recording the congregation’s responses to his presence and asking them a set of probing questions he had developed toward an eventual dissertation. He jokes that when he finally writes his book it will be called ‘The Devil Came to My Church Today.’
“Theo held the door for me as we left the chair’s office, my failed ambition tight around me like a shroud. Just outside the building he stopped. The day was bright, windy, all the clouds blown out of the blue sky. ‘It’s enough for two, if we live frugally,’ he said. He smiled at me, and it looked as though he was unused to smiling in any casual way. I realized then that he was serious. He was proposing. That we spend the year together, the two of us; that we should be the project: an experiment in bliss, conjugal or otherwise. When you get to know Theo better you’ll see this side of him. He is definite about his desires, and how to achieve them. If he took infinitely more care with the effects of these desires on others, he might be a world leader. In this case, with his clarity, he would save me, no matter if it were incidentally. If I hadn’t recognized this radical vision of his for what it was, I probably would have thanked him for his gallantry and gone on my way. But I could see that what he was offering me was something potentially far more gratifying than the chance to concentrate on my field of study. He offered me nothing less than a shared reality. A life inside the bubble, with him.” Raquel’s forested eyes were bright with the deep memory of this life-changing event. I had never heard of anything so providential, not even in one of the countless cheap romance novels I had devoured in a particularly gluttonous phase at the library. But listening to Raquel, watching her serious, finely drawn face describe acmes and zeniths of humor and discernment, I could easily understand how Theo had been so inspired. She made me think of la belle dame sans merci, the eponymous antiheroine of a poem we’d read in class, an imaginary woman who left her real-life swains spellbound, on a hillside, the blood drained out of them, “alone and palely loitering.” They could never find her again. But he had found her, whoever she was. I wondered if it mattered to him who she was, or if he had perhaps taken an even greater leap than Raquel realized, shooting himself at her randomly like a proton, a spark from a fireplace, like a freewheeling ember of meaninglessness.
“It didn’t seem enough just to leave the office together and stay that way. We decided to quit the program together, though we wouldn’t tell the department till after we’d spent our year’s worth of funding. We still haven’t told them. We would take the money and drive across country, like any other red-blooded American couple with a functional hatch-backed automobile, but we would not stop at any churches. We gave ourselves the whole summer to make the trip, and left our small university town a week later. We drove all day and all night, heading northwest, through Ohio, Illinois, and North Dakota in a blur of navigation and convenience-store coffee. All the way I was pointing out perfect sites for our new life, little towns in the middle of nowhere, and Theo was saying, ‘No, it’s too soon.’ Because, you see, we didn’t realize that this would be a round-trip voyage. We thought we were gone for good.”
Gone for good, what a strange expression. I looked at Cherry, a question dawning on my lips, but her face wore the look of politely suppressed boredom she wore when she was being chatted at by some friend of her mother’s at the library. This was not what she’d expected. I, on the other hand, was suffused with borrowed bliss: I was in a little car, passing through dozens and dozens of towns even smaller than Wick, and never stopping. I was alone in the car.
“Now, looking back on the trip, it seems obvious to me what we thought we were doing. We were forging ever westward. We were
“Theo held the door for me as we left the chair’s office, my failed ambition tight around me like a shroud. Just outside the building he stopped. The day was bright, windy, all the clouds blown out of the blue sky. ‘It’s enough for two, if we live frugally,’ he said. He smiled at me, and it looked as though he was unused to smiling in any casual way. I realized then that he was serious. He was proposing. That we spend the year together, the two of us; that we should be the project: an experiment in bliss, conjugal or otherwise. When you get to know Theo better you’ll see this side of him. He is definite about his desires, and how to achieve them. If he took infinitely more care with the effects of these desires on others, he might be a world leader. In this case, with his clarity, he would save me, no matter if it were incidentally. If I hadn’t recognized this radical vision of his for what it was, I probably would have thanked him for his gallantry and gone on my way. But I could see that what he was offering me was something potentially far more gratifying than the chance to concentrate on my field of study. He offered me nothing less than a shared reality. A life inside the bubble, with him.” Raquel’s forested eyes were bright with the deep memory of this life-changing event. I had never heard of anything so providential, not even in one of the countless cheap romance novels I had devoured in a particularly gluttonous phase at the library. But listening to Raquel, watching her serious, finely drawn face describe acmes and zeniths of humor and discernment, I could easily understand how Theo had been so inspired. She made me think of la belle dame sans merci, the eponymous antiheroine of a poem we’d read in class, an imaginary woman who left her real-life swains spellbound, on a hillside, the blood drained out of them, “alone and palely loitering.” They could never find her again. But he had found her, whoever she was. I wondered if it mattered to him who she was, or if he had perhaps taken an even greater leap than Raquel realized, shooting himself at her randomly like a proton, a spark from a fireplace, like a freewheeling ember of meaninglessness.
“It didn’t seem enough just to leave the office together and stay that way. We decided to quit the program together, though we wouldn’t tell the department till after we’d spent our year’s worth of funding. We still haven’t told them. We would take the money and drive across country, like any other red-blooded American couple with a functional hatch-backed automobile, but we would not stop at any churches. We gave ourselves the whole summer to make the trip, and left our small university town a week later. We drove all day and all night, heading northwest, through Ohio, Illinois, and North Dakota in a blur of navigation and convenience-store coffee. All the way I was pointing out perfect sites for our new life, little towns in the middle of nowhere, and Theo was saying, ‘No, it’s too soon.’ Because, you see, we didn’t realize that this would be a round-trip voyage. We thought we were gone for good.”
Gone for good, what a strange expression. I looked at Cherry, a question dawning on my lips, but her face wore the look of politely suppressed boredom she wore when she was being chatted at by some friend of her mother’s at the library. This was not what she’d expected. I, on the other hand, was suffused with borrowed bliss: I was in a little car, passing through dozens and dozens of towns even smaller than Wick, and never stopping. I was alone in the car.
“Now, looking back on the trip, it seems obvious to me what we thought we were doing. We were forging ever westward. We were
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