“This is okay, right?” she said. “A friendly hug?”
Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.
“It’s so much better this time. I wonder if it’s a social thing, like you need to be with someone else to get the full experience. What do you think?”
He thought his head might burst with terror. He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored. All his life, people had concealed their true opinion of him—only Clem had been honest. Into his chest, like a giant air bubble, unreleasable through lungs or stomach, came the agony of having hurt his son. He leaned forward and opened his mouth, trying somehow to release the bubble. He perceived his resemblance to the parishioners whose final moment he’d witnessed, his jaw lowered with agonal breathing, his facial skin stretched over an emerging death’s-head. It wasn’t clear how he could survive another moment of the agony.
When Frances withdrew from him, he felt no relief, only reproach. She was having a joyful experience and he an abominable one. This fact, the humiliation of it, seemed to brighten the living room in a disagreeable way.
“There’s something weird about the light,” she said. “It seems different from one moment to the next—I wonder if it’s always doing that. Maybe the pot makes my eyes more sensitive?”
Her friendly tone compounded his torture. That she wasn’t recoiling from his ugliness and failure seemed impossibly merciful. He alone, of all the people in the world, was phony, he alone a wraith-person.
“It does seem brighter,” he found himself saying, only to be stricken by the revolting wetness of his mouth’s creation of the words.
“Are you all right?” Frances said. “I read that pot makes some people paranoid.”
Before he could stop himself, he admitted that he was feeling paranoid. Instantly ashamed, he added, with croaking falsity, “Just a little—not a lot.”
“Come sit with me—I’ll hold your hand. Maybe you just need to feel safe.”
Going anywhere near her was unthinkable. His dread of discovery by her children had struck him with renewed force, and the kitchen! Even with the fan on, the kitchen surely stank of marijuana. It was imperative to get away before he was discovered. In his mind, he formed the words I’m sorry, trying to gauge what more they might reveal about his native excrescence. Whether he actually uttered them, as he left the room and snatched his coat from the newel post, he never knew.
Walking back to the church, unable to find a facial expression that didn’t broadcast culpability, he might have been a spider crawling across a white wall. It was a miracle that no one stared at him. When he reached his car, he locked himself inside it and lay down on the front seat, out of sight. Eventually he noticed that he was no longer psychotic, but the emotional truth of his paranoia persisted. When he returned to the parsonage, intending to hide in his office and pray, he was moved to stop first in the storage room and empty Marion’s ashtray into his hands. He smeared the ashes into his face, opened his mouth to them.
The season of Lent had begun, and it wasn’t all bad. Shame and self-abasement were still his portals to God’s mercy. The old paradox—that weakness, honestly owned, made a man stronger in his faith—still obtained. Accepting his failure with Frances, he asked Kitty Reynolds to lead the next Tuesday circle without him. At home, he humbled himself with Marion, told her she looked nice, took an interest. When she said, with cool amusement, “I gather you’ve had a setback with your little friend,” he turned the other cheek. He said, “Go ahead and mock me. I deserve it.” The days were getting longer, and when he sat in his twilit study and labored to express a sermon-worthy thought, he could hear her clearing her throat in the adjacent room, applying her language skills to the at-home proofreading work she was doing to pay for new clothes, a better hairdresser. Now that she was looking trimmer, more like the intense young woman he’d fallen for, he wondered if there might be hope for their marriage after all—if they might yet find their way to a new arrangement.
But she still slept on the third floor and made him do his own laundry, and despite his renewed engagement with God he couldn’t rid his mind of Frances. As he wore out the shame of his behavior in her living room, through incessant revisiting of it, he remembered more clearly her own behavior: that she’d asked him, more than once, to hold her hand; that she’d put her arms around him from behind, in a supposedly friendly hug （weren’t friendly hugs frontal?）; and that, moreover, she’d dressed for their date in a garment begging to be raised above her hips. With terrible hindsight, he saw that she’d offered him the very chance he’d dreamed of. And even if he’d had her only once, even if he was only a passing itch she’d felt like scratching, while high on drugs, it would have meant the world to him.