A moment later they started singing again. Why shouldn't they sing? I thought miserably. They aren't me. I stood and waited. I heard the front door of the house open and shut. I saw Emma walking slowly to the garden gate.
She opened the gate and came toward me over the brick path at a thoughtful, deliberate pace. She was not wearing the beret, but she'd put the long coat back on. It was unbuttoned, open on the white sweater and jeans underneath, the slim, elegant figure underneath.
It was a cool, crisp day. The sun was bright. The shadows of lofty clouds sailed swiftly over the grass. Emma's cheeks were already turning pink with the weather, a sensational contrast with her black hair and her green eyes. Those eyes were glistening with-what?-mainly bewilderment, I think, and maybe pain-yes, pain.
As for me, I was just sorry, so terribly, terribly sorry I had not called the number she had written on the coaster at Carlo's.
She came to stand before me. She looked at me a long time, studied my face, as if she might find some clue there to what was going on. Her lips parted, but she seemed unable to find the words to speak.
"Emma…," I said.
"What are you doing here?"
I couldn't answer. Driving over the bridge, fretting over the disastrous possibilities, I had envisioned this scenario a dozen different times. I had prepared a dozen different lies to tell her if she caught me out. But now that it had actually happened, I was struck silent. Even I could see that a lie here would be quicksand. I would never get out of it. The truth, though-even if I weren't professionally bound to keep her father's case confidential, I wouldn't have had the courage to tell her the truth.
"Were you following me?" she asked.
I nodded.
"You were spying on me."
I nodded.
She shook her head, bewildered. Bewildered, she gazed down at the path beneath her shoes with an expression of wonder. She moved around past me to the lemon tree. There was one of those circular wrought-iron benches surrounding the trunk. She sank onto it. She considered the bricks another moment. Then she raised her eyes to me and shook her head and gave a single laugh-bewildered, all bewildered.
"What are you doing here, Emma?" I blurted out.
"Well," she answered quietly. "I'm not really sure that's the question."
"No, I know, but I mean: you looked like you were praying?"
"Did I?"
"I mean, you and I, we-talked… About poetry and philosophy and
… I mean, is it a play? Are you rehearsing a play or something?"
Another wondering laugh burst out of her. The sun through the lemon tree's branches laid a filigree of shadows over her cheeks. It had the weird effect of making her seem part of the scenery, at one with the surrounding garden.
"You're a Christian," I said, appalled.
She nodded. "I am; it's true."
"But that… you can't… you can't be. You… I mean, your father…"
I stopped myself before I said too much. Or maybe I already had. Emma arched an eyebrow at me. "What about my father?"
" Well, I mean, he's… I read his book; he's… I mean, he's an intellectual. You're an intellectual. We don't believe in God anymore. I mean, sure, if you want to pretend there's some amorphous, mysterious Oriental crap underlying actual real reality, fine, but this-this is organized religion."
"It is a little organized," she conceded, "but I try to inject my own personal chaos into it whenever possible."
"No, really," I insisted. "Christianity, Emma. It's for those guys on TV who go around telling people not to get laid and then get caught handcuffed to a hooker in a Motel 6 somewhere."
"I guess I haven't quite reached that stage of spiritual development."
"Nobody believes in this stuff anymore, none of the real people."
She continued to look up at me, wondering, even amazed. "You mean, real people like my father."
"Well…"
Emma gave a slow nod. She looked away, off into the distance, where you could see, through the neighboring houses, glimpses of the tree-lined road. The people, the congregation, had stopped singing inside, and the low voice of the preacher had taken up again. The whisper of traffic reached us, too, and the songs of birds carried on the vital autumn air.
"Well, my father is a very brilliant man, that's for sure," she said finally. "And he's always been a man of deep convictions too. When he was younger, he was convinced that Freudian analysis would set us all free. Then he was convinced that communism would save the world, then he amended that to socialism-though I've never completely understood the difference. What else was there? Feminism was very big with him about ten years ago. And he's still into multiculturalism-you know, noble savages and all that. Then there's the postmodern stuff; I guess that's the latest-everything's relative, there's no truth, words don't mean anything. And of course atheism-that was always there, that was a given. You couldn't really have the rest of it without that."
She spoke all this into that distance between the trees. My eyes went over her profile as she did. I was struck again by the rightness of her, by my certainty that we were meant to be together. I had never known anything as surely as I knew that my best life depended on her. I loved her.
Now she turned to look up at me again, the filigree of shadows shifting on her heart-shaped face, holding her within the texture of the garden. "One thing I couldn't help noticing after a while, though? Brilliant as he was, every thing my father believed in turned out to be untrue. I mean, people don't really have Oedipal complexes, not usually anyway, and labor doesn't actually produce capital. Women are born different from men, some cultures are better than others, and on and on. And then, on top of being wrong all the time, he's also miserable. Drinks morning to night, hates his marriage, treats my mother like garbage. I sometimes think miserable people shouldn't be allowed to have philosophies at all, you know. I sometimes think they should have to find happiness first, then at least they can tell us what worked for them." She waved the thought away with her hand. "Anyway, the point is, after a while it made me wonder. The fact that all these deep convictions of his turned out to be, you know, just false, made me wonder about the other thing, the God thing. Well, it's a long story."
I drew my hand along the side of my jaw. I had to admit, it didn't seem as silly as it did when she was praying. "What about this?" I said, gesturing toward the house. "All this hush-hush stuff. Is this the catacombs or something? You have to come here to do this in secret?"
Emma seemed about to object. I wouldn't have blamed her. It was none of my business, for one thing. Plus we both knew I owed her more answers than she did me. Still, she seemed to want to explain, to get it out of the way, maybe, before we got down to discussing the real topic of the day, which was why the hell a creepy scummy slimebag like me was following her around and spying on her.
Emma looked toward the house, gave a fond half smile. "It's not secret. It's just private, that's all. The people who come here are mostly in the same boat as I am. You know, it's a university town. We all have parents or boyfriends or girlfriends or bosses or whatever who are academics or intellectuals or radicals or journalists-you know, people who have very, very strong convictions that just happen to be untrue. And like most people who have convictions like that, they get very angry at anyone who disagrees with them. Some of us are afraid of losing our jobs or our lovers. Some of us don't want to stop getting invited to the hip parties. Some of us-like me-I just don't want to break the heart of someone I love. It's not being secretive exactly. Most of us aren't the sort of people who would fit in at the mainstream churches anyway. So we organized this and it's private and it gets the job done."