Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,58

mine. It seems foolish now, that we should have felt unable to tell them, and so went on acting like children even as we chafed at being treated as such. It is not implausible to think that my parents would have been relieved to learn I was in love with a lapsed Catholic bound for medical school in New York; a Muslim girl would have been preferable, of course, but at least with Maddie I was unlikely to join their only other child halfway around the world anytime soon. As for Maddie’s mother, the presumed objection seemed to be less on religious grounds than simply a preference for someone with a whiter-sounding name. Still, we persisted with our ruse. When my parents came to visit, Maddie’s things went into a closet. When her mother and stepfather took the train down from Loudonville, Maddie entertained them in the apartment of an old high school friend who lived over on York. We left our landlord’s name on the mailbox, his voice on the answering machine, and steadfastly ignored the landline whenever it rang. It was not until Labor Day of that year that I bought my first cell phone, a Motorola the size of a shoe, and which had to be held out the window to get a signal, if there was a signal to be got at all.

We had dinner with the high school friend once. Maddie invited her over for pizza and wine and the conversation wound its way to a point where our guest felt comfortable asking whether I agreed religion stymies intellectual curiosity. On the contrary, I said. I consider seeking knowledge a religious obligation. After all, the first word received in the Quran is: Read! And the third line is: Read, because your Lord has taught you the pen; he taught mankind what mankind did not yet know. But religion, our guest insisted with impressive confidence, allows you to ask only so many questions before you get to: Just because. You have to have faith. Well, I said. Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person’s problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren’t empirically verifiable. Find me the empirical evidence as to whether you should derail the train and kill all three hundred passengers if it would mean saving the life of the one person tied to the tracks. Or: Is it true because I see it, or do I see it because it’s true? The whole point of faith is that irreducible answers don’t bother the faithful. The faithful take comfort and even pride in the knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

It was not a flawless speech, tipsy and improvising as I was, but still I was glad the subject had been broached, because it had seemed to me that a conversation along these lines had been looming on the horizon for me and Maddie for a while. Yet throughout dinner Maddie was unusually quiet, and the topic did not come up again the following day. Nor did it come up again at all before Maddie started her premed conversion classes and I flew abroad. All those walks. All those hours tangled up in bed. Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

• • •

The bioethics council operated out of the basement of a Georgian town house in Bloomsbury’s Bedford Square, a pretty oval garden popular at night with methadone addicts whose discarded syringes were a regular feature of my walk to work. My aunt’s flat was a pleasant place, four well-kept rooms in a handsome prewar mansion block, but I did not spend much time there. Typically, I ran a bath (there was no showerhead), bought a coffee and pastry from the café at the end of the road, put in my eight hours at the bioethics council and then read in a pub or watched a film at the Renoir before calling Maddie from bed. On the weekends, I ran. Not in the parks, which with their manicured grass and mosaic flower beds were too unreal. You got nowhere running around Inner Circle. Instead, I dodged shoppers and strollers all the way