Lying naked on the velour couch in the incense-choked living room of a woman he did not love, Jason Sanders did not, or could not, reflect. The room was dim, claustrophobic. Light attempted to flicker its way through the brimstone-scented incense clouds from gothic gobs of candle wax and through a small bead-hung window. A black light near the boom box, which was droning industrial metal, absorbed the glow of two lava lamps. "This is my love den," she had said, ushering him in from the cramped, grungy kitchen. "The candles are for your birthday," which was impossible, unless she had lit them on this day years earlier.

When she left him in the living room, with the stated intention of "slipping into something more comfortable," Jason fell to the couch as if he had fallen there a long time ago. Some ancestor of his had played this role a long time ago; he knew the slow collapse onto the couch under the weight of his choice. He undressed.

Outside, under a sky white and heavy with August heat, a five-lane strip highway grinded along, its motors and kitchen ventilators and trash compactors. The strip mall stores glared through acrid waves of hooded heat on waiting, turning, stalling cars. Though the sounds of the strip outside and the industrial music inside were somewhat different, coal inspired both. Jason Sanders, twenty-five-year (which is to say life-long) resident in this middling city, did not reflect on coal, but knew in his Appalachian blood that coal and, by extension, the underworld, was king. He undressed.

Across the city, which means through the viaduct under the railroad tracks, along tree-haven streets, a block before the grass and polished-dirt park: inside an eccentric Railroad Age house and up to the southerly second-story apartment: Jason Sanders's marriage. Though only three weeks' clothes, dishes, books, and unopened mail bestrew the hardwood floors, the accumulation is eloquent of seven years' untidy domesticity. A corner of a nuptial Persian rug, once the object of connubial pride, climbs a wall in diagonal repose in the furthest corner from a defunct gas-fire hearth. A child accustomed to plush should have played on it, or such was the intention of its donors over seven years ago when Jason and Sarah hastened a wedding of Habsburgian inevitability in expectation of the unexpected child. After the miscarriage, the rug, like love and prayer, had seemed a conspicuous extravagance; these, however, the couple did not consciously discard because gifts from parents and love and prayer were known to be good things. So the rug remained, a reminder of unpleasantness, which, if it crept to a corner and began to climb the wall, was left to its own devices. Now in the empty apartment the rug and detritus are not objects but ghosts.

Dressed in white tie and tails, bearing the wine they had ordered from room service on their wedding night, the third person had stood in the doorway — or so perhaps they had both dreamed, each hurrying the next morning to tell the other. He had entered uninvited, handing Jason a note card on which was written, "2:18."

"What is this?" he had asked.

"My gift to you. It is the precise time at which you became one."

"Oh," Jason had said, pursing his lips sarcastically for Sarah's benefit.

"Thank you," Sarah had said. "What a thoughtful gift."

The stranger then asked for a kiss, which Sarah allowed on the cheek where dozens of relations had already placed a kiss. When his lips touched her face, Jason's cheek also was kissed. Sarah then submitted to his caresses. He moved his lips in a pattern over her forehead, her lips, and over her heart. As the third person removed, one by one, the 40 pins bolstering Sarah's hair, Jason's hair tingled at the roots. When her hair fell to her shoulders the third person said to both of them, "My bride," and led them to the bed. There they opened their self to him, and he loved them.

Jason Sanders had seen jealousy rise before him and fall at the third person's touch. The next day, as they discussed the night with muted tones and blushes, jealousy overcame him again.

"It was just a dream," he said, and she, ashamed, agreed.

On the third night of honeymoon at a Maine hermitage, after sailing a small boat together most of the day on a glacier-etched lake and spotting loons and smoking a cigarette till they resurfaced to spot them again, they had drunk sapphire martinis at a lumbered kitchen table.

"You aren't jealous, are you?" she said when they had gone to the porch to smoke a cigarette and look for satellites.

"No."

"Of the person, I mean."

"I know."

"It seems like it would be natural to be jealous."

A loon shrilled its banshee cry and she curled against him, nuzzling a cold nose into his neck.

"I don't think you should be jealous," she said.

As the gin phosphoresced around them that night, they levitated upon it until they were high enough to see down through its convex depths into their future, its details still indistinct but their primary colors magnified, nearly present. They spoke of the child she carried, their dreams for it. She said it needed good godparents and he, eased by the gin, joked that the third person would probably take up the offer, intent as he was on involving himself in their most intimate moments.

"Yes!" she enthused. "Let's ask him."

When Jason made love to his bride that night he saw still through the gin lens, which was by now fish-eyed so that he saw himself, too. And as he moved above her he saw their self below him, their two bodies fused in the lens's blur. Near his climax, an excess of love welled up within him and washed over him, pooling around the conjoined bodies in the lens so that he must become the self in the lens. His body remained brooding over her, but he felt it all now as if she were his body, and the body above them, the fixed point of perspective at the eye of the lens, revealed itself now to be the third person who was making love to them in or as Jason, who was making love to his wife.

Lying naked on the velour couch, Jason Sanders might have reflected on the wedding-night apparition, but the darkness, hanging in the air like clouds of incense, paralyzed him. The darkness rose up, visible, out of the specifics of the situation — the drinks at lunch, his wife's note, a skirt, these stale cushions — and showed them to be dull, duller than the darkness. It descended in the incense and showed itself to be the air he breathed. It traversed the space and time of the small room and showed itself to fill it. It turned the time-space continuum inside out so that all of time and the universe were contained within his place and moment as in an immense bubble, his time and place stretched to a thin translucent oily shifting film, and showed itself to fill that, too. Miles away, hypothetically, a cold front bearing rain stirred a great wind, one breath of which could have dispelled the darkness.

Or perhaps those winds could move along the years. Before and for a time after the miscarriage there had been an arduous joy, their marriage a poor but picturesque kingdom contained in a fluorescent-lit two-room apartment behind the Wal-Mart where he worked nights as a security guard to support them during college. Their love seemed to consecrate the domestic paraphernalia — the same that later depressed their cluttered living room — so that Tupperware and plastic glassware became fetishistic ritual objects of the marriage cultus. Every act in the kingdom of marriage was a ritual pointing beyond itself to another kingdom in which glassware was made of glass and there were no leftovers and no hunger either. At some point, probably after college, at the beginnings of their careers, they neglected the cultus, and the rituals stopped pointing beyond themselves, exhausted in self-reference. It was now more unlikely that grace should move across the years, across the kingdom whose ritual objects had been profaned and rites desecrated, than that light should penetrate the black-lit living room where Jason laid.

The nights of the college years — spent in fluorescent vigilance at Wal-Mart, Jason standing guard in a handsome black security uniform while Sarah studied for both of them at a McDonald's table near the entrance — had resolved them to pursue something better than a plebeian's servile place in the mass market for themselves and their children. They wanted to save, or at least change, or at least preserve what good was in, the world. While Jason set out on a career with vague ambitions in journalism, Sarah became a teacher. In her second year, instead of coasting along on the previous year's lesson plans, she began learning origami and papier-mâché, preparing seven-course meals for her French class, memorizing audition-sized chunks of classic literature to recite to her English classes. In her third year, she directed a neighborhood shadow-puppet mime, wrote a libretto for the local children's opera company, organized the school rummage sale, coached the girls' badminton team, baked cookies twice a week for the teachers' lounge, advised the school literary magazine and yearbook, and spearheaded the campaign to get an innovative English curriculum accredited. She left the house each morning while it was still dark and Jason still in bed and used the weekends to catch up on grading. Their conversations, their exchanges, became respectful and terse, each hurrying to inquire about the other, "How are you?" And each was careful to reply to the other, "Fine," and the objects gave up their ghosts.

By the time Tamara arrived in their lives, they were two years beyond the period of arduous happiness. She was a Southern hippie, dirty and carefree, who drank happily and often, and never showed up late for work. She came to town as the friend of a friend of Sarah's. When Jason saw that Sarah felt obligated to befriend Tamara, he did all he could to encourage the relationship in order to draw her out of her hundred-hour work week. He arranged a secretarial job for Tamara at his newspaper. She became a frequent visitor to their apartment, and when she came to drink Lite beers with Jason, the ghosts behind the objects seemed to vanish and all manner of domestic appurtenance lost the sheen of tragedy, of desecration. The two drank and talked about mundane things in the living room, trying to distract Sarah from her desk in the adjacent sunroom. Often they lured her away because when Tamara was there glasses were glasses and Tupperware Tupperware and it seemed impossible to think that they had ever been ritual objects. Sarah was glad to forget, if not the cultus, then at least its desecration.

When the third person appeared, as he was wont from time to time to do, they could not forget. They were careful not to drink before making love, for fear that he would come again. If he appeared, usually they stopped making love, but always this required resisting the love that entered them, and sometimes it overwhelmed them so that they could not stop. When this happened they could see the ghosts behind the objects more clearly than ever, but also they thought they saw the ghosts begin to resaturate the objects with their former fetishistic glory.

Then they spoke to each other through apprehensive eyes: "Will it come back again?"

And with some hope in their eyes: "Can it come back again? Can it be restored?"

In a few days, though, after the house had been cleaned and messed again, after they had massaged each other to sleep and then fell asleep before the massages, after they had said their prayers before bed and then began putting them off till morning and evening and the next morning, the objects detached from their ghosts again and Jason and Sarah faced the work week and the desolation of the weeks to come.

On the morning of his birthday, deep inside a long period of desolation, the note she had left on the table had said, "We must do wash today," "we" meaning he, because she feared the ritual as he did, but it fell to him because he had more time to be the domestic priest. The phone had rung: Tamara. He had made excuses — too much work to do, he had been procrastinating too long — but she had prevailed and persuaded him to a birthday lunch, for which she had taken the afternoon off from work.

Before he left the house to meet her he had put a load of laundry in the basement washing machine. Now during their lunch and trivial conversation, over a single martini and two beers that did not get him drunk, he thought of the clothes in the basement and wondered how long they could sit spun and damp in the machine before going stale. Having agreed to have another drink with Tamara at her place — where the liquor was cheaper — Jason stopped by his house briefly after lunch and transferred the wash to the dryer. Another drink or two, he thought, and he could face the folding and ironing, the washing of last night's dishes, the hanging and washing and drying in a lonely flat full of ghosts.

Shortly after entering her apartment, he knew. He did not think, I am going to commit adultery, but he knew and some part of him knew to avoid reflection. He knew instead, without reflection, what his blood knew. It felt and saw and smelled and smacked of the bituminous cloud hovering in the incense over the old velour couch, muffling the boom box's industrial drone, absorbing what light filtered through the bead-bedecked single window. After she left the room to "slip into something more comfortable," his blood knew how to respond, knew the part he had to play. But he was not the character he played, not the undersexed husband who has never experienced his youth and nurses a legitimate sense of injustice and deserves something more and bargained on something more and has a God-given need for human intimacy and needs something special on his birthday and no matter the consequences and there being really no consequences because in a marriage as dead as this how could one infidelity, or even ten, make a difference? Rather, undressed and slouching on the couch as gravity would have him, his torso buckling in several folds and his figure pale and very aged, he played his part without gusto or mannerism.

They appeared in the hallway together. The dim light hid his nakedness, so nothing stayed them from their intention: "Surprise!" they trilled. "Hap-py birth-day!"

After she grasped the situation, which was after she had crossed the room in concern for his well-being and after, at her tender touch, he had hidden his face in shame, a breeze had stirred the incense. The paralyzing cloud having lifted, freeing Jason to dress himself, they had spoken little. The boom box drone had accompanied their tactical words: the arrangements that kept her at Tamara's for the night, provided him with dinner at home, blocked out a time for them to talk the next day. The crisis had been sudden, the immediate aftermath understated, businesslike. He had left and she had stayed on at Tamara's.

Tamara had been shocked, immediately suggesting divorce, and offered her guest room if Sarah wanted to move in. Her parents would take the opposite line — she knew them well enough — arranging counseling appointments with their respective pastors, offering Southern Baptist marriage manuals and picking her up for church Sunday mornings. But on the evening of the day her husband betrayed her she knew what to do. With a few well-chosen words, she set Tamara's conscience at ease, let her know that she was not to blame. Alone in the guest room she allotted herself thirty minutes each evening to cry, for as many days as it would take to get it out. Then she reviewed the past year, the years, and concluded that, while she may have been justified in dedicating most of her time to the high calling of teaching, and while her husband may not have been sufficiently understanding and supportive of her efforts, she should have sacrificed her standards of perfection in teaching in order to comfort her husband, who was not strong enough to support her. She concluded that she had been blind to the state of her marriage. She made a list of the ways she had fallen short of being a good wife. Then she made a list of the ways in which she could be a perfect wife. As she reflected and wrote, the vision of perfection began to arrange itself before her, point by point on her pad of paper.

As she was moved to hope, the tears came again, and to control them she wrote, in autonomic repetition, a phrase of a language she did not understand that had presented itself to her as comfort, summoning itself from a digested chaos of fragmented, non-signifying memories. Ubi caritas et amor: her lips repeated it in novitiate elocution. And before her lips, there also was the third person, dressed in a bridegroom's suit, kissing her on her eyes and nose and cheeks. When she woke up in the morning she remembered the previous day's betrayal, and the anger in her heart, stubborn like a stone, was covered with the first pearly layer of love.

Driving away from Tamara's apartment, under the railroad tracks and along the bustling park, Jason had mourned his marriage. The birthday surprise had been a sharp embarrassment, a shame, but when he saw the joggers in the park who knew nothing of the debacle — and he was sure would know nothing because Tamara was a loyal friend — the embarrassment soon passed. Then the recollection of the women's surprise did not sting or overawe him with its tragedy. Had the effect of the isolated infidelity been immediately devastating, leaving him in a pool of his remorseful tears, he could have risen the next day buoyed with resolved vigor to amend his error, encouraged by a swell of emotive love. Instead he saw the infidelity not as a deviation from a normally faithful marriage, but the consummation of an unfaithful marriage that had for some time now tended toward adultery.

The scene in Tamara's apartment presented itself to him as an icon, a symbolically compressed synchronic composition of the marriage. On the couch in the lower left corner, grayish-red in torpor, one fist closed at his side while the other gestures open to the window, Jason's image reclines amidst the litter of the floors. In the lower right, separated from him by a cutaway wall and facing the edge of the picture, Sarah bears in one hand books and a cake, her other elbow draped with streamers below the hand, its index and middle finger raised in pardon. Her dress is blue, faded to match her passionless, Byzantine eye sockets. She is in motion, bustling to the corner for her purse; her halo seems to have trouble keeping up. Above both of them, in the place of a ceiling, lurks a cloud fed black from below by a coal stove and yellow from above — in an expanse of creamy gold, shot through with the rays of an extra-pictorial sun — by two thuribles freeze-framed on the upswing of their pendula. The diminutive cherubic thurifers incline their faces to an elongated figure levitating slightly above the cloud who, like Jason, gestures with an open beckoning hand and, like Sarah, raises the other hand in pardon. The figure's mouth is open in speech, and Jason, unlike his image in the icon, could hear, or at least read along the bottom of the icon, the words, deus ibi est, which he reckoned to be a mistake because he saw now that there beneath the coal cloud God precisely was not.

He and Sarah knew with what neglect they had cared for the marriage cult. The domestic God and all attendant spirits had long since fled the apartment, he thought. His mishap today had only been the finale of the desecration. He did not look beyond the icon to a future in which to renovate the cultus, for the icon seemed to have gathered all time into it. He simply kept the image before his mind's eye as he went home to mourn.

The industrial drone of the music was not with them on the day after or on the subsequent days and weeks of conversation, but they heard dark notes ahead of them, in the future, as they spoke in broken, hyphenated sentences like those of two hikers, one trailing the other, coming out of a steep valley. They interpreted the music as dirge, and so made their way toward it in anticipation of a deeper, more meaningful mourning than the expressions of bewilderment, anger, and disbelieving grief they traded in the first weeks of conversation. Sarah, despite her vision of perfection and possible peace, detected in her heart's anger the seeds of a catastrophe that she did not know how to avert. Hers, though, was at first the only vision of hope, however weak, between the two of them, and to counterbalance his despair she spoke more positively of her hope than she otherwise might have done.

"But this can't be the way it always — " she was saying.

"Ends?" he said. "No."

"Then what?"

"Is."

"But not was."

"No, maybe."

"And so not always has to be."

"Maybe, but it does not explain."

Their dialogue was long and errant — punctuated by her half-hour rations of tears and their workdays — their words self-consuming, their point only in the past without conception of the future but for grief. And they mourned the whole of their past, the marriage arranged by fate and family, the desecration of its rite, the seeming impossibility of renovation. There was no end to the talk, evening after evening, but gradually the repetitions began to appear as switchbacks on a steep trail and they gathered the sense of ascent, that they were climbing out of a dark valley to a point much higher where they would find, if not hope, then a lighter mourning, a danceable dirge. From the days and hours of errant talk emerged the elliptical tracings of a meaningful conversation, the précis of a movement of the soul. In retrospect, the weeks of conversation compressed themselves to this series of traces, the tracks of their ascent.

"It's not that I don't — " he was saying.

"But you did — "

"Yes, and now there is only — "

"Grief?"

"Grief."

"But not only, surely."

"God, this house."

"Yes."

"It could really use — "

"It could really use some cleaning."

As the conversation developed over weeks, they also cleaned and tidied, arranged and rearranged, in the apartment they paced for weeks of evenings. When Jason began to pick up detritus, he held each thing in his arms, as if it were from the side of the steep trail that he picked it up, and he were carrying it with him to a place at which they had not yet arrived, carrying the pile as talismans, or lost-and-found items, toward the dirge ahead.

"I just don't see how — " she said.

"No."

"But how could — "

"But I did — that is, it's hard to say." He added a hammer and nails to his embrace.

"And the day?"

"I don't know if I can — " He dropped a book.

"But you have to sometime."

"Is looking back — "

"The same as remembering?"

"Yes."

"No."

"In the first instance — " He picked up a moldy coffee cup and averted his nose. " — you want to go back."

"And in the second?"

"You don't want to go back — "

" — And so that's why you remember?"

"Yes — and to know which direction is up and out."

They spent some days during this time in actual hiking, keeping as much away from public entertainments like movies and sporting events as possible. At first they read pain in other couples' faces and panicked to think that all marriage is a contract of sadness. Later they avoided public places because in the hills along the river, taking with slow and wandering steps their solitary way on rooted trails in unpeopled busy woods, they caught themselves talking to each other impulsively, without self-reflection, about their youth — about making love in the woods, about bottles of wine on an afternoon train, a blue-moon walk when both had woken in the middle of the night alive to the moon and taken a chilly turn around the block together. The talk at these times was not the sticky nostalgia of a wake, but bubbling reminiscence for the sake of immediate pleasure. They were not, it became apparent, engaged in mere peace talks. And so they avoided the public — the silent pairs of faces in truce at restaurants and the gregarious couples at the motorboat regattas who launched social sorties from each other's air space as agreed in the recently revised marriage treaty — not for fear that all marriages must be like those observed, but because they glimpsed, though dimly, an alternative. In the woods sometimes they could concentrate on seeing it clearly, while the movies and social events distracted them, set them back weeks.

But, despite the brief flights of reminiscent transcendence, the infrequent walks in the woods did little to unburden them of their grief. As they looked to, or rather for, their future, they continued the muddled conversation of explanation.

"But it came so swiftly," he was saying.

"Did it?"

"Regardless, at least, of — "

"Circumstance? No."

"Yes. That is, no. That is, what could we have done?"

"Or can do."

"Which is to say, can we?"

"It seems so."

"Which, then, is to say, what?"

"Yes, it does feel intractable." She scrubbed at a tar stain on the pine floor.

"Immovable." His broom chased a dust bunny along the moldings at the base of the wall.

"Irredeemable." She restored an upended chair to its place by the sofa.

"Despite all intention against recidivism."

"So you have turned from it for good?" she was saying.

"Yes, but in the myth — "

"Which one?"

"Which one?" He deposited his pile on a bookshelf and took another turn around the room. "There's Lot's wife — "

"And Eurydice, I was thinking."

" — and the harrowing of hell."

"Yes."

"But Orpheus doesn't want to go back."

"No."

"And you don't either."

"No, but I want to make sure — I'm afraid that — " He again deposited a heap on the bookshelf and remained there, facing the wall.

"I am still there," she said.

"But could you ever — move on from there? Because I am not like Lot's wife, lingering for the sake of things that were all on fire. I think I could bear it, being Orpheus or one of the harrowed, if I knew — " He began to turn, then gripped the bookshelf and kept his back to her.

"But I didn't mean that. I am not still there."

"You mean you're here."

"Yes."

"You, too, are coming away?"

"Yes."

"You, too, are following — "

"Yes, we are both following."

"When can I look back?"

"Maybe now — to reflect."

"But none of them were allowed until they got out."

"And so what did they look at?"

"I don't know. An angel? The top? The path?"

"But not back."

"No. But then, when they are out, they must."

"Yes, or they would get drunk like Lot and — what?"

"Slept with his daughter."

"Hmph." She giggled and tossed a glass in the air and caught it again. "It shouldn't be funny."

"No. Yes.... But if then I can look back to reflect, when to look for you?"

"When we get out, you won't have to."

"Is that comforting?"

"Is it bearable?"

He made another trip of gathering, still with his back to her, and she saw that though he deposited his heaps of detritus on the bookshelf, he carried their ghosts still in his embrace. When he stopped again at the bookshelf, he built of the dishes and books and papers a structure balanced so delicately that it moved in the apartment's air like a kinetic sculpture, seemed in fact buoyed by the warm breaths of air. When he stepped away, she saw that the ghosts now hovered nearer their objects, expecting.

"I wish you would carry me to bed," she said.

He laughed. "If you'll carry me."

She came to stand beside him on his right, facing the opposite direction, on the Persian rug before the kinetic altar. Placing his left arm around her shoulders and reaching his right arm around her far hip, he lifted her, and she responded with apposite gesture. It was the unseen hand, upholding them at their chiasmic intersection, toward which both of their heads inclined as it led them, floating, across the threshold of their bedroom.

Their lovemaking was no less mournful than their conversations, but it was a kind of dancing. And even if they doubted whether there was still anything in the marriage to affirm, the sexual act, so insistently procreative, was affirmation. If it did not affirm their life, it affirmed at least life. And though they refused in their mourning to call it beauty, the sensation of the beautiful, which had been absent the past several weeks, moved them. When Jason rubbed his wife's back after the sex, though he told himself he wanted a backrub in return, his intentions, in spite of himself, were good. And when Sarah told her husband that she loved him, though she was not sure she meant it, she was telling the truth. They fell asleep feeling distant, feeling that there was not one flesh in bed as should be, but two. And they were right. The other person laid with them, brooding over their dreams.

Ryan J. Jack McDermott lives in the Virginia wine country with his wife and young son, Augustine. He is working on a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Virginia, and holds a Master's in Theological Studies from Duke Divinity School. He is the arts editor of The New Pantagruel