She waits on the porch, that is, for trouble to come, and come it does. Boy, does it. Of course, you could also argue that Bad, Bad Love herself is trouble. And in this, our first-foot-into-the-tender-twenties episode (20, already!), of our trouble-on-a-slow-simmer serialized novella, The Will of Venus (Otherwise Known As A Fairy-Tale for Superwomen), you would find plenty to back you up (and if you were to ask Father Clanning, he would no doubt agree). We’re headed to a bad place, Bad, Bad Lovers, and I’m not even mostly kidding.
But we’ll get there slow. Consider this chunk a first dip of the toe.
If you’d like to fortify yourself before this swim in choppy waters, you’ll find an all-day snack buffet down in the lobby, just scroll back through our offerings. Or click right here to be sent all the way back to breakfast. Alcohol not included (some a’yall are big drinkers, so the bar tab’s separate).
~
Welcome Committee
Father Clanning arrived early. From the front porch, Marta watched him move with short, shuffling steps up the dusty road. He wore a cassock and, when he got closer, she could see the thin film of dust that had settled around the hem. He was carrying a bible with a brand-new cover. It looked hard, like it would resist if you tried to bend it.
Marta wondered if this were in lieu of a bottle of wine or bouquet of flowers, the sort of thing most people brought with them when someone invited them to dinner. Back in the days when she went to dinners, Marta had always picked up those things just around the corner from her hostess’s house. Some instinct of self-preservation didn’t seem to want to allow her to forget entirely. But maybe priests were exempt–they weren’t supposed to drink anyway–and Marta had never had dinner with a priest before.
The whole man, Marta thought contemptuously, was gray. As the stooped figure shuffled its way out from under the apple trees, Marta noticed that the priest was muttering to himself. The thin, shapeless lips moved ever so slightly, and low, unintelligible words reached her ears across the narrow expanse of the front lawn. He was probably not accustomed to dealing with people, except from his pulpit.
The dusty cassock dragged over the lush, emerald-colored grass (emeralds Marta would never recognize, never see; emeralds over which the almost-old man shuffled without looking down). There were patches of deeper green, too, like fabrics much too rare ever to have been seen anywhere along that dusty road, priceless brocades woven by the trees and their shadows, their shadows that made coolness, their leaves that flirted with diffuse patches of late-afternoon sunlight, chased them.
And Marta and Father Clanning were oblivious to all that beauty. Marta plotted (even though she herself was unaware of her plotting), plotted as she sat there in the rocking chair, on the porch of Pearl and Cornelia’s house, as she watched the priest come toward her, as though in slow motion, as though suspended in some strange liquid melted by the heat. Marta didn’t see the trees because she looked at them all the time, they were just trees, and because she was listening to a small but very sure voice inside herself, telling her that the moment had come. The priest didn’t see the trees and their beauty because of his mutterings. He was listening to them at the very same moment at which he produced them, and this required all of his concentration.
The porch was dark with shadows made by the overhanging roof, and Father Clanning didn’t see Marta until he almost tripped over her bare feet as he approached the screen door, ready to press the doorbell embedded in its wooden frame. He looked down and froze with a hand, a gray hand, outstretched toward the doorbell.
“It don’t work.”
Marta’s brown eyes, with their touch of green-gold, glinted strangely, like those of some animal gifted with night-vision, a quality Father Clanning lacked. Marta was a lioness and the priest was frightened. He was lost in the jungle, and just as he reached out his hand to move aside the thick leaves of some plant whose name he didn’t know, just as he almost touched the foreign, rubbery surface of those leaves, he looked down. There was a lioness there, a lioness with brown-green-gold eyes, slanted eyes. The eyes glittered, sparkled with something like malice, but buried beneath the deceptive stillness of the dark pools, fleeting, maybe not even there at all.
Marta enjoyed the priest’s surprise, his discomfort–he had thought himself alone with his Bible and his mutterings, and then there she was, all dusky amid the early evening shadows of the porch. She had on a loose-fitting, square-necked dress with nothing underneath. It was too hot for underwear; she had been going to change before dinner, but here he was already, so she wouldn’t bother. Father Clanning’s faded gray eyes were all pupil as they traversed, respectfully but lingeringly, the soft mounds of olive-skinned flesh clearly discernible beneath the neckline of Marta’s dress, her painted lips, the hard eyebrows (lines like the chiseled arch of a bird’s wind far away against the sky very early in the morning). The loosened hair.
Marta was quiet—she’d decided that was how she’d be tonight—self-possessed, a touch of irony flitting back and forth over the edges of the Mona Lisa smile. That old priest couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was used to having that effect on men.
“Why don’t you have a seat?”
Father Clanning sat down in the rocking chair next to Marta’s. He was close to Marta–the arms of their chairs were almost touching. Marta was rocking back and forth, slowly, rhythmically, pushing off anew at the end of each forward dip with an unnecessarily precise, almost impudent, movement of her bare toes. Her toenails were painted pink.
Father Clanning made the obvious introduction, turning awkwardly in his chair in order to face Marta. He held out his hand to her. She hesitated for just a fraction of a second, and then Father Clanning felt the cool, dry skin of her palm make contact with his. Strange how skin could be so cool. He was conscious of the dampness of his own skin, of the miniscule beads of sweat that hid amid the creases of his palm and made it, perhaps, disagreeable to touch.
He noted that she seemed reserved, if not displeased altogether, as she murmured her name. Father Clanning was conscious, also, of having arrived early, and was not sorry to delay his entry into the shadowy interior of the house, but he could think of no suitable topic of conversation with which to engage Marta, so he stammered a bit, getting the obvious out.
“I don’t b’lieve I’ve ever seen you in church.”
Marta was suddenly innocence, a little girl, her skin fresh like when it had glowed against the peach chiffon of the perfect dress in which she had left that very same porch, the night before, for the cotillion.
“Well, you wouldn’t have. I work on Sunday mornin’s, real early, in the diner on the main square. So I don’t have time to go to church.”
Father Clanning thought Marta a victim of the cruelest of circumstances; such a lovely woman serving coffee to strangers early on Sunday mornings; it seemed somehow unjust, almost obscene. The dinner hour would be one thing, but there was something even more disturbing about the early morning, with its deceptively pure, fresh light, the way everything looked cleaned up and ready to start all over again. Men would look at her as she moved around behind the counter, as she bent to pick up a fork or knife someone had dropped. Some would look covertly, out of the corners of their eyes, sheepishly humble before her beauty.
But others would stare openly, one side of their mouths curving up in a knowing grin, the mouth full of half-chewed eggs or toast. They would ask for more coffee, or something else they didn’t really want or need, just to bring her over in front of them, and Marta would have to answer them, do their bidding, even though she had clearly read the pretext behind the request. Father Clanning’s faded sense of justice (he had lived a long time isolated from most things) was offended: she probably even had to take the bus into town.
The priest’s desires for such contact as Marta’s face and body suggested to the minds of most men had long lain unrecognized, suffocated beneath years of cassocks and hymnals, church suppers and elderly parishioners. Those years had almost completed their process of making him elderly himself–his hair had lost its beautiful chestnut color, but gradually, so that he had hardly even noticed. The once bright blue of his eyes had dulled to a tinny, milky gray. He had begun to stoop. All this had come on slowly, though; the process had been almost painless.
Once, just after he was ordained, he had almost allowed himself to be tempted. He had been young and lonely in his first, isolated parish. She was blonde, not dark like Marta, but her body was rich and musky. She was unhappy with her husband, and came to him for consolation, advice; there was a certain tantalizing scent of warm flesh when she walked into his office. He knew the smell was there, around her, when he saw her seated on the wooden pew–left side, third row back–every Sunday. Alice. Alice all alone. Alice’s husband played poker on Saturday nights, so he always slept through church on Sundays.
The moment of greatest danger had come, like now, in the midst of summer; like now, with the agonizing heat, the suffocating humidity. Once he had been mesmerized by tiny pearls of sweat resting like dew on the almost invisible blonde hairs of Alice’s upper lip, mesmerized in the early twilight of his office when she had appeared unannounced, without an appointment, with the secretary already gone home. The lips with their thick coating of red moved gently around the syllables of her unhappiness, of her misery.
She was afraid of her husband, of Andy, afraid he might hurt her, and the sweat had formed as he watched. He could see each individual pearl materialize out of her pores and sit, like a precious jewel, on the soft down that silked over Alice’s skin. He had been that close to her.
They’d transferred him to another parish at the next June conference. Father Clanning had been relieved, and devastated, and he’d cried as he packed his grey belongings. He’d cried and he’d smiled and he’d wondered if they knew.
He didn’t say goodbye to Alice.
~
More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
~
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