This kind of playfulness, Tom reflected, was entirely absent from his marriage. He didn’t blame Peggy for their rather perfunctory sex life. He blamed her parents, and the long line of ancestors who had blindly embraced repressive strains of Christianity, with their puritanical separation of body and spirit, the equation of pleasure with shame, and the near deification of guilt. All that had led to generations of frustrated, lying men and guilt-ridden women. Tom knew those women well. He’d been reared by one, and he’d married another. Even when almost every fiber of Peggy’s being cried out for release, her relentlessly conditioned mind short-circuited her desire, burying the ancient urge with destructive consequences that no one had yet evolved a system to calculate. Tom had heard countless similar stories in his medical practice, and he saw the pernicious results. He sometimes wondered whether the myriad of vague female complaints he encountered—“nerves,” “vapors,” “hysteria”—might not be cured by a few nights of guilt-free sex. But for many of those women, that cure could not be accomplished without a pharmacological guillotine that would sever the body from the cerebral cortex. Until that existed, true sexual fulfillment for those patients would remain unattainable.
In the previous century, when laws governing doctors were much less stringent, his professional forebears had approached this problem directly. Tom had read medical histories that described doctors using electrical vibrators of various types to treat women suffering from “hysteria.” The cure was simple: orgasm. Many female patients had never experienced orgasm, at least not with their husbands, who were frequently inattentive, ignorant of the existence of the clitoris, or both. Tom suspected that most of those long-suffering women had been the “beneficiaries” of a repressive religious upbringing, and thus could not bring themselves even to masturbate for relief. This sexual deprivation had obviously persisted into the 1960s, especially in the Bible Belt, but across the nation, too. One only had to look at the sexual primers and self-help books starting to climb the bestseller lists to find proof. Peggy had actually purchased a couple of these titles, but she’d yet to put any of their suggestions into practice. Tom almost dreaded the day that she would try. Watching someone struggle to break down rigid barriers in their personality was a difficult thing to witness—much less help with—after one had stepped into a world where sexual intimacy was effortless.
In Viola Turner’s bedroom, shame had no place. Body and spirit were one. Viola might be a devout Catholic, but she made love without a trace of guilt. In Peggy’s world, desire was guilt. In Viola’s, desire was action. In Viola’s bed, the word no did not exist. If Tom asked her why she did a certain thing, her answer was always the same: “Because it feels good.” Viola would gaze steadily, almost tauntingly back at him, certain that her answer was true and irreducible. “Does it feel good to you?” she would ask. Such childlike simplicity, Tom realized, was the essence of sexual love. There was a darker side to sex, of course; sexuality had as many facets as the human personality. But the darker sides, he was coming to believe, grew out of repression rather than from the natural openness that Viola personified.
In this atmosphere, sexual epiphanies occurred almost daily, and Tom felt alternately foolish and empowered by them. Never had he experienced the kind of protracted pleasure Viola gave him, nor had he seen a woman experience such heights of arousal and release. He tried to believe himself free of prejudice during these encounters, but ultimately he couldn’t fool himself on this score. At the deepest level, he felt as though he were coupling with some exotic creature brought from a distant land, or even another planet. When Viola rode him, single-minded in her focus, he saw clearly that “guilt” and “shame” were man-made constructs that, however deeply ingrained they had become in the Calvinist lineage of his people, had only been lightly grafted onto the surface of Viola’s tribe, and had never really taken. Tom knew such thoughts were inherently racist, but they were his thoughts nonetheless, and could not be denied.
He didn’t speak of love with Viola—not in the beginning. And on the first day he found the word forming in his mouth, she read his mind and put a finger to his lips. When he tried to move the finger away, Viola shook her head and closed her eyes, squeezing tears from beneath her lids. She had never blocked out the truth that Tom denied like a little boy pretending he could fly from the roof of his parents’ house. The laws that precluded the two of them from having a future together were as absolute as the laws that would break the legs of the boy who leaped from a roof with only a red cape to hold him aloft. Yet despite this awareness, not even Viola could make herself stop the affair.
For six weeks they courted disaster, dancing along a precipice that skirted a bottomless void. Thankfully Viola had no one to answer to, since she lived alone, and Peggy assumed that Tom was simply working harder than usual. During the sleepless nights beside his wife’s softly snoring form, Tom would lie stiff and sweating, his mind under assault by dangerous fantasies. But having tasted Viola, who could say what was sane or mad? After discovering portals to new worlds through an almost miraculously feminine woman, what man would not dream of a future with her? Of running off to a place where skin color meant nothing? Viola swore that no such place existed, not even in Paris. That might be, Tom admitted, but the real obstacle to fulfilling that dream was his children. How many times did he rise from bed and pad into the rooms of his son and daughter? Jenny was sixteen then, Penn only eight. To look down at their innocent faces and imagine leaving was impossible. Yet Tom could not stop his mind from fleeing to that fantasy realm where he would awaken to Viola every day, to her liquid eyes, her effortless smile, and the fluid grace of her body.
That dream ended forty-five days after it began.
Nearly seven weeks after they consummated their desire in the X-ray room, Viola suddenly changed. The previous day, Tom had rendezvoused with her as usual, and her eyes had shone with boundless love. The next morning, when he saw her in the clinic, the light had gone out of her eyes, and impassable walls had been raised around her. When he tried to question her, she only shook her head and hurried on to the next patient. Without saying anything, Viola made it clear that Tom Cage was as irrevocably part of her past as her dead husband. At first he thought she must have received some bad news about her brother. But during a tense coffee break she told him that Jimmy was still hiding in Freewoods, though chafing to return to Natchez and “the struggle.” After two hours of dazed disbelief, Tom finally cornered Viola in an examining room and demanded an explanation for the distance between them.