Enduring Love by Ian McEwan Page B

That’s what’s so insulting about it.”
    He put his hands on his hips, and for the first time I found myself calculating the physical danger he presented. I was bigger, and I still worked out, but I’ve never hit anyone in my life and he was twenty years younger, with big jointed knuckles and a desperate cause, whatever it was. I straightened my back to make myself taller.
    “It hadn’t occurred to me to insult you,” I said. “Until now.”
    Parry moved his hands from his hips and presented his open palms. What was so exhausting about him was the variety of his emotional states and the speed of their transitions. Reasonableness, tears, desperation, vague threat—and now honest supplication. “Joe, please, look at me, remember who I am, remember what moved you in the first place.”
    The whites of his eyes were exceptionally clear. He held my stare for a second before looking away. I was beginning to see the pattern of a tic he suffered when he spoke. He caught your eye, then turnedhis head to speak as though addressing a presence at his side, or an invisible creature perched on his shoulder. “Don’t deny us,” he said to it now. “Don’t deny what we have. And please don’t play this game with me. I know you’ll find it a difficult idea, and you’ll resist it, but we’ve come together for a purpose.”
    I should have walked on, but his intensity held me for the moment and I had just sufficient curiosity to echo him. “Purpose?”
    “Something passed between us up there on the hill, after he fell. It was pure energy, pure light?” Parry was beginning to come alive, and now that his immediate distress was behind him, the interrogative inflection had returned to his statements. “The fact that you love me,” he continued, “and that I love you is not important. It’s just the means …”
    The means?
    He addressed my frown, as though explaining the obvious to a simpleton. “To bring you to God, through love. You’ll fight this like mad, because you’re a long way from your own feelings? But I know that the Christ is within you. At some level you know it too. That’s why you fight it so hard with your education and reason and logic and this detached way you have of talking, as if you’re not part of anything at all? You can pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, perhaps because you want to hurt me and dominate me, but the fact is I come bearing gifts. The purpose is to bring you to the Christ that is in you and that
is
you. That’s what the gift of love is all about. It’s really very simple?”
    I listened to this speech, trying not to gape. The fact was that he was so earnest and harmless, he looked so crushed, and he was speaking such nonsense that I felt genuinely sorry for him.
    “Look,” I said, as pleasantly as I could. “What is it you want, exactly?”
    “I want you to open yourself up to—”
    “Yes, yes. But what do you actually want from me? Or with me.”
    This was difficult for him. He squirmed inside his clothes and looked at the thing on his shoulder before saying, “I want to see you?”
    “And do what, exactly?”
    “Talk … get to know each other.”
    “Just talk? Nothing else?”
    He wouldn’t answer or look at me.
    I said, “You keep using the word
love
. Are we talking about sex? Is that what you want?”
    He seemed to think this was unfair. The whining note was back in his voice. “You know very well we can’t talk about it like this. I’ve already told you, my feelings are not important. There’s a purpose you can’t be expected to know at this stage.”
    He said more along these lines, but I was only half listening. How extraordinary it was, to be standing on my own street in my coat, this cold Tuesday morning in May, talking to a stranger in terms more appropriate to an affair, or a marriage on the rocks. It was as if I had fallen through a crack in my own existence, down into another life, another set of sexual preferences, another past