3.

Their life has come to revolve around Peoples Temple in strange, small ways. Friends from before are ‘non-Temple friends’ and their calls not always returned. Food Evelyn makes is often ‘Temple food’, for potlucks or midweek meetings, or sometimes cakes or cookies to be sold. When they get in the station wagon to go anywhere, there is always three minutes of meditation first, and the one time Lenny forgets to do this he almost runs over that white cat. When Evelyn is offered a position instructing girls’ P.E. at Evergreen High, in addition to the French teaching job she secured even before graduation, she comes home starry-eyed and gushing, ‘I can’t wait to finally be earning some real money for the Temple!’ When Lenny is told of the ‘groovy night classes’ Jim Jones teaches a couple of towns over, he doesn’t like the idea of being away from Evelyn, but she says he should go, says it’s important not to neglect his mind with all the days spent with crazy people and he’ll no doubt learn a lot, can come home and tell her what he’s learned and save her the trouble of going herself. So on Thursdays, Lenny packs a change of clothes and drives thirty minutes from the mental hospital to the high school in Moontown, and for two hours or usually more, he’ll sit in the over-filled classroom and try to follow as Jim Jones zips from topic to topic: Mao Zedong, the Spanish Inquisition, reincarnation, the execution of the Rosenbergs. Mostly Lenny likes the classes and the people in them — at least half of whom are Temple and the rest hippies or rednecks from all over the county — but the long hours are difficult and he has trouble articulating anything he learns to Evelyn and on these nights they never have sex.

Saturdays are no longer days of leisure but Temple days as much as Sundays, days for Temple construction work, which isn’t easy for a Berkeley Hills boy unaccustomed to physical labor and not so good at taking instructions. The old Temple people from Indiana are often common people, who’ve made their livings on farms or in factories, and are quick to shove Lenny away or take the tools right out of his hands when he does something wrong, and will sometimes even cuss at him — folksy cusses like for-pete’s-sake or goshdarnit, but their facial expressions mean, snarling.

Evelyn never seems to mess up. He sees her from a distance working and talking in an old shirt of his and wonders how she does it.

Late in July, Evelyn turns twenty-three, and Lenny is proud of his pretty smart wife, so grown-up, always growing. Her birthday is observed early as part of the Temple’s communal July-births celebration, a barbecue after one of those hardworking Saturdays, but he would like to get her something nice. So he calls her parents in Davis and speaks for a long time with her mother, whose name is Margaret and who knows better than anyone the sorts of things Evelyn likes. They talk about books, blouses, a delicate but practical wristwatch so Evelyn can keep time when she starts teaching, but in the end, they agree on some earrings: Mexican silver like on their honeymoon, and with little dangling roses. When he describes them to Margaret, she says yes, silver roses, how Evelyn.

‘I mean, they’re lovely of course,’ Evelyn says on the morning of her birthday, having unwrapped the tiny jewelry box, ‘But I meant it when I said I don’t want you wasting money on me. I’d rather help the Temple than accumulate material vanities.’

She proceeds to tell him emphatically not to get her anything for their first wedding anniversary in August, that she won’t get him anything, and he feels hurt, disconcerted. Yet she does wear the earrings, seems to like them and touch them frequently, and looking at her bare neck and pinned hair, he thinks she is even more beautiful than when he used to see her around campus, walking around like a rare thing that he would never know.

‘He is bright in his own way, it’s just not a lot comes out and not a lot gets through.’

‘Mmm-hmm. I seen that.’ Jim Jones takes a sip of coffee, swirls it around his mouth, and swallows. ‘Thing is, I think, he been sheltered. By privilege, parents, women. ’Course, I don’t blame you. He got that sweetness, makes a woman protective. Just, ah, honey, don’t be fooled into thinkin’ you got all the power, on account of he depends on you. Male dependency, that’s a form of chauvinism.’

‘I never thought of it that way,’ Evelyn says.

‘You think on that, darlin’. I want you to think on that, ’cause it’s my feeling … Socialism ain’t about weak takin’ from strong. We all wanna be freethinking, striving individuals, workin’ for the greater good, and Lenny can’t be doin’ that if he’s dependent.’

‘Perhaps I’ve been living in bad faith all this time.’ Evelyn looks at her coffee.

‘Hell, honey, I know you’re tryin’ hard to live the honest life. Meaningful life. Ain’t easy. Hope you don’t mind me askin’ … Man you with before Lenny, you love him better?’

‘I … didn’t realize I had mentioned …’ Evelyn feels her cheeks burning — that characteristic sense of shame that always comes over her when anyone mentions Jean-Claude unexpectedly. ‘I suppose I did, if romantic love is what you mean.’ She sees Jim Jones frown and tries to explain herself. ‘I was younger then, and it was a new world, and he was the first man of any substance I was, well, with. I was vulnerable, I think, to that kind of romantic attachment.’

‘You were vulnerable.’ Jim Jones chews over this fact and extrapolates quietly, ‘You allowed yourself to be vulnerable, like never before. He was, uh, older?’

‘Not very much older. Twenty-four. I was twenty. I was you-ng.’ Evelyn’s voice cracks queerly, and her face suddenly feels like it might shatter. She is still young.

‘He taught me things, showed me things. He was a Marxist, and a very good lover.’ Evelyn takes a deep breath. ‘We read poetry … French poetry. We only spoke French together. I spoke like a child when I met him, but then I was fluent and then it was over. I could have married him.’

There’s much more Evelyn could say about Jean-Claude, but already she suspects she’s said too much. Jim Jones is silent, staring somewhere behind her. She has bored him. Her problems are boring and insignificant and not real problems. She brushes her hand over the table and makes her voice clear and shallow. ‘It would’ve been a very different life. But it’s not the life I’ve chosen.’

At this, Jim Jones looks at her. He has his sunglasses tucked into his shirt pocket, and his eyes without them are very kind and very brown, almost Oriental. She likes his eyes. ‘That vulnerability, made you love the Frenchman …’ Jim Jones starts thoughtfully, then smiles like he’s telling a joke and reaches across the table. Her hand. ‘You keep that. You need that. Where you goin’, this life you’ve chosen, you’re gonna need to be vulnerable.’

Later, after they have risen from the table and he has kissed her, a visiting pastor’s kiss by her ear, nothing more, and he has complimented her earrings — ‘Them’s nice roses there’ — and she has thanked him again for the paperwork — really she likes it, she isn’t suited to being a housewife, anything for the Temple that uses her mind before the summer is up — and after he is gone, and there’s only the white emptiness of the house and empty white cups to be rinsed, cups that remind her of eggshells, and her hands on the cups, that hand he held, and her voice humming softly, a song she doesn’t consciously choose but so appropriate: Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair, His lips are something wondr’ous fair … And, yes, his hair is black, and, yes, she loves him truly. To the devil on her shoulder, she’s smiling yes, thinking of the man who just left and smiling, for is it so bad to love him? To love this man so wondrous and black-haired? And anyway, she isn’t serious in the thought, can dismiss it any moment, is a freethinking woman with free will. Dismissing it and drying her hands, she sees, outside the kitchen window, the garden where two months ago they were growing marijuana — two months is not a long time, two months is not true love. But love, she loves, she knows, and no angel to whisper otherwise, no punishing lightning bolt, only the garden, which somehow breaks her heart, and the white cups drying upside-down and her white hands on the dishtowel and a sudden muddled feeling in her brain, because of course it’s true, of course she is, and there’s no hope for her: she is in love with Jim Jones.