And still would. Because, he was instinctively certain,
No one could ever even prove he was responsible. He would always be lying peacefully asleep in his bed, with Veronica there by his side.
They’d married while she was a sophomore in college and looked a lot like Terri and June looked now, when he’d still been convinced he had a brilliant professorial career ahead of him. She’d been conservative, a devout Catholic, though given to transient mystical and psychic enthusiasms—geomancy, positive thinking, even self-hypnosis—that had made him think her basic ideas were much more malleable than they really were. He’d married her in the confidence that a few years of concentrated exposure to his vastly superior way of thinking would be enough to turn her ideas completely around. But in fact, by the time the third and final college at which he’d taught refused to renew his one-year contract he’d given up trying to impose himself in either his career or marriage, allowed himself to sink unprotesting into what he recognized as Thoreau’s prototypical life of quiet desperation. Veronica took care of him, mothered him almost, and though they had nothing in common and she often irritated him, he liked her well enough. She was generous and indulgent and still attractive for her age, though their sex life had dwindled over the years to what they both had come to see as a sort of hygienic minimum. He loved his comfort and security too well to risk losing them; he knew he had too little glamour or enthusiasm to hope that he could find himself someone better by leaving her. She believed in marriage until death; he was too settled, despairing, and lazy to carry on extramarital affairs behind her back, and he had no desire to hurt her pointlessly.
But if he could have his affairs, his perfect fantasy adventures, without leaving her side… It was the perfect solution. Or would be, if he could deal with Mother Isobel.
The priest was finishing up:
“Therefore, O impious one, go out. Go out, thou scoundrel, go out with all thy deceits, because God has willed that man be his temple.
“But why dost thou delay longer here?
“Give honor to God, the Father Almighty, to whom every knee is bent.
“Give place to the Lord Jesus Christ”—and here Father Sydney sketched the sign of the cross in the air a final time—“who shed for man his most precious blood.”
The exorcism was over. St. Jacques exhaled, realized he’d been holding his breath, that he’d actually been afraid something would happen to him. If telepathy was real, then perhaps the Church’s ceremonies could focus a congregation’s latent telepathic powers against people like himself…. But in any case, the exorcism had done him no harm.
Still, he should get some books, find out as much as he could about incubi. To protect himself from Mother Isobel, if for no other reason.
Mother Isobel announced there’d be a short faculty meeting after lunch, then dismissed the assembly.
As he turned to leave, St. Jacques saw Marcia staring at him from the back of the chapel. He had enough time to seize the expression on her face before she realized he was looking at her: no longer the loathing and contempt she’d affected before her friends, but rather a troubled, confused, almost terrified look.
He ate lunch with Veronica and the poet. Thomas was talking, as usual, about Divine Inspiration. Not just any old Divine Inspiration, but rather that Divine Inspiration (something here about “the force that through the green fuse,” which St. Jacques was sure he had stolen) that enabled Russell Thomas to write his paeans of praise and thanksgiving.
St. Jacques detested him, but thought that this once it couldn’t hurt to be seen in his company. Unfortunately, Mother Isobel never put in an appearance, so it was a wasted effort.
Thomas’s monologue left St. Jacques free to worry about what, he finally realized with a certain surprise, was an ethical question. The vulnerable look on Marcia’s face had awakened him to the fact that what he was contemplating was perhaps more a sort of rape than it was the consequenceless, if scandalous, series of
Though perhaps it would be better to picture the whole thing as a kind of irresistible seduction. There was no force involved; the Marcia of the night before had been willing; it was only her reawakened self who’d been troubled. And that perhaps more because of the interpretations Mother Isobel had put on her experience than because of anything inherent in the experience itself. Or, at least, in what had happened when it had been just the two of them, before St. Jacques’s own fears and self-censorship had brought the avenging nun into the scenario.
