Magdalene (49 page)

I cleared my throat.

“So... Um. Why aren’t you, uh—”

“Sealed.”

“—sealed to your husband?”

“We were excommunicated,” she mumbled, now
paying extra attention to her steak. “We can’t go to the temple
until we’ve completed our repentance process. Rebaptized. Wait a
year. At least. I don’t...” She bit her lip. Gulped. “I don’t know
if he’ll ever—”

“Why were you excommunicated?”

She dashed tears away from her face. “Um,
fornication. Bryce broke his temple covenants. Deliberately.”

“His? You hadn’t made any?”

“No. I didn’t intend to until I met a man I
could marry in the temple. That’s the goal, you see. And then—”

“Wait, and then you just...
caved
?” I
could understand falling in bed with a man. I couldn’t respect the
sudden lack of discipline, especially compared to the iron control
Mitch had displayed.

Her head snapped up, a feral look on her
face. “I was thirty-fucking-six years old,” she snarled. “All I
needed to go over the edge was the right man to touch me just
right, so keep your asinine judgments to yourself.”

Don’t... I can’t... I want to. I want to,
Cassandra, you have no idea, but I can’t. Not yet. Please.

I acceded with a nod. Mitch was not so
different from Giselle, then. I could’ve pressed him until he
caved, the way Kenard had apparently pushed Giselle, but the
outcome would have been vastly different.

“Thing is,” she said, settling back, her
temper gone as fast as it had flared, “because I hadn’t broken any
temple covenants, there was no reason to excommunicate me. I
would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist and told not to do that
anymore, and since we’re married now, it would’ve been a moot
point.”

“That’s...backward. The man, I mean. Getting
punished more than the woman. Usually, it’s the woman who’s
vilified. Daughter of Eve and all that bullshit.”

She shook her head. “We don’t believe in
original sin and we’re not philosophically certain Eve sinned at
all.”
Really.
“In practical terms, that translates to the
man being the responsible party.” Her mouth twitched and she said
wryly, “We’re kind of put on a pedestal, like we have no libido,
much less that we’re a bunch of succubi running around looking for
any and all innocent males to suck off in the middle of the
night.”

I laughed. “I get it. All madonna, no
whore.”

“But unfortunately—which I never noticed
until Bryce pointed it out to me—the men are regularly chastised
for being scoundrels and wastrels, even though they’re not. They
work hard to provide for their families, put in hours and hours of
church service, and never get any credit for it. Mother’s Day is
sacred, but Father’s Day is a joke. Some men are more sensitive to
it than others.”

“And Bryce is.”

She nodded. “So while it’s nice, as a woman,
not to be thought of as the root of all evil and responsible for
all the misery in the world, it can get condescending, and
that
imbalance has a few unintended consequences. Layers and
layers of subtext and gender politics there I’m not going to get
into.”

I could imagine. “Okay, so if you all are so
weak that you can’t be held responsible for your actions, why did
you get excommunicated?”

“I...kind of...asked to be. See, Bryce has
posttraumatic stress.” No doubt. “He’s been in therapy for—oh,
hmmm. Dunc just turned two—so, almost three years now. He has a lot
of baggage with the Church that he’s trying to sort out while he
sorts out his trauma. The last thing he needed was for his wife—who
was an equal partner in the deed and just as culpable, because I
could’ve said no and he would have respected that—to be sent along
on her way while he had to go through the whole ordeal. It would
have been the final betrayal for him and I didn’t want to be the
fulcrum on which he broke. I wanted to support him, to acknowledge
my part in what we did, to not let him carry that alone.”

“What do you mean, you ‘kind of’ asked?”

“They’d decided not to, but I talked to my
bishop, told him why I thought it would be better for Bryce, so he
agreed to it. Reluctantly.” She pursed her lips. “I believe Bryce
has responded better to his therapy and church because of it.”

“How does he feel about that?”

“Hates it. He feels it was all his doing,
because he
intended
to break his covenants, wanted to break
them with
me
.”

Ah, enlightenment. “To break his ethereal
bond with his first wife and forge a corporeal bond with you. You
wouldn’t be number two.”

“Exactly. The bad part is it also broke his
bond with his children, and he adored them. He’d forgotten about
that. So, in effect, he lost them twice.”

I would lose much more than this game,
Cassandra. You have no idea how much I have at stake.

But she was still talking. “...also didn’t
think about how I might have to deal with my own emotional fallout
or even that I’d have any. Because of his motives, he feels he used
me. Because of the way it happened, he refuses to concede that I
had a choice.”

I raised my eyebrow and waved a hand. She
sighed and hit me with the most marvelous seduction story I’d ever
heard. Under other circumstances, I would have gasped and squealed
and giggled like a little girl, asked for more, but this was not
the time.

“So, yeah, he would’ve pushed me until he
got me in bed, but it wouldn’t have happened if I really didn’t
want it to.”

“Why not? He’s twice your size.”

“I was armed.”

Guns. As a matter of course. Such a foreign
concept to me, yet it was one of the reasons I’d first considered
Ashworth as my executor: Where he went, his family’s guns
followed.

“And so the first time you slept with him,
his garments...?”

“Bryce hadn’t worn them in years. They all
burned and he never replaced them.”

“If he’d had them on that night, would you
have had sex with him?”

She said nothing for the longest while.
“No,” she finally murmured slowly. “I would’ve made him take me to
Vegas right then or made him wait until Monday when the courthouse
opened. I knew he wasn’t wearing them, so it didn’t occur to me to
play what-if.”

“You knew? Before he took his clothes
off?”

She nodded. “You can tell. When you go to
church Sunday, watch the men’s pants legs, down around the knees.
You’ll be able to see the impression of the hems through the
fabric. And through the shirts. It looks like an ordinary tee shirt
under there, but if you pay attention, you’ll start picking it up.
The first time Bryce and I officially met, Sebastian had already
told me he was a member of the Church, so I was surprised when I
didn’t see the ridge around his knees or the deep scoop under his
dress shirt. Then he propositioned me and I knew he’d left the
Church behind.”

“That didn’t bother you?”

Once again, she hesitated. “No.”
Bullshit
. “I...felt lucky to have a sexually aggressive man
who’d grown up in the same culture I did and could speak my
language. No backtracking or explaining, like what Mitch had to do
for you. He didn’t have to be told why my sleeping with him before
marriage was significant. I didn’t have to be told why his sleeping
with me was even more significant. I didn’t have to worry about him
not believing that I was a thirty-six-year-old virgin or having to
explain why. I bet you spent weeks trying to figure out how to get
Mitch in bed because you thought you could get around him.”

That was true enough and I said so.

“And...” she murmured, looking away from me,
her face flushing. “I made the mistake of assuming that Bryce
would...um...”

“Repent.”

She gulped, and suddenly, my heart ached
with hers.

“So,” she said abruptly after a tense
silence. She cleared her throat. “You summoned me to take this bug
out of your ass?”

I chuckled, but only half-heartedly. “Yeah,
but it’s still there.”

“Well. I understand.” Yes, she did. All too
well. “Here’s the thing: Mitch isn’t going to stop wearing his
garments and asking him to will pretty much be a punch in the face.
If I were you, I’d make an effort to get used to it or at least
don’t say anything about them.” I nodded. Status quo, with
information I finally understood, even if I didn’t like it. “Are
you
really
planning on joining the Church?”

It was the same question Sebastian had
asked, in the same disapproving tone of voice, then Prissy, and I
couldn’t imagine why all these people wanted to keep me out.

“No information is sacred in your family, is
it?”

“Not much, no.”

“I’m—”
Too.
“—was—thinking about it.
Why?”

“Do you believe?”

“Does it matter?”

She barked a laugh that had no humor in it
whatsoever. “Oh, yes, it matters very much. You have an honest
relationship with Mitch: You don’t believe, he knows that, he
accepts you on that basis. Don’t do this because you think it’ll
make him happy. It’s a lot harder to be married to a member who
doesn’t believe than it is to be married to a nonmember.”

“Your husband doesn’t believe at all,
then?”

“He doesn’t know what to believe. His father
had a fucked-up idea of doctrine, drilled it into him, and he’s
having to relearn everything. We—me, Knox, and Morgan, I mean. We
give him a frame of reference. Answer his questions, clear things
up. We might all have our issues with the Church—and it with us—but
we have a solid grounding in doctrine and we believe. Because Knox
and I aren’t exactly the most pure people ever, and Morgan’s
constantly torn between the Church and his homosexuality, Bryce
trusts us to help him sort it out.”

Giselle was on the last few bites of the
chef salad she’d requested after finishing her enormous steak. Her
dessert, she’d said. I watched her eat and couldn’t, for the life
of me, figure out where she put it all. “You have to understand,”
she continued. “Generally, the Church sees excommunication as a
break that you can build on. You know, start over fresh. Clean
slate. Like bankruptcy. Bryce needs that.”

“And you don’t.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I do. I mean,
that night, when he and I first slept together—I don’t see how it
could have ended any other way. On the other hand, I want the
chance to spend eternity with him and I believe this is the only
way I can do it.”

I sighed. The doctrine itself, what I knew
of it, seemed to have some sort of internal logic. But the culture—
The entire culture was one fat complicated mess of rules and
regulations, traditions, unwritten protocols, exceptions, and
paradoxes.

“Yes,” she said, her voice steady and
serious. “We
are
a culture of paradox. It’s hard to
navigate. I
choose
to believe the core principles, so I’ve
chosen to put up with the cultural and political bullshit I don’t
like—and there’s a
lot
I don’t like. While I think that your
going to church with Mitch is a good thing for both of you because
it shows him you’re supportive of him, getting baptized if you
don’t believe is taking that supportive spouse thing way too far. I
think it would be a bad thing.

“Why don’t you take a cue from Mitch, since
he hasn’t tried to direct you toward this at all? I have a sneaking
suspicion he’d pull rank on you and disallow it anyway. Look, you
went to church on your own and you stuck with him on your own
without getting laid and you married him. So... Go home, think
about it. When you’re ready, force the issue, make him talk to you.
I’ve given you the information you need to do that.”

“You do understand I only married him to
fuck him, right?”

“Is that right. Well, in that case, tell me
something. If you had known it was possible you’d be playing second
fiddle to Mina for eternity, would you have gotten involved with
him?”

I’m not going to lie and say I would’ve
gotten involved with you if I’d known all this up front. I wouldn’t
have.

“I don’t need an eternal commitment to get
my itch scratched.”

“Then Mina’s eternal dibs on Mitch shouldn’t
make any difference to you, should it?”

I hate lawyers.

She speared me with those cold eyes again.
Were I not so secure in my place in the world, she might have
scared me a little. “The garments? Deal with it.
Graciously
.
It is incumbent upon you to accept him the way he is for however
long you’re together. After all, he accepts you and
you
rebuilt your wealth on your back.”

“You’re a real bitch, you know that?”

“And
that
is why you called me,” she
said as she patted her mouth with her napkin. “Let’s go
shopping.”

* * * * *

The Big
Finish

April 8, 2011

Friday morning, I sat in my temporary
permanent Blackwood Securities digs at Hollander Steelworks, up to
my elbows in designs for home décor and jewelry one of the
foundry’s draftsmen had brought to me at Mitch’s request.
Sebastian, as his artistic alter-ego Ford, had designed a good half
of them.

I was, in fact, staring at
Sebastian’s—Ford’s—bold signature on the exquisite rendering of a
bracelet when my phone began jangling his ringtone—“Brass in
Pocket.”

“Yo, Cass,” he said when I answered. “Hate
to barge in on your honeymoon, but this guy from, uh... Let’s see,
Vorcester & Minden. Yeah. Mid-sized company in Alabama. He
called me today, sounds desperate for some expertise. Can you take
it?”

“Can’t stand to leave the royal brats
behind?”

“Well, that and I don’t do insurance
companies. Never have.”

Of course not. He served producers.

“No problem. Deets?”

“I’ll email ’em. Thanks.”

My assistant and I had our routine down
cold. She would pass out the particulars to my staff, who would do
some preliminary research at one end of the company while I did
some on the other end, and we’d meet in the middle with details and
data analysis.