Now, over three hours later, sitting in her sunroom office, she was tense again, but for an entirely different reason. Not ten seconds ago, she had heard the thunk of the mail as it came through the slot in the front door. This street got its mail earlier than almost any other in this section of the city. She knew that it was lying out there in the little foyer space in front of the front door, spread out across the round rug she had placed there to take the dirt from people’s shoes. She knew, as well, that if she left it there, Ian would pick it up when he came in, and that would be anytime now. Nine-thirty. She checked the clock and it was almost nine-fifteen. Ian said there wasn’t going to be any sex, but Edith knew he was lying. He always was. Now that she had become squeamish about doing it in her own soft bed, they did it on the floor in the master bedroom, with her bare back pressed into the scratchy green carpet and her head hitting into the wood underneath it. They did it on the couch in the living room, with the shades drawn only halfway. They did it in the kitchen, on the tile, until their nakedness was etched with tile lines and they looked as if some artist had plotted a pattern to break them up into collages of themselves. Edith would have thought that they would slow down, once Will caught them, but the opposite was true. They never seemed to be able to get enough sex now. They never seemed to want to do anything with each other but get naked and go at it. Edith wondered if Ian did as she did, sometimes, and, right at the moment of climax, imagined Will bursting in on them once again.
Edith went on making her way carefully through the letters that had been posted to her website. She had erased the one Bennis Hannaford had sent, but Bennis Hannaford was apparently not the only one who knew that there was something called Christian Humanism that had come before Secular Humanism. The trouble was that she herself had not known. She clicked through the essays on the page she called Getting It Out of My System, found the offending piece, and flushed. It wasn’t fair, really. She must have read a thousand essays by self-important media pundits that were just shot full of holes, but nobody ever called them on it. They didn’t lose their jobs. They didn’t lose their chances. They just went on being “real” writers, and here she was, sitting in a sunroom in Philadelphia, unpublished except for her column in Free Thinking magazine and her deal with Freethinker Press—and that didn’t count. When she was honest, she admitted it. She brushed hair out of her face and tried to forget that she was, at the moment, embroiled in a huge argument with the two women who ran Free Thinking magazine, and that if that went on much longer, she wouldn’t be published there anymore either.
She pushed her chair away from her worktable and stretched. She clicked at her mouse again and got rid of her own Web page. She ignored the rest of the e-mail. She didn’t want to read another word about how Christian Humanism was just another name for the Renaissance, and anybody who had ever had so much as a freshman college course in Western Civilization should have known this.
Even “freethought” organizations weren’t really all that impressed with “freethought” writers. When they held conventions, their stars were always people from the outside: Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, Richard Dawkins, Wendy Kaminer. Edith felt a wave of heat roll over her and took her hands away from her head. She had started to get hot flashes. She hated them.
The mail was out there on the carpet. It wasn’t going to go away while she sat there. Edith got out of her chair. She hated the thought of going through the dining room, because the copy of Vanity Fair was still there, still marked at the place where Bennis’s picture was. She solved this by looking above it, out the window to the side, and catching a glimpse of a police car parked somewhere down the street, its lights flashing slowly but its siren silent. It did not faze her. Ever since that fool man, with his dead wife and his religious faith that had done him no good but to make him crazy, had shot his head off at the altar in St. Anselm’s, there were police cars in this street all the time. It was almost comforting. This was Philadelphia, after all. They could always use a police presence. Edith made a mental note to write a column about faith healing, something everybody hated, something she couldn’t be made a fool of for writing. Then she realized that she was standing there in front of the mail slot with the mail at her feet, and that all the news was bad.
“First rule of real life,” Bennis Hannaford had told her. “When they want the piece, they don’t send mail in your stamped, self-addressed envelope. They don’t even use e-mail. They get on the phone and call.”