The Virgin Spy

by Krista Bridge

  “But surely you can see that the Christian church is mired in patriarchal institutions that inhibit a woman’s freedom to think,” she says helplessly, beginning to understand his affable smile as a wall of steam you can’t see through.

  You eat quietly, listening as he answers your family’s questions, nodding, Yes, he does believe premarital sex is wrong, shaking his head, No, he does not believe God is infringing on his right to live his life. He tells anecdotes about his church, the youth group he headed as a teenager, the Bible retreats, the fundraisers and clothing drives, the Christian camaraderie, the good works—all related with such cheerful piety, such absence of self-protectiveness, that you fear for him. When your mother tells him about a friend’s illness, he suggests a prayer chain.

  “My younger sister had meningitis a few years back,” he says. “Our reverend, who’s just the coolest guy you could ever hope to meet, got all the churches across Ontario banded together to pray at the exact same time each week. We hand-picked several older, more experienced churchgoers to pray every night. My sister’s recovery was so fast that even the doctors granted that there was likely something in that prayer chain. Even the doctors.”

  Your mother clears her throat, a compulsive habit.

  “I see that frown,” he says, smiling at her. “But there’s power in everything. Never say never.”

  After dinner, you walk him to his car. It’s almost the beginning of spring, and almost the end of your first year in university. The air is still wintry. You draw your finger along the warm underside of his mouth, notice its solemnity curving into kindness. Standing so close to him, you feel calm for the first time all day. With a light deliberation, he places one finger on the pout of your lower lip, as if blessing your mouth.

  “I sensed a tension,” he says.

  “In my family, you’re the kind of boy I can’t bring home.”

  “Hang in there,” he says. “We all have our crosses to bear.” He gives you a stiff-handed pat on your bottom.

  When you return, your mother and sisters are assembled in the front hall.

  “Why on earth are you dating a born-again Christian?” your mother asks before you even close the door. When she pronounces the word Christian, she rolls her eyes slightly and lets her shoulders slump, as if reluctantly granting you a point in an argument.

  “I’m not. He’s just a regular Christian,” you say. “Like you used to be.”

  When you spot opportunities to remind her of the minor shames of her past, you seize them with the speed of a hand drawn back from a hot stove.

  YOUR MOTHER TELLS you she hates you almost daily. You can see the catharsis these words provide, the way they set calm on her face like a restorative breath. The littlest things set her off. Your spoon clicking your teeth when you eat cereal. The way you shorten the word the before vowel sounds. The way you knock over chairs to get to the ringing phone. Sometimes she throws things. The wooden fish-shaped flute. The Beatrix Potter bowl you ate applesauce from as a child. Her keys. Lately, you’ve begun to chart her explosions with a scientific interest, plotting in mental graphs the arc of her anger—like a mountain, its confident ascent, its tired slope downwards and out. You are amazed by its triangular containment, its pointed insistence. You discover that there are countless mathematical ways of understanding anger, its origins and results. Each time her eyes tighten and her voice compresses, you lapse into algebraic wonder. If z is the outburst and x is your deliberate mispronunciation of the word February, what is y? You begin to call her Mother. Talk with your mouth full. Cut your hair too short. She throws the toaster.

  “You push me,” she protests. “You know I have a temper.”

  You shrug. “You’re supposed to be an adult.”

  In the morning, she stands at the kitchen counter slicing grapefruit for your breakfast. She stops a moment to draw a white terrycloth bathrobe over the black lace slip she wears to bed. Moving slowly around the kitchen, from the cupboard to the refrigerator to the toaster, she tells you her dreams.

  “You were kidnapped by a heroin addict and I was searching for you everywhere. Then someone told me that you were at the bottom of the lake so I dove down to find you, but I couldn’t swim because the water was thick and sticky like toffee.” She turns to you expectantly, like someone waiting for her sentence to be finished. “What do you think it means?” She hands you half a red grapefruit.

  “Mother,” you say. “I neither know nor care. Now let me be.”

  “Then I dreamed I was running in a marathon and it was the best run of my life, but then I was driving in the car and I was in Italy. Then I was having sex with a taxi driver.”

  “How odd,” you say, reading the paper with a great show of focus. “A thirty-five-year-old woman is fighting for the right to keep a python as her pet. She claims he is quite affectionate.”

  She spreads butter on your toast, hands it to you, and leaves the room. As you eat, you let your crumbs fall on the table, and when you are finished, you leave your dirty dishes on the counter. It seems easier to stop trying for peace. Recently, you have taken to angling your phrases with a formal, almost British flair. You request that she not take the Lord’s name in vain. All this annoys her, which motivates you to continue. “That’s just my fancy,” has become your favourite way of punctuating your ideas and observations. You think it sounds aristocratic and self-deprecating. She tells you she cannot bear your new affectations. When you wake up, you throw your pajamas on the floor, forget to make your bed before you go to class. When you come home, you leave your keys in the front door. What appears as rebellion is really just laziness. You have begun to see anger on the flip side of everything. At night, you dream a different mother. One who wears aprons and knows the ratio of eggs to flour in baking. One who gardens wearing a straw hat and attends Sunday mass with a rosy enthusiasm. One who sleeps in a flowered flannel nightgown and greets each morning with a cheery stretch, who laughs off life’s disappointments and dreams a landscape of shimmering domesticity.

  THE ONLY PERSON who approves of the boy’s faith is your father.

  “It’s the only good sense I’ve seen in her for years,” he tells your mother.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “If you knew her at all, you’d know he’s not her type.”

  Your father approves of a young man with sound Christian values, the sort of boy who goes camping with his family, who knows how to erect a tent and hook a fish for dinner, a boy with God on his mind instead of sex. A boy who can strum “Blowin’ in the Wind” by night and lead the hymns come Sunday morning. Your new boy is not this outdoorsy type of Christian, but you can’t be bothered to explain this to your father. His mind is already bent with problems he can’t find explanations for. He can’t understand how the female side of his family has gone so wrong, supporting abortion and arguing the dangers of religiosity. Your older sister pins newspaper articles about church corruption on the refrigerator, highlights sections about Catholic priests molesting young boys. Your mother stopped taking you to church when you were ten. Her sole explanation was that she had had enough of hypocrisy. She cited your father as the first fool in the parade of hypocrites and insisted she would not subject her children to the litany of lies to which she had been subjected. Your father sleeps in the guest room and goes to church every Sunday morning.

  You don’t care what either parent thinks of your boyfriend. You dismiss your father’s approval of your good sense, ignore your mother’s insistence that dating a Christian is a form of post-adolescent rebellion. It seems to you that God has laid Christianity not just in your boy’s heart, but on his skin, a glaze that can almost be mistaken for sexuality. It is true, as your mother reminds you, that his bright red hair is a little too flaming, but what she doesn’t see is the way his professed sexlessness careens into sensuality. He expresses only positive thoughts and enjoys holding hands. In an effort to shock him, you pretend to be more cynical than you are, claiming to be a res
olute atheist, arguing that his love of God is only motivated by fear of hell.

  “I think you’re an agnostic, at worst,” he tells you. “You just haven’t found the right church.”

  “I’m not a good person,” you warn him. “I sometimes hurt people intentionally.”

  He squeezes your hand. “You just haven’t found someone who brings out the best in you.”

  As your dates begin to unfold in these battles for your eternal soul, you worry that he views dating you as the ultimate good work, your conversion as the triumph that will secure his seat in heaven. And when you offer your cheek for a goodnight kiss, you feel in his lips the fleshy diffidence of wholesomeness, the purity that courts, even demands, corruption. Secretly, you have determined to wheedle his virginity out of him. You whistle as he drives away.

  YOU HAVE BEEN SEDUCED many times, but have no idea how to seduce. With pencil and paper, you sit at your desk to dissect past seductions, chart patterns and map goals, pinpoint techniques and calculate probability. Resolved to master the tricks of past lovers, you clear your desk of schoolwork and compile a list of the boys you have slept with. The number comes to seven, and you feel strangely panicked, simultaneously corrupted and inept. That’s almost two for every year since you started having sex at fifteen.

  You cross the first few off your list with black marker. You can learn nothing from these first boys. They seduced you with self-pity, sadly confessing their romantic failures. One announced that you were the shining speck in his rusted life, settling unattractively in your arms like dead weight. More successful were the later boys. They seduced you quickly, like a band-aid removed painlessly in one swipe. They drew you in with specific flattery and vague cajoling. Targeting your weakest areas—your hated inner thighs, your tender lower lip—they placed themselves outside the action. These boys noticed the shape of your hands, the soft skin just below your navel. They took you in by inches, seemed to bow before your naked body with such concentrated reverence, such well-rehearsed appreciation. They told you that you were beautiful and intelligent and fun and knew that it would be enough to carry you through. You were seduced with your own ego and left empty-handed.

  You are not confident that you have it in you to be this cunning, but you are willing to try. His Holiness’s desire for you, so sweetly dispassionate, so unencumbered by lust, fills you with a sense of purpose. Standing at your bedroom mirror, you take off your shirt and stare at your breasts, imagining your body as a net in which you will catch his affection. When you were getting to know him, he told you about when his parents fell in love. They sent each other notes using the words of the Bible, the verses of psalms. They were shy, he explained, and it was the only way they knew to express their feelings. “I love the house where you live, the place where your glory makes its home,” his father had scrawled in his mother’s datebook. She left a reply in his hymn book: “I have treasured the words from your lips; in the path prescribed walking deliberately in your footsteps, so that my feet do not slip.” You wondered how these religious fanatics managed to hold down jobs where they had to speak without the aid of God’s Word.

  “Are you allowed to do that?” you asked. “Use stuff from the Bible as your own words?”

  “If you’re doing it for the right reasons,” he said. “Faithful you are with the faithful, blameless with the blameless, pure with the one who is pure.”

  Thinking of his parents, you decide to put your own spin on romantic communication. You write him a little poem, hinting at depths of feeling, avoiding anything overtly sexual:

  you bending over me:

  it is like

  standing still

  in the heart of a hurricane

  a shiver of sorrow

  rippling forever

  When he tells you he thinks it is sweet, you write another, leaving it on his knapsack after class:

  your taste sparks

  tea with honey

  darjeeling fantasies

  words get lost

  in this brew of hope

  You don’t care if he thinks the poems are silly. You know how to let yourself be wanted, but are just learning how to want.

  LATELY YOU’VE BEEN possessed by the suspicion that everyone is having a good time except you. During lunch at school, you read the work for afternoon classes while everyone else sits in small groups talking; food fights seem to erupt with unusual frequency. Even though you are almost at the end of first year, you feel you have learned nothing. You are biding your time, waiting for your ignorance to be revealed. Every time you hand in an essay, you fear you’ll be found out. Sometimes you feel that if you put as much effort into learning as you do into pretending to learn, the world would be taken by storm. Instead, you take long naps in the afternoon.

  His Holiness invites you on a Bible retreat. At first, you plan to decline. You cannot imagine being trapped north of the city with a group of people determined to preach God’s word. At night, you’re kept awake by the thought of his slender back. Just when you’re almost asleep, you’re awakened by the sound of your father, moving down the hall to your mother’s room. His footfall vibrates the whole house. The door closes and the movement stops as you hear his voice, less audible than a murmur. Silence follows, and you hear his voice more loudly this time. Her voice starts out of nowhere, exhausted and alarmed. The voices grow louder. Stillness flattens the air each time one voice becomes clear enough for you to hear the words. A moment later, your father closes her bedroom door and heads down the stairs. You get up, open the curtains, and return to bed. The streetlight reflects the glare from patches of March snow. You burrow under the wintry brightness of the night.

  The next morning you awaken to the sound of fighting in the kitchen.

  “If you think you can afford it, think again,” your father is saying. “I doubt if you’d be happy in a one-room apartment without the girls.”

  “The girls would come with me,” she says. “You could never get the girls to go with you.”

  “I doubt they’ll want to live in a tiny apartment.” He intimidates by not shouting. “In any case, they won’t be living at home for much longer.”

  She yells, suddenly, “You’re such a fat bastard!” Her voice is loose and crazy. “I’d get the house. The girls would stay with me.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” he tells her. “I’ve been doing my research and you wouldn’t get the house. I have an ace in the hole.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “What’s your ace in the hole?”

  “A good card player never gives away his ace in the hole.” You can tell he is smiling.

  Closing your bedroom door, you find a radio station playing rap and turn up the volume. You shut your eyes and lie down and for a moment feel soothed by the music’s metallic certainty, that repetitive hammer of noise. Your father listens only to classical music and Leonard Cohen. You decide that a weekend of preaching is better than a weekend of fighting and imagine how happy His Holiness will be when you tell him. Just the thought of calling him comforts you.

  FOR LUNCH, he eats tofu with noodles while you have a hamburger.

  “I love the way you eat,” you tell him. “It’s so polite. You even make tofu look good.”

  You are captivated by the smallest things. He seems amused and pleased by your hyperbolic fascination. You’re amazed by his restraint, a quality you have never encountered in a man. When he first saw you in the junior common room of University College, he approached tentatively and invited you to attend a night of murder mystery organized by Campus Crusade for Christ. You told him rudely you weren’t interested and didn’t believe in God. He apologized, lingered for a moment before walking away. The next day, you spotted him in your Romantic poetry class. When you sat down, he came and sat next to you. He spoke with quiet certainty and told you he was sorry for bothering you, he knew people’s attitudes towards Campus Crusade for Christ.

  “The word crusade is unfortunate,” he
said, laughing. “We’re not trying to recruit unwilling people to Christianity.”

  You liked his deferential manner, his lightly freckled skin. After class, you agreed to coffee. Sitting next to him was like holding an orange in your hand, feeling its perfect weight. In your memory of this day, he is wearing red velvet pants, though you know this cannot be so. You often argue this way with your memories, moments that are vivid but seem unlikely. You remember him telling you he loved you in the pause between rainstorms. Sitting in the car after a movie with the rain coming down so hard you couldn’t hear each other speak. In a quiet moment, the rain dripping like a metronome, he said, “I love you,” and you were too embarrassed to answer. When you really think about it, you know that this is not how it was. There was no rain, and you were the one who spoke the words, but your mind will not accept this as the reality. All you can do is back away from the real memories, and let the false ones stand.

  While he eats his tofu, he watches you with curiosity. You can’t think of anything to say, so you sit in silence. Ordinary moments like this stay in your head with cinematic accuracy.

  “You know Jack, the teaching assistant in our Romantic poetry class?” you ask him. “He accused me of plagiarizing.”

  “Does he have evidence?”

  “Of course he doesn’t have evidence,” you say. “I didn’t plagiarize. He said the writing style differs from the style of my other papers.” You worry that you’ve told him so many times you’re a bad person that he won’t believe you now, that he classifies unchristian, wicked, and dishonest as qualities that cannot exist separately.

  “Jack’s a good guy. It seems to me that if you tell him you’re not guilty, he’ll believe you.” His solution is appallingly swift and innocent. He returns to his tofu. “At work a few years ago, my mom was accused of embezzling company funds. She didn’t know what to do so she marched into a board meeting with her Bible and swore on it that she hadn’t committed any such crime.”