by Amy Lapwing
“Peace.” Helena’s hand was warm, her smile friendly.
Justina looked from Helena to Michael; he was already looking away. They went back to their seats and the vicar made the parish announcements as the children came in from their Sunday School classes.
The beautiful place that had resounded with words telling of something outside that brought hope, something that was there whether she chose to think about it or not, this place contained Michael, in the company of another woman who wanted him. The jealous feeling jumped into her mind, an ugly little atheist, laughing at the calm, calling the peace make-believe, an irrational imagining. The restless children brought back her earlier impression of a spectacle of people gathered to obtain a blessing; the celebration of the Eucharist, the climax of their spiritual probing, was yet to come. She felt an impulse to leave but the impatient sigh of the leaning boy a few rows up kept her in her seat. She wanted to trust this place.
The congregation took communion in a circle about the simple altar before the windows. Justina stood with her hands cupped before her, as the others did. The vicar tore off a piece of bread from the small loaf in the pouch he held and looked in her eyes. “May the body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in everlasting life.” He emphasized “you,” his eyes the clearest blue she had ever seen, his expression open to anything she wished to give him as he paused before her. “Amen,” she choked out and tears escaped from her eyes. The woman lay reader came to her with the cup of wine. She sipped and returned to her seat, wiping the embarrassing tears away.
She sat waiting for the others to be done. Helena chewed her bread, her head bowed, and refused the wine; she returned to her seat with a frightened but brave expression, a stuttering child who has just gotten through the ordeal of giving a book report. Michael walked behind her; confused, Justina watched him, not sure what she was looking for. He sat and did not look toward her. She looked out the windows at the trees languidly waving their red and gold treasure to the vast blueness, like a lover offering his soul to an unfathomable beloved.
“Our Prayer of Thanksgiving is found on page three hundred and sixty-five. Let us pray. Heavenly Father. ... Graciously ... Fed us with spiritual food ... Into the world in peace ... Grant us strength and courage to love ... Through Christ our Lord. Amen.” The comforting words entered her and draped themselves upon the bundle of tender hurt deep beneath her throat. She stood still and let the tears come out onto the book, fumbling in her pocket for an old tissue. “Here,” whispered the woman next to her, offering her a fresh one. Justina dabbed her eyes as the congregation sang the closing hymn, her neighbors looking up from their hymnals to glance sympathetically at her.
It would help her regain her composure to greet the vicar, she knew, rather than indulge her impulse and simply bypass him and run away home. She stood in the long line of couples and middle-aged women with foot-stamping, mugging children, and elderly couples and women. She endured solicitous conversation from the woman and the couple she had been sitting near. At last she shook hands with the vicar, his expression smiling and closed now, trying to hurry the line along. Justina stepped outside into relief.
“Hi!” Helena stood by the steps, smiling. “I didn’t know you went to this church,” she said.
Michael’s tight, impatient smile faded as he saw Justina’s still-red eyes and nose.
Justina explained this was the first time she had been.
“It’s Michael’s first time here, too. He wanted to go to church so I said, Hey, have I got a church for you! You like it?”
“It’s nice,” Justina murmured.
“It’s a nice little church,” agreed Helena. “I think that’s why I like it, because it’s little. Ned and everybody knows my name. It’s not this huge, formal thing, you know? It’s not so churchy, you know what I mean?”
Justina was silent.
“What’d you think of it?” asked Helena of Michael.
Michael wanted to talk to Justina, he thought he knew why she had been crying, but he did not know how to nicely get rid of Helena. “It’s very charming. Justina—”
Justina glanced at the clumps of people walking off to the parking lot, their expressions smiling with benediction or simply satisfaction at fulfilling their imagined duty. “Excuse me.” She started off. “I better get going. Nice to see you.”
Michael watched her go, his hands by his side, fists clenching and releasing. Helena looked from him to the retreating woman. “I got to rush home too,” she said, “get ready to go to work.” Her green lens-clad eyes held his, her kind smile belying her undeserved hurt. “Glad you could come, Michael.” Her high heels clickety-clacked as she walked to her little white sports car.
Justina unlocked her car; the heat of the interior floated out. “Justina!” Michael came up behind her. “Are you upset?” He stood stiffly, frightened of her rebuff.
“Church always does that to me.”
“You never go to church.”
“When I do, I cry. Okay? Some people pray, I cry.”
Three small boys with crew cuts raced behind Michael and stopped short at a van and slapped the door, each trying to cry victory louder than the other. “Are you angry with me?” he asked, stepping closer to her.
She attempted a mocking laugh. “Why would I be angry with you?”
Quietly he said, “I didn’t sleep with her last night.”
She looked over the top of her car, so he would not see her relief.
“I mentioned I wanted to go to church,” he continued, “and she suggested I come here. We came here separately.”
“Good for you.”
“I haven’t been with anyone since— us.”
His simple admission dispelled all the jealousy and confusion that had been with her since he had come back to Kennemac. He was as he had been before, hers. “I don’t understand,” she said, pinching her forehead.
A Jeep paused near them, waiting to insinuate itself into the line of cars waiting to enter the roadway. A teenaged girl looked through her window at them, her eyes blinking with thought.
“I was trying to make you jealous,” he explained. “I was angry, about James. I was acting like a child.”
“Michael—” She could not look at him; she stared at the white and black pebbles embedded in the faded gray asphalt. “I was going to sleep with him.”
Michael breathed shallowly, the blood pounding in his head, waiting for the rest of her confession.
“I almost did. But I couldn’t,” she went on. “It was just— I couldn’t. But I wanted to, just to forget you.” She looked at his face, the lines deepened with disquiet, the hair a little grayer than she remembered. She looked over his shoulder at the line of cars behind him, the driver in the front auto swinging his head right and then left and then right again before pulling out, his children sitting like prize pigs behind him, his wife beside him, indulging a feeling of protectedness, Justina imagined. “I forget why now. My father has cancer and he looks at my baby pictures because pretty soon he won’t be able to ever again. And I look at him and I know his body is going to waste away on him. But I get to come back here and get away from all of it, from the dying. And I come back here and it’s, oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be avoiding Michael because I love him too much?”
She let him hold her as she wept. She sobbed to be near him again, to touch his shoulders again, to smell him again. “I am so stupid. How did I get so stupid?”
“We both are.” Her hair was cold and silky. He breathed in the scent of her scalp, he wanted the unexpected closeness to obliterate thought and memory. “Some people are stupid drunks, we’re stupid lovers.”
She sniffed. “Or nothing at all.”
“We’ve tried nothing. It didn't work too good.”
The girl in the Jeep looked out the car’s back window at them as her father steered into the road, her blinking eyes and the solemn set of her mouth saying simply, Something is happening.
“Oh, my God,” whispered Justi
na. “I love you.”
He leaned his cheek against her head. The elation welled up in him slowly. This was not the end of their troubles, he knew, but it was enough, for now, this resurrection of tenderness. He told her he loved her. Till the end of the world, he wanted to say, but he feared overwhelming her. She loved him, right now, she was with him, again, for now. It would have to be enough. “Come on, let’s go have lunch.”
They got in her car and she drove them to that sub place he liked next to Moe’s. They sat in their Sunday best at one of the early Reagan-era, too old to look nice, too new to look cute, little melamine booths along the wall with the mural of a gigantic mythical pizza oven, signed “RoboBrush ‘84.” She got a slice of chicken veggie pizza and he ordered a steak bomb with mushrooms and cheese, they had sold seven thousand, he wanted to see why. He sat on the bench next to her while she started on her pizza and he waited for his sandwich, mooching off her. His number came up and he went and got the obscene thing, a week’s supply of meat and grease, and pretended to ignore her tut-tutting. She finished her pizza and watched the patrons coming and going, their open-mouthed faces glumly reading the menu board over the ovens as they entered, their shoulders hunched over their plates while they ate, their legs swinging around their full bellies as they went out, all to a soundtrack of Greek folksongs sung by a woman she imagined to be small and dark and juicy with long almost black hair and red smiling lips. Michael put down the rest of his sandwich and pushed it away, half-eaten.
“Done already?” she asked.
He covered a belch. “This is a really great place, isn’t it?”
“It’s a jewel.” She was looking at someone, he followed her gaze. A teenaged boy with a crew cut, his hair color undeterminable, in baggy jeans and a hooded plaid shirt, shuffled in hand-in-hand with a teenaged girl, dressed similarly, except for the lace trim of the tee shirt visible at the neck, her face delicately curved, the skin and dark brown hair glowing. They stared at the menu board; the boy took a tentative step forward to the counter, the girl stayed put. He stepped back to where she was and glanced at her and then back up at the board, which she still stared at. She responded to his subtle pressure and they stepped up together to the counter. He ordered first, she was still deciding; then she shrugged, apparently deciding on something familiar, and ordered. He paid and they stepped back, their bodies loose with the discharge of decision-making. The girl smiled shyly at the boy, rolling her eyes at her indecisiveness.
“Ready to go?” Michael asked.
They went out and strolled along the shopping center’s sidewalk. They did not want to go anywhere, really. He told her the shopping plaza had once been orchard land and walked her out to the end of the parking lot where they could look out over the main road of Kennemac and beyond to the hills below them. It was a pretty New England autumnal view, the air hazier, though, than in travel brochures and magazines. And there was no church steeple.
He held her as they stood side-by-side watching the cars go by. “Do you have to go back now?” he asked.
“No.” She caressed his back, taking pleasure in the feel of his wool jacket, of him beneath it. “I want to stay with you.”
He kissed her forehead. “Then let’s go to the store.” They went to the grocery store there in the shopping center, not his usual store, but this was not the time to encounter Helena again, although he would have to explain himself to her eventually, he knew. He hoped she would forgive him, he really did like her. They bought a few things for dinner and she drove him back to the church parking lot to get his car, and she followed him to his condo. They spent the afternoon preparing olla de carne, a labor-intensive Costa Rican stew that required a lot of chopping and pot tending. Between recipe steps he played excerpts of the music he and his chorus were preparing for the fall concert. She made a mental note of the composers; she would read up on them at the library, she did not know much music history. He lent her his CDs of the pieces and she sat on the couch and read the jacket notes while he played the piano.
“You think it’s true whole pieces of music would come into Mozart’s head?” she asked, looking at the Requiem CD.
“Of course.” He closed the Requiem vocal score and looked on the piano’s music stand for something else.
“That’s wild. I’d have thought he’d work it out at the piano.”
“Probably he did, sometimes. But music was a part of him from his childhood. He heard it all around him all the time, so probably he heard it inside him too.”
She thought about her early coaching in math and computers from her parents. It never turned her into a computer programmer or a math whiz. “That ever happen to you?” He did not know what she meant. “Does music ever come into your head?”
He went to one of the bookcases and flipped through a section of slim scores and song sheets. “All the time. Other people’s music.”
“But all the theory you know, haven’t you ever composed?”
“I have tried. It doesn’t come.”
“Maybe with more practice.”
“I don’t create music. I can interpret it, I can help others to interpret it.” He pulled out a song sheet from the shelf. “But I’m not a composer.” He put the song sheet on the piano and went into the kitchen. She heard him lift the lid off the pot. She wondered at his certainty. He did not seem disappointed at all as she expected she herself would be. He seemed to accept his limitations.
“Why do you make such a face?” he asked when he came back in. He sat down again at the piano and opened the song sheet.
“If you didn’t have to be here, where would you be?”
“Here? You mean here, with you?”
“I mean, here, in Kennemac, being Mister C and everything.”
“You mean my work? I don’t know. I guess I’d be at another college.”
“You wouldn’t want to be with an opera company?”
He studied the music, his hands on his hips, his neck stretched forward. “Maybe. Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I was wondering about being content and whether you were.”
“I’m more content than I was yesterday. Querida, come here.” He began to play the song.
She came and sat beside him on the bench and looked at the sheet music. She sat back with a smile and looked at him. He continued to play the accompaniment while she squinted at the English lyrics. There was no French, even the title was given only in English. “Which one is this?” she asked.
He kept playing, watching her to see when she would recognize it.
“Oh!” He remembers, she thought, he even got the music. She watched him play, her face bright with the expectation of a serenade.
He stopped playing and frowned at the sheet music.
“I didn’t recognize the English version,” she said.
“It’s not very good. Here, you sing it, in French.” He played it from the introduction.
“No-no-no!” she protested.
“Come on, I’ll sing too, but I don’t know all the words.”
“Don’t laugh, I can’t sing, just remember that.”
He began with the chorus, “On a beau faire,” and she joined him, her voice soft and airy but in tune. “On a beau dire, qu’un homme averti en vaut deux.” They sang two verses together, she remembered most of the words, he hummed when he did not know them, to keep her going. “That’s all I can remember,” she said, stopping.
He played the finish and turned to her. Her smiling eyes were soft and warm with letting go of faked indifference they had assumed for the last nine months. She kissed him and caressed his face, the grainy skin she had never noticed before. Her brows gathered in a question as she looked in his eyes, the welcomed sharpness finding her again and again.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Sweetheart,” she said, caressing the hair on the back of his head, “show me your goddamn bedroom.”
He remembered she had never been in his bedroom. He had even avoided saying the wor
d when she used to visit, that long year ago. He led her upstairs to the large chamber. She walked around looking at his things while he stood in the doorway watching her. The blinds were drawn on the two windows, darkening the already den-like interior. The bed is huge, the deep green bedspread frightens me. There were matching nightstands on either side with tan shades on the extinguished lamps. The walls were bare except for a few family photos. He had two chests of drawers, their surfaces covered with framed photos. She asked who was in the pictures and he showed her the recent likenesses of his parents, his sisters and their husbands and children. She looked around his lair again, taking in the scary bed last. She laid down on it, her legs together, her arms stiffly by her sides. “I feel like a conquest.”
Michael laughed and laid himself down beside her, turning on his side to see her, his head propped on his hand. “And you’re not?”
“And so, what? You’re the conqueror?”
“Naturally.”
“What a crock!”
“You started it.” He rolled his chest on top of her, his hands cupping her shoulders. “I have you now. You are my captive.”
“What’re you going to do to me?”
“What’s my choices?”
“You could make me your slave. That would take a lot of work, though, a lot of training. I probably still wouldn’t be very good at it.”
“No, probably not. What else?”
“You could set me free.”
“After all the trouble I am having to capture you?”
“What trouble?”
“You know, conqueror things, arms build-up and troops deployment and strategy. Lots of strategy. Lots of trouble, for you.”
“So you’re not going to let me go?”
He settled himself more squarely upon her. “No.”
“Then there’s only one thing left. You’ll have to kill me.”
He squeezed her shoulders, lowered his lids and his voice. “You think I don’t know what that means, because I don’t read as much as you do. But I do.” He was going to kiss her when he felt her shoulders tense up. He lifted himself off of her. “You don’t like it in here, do you?”