You must believe you have sinned. You don’t go to heaven because you’re good. You go to heaven for a man named Jesus. Ask Jesus to forgive you and he will clean your heart.
These fervid phrases coming from the speakers, designed to lure revelers to the apartment’s empty dancefloor, had a curious pertinence to Rebecca. Four days earlier she had published an honest exposé of a man’s affair, and now, at 2 or 3 a.m., somewhere along in there, she was avoiding that very same man at Michael Aluff’s Catholicism-themed rave. She looked around the room. He stood beside the votive rack, a thin-limbed figure addressing a group of shorter people.
“This is how I understand intellectual exchange. I roll a glass marble across a smooth surface. I watch it crawl around the room. I expect everyone else to watch the glass marble circling and rolling. I expect everyone to want to watch it. All my focus rests on the glass marble. The glass marble is an idea.”
He was interrupted by the speaker’s beat drop: Hallelujah, thank you father. Hallelujah, you must be blood-washed. People thumped lightly and the urine samples in the depleted wine bottles rattled, the suggestion being that last sips were for desperados, aristocrats, or those who did not mind a bit of brash faux-pas. That person was Rebecca; and into her red cup she tipped the last remaining teaspoons of Michael Aluff’s sacramental wines, avoiding eye contact with the skelly-boned man now pinching at his imaginary glass orb.
Several weeks earlier the idea had been planted in Georgina’s apartment. Georgina was a server at Accomplice to the Villain, a bug-fouled little barbecue joint that served jerky to young professionals. Being a waitress had expanded Georgina’s social capital to enviable heights. Sitting there on the blood-red velveteen futon, with her black eyebags, she looked like the coolest woman alive, rare and cool. She had a husky, throaty voice and spoke mechanically, as if conducting a briefing session from memorized notes, showing few signs of emotion in order to maintain a light irony and an aseptic intelligence. There was a wariness about her, a way of guarding against things that didn’t feel right. Once, she had told Rebecca her two reasons for being: Bret Easton Ellis and a sense of the enemy.
“Vulgarity, I think, is the most attractive thing.” Georgina recited tonelessly as she walked towards her kitchen. “Men are dreadful, as a matter of fact. But women should not blench at the sight of dreadful men, any more than doctors should blench at the sight of blood. In one case, as in the other, it’s part of the job. Coffee?”
Rebecca had visited Georgina that day looking for advice, a question of personal development. She was in search of practical gains like money and power, as well as a way to attract social currency in its cash forms: envy and attention. She knew how to write sweet little stories about jerkwater towns and environmental movements, about hard-hit people in states that took real discomfort to visit—Holiday Inn salads and high-fructose corn syrup, that kind of thing—and knew for a fact, according to feedback from professors and trusted mentors, that she was competent and grammatical and quick-witted with epigrams and aphorisms. For a long time she had planned to become a researcher; nothing seemed more weighty and indispensable than taking notes on other people as a serious career, in marginalized places like Syria and India (her words), hiring translators with names she couldn’t pronounce and returning to university each fall in an agora scarf and toe-strapped sandals. She would inevitably describe to freshmen how our relationships to places and communities never remain in one fixed position, but contain contradictory elements; she would teach students how to stand on the periphery, how to observe and categorize people, how to feast on the entire world.
But instead, two years out of school, she was the Cancer Reporter for an online newspaper called MALT. Medicine and Lifestyle Times. Rebecca wrote a weekly column on palliative care and preventative measures. Once, she had a piece go semi-viral and receive over 100,000 views, a pocket explainer titled “How Your Diet Influences Your Colorectal Cancer Risk” (deciding on that title, the double “your,” had been a tortuous and overlong experience), and in response, people all over the country emailed her beautiful stories of loss, death, and disease: Maya from Dubuque, who was widowed in the span of three weeks, and Dan from El Paso, himself on the verge of death, a fat cluster of malignant cells eating up his rectum. The paper was dishonest and their work was fraudulent, little more than a résumé piece piece for the fabulously wealthy Editor-in-Chief, one of the lesser Tisch spawn who was dumped from Columbia Journalism after torching, in print, a church-basement community effort to recycle firearms into garden tools. But however purposeless and singularly self-serving was the shameless playacting, however poorly Rebecca’s articles performed, she had resolved that there were worse things, much worse things, than peddling clickbait medical columns to the sick, the dying, and the lonely.
For years this straightforward sort of ableness had been enough to navigate the bush, like a prismatic compass by her side. Then, the morning before she was due to see Georgina, her boss shepherded her into the corner of the newsroom and explained gently that her recent story on liquid biopsies was, well, a touch pastiche, and the other one on forever chemicals was no other way to put this: boring. He reminded her of the publication’s ethos with a pinched smile, as if relaying news about a sick patient behind his office door. The problem is that you’re nostalgic. You’re sentimental. You miss the point because you’re too caught up in that. It’s not interesting. Everyone can be nostalgic. The whole world’s nostalgic.
After Rebecca laid it all out that evening, Georgina paused in good faith and thought.
“Here is my opinion. Vulgar sexuality. Rauchiness. Obscenity. Edge. You write about bodies. Bodies falling apart. Grotesque. The logical next step is sex. Men love writing about sex. They love reading about sex. I think you should find an affair. Just indulge. That’s my advice. Indulge. Indulge. Indulge.”
There wasn’t even the faintest shade of sentiment in her voice.
Rebecca was interested in affairs in the same way she was interested in people going to the movies, reading magazines on trains, unfolding maps in the wind, grilling hotdogs on summer weekends, dialing across landlines to decide a place and a time to meet. She delighted in the mass-synchronization of human mass-experience. The stilt-legged man with the marble—he was one of the servers at Accomplice to the Villain, a friend of Georgina’s. He dated a girl named Susie and lived with her brother in a blue-paneled house, and had an affair that he not only announced, but promulgated. Rebecca wondered to herself if such a young person could have an affair—she’d always imagined that word applied to aesthetes and the middle-aged—but Georgina had promised her that he was the real thing, or, at the very least, the only person to agree, on grounds of anonymity, to an interview about his intimate life; plus, he was loquacious, brilliant, a man of wry and murmurous reflections. They met unceremoniously on a Thursday evening. He looked like Allen Ginsberg, everything on his face narrowing towards the bottom. He reminded Rebecca of an old glass negative, a stereoscopic tintype, an albumen—the way people in old photographs always look: dissatisfied, suspicious, still, judging the weakness of other people, resigned to the business of doing things they’d rather not do.
“So, what arouses you?”
“Political differences arouse me. I take a distinct pleasure in the possibility that my mistress is a Republican. If she were a Republican, she would be dispassionate and even-handed about it; she would know by heart the charts behind her theories, the words behind her charts, the moral feelings behind her words. Sometimes she shows up to my house in a flouncy skirt and glamorous office shoes, sterling earrings from her father, a brown leather belt that wraps her waist like bark on a tree trunk—the ensemble of an office woman twice her age—and in those moments I think, feeling my radiant sweet boyish smile, ‘My mistress is pretty good looking after all…’”
“On those nights when she looks so heavenly mature, so sensual, I read her a passage of Faulkner before bed to set the mood, for intercourse or sleep, Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know… How she yawns! I can feel my blood flowing invisibly through my tiny veins and arteries, throbbing delicately—precariously—from my fingertips through my body. Nothing wilder, nothing more euphoric, nothing more impossible to describe than those final swollen nights in the still hot damp of summer, when I felt my affection through those luscious words, as if baptizing her, not with water, but with those oblatory sentences that had for so long been nothing more than personal and private obsessions.”
He finished his interview with a request. “I am envisioning this. ‘A poet, a songwriter, and a well-all-around-fellow.’ That’s how I’d like the piece to describe me. A well-all-around-fellow.”
Back in Aluff’s living room the marble made another circuit, the group murmured uh-huh uh-huh, and Rebecca, sweating politely, penance whacking at her temples, heard Georgina’s hoarse voice cut through the air, “God, bark on a tree trunk?” And in no time at all here was the man himself, advancing into their midst, the Master of the Party and the Genius of the World. Garbage. Stomach-turning fluff. Heaps of it, tottering, magnificent. Only spittle made it out of her head. The female sensitivity! Ten thousand qualities and not a single one worth having. All the effort, the careful self-pruning, the good practice and self-discipline; all that, to end up the type of person who is totally boring, torturous, overlong, stupid, full of red tape, blood-washed, estrogen-filled—Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The truth well-expressed!