“What does that have to do with fucking?”
“I mean, yes, if you could forgive me—if we could find our way back—then, yes, I would very much like to … find our way back. But right now—”
“Right now,” she pointed out, “we’re alone in a hotel room.”
“And our son is in a ward three blocks away.”
“I’m not the one going on and on about what I’ve fucked. Or couldn’t fuck but really, really wanted to.”
He covered his ears. Her chest was heaving, but not only with anger. In taunting him with the dirtiest of words, in a hotel room, she’d accidentally turned herself on. There was an itch to be scratched, and it really did seem as if everything else could wait. She pushed his knees apart and dropped to her own.
“Marion—”
“Shut up,” she said, unbuckling his belt. “You have no rights here.”
She unzipped him, and there it was. The beautiful and hateful thing. Interested in seventeen-year-olds, interested in home-wrecking forty-year-olds, apparently even somewhat interested in his wife. She lowered her face to it, and—good Lord. He hadn’t showered.
A noseful of Cottrell ought to have sobered her, but somehow everything was interchangeable. It was as if, instead of repulsing the assault she’d provoked from Bradley, she’d surrendered to it and were catching a whiff of the aftermath. Though the matter of the seventeen-year-old still had to be dealt with, the Cottrell matter seemed settled. Withholding her mouth would suffice as punishment. She pushed him onto his back and stretched out on top of him.
“With a kiss,” she said, “I forgive thee.”
“You don’t seem right.”
“I suggest taking the kiss while you can.”
“Marion?”
She kissed him, and everything was interchangeable. Not just he and the other man, not just she and the other woman, but past and present. They hadn’t made love in so long, it might as well have been twenty-five years. She in her younger body, he pulling off the coat she’d bought, the air as dry and thin as Arizona’s, the fading light a mountain light. And how easy it had been in Arizona. Along with a faulty mind and a believing heart, God had given her an oversexedness so scratchable that she could relieve it in a public library without attracting notice. And how easy it was again. Seizing on some incidental contact and running with it, she promptly convulsed. She opened her eyes and saw gleaming, in Russ’s eyes, a memory of that orgasmic girl. He’d liked that girl, oh, yes, he had. The gift she’d been given had made him feel powerful. Although she’d misplaced it in the swamp of motherhood, lost it altogether in the wasteland of anxious depression, her refinding of it made him powerful again. His thrusting abandon hurt around the edges, and she would pay for it later, but his excitement excited her. She urged him on, urged herself on. She heard an almost barking sound, an ongoing laugh of surprise, until further convulsing silenced her. He redoubled his efforts, but here, too, the past recurred. As in Arizona, once sated, she remembered her guilt.
When he’d finished, he rested his full weight on her, his scratchy cheek against her neck.
“Not so bad,” she said. “Right?”
“I don’t want to leave.”
“Well. No rush.”
The only light remaining was from the bedside alarm clock, the only sound the passing of cars in the distance. He kissed her neck.
“To be with you like this—I’d forgotten.”
“I know,” she said.
“It’s such a simple gift.”
“Shh.”
The sound of a car passing was like a breaking wave of water. Guilt fluttered in her again.
“Turning and turning,” he said. “‘Till by turning and turning, we come round right.’ That’s how this feels. Like I’ve been turning and turning…”
The song was devotional, but she knew what he meant. To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed. In the plain words of the song was a joy so deep that its roots were inextricable from sorrow’s, and the release of sorrow was even sweeter than the other kind of release. Sorrow was of the heart, and she gave herself to it. As she wept, she felt him hardening inside her. It made her cry harder. She was his again.
He brushed at her tears with his fingertips. “I never want to leave you.”
“That’s nice,” she said, sniffing. “But I should probably use the bathroom.”
“I’m no good for this world. We never should have left Indiana. We should have spent our whole life there, just the two of us and the kids, a community of believers…”