Louise was visiting her family out west so I invited Emma to dinner, then Jason called, at loose ends, and on an impulse I invited him, too. They know each other a bit to talk to and better than that by reputation because I squeal on them to each other. Each has always been disposed to the other and I liked the idea of three people in the apartment with everyone talking at once, making a pleasant hubbub. I served a shrimp thing and a salad and for dessert my grapefruit-parsley sauce that you pour over ice cream and everyone becomes emotional. It’s wrong for people our age to feel “like” adults; we are adults, aging ones, but none of us entirely believes it—there’s something arrested about most of the people I’m close to—so an evening without petulance, without rancor, without childish anxieties, without any emotions that aren’t amiable and grateful is a rare evening and one we know to value. Emma and Jason got on like a house ablaze, as the old expression goes, and each was happy for something about the other—Jason for Emma’s wedding and Emma—though of course she didn’t say so—for Jason’s sanity.
Jason was the newsy one. It seems he’s becoming more Jewish. He’s half Jewish, on his mother’s side (which is the side that counts), and he’s thinking of turning into one of those half Jews who are far more serious about it than we full Reform, slacker Jews ever seem to be. Though I was sort of stunned by this I held my tongue—everyone was being so kind and adult, and the apartment was in its party mode. Most nights, I keep the lights off, except for some dim ones in the kitchen and the light given off by the TV. I’m content to stumble about in an ecological semi-darkness when I’m alone. When people are over, I turn on the lamps throughout the apartment, at a clement level, and add candlelight to it. The candles give off that nice fragrance of wax and flame and, this night, I’d even gotten Casablanca lilies, which pitched in their festive expensive scent. The atmosphere was radiant and I wasn’t going to subtract from it by being skeptical or snide about Jason’s new affirmation of faith, though I confess it worried me a good deal. I had recently given up having opinions and depended on Jason’s reflex of negativity to balance me out.
“I never took it seriously, ‘religion,’” Jason said—a little haltingly for him—“but then we were trained never to take anything seriously, weren’t we? That’s what made us such smart-asses—not you, Emma—because nothing ever meant anything, really.”
I noticed that Emma looked sympathetic.
“And of course, God was absurd and faith was absurd, and I still believe that—but the thing is, I was so stupid, I’d completely neglected Reconstructionist Judaism. They see God as a kind of image or metaphor. They just hack off the supernatural aspect, which makes religion so impossible to embrace, and what’s left . . . I don’t know . . .”
“. . . is nice,” Emma said.
“Well, yes. It’s . . . human or something—nice, it’s nice. And you know, I’ve been at a point for a while, where there hasn’t been much going on, really—”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I protested; a formality.
“You don’t have to. I’ve said it for you. But you know: there was the insane period—does Emma know about—”
I confessed: “She does.”
“That’s okay—really, I’d be sort of offended if you hadn’t bothered to mention it—anyway, there was that. Then all that time after. Then some kind of exhaustion and . . . I’ve been a little tired of myself, honestly.”
“We all get that way sometimes,” said Emma.
“I mean: my responses to everything. Everything has to be seen through. Every person is just a receptacle of flaws. And why?”
This was a rhetorical question.
“All it is is a mode—a mode we can’t free ourselves from.”
He looked off to the side and into a middle distance. His eyebrows were working and his mouth was, too. He was trying to formulate his next thought, and he manipulated his face so that we would wait for it and not interrupt with any thoughts of our own. Then he spoke. “I remember I saw this play about thirty years ago.”
“Are we on topic?” I asked.
“We are. Anyway, I don’t remember what it was called and I don’t know if I’d like it now but at the time I found it very moving. Near the beginning of it, there was this scene where the people are squabbling—it’s the morning after a debauched night—it’s that kind of fight—and there’s a knocking on the door. They keep fighting and the knocking goes on, until finally, someone opens the door and the Gestapo bursts in!”
“Oh my word!” said Emma.
“Yes—only, it was shocking, not funny, it was effective, do you know? Then I read John Simon’s review—he trashed it—but the only thing I can remember about the review is that he said it was ridiculous that the Gestapo would have just politely knocked like that. They would have kicked the door in. And maybe that’s true—I suppose the Gestapo didn’t spend a lot of time knocking—but I thought, Really? That’s your gotcha? The Gestapo knocked, therefore it’s a bad play? That’s all it takes?”
“Well: John Simon,” I sighed, for the thousandth time in my life.
“Except you see, I think that’s what I’ve been doing—I think that’s what most of us do. Life comes at us—this huge, messy thing—and all we say is, ‘The Gestapo doesn’t knock’ and good-bye, life! I mean it’s not hard to find the flaws in things, the fissures in things, they’re everywhere. Do it enough, it becomes a kind of parlor trick. It doesn’t mean you’re impressive. It doesn’t mean you’re smart.”
“No,” said Emma, and I was concerned that she was starting to like Jason even more.
“I think the mistake we make is we grade everything down from the Perfect when we should be grading up from the Nonexistent.”
I have a long history with people undergoing epiphanic breakthroughs, and it’s been demoralizing when it hasn’t been chilling. In her time of fresh crisis, Fredda had an epiphany a day that made everything all right forever until, after a couple of years of this, she killed herself. I’ve had friends who realized that forty years of crushing anxiety had all been a gluten allergy and friends who decided that all they needed was a child, and it’s never ended well. What’s more, Jason’s epiphany hovered uncomfortably close to arrant sentimentality, and when people are giving themselves to sentimentality, they’re evangelical about it, and they urge you to contribute a coordinating emotion. This is something I’m not able to do, and the incapacity is one I don’t regret. Casting aside my recent vow of neutrality, I raised an objection.
“Look, some things are deserving of criticism—some criticism is the only thing saving us from complete—”
“I’m not saying we should be morons,” he interrupted. “I don’t think we should not notice anything. I just think maybe we should be more careful choosing what the outweighing factor is.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. It wasn’t that this was some brand-new Jason. He was more like a long-ago Jason, come back without warning—the one I’d first met, when he was straight out of Juilliard, handsome, with that voice, and being called in to audition for absolutely everything, and coming thisclose every time. (He was always losing out to Alec Baldwin.) He had a shining sense of destiny then (incorrect, as it turned out) that made him both a blowhard and impossibly likable.
“It’s just,” he continued, “that I’ve sort of dismissed people from my life, haven’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I mean, there’s been zero.”
Jason sometimes dates men and sometimes dates women but for a long time he’s dated no one. And most of his friends have peeled off.
Then he said something that seemed to intuit my misgivings.
“And I’m always so afraid of being sentimental—and what a stupid thing to run from! I mean, not real sentimentality—the kind that’s a branch of cruelty, that annihilates—but this business of suspecting every feeling of being a con job. Even David Foster Wallace said the really courageous writer would be the one who risked being thought sentimental.”
I did not say “for all the good it did him” because (1) shallow jokes about suicides are not funny, and (2) it would have been exactly the sort of remark Jason was inveighing against and I didn’t relish the prospect of being turned into Exhibit A.
“Really,” he went on, “I think what it is is that I’m becoming attracted to ethics. And you can’t have ethics without people, so . . .”—and here he lowered his majestic voice to a comic basso profundo—“I’m thinking of enduring people again.”
“That’s a very good idea,” said Emma and lifted her wineglass in a toast.
“For those who are able,” I said and, under social pressure, lifted my glass, too.
Jason was about to say something, then decided to say something else instead. He looked at me directly and knitted his brow because what he wanted to say was not easy for him to say or for me to hear.
“You know, under all this . . . this . . . there really are a couple of relatively nice guys.”
“That’s true,” said Emma, her eyes aglow.
And it had been such a pleasant evening before they lost their minds.