Silence and the Word (7 page)

“What are you doing?” Jessica asked.

Anjali looked up from her pile of papers to
see the girl sitting across from her in the cafe, hands neatly
folded on the table. Jessica seemed to fit there, in her white
blouse with the long sleeves, not so dissimilar from what the
missionary girls wore in Temple Square, right outside the cafe
window. In late February, the snow had melted from the streets, and
they were enjoying an early burst of spring weather—coats
discarded, the girls strolled in sober pairs, pretty and friendly,
ready to tell a visitor more than he would want to know about the
LDS church.

The temple itself rose high, beautifully
white and gorgeously Gothic in its graceful steeples, a beauty
marred only by the rather gaudy gold angel Moroni at the crown.
Anjali had been enjoying the irony ever since she arrived in Salt
Lake—that in this half-Mormon city, in this almost wholly Mormon
state, a cafe selling caffeinated drinks sat overlooking Temple
Square, the heart of their religion. When Neil had first moved to
Salt Lake, and she had joined him, she’d been worried that she
wouldn’t find cafes at all, that the Mormons wouldn’t allow them.
But they were everywhere.

“It’s math, mostly.” She had been working a
lot this last year, doing some of the best work she’d ever done.
Her advisors at the lab were pleased with her, but she couldn’t
bring herself to actually care. It was just something to do,
something to fill her mind and hands.

Jessica reached out and touched the papers,
her hand tracing over Greek symbols, leaving no mark on the page.
“I was never much good at math. Mostly I liked to sing.”

Anjali could imagine this girl, standing in
the tabernacle across the street, her head tilted back and her
throat open, sending songs up to her God. “I can’t stay on key, but
I like to sing too.” It had been over a decade since she’d lived in
Sri Lanka, but she could picture her mother and aunts, singing
Tamil film songs as they left the movie theater, laughing.

“You just need people to sing with.” Jessica
spread her hands wide, gesturing to form a circle. “When you’re
surrounded by your sister-wives and the spirit is moving through
you all—you can’t help but sing.”

“How many sister-wives did you have? There
were only the two tombstones in the cemetery.”

Jessica frowned a little, thinking. “There
were only two of us, me and Elizabeth, that actually lived as wives
to Matthew. But he was sealed to six women in all—Katharine and
Sarah and Olga and Naomi.” She grinned, looking no more than twelve
for a mischievous instant. “No one liked Naomi; she was just plain
mean. But we didn’t have to see her much.”
“Where did they live, if not with Matthew?” Anjali had always
assumed that the Mormon wives all lived with their husband; she had
imagined it sometimes, a dozen women in one big house, cooking and
cleaning and chattering away, raising a horde of children. She had
thought they must have been mostly happy, while the man was
away—but how did they manage when he came home?

“They lived with their first husbands. Well,
Sarah’s husband died, but she didn’t want to move in with Matthew.
She was a schoolteacher; she did all right living alone.”

Anjali felt like she should be taking notes;
if she were a sociologist, an ethnographer, she’d be in a fever of
excitement at this chance to interview a primary source. But she
felt a strangely proprietary emotion for Jessica. This was
her
ghost—she didn’t want to share her with anyone. There
were plenty of journals and records from the early days of the
Mormons, the Latter Day Saints—academia could get along just fine
without knowing Jessica’s story. “So you didn’t have a first
husband?”

“I didn’t need one. I had Matthew. He was my
life.” Jessica’s voice had been calm up until now, almost academic
in tone. But with the mention of Matthew’s name, all the emotion
and passion was back, trembling in her voice. “Are you
married?”

“No.” A single short word, forbidding.
Unfortunately, the girl was too young to be tactful. Everyone in
her department had been very good—when Neil had left Utah, and she
hadn’t volunteered the story of why, they hadn’t asked. They had
carefully talked to her about work instead. She hadn’t had to talk
to anyone about him.

“But you’re old! Aren’t you?” Jessica peered
at Anjali, as if she were having trouble deciphering her dark skin,
her thick black hair. Anjali’s mother had always said that brown
skin aged better than white did, that it didn’t show the lines as
fast.

“I’m twenty-nine.” A terribly old maid in
Jessica’s mind, no doubt, and in Anjali’s mother’s mind too, for
that matter. It was easier, living in modern America. Somewhat.

Jessica considered a moment, then nodded her
head, decisively. “You’re pretty enough; you should get married.
Isn’t there anyone?”

“There was.” It was hard to say the words.
She had successfully avoided talking about it, thinking about it,
for so long. “It ended, almost a year ago.”

“But you still love him.” It wasn’t a
question, so Anjali didn’t bother to answer. Those who were
heart-whole didn’t spend their nights in frozen graveyards. Instead
she picked up her pen again, straightened the pile of papers. This
conversation had gone on long enough.

“I need to get back to work, Jessica.”

The girl hesitated for a moment, as if she
were about to say something else. But then she just nodded, and
disappeared. One moment there, the next, gone. People could
disappear so quickly.

She was walking in to campus the next time
Jessica showed up, walking east along the Avenues, from 2nd and Q
up through R, S, T, to U and University, then turning right,
wending through a curvy mess of old streets, big houses that stood
out from the city’s appallingly regular grid and the mass of neat
little three-bedroom homes. This part of town reminded her of New
England, where she had gone to college; it comforted her, a little.
A strange, late snowfall the previous night had given way to bright
sunshine, melting and refreezing, coating the trees in crystal, the
grass in glittering light.

“I met Matthew in the springtime,” Jessica
said. She kept pace beside Anjali, her footsteps leaving no imprint
in the pristine snow. Appropriate, Anjali couldn’t help thinking;
her own footsteps broke a battered, muddy trail.

“My parents and I had just moved here; we
were excited. Brother Brigham had such plans for the city—he even
laid out the streets, wide enough for four oxen to walk
abreast.”

“They’re pretty wide.” It did make for an
attractive city, Anjali had to admit. Salt Lake was orderly, clean,
well-laid-out. Lots of white buildings, no trash on the streets.
Did the missionary boys walk the streets in the early morning,
picking up the trash? And what did they do with the homeless here?
Only in the heart of downtown did you ever see them at all. It was
morbidly amusing, imagining dark scenarios where they were rounded
up like cattle, exterminated to maintain the image of the clean
city of God. A science fiction horror story. But undoubtedly they
were only taken to shelters, forced to listen to a little preaching
in exchange for a warm meal and a place to sleep. Not a bad
deal.

Jessica smiled, her eyes sparkling. “I met
Matthew at a church social; he couldn’t dance with me, of course,
but he brought me punch, and we talked. I wanted to dance with him
so badly that night…”

It made her chest ache, listening to the girl
chatter. She didn’t want to remember how she met Neil, when she was
still in college and he was in grad school. He was talking to her
roommate, flirting with her, trying to make her laugh, and
succeeding. Anjali had just listened to him, enjoying the sound of
his voice, the hair falling across his face. She had wanted to
reach up and brush it back, uncovering blue eyes. She took a deep
breath, banishing the memory. “Neil doesn’t like to dance.”

“Well, that doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Jessica paused, eyes speculative on Anjali’s face. “As long as he
likes dancing in bed… .”

“Jessica!” Anjali was actually shocked—the
girl looked so sweet, so innocent and virginal.

She laughed. “I
was
married, you know.
For three years. I was going to have a baby… .” Jessica’s voice
trailed off, and then she was gone again, just disappeared, before
Anjali could ask anything more.

She kept walking, one foot in front of
another through the shining snow, trying not to remember what it
had felt like, dancing in bed with Neil. After he left her, she had
gone months without, lying alone in her bed with the small stuffed
bear he’d given her. Sometimes she wore his old green flannel
shirt, even in the sweltering summer heat, even though the scent of
him had long since disappeared. She sweated in his shirt, tried not
to think, and stared out her window at the mountains, waiting for
the sunrise.

There had been one man, six months after. She
had met him at that same cafe overlooking the Temple—it seemed like
a good place to meet men, since the Latter-Day Saints weren’t
supposed to drink coffee. One of her classmates had started dating
a Mormon guy, but it had brought her nothing but trouble; he wanted
her to convert and didn’t believe in sex before marriage; it just
about drove the poor girl crazy. Anjali didn’t want to deal with
that—but she didn’t do much better. The cafe guy had eaten potato
chips in her bed, had tried to talk her into leaving off the
condom, and even after she’d gotten the condom on him, he hadn’t
been any good. She could barely remember his name, and when she
told Neil about it, on the phone, she couldn’t even manage to sound
enthusiastic enough to try to make him jealous. It was just no
good. Neil knew it had been nothing, worse than nothing, and he’d
sounded impossibly sympathetic.

Maybe it would be easier if they stopped
talking, as some of her friends had suggested, but neither of them
seemed able to manage that.

After saying goodbye and hanging up the
phone, she’d just climbed into the shower, turned the water on,
scalding hot, and cried. It gave her less of a headache, when she
cried in the shower. What had Jessica and her sister-wives done
back then, before showers? Anjali would have to ask her, the next
time she appeared.

She got e-mail from Ravi, a few days before
spring break. He had frequent flyer miles, and a week off from
teaching. He was feeling lonely, sad about a recent break-up. He
wanted to see her. Did she want him to come out?

Anjali told him that she needed to think
about it, but she’d let him know soon. She didn’t need to think
about it at all; she wanted to see him. Anjali remembered what it
felt like, the few times he’d touched her, so many years ago. She
hadn’t loved him at all, but she had enjoyed him a great deal, and
that was exactly what she wanted right now, to put emotion aside,
to sink into her body and give it what it needed. At least that
desire could be satisfied.

Neil wasn’t happy when she called and told
him; he’d never liked Ravi. He had hurt other girls they knew and
Neil didn’t trust him. The conversation that night was long, and
filled with uncomfortable pauses. There were too many things they
couldn’t say to each other. After he hung up, she curled her body
around the dead phone, her eyes fixed outside the bedroom window,
on still-snowy mountains, not seeing them. Anjali told herself that
even though she didn’t want to upset him, Neil had no rights over
her body. She needed to start moving on. She felt her skin
contracting with desire, with the need to be touched, and held.

Anjali wrote back the next morning, telling
Ravi to come. She felt a ghost of a breath as she typed in her lab,
a shadow touch across her cheek, but when she spun on the stool,
there was nothing and no one there. Perhaps the lab was too
rational a place to accommodate a grieving ghost.

The best part was when Ravi tied her down.
Wrists and ankles, done with scarves and a single old tie Neil left
behind. He blindfolded her too, a makeshift blindfold of a T-shirt,
tied behind her head, covering her eyes. Blinded, bound, Anjali
could finally relax, could send her mind away and let her body move
as it would, responding to strong hands, to fingers that were
alternately gentle and cruel. When the pleasure wasn’t enough, when
she begged for it, he gave her the pain she needed, the physical
pain mixed with pleasure that could take her away, could obliterate
every thought, every memory. She was nothing but an exhausted,
sweaty body, responding to the rake of fingers across her thighs,
the heavy hand slamming down against her ass.

When he finished, she asked him to do it
again, and again, and again, until at last she could fall into a
dreamless sleep.

They walked in the cemetery before he left.
The last of the snow was melting, and flowers were coming up
everywhere. Spring crocuses, a few early daffodils and irises.
Anjali felt strangely at peace, there, among the Mormon patriarchs.
Perhaps she should have feared their stern morality, but it seemed
that the morality of 1800 was not the morality of today. Somehow
she suspected Brigham Young would have understood, might have kept
cords attached to his bedpost, and a horsewhip tucked under his
bed. As she walked beside Ravi, listening to him talk about the
woman he’d just lost, the woman he still loved, it pleased her to
imagine the Elders of the church, dozing in their graves, dreaming
of the girls they married and the ones they left behind.

Jessica paced them in the distance, under
pine trees still dusted with snow, but she didn’t come near.

“You should talk to him,” Jessica said. They
were up in the mountains; Anjali had driven up to Big Cottonwood
Creek that morning, feeling a need to be among trees and silence.
But her ghost had come with her, and wouldn’t leave her alone.
Jessica had been saying the same things for hours as the sun slid
lower in the sky and the air began to chill. “You haven’t talked to
him in weeks.”