Helen of Troy with no Achilles to save her May 26, 1985

  

She’s gone. Like a spirit suddenly exorcised, losing all corporal substance. They backed up their truck and vanished west, not beggars but possessed in their search for God, after the Devil won here in the east.

Mary Ann moves, not out of economic necessity, but by a need too sooth the ache she still has from years ago, the choice between two men who claimed to love her.

She mentioned having the same nightmarish dreams ago. Johnny agreed for the same reason, having benefited uncertainly by her choice.

I overheard him on the phone complaining about Mary Ann’s books.

“We can’t have our daughter growing up around such sinful stuff,” he said, in a dark uncompromising tone.

This reminded me of his mother and her almost devilish obsession with austerity, a version of Calvinism stretched thin. While my first impression of her has since mellowed, the shreds of it remain, she is manipulating both Mary Ann and Johnny from behind her veil of piety.

She and Johnny work on saving Mary Ann’s immortal soul, and Mary Ann has changed. Before leaving, I heard Mary Ann call her one-time best friend, ‘trivial and uninteresting,” out only for a good time. She shed no tears leaving them, or from her two other closest friend, roommates and confidants from a time when she acted and sounded just like them, and now hates that part of herself.

Had she chosen the other man back when this began, she might well now hate the inner demon that disguises itself as faith today.

I don’t think she really hates the good times, a fact Johnny suspects as well, pointing out how she has chosen to keep all the clothing she used to wear in the clubs, clothing she hasn’t even looked at in years.  Her books, her photographs, her recollection vanished without a trace – with me discovering how Johnny gave them away to Mary Ann’s brother just before they left.

Johnny and his mother seem determined to remove temptation that might send Mary Ann back into that life again and could not control her if she clung to those things that reminded her of a more pleasant time.

The apartment they abandoned stood as a fortress against their reconstruction.

But out west, in the heart of the Bible Belt, Mary Ann will be isolated from her old world, surrounded by other – to me – Demonic forces determined to reshape her and her life.

She told me she needed to do this. Yet on the phone, she broke down crying and said she was doing it for Johnny and their child, so that they will have a chance to live a life they cannot live here.

She is Helen of Troy, taken off to the besieged city with no Achilles to save her, isolated from her roots, stolen from her family who remain here.

I wanted to talk her out of it; I could not.

This morning, they left, they and Johnny’s mother, a dark angel determined to save her soul.

 

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