Bible Stories for Adults by James Morrow Page A

whispers.
    I hiked up the bluff, walked through the wind-smoothed grass, and ambled across the veranda. Intimations of Kristin were everywhere. Her collection of kitschy pictures—a calendar infested with kittens, a watercolor of a child mesmerized by a bunny—cluttered the walls. Over the fireplace, the framed cover of a movie star magazine displayed the highly dental face of the Hollywood actor Rainsford Spawn.
    I took myself on a cursory tour. Our other members, I discovered, had already set about their duties. Jagged notes of recorded rock music—the notorious Tinker’s Damn album
Flesh before Breakfast
—blasted through the door to Maggie Yost’s room. By nightfall, I knew, the poor woman would have the audial equivalent of eyestrain and a prolific case of diarrhea. Noting that the door to Lisha DuPreen’s room was also closed, I surmised she must be making love to whichever fellow she’d imported for the purpose. During the rest of the year, as it happened, Lisha DuPreen had little use for men. She was not maladjusted, nor unemotional. She simply didn’t care for that particular gender.
    I peeked into the basement. Sure enough, Kendra Kelty had set up her laser disc player and was attempting to engross herself in an old Rainsford Spawn movie,
The Last Aztec.
Kendra Kelty thought that every picture Rainsford Spawn ever made was a colossal bore and that Rainsford Spawn himself was a misogynist and a Nazi. Kendra suffered in silence.
    I returned to the living room. Dr. Dorn Markle, the Kristinite who hated water—who believed that to venture ten feet into the Atlantic was to court deadly undercurrents and offer oneself to platoons of sharks—had just returned from his swim. Droplets spilled from his body, making ephemeral stains on the hardwood floor. His was the misery of a wet cat.
    â€œHi, Dorn.” I extended my donated hand, the one the surgeon had stitched onto me, and our fingers intertwined.
    â€œHowdy.” Dorn had wondrous eyes: large, luminous, green. He was a walking advertisement for his optometry business.
    â€œScrumptious weather.”
    â€œHope it lasts till Sunday.”
    Profound conversation was rare during Kristin Week.
    I sauntered onto the veranda. Billy Silk, a man both physiologically and morally allergic to alcoholic beverages, sat on a chaise lounge, sipping apricot wine. A moment later Wesley Ransom appeared. Wesley despised all things athletic. He found any form of exercise excruciating. He had been out jogging.
    The pain on Wesley’s face, I could tell, did not owe entirely to his recent run. This Kristinite harbored troubled thoughts.
    â€œGreetings, Billy. Salutations, John.” Martyr’s sweat rolled down Wesley’s face. “Glad I accosted you two together. There’s a matter we should discuss, a matter most dire.”
Salutations, accosted, a matter most dire:
such was the sort of diction Wesley Ransom liked concocting for himself. He couldn’t get over being an actor.
    â€œDire?” Billy poured wine into a plastic cup that had once belonged to Kristin. The cup bore an image of a teddy bear. I liked Billy. He was a vegetarian computer programmer who heard elves whispering amid the memory boards.
    â€œIt’s like this,” said Wesley. “Being a Kristinite doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, not a rat’s ass. I don’t believe in our Society. It’s . . . unreasonable.”
    Billy, the spiritual one, was more offended than I, the math teacher. “It hurts me to hear such talk from you, Wesley. You of all people—with that heart of yours . . .”
    â€œHere’s the nub of it, confreres. I’m quitting.”
    I guess Billy had emptied Kristin’s teddy bear cup once too often, because he actually began to cry: not fully orchestrated bawling, but choked sobs akin to the unspontaneous noise of a dog barking on command. “You
can’t
leave.