The Reinvention of Love

across the front of my dress and a small moan escapes my lips.
    At first when we met in the church we spent some of the time in prayer. Adèle is more religious than I am and she believed that by increasing her devoutness she would alleviate some of the guilt she felt at having an affair. By praying more,by praying harder, by having prayer be a large part of our relationship, she would be forgiven the sin of adultery. We would kneel together in the pew, heads bowed and hands clasped in front of us. I don’t know what silent words she offered up to God, but I know I prayed, with all my strength, that she would leave Victor and come away with me. I feared that our prayers were cancelling each other out. She was probably asking to fight temptation. I was begging to have her yield to it.
    Now I lean my head on her shoulder. She still smells of the outdoors, hasn’t taken on the musty perfume of the church. I feel weak with longing.
    In the orchard, if we are lucky, we are able to hold hands, to manage several kisses while walking through the groves of trees. In the hotel, we can be entirely ourselves, without clothes or pretence or observers. The church has more privacy than the orchard, but it is the house of the Lord and comes with his attendant laws. In the orchard we can pretend that we are courting. In the hotel we can pretend that we are married. In the church we know that we are sinners.
    That knowledge does not entirely encourage romance.
    Do lovers always suffer an impediment to their love? Is that what keeps love sweet and strong – the circumstances that would force the lovers apart make them cleave together more keenly? Will we end up poisoning ourselves, like the lovers in Victor’s wretched play? What other choice will there be? We cannot be together, and yet we cannot be apart.
    “We should pray,” Adèle says, without conviction.
    But we don’t pray. I lift my head from her shoulder and take her face in my hands, kiss her deeply and passionately. The church recedes, disappears. There is only the mix of our breath, the feel of Adèle’s skin, our kiss. Love is a kind of attentiveness, I think. And yet, love also renders the world outside the lovers invisible, without consequence.
    Adèle breaks away first. “I want you so badly,” she says. “I’mnot to be trusted.” She entwines her fingers in mine. “I will think up a lie for tomorrow. We must go to the hotel for the afternoon. Can you get away?”
    I am meant to be at the newspaper tomorrow, but I will work up an excuse not to go. Perhaps I will be ill. I do feel ill.
    “Yes,” I say. “Can you manage to escape for a whole afternoon?”
    “I must.”
    The thought of the pleasures of the hotel room makes me squirm on the hard wooden bench. Adèle tightens her grip on my hand.
    “I’m sorry,” she says.
    “For what?”
    “For causing you pain. For not marrying you instead of Victor.”
    “But you didn’t know me when you married Victor.”
    “I’m sorry anyway.”
    This is what happens in the church. Prayer and wish are entwined, and it becomes impossible to prise them apart. There is a strong need to confess.
    “You wouldn’t have had your children,” I say, “if you had married me.”
    “I love you more than my children,” says Adèle. Her words resound through the empty church, and we are both shocked into silence by what she has just said.
    It strikes me that Adèle has more courage than I do. I have been looking at our future through the filter of my character. I would do better to regard it through the filter of hers. If she can say a thing like that, then she is capable of more than I supposed. She is capable of more than I am. She will have the strength to find a way for us to go forward.

IT HAS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE to meet with Adèle. There has been an outbreak of cholera in the city and it is unwise to leave one’s house as the streets are full of infection – these same streets whose raw sewage caused the outbreak. It is said that two thousand people died on one day alone last week. Hearses prowl the avenues, more numerous than horse and cab. All manner of wagons and carts have been pressed into service to carry the hapless dead to the overcrowded cemeteries. Grave-diggers are reportedly jumping on the corpses to squash them down and make room for the freshly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, in the haste to halt the spread of the disease, people are being buried alive.
    The pianist Liszt is