“I was thinking,” he said, “do you want to go to First Reformed?”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t know—it’s Palm Sunday. It might be nice to be someplace familiar.”
“I would love that.” She kissed him again. “It’s a great idea. Thank you for suggesting it.”
She was happy that he’d made a definite wish explicit. And happy, after all, to return to First Reformed, on a Sunday when her father wasn’t there. Happy to see faces of surprise when she and Tanner made their entrance, happy to accept a palm twig from the greeters, Tom and Betsy Devereaux, happy to claim the pew she’d shared with Tanner at the first service she’d attended with him. It was strange to recall how she’d imagined, at that service, that they were there as a couple; strange how wishing for a future life and then actually inhabiting it made time feel unreal. As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshiping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.
And so it happened. Near the end of the service, when she stood with Tanner to sing the Doxology and heard his tenor voice ringing forth, heard her own voice quavering to stay in tune with him, the golden light entered her again. This time, not being veiled by marijuana, it was even brighter. This time, to see it, she didn’t need to look down into herself. She could feel it rising up in her and brimming over—the goodness of God, the simplicity of the answer to her question—and she experienced a paroxysm so powerful it took her singing breath away. The answer was her Savior, Jesus Christ.
She hadn’t found the answer in the other churches where she’d been looking. She’d found it where she’d started. This seemed to her a crucial fact.
The spring morning into which she and Tanner emerged, after being cooed over in the parlor, admired by dewy-eyed matrons, was the warmest of the year so far. In the wake of her paroxysm, her senses were alive to the caressing breeze, to the fragrance of flowers and spring earth, to the blazing of the dogwoods by the bank building, to the song of unseen birds, and to her body’s own springtime urges. Because a visitation from God had stirred them up, they didn’t seem the least bit wrong to her. They were simply part of being His creature.
“Let’s take a walk,” she said.
“Your feet are going to hurt in those shoes.”
“It’s so beautiful, I’ll go barefoot.”
The sidewalk on Maple Avenue still had winter beneath it, a thrilling contrast to the warmth of the sun. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone walking barefoot. The eight-year-old girl she’d once been was now eighteen and someday might be eighty. Her sense-memories of spring were confirming her insight from the sanctuary: time was an illusion.
“It just happened again,” she told Tanner. “What happened at Christmas—it happened again while we were singing the Doxology. I saw God.”
“You—really? That’s far-out.”
“What’s strange is that yesterday was the total opposite. Yesterday I felt so dead, and now I’m so alive. Yesterday I had no idea what to do, and today the answer is so clear to me.”
“What do you mean?”
In a few words, she recounted her conversation with Gig. To spare Tanner’s feelings, she omitted Gig’s judgments, but Tanner was angry even so. Although she gathered that Laura had been quite the screaming bandmate, Becky had only once seen him really angry, when Quincy made the band late for a gig in the city.
“What the fuck? He called your house? Behind my back?”
“You didn’t give him my number?”
“That guy? No way. If he has something to say to me, I’m the one to say it to. Did you tell him that? Tell him he should be talking to me, not you?”
“All I did was answer the phone.”
“God, I am sick of this. He’s a good booker but a total sleaze. He’s been all over you since day one. I can’t believe he called you behind my back!”
Tanner’s outburst, its assertiveness, was extremely pleasing to her.