It was painful to recall, but Russ had loved Rick Ambrose.

Once upon a time, in New York, at the seminary on East Forty-ninth Street, Russ and Marion had been the It couple, into whose married-student apartment other young seminarians crowded three or four nights a week to smoke their cigarettes, listen to jazz, and inspire one another with visions of modern Christianity’s renaissance in social action. Twiggy, pretty Marion, more deeply and eclectically read than anyone else, wearing snug pedal pushers and bulky sweaters that evoked the Welsh countryside of Dylan Thomas, was the envy of Russ’s fellow seminarians. Whatever she and Russ did was ipso facto the hip thing. Even pulling up stakes and relocating to rural Indiana, which he’d felt obliged to do when Marion became pregnant and his applications for more exotic postings were rejected, had seemed like an edgy move. Only when Marion withdrew into motherhood, grew heavier and wearier, and Russ needed to come up with fifty sermons a year, rewritten by Marion and delivered in two churches with a combined flock of fewer than three hundred, at eight thirty and ten o’clock every Sunday, did the life she’d once made large for him begin to feel inescapably small. Whenever he contrived a respite from the Indiana farmhouse, by begging favors of pastors from nearby churches, and attended conferences in Columbus or Chicago or protested for civil rights, he was bittersweetly reminded of the edge that he and Marion had lost.

Russ’s refusal to forgive Ambrose, which for nearly three years had organized his interior life and received daily support from Marion, seemed silly when he imagined explaining it to Frances. Worse than silly: unattractive. He saw that, to have a chance with her, he might need to let go of his hatred. But his heart didn’t want to. The loss would be huge, would waste a thousand days of nursing his grudge, would render them meaningless in retrospect. There was also the danger that, if he made peace with Ambrose, Frances would feel even freer to admire Ambrose, and that he, Russ, would end up with nothing—neither his righteous pain nor Frances as his private reward for bearing it. He and Ambrose would still be competing, and he would lose the competition.

Resolved: that goodness is an inverse function of intelligence. First affirmative speaker: Perry Hildebrandt, New Prospect Township High School.

Let’s begin by positing that the essence of goodness is unselfishness: loving others as one loves oneself, performing costly acts of charity, denying oneself pleasures that harm others, and so forth. And then let’s imagine an act of spontaneous kindness to a previously hostile party—to one’s sister, for example—that accords with our posited definition of goodness. If the actor lacks intelligence, we need inquire no further: this person is good. But suppose that the actor is helpless not to calculate the ancillary selfish advantages accruing from his charitable act. Suppose that his mind works so quickly that, even as he’s performing the act, he’s fully aware of these advantages. Is his goodness not thereby fully compromised? Can we designate as “good” an act that he might also have performed through the sheerly selfish calculations of his intellect?

First, however, she needed to see if any chocolate cake was left. It was nearly nine thirty and the concertgoers would be hungry. Letting the sanctuary door lock itself behind her, she paused in the front hall to collect herself. There was a scraping rumble from a snowplow in the street, a nasty rip in her beloved coat. She pulled on the loose threads, wondering if it could be repaired. She’d reentered a mundane world in which it wouldn’t be so easy to stay connected with God. For the first time, she understood how a person might actually look forward to Sunday worship in the sanctuary.

“Then what did you come here for? What do you want?”

“I want you to be a person you could never be.”

“What kind of person is that?”

Russ considered the question. It was a relief to finally air his feelings, but he was following a familiar pattern. Later on—soon—he would be mortified by everything he’d said. For better or worse, this was who he was. When he saw the answer to Ambrose’s question, he went ahead and spoke it.

“I want you to be a person who needs something. Who cares about my approval. You ask me what you could say that wouldn’t set me off, well, there is one thing. You could say you loved me, the way I used to love you.”

Ambrose sat up straight again.

“Don’t worry,” Russ said. “Even if you could say it, I wouldn’t believe you. You never loved me, and both of us know it.”

While Laura Dobrinsky, now seated at the church’s baby grand piano, belted out a Carole King song, he returned to the crowd and maneuvered through it, stopping for a hug from a Crossroads girl who’d confessed to being awed by his vocabulary, and a hug from a girl who’d challenged him to be more emotionally open, and a hug from a girl with whom he’d improvised a skit about the hazards of dishonesty, to much approbation, and a hug from a girl who’d vouchsafed to him, in a dyad, that she’d gotten her first period before she turned eleven, and then a thumbs-up from the boy who’d helped him with the concert posters, and a friendly nod from no less an eminence than Ike Isner, whose face he’d once palpated, while blindfolded, in a trust exercise, and whose blind fingers had then palpated his own face. None of these people could see inside his cranium, all had been fooled into applauding his emotional candor and collectively propelling him, with a kind of gently pulsing group action, like macroscopic cilia, in the direction of belonging to the Crossroads inner circle. The hugs in particular were still pleasant, but the edge of the crater was creeping up on him again, now taking the form of a classic depressive question: What was the point? The inner circle had no actual power. It was merely the goal of an abstract game.

The house was easy to find again, because it was on a dead-end street by the cheerful name of Felix and its street-side mailbox bore a weathered NIXON AGNEW bumper sticker, possibly humor, possibly a red herring for the township police, or possibly, who could say, a heartfelt statement. As Perry came up the street named Felix toward the rail embankment, he saw the white Dodge in the driveway, buried in whiter snow. Light showed around the edges of sagging shades in the house’s living-room windows. The front walk was unshoveled, altogether untrodden.

[...] If Marion remarked on the sheepskin coat, made the mildest insinuation, he would blast her with the news that Perry was a pot smoker. Even better, he would tell her about Ambrose. For three years, she’d been maligning Rick, reinforcing Russ’s grudge against him, and when she learned that Russ had forgiven him, unilaterally, without consulting her, she was bound to feel betrayed. No doubt she’d imagined she was being a loyal wife. But she, in a sense, had betrayed him first. If she hadn’t been so supportive of his failings, he might have made peace long ago. Frances had restored him to his courage, his edge, by believing he was capable of more.

“All right.” She brought the cigarette to her lips, her eyes crossing to focus on the coal. “It annoys me that you want to fuck her.”

The kitchen seemed to spin beneath his feet. He’d never heard that word from her.

“It’s really quite annoying, and if you think it’s because I’m jealous, that’s even more annoying. I mean, really—me? Jealous of that thing? Who do you think I am? Who do you think you married? I’ve seen the face of God.”

“You wanted the kids. You wanted this life.”

“You didn’t?”

“If it had been up to me, we’d be devoted to service. You wouldn’t be a housewife, and I damn sure wouldn’t be giving sermons to bankers and the bridge club.”

“You’re saying that I’m the one who dragged you down? That you’re the one who sacrificed? That you’re doing me a favor with this marriage?”

“At this point? Yes. That is what I think. If you want to know why, take a look at yourself in the goddamned mirror.”

It was the cruelest thing he’d ever said.

“That hurts me,” she said quietly, “but not as much as you wish it did.”

“I—apologize.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea who you married.”