by Ellen BassHe didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. —Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's wife, on why he didn't believe in God I want to know too. Belief and disbelief are a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet in the Prado—I don't like it. I do. —before the Picasso. Or the tattoo artist with a silver stud in her full red executive lips, who, as she inked in the indigo blue, said, I think the G-spot's one of those myths men use to make us feel inferior. God, the G-spot, falling in love. The earth round and spinning, the galaxies speeding in the glib flow of the Hubble expansion. I'm an East Coast Jew. We all have our opinions. But it was in the cabin at La Selva Beach where I gave her the thirty tiny red glass hearts I'd taken back from my husband when I left. He'd never believed in them. She, though, scooped them up like water, let them drip through her fingers like someone who has so much she can afford to waste. That's the day she reached inside me for something I didn't think I had. And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river she pulled the river out of me. That's the way I want to know God.
