Bodies and Souls (3 page)

And here his imagination stopped, for now, because he was a minister and the lush imagery in his mind had triggered off too many intrusive symbols. Yes, he would have liked to be with that woman just for a while—and what would have been the consequences? For he did believe there would be consequences; he had long ago lost the ability to be a simple sinner. The worst thing that could have happened would be for someone to see them, for the tale of his infidelity with the scarlet woman of Londonton to spread among his parishioners, causing them to lose their faith in him, and to his wife, causing her pain and anger. At the least, even if no other person discovered them, even if Liza Howard didn’t bruit the news around town, he would have had his own conscience to deal with. No. That sexy sin would have been too fecund; it would have grown like a swampland of weedy trees, extending its shadow and roots over his entire life. It would never have been worth it. Never the right thing to do. But he realized he had wanted to do it then, and found pleasure in imagining it now; and this revelation shook him. How could he have been so dully unaware, so oblivious of his own bodily appetite? Liza Howard had probably been no more seductive than he. This sort of thing must happen to her often, Peter thought. People must often take her sexiness personally. Bodies were
always getting in the way of things. Now he looked out at her, winging a silent apology toward her, but she only stared back at him blankly.

He looked away from Liza Howard and searched through the congregation for his wife, Patricia, and finding her, he found instant consolation. He did love her. He had been terrified all during his twenties as he came to know more and more people who had had miserable childhoods—alcoholic parents, drug-addicted parents, divorced parents, hateful parents, absentminded parents—that after being gifted with loving parents, he did not deserve, he would not get, a loving wife. His childhood had been happy; was his marriage bound to fail? It was more than superstition, it was logic: who gets everything in life? So he was afraid of seriously considering marriage with any woman he met. Yet because of his religiosity and his everlasting sense of responsibility, he had trouble considering any lighter liaison. He went to graduate school for a master’s in English literature, and on to seminary, and during these years he had no trouble meeting women, because he was handsome, smart, witty, and kind. But he never dated any one girl for very long out of fear that one or the other of them might tip the balance of their affections by caring more or wanting a commitment when the other didn’t. Still he did not lack ever for women friends or lovers, and because he was pleasant and gentle, he often found himself comforting the young women who had been somehow hurt by friends of his. He often felt helpless in the face of their pain.

“I can’t live without Bill,” a young woman would cry to him. “Oh, Peter, what shall I do? I want to die.”

He would gaze at the grief-stricken face of a heartbroken friend and think that this was the ultimate cruelty on God’s part; not death or disaster or disease, which were at least honest, but love, which was deceitful. It used irresistible beauties to lure a person into a moment of joy and then into almost intolerable pain.

He did not know how his parents had come by that happy marriage of theirs. Perhaps it had been mere luck. But he did not expect such luck in his own life.

At last a wonderful thing happened to him: a woman broke his heart. He was twenty-seven, and just starting out as a pastor of two small churches in rural Maine. Sarah was an artist. One day Peter had looked out the window of his church office to see a woman in a soft blue dress sitting cross-legged in the grass, sketching the lines of the simple Protestant church on her large white pad. She was intent on her job and did not notice when Peter came to stand by the window and stare at her. She had very long blond
hair which fell over her shoulders as she moved, so that the quick certain gesture which she used to brush her hair back was an integral part of the definite rhythm with which she drew; as if her work and her self were one and the same. Peter watched the woman for a long time, and when he finally left his office to intrude himself into her presence, he felt it was the bravest thing he had yet done in his life: he knew that this was a woman he would love. And he did come to love her, and she him. They saw each other for over a year and then became engaged. But Sarah could never bring herself to set the wedding date, and it all ended with her admitting that she did not want to marry Peter.

“Tell me the truth,” Peter had said to Sarah the night before she was to fly to Colorado to live with another man, a former lover. “You’re afraid of marrying me because of my profession, aren’t you? You don’t want to be a minister’s wife.”

Sarah was as straightforward as she was lovely. “I know how much the truth means to you, Peter,” she said. “No, I am not afraid of your profession. I’m not afraid of anything. The truth is that I don’t love you enough to be married to you. I’m glad I was your lover for a while, but it’s over for me now. But I’ll always care for you.”

When she left, Peter did not think he could bear the pain. He lay in bed for days, telling others that he had the flu, crying in a way he never dreamed a man could cry, and wondering how on this earth he could ever find a reason for getting up and out of bed. Finally other people’s sorrows rescued him: someone in the parish died and he was called upon to minister to the family. And so he began to function. But he found himself dwelling on the loss of Sarah’s love in the same way that a miser might cherish a rough-cut diamond, turning it and pressing it with his hands, even though the glittering edges would slice and cut him till he bled.

Later, he learned of the refinements of sorrow, the companions of grief: bitterness, cynicism, despair, apathy, anger. For a while he wished that Sarah had left him by dying, because then she would not be able to love any other mortal. Sometimes his lovesickness made his life and the very space of the room he was in seem thick and crowded; as if sorrow were a billowing cloud. At other times his life and the room he was in would seem sucked clean of meaning, empty; as if sorrow were a vacuum. There were times when he would grip the sides of the lectern to keep from crying out to his congregation that
he hurt:
he missed Sarah’s body, her sweet breath, long legs, laughter, breasts.

So he learned genuine compassion. One Sunday morning, four months after Sarah
had left, Peter realized with a start that at least a third of his congregation in this rural Maine area were widows and widowers. There they sat, the kindly Christian women who had put on straw or felt or fur hats and pinned flowers or brooches at their necks, weathered older men who had put on their best suits and ties, and all not out of vanity, but in order to come out into the cold winter days alone to attend church. These were industrious, persevering people, not the type to indulge in despair—and yet surely there were nights when their bodies ached as his did for another body to hold. As he studied his congregation, he found himself thinking that there must be ways to ease their mutual pain. And so he called for Sunday-night potluck dinners, and musical performances by the young and old of the community—and for a while there was a flurry of activity in his life that used up his time and taught him the healing powers of hard work.

One day sixteen months after Sarah had left, Peter caught himself admiring the long curve of leg of a pretty young woman who was taking over the elementary Sunday school classes. She blushed; he lusted; and smiled with relief at his lust. That night he sat in his apartment alone and drank a toast to himself, pronouncing himself healed. He had survived. Furthermore, he had learned a lesson: that the human heart was not the fragile, limited organ he had thought it was; it was tough, and it could expand endlessly. It could curve with necessary grace around almost any wound.

How could this happen? How could his own fist-shaped heart close like a hand around a rock of pain only to open with a flourish to present live flowers? He did not understand, but he thought that certainly if a man could believe in his own heart he could easily believe in God.

The pretty young woman was Patricia. She taught second grade in the public schools and had been in love with Peter ever since his first sermon at that church. She had not been able to get his attention during all the weeks she had faithfully sat in the front pew of the church, and out of desperation she had agreed to teach Sunday school. If Peter’s strength lay in the knowledge that he had been happy as a child, Patricia’s lay in the conviction that she would be happy as an adult. Peter was so dazzled by her fearless optimism that there were times when he was amazed to realize that she was also physically beautiful. The times when her beauty was recalled to him most forcefully were the times when they were in bed together; he would lie on his side and smile at Patricia in sheer delight.

“What’s so funny?” she would ask, tracing his smile with her fingertips.

“I keep forgetting how lovely you are,” he would say. “It’s always such a pleasant surprise.”

Patricia would shake her head, pretending he was speaking nonsense, but he was speaking the truth, and at no time were his words more true than after they had made love. Then Patricia’s power was transformed into content, and her determination for the future distracted by the idle pleasures of present joys.

They had been married eighteen years now. Their love had undergone the transmutations natural to a family: they had two sons and a daughter, and emotions shifted and glittered within their family with the same intact and interconnected variety of patterns as in a kaleidoscope. There were nights when Peter was glad to send his children off to bed so that he could be alone with Patricia, but there were also nights when he crept into their bedrooms to linger a moment above each sleeping child, his heart nearly breaking with love and hope and fear. If God really did look upon each human as His child, or even upon humankind as His children, then
poor
God, Peter thought, He didn’t know what He was getting Himself into when He created us. Peter wanted so desperately to keep his children happy and safe, and now they were awash in the turbulent teenage years when he could not protect them. He and Patricia had seen them through the perils of childhood, through illness and accidents; they had done the best they could to ease them into the civilized world of school and society. The early years of fatherhood had been demanding enough—but these last years! Peter’s children were being confronted with cars, drugs, sex, philosophies. They would have to make choices. They would have to leave home.

Peter worried about Michael, his oldest child. Love had never been easy between him and Michael; it seemed that from Michael’s birth the two of them had been engaged in a series of strange skirmishes that grew less subtle as the years went by. Blackhearted child! Peter often thought, yet he loved his first son with a desperate love that was nearly a frenzy. Michael was making it absolutely clear that he wanted nothing more than to leave home, to live his own life, and as much as Peter often longed to rage at the boy, “Just go then, you ingrate, I’ll be glad to get rid of you and your wretched sulky ways!” he also was terrified for the boy’s sake, terrified to have him go off on his own. What did Michael know about life? He was so young, so pigheaded. Oh, this was a terrible age, seventeen, and a terrible time for the entire family: Peter felt that Michael’s approaching departure was a kind of amputation of the family, and he dreaded it.

But surely this was an unnatural response, at least an overdramatic one. Peter looked down to see Leigh and Mandy Findly standing side by side, their heads bent together over a hymnal. Mandy was a year older than Michael; at eighteen this year she had started her freshman year at a college an hour away from Londonton. Peter didn’t know the Findlys well, but he did know this much: Mandy was back for a visit after only six weeks away at school; here she stood next to her mother with all apparent friendship and goodwill. How had Leigh managed to accomplish this? She was not a perfect mother, or at least she had not had the perfect circumstances: she had been divorced for years and years, and had lived her life in a sort of attractive artistic muddle. She was a potter of some renown but apparently little ambition, the bohemian of Londonton. Peter knew from Patricia and other committee chairpersons that Leigh Findly could never be counted on to help with church or community projects; she was always too busy with her pots. She probably made a decent living from her work, for she and Mandy lived in an attractive old Cape Cod house in one of the better sections of town, but it was possible that the house was an inheritance from her divorce. At any rate, while she never seemed to be poor, she never seemed rich, either, and was always drifting around in turquoise or magenta batik cotton skirts. She wore the skirts even in the winter, with high-heeled, fleece-lined leather boots. She was around forty, a pretty woman, even a sexy one, although her sexual attraction was different from Liza Howard’s: Liza’s was pure, a chemical, a beam, powerful in its simplicity and directness. Leigh’s sexuality seemed more tied up in her intelligence and her sense of humor. Probably she would never be able to seduce men as completely as Liza did because Leigh wasn’t able to take sex so seriously. Still, it was known that she had had her share of lovers through the years. Sometimes, when a man had moved in with her, she had brought him to church with her, with her and Mandy. No man ever lasted very long, not more than a year or two, but Leigh did not seem to suffer from this. She seemed quite happy on her own, and was in fact a likable woman, a nice woman. Still, she had not provided what could be called an ideal environment for a child. What textbook would say that the best environment for a child was that provided by a flaky, divorced, absentminded, fornicating mother? Yet Mandy was a lovely and well-adjusted girl. Peter did not know her well, but it was obvious to him that the young woman liked herself—and that she liked her mother.

How had Leigh managed this conjuring trick? Peter wondered. Was it sheer luck or force of personality? How had she managed to have her daughter standing next to her,
happily sharing a hymnal, when Peter’s son was standing at the back of the church, making no pretense of singing, undoubtedly snapping his gum in irritation and boredom?