I Knew You'd Be Lovely

  “What’s the matter?” Hannah said. She tilted her head. “C’mon. Come here.”

  “I don’t know,” Sydney said. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Hannah was walking toward her. She tried again. “It’s just—he really loves you, you know?”

  Before she could get to the rest, Hannah had taken her hand and was leading her back to the apartment. “March!” she said, stomping her feet. Tipsy and determined, she pulled Sydney—reluctant still, but willing to be led.

  When they reached the doorway, Hannah stopped abruptly and Sydney bumped up against her back. With Sydney right behind her, she put her key in the lock, but before she opened it, she turned. She turned around, and she kissed Sydney, kissed her soft, warm lips.

  It was a delicate, grateful, exciting kiss, and when she pulled away, Sydney’s eyes were still closed.

  “I knew you’d be lovely,” Hannah said, and opened the door.

  PROOF OF LOVE

  Kelly loved Jesus, and she also loved Nash. Well, she didn’t love Nash exactly, but she found him to be very intriguing. She felt she could love him. Nash worked at Whole Foods and had blue eyes that were so pale and bright they almost looked fake. She’d spotted him there five months ago, and they chatted while she was helping him bag the food. He held up her salsa.

  “Watch yourself, this one’s industrial strength.”

  “I keep cayenne pepper in my glove compartment,” she said. “You can’t get too spicy for me.”

  “In your glove compartment.”

  “For spice emergencies,” she said.

  The following week she caught herself reapplying her lipstick before she went in and waiting until his line was open to approach the cash registers.

  “These look good,” he said, scanning a box of coconut ice creams frozen in the half shell.

  “They’re from France,” Kelly said. “They do things like that in France.”

  He smiled. “Indeed they do.”

  “I don’t even like ice cream,” she said. “I just liked the looks of them.”

  “You don’t like ice cream? What is that, some kind of birth defect or something?”

  “We’ve all got our flaws,” she said.

  A week and a half later she bought two bottles of wine. In line, she admitted that the salesmen at her local wineshop intimidated her. “It’s not just the jargon; it’s the way they seem so enlightened or something. Like they’ve shed all attachment to material things.”

  “All except the grape,” he said.

  “Well, if you’re going to grant exceptions, the grape is a great place to start.” She pretended to read his name off his shirt, but really she’d noted it weeks ago. “And you, Nash? Have you given up all earthly attachments?”

  “Uh, my answer to that would have to be an unqualified no.”

  “Care to help me out with one of these?”

  They got drunk on her back porch. It was the last balmy night of summer. Her dog loved him, sat in his lap, wouldn’t leave him alone. She was a graphic artist for a magazine, and her dog’s name was Pixel. She told him both these things, which were true. She also told him that she didn’t like her job very much, which wasn’t true.

  “If I ever get fired, I’m coming to work at Whole Foods. If you people will have me, that is.”

  “I don’t know—they’re very selective. They can tell if you’re only in it for the discount.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t turn down the discount,” she said. She took a sip of her wine. “You know, in Atlanta, they call Whole Foods ‘Whole Paycheck.’ ” The previous weekend she’d left Chicago for Atlanta to visit her sister. Kelly was older than Michelle, but because Michelle had married and was procreating close to their parents’ home in Buckhead, where they’d grown up, she was openly favored. Kelly was the only one in her family of science types who practiced the faith, a faith she’d learned on the sly from her Catholic grandmother, and for this and other reasons she was considered the odd duck in the family. The black sheep. The wet chicken.

  She noticed their glasses were empty and went to fetch another bottle. “How’d you end up working there?” she said.

  “Lack of ambition,” Nash said flatly. “The usual things don’t inspire me.”

  “And which things might those be?”

  “You know—money. Fame. Power.” There was no hint of reprimand in his voice even though the answer now seemed obvious.

  Kelly refilled their glasses, giving the bottle a little half-twist at the end. “So what does inspire you?” she said. She knew what she wanted him to say: Love. Truth. Beauty. But Nash didn’t answer. “You don’t fool me,” she said, sitting back down. “I bet you secretly want to rule the world. I’m sure you have your plans.” But Nash just looked at her with his sea blue eyes and said nothing.

  “What’s with all the God stuff?” he asked, indicating her wall with a lift of his chin. There was a profile of Jesus to the left of her fireplace, and next to the window hung some giant ivory rosary beads she’d picked up in Mexico. On various shelves and tables there were figurines, prayer cards, scapulars. She hadn’t intended her decor to have a religious theme; it had just ended up that way.

  “What can I say? I love the guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “Jesus.”

  “Rrright,” said Nash. “Jesus.”

  “I’m very religious,” Kelly said. “But not in the usual way.” It was true. Kelly was not formal with God. “Baby,” she called him, as in, “Jesus, baby, you’re the one for me.” She deeply suspected God was a lot funnier and more hip than people gave him credit for. Everyone was always so lugubrious: the capital letters, the hair shirts. She tried to put herself in God’s shoes. What would she want? Tenderness, intimacy. An unparalleled love. Someone whose loyalty was independent of circumstance. Someone who tried to be original, in addition to reciting prayers. So that’s what she tried to give. Doing the dishes, ambling through the supermarket, she tossed little nuggets his way: “I love you, G. What’s not to love?” She tried to keep it fresh and simple.

  Her friend Gwen told her she was insane. Kelly thought this was harsh. “You could say eccentric and get your point across. You could say intense.” But to be honest, she’d learned not to expect others to understand. At times, people in the pew beside her would begin to nod when the priest said something counterintuitive, such as that gays had no place in the kingdom of heaven, or that birth control was a sin. She heard what the priest was saying, but something inside her didn’t believe it. She couldn’t imagine those words on Jesus’ lips. “I’m sorry,” she would whisper. “We don’t really know what we’re doing here—we need help. We need you.” She stole jokes from movies like Jerry Maguire. “Help us to help you. Help us to help you help us.”

  The air was thick with silence; Nash was waiting for her to speak. “I think the church gets a lot of things wrong,” she said. “It’s man who makes a fuss over what people do with their genitals. God cares more what people do with their hearts.”

  “The church gets more wrong than it gets right, if you ask me,” Nash said. “The Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition.”

  “Yeah, well, Jesus is wildly misunderstood and always has been. What can I say?” She paused. “You should give him a chance.”

  Nash laughed. “First of all, you don’t know what I have or haven’t given him. Maybe I have given him a chance.”

  “You should give him a second chance.”

  Nash took a long drink of his wine. “I didn’t know you were a Jesus freak,” he said. “You don’t seem all that conservative.”

  “I thought it was hilarious when the church said it was choosing a conservative pope, to remain true to its roots. Jesus was a radical.”

  “You are right about that, I suppose.”

  She felt encouraged by this concession, minor though it was. “C’mon,” she said. “Give the guy another chance.”

  “You think you have it all figured out, don’t you?” he said.

&nbs
p; “No,” Kelly said. She could feel the wine’s heat in her cheeks. “Not really.” She set down her glass and leaned closer to him. “But I secretly want to save the world,” she said.

  He slipped a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s not so secret,” he said.

  At the end of the night, he didn’t kiss her—not even on the cheek. Nor did he kiss her when he rode his bike over two weeks later, although he did bring a jar of blackberry preserves, and tell her stories about how he’d been a philosophy major at Northwestern but had spent most of his time doing laps in the pool. He said it helped unclog his head. “The problem with philosophers is that most of them can’t write clearly,” he said. “I’d get to the end of a sentence that went on for a paragraph and realize I didn’t know what the verb was.”

  “I know what you mean,” Kelly said. She toasted sesame-seed bagels for the jam and asked him to pick out some music. It was late afternoon, but ample sunlight still slanted through the windows of her kitchen. She could hear the neighborhood kids playing in the street. On weekdays, Chicago felt like a city, but on Sundays, it always felt like a small town.

  “Don’t you have any jazz?” he asked, thumbing through her CDs.

  “I wish I liked jazz, because I think it’s sort of cool to like, but actually I hate it. All that meandering around … It’s depressing.”

  Nash was shaking his head. “There’s no real hope for you. You know that, right?”

  “I know,” she said, spreading jam on a bagel. “I’m a misfit. I also hate zoos and baths. And pesto.”

  “That’s a lot of hate for one so young,” he said, which she took as a compliment. She was thirty-six, and figured Nash to be at least a couple of years her junior. He selected an Ellis Paul CD. “What have you got against baths, anyway?”

  “They’re so boring. It’s just being stationary and wet. You try to read, but the book gets all soggy. And the water gets cold. Then you get this crick in your neck, and you can never quite get comfortable—”

  “At least now I know what to do if we ever need to torture you—forced bath time,” he said. She loved his face; there was always a measure of sadness in it, even when he was smiling.

  “How’s Baby been treating you?” he said. Baby had become their code word for Jesus.

  “Baby always treats me right,” she said. “Next Monday is Yom Kippur, so I’ll be fasting, like he would have done.” Kelly had such respect for Judaism and so liked to remind people of Jesus’ Jewishness that her boss had taken to calling her “Jesus for Jews over here.” She set the plate in front of Nash. “On an entirely unrelated note, could I interest you in a mimosa?”

  He looked pleased. “Twist my arm,” he said.

  She dug a bottle out from the back of the fridge. “I have this Champagne a friend brought me from a wedding she went to. I guess she felt bad because she’d called me at four in the morning to ask what brevity was the soul of. She was working on her toast, and just drew a blank.” She could feel Nash’s eyes on the back of her neck.

  “If brevity’s the soul of wit, what’s verbosity the soul of?” he said.

  She shrugged.

  “Tenure,” he said.

  “That’s a good one.”

  “My mom’s a professor,” he said. “She hates the bullshit.”

  She handed him a mimosa and held up her glass. “To a world with less bullshit,” she said, to which he quickly added, “and other things that will never happen.”

  “We need a revolution,” she said. “A less-bullshit revolution.”

  Nash swallowed the sweet concoction and fake winced, as if he’d taken a hit of grappa. “ ‘All revolutions evaporate, leaving only the slime of bureaucracy,’ ” he said.

  “Ain’t it the truth.”

  “That’s Kafka, of course. Not me.”

  “Gotta love Kafka,” Kelly said. “We could use a few more Kafkas around here.” She set her glass on the table and they both sat down. “What does your mom teach?”

  “Psychiatry. She’s at the med school.”

  “Oh,” Kelly said. “Free therapy.” Nash raised an eyebrow as if to say that free therapy from your mother is not something you want.

  “How about your dad?” she said. Her own father was a molecular engineer, and was as honest and gentle as they came. He fell into a category of large-hearted nonbelievers whom she privately referred to as the Christlike non-Christians.

  “My father killed himself when I was eleven,” Nash said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said softly. She had the impulse to touch him, but her arms felt as if they belonged to someone else. “What was he like?”

  “I consider him to have been a professional sloganeer. He always had these sayings, like: Do today’s work today and Neither hurry nor wait. Or my mom’s favorite: Keep your words soft and tender, for tomorrow you might have to eat them. I don’t remember that much about him, to be honest. He used to read me Shakespeare’s plays as bedtime stories. Then he would stub his toe and say: ‘Fie on’t!’ and I would laugh.”

  “He sounds wonderful.”

  Nash drained his glass. “Sometimes life just doesn’t make sense, I guess.”

  “But we only see partially,” Kelly said. “We don’t see how it all plays out.”

  “No, I can tell you how it played out: He’s dead.”

  “Right, but—”

  He stood up and placed his hand on top of her head. “Sorry, kiddo, but I should hit the road,” he said, and before she knew it, he’d pushed open the door, swung a leg over his bike, and was pedaling away.

  “I love him,” Kelly said. She and Gwen were having mochaccinos at an outdoor café and watching people pass by on their way to the independent movie theater or the Armenian restaurant. “I want to take his clothes off with my teeth.”

  “He still hasn’t kissed you? Nothing?”

  “Nada. It’s like he’s never heard of kissing. And I’m afraid to touch him. I can’t tell if it would be welcome.”

  “How often does he come over?”

  “Once a week. For the past two months.”

  “And he calls you every other day?”

  “Yup.”

  “And he’s not gay?”

  “Nope.”

  Gwen stirred her whipped cream dispiritedly with a flat wooden stick. She seemed to be wearying of the Nash subject. “What do you even like about this guy?”

  Kelly looked down at her coffee. “He has interesting observations. He doesn’t care about unimportant things.”

  “Like showering and shaving?”

  She lifted her chin. “He stands a little apart from the world. I like that.”

  “He seems a little broken, in my opinion.”

  “We’re all a little broken.”

  Gwen rolled her eyes. “Lucky for him you’re drawn to the hopeless ones. You and your bleeding heart.”

  Kelly knew she had some radical ideas concerning heaven. “I’ve heard that in heaven, my joy will be complete. And my joy will be incomplete unless everyone comes with me,” she told her priest. This was during confession, when she was supposed to be focusing on her own sins. She half-expected the priest to say: “Well, now that you mention it, little lady, you do have a point there.” He didn’t. But neither did he protest.

  It was Gwen who protested. “Even the bad guys get to go—the killers and the rapists?”

  Kelly stood her ground.

  “Even the people who don’t, you know, believe in Jesus?” Gwen was not particularly religious, and her mouth always got a bit gummy when saying the word Jesus out loud.

  “If faith is a gift, how can you punish those who don’t have it?”

  Gwen paused. “What good is heaven if everyone gets to go? What justice is there in that?”

  “Mercy is greater than justice,” Kelly said. She believed it with all her heart.

  On Sunday morning she went to church. She’d just learned the Spanish word for mercy and thought it was beautiful, found herself repeati
ng it under her breath as she drove. Misericordia, misericordia. During the Gospel reading, the priest said, “May all who have ears hear,” to which Kelly quickly prayed, “Give everybody ears.” At the end of Mass it was announced that there would be a prayer vigil at five o’clock to end abortion. Kelly always wondered why they didn’t have prayer vigils to end unwanted pregnancy, and had once put this idea in what she thought was a suggestion box but turned out to be a donation box for the world’s poor. She stayed late, alone in the empty pews, and prayed. She felt Jesus close, as she often did—invisible but close. This was her life: always sensing him and missing him at the same time.

  She wanted to pray about Nash, who indeed seemed to keep separate from the world, and she was beginning to fear that she was part of the world he kept separate from. But she tried to be careful never to tell God what to do. Instead of praying for a Cubs victory, for instance, she simply said: “May your holy will be done.” Then later, she chastised herself: Well, maybe you should have been a little more specific.

  “Make my heart your heaven,” she said. She lowered her head. “I give you my life.” She wished she had something better to give; she knew she was no model of blind obedience. “I offer you the lives of all the saints,” she said. She liked the way the communion of saints allowed you to share in the good works of others. “I offer you all the love of all time. Give me everything you want me to have, even if there’s suffering involved.”

  She had to admit, she had not yet learned the art of loving suffering. She realized she should; she knew suffering was proof of love. “Do you know that the saints in heaven would envy you?” she’d once read in a mystic’s diary she found in her grandmother’s closet. “Their time of sacrifice is over.” She thought she understood what this meant. Now, while she had free will, was her chance to show God she loved him more than earthly things. Nevertheless, she found herself avoiding sacrifice and seeking her own pleasure. She tried to override this tendency—the tendency toward self-satisfaction, when she could be trying to charm God—but it was difficult. Still, she knew God understood this difficulty. God understood everything.