Nonetheless, Patrick becomes my boyfriend. We spend the winter holed up in his apartment, wrapped in separate blankets on the couch, writing papers on our laptops. Usually he goes to bed before me and is closing the drawer of a bedside stand when I come into the bedroom. Then we try to have sex but he can't get an erection. Each time he ventures an explanation — my blond hair? He's never found blond women attractive. My crooked bottom teeth? Or maybe my green winter jacket, which reminds him of one his mother used to wear.

When Patrick says these things, I despise him and counter that I believe my relationship with him to be a karmic punishment for the pain I caused my college boyfriend during our breakup.

"You see me as a source of suffering and karmic punishment?" he asks.

"Yes," I say.

"That's a really faulty understanding of the concept of karma," he says.

I speculate obsessively about the contents of Patrick's bedside drawer: pictures of the ex-girlfriend he says he's still in love with? Some sort of Buddhist porn? Eventually, I find an excuse to stay behind when he has an early-morning class, and, shaking with the panicked certainty that people who violate others' privacy always get what they deserve, open the drawer. It holds a rolled-up, dented white tube. "Male-genital desensitizer," the label reads.

The next time I see Patrick sliding the drawer shut, I ask what's in it.

"Just my male-genital desensitizer," he shrugs.

"What do you do with your male-genital desensitizer?" I say.

"I cover my penis in it before I go to bed," he says, "so I won't have sex with you."

"Then why," I ask, "do you tell me you can't get it up because I'm ugly? Is this your moral exemption for being spiritually advanced?"

He presses his fingertips together as if in prayer. "It's not about my spiritual progress," he says. "It's about yours.

I thought this would be instructive for you."

So it ends with Patrick. I'm furious and blame the Catholic childhood beneath his Buddhism, become adamantly convinced of Lydia's Jesus-in-the-eyes theory. Every div-school boy, I now believe, conceals within himself a personal relationship with Jesus, a well of guilt and shame so deep that fish living at its bottom would have to produce their own light, and a visceral horror at the pollution that is the female body. His body may be heaving on top of you, but his mind is on the sad-eyed Christ he imagines to be watching from the corner.

Cast back into my apartment, I tag along with my roommates to girls' night, a social event for female residents of div-school housing. Most of the women come from the South and attended Christian colleges. They bring slice-and-bake cookies; we watch a Sandra Bullock movie. I have no idea how to talk to them.

Sitting awkwardly amidst diet cola and fat-free potato chips, I remember a fantasy I used to have about grad school. That I'd spend disciplined hours reading theory, preferably in French or German, which I'd then mull over with fellow students beneath autumn-leaved trees, before returning to my desk to write passionately into the night. This is pretty much the opposite of what has happened. Empty notebooks gather dust on my desk. In class discussion I register little more than irritation at classmates who talk about their feelings rather than their thoughts. I chain-smoke, drink far too much, and never finish my papers. Div-school boys are the only thing I've done here. How did the drive and focus that led me here just up and vanish?

But I don't want to think about this, any more than I want to think about the break-up that cast me into the arms of div-school boys. Instead I swear off religious guys — loudly, drunkenly — and take up with Kevin, a doctoral student in religion who claims to be an atheist Jew. Kevin has a glass eye as a result of a childhood gun accident. Knowing the glass eye is noticeable only at close range, he stands far away in conversation and closes his eyes very early before kissing me.

A few weeks after we meet, we're lying in his bed when he says that after the gun accident he had visions of Christ.

"What?" I say.

He says that in the years after he lost his eye, he would often gaze out the window of his mother's car to see Christ hanging on the cross beside barns and silos, in cow pastures and condominium developments.

"But aren't you Jewish?" I ask.

"This was before I converted," he says. Apparently he grew up Presbyterian and his conversion to Judaism involved no initiation rites — just a feeling of becoming Jewish. My heart sinks: Jesus in his eyes. He asks what's wrong and I tell him about Lydia's theory. I turn voraciously confessional, talk on and on.

Kevin looks sad. "People on the rebound from break-ups with God," he says, "make for perilous lovers."

"I don't know if the problem is more the size of their loss or their lack of self-awareness," I say, and then wonder who exactly I'm talking about.

Kevin and I break up a few weeks later, over tea in his kitchen on a rainy day. He loans me an umbrella I'll never give back and walks me to the front porch. Half a block down the street, I turn back to see him smoking on the porch. He looks morose, deflated. At least this time I can tell that what's wrong with his eyes isn't Jesus. It's loss.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	After graduating from divinity school in 2005, Jane Yager moved to Berlin, Germany, where she now lives with her boyfriend and their one-year-old son. She works as a writer and translator, and has recently contributed to the Times Literary Supplement and the Global Post.