We moved on.
Rozet, nothing but a few manufactured homes standing in dreaming green fields overlaid with train tracks, traversed by bright-colored coal trains, mile-long dragons sluggish with fire. East. Devil’s Tower, a stone temple where X painted for hours, standing at his French easel among tall grass and sage brush, brim of hat pulled down over his long nose, I dozing on a blanket spread on the grass, smelling of bug spray and sunscreen. I watched through a sleepy waver as he raised his arm to the square and measured, thumb against pencil, and shifted shape before my dozing eyes from a fourteenyear-old boy with thick, thick glasses to his present, attainable, infinitely more desirable state. He wore an old green apron over his jeans, splattered with paint, heavy with rags and brushes. On a dry bit of highway we sat in a traffic jam and watched a moose menace a blue Volkswagen. Spearfish, Sturgis, Rapid City, an intense sunset blood-red and blood-purple over an endless similarity of Badland buttes, nature’s own Rexburg, all modest color and steeple. X and I pulled off the abandoned road. I climbed into his seat, straddled his lap, and brushed with my tingling mouth the fine filament hairs over his bare shoulder, where the late Dakotan light rang like a drum against his warm skin. We went south through Porcupine and Wounded Knee, and made what we could of western Nebraska, of all its nameless towns with their identical silos, old-timey shop fronts along listless brown avenues, broken windmills in tangled fields, backdrop of Chimney Rock under a black anvil cloud.
Through all of this, through days of travel, I accustomed myself to the rhythm of the road. Call James in the morning, argue. The gloom of driving, brush-fires of remorse pursuing me in the clouded side-view mirror. And at night, on hotel beds that were unsatisfactory for sleep, in rooms that smelled of sage brush, old cigarettes, and recirculated air, the steep ascent into paradise, a margin of relief where I admitted nothing – not Rexburg, not James – nothing but the presence of X, the fact of him, his reality – and his unreality, too, the faint trace of Adam’s smell, the only substantial thing in a mercifully formless void.
When we had finished and he was asleep with his back to me, covered by the thinness of a sheet, my eyes moved where my hands had moved, along the stark slanting line of his body, pale against the darkness of the room, peak of shoulder to hip, and in a haze I would wonder how even when we were still, even when we were done, how just lying beside him was enough to drive everything else from my mind.
The hotels were my only remedy. Each evening at check-in time I scrubbed away my anxiety with a new freshly unwrapped soap bar in a new lukewarm shower in a new nowhere town. Sometimes X would join me in my shower. He would wash my back for me, bend his neck to kiss me; there would be shower spray on his eyelashes and in the fine dark hairs of his eyebrows, sparkling like rain over the Bench. But when morning came my phone was in my hand again. James was in my ear again, pleading, accusing, and the whole awful routine began again the moment we took to that loathsome highway. I couldn’t manage to keep myself confined to the easy spaces where X and I floated in our isolated sea. Every sunrise was a fresh reminder that I had no strength to break Rexburg’s hold.
6.
A fire cannot rage in your heart but spare your clothing from burning. You cannot walk through a bonfire without blistering your feet. The burns will tell. The smoke will tell. The world will see how your lust smolders, and the world will despise you.
Adultery is wrong because it incites jealousy. It incites rage. It makes one man fight against another, and neither will ever be satisfied no matter how many blows are struck or how many wounds are dealt.
Adultery is wrong because God dictates matches and mating; because God chooses our partners and who are we, to think we know better than God? I hear Katherine’s voice inside my head: Well, who cares if I don’t like going to bed with him? Who cares if it’s not what I thought it would be? This is the husband God gave me, and who am I? Who am I to second-guess our Heavenly Father?
It is wrong because theft is wrong, because what is given to one man is his to have, because all men despise a thief, because what is taken can never be repaid.
Oh, there was so much certainty before I met you, X. Wrong because everybody will know. Wrong because because this is all so simple, it’s easy, it’s as clear as day, and you can be certain that you’re doing the right thing, always, all the time.
X and I sitting at the counter of a diner in Prairiesville, lacquered wood bar, hard chair anchored to the ground, tipping a little when I pivot the seat too far to the left. The woman behind the bar stabs a check onto an aluminum spike beside the register. She turns to us to take our order; her eyes are small and tired behind the drooping brown eyeliner that all older Catholic women wear; there is a tiny silver crucifix hanging around her neck. She smiles at us so kindly and says, after she notes our orders, “It’s real nice to see two kids like you in love.” The old man at the counter beside X stirs his coffee and grunts in agreement.
There is a great gout of flame in my heart, and a crackling of sparks, the snap of a twisted limb burning. There are bite marks on my shoulder and a message from my husband on my phone. Can’t they see, the waitress and the old man? They are supposed to see. They are supposed to despise me. It’s wrong, because god says so as simple as that as clear as that
7.
Nebraska morning. Pale yellow light over the empty parking lot beside the hotel. The tips of long grasses blazed. Across the highway a stand of shade trees stood well back from the road, sheltering a small white house at the end of a long dirt drive. I had excused myself to the parking lot, as I did every morning, for the ritual call. I could have called James in the private corners of hotel lobbies, at the ends of gray rooms where continental breakfasts were offered, my side of the conversation masked by the noise of travelers. I could have called him in the room, with X shaving his neck at the dimly lit sink. X wouldn’t have minded, wouldn’t have interfered. I preferred parking lots. There was always a road within view. There were always cars in motion, people going away. As James wept or railed in my ear I kept my eyes on the passing people. I reminded myself that I was one of them, traveling, working my roots free of hard yellow soil, soon this call would be over, I had done my duty to check in, soon I would be somewhere else, a new hotel, miles closer to figuring this mess out.
In the empty lot beside me the heads of yellow-framed, black-eyed flowers were just visible above the grass tips. Small brown birds dipped into the space where the flowers nodded, arcing low, snatching insects from the glowing air. I watched them for a time. I felt nothing for those few moments – no anxiety, no lust; I felt the alternating drop-and-rise, the stiff-feather beat of wings, the snick of wind against the falling small bodies. I preferred parking lots because they were as close to nature as I could get in the mornings.
In my pocket, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out quickly, relieved to see James’s name on the screen, relieved as I always was when I spoke to him, reassured that he was still there.
“James?”
Silence. Just for a moment, silence – enough time for two birds to arc down into the field and rise again on quick wings.
“Hello, I’m sorry.” Not my husband’s voice. Higher in pitch, softer. “My name is Brian. I know we’ve never met. I’m....” He trailed off.
“You’re James’s boyfriend.”
The man on the other line made a small noise, maybe a sigh, maybe a laugh. “Yes.”
And then in an instant my heart lurched, my eyes filled with tears. “What’s happened to James? Why are you calling on his phone?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. James is okay; he’s at the store right now. I sent him out. But I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t have your number, so I used his phone.”
“Oh, God. I thought something had happened.”
We laughed together, the quiet, polite chuckle of embarrassment.
“I’m worried about James,” Brian admitted. “He’s not taking this well.” And he told me how James could hardl
y be roused from bed, how he cried, how when he was not crying he read scripture, underlining passages with emphatic strokes, biting his lips. How James didn’t want to talk about me, and didn’t want to talk about the future, either. “That scares me,” Brian said. “He doesn’t seem to care about the future at all. I’m afraid he’ll try to hurt himself.”
My heart, a sickened, hollow, small thing, strained in my chest. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to do anything.”
“I should go back. I should get back to Rexburg and stay with James.”
“No. I’m not in it anymore – the Church, I mean. I left.”
“He told me about that.”
“I am trying to get him to see, too, that it’s better to leave if you don’t fit in. I think you did the right thing. He just needs more time.”
“But what if he...?”
“He won’t. I didn’t want to worry you. I’m sorry. I guess...I guess I just needed to talk to somebody who understands. Somebody who loves him, too.”
“I do. I do love him. I’m afraid I’ve hurt him too much by going.”
“He’ll be okay. I just needed to talk to somebody.”
I told him I was glad he’d called, although I was not. I was trembling and cold. My stomach knotted up hard. I told him, “You can call me any time you need to talk. I’m always here. Just...please tell James...tell him it’s going to be okay.”
Fragments of Brian’s words repeated in my head long after he had hung up. I watched the empty lot and listened to the broken echo. Future try to hurt himself somebody who loves him doesn’t care about he’ll be okay. My parking lot, my simulacrum of nature, was as hard and cold as the lines James inscribed beneath passages in his Book of Mormon, as uncomforting. The highway roared. I turned my back on it and crept back inside to watch X shave and pack. He asked me what was wrong. I said, “Nothing. Nothing is wrong. He’s going to be okay.”
8.
With the justice of God, men shall be judged according to their works. And if their works are good, and the desires of their hearts are good, when the long night comes they shall be restored to that which is good. And if their works are evil, they shall be restored to evil.
All things restored to their proper order, everything to its natural frame. Mortality raised to immortality. Corruption raised to incorruption. Raised up, and raised up, according to my good works, up to endless happiness, up to inherit the Kingdom of God. All I have to do to get to the Kingdom is desire good, and do good. By grace am I saved, and by my works am I rewarded.
My reward is a place of comfort, a place of rest, a place where time has no meaning, no brevity, no urgency, no constraint. By my works and my desires will I reward myself with an endlessness of love and community, a family dressed all in white whose hands are always stretched out to catch me, though in such a place I could never fall.
We are gathered around the table, all of us in white robes that glow with the brilliance of joy. Our faces are clear and untroubled. Between us there stretches a web of perfect understanding, of clarity of sight. All the faces I love, all the hands that will catch me. The children I have yet to bear. My mother and my father. My sister and my brothers. And James and X and Brian and me, perfectly connected, perfectly loved, unending.
There are no walls to this place. It is a glow within a glow, where faces and hands stand out with breathtaking sharpness against the comfort of white on white on white. Layers of peace, the Veil behind which I have left the concerns of the world.
In this place James and I, and the man he loves, and X and all the unknown children between us will walk and talk and hold one another in comforting arms and rejoice in an eternity of presence. We will move through a white landscape as soft as feathers of snow. We will feel the lines drawn between us, violin strings, how each string has a sweet tension all its own, how it draws out from my heart like a bead of silver fire and plunges into yours, X, and vibrates with the feel of your soul, your kindness, your humor, your beauty; and from your heart to James, where the string resonates with all the love he holds, his passions and his fears, the desire of his hands to do good works; and from James into Brian, and from Brian to me, and from us into the never-ending, ever-changing, breaking crescendo of family, the family we are given and the family we choose, the souls we gather to our hearts, the strings we pluck, the harmonies we join. In the white land we all sing together. No one hurts anymore. No one cries anymore. Every note is heard. That’s the way it will be, unending.
**
This is what you lose when you no longer believe in God.
9.
We were, we learned, in the tail end of Nebraska’s storm season. I was used to regular summer storms but Rexburg’s thunderheads were positively domestic by comparison with the fierce banks and shelves of cloud hanging over the wheat fields. They loomed, inverted step pyramids, banded like angry layer cakes, sculpted by a rotational wind that hinted at funnel clouds. Always the storms were accompanied by a dramatic light which stirred X. He loved the bright bruised sky against the luminous yellow of the fields, and whenever we noted a dark smudge on the horizon X became fidgety with anticipation.
One storm positioned itself obligingly just beyond a bizarre monument, old dead cars painted primer-gray and stacked and arranged to resemble Stonehenge. It was more than X could do to resist the scene. He tried to set up his easel but the nearness of the storm prevented it; he went chasing several pieces of watercolor paper across the weedy ground while the cloud cell turned lazily above the silent, brooding prairie. Some small bit of rubble picked up by the wind pinged against the hollow metal flank of an upturned Impala. The sound chilled me. We settled for photographs of the place.
Following X through the strange monument of Carhenge, I wondered what was here for him – here in me, in my presence. I was not so exciting as the cars or the blue storm-light. He hadn’t drawn me again since that first time in his hotel room. My stomach knotted to realize that only now, when we had been gone from Rexburg for so long, had I even stopped to consider what X was getting out of our little adventure. Sex, certainly. Was that all I was to him, a mobile concubine? This is the kind of question normal women ask before they upturn their lives, I told myself. I had been so thrilled at the excuse to leave town that I had gone about it all slipshod and hasty, and now I was tied to a man for God knew what purpose.
The bank of cloud seemed to draw nearer. It certainly was taller and an alarming wash of indigo was now visible below it, the dragging stain of precipitation. That could be hail, X said. We’d better get going.
Carhenge disappeared behind the dust of our retreat. Only the storm could be seen through the hybrid’s rear window, its forward face narrowing to a prominence that pointed in our direction with a long ominous finger of cloud. X squinted at it in his side mirror. “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Why are you with me?”
He laughed. “Why are you with me?”
“I mean, what are you getting out of this? I’m not so full of myself to think that I’m anything special. I’m not the most beautiful woman in the world. I’m not even single. I’m messed up and complicated. So why me? Why did you let me come with you?”
“You seemed like you needed a friend.”
The roadside wheat bent before the wind. I watched it flatten and shake without answering. “Okay,” X said. “There is a reason. I just don’t know how to say it without sounding like a creep.”
“Tell me. I need to know.”
He pulled onto a side road that joined the highway at the site of a lone rusted mailbox affixed to a decrepit wooden stand. The road was only paved a few yards out; beyond, where it ran between barbed-wire fences and nominal pasture, it turned to dirt, and far out among the flat acreage the dark outline of an old house hunched in the wind. X watched me a moment, apprehensive. Then he tapped my
elbow. I removed it from the glove box between us. It opened with a click. He sighed, and reached inside, and pulled out a small sketch pad with a brown cover and handed it to me. The sketch pad was old; its cover was stained and scored, the corners of its pages felted from years of handling. The spiral wire of its spine had relaxed at one end, unwinding itself through two or three perforations.
“Open it,” X said.
I did. Inside it was full of faded drawings. Of me, I thought for a moment; but the more I looked at the woman on the pages the more subtle differences I saw between us. She was a few pounds heavier, more softly curved. Her naked breasts were slightly larger, her nose just barely more snubbed. Her hair was cut a bit shorter than I kept mine, but the similarities were astounding. We could have been sisters. We could have been twins.
“Who is this?” I looked up into X’s face. He was frowning; he looked ashamed.
“Rebecca.”
“Oh my God.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you. I was engaged to her once, but she left me. When I first saw you I couldn’t believe how much you look like her. And at first it was almost the same, being with you. But now it’s different. Now that I know you, you’re nothing like her, and I’m happy. I don’t want her anymore.”
But the sketch pad was right there in my hands, bearing testimony to X’s lost love. “This is so strange,” I said.
Baptism for the Dead Page 11