“The body is forever an indignity, for each of us,” Josquin would say when his got complicated. “I’m working on a poem about it. ‘We are the farting children of Heaven, blessed be our slippery viscera.’?”
Then Tess would sing “The Flesh Is but a Sack of Goo,” and Josquin would laugh uproariously. That laugh was worth everything. She could have kissed him then.
She worked very hard not to.
Not that she feared he wouldn’t welcome it; she was terrified he would, and that she wasn’t strong enough or together enough to keep the past from rearing up and biting her. She’d suddenly be thirteen again (against her will) and crossing that final line, unable to breathe—
She quashed such thoughts before they went further. A few nightmares still festered in her mind’s oubliette, and she wasn’t ready to look. She might never be ready.
Even so, Josquin occupied Tess’s thoughts more than she wanted. She daydreamed. He’d be serving dinner and accidentally touch her hand…Or he needed help unfastening a troublesome buckle on his doublet, and…Or she offered to scrub his back, but she dropped the scrub brush, and then…
What a burden those ellipses bore. She dared not put words to what came next.
The cure for sin-bridled thoughts, she well knew, was St. Vitt’s Invocation Against the Demons of the Flesh. She’d had to learn it by heart even though Mama had claimed that only men ever really needed it. “Your future husband may not know it,” Mama had warned. “It might be up to you to teach him.”
It went like this: St. Vitt save me, for I have sinned in thought. Pleasure is deceit, longing is selfish, and bodily lust distracts us from our purpose, the greater glory of Heaven. I am meat, and meat is for worms; it does not deserve to want. I place my desires in your hands, for you to break upon the Anvil of Virtue—
It went on and on, a dismal parade of recrimination and remorse. Tess rarely got past the Anvil of Virtue, which gave her a fit of giggles incommensurate to how funny it was. Laughter brought her some relief, but not enough. She couldn’t sleep.
Then one day Josquin knocked his inkpot into the bath—which was entirely Tess’s fault, for setting it by his elbow on the bath desk without warning him it was there. She’d been trying to anticipate him and deliver it before he asked. Anyway, it spilled into the water, which made it urgent to get Josquin out before he was stained blue-black all over. Tess efficiently removed his writing papers and the desk, without further disaster. He hoisted himself out, but needed help getting dry quickly. Josquin was laughing, good sport that he was, while Tess rubbed down the places that were hard to reach.
By bedtime, alone in her room, she was still drying him in her mind. The texture of him was fresh and vivid, the heft and give and pull. The smell of him, too, and remembered laughter ringing in her ears, and the warmth, and she imagined kissing that mouth—had longed for it in the moment, he’d been so close—how soft his lips would be, how sweet—
She wanted him. There it was, the unthinkable thought.
Saints in Heaven, she couldn’t go on like this. She couldn’t rush downstairs and pounce on him, and St. Vitt’s Invocation was useless. She’d generally resolved or circumvented this inner struggle, but lusting after Josquin brought it back: her sordid nature was forever pitted against her longing to be good. Despairingly, she flopped around in bed like a trout out of water, until two memories struck her at once.
The first was Mother Philomela saying, There are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply.
And the second was what Darling Dulsia had been saying before Tess’s painful memories interrupted. She’d been too upset to listen, and yet apparently she’d retained the words, because here they were, sprung up in her hour of need: Your body is yours, the enjoyment of it is yours, and you should never let anyone, even a Saint, rob you of it.
Two women from her journey—polar opposites, or were they? Both worked with bodies and dispensed advice; there were more similarities between nun and whore than she could have guessed. What if those poles weren’t mutually exclusive? What if opposites could be combined and transcended, paradox embraced, a whole life lived in contradictory case?
She blinked, and for a second she glimpsed it again, an afterimage of pale blue fire. City life had been so busy that she’d forgotten that other feeling, of being completely free to choose.
She had permission to let her body do and be and have what it wanted, this once. She hadn’t banished Josquin with all this thinking; he came back to her, full and glorious and blazing like the sun. She touched what demanded to be touched and she let her mind fly where it would.
The endpoint was like nothing she could ever have expected, like all the beauty of the world channeled down her spine at once. Like being struck by lightning made of music. She felt dissolved all the way to her extremities.
Tears sprang to her eyes. No one had told her. The body was. All. Nothing.
There.
Afterward, though her body felt pleasantly adrift, she couldn’t stop thinking (she’d never thought of herself as a thinker; Seraphina was the smart one). This, whatever it was called—Josquin probably knew, if she’d dared to ask—was one more way to put herself back together, like walking or turning hay. All right, pleasanter than turning hay.
Mama had been quite clear: men might enjoy their bodily lusts, but a woman’s lot was duty and pain (although there was pleasure, presumably, in doing one’s duty and knowing what rewards awaited in the hereafter). Tess wondered whether her mother had ever experienced this. She couldn’t have. How could she omit to mention it if she knew?
It was possible to bear children and still not know. She herself was proof of that.
As she drifted toward sleep, Tess was struck—hilariously—by the thought that she should tell her mother. She should tell everyone, preach the word on street corners. That was absurd, of course. This was even more personal than Anathuthia. Even she did not have the brazen gall to mention this holy mystery in public.
Not yet, anyway.
* * *
Two weeks before the New Year, Tess gave her lecture at the Academy.
Josquin lent her his nicest doublet. It was a bit out of fashion (he lamented; Tess, as a Goreddi, had never seen the like) but well made, a deep brown velvet with red satin peeking through slashes in the sleeves. You could get married in a doublet like this. Tess turned her head upside down over a bucket and snipped her hair a little shorter; Josquin wore his long, but Josquin also had a chin beard and a strong jaw.
Josquin clucked his tongue at her, not for roughing up her hair but because she still insisted on going as Tes’puco.
“You don’t understand,” she snapped, tossing her head and looking in the glass. She looked dramatically windblown, which she rather liked. “It’s better to keep pretending to be a man. I’ve been the lone girl among naturalists before. They never took me seriously—or if they pretended to, they were seeking something in return.”
“They aren’t all like that,” Josquin began, but cut off when Tess gave him a look.
“Fine. Say they’re not,” said Tess. “Even so, I’m not outgoing and gregarious like you. Tes’puco is a shield for me to hide behind as I talk. He gives me courage.”
“You might try a glass of wine for that,” Josquin said, picking lint off her sleeve.
“Indeed not,” said Tess, who had her reasons. Impulsively, she reached for his hand and squeezed it. “If I took enough wine to dampen my fears, I’d forget my speech altogether.”
Josquin squeezed her hand back. “I wish I could come with you and be your wine.”
The way he said it filled her heart with exultation, and that was just as good.