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Coming from Frances, the word genius was like acid on Russ’s brain. He should have borne it stoically, but on his bad days he was unable not to do things he would later regret. It was almost as if he did them because he would later regret them. Writhing with retrospective shame, abasing himself in solitude, was how he found his way back to God’s mercy.
An embarrassed silence fell. The last daylight of November was dying in crayon colors beneath the clouds on the suburban horizon. Russ now had more than enough to be ashamed of later, more than enough to be sure that he deserved to suffer. The sense of rightness at the bottom of his worst days, the feeling of homecoming in his humiliations, was how he knew that God existed. Already, as he drove toward the dying light, he had a foretaste of their reunion.
God only knew what expression was on his face. He walked on, blindly overshot the main entrance, and found himself outside the function hall. He was taking on dark water through large holes in his hull. The stupidity of never once imagining that she could go to Ambrose. The clairvoyant certainty that Ambrose would take her away from him. The guilt of having hardened his heart against the wife he’d vowed to cherish. The vanity of believing that his sheepskin coat made him look like anything but a fatuous, obsolete, repellent clown. He wanted to tear off the coat and retrieve his regular wool one, but he was too much of a coward to walk back up the hallway, and he was afraid that if he took the detour and saw the dusty crèche steer, in the state he was in, he might cry.
[...] Ambrose had an idea so elegant that Perry wondered if there might be something to it. The idea was that God was to be found in relationships, not in liturgy and ritual, and that the way to worship Him and approach Him was to emulate Christ in his relationships with his disciples, by exercising honesty, confrontation, and unconditional love. Ambrose had a way of talking about this stuff that didn’t seem insane. He’d inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who’s uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they’re used to in everyday life; they find they know who Steve is. Perry was altogether fascinated by Ambrose, and he felt that his own singularity entitled him to a place near his side, and so he was disappointed that Ambrose, after the night of gin, had seemed to shun him. He was forced to conclude that Ambrose detected the fraudulence in his playing of the Crossroads game and didn’t trust him. The other likely explanation—that Ambrose was sensitive about encroaching on the Reverend’s family—had been demolished by the visibly close attention he’d been paying to Becky since she’d joined the group.
He now saw that his supposed self-discipline, the outstanding study habits his parents and his teachers had always praised, had not been discipline at all. He’d excelled at school because he’d enjoyed learning things, not because he had superior willpower. As soon as Sharon introduced him to more intense forms of pleasure, he discovered how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were. He found himself skipping organic chem lab for hardly any reason, just to take a long walk with her, not even to have sex, just to be near her. He had his first experience of fellatio on a morning when he should have been in Roman history. He failed to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis in Sharon’s vulva had offered more pleasure, in the moment, than studying did. What this said about his self-control was bad enough. Worse yet was how it undermined his best moral argument for keeping his deferment—the idea that he could better serve humanity by working diligently at school, becoming a leader in the field of science, than by serving as a grunt in Vietnam. If he couldn’t keep his grade point average above 3.5, he truly had no right to a deferment.
The mob obeyed him. Though Ambrose was technically subordinate to Clem’s father, everyone knew who the group’s real leader was: who was strong and who was weak.
“We’re going to skip the prayer tonight,” Ambrose said. “Is that okay with you, Russ?”
The older man nodded meekly. He was weak! weak!
He no longer respected the old man. Having glimpsed his fundamental weakness, he now saw it at every turn. Saw him exploiting Becky’s politeness to drag her on their Sunday walks, saw him distancing himself from their mother at church functions and chatting with other men’s wives, heard him blackening Rick Ambrose’s name because young people liked him, heard him reminding people who didn’t need reminding that he’d marched with Stokely Carmichael and integrated the swimming pool, saw him gazing at himself in the bathroom mirror, touching his shaggy eyebrows with his fingertips. The man whose strength Clem had admired now seemed to him a raw blot of egregiousness. Clem couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He was giving up his student deferment to show his father what a strong man did.
It was a testament to her father’s abilities that, even when the light in his eyes had gone out, he not only saved the house but put meat on the table and continued to pay for Shirley’s dancing and voice lessons. He now worked as the sales manager for Western All-Sport, which he’d sold, for less than its book value, to cover his other losses. In a mental state like the one for which Marion was later hospitalized, if not worse, he dragged himself out of bed every weekday morning, dragged a razor across his cheeks, dragged himself to the streetcar, dragged himself through meetings for a company he had no hope of making his again, and then dragged himself home to an unforgiving wife, a favored daughter whose disappointment tortured him, and Marion, who felt responsible for what had happened. Because she was invisible, she’d noticed things the other three of them hadn’t. She’d known that something wasn’t right.
In July, Bradley took Isabelle and his boys on a car trip to Sequoia and Yosemite. Marion had begged him to use his vacation to get started on the screenplay, which she’d now completely outlined for him, but he said he owed the vacation to his boys, and off they went. As long as she hadn’t had to go more than four days without seeing him, as long as their rightness for each other was regularly confirmed, she’d avoided further episodes of slippage. But a weekend alone, after a week with no hope of seeing Bradley, was endless. The very sun seemed evil to her in the way it dawdled in her windows, took its insolent time in going down. She couldn’t read a book or go to the pictures. The passage of time needed vigilant monitoring. She sat perfectly still, trying not to even blink, until the fear of relaxing her vigilance became apocalyptic, as though the world might end if she so much as flexed a muscle in her foot. She was very, very low. For some reason, she was especially averse to bathing, the sensation of water on her skin.
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.