He stopped, of course. He wasn’t on the football team. But “stopped” was also a misleading word, because in truth that night was only the start of it, the first in a long series of nights of pushing her, bit by bit so she barely noticed him pushing, until having sex remained little more than a technicality. It also didn’t help matters that the entire soccer team was monitoring his progress almost as closely as they followed Brazil to the play-offs in last year’s World Cup. He had known his teammates longer than he had known her, after all, and unfortunately he was the one person on the team who couldn’t lie to save his life. The day he came to the locker room—it was off-season, but a group of them liked to train together regularly all the same, to stay in shape—with the long-awaited news, though, he felt sick to his stomach as soon as he said it. And he felt even more nauseous when the team burst into a chorus of whooping cheers, high-fiveing him as if he had scored the ultimate goal, as in fact he had. He stayed a moment in the locker room after they filed into the gym, reeling with nausea and holding his mouth open over the toilet for a while, but nothing came out. That was the problem, he realized as he braced himself against the toilet bowl, his strong hands sliding along the slick porcelain rim. It wasn’t going to come out. Everything he had done to her hardened inside him like a lead bullet lodged in his gut.

He slept with her many times after that, but there wasn’t a single time he slept with her again that the image didn’t flash through his mind of that day in the locker room bracing himself against the toilet, of that ugly thing lodged inside him that he could never remove, of how he could never return to the person he used to be, unburned by selfish fires; that the Jason he had been before had been charred and destroyed forever. He ignored that image for a year, maybe more, until he couldn’t ignore it anymore. He began to hate himself. And then he fell into his new world like a diver plunging into living, purifying waters, that animal hole on the soccer field tripping him like a proof of God’s presence in the world. Now when he recited his prayers, he sang out loud the words written in the prayer book, his secret vow to God: “Turn us to You and we shall return—renew our days as of old!”

“HOW OLD are you?” Jake asked suddenly, looking up from the jeweler’s loupe. His own question took him by surprise. Being with Leora had given him some bad habits, not the least of which was the habit of asking strangers obnoxious questions.