“How invigorating!” he exclaims to her now, running his fingers through his beard as he contemplates the white paint peeling from the siding of the church. “A real, tangible, sweat-and-blood way to pull a congregation together!”
Of course the task will be difficult, but he reminds his wife that he came to this town precisely because it would be difficult. He came to this town because he knew he would be needed.
Noah continues to meet with Mauro, who offers advice that is sometimes helpful and sometimes baffling. He calls in the town electrician and the town plumber, who happen to be the same person. One morning he visits the dank offices of the town bank to assess the state of the church’s finances, and that afternoon he rounds up a pair of burly high school seniors to work as his construction crew. They roll their eyes and agree to his offer. With school out for the summer and the movie theater gone out of business, what else is there to do in this town?
“The situation isn’t as bad as you might think,” Noah tells his wife. “The floors and the fans, yes, we’ll work on restoring those. But Mauro was wrong about the pipes and the electrical equipment—that’s all fine. The windows and the roof we’ll check. And the painting, sure. The mildew. You know.”
Every morning he bolts down his cup of coffee and then heads up the hill to the church, his folder of notes tucked underneath his raincoat, to direct his sullen, ragtag work crew to various parts of the building. With them he carries in unwieldy boards of lumber and panes of glass. He ascends a ladder into the rafters, where he washes the windows with bleach and clears out the leaves and the debris. The birds watch him warily—a flock of bright button eyes in the dark. When one of the boys asks Noah what he wants to do about the birds he turns and gazes through the broken panels of stained glass, sees the rain falling coldly into the trees, and decides to leave them where they are.
“What harm are they doing anyone, really?” he asks his wife, who is kneeling nearby. She opens a can of paint and turns to him.
“No harm at all,” she assures him. She moves the step stool to the wall, pulls out a small nylon brush, and begins swiping broad stripes of cream-colored paint around one of the door frames. Noah stands for a moment and watches her work: steady, even, silent. Her hair is pulled back and she is wearing one of his old button-down shirts, several sizes too large for her. Before he returns to his crew, he leans in and kisses the shirttail that hangs over her hip.
“I love you,” he says. “I love that you’re here.”
Where else would she be, if not here? What would she be doing, if she were not helping him? As she paints she thinks about the job that she left in the city, remembers the displeasure that darkened the face of the owner when she told him that she was leaving the studio.
“Temporarily?” he pressed her.
“For good,” she murmured.
“Well,” he said, grudgingly handing over her last paycheck, “I want you to know that your job will still be here if you ever change your mind.”
Although she left her work with some regret, she feels somewhat relieved now to be away from it, away from the disjunction between illusion and reality that photography implies. Sometimes she would hear couples screaming at each other in the parking lot on their way into the studio, and yet when they were in front of the backdrop, facing the lens after she had settled them down on their stools with flowers or props, they would kiss or lean into each other’s arms as if they were always this content to be together. In one of her dresser drawers at home she has a framed photograph of her own family from when she was an infant: her sister perched upon their mother’s knee, both of them smiling broadly into the camera, the baby cradled between them. The apparent tranquillity and the stability they present to the viewer are what Noah’s wife marvels over time and again. In real life her family was reckless and desperate, and if she herself has turned out to be somewhat of a skeptic, if she sometimes finds it hard to reconcile the appearance of a picture with the reality of things as they are, perhaps this photograph is the reason why.
Her sister—a full five years older than her and born of a different father—liked to remind her younger sibling that she was an accident, a mistake made by a mother who had never wanted the first child and who certainly hadn’t planned on having the second. “You weren’t supposed to be here,” the sister would hiss at her at night, when they were huddled in the same bed with the streetlamp shining in the window.
She didn’t want to believe her sister, but how could she not? It was clear that she didn’t belong in this family. The memories she has of her prodigal mother and her profligate aunts are loud and brightly colored, full of music and the clinking of glasses. She remembers them as daring and laughing, while she herself was awkward and wraithlike, already taller for her age than she should have been. She learned to stand against the wall and make herself invisible until they forgot that she was there, hoping that her mother would not see her and whisk her away to her room, tuck her back into bed beside her sister, and kiss her good night in a rush of rose perfume. Her mother had been an artist and had lived an artist’s life: wild, unrestrained.
She remembers her mother’s efforts to discover her youngest daughter’s hidden talent, enrolling her in drawing classes and singing lessons, handing her musical instruments only to take them away again; her mother even went so far as signing her up for sports, although she was never fast enough or strong enough to be of any use. Instead she spent most of her middle school and adolescent years on the sidelines. Somewhere along the way someone put a camera in her hands, and that was how she found her calling: to point and shoot at greatness, to sidle up close to the strongest or the smartest so that she could capture a little of their luminescence. Later on, after she had learned how to develop the photos by herself, she would bring the prints out of the darkroom and spread them out across the kitchen table and feel as though she had managed to acquire a fraction of that light for her own.
She liked to bring out the best in people, and it was true—she had a knack for it. She learned to look for it in everyone she came across. Indeed, it did not take her long after meeting Noah to realize that he had no “best” self; he was like his picture every day. She used to sit in her pew and look up at him, loving him for the way that he beamed out at his congregation as if they were, each and every one of them, pointing cameras at his face and asking him to smile.
Is she concerned that the people of this town do not seem to be as enthusiastic about the project as her husband is? No, not particularly. In the evenings as she and her husband hike down the hill and head home through town, they meet their neighbors on the street and Noah pulls up short to speak with them. He gestures to the church and lists all the changes he’s been making; he reminds them that the building will be ready for services in two weeks. If the townspeople do not respond with the energy of Noah’s former congregation, if they seem to gaze at the white steeple in the misty distance with more wariness than hope—well, then it is only a matter of time until her husband turns their hearts and minds around. And if Noah seems to grow a little solemn after these brief meetings, if his steps echo more heavily between the rain-soaked trees that surround them, it is only because he is so weary from his work. Who wouldn’t be?
Besides, before he goes to bed he often gets his second wind. “You know, they said it couldn’t be done,” he calls to her from the bathroom. She hears him turn on the water and splash at his face. “They all warned me against it! They said this town had given up on God a long time ago and that I’d be hard pressed to change them.”
“Who said, dear?” says his wife with a yawn. Her fingers are streaked with cream-colored paint. “Who are you talking about?” She undresses and slips below the quilt, trying to ignore the strange wooden carving on the unfamiliar headboard. Now that she has had a few weeks to hang photographs and rearrange the furniture, she doesn’t mind this old house so much. It is spacious and warm. Still, it takes some effort to forget that the plates she sets out for dinner are
the former minister’s plates and the typewriter she hears tapping and chiming from Noah’s study is the former minister’s typewriter.
“But what’s the point of a project if it doesn’t have a touch of the impossible to it?” replies Noah, unfazed. When he returns to the room he bends over her and kisses her on the forehead and then looks toward the cheerless window, hardly seeing the rain at all, his countenance feverish with purpose. She turns her head on the pillow to face the same way, and from her position in bed she considers the church in the distance—a white stone figurine against an assembly of clouds that are both soft and ominous.
“Why do you think we came to this town, anyway?” Noah adds, as he slides into bed beside her. He grins. He means it as a joke, of course, but then again there is a little truth in every joke and now she understands that the broken church and broken spirit of this town are exactly what drew him to it.
If lately there have been times when Noah does not answer the questions she poses to him, if he forgets to bring home whatever it is that she asked him to pick up, or if he walks with her in meditative silence—in these moments she reminds herself that the only reason why he cannot hear her is because he is listening to someone else, and perhaps when a man is listening to God the voice fills to the brim of his mind so that it is much harder to hear the small and ordinary person walking in the rain beside him.
But when he is present, he is fully present—his affection palpable, his touch at once tender and electrifying. Under the sheets he reaches for her, his hands cool, and her skin tingles as his blisters—rough and new—graze across her side. He kisses her earlobe and her throat, sliding on top of her. She arches her back and wraps her arms around him, digging her fingers into the hard muscle of his back and feeling his body rock with hers while the rain pounds fast and thick above them.
seven
Leesl used to have a lover but she only ever loved him from afar.
Every day he would call her on the phone and when she heard his voice unraveling through the phone cord, twining in tight spirals across a distance of one thousand five hundred and nine miles, she would fall in love with him all over again. She would feel herself swoon—physically swoon!—and then she would need to clutch the receiver in order to keep herself from toppling to the kitchen floor.
“I love you,” the lover would say to Leesl.
“I love you, too,” she would reply.
“When are we going to live in the same place?”
“Soon,” she would say. “Very soon.”
After a few months of long-distance the lover couldn’t stand it anymore and so he quit his job and moved to the town. But immediately after his arrival Leesl fell out of love with him and so a week later he moved right back to where he had been before.
He called her from a pay phone as soon as his train arrived. “Why didn’t it work?” he said to her across the miles, plaintively.
“I don’t know,” she said—even though she did know. Her love had been linked to his absence. She did not miss him when he was near her.
When she hung up the phone she was sorry, of course, but not sorry enough to call him back. She lay down on the floor and she cried—Leesl believes that one should always cry at endings—but when she stood up again she felt better. As the days continued to pass she felt better still, and after two weeks she felt that she was almost entirely over the whole affair. When she thought of him it was not with love but with fondness. And some concern.
The townspeople were never quite sure what happened there. They assumed that because Leesl was so mousy (her face pinched, her glasses thick, her walk plodding), the lover had called it off. No one ever would have expected Leesl to call off anything. No one knows Leesl at all.
“She’s been jilted, obviously,” says Mrs. McGinn to her daughter. “And with her mother gone now to live in that group home in the city—Leesl’s got no one. Not a soul.”
“Do you think we ought to find her someone new?” asks the daughter.
There is not much to do in a town like this one but gossip. With the weather so poor for so long, most people spend their time shut up in their own houses. There have been no outdoor art fairs, no markets, no family picnics since the rain began, and the only places people tend to meet one another now are in Mauro’s general store or Mrs. McGinn’s diner. Sometimes, when the rain lets up a little, they gather in great colored flocks of umbrellas in the town square and they start to plot, pulling at their neighbors’ strings like so many marionettes. They do not mean any harm. They intend, in fact, only the best.
“We are only wanting people to be happy,” says Mauro with a shrug and a swig from his wine bottle. “Who is to be judging? Who is to be throwing all the many stones?”
“She’s clearly suffering from heartbreak,” says Mrs. McGinn. “Which means she might want to be alone right now.”
Although Mrs. McGinn says this with great conviction, she doesn’t actually believe it. Each one of her divorces has devastated her. She is convinced that a person can only thrive when she is a part of something: a marriage, a committee, a crowd.
“I’m not alone!” proclaims Leesl, coming to her own defense when she hears them. “Look! Do you want to see a picture of my cats?”
The townspeople do not want to see a picture of Leesl’s cats. They have seen all the pictures before.
Only Mrs. McGinn glances dutifully at the photo as she sighs. In truth, the main reason why she is so concerned about Leesl is because she believes that a place is as stable as its most unstable citizen; that one person’s depression can affect the entire population, infecting everyone with a gray and dismal seed that, once planted, is difficult to uproot. Look at the old minister, and how his death has shaken the community. The townspeople have spent many hours worrying over his lonely life and his untimely end. Are they at all to blame? they want to know. Should they have been kinder and more patient with him? Could the rain have been sent as punishment? Mrs. McGinn knows that thoughts like these are foolish ones—how could anyone be blamed for something as fickle and as unpredictable as the weather? This is not the Old Testament—but they will not listen when she tries to reassure them. They seem to have conveniently forgotten that it was raining long before he died.
It was Leesl who knew the old minister better than anyone. She taught herself to play the organ as an adolescent and has been going up to the church to provide the music for services for years. She also offers music lessons, but over the past few months the last of her clients has fallen away. No one here feels all that much like singing.
But Leesl doesn’t mind. At home she sits contentedly with her cats and her piano, paging through her music books while the cats stare into her fish tank with slanted yellow eyes and bat at the glass with tufted paws. The fish have fins that shine like bands of sequins. They rise from the jungle of their plastic plants and they drift upward with their mouths open, lips kissing the shifting surface. The cats purr and Leesl smiles, looking for songs to play at the new minister’s first service. A geranium sits on the windowsill, sturdy and blooming in defiance of the rain.
When she has chosen her hymns, she prepares herself to climb the hill to the church. She slips the tuning knife into the front pocket of her dress and then she walks very cheerily through the streets with her red umbrella.
“Stranger than ever,” say the townspeople, exchanging knowing glances. They remember how, in the days following the minister’s death, they would approach her to ask what the man was like in those final days—what he talked about, if he seemed happy, if he ever mentioned them. Leesl’s answers were always vague and disappointing. By the time the new minister showed up, they had stopped asking.
Someone suggests that perhaps Leesl is in love with Noah.
“You are thinking so?” asks Mauro, and Mrs. McGinn shrugs. The man is terribly attractive.
And yet Leesl is not in love with anyone—not even the long-distance lover, not anymore. The truth is that she likes the church; she feels safe
there. She doesn’t mind the slow walk up that hill, her boots filling with water and her umbrella pulling in the wind. She would rather be of use than stay at home, waiting to give music lessons to students who never come.
As she draws closer, she hears the sound of a hammer ringing through the rain. At the top of the hill she finds Noah on the roof, crouching over the shingles while the wind wraps around the steeple and the bells bang together. His wife is pacing back and forth on the ground below him, looking up at him and shielding her eyes in the rain. Leesl pauses to watch them. She is curious about the minister’s wife, and has thought about befriending her (she knows the woman must be lonely in a town like this, where people are no longer accustomed to welcoming strangers); but then Leesl has never felt the need of many friends. Besides, how can she befriend a person who never leaves the house without her husband?
Leesl goes ahead and lets herself into the building. Once inside she hangs her slicker over the back of a pew and goes to stand alone at the pipes, tapping her tuning knife along the wood and fiddling with the sliders. It is a matter of temperament, she knows; each organ has its own pitches, its own quirks. Her task is to make this one sing.
It is important to Noah that the organ be perfect and the roof stop leaking. He told her so the other day. The buckets below the rafters are already halfway full, and the water is rising. She understands that the church cannot be in such a state when the congregants come, but what she does not want to tell the new minister is that she does not believe the congregants will ever come. They were not here for the last minister, and they will not be here for him. She only hopes that Noah will be stronger than the last one, that the failure will not break his heart.
Leesl knows what it is to have a broken heart, and she fears what can happen when the heart doesn’t heal. She does not want to think of her long-distance lover, does not want to know how he is feeling because if he truly is in pain, she doesn’t think she could bear to know it. That is the problem with love. That is why Leesl prefers to be without it.
Noah's Wife Page 5
