Ed is breathless; he will die before long and I feel ruthless using up his strength, but he listens to my boastful grievances and amazement. (I kept Margery in mind for twenty-five years but couldn’t enter her love until I also loved a young man who was above me.) L. won’t say I miss you. He did say I love you. He gives me clothes and presents whose accuracy is a higher form of speech. His family acts without prudery, naked all day above the servants, grooming each other at the lake. I wake at night expecting L. to be in my bed in San Francisco. His rich person’s problems create a mood of unreality even in himself. I know him, his dilemmas—does that oppress him?

Ed is still listening. He says, “L.’s features are so polished, they’re almost overdone.” I eagerly agree. L. is wide open, tender, remote, precise, serious, unsure . . . First I fought for meaning, now I have too much of it. I disappear from a position too full or empty to reveal the extent of my need. I’m Margery following a god through a rainy city. The rapture is mine, mine the attempt to talk herself into existence.

4

Margery prayed on the stone floor of a side-chapel at St. Margaret’s the Friday before Christmas, 1406; little statues made of rye dough adorned the altar. She prayed on one knee, arms outstretched like a crucifix. Jesus delayed and Margery was weary, overcome by desire. She thought her suffering was the result of bad luck which good luck could reverse. Daydreams of acknowledgment took shape in the beyond. A priest, young and handsome, held the sacrament over his head. A keening in his chest never stopped. The sacrament shok & flekeryd to & fro, as Margery wrote—a white dove calling turrr turrr and batting its wings as blue sky burst through the roof.

Jesus pictured Margery carrying fruit in her apron in a small orchard her family owned behind her house: she’s squinting in the sun and he can smell her sweat. They roll on top of hard pears. She laughs at moments that surprise him—her irony frames these wholesome images.

When he returned to Margery it was nothing like that. He materialized, barefoot on the wood, goosebumps on his thighs and arms. She had not seen him for ten years. His hair was browner than she remembered. He wore a sweet gaunt smile that pulled downwards, and his skin moved her with the fact of his birth. Margery’s round face surged forwards; her eyes sought to rush him over the bridge they created. Her love of his fresh body was accompanied by—even based on—a horror of decay. He stepped backwards into the table in Margery’s bedroom. Jesus had L.’s Scottish face—high narrow brow with smooth features crowded beneath, eyebrows defined more by delicate bones than hair.