The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Rosa, whose attention had been momentarily hijacked by a mellow saxophonic rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” smiled and took a sip of red wine. “You certainly have some rich material,” she said. It was a while since she had last spoken, and she could tell by the exaggerated precision with which she was now forming her words that she had grown a little tipsy in the interim.

  “Yeah,” Chris said contentedly, “I’m excited about it.” He pointed at the plate of sweets in front of them. “What do you think of the gulab jamon? Out of control, right?”

  Rosa gave a queasy smile. The gulab jamon was quite revolting, she thought: a sort of rose-infused gummy bear.

  “When I was in India,” Chris went on, “I was totally addicted to this stuff. Most places in New York don’t do it right, but the chef here is really amazing. He used to work for an Indian maharaja or something. He’s a really interesting guy, actually. We’ve hung out a couple of times and smoked bidis together. He’s got some great stories…”

  Rosa sat back, letting the drone of Chris’s auto-conversation wash over her. There was a kind of genius to his dullness, she thought. There was nothing you could throw at him that he would not instantly transmute into something achingly uninteresting. Not that it mattered. Tonight, she was sloughing off her judgmental, perfectionist self and going with the flow of things. Chris was fine. She had already decided that she was going to sleep with him.

  “This is fun,” he said. “I’m really glad you agreed to come out tonight.”

  “Me too.”

  “I was kind of surprised, to be honest. You said no so many times. I figured you were still angry with me.”

  “Angry?” Rosa smiled skeptically. Chris was far too insubstantial a figure to have ever inspired her wrath.

  He gave her a coy look. “You don’t remember, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Ah, well, if you don’t remember, maybe we should just let it lie….”

  “Tell me. When was I angry?”

  “The last time we spoke at Bard, you were pissed with me because I’d lost your copy of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and because I hadn’t turned up to hand out pamphlets at something or other. You gave me this huge dressing-down in the middle of the street.” He paused. “You really don’t remember any of this?”

  Rosa shook her head.

  “You called me ‘a complacent cretin.’”

  “You remember the exact phrase ten years later?”

  “Sure. You don’t forget something like that.”

  “I’m sorry. I must have been extremely obnoxious.”

  “No biggie,” Chris said with an unconvincing shrug. “It’s all water under the bridge.”

  Rosa looked around the yard. The garlands of colored lights overhead were beginning to blur and multiply. Partly out of a desire to make up for her past sins and partly out of boredom with the precoital preamble, she leaned across the table now and placed her hand lightly on top of Chris’s. “Shall we go somewhere and have sex?”

  It took them fifteen minutes to walk to Chris’s loft on Second Avenue. Having committed to the evening’s denouement, Rosa was anxious to be done with it. Chris was still fiddling with his keys when she pressed him up against the building’s heavy iron front door and thrust her tongue in his mouth.

  “Take it easy,” he said, pushing her gently away.

  Sheepishly, she withdrew, and they climbed the six steep flights of stairs to his apartment without further physical contact.

  Inside Chris insisted on opening wine and turning on the stereo. Rosa watched hazily as he fussed over the choice of CD. At last, having settled on the songs of a depressive English folksinger, he turned to her with an amorous smirk. “Let’s get those clothes off you, shall we?”

  She had worried that his conscientious mood-setting portended a tediously connoisseurial approach to sex, but this concern proved quite unfounded. Chris fucked with all the speed and abstracted efficiency of a dog and the act was accomplished in just under ten minutes.

  “Did you come?’ he asked afterward.

  Rosa, ever the truth teller, shook her head.

  “Is there something you’d like me to do?”

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “It’s fine. I mean…I don’t have to, every time.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded sagely. “A lot of girls are like that.”

  Rosa glanced at him in amusement. How fortunate to be so credulous!

  “I had a girlfriend a while back who had an orgasm about once a year,” he said. “It wasn’t like the sex was bad or anything. The sex was amazing, actually. She just never came. So at first, I was like, This is crazy, you need to go and see somebody. But she was like, No, orgasms just aren’t that important to me…”

  Rosa watched him finger his tiny scribble of chest hair. He was never going to stop talking. The act of intercourse had been a mere caesura in the truly erotic business of listening to himself speak.

  “Can I ask you something?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you work out?”

  “No.”

  “I just wondered because you’ve got a great body, you know, but if you worked out, you could really tone it.”

  “Ah, yes,” Rosa said. “My roommate tells me the same thing.”

  “You have a roommate?” Chris laughed in amazement. “Man, that must be rough. I can’t imagine having to share a bathroom at our age…” His laughter dwindled to a contemplative Haaaaa. “It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it?” he said. “I mean, I used to be so intimidated by you at Bard. You were so glamorous.”

  Rosa registered the insult of the past tense without resentment. Fair was fair: ten years ago, she had called him a cretin. He was entitled to some payback.

  “I mean,” Chris said, “if you’d asked me then what you were going to be doing when you were thirty, I would never have guessed that you’d be working in an after-school program and living with a roommate. I would have thought you’d be running an African country or something.”

  Rosa looked up at the ceiling. What was the Talmudic phrase she had read in one of Rabbi Reinman’s books? “Accept the truth from whoever gives it.” Chris was right. She had not fulfilled her promise. She had lost her way. The proof of it was her presence in this bed.

  A sudden nausea came upon her. She sat up and clambered out of bed.

  “Have I offended you?” he asked, a little too eagerly,

  She shook her head. “No, not at all. I just need to pee.”

  In the bathroom, she surprised a cockroach feasting on Chris’s toothbrush. It scuttered across the sink and then froze, as if regretting its cowardice. Rosa had just enough time to kneel down at the toilet before unleashing a terrible purple gush of tikka masala and red wine into the bowl.

  “Hey,” Chris shouted from the other room. “Do you want to hear some really amazing Ghanian hip-hop?”

  “Sure,” she called out. She sat back and wiped her mouth on her forearm. The cockroach was perched on the sink faucet, waving its antennae good-naturedly at her. Through the window above Chris’s bathtub, there came a distant drone of traffic and the plaintive wap-wap of a tattered plastic bag trapped in a tree.

  Please God, she prayed, if you exist, if you want something from me, give me a sign: tell me what I should do. She closed her eyes, waiting for a voice, a sudden gust of wind, the thud of a soap bar falling from its dish. But there was nothing, just the flapping of the plastic bag outside and the tinnitus of Chris’s voice wafting down the hall. “These guys are meant to be really amazing live…”

  She stood up, disgusted with her own childish egotism. The God she believed in—or wanted to believe in—did not sit about in his cloudy house, waiting to help out drunken doubters with proof of his existence. He was not some whimsical dispenser of signs and special favors. He was God, for God’s sake.

  “Are you okay?” Chris asked when she returned to the bedroom.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  �
��I thought maybe you were going to be sick.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She began to get dressed.

  “What’s up? What’re you doing?” Chris asked,

  “I need to get back.”

  “Why?”

  She hopped about, trying to force her foot through the twisted leg of her pants. “I have stuff to do in the morning.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “Is it what I said before about—”

  “No, really. I just want to sleep in my own bed tonight.”

  He watched her putting on her sandals. “Are we going to get together again?”

  She turned to him. He was not a bad person, she thought. A fool, certainly. But not a bad person. “I don’t think so,” she said. She smiled kindly. “I appreciate your asking, though.”

  CHAPTER

  17

  Karla woke up agitated, mystified. She turned off her alarm clock and looked around the room. “Mike?”

  She usually loved the mornings when Mike left for work early. Today, though, the stillness of the apartment felt ominous. She sat up, trying to locate the source of her unease, and abruptly, as the events of the previous evening came back to her, she lay down again. What had she done? What had she done? She pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes, until she saw dancing dots of phosphorescent blue. The weight of her sin lay on her like a rock, pinioning her against the bed. She could not go to work, that was clear. She could not possibly face Khaled. She would have to phone in and pretend to be sick.

  In the bathroom, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and gave a little cry of anguish. Her chin was red and raw where Khaled had burned her with his bristle, and there was a lurid purple-and-green bruise on her hip where she had stumbled against the corner of her desk during their kiss. How would she possibly explain these marks to Mike?

  The colleague who answered at the hospital was full of sympathetic concern. “It’s probably that stomach flu that everyone’s been getting. Poor you, Karla.”

  Karla grimaced in shame. This was the first time she had missed work in five years, and the only time in her professional life that she had lied in order to do so. “It’s no big deal,” she said. “I’ll probably be fine by tomorrow.”

  All day she lay on the sofa in her living room, flicking restlessly between daytime soap operas, trying to fend off the visions flitting through her head. It was a disgusting thing she’d done: disgusting and irresponsible and vile. She had not wanted to do it—not really. It had been a temporary madness. He had put his tongue in her belly button. He had even tried to lick—oh, God. What a horrible, horrible man to do that. She was never going to speak to him again.

  Mike was upset to come home in the evening and find Karla still in her nightgown. Karla almost never admitted to any sort of incapacity. To have her malingering about the place made him nervous and irritable.

  “What’s the matter? Are you depressed?” he asked accusingly.

  “No,” Karla said, “it’s just a stomach bug, I told you.” This was the first time they had spoken since their fight about her essay. He had already been asleep by the time she got back from the hospital last night. She was shocked to discover that her guilt did not altogether cancel out her lingering fury.

  “Why didn’t you go to the doctor today?” he demanded.

  “There was no point. It’s getting better. I’ll be up for work tomorrow.”

  He pointed at her face. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  He came over and prodded roughly at her chin. “That.”

  “Ow.” She batted him away. “Don’t.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been using a new moisturizer. I think it’s given me an allergic reaction.”

  He drew back in distaste. “You should watch out it doesn’t get infected.”

  At work the next day, Karla found a note under her door.

  Dear Karla,

  I came to find you but you weren’t here. I hope everything is all right. Please call me on my cell phone as soon as you get this.

  Love,

  Khaled

  She was still studying it when he walked in.

  “You’re back,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I was worried. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, of course.” Look at him, she thought. He’s nothing. A tubby man with a bald spot.

  Khaled smiled. “I’m glad.” He stopped and pointed at her chin. “Was that me?”

  “Yes.”

  He paused. “I have done something, and if it was the wrong thing, you must tell me.”

  “What?”

  “I booked a hotel room.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “I made it for tomorrow night. I thought, since you have yoga on Thursdays…It’s a nice place, you know. Not sleazy.”

  “Oh God, oh God.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s too soon, you’re right.”

  She looked at him, standing with his eyes to the floor and his arms dangling loosely at his side, like a reprimanded schoolboy. With a suddenness that made him flinch, she grasped his sleeve and pulled him toward her.

  The Regency Suites was downtown, in Battery Park City, safely remote from both home and work. To get there, Karla had to take a 4 train, get off at Forty-second Street, take the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square, and then catch a 3 train to Chambers Street. She walked the rest of the way, using a map that Khaled had downloaded for her. It was a warm, pink-skied evening, and the streets were crowded with people spilling out from restaurants and bars. On every block, it seemed, there was a different gaggle of tipsy women in miniskirts and strapless tops, screaming merry obscenities at one another.

  She had always dreaded summer. It was the season of disclosure, of floaty fabrics and bare flesh and open toes, the time of year in which her exile from the world of carefree fun and sensual pleasures was driven home most painfully. In preparation for this evening, she had tussled into and out of several outfits, including—madly—some items from her reliquary of “skinny” clothes. She had tried on a rubbery girdle that purported to Make You Lose Ten Pounds Instantly! but alas the pounds had not been lost, only redistributed to either end of the rigid garment. Ultimately, she had opted for a tent-size, calf-length black dress that her mother had once told her made her look like the prow of a ship. She was, she thought, a comically implausible adulteress.

  The hotel had an atrium lobby, with a marble floor and several outsize chairs clad in candy-colored velvet dotting its perimeter. Behind the front desk, there was an abstract mural—rough stripes of yellow and red and blue paint—and three clerks, all wearing black suits with mandarin collars. Karla wondered anxiously how much money Khaled had paid for a room in this frighteningly chic establishment. When she approached the desk and gave Khaled’s name, she was amazed to receive a smile from the clerk, and more astonished still to be given the room key without any questions or argument. Khaled had not yet arrived.

  She rode the elevator to the eleventh floor, clutching her plastic key card. Room 1126 was at the far end of the corridor. She approached it slowly, as if the secret of her assignation were held in a bowl on her head, and it was only by maintaining the most scrupulously even gait that she could keep it from sloshing on the carpet. At the door, she slid her card, now slippery with sweat, into its slot. A green light flashed, and she turned the handle.

  She walked around the small beige room, breathing in its chill mustiness. Two tiles of chocolate had been laid on the bed pillows. She picked one up and ate it while considering the brown floral bedcover. She had seen a news program once in which an investigative team had shone infrared light on hotel bedspreads, revealing gruesome palimpsests of semen and bloodstains.

  She decided to pull the cover off.

  As soon as she had done so, she regretted it. The bed looked horribly bare now, as if an operation were about to be performed on it. And what if Khaled interp
reted her gesture as sexual impatience? Hurriedly she shook out the bedspread and put it back on the bed.

  Feeling hot and a little breathless, she went to the window to see if it could be opened. When she pushed the curtains aside, she gave a small cry of surprise. The room faced directly onto the site where the World Trade Center had stood. She had never been to Ground Zero before. The idea of making a special trip downtown to gawk at it from a “viewing stand” had always seemed to her in very bad taste. The terrible piles of twisted metal that she had seen in newspaper photographs had been cleared away now. In their place lay an enormous, antiseptic gray scar, surrounded by chicken-wire fence and bathed in the surreal white glow of stadium lights.

  She was still staring out at her view when she heard the door half opening behind her.

  “Who is it?” she called out.

  “Me.”

  She went to the door and undid the chain. Khaled was standing in the corridor, looking eager and slightly harried, with a plastic bag in his hand. They smiled nervously at one another.

  “It’s a nice room,” she said, gesturing around her like a realtor.

  “Really?” he asked. “It’s okay? There wasn’t a picture on the computer, so I had to take a chance.” He paused for a moment to survey the furnishings. “Oh, yes…it’s nice.”

  He pulled out a bottle of wine from his plastic bag. “It’s French.”

  “Lovely.”

  “The man in the store recommended it.”

  Karla felt a pang of sadness, picturing Khaled in the wineshop, earnestly canvassing the opinion of experts.

  “I think I need to take a shower,” he said. “Would you mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Karla sat down on the bed and examined the tiger stripes on the carpet where the vacuum had rubbed the pile the wrong way. Everything was wrong. She had made a terrible mistake.

  When Khaled returned, he was dressed in one of the hotel’s white, waffle-weave robes, with a towel around his neck, like a boxer. “That feels better,” he said. “It’s so hot outside…” He paused, registering her unhappy expression. “What’s the matter?”