"Do we believe in souls, Justin?"
The large bay window of her bedroom was flung wide open, and through the filmy curtains drifted the fragrant urgings of the summer night.
Slowly, they had come apart from each other. He had watched their bodies separating as she had lifted herself away from him, her face turned to the side so that he was unable to read the shape of its expression.
They both had bodies that were narrow and very white; though the summer was well advanced, mid-August, they were both winter-pale, their days spent deep down in their enclosed pyramid with the wild properties of light.
She lay back, her hair slightly damp and darkened against the white pillow. When she was lying down like this, there was a hollow high up on each leg that he thought must be unique to her, heartachingly formed. He thought it would be impossible for him ever to love a woman who lacked this precise ellipse carved into each thigh. Her stomach, too, was concave and lovely, so much loveliness, and the moaning fragrance of the summer night pouring into the room.
There was only the thin light of the moon, and he needed to see her more clearly, to see how the momentary expression of her face was set. He switched on the little lamp beside her bed.
"Too bright, it hurts," she said, and, leaning over him, she fished out a black silk scarf from her night-table drawer and flung it over the light. She turned back to him then as she had been before, one arm cast back over her head, slightly altering the shape of her breasts, and she repeated her question.
"We believe in bodies, Justin, but do we believe in souls?"
Only minutes ago, sitting astride him, she had seemed almost terrifying in what she knew. Now he could see her in the silk-darkened light, her pupils large and almost entirely blotting out the blue, and he saw that she was smiling, her lips playfully curved, although she wanted him to answer. He could read the intent out of her mouth. Sometimes she was like this, childish and charming, and other times she terrified him by what she knew.
"Of course not, Dana. We're scientists, physicists. How can we believe in souls?"
Her lips were slightly bruised, swollen from his hard kisses. At first she hadn't wanted to kiss, it seemed to be the only thing their bodies could do to each other that made her uncomfortable. Now she hardly ever resisted his mouth against hers. Sometimes, though this was rare, he even found her mouth initiating the search after his.
"I can. I'm fully capable of believing myself possessed of an immortal soul. I think I'm even capable of believing you possessed of something vaguely soul-like."
The wounded lips made her seem even more like a child to him, as if she might have hurt herself by falling from her bike or tumbling out of a tree, and it stirred up tenderness, too much coming too quickly. He felt the frightening rush of it and let it escape in something like a laugh.
She smiled back, childish and charming.
There was little of the terrifying girl to be seen in her now. Only minutes before, she had moved over him so knowingly, all his desires in her tight grip as if she inhabited his mind, had access to the sensations of his body, knew his desires far better than he. Now she gazed at him like a child, waiting for him to answer.
"I meant justifiably, Dana: How can we believe in them justifiably?"
"Oh, justifiably!"
She was grinning broadly with her poor abused lips. He leaned over on his left elbow and kissed her. She turned her head away.
"Are they sore, your lips?" he asked, running a finger lightly over them.
"Mmm, now that you mention it. Brute."
"Soulless brute."
"All brutes are soulless. Therein lies the difference."
"All things are soulless, including you."
"Not me."
"Sometimes I think especially you."
She laughed, low down in her belly, so that he let his mouth move downward over her, his kisses tentative with doubt. He would never possess her certainty when it came to this sort of knowing. He still made mistakes, he made them often.
"Daddy believes just the opposite, you know."
Justin removed his mouth and looked up at her. Apparently, he had erred again.
"Daddy believes that all things are full of souls."
"Your father is a great physicist, Dana, not because he has such beliefs but despite them."
She smiled sweetly. It was an old argument between them, which was sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter.
Justin moved back up the bed so that he was lying beside her. He reached out again to run a finger over her lips, tracing them again and again, each time a little harder, and tried to imagine himself into her body. He had intimate knowledge of his doubts, while she always seemed to know how to make him feel exactly what she wanted him to feel.
Enchantress of the world.
She turned her head now to face him so that his finger slipped over her cheek.
"So you think it's just us and our bodies, then?"
"No 'and,' Dana. How can there be an 'and' when it's a single thing."
"I like the 'and.' I'm in favor of the 'and.' It seems too lonely without it."
"It seems lonelier to me with it. If you've got a soul concealed somewhere in here," he said, sweeping his hand from her shoulder to her thigh, his fingertips glancing the heartbreaking sweetness impressed in her flesh, "then how can I ever know it? How, Dana? I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all."
"That's probably the best argument you can give for the soul's existence," she had answered him, laughing softly, with nothing of the child left there to be seen.