I let out another grunt plus a snort. ‘Jews wander on and on a
nd on … ’
‘Think about where your mouth has been. Think about where your hands have been, your open legs. Don’t you know what you have absorbed? You have sucked men’s sinning, their filth, Mira, right up inside you. These guys have sex with you. They watch you. They watch how you move. They do not think good thoughts about you, Mira.’
‘That’s not true! They do. I know they do.’
‘No. The whore is the woman he beats out of his body.’
I remembered Ezrah in his car with me when I first told him what I was doing, Ezrah in the car with me outside the temple during Yom Kippur, slamming the door. When he left me alone I pulled the shawl I was wearing up over my head and I covered my face. I slid my hand under my dress, into my underwear, and I lifted my leg. I stuck a finger inside my ass. The first time I ever felt there. A dark, tight, unloved inside.
This was how I atoned for our sins.
‘I knew it was from the very first time you came near me,’ Gio said. ‘You are an open furnace, able to feel anything. I’m telling you this for a reason.’
My throat constricted. I put my hands over my eyes.
‘If you repent for your sins, Adonai will take you back. God promised the whore His undying love. God sings to the whore His saddest love song. “And I will betroth thee unto me forever,” He sings, “I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness.” I am telling you, Mira, that there are whores who have been wandering in the desert for thirty years. They are the ones who truly know the Lord, our God, Adonai … ’
I took my hands from my eyes and looked out the window. God was not watching. He was not watching as I fucked!
We were back on the busy part of the highway, speeding by gas stops, bright cubes selling food.
‘After having sex with as many men as she could on the boat, Mary finally made it to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Cross.’
I wanted to blow this car up and die in the fire.
‘But she found that the church would not let her in. She tried to go in with the swell of the crowd, but as soon as she set foot at the threshold of the church, something repelled her, Mira, some kind of force.’ Gio paused. He kept checking on me. ‘Mary suffered this way five or six times, watching all the other people enter the building easily. And yet she could not go. There was some kind of force field repelling her. She felt it all over her body, inside herself too. Eventually, Mary gave up and stood in a corner of the court. And just when she gave up … ’ Gio paused again. He enunciated every word. ‘Mary knew it was the conscience of her uncontrollable lust that prevented her from going inside the church.’
I was leaking through the T-shirt in my underwear, sitting in blood on his white car seat.
‘Mary needed the Mother of God. She wept and grieved and beat her breast. “Help me,” she prayed to the Mother of God. “It is not a man that I need anymore!” She got down on her knees and this is what she prayed: “Virgin and Lady who gave birth to the Word, I see that it is not suitable or decent for me, defiled as I am, to look upon you, you who always kept your body and soul clean. It would be right for you in your purity to reject and loathe my impurity … ”’
Gio was making his voice high and girlish.
‘“But help me, please,’’ he continued, ‘‘for I am alone. Receive my confession, woman to woman, and let me enter the church. Do not deprive me of the sight of that most precious wood upon which was fixed God-made-man whom you carried and bore as a Virgin!”’
I started laughing at Gio’s performance as the whore. I sat through the rest of it, hating him.
‘“Oh Lady, let the doors be open to me so that I may adore the divine cross! He showed us how to die to the world – how to die in our heads, not in our bodies; how to let ourselves die by burying ourselves in horror, to die to the world but to rise and live again. I beg you, Mother, from whom God became flesh, to guarantee my promise and I will never again defile my flesh by immersing myself in horrifying lusts!“’
‘My lusts are not horrific,’ I said.
God, I am not religious. God, let my vagina melt into the seat. God, let my two feet descend to the highway, through sudden holes in the floor of this car. Let me make sparks with my flesh on concrete.
‘I can feel every cock that has ever been inside me.’
Buildings grew up ahead. We were back in the city, back near the club.
‘When she promised to never again defile herself,’ Gio said, in his normal voice, ‘Mary was finally let into the church. Mary was ready to be led to salvation. The voice of the Mother of God came to her and said, “Cross the river Jordan and there you will find rest.”’
‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘When I met her, Mira, Adi had already been wandering for years. She was a naked girl with no hair on her vagina who had not eaten for years.’
I was swallowing, fighting the vomit back down. I closed my eyes to shut up my throat.
Gio’s whole body was shaking strangely. I wanted to curl far away from him. I had the bloody pillow behind my back. I took it and hugged it: Mommy’s special pillow.