My Lover, the Rabbi

My lover, the rabbi, his cock smaller than mine, we weren’t measuring, we weren’t in competition, when he came his fluid got caught in his pubic hair and created a sunset effect, a cloud, a confusion, not unlike Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, but inverted.

*

My lover, the rabbi, still mourning the deaths of his parents and brother, was unusually distracted when we had sex—no proper way to phrase our congress, call it sex or habit, habituation or a grievance procedure, a catastrophe that never concluded.

*

My lover, the rabbi, friendly with a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian novelist, flew back and forth from Charlottesville to New York to Vienna, in search of orgasms, phrases, close readings, psychological lacunae, places where he could go blank inside and forget his troubled origins, and I was no help, in my apron, in the kitchen, not my kitchen, mine was too small, but in his roomier kitchen, where I did my best to secure his affections with a galette, a flan, a coulis, a brisket.

*

My lover, the rabbi, adopted his nephew, upon the death of the rabbi’s brother, and I developed an intense, unhealthy friendship with this nephew, now eighteen and in love with Messiaen, the young man a devotee of birdsong and of Christian religious culture of the most refined kinds, perhaps in an attempt (half-conscious? malicious?) to exact revenge on my lover, the rabbi, who espoused intolerant and xenophobic views about absolute, essential differences between adherents to various religious traditions.

*

Could I ever tell the rabbi, my lover, that I had “tricked” with his Charlottesville husband long before I’d met the rabbi—that I’d let the Charlottesville husband penetrate me, an act I’d never permit the rabbi to commit on my supposedly anally-virgin person?

*

Why did I refuse the rabbi the use of my back hole, when his Charlottesville husband had availed himself of its lubed forecourts and antechambers, murky and unnarrated as they were?

*

My antechambers—anal backwaters—had no stories attached to them, so I, without a prehistory, became the rabbi’s forbidden, verklempt possession, more of a Mopsy doll than a man, despite my receptivity to the thrusts of the Charlottesville financier.

*

Had the rabbi temporarily given up on me because he’d discovered that I’d allowed the Charlottesville financier to make use of the rear entrance I’d announced was verboten to the rabbi, the man to whom I’d professed a primary, commanding love, never to be overshadowed or threatened by any other fleshly attachment?

*

To the rabbi I’d promised a loyalty so primal and regressive it almost qualified as a throwback to a totalitarian, fascistic style of erotic attachment, a mode whereby I agreed to forfeit my autonomy should the lover request my annihilation or at least my humiliated subordination.

*

The rabbi wore clear glasses, I mean clear frames, which “read,” against his always semi-bearded face, as snow queens, transparent icicles, divinity ambassadors of nothingness—his hirsute face striking a Satanic (or chthonic) chord that the clear frames offered a contrast to, as if indicating (to an unbiased beholder, one awake to the allegories lurking in daily life) that the almost fecal (yet worship-worthy) characteristics of his stubbly face could be cleaned (or turned inside out) by the purifying, flushing action of the frames, acetate engines of rehabilitation—for it is a fact that the jewels and accessories with which we ornament our paltry bodies can have a spiritual and physiological effect (purgative and balance-affirming, like a compass asserting the divine right of kings) on our suppurating, flaccid, wobbly bodies, our fat thighs and sagging breasts and cellulite-dimpled buttocks, the skin above our elbows hanging loose like pendant sunflowers or hydrangeas after a massive rainfall catalyzed by global warming.

*

“What will happen when my fevered passion for you—right now at a peak that threatens to damage my health—subsides, and I grow to dislike you, or find despicable or depressing the fact that you are two inches shorter than me, that you have never played volleyball or cricket, that you don’t know Latin or Ladino—O, the list of your lapses extends like a tape measure onward to an infinity encompassed, perversely enough, by my testicles and also my superior command of exegetical fine points I daren’t mention to you now, while I’m lying on top of you at a Super 8 motel in New Paltz, our belly-button lints converging like the obviousness of Schubert reiterating the C major chord in a jejune sonata already tediously governed by C major”—thus I said to the rabbi; and does that mean that our filth, my filth and the rabbi’s, together add up to a harmonic tautology, an abundance of same-same relations, my stinky lint canceling out his stinky lint?

*

To my lover, the rabbi, I said, at a crucial juncture in our up-and-down, roller-coaster relationship, “To whatever configuration suits your libido I will conform my body, and I will forfeit the postures that my fantasies and heritage hardwire me into desiring—I will forfeit those preconscious preferences in an attempt to wrest you back from a purgatory I thrust you into”—all of this sentimental and manipulative palaver I mumbled in his ear while uncharacteristically opening my every orifice to his slow, fastidious inspection, so he could scour and survey my body for any unwanted signs of filth or ambivalence—toward him I know I must express unswerving loyalty as well as clean, scrubbed, perfumed surfaces and interiors, lest he gag while inserting a tongue or any other organic or inorganic devices into cavities that should be shelved under “trash receptacles” at Home Depot or the Library of Congress rather than “sacred texts” or “religious and ritual practices of an ancient nomadic people governed by their love of cattle, sheep, goats, and other vulnerable receptacles of holy awe.”

*

His unctuousness, the rabbi’s, my lover’s, pretending not to wound me when in fact his flattery aimed to decimate my so-called ego, a tattered bladder, pierced and flayed and obviated—his unctuousness entailed never saying, “I’m sick of you, stay away from me with your sticky need”—instead of rejecting me outright, he pretended that we’d see each other after the holidays, but the holidays were followed by more holidays, an endless series of deferrals, excuses to wound me.

*

It wasn’t the rabbi’s cock I wanted in my face, it was the sense of annihilation and relief that rushed over me when his cock finally arrived to smother and obliterate my restlessness and ambivalence—the arrival of his cock in my face and the sense of surfeit it provided (gratuitous because I’d never asked for it and because it cost nothing but was a gift as free as a housefly circling a plate of overripe blueberries) canceled my tiresome individuation, the dreary bleat of “self” that burdened me and cinched my breathing like a straitjacket over my rib cage, the “self” corset unfastened by the rabbi’s cock, with its impersonality and the repetitiveness of its rhythms, a percussive timpani stick without pitch or speech or story, drumming against my mouth and nose and eyeballs and scalp—the repeatedly cresting arrival of his cock on my face “did a rabbi” on me, as I put it when talking to myself, or what remained of myself after the brutal pulsations of my lover’s tool made hash of my too-organized sensations and rendered them a tonic hodgepodge, truly a “faggot,” a bundle of mismatched sticks, sticks without beauty or design or intentionality, causeless and unwilled sticks tied together and glad to be ill-sorted and at odds with one another—a soporific beatitude landing on me in the form of an imperfectly shaped cock surrounded by curling white and black hairs, the hairs themselves lacking logic or symbolism, simply a nest of nothings, a void gathered together into a furry bundle—a nest in which my newfound nothingness could rest its egg and lie under the warm bird hatching my newly erased self, my nothingness-self, into an unsoiled heartbeat, a pair of wings, a timid beak, all set to make its avian way across the low sky in search of the next cock, the rabbi coming to visit a second time representing not the return of my lover but the arrival of a new lover, rabbi turning into new-rabbi—same man, same trespasser, same saint, same punisher, but with the piercing novelty of a new cock, the rabbi’s talent consisting in his ability to inaugurate a new self every time he undressed and pressed his many-coiled complexity, an annihilation compress, against me, like a mentholated bandage or washcloth over a swollen, bitten, and lacerated region of skin.