The Gargoyle

Maria

That was my fear, but this Christmas Day had shown me that Maria

All my life I had heard foolish stories about love: that the more you give away, the more you have. This had always struck me as nothing more than a violation of basic mathematical principles. But watching Maria

It comforted me that love was her soul’s natural condition and not an aberration built on fantasies. Her love was not a lemur, an animal so named because Portuguese explorers in Madagascar noted large shining eyes peering out of the forest when they sat around their campfires. Convinced that these eyes belonged to the spirits of their departed companions, they christened the animals with the Latin word meaning “spirits of the dead.”

When the last turkey leg had been eaten, Maria

After she helped me into bed, Maria

The briefcase was fat with sleeves of bills, fifties and hundreds. In my days of pornography and drugs, I’d seen the occasional satchel of cash, but nothing like this. I spun the numbers around my skull, trying to come up with a rough estimate. It was difficult to do the math-I was still too stu

Two hundred thousand dollars. Which she’d left sitting under the bed all day. Which anyone could have walked away with. I called her stupid; she laughed and replied that against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain. And really, she asked, who would look under a hospital bed on Christmas Day for a briefcase of money?

“You think I can’t afford you.” She stated it as if there were no possibility that she might be wrong. She wasn’t. When I nodded, she said, “I’m ready for my present now.”

Over the previous weeks I’d fashioned dozens of versions of the same little speech, like a high school boy plotting how to ask his favorite girl to a dance, but now that the moment was upon me, I felt only uncertainty. Timidity. Embarrassment. I wanted to be suave but, just like that high school boy, I was struck dumb. It was too late to escape, and I knew that my gifts-there were three-were too personal. Too stupid. My hours of labor had been to no avail: what prideful delusions had convinced me to make these gifts? She’d think them childish; she’d think me too forward, or not forward enough. I wished for lightning bolts to blitz my room, to pierce the bedside table where my silly little offerings were hidden in a drawer.

I had written three poems for her. The spinesnake laughed at the sheer arrogance of my efforts.

All my life, I had written poetry, but I’d never shown it to anyone. I hid my writing, and hid myself within the writing that I kept hidden-only a man unable to handle the actual world would create another one in which to hide. Sometimes when I realize that I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted, a wave of discomfort shudders down my back, as if another man were standing too close to me at the public urinals.

Sometimes I feel there is something profoundly unmanly about any writing, but poetry is the worst of all. When I was gripped by fits of cocaine paranoia, I would burn my poetry journals and watch the burning pages peel off one another in layers, the flames spitting little gray flakes into the air. As my ashen words swirled into the heavens, it pleased me to know that my i

Speaking a woman into bed was safe, because my words disappeared with the vapor of my spoken breath; writing a poem for a woman was fashioning a weapon that she could later use to assault me. Giving away one’s writing meant that it would be out there in the universe forever, ready to come back to wreak vengeance at any moment.

So I’d blown it. It was Christmas Day, I was stuck in the skeleton bed, I owed Maria

My words were, and are, unworthy of Maria

But I had no choice, so I reached into the desk drawer and-LOSER-screwed my pale imitation of courage to an imaginary sticking place. I pulled out the three single sheets of paper, closed my eyes, and held the poems in Maria

“Read them to me,” she said.

I protested that I couldn’t. These were poems, and my voice was a deal at the crossroads gone horribly wrong. A fiery hellhound had broken into my throat and left behind a busted guitar with rusty strings. My voice was-is-majestically unfit for poetry.

“Read them to me.”

Now it is years later. You have this book in your hands, so obviously I’ve overcome my fear about giving away written words. But the three poems I read to Maria

When I finished, she crawled into my bed. “That was lovely. Thank you. Now I’ll tell you how we first met.”