Catherine is angry but also worried about Margery. She sends her daughter Jane to Margery’s anchorite confessor, asking him to abandon Margery. Jane wears a net of gold mesh through which strands of gold hair gleam. Her cunt lips hang and her swelling hips feel as though they belong to someone else—enormous, round, good to put her hands on. She has her grandmother’s figure. The anchorite declines.

Margery confronts Catherine. “Your husband has thirty years in purgatory unless he has better friends on earth. You must pay three or four pounds for him in masses and charity.”

Four pounds is a lot of money and thirty years not such a long time. Catherine tells Margery not to visit her again. In Catherine’s contempt Margery regains contact with Jesus, but she frets about the heinous Spanish woman at Lambeth Palace. Jesus wants to marry her, Philip and Arundel think she’s exemplary. Why does the charge of mismanagement slide under her happiness and subvert it?

Jesus perched naked on a banquette, eating a pear tart, rejoicing in bland fragrant sweetness. He offered a slice to Margery, who never refused pastry. He tucked his cock between his legs and wore a flushed, mocking face. He crossed his legs tighter, displaying only sparse brown hair. The ground slid away; Margery’s dirty laugh hovered over an empty space because the joke was against her.

Jesus got dressed as a knight. His purple doublet was padded over the chest; he fastened the four-petaled buttons and set a heavy gold belt around his hips. The tension between masculine-feminine and inside-outside pervades all levels of my community. Margery’s nose lifted to catch his scent as he passed. “Jesus, did you miss me?” He felt helpless, weak. To regain control he rolled his eyes as though he’d been dragged through the subject a thousand times and sheltered her in his arms in paternal exasperation.

“Ask what you wish. I shall say to you, my own beloved spouse, ‘Welcome to me, here to dwell with me and never to depart from me, but ever to dwell with me in joy and bliss.’”

•

If I say I love you too often, it’s partly amazement at the strength of my desire.

Jesus does not miss Margery though he seems to need her. Before storms she feels intolerable expectation.

Confronted by my demands, L. extinguishes all response. His feelings flatten into a wall of mute, introspective despair.

I learn it’s exquisite to be fucked by a big cock because it stays pliable till the moment of orgasm. Because of the pleasure I’m beautiful, poised on my fingertips and the balls of my feet like a runner at the starting line.

Jesus kisses her too quickly, jamming his tongue down her throat; he says, “I’m horny.”