The Signature of All Things

flowers together. She had a small genius for it. She was dead at the age of fourteen. I have scarcely thought of her these many years. Why on earth are we speaking of Julia?”
    “Why can you not love me?” Alma asked, hating the desperation in her voice.
    “I could not love you more ,” Ambrose said, with desperation to match her own.
    “I am ugly, Ambrose. I have never been unaware of that fact. Also, I am old. Yet I am in possession of several things that you wanted—comforts, companionship. You could have had all those things without humiliating me through marriage. I had already given you those things, and would have given them to you forever. I was content to love you like a sister, perhaps even like a mother. But you were the one who wished to wed. You were the one who introduced to me the idea of matrimony. You were the one who said that you wanted to sleep next to me every night. You were the one who allowed me to long for things that I long ago overcame desiring.”
    She had to stop speaking. Her voice was rising and cracking. This was shame upon shame.
    “I have no need of wealth,” Ambrose said, his eyes wet with sorrow. “You know this of me.”
    “Yet you are reaping its benefits.”
    “You do not understand me, Alma.”
    “I do not understand you at all, Mr. Pike. Edify me.”
    “I asked you,” he said. “I asked you if you wanted a marriage of the soul—a mariage blanc .” When she did not immediately answer, he said, “It means a chaste marriage, without exchange of flesh.”
    “I know what a mariage blanc is, Ambrose,” she snapped. “I was speaking French before you were born. What I fail to understand is why you would imagine that I wanted one.”
    “Because I asked you. I asked if you would accept this of me, and you agreed.”
    “ When? ” Alma felt that she would tear his hair straight out of his scalp if he did not speak more directly, more truthfully.
    “In your book-repair closet that night, after I found you in the library. When we sat in silence together. I asked you, silently, ‘Will you accept this of me?’ and you said, ‘yes.’ I heard you say yes. I felt you say it! Do not deny it, Alma—you heard my question across the divide, and you answered me in the affirmative! Is that not true?”
    He was staring at her with panicked eyes. Now she was struck dumb.
    “And you asked me a question, too,” Ambrose went on. “You asked me silently if this is what I wanted of you. I said yes, Alma! I believe I even said it aloud! I could not have answered more clearly! You heard me say it!”
    She cast her mind back to that night in the binding closet, to her silent detonation of sexual pleasure, to the sensation of his question running through her, and of her question running through him. What had she heard? She had heard him ask, clear as a ringing church bell, “Will you accept this of me?” Of course she had said yes. She thought he had meant, “Will you accept sensual pleasures such as this from me?” When she had asked in reply, “Is this what you want of me?” she had meant, “Do you want these sensual pleasures with me?”
    Dear Lord in heaven, they had misunderstood each other’s questions! They had supernaturally misunderstood each other’s questions. It had been the one and only categorical miracle of Alma Whittaker’s life, and she had misunderstood it. This was the worst jest she had ever heard.
    “I was only asking you,” she said wearily, “if you wanted me . Which is to say—if you wanted me fully , in the way that lovers typically want each other. I thought you were asking me the same.”
    “But I would never ask for anyone’s corporeal body in the manner of which you speak,” Ambrose said.
    “Why ever not?”
    “Because I do not believe in it.”
    Alma could not comprehend what she was hearing. She was unable to speak for a long while. Then she asked, “Is it your opinion that the conjugal act—even between a man and his wife—is something vile and depraved? Surely you know, Ambrose, what other people share with each other, in the privacy of marriage? Do you think me debased, for wanting my husband to be a husband? Surely you have heard tales of such enjoyments between men and women?”
    “I am not like other men, Alma. Can that honestly surprise you to learn, at this late date?”
    “What do you imagine you are, then, if not like other men?”
    “It is not what I imagine I am, Alma—it is what I wish to be. Or rather, what