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It was true that, in a different chamber of her mind, their reunion was unfolding as she’d imagined it, a trail of discarded clothes leading down a hallway, lunch forgotten in the frenzy of their coupling. From Bradley’s little glances at her figure, his touchings of her shoulder as he steered her through his plants, she guessed that he’d imagined the same thing. But now she could see, as she never had before—as if God were telling her—that the obsessive chamber of her mind would always be there; that she would never stop wanting what she’d had and lost.
The wren in the bushes erupted in full song, liquid, melodious, achingly clear. It seemed to her that God, in His mercy, was speaking through His birds. Her eyes filled.
Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.
To survive the grandkids, she’d promised herself a cigarette, but now she saw that she didn’t have to smoke. God took and took, but He also gave and gave. Freed of the ghost of Bradley, freed of the morbid urgency of dieting, she could be free of cigarettes, too. Her elation held until, north of downtown, the freeway traffic came to a dead halt. She wanted to get back to Pasadena in time to swim before dinner, to be enveloped by water, and the traffic jam infuriated her. It turned out that she needed to smoke after all. And there was something else, a nasty little itch. With a glance at the car to her left, she felt herself between her legs. It was shocking how Bradley’s assault, which had left her unmoved in the moment, now aroused her. Would it really have been so bad to give him what he wanted? For the sake of her private parts, which three months of longing had tantalized and primed, she was sorry that she hadn’t. Smoke was drifting from the driver’s side of the car in front of her. She unrolled her own window and punched the lighter on the dashboard.
Each fact that Russ conveyed fell into place as if it had been meant to be there all along. Without noticing how, she’d come to be holding a burning cigarette on the patio outside the bedroom. The base of the telephone was at her feet, its cord stretched to its limit. Although the sun was still golden in the west, its light seemed dark in a deeper dimension, but this didn’t mean that God had left her. With the new darkness came a feeling of peace. To bask in His light, to experience the elation of that, was a privilege to be earned, a privilege to feel anxious about forfeiting. Now that her long-deferred punishment had commenced, she didn’t have to struggle or be anxious. Secure in God’s judgment, she could simply welcome Him into her heart.
And yet: what if she didn’t? What exactly would be gained by dragging him through Bradley Grant, through Santa, through the abortion, through Rancho Los Amigos? She could clear her conscience by groveling in the dirt, but was it really a kindness to her husband? Now that Perry’s calamity had brought Russ back to her, might it not be better to simply love him and serve him? He was like a boy, and a boy needed structure in his life, and wasn’t remorse a kind of structure? She would never be simple, but she could give him the gift of thinking he’d wronged her more than she’d wronged him. Might this not be kinder than dumping her complexities on him?
It could have been Satan asking, but she didn’t think it was, because the temptation didn’t feel evil. It felt more like punishment. To not confess her sins to Russ—to renounce her chance to be chastised, maybe pitied, maybe even forgiven—would be to carry the burden for the remainder of her life. The unending burden of being alone with what she knew.
“Sweetie, I didn’t listen to Him, either. From now on, we’ll have to try to do better. That’s why I want us to pray together every day. I want us to change. I want us to be closer. I want us to experience the joy of God together.”
He shuddered.
“A terrible thing happened, but there can still be joy. I was looking at the birds outside—can’t we still take joy in Creation? Can’t we take joy in each other?”
He gave a cry of pain.
“Shh, shh.”
“I don’t deserve you!”
“Shh. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t deserve joy!”
“No one does. It’s a gift from God.”
To ignore Gig’s advice, at the cost of his firing Tanner, would obviously be the height of selfishness. But Shirley had died imagining her niece on a Grand Tour of Europe, Becky had already given away nine thousand dollars of her money, and the alternatives to Europe were dismal: either another summer with her parents, waitressing at the Grove, or a succession of cornfields and depressing small cities, the steambath of July in the Midwest. She understood that this was the reality of the music business, but the vision of going to Europe and advancing Tanner’s career was too perfect to be defeated by reality. She didn’t see how she could give it up.
tough lesson: most important things in life involve a choice of some kind
[...] As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.
And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.
Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.
enjoyable opening