Perfect Reader (24 page)

“Interesting that sort of thing is allowed, and yet someone raises the notion of school prayer, which might accomplish similar goals, and everyone goes berserk,” Paul said. He’d been quiet throughout the meal, busily chewing, and the three of them paused in their eating and stared at him.

“You think there should be mandatory school prayer?” Flora said. “But which prayer? Whose prayer?”

“But Paul does have a point,” Madeleine said. “Where does one draw the line between traditional spirituality and spirituality in this nebulous ‘healing’ form, between ‘mindfulness’ and prayer?”

“Madeleine thinks it’s all hooey,” Ray said.

“I don’t think it’s hooey. Or what I think is hooey is not the act itself but the notion that one can solve the problem of school shootings with heavy breathing. That’s a fantasy. An understandable one. But a fantasy nonetheless.”

“At God, I think. One draws the line at God,” Flora said. She waited for Paul to defend himself. He refused. “That’s the difference between what Ray is doing and school prayer.”

“Anyway, it’s going well,” Ray said.

“All this talk of reducing stress and violence. It’s so American, isn’t it?” Madeleine said. “Do other cultures talk about these things?”

“We have a different kind of violence here. It’s a real problem,” Paul said.

“Do people ‘go postal’ abroad? Or is that coinage and pathology ours alone?”

“Sometimes violence seems like an excellent way to reduce stress,” Flora said.

“You don’t mean that,” Paul scolded.

“I’m afraid she does,” Madeleine said lightly. “Don’t let that sweet face fool you.”

“Everything’s delicious,” Paul said.

“It’s the grill,” Ray said, happy to talk food. “Works like a charm. Thanks for your help out there.”

The dining room light fixture was an upside-down colander Georgia had painted during her Bloomsbury phase. Paul, Apostle though he was, seemed not to notice. The tablecloth of layered ivories, Madeleine had woven in college. The transporting thinginess of things. Flora felt herself reach the moment of too much wine. She met the moment, and surpassed it. The plates were cleared, and they moved to the futons in the living room for dessert—homemade lemon bars and espresso. Flora stuck with wine.

Madeleine asked Paul about his practice, how he found the legal woes of Darwinians.

“It’s mostly divorces, a depressing number of divorces,” he said, as was his line. “Divorce and real estate.”

“That pretty much sums up my life,” Flora said. Everyone ignored her. Did he not believe in divorce, this Paul? Did he believe in the sanctity of marital misery and all that? School prayer? Good Christ. Was he a hypocrite for all the premarital sex? Was every ejaculation not a release but an agony of guilt? What variety of believer was he? And Esther Moon, too, with her out-of-wedlock baby and her sexy gold cross, like a hand gesturing toward her breasts. Was Christianity in Darwin another twenty-first-century trend, a regressive rebellion like the kind enacted by stay-at-home moms?

Paul asked Ray and Madeleine where they liked to hike. They told him about their favorite spot, out by the reservoir, where sometimes in winter they went cross-country skiing at night. They talked headlamps. Talk of headlamps led to talk of camping. They talked tents.

“I bet this one has never so much as set foot inside a tent,” Paul said, flirting, oblivious.

“Zipping myself into my room for the night?” Flora said. “No thank you.”

After dessert, she followed Ray upstairs while Paul helped wash up. A transaction had been discussed ahead of time. He gave her a plastic bag with three finely rolled joints. “This stuff is smooth,” he told her. “I got it from the number two dealer in the state. I met him at the center.”

“Who’s the number one dealer?”

“I could tell you. But then I’d have to get you stoned so you’d forget about it.”

She kissed him on the cheek. She loved his corniness. They were standing side by side in Georgia’s old room, where he kept his stash, now an appliance hospital, a vestigial, ruptured room, with Madeleine’s broken loom, a neglected treadmill, a dusty radio, unplugged, a vacuum cleaner, a few half-filled boxes. From the top of one, an old rodent aquarium jutted. Dim light came in from the hall. Flora could not see the color of the walls.

“Can you believe that school prayer business?” she asked him.

“Don’t be so hard on the guy, Flo. People think differently. But it doesn’t make them idiots. He’s had such a different life experience from yours.”

“What’s next? Book banning?”

“Is he really saying anything so extreme? He seems like a nice guy to me, a smart guy. Why don’t you talk to him first, then make up your mind. You’ve always been so quick, so definite.”

Had she? Sluggish and vague seemed more accurate. It was surprising, foreign when people described you to yourself. One deceived constantly, with no intention of deceit.

A reasonable suggestion, Ray’s—talk first, then get mad. But in the car, on the way not home, as there was no home, but back to Paul’s rank apartment, Flora turned mean. Maybe it was the wine. But they had all been so unfailingly polite, so politic when Paul voiced his opinion, which now struck her as ludicrous. It had started drizzling, and she began to sing: “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus sitting on the dashboard of my car.” She put her feet up on Paul’s dashboard. He looked at her and shook his head. “I don’t care about bad behavior, long as I got my plastic Savior….”

“You’re in a pleasant mood,” he observed.

“Do you actually believe,” she said, “and by ‘you’ I mean all of you, that if I don’t accept Jesus Christ as my personal Savior, I will burn for all eternity in the fires of hell? Is that it? The nuts and bolts, so to speak?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That my father currently burns there now?”

“We
can’t
know what he believed right at the end, can we?” So like the lawyer to ignore the larger point and zero in on the technicality. The matter of what the dead believed was not one worth arguing.

“I mean, is that the kind of believer you are?” she asked. “What is the point of believing in such a punitive God?”

“Flora, are you listening to yourself? Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow, when you’re a little less hostile.”

“I’m not hostile. I’m hoodwinked. I was sleeping with an evangelical without knowing it. I think I had a right to know.” That was the thing. You didn’t know anyone, other people constantly revealing themselves to be aliens.

“You make it sound like evangelical Protestantism might as well be syphilis.”

“Yes, quite—a spiritually transmitted disease.” She felt extremely articulate, anger rendering her smooth and sharp and silver-tongued.

“I’m not a fundamentalist, Flora. Not that I have to defend myself to you. I believe in God, but not only in God. My sister is gay and I love her and accept her.”

“How large-souled of you! And who are you, exactly, to accept her?”

“I’m saying it’s not an issue for me—I’d think you’d know that. I’m not as narrow-minded as you’re suggesting. Really, I’m not as narrow-minded as you are. You realize you’re who people have in mind when they complain of the liberal elite?” He turned from the rain-stippled windshield to look at her accusingly. “You Darwinians who preach tolerance to families of any and all configurations. Transgender, fine, wonderful. But Christian, God forbid.”

“It’s just such bullshit. School prayer? What’s next? Intelligent fucking design? You and nutty fucking Esther Moon, putting the evil back in evolution. I mean, what exactly are you doing for her, or with her? Anti-intellectual mumbo jumbo, insidious, culty bullshit. Did my father know about this secret passion of yours, your mission to convert the schools of Darwin?”

The light in town was red and Paul came to a stop. “One thing I loved about your dad was he was not a snob,” he said. “He had no need for snobbery. I think it came from his sureness in himself. My friends at Darwin and other professors regarded religiosity, when not practiced in a purely academic way—
the Bible as literature
and all that—as low-class, a little embarrassing. A bar mitzvah on the Upper West Side, that was one thing, that was cultural. Going to church every Sunday, that was comical. But your dad had an openness to ideas—liberal in the true sense of the word. You like to talk about all you inherited. Well, some things you didn’t get from him.”

The comparison cut. “The light is green,” she said. “So I’m a snob for disavowing school prayer?”

“My mother told this story—the three-martini fight. A couple goes to a party and the man has too much to drink and acts like a jerk. When they get home, the wife says, ‘You know, you acted like a jerk tonight. You shouldn’t have had that third martini.’ And the husband says, ‘I didn’t have a third martini, I only had two.’ And then they begin to fight about that.”

“And I’m the drunk jerk husband here?” Flora asked.

“You do seem to have a tendency to overindulge,” he said.

His pomposity was insufferable. “Jesus Christ, Paul, don’t twelve-step me.”

“You’re not mad about this, Flora. I don’t know what it is that upset you, and I don’t really care. I’m tired and I want to get home and go to sleep. But for the record, I don’t want to convert anyone, I was just thinking aloud. I rarely discuss my religion with anyone, for this reason.”

“Why? Because we’ll see you for the idiot you are?”

She’d gone too far. He’d given her a way out and she’d stayed in. The word
idiot
had lodged in her mind when Ray said it in Paul’s defense—“it doesn’t make them idiots”—and now there it was, on the dashboard. They arrived at the little parking lot behind Paul’s apartment and he got out of the car and slammed the door. It would be satisfying to leave, to storm off, too, but logistically unworkable. Flora followed him up the stairs. He undressed and got in the bed and was asleep in minutes, or pretending to be. She watched him. He had delicate skin and his closed eyelids were tinged a near purple, as though they’d been painted or dyed. He looked vulnerable. Watching him, she felt a sudden bolt of intimacy,
an attack of the fondines
. Was it the threat of loss that made him so appealing?

She went into the other room and sat by the window, looking down to the Darwin street. She cracked the window and lit one of the joints Ray had given her, the smell of pot tampering with the tired food smells slinking from the restaurant below and the damp of the night. Her heart soon raced. Marijuana relaxed other people, but it made her feel she might die—a feeling she liked. Was this what it had felt like for her father at the end? “You can’t live his life for him,” her mother had said. But whose life was she living? It was unrecognizable, not her life. Studying poetry, fucking a Christian? But Paul was wrong in this: She was not one of them, one of the sanctimonious liberal elites of Darwin. He was sanctimonious. It was he who was like them—the moral superiority of Christians not unlike the moral superiority of academics. The ostentatious decency, the constant scolding. The absence of doubt. Flora had yet to experience anything she did not meet with some degree of doubt. To be able to look at the world and assess with utter confidence—yes or no. Or was Paul that way? She knew so little of him; he had not tried to make himself known, but she had not tried to know him, either.

And Cynthia—how had she let things sour so with this most important person in her father’s life? Her life had gone wrong when first she moved to Darwin, and it was going wrong again. Where had the Flora of leaps and boldnesses gone? “Quick and definite,” Ray said. Maybe she’d been more herself at the age of eight than she was now. But what did it mean to be oneself? People said, “She doesn’t seem quite herself,” as if selfhood were a state one drifted in and out of, the self a semipermeable membrane. She’d been sleeping through her twenties, often literally. And now she was back in Darwin, where there was no future, only past. This is no country for young women. Why had she returned? To bring it all back, or to bury it?

She fell asleep on the chair in the living room and woke in ashy daylight to a pulsing in her head, steady as a metronome, as though her heart and brain had swapped places. She made her way to water, then to the bed. Paul and his hiking boots were gone. The plan had been today she would meet his family. But the invitation was, it seemed, implicitly rescinded. Paul would remain for Flora—in a way that Flora for the rest of her long life would never manage to see herself as being—fatherless.

Spring