The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Read Online Free

newly restored glory.
    It was from the construction workers that I first found out some of the details of Judith’s life—details that could, of course, come only from people who know your home so intimately they inevitably believe they’ve come to know something of you as well. Through them I learned that the woman was a lesbian bitch with too much money on her hands. She was fucking the architect on the side (you could tell by the way they always went off to some room when she came by), which explained why he was such a bastard himself and why he probably got the job. She wanted a bathroom on every floor of the house, which made no goddamn sense because why the fuck would she need four bathrooms when only two people would be living there? Her library was an entire floor and she wanted the whole thing with built-in bookcases and sliding doors to cover them. What kind of fucking person needed doors to cover their books? And her bedroom? It was half of the third floor. A whole fucking family could live in a room that size. There was no husband, boyfriend, or girlfriend, but she was a lesbian, you could bet on that. All you had to do was look at that short hair and nearly flat chest to see it.
     
    It wasn’t until the end of that September that I finally met the woman I had described to Joseph and Kenneth as tall and white. Until then I had seen her only once, in passing, out my bedroom window as she stood on the steps of the house and stared up at the roof. At first I had assumed that she was an agent of some city bureaucracy, assigned to the neighborhood to report on the condition of its aging buildings, to determine whether they were in need of repair or demolishment. Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes, and check up on the children of negligent parents. It wasn’t until she began to rub her hand along the banister and chip away at the crumbling black paint that I realized her interest in the house was purely personal. She foraged through her purse, pulled out a set of keys, and nudged the door open with her shoulder: irrefutable signs of ownership.
    Judith was sitting on the bottom steps of the house on an early fall afternoon with a little girl leaning back in between her legs when I came out of my house. I was dressed for a wedding, and as I turned to lock the door behind me, I heard her say, “What a beautiful garment.” Her use of the word “garment” struck me most—it was polite, almost formal, as if the word had been inserted into her sentence at the last possible moment out of an instinctive sense of cultural diplomacy. I was dressed entirely in white. I had on white pants, with a white shirt that had a crucifix embroidered down the middle, over which I wore a finely woven shroud of white cotton. It was an outfit that meant nothing here, stripped as it was of all context. On the rare occasions that I still wore it, I did so expecting the taunts and stares of my neighbors and their children.
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “What’s it made of?”
    “Cotton.”
    “Special occasion?”
    “A wedding.”
    “Not your own, is it?”
    “No. A cousin’s.”
    She introduced herself by pointing to the house behind her and telling me she had just moved in. Her name, Judith—Judy—was the English counterpart to my cousin’s name—Yodit. When I pointed that out she shook her head, bit down on her lower lip, and said, “No, no. That’s much prettier than Judith. Much prettier.” She was tall and narrow, with skinny arms and short brown hair cut just above her shoulders. She had a slightly crooked mouth and full lips that marked her face in a peculiar way. They made her mouth seem too large for her face, and her face too small for her head, so that there was something almost doll-like about her.
    “You’re right,” I said. “It is.”
    We both pretended to laugh, after which she introduced me to her