JERUSHA CRONE / THE GOSPEL
M is missing a front tooth. He’s a white trash saint from east Virginia who lives across the street from me. Saint to those of us raised Baptist means bathed in grace. He and I stand in his kitchen with Tom Hall playing and I ask him to dance. His arm wraps around my waist. We stumble drunkenly against each other like a happy couple getting a divorce. His body is warm, American Spirit Yellow cigarette smokey, elegant and small. A grimacing crimson face of some mythical creature sits center on his boney chest. He’s got scoliosis. His eyes are eucalyptus-flavored hazed fog as he takes his glasses off to screw. He’s scathing. He says I look silly stepping back and leaning on the counter to just look at him with too much blush on my cheeks but I let this slip, slide along my flesh leaving neat fingernail streaks on my shoulder blades. As for me, I’m not allowed to leave any marks.
Jesus Christ.
You look awful. I say. His hair’s all wrong.
You’re a whore.
We pound campari sodas at the Rainbo Club on Damen and there we also laugh about our absent fathers. Orange peeled and bittersweet. In the photo booth, we take pictures with our tongues tangled up, my hand round his head like a blessing. I baptize you. He hides these in a box.
What do you find satisfying? I ask.
The scent of lavender, a breeze that hits you just right.
Thank you.
It’s a stupid question. He forgets where I went to college and when I correct him he says he doesn’t care.
He describes a family vacation taken in hurricane season. There’s an image of his sisters holding his hands while his child-body floats, angelic in the wind. He doesn’t do heroin anymore, he finds other forms of feelinglessness.
I’ll fly away, oh glory I’ll fly away when I die hallelujah.
His kitchen is a candyland: a landscape of domestic bliss. I hate you, he says.
It's 2am and I’m wearing my real fur coat with black satin lingerie but he’s focused on the chicken breast sizzling in the pan. I tell him about masturbating on the flight home from my father’s funeral. He tells me about a flight to Seattle with his pants unbuttoned, drunk. He didn’t even notice. He turns to me, peers beneath the fur.
Later, he says, going back to the stove. I like to watch him cook and I like the lighting in his bathroom even though I see her hair ties on the floor. We take an image of the two of us sitting at the breakfast table I mock up into a Christmas card with the inscription go fuck yourself. He says it’s perfect. We send a copy of the card to our only mutual friend.
My great grandmother ran a bakery in San Marcos and after her first husband, the radio show host, died of lung cancer she started up an affair with a truck driver who came through town. Her peach cobbler recipe I make for trust-fund boys in long black jackets who live off fast food and call me an enigma. I never cook for M. He doesn’t need me.
I bleed on his sheets and promise to send money in the morning. I promise to get housebroken one of these days.
On the couch he lets me lean against his shoulder for the first time while we watch music videos from the nineties. I nuzzle in like Judas at the last supper when he told Jesus he liked him so much but he didn’t know what kind of future their relationship had and Jesus poured another glass of wine, a tempranillo with kind tannins.
You’re breaking someone else’s heart, he says. I press my lips against his cheek. I don’t care.
He gets up and walks to the bathroom. He pisses with the door open, sitting down.
I love you but I hate you so much, he says.
You what? I ask.
I hate you.
I hate you too.
I tell him about the men’s Bible study back at my childhood church and a Saturday out at the Burg’s ranch where there were too many emus running around so the men took machetes out there with the intention to slit their throats but you see, emus can move their necks real fast so the casualties were next to none. That was the ranch where they tied the rabbit up in the front yard and the poor thing got eaten by coyotes of course which was an ending they seemingly did not expect. Then there was the mobile home with the goats out front climbing all over the red pickup truck where we watched a video of tribes in Africa dancing round a fire, which was supposed to ignite some holy flame within us since Jesus died for them too but instead I didn’t sleep for weeks.
There’s a dishwasher at his work who likes to talk about sports but he told him he doesn’t know anything about sports so instead the dishwasher tells him in detail all his health problems. The dishwasher had a brain tumor removed recently. I say I know too many men with brain tumors which is true. He puts his hand on my arm.
I’m nauseous. He saw another girl over the weekend. She sucked him off and he accidentally did meth again.
We shotgun camouflage Busch Lite cans over his kitchen sink between shots of amaro and wine. I’m flooded in bubbly, foamy wheat and he laughs at me. Showing his tooth gap. I’m pure amusement or so I imagine ’cause he can tell I’m trying hard to make him like me. He pours me another glass of wine.
I’m getting notes of cantaloupe I say. I lean back aristocratically.
Shut up, he says.
When we kiss his spit is blue iris, lemongrass and sage. I bite his lip till he bleeds, carnation colored blood down my tits.
I’m sorry.
Jesus Christ.
We watch a David Lynch film curled up on his couch until he falls asleep. I climb into my side of the bed. The pastel light of the screen halos him. He sleeps with his head tilted upwards as if in prayer towards the persimmons hanging, fermenting along the ceiling. Sometime in the night he climbs in bed with me. I’m delighted.
In the morning I wake up before him to shower. I use his nice soap that’s clementine and tuberose scented. This pisses him off but I’ll send over a couple more bucks to cover the expense. I climb back into bed and kiss his cheek but he doesn’t like morning sex so we just lay there for a bit laughing until we cry. When we get up he makes two cups of coffee we drink at the breakfast table by the flowers he brought home from the restaurant—paperwhite narcissus, liatris, alstroemeria and marigolds.
He says he loves me while we’re having sex in May. I start crying and say it back and we look at each other, but do not smile. Later, we go to the 4am bar a block away where we tell the staff we are siblings like Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament tale. I wear my smallest green and white dress before sundress season but he says it’s so cute. We make out in the photo booth but the images never come out and I call a friend crying while he steps outside to smoke since she texted him and he says he really needs to be there for her right now. I drunken run home with him following behind. I sit at the breakfast table with my bags packed, feeling every shade of lilac known to man.
You’ll always choose her, I say.
I’m here with you.
He calls her while I shower and I wait naked with the door closed for him to hang up.
Thank you, he says.
I’m sorry. I will not be resented.
I’ll have the upper hand, baby.
Let’s be through.
He responds with a thumbs up. She moves into his apartment shortly after.
My grandmother gave birth to secret twins who were fathered by an airline pilot we have a few pictures of. This was back before my grandfather, when she was a stewardess in Kansas and she sent the babies off to who knows where. We can’t find them. My grandfather says they were two girls and I imagine one day I’ll be picking produce at the grocery store, smelling cantaloupes next to some old lady in a bright red coat and her hands will look just like mine. My grandmother got alzheimer’s and called me a slut in highschool and she’d also say your hands are so cold.
Cold hands warm heart, I’d say.
Yes.
M and I sit on the cool tile floor with our backs against the fridge while he tells me about the dark haired girl out west he worries about. He grows misty at the thought of her, folds himself in half. God, I’d like to hold him. I’d like to raise his twisted body up like a pieta fernet sloshed and innocent. When I lean forward he lifts up his head.
Too much, he says. I tilt my cheeks and grin. Six months later, walking down Kedzie with our hands playfully brushing into each other he tells me that was the last time he cried. I tell him he’s walking too fast and we argue in a pile of golden ginkgo leaves. Later under the deep night shade of an oak tree on Sawyer Ave, he will grab my head again
I want you.
We wander through alleyways to my backdoor in silence. My thighs feel translucent, shining turquoise smooth and I taste both of our cigarettes. I feel joy.
Amazing grace, how sweet.
A childhood fear: the rapture because what if Jesus returned and you were unable to explain yourself. What if you had to get going before you told everyone how much you loved them? Then in college my Greek professor with a Snoopy themed tie said he and I would get left behind and boy would we have fun. My mother had a fear of getting fake tits and the silicon just sitting there when she got lifted up to heaven. I’d like to get fake tits too. One time he said he would commit to me. It's just that my boobs are too small and I said I can’t argue with that. What if after the rapture I went across the street, hungry as could be but his apartment was left empty and I stood outside in the snow, waiting for him to answer the door in my red coat and big white cowboy boots I bought just for him. She might answer, in her sweatpants with a messy bun.
Damn it.
I pass her on the sidewalk on a Sunday afternoon and she doesn’t look up. I should know by now to walk on the left side of the street. If I said anything to her I think I’d tell her I really think she’s pretty. I’d say he told me he’s content and I’d show her the picture of my black eye from back in May. I met a lawyer then, who didn’t comment on the bruise but bought me a negroni and fingered me on the sidewalk outside of his highrise in the new money part of town. My eye was key lime colored, lapis lazuli and sunflower gold.
I respect women, the lawyer assured me, all my best attorneys are girls.
I’m sorry about the bruise, M says.
I like it. I’m affected, pursuing sainthood too. I’m bold and brazen and keep on coming back.
Another fear: to lose a finger stuck in a wedding ring I just can’t get off. I think about a Superbowl Sunday in the mid two-thousands when the son of the missionary showed us all his new pocket knife in the back room where we played Tony Hawk Xbox games and when he shut the knife he cut his finger off so we spent the rest of the night crawling around the floor trying to find it while my father and his drove him out to the hospital in Bertram. His father got shot on a hunting trip some years later in an accident and my father went silent for a day. They hadn’t spoken since Katrina when even all that water flowing over broken levies couldn’t wash away a man’s pride. This fear is a vague one. It's about the impermanence of men, how easily their bodies crumble like M telling me he had a stroke the week before or so his sister thinks. She’s a nurse or something.
Jesus.
In November we meet for cigarettes when the weather is unseasonably sweet—a peach candy crisp evening with air like almond extract.
Those things will kill you. A rehearsed and redundant line. We both finish half a pack. He’s smoking yellows. I’m smoking blues. I try to look both innocent and wise in my knee socks while he tells me about a dinner party on Halloween where he and the guys stood outside by the grill out back talking meat and he might get a gym membership with her as a form of true affection. He’s weaker than when I saw him last. I tell him I transfigured. Everything is better than ever and I’m in love with someone else who lives in Soho, whose teeth are perfect and he pays for every meal with old money from his family of surgeons and he himself has survived cancer. M doesn’t really care.
I didn’t think this would ever happen again. I’m lying smiling on my bed mat while he sits up and sighs.
Oh, please, I say. He puts his glasses back on. He’s gotten his tooth replaced by now but I still think he’s pretty. I’ve gotten long acrylic nails I try so hard to soften, still careful not to scrape his skin. He kisses me before he leaves and I say It’s always good to see you while he walks off down my hall.
I dream of Jesus down by the Atlantic in hurricane season sitting in a red lawn chair with a fruity blue beverage and maybe a curly striped straw with a sugared orange slice sitting on the rim. The wind billows round him, robin’s egg and seaweed green. Still he seems unbothered like in the story where he walked on water when all the bass fishermen were watching in a southern lake in the years before the drought, the year when my grandfather who was a fisherman found a body washed up from the flood. He made the local paper. Jesus is sunburned in my dream, cherry tinged caramel skin peeling off his shoulders and he sighs.
Blessed are the meek.
What does it mean to be meek? He sips his drink.
Not needing to be in control. The tide begins to rise but we stand there and let the foam soak our scabbed feet even though it stings my bloody heel.
That’s redemption, baby.
Amen.
When you give up control, you’re free. You’re the dominant one, the one who needs nothing. And I hold his head in my hands while I say I never expect anything and he says thank God which I imagine is a prayer back at me. I say I want to take him fishing in the Guadalupe. He tells me he wants to sit in a truck and drink whiskey.
Is being sober like your whole personality now? he asks.
We have a saying in AA, I begin.
Shut up.
I’m kidding. I hate AA.
John Prine’s playing from his television and he holds me against him.
I’m glad you’re here, he says. He tells me sometimes it seems like my whole personality is death. I tell him to fuck off.
My sister says he doesn’t really love me, which would be alright. I like his transience, his warm scarcity. It means I’ll never be held accountable for shit.
Sin had left a crimson stain, he washed it white as snow.
A fear and dream: single motherhood in a mobile home on a ranch of some good Christian family who fixes things when they break and I stand with a baby on my hip on the newly built back deck watching the cow dog bathe in the blue plastic pool. I’m shirtless with milky tits, in big blue jeans a toddler tugs on.
There’s a rattlesnake, he whimpers.
Get the gun. I’ll blow that sucker away. When I wake up from these dreams I miss my children. Sometimes, I cry. I love my southern Baptist phantasms.
When he blocks me again I gussy up in black velvet, thigh high boots with pink pepper perfume and I smoke alone downtown. There are richer men there who cultivate the better parts of me.
What do you write about? asks the man who works in real estate.
I write about ethics, I say. His penthouse is poorly lit. He tells me I’m a genius, sexy and brave. My freedom is admirable as for him he’s so tied up in ghosts and he wants to be even richer for no reason in particular. I describe my mythos of true love: my mother, still a teen at the time, in a Chili’s in Austin resolving to marry my father for his nice thighs and god dammit it worked. He drops me off at my apartment in the late evening in his black Mercedes after he decides I’m really no good for him and he says, get out of my car.
I imagine M sees this from his front door standing in his camouflage crocs. I imagine he sees me lift my cherry red tipped middle finger and say, oh go to hell.
I text him the next week asking about their trip to Paris. He tells me he’s off on Tuesdays and she’s always at work. I lay on my floor, feigning apathy. I do not ask to see him. I’ve got agency, baby. I’m more gracious and clever than ever.
Blessed are all the other women who know they won’t stick around.
May their wombs be fruitful, their head unbelievably good.
Later in my apartment I tell him it's not fair. I don’t deserve it. I feel so lucky and he says shut up. I smile. The good lord made our bodies work so well together. He says it’s usually not this good and I feel like a flash flood rushing up the saint augustine grass hillside up to the biggest pecan tree and he kisses me so sweetly I forget he’s ever left.
Goodness gracious, I say.
I hate you, he says.
I went to Mexico once with my brother and cousin and a couple who were also missionaries. They liked wine and cured meats and cheese so the husband and I talk maceration, real juiciness and how textures intertwine. The missionaries are building a house on a big piece of land and they’re going to have a wine cellar, they decided. The husband tells me later he’s sorry about all my misfortune and he will do whatever he can to make me feel protected which is much appreciated because back when we went to Mexico I was only fifteen and my cousin who was driving got arrested for unpaid parking tickets at the border and my brother and I sat there on the curb by border patrol until he pulled up in his big white truck and promised a plan to get us back home. The husband died a few months ago too—electrocuted while working on the new home.
The male orgasm is the perfect display of fragility. It's the most beautiful thing, I think, I explain when he looks up at the drawings on my wall. I hid the drawing of him in the closet. It would make him too pleased.
Bite harder. Don’t be a bitch.
Turn around.
I ask the man downtown to describe to me the cancer, to show me the image of the tumor that he’s framed and tucked away. He tells me he’s trying to hold it together. I’m so fucking hot.
I imagine playing tennis in a little yellow skirt and matching hat in the sunshine with my hair in bouncing curls and big ole red lips smiling while M sits on the sidelines frail and elegant in the shade wearing a cream sweater with his hair slicked back like he likes but I think it looks too harsh for his strong jaw, I wish he’d shave his head again. I’m glistening, running all around and I play the game well against an unseen opponent while he watches me like some kind of prey and my legs are so tan and long. I smell like bourbon, roses, and mint. In this fantasy I have a real southern accent I cannot shake. In this fantasy, we sit silently in the car ride home and when we get back we don’t have sex. He cries at the foot of the kingsize bed and I tell him I’m going outside to smoke.
He once told me he likes to live at the brink of black out, barely noticing and numb as can be. I tell him I feel everything in the whole world. I feel the heartbreak simplicity of the satsuma leaves sitting on the counter and like God at creation I call them very good. There’s an image in my iphone of him rolling out his tangled spine laying on the floor. He’s looking up at me, annoyed. That was the day after we first met. I tell him I’m writing a hagiography and he asks for me to use his real name.
In February early morning after the first big snow he texts that she’s kicked him out. He asks to stay with me for a while.
You’re welcome anytime. I’ll get you coffee made.
Twenty minutes later he says it’s all fine now, she let him back in. He says he’s grateful.
You could call this all mercy like standing in the big creek catching crayfish with your bare hands with your cousins and pretending to be orphans, conditioning your child mind for death. Out there we’d scramble up the limestone cliff creekbed into the bamboo forest and we acted bravely in the face of imagined scarcity, with our thoughts on heaven where there would be no more tears. We sang Amazing Grace at a fake funeral in that forest and I cried and cried and cried. You could call it forgiveness the way I ask how she is and he says he likes to care for her and I say how sweet as he struggles to light the cigarette in the wind. I want to bring him flowers, tulips tied in twine to show I really mean no harm. He tells me I’d be a great ex-wife. I’ve thought as much for years.
Marry me, then.
He ignores this, folding the sourdough. I’m Christ-like, honey. I come again and again and again.
Twisted up in him I feel rosy, skinny as can be and sweet as candied ginger in a landscape of smoke and butter far away from this midwestern malaise. At my childhood church they said in eternity there will be no marriage. We will wear white linen and sing all our favorite songs. We will not taste these delightful little snacks, nor suck each other’s dicks. We simply will not care.
In this, the meantime I’ll relish scarcity. I’ll relish the delicate flesh of my neighbor on a Monday night. I’ll let desire win. When he leaves me again for her I’ll forgive him over and over and over till stigmatas bloom into my palms. He’ll see this and say I look good. He’s my heat lightning in August, a signal of some end, but I pray God lets him grow old so he can move down to Florida and there we can sit silently on the dock and just fish. This is my most heathen desire, to be alive a long time.
I need power, I text him, I need to make a baby.
Okay, M says.
He stands up on the second story stair landing—the very picture of salvation, wearing a white wifebeater with mezcal on his breath.
I laugh, you’re a whore.
I always get what I want.
Jerusha Crone is a writer and visual artist from Central Texas currently residing in New York. She holds an MA in divinity from the University of Chicago and is a certified Texas Water Specialist with Texas Parks and Wildlife. Her work has appeared in Hobart and Fugue, among others.