Bodies and Souls Read Free

and body unlike anything he had ever seen before, a mythicbeauty. If Renoir had painted Mae West in modern dress, perhaps the result would have resembled Liza Howard: she was a blue-eyed blonde with an hourglass figure, a blooming summer garden of a woman. She usually wore her thick honey-colored hair pulled off her face and piled in soft convolutions at the back of her head, the better to display the emeralds or pearls in her ears. But the very way she restrained her hair indicated how long and wavy it would be when she released it. Everything about the woman was undulant, the gentle turn of her arms or legs, her full pink lips, her high, pillowy breasts. She was a tall, long-waisted, long-legged woman, perfectly proportioned: the sort of woman who made slimmer women look angular and ropy and tough. She was a woman of luxurious flesh.
    But she was also a woman of licentious flesh. She counted on the lust of men to keep her entertained and she did more than her share of coveting neighbors’ husbands and committing adultery.
    Peter knew certain things from gossip, and others from occasional confessions from outwardly proper but inwardly wretched men. Still, she was going too far with her attempts to seduce Peter himself.
    Peter knew he was a handsome man and that this helped him in his ministry. Other women had had crushes on him and expressed this in a number of charming, embarrassed ways: serving diligently on committees, giving him chaste, handmade presents, even asking him to help them deal with the burden of their feelings, because they knew he was a married man.
    But Liza displayed no such delicacy. Once or twice he had asked her to help him with some church task, in the hopes that over the casual friendly ease of an afternoon’s work, she might drop her guard and let him see the frightened child within. For there was surely a frightened child within us all, wasn’t there? Peter thought so. Liza did attend church, and she was intelligent—she must know that she was greedy, adulterous, uncharitable, and vain. Peter believed that in her heart of hearts Liza mourned for herself, for what she had become.
    Just last weekend he had asked Liza to join him in visiting three very old couples who lived on farms in the mountains around Londonton, thinking that as they drove from farm to farm Liza would reflect on the difference between her state and that of other parishioners, who were at this point all too old or crippled to make the journey into church most Sundays. He thought the sight of their withered bodies and humble homeswould fill Liza with pity; she would see how lucky she was to be so wealthy and beautiful. The last old couple they visited had a nice home filled with drying apples and obliging dogs and cats. Peter expected Liza to say something —how she admired the old couple, how she envied them their quiet going on with life, how she was aware in the middle of dark nights that in spite of the superficial beauty of her life she was in truth more lonely and miserable than the old couples they saw who had so few material goods. Liza at thirty-five was a widow; Peter wondered if she had played a role, if only indirectly, in helping her aging husband to a heart attack.
    But as Peter and Liza had ridden together through the brilliant New England day, Liza had not opened her heart to Peter. And so, finally, Peter had made a great attempt: he had reached his hand across the seat to place it gently over Liza’s elegant smooth hand, which fairly blossomed with rings. Liza had not withdrawn her hand, and so for a moment they had gone along that way, hands clasped in friendship.
    “You know,” Peter had said, “it is what is in one’s heart that really matters.”
    “Do you want to sleep with me?” Liza had asked in reply.
    He had dropped Liza’s hand and nearly run off the road in horror. That she would invite him, suspect him! The entire afternoon, the old people—none of it had meant anything to Liza. She was too