“All right, I’m glad to hear it.” She smiled at him so tenderly, his heart turned over.
“I wanted to thank you for taking care of the problem with the air conditioner while I was gone. That was very resourceful of you. I also appreciate the way you took care of the garden.”
“It was my pleasure. I suspect it was good therapy for me to keep busy.”
“Now,” he said, sighing deeply, “about my mother. You know tact and diplomacy are not her strong suits, but she really does like you. She probably wants to know when we plan to get married because she’s so anxious to have a daughter in the family. As far as the way she acted about your attack, don’t you let her or anybody else make you embarrassed, because what you said in your letter is absolutely correct, you haven’t done anything to be embarrassed about.”
“I have to keep reminding myself of that.” As she spoke, she played idly with the fabric of her skirt, avoiding Brian’s eyes. He recognized the gesture as her mental holding pattern, it had always communicated to him that she was nervous about what was going on, but not so much so as to require doing anything about it.
“Now as far as my changing my mind about getting married, that sort of threw me when I read it. Why on earth would I change my mind? There’s nothing I want more in this world than to marry you. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”
“Oh, no. That was one of my middle-of-the-night thoughts. You know, you wake up in the middle of the night with a stupid thought and it seems perfectly sensible until you get up and examine it in the light of day.”
It was such an Emily-ish thing to say that he had to smile. “Next time you wake up with one of those thoughts, you come and get me, and we’ll thrash it out together.”
She looked at him intently and as she did so she traced the outline of his face with the tip of her finger. “What is it about you that makes it so difficult for me to think clearly sometimes? There were all sorts of mundane things I needed to talk to you about, and I can’t remember any of them. Maybe it’s the way your face looks like it was carved from a block of fine marble, like the face of a saint. Maybe it’s your voice, so low and sweet; it resonates in my mind and is like a tune I can’t stop re-playing in my brain. I’m sure there are a lot of things we ought to talk about, but we could let them go until tomorrow, couldn’t we?”
He drew her closer with a very gentle pressure, alert to the slightest resistance she might offer, but there was none. He kissed her, and she returned his kiss with warmth that penetrated to his core. After some enjoyable moments, he spoke. “Are you comfortable with this, sweetheart?”
For a long moment she said nothing, just smiled and stroked his face with her hand. Her answer when it came had a familiar ring. “I love Brian; I touch Brian; I like the way it makes me feel; this is happening, especially now, because of the grace of God, I love God. No more boxes, no more chains, no more guilt.”
The morning dawned one of those scorchingly hot days that chase even die-hard Southerners indoors to the bosoms of their air conditioning. Brian and Emily agreed that a nice quiet day inside was what they both needed. Brian spent the morning attending to all of the mundane things Emily hadn’t been able to remember the night before. At one point when she was in another room, he called Detective Hoffstedter to find out the status of the investigation. There was no real progress to report. Apparently, Emily’s attacker had used her engagement ring to pay off a drug related debt, and it was very unclear from the suspect who had been in possession of the ring who that person was. The policeman said that the ring would have to be held in evidence, but Brian had the feeling that Emily would never want to wear it again anyway.
After a light lunch, Brian decided to dive right in with some questions that her long letter had prompted. He asked, “How are things going with Dr. Whitfield?”
Emily paused briefly before answering. “Pretty well, I think.”
“I recall you mentioned in your letter that you felt odd talking to him about the private aspects of our relationship. You needn’t feel that way. Paul was right when he said I don’t mind, if talking about it with him helps.”
Emily took a minute to digest this and seemed satisfied. She said, “I appreciate that. It still seems strange to be talking about such personal things with a stranger.” Again she paused, as if choosing her words very carefully. “I guess we ought to talk about the things I’ve remembered in therapy.” Looking at him directly for the first time since this conversation started, she said, “You knew all along that my childhood had been more violent than I let on, didn’t you?”
“I suspected it might, and Paul seemed convinced. So many terrible things have happened to you, Emily. Are you finding ways to deal with it?”
“Yes, although some of the ways are not as constructive as others, crying all night for example. When I knew that I had been attacked, one of the worst things about it, one of the things that really threatened to undo me, was the idea of being tied up. It was like the final insult to know that I had come into contact with such sick behavior and been totally powerless to do anything about it. To know that my father was in his own way just as sick, it’s very difficult to explain how unnerving that is.”
“And so now, in your mind, there’s a connection between sex and violence which was just affirmed when you were attacked. How do we get beyond that?”
“I have to change the whole way I look at it. I have to stop thinking of sex as something that my father did to my mother or that men do to women. It doesn’t even work if I think of it in terms of what men and women do together. I have to think of it in personal terms like the ones in which you first explained the facts of life to me. You remember that, don’t you? You didn’t say ‘This is how the male body works’ or ‘This is how the female body works.’ You put it in personal terms, you said, ‘This is what happens when you touch me.’ That’s what I have to do.” She paused for a moment to look at him very directly, “I have to look at intimacy as something that Brian and Emily will have together. I have to keep at the forefront of my mind that being intimate with you is what God wants for me. Then I can deal with it.”
“You said that Dr. Whitfield asked you questions and forced you to confront your feelings of embarrassment. Are you embarrassed talking to me now?”
“Maybe a little. Nothing like I would have been before.”
“Emily, I was so proud of you for going to see Dr. McGinnis on your own. I know that must have been hard. You said you thought about me touching you. You can’t imagine how much that meant to me.” There was obviously more that he wanted to say, but he couldn’t find the words.
“Brian, you’ve known all along, haven’t you, that it was never you, it was always me? There’s never been a day when I didn’t want you, it was just my fear getting in the way. You do know that, don’t you, darling?” As she asked the question, there were tears that wanted to fall, but she wouldn’t let them.
“Emily, we need to get married.” He said it with such conviction that she was puzzled.
“We will, Brian, eventually, as soon as we can work it all out. Remember all the nuisance with all those details last time.”
“Have you got your heart set on all that stuff?”
“I’m not set on any of it at all, but it seems to go with the territory when it comes to weddings. If it were up to me, I’d just as soon get married right here in this room, it’s my favorite place in the whole world, but...”
“Well then, let’s do it. Let’s get married right here in this room. Today. Or maybe tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow after church, let’s get married. I’ll bet Jack Peterson would do it for us. Paul will be here anyway.”
Emily was completely taken aback and for a moment just sputtered. When she finally became capable she spoke. “But what about your parents? Won’t they be hurt to be left out?”
“We’ll let them have a reception for us as soon as we can get up there. They’ll understand. My father couldn’t care less about that sort of thing, and
to tell the truth, I don’t feel any real obligation to my mother about it. There isn’t any good reason not to get married.”
Emily was attempting to be the cooler head that prevailed. “Brian, you can’t just decide on one day to get married the next. What if I get scared, what if I have one of my bad days and freeze up and cry all night?”
He spoke gently, “If you cry all night, then I’ll hold you all night.”
“I don’t think that’s what people are supposed to do on their wedding night.”
Brian did not want her to think that he had been swept away in a tide of romanticism. He wanted her to know that his suggestion was not purely extemporaneous. “Emily, I’ve been thinking about this a long time. If we agree that we won’t be intimate until we get married, and we don’t get married until we’re absolutely sure you’re ready to make love, then we get caught in a vicious circle and we’ll never get married. I don’t care if I have to wait a year to make love to you, I want to wait it out as a married man.”
“There’s a lot I need to think about here, this is not a small decision.”
“Emily, we love each other, we want to spend the rest of our lives together. What is there to think about?”
“Brian, don’t be simplistic, you know this is a lot more complicated than that. I have a lot of recovering to do yet. I don’t want you to be saddled for the rest of your life with an emotional cripple.” As soon as she said it, she recognized the unfortunate connotations she had unleashed. “I’m sorry, that’s not a very good way to put it.”
Brian was smiling, “Don’t worry. It’s when you consciously avoid using those kinds of expressions that it bothers me. You’re hardly an emotional cripple. You’ve made amazing progress in overcoming what’s happened to you.”
“You’d have to admit that I’m not there yet, not recovered.”
“Sweetheart, it’s taken me twenty years to get to the point where people can use expressions like ‘cripple’ in front of me without my flinching, I know what you mean about recovery. But why can’t you continue your recovery sleeping in my bed?”
Emily began to feel like the hapless customer in the car showroom who is being pressured to buy and wants only to run away and be alone. Brian sensed that he was pushing too hard. “Emily, I’m sorry. What can I do to help you make this decision?”
“Mostly I just need to think about it. There is one thing you can tell me about yourself. You realize that anger is a major issue with me just now. I know there have been times when you’ve been exasperated with me and you’ve gotten sort of cranky, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you really mad, except the time I disappeared off to Raleigh. The only time I ever heard you describe yourself as really angry was when you came back from the war. What if life with me disappoints you, what if eventually I make you really mad? What would you do?”
“Life with you could never disappoint me. I’m not saying I’ll never get angry with you; I’m sure we’ll disagree about things and drive one another nuts sometimes, but I’m a different person now. The hard things that have happened to you make me mad, but I learn to deal with it just as you do. No matter what happens, I’ll never again be as angry as I was when I came home from the war. I’m a different person now. You wrote in your letter that you used to lose sleep wondering about my attempted suicide. Is that what you’re thinking about now?”
“Brian, that’s none of my business. I should never have mentioned it. It’s just that sometimes it occurs to me what a big part of your life you’ve made me; it’s frightening to be so important to someone you love. Sometimes I wish you didn’t care so much, then the things that hurt me wouldn’t hurt you too.”
Brian looked thoughtfully into her troubled eyes and wondered how best to address her worry. “When you were first in the hospital and I didn’t know whether you would recover, I was angry with God. Jack came along and found me that way. I demanded that he explain why God let you be hurt. He said that because God gives people the choice of whether or not to follow Him, those of us who love Him have to live in the same world as those who don’t. He said that the pain and suffering caused by sin are the price we pay for having free will. I think that love between two people works the same way. Hurting when you hurt is the price I pay for the joy that loving you gives me. I’ll willingly take the one as long as I can have the other.”
“There is so much I need to think about. I need to be alone for a while.” Brian was going to suggest that he make himself scarce for the afternoon when Emily continued, “This is a decision I have to know that I made by myself, that I didn’t get talked into. I’m going to soak in the tub all afternoon. I do some of my best thinking in the bathtub.”
Brian smiled at this typical Emily-ism. “I’m going to run some errands, so you’ll have the place to yourself, in case you get pruny and want to be alone somewhere other than the bathtub.”
As she sat amidst the bubbles, she decided to approach the decision very logically and think of every good reason both for and against marrying Brian, and doing so now. “The best reason in favor is Brian himself,” she thought. “I know I’ll never feel this way about anyone ever again. He is so incredibly patient, so kind. I can’t imagine how wonderful it would be to spend the rest of my life waking up to the sound of that sweet voice. And if I am honest with myself, I have to admit that it’s getting harder and harder to say goodnight and crawl into bed alone, knowing that beautiful body is in the very next room.”
Another compelling decision-making device Emily had used in the past came into play here. She often asked herself the question, “How much will I regret it if I let this opportunity go by?” And in this instance, she knew, she would always be sorry if by putting him off she lost Brian.
Then came the arguments against marrying now. The biggest single thing on that side of the scale, she recognized, was herself. “I find it hard to imagine that I’m seriously considering doing this now. I could ruin his life by giving him what he wants. He might always be sorry, and grow to hate me. But he seems so sure that this is the thing to do and the time to do it. Oh, why can’t I be one of those people who always knows what to do?”
She knew that what it all came down to was intimacy. They were already living together, and doing so successfully. Brian was such an easy person to get along with—that was not the problem. It was going from literally living together to the truth of the euphemism; it was crossing the threshold of the master bedroom and forgetting all the nightmares that was the challenge. Emily asked herself, “If I’m afraid, then I should confront it. What am I afraid of? I can’t be afraid of Brian, it’s impossible to imagine him hurting me. Maybe what I’m afraid of is failing to please Brian the way I failed to please as a child. Maybe I think I’ll be as poor a wife as I was a daughter. But I wasn’t a poor daughter. I never got the chance to be a daughter at all, just a punching bag.”
Emily remembered when she and Brian were first discussing wedding plans, he kept stressing that the only consideration she need have was, what did she want? She asked herself that question now, “what do I want?” But answering that question had never been easy for her. She tended always to think in terms of giving other people what they wanted, and finding her happiness through the filling of other people’s needs, trying always to be the good child, the person people wanted her to be. “All I really want,” she thought, “is Brian.”
And then of course, inevitably for her, came the long list of “what if” questions. “What if all I can think of is being raped and I turn away from him and he thinks it’s him I’m repelled by when it’s myself? What if I don’t know what to do and my ineptitude frustrates him? What if I’m not as good at it as the women he knew in the past and that frustrates him? What if I get too embarrassed and don’t do the things he wants me to do?”
But always the answer kept coming back. The answer was Brian, sweet, gentle, patient Brian. “The Brian who cries for me, the Brian who prays for me, the Brian who makes my life a joy.”
&n
bsp; It occurred to her that she would never be happy about this decision until she had prayed over it, and she was of the school of thought that says you can’t pray in the bathtub because God hasn’t wanted to talk to naked people since the Fall. So she got dry, got dressed, and went into her room. “All right, Lord,” she thought, “You’re in charge here, so tell me, what do I do?”
People who don’t pray are generally skeptical when people who do make the claim that they hear the voice of God, or that God answers when they speak to Him. Non-Christians think that the praying people are talking about hearing God with their ears. They don’t realize that there are some things that are only heard with the heart. Emily’s answer came to her in a song that she suddenly couldn’t get out of her head, a hymn that they had sung the very first Sunday that Brian had gone to church with her. One stanza of “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go” went
“O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee,
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain,
that morn shall tearless be.”
She realized that what she said she believed in the easy days before her pain had never ceased to be true. “Through all of it,” she told herself, “God has been there. No matter what happens to Brian and me, we can deal with it, because we won’t be dealing with it alone.”
When Brian returned home, he heard Emily humming to herself in the guest room. He tapped on the door to hear her answer, “Don’t come in, it’s bad luck.”
In a few seconds she emerged, “I never told you about the beads from Miss Margaret, did I?”
Brian was completely baffled and simply shook his head.
“I had them packed away and I had forgotten all about them. You know the old saying, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.’ Well, Miss Margaret gave me some beads from her old dress and said I should use them for something old, so I was sewing them on. But you can’t see, because that would be bad luck.”
Blackberry Winter Page 34