Saints

It’s Sunday, and you’re in your bedroom, in a towel, getting ready. Church is at nine, a series of meetings. During one, you’ll teach adults forgiveness and repentance, Psalm 32. Your hair is damp from a shower and smells of camphor. Behind you, in bed, is the woman you live with. Her cell phone lights her face in the dark. She no longer attends. She no longer sits with you, in a pew, scratching your back. You miss this. You miss her.

She watches you in your towel, in the mirror. Under the covers, she wears a Disney top and plain gray panties. She moves, a body of water. You feel yourself get hard because you think sex is coming. Sex is only one of the sins you hide from your bishop. Another is jealousy. But maybe you don’t hide as well as you think you do. You face the mirror and drop your towel. She told you, early into living together, that she liked your penis. She used that word. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to you. But then she mentioned two guys—two jerks—from college, and you had to rethink the Mormon girl you loved; you had to pray, on your knees, for understanding. Many are the torments of the wicked.

You look in the closet for underwear, your temple garments. You look in a dresser. She is not supposed to see the garments. She is not your wife. You, unworthy, unrepentant, are not supposed to wear them, but you do because hypocrisy is another of your sins, confession of which you equate to a kind of hell. You tell yourself, of course, that the garments are sacred, that eventually they will change you, and that, once changed, you will confess.

Grace is beyond measure.

You put on top and bottom. Your parents, and their parents, wore garments. And maybe that’s all holiness is, enduring. Following. Over the garment’s breast, navel, and knee are symbols she wore only a year ago, symbols you hide from her now not because you believe the stuff about pearls before swine but because you care. The garments remind her of who she used to be, and who she used to be is still painful for her.

You dress quickly. You spray cologne. White shirt, dark tie and slacks. You don’t wear complete suits. In your own way, you rebel, and this, she admires. You stand beside the bed, and she hits you, bottom to top, with the light of her cell phone. To her, you’re a curiosity. To her, your devotion, to God, to her, surpasses all understanding. You think, because of this, that she doesn’t really know you; you think, there’s a difference between devotion and fear.

“You look handsome,” she says. “I like those pants.”

“Thanks.”

She asks, then, about people at church. She pulls back the covers. She names a few. Brother, Sister. The formality is how she separates herself. She is no longer Sister. Does anyone miss her? she asks. She looks at you. She needs to be told she is loved. Her family no longer speaks to her. You say yes.

“What do they say?”

You can’t remember, but you tell her the missionaries want to come over for dinner.

“Do they know we live together?”

“They know I live here. You never updated your records.”

Before, if anyone from church was visiting, she would leave. She would take herself to a movie. To be sacred is to be separate. You have done this, you think, with your relationship. You have kept her away. Every month you tell your home teacher to visit you in the chapel, in one of the classrooms, because your place is a mess. You hide her, like your garments. But now she says hiding feels wrong, like an affair.

If she’s the mistress, your wife is the church? Is that what she thinks? “Maybe you’re my wife, and the church is my mistress.”

“But I don’t want you to have a mistress at all,” she says. “I want you to feel like you can share everything with me. I want your happiness to be my happiness.”

She wants you to tell the bishop that you live together and love each other and that there is nothing wrong with a man and a woman testing their love. Too many women in the church rush into marriage before they even know who they are. Because of living with you, because of leaving the church, she says, she knows who she is.

“Invite the missionaries,” she says. “It’s okay. I’ll make a casserole. We shouldn’t have to live our lives separately. Even though I don’t care about the church, I can still care about the fact that you do.”

She stands, bare, bright legs, and goes, as if in pain, to the hamper. The sky, through window slats, is the color of broken stone. She separates your laundry. Pants and bras from your garments. She asks about cohabitation; she uses that word—a church word she never uses—which makes you stop, again, and look at her. For a moment, she is desperate. “Do you think it’s a sin?” she says. “Do you think we’re sinners?”

You know what she wants to hear, and you know the truth, and they’re not the same. Over a laundry bag, she holds your bottoms; she touches the sacred mark. You can no more bring her back to church, to you, than you can will yourself to leave it, to leave her. Only God saves. Until then, you will be, both of you, who you are. You will be less than yourselves.

You will be Brother. You will claim, from the pulpit, to know things you do not know. You will pray. You will love the fallen, broken person beside you because you are fallen and broken yourself.