Joshua Ferris - To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

“Hey, it happens. You don’t need to apologize,” he wrote.

Think you’re the first one to go hmmm, this evidence is just a little too thin? Well, you’re not. We’ve all turned our backs on it at some point. Nobody wants to be a dupe. We’d be a bunch of gullible idiots if we didn’t have serious misgivings at some point. It’s a test of faith, Paul. A test of faith, and you passed. What it will do in the end is just make you stronger. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that a religion founded on doubt asks you to take so much on faith?

How many are there? One hundred? Two hundred?

My rough estimate puts that figure somewhere between two and three thousand. But all very scattered.

As Mrs. Convoy stood in the open doorway calling “McKinsey?” Connie turned to me and said, “I have a confession to make.”

I drew closer. In the small confines of the front desk, crowded by the swivel chairs and shoulder to shoulder with blockades of files, drawing closer really only meant turning around. She sat on the chair, dressed entirely in shades of gray — a gray skirt over darker gray tights starting to fade at the knees, a gray T-shirt with darker gray bird — except for a diaphanous blue scarf twisted wildly around her neck. She wore a pair of flat blue tennis shoes that lacked all pretense to athletic utility. Her hair was set in bobby pins imprecisely arrayed, like a train yard seen from the sky.

How inimitable the bobby pin is! The coppery crimp on the one prong and the other prong straight, the two dollops of hard amber at the endpoints. The bobby pin has not changed since it was worn by good-hearted nurses in virtuous wars. Though they held her hair down with old-fashioned severity, on Connie bobby pins were the very edge of fashion. I recalled the pleasure I took whenever I had the opportunity to remove them from her hair, one pin after the other, and to place them on the nightstand in a neat little pile, taking out one as carefully as the next so as not to pull the hair with it, until down came a storm of curls gently scented and still a little damp.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m just going to say it. Remember how I told you that I was a nonpracticing atheist? Well, I’m not, really. I mean, I sort of was for a while, but now I think I’m not. An atheist, I mean. What I mean is, I’m not a hundred percent certain that God doesn’t exist, and sometimes, I’m almost certain that He does.”

“As in, you believe?” I said. “You’re a believer?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

I was shocked.

“Sometimes?”

“Most of the time.”

I was beside myself. On how many occasions had she expressed her skepticism about God? On how many occasions had she rolled her eyes along with me when some idiot on TV was telling women what was best for their bodies in the name of God? Or condemning gay marriage in the name of God? Or denying evolution and restricting scientific research in the name of God? Or defending assault weapons with hundred-round clips because God wanted us all to have guns? On how many occasions had she nodded along in implicit agreement while I went off on some Hitchensian rant?

“Have you always been a believer?”

“Not always.”

“When weren’t you one?”

“Around the time we got together.”

“You were a believer when we first met?”

“You made some very convincing arguments,” she said. “You can be very convincing.”

“You mean… I convinced you to be an atheist?”

“I was swept up!” she cried. “I was in love! I was willing to change!”

“You lied to me?”

That first year with Connie, year and a half even, I can hardly remember for how in love we were. We were just all love, morning and night, and all day, and love, and love. The only thing that gave me pause was her poetry. From what I could tell, she was a decent poet. Her poems never made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me, but neither did any of the published ones that she read aloud to me in bed, and in the park, and in bookstores, and in empty bars on winter afternoons. Not making sense seemed to be what it meant to be a good poet. Which was fine. But in that first year, year and a half, she stopped writing altogether. I thought it was important, if you called yourself a poet, to write poetry. I didn’t totally mind that she stopped, because I wanted her to be with me more than I wanted her to be actually writing poetry. But as time went by, and she still wasn’t writing, I asked her why. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I’m just happy.” “You have to be sad to write?” “No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. Maybe. I guess maybe I do. Because when I’m happy, I don’t feel compelled to write. I’m just happy being happy.” “So when you start writing again, I’ll know you’re unhappy?” “You’ll know that I’m stable. That I can write because I can think about something other than you, us. I can think about poetry again.” That made sense, I supposed. But I still had to wonder, what was she if she wasn’t writing poetry? She wasn’t a poet. Poets write poetry. She was really just a receptionist at a dental office. A receptionist and the girlfriend of a dentist, her employer.

Suffice it to say, she was doing plenty of writing these days. But now I had confirmation that there was something wrong with Connie on the same order as there was something wrong with me. All that time not writing poetry, downplaying her family affections, putting Connie-Who-Loves-Paul ahead of her own essential self. Poor girl, she was cunt gripped. She had loved me so much that she felt compelled to lie to me just as I had lied to her. A sadness settled into me as solid as the one I had churned through in the weeks following our final breakup. As it turned out, we were perfect for each other.

“No wonder you didn’t want to spend time with your family in the beginning,” I said. “You were living a lie.”

She didn’t answer.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because I want you to know that it’s okay to believe in God,” she said.

She swiveled closer along the plastic runner, a few inches at most, but enough so that she might have easily taken my hand. I thought she might. But the most she did was put her hands on her knees.

“It doesn’t make you weak or stupid,” she said.

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t think so.”

“As long as you believe for the right reasons.”

“And what reasons are those?”

“You tell me,” she said.

I stared at her. I suddenly realized that this wasn’t just a confession.

“Whatever’s going on with you—”

“What’s going on with me?” I asked.

“—as long as you’re choosing God for the right reasons—”

“I’m not choosing God for any reason.”

“Then what are you doing, getting wrapped up in this thing?”

“What thing? It’s not a thing. It has nothing to do with God. It’s a tradition,” I said. “It’s a people. A genetically distinct people. And I’m not wrapped up in it.”

“Why is our website still live? Why have you stopped pestering that Internet lawyer to do more? Why is it that every time I turn around, you’re composing a new email? Whatever you’re not wrapped up in, Paul, why does it seem to be so much more pressing than your patients?”

I walked away, leaving her in that claustrophobic enclosure. I went down the corridor and through the door, into the waiting room. I walked up to the front desk and stuck my head in the window. She had thrown her head back but was sitting otherwise unmoved.

“Let’s do this,” I said.

She swiveled abruptly.

“Let’s agree to stay out of each other’s business. What’s the point in meddling now, anyway? Who knows,” I said. “Maybe if we can keep to ourselves, we can both finally be honest with each other.”