Free The Language of Paradise: A Novel by Barbara Klein Moss Page B

lumbering creature who moved sullenly around the room with her mop and pail, choosing at random the patches of floor she would favor with suds that day; his mother was always complaining about her. The girl gaped at him, her mouth half-open. “It shines like gold!” she said, and before he caught her meaning, she reached out two grubby fingers to touch his hair. Gideon was too startled to recoil. Then, as if to pay him in kind for the liberty she’d taken, she grabbed his hand and thrust it under her bodice. The sudden contact with her flesh shocked him. The spongy fullness overflowed his palm. Until that moment, he had hardly seen her as a person, much less a woman. It seemed to him that she said things, but he couldn’t absorb them. He didn’t know how long he stood there—long enough for her to mistake his paralysis for pleasure and lift her skirts. Only then did he find the strength to wrench away from her and run out of the room.
    His mother wanted to know why he wouldn’t stay in the schoolroom anymore. He couldn’t tell her. The experience had nothing to do with him; it had happened in an underworld he never planned to visit again. But in spite of his best efforts to lock it away, he would see the girl’s face, at once knowing and stupid, the tip of her tongue between her slack lips; he would hear her whisper in his ear—breathy exhalations, a murmurous crooning—and even as his mind revolted, his body would be roused.
    After a few weeks, he went again, telling himself he would exorcise her once and for all. The girl laughed lazily, as if she had been waiting for him, and without a word began to unbutton her dress. He pelted her with names to keep her away: “Fat cow! Filthy pig!” For a boy who acquired words easily, he knew few bad ones. Even these weren’t so very bad—feathers rather than stones, for they tickled the girl, and the more he flung, the more she showed him, lifting her skirt to display thighs the color of curd, a great puckered rump that she parted with her hands, looking at him coyly over her shoulder. When he could stand it no more, he ran. She hadn’t touched him—all the times he would go to her, she never touched him—but as soon as he got home, he touched himself. It was as though they had reached an agreement.
    Love wasn’t something Gideon felt a need for, nor did he connect it with the eruptions of his body. His college classmates attributed his restraint to an excess of piety. It was simply that whoring had no meaning for him, didn’t kindle his desire. Why should he go to some degenerate stranger to slake a momentary urge that he could stifle on his own? This was a sin, he knew, but he was neat and quick about it. In his own mind he was preserving himself for the wife of his destiny, though his notions about that worthy goal were vague. Love, when he thought of it at all, was an exalted enigma, not unlike the Lord Himself: infinitely lofty, conveniently remote. Until this morning, it had never had a face.
    Gideon could not say, even now, why that face should be Sophy’s. Nothing about her seemed to warrant such an operatic intensity of feeling. She was small and spare—skimpy, his friends would judge her, no ornament for a man’s arm—and uncommon to the point of being odd. Her manner was the opposite of artful. Although it was their first meeting, she had not bothered to disguise her admiration for him, and had openly hinted that he should take Unsworth’s place in the household. Yet he liked all these things about her: liked her childish looks and the frankness that went with them, which would have seemed audacious in any other girl; liked her solitary dancing, and yes, even the endearing ineptitude of her paintings, which were only clumsy sketches of her dreams. Maybe, Gideon thought, love was nothing more than a series of likings, strung together like beads on a chain. Not pearls or rubies, but humble wooden beads: the sight of a girl in a field, the part in her