Vox(35)

He stood there at the baker’s stall with an armful of produce and flowers and with a distant look in his eyes. We’d spent ten months without seeing each other, not once, and we would have gone on not seeing each other if I hadn’t left the cheese shop and walked straight across the market hall.

I risked two words. “Still here?”

“Still here. I have a ticket home in August,” he said. “After the summer term finishes. I can’t stay in your country any longer.” As he spoke, he avoided my eyes and fixed on the silver bracelet. “I wouldn’t have stayed out the summer, but they made a generous offer.”

August was five months away. When he left, I knew he would never come back to the States. Who would?

Lorenzo paid for his bread. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared through the crowded market to the far end where the café and the wineshop were. This was a Tuesday morning, unusually warm for March, which had a habit of hitting Washington with a fresh blast of winter, as if to remind us that the season wasn’t over yet, not without one last bang. My head told me to run out the side door, forgetting the cheese, and hop the next train back home. Or anywhere. My feet disobeyed and remained glued to the floor. And then he was back, another bag added to the collection of groceries he’d already purchased.

“Meet me in the Eighth Street alley in ten minutes,” was all he said.

Officially, premarital and extramarital sex were illegal. They’d always been illegal in most states, a holdover from the days of pre–Middle Ages sodomy laws that forbade even a married couple from engaging in anything other than vaginal intercourse. “Immoral” and “unnatural” were the benchmarks. Rarely was anyone charged and criminalized for fellatio or anal play, though, and affairs outside the marital bed were regarded as normal, if not commendable, acts.

And birth control? That’s a good one. The pharmacy shelf that used to hold Trojan and Durex and LifeStyles boxes is stocked with baby food and diapers. A logical replacement.

Reverend Carl had a few things to say about sexual morality when he rose to his current seat of power. No elections were held, no confirmation hearings—the president wanted votes, and he got them. All Sam Myers needed to do was listen to an unofficial right-hand man, a man with the attentive ears of millions who thought moving one hundred years in reverse was actually desirable.

Blessed be the loophole.

I don’t know if there’s really an adultery wagon, but I do know what happened to Annie Wilson down the street when her husband called in the infraction. It was on television, a handful of days after my world changed.

Annie Wilson was a tart in housewife clothing—at least she dressed down when her husband was home. I expect she made a beeline for her wardrobe on Wednesday mornings after he left for work, and reversed the dolling-up process in early afternoon after the man in the old blue pickup started his truck and left for another week. They had an arrangement.

I shouldn’t call her a tart. I’m no better, and Annie’s husband was no Prince Charming. She’d been wanting to leave him for two years, and once he canceled her credit cards and stopped payments on her car, Annie might as well have been living in a maximum-security prison. One Wednesday, I remember cheering her on, silently urging her to just walk out of the house and get in that blue pickup and never look back.

If she hadn’t had the two boys, both under ten, maybe she would have done that. And if she’d run off that Wednesday afternoon, maybe I wouldn’t have had to watch her on television that night as Reverend Carl Corbin handed her over to two blandly dressed women with gray faces that matched their long habits. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to hear him tell us about the convent in North Dakota where Annie Wilson would live out her life with a wrist counter set to a daily maximum of zero.

What made up my mind to walk out of Eastern Market and head for Lorenzo’s car in the alley across the street wasn’t only lust, and it wasn’t only the one-sided argument I’d had with Patrick that morning. Rage had been crackling inside me like a fire, first a slow burn, then an inferno. I knew all about the double standard, the private clubs that had cropped up in cities and towns where single men of certain means could go to unload their stress and sperm on professional ladies of the entertaining sort. Patrick had told me about the clubs after overhearing a conversation at work. They were the last places where you could get your hands on a box of rubbers.

Prostitution, they say, is the oldest profession. And you can’t kill anything that old. Also, the gays had been taken care of in their prison camps; the adulteresses like Annie Wilson were working farms in North Dakota or the grain belt of the Midwest. The Pure had to do something about single women who had no families to take them in—they couldn’t very well live on their own with no words and no income. They were given a choice: marry or move to a cathouse.

When I thought of Sonia—of what would happen to her if Patrick and I were out of the picture, of whether she would be forced into a loveless marriage or sent away to a commune of whores where she could do nothing with her mouth but suck and moan—my blood boiled. Even the whores were supposed to shut up and behave.

So I walked out of Eastern Market and across the street, dodging potholes and semifrozen puddles, and got into Lorenzo’s car. It was the only method I had of saying “Fuck you” to the system.