This particular bit of internal advice bucked her up, made her feel strong, independent, more like a television star and less like a loser actress. She gave herself permission to temporarily ignore the little pods of people who were ignoring her, and drifted over to the wall of bookshelves to read the spines of the books and find out what Kyle and Van were reading or pretending to read. She and Kyle had both been book junkies back in high school but she always went for a good novel while Kyle was constantly struggling with the serious thinkers who were utterly over her head. He had been so sure she could join him in his fascination for theological and philosophical ephemera, but while she had loved listening to him read to her, she actually never understood a word. Although she did develop a true fondness for Teilhard de Chardin, that old brainiac priest who had fallen in love with a woman he couldn’t have sex with.
And there he was, the intellectually impenetrable and physically chaste Jesuit, represented by at least six or seven volumes, next to Henri Nouwen, another high school favorite, and there at the end of the shelf four volumes of Thomas Merton. Another one of those priests who couldn’t consummate their lust for the women they loved, because of the church. They were their own Boy Scout troop, those guys. The Merton books were newer, while the other books sported the battered covers of those read years ago. Probably the same ones he’d read to her in high school before she would finally get sick of it and climb all over him. She thought about reaching up and taking a peek, hoping to find one of the passages he had read to her back then, but decided against it. No more of that, she reminded herself, as she let her attention drift to the other shelves—volume after volume of medical textbooks and then shelf after shelf filled with books about childbearing and child-rearing—What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Years, Bearing His Fruit: Stories About Godliness for Children. Were Kyle and Van some sort of Jesus freaks now? Some of these books looked more like mindless Christian middle-stream tripe.
“You checking up on my reading?” Kyle asked, stepping up beside her.
“Absolutely,” she admitted, and she gave herself permission to grin at him. “You still reading this stuff?”
“Mostly Merton now. I went down to his monastery in Kentucky, it was really beautiful.”
“You went to a monastery? What, do they give tours?”
“Not a tour,” Kyle explained, smiling a little at her cheeky ignorance. “More like a retreat. Their doctor needed some time off, so I went down for a week and took care of them, and prayed with them.” He bumped a little on the word “pray.” Kyle knew her attitude toward that sort of thing, or at least he knew that her attitude toward that sort of thing had probably not changed over the past years. She had never been openly disrespectful about the seriousness with which he regarded his Catholicism, but it was impossible not to notice that her views were a shred hostile. One time she had actually posited that she might not believe in God; that was another big hurdle.
“So you’re a bigger Catholic than ever, I guess,” she observed.
“I guess I don’t have to ask where you stand,” Kyle replied.
“That whole horrible religion sucks,” she informed him. “Although I do still have a soft spot for Caravaggio.”
“The murderer.”
“He was a genius who broke some rules. Like your favorite Jesuit.”
“Chardin didn’t break rules, that’s the point.”
“He so did too, Kyle, that much I remember. The church told him to shut up, which he didn’t—”
“He did.”
“No, he didn’t, he kept writing.”
“But he didn’t publish until after he died.”
“They were creeps, they should have let him do what he was doing, discovering Piltdown Man.”
“Peking Man.”
“Whatever. They sent him to China, right—”
“Yes, that’s—”
“As a way to shut him up and stop him writing about evolution, even though he knew that God wanted him to be doing that.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“You told me the story enough times, and then when they banished him to China, what do you know, the biggest find of the century, Peking Man, is right there. So that’s either irony or God. You can take your pick.”
A charming laugh flashed out of nowhere and skittered between them like a butterfly. “What are you two arguing about?” And there was Van, smiling, rosy, the blonde child propped on her waist. “Reminiscing about your great romance?”
The shock of Van’s direct allusion to their “great romance” clipped Alison right across the back of her neck. She turned, polite, racking her brain for a sufficiently lighthearted comeback, but Kyle was ahead of her. “Hardly,” he said. His indifference to the accusation put him effortlessly on firm ground. “We were arguing theology.”
“Hardly that either,” Alison echoed. “I never understood a word of it.”
“Not so. You’re very good,” he informed her. “More wine?”
He turned and reached over to a side table, where several opened bottles waited for a host’s attention. Van’s smile floated over them, and back to her guests with an adorable, bemused exasperation.
“She was the love of his life, you can’t blame a wife for suspecting the worst,” she announced cheerfully.
Alison remembered how at Dennis’s Christmas party Van had proved herself so adept at the art of inflicting wounds in public.
“Well, I want to hear about the theology,” Martin announced. “An actress, arguing theology! You don’t see that every day.”
“She’s quite intelligent,” Kyle stated. He wasn’t looking at her.