The Language of Paradise: A Novel (9 page)

“I think you mean to say that he is faithful,” Gideon said, making no attempt to suppress the lilt in his voice.

“Oh, he is that, I suppose—he’s always underfoot. I wish I liked him more. He stares at me when he thinks I’m not watching. I’m sure he means no harm, but he makes me uncomfortable.” Sophy turned to Gideon and lifted her chin, swiping with one hand at the errant lock of hair. “It would be quite different if you were boarding with us, Mr. Birdsall. We would have wonderful conversations about deep subjects—art and philosophy and true religion. Do you know, when I saw you in the meadow with the sun glinting on your hair, I thought you were an angel? That was why I ran away. I knew I wasn’t fit to meet an angel.”

SHE WASN
’
T THE FIRST GIRL
to draw conclusions about his character from the color of his hair. Gideon was reminded of this as he retraced his path through sweet-smelling fields back to the road, the drone of insects making a soothing counterpoint to his thoughts. For as long as he could remember, women had cooed over his blondness, assuming that a boy so fair must be as angelic as he looked. As a child he’d delighted in mocking their effusions, screwing up his face and sticking out his tongue while his mother feigned horror.

When he was not quite fourteen, he began to stir another kind of interest. Gideon had been waiting in the schoolroom one afternoon when the girl who cleaned up after class stopped in front of him. She had never spoken to him before, and on the rare occasions when they’d shared the space, he’d ignored her presence. She was a farmworker’s daughter, a vacant, lumbering creature who moved sullenly around the room with her mop and pail, choosing at random the patches of floor she would favor with suds that day; his mother was always complaining about her. The girl gaped at him, her mouth half-open. “It shines like gold!” she said, and before he caught her meaning, she reached out two grubby fingers to touch his hair. Gideon was too startled to recoil. Then, as if to pay him in kind for the liberty she’d taken, she grabbed his hand and thrust it under her bodice. The sudden contact with her flesh shocked him. The spongy fullness overflowed his palm. Until that moment, he had hardly seen her as a person, much less a woman. It seemed to him that she said things, but he couldn’t absorb them. He didn’t know how long he stood there—long enough for her to mistake his paralysis for pleasure and lift her skirts. Only then did he find the strength to wrench away from her and run out of the room.

His mother wanted to know why he wouldn’t stay in the schoolroom anymore. He couldn’t tell her. The experience had nothing to do with him; it had happened in an underworld he never planned to visit again. But in spite of his best efforts to lock it away, he would see the girl’s face, at once knowing and stupid, the tip of her tongue between her slack lips; he would hear her whisper in his ear—breathy exhalations, a murmurous crooning—and even as his mind revolted, his body would be roused.

After a few weeks, he went again, telling himself he would exorcise her once and for all. The girl laughed lazily, as if she had been waiting for him, and without a word began to unbutton her dress. He pelted her with names to keep her away: “Fat cow! Filthy pig!” For a boy who acquired words easily, he knew few bad ones. Even these weren’t so very bad—feathers rather than stones, for they tickled the girl, and the more he flung, the more she showed him, lifting her skirt to display thighs the color of curd, a great puckered rump that she parted with her hands, looking at him coyly over her shoulder. When he could stand it no more, he ran. She hadn’t touched him—all the times he would go to her, she never touched him—but as soon as he got home, he touched himself. It was as though they had reached an agreement.

Love wasn’t something Gideon felt a need for, nor did he connect it with the eruptions of his body. His college classmates attributed his restraint to an excess of piety. It was simply that whoring had no meaning for him, didn’t kindle his desire. Why should he go to some degenerate stranger to slake a momentary urge that he could stifle on his own? This was a sin, he knew, but he was neat and quick about it. In his own mind he was preserving himself for the wife of his destiny, though his notions about that worthy goal were vague. Love, when he thought of it at all, was an exalted enigma, not unlike the Lord Himself: infinitely lofty, conveniently remote. Until this morning, it had never had a face.

Gideon could not say, even now, why that face should be Sophy’s. Nothing about her seemed to warrant such an operatic intensity of feeling. She was small and spare—skimpy, his friends would judge her, no ornament for a man’s arm—and uncommon to the point of being odd. Her manner was the opposite of artful. Although it was their first meeting, she had not bothered to disguise her admiration for him, and had openly hinted that he should take Unsworth’s place in the household. Yet he liked all these things about her: liked her childish looks and the frankness that went with them, which would have seemed audacious in any other girl; liked her solitary dancing, and yes, even the endearing ineptitude of her paintings, which were only clumsy sketches of her dreams. Maybe, Gideon thought, love was nothing more than a series of likings, strung together like beads on a chain. Not pearls or rubies, but humble wooden beads: the sight of a girl in a field, the part in her hair, the feeling of possession that came over him when he entered the room where she sat alone. Had Dante felt more for Beatrice, Petrarch for Laura? Or were they simply more skilled at translating such moments from the vernacular of life into the high language of art?

A rabbit skittered across Gideon’s path, startling him. He stopped and looked around, amazed to find himself halfway to the seminary already. Without realizing it, he had been moving along at a fast clip, his feet keeping pace with his thoughts. He had almost outrun the night, but it seemed to be gaining on him; the sky had lost its luster, the air had an edge. He pulled his coat closer. In spite of himself, he felt his old fear of being alone on the road after dark. The sweat he’d worked up was trickling coldly down his sides.

Reality seeped in, along with the chill. What nonsense had he been entertaining? It was all very fine to imagine coming home to Sophy after parish rounds or monklike hours in his study, to open a door and find her waiting for him, as she had waited this afternoon.
His little wife
. But he knew very well that these pleasantries were only the outer layer of marriage, the thin skin over the pulsing heart. Singular and unfathered as he was—hatched from an egg, his mother used to tease him—he was aware that beneath the homely comforts of the hearth, its reassuring rituals, gaped a mystery. He, who had always kept himself to himself, who had looked out at the world from a calculated distance: how would he manage the thorny business of becoming one flesh?

It was not Gideon’s habit to open the door of the marital chamber, even in his dreams. He opened it now, but only a crack—just enough to glimpse Sophy in her white nightdress, chastely gathered at the neck. Against the bank of pillows, her hair in a thick plait over one shoulder, she looked more childlike than ever. He would have spared her the sight of his pale calves in his nightshirt, but it was too late. Her face lifted to him with that bright candor he loved: a flower to the sun. He approached slowly, so as not to overwhelm her, marshaling all the wisdom he had picked up secondhand in the college common room (“A woman must be opened with care, like a bottle of fine wine.”); bestowed a reverent kiss on her brow and her temple (“Let the points of the pulse be your guide!”) before touching her lips; loosened with one finger the ribbons at her throat; drew up by millimeters the hem of her gown. But beneath the fabric was more gauze: a blur of a body, as nebulous as the trees in her painting. Her intimate particulars would not come clear.

He knew why. For all his care, a pair of ghosts had materialized in the room. His mother, as composed as she had been in her coffin, sealed in perpetuity behind her fixed smile. The schoolroom girl, goading him on with throat sounds and nonsense words. They had stationed themselves on either side of the bed, like attendants at a wedding.

“Go away! Go
!
”

A flock of birds rose suddenly from a nearby tree, and Gideon realized that he had shouted out loud. Sheepish, he looked around him, but the road was empty except for the persistent rabbit, whose button eyes were trained on him from a safe distance, curiosity having overcome its timidity. The bridal chamber had receded into the vapors, leaving him with a sediment of resolve. If he were lucky enough to be admitted to Sophy’s presence again, he would devote himself to creating the garden of her dreams, with a fountain whose spray aspired to heaven, and statues, too. And he would build a wall around it, and set the stones so snugly that no dark influence could pass through, from this world or the next. The Reverend would have no cause to reproach him.

Not that there was much chance. He began to walk again, more slowly, with every step conscious of his life narrowing to the size of his solitary room. The family would be sitting down to their supper about now—a clan with its own rites and customs. They had probably already forgotten the poor student they’d invited into their midst; he was nothing more than a Sunday’s good deed, briefly embraced, soon effaced. Even more ominous was the possibility that they were sharing their opinions of him over the remains of the stew. At this very moment Sophy might be amusing Unsworth with remarks about the serious young man who had stolen her precious Sunday afternoon.
He looked at me in the field. He thought I wasn’t watching.

Gideon shifted the packet of papers from one arm to the other. In the grip of his fantasies he had almost forgotten Hedge’s parting loan. The essays, wrapped like butcher’s paper around the unfortunate blacksmith’s cautionary verse, were a tangible reason to return. He would contrive a few clever questions requiring long-winded responses and ask to see the Reverend outside of class. It was obvious that Hedge never needed an excuse to expound.

As for the rest, why should he concern himself? Marriage was a sacrament—or so the church proclaimed. There were vows to be spoken—vows he would soon be empowered to pronounce. If such a one as he, unfinished, imperfect, could bind two souls together for eternity, how could he doubt the efficacy of the promises? Surely, if he and his future wife pledged in the company of the faithful to worship one another with their bodies, their bodies would show them the way. Who knew what marvels lay in wait, what unknown lands they would discover?

The thought was such a revelation that it burned in his head like a lantern, illuminating the road ahead. He began to run again, and was in his room before the dark set in.

ON TUESDAY, THE MORNING
of his first Hebrew class of the week, Gideon woke early and took special pains with his clothes. His reflection in the glass mocked him. A couple of days ago he had cared only for Reverend Hedge’s opinion of his mind, and here he was, fussing over the whiteness of his collar.

He had always taken his beauty for granted. It was something he had been born with, like hands and feet. He knew that his mother took pride in his looks as an outward token of his general superiority, and was secretly pleased when others fawned, but Gideon had little vanity himself. Such admiration was too easily won. Fair hair and fine features were hardly as worthy of praise as mastering Greek. Now, for the first time, he considered that these attributes might have a practical use. Hadn’t Sophy mistaken him for an angel? Absurd, of course, another sign of her innocence—still, it was hard to resist such an exalted vision when, all his life, he had felt set apart, groomed for something higher. He would do his best to live up to her lofty view of him, though he wasn’t sure what she would think of his new ambition. Apparently—Gideon adjusted his cravat, squared his shoulders, exchanged a radiant smile with his conspirator in the mirror—he was applying for the position of suitor.

He need not have bothered. The Reverend strode into class with his head down, scowling and preoccupied. The last examination papers had been disappointing. Abysmal, as a matter of fact. Hedge made as if to set the offending papers on the desk, but, appearing to think better of defiling its surface, held them at the end of one stiff arm.

“I have asked myself—nay, interrogated myself—whether my instruction is at fault. Whether I have lingered too long on my little tales of house and home, thinking to sweeten the labor of learning with a bit of honey, as I’m told the Hebrew sages do. I have scoured my conscience, yet I find I cannot take up the cross for such
incompetence
, such
indifference
, such outright
contempt
for the language of Holy Scripture. I must bear down, gentlemen! For the sake of those souls who will one day be in your care, I must wield the rod!”

The arm swung in their direction, the papers came at them like grapeshot.

Gideon was unmoved by these histrionics. He had seen them before, and besides, he had nothing to fear: his own examination was clean, except for a couple of insignificant changes. He could no longer summon up the holy awe he had felt in Hedge’s presence; observing the man in his native habitat had taken care of that. Still, he wished the Reverend would acknowledge him in some small way, raise him above his disgraced classmates with a quick glance or a nod. Hedge’s baleful eye hadn’t settled on him once—seemed, actually, to skim over him with willful disregard.

The class wandered on, interminable. Hedge was at his driest, Hebrew issuing from his mouth in a continuous uninflected line, as from a parchment scroll rolled out by inches. Gideon knew he wasn’t the only one who lacked the courage to sneak a look at his pocket watch. Stomachs were grumbling all around him; dinner hour must be long past. The professor’s teaching lacked the drama of his preaching. His domestic homilies might be universally mocked, but it was clearer with each passing minute how much they had leavened the tedium. When at last he creaked to a close, the students didn’t move for several seconds. Boredom had numbed them into docility.