The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  “Honey, I’m not criticizing. I’m just trying to make a point.” Randall turned to Ruth. “Don’t you think thirteen’s too young?”

  “Everybody’s different,” Ruth said after a brief hesitation, reluctant to take sides in the dispute. “It’s hard to generalize.”

  “That’s too easy,” Randall shot back. “You’re a mother. Do you want your daughters having sex at thirteen?”

  Ruth shrugged. “I hope they wait till they’re in college. But a lot of people don’t.”

  Gregory pounced. “Did you?”

  Ruth poked at her sag paneer for a moment before answering.

  “I had my first real boyfriend in college,” she said. “There were a couple of weird experiences in high school, but I didn’t really know how to process them.”

  Randall and Gregory traded prurient looks, allies again.

  “Weird experiences,” said Randall. “Now you’ve got our attention.”

  “Come on.” Gregory made a coaxing motion with his hand. “Don’t hold out on us.”

  “It was nothing,” Ruth insisted. “Just, you know, the standard groping.”

  “The standard groping’s always been good enough for me,” Randall said.

  “As opposed to the substandard?” Gregory inquired.

  “Even that’s better than nothing,” Randall said with a laugh. “Who wants another Kingfisher?”

  RUTH HAD trouble falling asleep. This was often the case when she’d had too much to drink, and she almost always had too much to drink when she hung out with Randall and Gregory. She’d gone to their house after the restaurant, ostensibly to watch a Margaret Cho video, but they’d gotten sidetracked. First they headed down to Gregory’s basement studio to look at his latest work, an unusually large installation that placed several French Resistance Fighter GI Joes in a maze of soulless office cubicles, each doll staring at identical miniature computer screens displaying the smiling face of the late Pope John Paul II. Ruth was puzzled by the piece until Gregory explained that it was an allegory designed to illustrate the way that existentialism/atheism had lost ground to organized religion in recent years as a result of the widespread anxiety generated by the ever more intrusive presence of digital technology in our lives.

  “Wow.” Ruth was impressed. “You really packed a lot into it.”

  Gregory seemed pleased. “Art is all about compression.”

  “It took me three months to round up those action figures,” Randall said, reminding them of his own contribution to the project. He wagged a finger at Gregory. “From now on you’re going to have to start working with Barbies.”

  “Yeah, right,” Gregory muttered, as if this quip had been intended seriously. “That’d be really original.”

  Randall smiled the way people do when they’re hurt and trying not to show it, then herded them upstairs to try out a recipe for chocolate martinis that he’d cut out of last Sunday’s paper.

  The experiment was not a success. After a couple of sips, they dumped the vile concoction into the sink and switched to Manhattans, a much safer bet. While Randall mixed her drink, Ruth picked up a MotoPhoto envelope resting on the table and shuffled through the pictures, which documented the Massachusetts wedding of Dan and Jerry, two of Randall and Gregory’s oldest friends. They made for a striking pair, one man tall and bald and amiable in a black tux, the other in white, bearded and stocky and a bit too intense. The two grooms danced cheek to cheek, fed each other cake, and posed with their elderly parents, who smiled gamely, if a bit uncomfortably, at the camera. Randall had found the ceremony to be incredibly moving—like a dream, he said—while Gregory took a darker view, knowing what he did about Dan and Jerry’s troubled relationship.

  “These guys break up every six months or so,” he said. “They only get back together because they’re so devoted to making each other unhappy.”

  Ruth laughed. “Sounds like a lot of couples I know.”

  “Dan and Jerry have every bit as much right to a bad marriage as anyone else,” Randall said.

  “People shouldn’t get married just because they can,” Gregory said.

  Randall glared at him, his face flushed from a combination of alcohol and anger.

  “Everything doesn’t have to be perfect, you know. You just have to love each other for better or worse.”

  Gregory turned to Ruth. “This is about us, you know. He’s mad at me for not proposing.”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Randall insisted. “I just can’t figure out why you’re so scared. We’ve been together for twelve years.”

  “I’m not scared,” Gregory said. “I just don’t see the point of getting engaged if we can’t get married.”

  “We’re making a commitment,” Randall said. “Once it’s legal, we’ll be first in line.”

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it,” Gregory said.

  “Forget it.” Randall’s face tightened into an unconvincing smile. “It’s really not worth fighting about.”

  “Who’s fighting?” said Gregory. “We’re having a calm discussion.”

  Randall drained his martini.

  “Let’s just watch the movie.”

  It was already after ten. Ruth tried to make a graceful exit, but Randall insisted she at least watch the first ten minutes, where Margaret did the hilarious imitation of her crazy Korean mother. She reluctantly agreed, but then got sucked in and stayed to the bitter end, by which point both her hosts had fallen asleep—Gregory dozing in an armchair, hands resting on his belly, and Randall snoring softly on the couch, his face naked, almost babyish, without his glasses. It didn’t look to Ruth like anyone would be breaking out the dog collars anytime soon. She kissed them both good night and showed herself to the door.

  RUTH MADE a point of sleeping in the nude when her daughters were out of the house. It was a simple indulgence, and, sadly enough, the erotic highlight of her week. This private ritual—shedding her clothes in the dark, slipping between the cool sheets, savoring the soft touch of cotton against her skin—had come to seem like a kind of foreplay, automatically nudging her toward that vibrant fantasy realm that, by default, was her sole source of sexual pleasure. And if these fantasies sometimes inspired her to break out the vibrator she kept hidden in a shoe box on a high shelf in her closet, well, so what? It was her body—her lean, muscular, lovely, unloved body—and didn’t it deserve to feel good every once in a while, especially if there was no one around to overhear the humming of the busy little machine, or the grateful cries of a woman who had no one to thank but herself?

  Tonight, though, her mind was elsewhere. She lay in the dark, exhausted and wired at the same time, her eyes wide open, the weight of solitude pressing down on her like a heavy blanket. She missed her daughters, wondered if the house would always feel this empty when they left for college, vast and unmoored, ready to lift away from its foundation like a hot-air balloon. She comforted herself with the thought that she still had seven years before Maggie graduated high school, long enough to make some changes. Maybe there’d be a man by then; maybe the exodus of the girls would feel more like a honeymoon than an abandonment, a transition from one rich phase of her life to the next.

  Maybe.

  Because it was just too creepy to consider the alternative: nothing changing at all, everything shrinking into the sad belated recognition that the best days had come and gone without her even realizing it. Ruth’s mother had sounded this note a lot in the weeks before she died, a kind of desperate nostalgia for everything she hadn’t appreciated when she’d had the chance.

  “Remember that house in Manasquan?” she’d say, propped up in the hospital bed, clutching the “pain button” that allowed her to dispense her own morphine. “The one we rented in what … 1978? That was a fun vacation. You enjoyed that, right?”

  “I did,” Ruth would say, because it would have been cruel to remind her of the truth, which was that they’d all been disappointed by something they’d been dreaming about for years. Th
e house they rented was small and smelled bad; the beach had been closed for two days because of medical waste that had washed ashore. But mainly, that vacation had just come too late. Ruth was a teenager by then, a claustrophobic adolescent trapped in close quarters with her family, just gritting her teeth and waiting for it to be over. The only good times she remembered involved sneaking out at night with her older sister and smoking cigarettes on the boardwalk.

  “It was so lovely by the ocean,” her mother whispered, though it seemed to Ruth that she’d spent most of the week inside that cramped bungalow, cooking and cleaning and watching TV, the exact same things she did at home. “Let’s go there again sometime.”

  Ruth shut her eyes tight and rolled onto her side, feeling perilously close to crying. The night had taken a toll on her, all that bickering between Randall and Gregory. She’d suspected they were having problems for a while now—Randall had certainly hinted at this in various ways—but until tonight, she’d allowed herself to assume that it was nothing serious. Now, for the first time, she felt it necessary to consider the possibility that they might be headed for a breakup, and she was surprised by how much it disturbed her. She liked them both as individuals, but she liked them even more as a couple. Sometimes, when she tried to imagine her future and couldn’t summon the image of a man who loved her, she found herself entertaining an alternative scenario, in which she and Randall and Gregory traveled the world together, a witty trio visiting interesting places and eating adventurous food, laughing everywhere they went. It was hard to trade this in for an imaginary future in which she’d have to deal with them separately—like a child of divorced parents—watching what she said, trying not to take sides, eventually having to meet their new boyfriends, all the while pining for the good old days.

  Beneath this worry, though, something else was gnawing at her. One of the things she most valued about her friendship with the guys was how honest it was. It had occurred to her more than once in the past couple of years that Randall and Gregory were the only people who really knew her anymore, the only ones she could trust with her secrets. Among other things, she’d confided in them about her lackluster sex life with Frank, about the two men she’d slept with in the year after her divorce—the memorable one-night stand at the Teachers’ Association Conference in Atlantic City, and the divorced computer guy who’d decided to move to North Carolina just when things were heating up between them—and about the dry spell she’d endured since then. They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested. That was why she’d been so surprised to find herself lying to them at dinner when Gregory asked her if she’d waited until college to become sexually active. It would have been the perfect time—and a huge relief—to finally tell the truth.

  Because the fact was, she’d never told anyone about Paul Caruso—not her mother or sister, not her college roommate, none of her boyfriends, not her husband, not even the two therapists she’d seen.

  And she really didn’t know why. There was nothing particularly shameful about it. Just two bored teenagers exploring their sexuality together, a necessary passage from curiosity into experience. It happened every day.

  Or at least it used to, she thought.

  PAUL CARUSO was Ruth’s next-door neighbor growing up, a fat kid two years ahead of her in school. Because he happened to be a cool guy and a talented musician, he had been spared some of the ritual humiliations visited upon the other “big boys” at Oakhurst Regional. Alone among this long-suffering cohort, Paul had avoided being saddled with a nickname like Wide Load or Truck or Blob or Blivet or Butterball or Lardass or Tiny or Two-Ton or Chubby Checker. He was just Paulie C., star trumpeter of the jazz ensemble and the marching band, an award-winning outfit renowned for its complicated routines and high-stepping military precision. People seeing a Wolverines’ halftime show for the first time would invariably find their gazes drawn to the tubby kid with the gleaming horn and the dark hair spilling out from the ridiculous toy soldier hat with the too-tight chinstrap, and feel compelled to remark on his nimble footwork, the surprising grace he displayed for someone lugging around such a heavy burden.

  In the spring of his senior year, Paul broke his ankle stepping off an escalator at the North Vista Mall. It was a freak accident; he said he put his foot down wrong and the bone just snapped like a pencil. With only a couple of months to go before graduation, he found himself hobbling around on crutches, the lower half of his right leg encased in a bulky plaster cast. He couldn’t practice with the band, couldn’t work the clutch on his Civic hatchback. His girlfriend, Missy Prince—a broad-shouldered softball pitcher widely considered the prettiest girl jock in the school—picked him up in the morning, but she had practice in the afternoon. Apparently, Paul’s other friends were occupied as well, because he was soon reduced to taking the bus home from school, the transportation choice of very last resort for a senior.

  Paul had been riding the bus for about a week when Ruth approached him on the sidewalk; he had just completed a laborious dismount from the vehicle, hopping on one foot with his crutches tucked under his arm, backpack in one hand and a trumpet case in the other. He gratefully accepted her offer of help, and the two of them set off on the slow trek to Peony Road, making stilted small talk about Ruth’s sister, Mandy, who was nearing the end of her first year at Rutgers. She helped him up the steps to his front door—he used her shoulder for support, bearing down so hard she thought she might crumple like an aluminum can—then followed him inside, through the hall and into the kitchen, which seemed instantly familiar to her, despite the fact that she hadn’t been there in years, not since she, Mandy, and Paul had played together as little kids. Everything was exactly the same as she remembered: the cushiony red benches of the breakfast nook, the toaster that accepted eight slices of bread, the needlepoint sampler over the stove that said, Take All You Want, But Eat All You Take.

  “Here you go,” she said, setting the backpack and trumpet down on the table.

  “Thanks.” Paul smiled, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a pale green dish towel. He seemed to be having a little trouble catching his breath. “Didn’t know … how I was gonna … carry all that shit.”

  “No problem,” said Ruth. “It was on my way.”

  He used his pinky and ring fingers to lift a few strands of hair from his forehead and tuck them behind his ear, an oddly girlish gesture that made Ruth suddenly conscious of the delicacy of his features—small nose, feathery eyelashes, the ghost of a narrower face encased in the flesh of a broader one.

  “You, uh, want a sandwich or something?” he asked.

  Ruth hesitated. The kitchen was dim and silent, and it was no longer possible to ignore the obvious fact that they were alone in the house. Mr. Caruso worked on the assembly line at the GM plant; Mrs. Caruso ran the office for Ruth’s dentist. His brothers and sisters were older, living on their own.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “We got roast beef, ham, turkey—”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “You sure? How about a soda or something?”

  “I better get home.”

  He gave her what Ruth later remembered as a searching look, focusing a whole new kind of attention on her, as if he’d suddenly realized that she’d grown up, and had become something more interesting than his next-door neighbor’s little sister.

  Embarrassed by his scrutiny, Ruth felt her eyes drift down over his soft belly and broad thighs before finally landing on his cast, which was almost completely covered with psychedelic graffiti. There were still a couple of empty spaces near the toe, and she wished she knew him well enough to fill them with her name and a brief, cheerful message. She gave an apologetic shrug.

  “Lotta homework,” she said.

  THAT WAS an odd, unsettled spring for her, the first time she’d ever really been alone. Ever since Mandy left for college, R
uth had been sunk in something approaching a state of mourning. Her big sister was the one indispensable person in her life—ally, best friend, consoler, explainer of the world. They’d shared a bedroom for thirteen years, trading gossip, complaining about their parents, mumbling secrets to each other until they nodded off, then waking up together to the tinny music warbling out of the clock radio on the table between their beds. With Mandy away, the house seemed perpetually out-of-whack—distressingly tidy and much too quiet, as if something more than a single person had been subtracted from the whole.

  It hadn’t been so bad for the first couple of months. Mandy called most nights and came home every other weekend, full of fascinating new information and unusually strong opinions. But then, at Thanksgiving, she solemnly informed the family that she’d fallen in love—she delivered this announcement at the dinner table, with an air of self-importance that Ruth had found both thrilling and vaguely sickening—and since then, she hadn’t come home at all, except for an obligatory couple of days at Christmas. Now Ruth considered herself lucky if she spoke to her sister once a week, and when she did, Mandy’s mind was a thousand miles away; she couldn’t even fake an interest in the details of Ruth’s pathetic teen dramas. All she wanted to talk about was Desmond, the Irish grad student with the beautiful eyes and soulful voice, who had awakened her to the suffering and injustice of the world. They were planning on traveling to Nicaragua over the summer to see the Sandinista Revolution for themselves, to cut through the fog of lies and propaganda spewed out by the American government and its toadies in the media.

  Great, thought Ruth. And I’ll be home with Mom and Dad, waitressing at the IHOP.

  It wasn’t that Ruth had a bad relationship with her parents, at least not compared to a lot of kids she knew. They weren’t especially strict or even normally vigilant; for the most part, they trusted her to make her own decisions about who she hung out with, where she went, and what time she came home. It probably helped that Ruth got good grades, didn’t have a boyfriend, and rarely got invited to parties.