The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir (21 page)

“Why is that funny?”

“It’s not funny. It’s just, well, usually people have sex way before six weeks.”

“They do?”

“Yeah, I mean, if they like each other.”

“How soon do you usually have sex with someone if you like them?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the person and the circumstances. But if I know I want to be in a relationship with them, usually within the first two or three weeks.”

I nearly choked. “How can you know someone well enough to have sex with them after two weeks?”

“You don’t. That’s why you have sex.”

“Have you had sex with a lot of people?” I asked.

He gave me a
Come on, you’re not allowed to ask that question
look, and then said, “Not that many, but I’ve been having sex since I was a teenager.”

“So it’s going to be hard for you to not have sex?”

“Elna, I don’t necessarily feel like we’re at a place in our relationship where we would be having sex. It’s just the
never
part that’s problematic.”

“I can have sex once I’m married,” I said optimistically.

“You do realize that’s the same thing as saying never,” he laughed.

I got quiet again. “You wouldn’t wait for marriage to have sex with me?” I asked.

“I don’t believe in the institution of marriage,” he answered.

Of course he doesn’t
. I practically threw my arms in the air with defeat
.
“So where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” he said, like he was saying,
Please go to sleep.

“Okay, fine. Good night.”

“Good night.” He rolled over again and closed his eyes.

We were quiet for a few minutes and maybe he was sleeping, or maybe he was thinking like me, either way I couldn’t take it . . .

“Is it because I’m ugly?” I blurted out.

“Oh, give me a break.”
Without even looking Matt put his whole hand over my face and shook it.
“You know you’re beautiful,”
he practically yelled. “But maybe this is just too much to take on—”

“No,” I cut him off. “There’s no such thing as too much.
I promise
, anything is possible.”

“I like you because you believe that.
Now go to sleep,”
he said and then he leaned in and kissed me, the way I remembered him kissing me from the beginning, like I mattered.

It didn’t work. We both started laughing.

 

When I woke up the next morning there was a space the size of a person in between us.
Room for the standard works
, I thought.
Room for the Holy Ghost
. Only we cut through the space: We were holding hands.

 

I can turn anything into a reason for believing things will work out. As I was walking home from the subway that morning, a ladybug landed on my shoulder.
It’s a sign,
I thought. And then when I stopped at the corner deli and bought a Diet Coke, I noticed that the bottle said: “One in twelve people win a prize when they look under the lid.”
One in twelve
. It seemed like the same odds that we were up against.
If I win something, it means we’ll stay together.
I closed my eyes like I was making a wish, opened the bottle, and flipped the lid. “You win a free Coke,” it said.
We’re gonna make it!
I started jumping up and down like I’d just won the lottery.
Everything is going to be fine!

We went to the new Star Wars movie the following Tuesday. I was determined to ignore everything we’d been arguing about and just go back to the beginning.
We will not discuss religion. We will not discuss sex. We will only have fun,
I decided. It seemed like it was working, too. I wore a cute outfit with matching heels, and for a minute I felt like a girl again,
the girl on the date
—until our walk to the subway.

“What do you think about cloning?” Matt asked.

“I don’t think about it,” I said, “unless I happen to see a movie about it. But in general, it doesn’t come up.”

“But doesn’t it make you question your faith?”

“Why?” I made a face. “They haven’t figured out how to do it yet.”

“They’ve cloned sheep.”

“So? It’s a sheep, not a human.”

“Yes, but they’re very close to successfully cloning humans,” he said.

“That’s impossible.” I looked at him, eyes wide. “They can clone a sheep, and it can move its eyes and walk and act alive, but they will never be able to successfully clone a human being.”

“Why not?”

“Scientists can’t create that thing that makes us alive,” I said earnestly.
“They can’t create a person’s soul.”

“I don’t believe in souls,” Matt said dismissively.

“What?” I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, breaking the flow. Several annoyed pedestrians bumped into me.

“What?”
I repeated. “You don’t believe people have souls?”

“No.”

“How is that even possible?” I turned and faced him. “I thought everyone, regardless of religion, believed in souls?”

“I don’t.” Matt shrugged like it was no big deal.

“So what makes you,
you?”
I asked.

“All the things that have happened to me,” he answered.

“But when you die, what’ll leave your body?”

“Nothing. My heart will just stop beating.”

“Are you being serious?” I said, reevaluating everything I’d come to believe that Matt believed. It was too much. If I tried really, really hard, I could accept the notion that there wasn’t a God and that maybe
just maybe
we’d ended up on earth by chance. I could even accept that death was it, the end—but I couldn’t possibly believe that there was nothing inside of me.

“Yes,” he answered.

I put my hands on Matt’s shoulders and held him in place. People were still pushing by us, glaring or grunting passive-aggressively because we were blocking the sidewalk, but I didn’t care. I held onto him until it felt like there was no one left on the street but us. I stared deeply into his eyes without speaking; I looked into the hazel, I looked past the yellow specks, and I searched until I found
the him
inside of him.

“What are you doing?” he finally said.

“I am looking at your soul,” I said sincerely. “Matt, I can see it. I know that it is there—
it speaks to me
.”

He tried not to laugh. “What does it say?”

“FUCK YOU!” I shouted.

If Matt looked surprised it was nothing compared to my face. It’s not a word I use that often, but when making a religious point, it was all that came to mind.

“Fuck you,” I repeated, still channeling his soul. “I’ve been living inside of you for twenty-nine years and you’ve been ignoring me the entire time!”

“My soul sounds angry.” Matt laughed.

“Tell me about it.” I sighed. “I think it just feels neglected.”

We reached the subway station, and said good night. Matt was halfway down the steps when he stopped and looked back up at me. “Just so you know,” he shouted, “they’re very close to cloning a human being.”

“If they clone a human being,” I shouted back, “a fully functional, emoting, thinking human—I will have sex with you that very day.”

Several people stopped what they were doing and stared at me; one woman covered her son’s ears.

Matt jogged back up the steps. “Deal,” he said.

“Deal.” We shook on it.

“I’m going to read
Popular Science
every morning now,” he said, walking back down the steps.

“I am, too,” I called after him. For my own sake, I wanted it to be possible. I wanted scientists to clone a person and announce it on the morning news. Not for genetics, or scientific progress, but because if a soul was something that could be obtained in a petri dish it would nullify my definition of God and I could sleep with Matt guilt-free.

 

It was only later that night that I realized Matt hadn’t set up another time for us to meet. When I called him three days later, he said he was going out of town for a wedding. I waited another week before I called again. But it didn’t matter, I already knew what was happening. In spite of everything, Matt was phasing me out. And it’s so interesting, because every girl knows when she’s being phased out, even if the guy coincidentally doesn’t pick up his phone that day. It’s like
you know
because you feel it.
How am I supposed to go back to a world without Matt? I can’t just make the line at Letterman walk backward and undo my feelings for him.
Unlike Christian or any of my other one-date wonders, my feelings for Matt felt irreplaceable. I wanted to get to keep him. So I started thinking about why he was pulling away.
It’s probably because I’m Mormon and it’s probably because I won’t have sex.

And for the first time in my life, I started to really question these things. Not the way I had in Sunday school, as a fun way of riling up the teacher or to annoy my parents. I questioned them as truth, as necessity, as the only way of living.
It’s not fair,
I thought.
How can religion take away love? But how can love take away religion?
Followed by,
God is supposed to be love, right? So if that’s the case, is love God? Is choosing to follow my feelings for Matt a religious act, or is choosing my religion over a relationship religious?

Matt called a week later. He didn’t apologize for disappearing or even mention that it was weird. He just invited me out on a playdate. He was going to an outdoor exhibit at the pier and he wanted me to join him.

We met at Union Square. Matt was waiting in our usual spot, standing underneath George Washington. He looked up from his book and waved. And the thing is, you can never know what another person is thinking, but the minute I looked at him my fears were confirmed:
He’s moving on.

“Hey, dude,” he greeted me like an old friend.

“Hey.”
Did he just call me “dude”?

“How stoked are you about seeing some art?”

“Pretty stoked,” I said.

We went to the exhibit, or we got to the exhibit, and just as we approached the first sculpture it started to rain. Not drops. Buckets. A downpour. We ran under the awning of a public bathroom, which wasn’t exactly the most romantic place to kill time, but it was the nearest place to hide. Sandwiched in between a group of German tourists and a businessman on a conference call, we tried catching up.

“How was the wedding?” I asked him.

“It was nice,” he answered. “How’s Letterman?”

“Fine. Pamela Anderson was on yesterday and her boobs are as big in person as they’re on TV.”

“Good to know.” He nodded.

Apparently this was all the information I’d stored up in two weeks.
Really impressive
, I thought.
Stop the presses . . . Pamela Anderson’s boobs are big. I hate myself.

Matt peered up at the thick gray clouds. “Doesn’t look like this rain is going to let up anytime soon,” he said.

“We can just skip the exhibit,” I offered. “Wanna go to a movie?”

“I think it’s too early—” he said.

I looked at my cell phone; it was twelve-forty. “Yeah, you’re right. We could watch a DVD at my place?”

“I like what I hear,” he said.

In the seconds it took to hail a cab, our clothes were soaked all the way through. Matt opened the taxi door for me. “Tenth Street and Avenue A,” I said, shivering.

The driver stepped on the gas and we headed across the bumpy cobblestone streets of the West Village. It was a chaotic trip, rain rattled on the roof of the car, the windshield wipers blasted at full speed, and the driver leaned forward in his seat and cursed the entire way. But it didn’t bother me—I managed to block everything else out except Matt. As long as we were together, we still had a chance. I turned in my seat to face him. The window behind his head was fogged up; it felt like we were in a cloud.
I want to kiss you,
I thought, but then I hesitated. It was hard to know where to begin.
Do we start from where we left off? Or do we go back to the tentative holding of a hand?

I slid my fingers across the gray leather seat, and linked them through his. “Hi,” I said.

He turned toward me. “Hi,” he answered.

And suddenly there it was, the same look he’d first won me over with and my heart beating so loud I was worried he’d hear.
Hi
. I imagined him coming home from work with groceries.
Hi
. I imagined waking up next to him, a down comforter folded under my arms.
Hi.
I imagined an entire middle for our beginning.
Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.
How was work? Is your headache gone? Did you need me to pick up the dry-cleaning? Can you get the kids while I put gas in the car?
Hi.

The cab came to a rolling stop in front of my apartment.

“I got it.” Matt pulled out his wallet.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, you get the next one,” he said.

“Okay!” It was all the affirmation I needed:
He said, “the next one.”

We walked into my apartment and took off our wet shoes.

“Can I make you lunch?” I asked.

“Sure.” Matt set his coat on a chair. “Do you need help?”

“Here
.
” I tossed him a kitchen towel. He looked confused, like I was asking him to clean my house or something.

“It’s for you to dry off with.” I laughed.

“Oh, thanks dude.”
DUDE!
He put the towel over his head and started looking through my rather limited collection of DVDs. I cringed when he got to my sister’s section, which included such classics as:
The Lamb of God, Passage to Zarahemla, Baptists at Our Barbeque, God’s Army,
and a bootleg copy of
The Passion of the Christ.
When Matt picked up the wacky comedy
Mobsters and Mormons
and started reading the plot synopsis—“Mafia hitman Carmine ‘The Beans’ is placed in the witness relocation program and sent to an all-Mormon community in Utah”—I walked into the kitchen to spare myself the shame.