Lord, give me an unattractive woman

Lord, give me an unattractive woman.

I can't remember the first time I met her, though my early years are compacted with memories of her as clear as frozen dew on a sterile landscape. Some of these are in the winter garden of Ireland, some in the flatlands of North Kildare or near the bordering Dublin mountains (or in Dublin itself). They are violent, demonic, and not to be expressed to a single soul; not for my protection, you understand, but for that of the listener. I see no point in the mindless slaughter of an individual's harmony with the world, you see; though there are types who merit it, believe me. There are those whose erratic, wounding movements through this delicate shroud that protects human life certainly could be said to deserve it. Those whose world splintering humanity, whose rupturing Menschkeit, could render a soul's peace a worthless thing. I'm sure each of them have an 'other,' someone to implode, or, if possessed by inhuman strength and unnatural will, to shield the innocent from such a diabolical mind. I was never curious to discover those others, for I had my own peace of mind to think of, and I am no flag-bearing crusader, leading the ignorant to awareness in some ghastly horn bleating triumph.

I was not born strong, nor was dormant within me the seed of brawn, nor my conditioning environment one of particular prowess, and yet I had to contend with her, and that from an early age. She was, at a distance, tender and somewhat loving, at least to animals. Brave, confident, loyal sounding. Not to the higher animal, however. When I approached her, her virtues turned in her contemplation of me, and I saw in a glimpse a fiendish barbarism in her look and manner, a Mephistophelian hellishness to her approaching gait, and when she spoke, although it was to utter sweet words, their meaning was all different. Silently, she talked of an idyllic childhood, spent in the shadow of a tall oak in summer, of a governess cosseting her in country quilts and dispensing honeyed milk, of cavorting siblings in constant proximity, and when I listened silently, something happened. The milk ran to sour poison, the nipple it ran through caught by greedy lips in great lung ballooning gulps, and when she burped, large spools of sable ink blasted from her pitching mouth. Her siblings' faces grew gnomish and menacing, their gallivanting was rendered lame and broken paced and from their now crooked limbs sprouted wiry shoots of steel hairs. And the long branches of that big oak drooped to the earth, eldritch-like, and razed the grass beneath it and anything living there, though when their tips brushed against her child's form, evil recognised evil, and they swept past her without causing harm.

If only her looks had been less game, her manner less saucy, her countenance whiter- if not than a saint's- then at least that of a Presbyterian bigot. Oh Lord. I need an unattractive woman; I need her common ungainliness to swell the finer image of Patricia's sweet devilry beyond proper regard, to render her crackling sexuality impulse dull by neighbouring proximity to a conventional sight. A woman with sphagnum moss springing from her armpits, bandaged in place by second day vests, with nipples more cracked than a California fault line from the teeth of featureless, overweening infants. A woman with plain, recurrent features who would never inspire men to bear arms over a fracture in ideology, a change in living conditions...or a spare tent on a stag night.

There are others like her. I've met them from time to time, though each of them, mercifully, has moved in different socials. Two, I think, have even met her, though in circumstances less than propitious, if by that you regard as failure an outcome by which no great emotional effect was wrought on either party in both cases. They must have acknowledged each other with wry, grudging smiles and held banter to hold comparisons between themselves and the innocents that occupy space in this power-disproportionate world. The effect they had on those around them at these places of meeting, however, was nothing short of ruinous.

A man (strong in his way; the soft tissue of his spirit generous and giving, to a degree, though clouded by conventional ego) had approached her and one of these devilkin at a beach house gathering in Sutton, attracted by her debonair good looks and curious staccato laughter and, ignoring the other 'man' (if that be sufficient to describe him, and I know that it is not), asked if he could buy her a drink. The two of them looked at him with silently laughing eyes, and this He-demon asked him whether he could afford the cost of it. "What...do you mean?" the man stammered, wondering if this were a private party after all, but before he could reasonably expect an answer, the other leaned toward him, close enough for a soul kiss, and...those around them swore...he just sucked down every last emotion registered on that man's face, good and ill alike. When the other'd drawn his eyes back, snapping them back toward Her with a dismissive turn, the poor man departed from the two in a vacuous trance. He was found later in some corner of the house, unsteady on his feet, reeling and inchoate, trying for the door yet pitching with the surf outside as he ambled and fell with a crash of his watch face against the wood floor. Time, for him, had indeed stopped. He never moved again. Heart failure, the doctor said. A weak artery wall. Yet before this was known a wide circle of guests (and not of the friendly kind) had formed a wall of another kind around Him and Her, breaking its integrity only when She put on one of her imposture's sad frowns and pretended the innocent, asking these lambs to do something, do anything to help the poor fellow!

Even those lambkins that were nearly directly exposed to such direful countenance couldn't begin to guess at her true nature if she did not wish it. I know someone who was, however, a woman who came to know and understand her real mind and, aware of such diabolical sickening that inhabited it, was not immediately driven to the edge. This woman, I'll call her Jane, was a stronger person than I. She was a sword-bearer. I suppose you would call her a crusader. She, to her eternal credit (though subtract from that more than a pound of common sense) even tried to bring Patricia and her dealings to an abrupt halt, in one lunging, epiphanic stroke developed to catch her off guard. This conception of hers that Patricia held moments of defencelessness (rather than sweetly charming waves of raw, ablative power that fluctuated microscopically in degrees of strength) was the single flaw in her plan, to my way of thought, and, believe me, I've had to re-design my thinking numerous times when it came to that woman. And the plan was otherwise a great one. It had the merit of bravery, nearly to the point of cheekiness, and of good timing, honesty, and the kind of mercurial ruthlessness I can only sit back on my hands and admire. You could say a flaw was that Patricia's core-black attributes dwarfed these virtues, both light and dark, that were summoned like a truthful sword to do battle with her, however I chose to ignore that at the time.

She confronted her in a photographic darkroom of a socialite's house in Glasthuil one evening. It was during one of his parties, a swell of attending guests standing to one side of the open door, the ageing socialite himself observing the scene with avuncular impartiality. The pretext, in general terms, was a marriage Patricia had recently visited harm upon. More specifically, she had slept with the husband, told all the wife's friends, and ritually humiliated the pair of them in front of their colleagues (a husband and wife team, they had chosen to confront her when she arrived at their workplace one day; stupidly, in my opinion). This was nothing to her in her vast array of misdeeds, of course, and she was nearly on the point of laughing it off when the admirable crusader instinctively cut her to the quick, or so it appeared, by slighting one of Patricia's man friends (the soul-digesting He-demon; an artist, as it happened), when, armed with extraordinarily cunning insight, she suggested his paintings were bland because of his association with her. Broken lines formed beneath Patricia's eyes but I knew it was merely a trick of light, shedding into the darkroom from the open door. She walked up to her and whispered something into her ear that drained the colour from her face, and all that fight, all that game cock blade-play, deserted her and she walked from the house a spent woman.

I only discovered later what Patricia said to her, as the socialite, nosy to the last, was the only one to hear it, and, as far as I know, he chose to tell only me. I experienced my own moment of epiphany at that moment, in his telling, and at once knew what to do about the lifelong problem that was that woman. It was the answer to my prayers, all its renditions: 'Oh Lord, give me a beast of a woman with a heart of gold; a wonderfully benevolent hoor that never scrubs her skin of disease; a golden countenanced commoner with the face of a mewling Fury; a scabies ridden humanitarian that sees and accepts me for who I am; Lord, give me the strength to accept such a woman.'

It was beautiful in its simplicity. It drew back love and disgust from the object of my attention and placed it elsewhere. It unwound twisted affection and ironed my repugnance. It offered me a chance at peace, a knowledge that sprang from Her lips, whose words I used against Her:

"If you died, no one would care."