A Month of Sundays

I inherited her. Alicia had been hired by my predecessor, a languid Gnostic stirred to dynamism only by the numen of church finances. Having ministered to our flock and its fleece during the go-go years, he left me a fat portfolio and lean attendance rolls. I was told, indeed, that the Reverend Eccles (short for shekels) believed that nothing so became a parishioner's life as the leaving of it, with a valedictory bequest to the building fund. At any rate, the nominal members stayed away from the Sabbath pews as from an internal-revenue collecting point, until the word went about in the land that lo! the new parson was not a hunting one but a hunted. Oh, shame upon me as I recall those Sundays, my sermons so fetchingly agonized, so fashionably anti-nomian. I suffered, impaled upon those impossible texts, weeping tears with my refusal to blink at the eschatological, yet happy in my work, pale in my pantomime of holy agitation, self-pleasing in my sleepless sweat, a fevered scapegoat taking upon myself the sins of the prosperous. The blue-suited businessmen regarded me with guarded but approbatory grimace as a curious sort of specialist, while musk arose thicker than incense from between the legs of their sea of wives. But enough of such shoptalk. I was sincere, if the word has meaning. Better our own act than another's. The Lord smiled; the cloud of witnesses beneath me grew, while wiring hung inside the pulpit like entrails in a butcher's shop, and my collection of interior pornography improved in technical quality (the early graininess expunged by computer enhancement from these latest Danish imports), and the organ behind me pertly sliced a premature end to the eloquent anguish of my silence.

She was pert, short, nearsighted, blonde in the hard ironed style, argumentative and rather metronomic. My organist at the previous church had been a plump black man (the music teacher at the local high school, and victimized by the ubiquitous demands of suburban tokenism) who rolled on the bench like a flywheel and set the pews to swaying during collection so the plates hopped from hand to hand like the bouncing ball at a sing-along. Sweeping the floors became a franchise, there was so much dropped change. Alicia, why do you keep hiding behind these wisecracks? When you sat down to play, I wondered if the thick soles of your trendy shoes wouldn't keep you from pedaling properly. Chartreuse bell-bottoms peeked from beneath your cassock. Behind your tinted octagonal spectacles, were your red-rimmed rabbit eyes really so shifty? I found out, didn't I?

•

"Mrs. Crick, did you feel you might have taken A Mighty Fortress a shade fast?" She is divorced, with two small children. Hire the handicapped. Her age on the edge of 30, as mine is on that of 40. Those ten years up on me, and the set of her lips, stiff as a sugar rose, and the impudent monocle flash of one or the other of her spectacles as she tips her head goad me to add, "At your tempo, A Flighty Fortress might be the better title. You left the choir procession stranded halfway down the aisle."

"The children's choir dawdled filing out" is Mrs. Crick's response. And: "You can't drag every hymn just because it's religious."

In retrospect, and no doubt then as well, beneath my prickle of dislike, I loved her standing up to me. Life, that's what we seek in one another, even with the DNA molecule cracked and our vitality arraigned before us as a microscopic Tinkertoy.

"There's such a thing as feeling," I told her.

"And such a thing as feigning," she responded.

Why can't I keep this in the present tense? She recedes in the vaults of the past as, on many a night, the clatter of the choristers having ebbed in a wash of headlights, she would switch off the organ (a 1920 three-rank electropneumatic, with a thrillingly discordant calliope of stops), gather to her breasts her Sämtliche Orgelwerke von Dietrich Buxtehude and Oeuvres Complètes pour Orgue de J. S. Bach Annotée et Doigtées par Marcel Dupré and 99 Tabernacle Favorites for Choir & Organ and sigh and retreat down the dimmed and silenced nave to the lancet doors and the black car parked in the black lot beyond.

"Good night, Mrs. Crick."

"Good night, Reverend Marshfield."

The draft from her opening the door, traveling along the carpet with a sacristan's tread, arrived at my ankles as the sound of its closing arrived at my ears. I feel my cassock sway in this wind. It is dead winter. Reverend. A chill. Her blondeness receding down the aisle. Her bottom, in tight slacks, surprisingly rounded, expressive. A touch of sadness in her shoulders. Her old car. I knew little about her life apart from Thursday nights and Sunday mornings. She gave piano lessons in the neighboring suburb. She had two children, who did not come to Sunday school. She must have had lovers.

"You are implying," I said on the above-mentioned occasion, "what?" My wariness was not that only of the watcher but of the watched. For some time, her attention had been upon me: That was the prickle.

She sat on the arm of a pew and hugged her pastel sheaf of music tighter. In this strained position her knees, bonier than the rest of her, protruded and pressed white edges into the stretchy knit of her tights. Was she about to weep? Her voice was dry. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I was implying. You're a good man. No, you're not. I'm sorry, I don't have any control over what I'm saying. Something else has upset me, not you."

"Would you like to tell me what?" I asked, though it was more about me, her image of me, that I wanted to hear.

"Oh, some man. Some stupid man."

"Who won't marry you?"

She looked up, her eyes behind the tinted lenses blurred. I never, as a rule, look toward people's eyes. Their mouths tell all. Hers was tense, prim. "That must be it," she said, sarcastically.

"I'm wrong," I offered.

"You're close enough." Her head bowed again. "You just get so tired," she added, of another "you," in weak apology.

I was anxious not to overdo; I missed my vestments, which veil me, enable me to speak with a voice arising from elsewhere than my own constrained chest. Her life, the Gothic carpentry of the church, the night outside, the parish and its intricate life all as in an Uccello converged on this moment, in whose black center I was sensually conscious only of my white hands, posed anxiously before me as if trying to build a house of cards in the air between the cavity of my chest and the glow of her bowed head. Their palms tingled. To this moment, toward which four decades narrowed, I had never been unfaithful to my wife. There had been temptations as strong, but my will to be tempted had been weaker.

"Tired of what? Tell me."

She lifted her face; her face was behind glass.

What do I mean, writing that? Am I imposing backward upon the moment the later moment when truly she was behind glass, her foot and her hair, with Ned? Or did my knowledge that a process of seduction was at work, that this face could, if not now, later, be touched, secrete in panic a transparent barrier? Her eyes, behind their tinted lenses, had to be guessed at. Her jaw wore a curious, arrogant, cheap, arrested set, as if about to chew gum. "Of men," she said, interrogatively--"?" It was an offering. "You'd be shocked if I told you."

I did not dispute. Dinna press, when swinging a golf club or parrying with a woman. Let the club do the work. I may have resolved, also, in this pocket of my silence, to make her pay later for this snub of hers; or again this may be read in retrospect, a later loop of the film overlapping.

"Then tell me about me," said I, bold and insouciant, a modern cleric, perching on the arm of a pew opposite. The wood nipped my buttocks. "I'm not a good man," I rehearsed my prey. "I pretend to feel."

As I had hoped, she became argumentative. " 'Good,' " she said. "I don't understand goodness. The term doesn't have much meaning for me. Things happen, people do things, and that's it. I know you don't believe that. I do think you exaggerate yourself as a believing unbeliever, as a man sweating it out on the edge of eternity or whatever; you tease the congregation. You shouldn't. Those people out there, they're just dumb; they don't know why they're just dumb; they don't know why they're hurting, or going into bankruptcy, or knocked up, or alone, or whatever. You shouldn't act out your personal psychodrama on their time. I mean, this isn't meant to be your show, it's theirs."

"I see," I said, lying.

She saw I was. "I mean," she said, and I loved the flush of earnestness stealing that arrogant gum-chewing cool from her features, "don't be so angry, about patterns and obstacles that are all in your head."

"Angry? Am I?"

"I'd say," Alicia said, "you're the angriest sane man I've ever met."

So you've met angry insane men? But I didn't ask that; I asked, benevolently, "What do you think I'm angry about?"

"What we're all angry about. You're unhappy."

Still smiling, still stoking my smile with interior vows of revenge, I asked, inevitably, "And what makes me so unhappy?"

I assumed she would answer, Your theology. Instead she said, "Your marriage."

"Isn't it perfect?" I asked; the words, inane yet divinely enunciated, arose beyond me, in some primer angels update.

My dear sexy organist laughed. Her laugh filled the church like golden mud--or do I misquote? "It's terrible," she pronounced, myopic and merry and her kneecaps thrust whitely through her panty hose by some stress in her perching position. "It's worse than mine, even, and that didn't last three years!"

There is a Biblical phrase whose truth I then lived: Scales fell from my eyes. She was right. In her helmet of centrally cleft gold, this angel had come and with a burning sword slashed the gray (as cardboard, as brain cells) walls of my prison.

This conversation took place early in Lent; I kissed her in the vestibule the evening of Holy Saturday, gathering her in between the lancet doors giving onto the nave and the weather-stripped doors giving onto the expectant night, gathering her into my arms, her head frosty with hair, above the wire rack of Lenten pamphlets and appropriate versicles directed at the alcoholic, the lonely, the doubtful, the estranged, gathering into my arms a startling, agitated, conflicted, uneven mix of softnesses and hardnesses, warm spots and cool, her body. After Easter, her black Chevrolet providentially having torn a gasket, she let me drive her home and took me upstairs to her bed.

Probably the conversation as I have set it down is a medley of several, scattered through a number of post-or prerehearsal interludes, in drafty ecclesiastic nooks haunted by whiffs of liquid wax and spilled cider, or on awkward frozen lawns while our gloved hands groped for the handles of differing automobiles.

•

Alicia in bed was a revelation--at last I confronted as in an ecstatic mirror my own sexual demon. In such a hurry we did not always take time to remove socks and necklaces and underthings that clung to us then like shards or epaulets, we would tumble upon her low square bed, whose headboard was a rectangle of teak and whose bedspread a quiltwork sunburst, and she would push me down and, her right hand splayed on her belly, tugging upward the tarnished gilt of her public fur so as to make an unwispy fit, would seat herself upon my upraised phallus, whose mettle she had firmed with fingers and lips, and whimper, and come, and squirm, and come again, her vaginal secretions so copious my once-too-sensitive glans slid through its element calm as a fish, and politely declined to ejaculate, so that she came once more, and her white-skinned joy, witnessed, forced a laugh from my chest. This laughing was unprecedented for me; under my wife's administration sex had been a serious business.

The minx's breasts were small but smartly tipped, her waist comfortably thick, her feet homely and well-used-looking, as were her active hands, all muscle and bone, and her public patch, as I have said, the curious no-color of tarnished gilt, gold dulled to the edge of brown, the high note of her blonde head transposed to a seductive minor.

At the join of Alicia's abdomen and thighs you could count the tendrils one by one; they thickened in the center to a virtual beard that, when we showered together ere returning to the scoured world, she would let me shape with soap into a jaunty goatee. She loved her own cunt, handled it and crooned of it as if it were not the means to a child but a child itself, tender and tiny and intricate and mischievously willfull. "My trouble is," she told me, "I think with my cunt." "I'm kissing my own cunt!" she sighed unforgettably once when I fetched my mouth fresh from below and pressed it wet upon her own. The lover as viaduct. The lover as sky-god, cycling moisture from earth to cloud to earth.

Though she was a fair enough sky herself. We played in each other like children in puddles. Dabbled and stared, dabbled and stared. The mud of her, white and rose and gold, reflected blue zenith.

Play. There was that, in daylight, laughing, after a marriage bed of nighttime solemnity and spilt religion, spilt usually at the wrong angle, at the moment when the cup had been withdrawn. What fun my forgotten old body turned out to be--the (continued on page 92)Month of Sundays(continued from page 86) toy I should have been given for Christmas, instead of the jack-in-the-box, or the little trapeze artist between his squeezable sticks, or the Lionel locomotive recurrently entering its papier-mâché tunnel. Thank you, playmate, for such a lightheaded snowy morning, your own body more baubled than a Christmas tree, with more vistas to it than within a kaleidoscope. In holiday truth my wonder did seem to rebound upon you, merry, merry, and make you chime.

Play, and pain. Her moans, her cries at first frightened me, at the very first because I naïvely imagined I was in my new-found might hurting her ("You're wombing me!" she once cried, astraddle) and next because I feared such depth of pleasure was not enough my creation, was too much hers, and could too easily be shifted to the agency of another. There is this to be said for cold women: They stick. So beneath our raptures I heard the tearing silk of infidelity and she heard the ticking clock that would lift me, from whatever height of self-forgetfulness, on to the next appointment, and home, to check the patch of invisible mending on my absence. Alicia found it hard to let me go, I know. For I was a rare man, in this latter world of overexperienced men, in the degree of power I granted her over me. Her bestowals had not for some years, I judged, won such gratitude and ardor. So my swift resumption of my suit of black, even to rubber overshoes in the postpaschal season of slush, caused all of her skin, bare on our bed, to stare amazed. Her clinging to me naked, at the head of the stairs, is the only embrace it displeases me to recall.

Play, and pain, and display. Her house was a little peach-colored one in a row of such houses on a curved street so newly scraped into being that mud ran in the gutters when it rained and the only trees were staked saplings. The upstairs windows were dormered; her children had a small room each facing the street and Alicia had taken for herself the long room giving onto the back yard, with its brave spindle of an infant beech, and an incipient box hedge, and a bleak garage, and an alley where an oil truck seemed often to be idly churning, and the backs of the next street in the development, and across a waiting tract of purple woods tinted ruddy with coming buds what seemed to be an abandoned gravel pit and, on the crest above it, incongruously, the little spikes and buttons of tombstones in a cemetery. I had, a few times, buried souls in that cemetery. I loved this sparse, raw neighborhood, for its impoverished air suggested that Alicia did not have the means to leave me, however often I briskly dressed and left her, and its lack of trees--the opposite of my own heavily oaked and elmed neighborhood of Gothic McKinley-vintage mansions--let the light in unclouded, nude as ourselves and, like us, eternally young. Oh, Alicia, my mistress, my colleague, my advisor, my betrayer, what would I not give--a hand? No, not even a finger, but perhaps the ring from my finger--to see you again mounted at the base of my belly, your shoulders caped with sunshine, your head flung back so your jawbone traced its own omega, your hair on false fire, your breasts hung undefended upon the delicacy of your ribs and anxious for any mouth to tease them, any hand to touch them, but untouched taking pleasure, it seemed, in their own unresisted swaying, in the smooth wash of light. I lifted my back, the muscles in my thighs pulled, my face was fed, you moaned. We bent a world of curves above the soaked knot where our roots mixed.

Alicia was nearsighted and had to look closely. Else, but for my voice and smell, I was a mist of maleness to her. And I, I borrowed courage from her shamelessness, and looked my fill, and reduced under the caresses of my eyes the brute biological engineering of her pores, striations, pimples, mucuses, wrinkles, wobbles, calluses and widening flaws--for time had made familiar with her, younger than I though she was--reduced to the service of love. There. That is what I meant by display, though the word love pains me as imprecise. Precisely, I worshiped her, adored her flaws as furiously as her perfections, for they were hers, and thus attained, in the bound of a few spring weeks, a few illicit lays, the attitude that saints bear toward God, and that I in a Christ's lifetime of trying (40 [present age] minus 7 [age of reason] equals 33) had failed to reach; that is, of forgiving Him the pain of infants, the diabolism of disease, the wantonness of fortune, the billions of fossilized deaths, the helplessness of the young, the idiocy of the old, the craftsmanship of torturers, the authority of blunderers, the savagery of accident, the unbreathability of water and all the other repulsive flecks on the face of creation.

We preened for each other, posed, danced, socketed every dubious elbow of the mortal envelope in an avid French kiss of acceptance. You've read it before, I know. Skin is an agreeable texture. Penises and vaginas notably so, patent pending. Weaning is an incomplete process. Sex can be fun.

Still, what a relief to have intelligere become esse. Land ho! She appeared to me during those afternoons of copulation as a promontory on some hitherto sunken continent of light. I had to drive from her town to mine along a highway that, once threaded shadily through fields and pastures, was now straightened, thickened and jammed with shopping malls, car lots, gas stations, hero-sandwich parlors, auto-parts paradises, driving ranges, joyless joy rides for the groggy offspring of deranged shoppers, go-go bars windowless as mausoleums (Gay Nite Tuesdays, Cum in Drag), drive-in insurance agencies, the whole gaudy ghastly gasoline-powered consumerish smear, bubbling like tar in the heat of high summer. Yet how washed and constellated it all looked in the aftermath of my sinning! How the fallen world sparkled, now that my faith was decisively lost!

•

We look alike, my wife and I. That is what people meeting us for the first time say, sometimes with evident amusement. We do not, ourselves, feel this; nor, during our courtship, was it anything but our differences that intrigued us. She was serenity and beauty; I, agitation and energy. She was moderate; I, extreme. She was liberal and ethical and good; I, Barthian and rather bad. Above all, she was female and fruitful; and I, masculine and hungry. My impulse, to eat her, to taste, devour and assimilate, which continues into even this our misery, though my bite has become murderous, began with the first glimpse; she was standing, in pleated tennis dress, in the windy warmth of an April day when tennis had become suddenly possible, beneath a blooming fruit tree, a small apple or a crab apple--a distinction I was too youthful to make at the time. Within this dappled shade, her head grazing the petaled limbs, the lowest was so low, Jane's prettily pale form appeared one with her arbor. There was piquancy in her seeking this delicate shade, on so delicately bright a day; I later learned she was allergic to the sun, and so she has remained.

Both pale, both moderately above median height, both blue-eyed and not a bit fat--tendony, rather--with the something tense about us qualified by an aura indifferent and ashen as of stalks of smoke, we make, in public, a twinned impression intensified, of course, by two decades' worth of phrase swapping, signal giving and unconscious facial aping. We have been worn by the same forces into parallel spindles. We lie down in bed together side by side and turn as if on a single lathe. We resort, I sense, to a common expression under stress--an upward tilting of the head and tighter trimming of the mouth that lets our besieger know we have withdrawn into a fastidious, and despite ourselves shared, privacy.

Oh, I know, I know, dear unknown reader, that just thinking of this woman tricks my prose into a new ease of fancy and airiness of cadence; I am home. But do not be fooled; this ease and comfort are not palliation, they are the disease.

•

The Reverend Dr. Wesley Augustus Chillingworth, Jane's father, had loomed as professor of ethics at the divinity school I attended. A green slanting (continued on page 241)Month of Sundays(continued from page 92) campus, a lake at the bottom, a great ironstone chapel erected by some industrial (industrious, in dust try us) sinner at the top. A rangy town beyond, with bars and buses for its denizens, while for us there was a screen of elms and ells, and bells, bells pealing the hour, the half hour, the quarter, until the air seemed permanently liquefied and spilling everywhere like mercury. Chillingworth was a short, square man, whose docile sallow squareness made him seem shorter than he was, of huge erudition; he delivered his lectures in a virtual whisper, often facing the blackboard or an antique brown globe of the heavens left in his room from an era when natural science and theology were, if not allies, at least members of the same club. The orgy of reading that must have consumed his youth and prime had left him, in his late 50s, wearing a great rake's faintly cocky air of exhaustion; there was a twinkle in his dryness as he led us through the desiccated debates of the Greeks, of the hedonists and the Platonists, the Peripatetics and the Cyrenaics, the Stoics and the Epicureans, over the one immense question, Is the pleasant the good, or not quite? His course epitomized everything I hated about academic religion; its safe and complacent faithlessness, its empty difficulty, its transformation of the tombstones of the passionate dead into a set of hurdles for the living to leap on their way to an underpaid and obsolescing profession. The old scholar's muttering manner seemed to acknowledge this, as without mercy he dragged us, his pack of pimply postulants, from Hottentot taboos and Eskimo hospitality (fuck my wife, you blubber) on to the tedious Greeks and the Neoplatonists (How can the soul be a form? How can it not be? How can God be a self? What else can He be? What is the good, then, but absorption into God? What is the good of it?) and further on to the rollicking saints, knitting their all-weather space suits of invisible wool, Augustine and his concupiscentia, Bonaventura and his gratia, Anselm and his librum arbitrium, Aquinas and his synteresis, Duns Scotus and his pondus naturae, Occam and his razor, and heaven knows who all else. By spring we had won through to Grotius and his jus gentium, and as modern ethics unfolded under Chillingworth's muttering, I had the parallel pleasure, as it were in running footnote, of seducing his daughter. We met in the cool British sunshine of Hobbesian realism, hit balls at each other with unbridled egoism and agreed to play again, as partners. By the time of our next date, Hume was exploding "ought" and "right" and Bentham was attempting to reconstruct hedonism with maximization formulas. Our first kiss came during Spinoza, more titillatio than hilaritas. Yet I felt my conatus, somber center of my self, beautifully lift from my diaphragm as, in the darkness of my shut lids, her gravity for the first time impinged on mine. As Kant attempted to soften rationalism with categorical imperatives and Achtung, Jane let me caress her breast through her sweater. By the time of Hegel's monstrous identification of morality with the demands of the state, my hand was beneath her sweater and my access had been universalized to include her thighs. How solid and smooth this pedant's daughter was! I had expected her to be spun of cobwebs. We were both 22 and virgins. The weather loosened; the nights were warm. Schopenhauer exalted will and Nietzsche glorified brutality, cunning, rape and war. All earlier ethics stood exposed as "slave virtues" and "herd virtues." Jane, in her room atop the great dusty vault of stacked books and learned journals her father called his "study," let me undress her--no, to be honest, undressed herself, with a certain graceful impatience, I having made of her clothing an asymmetric mess of rumples and undone snaps. She flicked away the last morsel of underwear and tucked her hands behind her head in the pose of a napping picnicker and let me look.

This was not my first naked female. But Jane was to these as the cut marble is to the melted wax of the preliminary models. No formula, utilitarian or idealist, could quite do justice to the living absoluteness of it. Here was a fact, 5'7" long and of circumferences varying from ankles to hips, from waist to skull. Her window was open, admitting cool air and light enough to see. A remnant strip of green and salmon glowed behind the spired horizon. Her girlhood room (childish wallpaper of a medallioned cottage alternate with a woolly shepherd, back turned, standing among dogs, tacked over with collegiate prints of Klee and Cézanne above the narrow bed where she lay displayed) surrounded me like a fog of atomized furniture as my eyes in twilight drank. Her father cleared his throat below. Jane made silent offer of a laugh and removed her hands from behind her head; she held out her round arms to me and mouthed the exclamation "Stop!"; she pulled me down into herself to snuff out my staring. "It's meant to be natural," she whispered, her first reproof, if reproof it was, or the first I remember, the first that shamed me, and that has remained preserved, beetle in amber, in my exuded sense of having--in having taken such awed delight in the sight of her (Achtung, indeed)--done something wrong. The British idealists Green and Bradley attempted to lift the human self, timeless and unitary, away from the ravening reach of analytical science. Do not think, because we became naked together, we made love. This was the Fifties. There were complications both technical and spiritual, traditional and existential. While Pierce, James and Dewey, with native American makeshift wit, tried to reverse the divine current and wag the transcendental dog with the tail of credulity's practical benefits, Jane proved alarmingly adept at dry fucking (forgive this term, among others; that which has existence [ens] must have a name [nomen]). Alarming because her adeptness showed she had done it before. Kneeling or lying sideways, her hands no-nonsensically placed on my buttocks for alignment's and pressure's sake, she would fricate our arcane contact until one of us, as often she before me as I before her, would trip and come. The laggard would follow suit. What poetry in virginity!--Jane's little gasp at my shoulder, and her glans-crushing push, and the leaps within her as of an enwombed kangaroo. The sweet sight of my semen, glutinous in her pussy or glistening on her belly like an iota of lunar spit. Penetrant love by comparison comes muffled. The existentialists, beginning with Kierkegaard, who set up a clever roar less unlike Nietzsche's than the gentle would wish, did away with essence and connection and left us with an "authenticity" whose relativity is unconfessed. Jane, satisfied, would seem to drift from me, not unhappily, on, in some hazy cloud of unfocused benevolence, Godless and wisely reasonable, submissive to time and tides. She was slow to say she loved me. Of her virginity (a mere wet inch away), she said she should "save herself." For some other? And the logical positivists thought to end human confusion by careful reference to the dictionary (see C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, 1944, the final text Chillingworth assigned). I introduced the word marriage. Jane nodded, silently. I saw her as "wife" and went blind with pride.

•

Jane, two decades later, though the intonation of her person and that of mine have come to be mutual echoes, and the dimple in her cheek has impressed a brother into the center of my chin, and the original russet of my hair and the chestnut of hers have thinned and faded to an interchangeable what's-the-use brown, with gray added to your taste (though she is not bald on top, like me, her forehead has heightened, and when she pulls and flattens her hair back in front of a mirror, something she is inexplicably fond of doing. she looks, as she says, "skinned"), she does, by another light--the light, say, of a fireplace as she stirs a martini with her finger and gazes into the flames, or of the bedroom 60-watt as she darts, head-first, into her nightie--look totaliter aliter, an Other, a woman, and, as such, marketable. I did seriously hope, amid the pressure-warped improbabilities of my affair with Alicia, to mate Jane with Ned Bork, and thus arrange a happy ending for all but the Pharisees.

For one thing, he was not all that young. He had been in some business--peddling real estate, or making fancy ceramics, or partly managing a ski resort in some yankee state; or perhaps he ran a pottery-shop in a ski lodge that was for sale--before getting the "call" and under-going, at his family's wise indulgence, divinity school. He was 30 at least.

For another, he reminded me of those 30-year-olds who had been courting Jane before I carried her off. Ned had the beard of the pacifist, the modest stature and sexual ambiguity of the Jesuit, the pipe and affected drawl of the assistant prof. I had always felt, in removing Jane from her circle of harmless seminarian misfits. I had deflected her from her destiny. Here was her chance to reclaim it, to put the numb nightmare of marriage to me behind her. I did not, even in my lovelorn madness, imagine she and Ned would marry; but perhaps they would clasp long enough to permit me to slip out the door with only one bulky armload of guilt.

For a third, they liked each other. They had the same milky human kindness, the same preposterous view of the church as an adjunct of religious studies and social service, the same infuriating politics, a warmed-over McGovernism of smug lamenting: Never did they think to see themselves, however heavily their heads nodded, as two luxurious blooms on a stalk fibrous with capital and cops. Of course, Jane must have seen in Ned her suitors returned to her; and he, my reasoning was, must see in her a female who, unlike whatever insatiable opposite numbers had scared him away from marriage, would have the grace and wisdom to let the appearance of submission be hers. My acquaintance with the girls of Ned's generation was purely scholastic, but I read often enough in the fidasustentative newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva that they (these girls), deprived of shame and given the pill, had created a generation of impotent lads the like of which had not been seen since nannies stopped slicing off masturbators' thumbs. Impotent, I must say, I was never: as ready to stand and ejaculate as to stand and spout the Apostles' Creed. This cause for rejoicing turned out to be, when in the phosphorescent decay of all we held dear we took to exposing old grudges, one of Jane's complaints; if I had not been, her case argued, so eternally upright, she might out of compassion have mastered a dozen winning tricks and excited herself to a flutter of multiple orgasm in the bargain. So Bork's supposed semipotence became an asset, an added pastel of probability as, in the hectic sketchbook of my mind's eye. I embowered the twain, a silken and limp Adonis and his mellowed, maternal Venus, the blasphemous and opulent couple goaded by remorse toward me (me, the invisible presiding blasphemed, the mutually loved, the Y of the triune equation) into one extravagant tenderness of penetration after another.

Fuck my wife, you blubber.

Many the night did Bork come for dinner and stay, while I plodded out into the sleet in placation of the telephone, to minister unto a comatose matrix of tubes and medicines that had once been a parishioner or (not very often; we were no bolder than we needed to be) to Alicia in her airy tract house. Many the night did I return and find them, my mate and my curate, still propped in a daze at the table, or bedded in opposing easy chairs by the fireplace, noogling away at the brandy and beer (they both had the capacities of vats, another auspicious affinity) and gently fumbling for (as far as I could tell) the rattle of a social cure-all in the tumbled blankets of their minds. What babies they were! I thought they might at least fornicate out of conversational boredom. But they never seemed to weary of talking. My nostrils stuffed with the musky stench of death or sex, my shoulders hoary with sleet and woe, I looked down upon them like an impatient God who, by some crimp in His contract with Noah, cannot destroy. I say sleet: it must have been winter. For more seasons than I can correlate the weather of, my prayers that I be betrayed ascended in vain. I prayed, and cried, and tried. I tried the nudge direct:

(In bed, with reeking Mrs. Marshfield) "Do you find Ned sexually attractive?"

"I like his philosophy."

"And his acne?" (Constantly at cross-purposes with myself, could bite my tongue.)

"I don't mind it."

"What do you think he does, for love?"

"I have no idea. We never discuss such things. Could I please go to sleep? The whole room is spinning around and I might throw up."

(Not to be dissuaded; the hound of heaven) "Why don't you discuss such things? I'd think you would. Isn't it a little abnormal, that you don't?"

"Tom, there's a whole other world to discuss, besides ego gratification."

"Am I talking about ego gratification?" (She had her father's gift, of enlightening me when I least wanted it.)

"That's all you ever talk about, lately."

"You detect a change in me, lately?" (Come on, guess. Alicia's ass sits on my head like an aureole, look. Guess. Do something to get me out of this.)

"Not really. You seem a little less frantic."

"In what sense frantic? When was I ever frantic?" (Me, me, what do you make of me, Mimi?)

"Please stop thrashing around. I really might be sick. I wish you wouldn't keep leaving me and Ned alone all the time; it makes us so nervous we both drink too much."

"There's something very beautiful about Ned, don't you think? He doesn't have any of our generation's hang-ups."

"He has hang-ups of his own," mumbled this maddening bed partner, this flesh of my flesh.

"Oh? Does he leave you kind of titillated but unsatisfied? Want to make love, just to relieve the tension?"

"Isn't tomorrow Sunday?"

"Better yet, today is Sunday. Roll over and tell me about Ned's hang-ups."

A soft snore signals her conquest of liquor, lust, marital heckling, and time. She is beautiful in oblivion. I envy her. She has the style of Grace if not its content. Her goodness keeps defeating me. My hate of her, my love of her, meet at the bottom of our rainbow, a circle.

•

And the nudge indirect:

"How does Jane seem to you?" Walking Ned home, through the parsonage yard, I take his upper arm for steadiness' sake.

"Pleasant, as always. Very engagée." He disengages his arm. Drunkenness doesn't make him unsteady; it merely deepens his boarding-school mannerisms.

"Her engagingness doesn't strike you as a cover-up?"

"Not frightfully, really. What does my rector exactly mean?"

"Well, I don't know. I worry about Jane. She's not happy. Not fulfilled, if you can stand the term."

"Here I stand, I can do no other." (Drunker than I had thought; silly punks the seminaries send us now.)

"Now that the kids are branching out, the only person she seems to enjoy talking to is you."

"And you, surely."

(Laugh, as memorably bitter as I can make it; etching with acid) "Don't kid me. It must be obvious to you, how little she and I communicate."

"Not so. Not obvious. Would never have supposed that to be the case. You even look like each other." He stands at his front door, teetering a touch. Street-light strikes a gleam from his glassy eyes. His beard makes his face hard to read. The mouth a mere hole, with a sinister drawgate of teeth. Santa Claus as heroin pusher. Even his ears, if they showed, might be a clue to his heart. His centrally parted hair is enough like a woman's to tip my insides toward kissing him good night. I teeter also. I tug back the abhorrent impulse and yank its leash savagely. All outward composure, I continue (the nudge semidirect):

"Well, I'm very grateful, for your being so sympathetic to Jane. She's in a strange time of her life and needs someone not me she can talk to. You seem to be it."

"My pleasure," quoth he.

•

To Jane I said, "Have you ever wanted to have an affair?"

We were in bed, her back was to me. "You assume I never have."

"I guess I do."

"Why is that?"

"Because you're a minister's wife."

"What brings this on, anyway?"

"Oh, nothing. Middle age. Angst. It occurs to me I've never really thought enough about you. What you want. What you feel. Whatever happened to all those boyfriends of yours?"

"I didn't have that many."

"Well, you knew how anatomy worked, before I showed up."

"It was just instinct, Tom. Don't be so jealous."

"I am a jealous God. I covet my neighbor's wife's ass."

"Which neighbor? Not that neurotic Harlow woman."

"I love her veils." When I looked down upon Mrs. Harlow in the third-pew seat she always took, I thought of beekeepers, purdah and mourning. However ultramontane my theology strikes you (silent veiled reader out there), in liturgy I lazily gravitate toward low; though I like myself in drag, church is not a costume ball. My questions were in danger of being carried away by Jane in her pockets as she drifted off into sleep. "Well, have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Wanted other men?"

"Oh, I guess."

"You guess."

"It's too silly to talk about. Sure, in some other world it'd be fun to go to bed with everybody and see what it's like."

"In some other world. I'm touched by your supernaturalism." It was true. I was. "Well, who would you begin with? Of the men we know."

"You?"

"Come on. You know I don't satisfy you." I have always admired, in the dialogs of Plato, Socrates' smoothness in attaining his auditors' consent to his premises. This lump wouldn't even admit to unhappiness.

Jane asked me, "Is this projection, or agitation, or what?"

"An ecumenical mixture?" I offered. "Tell me about men. Whatever happened to that pacifist? How do you feel about Ned Bork?"

"He's awfully young."

"All the more vigorous for that. And endlessly sympathetic, don't you find? Don't you love his brand of Jesus? The poor ye have with you not necessarily always. I come to bring not peace but a peace demonstration.' "

"That is nice."

The gravity of her warm mass pointed me away from Ned. Her phrase "fun to go to bed with everybody" had packed her with a delectable, permeable substance, many tiny little possible bodies. As I struggled to roll her over, Jane said, sociologically, "It's so unfair; women spend their days doing physical work while men like you, who sit at desks or worry about people, wind up at night with all this undischarged energy."

"Ah," I said, "but you have two X chromosomes to my one."

• • •

"Alicia, love."

"Yes, lover."

"Are you conscious of being more ambitious, in the service, than you used to be? How many instrumentalists did that Handel Concerto in F take?"

"Some, but it didn't cost the church anything. They were friends or friends of friends."

"It seemed to me Ned cut his sermon so we wouldn't run long."

"No, he didn't cut it, he planned it short. I told him ahead of time."

"Oh, You two worked it up without telling me."

"Well, if you want to put it that way. Did you mind? Didn't you like the music?"

"I loved it. You have a great touch. I just wonder if the church should become a concert hall."

"Why not? It isn't much else."

"Oh?"

"Except, of course, a display case for you?"

"You feel that, or are you making some other point?"

"You know I feel that; I told you six months ago, before we . . . were like this." We were in bed. Her hand flicked to indicate our bodies with a certain impatience: Her gum-chewing hard self showed. The summer was past. The sky hung dull as pewter in the bald, leafless windows of her bedroom. The oil truck in the alley whined. Her children for much of the summer vacation had been visiting Mr. Crick, who had remarried in Minnesota: they returned from school at 2:30. It was 1:47, said Alicia's little vanilla-colored bedside electric clock, with its delicate, scarcely visible hands, green tipped for luminescence at night, and its chic shy shape, that of a box being squeezed in an invisible press, so its smooth sides bulged.

I said, "Time for me to go."

"I suppose," Alicia sighed, and did not cling as I swung my legs from the bed.

I stood and explained, "I told the Dis-staff Circle I'd help with the hall decorations for the Harvest Supper."

"You don't have to explain."

I put on my underwear and cleared my throat and released what had been on my mind. "From a conversation I had with Mrs. Harlow I got the impression our relationship might not be entirely a thing unseen."

Alicia, propped on a pillow, her small breasts licked by the light, made her mouth of wry weariness, looked at me flat as a cat looks at one and advised, "Screw Mrs. Harlow."

• • •

I hoped her black car parked at Ned Bork's brown-and-green cottage was an optical illusion. The naked foot I had classified as a fevered hallucination. I had said nothing to her. We were meeting less frequently, in shorter days pinched mean, pinched black and blue by our busyness of the fall. Fall, fall, who named thee? The year's graceful aping of our cosmic plunge. How much more congenial, in its daily surrender, to our organic hearts than the gaudy effortful comedy, the backward-projected travesty of spring. The diver rises feetfirst from the pool, the splash seals over where he has been, the board receives him on its tip like a toad's tongue snaring a fly. The stone has been rolled away. Oh, carapace-cracking, rib-pulling hallelujahs! The agony of resurrection, a theme for Unamuno. The agony of dried tubers. See Eliot, Tom. See Tom run. Run, Tom, run.

To work. Our leading character, Tom, miscast as a Protestant clergyman, could not ignore the telltale clue of the black car the second time he saw it. No doubt there were other times when he had not seen it. This time, Tom had been lying awake, listening to noises that a sane man would have dismissed as the normal creak of wood and breathing of somniacs but that he preferred to hear as the step of a murderous intruder, the half-smothered shuttle of his fate being woven. His wife slept heavily, moaning, Crucify him, crucify him. Nixon, of course. Nixema, the noxious salve for liberal sores. Oh, cursed be the sleep of the just! Barren fig trees, every one. He arose impatiently, went to the window, threw up the sash and lo! to his wondering eyes did appear. . . .

Ignore it. It was just an old black Chevrolet. Sitting awink with moonlight and arc light. But, like the cinder of a comet's head, training after it a pluming trail of fair skin, gold fuzz, white sheets, undiluted sunshine, radiant intimacy. A tousled pale treasure of flesh and moistened oxygen that had been his. Tom returned to bed but could not sleep. His eyes had sipped poison. Covetousness threatened to burst his skull, ire his spleen and lust his groin. He twisted, he writhed; the twinned body beside him had ceased to turn on the same lathe. He arose. Learning from frosty experience, and in deference to the Heraclitean river that indeed would be some weeks chiller than when he first stepped into it, for the month had become December and the holy season Advent, he put on not only his pajama top but pants and socks (probably mismatched in the dark, though the odds were shortened by the high percentage of his socks that were black), shoes, an overcoat that had gloves in the pockets and, from the front hall rack (the slavelike, treacherous stairs negotiated), a little wool hat given him ten years earlier by his then-living mother and which, after years of disuse, the hat bearing too comical a suggestion of a Scots game warden or a stage detective, he had taken to wearing again. Mother, protect me. 'Gainst hail, cold and doveshit be thou a shield.

The blue night barked as I opened the door. Down, Fido. An inch of dry snow mottled the brittle lawn. I left tracks. Thinking fast, if not well, I did not make straight for the windows baleful with the same mute lamp that had lent substance to the earlier orgy but walked around my house, lightly, tightly, lest my scuffle stir the Nixonophobe snug above, and left my turf through the gap in the hedge provided, after checking from the front lawn that a wee-hour calm, indeed, did reign in the town, apart from the private brothel simmering down the alley. Stealthily I approached Ned's house by the pavement, where my steps blended with those of daytime innocents whose hearts had not been pounding like mine and, as plain beneath the street-light as a blot on table linen, had no inspiration but to merge with the other blot--that is, to squeeze open the door of Alicia's black car, push forward the balky seat, crawl into the back and crouch in an attitude that, were I a Moslem and Mecca properly aligned, would have done for prayer.

For minutes I froze there, motor immobilis. The enveloping aroma of dark floor mat, haunted by old orange peels and lost M & M's, was my sufficient universe. At last convinced that my criminal commission had not alerted my betrayers, I adjusted my crouch more comfortably, pulled my mothering hat closer to my icy ears and tried to spare my cheek prolonged acquaintance with the waffly pattern of the floor mat as it arched over the drive shaft. Sleepiness, long courted, assailed me inconveniently.

At this point an obligation arises (you insatiable ideal reader, you) for an account of my thoughts during my indeterminately extended but somewhat happy vigil. I notice I have slipped into the first person: a Higher Wisdom, it may be, directs my style.

Somewhat happy. I have always been happy, Americanly, in cars. I learned to drive the moment it was legally permissible and became my father's chauffeur. The first piece of furniture I could drive. A car's smelly, tatty sameness within its purposive speed. Tranquillity in flux. A generation and the hump of a lifetime later, my car becomes for me a hovercraft skimming above the asphalt waves on a rubberized cushion of air, severing me from any terrestrial need to be polite, circumspect, wise, reverent, kind, affectionate, entertaining or instructive. Encapsulation in any form short of the coffin has a charm for me: the cave of wicker porch furniture that children arrange, the journey of a letter from box to sack to sack to slot, the astronaut's fatalistic submission to a web of formulas computers have spun. My position crouched on the floor was in a sense chosen; chances of discovery would only be slightly improved by lying on the back seat. But being down, empathizing my way along the floor mat's edge, through the crumby detritus of the Crick children's snacks, past a button and chewed pencil stub, into the nether region of the driver's seat, where a square foot of fluff and stray licorice and the red pull bands of cigarette packs cozily defied purgation, and a system of rusty springs inscrutably impinged upon strips of gray felt, pleased me, not only in its concentrated pose of humiliation, so that, scapegoat and precipitate, I made myself, compactly crouching, the hard center of a vague world of shame, but in its potential of springing up, like a child at a surprise party, and astounding Alicia into loving laughter.

In fact, after what may have been 20 minutes or an eternity, my aching back and agonized knees compelled me to sit on the seat, slumped over to avoid decapitation by passing headlight beams. Were the lovers asleep? Was Jane not? I had vowed to return to the parsonage, my jealous rage chilled to a permissive slush, when the light above Ned's door came on. From the sliver of him that for an instant showed, he seemed to be wearing a mussed shirt and an unbuttoned beard: Alicia, her red dress, Christmassy, beneath an unzipped loden coat. Trim and brisk, her car key prefished from her purse and ready as a stiletto in her gloved hand, she crossed to her car, my cave, and opened the door. Though I was slumped so the ashy stench of the armrest ashtray crowded my nostrils, a beam of radiance from his porch light fell upon my face the instant she opened the door. She never faltered. Her form eclipsed the light, closed the door, settled smartly into place behind the wheel, caused the motor (reluctantly) to start and motionlessly piloted our craft through the empty rectilinear streets.

I doubted that she had seen me.

But she sniffed and said, after (from the mix of lights and motion in the back seat) some intersections had been passed and corners turned, "Really, Tom, this won't do."

"As Adam said after mating with a freshly named beast of the earth," I said, sitting up. "How was it? How is he? I've been telling Jane he was impotent."

"He said you'd been pushing Jane at him. That's pathetic, Tom."

"It was just a thought. How else can you and I go off and run the Boro-boro mission school all by ourselves?"

"We can't and won't."

"Agreed. Taxi, take me home."

I didn't like her tone or the tone it was forcing on me. I began to whine, to rage, to wriggle deeper into the loser's comfortable hole. "You bitch. You scarlet harlot. How could you do this to me?"

"Take you home?"

"Screw Bork all the time."

"It hasn't been all the time, Tom. Just a few times. I had to do something to break my obsession with you. I need all the help I can get."

"And does Bork give all the help you can take?"

She sat prim at the wheel. Occasional car lights set her hair on false fire. It had been freshly brushed and neatened. I noticed, which made her recent tussle so real I bent forward to pinch off the pain. I gasped. Only her voice could salve that pain. Each poison its own antidote. She pronounced flatly, "I have no intention of describing it to you. I didn't ask you to spy on me."

"Christ," I grunted, "how could I not? You parked your big black cunt of a car right under my nose. The last time it was there. I came down and looked in the window and saw your goddamn naked foot."

Alicia said, "The last time? I don't think we made love that time, we were just talking. I remember. I took off my shoes and put them up because his floor is so cold. Whosever idea was it, to make a place to live in out of a cement-floor garage?"

"Not mine." I said, not deflected. "Not last time, but this time, is that what you're saying?"

"Is it? You spy, you guess.'

"Well. How is the mealymouthed son of a bitch? Isn't it awfully tickly?"

"Not too."

This made it real again, her giving her body to another, just when my fantasy of Ned's impotence, or homosexuality, was inching from the realm of faith into a kind of negative verification; I groaned--involuntarily, for I felt, correctly, that I had used up my groans and the next one would goad her to counterattack. Without turning, Alicia pulled out the Tirade stop and her voice went up on its hard little pipes. "Well, how do you think I feel, watching you and Jane make cow eyes back and forth every Sunday, what do you think it does to me, having you run in and screw and hop back into your clothes and traipse off to some adoring deaconess after you've had your--"

"Fun"? "Way with me"? "Kicks for the week"? I forget exactly how she put it. Her complaints went on--my uxoriousness, my pastoral offices, my sense of order and obligation all turned into reproaches, into a young bawd's raillery--and I sat behind her sunk in sadness, sunk deeper each moment as her plaint widened from the justified to the absurd (I even looked like my wife; I was planning to seduce Mrs. Harlow; I was going to fire her, Alicia, as soon as she stopped "shelling out"); as she berated me, disclosing all the secret ignominy our affair had visited upon her, and voicing all the shaky hardness that 30 years of being a female in America had produced, a glum ministerial reality overtook my loverly fury and fancies. This woman was a soul in my care. She was crying out, and I must listen--listen not in hope of curing, for our earthly ills find little earthly ease, but as an act of fraternity amid children descended from, if not one Father, certainly one marriage of molecular accidents. And, indeed, in some minutes her devils, outpouring, did take up residence in swine, the dark houses flying by, and pass from us. Still controlling the wheel, Alicia sobbed.

I climbed from the chill back seat to the seat beside her; warmth gushed from the heater onto my legs and face. "I'm sorry," I said, "I'm sorry. It was wrong, our getting to know each other."

"I can't feel that," she said, her syllables prismed by tears.

"Well, something's wrong," I pointed out, "or you wouldn't be crying and I wouldn't be running around in the middle of the night in my pajamas."

She turned her head, at last, and looked at me, very quickly. "Is that true?"

"Just the top," I conceded. "I took the time this time to put on pants. And even a hat. My mother gave it to me."

"Does it upset you that much? My seeing Ned?"

"Seems to. Like I say, I'm sorry. Take it as a compliment."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Keep at it. Fuck away."

"You know, you've played this awfully cool. You've never once suggested you might leave Jane. I know you can't, but even so, it would have been nice, to me, if you'd just once said you wanted to."

"She had to give me a reason, and she won't. She's just too good."

"Not in bed, evidently."

"That may not be her fault. Women are cellos, not fellows. Anyway, you and I wouldn't be that good, either, if it were aboveboard and for day after day instead of an hour a week."

"I love you, Tom. Do you love me?"

"I hate the word, but sure. I'm wild about you, to be exact. Me wild. You tame. Ugh."

"What do you want from me? Tell me."

"Take me home. To my home," in case she misunderstood. She had been driving into the darkened gumbo of commerce between our two towns and backed around in the lot of a factory-reject shoe store. No pair alike. If it pinch, wear it. If it feel good, cast it out.

"I'm sorry about Ned," she said after silence. "I hope for his sake I didn't do it just to bug you."

"Is the past tense the right one?"

"I don't know." I feared she would cry again. But we were close to the church and parsonage. There was a dead space of asphalt between them. She stopped here, far from any streetlight, and I wondered if I was meant to kiss her good night. It seemed strange, to be kissing right to left, the woman behind the wheel. Like seeing yourself not in a mirror. She dropped her hands to my lap and, as intent as when Buxtehude was challenging her fingers with sixteenth notes, unzipped my fly. Miraculous woman! Not a word was spoken; I roused instantly. She unwedged herself from behind the wheel, maneuvered out of her underpants, made of her crotch an arch above my lap. Imagine: the thickness of our overcoats, the furtiveness of our flesh, the vaporishness of our breaths, the frosted windows through which the turrets and cupolas and dormers of the neighborhood loomed dim and simplified as wicked castles in a children's book. She was wet (a star winked on as I entered her) and ready; I came as quickly as I could, she seemed to come, I rezipped, we kissed, I exited, a patch of ice nearly slipped me up, I recovered balance, her headlights wheeled, my house loomed, my weariness wrapped itself around a dazed and dwindling pleasure.

My porch. My door. My stairs. Again the staircase rose before me, shadow-striped, to suggest the great brown back of a slave; this time the presentiment so forcibly suggested to me my own captivity, within a God I mocked, within a life I abhorred, within a cavernous unnamable sense of misplacement and wrongdoing, that I dragged a body heavy as if wrapped in chains step by step upward. Jane stirred as I entered our bedroom. As I undressed, a strand of belated jism dripped lukewarm onto my thigh. I used the bathroom in the dark and slid into bed grateful as one of the damned might be grateful when the jaws of eternal night close upon him. Prayer had become impossible for me. "See any UFOs?" Jane, knowing I had been up, misreading my restlessness and taking pity, rolled over, threw a solid thigh across my hip, fumbled for my penis, found it and would not let go.

• • •

The parsonage living room. Morning sunlight streaming, shade-tainted, dust-enlivened, from windows east and south. Snow crust from last week's storm visible through them. Car roofs peep above plow-heaped snow worn glassy in spots by childish boots. Also visible through the windows: turn-of-the-century roofs and windows with some scallop shingling and jig-sawed brackets, a mailbox painted in patriotic tricolor, a bird feeder hopping with feathered mendicants, a covetously onlooking squirrel, street signs, street lamps, etc., etc. Within, our eyes, shifting from the dazzle, blink away a sensation of gloomy solidity amid hothouse warmth. The fuel shortage is a winter away. Glass-fronted bookcases. Dark-veneered furniture. Chairs padded and studded. Everything neat: table runners aligned, back issues of magazines arranged in overlapping rows on a gate-leg table half folded against the wall, various translucent objects, sentimentally given and as sentimentally retained, throw rainbows and loops of light here and there. Dark oaken staircase visible through arched doorway stage left. Knocks offstage. Footsteps.

Enter, chatting, Jane Marshfield, in austere yet attractive house dress, and Alicia Crick, bundled in wool, carrying pastel books of music.

Jane: At least the sun's out.

Alicia (tugging off knit cap and fur-trimmed driving gloves with faintly stagy, excessive, pained exertions): Is it?

Jane (hesitantly, aware that this visit is unusual, though not aware yet of its menace): I don't know exactly where Tom is: I could try--

Alicia: I just left Tom. At the church.

Jane: Oh.

Alicia: I came to talk to you. I came, Jane, to ask you to get Tom off my back.

Jane: How--how do you mean?

Alicia: In about as coarse a sense as you can imagine. I don't know exactly what you and he share, you're a mystery to all of us, but you must have guessed that he and I have--have been together. Have slept together.

Jane (sitting down, stunned, but in the next heartbeat gathering herself, not quite primly but bravely, with an instinctive hauteur perhaps not quite expected by the other, for battle): No. I had not guessed.

Alicia: Then I'm sorry to put it to you so bluntly. But I'm desperate. (She has opted, perhaps because the other's manner has taken some options from her, for a brusque bustly approach, pulling off her scarf, setting down her books, almost stamping her feet, as if to convey a heedless, superior vitality; the effect is rather vulgar and scatters the plea for sympathy it disguises.)

Jane (very gently, after clearing a frog from her throat): How so?

Alicia: Your husband is a maddening man. You must know that. (Implying, however, that she doesn't; that she furthermore knows nothing about him [me])

Jane (diffidence being her second line of defense): I don't know, is he really? Around the house, he's been quite cheerful lately.

Alicia: I flatter myself I'm the reason why. May I sit down, Jane?

Jane: Please, Alicia, do. Would you like some coffee? Or a little sherry? I know it's still morning, but this seems a rather special occasion.

Alicia: No, thanks. I can't stay.

Jane: Yet you've taken off your coat. When did this--your--liaison with Tom begin?

Alicia: After last Easter. Ten months ago.

Jane: And how often did you--usually meet?

Alicia (beginning to dislike her responsory role, yet unable to locate where she lost the initiative): Once a week, more or less. Summer was difficult, with everybody's kids home. When mine were in Minnesota with Fred--my ex-husband--

Jane: I know of Fred.

Alicia: Tom and I saw a lot of each other. The rest of the summer, hardly at all. Don't feel sorry for me. There were other consolers.

Jane: Does Tom know this, that there were other men?

Alicia (balked almost into angry silence, her anger having in part to do with resistance of the agreeable, sliding sensation, not foreseen, of confiding in another woman): He knows in part.

Jane (considerately seeking to ease her guest's way): And you wish to end this one of your affairs, the one with Tom?

Alicia: Why do you say that?

Jane: Why else would you come and tell me? What did you say your object was--some all-too-vivid phrase--to "get him off your back"? (Discovering irony; the whole situation is romier than she would have believed) I suppose I can chain him to the bedpost at night, but in the day, he must be out and about--

Alicia (she can't have this): One thing you don't understand. I love Tom.

Jane: And these others?

Alicia: And he loves me. We do something very real for each other. Very real and rare.

Jane: You think it my duty, then, to bow out, to vacate (hands uplifted, with exasperating delicacy, to indicate the walls and furniture about her) the parsonage?

Alicia: I think it his duty to shit or get off the pot.

• • •

Jane vowed to me those were her exact words: I made her repeat them until we both fell to laughing. Their interview, also, fell apart after this exclamation; Jane's distaste, all the more in that she tried to conceal it, flustered my dear organist with her thick waist and firm hands and cerebral cunt. Having trespassed, having blundered, having failed to gain the violent release from ambiguity she had come for, having even forgotten why she had come, she left, cradling her pastel music with the gloves trimmed in fox fur, almost slipping on the icy lower porch step, where the eaves always dripped, in her tear-blind rage at her own mistake, at Jane's gracious obstinacy, at our marriage. She had seen we were a pair but had taken us for a salt and a pepper shaker, not the matched jaws of a heart-breaker.

Jane, Alicia gone, poured herself enough of the offered sherry for the two of them, went upstairs, drew a bath and thrashed hysterically in the steaming, startled water. But she did not attempt to reach me, at some check point of my tortuous rounds, and she met her own afternoon obligations, which were a luncheon meeting of the local garden club, with slides of Elizabethan gardens; a trip to the orthodontist with Martin, my older son; and the reception, at 4:30, of the piano teacher, who improved my younger son, Stephen. I came back at dusk, having during that long afternoon counseled an impending marriage and an impending divorce, having encouraged the Ladies' Wheel at their quilt making and driven 30 miles to visit the hospital room of a formally churched, carcinoma-riddled parishioner who, with his last surge of energy, resented my intrusion; and having had a beer with Ned.

Supper done and the boys safely stupefied by television, Jane said to me, "I suppose your girlfriend told you the news."

"What news?" An unfortunate lag. "What girlfriend?"

"Alicia dropped by this morning. We had a pleasant chat, but she refused sherry. So I've been drinking sherry all day."

"Did she--"

"Spill the beans? Yes."

What flashed upon me was, I'll never sleep with her again, never see her riding me in the sunlight again. A radiant abyss, like the divine abyss the apologists posited to counter the Greek myth of Primal Matter. "Why?" was all I could utter.

"I think to help me know you and to give us the opportunity to separate. Is that what you want?"

"Lord, no." For all the times I had dreamed of freedom from her, my answer came--nay, was flung--from the heart.

"Why not?" Jane reasonably asked. By the candlelight of the dining room I perceived that she was shaky, that a sherry bottle had materialized beside her dessert dish. "You can move right in. She has everything you need. A house, a way of supporting herself. It would get you out of the ministry, which would be a relief, wouldn't it? You don't believe anymore."

"I do! I believe everything!"

"You should listen to your own sermons sometime." Thus spoke, with easy authority, the daughter of Wesley Chillingworth.

"Did Alicia--did Alicia propose my moving in with her?" It was an enchanted thought, residence in that treeless young development, with its view of the cemetery hill, with my cuddly, gum-chewing wife, who would wear filmy dressing gowns carelessly buttoned and breezy and slippers trimmed with pompons; she would always be there for me. Between me and such a reality stood a black wall, utterly solid, though utterly transparent: onyx sliced miraculously thin.

"We didn't get that far," Jane said. "We thought it was up to you. She said"--and here her quotation, and my incredulity, and our hilarity, and the vision betrayed. We talked to exhaustion that night; I had a meeting at eight but returned with haste, for not only was I fascinating to her, as I spilled out the details and near misses on the other side of the looking glass with Alicia, but she to me; for Jane, too, had ventured, if only mentally, from our nest.

"What did it feel like?" I begged, of her encounter with Alicia, already, not three hours gone since I renounced her (no cock crew), greedy for the sound of my mistress' name, a glimpse of her gestures, any morsel of the other world in which my supine other form lay transfigured.

"Oh," Jane said, wanderingly, trying to think back and having too much sherry to think back through--in my mind's eye we are in our glum and elaborate bedroom, she is groping for her nightie, a dowdy tent of cotton she must have shopped for in a novel by one of the Alcott sisters--"not so bad. It was like being onstage. She came in with her fists up. I minded it less than I thought I would."

"What was the worst moment?"

"When she said she loved you and you loved her."

"What did you say to that?"

"I said I loved you, too. And you loved me."

I cannot imagine her saying it, but she evidently did. Nor do I remember how, in the vast blur of words we generated that night, I responded to her discomfiting declaration. No more dialog: I see your blue pencil, ideal reader, quivering beneath your blue nose. Jane in deportment was drunk, sad, uncomplaining, rather elegantly rational. Having offered me freedom, she did not cinch my captivity but left it that I would, when I could get my "priorities arranged" (a dry Chillingworth touch, that), come to a decision, to several decisions. Actually, I had no intention of making any decision that others (read: God) might make for me. I did not even resolve, having decided (or having let God enunciate His decision through me) not to marry Alicia, not to sleep with her; this she decided, and her manner--flat and frosty (her interview with Jane has chastened her rather unbecomingly)--plainly declared, in the subsequent days, as we communicated enough, but no more than enough, to allow our professional relationship to continue. If Alicia, then, took on the minimal, masculine lines of a defensive position, combining the stiffness of one who has miscalculated with that of one who has been wronged, Jane in contrast fluffed up, recurring, many a night, to more sherry and to details of my romance, which, the more it became a farfetched tale of adventure and wonder, made me more and more a hero. That Alicia the unmarried, the free, had liked me as lover was the discreetly unvoiced point of fascination. And, as with the passing of the days my sorrow reassured her of Alicia's withdrawal, Jane, like a startled cat slowly satisfied that she has the bowl of milk entirely to herself, began to purr. She confessed, what 20 uxorious years had not made plain, her body's need for mine. Though I felt my body, in her mind, might now have had its value enhanced by her secret erotic regard for the other woman (women had just begun to call each other sister), I complied. In my darkness there was nothing else. But, lying beside her then, my consort sated and snoring, I would panic the panic of the sealed, for the last chink had been closed in the perfect prison of my wife's goodness. She had become good in bed.