I grew sick with fear. I grew small and hunched and sallow, worrying. There were days when I thought about it every hour, hours when I thought about it every minute. What if she accuses me of rape? What if she dies? What if I get a venereal disease? What if I get cancer? I went to the library and pored over legal books. I pored over medical articles, looking for symptoms. I checked my body constantly and panicked at every pimple and rash. I turned my face away whenever police cars went by. I was in an agony of terror: the symptom of my buried revulsion.
Lauren tried to help, but she only made things worse. She would lay her fingertips gently on my chest in the darkness and whisper to me with impatient tenderness: "Look, you didn't mean it. She said she wanted to. She did."
She didn't understand. How could she? She was part of my guilt. I saw that finally. I could tell myself that she had brought me into The Scene, that she'd suggested it and made the introductions. But I knew the truth. She had followed my lead. She had admired me, had wanted to please and impress me. She had shaped herself to my desires.
And now here she lay, whispering comforts into my sleepless ear, while another voice-my own voice-was whispering: "Look at you! Sniveling, fearful, sweating in the dark. Where're your theories now, Philosophy Boy? Where's the great enlightenment, the freedom and liberation you promised? You scuzzy shithead. Look at what you are."
So much for sex as a path to the good life. So much for power, too, when you came to think of it. So much for Freud and Nietzsche as guides to happiness. And as for Marx? Well, Marx, it turned out, was done for, too. It was not so very long before that I had watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, watched that signature monstrosity of a monstrous century die its miniature death on the piece-of-papersized TV on Lauren's kitchenette counter. I had seen Marx's children come blinking out of the pit of tyranny into the bright, gaudy light of the big, beautiful market-driven world, seen them lift their grateful hands to that glad radiance where it reflected blindingly off the teeth of movie stars and the fenders of Corvettes and the bare skin of Western women, hot and spoiled and blessedly free. The hard-hearted, war-mongering, greed-is-good troglodytes of conservatism had prophesied it would be so, those suit-and-tie defenders of old truths and old religions and the silly, old, outmoded American way. They had predicted it would be like this and we-we the fine, sophisticated, enlightened, chattering self-certain of the left-we had called them every name we could think of, anything we could think of that might intimidate them into silence. And now look. Look. It was no good denying it, though all my radical friends made haste to: They had been right, those conservatives-they had been right and we had been wrong. The truths we'd held to be self-evident were nothing more than a comfortable climate of opinion, self-congratulatory certainties that made us feel righteous and progressive and bold and yet had nothing to do with facts. This, too, I understood now. We had been wrong. I had been wrong.
I had been wrong about everything.
What an awful thing to discover. My whole sense of myself was shattered. I felt as if I were falling apart. I had to do something.
I don't know why I went to the Church of the Incarnation. I had been raised without religion, mostly. I had certainly never been baptized or anything like that. My father, the child of a sometimes-radical academic, always swatted away my metaphysical questions as if they were mosquitoes. My mother, who'd been brought up Catholic, retained some vague notion of a gentle infant deity as long as her mind held out, but for the most part the Christ she knew was a figment of her later madness. For myself, I was an atheist, tolerant of faith only in the form of that vague Western version of Eastern mysticism so popular among my colleagues and friends.
Still, one afternoon, I was walking along Madison Avenue, and there was the church and I stopped in front of it. It was a beautiful old place, an old Gothic Revival brownstone sitting on the banks of the avenue almost defiantly serene as the flood of nervy pedestrians and deafening traffic went rushing past. Dwarfed by the towering modern apartment buildings all around it, it seemed to me a thing of more human dimensions than they somehow, aspiring skyward in this sort of small, hopeful way, peak to peak, pediment to gable to steepled tower, each crowned with a finial cross. I seized on it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the boiling sea. I went inside.
The traffic noise died away as the big wooden door swung shut behind me. I stepped across the tiled vestibule to the head of the nave. The light in here seemed white and golden, the effect of its play on the marble altar and its gilded cross. Lancets and quatrefoils of vivid stained glass ran along the walls to either side of me. Christ enthroned, Lazarus risen, Virgin with child all flamed into relief or drew back into shadow as the sun shone through them or moved past.
There was no service going on, but a few people were bowed prayerfully in the pews here and there. I didn't want them to see me, so I retreated into the vestibule and stepped into an empty side chapel.
I took a seat at the front before a small altar, also of marble. There was a wooden crucifix on it, framed against a multicolored triptych on the wall behind. Jesus hung wracked and mournful on the cross, his dying eyes turned up to heaven, the thorns carved into his head, the blood carved onto his brow.
I didn't know what I was supposed to say to him. "Hi," I said finally, in a barely audible whisper. "I hate to bother you, but I'm really feeling like shit here." Embarrassed, I screwed my palms together in my lap. "Frankly," I added with a laugh, "you're not looking so good yourself." Then I buried my face in my hands and started weeping. I said to him: "Help me! Forgive me! Forgive me, help me, help me!"
The storm passed. I waited there, just like that. I'm not sure what for, exactly. Maybe I thought I would peek through my fingers and see the celestial cavalry charging over the altar to my rescue. More likely, I was hoping for an enlightening interior blast of some kind. Some hallelujah conversion maybe. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. I stayed a while longer, trying to force it, trying to get a little uplift and inspiration going by sheer willpower. But no. Nothing.
Well, what did I expect? This whole God thing was bullshit. Everyone knew that. Everyone I knew knew that anyway. I got up and got the hell out of that place in a hurry. If you're going to get past things like this, I told myself bitterly, you have to get past them on your own. I was a man, wasn't I? Well, I was going to act like one. To hell with my damn theories. I knew what was right. I just had to do it, that's all-and I would. I was going to call up the Bedford woman and apologize for being a brute and a blind fool. I was going to dump the ugly sex that made me feel good in the moment and lousy ever afterward. I was going to stop using these awful drugs and clear my head and try to be kinder to people, try to be more honest about what I thought and felt and saw, more honest and forthright and kind all around. I was going to change everything, damn it. I was going to start everything over from scratch.
And I did. With God's help, I did. Because, of course, over time I realized what should've been obvious to me right away: that my prayer in the chapel that afternoon had been answered, after all. The celestial cavalry had, in fact, charged over the hill at the first sound of my cry for help. I didn't see it at first because there was no magic to it. It was just real-as real as real. My prayer had been answered almost in the saying of it.