[I'm not sure why this story came to me this evening. Well maybe I can trace how the notion bubbled to the surface of my mind, if I try really hard; but I suppose it doesn't matter. So far as I can tell, it's not a story I've told before now. It's ancient history, but maybe helps flesh out the picture I have tried to draw of those days.]
__________
Hosea's log: Star date ... early-to-mid January 2005.
Location: back in the house we sold in 2013.
Wife's romantic status: Deeply enmeshed in her short but torrid affair with Boyfriend 3.
I think I've mentioned (in an off-hand way that I don't expect anyone to remember) that for a while Wife was an active volunteer on a prayer line. This was in the years not long after she went onto Disability and stopped working. At the time she was exploring the local Evangelical churches and looking for ministries that she felt called to. This was one of them. She would volunteer to man the phone during certain hours, and they gave her a little gizmo to attach to our landline. [That's how long ago it was.] When her time came, she switched the gizmo on, and calls to the prayer line would be routed to our phone. (Or to anyone else who was on-duty at the same time, of course.) The phone would ring; she would ask the strangers at the other end what they needed prayer with; and then she would pray with them. Rinse and repeat, until her time was done.
Anyway, one day Boyfriend 3 came over to visit—sorry, I mean "came over to fuck"—while the boys were at school and I was at work. And fuck they did. Apparently it was glorious, from what I heard about it later. Wife's affair with Boyfriend 3 was brief but very intense. Also they shared a religious vocabulary, and they had a lot of similar emotional baggage. To make the back story even more interesting, Boyfriend 3's father (that's Tartuffe, in case you are keeping track) had started his own church once upon a time, and ordained Wife as a minister in it because of ... reasons, I guess. It made no sense to anyone but the two of them.
Sorry. I got distracted. But this background all matters.
Anyway, the two of them fucked rapturously and then lay on the bed recovering. And then Wife looked at the clock and realized that her time on the phones was coming up soon. So she sat up in bed, propped herself against the head of the bed somehow, made sure the phone was in reach, and turned on the switch.
Boyfriend 3 lay there—probably still naked, for all I know (though of course I wasn't there)—and listened to her pray for people. Of course the situation was preposterous: Wife had just finished enjoying a round of delicious adultery (which is still forbidden in the Ten Commandments, last I checked), and now was praying pious and heartfelt Christian prayers for the afflicted souls who called in.
I have only Wife's version of the story. But according to her, after her hour was up Boyfriend 3 commented,
"Wow. My father was right to ordain you after all."
Somehow, regardless of everything that was religiously and morally wrong with her own situation, Wife had succeeded in hearing these people and in speaking to their problems in prayer.
Or at least that's what she told me he said. But back then I believed it. The way she was back then, it would have been very possible. That's part of why I called her "empathetic" in this post. It's part of why I think the connection between blessedness or sanctity (on the one hand) and chastity or conventional morality (on the other hand) is pretty vague and tenuous, as I expressed later to D in this poem. And it's why I became so baffled by her narcissism and social tone-deafness, though to be fair those were on evidence early on for any with eyes to see.
But once upon a time she was capable of better, too.
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