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  David Palmer lay beside her, and very slowly, with one finger, traced the line of her chin and throat down to the center of her chest, between her breasts and under her breast, stopping at her arm. He touched her lightly, drawing with his finger an invisible line around the edges of her face, across the ridge of her eyebrows, and down the tip of her curving-down nose. He traced the planes of her body, the ridges of her collarbones, the line of her arm across her breasts.

  She closed her eyes, partly to avoid seeing his eyes as they examined her face, her chest, and partly to better feel the electrical touch as it moved across her lips, her shoulders, her breasts, her hips. Her heartbeat thrummed inside her chest and matched a thought that sounded like a drumbeat in her head: this is exactly what you wanted, exactly what you wanted, and she answered, yes, yes, exactly.

  Done and done for all time, and done quickly, too. For at the very beginning, just as he lay full length on top of her, a spasm passed wave-like through him. He sighed deep inside his throat and held her tightly against him as though she might try to get away, and said, “It’s been so long, so damn long.”

  Lee held his shoulders tightly, too, feeling the passing shudders drain away. She said, “After seven years, you’re reinstated to virginity.” She immediately regretted the flippant, uncaring sound of the joke Ray had once told her.

  David Palmer laughed, “Then I’m a virgin again several times over.”

  After a few silent moments, he rose, left the room, and brought back a towel, damp on one corner. “You washed my face,” he said, and gently wiped Lee’s abdomen.

  And after those ablutions, the act was more than she wanted, more than she expected. In the slow, gentle coupling with David Palmer came the knowledge that her experiences with Charles had been rushed and amateurish: that she, in imitation of her husband, had forced herself into a determined concentration on her own feelings, on her own satisfactions—each of them separate and apart.

  In David Palmer’s manner there was no separateness, no hurry, no self-doubt. In his eyes there was a studied, speculating, gauging of Lee’s body as he looked, as he turned her; in his voice, a demanding yet solicitous enquiry—“Do you like this? Don’t let me hurt you”—in his questions; a judging of her reactions; in his hands a languid searching for the edge of pleasure. At one point, he said, “Wait, wait,” and when in irresistible intent she continued to rock back and forth, he stopped her, pulled her down, saying, “I say be still. Be still, little dark angel.” And somewhere inside, in a unique and disembodied, mystical intimacy, they held their flesh back from the precipice, all the while feeling its inexorable pull, all the while knowing that at some point they would fling themselves over.

  Halfway through the late afternoon, David Palmer went downstairs and brought back a decanter of dark red wine and two glasses. He said something about the wine, “Marquisa de Riskal,” he called it, and later, much later, they lay quietly side by side, like effigies, naked on the black and gold tapestry. And around and beneath them, the great house lay silent, seeming to hold its breath, seemingly aghast in all its stately beauty.

  Chapter 6

  I must lie down where all the ladders start,

  In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

  “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,”

  William Butler Yeats

  It was six o’clock when Lee left the rectory, the afternoon sky clouded over in a pearly grayness with a fine mist of rain drifting down. Was hers the only green Plymouth in the parish? she wondered, and kept her eyes on the concrete on the way to her car and held her hand up to the side of her face as she steered the car out into the street. Was the red and yellow Buick under its shelter by the old school? Was Father Kennedy looking out from his third-floor window?

  A smattering of rain fell across the windshield that would just smear if she turned on the wipers, droplets sliding from one place to another, falling along lines until they gathered enough weight to run to the bottom. Tears, somehow related to the rain, came up into Lee’s eyes and spilled over. Several times she looked into the car’s side mirror to wipe them away. Not a flake of make-up was left on her lips or cheeks, but she didn’t search around in her purse for a lipstick. The flushed, changed person who looked back didn’t need any extra color.

  The planned for, the unexpected, could they be one and the same thing?

  Yet there was one fact, one possibility she didn’t have to worry about, one thing that was taken care of completely. “Well, at least I can’t get pregnant again,” she said out loud to the mirror.

  The Bettlemains’ truck pulled up into the driveway at the exact moment Lee was exiting her doorway to take Willie Mae home. “I’ll leave the girls with you,” she told her husband, looking toward something beyond his shoulder.

  Charles turned sideways to let her pass. She could smell the perspiration coming from his clothes, and somewhere in the recess of her brain a picture of him crawling under sinks and houses juxtaposed itself against the scene in the rectory bedroom.

  Cassie and Lill didn’t mind being left with their father. He would sit on a lawn chair under the carport’s roof, take off his muddy boots, send one of them into the house and then the other for a beer. Between Charles and his daughters existed an affinity not based on words or play. Probably what I feel for my mother—whatever that is?—Lee thought. She backed the car out, spinning the tires on the gravel just a bit, leaving the three blonde heads close together, bent over something Charles was holding in his hand. He was not a bad father.

  “Did you have a good time, Miss Lee?” Willie Mae asked, after Lee slid three folded one-dollar bills into her hand. The question always came at this moment, as though the money demanded something from the maid. Lee was sure the colored woman never asked Claire Bettlemain that question on the drive home nor any other question for that matter. Willie Mae was at least fifty years old and had worked for Mrs. Bettlemain most of her life.

  But Lee could not keep the words in her mouth: “I had the time of my life. I’ve never had a better time, and it wasn’t playing bridge either.” As she spoke, the thought formed that she would follow up the truth with a lie about lunch and shopping. She knew by tone and expression that the sexual illumination of the afternoon showed, and she suspected that Willie Mae, though uneducated, was shrewd in reading expressions.

  “I can jist see you did!” The woman gave Lee a broad wink, dropping her dark eyelid down like a curtain over a surprisingly pale-brown eye.

  Lee forgot the need for the lie and laughed, loud and euphoric. The afternoon with David Palmer, at first so uncomfortable and then so exploratory and finally so inexplicably satisfying—the satiation of the body and that alone—had raised Lee’s morale, had brought the fluids in her veins and the atoms of her flesh and bones into alignment, her sexual self restored, an internal unity redone.

  Willie Mae giggled. “I always say, all us women folks needs is a new dress and a new bo’friend.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Lee agreed, appalled at being guessed so easily and yet equally glad to share this full and open feeling.

  They rode the rest of the way down to Troupe Street with the quiet rain falling as it had when Lee left the rectory. After they crossed over the railroad tracks, the houses changed from brick and stucco to wood frame and tar paper.

  Willie Mae said in a soft tone, as she hefted her bulk out of the car, “I could smell it on you, Miss Lee, even fore you left the house: a heifer ready to jump the fence.”

  “What’s that?” Lee asked, leaning slightly across the seat.

  Willie Mae Bell didn’t answer but stepped back to stand spraddle-legged in the dirt road, waving Lee good-bye in a campy, friendly way, side to side: the waves of beauty queens in a parade or good-byes to an ocean liner. Lee watched the black woman in the rearview mirror as her image receded. The thick, stocking-topped maid seemed elevated, exonerated somehow above the leaning, narrow unpainted houses around her; somehow she was above the rutted, sand
y road.

  That night, Lee covered her daughters’ shoulders and let Furlough in. How can everything change and still be the same? she wondered. She sat beside the black Lab on his dirty scrap of a blanket and leaned back against the kitchen cupboards. The dog’s wide head twisted to look up, the great cocoa eyes staring intently, the tail thumping, exactly as it had the night before.

  Lee sat until the chill from the tile came up through the blanket, sat until the dog’s snores were almost as loud as Charles’s down the hall. Then she walked back to the bedroom, to where her husband lay asleep in the frosted light from the street lamp. She opened her jewelry box and placed her gold wedding band and engagement ring far back in the left-hand corner of the small drawer.

  Charles had taken his ring off the first week they moved back to Strickland. Something about his father kidding him: “Why don’t you wear it in your nose?” and something about it getting caught in machinery. Lee was not sure where Charles’s ring was now, was not sure what it had meant when he took it off seven years ago, was not sure why now that she had to take her rings off, since they’d been on her hand all afternoon.

  In the nights that followed, Lee Bettlemain examined the afternoon with David Palmer. “Adultery,” “Thou shalt not” were always her first thoughts, but the blaming was always followed by an argument, an explanation, not to herself, but to the voices of her upbringing: Her father’s jovial, “I love all women from zero to eighty, blind, fat, or crazy,” and her mother’s response, “Don’t kid yourself, Lee. Men love only one thing.” The nuns’ requirement of “pure thoughts in a pure body” stood beside Ray’s attitude—a code Lee’s sister must have picked up in college—” It’s a damn poor woman who can only keep one man happy.”

  And deep inside where there were no other voices than her own, there were two totally different emotions: one mournful, one joyous. One voice informed her that she was no longer innocent, that she would suffer and pay, that she had sinned in thought, word, and deed. And the other voice sang “Hosannas” for the body she lived in, for a body that could tremble and give way.

  She had trembled when he unbuttoned the mother-of-pearl buttons, shivered with the thought that she had sewn those buttons and made those very buttonholes for his fingers. She had trembled in the control of the body, which told the mind to be quiet while it went about its business. She had shivered and turned toward him, her nipples tightening, her skin springing to goose flesh.

  “Are you all right?” David Palmer had asked against her hair and forehead, his hands sliding down the prickled surface of her arms.

  “I’m afraid,” Lee whispered.

  Unpredictably, in contrast to the slow, clinical way he’d undressed her, he looked down, and moved into her, and replied, “So am I.”

  Tuesday morning at St. Anthony’s, David Palmer was not raking leaves out under the bare trees. Only Ralph, the janitor, stood at the far edge of the school’s property, slowly pulling the pronged rake along the ground. A brown paper grocery bag for the pecans lay on its side where the wind had blown it over.

  After seeing Cassie into kindergarten, Lee put Lill on a playground swing and gave her a push, encouraging, “Pump now, stretch your legs far out to make it go higher.” Then she walked to where the janitor was working. The old colored man peered out from under his wrinkled hat in a patient and forlorn manner. His bloodshot eyes looked, as if barely seeing, from under the brim.

  “Where is Father Palmer?” Lee asked.

  “I don’ know ma’am. He called off raking this morn’,” Ralph replied. “Said he’d be back directly.”

  “Does that mean tomorrow?”

  “I don’ know. He’s got lots of meetin’s.”

  Until that moment, Lee had forgotten the Wednesday night meeting announced on Sunday, but if Father Palmer was not going to be under the pecan trees, where else could she see him?

  The day was suddenly acrid and sour, and Lee walking away from the janitor felt as dry and brown, as death-blasted as the leaves she walked on. An impulse came to throw herself on the ground, to roll in the leaves and dirt, to screech, to howl, to be taken away in a straitjacket, in an ambulance. But all she did was retrieve her child from the swing that had died down to a standstill and gently carry the small soft body back to the car.

  The rest of that day, Lee relived the afternoon with David Palmer over and over. Why had the man stopped raking that very next morning? Lee could not stop her work or routine. Housework and sewing filled up, leveled off, and wore away the hours. The strangeness of having had sex with a man who was not her husband, a priest, the man, David Palmer, asked that her hours be given over to idle, pointless feelings and thoughts. But the day’s schedule cordoned off that impulse and left it in a corner of her mind to bubble in its mystery. Lee had to run the washing machine for two loads, had to get the clothes off the line, had to finish the waistband on a pair of slacks, had to pick Cassie up from school, had to prepare dinner—had to do exactly as she had done the previous Tuesday…before David Palmer.

  Her sister Ray would be coming back from Jamaica. Her mother-in-law Claire would be dropping by. And Lee was already ten dollars behind in the sewing money. The week stretched out, filled with chores, except that she might see David Palmer the next morning under the trees or she would see him Wednesday evening at the meeting after the 5:30 Mass.

  Again, Wednesday morning, the priest was not where he should be, raking under the trees, and again Lee felt as if the day had been robbed of its treasure. She took his absence to mean that in some way whatever door had been opened by the afternoon in the rectory was now being closed.

  What she’d hoped was not at all clear. Vague passionate afternoons in a book-lined room with two figures stretched out on a black and gold tapestry bedspread was as far as her imagination could carry. But then the reality of a husband, two children, and another one inside asked, “What about us?” For them, she had no answer. But that nothing would happen, nothing would change, seemed too cruel, too whimsical, too painful.

  Ray arrived late Wednesday afternoon and took Lee and the girls out to lunch at a new Mexican restaurant in Strickland. Bent-armed gray-green cacti stood at the doors, prickly sentinels, and bright green, yellow, and pink striped serapes hung on the walls. Cassie and Lill insisted on sitting in a booth by themselves, putting their napkins in their laps, eating all the crackers and drinking all the water even before their order was taken. Last week, Lee would have been like her daughters, glad to skip the peanut butter and jelly lunch, but today she felt fretful, sallow, spread out over light years, separate from her sister and her daughters, separate even from herself, unable to return.

  She listened to Ray ordering, relieved to find her sister in charge, a little browner from the Jamaican sun, her hair a shade darker red. “I put a henna rinse on it,” Ray explained, her pale-coffee coloured eyes squinted against her cigarette smoke.

  “I took twenty dollars and those black shoes and socks out of your suitcase,” Lee said.

  “Well, god, don’t act like you killed somebody. I don’t mind.” Ray put her cigarette down, her eyes following it. “You found the grass, too, didn’t you, kiddo?”

  “Yes,” Lee answered carefully, feeling a shake in her voice. She didn’t want Ray to explain. The dry pungent leaves in the plastic bag belonged to her sister’s world. Circular and seamless, it was a place that allowed all things, a world Lee didn’t want to think about. But taking the shoes and the money made her silent.

  “It’s like alcohol, kiddo, during prohibition. Ten years down the road, pot’ll be legal, and the Government will be taxing the hell out of it.”

  “I know. It’s not that. I just feel bad about taking the money. I’ll pay you back.”

  “God! A lousy twenty! You could have spent it all. I wouldn’t care.”

  “No, I’ll pay you back,” Lee insisted, wondering where she could find an extra twenty in her budget. It was bad enough that Ray always paid when they went out for lunch. And n
ow it seemed more important than ever to not ask Charles for money at the end of the month.

  Silently, Ray reached across the red tablecloth and took Lee’s hand. She kneaded the back and inside of Lee’s palm, pulled at the fingers. “Tell me what’s the matter, big sister. You’re so pale you look like you’re coming down with the flu.”

  “I’m pregnant again,” Lee said, glad to be able to tell a half-truth, half of the cause of her washed-out appearance, glad that she could hide the other reason.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Ray dropped Lee’s hand. “Oh, my god!” she said, too loudly, causing the other patrons in the restaurant to look. She raised her perfectly tweezed eyebrows into two arches on her forehead. “I can’t stand it, Lee! I cannot.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m the one who’s pregnant, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be flip. Do you know what this means?”

  “Probably better than you.”

  “It means you’re stuck here for the rest of your life.”

  “I thought I was here for the rest of my life.”

  “Oh, my god!” Ray repeated, but then glanced around. Some of the other customers were still looking. Quieter, she leaned across the table and whispered, “I thought Cassie and Lill were it, and you’d go back to school and get out of this hell hole.”