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all been there. They’d all done that. And most had their “I Love NY” T-shirts to prove it.
    Now this was something that even the most discerning eye couldn’t see. For 150 years, First Baptist had been the church home to uptown’s most distinguished and dignified stakeholders. While other members came and went, the inner circle was a small conglomerate of “I’s”—inheritors, investors, and insiders. Going all the way back before worshippers at Convent and Abyssinia, and even those blacks with more bourgeois aspirations who’d traveled downtown to find their God in the pews at the Methodist and Catholic churches, First Baptist’s original members were some of New York’s first Ivy League graduates, lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, politicians, and big-business proprietors. Slick and savvy, they believed in and portrayed an image that was far from reproach and close to godliness.
    More than two centuries later, the Virtuous Women were a stagnant emblem of this persona. Only, like their predecessors, it was more pomp than particularly true.
    “I told Richard that no Christian man would ask his wife to do such a thing,” Sister Oliver went on. She was in the middle of a tearful testimony about her husband’s recent desire for oral pleasure.
    “No,” a chorus of condemnation surfaced around the table of twenty-three women.
    “It’s just not right. It’s not pure. That…thing shouldn’t be anywhere near my mouth!” She struck the table and fell back in her seat dramatically. The sisters on either side of her leaned in to provide comfort.
    “When did it start?” another sister asked after Sister Oliver gathered herself. Her voice held high a focus on disdain, but still there was a hint of sheer nosiness. “I mean, when did Deacon Oliver start asking you to…you know”—dagger eyes from around the table stopped her midsentence—“do that?”
    “It was last month,” Sister Oliver started. “He went away on his business trip to Jamaica and came back asking me to…do it. He tried to pull the car over on the highway on the way back from the airport. We were on the Long Island Expressway! I couldn’t do that! Not on the expressway!”
    While a solemn hush of shame eased about the room, across the table from Sister Oliver was one member whose snickering at the thought of the roadside romp could not be contained.
    Troy was trying so hard to focus. She held her hands on her Bible and bit the inside of her upper lip whenever her mind drifted away from Christian thought. But just as it had when she had gone to church with her Grandma Lucy as a child, this technique was failing her now. Her upper lip was already numb and the thought of Sister Oliver playing headmistress 7 on the side of the expressway was…well…sinfully hilarious.
    The latest Sister Oliver was the second Mrs. Oliver to a sixty-year-old widower who’d spent more time enjoying his newfound sexual freedom than mourning his wife’s death before he settled on courting Mamie, the short and plump middle-age daughter of an older, well-respected deacon. Never married and ridiculously prudish, Mamie wasn’t exactly the best fit for Deacon Oliver, but she was the only single woman in the church in his age group who didn’t have children and grandchildren he’d have to worry about.
    Sister Oliver seemed to come to each meeting with some new complaint about Deacon Oliver’s bed acumen and at each meeting Troy was forced to shake her head and bite her upper lip until it bled.
    “I tried it for my husband once,” another sister started, “but it made my jaw hurt and I bit my tongue.”
    Troy’s snicker blossomed into a giggle that could be heard by her neighbor, the president of the Virtuous Women, Sister Myrtle Glover.
    “Now, now,” Myrtle said, rolling her eyes at Troy. “We won’t hear of that. We all know that such behaviors are hedonistic and we must protect our husbands from falling to these worldly desires. The penis is meant for