And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles.
In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same recurrent life themes of this man.
She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and urinate as she was applying makeup in front of a mirror) had much legitimacy. Love was a commitment toward compromise and sacrifice.
So, while the thick cloud of his flatulent odor was beginning to dissipate and a steak sauce commercial was interrupting the Tonight Show, she became drowsy. At one moment she heard him say, "That steak sure looks good on the TV, doesn't it Honey?" and then in the next she fell off a precipice into a vacuum of wind that made up dreams. Like women who when experiencing prenuptial jitters have nightmares of their wedding ceremonies being interrupted by dark revelations, she dreamed something similar to this belatedly. She dreamed that she and Michael were at a diner in the John F Kennedy International Airport. They were getting married there before departing to Tokyo. Suddenly the airport security guards, all of whom were Japanese, interrupted the ceremony, whispered something to the potential groom, and gave Polaroid photographs to the Catholic priest. She wasn't sure what they said but she did hear the words "airport bathroom graffiti" which made her grimace not for the ignorance of those who were part of this consensus (she didn't "give a flying fuck" about what they thought in the slightest) but that these bereft hollow heads epitomized what the droves of men would think. It didn't depress or upset her: it was just like being a sole life form on Mars. It was uncomfortable as hell but she was quite used to it. MF, after being shown the photographs, asked the priest if he should go through with a marriage to a woman who had drawn such unregenerate images on the doors of the women's toilet but the priest ignored his maudlin whining as if annoyed by any distraction that would delay his inquisition. Gabriele could sense this priest's yearning to put his fangs into her for she knew that the taste of blood was sweet and that the blood of a unique being would be envisaged by such savages as the sweetest yet. "Tell me, did you do this?" he asked the dark veiled woman but he did not give her time to respond. "Who is this black man that makes up the face and body of a savage God in this grotesque and blasphemous mural?" demanded the priest.
Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers, neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one wishes the larger image to be, I suppose."
"What I want it to be?" mocked the priest acrimoniously. So, I suppose, if I want it to be the Virgin, Mary — "
"Then it is Mary."
"Mary sure has a lot of naked images of black men with grotesquely large genitalia running through her head," said the priest.
She smiled. "Of course she does, as all women do. Have you never heard of
Masters and Johnson? Surely Kinsey could not have eluded a person of your type.
If I were to dig up the foundation under that hairy grandfatherly veneer of
yours who knows what I'd find."
"Aren't you smart? To think that we could have naively put your name in holy matrimony. But do tell me, now that God is generously revealing all of your perverted ideas, what you think is in my heart!"