by Мэтью Квик Q
“Thank you,” she said. “So do you think you want to give your life to Jesus?”
I was just about to lie when this muscle-y blond football-player-looking kid snuck up behind Lauren and started to massage her shoulders. “Hey, buttercup,” he said.
Buttercup? Really?
“Hey,” Lauren said in a way that let me know this wasn’t just any old church member. He looked like the Johnny kid in the pamphlet and nothing like me. “Leonard, this is my boyfriend, Jackson. Jackson, this is Leonard.”
“I hear you’re serious about making Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior,” Jackson said to me. “It’s definitely the way to go.”
“Do you enjoy parking?” I asked, although I’m not sure why. Probably because I was angry and just wanted to leave. I felt so tricked by Lauren. Being eaten by her was one thing, but introducing me to her boyfriend after she’d led me on—that was entirely unacceptable. She used her femme fatale skills to get me into her church, bait-and-switch style, when she already had a boyfriend who was much more normal-looking than me—a completely different type. “Do you guys park?”
“Leonard!” Lauren said, because she definitely got the reference, although it took her a second.
“What are you talking about?” Jackson said, and made a confused face.
I looked up at the clock on the gym wall—I remember it was protected by mesh wire so basketballs wouldn’t smash it.[46]
“Quarter to one already?” I asked, and then started to lie again, only these were escape lies. The Bogie-Bacall fantasy had been temporarily shattered, so I just wanted out of this church. “Holy shit! I have to roll my grandmother over in her bed. She gets bedsores if I don’t do it every four hours or so. My grandfather does it when I’m at school, but he refuses to do it on the weekends. He says, ‘The weekends are mine,’ which seems mean until you know that he has Alzheimer’s, so you really can’t hold it against him. Okay. Off I go.”
I stood up and walked out of the gym, up the stairs, and out into the afternoon.
Lauren followed me and kept saying, “Wait up. Let’s talk. What’s going on here? I thought you were serious about Jesus.”
I spun around and said, “I’m a devout atheist. I don’t believe in hell, so none of this scares me. I really just wanted to go parking with you, like the kids do in that pamphlet you gave me, because I think you’re beautiful—like Lauren Bacall—and so unlike the girls at my school. And I sort of admire your standing at the train station all alone giving out pamphlets, trying to save people. You seemed so interesting when I met you—like no one else I had ever met before. But you don’t seem the same in your church—like there’s no risk being Christian here because everyone is Christian in your church. You’re just one of many here, where at the train station you were one of a kind. And I’m a one-of-a-kind type of person, and that’s just the way it is. So we’re definitely breaking up. And I can’t believe your boyfriend looks like Johnny from the pamphlet. Jesus Christ, you could do better!”
Lauren just stood there with her mouth open.
“I’m sort of crazy. I’m mostly lonely,” I said, because she looked little-kid confused and I was starting to feel bad for her again. I guess I only liked her when we were alone. “I follow sad miserable-looking adults on the trains all day sometimes and so I thought we had weird train-station behavior in common and—”
“You all right, Lauren?” said Jackson, who was now somehow rubbing Lauren’s shoulders again and glaring at me like he wanted to kill me before I could accept Jesus Christ into my heart, and would therefore—in his mind—end up burning in a sea of fire.
“She’s all right,” I said. “I’m leaving. Problem solved.”
I left.
TWENTY-TWO
I’d see Lauren at the train station from time to time but she pretended like she didn’t know who I was, and I pretended like I didn’t know who she was either.
This went on for a year or so.
Then one day, I saw her in Center City being harassed by a bum, who was following her and yelling, “Give me a sandwich and you think you saved the world? It don’t work like that! You think God sent you to give me two pieces of bread with a slice of cheese and a flimsy circle of bologna and cheap bright-yellow mustard and that’s supposed to make up for ten years of living in a cardboard box? That’s what you want me to believe? God loves me because you gave me a half-assed sandwich? I’m homeless—not crazy!”
The guy had wild eyes and a lion’s mane of gray hair that made his head look like a frozen sun or something.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Lauren said.
“That ain’t good enough,” the bum said. “I gotta few things you can tell your god the next time you pray in your nice warm house with a toilet in it and a whole refrigerator of food that you’d never give to bums like me because it costs too fucking much and so it ain’t bum food. I bet you got a dog that eats better than me.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry.”
It was kind of funny seeing Lauren getting verbally beat down by a bum, and I was totally on the bum’s side, but Lauren looked so rattled that I had to intervene. And so I went up to the bum and said, “I was sent to you by the Atheist Society of America. We believe in chaos and no god at all, and want to congratulate you on putting this uppity Christian in her place. As a reward we’d like to give you twenty dollars that you may use to buy a superior sandwich or whatever you’d like. No strings attached.”
The gray lion-haired bum looked at me like I was insane, but he snatched the money out of my hand and walked away.
“He’s just going to buy alcohol or drugs, you know,” Lauren said, which made me sad, because she didn’t know that man at all, let alone whether he had a dependency problem.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’m Leonard Peacock,” I said, and stuck out my hand confidently, putting on the Bogie charm.
“I remember who you are,” Lauren said, ignoring my outstretched hand, playing hard-to-get Bacall again. She looked really shook up, so I didn’t take offense. “Why do you think he got so angry at me?”
I didn’t feel like listing all the reasons why she deserved the verbal beatdown from the homeless man—mostly because I knew that wouldn’t help my cause—so I just changed the subject. “You’re welcome.”
“What?”
“You no longer have a bum trailing you, yelling at you.”
“Oh,” she said. “I was fine. God would have protected me.”
“Maybe god sent me to protect you,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.
“Maybe.”
“God says you should have coffee with me right now?”
“You want to have coffee with me? Why?”
“We can talk more about god,” I said, giving her the line she wanted.
“What you said to Jackson and me at my church,” Lauren said. “It was really rude.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said just to get her to have coffee with me, because her face was all red from her being harassed, and she looked so femme fatale—so much like she needed saving—that I didn’t even care she had trap written all over her.
“I’m not going to park with you,” she said in this really serious way that depressed me; I only had so much Bogart in me, truth be told, and I was already running low.
“Do people in your church really use the word park as a euphemism for having sex in cars? Do teenagers really have sex in cars? I don’t even drive.”
“If you’re just going to make fun of me for going to church and believing in God, I don’t want to have coffee with you, Mr. Atheist.”
Her calling me Mr. Atheist really deflated me because it felt like a wall—like my personal beliefs were going to keep us from being friends and ultimately kissing. It was like once again someone was labeling me and putting me in a box just as soon I expressed myself. Suddenly, the whole deal didn’t feel like a game anymore.
Consequences, Herr Silverman says. Conseq
uences.
I abandoned my plan. I made a real attempt. “I’m not going to make fun of you, okay? I just want to understand you. Maybe we can have an exchange? Maybe we can talk about our beliefs over coffee without trying to change each other. What do you think?”
“I’m not going to kiss you.”
“You have Jackson to kiss, right?”
“I’ve never kissed Jackson either.”
“I thought he was your boyfriend.”
“I’m saving myself for my husband.”
“Saving yourself?”
“Yep.”
“So you won’t even kiss someone before you get married?”
“Not the way you’re thinking of kissing. A peck on the lips or cheek doesn’t count.”
I must say, her never having been kissed was really attractive to me for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I was drawn to Lauren’s innocence. Maybe it reminded me of who I was before all the bad stuff went down.
I said, “You owe me one cup of coffee for getting the homeless man off your back. I know this place around the corner. What do you say?”
“We’ll talk about our religious beliefs. Like an exchange, right?”
“Right.”
And then we walked to this coffee shop that had crazy huge couches that were random geometrical shapes like triangles and rhombuses and circles. It was like being in a day-care room for giant babies.
We got a seat and I ordered a double espresso, because I thought that would sound really sophisticated and cool and was the most Bogart-like thing I could order since I couldn’t order gin or scotch. Lauren ordered a peppermint mocha, which made her seem like a child again, and I also liked that about her,[47] so I called the waiter back and said, “I’ll also have a peppermint mocha.”
Lauren looked around the shop and up at the ceiling like she was examining the construction of it, making sure the roof wouldn’t fall on our heads, and then said, “So why are you wearing a suit?”
“I do that sometimes when I take a day off school to do research.”
“What are you researching?”
“Aging and the possibility of adult happiness.”
“Jesus can make you happy.”
I laughed and said, “Do you talk about anything else besides Jesus?”
Lauren smiled and said, “So why have you been ignoring me for a year?”
“I haven’t. You’ve been ignoring me.”
“I have not been ignoring you! I try to catch your eye whenever I see you at the train station, but you walk by so quickly without looking. I’ve actually been quite hurt by your snubs.”
I noted that she was doing the cat-face femme-fatale thing again. She was now back in trap mode. “What about Jackson?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“I bet he doesn’t want you talking to me.”
“He would be happy if we talked about God. He believes we should save everyone too.”
“Then why doesn’t he help you pass out Jesus pamphlets?”
“He used to, but he’s at college now. And he’s not my boyfriend anymore.”
That bit of news got my heart pumping. “Is that why you’re having coffee with me today? Because you no longer have a boyfriend?” I said, hoping for the right answer, but the waiter came back with our peppermint mochas.
Lauren sipped hers and said, “Yum!”
That made me smile. I sipped mine and it tasted just like a melted York Peppermint Pattie.
“Maybe I could take you to dinner sometime, what do you think?”
“Are you asking me out on a date?” Lauren said.
“Okay, scratch that,” I said, because her eyebrows got all scrunchy and her eyes got all squinty, and not in the sexy cat-face Bacall way either. “Maybe this right here could be our first date, and then we won’t have to worry about the asking and saying yes part. We could just start now.”
“Well, I only date boys who are Christian.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.” I wasn’t really that daunted at first because it seemed like such a silly thing to me—something we could easily overcome. I didn’t realize how limiting her Christianity actually was.
“Do you want to talk about Jesus?” she asked.
“That’s your favorite topic, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t you have any other interests at all?”
“Sure. But we have to clear this hurdle before we move on to those. I don’t want to waste your time or mine.”
“But doesn’t your religion tell you that everyone is important? I mean, that bum obviously didn’t believe in Jesus and you still gave him a sandwich.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to date him!” Lauren kind of rolled her eyes at me all adorable and then sipped her peppermint mocha.
God, I loved her so much at that moment, mostly because she had just implied that she’d consider dating me—that my dating a girl was actually a possibility.
“Leave it to me to fall in love with a Jesus freak,” I said, and then laughed to make it seem as though I was only being playful and kidding.
“You don’t even know me,” she said.
“But I’d like to.”
She sighed and looked out the window.
Then we just sort of sipped our mochas and watched people pass outside for fifteen minutes or so.
Afterward, we walked to the train station together and then sat side by side on the ride back to Jersey. Our elbows were touching through our coats and that gave me an embarrassing hard-on, which would have been a problem if it were summer and I had no coat to hide under.
I could sort of tell that she was feeling something too, regardless of whether she wanted to or not.
When we got off the train she made the Bacall cat face again and said, “It was nice having coffee with you. Maybe God will change your heart and we can continue our talk about Jesus. And then who knows?”
She said that in this really flirty way that made me even harder than I already was. My hands were in my peacoat pockets and I was sort of holding the stupid hard-on to my abdomen like a loaded and cocked catapult. I couldn’t have spoken if you paid me so I just nodded.
“I’ll be praying for you,” Lauren said, and then waved good-bye by bending the tops of her right-hand fingers three times, just like a little kid would. She spun around and then walked away from me.
I kept thinking she was trying to trick me again—using her sexuality like female teachers do, flirting to control you. That she was nothing but a trap. But I had to know what it was like to kiss her. I just did. I didn’t want to fake being interested in Christianity again, because I was so tired of faking it with everyone else in my life. So I decided to think long and hard about the possibility of god, since that was all Lauren wanted to discuss. I thought up a list of questions and I asked her a new one at the train station three times a week.
Why would god allow the Holocaust to happen?
If god made everything, why did he invent sin to trick us and then hold our sins against us?
Why are there so many religions in the world if god created the world and wants us to be Christian?
Why does god allow people to fight wars over him?
What if you were born in a different culture and never even heard of Jesus Christ—would god send you to hell for not being Christian? And if so, do you believe that’s fair?
Why are men always the leaders in your church? Aren’t women capable of leading too? Isn’t such a patriarchal system sexist in this day and age?
Why do so many babies die?
Why are there so many poor people in the world?
Did Jesus visit any other planets in distant unknown universes?
Stuff like that.
The next time we saw each other it was a warm spring afternoon and she was wearing these shorts with pockets on the sides and I couldn’t stop looking at her creamy thighs, which were perfect. In front of the subway station, she was all smiles and said, “HELLO, LEONARD! I�
�ve been praying for you! God’s given me a special peace regarding our friendship. I know it will be for a reason.”
But the more questions I asked throughout the summer, the quieter and less enthusiastic she got, and the less I enjoyed studying her various exposed body parts.
It was like she thought I was beating her down with my words when all I really wanted to do—besides look at her wonderful body—was understand and have an honest conversation.
Lauren never really answered my questions, unfortunately. She just quoted Bible verses and repeated things her father had told her, but I got the sense that she didn’t really believe the things she was saying so much as she was clinging to those answers because she didn’t have any other answers and maybe having the wrong answers was better than having no answers.
I don’t really know, but the more questions I asked, the more she started to hate me—I could tell—which was just so so depressing.[48] She also started to notice that I was checking her out, which got kind of awkward, especially when she started wearing these really baggy longer shorts, which ruined the view and sent me a pretty clear message.
The last time I saw her was maybe a week ago. When I walked up to her at the train station, she frowned and said, “If you want answers to your questions, you’re going to have to speak with my father. He says your questions are dangerous and should be answered by a church elder.”
That depressed the hell out of me.[49]
“Listen,” I said as several sad briefcase-toting suits flocked by in a depressing, emotionless rush. “No more questions. I realize that maybe you and I are incompatible. I’m not going to harass you anymore, but can I ask you just one favor?”
“It depends,” she said, looking me in the eyes in this way that could have been flirting or could have been leave me alone. It was hard to tell. “What do you want?”
“Will you keep praying for me?”
Her eyes got wide for a second—like she was really excited that I asked her to do that—but then her eyes shrunk into little black peas, and she said, “Don’t make fun of me, okay?”
