Come Sunday: A Novel by Isla Morley Page A

looked slept in, with black eyes casting dark shadows beneath them, could smile the saddest of smiles, a smile that made you want to run for your first aid kit.
    “How goes the war?” he would ask, meaning the deadlines and their casualties lying in scrappy piles on my desk. Or maybe he never meant that at all.
    “The barbarians seem to have the upper hand,” I usually answered.
    After a few weeks he started coming in, as if the desire for conversation was enough to make one happen. Sometimes it was only when he got to my desk that he realized he had nothing to say. And I would apply the energy it took to jump-start a dead battery just to find a way to reply. Instead of exchanging any words then, we would look at each other the way mothers tell their children not to look into the sun.
    Sometimes he would pick up the galleys of an article I was proofing and make a comment, and we’d keep it light. And then one time he picked up a book from my stack.
    “Nietzsche,” he said. “You read Nietzsche?”
    “When I’m having trouble sleeping,” I joked.
    “A man who fell in love only once, with a Russian girl sixteen years his junior.”
    “I didn’t know he married,” I said.
    “He didn’t. She turned him down and later became involved with Freud. Salomé was her name, perfect for a woman who caused him to lose his head, don’t you think?” It seemed to me then that Sal was speaking of himself and his own Salomé.
    A few days later, Sal returned to my office with a book under his arm.
    “I come bearing gifts,” he announced, handing me the book. I opened it to the page with the bookmark. It was Raphael’s painting of the Transfiguration of Jesus.
    “Are you religious?” I asked, drawn not to the ascending beatific Lord on the mount, but to the demonic expression of the boy’s face at its foot.
    “A lapsed but well-intentioned Catholic,” he replied. “See, our friend Nietzsche used this painting to explain one of his philosophical concepts. He believed the world was divided between the Apollonians and the Dionysians. Apollo, the god of light, represented reason and self-control. Dionysius, on the other hand, the god of wine, stood for intoxication and passion. And pain.”
    “I think I can guess in which camp he would put his dear Salomé.”
    “And himself.” Neither of us was looking at the painting anymore.
    “What about you?” I asked. It was a cheeky question, one that sprinkled crumbs into the forbidden forest, and one we could both pretend was meant for the birds, the way we could pretend we were talking about philosophy and not people losing their heads.
    “All Dionysius around you, I’m afraid.” He said it straight-up, eating the crumbs just as I had intended. It’s a game that children play, getting lost, just for that one delirious moment when you’re in the middle of something unfamiliar, where you have to smell and taste and guess your way. Sal was looking at me, unblinking: had he guessed right?
    There was no finding the way back by flipping the book’s pages, but I did anyway, to the page featuring Moreau’s painting of Salomé’s dance. I have since looked again and it is indeed the Baptizer’s head served on a silver platter, but at the time I could only see Greg’s. When I returned Sal’s look, it could only have been with Salomé’s eyes.
    All Dionysius around you . It was a dare, not a compliment, but nevertheless it confirmed that for someone I had ceased to be invisible. That I might be something other than mother, wife, baker, candlestick maker. That I might, if I were painted on one of Raphael’s cream canvases, be the siren whose plaintive song caused men’s ships to be dashed upon the rocks. It had not occurred to me then how closely my feelings might have resembled my mother’s.
    “She’s a beauty,” he said a few mornings later, returning the framed photo of Cleo to my desk. He touched things on my desk, lifted books, stroked picture frames. Everywhere