An Advent Short Story

by Jeffrey A. Vamos

Based on Matthew 1:18-25

Read during the service on December 23, 2001 at First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto

I first met Pip Marihart at Casper Nickerson’s party, where every not-quite-out-of-the-closet gay man in the small town of Begget Colorado went for Christmas Eve Eve. It was a sort of wink-wink, nod-nod tradition among the fledgling gay community, such as it was in that little corner of the small world, emphasis on small. The penultimate Eve of Christmas tradition spread, as most diseases do, by word of mouth, and I’d heard about it that first year of my tenure at St. Ignatius College from Stewart Simenson, one of the T.A.’s of the American Literature Class I was teaching. His gay-dar seemed to pick me up like a Zeppelin at 20,000 feet. During my first year there in Begget, I suppose I had to be there, inasmuch as it was one of the few occasions where one could be who one was in that place.

I slowly walked up the snowy steps of Casper’s house on Elm Street, an appropriate enough street for the Rococo nightmare that was the interior of his house, and found Casper greeting me even before I’d rang the bell.

"Joseph! You’ve just got to do something about those dreadful boots." Casper, who prided himself on his high fashion sense, was fond of teasing me for my rather utilitarian one.

I walked into Casper’s dank living room, predominated by a nauseous maroon with garish paisley curtains, and carefully began removing my Wellingtons. The humid moisture of too many humans in too small a space condensed on my cold glasses. It was through those foggy glasses that I first saw this sprightly specimen of a man (albeit a rather effeminate one). Pip was in the middle of instigating a game (now a tradition at Casper’s party each year, I understand) that I believe is called Chubby Bunny. The object was to articulate clearly the phrase "Chubby Bunny" while continuing to add an additional marshmallow to one’s mouth with each new attempt.

He was wearing an electrified sweater, depicting the Holy Family in flashing colored lights on his chest, a fashion statement so horrific, so off-the-charts ghastly that it suited him to a tee, I would later find. With each new flash, the Mary and Joseph and donkey would get smaller and move closer to Bethlehem, just to the right of his armpit, until reaching its destination, whereupon the scene would begin again, a sort of garish, Sisyphean version of the Christmas story. And although it was inconvenient to have to plug and unplug himself as he occasionally needed to move from room to room (I imagine such a scene drew too much current to be battery powered), he didn’t move much, simply holding court on the burgundy claw-footed loveseat in Casper’s dreadful front parlor for most of the night.

"May I inquire as to where one can purchase such a unique sweater as that?" I asked him.

"I never divulge the identity of my religious supplier," he retorted, sniffing and shaking his head rather like a drug addict. Although he said it jokingly, I would later learn that Pip Marihart took his religion—admittedly a rather strange brand—very seriously.

It was only a few days after first meeting him at that party, which ended with Pip leading the entourage out onto the freezing porch, and singing over and over "Silent Night" to an indifferent neighborhood, that quite against my better judgment and will, I fell in love with Pip Marihart. I believe that there are very few persons in this world who, for whatever reason—pheromones, biophysical energy patterns, Astrological conditions, whatever—have a kind of inexorable power over one. So it was with Pip, with respect to me. The experience of falling in love with him, in a way far from joyful, was profoundly humbling to me, almost painful. I found myself caught in a kind of spell, since I found it such a compulsion to be with Pip every moment of every day those first few weeks. Pip would finish his nursing shift, and I’d be waiting there, like a dog for his bowl, rubbing anxiously the elbow patches on my jacket as I waited for him to come to the hospital lobby.

It was further humbling inasmuch as I was forced to concede the truth of such a hackneyed notion as this: that opposites do, in fact, attract. I’d like to think, for all my intellectual pride, that there’s something subtler to love than that. For Pip became the Ectomorph to my Endomorph, the Jerry Lewis to my Orson Wells (in his corpulent, epicurean late phase of life of course), preferring Telletubbies to my Telleman, Gilligan’s Island to my Paradise Lost.

Perhaps love is so painful because it gives you a sense that you are profoundly missing a piece of yourself. And if you were not to meet the person who seemed to hold that thing, that lost fragment, you might never know you needed it, going about your life in a kind of somnambulistic comfort, never deviating from what seems rational and expected.

It was almost exactly one year after Casper Nickerson’s party that Pip and I were married. I say married, and of course you know that such is a euphemism in a world so hard-wired to think of marriage as the exclusive domain of those couples endowed with procreative ability. We were in Maui, where we had decided to celebrate the end of my term, and on the second-to last day, Pip awakened that morning in a rather solemn mood. We were lying together on the beach sipping our coffee on the lounge chairs when Pip blurted, "We have to get married." He said this as if stating a matter of fact, and smoothed his T-shirt over his chest; I believe it was his favorite one, sporting a depiction of Jesus smiling, looking out onto the world and giving a big thumbs up.

I reacted to Pip’s proclamation with some resistance. If I have adopted any kind of religion, it is that of convention, and such religion does not recognize the marriage of one man to another man. If I could say I had a religious practice, it was that of doing things rightly, not calling attention to oneself. Though we argued a bit, and though I put up some resistance, I reluctantly agreed.

And so on the final evening of our trip, standing on Napili Beach at sunset before a small Native clergyman in a Hawaiian shirt and grey jacket, we exchanged our vows. The small man read the holy words with such reverence and tenderness that I actually found a tear come to my jaded eye. He apparently read a sort of conglomeration of scriptures, which made them both awkward and beautiful at the same time. "And they shall cleave to one another, and the two shall become one flesh."

Pip stood there standing up straight like a military man, looking more serious than I’d ever seen him.

It was later that night, before we went to bed, that Pip insisted that we complete our marriage ceremony with a private, rather puerile ritual—that ritual most associated with prepubescent boys wherein they cut their fingers and exchange blood, thereby binding them together for life. Pip knew it was juvenile, but had always pictured it this way and insisted.

"Those whom God has joined together let no man separate," he said as we held our sliced and bloodied fingertips together there for a few moments, and then Pip licked mine clean, then his own, and we soon found ourselves lying drowsily between the flower-print sheets, exhausted from the day. As I entered that state between sleep and wakefulness, the Maui breeze blew through our small bungalow on that last Edenic night, and I spooned that small man whom I’d grown to love against my will, as was our pre-sleep ritual. That moment seems in my memory to be one of the very few of my life in which I could say that I was truly at rest from the enervating business of critiquing the world, or seeming right to it, putting up a solid face—that moment lying there when it was difficult to tell where he ended and I began. That evening, the blood ritual that completed it: this seemed to be the actual consummation of our unconventional marriage.

It was exactly two nights later when Casper Nickerson’s party rolled around once again. Pip had made the unfortunate decision to begin one of his 24-hour nursing shifts the day after we’d gotten back. He had agreed to meet me at Casper’s after his shift, but an hour after the appointed meeting time I found myself nervously swirling a glass of scotch, while Casper tried in vain to entice his guests into playing a round of Twister: The Christmas Version (a prize find on Ebay). The party was sorely lacking Pip. And I was getting worried.

A call to our house yielded no answer. So I decided I’d leave and go look for him. I went to the hospital and spoke with Julie, Pip’s nursing colleague on the Obstetrics unit where he worked. When I mentioned Pip, she stiffened and took a deep breath as she told me that he had left over two hours before.

"Do you know where he went?" She looked at me askance and began absent-mindedly cleaning up what looked to be a rather scattered tray of obstetrical instruments, and I noticed that there were a few small spatters of blood on the sleeve of her olive-green scrubs.

"He left a bit early. He didn’t say anything to me."

"He was supposed to meet me at a party at 8 O’clock. Do you have any idea where he is?"

Julie faced me square and seemed for a long moment to look inquiringly into my eyes, then suddenly looked away again. "No. Really. I’m sorry. Maybe try him at home."

It was an hour later, after poking around in the mall where I thought he might be doing some last minute shopping, when I walked up the thickly painted gray wooden steps of our porch, and began to stomp the snow off my Wellingtons. No sooner then did the door open, and Pip emerge in his cupid-print Pajamas and bunny slippers, closing the door quickly behind him.

"Shhh. Shhh. Quiet, Love," he said, puffs of condensed breath billowing from his mouth. He pressed his bandaged fingertip to my lip, and we stood there in the cold and silence, frozen for a moment.

"What—?" I whispered. Suddenly, a sound as shrill as a train screeching to a halt emitted from the inside of the house, ending in a kind of painful, spasmodic rhythm.

"What? Who?" I asked, but Pip was soon inside the house, headed toward my study, where the sound was coming from. I followed him into the room, and discovered a small wailing newborn child, nestled in a cardboard box among some blankets.

"Piper Reilly Marihart, what is going on?"

"I promised, Joseph." Pip tenderly picked up the child and deftly placed a bottle of what I assumed was milk in its mouth.

"You promised what?"

"I promised that he would be my son."

"You promised whom?"

"Marta."

"Who’s Marta?"

"Listen, Joseph, we don’t have much time. I’ve got to pack up. I’m taking the car. We need to leave tomorrow. I hope you’re coming."

"Hope I’m coming. What? Why? Have you gone completely crackers, you lunatic?"

Pip suddenly stopped looking at the baby, and for the first time I saw on his face a look I’d never seen. It wasn’t quite anger; perhaps it was not unlike one would expect from a lioness whose cubs have been threatened.

"She died tonight, Joseph." Pip looked away into the distant mirror as the baby quietly snorted and sucked. "She had been in labor for 48 hours. I was there for the last 20 of them. I don’t expect you to understand spiritual things, Joseph. I don’t know why, but when I was with her, she saw something in me. I can’t explain it.

"A few hours before the baby was delivered, while she was still conscious, I was alone in the room with her. I bent over her and she grabbed the cross I’m wearing here, and caressed it. She asked me to turn out the lights. She was from Mexico, here illegally, and she didn’t have a husband. She knew what was going to happen.

"‘Promise you keep," she kept saying. " ‘You keep, I choose you." I promised her, and made the sign of the cross on her forehead.

"A few hours later, her uterus tore as the baby freed itself from whatever it was that was preventing it from coming out, and she bled to death. I told Julie that I would take the baby to the Nursery. But I came home instead. I’m sure she knew what was happening. But, they are going to be looking for me in the morning." By this time, Pip had put the baby back into its cardboard crib, and into a black suitcase he started packing his clothes, which he had piled onto the floor of the study. "Get some sleep Joseph."

"Get some sleep. Are you kidding me?"

"Shh. You’ll wake him up again."

"Piper Marihart, what do you mean, you’re leaving tomorrow. You’re taking the car. What about me? You’re leaving me, just for some baby that you don’t even have any responsibility for? A baby that legally needs to be the responsibility of Child Protective Services, or the local orphanage, or whatever agency it is? It’s illegal to take this child. And what do you know about raising a baby. What ever happened to all that ‘Those whom God has joined together, let no man separate,’ blah blah blah—crap?"

Pip, at that moment, did something I never would have suspected him capable of. He slapped me. It wasn’t a strong slap, it did sting, but it was a sort of gentle forehand to the cheek. And the thing was, he did it with such confidence in his eyes, with such an absence of fear, with such a single mindedness, that it made me quake with fright.

"Maybe it’s not man separating us, Joseph. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. I love you. And I’ll miss you."

"But I have tenure. I can’t leave. Pip…." As I went to embrace the small frame of the man who had been my one true love, I touched his shoulder. It seemed as rigid and cold as stone, and he remained silent. I believe I did see a small tear forming at the corner of his eye, and his lip quaked just a bit, as he mechanically continued his packing.

That night, and the few hours of half-sleep that accompanied it, are all something of a fog. The thin hours of the morning are those that call up the angels and demons that populate that state between sleep and wakefulness. I took the couch in the living room, but could not really sleep. The baby slept with Pip upstairs in the bedroom. As much as falling in love with such a whimsical man humbled me, this sudden turn of events, this sudden rending of the garment of our nascent marriage seemed to place me in a state of shock. I lay there on the couch watching the fire in the fireplace die, and shivered, and for the first time since I was an adolescent, I wept. I cried myself into a state of semi-sleep. Pip had put on Christmas music on the CD player in the bedroom, presumably to calm not only himself but the baby, and so I drifted off to the nightmarish sounds of "Frosty the Snowman" and "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer."

It’s difficult to describe what happened in the middle of that cold night, the fire gone out and the cold having taken over the house. I am not a dreamer. By dreamer, I mean not only that I’m not one who entertains fantasies, but also that I usually do not have those dreams that occur in sleep. This night, however, was different. It’s curious to note the effect of dreams on a non-dreamer: as I imagine the impact those dreams had on my psyche, or spirit, or soul, or whatever you want to call it, perhaps a metaphor to describe it would that of a piece of steel between hammer and anvil. And, I can’t even tell you what the dreams were about—I myself have only small inklings of them, small fragments: a beautiful young woman carrying a sword; a crocodile; a lamb with a human head; and of course the face of that child, that supple raisin of a child whom Pip had brought home with him. Such fragments bespoke another world, of whose existence I had somehow stumbled upon, having no knowledge or clue that it existed but whose existence suddenly seemed to make clear the meaning of all our waking hours. And I was, in that state between sleep and wakefulness, filled with a profound sense of fear, and of humility.

It was as I was still dwelling in this nether world when I felt Pip’s warm hand upon my cheek, gently calling me back into time. "Joseph?" I awoke to the face of the child, sleeping in Pip’s arms. He held it up to my face, like a talisman against all the dark inadequacies and failures of my spirit. "Joseph, I need you to watch him. I need to go to the store. I’m out of diapers."

It would only be a short time later, when I learned more of the subtleties of an infant’s early digestive process, that I realized what a dire circumstance this was.

Before I could respond, Pip had placed the sleeping cherub in my lap and was out the door. I cleared my eyes of sleep and in the flashing Christmas tree lights that had been continuing to pulse on the living room walls through that long night, I stared for a long time, as in a trance, into this infant’s peaceful, sleeping face. I should say that if there exists a cure for the cynical heart, the only thing that it could possibly be is the face of a newborn human being. Perhaps the dreams that I’d had deluded me, or forced me into some sort of altered state—or perhaps one could say that it was out of that dream-fog that I had the ability to see more clearly than I ever had. For it was with that spiritual vision that I looked upon this child and saw in him the seed of the universe. And I somehow knew beyond doubt that I was meant to be his father.

I still do not account myself a religious man. But on the other hand, I believe it is only religion that can make one do what seems irrational to the rest of the world, what seems to cut right against the grain of comfort and even survival—and to base this irrational behavior on exactly what is unseen. What is unproven. It was with that curious certainty that I left the infant sleeping in his cardboard box, just for a moment, and started the car. And began packing my things into my leather suitcase.

When Pip returned with the diapers and some extra supplies, he looked at me with surprise, finding the car running, finding myself packing the suitcase. "We can come back for the rest of our stuff later," I said. "We’d better hurry. They’ll be looking for us."

Later that morning, we saw the sun rise over the Rocky Mountains as we headed south for Mexico, and Nat King Cole was singing, "O Come, All Ye Faithful" on the radio.

"What shall we name him?" asked Pip, breaking the silence.

I paused for a moment and listened to the music. "…O come, all ye citizens to Bethlehem…"

"We shall call his name… Jesus," I blurted out, with a half smile. "Hay-sooos." I said slowly.

A moment later, just as we were approaching the county line, we passed a police car stationed at the side of the road, whose flashing blue lights seemed a stark contrast to the Christmas lights we’d left behind in our cozy home. Pip hid with the child for a moment, in the seat well and out of view.

"It’s all right. He’s not stopping us," I said as I gently pushed down on the accelerator pedal.

The End.

© 2001 by William Henry Vamos