Tremble (31 page)

Clarissa stood in the sudden breeze. She found herself looking across a field of wildflowers: wild lavender, asphodels, forget-me-nots, all carpeted the clearing, which was fringed with pines. It looked like the rambling garden of an abandoned estate, cultivated grounds that had once run to the edge of the small mountain. She closed her eyes and breathed in the intoxicating scent. Joseph came up behind her and put his arms around her.

“I knew this place once, many centuries ago,” he whispered. Still with her eyes closed she turned and kissed him. He kissed her back, biting her lips and tongue gently. He ran his tongue down her neck as he pulled open her blouse. Cupping a breast in each hand he dropped to his knees and buried his face between them as he pulled down her skirt.

Clarissa opened her eyes and looked down at him. He was to be hers; this was a union she never even dreamed of. Yet she couldn’t believe how natural it felt, to have this near-naked man kneeling at her feet. She gasped as his fingers found the part of her she herself had never explored. It felt as if he was splitting her apart and blowing all her secrets to the wind.

He began to caress her flesh, stroking her backward and forward. Clarissa weakened against him, bliss cutting through her in trembling waves. She clutched at his hair but still he continued relentlessly. He moved his mouth down to her sex. Clarissa was mortified with embarrassment. How could he be so intimate? How could he know how to pleasure a woman so? She closed her eyes again and surrendered herself to the intense pleasure, her knees buckling under her. He lowered
her gently to the grass and parted her legs wide, nuzzling into her, his hand buried between her thighs. His fingers squeezed her breast as she writhed under his touch. She had never felt more alive, more at one with her physical self. It was as if she was about to break into throbbing blossom. She opened her eyes and saw the beauty of his sex pushing blindly against the grass. She reached down in wonder. Uncertain and trembling her hand fastened around the tip. What incredible softness, a velvet she had never imagined. She felt him tremble under her touch. Oh, the wonder of him expanding beneath her.

He brought his face up to hers and, musky with her scent, kissed her. She wanted him. She wanted him in her, to fill the emptiness inside. She wanted to believe in something. In this. The inherent naturalness of the act. The very beginning when there was the Garden, then Adam, then Eve. And then love. Hot, pulsating, primal, and screaming. The guts of paradise, the hot salty stench of life, and with it, finally, tragedy.

Joseph slowly entered her. The miracle of his flesh made her weep and gasp until she exploded into one blinding flash and she thought she would die with joy.

But she didn’t. And afterward, in the sudden silence, nestled against his damp shoulder, Clarissa realized that her faith had returned. Belief lay not in some abstract paternalistic figure in the sky, nor in the painted blood oozing from Christ’s crucified feet or the muttering incantations repeated while kneeling on a cold marble floor, but in an elemental force that filled the sky, the sea, the soil, and every living cell that died, lived, and was reborn. And so it was that the young nun became one with the angel she was sure she had not summoned.

She turned his face to her to kiss him. With a pang she saw that he was now aging rapidly. Gray was visibly creeping through his hair, wrinkles had begun to eat their way across his skin.

“I told you we didn’t have much time.” He smiled sadly at her.

She helped him down the mountain. Holding onto her shoulder, grasping a branch for support, he made his way painfully. His body had already started to buckle, his shoulders hunching over, the flesh of his chest shriveling as his skin mottled.

By the time they reached the bottom he looked eighty years old.
Clarissa lowered him carefully onto a flat rock by the sea. With an effort Joseph lifted his head and gazed at the horizon. The sun was already low in the sky.

“When the light goes so do I,” he whispered hoarsely before collapsing.

Clarissa ran to the cave and brought out a chair and a tape cassette player. She sat him down in the cane rocker facing the sea. Joseph was already speechless with exhaustion. Silently he kissed her hand. He was dying and there was nothing she could do. She switched some music on. It floated out majestically, rising and falling with the circling seagulls. Joseph smiled at her, his skin taut across his cheekbones, his eyes hollowed like those of a martyred saint. The sun was just above the horizon.

“Beautiful. Music of the gods,” he murmured and with visible effort reached for her hand.

“Do not mourn me,” he said. “I am as ephemeral as your dreams, a shadow dancing on the wall of a cave.”

Clarissa kissed him and knelt. She held her rosary beads and administered the last rites. With tears streaming down her face she sat beside him and looked at the sea as she stroked his withering fingers.

The sun edged toward the horizon, lacing the darkening sky with pink and purple hues. Finally it sank below the edge of the sea. A moment later Clarissa heard Joseph breathe out his last breath and his flesh grew cold in her hand.

She laid his arm across his lap and forced herself to watch as his flesh putrefied on the bone. Soon the skeleton began to burst through the dead skin like a strange underworld fungus. The flesh became powder, the bones turned to dust. This is eternity, she thought, gazing not in horror but in wonder at the relentlessness of Nature.

It was nearly dark but the rising moon was enough to illuminate the cane rocking chair. Joseph’s remains lay as a fine white dust that traced the outline of the living man. Clarissa stood and looked out to sea. She imagined she saw the faint silhouette of a whale’s rippling back moving through the waves. A breeze sprang up. It lifted the dust and carried it across to the sea, where it hovered, cloudlike, for a second and then scattered across the water.

Three weeks later Clarissa returned to the convent. As she walked toward her cell a voice cried out her name. It was the abbess. The old woman was standing in the graveyard attached to the convent, clutching a wreath of flowers.

Clarissa hurried over. As the abbess embraced the nun she immediately noticed her transformation. The young woman seemed softer, a new humility shone from her eyes. And she didn’t shrink from touch as she had before.

“So the retreat was successful?” the abbess inquired gently.

“It was extraordinary.”

“Good. So all is as it should be,” the abbess replied as she laid the wreath onto a nearby grave. Suddenly Clarissa noticed the name inscribed on the simple tombstone.

“Maria Stelopolis!”

“Of course. She was my aunt, didn’t you know? And she led a very full and happy life,” the abbess said without missing a beat, then winked at her.

That night, alone in her cell, Clarissa pulled out the photo of Joseph. The toddler was still visible, standing slightly out of focus in the illuminated cave. She propped the photo against the wooden crucifix and stared at it until morning.

The next day Clarissa went back to the cannery. At the end of the counseling session she walked out the back and was gazing across the small harbor when Georgio ran toward her, dragging his sister by the hand.

“Ask her,” he said to his sister, pushing her purposefully toward Clarissa.

“Bless me again, for I see that now you have the touch,” she said to Clarissa in Greek.

“Nothing has changed,” Clarissa replied in English, but the young girl leaned forward and looked closely at the nun. Over her shoulders she thought she could see the faint outline of wings, or could it be the sunlight behind her? Either way the childless wife was determined to bear the son she had promised her husband.

“Bless me anyway,” she said in English.

Reluctantly Clarissa laid her hands over the girl’s womb, then closed her eyes to conjure up an image of Joseph, his face smiling down at her.

Time passed and Clarissa threw herself into setting up a women’s health-care center on the island, raising funds and organizing for a gynecologist from the mainland to consult two days a month.

Then one day, as she was walking with Pater Dimitri through the town, she noticed that the village women were staring at her and whispering among themselves. Doors opened as she walked by and a small bunch of housewives gathered and followed her as she continued toward the church.

“What is it?” she asked Dimitri, nervous that she might have unwittingly offended the community somehow.

The priest turned toward the villagers. “We shall see,” he said in a low voice.

One of the women, the butcher’s wife, a strident creature, stepped forward. She approached Clarissa and kneeled in front of her. “O, holy sister, bless me and cure me of my barrenness,” she murmured. The other women nodded in silent approval.

Pater Dimitri raised the woman to her feet. He spoke to her, then turned to Clarissa. “It seems you have cured Christina, Georgio’s sister, of infertility. They say you have the holy touch.” He grinned, then whispered, “Even if you don’t bless them, don’t worry—faith manifests in many forms.”

Clarissa paused for a moment, then reached out to place her hands gently on the woman’s womb, and felt life flow from herself into others.

A
aron Solomon Gluckstein hurried along to the Fulton Street subway, his cumbersome body bent into the icy November wind blowing straight off the Hudson. His shoulders shook with unnatural urgency as he fought the temptation to look to his left and take in the gaping hole on the horizon visible since September 11 that year. May the Rebbe save us all, he thought as the ghost of his cousin rose up before him. Reuben Gluckstein had perished when the second tower fell. He was one of the volunteer medics who had worked for the Hatzolah ambulance—the ambulance service supplied by the Lubavitch community. Reuben’s death had been a great jolt to Aaron’s awareness of his own mortality, a vulnerability compounded by the trauma of the disaster that thrashed daily like a recurring nightmare in the souls of all New Yorkers.

“Armageddon would be a breeze after this shit,” Aaron muttered, then looked behind him nervously. He’d had the sense of being followed, ever since he’d left the massive granite offices on Fifth, a prickly feeling that burned the back of his neck. A man in a brown anorak and jeans turned a corner sharply; Aaron wondered if he’d seen him earlier, when he stepped out of Safecom.

Aaron was a claims assessor for one of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. Having completed half a medical degree, before training as an accountant, he’d found himself naturally slipping into insurance. He’d worked for the same company for over twenty years and was considered one of their most loyal and reliable employees. Tenacious with regard to his cases, he was feared among lawyers, many of whom had lost against his evidence in court. And he was fiercely proud of his ethical record…until today.

What could they do? Kill him? It was a throwaway comment, until he remembered the mysterious disappearance of a colleague several months before. Aaron tried to dismiss the churning fear that had suddenly transformed his stomach into an uncomfortable soup. Hinkel. What case had he been investigating? Aaron racked his brains, but the cold was numbing. Hinkel had been due for retirement; he’d talked about living in Taos, New Mexico, he’d even bought himself a rundown hacienda, but it was strange how one day he suddenly just wasn’t there. His desk had been cleared and made devoid of anything that had marked it as Hinkel’s. Aaron had never heard from him again.