Every second Friday night, most of the camp workers piled into trucks and went down to the movie house in Flagstaff, chaperoned by George Ginchy himself. The first time Russ had joined them, after losing his religion on the mesa, he’d been transfixed by the window movies opened on the larger world, and he’d been going ever since. On a Friday night in April, when he and the others trooped into the Orpheum, a small, green-coated figure was waiting for him, by secret prearrangement, in the last row of seats.
Very soon, almost as soon as the lights went down, four soft fingers slipped into his callused hand. To hold a woman’s hand was so absorbing and momentous that the shouts of the Three Stooges, in the first short subject, were unintelligible to him. While Marion, for her part, seemed perfectly at ease, laughing at the twisting of ears and the collapse of a stepladder, the spectacle of violence struck Russ as a profanement of his moment with her; it hurt his eyes.
When the feature started, a Sherlock Holmes picture, she lost interest in the screen and rested her head against his shoulder. She extended an arm across his chest, pulling herself closer. Basil Rathbone, meerschaum in hand, was speaking unintelligibly. Russ tried not to breathe, lest she let go of him, but she stirred again. Her hand was on his neck, turning his face toward hers. In the flickering light, a pair of lips surfaced. And, oh, their softness. The intimacy of kissing them was so intense it made him anxious, like a mortal in the presence of eternity. He turned his face away, but she immediately drew it back. By and by, he got the idea. He and she weren’t there to watch the movie, not one bit. They were there to kiss and kiss and kiss.
When the credits rolled, she wordlessly stood and left the theater. The house lights came up on a world comprehensively transformed, made more vivid and expansive, by the joining of two mouths. Feeling wildly conspicuous, hoping he wasn’t, he slipped into a group of workers exiting the theater. Marion wasn’t in the lobby, but George Ginchy was.
“You never cease to surprise me,” Ginchy said.
“Sir?”
“I took you for a God-fearing country boy. You almost squeaked with clean living.”
“Am I in trouble?”
“Not with me.”
Marion led him, in the weeks that followed, up a long and twisting stairway, scary to climb but delightful to linger on each step of—the first I love you in a letter, the first I love you spoken, the first kiss in public daylight, the hours shortened to minutes by kissing in her uncle’s parlor, the more frenzied nighttime grappling on the seat of the Willys, the unbelievable opening of her blouse, the discovery that even infinite softness had gradations, softer yet, softest of all—which finally led, on a cloudy afternoon in May, to her locking her bedroom door, kicking off her shoes, and lying down on her little bed.
Through the sheer curtain on her window, Russ could see her uncle’s art studio.
“Should we be in here?” he said. “It would be awkward if someone…”
“Antonio’s in Phoenix, and Jimmy’s not my keeper. It’s not as if we have a better place.”
“It could be awkward, though.”
“Are you afraid of me, sweetie? You seem afraid of me.”
“No. I’m not afraid of you. But—”
“I woke up knowing today would be the day. You just have to trust me. I’m scared, too, but—I really think God intended this to be the day.”
It seemed to Russ that God was in the cloudy light outside but not inside her bedroom. Somewhere on the stairway to this moment, he’d lost hold of the importance of preserving his purity until they were married.
“Today’s good for other reasons, too,” she said. “It’s a good safe day.”
“Is Jimmy not home?”
“No, he’s in his studio. I mean I can’t get pregnant.”
He didn’t love feeling always slow, always behind, but he did love Marion. It wasn’t accurate to say he thought about her night and day, because it was less a matter of thinking than of feeling filled with her, filled in the unceasing way that he imagined a more truly religious person, a Navajo on the mesa, might be filled with God. And she was right: if not today, in her room, then when and where? He never wanted to stop touching her, but merely touching was never enough. His body had been telling him, albeit mutely, and yet so insistently that he got the message, that the pressure of her presence in him could only be relieved by releasing it inside her.
Which he now did. In the gray light, on the quilted coverlet of her bed. The release came very quickly and was disappointing in its suddenness, surprisingly less satisfactory than his solitary chafings. An act no less crucial in his life than being baptized had lasted scarcely longer. Ashamed of how unmomentous the act had felt in the event, he became more generally ashamed. His proportions were as ungainly as hers were ideal, his boniness an affront to her softness, his skin a dismal gray against the creamy white of hers. He couldn’t believe she was smiling up at him, couldn’t believe the approval in her gaze.