The mirror sickened her. Her features hung from a billowing curtain; her hair was gray, thin, her lips had thinned, and her mouth pulled downwards, stale and dishonest. Injustice without remedy. The skin on her hands and face had gleamed with indestructible youth but Jesus withdrew the body’s beauty.

In her descent each basement gave way to a deeper one. How do we bear the loss of opportunity and life? She recoiled with crisp fear from elderly friends: they dragged her into the grave. She turned away from young people; their tight juicy skin was a brutal assault, was a darkness, future as past. Friends spasmed with pleasure as their bodies faltered, saw the last light as they sifted into dust. Death weakened Margery because she no longer held a belief that could survive its spotlight—neither do I.

Towards the end of the night, Margery climbed in with John. He propped his head on his elbow and gazed at her; he didn’t exactly know her but she couldn’t cry until she’d felt some warmth. John dangled his fingers over hers and rubbed his rather thick pinky nail against the tip of her thumb as his father used to do for hours when John lay in his crib. The torrent flowed and John whimpered in sympathetic desolation, everything concentrated in the friction of nail on skin. He thought it was his own sorrow and his caresses were aware, his heart blinking in the early dawn. His affection was comforting and hard to bear. Insidiously, the old pleasure fanned out like wings until the fact of rejection startled her with a sickening shift and a jolt of adrenaline dried her tears.

•

Everything she knew was against her. Her perilous journeys had been conversations with Jesus. There were sea captains to guide her and bishops to vanquish like small dragons. Death had become a task to perform, an achievement. The problem was stupid: How do you find your way in empty desert when you have become that desert? She wanted to shed the knowledge of life and death now that such knowledge could not lead outside itself, could not be used to improve her position. Margery fell back with a feeling of vertigo. She looked at her open fingers.

54

Margery rolled on her back; she lay musing, suddenly very comfortable, laughing, imagining long conversations and the weight of his head on her shoulder. She straightened her legs—a moment of relief. All day near and distant shutters banged open and closed; she heard the flat-footed voice of a child. She wanted to amuse Jesus and to describe her nights. His withdrawal was a story, like all her stories, for him.