Novel Excerpt: My Life with Michael

I couldn’t tell you how many times I checked the clock. I’m sure you know how it went, anyway. You look at the clock and it’s only two minutes later than it was the last time you looked. Next time you check it’s only been three more minutes. The next time you hold out as long as you possibly can until you’re sure it’s been at least twenty minutes, and then you look and it’s still only been five. And then finally you start thinking about something else and you don’t look at the time and suddenly it’s been an hour and if you don’t hurry up, you’re going to be late. So rather sooner than I expected, it was after four and I still had to find the hotel, so I decided I’d better get going. I hastened back to the car, and it was almost a relief to be rushing around because if I instead had to think about what was going to happen in less than an hour from now, I was worried that my brain might implode and I would have come all this way for nothing.

I must have made half-a-dozen wrong turns on my way to the hotel. I’d always had a lousy sense of direction, but this was unusually bad, even for me. I was downtown, and each misstep resulted in an eternity of turning around or circling the block and waiting for traffic lights and pedestrians. By the last time, I was half-convinced I was trying to get lost on purpose. But then I realized that if that happened, I’d have to call and tell him, and having that particular phone conversation sounded even more unendurable than seeing him in person. And when I crept around the next corner, fingers clenched to the steering wheel as if it were a life preserver, the street sign told me it was the right one and there I was, driving into the hotel parking lot at last. I still had twenty minutes to spare. Why wasn’t it over yet?!

I sat absolutely still for five of those minutes, mentally commanding my heart to cease its infernal yammering. I spent the next five gathering up my things and checking to make sure that all of the windows and doors were locked and the parking brake was set six or seven times. And then it was ten till and I still had to get to the tenth floor and I figured I’d better hurry because I didn’t want to be late. What was this, a job interview? Contempt for my own foolishness finally got me going. I made it through the lobby and all the way up the stairs to the tenth floor without hesitating, and then I was in his hallway and the room was right there, but I was panting and sweating and I couldn’t go in just yet. Unless it was the thirty-eighth floor or I had a lot of baggage or companions, I always took the stairs, and now I regretted that age-old resolve on my part because I was a mess and even worse, I’d lost my physical momentum and had started thinking again about what was going to happen here. Big mistake.

The hallway was high-ceilinged and dim. Phony candle-type lanterns hung in iron brackets every ten feet along the walls, spilling what little there was of their eerie light onto the blood-red carpet. The only windows to the outside were at the very ends of the protracted hallways; I could barely make out the tiny breaks they carved into the pervasive gloom. I wondered briefly if they were large enough for me to jump through. Hoping for respite from the strangling sensation that clutched at my throat, I craned my neck skyward. The ceiling was decorated with some sort of bronze gilded pattern, and where a moment before it had given the impression of loftiness, now it seemed to be pressing down, ever closer to my unprotected skull, and the gilding wasn’t an artistic design, it was a web of interlocking chains poised to drop down and trap me there, where Michael would undoubtedly find me the next morning, huddled in a whimpering ball and ready for the insane asylum. I peeked reluctantly back towards his door. It stood tall and ominous, a large black iron knocker dead in its center. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” I seemed to hear it clamor, surely in order to summon the damned spirits within. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” And then there was a slow creaking sound, like that of a poorly-oiled door or the gates of hell opening, and I leapt into the air and from that elevated vantage point finally saw that there was a visitor entering another room down at the other end of the hall.

I exhaled. Somewhere in my head I heard chicken noises and that was annoying so I ran a brush through my now mostly-dry hair, resettled my bag on my shoulder, and took a fortifying deep breath. I took the teeniest hold possible of that big black knocker and gave it the most timid tap I could muster. “Boom!” it resounded. I heard movement inside the room, and then a chasm was opening before my eyes, threatening to swallow me up, and I held my breath as the door separated slowly from its jamb. I don’t mind telling you that in that moment I was scared out of my wits and not in the least bit horny. And when he finally appeared in the doorway the expression on his face told me that he felt about the same way.

“Hi,” I said, showing off my quick wit and brilliant conversational skills.

“Hi,” he answered back, with equally impressive eloquence.

And then we stared at each other, motionless with fear.

“Can I come in?” I asked finally, speculating with some justification that the answer might be no.

“Oh, of course.” He moved aside about three inches, and I wiggled my way out of the hallway and into the room.

The Layperson’s Bible: Sexual Behavior Part IV - Chastity

Much has been made of the concept of Christian chastity; it has, in large part, governed churchly as well as secular matters, leading, among other things, to the belief that priests should be abstinent and that pre-marital sex is a sin. In fact, the virginity of unmarried women was, and to some extent continues to be, a prize to be safeguarded. Well, sort of.

For example, if a man accuses his wife of not being a virgin, and her father has the tokens proving her virginity, he must pay father 100 shekels of silver, and keep the wife. If the tokens (likely cloth showing the blood that results when the hymen is broken) cannot be found,

“Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house.” (Deuteronomy 22:21)

But, interestingly, a woman who voluntarily surrenders her virginity might also find thereby a means of securing a husband, albeit in a somewhat backhanded way:

“If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;
Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

In other words, a man can have his wife killed if he can prove she was not a virgin when they married. On the other hand, the man who actually does the de-virginizing can be forced to marry her. (I guess that’s necessary, since the poor woman who is no longer a virgin seemingly can’t marry anyone else under potential penalty of death.) In short, the woman who is trying to land a particular husband will do well to sexually seduce him. But by the same token, a smart man carrying a torch might employ the same strategy to obtain a wife who might otherwise have been unattainable.

These, however, are Old-Testament regulations. What does the New Testament have to say on the subject?

Well, interestingly, not very much. In fact, except for on the subject of marriage and adultery (see my previous post), the Gospels have surprisingly little to say regarding sexuality. Jesus in his teachings does not seem to have been overly concerned with carnal behavior; indeed, not one of his famous parables concerns the big Biblical bugaboos of homosexuality or bestiality, nor even, for that matter, the concept of chastity. So where does that come from?

If you ask me, the modern conception of Christian abstinence comes not from the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, but from Paul in his Epistles. One day I will sit down and count up the number of times Paul disparagingly utilizes the word fornication; I’m willing to bet that it occurs more times in his Epistles than in the rest of the Bible combined. Furthermore, the whole concept of virginity, or at least male virginity, appears to derive from Paul, who concedes that:

“Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful.
I suppose that this is good for the present distress, I say, that it is good for a man so to be.” (Corinthians 7:25-26)

So here for the first time, three-quarters of the way through The Bible, arises the first suggestion that chastity is desirable for both men as well as women. Paul’s advice to both sexes? To marry, as a means of staving off unsavory and perhaps illicit sexual desires; that is, of course, if those desires cannot be quenched entirely:

“It is good for a man not to touch a woman.
Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.”(Corinthians 7:1-2)

“For I would that all men were even as myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.
I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I.
But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” (Corinthians 7:7-9)

In other words, the conception of sexuality as a need or desire to be squelched and frowned upon comes not from God, nor from Jesus, but from Paul’s admittedly ungrounded interpretation of what he personally thinks is best regarding carnal behavior. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere else in the Bible does any other person, however holy, recommend abstinence, which is untenable at best, as a preferred way of life. While certain behaviors may be seen as abominations, and adultery in the form of the time is strictly forbidden, no one besides Paul seems to view sex itself as a thing to be shunned and avoided.

Read, for example, Jesus’ parable of the ten virgins who went forth to meet their bridegroom. (Matthew 25) Really? Ten virgins for one bridegroom? This reads more like modern porn than like Bible-talk, and like some pretty outrageous porn at that. But does Jesus judge the virgins, or the bridegroom? Not in the slightest. Because while heavenly matters are certainly superior to earthly ones, God is, and always has been, practical; recognizing since the day that Adam and Eve left Eden that man was and always would be a slave to his flesh; that He, indeed, made him that way.