Lida belted the bathrobe more tightly around her waist and walked over to the bed. She sat down on the edge of it. When she had thought that Christopher was not serious, he had made her feel young. Now she was far too aware of the slackness of the skin on her face and neck, the fine tracing of lines on the backs of her hands. She did not want to be too aware of getting old. Her cousin Delphinia was too aware. Delphinia spent a lot of time with plastic surgeons.
“Hello,” she said to Christopher.
“You had on the alarm clock,” Christopher said. “Whatever for? It’s Sunday morning.”
“On Sunday mornings I go to church.”
“Oh.” Christopher considered this the way he might have considered a confession of culinary abnormality—“On Sunday mornings I eat fried chicken feet,” for instance. Lida thought she ought to be grateful that Christopher knew what a church was. He stretched put a hand and touched her hair and smiled.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.
“Good Lord, no,” Lida said. “That’s all we’d need.”
“Why? You said yourself that everybody on the street knows what’s going on anyway, except maybe Gregor Demarkian. What’s the matter, if we go to church together, Gregor will suddenly see light dawn?”
“Krekor does not go to church. Or at least he does not go very much. I should go today to be with Hannah, I suppose.”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
“You’ve never even been interested in religion?” Lida asked him. “You’ve never for a moment believed in God?”
“I want to know what’s really going on here,” Christopher said. “Do they disapprove of you, is that it? Do they disapprove of us for doing this?”
“I don’t know. It’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Then what are you worried about? From everything I’ve seen, Tibor Kasparian is a nice man. He’s not going to leap out of the pulpit—”
“—we do not have a pulpit—”
“—and start calling you a scarlet woman. Neither is anybody else. Maybe your friend Hannah will be a little jealous.”
“Hannah has other things on her mind.”
“And maybe my sister will start fussing—which is par for the course for Bennis, and there isn’t a damn thing either one of us can do about it—but I don’t think any of these things amounts to a serious drawback to the two of us going to church together. It might even be interesting. I don’t usually like churches.”
“I thought you didn’t.”
“I don’t like people who try to tell me what I’m supposed to do and what I’m supposed to think and what I’m supposed to feel. I don’t like the idea of feeling that I’ve done something wrong just because I’ve started to be happy. I don’t like the idea of you feeling like that.”
“I don’t feel like that, Christopher. I don’t understand where you get your ideas.”
“I watch MTV,” Christopher said.
“Well, you should watch Mother Angelica,” Lida told him. “I do not think of it as someone trying to tell me what to do. I think of it as a bargain I made. If I am to call myself a Christian in the Armenian Church, then I have obligations.”
“One of which is not to sleep with me.”
“Sleeping with you does not matter, Christopher. Sleeping with you for a week when we are not even thinking of getting engaged and not having any intention of stopping, that matters.”
His fingers stroked her cheek. “I’m glad you have no intention of stopping.”
“Christopher, you are impossible.”
“I work at it.”
“You work at the most astonishing things,” Lida said.
She got up off the bed. She felt a little cold and a little silly, sitting there with nothing but this bathrobe on and a pair of underpants underneath it. She went to the closet drawers and got out a bra and a new box of panty hose.
“Christopher,” she said, calling through the open closet door, “do you believe what Bennis said last night? That Hannah is no longer a suspect?”
“Sure. She got it from Gregor Demarkian.”
“It was good of her to call and tell us.”
“There was nothing good about it. She was trying to find out how late we got in.”
“I do not think you are always fair to Bennis, Christopher. She is a much nicer woman than you seem to think.”
“She is a much nosier one than you’ve ever imagined. What are you doing in there?”
“I’m getting dressed.”
Her navy blue linen was hanging to the right of the jade wool. Lida took that one and put it on. It was one of the most conservative dresses she owned, man-tailored, like an elongated shirt. What was she trying to do here? She went to the built-in drawers again and fumbled through the top one until she found her silver beads. They were conservative too.