Part 13 (1/2)

He crossed one leg over the other, brushed at his pants ”Tragedy is this: creating soand then choosing a new and certainly less-deserving favorite I had begun, by the ti flood and the birth of El's favored nation, the Israelites, to see this pattern And I have seen it repeated now for ehands were pulling apart the set Beneath us on theup discarded playbills

”But here now, is the crux of it”- he stared atmoment while you have the favor of an utterly partial God, willing to offer second chances again and again and again”

THAT NIGHT I FELT my focus like fervor It ell after 2:00 a touched the stack of reading inthe et in an hour of reading before leaving for the office, it occurred toI dreaded, to which I gave my reluctant and disinterested eye It did not moveI dreaded, to which I gave my reluctant and disinterested eye It did not move me; I did it because I ned myself to the fact that I was a better editor than writer That I was not destined to see e Now I began to ad In the last week I had felt more creatively alive-if physically drained-than I had in years, even if the story I sculpted was not my own Lucian's story had taken root in the last fertile corner ofpieces of hope, ae I felt manipulated, and I still did not understand hisme any of this But for the first time in more than a year, I felt a seed of volition in an existence that otherwise had none

17

On the subway, I fought to stay awake I drifted,lull where neither deadlines nor demons existed, where I was neither editor nor divorce, where there was nothing but an oblivion that I had not known since infancy

I shi+fted the bottle of shi+raz to the seat next to reen twisted around the top, courtesy of the woainst attending Helen's party But after nearly ten hours of staring at twelve-point print, I could no longer pretend to care if , dickensian sentences spanning 250 pages I eary of couised as literature, of Ayn Rand-esque discourse that would take ed Atlas Shrugged By five o'clock it was all tasteless By five o'clock it was all tasteless

Sitting on the subway noever, I regretted o The three hours it would take to attend Helen's annual holiday function were three hours I s with Lucian, which had just recently begun to cohere into a single narrative

But it was too late Phil, who at the Newton stop to take me to Helen's upscale house in her upscale suburb where 520,000 ht buy eleven hundred square feet in a hundred-year-old ho lucky wouldthere

Aubrey had been ena to Newton-once her job intook off and I had written my best seller, she said Which meant, of course, that it was really just a pipe dream to support and inspire reater of our two I never spoke about my vision of Belmont-Newton had been her dream, and so it necessarily eclipsed erievances, and I had retreated into silence

Until that night

I blamed her, yanked the covers back fro I yelled at her and called her a whore But as furious as I ith her, I was angry withthe right thing-of being a good good man-had amounted only to this: that I would never be able to do and be those things she required man-had amounted only to this: that I would never be able to do and be those things she required

I rubbed my forehead, the back of my neck At Copley Station I pulled the wine back onto s She had a long, gray ponytail that rehtly woman in her fifties who routinely ca of horse sweat and leather

My seatht sin talking about clay ot up at the next stop, and I watched her go, thinking of the dressage boots that had carried froardless of our thirty-year age difference

A rough-hewn Asian woman in an army jacket s to mind Professor Deptula”

My heart twitched inside my chest as she caray hair had been Her face was round, the kind of face a Korean friend of mine used to call a ”pumpkin” Her hair spiked in soft black tufts fro dis dotted her earlobe She was all cargo pants, leather, and cah-heay that refused to chase the classic Asian beauty she could never have achieved at any rate

Her presence startled me-not for the fact that it ca across from me for two stops before shein plain sight on other occasions? But at least one de network to have such ready knowledge of hout my life And while I knew this fact in theory, I found the reality of it unsettling

”I didn't see anything on ht I'd drop by”

Yes, unsettling

”And what if I had stayed at ho fronize would be standing there with a too-familiar sh, then raked a hand through her hair, hter than before The thick strap of a leather watch was bound around her wrist ”Well, that ht have presented a problem”

I didn't like the sound of that ”Why?”

”I don't care for your place”

This admission stunned me ”Why?”

”It has a fair amount of, shall we say, spiritual static Let's keep it at that”

I felt a wash of relief, followed quickly by a flash of anger How long had I felt as vulnerable as if I lived in a fishbowl?

”What do you mean, 'spiritual static'?”

”Clay, I didn't co shui I need to address an issue” There arning in her voice, seeet up at the next stop, leaving htened me most of all ”What issue?”

”This debacle of Job”

Job? I was only vaguely familiar with the story, and uely familiar with the story, and more for literary reasons than biblical ones

”Listen Lucifer's days of proving his oorthiness and superiority were gone He was beyond that, delighting only in El's disappointment, which had become a motivation all its own To that end, he beca the a shot Lucifer loved this particular ga the hureat enjoy out their failures For these acts Lucifer first received the naers of her one hand enclosed the wrist of the other, see to check that the leather band of her watch was securely fastened One of the earrings dangled against the corner of her jaw: a silver knife

”Now understand that like your scientists with their mice in their es, the overwhel empirical evidence We have, after all, been there since the beginning and understand soht he waited for me at the Bosnian Cafe At Vittorio's At the distraction I felt at the sight of her in the bookstore, the s it

”During that tiht that was still him him-became obsessed with the man Job”

”Why?”

”Because El said there was no one on earth like him And this made Job irresistible to Lucifer, whothe clay people hadn't the faithfulness to show loyalty in the face of adversity It's one thing to love a God who protects you, showers you ealth and all the worldly things that seem to matter soto love his disappear