682
THALIA SELZ
all the time in routine trammg flights, and with each crash we
co-eds pursued the survivors ever more hotly. It was more than
grab-pleasure-while-you-can. More than the youthful romantic
desire to give ourselves to potential heroes. It was as though we
were trying to get through, into the very crashes, to immolate our
own young bodies on those exploding gasoline pyres. We wanted
to die, too, consumed by our sex, the violence of the times, the
frightful rape of flame and history. We wanted to kill and
be
killed in one glorious holocaust-to become both the raper and
the raped in the red womb of our crazy collective suicide. And we
would do strange things to express our excitement. A certain
memory recurs.
I am lying flat on my back between the lectern and the
altar
in the Church of the Holy Trinity. I have not a stitch on and
the young gentleman on top of me, pumping sweatily away, hasn't
either. We have earlier in the day rejected both the Baptist and
the First Congregational as not provocative enough in their imagery,
and as I lie there afterward staring thoughtfully up at the medium–
high church Episcopalian stars in the modest plaster firmament
above me, I reflect (in that moment of awesome clarity which
always follows a climax with someone you in no way love)-I
understand
that what we have really been looking for up there
is
a good, old-fashioned, implacable Byzantine Pancreator like those
I have seen in slides of Monreale and Daphne (yes!).
Of course I am not ashamed. I use the Church of the Holy
Trinity the way I use the "boys," to excite me with the spectacle
of my own prodigious power. And to see if I can't get caught,
somehow, and be made
to
die for it all. Oh, sweet death,
with
your infinitely wet kisses.
Even Vasiliki has got her husband (acquired, of course,
through us) killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and now my family
finally shuns her. Even Jason won't speak to her when he meets
her on the street. It is as though they suspect she is a witch,
has
the Evil Eye, and so at last she can be allowed to pay (lucky
Vasiliki) for what she did to Joshua.
Am
I never to pay? Later my boy takes me to a forbidden
roadhouse with an imitation log-cabin bar. Not beer, but whiskey,
for the boys have money to squander in the quaint, rusticated
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