City of God (43 page)

—Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang. . . and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves. . . until, shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet. . . where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell. . . to name just a few of the stars.

—I anticipate not being invited to the wedding. From remarks Pem has made, I think it will be a simple five-minute event down at city hall. Flowers from the peddler at the curb. Echoing catacomb-like corridors of marble. ID and marriage license in one hand, divorce papers in the other. Ministry of the Civil Service: windowless room with stained-glass insets.

They used to do this feature regularly in the papers, lovers forging their fate with civic blessing. Picture of the line of couples and their chosen witnesses, handsome West Indians, scared and pale eighteen-year-olds from Queens, sturdy young Latinos in tropical colors, stylish, lots of laughter, ready to break out dancing, a quiet older couple holding hands. Pem and Sarah. This is their principled decision—the municipal sacrament.

Maybe Seligman will be their witness.

Now I am thinking of the marriage night. It is unpleasant imagining any two people you know making love, but I have no trouble here, this is such a pure thing, such plighted troth, there is nothing porno-graphic about it, Pem lowers his clumsy adoring being on Sarah, her hands wander over his back like the learning fingers of a sightless person, he is practically weeping for joy, he tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear just the way she does when she's bent over the Torah, he touches her mouth, and when they kiss there is nothing at work in his mind, no running commentary, the indissoluble self is dissolved. I say it is dark, it is late, the boys are asleep on the floor below, but the dimmest light from the street seems to gravitate to her eyes which shine dark as plums. I can't imagine what it is like for her, but as she guides him, holds him, he sinks into total recognition, as if they have always made love, as if they have been man and wife for a practiced time. There is no sense of discovery, of a new knowledge, and whatever her particularities of flesh and bone, they are transformed instantly into the only shape and structure that it is possible for a woman to have. . .

Pem hasn't completed his conversion studies, but I don't think they will wait to marry, Sarah in her progressivism coming out to meet him halfway, as it were. He said to me last night that he has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now, studying to be a Jew.

Pem, I told him, maybe you better not say that to anyone else.

Why? It's true.

Are you sure you've got the right perspective on this?

Well, I admit, part of my thinking is in the nature of making spiritual reparations, so to speak. Maybe that's where it began. But it's more than that now. I feel liberated, restored to my mind, my intellect is being admitted into my faith. Everything is coming together, it's all so logical. I have never felt as honest, as without misgivings in my belief in the Creator. It is unattached to mythology. It is nonpictorial. Admittedly there's a lot of pseudohistorical clutter in Judaism too, but that's what Sarah and Joshua founded EJ for, to get back to the crucial first things. And that's what we will do. For me, now, Judaism is Christianity without Christ, and I have a glad heart.

A glad heart. I like that.

It's more than a fucking phrase, Everett. It's a real feeling-state.

Okay.

Migod, there is something about the secular disdain that is really awful.

I don't have the secular disdain.

You would do better with a glad heart than the secular disdain.

I do all right. I like birds, I like women, I like language. These foolish things gladden the heart.

Do you know, Everett, what the anthropic principle is? It is quite simple: that our universe, having exploded into existence at an inflationary rate, and spent billions of years swathed in an opacity of gases before photons brought light into space and everything cooled—

Wait a minute, what are we on to now?

Seligman told me this—after photons lit things up enough to create the furnaces of stars in their galaxies and stellar dust and dark matter. . . well, from all this perturbation just those elements were created that allowed for the appearance of human life. That is the anthropic principle. Whatever the universe is composed of seems to have made us possible.

Seligman told you that?

It's an idea kicking around among the cosmologists.

Is that the best they can come up with? The self-evident anthropic principle?

Well why it's useful to them, it smooths out some of their problems. They are in less of a bind if it turns out that there are other universes besides this one that may not have the necessary components for human consciousness.

Like what?

Like hydrogen and carbon and space and time and such.

I see.

But ours has these things that allow us to be having this conversation. I'm telling you just so you know there are some secularists who do not have the secular
disdain.

—A little thought experiment: If we were to build a rocket ship and send it off into space, and this rocket ship were equipped to feel like home, with roads and houses, lawn chairs, VCRs, Kmarts, football fields, and wars. . . the space traveler, upon awakening, would not be able to tell if he was on earth in the usual orbit or drifting forever, irrevocably and without remediation, through the anthropic universe. You see how simple it is?

—And so it's done, they were married downtown in the middle of the week, and I was right in not expecting to be best man, there was no best man, there was a best woman, Joshua Gruen's sister. I understand that, I understand why Sarah would make that choice, the thoughtful-ness of it, the acknowledgment, in the midst of her joy, of her loss, the loss to both of them. A large, meaningful choice enacting the impeccable ethics of Sarah.

The sister's name is Judy, she's a psychiatric social worker, mid-thirties, small dark-haired woman wearing a corsage, trim little figure, quite nice, just a little tearful as we sit talking in the Senate Room of the Jefferson residential hotel on East Seventy-second Street on this Sunday afternoon.

“I'm happy for Sarah,” Judy says. “She's a wonderful person. She and my brother were a marriage made in heaven. But after everything she's been through, she deserves some happiness. I think this is good for the kids, too.”

Judy's husband, Al Something, teaches English at some community college in New Jersey—he is not that convinced. Pepper-and-salt beard, which he strokes as he watches Pem, who at the moment is dancing and chatting away with an elderly white-haired lady.

“I don't believe in conversion,” Al says. “I don't think it's possible. What do you call a Christian Marrano?” he says to me.

Around the small dance floor are several tables with white cloths at which the guests sit nibbling on the hot and cold hors d'oeuvres. A bar to one side, the bartender not overworked, it's a sherry and soft-drink crowd. I go over, and when I ask for a double vodka on the rocks, his face lights up.

Maybe fifty, sixty people, most of whom I don't know, the extended relationships of Pem and Sarah. It will take me a while, but I will come to understand that on one side sit the Pems and on the other the Sarahs, not a combination conducive to partying, no horas on the dance floor, the combo plays dance music, slow-swinging, gentle—piano, sax, guitar, bass. They're not bad. But in this crowd, when someone gets up to dance everyone watches.

On these occasions it's always a strain connecting the principals, your friends, to the relatives and friends from their past. Another world. You have the feeling that the wedding guests are just those people whom the bride and groom have spent their lives trying to escape. I am surprised on two counts, one that there is any wedding reception at all, and two that it is here at this stuffy hotel. But this is the residence of Sarah's dowager aunt, the late mother's older sister, Myrna Fein. Seeing her instruct one of the waiters, I understand this is her show.

As I think about it, I don't know how Sarah has been able to keep her establishment going. How much Joshua could have left her in insurance, whether there was money in his family, or if there's a mortgage on their synagogue.. . . Money doesn't seem to be a problem. I know Pem is broke, but I don't have the feeling she is. Yet her father as a lifelong academic could never have been that well-heeled. And nursing homes are expensive. How can anyone write a proper novel without talking about money?

Judy and her husband get up to dance. They greet Pem and Sarah, who are now together on the dance floor. The two couples fox-trot in a kind of open half-embrace as they talk. Pem gesticulates with his free hand. They all laugh, even sister Judy's skeptical husband.

Sarah is wearing an ivory suit with a bronze silk blouse that picks up the lights in her hair. Her hair is longer now and tied simply behind her neck, in the style of an American revolutionary. Her ears are unadorned. I see she is not wearing her specs for the occasion, for a moment she looks past the others straight at me, but I realize she is too nearsighted, too beautifully, radiantly nearsighted, to actually see me.

And here is Myrna Fein, the hostess, bearing down on the guest who sits alone. Settles in the chair beside mine. A stout woman, a round pretty face, heavily made up. Huffs and puffs to catch her breath, staring at me all the while.

“So you're the writer. . .”

“I am.”

“Are you married? I don't see a wife here.”

“No.”

“Are you divorced?”

“I'm a confirmed bachelor.”

“That's nothing to be proud of. My eyes tell me you're approaching the age when you'd better find a woman to take care of you. You wait too long, what woman will want the job?”

“Thank you for your very good advice, Myrna.”

“You're patronizing me. When my husband died ten years ago, I took over his business. A parts supplier to General Motors. I sold it last year for forty-five million dollars. And I'm telling you, you don't want to be the perennial extra man at my Sarah's table.”

Whammo.

“I know all about you,” she says. “I've got eyes, I'm not as stupid as you think.”

Across the room, I find the little bishop. He looks older and smaller in civvies. He is relieved to see me. “I'm not sure just how to proceed,” he says. “Do you happen to know if anyone is going to give a benediction?”