Louisa Hall - Trinity

I agreed, feeling Jack’s eyes on the side of my face. And when the explosives man went off to fill my beaker with water, Jack and I were alone.

There we were, standing in that wavering room. He fixed me with his troubled eyes.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t go to dinner with him.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.

“He beat his wife,” Jack said. “She got a divorce.”

“But then at least he’s divorced,” I said.

And for a moment, I felt very fine. But then, of course, I saw that Jack wasn’t laughing.

He wasn’t laughing at all. He was looking at me, instead, with such unbearable sorrow that I immediately realized how badly I’d miscalculated the joke.

Then, of course, I repented my error. But before I could think what to say to undo it, the explosives man had come back with my beaker, and Jack had excused himself and gone off in search of a less accusatorial part of the party.

LEFT ALONE ONCE AGAIN, I BERATED MYSELF FOR FORGETTING HOWcrucial it had become for me not to participate in the narrative of guilt and renewal he’d been crafting ever since the event.

In the beginning, of course, when the event had been scheduled, he’d accepted the duty to endure my untidy bereavement. Several times, for instance, he allowed me to come over to his house to sit beside him and weep, blowing my nose and wrinkling my forehead and rehashing the ancient arrangement, though of course we both knew he still had a wife, and his wife was still an irreproachable person.

For hours, in those days, he remained there beside me. He accompanied me in that stage of my sadness, he really did, and even after the awful event, when I’d taken a bus from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and the shuttle back up to the mesa, he came over and slept in my cot.

All night, though I was bleeding so disgustingly it got all over the sheets, he slept with his arm over my shoulder. And even when I finally felt tired, I forced myself to keep my eyes open. I didn’t want to miss a moment of him still lying behind me.

Even later, when the shooting pains in my stomach began and I was afraid I was dying, I was reassured by his presence. I even began to feel somewhat hopeful, because though what I’d just done was wrong, Jack was lying with his arm over my shoulder, as though he cherished my life so completely he’d lay down his own to protect me. Horribly, I know, because what I’d just done was a crime, I began to imagine that now that I’d done what I had, maybe we could get back together, if not forever, then for the time being, or for all of time as it moved on the mesa.

Only later, when he’d gone back to his house to get ready for work and I was sitting by myself on the toilet, waiting for the much-promised clot to slide out, did I remember the priestly way he’d kissed my forehead before heading out. And then, of course, I knew it was over. Then I realized he’d only come back to finish what was left of his allotted repentance, because repentance, unlike need, can be finished.

While need goes on forever, repentance has limits, and at some point in the future, if he hadn’t reached it already, Jack would complete the necessary atonement to counterbalance the sin he’d committed, and then he’d be allowed to forget me.

How clueless I’d been, I thought, sitting there on the toilet. In those previous weeks, each time I’d left his house after airing all my grievances, I’d imagined we were coming to a new understanding. I’d headed back to the WAC dorms, through the crusts of old snow, past the stunted junipers and the Quonset huts with their laundry strung up on clotheslines, and I’d imagined I was a character crucial to the course of the story.

Not a wife, no, but a crucial character still, like the goodly Christian prostitute who accompanies the unhappy student murderer to the distant Siberian steppe, where together they repent his murder forever.

But repentance, I realized, while sitting there on the toilet, never goes on forever. And with each act of kindness I required from Jack, he was heading toward forgiving himself.

From that point on, I didn’t go back to his house. I cast no painful aspersions upon him. For most of March and April, while the war in Europe was winding down, I forced myself to keep my own grief.

I stayed in the office past closing, and at night I went to the PX, where I ate unhealthy food and drank warm Coca-Cola. All through those terrible weeks, I played bad songs on the jukebox and forbore any expressions of sorrow, leaving Jack alone with whatever remained of his guilt, and in doing so I forced him to hoard it. I made his debt to me start earning interest, and it was only because of that debt that he crossed the room to find me at that party.

And I felt how badly he wanted to touch me, and it all went as I’d hoped, until I made that stupid joke, and squandered in one awful moment the entire balance due of repentance that had been so extraordinarily painful to build up in the first place.

THAT’S WHAT I WAS THINKING ABOUT, WHILE I LEANED ON THE CENTRIFUGEand didn’t listen to the man from explosives, who at some point had returned with my beaker.

And then Mike Michnovicz abruptly ceased on the accordion, and the whole lab was swallowed in a silence so horrible and clattering that someone immediately put on a record, and I watched Jack talking with a group of GIs, and then I watched myself get up from the centrifuge and walk over to put my hand on his shoulder.

Then we were dancing together. He was smiling down at my pretty, young face, which I’d tilted upward to gaze into his eyes, except it wasn’t me. It was some other girl I’d momentarily mistaken for myself, and from my banished position, invisible and insistent, I watched them dance like a ghost who can’t accept that she’s dead and keeps stubbornly hanging around with the living.

And then I finally saw my mistake. I almost started laughing, leaning on the centrifuge, wondering how I’d initially missed it. I was not, I realized then, a well-intentioned prostitute, but the horrible ghost of a murdered old woman.

Then I reexamined the events of the past months. I remembered that once, during the previous weeks, when I was forcing Jack to fall into debt, I did commit one small indiscretion and go back to his house and cry, and say that now that we’d descended so far into squalor, why shouldn’t we keep on descending.

There must be a bottom, I said, and now that we’ve come so close we should reach it.

And then, of course, we ended up in his bedroom together, getting undressed in his bed, and only then, lying there with my skirt up, did I begin to suspect that this might be a mistake I was making.

I began to fear that the bottom was still very far off, much farther than I could have expected. And it was still so soon after the event, and the nurse had warned me several times not to do this.

And then suddenly I was very afraid, and I knew that afterward I’d lie awake alone in my dorm room, looking up at the ceiling and waiting for the crazed mice to start running.

Then, for a minute, I did what I could to turn back the train. I told Jack we shouldn’t go on. I said I’d changed my mind. I said it could only make my suffering worse, but then I saw how disappointed he looked, how pained and fundamentally saddened.

And of course I was still working under the mistaken impression that I was the Christian prostitute, so I gave up my selfish resistance. I told myself that the train had long since left the station, and we were already on our way to the steppe. Then, finally, I got myself to relax. But afterward, when he’d pulled himself out and a distance had opened between us, and we were lying there close but farther and farther apart, him rising up to the surface, me sinking deeper into the darkness, I did in fact start to suffer.