A. There is no such thing as rape. Nobody can rape a woman unless she consents at the last minute.

(The girls in my high school actually used to repeat this piously to each other. God only knows where we got it. It was the received wisdom, and like robots, we passed it on.)

B. There are two kinds of orgasm: vaginal and clitoral. One is “mature” (i.e. good). The other is “immature” (i.e. evil). One is “normal” (i.e. good). The other is “neurotic” (i.e. evil).

This pseudohip, pseudopsychological moral code was more Calvinistic than Calvinism.

C. Men reach their sexual peak at sixteen and decline thereafter…

Brian was twenty-four. No doubt he was over the hill. Eight years over the hill. If he only fucked me once a month at twenty-four-imagine how little he’d fuck me at thirty-four! It was terrifying to contemplate.

Maybe even the sex wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been an indication of all the other things wrong with our marriage. We never saw each other. He stayed in the office until seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve at night. I kept house and moldered away in the library over my eighteenth-century sexual slang. The ideal bourgeois marriage. Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.

Things went on like this for several months. I got increasingly depressed. I found it harder and harder to get out of bed in the morning. I was usually comatose until noon. I started cutting nearly all my classes, except the holy of holies: the Proseminar. Graduate school seemed ridiculous to me. I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book “proving” that Tom Jones was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. You were supposed to keep all the names of the professors and all the theories straight so that you could pass exams on them. Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading Tom Jones as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. All the books of criticism had names like The Rhetoric of Laughter or The Comic Determinants of Henry Fielding’s Fiction or Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire. Fielding would have been rolling over in his grave. My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.

The fact was that I was always a compulsive A-student and tests were easy for me, but in graduate school the bullshit was so high you simply couldn’t overlook it. So I slept through it I slept through the comprehensive exams in May. I slept instead of working on my thesis. On the rare occasions when I made it to class, I sat there scribbling poems in my notebooks. One day I worked up the guts to pour out my troubles to Professor Stanton.

“I don’t think I want to be a professor,” I said, trembling in my purple suede boots. It was sacrilege. My Woodrow Wilson Fellowship committed me to college teaching. It was almost like abjuring God, country, and flag.

“But you’re such an excellent student, Mrs. Stollerman, what else could you do?”

(What else indeed? What else might there be in life but Aesthetic Implications in the Dialectic of Satire?

“Well, er, I think I want to write.” I said it as apologetically as if it were: “I think I want to kill my mother.”

Professor Stanton looked troubled. “Oh that,” he said, vexed. Students were probably always coming to him with futile ambitions like wanting to write.

“You see, Professor Stanton, I started studying eighteenth-century English literature because I love satire, but I think I want to write satire not criticize it. Criticism doesn’t seem very satisfying somehow.”

“Satisfying!” he exploded.

I gulped.

“What makes you think graduate school is supposed to be satisfying? Literature is work, not fun,” he said.

“Yes,” I said meekly.

“You come to graduate school because you love to read, because you love literature-well, literature is hard work! It’s not a game!” Professor Stanton seemed to have found his true subject.

“Yes, but if you’ll excuse me Professor Stanton, it does seem that all this criticism is out of keeping with the spirit of Fielding or Pope or Swift. I mean I always imagine them lying there in their graves and laughing at us all. This is just the sort of thing they’d find funny. I mean I read Pope or Swift or Fielding and it makes me want to write. It starts my mind going on poems. The criticism seems sort of silly to me. I’m sorry to say this, but it does.”

“Who made you the guardian of the spirit of Pope? Or Swift? Or Fielding?”

“No one.”

“Then what the hell are you complaining about?”

“I’m not complaining. I just think I may have made a mistake. I think I really want to write.”

“Mrs. Stollerman, you’ll have plenty of time to write after you get you Ph.D. under your belt. And then you’ll always have something to fall back on just in case you’re not Emily Dickinson.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, and went home to sleep.

Brian woke me up with a bang in June. I’m not exactly sure when the onset of it was, but sometime in mid-June, I noticed that he had become more manic than usual. He had stopped sleeping entirely. He wanted me to sit up all night with him and discuss heaven and hell. Not that this was so unusual for Brian. He’s always been extraordinarily interested in heaven and hell. But now he began talking about the Second Coming quite a lot and he talked about it in a new way.

What if (he asked) Christ came back to earth as an obscure market research executive?

What if nobody believed Him again?

What if He tried to prove his identity by walking across the water on Central Park Lake? Would CBS Evening News cover the occurrence? Would it be billed as a human interest story?

I laughed. Brian laughed too. It was only an idea for a science fiction novel, he said. It was only a joke.

In the days that followed, the jokes multiplied.

What if he were Zeus and I were Hera? What if he were Dante and I Beatrice? What if there were two of each of us- matter and antimatter, three-dimensional and no-dimensional? What if the people on the subway were really communicating with him telepathically and asking him to save them? What if Christ came back and liberated all the animals in the Central Park Zoo? What if the yaks followed Him down Fifth Avenue and birds sat and sang on His shoulders? Would people believe who He was then? What if He blessed the computers and instead of spewing out printed sheets about which housewives buy the most detergent, they suddenly started spewing out loaves and fishes? What if the world was really controlled by a gigantic computer and nobody knew it except Brian? What if this computer ran on human blood? What if, as Sartre said, we were all in hell right now? What if we were all controlled by complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines which were controlled by other complex machines? What if we had no freedom at all? What if man could only assert his freedom by dying on the cross? What if you walked across the streets of New York against red lights with your eyes closed for a whole week and you weren’t even grazed by a car? Did that prove you were God? What if every book you opened at random had the letters GOD somewhere in every paragraph? Wasn’t that proof positive?

Night after night the questions continued. Brian repeated them at me like a catechism. What if? What if? What if? Listen to me. Don’t fall asleep! Listen to me! The world is ending and you’re going to sleep through it! Listen to me!

In his frenzy to have a constant audience he even slapped my cheek once or twice to awaken me. Dazed and bleary-eyed, I listened. And listened. And listened. After the fifth night, it was no longer possible to doubt that Brian had no plans for science fiction. He himself was the Second Coming. The recognition was slow to dawn. When it did, I wasn’t actually sure he wasn’t God. But, according to his logic, if he was Jesus, then I was the Holy Ghost. And bleary-eyed as I was, I knew that was crazy.