One of the few bright spots in Russ’s life—that Becky, against all expectations, had found her way to Christian faith and shared her inheritance with her brothers—was dimmed when she stopped attending services at First Reformed. She’d already spurned his invitation to join his confirmation class, and it now transpired that she and Tanner Evans were exploring other churches in New Prospect. When Russ asked why, she said she was looking for something more inspiring than Dwight Haefle’s sermons. “Does he even believe in God?” she said. “It’s like listening to Rod McKuen.” Russ, who had his own doubts about Dwight’s faith, replied that he, Russ, did believe in God. “Then maybe,” Becky said, “you should talk more about your relationship with Him and less about the evening news.” Her point was debatable, but he sensed that theology was just a pretext anyway; that her rejection of him was deeper and more personal; that Clem had done a thorough job of turning her against him. And perhaps rightly so. The bathroom sink into which he now regularly spent his seed, picturing Frances Cottrell and blocking from his mind all thought of God, was three steps from his daughter’s bedroom door.
Even Arizona had become a clouded prospect. Enough kids had signed up for the spring trip to fill three buses, and his plan was to leave two of them at the base of the Black Mesa while he led a third group up to the school at Kitsillie. The Black Mesa was in the heart of Diné Bikéyah. Nowhere more than up in its thin air, in the mind- and landscape-bending midday sun, beneath night skies pressing down with the weight of a million stars, had he felt more connected to the Navajo spirit world. Kitsillie’s primitive conditions would also be an opportunity to show Frances how capable he was of handling them, and they would test her appetite for new experiences. If, unlike Marion, she turned out to have a taste for roughing it, the possibilities for further joint adventures would be limitless. But when, after much trying, he reached Keith Durochie on the telephone, Keith bluntly told him, “Don’t go there.”
“To Kitsillie?”
“Don’t go there. The energy is bad. You won’t be welcome.”
“That’s nothing new,” Russ said lightly. “I wasn’t so welcome in the forties, either. You remember how you wouldn’t even shake my hand?”
He expected Keith to laugh at the memory, as he had in the past, but Keith didn’t.
“You’ll be safer in Many Farms,” he said. “We have plenty of work here. The people on the mesa are unhappy with the bilagáana.”
“Well, and I know a thing or two about building bridges. Why don’t we see how things look when I get there.”
Keith, after a silence, said, “You and I are old, Russ. Things aren’t the same.”
“I’m not so old, and neither are you.”
“No, I’m old. I saw my death the other day. It was on the ridge behind my house—not far.”
“I don’t know about that,” Russ said, “but I’m happy to think I’ll be seeing you again.”
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, he left his car in the First Reformed parking lot, so as not to let it be seen too suspiciously long at Frances’s, and walked uphill on sidewalks wet with the melting of dismal, clumpy snowflakes. The hour, nine o’clock, felt more suitable for a doctor’s appointment. Frances’s house was freshly painted and rather stately, a reminder of how much money she’d received from General Dynamics, and he rang her doorbell with a foreboding which he could only pray that marijuana would dispel.
“So much for my idea,” she said, leading him into her kitchen, “that you wouldn’t show up.”
“Do you not want me here?”
“I just hope we’re not making a big mistake.”
She was wearing a wide-necked brown sweaterdress and thick gray socks. Seeing her as she was at home, not in one of her smart Sunday outfits, not in her Tuesday-circle tomboy attire, he had an unsettling strong hit of her reality—her independence as a woman, her thinking of thoughts and making of choices wholly unrelated to him. To glimpse how it must feel to be her, inhabiting her own life, round the clock, was exciting but also daunting. On the counter by the kitchen stove, she’d already set out an ashtray and a crudely fashioned marijuana cigarette.
“Shall we get right to it,” she said, “or do we need to discuss it to death first?”
“No. Just assure me you’re really okay with doing this.”
“I’ve already done it—sort of. I don’t think I had enough.”
She reached and turned on the stove fan, and he wondered if there was underwear beneath her sweaterdress. The dress had slipped down her shoulder without exposing a bra strap. The skin of her upper back, which he’d never seen before, was smooth and lightly freckled. It, too, was real, and it gave him a pang of nostalgia for the safety of his fantasies. He’d been managing all right with fantasies; he could probably keep managing indefinitely. And yet to shy from the reality of Frances would confirm Marion’s belittling assessment of him. She’d given him permission because she didn’t believe he was man enough to use it.
“Let’s see what happens,” he said.
They hunched forward, side by side, under the exhaust fan. The marijuana smoke was scalding, and he might have stopped at one lungful if Frances hadn’t insisted that one wasn’t enough. She took sip after sip of smoke, holding the little cigarette like a dart, and he followed her lead. They didn’t stop until the remainder was too small to be handed back and forth. She went to the sink, dropped the “roach” in the garbage disposal, and opened a window. The snowflakes outside struck Russ as peculiar, artificial, as though strewn by someone standing on the roof. Frances stretched her arms above her head, raising the hem of her dress and with it, again, the question of underwear.
“Wow,” she said, splaying her raised hands. “This is much better. I wonder if you have to do it twice before you get the full effect.”
Though this was Russ’s first time, he was definitely getting an effect. The realization had hit him, like an anvil, that February was flu season—one of her kids could easily come home sick and discover him with their mother. The possibility seemed far from minimal, indeed quite strong, and he was appalled that he hadn’t considered it until now. The hour also suddenly felt not at all like morning. It felt closer to the hour when school let out—he could almost hear the final bell, the tumult of liberated kids, Frances’s among them. In the glare of the kitchen lights, he further realized, he was highly visible to her next-door neighbors. Looking around for a switch, he noticed that she’d left the room.
From the front of the house, at a sickeningly high volume, easily loud enough to attract the attention of neighbors, if not the police, came the sound of Robert Johnson singing “Cross Road Blues.” Russ discovered that he’d turned out most of the kitchen lights, but the one overhead was still burning. In the midst of searching for the switch, he understood that he could simply leave the kitchen.
The living room was blessedly dusky. Frances had thrown herself onto a sofa and bunched up her dress in the process. Russ glimpsed a sliver of white panty and searingly wished he hadn’t. His interest in the question of underwear was obscene. The loudness of Robert Johnson was an emergency.
“What do you think?” she called to him happily. “Are you feeling anything?”
“I’m thinking,” he said, but this wasn’t true, because, whatever he’d been thinking, he’d now forgotten it. Then, surprisingly, he remembered. “I’m thinking we should turn the music down.”
Even as he said it, he knew it was hideously square. He braced himself for shaming.
“You have to tell me everything you’re feeling,” she said. “That was the agreement. Actually, there was no agreement, but what’s the point of an experiment if we don’t compare results?”
He went to the stereo console and turned down the volume—too far. He therefore raised it again—too far. He lowered it again—too far.
“Come sit with me,” Frances called from the sofa. “I’m so aware of my skin—you know what I mean? It’s like the Beatles, I want to hold your hand. I’m j
ust so—it’s like I’m here but my thoughts are in every corner of the room. Like I’m blowing up a gigantic balloon and the air is my thoughts. You know what I mean?”
I went down to the cross road, babe, I looked both east and west
Lord, I didn’t have no sweet woman, babe, in my distress
Standing at the console, Russ was plunged into the hissing, low-fidelity world from which Robert Johnson was singing. He’d never felt more pierced by the beauty of the blues, the painful sublimity of Johnson’s voice, but also never more damned by it. Wherever Johnson was singing from, Russ could never hope to get there. He was an outsider, a latter-day parasite—a fraud. It came to him that all white people were frauds, a race of parasitic wraith-people, and none more so than he. To have loaned Frances his records, imagining that some particle of authenticity might adhere to him and redeem him, was the pinnacle of fraudulence.
“Oh Reverend Hildebrandt,” she called in a singsong voice. “A penny for your thoughts.”
The record label rotating below him was not Vocalion. The record was an LP, not a 78. Dimly, through his confusion, came the fear that she’d replaced his valuable antique with a cheap modern compilation, but instead of being angered he experienced a kind of menace. The revolving vinyl was like a vortex, a dark drain down which he was being sucked toward darker death. There had to be a special place in hell for him. If indeed hell, its sulfurous fires, existed. If hell weren’t exactly where he was standing, in his detestable fraudulence, right this minute. He felt his back go warm with a body’s proximity.
“You seem,” Frances said from close behind him, “more interested in the music than in me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You can feel anything you want. I just want to hear about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, lacerated by her reproach, convinced of its justice.
“But maybe we don’t need the music.”
The haste with which he took her suggestion and raised the tone arm screamed of a too-eager accession to another person’s wishes, a lack of authentic wishes of his own. As the record slowed to a halt, Frances put her arms around him from behind. She rested her head between his shoulder blades.
“This is okay, right?” she said. “A friendly hug?”
Her warmth entered his body and funneled straight into his loins.
“It’s so much better this time. I wonder if it’s a social thing, like you need to be with someone else to get the full experience. What do you think?”
He thought his head might burst with terror. He heard himself issue a chuckle, prefatory to some kind of speech act. The chuckle was reekingly phony, a creaking contraption of sinew and muscle, involuntarily activated by a craven wish to please and to fit in—to pass as an authentic person. It seemed to him that every word he’d ever uttered had been loathsome, slimy with self-interested calculation, his fatuousness audible to everyone and universally deplored. All his life, people had concealed their true opinion of him—only Clem had been honest. Into his chest, like a giant air bubble, unreleasable through lungs or stomach, came the agony of having hurt his son. He leaned forward and opened his mouth, trying somehow to release the bubble. He perceived his resemblance to the parishioners whose final moment he’d witnessed, his jaw lowered with agonal breathing, his facial skin stretched over an emerging death’s-head. It wasn’t clear how he could survive another moment of the agony.
When Frances withdrew from him, he felt no relief, only reproach. She was having a joyful experience and he an abominable one. This fact, the humiliation of it, seemed to brighten the living room in a disagreeable way.
“There’s something weird about the light,” she said. “It seems different from one moment to the next—I wonder if it’s always doing that. Maybe the pot makes my eyes more sensitive?”
Her friendly tone compounded his torture. That she wasn’t recoiling from his ugliness and failure seemed impossibly merciful. He alone, of all the people in the world, was phony, he alone a wraith-person.
“It does seem brighter,” he found himself saying, only to be stricken by the revolting wetness of his mouth’s creation of the words.
“Are you all right?” Frances said. “I read that pot makes some people paranoid.”
Before he could stop himself, he admitted that he was feeling paranoid. Instantly ashamed, he added, with croaking falsity, “Just a little—not a lot.”
“Come sit with me—I’ll hold your hand. Maybe you just need to feel safe.”
Going anywhere near her was unthinkable. His dread of discovery by her children had struck him with renewed force, and the kitchen! Even with the fan on, the kitchen surely stank of marijuana. It was imperative to get away before he was discovered. In his mind, he formed the words I’m sorry, trying to gauge what more they might reveal about his native excrescence. Whether he actually uttered them, as he left the room and snatched his coat from the newel post, he never knew.
Walking back to the church, unable to find a facial expression that didn’t broadcast culpability, he might have been a spider crawling across a white wall. It was a miracle that no one stared at him. When he reached his car, he locked himself inside it and lay down on the front seat, out of sight. Eventually he noticed that he was no longer psychotic, but the emotional truth of his paranoia persisted. When he returned to the parsonage, intending to hide in his office and pray, he was moved to stop first in the storage room and empty Marion’s ashtray into his hands. He smeared the ashes into his face, opened his mouth to them.
The season of Lent had begun, and it wasn’t all bad. Shame and self-abasement were still his portals to God’s mercy. The old paradox—that weakness, honestly owned, made a man stronger in his faith—still obtained. Accepting his failure with Frances, he asked Kitty Reynolds to lead the next Tuesday circle without him. At home, he humbled himself with Marion, told her she looked nice, took an interest. When she said, with cool amusement, “I gather you’ve had a setback with your little friend,” he turned the other cheek. He said, “Go ahead and mock me. I deserve it.” The days were getting longer, and when he sat in his twilit study and labored to express a sermon-worthy thought, he could hear her clearing her throat in the adjacent room, applying her language skills to the at-home proofreading work she was doing to pay for new clothes, a better hairdresser. Now that she was looking trimmer, more like the intense young woman he’d fallen for, he wondered if there might be hope for their marriage after all—if they might yet find their way to a new arrangement.
But she still slept on the third floor and made him do his own laundry, and despite his renewed engagement with God he couldn’t rid his mind of Frances. As he wore out the shame of his behavior in her living room, through incessant revisiting of it, he remembered more clearly her own behavior: that she’d asked him, more than once, to hold her hand; that she’d put her arms around him from behind, in a supposedly friendly hug (weren’t friendly hugs frontal?); and that, moreover, she’d dressed for their date in a garment begging to be raised above her hips. With terrible hindsight, he saw that she’d offered him the very chance he’d dreamed of. And even if he’d had her only once, even if he was only a passing itch she’d felt like scratching, while high on drugs, it would have meant the world to him.
He was mourning his lost chance when God’s providence intervened. Although he sensed its awkwardness for Becky and Perry, he’d attended every Crossroads meeting in the new year. He was technically an adviser, but he’d embraced his inferiority to Rick Ambrose and comported himself like a newcomer, there to participate in exercises and explore his emotions, not to enable young people’s growth in Christ. On the last Sunday night in February, after Ambrose had parted the crowd in the function hall, as if it were the Red Sea, and instructed one half of it to write their names on slips of paper from which the other half would draw partners, Russ unfolded the slip he’d drawn and saw whom God had given him. The name on the slip was Larry Cottrell.
“The instructi
on here is simple,” Ambrose told the group. “Each of us tells our partner a thing that’s really troubling us—at school, at home, in a relationship. The idea is to be honest, and for our partner to think honestly about how to be helpful. Remember that sometimes the most helpful thing is just to be present and listen without judging.”
Russ had thus far avoided Larry Cottrell, to the point of never looking at him, and Larry seemed neither pleased nor displeased to be his partner—it was just another exercise. As the other dyads dispersed around the church, Russ led him upstairs to his office and asked what was troubling him.
Larry touched his nostrils. “So you know,” he said, “my dad was killed two years ago. We had a picture of him, in his air-force uniform, it was in our upstairs hallway, and then last week it wasn’t there anymore. I asked my mom why she took it down, and she told me … She told me she was tired of looking at it.”
The pimpled half-maturity of Larry’s face, the coarsening of his mother’s features by male hormones, corrected Russ’s notion that her looks were boyish. No boy looked like Frances.
“And then,” he said, “this guy she’s been dating, I mean, she’s probably lonely, but she gets all fluttery when she’s going out with him, and it’s like my dad never existed. He was one of the youngest colonels in the history of the air force … he was my dad—and now she doesn’t even want to see a picture of him?”
Russ was alarmed by the ambiguity of has been dating—whether the verb tense encompassed the present or referred to a period now past.
“So,” he said, “your mother has been, or was, at some point…”
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