A conversation like any other

He slept with three women during his stint in Paris. The first woman was named Regan, and she was younger than he was, and pretty. At first, he’d thought she was a literature student like himself, and he’d recommended some modern authors that she might like to read, and she’d told him that really, if she could do two things, she’d like to be a development worker, which is what she was in school for, and also a writer, but she worried that she didn’t have time for the latter, that it would just live at the edge of her conscious mind, a thing unrealized. And, though he reassured her, he was also certain that everyone in the world as their first or second job probably wanted to be a writer. It was a pretty common thing to desire. And so, in talking with her they found a middle ground discussing the history of Western Art, which was a requisite class for everybody abroad that semester.

And, in these conversations, he delivered disquisitions on the caves at Lascaux and of the cave drawings, dated to incredibly distant times that they’d found in remote parts of the Appalachia in America. She found him interesting, liked knowledge of the sort that the displayed. He had this habit of not really making eye contact when he talked, as if he was nervous. He was relatively attractive, and the thought that she made him nervous, secretly pleased her, made her feel a bit of the control that was always absent in these sorts of interactions. It was always dependent, or nearly always dependent on the male of the species to begin the conversation, and, while this always seemingly gave the woman a modicum of control, really, what it did, was placed her in a position only to receive advances rather than capture them for herself. And so, only if she had one hundred hands could she count that the number of conversations that had not gone this easily with men, she was sure, even at her young age, would have liked to have slept with her, or at least gone out on a date with her, and it was a delicate, a difficult thing, to balance their expectations, set them straight, without being conceived of as a bitch or vapid or somehow manipulative, which she wasn’t. She was just a woman who had to manage expectations.

And this young man, who was quietly telling her how the cave paintings at Lascaux weren’t really art at all, but religious signs, was worth listening to. “That’s the crux of art,” he told her, putting his glass at an angle and spinning it deftly as if it were a top. “All art or at least all good art is religious, or fine, if we’re uncomfortable with that term, spiritual. It seeks a connection with someone or something beyond ourselves. When art becomes self-referential, baroque, it starts to lose its meaning. Art cannot exist for art’s sake. What are the things you’ve read? Apologies, it’s more my field of expertise, look at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, their texts are more or less spiritual guides to life. The amazing part is that they provide so many characters struggling with the reality of being a human being wrapped in the mystery of spirituality. The two seem inseparable, threaded together in the fabric of our beings.”  

She was not a strict atheist, but she had never really believed in any type of organized religion. It seemed silly, in the way that an older relative with dementia might at a large party. It was not worth attending to because it couldn’t possibly matter what they were saying. To give it more attention as some of these famous atheists, whose books she’d only glanced through, was to give it more credence than it deserved. “The struggle,” she said, wetting her lips with a bit of water, “is not spiritual. It’s carnal. The thing human beings spend most of their time thinking about is where their next meal is going to come from, its shape and flavors, or where the nearest bathroom is. It’s an illusion that literature, from what little I’ve read,” she demurred, “tries to play with, the delusion or illusion that we spend the majority of our lives on a different plane of being than we actually do. We spend the majority of our time worrying about food, water, toilets and sex. It’s a wonder we find time to think about anything else. And, any writers, even those old greats, who spend so much time describing the spiritual are being disingenuous, painting pictures as they’d like them to be rather than as they are.”