Plum Pound Cake
It's thick enough to hold everything together.
Already reality’s changed; already this is outdated; already things are far more beautiful than I imagined a couple of weeks ago. Already the conversations I predicted here took place, but transformed. What use is a prophetic gift, if not to show you how inadequate prophecy is in the face of grace?
You see why it’s impossible? You see why I can’t write? You see? You see? Even plum pound cake isn’t thick enough; I got the oven temperature wrong anyhow; that metaphor’s outdated too.
And yet, until I catch up (I’ll never catch up; the only perfect account is the event itself; the next best thing is silence) until I catch up, this is all I have for you.
I write less and less, unless you count love-texts and college essays and SEO web content about health conditions. I write less and less and, finally, nothing.
And I don’t mean, I should find time, I have writer’s block, if I only —
No, I mean, I’m done.
Not as a proclamation, I quit! More an observation. I seem to be done.
Hm.
What do you need writing for, when you have love and Jesus?
Tolkien had both. Why did he write?
Poor Randy, poor Beloved, with his complicated deep mind, as soon as he clears me a space for faith what floods in but the faith of my childhood, the Old Rugged Cross, and fairies and saints, too, and God with checklist in hand like Santa Claus, how can Randy respect that, but here we are, he hasn’t left yet, I’m in awe.
Joy and awe.
I mean, maybe he also needed a companion in simplicity.
We both believe in fairies.
Maybe I’ve stopped writing because I’m letting go of vanity. I mean, not deliberately, but again, it just seems to be happening. Writing is nothing if not vain, right? Look at this clever thing I said!
God in his white nightgown, checklist in hand. A belief to skewer vanity. Well, who could — ?
Even now, you see, I’m mocking a bit. I don’t mean that exactly —
Maybe I’m afraid my lefty, intellectual friends will find out. Real me — happy me, honest me — wants to scrub floors and praise Jesus and obey my man. I could write all that out in so many words, but could I click Publish?
How do I write about kneeling in front of Randy’s La-Z-Boy and holding his hand while I say my prayers?
Is it a joke?
It’s not a joke. The foolish shame the wise. And oh, we can’t bear to be foolish, we can’t tolerate foolishness — halp, somewhere someone is Wrong On The Internet —
— Something’s gone wrong, yes. We’ve lost the idiom.
The act, luckily, remains untouched.
Pray with me.
From that circle, that silence, everything.
Ballet, now, that’s different from writing; ballet is bigger and better than I am, pretty close to infinitely bigger and better. It’s objective, Apollonian, a compass rose, a sky-wheel, all the stars moving in free accord with the choreographer’s plan — really, no one after Plotinus needed to write a word.
It’s a bit of a relief that I haven’t given up every art. I can dance in joy and in sorrow, and lucky I can — would Randy dump me if I gave up every last art for him?
No.
No, he actually wouldn’t.
He’d talk gravely with me about it. How do you think you would feel about that choice in five years? Don’t you imagine you might regret it later? He’d be right. I’d start dancing again.
If you want a hard school, find yourself a compassionate man.
You fall into panic, you text him a hundred times in a row, rattling every bar your lower man can think of to test whether things are really okay. (And your lower man, your demon, is clever: Beg him for sex when he feels chaste, worry him about this thing he did decades ago, try to figure out why he looked away from you that one time, was he annoyed with you? Ask him over and over again … ) You delete most of those texts unsent, but plenty squeeze through.
Randy remains mild and unmoved.
To a mere human mind, love seems horrific.
How can he be calm in the face of all this annoyingness? Is he, in fact, indifferent?
Yes, that’s it, the core, the Advaita of it, as Randy might say — love in its deepest nature looks a lot like indifference.
Not indifference:
stillness.
You holler for mercy.
The sky clangs shut.
Randy drives to your house to comfort you and says nothing, just sits quietly with you. Together, you watch some Korean art film that isn’t as good as you remembered. A few hours later, he goes home.
It’s only when you look around and see Jesus on the Cross, your Beloved right here putting up with your annoyingness and your bleeding all over every damn thing that you realize:
The sky clangs shut, we’re trapped in the Shadowlands, and God’s on this side.
Your Beloved gives you his command — be loved — and he gives you free will, and you fall and you fall and you fall —
and you were never anywhere else, you were falling into his heart all along.
Maybe I will write something.
A journal, perhaps.
Just to keep my hand in.
Today I took a lab practical. I passed with a 94.
I’ll go teach class in a couple of hours. It’s a conditioning class for a mixed group of beginners through advanced dancers. I’m just the substitute. Hope I can create a flow that works for everyone.
I might go to bed and masturbate before I teach. I’ll think about —
oh, I don’t know, I don’t have a storyline, and if there’s no storyline there’s no energy arc, no narrative thread, it’s too boring to mess with, so I guess I won’t.
I think about texting Randy: Send me a storyline and I’ll have to fantasize it whether I want to or not.
But he won’t, so I won’t.
I think about libido; I think about equilibrium; I think that Randy will have my undivided attention as long as he keeps me trotting in a circuit between longing for him and resolving not to annoy him. Desire and biting-my-tongue. I’ll never be bored, and he’ll never have to raise his pinkie finger.
(I bet God does that too: Toss the kids a theological gambit and they’ll keep themselves occupied for a millennia or two. Come on Son, come on Ghost, let’s go fishing.)
Clever.
And yet, you know, Randy isn’t controlling. Control is petty. This is something above. Beyond. Eerie. Simple as milk. Randy’s probably sitting in his La-Z-Boy right now, silently fingering scales on his guitar, watching Hickok 45 on YouTube. All these words are just me, silly Jenn, making up stories again.
I ride my desire like an elliptical orbit, revolving aeons out from Randy’s silence.
I’m a planet with free will.
In motion, stillness.
Next day. I go to Randy’s house. We talk about AI and photography and painting and — I don’t know, memory, delight. The air turns solid and something is happening, here, now, molecules shimmer like heat rising from blacktop, I’m dizzy with longing for him, flushing, confused, and he brings out pictures — that’s me 20 years ago — no it isn’t, he’s a stranger, my mind won’t comprehend the difference, boy to man, I only know someone is telling me this stranger is Randy, have I given myself to someone I don’t even know?
I push that stranger away with barbed words, that’s never you, that self-important little twit, but it’s not a stranger, it’s Randy, and I’ve hurt his feelings.
I’m still spinning, disoriented, unable to explain how I feel. He lets me hold him. He lets me sit in front of him and lean on his knee. Gradually my nervous system calms down and I’m so relieved to find him kind, the same, that I can’t stop laughing.
Strange, he rarely laughs out loud, but his face holds a laugh. It’s there in the creases around his eyes, in the light that wells through his skin. I can’t look away from him, but I don’t want to embarrass him, so I tease him:
I’m so sorry, I know it must be hard work being adored.
Dorrie said that, didn’t she? Yes, exhausting, Statius drawled in reply.
Randy, though, doesn’t answer. The smile deepens around his eyes.
I wrote that, too. I wrote it in 2023, and here it is happening. The smile deepens around Statius’s eyes and Dorrie knows he forgives her for loving him so very much.
I mean, I don’t actually worship you — I correct myself. I do worship you just a little.
That was in the story. All this happened before.
Again, reality slips. Vertigo. Symmetry.
He knows. He keeps looking at me with that gentle gaze that has the joy of the universe, God’s very joy, in his eyes.
I go home, drink two glasses of wine. The cat sits on my lap. I say evening prayers. I fall asleep.
Next day I teach class, which I do well.
I take class. We rehearse Nutcracker — of course, what else does one do after Halloween and before Christmas?
It’s hours of mental and physical attention, plus lots of waiting. I learn choreography less well than I teach; but I’m present, attentive. I need to be. It takes all my effort just to seat-of-my-pants it.
Home. I call Randy. I apologize for speaking cruelly to him.
I did hurt his feelings, he says, but it’s okay.
It’s not okay with me, but nor would biting my tongue and keeping up a smooth facade be okay. I do know I need to do better. Discover how to govern my tongue without denying the truth. But those words, the words that hurt him, were they even true?
Or were they a lie I made up to ward off reality?
Randy’s sleepy. We say good-night.
Sunday morning. I do laundry and clean and order some secondhand clothes online, clothes that are hopefully less ratty than the ones I’ve been wearing to campus. My brother gave me a lecture about buying new clothes, and it stuck. Sun shines through the windows and touches the fern, wells through the leaves of the monstera that’s so top heavy it’s about to tip over its pot.
I think about Randy, because what else would I think about? Love, the only subject. Love, dance, Plotinus. I won’t bother Randy so early; he’s asleep. A fat dose of my willpower goes to not-bothering-Randy. It’s the least I can do, he’s so patient with my pestering.
(Thank you for your patience with me, a long-ago woman wrote on one of those photos that spooked me so much. It’s all happened before, I reckon. Randy, patient and kind. Women, flawed and importunate. Him putting up with our frailty.)
I’m flawed and awesome, he told me yesterday with a sweet laugh. Flawesome.
Rhymes with blossom.
You’re flossom, too, he said.
Later, I’ll bake a plum pound cake for his mom as penance for hurting her son’s feelings. I’ll drive up the mountain and give them the cake. Randy will practice guitar while I work on some SEO content. There’s probably a technical word for playing an electrical guitar without the amplifier. It’s a fairy-foot sound, a squirrel-scrabble sound, nails on strings, with only a whisper of resonance.
Air will shimmer between us, desire, desire, and only I will see it, only I will glance up, unable to move or speak, caught like a moth in amber. Randy will keep practicing, content in that amber, that silence.
Later, another day, a few days into the future, I ask Randy: Tell me a fantasy and I have to imagine it whether I like it or not. Then I tease him: That way, if I feel desirous and you don’t, you can participate without getting your hands dirty.
Sure enough, he laughs kindly. Sure enough, he refuses. But instead he asks something so much better: Imagine me in Heaven — if there is a Heaven, I’m not sure I believe it, but I think there is — imagine me in Heaven, and at long last I can pet foxes and cheetahs.
I’m already imagining it: Orpheus harping to the animals, Amphion raising the walls of Thebes with song. This time the music wails to the coastline, the sea-black rocks.
A sinuous, shadow-dappled cat winds around Randy’s back. She rests her golden chin on his shoulder. He glances up from the strings to see three fox-kits gamboling around his vegan-leather boots.
I hope the pound cake has time to cool. It’s best as a chill plummy slab.
I didn’t think I would like plum pound cake, Randy will explain, sometime after the photographs but before the fox-dream, I didn’t think I’d like it, but I did.
Oh my goodness, I think, getting up from my keyboard and imaging kissing Randy’s temple, I can’t get enough of that man.
Excellent.
I needed this to feed my stoppered art. I started reading it yesterday morning and stopped and came back again to finish it this morning like stepping in the river but in between I was thinking about it. Your writing here is a gift. As I read my brain was saying ahhh ahhhhhh ahhhhh. Yes.
Rebecca