Roger's Version (6 page)

“If you could wait until after Christmas we could chop up the tree.”

“You say that every year. And then what do I say?”

I pondered, and looked at my shelves, and remembered that I had wanted to look up something in Barth. “You say that’d be too late. The leaves will have blown all around the yard again.”

“That’s right. That’s very good, Rog.”

“And what
do
we do about the pine boughs every year? That I
have
forgotten.”

“We drive out into the country, and steal them from the evergreens in the woods around a truck stop. Except every year more and more of the lower ones are gone; we ought to take that long-handled pruning saw that sits gathering rust up above the garage rafters.”

“I think Richie broke it, trying to make a tree house.”

“You’re always blaming Richie.”

But in truth I blamed Richie for nothing; it was clear to me that without the boy Esther and I would have almost nothing to talk about, and the coldness between us would increase. I sought for something to mention, some sop to toss her as she looked up at me out of her bestial boredom. “I had another conference,” I told her. “Earlier. A really crazy kid, quite repulsive somehow, though he looked more or less normal physically, one of these computer types from the science end of the university. God only knows what brought him over to the Divinity School. I do know, actually. Apparently he’s good friends with awful Edna’s awful daughter Verna, remember, who had the illegitimate black child and lives over in some project in the slums—”

“Keep talking,” Esther said. “I have to run see if the broccoli’s boiling over.”

She darted down the hall, angling right through the dining-room arch, then on into the kitchen, and I watched, enjoying my favorite view of her, the rear view: erect small head, taut
round butt, flicking ankles. It had not changed since I would longingly observe her swishing away from me down the church aisle after choir practice, shaking the dust of my church from her feet. In those days, the days of miniskirts and flower power, she wore her vivacious pale-red hair long and bouncing loose down her back; it seemed to equal the mass of her entire body. In the years since, some white strands have appeared, most thickly at the temples, and she twists and clips and pins her skull’s frizzy adornment in an illimitable variety of buns and tucked wings and more or less strict, prim, Frau-Professorish coils. At night, her hair let down is an even bolder sight than her still-effective nudity. Esther keeps her figure trim by a very simple procedure: she weighs herself on the scales every morning, and if she weighs more than a hundred pounds she eats only carrots and celery and water until the scales are brought into line with ideality. She is good at mathematics. She used to help that tax lawyer rig his figures.

Rather than follow her, I seized the moment to look up the Barth quote. It involved, I remembered, a series of
vias
, each discounted as a path to God. It was almost certainly from
The Word of God and the Word of Man;
I took down my old copy, a paperbound Torchbook read almost to pieces, its binding glue dried out and its margins marked again and again by the pencil of a young man who thought that here, definitively and forever, he had found the path, the voice, the style, and the method to save within himself and to present to others the Christian faith. Just glancing through the pages, I felt the superb iron of Barth’s paragraphs, his magnificent seamless integrity and energy in this realm of prose—the specifically Christian—usually conspicuous for intellectual limpness and dishonesty. “Man is a riddle and nothing else, and his universe, be it ever so vividly seen and felt, is a question.… The
solution of the riddle, the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need is the absolutely
new
event.… There is
no
way which leads to this event”: here I thought I had it, in “The Task of the Ministry,” but no, the passage, though ringing, did not have quite the ring impressed, three decades earlier, upon my agitated inner ear. Farther into the essay, I stumbled on a sentence, starred in the margin, that seemed to give Dale Kohler’s line of argument some justification: “In relation to the kingdom of God any pedagogy may be good and any may be bad; a stool may be high enough and the longest ladder too short to take the kingdom of heaven by force.”
By force
, of course: that was his blasphemy, as I had called it. The boy would treat God as an object, Who had no voice in His own revelation. I searched impatiently, at random; I could feel Esther’s boredom pulling at me, sucking at me, wanting me there with her in the kitchen, so we could be bored together. And at last, just as I had abandoned hope, the loose, scribbled pages opened to the page where, in triple pencil lines whose gouging depth indicated a strenuous spiritual clutching, my youthful self had marginally scored, in “The Problem of Ethics Today,” where one would least think to find it:

There is no way from us to God—not even a
via negativa
—not even a
via dialectica
nor
paradoxa
. The god who stood at the end of some human way—even of this way—would not be God.

Yes. I closed the book and put it back.
The god who stood at the end of some human way would not be God
. I have a secret shame: I always feel better—cleaner, revitalized—after reading theology, even poor theology, as it caresses and probes
every crevice of the unknowable. Lest you take me for a goody-goody, I find kindred comfort and inspiration in pornography, the much-deplored detailed depiction of impossibly long and deep, rigid and stretchable human parts interlocking, pumping, oozing. Even the late Henry’s
Opus Pistorum
, so vile it was posthumous, proved not too much for me, for me had its redeeming qualities, exalting as it did and as such works do our underside, the damp underside of our ordained insomnia, crawling with many-legged demons. Lo! the rock is lifted. And what eventuates from these sighing cesspools of our being, our unconscionable sincere wishes? Cathedrals and children.

Richie was crouching blurry-eyed over his homework while trying to keep a rerun of “Gilligan’s Island” in focus. I ruffled the back of the boy’s hair, dark brown like my own before gray infiltrated everything but my eyebrows, which remain solid, dark, long, and stern. “How’d school go?”

“O.K.”

“How’s your cold?”

“
O.K
.”

“Your mother says it’s getting worse.”

“Dad. I’m doing homework. What’s twenty-seven to base six?”

“I have no idea. They didn’t have bases when I was in school.”

Actually, I had tried to understand them with him, and by following his textbook closely had seemed to succeed; but the slidingness of exponentiality repelled me, and the revelation that base ten was in no way sacred opened an unnecessary hole in my universe. Thinking of mathematics, I see curves moving in space according to certain aloof and inevitable laws, generating the beauty of trajectories, expanding, carrying
truth upon the backs of their arches, like cherubs on dolphinback, farther and farther out, plunging and rising. The Gnostics’ hierarchies of angels and of human degrees of susceptibility to the pleroma, and the “measuring of the body of God” set forth with so much laborious alphabetic arithmetic in Merkabah mysticism, surely anticipated and intended to represent these sweeping immaterial formulae that mediate between us and the absolutes of matter and energy. I continued to Esther, “And he had the nerve, this science type I was telling you about in the library, to more or less ask me to get him a grant so he can prove God’s existence on the computer.”

“Why are you so dead against it? You believe in God, or at least you used to.”

Sensing her mood, I wasn’t sure Richie should hear what would be coming out of her mouth; but we were all in the kitchen, where she, above all, had the right to be. Partake of her food, partake of her mood. “I’m sure I still do,” I stiffly said. “But not because a computer tells me to. It trivializes the whole idea.”

“Maybe this boy thinks God is more than just an idea.”

“You sound remarkably like him.”

“How tall was he?”

A curious question, but I answered. “Six feet, at least. Too tall.”

“You gonna get him the grant?” Little Esther was being slangy, drawling and jauntily lighting a cigarette from the orange-hot coil of a burner on the electric stove. She lowered her face to within an inch of a ghastly maiming: a stumble, a mere nudge, and she would be forever branded.

“I do wish you’d stop your smoking,” I told her.

“Who’s it hurting?”

“You, dear.”

“Everybody in the house, Mom,” Richie pointed out. “They were saying at school how people who live with smokers have lungs almost as bad as smokers themselves.” On “Gilligan’s Island” a small man with a yelping voice was wearing a sarong and trying to avoid a heavyset blond man who, clad in a splashy-patterned bathing suit, was bombarding him with water balloons from a helicopter.

“I can’t possibly get him a grant,” I said. “That’s not my department at all.”

“He sounds like a rather touching young man,” Esther told me, on no evidence.

Richie interrupted again. “Mom, what’s twenty-seven to the base six? Dad won’t tell me.”

“Forty-three,” she said. “Obviously. Six goes into twenty-seven four times with three left over for the units column. Read your book, Richie, for Heaven’s sake. I’m sure it’s all in there, that’s why they give you the book in the first place.”

I was nettled, sensing that she was siding with this unknown youth only in order to annoy me. I debated the wisdom of pouring myself a pre-dinner bourbon. Esther had poured another slug of red wine from the green Gallo jug, and just the way her hair had loosened up, its wings coming untucked, proclaimed her readiness for a fight. Were I to get drunk, it would help me in the fight but incapacitate me for the reading I had hoped to do tonight—the book, for instance, on Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers had been written by a former student, who was looking to me anxiously for a blessing and a bit of a boost up the Jacob’s ladder of academic preferment. I compromised on the drink, denying myself the bourbon but pouring some of the Gallo into a glass of my own. It tasted thick, fusty. I prefer white. I really prefer champagne. “Since when,” I asked my wife amicably, “have you become such a theologian?”

“I’m not,” she said. “You know what I think. I don’t think anything; I mean, I don’t think
it’s
anything. I think it’s nonsense. But I’m amused to see you so vigorously defending your own style of nonsense against somebody else’s style. All these emperors without clothes, you all have your turfs to defend. This boy comes in and offers to prove God’s existence and you curl that upper lip of yours and lower those eyebrows and obviously wish him dead, gone, out of the church. To you he’s a heretic.”

“I would not so dignify him,” I said, all dignity. “He’s very young, and I dare say a month from now he’ll have another brainstorm. He’s using God as a gimmick for a grant. This whole generation has grown up that thinks of nothing but grants. An academic welfare class.” The wine was sour; it hadn’t been just Esther’s breath. Of course, fermentation is a kind of rot, much as life, from the standpoint of energy, is a form of decay. There was, though, a beauty, a certain soap-bubble shimmer of benignity, in feeling the first sips mingle with my blood and speed up its motion through my veins while my gaze was fixed on Esther’s pursed, aggrieved little lips, tensed to unleash the next argumentative utterance. She spoke of my upper lip but it was hers that was complex; across her mouth there passed that wistful cloud, that sad sweet blur, a scarcely perceptible “hurt” look, a hint of some sudden tender sad song about to form a round
O
. She used to blow me a certain amount; indeed, when we were new to each other and the passion of courtship was upon her, the female passion of beating out another woman and securing a protector, I could hardly keep her lips away from my fly. In cars, while I was driving: her fluffy head would bump the wheel and make steering tricky. In my church office, as I sat back in the fake-leather easy chair my counsellees usually occupied in their spiritual confusion: my eyeballs would roll upward in the
manner of Saint Teresa (who used, incidentally, to yearn at communion for a bigger host
—más, más, Dios!
). In bed, when we were spent: Esther would rest her lovely little sugar sack of a skull on my belly and hold me softly in her mouth as if for safekeeping, and in my sleep I would harden again. Now it was a rare thing, and she never failed to let me feel her disgust. I could not in good faith blame her: our emotions change, and the chemistry of our impulses with them.

“Why don’t you bring him around?” she asked, as if innocently, her eyes also, it occurred to me, like my recent visitor’s, awash with window light, though their blue favored the green end of the spectrum and my young visitor’s the gray. My own eyes, to complete the chart, are a somewhat melting chocolate, a dark wet bearish brown that makes me look, according to the susceptibilities of the witness, angry or about to cry. Esther sarcastically added, “I haven’t been around a brainstorm for years.”

Underneath our sour exchange, Richie vented his exasperation. “All this dumb book does,” he said, “is talk about sets and keep showing these like puddles of
x
’s that don’t have anything to do with numbers!”

With a sudden graceful acquiescence Esther bent low, as minutes before she had bent her face to the hot stove coil, and read the textbook over his shoulder. “When we write twenty-seven,” she told him, “it’s a shorthand way of expressing two sets of ten plus seven ones. To do it into base six, you must ask yourself how many sixes go into twenty-seven. Think. Begins with F.”

“Five?” the poor child said, his brain frazzled.

“Four.” Her voice barely disguised her disgust. She pointed into his book with a disagreeable scrape of her fingernail. “Four times six is twenty-four. With three left over makes forty-three. See?”