Toward An Infinite Love
by Anne Milchkey

V------- was her name. My first memory of her is some grade school talent show I had been forced to attend at the age of six. She wore a black silk dress, bordered at the collar with white fringes, terminating just below the smooth perfection of her neck and above the mounds of her immature breasts. Her legs clung to the body of the cello in a somewhat bizarre yet, as I was to discover much later, purposeful posture. Years later, the association between her and her instrument (as well as the significance of the aforementioned gestures) would evoke an erection at the mere sight of it's leather case. At the time however, the mutilation she visited upon the poor inanimate instrument (vaguely reminiscent of an inept headsman vainly sawing away at the neck of a victim whose head refuses, despite his most violent effort, to come off) made me cringe, the imagined scent of burning horsehair accompanying her tuneless and frenzied execution of one of the Bach cello suites. At the climax of an inexpertly improvised cadenza she, for the first time, glanced up at the audience with an unusually knowing expression as if daring them to find fault with her. She smiled sheepishly at the intermittent applause and promptly exited my awareness for nearly a decade.
When next we meet, it was during a Christmas party that was due to the conspiratorial machinations of fate, placed strategically during one of the worst snowstorms of recent memory. In the intervening years she had blossomed into something which if not exactly nymphetic, (she was well past that critical age so celebrated by a certain Russian genius elsewhere) partook of it's luster without inviting violation of the Mann act. She wore her long almost black hair tied up into a prudish bonnet which if not for the elfin glare of mischief in her eyes would have deceived even the most perceptive of priests. Her face seemed to have been sculpted into a permanent wistfullness, eyebrows poised in the eternal posture of disbelief dissolving into the sleek coltish composition of her slight, though well rounded frame. Her olive skin was set off against a white blouse (tied up revealing her bare midriff) and black bellbottoms. Her mother, a somewhat embittered divorcee with a taste for the booze and a reputation for her dalliances with married men (all this surreptitiously gleaned from the whispered conversations between my aunt and a garrulous hairdresser who could have been J. Edgar Hoover's younger sister) spent the first half of the party reprimanding her for dressing like a prostitute, gulping Bombay sapphire martini's between breaths, before adjourning to the bathroom in the company of a balding vacuum cleaner salesman known only as Mr. Spalding. Their tumescent fumblings went without comment save for a few embarrassed gestures of helplessness from my mother.
This whole display allowed me a certain perspective on the world of adult relations, which viewed from the vantage point of my own adolescent ineptitude, did not fill me with optimism for the future. V-------- for her part did her best to ignore it and myself along with everyone else. She had crawled up into a ball on the couch engrossed in a book which, if my imagination is not deceiving me (it seems to good a description of my nonexistent sex life at the time to have been true), 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' "Good book?" I ventured, "It's not particularly convincing." She looked up suddenly, throwing the book behind the couch, taking my hand and guiding me out of the party area and into the bedroom, my heart violently reacting to an imagined tryst that was not forthcoming (at this point my masturbatory fantasies were already begin to seep into my reality without any help from the external world). She started riffling through the pile of coats on my mother's bed after a moment unearthing her mother's hand bag. She reached in, her brown eyes stared vacantly into the ether as her tongue searched the edges of her trembling upper lip, "Got it." Her hands closed around a bottle of pills. We stole through the living room, (rather she stole, I stumbled along after) expertly seizing a bottle of cheap champagne from the fridge while simultaneously engaging a certain myopic Mrs. Cartwright in conversation, her sentences peppered with phlegmatic rehearsals of her death rattle, before escaping to the relative privacy of the upstairs deck. "It's cold out here. "I said. "Not as cold..." She stopped midword unwrapping the foil that encased the stopper, placing both her thumbs behind it. "As it is in there." On the word "there" the cork flew off into the snowy air, a frothy mess of champagne (not quite champagne, sparkling wine is probably more accurate) spilling through the cracks in the frozen wood. She passed the bottle to me extracting two small pills from the opaque brown bottle. "What is that stuff?" "Percodin. If you take it with alcohol you get an interesting high. "She took the bottle from me and downed about a quarter of it.

**************

The scent of her cunt (it was my first therefore most vivid introduction) was an ambiguous mixture of rosewater and African violets, intermingled with a faint animal muskiness, probably the result of her bad masturbatory habits. It smiled from beneath her spread thighs; folded flesh neatly aligned in two symmetrical half moons back to back; clitoris glistening in the refracted light of the fading Manhattan sun, the book lamp and their mirrored twins.
No not the mirrored ceiling your thinking of. My memory sketches in a rectangular stretch of that watery surface, just above a bureau directly across from her bed, dusted faintly with talcum powder, cornered in fading photographs. Old boyfriends and family dogs framed in a rough posthumous equality. "Where am I?" I asked quite innocently pointing to the cemetery of Polaroids, used condoms, jars of dried semen and plucked pubic hairs. She shrugged guiding my hand between her legs, her bush trimmed into what she jokingly referred to as her Hitler mustache (she had spent a short time as a dominatrix, her standard costume being a modified SS uniform, a rather strange affectation for a Jewish nymphomaniac). She shrugged and said, completely unaware of how deeply it wounded me. "You were an experiment. I wanted to take your cherry. You always hear men bragging about defrocking some virgin school girl." She pinched my cheeks, not so much as a cute gesture but so as to inflict pain. She was a performance major at Julliard at the time. (If you haven't noticed we have come along from the snow storm of my initiation) I attended only one of her performances; a student ensemble rehearsing the prelude and liebestod from Tristan. She was safely buried within the string section, though I could see her legs and pantiless crotch wrapped around that block of wood, a highly unorthodox position from a technical stand point, one her teacher had tried to woo her away from until he was introduced first hand to it's benefits. I imagined that the whole bunch of them had fucked that raging pussy of hers. She told me that she liked to finger herself during the pauses, following the rests, subdividing the strokes of her fingers against her clit into 32nd notes, superimposing complex polyrhythms, timing her orgasms to coincide with the full orchestral tutti. That particular night I believe she told me that she had taken to practicing with a metronome jammed up her ass.

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She had an odd, phony streak; the way she pretended toward social status was embarrassing when it was not hysterical (which was most of the time). She picked her boyfriends wallets to pay for elocution lessons. I caught her in a certain bar in the lower east side, passing herself off as a Brit, rolling her rrrrrr's in such an exaggerated manner as to have made Queen Victoria sound as if she was from the Bronx. She spoke of her career, the premiere at Carnegie hall, the busy recording schedule etc. as if it had already occurred and she had grown weary of the adulation. She went on and on about the alleged inadequacies of her fellow students as well as the historical virtuosi that had preceded her; such and such is a horrible accompanist as well as an impotent homosexual. Rostropovitch was a hack, an empty technician The truth be told her tone lacked warmth and her interpretations were in questionable taste Mozart drowned in rubato, the romantics sawed through with complete absence of dynamic articulation, her Bach overly wooden and mechanical. She was a horrible cellist but even her flat tone could not disguise her other virtues; even to the most acerbic critic, an exceptional fuck and even better actress.

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My function in the whole mess of Vanessa's existence is something I have yet to define to my own satisfaction. I did not qualify as a father confessor, though she loved to confide all her exploits, her cons, the soap opera sitcoms that erupted periodically when one of her suitors discovered that they were not the only ones exploring the void between her legs. The whole time I believe she did not consider me one of them; the sex was secondary, almost incidental. "I've started seeing this insurance salesman who likes to dress as a bishop, miter and robes of the finest silk. He likes to penetrate me with his scepter while reciting the mass in Latin! "This was almost too much even for me and I told her so. "What's wrong?" "That's sick." "Since when have you been such a prude?" "Why are you such a whore? No one could possibly want to fuck that much." I added under my breath the great variety of men who had perched between her sweet thighs: hunchbacks, war criminals, politicians whom she reamed with eight inch strap on dildos, cabbies and waiters, their pants burdened by wads of dirty singles and change plucked from the gutters, pockets which she riffled through while they slept in the stilled post coital womb of unconsciousness, the homeless, the insane, the virgin drag queens whom had never seen a pussy in technicolor, in the cinemascope wide angle madness that lurked below waiting to consume their pricks (for them she often played butch, tying her tits down and planting a cucumber down the side of her leather pants). The dawn would find her plucking the gristle from her fangs, staging the whole mess in a manic monologue in some downtown coffee shop to my audience of one. I asked her again the same question to which she replied. "I fuck therefore I am," reaching under the counter to grab my cock. I pushed away her hand. You're not getting off that easy. Tell me why you come here every week and tell me everything." "You like it." "That's not the point. I want to know what you get out of it."
That's when she told me. She believed her pussy was the pathway to the divine. She told me that when she came she heard the voices of the dead. A picture popped into my head of her on her knees before that insurance salesman, hands held above his head like antennae, Vanessa massaging his stiffening cock in her hands, speaking her prayers into it, jamming it into her ear waiting patiently for a reply. I saw the lines forming along the corridors that led to her apartment, the cripples, lepers and blind men rubbing her clit hoping for that convulsion of divine inspiration. Paranormal investigators would come and set up their equipment, shave her pussy and send the smooth black hairs to labs around the world where it would be discovered that that glistening snatch of hers was radioactive. Technicians dressed as aliens in science fiction movies from the fifties would probe her with Geiger counters. The tabloids would report how a thimble of her essence had cured an entire village in sub-Saharan Africa, infected with the ebola virus. "You believe me don't you?" I shook my head. "That still doesn't answer my question. It doesn't matter whether I believe you or not. What do I have to do with it? "She smiled, mussing up my hair like a mother would do to her child. "You, dear M-----, are my chronicler; the witness to the miracle." I'm not quite sure I understand what you're getting at." I said. She adjusted the strap of her bra beneath her sweater. "They don't mean anything, one of them is as good as another. It's as if I don't exist in those little stretches in between. I see myself in their eyes when they come inside me, but afterwards I fade away like a ghost. When I tell you it's like I create another reflection. It reassures me to know that regardless of my unreality, that I exist somewhere. Even if I lie to you or embellish it, the dream is inside someone else." "Besides," she added with a smile, "Someone has to go to the Vatican and petition for my sainthood."
Everything changed when Gwen entered the picture. Slowly at first, her presence suggested not in the conversation itself but as some conspicuous gap, though everything she said traced an outline of her. I mentioned in passing that she seemed to be holding back something. She smiled sadly and said. "I've fallen in love." "So what else is new? You fall in love every fifteen minutes." "This is different." Then her voice trailed off into an enigmatic silence. Her behavior became even more erratic. She began to ignore her regulars, rewarding the more persistent of them by anonymous phone calls to the IRS, to blissfully ignorant housewives who were beginning to wonder why the old ball and chain was spending every night at the office, to the police (the first thing they all do is spill their secrets she said between drags, this one killed his 1st wife, that one's an embezzler etc.) She began to act like a virgin, limiting her activities to the occasional date with the shower head. She began to miss our regular meetings. One night I followed her as she left her apartment, watching as she sat alone in a church just off St. Mark's place, fingering herself in the empty confessional. When she left I followed her out, tapping her on the shoulder when we reached the sidewalk. "Communing with the deity?" She didn't seem at all surprised to see me. "Did you like the show?" She said. "You're not going to try and tell me that you knew I was there." "Why else would I have done it?" We went back to her apartment. On the way back she recited the litany of her woes, the sleepless nights where there was not a cock in the land that could still her thoughts, how the voices had stopped speaking to her. "It's all her fault." "Ah so she's a woman!" I said in surprise. That possibility had never entered my mind. "And a virgin." She replied in a exhausted whisper. "So that shouldn't be too much trouble for you." She painted me a picture of her. Gwen purchasing postcards in a stationary store. Gwen counting the rosary. Gwen receiving communion, her salmon colored tongue extended, eyes closed as if in a kiss, waiting for the cock that would never come (no pun intended). The way her lips trembled when she was uncertain of an answer. She had surreptitiously photographed her on her way home. She was petite with short black hair and the face of an angel or a Celtic fairy, small pert breasts, blue eyes, the type of blue that was so light as to seem preternatural, almost feline. She was probably around 25 or so, though her childish stature gave her a much younger appearance; waifish without the narcotic, wasted aura that you would find on the runways of Paris or in the pages of fashion magazines. She neglected to tell me that she was a nun.

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Then I saw her for myself. I had been waiting for Vanessa though as usual, it didn't appear that she would be gracing me with her presence. I drained my coffee and just as I started to put on my coat, I heard her; a soft muted whimper from behind. As I looked around, she glared at me suspiciously, trying to hide her tears. I am not particularly bold, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to investigate V-----'s image from the other side of the glass. I sat myself down at the small table. "I don't mean to intrude." I said. "I'm fine really." "I believe we have a mutual acquaintance." This piqued her interest. "She's in love with you, you know." "It's impossible." "Are you ashamed of being with a woman?" That made her blush. "I don't think it's any of your business." "I'm sorry." I started up from the chair but she grabbed my hand. Don't go. You really know her?" "She tells me everything. She has become a changed woman, since she met you." A single lingering tear escaped slowly down her cheek. "It's impossible!" "What's so wrong about it, you are both very attractive women." Now she was gushing. I almost could have laughed in her face, the whole damn thing was so melodramatic. "I have taken holy orders. "I almost fell out of my chair. "Oh she has sunk to new lows." I said in my best 'condemning politician' voice. She didn't catch my sarcasm. "No, I, I am just as guilty." "It all makes sense sort of. You know she has visions, or at least she thinks she has them. She told me that she speaks to God." I said it matter of factly, as if god were not GOD but some well known celebrity whom had fallen somewhat in stature since his retirement. "Your not serious." She gave me a look that I have only seen cross the face of avowed atheists. Then I started talking. I told her everything, every confidence. If Vanessa was determined to make her life into some sort of passion or oratorio, then she could finally have a Judas, a role she had perhaps intended me to play from the start. She was clearly distraught. "You love her, Don't you?" She said. "Who could love such a person?" I replied. "Admit it." "Do you? Has this spawned in you some sort of religious crisis? Did you hang on to your virginity or did you drop your panties (do nuns wear panties? Are they made of cotton or camel hair?) the first time she propositioned you?" She started to cry again and the coffeehouse dissolved into an auditorium. People seemed to be streaming into the place turning their chairs around to face us. I stood up and took a bow and I imagined them both beside me, clutching roses to their breasts, as the curtain fell behind us.

**************

I did not here any further news of her. Occasionally a videotape would appear in my mail box and out of curiosity I would put it on and find them, not in the midst of some provocative pose as you would have expected, but asleep. Hours of them curled around each other in the innocence of dream. V------- would (I'm sure it was not my imagination) face the camera and her eyes briefly open, giving me a knowing wink, as if to inform me that technology had given her far more convincing means of insuring her existence than entrusting me with her confidences. Eventually the tapes stopped coming.
I read of Gwen's suicide in the Daily News, the poor girls drift from the convent into the arms of a lesbian lover described in the most lurid prose imaginable. The head of the article featured a picture of her in her communion dress.
As for V-------, well, around the time I read the article I was summoned to her lawyer's office and told that she had relinquished all of her worldly possessions to me. I asked him if she too had taken her life. He remained silent on the matter for quite awhile before finally admitting to me that he did not know and in any case could care less (Leading me to believe that he had received his few sporadic payments in terms other than cash.) I did not press the matter.
Several years later I was attending a performance of Poulenc's Dialogue of the Carmelites at the Met. During the final act (If you have not seen it, the finale is the defining moment of the whole opera, a female chorus of nuns singing as they make there way to the scaffold, their song reduced slowly by the music of the guillotine until only a single voice remains) I was not particularly alert on this day and as I looked out into the aisles, a woman whom I mistook for one of the singers stole passed me. Convinced that I was finally losing my mind, I followed her out into the lobby, catching sight of her as she made for the exit. I caught a glimpse of her face, though I am sure she did not see me. The black cape of her habit lent her progress across the lobby a ghostly air as if I might have pulled it back only to find it had been a gust of wind animating a shredded garbage bag. As she started through the revolving doors she bumped into a couple and I saw her, quite clearly, the reflection of her hooded face framed in the glass, tiny white teeth pressing down on her full bottom lip. They shrank away from her, as if fearing that they're union might be rendered barren by her chastity. It was the last time I saw her, reborn as a bride of Christ.
I might try and render some explanation of her transformation from sensualist to saint but I'm afraid it would be nothing more profound than those typically expounded by the garden variety fumbling Freudian. I would not cheapen her image with generalities. Suffice to say that sin cannot exist without it's mirror image, and that it somehow justifies it's opposite. Perhaps only god can tell the difference between the two. My own opinion (that her guilt ridden mind had driven her to assume the identity of her dead lover) seems, in the end quite superfluous. I close my account of V------'s existence, (the only record I have of her, as the photographs and videotapes she sent me were destroyed along with my apartment, in a fire some years ago) with an epigram of Bishop Berkeley's; a radical Idealist who maintained that we exist only in as much as we are perceived by the mind of God. ( I could be in error in this as I was never much of a philosophy student)
"Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few." To the theological truths of St Thomas's Summa, Anselm's ontological argument and Augustine's Confessions we may add V------'s doctrine of erotic transubstantiation, In which God can be glimpsed only in the eye's of one's conquests.