She trotted down without another word. I turned and did a series of push-ups.
The next day Charlie visited, the air was humid and still. I wore a white cotton top, a lace bra beneath to present me to best advantage. Our search for a secluded spot was unsuccessful. By coincidence, we were only blocks from the church—where I had already declared we would never go to make love—when the skies opened. By the time we ducked under the church’s stone archway, I was drenched.
“Oh my,” Charlie said, a devilish grin on his face.
“What is it?”
“You.” He pointed at my chest.
The wet shirt had become see-through. It clung to my body, left nothing to the imagination. Remembering my fantasy, I pulled his face between my breasts. My lover.
Two seconds after I released him, the church door opened, and there was Mrs. Morris. She seemed every bit as surprised as we were. Before I could speak, Charlie whipped his wet jacket off to drape it over me.
“Hello, Mrs. Morris,” he said. “Didn’t we get caught by the weather?”
“Come in,” she said, shaking her head, not scolding but instead somewhat amused. “I’m sure we have some towels in here.”
While we wiped ourselves off in the nave, she hurried up to the organ and switched it off. So she’d been playing again. Which maybe explained her good mood.
By the time we dried out, Mrs. Morris had taken her umbrella, wished us a good evening, and set out for home. Charlie stood up from the pew we’d been sharing, and crossed to the organ. Turning it on, he also switched on the lamp over the music stand. When he saw what piece I’d played most recently, his face lit up too.
“The toccata? I love it. Brenda, would you please?”
I ambled over. “Only the opening, Charlie. I don’t have the fugue part in hand.”
“Anything. Aside from hymns, I haven’t heard you play in centuries.”
I sat on the bench, my husband standing beside me, towels draped over our shoulders, and despite the limited stops and two broken manuals, I began.
Yes, the opening was powerful. Yes, the world fell away. When it came time to turn the page, I did not have to do the usual hasty grab. Instead Charlie reached forward to do it, which meant that the former choir boy was reading the music along with me.
As the fugue approached, I felt confidence from how well the first passage had gone. Which was dumb, because it made me barrel right over the waterfall. Only a few measures into the fugue and my right hand stumbled on the melody, my left entered late, and it all became a ball of knotted yarn.
“Damn,” I said. “It was going so well.”
“Brilliant,” Charlie said, touching the score. “This is the measure that stops you?”
I nodded. “Just about every time.”
“Here.” He pulled me around to face him. “Can you sing it to me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just sing the melody of that measure, and the part after, if you remember it.”
“Well, I can’t. I don’t know it. That’s the whole problem.”
Charlie leaned forward, reading the notes, then he squatted so his face was level with mine. And he sang. “Ba ba-bum ba-bum bum-ba.”
“This is silly.”
But he sang the measure again. “Ba ba-bum ba-bum bum-ba.” Perfectly on pitch. When he did it a third time, I sang along.
“There, you see?” He smiled as if he’d been repairing organs all day. Scanning the page, he squatted again. “Now the next measure. Ba-bum-bum, ba-bum-bum, ba-ba.”
And I sang with him. Two minutes later I could sing the whole right hand of that passage. We did it together.
“Now comes the fun part,” Charlie said, touching the key to make sure we would still be on pitch. It reminded me of when he’d done that same thing, on the piano in our living room, before singing on Christmas Eve. So much had happened, so much changed, yet he was still Charlie, not wanting to be sharp or flat.
“Ready? And—”
I started again, this time without him. When I reached the third measure, though, he came in singing the part of the left hand. My voice in the upper register, his in the lower, we played that fugue with our voices. We’d made an organ of ourselves.
We sang about ten measures before I couldn’t help it and burst out laughing. Charlie laughed with me. “We’ll teach that toccata who’s boss. Try once more?”
Oh, Charlie. What was this euphoria? This high delight? “Yes please,” I said. “From the top.”
The next day at breakfast, Reverend Morris announced that Charlie and I were welcome to use the Hudson again, from time to time.
“Provided you leave at least a quarter tank of gas,” he said, “in case I need to visit a member of the congregation unexpectedly.”
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Morris said, “but just who is going to pay for the gasoline?”
“You could take it from my salary,” I volunteered.
“Well.” She rose to head for the kitchen. “As long as you return it in impeccable condition.” Which I translated to mean we should not have sex in the car.
“That is incredibly generous of you,” I said, as sincere as any newly married girl would be, when her means of deliverance has arrived.
“No reason you two should be cooped up around here,” the reverend said. “New Mexico is a beautiful place.”
Charlie and I began to learn that very thing, every chance we got. We were sightseers with a mission. He would find a potential spot, and pull over. Or I would spy something promising, ask him to stop, and say, “I want you to come with me.”
He always did. East of Taos, among the sweet-smelling ponderosa. Beside the Cimarron River, in the whispering grass. Standing up, in a cleft of boulders near Albuquerque, not fifty feet from a busy road. In a vast empty expanse somewhere to the south, writhing in the dirt under a roasting sun till we sweated like thoroughbreds. Oh, that one is with me still. We yowled like cats, and finished with skin painted red by the clay. We tried to wipe it off each other, which only made the mess worse. So we stood naked, laughing, so revealed and intimate. I adored it.
I figured something else out too. Remembering when Lizzie asked how I would feel if someone took my music away, one Sunday I invited Mrs. Morris to play the closing hymn. Reverend Morris would be in the middle of worship and unable to object.
“Really?” she said, her face lighting up. “Honestly?”
Which was how I helped her more than I’d realized. She remained stern as ever, but it became not her only mood. One night climbing the stairs I heard something from the main house, and stopped to listen. Yes, she was laughing. The next Sunday I asked Mrs. Morris to play two pieces.
Meanwhile Charlie and I explored as much of New Mexico as that gas tank allowed: pueblos and Indian dwellings, cliff towns from centuries ago, deep dry gulches—where if it rained for as little as five minutes, they could flash-fill and flood and sweep us away. Always I asked the same way: “I want you to come with me.” And he would.
Then we found the falls of Nambe. Way up in the hills, far from prying eyes, where the water was cool and tumbling, and the sand as soft as cotton sheets. We were gentle that day, my body unusually welcoming, and Charlie moved with a kind of certainty I hadn’t felt before. Afterward we swam, in no hurry to dress, Adam and Eve in a season of war, trying to make our own Eden.