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Ilke began to massage sandalwood oil into Adrienne’s arms, pressing down, polishing, ironing, looking, at a quick glimpse, like one of Degas’s laundresses. Adrienne shut her eyes again and listened to the music, which had switched from synthetic lullabies to the contrapuntal sounds of a flute and a thunderstorm. With these hands upon her, she felt a little forgiven and began to think generally of forgiveness, how much of it was required in life: to forgive everyone, yourself, the people you loved, and then wait to be forgiven by them. Where was all this forgiveness supposed to come from? Where was this great inexhaustible supply?
Adrienne breathed deeply, in and out. “I killed a baby,” she whispered.
“Yes, we have all killed a baby—there is a baby in all of us. That is why people come to me, to be reunited with it.”
“No, I’ve killed a real one.”
Ilke was very quiet and then she said, “You can do the side-lying now. You can put this pillow under your head; this other one between your knees.” Adrienne rolled awkwardly onto her side. Finally Ilke said, “This country, its pope, its church, makes murderers of women. You must not let it do that to you. Move back toward me. That’s it.”
That’s not it, thought Adrienne, in this temporary dissolve, seeing death and birth, seeing the beginning and then the end, how they were the same quiet black, same nothing ever after: everyone’s life appeared in the world like a movie in a room. First dark, then light, then dark again. But it was all staggered so that somewhere there was always light.
That’s not it. That’s not it, she thought. But thank you.
“You bought the Spearsons a new picnic bench?”
“Yes, I did.”
She thought about this. “Didn’t they think you were being hostile?”
“Oh … I think, yes, they probably thought it was hostile.”
so funny
“We are with each other now,” Martin was saying. “And in the different ways it means, we must try to make a life.”
Out over the Sfondrata chapel tower, where the fog had broken, she thought she saw a single star, like the distant nose of a jet; there were people in the clayey clouds. She turned, and for a moment it seemed they were all there in Martin’s eyes, all the absolving dead in residence in his face, the angel of the dead baby shining like a blazing creature, and she went to him, to protect and encircle him, seeking the heart’s best trick, oh, terrific heart. “Please, forgive me,” she said.
And he whispered, “Of course. It is the only thing. Of course.”
And the more Adrienne thought about it, about the poor bereaved Spearsons, and about Martin and all the ways he tried to show her he was on her side, whatever that meant, how it was both the hope and shame of him that he was always doing his best, the more she felt foolish, deprived of reasons. Her rage flapped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage—vestigial girlhood rage—inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think, where did you go?
Time, Adrienne thought. What a racket.