“One begins to understand how truly small this town is,” Mary pronounced, “when this is the news of the day.”
She and Ahinoam and Ada were sitting in the shade of the courtyard, preparing a small meal of fruits and cucumbers, yesterday’s bread and beans which required no fire, and she was half watching the men mill about, preparing to go to the house of a tax collector, which was the only thing they’d heard about all day. It had spread through the town, and the people of the synagogue had braved the heat, or rather been so bored of sitting alone in their houses, they had come to the door of Simon Peter’s house warning them against going.
“They are sinners,” old Jairus said.
And when he said it, what he meant was not only that they were tax gatherers, but that they kept company with whores and with those Jews who had turned their back on the synagogue and the congregation of Israel. They kept company with the painted men, and with sodomites and, in fact, they were sodomites.
“Why does your teacher eat with sinners?” they had demanded of Andrew.
The six times in the last three hours when someone had come to the house of Peter, begging them not to attend Levi’s, Jesus had only come to the door once, tired, unshaven, with a half grin on his face and his robe open at the collar.
“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick,” he said.
Mary remembered him like this when he was a boy, ignoring those he thought were foolish, shaking his head over nonsense, giving it no time, almost being a little too careless.
Before he headed out the door, Mary, still sitting in the courtyard, called to him.
“Yes, Ma Ma?”
“Jesus,” she crooned, reaching up and taking his hand, pressing it to her cheek, “Oh, my Jesus.”
“Ma Ma?”
“Is there not some way that… It’s quite hot. Do you think you might…?”
Jesus pulled his hand from Mary’s and looked down at her in exasperation.
“Why does everyone think—oh, never mind! Mother, I thought better of you.”
“You can think what you want of me, but it never hurts to ask.”
“Humph,” Jesus cleared his throat, kissed his mother perfunctorily on the head, and left her.
But whatever Mary had thought of her son’s tendency toward not caring enough, as the night was setting and a wind was gathering, when a group of men from the synagogue approached him and begged him not to attend the feast at the house of the sons of Alphaeus, Jesus changed.
“Go and learn what this means:” he almost shouted over the wind, “‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Stormy eyed, like the very lion of Judah finally roused, Jesus turned on Peter and Andrew, on James and John, Nathanael and Bartholomew, Simon Zelotes. He said, “Does anyone find fault with this?”
“No.”
“No.”
Some turned away, and some hung their heads.
Magdalene, Nathaniel and Simon Zelotes enthusiastically shouted:
“No, Master!”
They walked through town like white ghosts, silent as shadows on the strange business of being received, their robes flapping in the breeze. In a crooked line they made their way to the house of light and dancing where James Alpaheus answered the door in shock.
“But why shock?” Jesus said to him, “after all we said we would be here.”
James, who always smirked and mocked, again looked like he didn’t know what to do with his face. He nodded, blinked and bowed deeply.
“Please come into our home,” he said.
Levi, who seemed so tired so often, was sitting in a ring a very strange folk, and he leapt up from the painted men and the bejeweled women, those laughing and drinking, snorting powders and pouring little poisons into their wine, and ran to Jesus, almost like a boy.
“You all are here,” he said, and he looked surprised to see the gruff Peter.
“All of your are here. And this gracious lady.”
“That’s no lady, that’s Magdalene,” John said.
“Ignore him,” Magdalene said, holding her hand out to Levi, who kissed it.
“His mother dropped him as a child and, alas, he is simple. My name is Mary, but I am called Magdalene.”
“And I am called Matthew,” Levi said. “All my friends call me Matthew.”
Magdalene looked to Jesus, and he nodded.
“Then we will call you Matthew too.”
As Matthew clapped his hands, his brother came forward with two goblets of wine and said, “Wait, wait, there is more. There is plenty for you all. There is a sheep roasting in the pit, it was roasting for days and is so tender. You will love it. I promise. Come. Let me get your coats. And water, for your feet. Come, come!”
Peter looked at Levi, whom he wondered if he should call Matthew now too.
“Little Shit—your brother—is different now.”
James was laughing as he led Jesus and the others into the room, introducing him to his other companions.
“James was always hated for who he was, as a child,” Matthew explained, “and our father was a tax gatherer too. So he was rich and hated, and figured as long as you are hated, you might as well go on being hated. He isn’t like that with his friends. And you are his friends now.”
Magdalene was an eye. This is how she thought of herself so often. She was an eye and an ear veiled in red, and sometimes, if she sat back perfectly still she heard and saw everything, and no one saw here. The feast was lamb and pheasant and fish, and she who had grown up in wealth could not believe people lived like this. The homes of Marta and Lazarus were for priestly families and respectable men. There was no drinking out of bronze, etched goblets or eating from pewter plates. And what was on the plates! Greek art, that was enough, for no good Jew, especially in the south where her family came from, would have had men and women etched on their vessels. How fine the work was. She turned her cup over and over in her hand. But what the work was shocked her. Men and only men, nude men, men wrapped together in love, men bending each other over as Moses had said not to do.
Matthew must have observed her, and he said, “Lady, please forgive. Those who told your master he should not come here were right. This house is not for the easily shocked.”
Magdalene smiled and said, “I have never been easily shocked. I’ve been shocked, but it’s never been easy.”
She helped herself to another kabob where the lamb meat was so tender it fell from the skewer and melted in her mouth. All about the musicians played wild sweet music, and she heard a woman, long haired and wild singing:
I shout in the street for my love.
Where has he gone?
My hair undone for my lover!
Where has he gone?
Melons and and wine are wet, and figs are juicy
But none like me.
When will my sugar man come,
and ring the juice from me?
And Magdalene saw, in the corners of the great room, men kissing men and women fondling women, and here one rose and led another into the dark, and she understood why the good people in the synagogue said, do not come here, these are sinners, and past the noise and the drums, she thought she might have heard thunder.
“Master!” James Alphaeus was saying, “give us a good word. What teaching do you have for us?”
“The teaching of being here,” Jesus said, while he tore a great slab of bread, and taking a piece for himself, passed one slab to Peter on his left, and one to John on his right so that they were passing it, dipping it in the birria sauce as he spoke.
“This is the teaching of what one does more than what one says.”
“You speak of the kingdom to come,” Matthew said, “and when I talked to these others, they said they’d heard your word. But… believed it was not for them, not for people like us. It was for those people in the synagogue, and those people in Jerusalem. How can we, such as we are, be any part of the kingdom of God?”
“And yet,” James Alphaeus said, “when we looked down the hill and we saw you, and all of your friends coming to us in white, it was like a very wedding feast.”
“Then let me tell you,” Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come.
“Then he sent some more servants and said, ‘Tell those who have been invited that I have prepared my dinner: My oxen and fattened cattle have been butchered, and everything is ready. Come to the wedding banquet.’
“But they paid no attention and went off—one to his field, another to his business. The rest seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.
“Then he said to his servants, ‘The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. So go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.’ So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.
“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing wedding clothes. He asked, ‘How did you get in here without wedding clothes, friend?’ The man was speechless.
“Then the king told the attendants, ‘Tie him hand and foot, and throw him outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’
“For many are invited, but few are chosen.”
The darkness outside of this house belonged to the gathering wind, but the inside of this house was filled with a red and gold light, like the light in ones heart John imagined. Soon they would be headed to Jerusalem,, and the wine was heady with a strange herb so he could not keep his mind on that or on much else. Hazily, he wished Sebastian was here. He looked around the room and saw men and women embracing, men and men embracing, those full of food and full of the herb that burned and smoked that they had passed around now sighing in contentment as they lifted their robes, undid belts, put away cloaks and coats and mantles.
Blackness and sleep rose to overwhelm him. There were whole moments when John realized he had been sitting upright and unconscious. The whirring, whining music of the shawms swirled through the night, and above it all was the boom of thunder.
He saw in one opening of the eye, Philip and Nathanael eagerly stripping as a round naked young woman, her hair full of golden coins, brought them both to her bosom. As he stumbled to relieve himself, he saw Peter take Ada by the hand, lead his wife to a bedroom and close the door. It seemed that Zelotes was sleeping against a wall, murmuring something, his eyes opening and closing, but by the dim light, John saw that someone lay on the floor, head between his legs, sucking him and working him with his hand. Man or woman he could not say, and it did not matter. In the midst of the wildest part of the feast, hairy buttocks round as two melons, long limbs stretched out like an X, Andrew was furiously fucking someone, and now, penis hard and full of frustrated longing, John sat down beside Jesus, whose eyes were glassy, reflecting the night around him.
Now came James Alphaeus and Matthew, strange in this night of revelry because they both appeared to be weeping, James the thinner, more weaseley one, Matthew, the taller and more handsome, both with those thin beards round their jaws. Matthew sank to his knees before Jesus, weeping, and now Jesus looked steadily at him, the glaze gone.
“Master,” Matthew said over and over again. “Master.”
He looked about the room.
“You have come here, and you have changed everything… though nothing seems changed.”
John heard a great groan of orgasm, fancied it was Andrew.
“How do I live now?” Matthew demanded. “How do I live?”
“You live by living,” Jesus said.
And reminding John of Sebastian by the river, Matthew cast off his red cloak and was pulling off his rings. He shuddered, and tears ran down his face. He undid the great belt and the tunic and stripped until he stood trembling and naked before Jesus, awaiting the baptism. But John had said Jesus’s baptism would not be of water, but rather of fire, and Matthew sank to his knees, pushing up the white robe of his lord, and Jesus helped him lift it up, until the two of them stood before each other naked, and John was still on the floor, barely comprehending, so that when James Alphaeus sank to his knees, he barely understood his cock in his mouth, barely understood lying there while James nursed on him and Jesus lay naked beside them, Matthew straddling him, kissing his mouth, his nipples, all down his body, and John felt James’s mouth on his cock, his hand on his stomach, kneading him, rising to touch his breast while Jesus groaned and sank his fingers into John’s hair.
Maybe it was him. Maybe it was him all along, Peter thought as he lay beside Ada. After all the sickness, the taxes, the hardness of life, and making oneself hard again that life, maybe it was him. As he lay beside Ada, stroking her hair, he remembered last night’s rising desire, the desire rising again in him now, in his stiffening penis. She drew him to her, opened her thighs and slowly first, then quickly, he had her and shuddered as his seed spilled and she clutched his hips.
She laughed as he lay in her, between her thighs, looking down.
“Look at us,” she said, “We don’t even know whose room this is. We must dress. We must find the others.”
The sky was grey, and a cool, wet breeze was coming into the room when they dressed each other, Ada straightening Peter’s tunic, which by now seemed too thin. Together they went through the maze of the waking house and found, amidst the sleeping revelers, Jesus sitting up with James Alphaeus and Matthew, John, and the others. What had Magdalene been up to all this strange night? But here she was now, serving out bread and fish and coffee to wake them.
“It is not the Sabbath,” Matthew said, stretching. “And we must all be about work.”
At the door, when Matthew and Alphaeus bid them goodbye, Matthew clung to Jesus a long time, and then he and Alphaeus clung to John.
“Thank you, thank you for coming to our home,” Alphaeus said, taking Magdalene’s hand.
They left in the cold lake breeze, their once white robes greyed under the grey sky. Occasional spatters of rain anointed them as they approached the city gate.
“Now there will be talk,” Zelotes said. “There will be talk of the teacher who spent the night in a house of wickedness.”
“If there is no talk,” Magdalene said, “then nothing worth doing has been done.”
So, though when they entered Capernaum, the eyes of those up early in the morning watched them, and when they approached the shore, the fishermen who knew them best watched with greatest curiosity, none of them said anything, and when they entered the house Mary approached Jesus and said, “Thank you, son.”
He frowned at her.
She pointed up, though directly above them was only the ceiling.
“The rain. The breeze. Thank you.”
“Mother, I didn’t do that.”
“Well, if you didn’t who did?” Mary said, leaving Jesus to ponder this as she touched him on the cheek, and then headed up the stairs to finish darning old clothes for the journey to Jerusalem.
