Chapter 4. Jefferson Jones

“...We don't have runaway capitalism in this country, in this world. You simply cannot loan money to people that can't pay it back and survive, as the lender...”

The only reason Jefferson Jones still listens to the Rush Porcine Show (on the Excellence in Radio Network) is to keep tabs. He keeps tabs on Rush because he’s sure Rush keeps tabs on him, like he keeps tabs on the most obscure of liberal senators; of course, Rush can hire tab-keepers to keep tabs, maybe even interns in tabulatory grad school who will surf for Jefferson Jones and tab Jefferson Jones should Rush need to take Jefferson Jones on in a media-hosted war of words again. Despite the resource gap, Jones fights on for his tabs. And he keeps them.

“Come on, people,” the bombastic radio-show host urges, “isn’t it obvious that every single person in this administration is Peter Principled? Do we really need more America bashing from this administration...”

No, Jones doesn’t really believe that fantasy; fifteen years after he’d gained his modicum of literary fame by fictionalizing Rush, Jones’ paranoia gland has neither the energy nor strength remaining to imagine Rush as Watching Him. Fifteen years after the publication of Jefferson Jones Takes over the Rush Porcine Show, thirteen and a half since the multimedia version and Jones still mulls it nearly every day. Think Rush is stuck reliving his glories of the Clinton days? Ha!

Sure, once in a while, Rush gets a tiny urge to slag the once neo-megalomaniacal author off in an interview or a throwaway remark on the radio show, but Jefferson Jones isn’t worth Rush’s while. The face of the Republican Party clearly has bigger – and preferably endangered – fish to fry.

“...Obama! I mean, you Obama people cannot have it both ways. You want lost opportunities, you’re gonna get lost opportunities...”

Lost opportunities, Jones muses –

•••••

– momentarily, but an angry blare from the dwarfing, ugly gray hulk of a pickup truck behind wakes him enough to automate the sensible Citroën into motion. Before Jones can push the car – Heather’s car, he hates driving – all the way through the intersection, the lumbering hunk jerks out to his left then accelerates past in a roaring of metal machinery, its two youthful occupants engaged in animated good-natured debate.

On a perfectly good Sunday and with a home less than a mile from campus, Jefferson Jones can hardly justify driving in.

I mean, when i was their age, he calculates, i railed against widescale American acceptance of the Gulf War. The first one. I threw blood at “counter-protestors” even when the cameras weren’t watching. All right, not real blood. Caro syrup. Hollywood blood. But still. All he knows now is that he’d had to put distance between him and them. His wife. Her daughter.

He pulls the car over, maybe 50 yards from his cornerside building on campus. It’s just beyond his reach, that sanctuary. From here, he could even walk it in three minutes.

He sits.

Jefferson Jones’ voice inside turns panicky:

Why the feeling of stifling nearness?

Not closeness. Nearness.

And does she even know?

How many more times can i do this and does she even know and before, when i was their age, well, why the feeling of oh so, so, ... “so after years and years of Democrats, led on by those like Biden who gained currency with the liberal crowd by saying how the war was unjust because it was for oil...”

•••••

To subsume what happened, Jefferson Jones seeks refuge instead in a younger voice accented with a David Hare obsession.

Open script. Scene one. Action.

Curtain rises. A non-descript kitchen at which a non-descript husband and wife – these are JEFFERSON and HEATHER – sit across each other at a round, non-descript kitchen table.

JEFFERSON: It’s time.
HEATHER: As always.
JEFFERSON: For work.
HEATHER: On Saturday.
JEFFERSON: On Saturday.
HEATHER: Leaving us.
JEFFERSON: Have to.
HEATHER: Leaving again.
JEFFERSON: Have to.
HEATHER: Problems exist.
JEFFERSON: They do.
HEATHER: It’s Saturday.
JEFFERSON: It is.
HEATHER: Let’s do...
JEFFERSON: Do what?
HEATHER: Do nothing.
JEFFERSON: It’s time.
HEATHER: On Saturday.
JEFFERSON: It is.
HEATHER: How worried?
JEFFERSON: Not worried.
HEATHER: Not worried?
JEFFERSON: Very worried.
HEATHER: Very worried?
JEFFERSON: Not really.

•••••

When he finally drives on, he realizes he shouldn’t be driving. He hates driving. When he parks in front of his building, he grinds undercarriage metal against the concrete parking bumper.

Jefferson Jones hates fucking parking, too.

•••••

Jefferson stands to leave. He confirms that the flask is still in the suitcoat pocket, then approaches Heather and kisses her on the forehead.

HEATHER: Need anything?
JEFFERSON: Have everything.
HEATHER: Sunglasses, maybe.
JEFFERSON: No need.
HEATHER: No need.
JEFFERSON: Back soon.
HEATHER: See you.

Jefferson exits.

HEATHER: Miss you.

Curtain.

Chapter 3. Vicky Helena Christina Barcelona

Taking it all for granted at 30,000 feet over Iceland, Helena eschews the airline’s movie offering for Vicky Christina Barcelona on her portable DVD player. She’d gotten the DVD – a cheap dubbed-only version – in Esperia for like $3. The player was a silly, showy gift from Brad. The anxieties are all her own.

•••••

So Christina (Scarlett Johansson) and Vicky (Rebecca Hall) fly to Barcelona for the summer, generally act like goofy American layabout tourist for a few minutes of screen time, and finally meet a swaggering Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) still high off of No Country For Old Men but outfitted with a much better haircut.

Director Woody Allen, deep in what will someday be called the Dirty Old Man Period of his career, then has Juan Javier propose A Menage. Ooooh.

“Iu malsimilu desirim,” explains Christina to Vicky, “iu plus, unu ontraxitivu amu.”

Hmmm, Helena thinks, ontraxitiva amu ... “Counterintuitive love,” maybe...?

Helena decides that she’s a little crushy for Scarlett Johansson – even though both her Christina and Christina’s pal Vicky are looking more than a bit vacant most of the time – and a lot in lust with Javier Bardem.

How could Christina try to pass a whirlwind flight to isolated Spain with this man? Clearly a Brad type, figures Helena: kind, giving, but conservative beyond appearances.

•••••

Psychoticartistic ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz) enters this paella of hormones, poetry, classical Spanish guitar score, and New York City-imported neurosis all descaro y ajenjo, crackling energy putting her excellently in immediate, burningly direct opposition to Javier Antonio’s unflappable cool.

A tiny but audible “oh” from Helena, who stirs in her seat. That’s sexy, she thinks, as Penelope triumphs instantly for the attention of her fancy over Scarlett and Javier.

Alas, Maria Elena can’t stay on-screen forever and when she departs the scene, Helena finds her attention dissipating somewhat – as do we all at this point in Vicky Christina Barcelona, as writer Woody Allen broadly paints by numbers for a while.

She wanderingly wonders about Brad’s talent. Maybe he does have the high-level talent the National High School Theatre Competition (Northeast Region) judges assessed, but, you know, real Star Quality like Javier Bardem or Penelope Cruz or even a Jefferson Jones?

I mean, Maria Elena is an *artist* given to crazy whims and tsunami-sized passion; Brad’s actions are all about some future he hasn’t planned. It’s like he wants to be conservative and do things the right way, but has no clue what things he has.

Wait a minute, Helena think. Is that what i want? Somebody with a future all planned out? Am i a Vicky and not a Christina?

•••••

Later, in a completely blatant burning of screentime to push Vicky Christina Barcelona over 90 minutes, director Allen introduces a sub-subplot wherein Vicky kinda sorta goes out on this kinda sorta date (to the movies, of course) with some dude from her Spanish class or whatever.

Flip, perhaps, but you know how you know of how little importance these scenes are? The actor that plays whoever the guy is gets no pre-movie screen credit at all, forever to exist only to clever trollers of imdb.com. Plus, during this scene, the only information imparted by Vicky here – Beware, spoilers – is repeated, like, twenty times throughout the course of this movie yet.

In any case, in the low point of Vicky Christina’s narration (sigh) comes when Vicky and said stiff go on the kinda sorta rendezvous. “The movie was a great success,” intones the narrator, drawing direct contrast with this one, quite frankly.

“The movie was a great success.” Helena turns to pass along some sarcastic crack. Plus, she craves a glance at her pretty boy. And Brad is a pretty boy, all jokes and kidding aside.

“That’s a pretty bad li – ”

She stops herself from further addressing the blissfully empty seat neighboring; Brad isn’t with her, of course. Helena’d departed America for Esperia six weeks ago, leaving him behind to wait. Nevertheless, she constantly feels him near, he always seems there – not in the modern, VoIP, Skype, email sense of continual virtual presence of another, but the age-old immediate feeling that we are together.

Helena oftimes finds herself viewing life as picture in frame and lovely, flighty, caring, self-centric, sensitive, oversensitive Brad always there. Though not the focal point of every move she makes, whether portrait or dot in pointillistic pier, Brad draws the attention. He’s a steadfast point in colors.

Sameness is ahead, thinks Helena. Is that bad?

•••••

Then there’s the much-discussed threesome stuff between Scarlett ‘n’ Javier ‘n’ Penelope, but come on. Director Woody don’t do sex scenes. He’s a New York guy: Much loud talk, not necessarily action.

On the other hand, the third-person retelling (complete with sweat-inducing kissy scene with the matinee starlets) of Christina’s affair is actually artistically honest and true to life – unfortunately, Woody has killed the device through overuse by this point in the film.

•••••

It all ends rather swiftly and anti-climactically. Vicky and Christina, in a classic Gilliamesque way, get the bookended conclusion, i.e. back in the airport returning to good ol’ NYC, looking empty-minded rather than stunned with much to mentally digest.

Helena is well unimpressed and recalling Brad’s take: “It was good. I liked it.” Of course, that might have been his review on any number of movies, as Helena can’t recall any derivation from his three standard reviews, the others being “It was pretty good. I liked it” and “It was good for what it was. I liked it.”

Just once Helena would like him to be blown away. Or utterly repulsed. She doesn’t know why. Maybe to prove ... something.

•••••

Helena won’t touch down in America for another four hours. She told Brad she was taking an overnight flight and wouldn’t arrive until late, that she’d see him tomorrow. Was it wrong for her not to want to see him immediately after a month and a half apart, she briefly considered before falling asleep with images of Penelope Cruz in her head.

Chapter 2. Déjà verra

Abélard came at length to Paris,
where the art of dialectics was flourishing,
and he,
presuming on his gifts.

From this small inception
his fame began to spread abroad
No long time thereafter he was smitten
! Grevious !
brought upon him by his immoderate zeal for...


study.

•••••

Brad was heavy in the throes of a bout of déjà verra. The baggage claim with its overlapping snakescale plates silent and unmoving, that particular beer-gutted skycap flirting with that particular Hertz agent, the angle of his eyesight to his patched up backpack at this moment: He’d see it all again, to be sure.

Déjà verra.

Brad’s bleary-eyed theory about airports is that they are a maelstrom of déjà verra, a veritable critical mass of I-will-do-this-again.

Because you will.

Standing still, life was happening to Brad, all around Brad. A glance at his cell phone display for the time was useless. The colon between hour and minute readings wasn’t blinking to indicate seconds passing – Wasn’t it supposed to? Or was it?

•••••

The stream of consciousness washes him up on the shores of some stuff he’d gotten from spring semester’s Astronomy 101; not that he was particularly fond of science, astronomy or anything related. He’d merely employed the actor’s old short cut in prepping for an exam: Straight memory dump of key information lifted from the text, set to a thespiary tone and acted out in your head if it helps.

(Clyde, the junior who taught Brad this trick, claimed he could automatically reframe his textbook into the rhythms of Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter as he read it. Clyde, it was generally reckoned around the department, was often full of shit.)

Ultimately, all the memorization he’d done of key passages in the texts hadn’t mattered at all. The quiz was multiple choice.

No matter. From Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity – “Good choice,” enthused Jasper. “That book is mean. Simple, but mean.” – inwardly Brad recited.

“The objective time of a physical occurrence can be inferred from the time we perceive it by allowing for the velocity of transmission...”

And if we don’t perceive it?

This interruption from some other section of the mind, a peanut gallery to Brad’s player. Hey, you gotta practice the improv, right?

“There are now a number of different ways of fixing position in time, which do not differ merely as to the unit and the starting-point. Indeed, as we have seen, if one event is simultaneous with another in one reckoning, it will precede it in another, and follow it in a third...”

•••••

Events in spacetime, simultaneous. A young man in 2009 awaiting his possessions after a journey. The day before a brilliant mind first enters the great university as though to own it in the 12th century. A young woman approaching Iceland through the air, another behind nine centuries without companionship in her education – both with life-changing lovers rapidly approaching. Millions of bedrooms across history hosting a great flow of sex and orgasm. A sinning Christian clergyman reincarnated as fox. A raft ride down the Mississippi or a rowboat turn down the Hudson. Blood spilling. Corpses buried and exhumed and reburied. Babies born.

•••••

...and drifting between ABC and BWI, Brad concludes that Baltimore / Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport is just not proper space at all, but rather a mere way station for the body.

Into his eighteenth minute awaiting his luggage, Brad was taken with the certain knowledge that he would be here again, doing this again, waiting for this luggage again. Déjà verra.

Airports are created and recreated, moment to moment, by possible futures bottled up the minds of passengers. Brad thought of his past, of Jasper in his fixed point in spacetime back in New Hampshire, mutual home to their upbringings. Brad thought of his future, of seeing Helena again – jesus, he missed her – and of studying with Jefferson “What the Fuck” Jones. Nostalgic times gone and tantalizing times to come were both mere hours away on either side of his existence. Or would be if time mattered here in BWI.

•••••

The rising sun seeps early red into the August sky over Corbeil, which is hard by the city of Paris. Abélard is awake and about before most of God’s diurnal creatures save the poorest of manservants, filled as he is with confident excitement.

If anyone were to see him, he might be taken for an angel. If anyone were to meet him, the very glow of Abélard’s stoked charisma would warm like a second sun.

And set over the rising sun, Abélard’s red hair burns with the radiance of heaven itself.

Damn straight he’s good.

•••••

Déjà verra isn’t Brad’s concept, dropped on him instead by Jasper: “I was sitting in class in September. I looked out the window and I didn’t actually see myself, but I knew that in April, I’d be able to go outside and see myself at that September moment. Through time. Like déjà vu in the future. Dude, man, it was mean.”

Nineteen minutes. Brad wonders vaguely if he’s old enough to truly feel nostalgic.

But he rapidly downshifts from sentiment, recalling departing on a five o’clock at Logan after alternatingly playing game after game of basketball throughout the night and smoking up Jasper’s brothers’ homegrown, followed by continuing to blast jays all the way to the New Hampshire border. (Talk about your redeye flights.) Like it matters that he’s got most of the day ahead of him, in this no-place no-time.

Twenty minutes.

•••••

Declassé enough to walk about like common folk, Abélard thinks smugly as the dawn sunbeams caress his cheekbones and trickle down his neck. He stops on the roadside and closes his eyes to feel the warmth. He knows that the essence of warmth on the skin, beauty of the scene, the pleasant feel of fine garments are defined by katholou which have first – only! – basis in the mind. His mind. On this morning, on the outskirts of Paris proper, Abélard feels very close to a loving God.

In his perception, reckons Abélard, sits comfortably the very warmth of warm, the beautifulness of beauty, the pleasantitude of pleasant. And his own perception is but one of millions of interpretations of an Earthly non-existent form of perfection.

At least that’s what he’d argued to dispatch William of Champeaux in debate. He could well argue the opposite tomorrow and triumph just as easily, Abélard realizes while allowing a smirk’s trace to curve one side of his mouth. Near-heresy yesterday becomes fashionable rhetorical spice today and divine dogma tomorrow.

At the height of his dialectical powers, Abélard is presuming on his gifts far beyond the warranty of his youth. He is awash in the vanity of false humility.

God chooses this point to disturb the ruminations of his scholarly servant: A strange sensation overcomes Abélard, an overwhelming feeling that he will visit this same space, but the other ‘way round, in egress from the great city. Surely shall it be a triumphant exit, almost certainly to Rome. For one brief moment, Abélard’s ungraspable future is within reach. Déjà verra.

•••••

Forget discovering signs of civilization: When those automatic doors swoosh open and the airport spits you out, you’re thrown into sprawling metropolic society. Brad cringes at the tsunami of natural light, his pupils contracting violently. Squinting to a point in the morning light, he fumbles about in his baggage for his sunglasses; his consciousness is at odds with his autonomic functions, as he attempts to calculate Paulie Knapp’s arrival time with all variables unknown. He’s also trying to remember where in the hell he picks up the bus to Blue Rock.

It will be some time before Brad remembers the sunglasses are in his jacket pocket.

•••••

The early August morn is passing warm, each particle sings with the Holy Spirit, and God is good. Abélard dons his shades and is ready to rush headlong into a wonderful, assured future.

Chapter 1. Chapter One

“Chapter one...” -- Woody Allen, Manhattan

Why this story and not that one? It’s not just because the dude got his balls cut off, i’m certain of that.

Okay, so i’m no Alexander Pope.

Restart.

Years ago, R. emailed me a somewhat oblique take on the melotraumatic tale of one Pierre Abélard, né Pierre du Pallet, and Héloïse. Today, she barely remembers sending it and surely has no recollection as to her motivation for passing it along. But Abélard Pierre and Héloïse have haunted my mindspace nearly daily since, even poking through pop culture into surreal life from time to time in between.

•••••

It’s hot. Summertime nighttime hot, but the oppressive chemical sting of the city air is miraculously blunted and the windows opened. Inside, the computer hums and i stare.

“What is it about this story that fascinates you so much?” asks R. She’s wearing the thin pink robe untied over nothing, like nothing she bridges the distance between from the study doorway to here. Making as to read the latest floating bit caught bobbing on the information ocean now entrapped on-screen, she leans forward so that her breasts cradle my neck and i can smell her. R. has a delicate powdery scent.

Something i'm saying about Abélard’s take on The Crucifixion as a moral influence for humanity and the implications on his own Conceptualist philosophy is interrupted by a gasp as R. roughly pinches my nipple; theories of Abélard as romantic love’s first original sinner are blown away as her hands ease downward toward my lap.

•••••

Briefly put, the story of Abélard and Héloïse runs as follows. Abélard, the greatest philosopher/dialectician of the late 11th/early 12th centuries, cockily came to Paris full of piss and red-wine vinegar. He is paid to privately tutor teenager/scholar (and o yes, serious anomaly) Héloïse by her guardian, her uncle Fulbert. Abélard seduces Héloïse. She gets pregnant. Fulbert demands that Abélard marry Héloïse, which would require Abélard to surrender his post at Notre-Dame University. Abélard marries Héloïse in a very privately, then has her live out her pregnancy in a nunnery. Unsatisfied, Fulbert hires a group of men to find Abélard and castrate him. Which they do.

And that’s not, as they used to say in the infomercials, all! Abélard recovers (well, sort of). He becomes a monk and basically insists Héloïse become a nun. Which she does (!). They correspond for several years thereafter, and Héloïse outlives Abélard by 27 years, the exact difference between their ages. Their bodies were reportedly exhumed more than once, ultimately ending up (maybe) in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

•••••

The story has endured, but endured barely, for the Abélard and Héloïse romelodrama appears to have surrendered much of its currency over the course of the last century. Mark Twain noted that while the real story was known to “precious few people,” the lovers’ “names are perfectly familiar to every body.” Twain describes the couple’s Lachaise gravesite as essentially an 1800s version of Jim Morrison’s, replete with treasures of affection, tokens of lust and damn near worship for the dead. Of course, Abélard and Héloïse are hardly household names today. At least not compared to, say, Jim Morrison.

•••••

So it’s the “terrible and nameless mutilation,” right? I mean, that’s what sticks. With the cruelest cut of all – promised ever thereafter to make your own sorrows “in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, so shall you come to bear them more easily” – came a legend that has endured to the present day.

•••••

Read enough on the original modern doomed couple, and you’ll believe there’s a bit of Abélard and Héloïse in every love affair. Identify with the hero’s brash youthful vanity, the student-teacher attraction dynamic, or the tricky beauty of mutual seduction; identify with the common adoration for bookishness and over-intellectualizing, the tragic breakup, or the lifetime long-distance life support for a mortally wounded relationship ... but identify you will.

That just makes it a proper love story.

And I believe.

•••••

An unbelievable breeze flows through the bedroom window to cool the sweat from our bodies, while outside teenagers raucously talk and laugh their way onto the next summer romance.

•••••

Tom Stoppard knew that of love, blood, and rhetoric – and this story is right chockfull of all three – it’s the blood that is essential.

The emasculation: It’s that particular detail at 900 years removed, admittedly perhaps pure shock value, which captures the 21st century imagination. The sacrificial castration makes the Abélard and Héloïse story true nearly beyond the realm of credulity, and therefore so so real.

Because what would you give for love?

Prologue, Introduction, Justification ... you know, that bit at the beginning

I’ve been wanting to write this story – these stories – for years, ever since receiving the first kernel of the story of Abélard and Héloïse. I resisted, reckoning that love as subject matter was little more than seriously overblown cliché. I mean, how do you avoid the cheesiness? How do you say something that hasn’t already been said?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you never do.

•••••

Nevertheless, i held out on writing what is today Abélard & Helena, divesting energy into post-apocalyptic science-fiction novels (o, you’ll be seeing that one soon enough), rewriting post-apocalyptic dramatic works for the stage, and crafting many a column on American football and European basketball.

Inspiration comes more slowly as age creeps into your brain, but it does arrive; you can milk it if you’re listening above the relentless brain of noisy information all around. Maybe it takes a perfect storm.

Further back than i care to remember or admit i imagined a writing method called “spontaneous plot.” In graduate school, my classmates and i were taught about “emotional form.” Newspapers, print media, the beloved novel today are all taking economic hits, with fewer and fewer reading serious works. And then, there’s the internet.

•••••

Inspiration: To write a serialized novel – you know, like Charles Dickens and some of those 19th-century Russian scribes – online, offering me the opportunity to craft these lonely ideas into pleasing prose. With links and pictures! All of it with the implied deadline of a hungry readership (that’s you) wanting a daily fix.

Plus, the online form is perfect for those so so many who feel they have no time to devote to sitting and reading a bit of proper novel. Whether the writing’s good or bad, the readership (that’s you) can’t say you don’t have the time...

•••••

Some parts of Abélard & Helena claim a genesis ten years old; at least one fragment germinated twenty years ago, but everything you read herein (hereon?) is new material. Despite the freedom allowed within the domain of Spontaneous Plot – to be explained in these pages, probably around chapter 31 – the entire storyline has been planned. There will be no “I’m just writing it, i don’t know where it’s going” from this writer.

If you’d like to comment either just to let me know you’re out there or if you find some egregious error in text, please write me at Abelard@37.com. Alternatively, if you’re down with Blog.com already, you can comment on these webpages. Though i won’t undertake any major rewriting until the entire novel is finished, i’ll correct typos and the occasional matter of fact (hey, it is fiction, after all) in previous entries.

•••••

Abélard & Helena is about love. It’s also about philosophy and God and passing your prime and conservative talk radio and sex and Mark Twain and Woody Allen and et cetera, but mostly i hope it’s a good novel.

Love,

Os Davis