She kindled hope so she could love unimpeded for another hour. Moist air blurred the moon’s edge. He’s testing her—because rejection is the sentiment of the era. She imagined reconciliations; they had happened before. He’s not sure how to approach her—Margery, is it too late for us to start again?

She saw him talking through a steady smile, eyes lowered, lashes’ gold dust, features painful with meaning. She held her arms out in the intensity of contradiction. “You couldn’t stand the intimacy we shared if you didn’t love me. I am always aroused, which proves my point.”

She had become a contradiction so she stated it with hectic energy to save herself, as though Jesus would have to return once it was clearly put: “Your ability to change my life, your unwillingness to do so.”

•

What quality did she love in Jesus? “An elegant loneliness which I desire.”

Margery wakes before dawn so furious that Jesus is a bitter taste in her mouth. Under a strange sky, in the middle of nowhere, only her fury is familiar. She wants to hurl her life at him like a bomb. She has to number her grievances as she lies rigid in the dark, knocking her feet together. She finally calls him a prick, reluctantly losing grandeur and scale. Jesus pretends to die, then lets her die for real. She mentally shouts Get away! as though he’s attacking.

Light pushes through, wan and gray; for an hour bird chatter dominates the city. She tries to protect herself by attacking him. She abandons Jesus.

“Your hips are too wide, you are knock-kneed. Your nipples are too small, you have pimples on your ass.” She drags farts out of him, his ignorant seagull expression as people look up and sniff and her insides roll with joy. She doesn’t know how to diminish him. “He’s just a boy, but extremely beautiful,” she adds, puzzled. She could never deface that beauty but she pulls his soul apart like tissue.

•

She tries again to steady and enclose the catastrophe. A boy, a charming boy who is tender, cruel, who treats me any way he likes. Who never endorses me, whose rapture breaks with everything, moments of innocence and intoxication, who arrives with gifts . . .

In her bed she sees them from above. Jesus strides too fast down the gray muddy road, his beauty, his clothes, her crude white gown, her clumsy gestures, questions. She follows like a servant (he relates to servants). She looks dwarfish, the huge white clown head, the frowning clown’s farce of self-advancement.

“You will never know anything till you have to work for a living. You bought me clothes and took me to Italy—you never gave me a penny of real support.”