Fire Sermon

by Jamie Quatro

  You’re my agenda, he said.

  The bride’s parents hired a professional videographer to film the ceremony. Two camera angles inside the chapel, to capture both the bride’s and groom’s faces. If you, an outsider, were to watch the video, you would see a young man with dark hair and broad chest, twenty-four, a bit green in the face, nearly crippled with gratitude and longing; you would see a girl, just twenty-one, with long auburn hair, eager to play her part. You would see the way they looked at one another, as the camera switched angles: bride blinking back tears and glancing from groom’s face to audience; groom bowing his head and nodding during the homily.

  You would see what everyone there saw: a boy and a girl in love.

  What you wouldn’t see is a day three years earlier, in the backseat of Thomas’s car, when Maggie was a freshman. His hand pushing hard on the back of her neck to force her mouth farther down, so deep her throat constricts and her eyes water, and how she tries to stifle the sound of her gagging, she doesn’t want him to feel bad for how he’s hurting her, he can’t know that what he’s doing hurts, he’s simply carried away by his need—abandoned, as he was, by his mother. He can’t help it, she tells herself.

  Nor would you have seen them, two nights before the car, alone in his dorm room when he told her about his childhood in Philadelphia, his father’s drug addiction and how his mother left town for good when he was ten, and how when he realized the deep trouble his father was in he went to Pittsburgh to ask if he could live with her. My dad used to ask me for money, I mean I was in sixth grade and he’d ask if I could get money off my friends. I took his cash and credit card and got myself onto a bus. My mom sent me back. She knew what my dad was into and she sent me back, he told her—his hand up her shirt, then inside her pants. She let him do what he wanted, this was a way she could comfort him, and anyhow her own body was responding to the kinds of touches she wouldn’t allow in high school—and now she’s on her back on his mattress, he’s taken off her shirt and pants and, with a finger, hooked the edge of her panties up, inserted himself beneath, Don’t worry, I’ll just rub on the outside, I can make you come that way and then I’ll finish myself but against her will she is grabbing him, she is pulling him hard against her. Are you sure? he says. Please, she says, almost crying, please, hears herself saying the word though she knows it isn’t the word she should say, not the word her best self would say—she doesn’t know Thomas, if he’s the right one for this moment—but right now, best self be damned. He pushes, hard. Twice, three times. Some pain beneath the pleasure, but the pleasure outweighs, she comes on the third push, comes again before he slides out and falls onto her belly.

  A wet heat between his navel and hers. He hands her some tissues. She wipes her stomach and presses a clean tissue up between her thighs, trying not to wince.

  I’m sorry, Thomas says. I pushed you too far.

  No, she says. I wanted you to.

  Back in her own dorm, her roommate asleep, she goes into the bathroom and washes herself with soap and water. She changes into her pajamas, kneels on the rough blue carpet beside her bed, and confesses to the God who has already seen what she’s done (and can you, reading this, forgive the self-indulgent, almost laughable repentance, berating herself for what is only normal, and expected? But recall: she is barely eighteen, her first kiss was only a year ago) that she has sinned. Fornicated. Had sex before marriage. Something she’s sworn she would never do.

  Ridiculous, she will think, years into her marriage. Ludicrous, the standard I set for myself.

  Beside her dormitory bed, with the sharp tip of a piece of sea glass she’d found on the beach that morning, she cuts a tiny groove in her forearm, tastes her blood in the dark, and tells God—only thinking the words in her head—that she will marry Thomas. Promises to go through with it, no matter what.

  I have made my bed and now will lie in it, she prays. This man will be my husband. I will honor your will in this way.

  Only let him be a good husband, she prays.

  You’re my agenda—the day the light changed, the air turned liquid. After lunch we took a long walk around the Vanderbilt campus, where James was staying. He was teaching a community workshop the following day. Dorm, chapel, dining hall, Bicentennial Oak—each placed in its precise location for us, for the moment we would arrive, and notice. A universe of forms bending its knee. Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. It was hot out. James kept wiping his neck with a handkerchief, refolding it into a neat triangle, and tucking it into his breast pocket.

  He: I was twelve when I developed the allergy, home alone and my throat started to swell shut. The hospital was eight blocks away. Thank God my father had taught me to drive. Those minutes in the car were such a rush. The thrill of driving in traffic, the reduced oxygen—knowing there were two ways I could die before I got to the hospital. I’ve gone looking for that feeling ever since.

  She: My first dissertation was going to be on postcolonial reinterpretations of the Genesis story, but I’d started writing on the sly—stories, poetry—and I just couldn’t keep going. Theory felt thinner and thinner the deeper I got into it. And then as you know we got pregnant with Kate. She saved me from the comp lit path. Later I got interested in the Hellenistic view of history versus the Christian, cyclical versus linear, and Old Testament versus New Testament eschatological outlooks. Things spiraled from there.

  He: I read them everything when they were little. Dickens, Milton, Shakespeare. Moby Dick in its entirety. Caroline must have been eight but she listened to every word.

  She: I read it to Tommy when he was nine. Moby Dick’s wasted on the young. Not the language, of course. But Ahab, the horror and disgust you feel—you have to reach midlife to realize Melville’s pointing the finger.

  He: Ah, but at what? We all have a white whale to chase? Or the chase itself will turn us into monsters unless we give it up?

  She: Both, I guess.

  The party on campus that night: James on the front porch talking with a faculty member. I was sitting on the steps. When I picked up my backpack and stood to leave, I saw him step back and shake hands with the professor. The assumption: We would leave together. We would do everything together, whenever we were together.

  I knew we’d get along, he said, as soon as we were alone. I knew it when I read your letters. I’ve saved them all. And your book. Astonishing. You said you write poetry?

  A little, yeah. Secretly.

  We walked toward the house he was staying in, the opposite direction from my car. Halfway there I stopped.

  I should get home, I said. Do you want to meet for breakfast?

  Of course, he said. (And he was there in front of the dining hall, watching me approach—on his face that mix of amusement/admiration/pleasure.) I reached up to give him a hug but because of my backpack he couldn’t return the embrace. He squeezed my shoulders instead.

  So you’ll send me a poem, he said.

  I’d be too embarrassed.

  One poem. I want you to promise.

  I don’t have anything ready.

  I’m not letting you go till you say it: James, I promise to send you a poem.

  I promise to send you a poem.

  Good. See you tomorrow.

  Each step a soft sinking into earth, walking back to my car, battling the urge to turn around. Fight like heaven, a minister once said in a sermon on temptation. Engage in the battle like you mean it. I’d battled before but it was nothing like this, nothing like the battle it would become nearly three years later, after the aborted film in Chicago, Take us to the Hyatt—his hand now on the seat between us, tips of his fingers touching my thigh.

  Thomas is, in fact, a good husband. He works long hours so she can stay in grad school full-time. Sometimes she takes the train in and they spend weekends in the city. They stay in the Mansfield in midtown, or when they’re in the Village, the Washington Square Hotel, where Bob Dylan lived with Joan Baez. A friend gives them tickets to see Ralph Fiennes and Tara Fitzgeral
d in Hamlet, sixth-row orchestra seats.

  He cooks for her, breakfasts, dinners. He doesn’t like cats but when she brings home a long-haired kitten, black and gray, he strokes it and says he doesn’t mind the litter pan in the shower stall. He goes to church with her, even prays with her if she asks him too. Reads drafts of her essays, does her laundry when she’s writing papers. Holds back her hair when she begins to vomit every morning, supports her decision to quit the doctoral program and cries when, after eighteen hours of labor and a vacuum extraction, their daughter comes into the world. No epidural, an episiotomy to make space for the vacuum head, a pain beyond pain that causes her to leave her body, not floating outside of it but descending so deeply inside it’s as if she’s no longer attached. I know it hurts like hell, hurts like hell, hurts like hell—the doctor’s voice repeating the words she cannot speak for herself while the baby is pulled out and she is pulled away from the doctor and nurses, away from Thomas, descending through interior darkness toward a tiny closet with the dimensions of a single cell. Into this space I must burrow, she thinks, or I will die.

  The suction leaves a round bulb atop the baby’s skull. Our two-headed darling, Thomas says, watching the nurse show him how to swaddle.

  Two years later she has an emergency C-section with their son. Thomas isn’t allowed into the operating room until they’ve done the spinal block. An intern misplaces the needle. I need my husband, Maggie says, before losing consciousness. When she wakes the intern’s eyes are inches from hers. Your blood pressure dropped, the intern says, but you’re okay now. A screen is drawn up between her head and lower body. Thomas comes in, scrubbed and wearing blue from head to foot, his eyes the only thing she can see. She doesn’t know the mechanics of the procedure; she feels pressure and tugging and imagines her father at the lake, reaching beneath the dark surface of the water to net a hooked fish.

  The baby emerges rump-first, the cord twisted four times around his neck. So much blood on the body, so unlike her daughter’s appearance, the birth canal and draining amniotic fluid a natural first bath. This baby is white with protective wax like the hard exteriors on cheeses she cuts away to access the soft inner parts. A nurse lifts him over the screen and she kisses a bloody ear, the part of him closest to her mouth. For the rest of her life, it’s what she will remember, remembering his birth—that tiny, reticulate, red-and-white ear.

  While they sew her up, Thomas tells her she’s incredible. Heroic. The bravest woman in the world.

  She is allowed no food—so much gas trapped inside, from the exposure to air, she can feel it in her shoulders and neck. She must expel before they’ll let her eat anything, or allow her to go home. Forty-eight hours pass. Stool softeners, laxatives, suppositories, nothing. Unbearable. Her breasts swollen and leaking, colostrum giving way to the pressure of first milk. Stitches, staples, swollen ankles, dry lips. The third day she takes off the hospital gown and puts on leggings and a tunic. I can’t stand this any longer, she says to Thomas, I feel like an animal. A nurse administers an enema and she cries, more from the humiliation and the anticipation of relief than the pain, and when it happens there is no warning. The outfit is ruined. She changes back into a gown and walks to the nursery to feed the baby.

  When she returns she hears water running in the bathroom and opens the door to see Thomas kneeling beside the tub, lifting the leggings to his nose. His neck turns splotchy when he sees her. I wanted to make sure I got them clean, he says, I didn’t want you to have to think about it when we got home. A moment she’ll come back to, over the years, the intense shame she felt—not that she’d soiled her clothing, but that her husband could, and did, love her in such a way. Embracing what was filthy in her.

  Nineteen years later, at the Hyatt in Chicago—just after she and James have climaxed together for the first time—she will think of the hospital and will feel, at first, only gratitude for the fact she no longer inhabits that animal-body. That she has emerged from the child-rearing years with a still-desirable form. She’ll go into the bathroom, lock the door, kneel in front of the toilet and vomit. Thomas cleaning backed-up shit out of her pants. Thomas rinsing the tub so the nurses wouldn’t have to do it. She’ll brush her teeth and wash her face and walk back into the room. Fuck me again, she’ll say to James, the only way to drive the image from her mind. And he will, he will fuck her again. He will pin her arms and, with his tongue, make a line from her neck downward, pausing to penetrate the deep well of her navel and trace the thin white scar above the rubbled hair.

  So you’ve come to me, again, because you keep falling in love with men who aren’t your husband. Is that correct?

  I don’t keep falling. James was the first.

  Let me remind you that the last time you came, it was because of the Aquinas professor. You said you thought you were falling in love.

  I was wrong last time.

  Let me remind you that before the professor, there was the minister; before the minister, your husband’s MBA friend. You claimed to be in love with each.

  Wrong each time.

  How do you know you’re not wrong this time?

  The others were preparation. The exposure of inferiors before the revelation of the ideal. Didn’t God first parade the animals in front of Adam and ask him to find a suitable partner among them?

  And now that you have found Eve, you believe you will stop looking?

  Yes.

  What if it’s the acquisition you’re in love with, not the person? What if your so-called love for James, once exhausted, begins to dissipate, then transfers itself to the next in line?

  There won’t be a next in line.

  You said that with the Aquinas professor.

  The professor was a prop jet. James is a fucking 747.

  Either way, if you want to stay married, you might not want to leave the ground.

  I know.

  I know I know I know I know I know.

  May 2017

  Dear God:

  Can you forgive someone for an act they cannot repent of? I knew in the elevator—knew in the car—what was about to happen. Did nothing to stop it. It’s been a month now and asking your forgiveness would mean seeing that night as sinful, but to preserve the memory I cannot let myself see it that way. Yet this is what you demand of me. To call the memories scales, let them fall from my eyes so I will see the evil behind the pleasure—using the pleasure to draw me away from you. Away from Thomas, the children. But I’ve lost him, he’s out there leading his magnificent life and I’m still here in the silence of not telling, so can you at least allow me the memory, unrepented? Let me keep it, God. Let me have the woman on the elevator, the man beside her, let me keep what the two of them did in room 1602, let it always be happening (and shall I pray, Let Christ always be dying for the pain that moment caused, and is still causing? What about the pleasure? Did he die to remove that too? How am I supposed to ask forgiveness for feeling what my body only naturally—)

  Dear James:

  I keep trying to write my prayers out longhand, in a journal, and end up wishing I was writing to you instead. So be it. I’m reading a book about the color blue. Brief poetic numbered passages. I read a few each morning and think about them all day and it’s like holding bits of candy in my mouth. The author writes about renunciation, says that when you give something up—alcohol, drug, person—it leaves a void inside of you that something else will rush in to fill. Augustine’s God-shaped hole. But some people, she says, realize the emptiness itself is God. That a Zen master once described enlightenment as Lots of space and nothing holy.

  I have this space in me and God is not there and emptiness is not there. What is there is this conversation we can no longer have, since our agreement in Chicago.

  I read an interview with a poet yesterday, someone you mentioned knowing. He said that when he was a boy he climbed the tree beside his house to gather apples. Sitting in the top branches, looking through an upstairs window, he saw the inside of his bedroom—from that
vantage it looked like a room he’d never seen—and instantly his desire for apples fell away. He forgot about them completely. And there’s that Jack Gilbert poem (I know you don’t trust him as a poet but I can’t help loving him) about going into an apple orchard to gather fruit but coming out with scent and dappled light and a wide sense of the passage of time.

  Both poets insist, in hindsight, they weren’t after apples—the apples were only a lure toward something else. The first poet said that just as he went after apples when he was young, so he went after the bodies of women when he was older. But his desire for women, too, dropped away, and what was left—the thing he realized he’d been after all along—was God. God was luring him through apples, through women, through sex. Once he realized it was God, the poet said, he began to understand that God, too, was a lure.

  But he never said what the thing beyond God was—what God was luring him toward. I suspect it’s a boomerang: sex a lure to God, God a lure back to sex, ad infinitum.

  How I want to rip these pages out and send them to you. Or call you on the phone and talk, the way we used to.

  Their second year in Princeton, Thomas and Maggie move out of married student housing to take a job as houseparents at a boarding school for a famous boy choir. Nights and weekend duties only, free room and board in return. She drives Thomas to the Dinky each morning so he can get to Princeton Junction, and from there to Penn Station. She attends her doctoral seminars in the mornings, teaches English at the boys’ school in the afternoons.

  Their apartment is in the main mansion, the former servants’ quarters. A row of windows in their bedroom looks onto the back porch, now enclosed as a locker room, the place the boys dump their backpacks. On weekends they can’t sleep in, the boys are there at first light, Good morning, Miss, Good morning, Sir, can we play basketball, can we walk into town, can I get into my candy closet. Every day, all day, the singing—tour choir, choir A, choir B, resident training choir. When she returns from campus, or after a run, walking the last bit up the driveway toward the mansion—brick, symmetrical, dormered and pillared—the high clear notes carry out through the open windows and catch in the branches of the trees surrounding the property, eighteen acres of grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape architect.