by Nancy Thayer
She did not seem miserable, however. She seemed well fed, well read, highly intelligent, critical, capable, and utterly self-satisfied. And no wonder: she possessed a ripe, complete beauty of face and body unlike anything he had ever seen before, a mythic beauty. If Renoir had painted Mae West in modern dress, perhaps the result would have resembled Liza Howard: she was a blue-eyed blonde with an hourglass figure, a blooming summer garden of a woman. She usually wore her thick honey-colored hair pulled off her face and piled in soft convolutions at the back of her head, the better to display the emeralds or pearls in her ears. But the very way she restrained her hair indicated how long and wavy it would be when she released it. Everything about the woman was undulant, the gentle turn of her arms or legs, her full pink lips, her high, pillowy breasts. She was a tall, long-waisted, long-legged woman, perfectly proportioned: the sort of woman who made slimmer women look angular and ropy and tough. She was a woman of luxurious flesh.
But she was also a woman of licentious flesh. She counted on the lust of men to keep her entertained and she did more than her share of coveting neighbors’ husbands and committing adultery.
Peter knew certain things from gossip, and others from occasional confessions from outwardly proper but inwardly wretched men. Still, she was going too far with her attempts to seduce Peter himself.
Peter knew he was a handsome man and that this helped him in his ministry. Other women had had crushes on him and expressed this in a number of charming, embarrassed ways: serving diligently on committees, giving him chaste, handmade presents, even asking him to help them deal with the burden of their feelings, because they knew he was a married man.
But Liza displayed no such delicacy. Once or twice he had asked her to help him with some church task, in the hopes that over the casual friendly ease of an afternoon’s work, she might drop her guard and let him see the frightened child within. For there was surely a frightened child within us all, wasn’t there? Peter thought so. Liza did attend church, and she was intelligent—she must know that she was greedy, adulterous, uncharitable, and vain. Peter believed that in her heart of hearts Liza mourned for herself, for what she had become.
Just last weekend he had asked Liza to join him in visiting three very old couples who lived on farms in the mountains around Londonton, thinking that as they drove from farm to farm Liza would reflect on the difference between her state and that of other parishioners, who were at this point all too old or crippled to make the journey into church most Sundays. He thought the sight of their withered bodies and humble homes would fill Liza with pity; she would see how lucky she was to be so wealthy and beautiful. The last old couple they visited had a nice home filled with drying apples and obliging dogs and cats. Peter expected Liza to say something—how she admired the old couple, how she envied them their quiet going on with life, how she was aware in the middle of dark nights that in spite of the superficial beauty of her life she was in truth more lonely and miserable than the old couples they saw who had so few material goods. Liza at thirty-five was a widow; Peter wondered if she had played a role, if only indirectly, in helping her aging husband to a heart attack.
But as Peter and Liza had ridden together through the brilliant New England day, Liza had not opened her heart to Peter. And so, finally, Peter had made a great attempt: he had reached his hand across the seat to place it gently over Liza’s elegant smooth hand, which fairly blossomed with rings. Liza had not withdrawn her hand, and so for a moment they had gone along that way, hands clasped in friendship.
“You know,” Peter had said, “it is what is in one’s heart that really matters.”
“Do you want to sleep with me?” Liza had asked in reply.
He had dropped Liza’s hand and nearly run off the road in horror. That she would invite him, suspect him! The entire afternoon, the old people—none of it had meant anything to Liza. She was too self-occupied.
“Liza,” he had said after a moment, “I love you in the way I love all the members of my church. And you are a lovely woman, which I’m sure you know without my saying. But I’m a married man, and a minister. I don’t lust after you. I’d like to be your friend. I’d like to help you.” Surely, he thought, he could not be any plainer than that.
Liza had studied Peter for one long moment with her gambler’s eyes—Peter had felt the gaze upon him, and had concentrated fiercely on the winding road. Then she had looked away again. “Of course,” she said.
When Peter glanced over at her again, he saw that she had rearranged herself seductively, so that ostensibly she was looking out the window, but with her body positioned in such a way that her skirt, which was one of those incredible new things with a slit up the side, exposed almost the entire length of one long, sleek, expensively stockinged leg. And she had placed her arm on the armrest of the car door in such a way that her blouse curved open, exposing a touch of creamy lace and of even creamier, curving breast. Again he nearly ran off the road. He was offended, and deeply disappointed. He had attempted to minister to her, and had been affronted. Churlishly he thought: the hell with it then, there is nothing more I can do. He had to drive a good five miles before he could forgive her or himself for his anger.
They had parted pleasantly enough, as if nothing had happened, and Liza had continued to attend church, and Peter had said nothing more to her. But he was despondent at the thought of his failure, at his inability to reach her, to let her know that she was God’s child and owed something both to God and to herself. How could he ever reach her? At this very moment, she was staring at him directly, with a frank come-hither look on her face, and Peter thought that if he were a different kind of minister in a different kind of church, he might stop the hymn and openly chastise her.
Of course he would never do that. It was not his style. And it wasn’t done, not here in this great New England pocket of reserve and propriety. He would never be able openly to confront Liza with her wickedness; and so he would never be able to help her. Every time she came to church she stood there in front of him as a blatant sign of his inability to be a true minister. But the most he could do at the moment was to try to turn wrath away from his heart.
No. He could do more than that. While the ushers seated latecomers and the organ music carried them through the final verses of the hymn, he could use these few moments to admit the truth to himself. It was not wrath he was trying to turn away from his heart, but lust; and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to turn away the lust, either. It was such a pleasurable sensation.
If he were honest with himself, he would admit that he liked having Liza in his church, that he enjoyed her presence and looked forward to it—wasn’t she the first person in the congregation that his eyes went to every time? She was a beautiful, sexy young woman, and his feelings about her were complicated. When he had invited her to help him with certain church tasks, had he not been secretly hoping for something more reasonable than a religious conversion? He had been hoping that she would find him desirable, and would express that desire in some definite way. When they were riding together in his car and he reached out to touch her hand, he had done so only partly from genuine human concern: he had also quite simply wanted to touch her. It was too bad that she had been so blatant and definite in her response; if only she had been subtle and shy. Then he could have had the joy of knowing they were physically attracted to each other without the attending responsibility and moral concerns. But no, she had immediately asked him if he wanted to sleep with her, and what could he do but reply as he had? He was a minister, a married man.
But what if he had said, “Yes?” What if she had replied, “Good, because I want to sleep with you, too?” What if they had agreed to make love just that one time, and to never touch each other or speak of the occasion again? It had been a beautiful, warm October day, and the country roads had been full of isolated driveways where a car could shelter behind shrubs and trees. It would have taken only minutes for him to convert the backseat of the station wagon into a lar
ge flat surface that would serve as a bed—not a very comfortable bed, but serviceable all the same. What would it have been like to stand in the hushed and dappled sunlight of the woods carefully removing the lacy coverings from Liza Howard’s body? It would have been so quiet—no ticking of clocks or muffled domestic rattlings behind doors—only the sound of their quickened breath, their exhalations as they moved against each other, their bare feet rustling in the high grass, the slippery sigh of branches rubbing together above them. They would have taken their time; they would have goaded each other into leisure; he would have stood naked, a light breeze playing over his skin, and he would have seen her standing nude in the open air, the sunlight exposing the white bulbs of her breasts, the ferny growth between her legs … they would have been back in the Garden of Eden.
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 t
aking 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.
