Damascus Gate by Robert Stone

reading Obermann's notes on the Reverend Theodore Earl Ericksen.
    "I couldn't telephone," she told him. "Are you alone? I can go to a hotel."
    "Nonsense," Lucas said impatiently. He was somewhat embittered over the flickering out of their affair. "Of course I'm alone. Did you think I would move someone into your flat?"
    "I thought you might have an overnight guest. Why not?"
    For a year or so, until the previous winter, Lucas and Tsililla had been a couple. It had been an intensely reflective, not to say a tortuously examined, relationship. Tsililla had been raised on a Tolstoyan-Freudian-Socialist kibbutz in the Galilee, equipped from infancy with such a plenitude of answers to life's questions as to leave her awash in useless certainties.
    Lucas himself tended toward introspection. They had exhausted each other. As part of their present arrangement, they had set each other free—a freedom that Lucas found particularly oppressive. No sooner had things gone wrong with Tsililla than he began experiencing impotence, which declined to set him free. For the first time in his life, he began to worry about aging and whether his powers would ever come back to him.
    On Tsililla's study wall was a picture of a well-known New York novelist with his arm around two fetching young soldier girls. One was the blushing twenty-year-old Tsililla, the second her then closest friend, comrade in arms and fellow kibbutznik, Gigi Prinzer. The touring writer had encountered them at their posting in the Negev and been smitten, whereupon the three of them had managed to parlay a jolly photo opportunity into a ghastly triangle. After an extravaganza of mutual psychic and sexual predation, each against all, the three principals had psychically imploded.
    The novelist had gone home, profoundly blocked and in deep midlife crisis, to his wife and the jeers of his cruel psychiatrist. In Gigi and Tsililla's company, he had gathered undreamed-of insights and material but was unable to write a line. Tsililla herself had published a dark novel, which was well received and indifferently translated into French.
    The novel had established her career as a full-time writer, although she eventually took up film criticism rather than fiction. Gigi, transformed into Tsililla's bitterest enemy, had gone to the Art Students' League of New York and to the École des Beaux Arts and then become a peace activist and commercially successful painter with a whitewashed studio in Safed. Only Tsililla, Lucas often thought, would preserve such a grisly souvenir as that photograph.
    "Shall I get my things out of the bedroom?" Lucas offered. The gesture earned him only a dismissive look, but it was one on which he doted. Her long pale face with its high cheekbones and prominent, full-lipped mouth never failed to stir him.
    He was sorely tempted to question her about the trip. He suspected she had contrived to fall in love again. Tsililla had a perpetual affair going with the great
beau monde
of mind and spirit and surrendered herself to it readily. In his jaundiced moments, he saw her as a silly little snob and groupie, and he was inclined to be unsympathetic this morning. But weary from the flight and whatever misadventures, she looked especially desirable. Then, to his perplexity, she came over to the chair on which he sprawled and kissed him on the cheek. He touched her hand in spite of himself.
    "Go to bed, my love," he said. "And later things will all be different."
    Leaving the bedroom door open, she tossed her traveling clothes in the customary heap at the foot of the bed and climbed under the covers. It was not unusual for her to go to bed at dawn.
    "What will you do today?" she asked him from beneath the counterpane.
    "I have to go down to Ein Gedi, to this conference. Talk to some Christian sky pilot. Religion and so forth."
    "You should do the mud," she said. "Put some on your bald spot."
    Anywhere else? he thought. He glared at her, but she was huddled under the