They spent the second day of the honeymoon in a rented car going up snowy, mountainous hills through forests of dangling icicles as thick as stalactites and as lush as its lost verdant facade, traveling by the most winding and treacherous roads until they were at last in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
On the third day of Christmas he gave to her the reverberating cacophony of country music, torturing an already queasy stomach that had just experienced car-sickness earlier that afternoon. From the front row of the concert she managed to smile without wincing noticeably from this howling through nostrils via song. The discomfort from her own disingenuousness in maintaining this coerced smile was as reprehensible as the sound; and yet it was nothing to her who had seen a decapitation in early girlhood and spoke of it like an inquisitive little scholar. The bombardment of senseless noise was the stuff migraines were made of; although fortunately for her none ensued.
On the fourth day of Christmas they were at this new business "of his." There was a ribbon cutting for this international gourmet supermarket which would soon be replicated in Japan. He showed her through the aisles and pointed out every item on the shelves as if the stuff one crammed down his or her gullet needed such elaboration.
On the fifth day it was Christmas and so they decided to travel around the area of Eureka Springs. They drove up and down the niveous and tortuous hills in and out of the town. Tree gazing from the more scenic back roads was his truth beyond the corporeal greed and ambition of financial enterprises (this world) and unempirical religion (the make believe world), and she was pleased that he had it. As his woman, she wanted to nurture a greater purpose in him. As a somewhat solipsistic being she wanted to stake a purpose in being with him beyond more intense pleasures of shared experiences which she knew were erroneously pinned on mutable others instead of the constancy of self. During this car-bound time she held her loose stomach successfully, stifling its rebellion through the exertion of will. She again smiled: It was a complaisant facade of any common soldier.
Then he took her to the town's shoddy replica of the statue of Jesus that was meant to duplicate the one that stood over Rio de Janeiro. The diminished Christ didn't have the efficacy of the original since it lacked omnipotent and sturdy immutability over the natural world and beauty. Still, with a hand pressed into his, she couldn't help but feel that specious illusion of God being up there in the sky caring about the ethical decisions of her little life. Of course, it was all conditioning: the warmth and strength of a man's hand being transmitted into her own, the sun upon her skin, and, from them, a glazed, ethereal staring at the statue as if it were radiating blessings upon her.
Side by side with her man in their warm winter coats, both like little furry animals against the kneecaps of this stone or fiberglass man-god, she did not mind succumbing to religious delusions. She was married now and all other suppositions and attempts to make her stance, her sense of the world, were nothing. All ideas that went contrary to his expectations were dust that her mind needed to sweep away. Marriage was reality. It was the psychological and physiological completeness of two people, and as such there was a necessity for compromise no differently than the appetites of the body being catered to by the brain that developed pleasure receptors to tolerate this incompatible coexistence. She argued to herself that it was an incontrovertible truth that a man's bedtime dominion transferred to all else. A woman, by getting married, either gave her tacit approval of this natural inclination or gained enjoyment from the ongoing challenge to minimize it.
An idea trespassed through the meadows of her mind that he had taken her here to force upon her a spiritual awakening and to test her obsequiousness to him and his god in action if not thought (she who, when logic domineered over all else was a lone, frigid polar bear who didn't even care that much for the sexual awakenings). Then another idea encroached upon her. She wondered whether having been awakened so often sexually had put her in a coma to all other forms of awakening. She disparaged the fleeting thought. It was a mere caprice, she argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her experience, and only this. Heretofore she had been impervious to the intensity of the hot sandstorms of raw emotion and the blizzards of refined emotion, thought.
But now all was different. She, an American, had knocked off her insular American shell (the little she had possessed) while in Jakarta. She had gone there thinking, according to her culture, that Moslems were extremists who hated Americans; but never believing the ideas that she was brought up with or the ones spewing out of this invisible mouth, society, she had disregarded the idiocy of fear and bias for the splendor of reviving truth. There she had met a gentle people; there she had been naked with easily torn skin; and there she had felt the hurt and the injustice of the masses, compassion and enlightenment seeming a great and insufferable travail. Then and now she needed to go to him in the hope of forgetting life's injustices within the softness of his skin massaging her own.
Since, subtly within her compromises, she was now emulating him for an "understanding" of religion and was now beginning to reflect upon her Aunt Peggy as a paragon of marital sustainability, somehow following the herd seemed less reprehensible. A being was born, grew up to reproduce, and then died. How could she, the maverick that she might be, add more purpose to the state of mankind than this? Could she be so supercilious as to think that the common experiences of those normal or normal acting people counted for nothing? These actions existed since the beginning of time so who was she to disabuse pragmatic, time-tested ideas that were passed down through the generations?
She maintained her glazed, ethereal stare at the statue; wanted to rapture herself from discomfort equivalent to those pews in a chapel; felt the mistake of being here with him bury her in the fragments of herself like the rubble of the Afghan Buddha; and yet feigned a glowing ember of yearning within this contrived display of contentment. She played the part well enough to believe it herself. She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and spinsters. She argued that marriage was a union built on incessant compromise and flexibility and that she wanted to be as adroit at it as she was in spitting chewing tobacco. She could have gone through a ceremony of marrying herself as the more outlandish Dutch women did. She could have rented out a large area for the ceremony and paid for a lavish, catered banquet, a wedding dress, and confetti. The recurrent idea of it was tantalizing. Even if marriage to oneself would lack some sexual exhilaration it would be a singular form of epiphany. The publicity would have been good for the sales of her art and there were days, upon her return from Jakarta that she taunted herself with this possibility as a viable way to keep herself from showing up onto the doorstep at the home of Michael's parents. But she ended up telling herself that she wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments.