This Is Not for You (35 page)

“Scotch woodcock,” you said, “in memory of London.”

You had made real coffee, which sat over a candle keeping warm. I was ridiculously impressed by the matching cups and saucers. I felt I should say something, but the change that seemed to me so extraordinary obviously had taken place too long ago for you to be aware of it any more. It was not, in your terms, important.

Sitting side by side to eat made conversation awkward. There should have been a mirror of the sort I so often spoke to you in, as we sat at the counter in a London milk bar. Instead we had to stare at book titles or turn to find our faces much too close together so that we chewed and swallowed with self-conscious daintiness. I felt ridiculous and somehow relieved. I found myself imagining how I would describe this scene to Grace, and I saw her eyes, slightly hooded with age, amused, but there was reserve there, too, requirement: go and find out. When we finished breakfast, I moved at once to the daybed. You cleared away the dishes and brought back an ashtray and fresh cups of coffee. I expected you to sit in the chair, but instead you sat down next to me, and there we were in this awkward side-by-side again.

“Don’t you want to look at me?” I asked.

“Not for a while,” you said, “not until I’ve told you the hard things.”

And so we looked down at our own hands and feet while you told me the story of your marriage from the wedding night until the day you packed your bags and left for Mexico nine months later, I waiting for the paper flowers and animals which never materialized. Apparently they did not breed in the new, tidy soil of your life.

“I almost didn’t go to Mexico. I almost took a plane to Athens instead. I had some melodramatic notion of throwing myself at your feet, telling you I’d given up everything—God, John, the lot. If you wouldn’t have me, I’d kill myself.”

“Why didn’t you come?”

You turned to me, startled. “What would you have done with me?”

I didn’t answer. For once I was silent against my welling desire, not from any reluctance in me but from a mood in your face I couldn’t read but didn’t feel either known or welcomed by. You took that silence for what it had always been before, nothing, and turned back to your telling.

There was no malice in it. There was real sorrow. I tried to forgive you the graphic detail which forced me to imagine what it had been like. I didn’t really have to imagine anything but the final scenes. I had known myself what it was like to stand before the open delight of your desire and be incapable of answering it. At least I had had a moral excuse. John had none.

“When I realized that he was afraid he simply couldn’t,” you said, “I thought I could do something about it. For a long time, I just didn’t have the nerve. He’s so remote in some ways. There wasn’t any way of talking about it. But I thought I could help. I wanted him so much. The longer he avoided it, the worse it was for me. It was about five months after we were married. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer. One night after dinner, I just began. At first I thought it was all right. He laughed and told me not to be silly, but he seemed interested, curious anyway. I didn’t care what I did as long as it worked. It was quite a performance. And I didn’t even know, when he started toward me, that it wasn’t all right.”

He had nearly killed you. Then he didn’t dare take you to the hospital. He tended you himself with absolute gentleness, but in horror of you and of himself that he could not speak.

“I told him we had to talk. I told him nothing mattered. Sex didn’t matter, but we had to be able to talk about it. Finally he said I was morally depraved. He’d realized before we were married that I’d had some experience. He knew women did these days, but nobody but a whore knew the things I knew, did the things I did. I tried to tell him. I tried to explain to him that nothing about the body is evil, that nothing he might want or I might want could be anything but lovely if we really loved each other. And I did love him. I wanted to tell him that I knew he was afraid. I didn’t dare. We went on for a couple of months the way we had before, twin beds and reading lamps. I was beginning to resign myself to it. There are lots of things besides sex once you decide about it. Then one night he came over to my bed as if he’d made up his mind to try. When, after a while, nothing happened, I began to be afraid for him. I touched him and began to talk to him, nothing crude really, just loving, and it began to work, but he felt to me so uncertain. I took him with my mouth, and he came. Then he hit me. Just once. He told me he never wanted to see me again, and he meant it. Oh, I stayed around for a week. I didn’t really know what to do. Finally I went to my minister. He talked with John. After that, he said I really had no choice. I should go to Mexico for a legal divorce. Then I should file for annulment with the Church because the marriage had never been consummated. I’m waiting for that now.”

“What’s happened to John?”

“Nothing. He wrote to my mother and told her that he’d like to stay on in Boston if she’d allow him to pay back the money over the next five years. Otherwise he’d sell out and go back to Louisville. She said he could stay. She has that little bit of vindictive pleasure at keeping him away from his mother.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I realized that at some point in the story I had taken your hand which I still held very firmly in mine. Now that I knew I had it, I didn’t know what to do with it, but you didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Well, it’s over,” you said, “and the odd thing about it is, I’m not really unhappy. In fact, I’m sometimes even… glad. There’s something very peaceful about giving up all that. Human relationships don’t really even interest me very much any more. I don’t mean I don’t care about people. I do. In a way, I even care more because I’m not involved. I’m getting an answer to that old question of Pete’s—we have to be ugly with each other’s sins until we’re detached enough to accept them of our own free will. Do you understand that? Probably you do. You’ve always been self-sufficient. I never have. It’s something I had to learn about now.”

“And you’re working,” I said, having let go of your hand.

“Yes,” you said. “I want to show you.”

Your workshop was as uncharacteristically ordered as your apartment had been. There were a dozen sketches pinned up on the wall. In the center of the room, on a stand, was your Crucifixion, almost finished. The cross was wooden, the Christ shaped of pieces of metal which had, though not obviously, first been used for other purposes. It must have been fairly heavy, but it was supported by the right number of nails. The figure was life-sized, the head up, the effect not skeletal so much as sketched in three dimensions, a hanging, straining weight of mortal suffering, undefeated. It was almost as if the head listened, as your bell ringers had done, to the note sounded above. I stood before it a long time before I turned away, knowing that for me man so tormented into whatever vision of salvation could lead me nowhere but to despair.

“No?” you asked.

“It’s powerful, E. It’s beautiful in a way—beautiful with the sins of the world. You’ve done what I said couldn’t be done, redeemed the material. It’s just that I don’t believe it.”

You nodded. “I know. It’s funny how far apart we’ve grown, isn’t it? That’s maybe the only grief I’ve got left with knowing how much farther I have to go.”

“How far have you got to go?”

“On anyway, as far as I can, as far as I’m called.”

Then you talked of the faithful life lived in the imitation of Christ. You read me bits from the lives of saints, but your texts were not often those we had studied together and argued about in philosophy of religion courses. What you were reading now was confessional literature mostly and persuasions of the persuaded. You had one little book called
The Right to be Merry
by a nun in an enclosed order. She wrote of talents given up to be given back, of poverty. “We are just too poor to own our bodies, to exercise over them the proprietorship by which we could lawfully claim the pleasures of the flesh.” “We accept the commands of others as alms to our poverty.”

“Are you thinking of going into an order, E.?”

“Thinking isn’t exactly what it is,” you said. “I study and pray and wait.”

“A teaching order?”

“I’d take the vow of silence and enclosure,” you said.

“Do you want to?”

“How can I explain it to you? In the worldly sense, nobody wants to be a saint, but some of us are called. I may have to be a saint, but I’m not sure I can bear it.”

I could hear the disbelieving laughter, the derisive comments, the cynicism of an invisible company of people. You, a saint? First, there was the impossible arrogance of it. Second, there were the doctrinal problems to be solved with particular reference to you: because your only sanctioned relationship was technically unconsummated, your purity could be established for you to take your vows. Finally, your personal history made you such an unlikely candidate. But none of that mattered really. Nor did it matter that I myself couldn’t possibly believe in the usefulness of a life spent in prayer for the world. The only honest protest I had to make was for myself. That you might one day shut the door on the world we lived in, leave me in it alone without ever the hope of looking up in a company of strangers to say, “There. There you are,” was all I could think of.

“I would miss you,” I said.

Later all the others would argue against belief or your motives in belief or your capacity to serve. You had friends more capable than I of denying the truth of Christianity. You had in your life lined up so many psychological clichés that it wouldn’t take more than an introductory course for anyone to accuse you of searching for a father figure, of trying to sublimate your homosexual tendencies, of Jewish paranoid appetites and delusions. Nobody needed even the terms to know that you had been, in the simplest, old-fashioned sense, “disappointed in love.” It was Saul, apparently, who fought morality with morality. He was to tell you that you were making a completely selfish decision, committing suicide to escape the responsibilities of love for your family and your friends. There must have been lots of people to remind you of the fortune you were giving up. Your mother, for one, for it was the only gift she was certain of giving you. Christopher Marlowe Smith, I’m sure, suffered a sense of shocking waste. For you, giving up the trinkets and toys that had delighted you would be much more difficult than giving away an inheritance you never really believed in and found an occasional nuisance. Did I know that none of these arguments would finally matter to you at all? They didn’t matter to me.

“It would be hard to give up children,” you said that afternoon. “It would be hard to give up fame, but, if the teaching of Christ is true, the only thing to do is live in terms of it.”

“It’s a hard faith,” I said, remembering how long ago you had said it to me. “Maybe any faith, taken seriously, is.”

When I left you that day, I had offered no objection and made no gesture of protest. Perhaps I thought there was still time. But who on earth would have dared or even wanted to take the responsibility of saving you from seeking your own salvation?

I had my own doubts, my own decisions to make. I spent the next day at the head office in committee meetings and conferences until late afternoon when I was to meet the head of the organization for drinks and dinner. He asked a great many questions about our work in Greece. Then he spoke of problems in South America, the political pressures from Washington. We had finished dinner before he was ready to discuss my job.

“Kate, I think you know you’re being considered as a replacement for Grace. She’s recommended it, but she’s not sure you’re ready for it. I’m not, either. I’m not sure you wouldn’t be more useful to us here or in Washington. Since we don’t seem able to make up our minds, I think the answer is for you to make up yours. If we send you back to Greece, we’ll recall Grace almost immediately to set up a training program. If you stay here—”

“Does she know she’d be recalled so soon if I accepted the job?” I asked.

“It was her suggestion.”

“I see.”

Then he outlined the kind of job he had in mind for me if I stayed, and he did make it sound as attractive as he could. I listened to what a year before would have seemed to me nearly ideal. Now, when I tried to think of living a life of committee meetings and political cocktail parties, my imagination simply failed. Instead I could hear in my head the repeating sentences of the Greek language records I had once so dutifully listened to: “In Greece, the sky is almost always blue”; “Hospitality is a Greek virtue”; “Help! Police! Someone has stolen my purse!”; “Get a doctor. The pain is in my stomach.” I could feel the dry k’s of that language forming in my throat mixed with the sharp, unlikely taste of retsina.

“Let me know on Friday,” he was saying.

Monk was on her way to bed by the time I got home, but Andrew was in the mood for a nightcap. I told him about the two jobs, describing them in as unprejudiced a way as I could.

“It sounds to me as if you’re going back to Athens,” Andrew said.

“But you think I’d be more useful if I stayed here.”

“No, Katie. That’s what you think. You’re bugged by people like John Kerry and their utilitarian arguments. Well, so am I. But if you make the wrong choice for absolute sense because it’s the right choice for you, why not? Something’s got to be said for loving what you do.”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“What about Esther?”

I lifted my hands in a Greek gesture.

“She’s doing some real sculpture, isn’t she? If she keeps it up, I want to give her a show.”

“I don’t think it will work, Andy.”

“She’s spoken to you then… about the order.”

“Yes.”

“Did you try to talk to her?”

“I didn’t have much to say.”

“No,” he said. “No, I suppose not. Will you be going back to anyone there?”

“No,” I said. “The only person… friend I’ve made is Grace Hardwick. She’ll be recalled.”

“Will she mind?”

“It’s her suggestion.”

“Will you?”

“For a while, yes, I’m sure I will.”