The Open Curtain (21 page)

Taking off her clothes, she slipped the dress on, leaving the back unzipped. She stood looking at herself in the mirror.

You look beautiful,
she told herself.

You’re making a big mistake,
she told herself.

You look beautiful,
she insisted again.
You’ll make a lovely bride. A blushing bride.

But her face was pale. She slapped first one cheek, then the other, but it didn’t look like she’d been blushing: it looked like she’d been slapped. Taking off the dress and hanging it back in the closet, she went into her parents’ bathroom, applied a little rouge to her cheekbones.

She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Garish,
she thought,
tomorrow I’ll do it more carefully,
and then washed her face clean.

How much in life,
she wondered,
can you press down, and how long can you keep it pressed down?
A risky thought, she knew, and then thought,
Why not pray?
There was one night before her wedding, it was not too late; why not correct her lie and pray?

She knelt down and rested her elbows on the side of the bed and stayed still, gathering herself so as to begin. It felt wrong to pray in her bra and panties. She got up and slipped into her clothes. She knelt down again, composed herself, began silently to call upon God.

Guide me
was part of it and
in your inifinite wisdom
and
in the hour of my need
and
please, dear Lord, let me know if I.
A series of forms, verbal combinations imposed upon more transient thoughts.
Bless my family in death
and
if it be your will
and
I submit myself to you
and
Please God your child needs.
Her knees started to ache. Again, around in a circle, the same forms in a different order and
Please reveal your will unto me, dear Lord.

She awaited an answer, shifting her weight from one kneecap to the other, but there was nothing, she felt nothing. It was just her with her eyes closed and nothing around her, two points of pain gathered in her kneecaps, the slight pressure of the bed against her forearms, but otherwise the rest of the world fled and God gone as well. She began again, more urgently this time, whispering audibly, yet more tentative as well.
I’m here?
she started and then
if it be thy will?
And
Please reveal? I am ready to listen? Show me thy will in regard to my life and I shalt obey? Give me a sign? Let me feel thy presence?
Still nothing, and more palpably nothing, and beyond that nothing, all suspended in a void. God had withdrawn utterly from her, and if she
opened her eyes she would be thrown alone into the world to live by her own wits; it was just her, and in a way it was not even her but nothing pitted against nothing. In a panic she opened her eyes, still feeling the absence of God all about her. She fell down the stairs, fled down the hall, pounded on Rudd’s door. “Rudd?” she heard her voice saying. “Please? I need you? Can’t you let me in?”

S
he awoke in his arms, on her sister’s bed, little memory of the night before beyond her blind flight from her parents’ room. I must not think about this too closely, she told herself. When she got up she realized she was not wearing either shirt or bra.

She couldn’t find her shirt. She found her bra under the bed and pulled it on, moving swiftly out the door and out of the room. In the bathroom, she looked at her face. Her hair was a mess. Her shoulders and neck, she saw, were colored with slight, almost invisible, streaks of blood. She looked over her arms and chest to find where she had been bleeding, but there was nothing—only on the back of one shoulder the distinct marks of teeth. But the teeth had not bitten through, had only left a bruise, blood couldn’t have come from there. She looked at her legs and then lowered her panties, but there was no blood there either,
still technically a virgin,
she thought, but where had all the blood come from? And then she realized it must have come not from herself at all, but from Rudd’s weakened neck.

She went upstairs to her parents’ room. She washed herself from head to toe, scrubbing. There was nothing wrong, she told herself, nothing to feel guilty about, there was no bleeding and thus, unless she had been deceived, she was still technically a virgin, still technically chaste, still technically worthy to be married in the temple. In any case, she didn’t remember any of it, so how bad could it be? Whatever had gone on, it wasn’t
that;
perhaps things had gotten out of hand, but she had been frightened, incredibly alone, hardly herself. She couldn’t be held responsible for what she couldn’t remember, could she? They would go ahead with the ceremony, there was no point in putting things on hold. She would be married, she had the Church’s approval to be married in the temple. She shouldn’t have slept in
his room, she shouldn’t have taken her shirt off, but no harm done. Technically speaking.

She dried off, put on a floral-print dress, pulled the dry-cleaner’s plastic over her mother’s wedding dress and took it out of the closet. She went downstairs, draped the dress over the couch, and went back into Rudd’s room.

He was still asleep, and she could see blood dried on his neck as if someone had been scratching at it. She could see too, looking closely, light streaks of blood on the sheets and even, here and there, on the white walls, though some might have been left over from the time he had slit his throat.

“Time to get up,” she said. “Wedding day.”

He stretched, smiled at her. “I thought I locked the door,” he said.

“You opened it for me.”

“If I had, I’d already be awake,” he said.

“Not just now. Last night.”

“Last night?” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

“You did,” she said.

“You weren’t here last night.”

“I was,” she said. “I slept right there,” she said, pointing at the bed.

He looked at the bed. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I thought I slept the night through.”

“No,” she said. “You opened the door and then we talked a while, and then …”

“And then?”

“You don’t remember?” She was thinking,
If neither of us remember, none of us can be held responsible.

“No,” he said. And then he said, furtively, “It’s all starting to come back to me.”

“You’re lying,” she said.

He lifted his hands, let them fall again. “Sometimes,” he said, “things …”

“Things what?”

“Never mind,” he said.

“No,” she said. “What?”

“They escape me,” he said. “Things escape me.”

Things escape him?
she thought, waiting in the kitchen for him to finish dressing.
Is it catching?
she wondered. Apparently things were beginning to escape her as well.

She poured herself a glass of orange juice. She could think it through, she told herself. If she wanted to, she could go back through the night and piece it together, all the way down to the bite on her shoulder. There were as well, she now realized, bringing the glass forward to drink, bite marks on her hands, hard to discern, a redness almost like a rash. Admittedly, there was a certain incentive not to piece things together. If she did, she didn’t know if she could face being in the temple unworthily. But if she wanted to, she was almost sure she could.

He came out, wearing a pair of chinos, a white shirt, a sports coat she had chosen for him from her father’s closet.

“How do I look?” he asked. He seemed very nervous. “Good enough to get married?”

She nodded, lips tight.

The day began to accelerate. They went to the garment distribution center and were fitted for garments. It seemed to take forever. There were no parking spaces left in the temple lot; they just kept driving around and around. It was an ugly building, Lyndi thought—the gold steeple, the white stone lozenges—from a distance a sort of third-rate wedding cake. They gave up and finally parked down below, walked up the steep hill, cutting across the grass. They started to run when Lyndi realized what time it was, then stood outside, panting, trying to catch their breath so as to walk in dignified.

She was assigned an escort and given a bundle of temple clothing.

The escort led her into a dressing room. They left her shoes on a rack just inside the door. “You’re on holy ground now,” the woman said. “No shoes.” A woman standing guard at the stalls said, “Third on your left. New bride?” she asked, and smiled. “There now,” said her escort from just outside the stall door. “Take off your clothing, please.”

“What should I put on?”

“Just stay nude, dear,” the escort said.

Over the top of the stall door, Lyndi watched her escort waddle away. She turned, looked at herself in the stall’s mirror.
Nude,
she thought.
What am I getting involved in?
She took off her dress, hung it in the locker, smoothing it down. She removed her bra, then her panties, balling them up together and putting them on the locker’s top shelf. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood there, cold, considering herself in the mirror, trying to look at ease. She rubbed her throat. Where was Rudd? she wondered. Was he nude as well?

The escort came back, a pile of thick folded fabric slung over her arm. She flopped it up and onto the stall door and Lyndi took it. It was heavy.

“Put this on,” said the escort.

“And my underwear?”

“No,” she said. “Just this.”

Lyndi unfolded it. It looked like a cross between an x-ray vest and a heavy tablecloth. There was a hole in the center for her head to go through. She put it on.

The escort came, led her to a room containing two odd structures: eight aluminum posts arranged in a large square, with thin but opaque white curtains strung between them in place of walls. She entered and was ritually cleansed with water then anointed with oil, the hands of old women touching her forehead, then reaching in through the open side of Lyndi’s robe to wet her back, her hip, her calf, each touch startling, a little burst of light. Then she was helped to step into her sacred garments and was led out.

Removing the poncho, she looked at her new undergarments in the mirror. She had to wear them now, forever, always under her clothes. She looked odd, like an old lady in an old-fashioned bathing suit. She felt the sacred marks with her fingertips, the slight raised embroidering over each breast, her belly, her knee, each mark hardly an inch long.

In her wedding dress now, garments underneath. Carrying under her arm the bundle—a gauzy case about the size of a pillow that held a pleated robe, a green apron with leaves embroidered on it, a sash, a veil.

She was hustled toward a small booth toward the back of the dressing room, another curtain. The curtain parted and she was ushered into the booth, where she was given “a new name, which you shall never reveal, except in a place that will be shown you hereafter.”
What does this have to do with me? she
wondered. Lips were pressed to her ear. “The new name,” the lips claimed, “is Rachel.”
Never forget it,
she thought.

Then the curtain on the far side of the booth was parted; she found herself out of the dressing room and in a hall, an escalator ascending before her, her escort following her onto it. Up one floor and then around a curving hallway, through a door and into a chapel. A woman in white softly played a vibrato organ. Women were to one side, men to the other. Her escort took her by the arm, guiding her along the wall to the second row. Rudd was there too, dressed all in white. A man in white, near the organist, stood with his
arms crossed. She turned and looked behind her. Row upon row of people in white, more coming in all the time, each carrying tiny slips of paper.
A gathering of ghosts,
she thought.

The men started to peel away to the left, the women to the right, meeting in a two-person-wide line at the chapel’s back.
What was my new name again?
she wondered.
Raquel? No, Rachel.
And when would she have to use it? Would she know? There was a line of them out the door and then to the escalator, up the escalator and down another curved hall, down the hall and then toward a blockade of old men in white suits who diverted the line into an endowment room. The room was like a small theater. At the front was a temple worker standing behind a marble altar that seemed illuminated from within. Temple workers to either side directed the men to the right, the women to the left. She moved down her row and sat down.

She waited as everyone filed in. In the front of the room was a rich, blue curtain. She could not see Rudd though she craned her neck. The worker behind the altar stood unmoving. The doors closed behind her, the hinge clicking. The man at the altar reached down and pushed a button. A voice emanated from the ceiling somewhere. The function of the man behind the altar seemed to be to turn his head to look at the women when the disembodied voice addressed the women, to turn his head toward the men when the disembodied voice addressed the men. They were told that if any of them wanted to leave they should do so now. Nobody left.