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the other. When we finally broke apart I would be limp and stunned with wanting him, almost unable to stand. And he would be mute and sweating.

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    “Can you get cancer from stored-up sperm?” he would say, grimacing.
    But we did not consummate it. We agreed. It would be even sweeter for the waiting. And it was the right thing for us.
    It was his decision. “Somehow, jumping your bones before the ceremony would be like screwing Trinity’s mascot or something,” he said. “Until we get married you belong to Trinity. But oh, baby, watch out afterward. Afterward, you’re mine.”
    And so we gasped and burned and fumbled along until our wedding day, and the instant we went upstairs to our room in the inn, to which the Pierces had treated us, we slammed and locked our door, and looked at each other, and then skinned out of our wedding clothes and ran into each other’s arms, and did there on the rag rug that had doubtless been hooked in another century by a blameless bishop’s wife the thing we had been waiting for. We did not even make it to the bed. After the first time, we did it twice more before we even got up off the floor. It was well past midnight before we finally lay together in the first of the beds we would share throughout our life. Since then I have slept alone very few times.
    I loved it. I always have. Making love with Joe is one of the very few totally absolute things I know; it is pure sensation and transport, unleavened by any external element. At the beginning of our marriage it was a kind of warm red earthquake, shaking me until my senses literally left me. Later it became sweeter, longer, deeper, and even later a slow, sliding roller-coaster ride whose course I knew as I knew my way from my bed to my bathroom at night in the dark, familiar in every inch and degree but no less transcendent in the last white burst than it had been the first time. I knew it was so for Joe,

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    too. I knew by the moves he made, the words he whispered, the sounds he made at the climax, the way he laughed aloud, a whoop like a boy’s, after it was done.
    For myself, I found I could make no sound. Not that first time, and never since, could I so much as whisper, whimper, cry out, laugh. I could feel the sound welling up in me as he filled and rocked me, feel the long, ululating cry of abandon and completion spilling from my lungs and climbing my throat; I could even feel my mouth open with it, and my lips draw back and contort with the long cry of love, and the tendons in my throat strain, but I could force no sound out.
    At first it puzzled Joe, and then alarmed him slightly, and finally became a challenge, a matter of honor, a slight. There were times, until we both made peace with my inability to make a sound during love, that he went at me so fiercely I thought he was trying literally to pound a sound from me, ream from me an affirmation. Sometimes afterward, he would fall silent and turn away from me, and I would feel tears of something like guilt in my eyes, and I would roll over on him and tease him with my hands and mouth until we could do it again, hoping that this time the dam in my throat would burst or he would forgive me my muteness. The latter happened always, but the former never did. I was as unable to shout my love as a stone.
    We finally made a small joke of it and were able to move past.
    “Why does it matter? It’s just noise,” I would say. “You should be able to tell by now that I sort of like it.”
    And he would laugh—would have to, because there was no mistaking how I felt about the act of love with my husband. A blind man could have read it from my thrashing body, from the great, silent rictus of passion HILL TOWNS / 31
    that arched my neck and blurred my face. “The silent death,”
    Joe came to call it.
    “It’s just”—I laughed one summer afternoon as we lay on the grass in the shady lee of our garden wall—“that I want to be able to hear