"Let me call you, okay? Because it's sudden death at the Junior League, and if they go through, I don't know when the next game might be."

"So we'll reschedule?"

"I think that would be best," said Larissa.

She knew the person she needed to talk to was Ezra.

"Lunch?" He glanced at the clock above her head. It read 10:45. "Uma?"

"I know butaI've got things later."

She began casually, talking about the pesky epilogue problem for Saint Joan. The play was opening next weekend, at the beginning of June, and they still couldn't decide whether to have the epilogue or to sc.r.a.p it. There seemed to be as many opinions as there were people. They rehea.r.s.ed it both ways, and were still agonizing. Poor Megan remained terrible and miscast. Larissa had made a reckless choice and was now paying for it every day.

"Larissa, has anyone told you you've lost weight?"

She shook her head. "No, not really."

"Oh, yes, really. What, you think I can't tell?"

"It's an illusion. You know what Sugimoto says. The fake subject in front of you looks real when transposed onto a photograph."

"Oh, so you were paying attention to Bo and Maggie on your birthday? I should've known you have unplumbed depths."

Oh, they've been plumbed, Ezra. Plumbed down to the bottomless maw.

"But which is it?" he asked. "Are you fake, or is your weight loss? Or is the weight loss the very thing that's making you a fake subject against a real backdrop?"

"You're making a big deal out of nothing. I'm five pounds up or down." Larissa was thirty pounds lighter. Everything hung off her like she was a cancer patient. She despised herself for her lying internal metaphors.

"Do you think I'm self-actualized?" she asked him.

"Not if you don't think you've lost at least half a Larissa."

"Okay, but I'm talking in a metaphysical sense. Look beyond the physical, Ez."

"The physical is but a manifestation of our inner sanctum. That's why the soul is so hard to hide."

Is it? Anyone who ever loved could look at heraand yetathey all loved, and they looked at her, and saw nothing. "Okay, can wea?"

"What's your question?" Ezra smiled. "No, I don't think you are self-actualized. Who is?" He leaned forward. "But you know what you are?"

She leaned away from him. "No, what?"

"Half a Larissa."

"All righty. Now listen." She leaned forward again, danger of seriousness from him avoided. "Ezra, what do you do when you have to advise your kids on big problems, like when you found our sad runaway Tenestra trying to give herself an abortion in the school bathroom?"

"Well, fortunately, in her crack withdrawal distress, she had gone into the men's bathroom," said Ezra. "I never would've found her otherwise."

"My question is," Larissa continued slowly, "what do you draw on to help her? Your education? Your intelligence? What?"

He shook his head. "Nothing in my education or intelligence can help me deal with a kid who's scared s.h.i.tless. It's a Gordian knot for her, not for me."

"So how does she decide to go into the men's bathroom?"

"She puts away everything else and follows her fear. What is she afraid of the most? Clearly in her case, it was giving birth to a baby."

"Is that how we make all our decisions? Out of fear?"

"Tenny did. I don't know how we do." He studied her. "What are you afraid of?"

"Oh, no, not me." She smiled so lightly, so brightly, all her teeth sparkled at him. She took a sip of her coffee and the hands didn't shake and she stifled the gag reflex from tasting close to anything that resembled nourishment.

"I see my kids, fifteen, sixteen years old," Ezra continued, "and they're confused, not ready to face life, and yet they have to choose a college, a boyfriend, whether or not to lie to their parents, have unprotected s.e.x, drive when drunk. It doesn't end."

Larissa nodded. "Sometimes when the kids come to me to ask for advice, I don't know what to tell them."

"Sometimes I don't either."

"Really? What do you tell them?"

"What do you tell your kids?"

"You mean my real kids?"

"Yes, as opposed to the fake ones in the photographs. No, not your children. I mean the kids you teach."

"Well, this is where my trouble starts," said Larissa. "My heart is conflicted. I see two different paths for them. I can imagine an urban college or a rural one. I can imagine playing baseball, as in the case of your Dylan, but also guitar. I don't know how you can even advise your own son."

Ezra looked amused. "Those things are easy, Larissa. That's not a do I have a baby or not. Do I have unprotected s.e.x or not. Do I sleep with my best friend's boyfriend, do I take my parents' car when they've expressly told me I can't."

"But what if you don't know how to make thearight decision?" asked Larissa.

"What I do then," said Ezra, "is ask, what is the overriding pa.s.sion of your life. What is the one thing you can't imagine living without? If G.o.d came to you in a dream and told you He would take away from you everything but the one thing you couldn't part with, what would that one thing you were left with be?"

Crowded bazaars, caravans, freak shows, high wire dancing monkeys, and fire hoops. I dream to be dreamless. I want it to be like before, not after. I want it to be not now when hollow heaven is awash in charcoal. "What if there are two?" she asked almost in a whisper.

"Rare. You'd be surprised how self-actualized the students become when the choice is presented to them this starkly. What if everything else was taken away? What do you want to be left with? They all know. If it's piano, or baseball, or their singing voice. For some it's their long legs, or their best friend, or their blonde hair. Some say their little brother. Some say their dog."

"Does anybody say their parents?"

Ezra laughed. "Not a single one, ever. What does that tell you?"

Larissa tried to will herself not to look like she was going blind, torn, drained, as if in a death struggle. "But what about the other stuff? Right and wrong stuff? Like taking the car when you're not supposed to?"

"That's harder," Ezra admitted. "Then I say to them, you know how you know what you should do? The thing that you actively don't want to do. That's how you know."

"Oh, I bet they love that."

"Oh, they do." He grinned. "They fling Epicurus to defy me, like monkeys throwing p.o.o.p. They all suddenly become Lucretians, start quoting from On the Nature of Things." He tutted mildly. "I can't get them to remember one quote from Kant or Kierkegaard, but Lucretius they have memorized. The atoms, ho, ho, ho, Professor DeSwann, they move in an infinite void, you see, and all we are is atoms, no more, no less. The reality of atoms is unflinching, they inform me. Suddenly all the young ones are Epicureans." Ezra laughed. "I tell them it's not a philosophy that has stood the test of time. They vociferously disagree. When I mention that Epicurean philosophy condemned l.u.s.ts of all kinds, condemned pa.s.sions, immoderation, they don't want to hear it. They hear only *reality of atoms.'"

Larissa was thoughtful. "Well, aren't your students correct, Professor DeSwann? We are made up wholly of atoms."

"We are, but you can't have it both ways to Sunday! I tell them that even atoms are not random. They move about in orderly, predictable ways, in ways that are designed and flawless. Even atoms are charged positively and negatively just enough and no more, the electrons do not fly away on whim and adhere to another matter just because they feel like it. The atoms behave along the lines of the natural order of the universe. Which is to say, not like human beings at all, who behave in all manner of appalling and unpredictable ways."

"You must be so popular at this point."

"Oh, I am. They argue. But then someone starts shouting, a boy takes the girl's pencil, the girl says it's not fair, someone gets a B instead of a B+ and complains heartilyaIn five minutes their own natural order is restored, and we move on from Epicurus because he cannot help us even for five minutes in the cla.s.sroom."

Larissa drank her coffee. She tried not to look at Ezra, her friend since freshman year in college, her friend even before Jared. She wished she were wearing sungla.s.ses, felt like she were. Her eyes felt swollen, she could barely make out Ezra's amused expression, his smart eyes, his tapping fingers. She didn't know who she was anymore. But she knew this. He picked her up on his chrome Ducati. His name she knew, like it was tattooed in blue on her electric soul.

"So how do we live, Ezra? How do we all live knowing we're a walking contradiction? Made up of orderly things on the outside, yet inside us chaos reigns supreme. We are the most erratic, inconsistent, uncertain movement in the universe."

"Yes, Larissa. Because G.o.ds cannot walk the earth," said Ezra, "without taking the form of beasts. Ask yourself: of all the things you endure and wish for and define yourself as and long for, what is it that makes you break out of your false choices and become that impossible thing: an unbroken undamaged self?"

"There is no such thing." And this she did whisper.

"Ask yourself what you want to be left with."

"What if there is no answer?"

"How can there not be an answer?"

"What if there is no right answer?"

"Really? Just atoms in a void, Larissa? Well, then, that's your answer."

"I don't understand about your Maggie," exclaimed Larissa a little too stridently. "Her body is giving out, is getting completely out of whack, and she keeps going to Our Lady of the Rosary. How in the world does G.o.d help Maggie?"

"Maggie?" Ezra said surprised. "I thought this was about your students?"

"Oh, it is, it is."

Ezra stopped speaking, almost as if he wanted to say something and didn't.

"But what if you can't be like her?" asked Larissa. "What if you don't believe?"

"You have to believe in something."

"What if you believe inanothing?"

"In nothing? Who believes in this?"

"Well, some of my students."

"Odd. They usually have very strong beliefs and opinions, even if dunderheaded." Ezra smiled. "Delightfully dunder-headed."

"But what does Jesus do for Maggie?"

"I think you may have the relationship reversed," said Ezra. "Jesus doesn't come and go as you please. He doesn't serve at your pleasure. He is an implacable source of all things, but He is not there for your convenience. Or you will quickly find yourself at a loss."

"That helps her?" It sounded most unhelpful.

"It does."

"Can someone be, say, a materialist and still believe in G.o.d?"

Ezra stared at Larissa with incredulity. "Um, no, Larissa."

"Why?"

"What do you need G.o.d for, if physical matter is your only reality?"

"Why can't someone believe in G.o.d sometimes?" She pressed on. "Like when He is needed?"

"But He is not summoned. You don't wear Christ like a coat. Take off, put on when it suits. He is not dispensable."

"No kidding." Larissa shrugged. Or shuddered? "It doesn't seem like He makes life questions easier at all."

"He doesn't," Ezra agreed. "He makes them harder. He is an insuperable master."

"Why would anyone want that?"

"They don't. Which is why so many people turn away from Him."

"So what's in it for Maggie?"

"Ah. What's in it for Maggie is definite meaning and infinite comfort. Because more so than with anything else, the universe for people with Christ in it is fundamentally different than for those for whom He is not in it. You can instantly tell them apart. The struggle for their own humanity, for significance, for the burden of obligations to others as well as for the destination of Self is markedly different for those for whom He does not enter into the equation of decision-making."

"And this helps Maggie?" Larissa asked skeptically.

"Sure. Her suffering is no longer meaningless. She is profoundly comforted, as by nothing else. Like our Saint Joan, without these things Maggie cannot live." Ezra paused, and then spoke almost reluctantly. "You know, you never did talk to her, though, like you promised."

"About what?"

For a moment, Ezra and Larissa stared at each other. Soft rebuke was in his eyes; guilty puzzlement in hers, like she knew he was right, but she couldn't even recall the conversation in which she had promised the thing for which Ezra was now reproaching her.

"Sorry, Ez," she said. "I'll talk to her this weekend. I think we're going beverage shopping on Sat.u.r.day for Monday's party. We'll have time alone then." Her coffee long finished, she stood up. "Still," Larissa said, "I don't understand why you can't just put on Christ. Put Him on, take Him off. Johnny Cash did. Your own personal Jesus."

"Jared," Larissa said Wednesday evening after coffee and clearing her throat. "What would you think of me going to visit Che?"

He had been reading the sports page and looked up halfheartedly, as if this was a conversation too biga"or too triviala"to compete with the absorption of the box scores of last night's games.

"Visit her where?" He looked back down. The catcher had hit three doubles in yesterday's game. Was that a record for the catcher?

"In Manila."

Yes, yes, look! They said it. He broke his own record. Four hits and three doubles in one game. Wow. Would he be playing again tonight? "Manila?"