garden rooms; so removed from the unsympathetic laws of the external world. Manus would not have seen me or my parents as less than human; he would not have started from me in fear. He would have felt compassion. I believe he saw the expectation in my eyes, yet he did not ask, only drew me in against him, and I watched the shadows of gulls on the wall as they passed outside the room.

  Over Manus’s shoulder I could see the book on the floor where it lay open, and I read the words:

  We all come from one beginning, the Prima Materia. The elements were born by separation. The work is to erase the boudaries between spirit and matter.

  My thoughts were full now with my mother and father, and the words resonated keenly and tears wet my face. Everything shimmered with meaning. Alchemy, I told myself, was the struggle to soothe the loneliness between men and women.

  I breathed the dampness on the air and pressed my face to my new husband’s neck, kissed his skin and felt tender with love, a pervasive ache for him in all the tissues of my body and mind.

  “Solutio Perfecta,” I whispered.

  “Solutio Perfecta,” he answered back and his mouth touched mine, the language of alchemy having become the language of Eros.

  Manus awakened me that night, kneeling at my bedside, showing me blueprints and plans his father had drawn for something he called a “Celestial Mansion,” drawings depicting, from different perspectives, a grouping of towers and rooms set upon a disk suspended in air, clouds floating beneath it; geometrically intricate renderings.

  “I found these drawings and journal entries inserted between the back pages of the Secretus Secretorum,” he whispered excitedly, almost breathless with his find.

  “Listen to this, Deirdre! He writes that, ‘The walls would all be transparent or semitransparent, but not made of glass.’ Deirdre, he has this idea that water can be solidified without being frozen or even cold. Air and fire support the mansion,” he said, indicating a cloud and a burst of flame beneath the floating mansion, “and there are traces of earth in the hard structuring that scaffolds the walls and in the mortar.”

  “How could air and fire support the mansion so it would float?” I asked gently, careful of his sensitive state.

  “Such a thing might be possible, if only we understand the four elements. My father must have understood this. You see, he searched into secret and sublime things. He calls it Divine Geometry, architecture taking its secrets from nature. To understand Divine Geometry one studies the four compass points and the four elements. And the nature of the winds, because the winds pressure the walls of structures and fortresses.

  “ ‘Everything physical has a spiritual counterpart, a more subtle, less visible replica of itself inhabiting the air,’ ” he read slowly, thoughtfully.

  Manus wiped dust from candles and tapers he found in a drawer and lit them in a circle around him on the floor.

  I sat with him as he studied the book quietly. He had ventured to the disturbing image we had turned back from earlier, after the intercourse of Sol and Luna. The picture of the two in the fiery oven jolted me. I got up and went to bed but kept casting curious, uneasy glances at the book, which I could see from my pillow. Manus turned the pages slowly. After the slab that bore Sol and Luna emerged from the oven, they were blackened, still embracing. Ravens had descended all around them, picking at their burned flesh. In the last image I dared to look at, they were skeletons and lying separated from one another in a field.

  I was afraid of the book now, and of Manus looking at the imponderable horrors it depicted, afraid of the yearning he searched it with.

  I felt for him, trying to bridge the gap between himself and the father he idealized, trying with his rational mind to decipher the images as if they were riddles to be solved. I knew then, though I don’t think I could have articulated it to him, that the rational mind was helpless against such images, for they were primordial and of the nature of dreams.

  The third day Manus climbed the walls into the next garden, where he caught a rabbit. It screamed as he killed it, an agonized, human-sounding scream that echoed between the walls.

  I cried as he skinned it, its blood staining his cuffs, but he disregarded me, set on cooking and eating it. The smell of the meat roasting over a twig fire made
my mouth water and my stomach throb, and when it was ready, I ate greedily.

  With my stomach full, I imagined that we could remain living wildly in this abandoned part of the house and grounds; that I would grow accustomed to the screams of rabbits and the death spasms of robins and jays pierced by little spears Manus might fashion.

  I lay down, content with food, and began to close my eyes. “Don’t sleep,” he said. “Make this a century-long night.”

  Something was drawing him back to the mundane world.

  I went with him outside and we climbed the walls, and he showed me how the house was built over the ruins of an ancient aqueduct. We sat a while looking at the stars, the sky that night full of celestial light. It was the Western Wind—who, he’d learned from his father’s papers, was called Zephyrus—with us in that hour, the gentle one who blows away the cold of winter.

  By dawn we’d left the gardens and had come around to a crossroads where we could see the front of the house. We built a bonfire, waiting out the last of the dark, Manus’s ruffled cuffs torn, the blood of the hare dried, his cornflower blue jacket ripped and flailing in tatters in the wind.

  When we appeared again, Mrs. O’Breen did not ask where we’d been. She joined us at the table and I struggled to recapture my pious, demure persona even as I ate voraciously, both Manus and I still wearing our touseled costumes.

  “I’ve got some nice things for you to wear now, Deirdre,” she said. “I’ve laid them out for you upstairs.”

  I nodded. “Thank you,” I said.

  Manus leaned in close to me, his mouth full of food, and gave me a kiss on the jaw. A vexed expression passed over Mrs. O’Breen’s face.

  Halfway into our second helpings of lamb stew, I brushed inadvertently against him as I reached for the sugar, and he grabbed me by the wrist. Mrs. O’Breen looked up from her teacup. Manus pulled me toward him and kissed me. It was his sudden, playful irreverence that caused her mouth to contract, as if there were something in the nature of his intimacy with me that she had not anticipated. Sensing this, Manus made a show of things, pulling me almost roughly to my feet so an inadvertent laugh escaped me.