“Just rest there for a second,” she said, stroking his hair. “We’re only starting.”
He didn’t know how she knew this, but again she was right. As soon as she said starting, his body told him she was right. The word in itself reelectrified it. That the crucial act could be repeated, after the shortest of breathers, would never have occurred to him. That it could be done four times, before the light faded and he had to rush away, was a dazzlement from which, he could already feel, as he urged the Willys up the steep road to camp, there would be no recovering. The Mosaic commandment against adultery, the plain dress of the women in Lesser Hebron, the proscription against dancing, the concealment of women’s necks: it was as if he’d grown up inside an ancient fort whose parapets and cannons faced out on peaceful fields, toward an enemy he’d seen no trace of. Now he understood why the fortifications were so massive.
The next time they sinned, in her little room, on an unusually warm and muggy afternoon, with a cat thumping against her locked door, he fell from a height of carnality into an abyss of moral anxiety. He trusted Marion because of her unfeignable love of God, her self-blaming goodness. What she wanted was no more than what he wanted, and the spilling of seed wasn’t shameful per se. An arousal and emission that occurred in dreams, without his volition, could only be a natural function of the body. But to release his seed inside a woman he wasn’t married to, to lose himself in her flesh, to wallow in her private aromas, was manifestly different. He extricated himself and, despite the heat, pulled the coverlet over him.
“Aren’t you worried,” he said, “about committing a mortal sin?”
She scrambled to her knees. Her nakedness, blinding in its beauty, seemed of no consequence to her.
“I don’t need to be a Catholic,” she said. “I want to be whatever you are. If you want to be Navajo, I’ll be a Navajo with you.”
“That’s not a possibility.”
“Then whatever you like. I needed to be at Nativity because—it was something I needed to do. I needed to pray and be forgiven. I prayed and prayed, and then there you were—my reward. Am I allowed to say that? You’re like my gift from God. That’s how miraculous you are to me.”
“But then … don’t you think we should be married?”
“Yes! Good idea! We can do it next week. Or tomorrow—how about tomorrow?”
As if the blessing of matrimony had already descended, he pulled her onto him and kissed her. She threw aside the quilt and straddled him, handling him with an expertness he didn’t question; she was naturally expert at everything. Only in her whimpers, which she emitted in rhythm to their coupling, was any sense of lesserness detectable. She whimpered and spoke his name, whimpered and spoke his name. In his mind, she was already his darling little wife. But after the culminating pleasure had coursed through him, he returned to being a sinner in a sweat beneath another sinner.
Her mood, too, had changed. She was crying, voicelessly, miserably.
“Is something wrong? Did I hurt you?”
She shook her head.
“Marion, I’m sorry, my God—did I hurt you?”
“No.” She gasped through her tears. “You’re wonderful. You’re my—you’re perfect.”
“Then what? What is it?”
She rolled away and covered her face with her hands. “I can’t be a Catholic.”
“Why not?”
“Because it means I can’t marry you. I was—oh, Russ.” She sobbed. “I was already married!”
A sickening disclosure. Jealousy and uncleanliness, both bodily and moral, were compounded in the image of another man possessing her as he just had. A woman he’d believed to be pure and purehearted was previously used—befouled. He felt sick with disappointment. The depth of it revealed the height of the hope she’d given him.
“It happened in Los Angeles,” she said. “I was married for six months and then divorced. I should have told you right away. It was terrible of me not to. You’re so beautiful and I’m—oh—I’m so—I should have told you! Oh God, oh God, oh God.”
She thrashed in her misery. A cruel part of him thought she deserved any amount of emotional punishment, but the loving part of him was moved. He wanted to kill the man who’d polluted her.
“Who was it? Did he hurt you?”
“It was just a mistake. I was still a kid—I didn’t know anything. I thought I was supposed to—I didn’t know anything.”