The Virgin Spy

by Krista Bridge

  You pause, choosing carefully from among potential responses. “Are you suggesting that I produce a Bible and swear to Jack that I didn’t plagiarize? That this will solve my problem?”

  “You never know until you try.”

  You slump in your chair, arms crossed like a child refusing to yield a point. “I hate Jack,” you say.

  “Come on now, let’s not use the word hate. Jack’s a good guy. I would even risk my life for him.”

  “Are you serious?” You didn’t see this much goodness coming, although conversations with him do tend to go this way, with random announcements that you used to think he came up with expressly to unsettle you.

  “Of course,” he says. “He’s a solid person. He’s taught me a lot and has always been fair to me. I couldn’t see him in danger and not help.”

  “But you’re not even friends with him.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I couldn’t stand by and not help him.”

  You can see the strain this places on him, having to explain pure instincts, virtue for its own sake, to a woman in a sulk. Analyzing his conviction does no good here. Disarmed, you stare in confusion and resolve. Such selflessness is foreign to you. You cannot trace its origins or map its consequences. He is sitting by the window, and you imagine, as his hair appears to light with sun, that goodness is contagious. You settle your chair closer to his, placing yourself within the perimeter of righteousness. Just righteousness, without the prefix of self. And you think it might actually be working. Goodness might be landing on your fingers, finding its way to you through the gateway of your eyes, because you feel sure as you listen to his calm assurance that you would risk your life for him, would gamble all you have to keep him in this world.

  YOU WALK AROUND your house slowly, moving in and out of a consciousness of Christianity, as you pack for the retreat. Your mother sits on your bed.

  “Do you really want to go?” she asks. “Is he making you feel obligated?”

  “No, Mother,” you say. “I’m tired of being here. I need to get away for the weekend.”

  “Don’t go on any snowmobiles.” She presses your hand. “I don’t think you realize how dangerous they are.”

  “Mother, nobody is going on snowmobiles. This is a Bible retreat.”

  “Well, you never know what they might try to get you to do.” She gets up to leave. “Watch out for those Christians. They’re not as good as they appear. If you want to come home early, call me. I’ll pick you up.”

  “Yes, Mother, I know,” you say, closing your suitcase as the doorbell rings.

  “That’ll be His Holiness,” she says, standing with her hands on her hips, surveying you with concern and frustration, as if she’s measuring the space between your eyes.

  You grab your suitcase and she follows closely. She doesn’t wave as the two of you drive away.

  “I think she’s afraid I’m going to become a born-again Christian and marry you,” you say to him, laughing. “And that you’re going to turn out like my father.”

  “Your father seems like a great guy,” he says.

  The day after their wedding, your father said to your mother, “I know you wanted me to tell you I loved you yesterday, so of course I couldn’t.” You considered telling His Holiness this, but you are beginning to see that he might be immune to such stories. You simply say, “He wasn’t at all nice to my mother on their wedding day.”

  “Well, sometimes brides are a real handful. I can especially see your mother being a handful.” He turns on the radio and stops at a station playing Bob Dylan. He hums along for a minute, then starts singing in his off-key tenor, changing the words and mixing songs. “Hey Mistress Tambourine Girl, play a song for me. Don’t think twice, it’s all right.” He taps your knee in rhythm to the music.

  When you arrive at the camp two hours later, it’s almost dark. He turns to you expectantly, as if your face will be lit differently in Christian surroundings, shaded by pine trees, reflected through the lake’s mirror. He takes your bag and leads you to your cabin, explaining that you’ll be rooming with a prayer buddy.

  “We do group prayers after each meal,” he says. “But we find that sometimes you get your most intense praying done with just one other person.”

  After introducing you to your cabin mate, Janine, he kisses you on the cheek and tells you he’ll meet you at the main hall before dinner. You turn to Janine, whose eyes are thickly lined with black shadow, lips coated with dark purple lipstick. She turns to you with a teacherly sigh.

  “We’ve been brought together because I was like you once. I know what it is not to know the way of the Lord. I’m glad God brought you here, and I think you will be too by the time this weekend is over.” She has your hand firmly sandwiched between both of hers. “I want you to know that you can talk to me.”

  “I’m starving,” you say, “Let’s go to dinner.” You can’t bear the drama of drawing your hand away.

  You break away from her in the cafeteria when you catch a flash of red hair across the room. He’s arguing quietly with a man wearing a yellow T-shirt bearing the words GOD’S WAY OR THE HIGHWAY.

  “What’s going on?” you ask him.

  “My cabin mate couldn’t come because he has the flu, so now I don’t have a prayer buddy.”

  You gesture towards Janine. “You can pray with us.”

  He forces a tolerant smile. “It doesn’t work that way. Three in a group upsets the balance. I’ll just pray by myself.”

  The fluorescent lights flash on and off. The man in the yellow T-shirt moves to the front of the room and raises his hand.

  “People, can we have some silence? John and I would like to address the group.” The room falls quiet. “Before everyone eats, we would like to introduce ourselves and tell you a bit about the activities we have planned for this weekend. John, want to take over?”

  John, in a matching yellow T-shirt, picks up his clipboard. “Thanks, Pete. It’s great to see all these familiar faces. And especially exciting to see some newcomers.” He winks at you.

  “Pete and myself are in charge of the activities this weekend, your camp counsellors, as it were. For those of you who might not already know, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I first started hanging with the folks in Campus Crusade for Christ in my first year at U of T. I started going to the meetings because nobody else at school was friendly.” He approaches and kneels before your chair, rests a hand on your knee, projecting to the group, but looking at you.

  “But then I realized these folks had something to say that I needed to hear, that I’d been waiting to hear. I’ve been active ever since, and I think these retreats are a great way of regrouping. We can share our feelings about God and discuss any Bible passages that might have us puzzled. I don’t know about you guys, but I always return to the city with a renewed sense of the Lord in my life.” He stands. “If there’s anything you need, feel free to find Pete or myself. We’re the dudes in these yellow T-shirts. It looks like dinner’s ready now, so if you’re ready for some grub, head on up and help yourself.”

  After all the people at your table have gathered their dinner, they encourage you to stand and lead them in grace. Panicked, you search for words of gratitude, but cannot summon thankfulness. You pretend the honour is too much for you to accept. “I couldn’t possibly,” you say, looking down, and they don’t push you.

  You eat tentatively, listening to the stories. One girl is a former cocaine addict who discovered God when she was lying naked in an alleyway, confused about where she was and how she got there. Another boy is a former compulsive shoplifter. When he tried to make the transition to grand theft auto, he got arrested and took it as a sign from God. Most of the people, though, have been raised in sound Christian families, lifelong followers of the Word. People finish eating and slowly filter out of the room, making their way towards the bonfire that John is starting by the lake.

  “I’m going to head down to my cabin for a quick nap before
we start the evening activities,” says His Holiness, standing up. His face is flushed, the redness absorbing his freckles.

  You look around as if you’ve forgotten where you are. “I guess I’ll meet you at the bonfire then.”

  You sit a moment longer, then decide to find Janine. Even though the Christians are friendly, you feel uncomfortable alone. When you reach your cabin, you find Janine arguing with Pete about Romans, chapter 8. A Bible is open on the bed.

  “Pete,” she says, her voice rising, “I’m not saying that your primary interests shouldn’t be spiritual. I’m just saying that you can have unspiritual interests too. The Bible says the unspiritual are interested only in what is unspiritual, but it doesn’t say that the spiritual must be interested only in the spiritual.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Pete responds calmly, lifting the Bible.

  You close the door. Genesis is the only part of the Bible you’ve read, research for a high school essay. Wandering along the path from your cabin, you decide to find His Holiness, to wake him to keep you company. You come to his cabin and open the door quietly. When you step inside, you are disoriented by the completeness of the dark, the northern night to which your eyes haven’t yet adjusted. You see the outline of his body on a low cot and you step lightly, afraid to wake him suddenly. You kneel at the side of his bed, watching as the darkness lifts and his face comes into focus.

  It occurs to you that he is better than you in every way one person can be better than another.

  The floor creaks under your shifting weight, and he simply opens his eyes calmly as if he had only been pretending to sleep. He doesn’t start when he sees you there and he looks hardly awake, but he takes your cold hand and places it on his chest, beneath the wool blanket. You say a silent prayer for virtue, hoping there is no one to hear it, no one to grant you in this moment what you’ve never had. Closing your eyes, you lean over and kiss him gently, in a way you doubt he has ever been kissed. With purpose. You are surprised that he doesn’t pull away, stunned when he pulls you towards him, then onto him. It seems to you that he is the one removing the clothes, the one saying, “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.” It seems to you that even in a moment of triumph and desire, even in a moment when desire is greater than triumph, you wouldn’t say such a thing. But you can’t now see the difference between his hands and your hands, between what he wants and what you want.

  His naked body seems so long, much longer than when he’s clothed. You feel his face, and it is hot, almost feverish. Your eyes skim the shape of his body, imagining his outline against yours. It seems that maybe this is all that matters, the outline of what’s happening. The details—where you’re touching him, the expression on his face, whether you wrap your legs around his body—seem unimportant. The most seductive part of the moment is knowing that he is your lover. The official sound of the title lover. It sounds almost evangelical, saturated with desire. You say it over and over to yourself.

  Afterwards, you watch the laboured rise and shaky fall of his chest, listen to his loud, wakeful breathing.

  “It’s okay,” you say. “I’m on the Pill.”

  Standing, he wraps his bathrobe around himself. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  When he leaves, you lie in bed worrying, hoping no one is around. You imagine getting expelled from the Bible retreat. You imagine black T-shirts: FORNICATION. JUST SAY NO. When he hasn’t returned half an hour later, you get dressed and go looking for him. Opening the door to the showers, you hear water running quietly, with weak pressure. It runs evenly, with little variation, as if there is no body beneath the spray. You move from stall to stall and find him in the last one. He is sitting on the concrete floor, his knees to his chest. He faces the wall, folded into himself.

  “Are you okay?”

  His shoulders twitch at the sound of your voice. He turns to you. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see if you were okay,” you say, shaking. You had anticipated gratitude.

  His voice is cold and hard and there are goosebumps on his skin. “Leave me alone.”

  You know you should be quiet, but you have too much to say. “It’s just sex. I told you that you have nothing to worry about. I’m on the Pill. I can’t imagine why you’re acting this way.”

  “Just sex,” he repeats. “You would say that.”

  “I should have just let you be,” he says, pressing his forehead into his knees.

  “What are you saying?” you ask. “I can’t hear you.”

  “I should have known,” he says, but not to you. “Faithful you are with the faithful, blameless with the blameless, pure with the one who is pure.”

  “I didn’t force you, if that’s what you’re saying.” You no longer want to go to him.

  He looks up at you briefly. “I met your family. I knew what you would be.” He turns from you again, beneath the weak water.

  You step from the steam into the lakeside chill and follow a thin path through the trees to the main lodge, where the phone is. As you wander, you grab a narrow branch covered in pine needles, and you pull them off one at a time, thinking, He knows me. He knows me not. Who knows me?

  WHAT YOU said you WANTED

  A man once told Tasha, “Sleeping next to a skinny woman is like lying next to a piece of Styrofoam.” She held on to that for a long time, even past the time when she needed to hear such things just to get her clothes off. When the man said that to her, she called her mother and told her right away. She still needed to pass on such comments. It seemed she would never stop.

  “That’s fine for him,” Isabel had said. “But don’t go using that as an excuse.”

  An excuse for what?

  “For portliness.”

  For Isabel, portly was one of the merriest, most benevolent descriptors in the English language. The world it conjured—the ripe medieval feasts, pewter goblets and game hens, bawdy laughter— mitigated the message, and she believed that if she applied this word to Tasha’s body, she would avoid inflicting the psychological damage associated with words such as hefty and overweight. Chubby was meant to deliver this conviviality but was simply without character: a bland, featureless word that contained none of the Falstaffian plenitude of portly. She could say it again and again. It was transporting. Not to mention functional.

  Isabel was still living in the big family house, though her husband, Ron, had left five years before. Isabel’s friend Rita had recently moved in, and although Rita seemed to occupy a separate bedroom, Tasha spent much time trying to figure out the nature of this friendship. Tasha visited Isabel almost every day, not out of an obligation to Isabel but out of some obligation to herself, a resolve to be the kind of person who would choose duty over fun.

  Not much had changed in the house since Tasha’s family had first started living there when Tasha was ten. The house was her father’s inheritance from his parents, and although it was tall and imposing, with a gloomy, forsaken beauty, no owner had put any confidence in its grandeur. Tasha’s parents—her father was a high school math teacher, her mother a drama teacher—were not well off enough to bother. They also thought renovations ruined a house’s character. Although the house seemed impressive from the outside, with three floors and a small turret, the interior was dim and smelled stale. As a girl, Tasha often thought the smell, mildewy and medicinal, resistant to detergent, had attached itself to her clothes. There were long, deep cracks like lightning strikes in the plaster on her bedroom walls, and the old oak floorboards were creaky and uneven. The ceilings were spotted with water stains. All the rooms, even the kitchen, were painted a decades-old dingy beige and Isabel and Ron had left up most of her grandparents’ artwork, so the walls were covered in paintings of empty rural landscapes, winter gardens, and sloping farm fields with a single horse grazing.

  Tasha’s bedroom was in the turret, and every year or so, she would go back and live there for several months while she changed jobs or men. On the walls still hung her childh
ood posters of golden puppies, an Impressionist-style painting of a shepherd boy playing a flute to his sheep, a watercolour of a pearly white unicorn under a blooming rainbow. Modernizing the room would have meant admitting it was still hers, that she would be back for it, and she wasn’t prepared to do that. At the same time, she felt a childish proprietary greed when Isabel suggested new posters. Returning to her girlhood room was somehow the consummation of all the bad luck she’d had out in the world, the proper conclusion.

  As a girl, Tasha had wished her home could be like the houses of her friends, everything pretty and cheerful, packed with lively clutter, the overflow of full lives. Her house had a different kind of disorder, not of abundance but of objects misplaced and never found, of dust balls lurking under all the beds and in all the corners. If she wanted to know where her clean clothes were, where her schoolbooks had been left, she had to keep on top of these things herself. Isabel’s meticulousness was not of that kind. Tasha’s friends had often envied the privacy of her turret bedroom, but unlike them, Tasha did not want her life to play out in private space. She wanted noisier complications, boisterous messes. She wanted to bicker with siblings, she wanted nosiness and door slamming, she wanted to eavesdrop and be eavesdropped on. She often wished for life to feel more crowded. In the blue evenings, she had liked to sit in her window seat and look down at the street, imagining that she was a princess, confined and abandoned in a turret, wrenched from the glory of her former life.

  Tasha went by Isabel’s house one evening before her second date with a new man. She brought two outfits to get her mother’s opinion about which looked better. The house had no full-length mirrors, so she had to stand on the bed in the master bedroom to get a view of herself in the mirror above the dresser. She was standing under the overhead light, a familiar position, with her head cranked to one side so she could see her reflection. One outfit was a long black dress, skimming her body, but not tight, then flaring out in an A-line just above her calves. The other outfit was a white blouse with ruffles along the front and a silky blue skirt that fell to her knees. The black dress was new, and it was supposed to make her look elegant and unreachable, lithe and cruel. She preferred the white blouse and blue skirt, which perhaps made her look innocent but seemed a more honest outfit.