One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  That last possibility—remote as it was—became the topic as soon as I sat down at the table with the women that night.

  “I know you said I wasn’t stupid not to see that Se—that my fiancé was hooked on porn,” I said, as Ms. Helen tossed a salad with small tongs she’d pulled from her bag and pushed it toward me. “But, really, did I miss red flags that maybe somebody not so naïve would have seen?”

  “Really?” Gray said. “Why would you even be thinking about the possibility of porn? You weren’t looking at Playgirl, right?”

  “No.”

  “Then why would it even enter your mind?”

  Ms. Helen poured a container of balsamic vinaigrette on my salad. “And don’t even think about beating yourself up for being naïve. That’s a rare and beautiful quality these days.”

  Too bad I’d lost it.

  “Tara,” Betsy said.

  I tried to focus on her.

  “As women, our sexuality is relationally based. Wouldn’t y’all agree?”

  “Definitely,” Gray said.

  Ms. Helen nodded, and my cheeks warmed. This was like talking about sex with GrandMary . . . except I had talked about sex with GrandMary. So, okay.

  “I agree too,” I said. “Which is why I don’t understand what he was getting from cybersex. He doesn’t even know those women.” Evelyn’s story of the prostitute flickered through my mind but I let it go. I hadn’t told the Watch that part.

  “That’s because you’re looking at male sexuality through the eyes of a female,” Betsy said. “It’s different for them—not all the time, but we don’t have to get into that. Just let me ask you this, if I may.”

  “Do it,” I said.

  “Did you see any flaws in the relationship itself, apart from all this?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “We were perfectly happy before I found out. At least I was. We never really even came close to having a fight until that night, when he was acting strange, I mean for him.”

  “Then I rest my case,” Gray said, “because there was no way you could know. He deliberately kept it a secret—partly by being perfect.” She tightened her ponytail. “You know, if everything else about him was above reproach, that one thing couldn’t be that bad. Make sense?”

  Going there meant I had to see Seth in a different light. A bare lightbulb light. I couldn’t turn that on right now, but I nodded at Gray.

  “And that’s when the shame comes in,” Ms. Helen said, “when someone is doing something so bad he can’t let anyone know.”

  “Don’t make his shame your shame,” Betsy said. “You’re not gon’ get healed that way.”

  “We’ve been so much a part of each other for so long,” I said, “separating me from him is like splitting myself in half. It hurts.”

  I got three versions of “I know.” It was enough to get me through most of the salad and out of the chair that ten minutes before I thought I might just stay stuck in forever. It was the closest thing I’d felt to a start.

  When we noticed Ike turning off the lights in the kitchen and clearing his throat, Betsy walked me partway down Bull Street.

  “One more thing about shame,” she said when we reached the corner at Harris. “Shame never comes from God. So whenever you’re feeling ashamed or foolish about this, that’s not God talking to you.”

  I didn’t have a clear conviction that God was talking to me at all. But at least now I knew when he wasn’t.

  Maybe that should have been my impetus for going back to church Sunday morning, especially since Daddy would be going alone and we hadn’t seen much of each other since Mama left. But I still couldn’t do it. God would be there, but so would Paul and the memories. I whispered, “I’m sorry, God.” It was the best I could do.

  SIXTEEN

  I got to work early Monday so Wendy would have no reason to be annoyed with me. Her focus wasn’t in my direction, though; that was obvious. When I arrived, she and Ike were having an intense conversation behind the loose tea display. I couldn’t see them as I started in cleaning the toaster oven someone had burned cheese in during the previous shift and hadn’t bothered to wipe out before it hardened into a weld. But I could hear the tautness in their voices. Neither one of them was doing an effective job of keeping the discussion to a whisper, so I decided I wasn’t really eavesdropping.

  “No, you can’t change shifts,” Ike said. “We’ve got a good team here in the afternoon.”

  “I’ll switch with Zoo-Loo. He’ll do fine with Tara.”

  “Zoo-Loo isn’t long for this world, so no.”

  Wendy’s sigh filtered straight through the tins of Earl Grey and Darjeeling.

  “Okay.” Ike’s voice was a trifle less bullet-like. “If you can give me a solid reason why you want to change, I’ll consider it.”

  I considered moving out of earshot. I didn’t want to hear that Wendy could no longer stand working with me. But I was afraid if I moved now they’d know I was there, lurking.

  “My schedule for my other job has changed,” she said.

  “Are you going to get fired from your other job if you keep your same schedule here?”

  “No, but it would be easier—”

  “Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk, but when I hired you we agreed that this was your real job and your other job, whatever it is . . .”

  He seemed to be waiting for her to fill in a blank but she didn’t. I could almost hear her eyes rolling.

  “We said it would be secondary. Are we still there?”

  “It’s not like I want to work two jobs. I just need the money.”

  Do it, Ike! I wanted to shout at him. Give her the management position! She can so handle it.

  Instead I heard Ike take a step back, imagined him adjusting the fedora with his index finger. “I can maybe pay you fifty cents more an hour, if that’ll help.”

  “It will,” Wendy said. “But not enough.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  I held my breath so I wouldn’t whisper, Wendy, don’t quit. Don’t leave me.

  “I’m staying,” she said.

  The conversation was clearly over. I virtually ran to the sink, ostensibly for some steel wool, and almost knocked Wendy over in the process. Our eyes met and she knew that I knew it hadn’t gone well. Why she didn’t just ask Ike for the management position, I still couldn’t figure out. But who was I to give employment advice?

  I had no idea what it was that yanked me out of a hard sleep at six fifteen Tuesday morning. Lexi and I had been up until one watching the Ethan Hawke production of Hamlet. The house was quiet, with Daddy probably off to work already and Mama still away. I knew it was the too-quiet that pulled me out of bed, but what possessed me to get dressed and walk to St. John’s Church, that had to be the Watch, telling me that if we invited God in I could heal.

  With the pain strumming inside me like a constant sad guitar, that healing was, as Hamlet would say, a “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Otherwise I might go as nutty as Ophelia.

  The Savannah January day was soggy and foggy and pocked with puddles, but I picked my way through it and slid into the back pew of the church just as Ned Kregg stood up to say those words again: “From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same . . .”

  The thin gathering of people seemed to be following in a book of some kind, and there were two different ones in the rack on the back of the pew in front of me, but I didn’t even attempt to figure out which one, much less find the page. I just watched Ned as he proclaimed more than read through the part about the name of God being great among the heathen and on into words that startled me.

  “Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem.”

  He went on to lead the tiny congregation to “humbly confess” their sins unto Almighty God, which they did in unison. I sat on the edge of the pew, held there by the fact that I was in front of God with my terrifying inner life. I had no idea what was going on as Ned g
ently delivered an absolution and began the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t even join in. I simply sat there, breathing hard, as if I had narrowly escaped the grasp of something horrible and had found refuge in this strange, confusing place.

  The service continued up there, far from me, and I stayed until the people were invited to come to the altar for communion. I left then, not because I didn’t feel like I could go up and figure out what I was supposed to do. I was just full. Any more and I would have overflowed and lost it all down the drain that always seemed to be open and waiting. That’s how it felt.

  I spent the rest of the morning walking, skirting puddles and sidestepping innocent-looking flats of slick leaves, and thinking. Wake up, Tara, the clearing morning said to me. Wake up and put on your strength.

  If I was going to see myself as someone apart from Seth, I was going to need it.

  And I wasn’t the only one. At work that day, Wendy seemed more upset than yesterday’s conversation with Ike warranted as far as I was concerned. I knew about trembling hands and chins, and brief lapses while you stared into space and tried to remember who you were.

  She didn’t bring me soup again that day, so I fixed her a mug of cream of asparagus and took it to her.

  “Drink this,” I said. “It’s comfort food.”

  “Do I need comforting?” she said.

  “Who doesn’t?” I said.

  And I left it at that.

  The next day, Wednesday, I went to St. John’s again, and sat about halfway up in the sanctuary and discovered which book to use. The Book of Common Prayer was its title. My lit crit training kicked in and I peeked at the publishing information. Its original copyright date was 1928. No wonder the language sounded as if King James himself had penned it.

  When they got to the confession of sin, I didn’t join in the unison reading, but I tried to take in the words—which were daunting. Evidently we had all erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep and “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” All of us—the pronoun consistently being plural—had done things we shouldn’t have done and not done things we should have. Fortunately God was asked to spare us and restore us. And in his solemn absolution, Ned declared that was a done deal. God forgave and was there to make “the rest of our life hereafter” pure and holy.

  Everyone else went into the Lord’s Prayer. I sat for the remainder of the service, realizing that I wanted that. In spite of the Watch telling me I had no reason to feel ashamed, I wanted that purging and that absolution. Or I might fester forever.

  I stayed for the whole thing, even though I didn’t take communion, and when it was over I waited until the gracious women and gentlemanly patriarchs—who all seemed to have floated in from a time long past—had said their good-byes to Ned before I approached him. If the light in his soft brown eyes was an indication, he was pleased to see me.

  “I’m glad you came back,” he said.

  “Did you find your jacket?” I said. “I left it on the hook.”

  “I did, thank you—”

  “I want to make a confession.”

  His only indication that I had just committed a complete non sequitur was a slight turning of his head, as if he were suddenly listening with a different ear.

  “Do you do that?” I said. “I mean, do you have some kind of booth thingie or something? I know this isn’t a Catholic church, but . . .”

  Convinced I sounded like a moron, I stopped. But Ned just nodded.

  “We don’t have a confessional, per se, but I’d be glad to sit down with you and hear anything you want to tell me. When would you like to do that?”

  “Now?” I said. I didn’t add, before I wimp out.

  He seemed to get that, though, because he said, “We can go over to the parish house. Nobody’s there this early.”

  Having lived in downtown Savannah my entire life, I didn’t know how I’d missed the fact that the Green-Meldrim House, next door to St. John’s Church, was also its parish house. I’d been inside once, on the obligatory field trip back in elementary school, so I knew the story about how General Sherman—the “evil” leader of the Yankee army in the “War of Northern Aggression” as some of my older teachers had still referred to it—had stayed there with his officers during the occupation of Savannah. The tale went that the hospitality was so gracious, he decided not to burn Savannah as he had Atlanta and instead gave our city to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Then he promptly went off to Columbia, South Carolina, and burned it to the ground.

  The other thing that stuck in my mind, naturally, was that the house had been used in Robert Redford’s production of The Conspirator. The long rug we walked over was a gift from him; he’d used it in the movie to protect the original English tile floors.

  Ned led me into a large room in the front where the sun was beginning to stream through the narrow doors that opened out onto the first-floor balcony, which was almost level with the lane it faced. The ceilings were fifteen feet high, but the arrangement of the furniture in conversational groups made it somehow cozy. When Ned motioned for me to sit on a vintage brocade divan, I hesitated.

  “Should we?” I said. “It’s an antique, right?”

  “We use everything in the house,” he said. “Including the period silver tea service, every Sunday morning for coffee hour.”

  “Do you live here?” I said. Could I sound any more like a fifth-grader on the aforementioned field trip?

  “My apartment is in what used to be the servants’ quarters, attached to the house.”

  “You are not serious,” I said. “I love that.”

  “So do I,” Ned said. And then he folded his hands softly in his lap and said, “How can I help you, Tara?”

  “You remembered my name.”

  “I’ll forget it if you want me to.”

  I was about to laugh but he seemed serious.

  “You can say anything you want and I will keep it in strict confidence. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we never had this conversation, unless you want to tell someone.”

  “Okay.”

  “But let’s pray first.”

  I expected him to pull one of the books of Common Prayer out of his jacket pocket, but he simply bowed his head and murmured about God being there as a third party to our conversation, to free my mind and heart and tongue and to give him—Ned—ears to hear my heart.

  He didn’t say amen. He just whispered, “You can start anytime you want.”

  I thought the floodgates had come all the way open when I spilled my story out to the Watch. But that day, sitting on a sofa where perhaps other women since the Civil War had poured out their anguish to a priest, I emptied myself of everything.

  The graphic specifics of what I saw, both times, on the computer screen and in Seth.

  Our attempt to reconcile.

  Seth’s almost-suicide.

  Evelyn’s report about the prostitute.

  Paul and Randi’s reactions and my angry retorts to them.

  My neglect of GrandMary.

  My argument with my father.

  My failure to have enough compassion for Seth that he could go to his healing with a fearless heart.

  My conviction that I would never see the world as a loving place again.

  And my refusal to completely believe that God was really in this and that I could be healed because I hadn’t given God even as much attention as I gave . . . anything. I finished with, “I’m that heathen you always read about at the beginning of the service.”

  Ned looked puzzled.

  “ ‘For my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts,’ ” I said.

  One eyebrow went up. “I’m impressed. I bet I could ask every person who comes for the service daily what I said at the beginning and none of them could quote it.”

  “I guess it just struck a nerve.”

  “Undeservedly. If you were a heathen you wouldn’t be here. We have plenty of heathens in Savannah, and
you definitely aren’t one of them.”

  “So,” I said, “am I absolved?”

  “I would be happy to give you an absolution,” Ned said. “We could all use one about fifty times a day.”

  “I hear a but,” I said. “Is this too bad for that?”

  Ned actually looked dumbfounded. “Okay, it’s obvious you’ve had some kind of religious upbringing.”

  “I was raised a Christian,” I said. “I graduated from Veritas Academy.”

  “Then I’m curious . . . Where did you come up with the theology that there is some sin that can’t be forgiven?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know. This just seems way too ugly.”

  “You don’t think Seth can be forgiven?”

  “Um, yes?”

  “Because . . .”

  “It says so in the Bible?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No. It does say that.”

  “It does. I’m more concerned about what you think you’ve done wrong.”

  He was starting to sound like Betsy and Ms. Helen and Gray, and instead of being reassuring, that made me uneasy.

  “I feel as if I should have more empathy for Seth,” I said. “He’s begging me to be supportive, to give him a reason to work at getting this thing fixed, but I can’t totally. And that makes me feel so . . . un-Christian. I want to be all compassionate and forgiving and say, ‘I’ll stand by you through anything’ . . .” I let the hands I was using to say it all drop to my lap. “I just can’t.”

  “Well, no,” Ned said.

  For the first time I realized he did most of his talking with his eyes. The rest of his face was serene, almost unmoving, but his eyes seemed to hold all the emotion. They shone and softened and sparked. They even seemed to sigh.

  “Just because you’re a Christian doesn’t mean you should deaden the pain you have every right to feel. You have to deal with that first before you can even decide whether to help Seth.”

  “That’s not selfish?”

  “No. That’s loving yourself so you can love your neighbor.”

  “I don’t have to feel guilty?”

  “Even if you’d actually done something wrong you wouldn’t have to walk around feeling guilty. That’s what the confession of sin and the absolution is about. It’s not just a ritual.”