by Tom Perrotta
“Pray with me,” he said. “Would you do that?”
TIM AND Carrie had been married for less than a year. Pastor Dennis had introduced them at a church picnic shortly after Tim had found his way to the Tabernacle and been reborn in Christ.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. “I think you’ll like her.”
Tim was pleasantly surprised when the Pastor led him over to the condiment table, where a folksingery blond was struggling with a big Costco bag of plastic forks, spoons, and knives that didn’t seem to want to open. Unlike most of the single women who worshipped at the Tabernacle, she was young and reasonably cute, with long straight hair and startled-looking blue eyes. In the strong afternoon sunlight, Tim couldn’t help noticing that her peasant blouse—a gauzy embroidered garment, the kind of thing pothead girls wore in the late seventies—was translucent enough that you didn’t have to strain to see the outline of her bra underneath, which was about as much excitement as you could hope for at a gathering like this. Her breasts were plump and pillowy, not what he normally went for, but he had to make a conscious effort to stop staring at them. He wasn’t proud of himself for behaving in such an ungodly way, but he’d been lusting after women since he was twelve, and it was turning out to be a harder habit to break than he’d expected.
Pastor Dennis relieved Carrie of the troublesome bag.
“You’re fired,” he told her. “Now get outta here. And take this guy with you, okay?”
Carrie smiled sheepishly at Tim, wiping the back of her hand across her sweaty forehead.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re the guitar player.”
“Bass,” he corrected her, momentarily distracted by Pastor Dennis, who was having no more luck with the bag than Carrie had. He was tugging at it with both hands, grimacing fiercely, like a man trying to rip a phone book in two.
“Gosh darn it,” he muttered.
“That’s really thick plastic,” Carrie warned.
With one final heroic grunt, the Pastor tore the bag asunder, unleashing a mighty cascade of utensils all over the table, including a few knives that landed in a bowl of bean dip. Tim and Carrie tried to help him with the mess, but he shooed them away.
“I’m okay,” he insisted. “You two go and get acquainted. I bet you have a lot in common.”
THEY SAT in the shade, drinking lukewarm soda, watching the kids tie themselves together in preparation for a three-legged race. The Tabernacle was a relatively new church at that point—it had only been planted for two years, after Pastor Dennis and a handful of disaffected families had split off from the Living Waters Fellowship in Gifford Township, which he accused of being “a namby-pamby, touchy-feely bunch of mealymouthed hypocrites who loved their cable TV better than they loved Jesus Christ”—so there were only about a dozen contestants in the race, ranging in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen.
On the whole, Tim couldn’t help thinking, they were an unprepossessing bunch, the boys scrawny and somber, the girls overdressed for such a hot day, visibly uncomfortable, nothing at all like the confident little jockettes Abby played soccer with. They stood at slouchy attention, nodding earnestly as Youth Pastor Eddie explained that sin was like a third leg, a foreign growth that hobbled us on our walk through life. If we could just cut ourselves loose from it, we’d run like the wind, with our Savior at our side.
It was an interesting metaphor, and it didn’t seem to spoil anyone’s enjoyment. When the first heat began, the little kids leapt forward, managing a few herky-jerky steps before squealing in alarm and toppling onto the grass with their partners. After a few seconds of hilarity, they untangled themselves, got up, and started over, dragging that extra limb around as best they could.
“You’ve had such an interesting life,” Carrie told him. “I haven’t done hardly anything.”
As far as he could tell, she wasn’t exaggerating. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, raised in a strict evangelical home, who hadn’t gone to college or even lived on her own. She rarely dated, had no close friends outside of church, and spent her days running the office of a Christian insurance agent who was a friend of the family. The way she described it, the only act of defiance she’d ever committed was to follow Pastor Dennis to the Tabernacle, against the wishes of her parents, who’d stayed behind at Living Waters. It made sense that she’d be intrigued by Tim’s checkered past, especially the rock bands he’d played in when he was her age.
“That must have been incredible,” she said, as if he’d told her that he’d climbed Mount Everest or fought in a war. “I can’t even imagine.”
“It seemed like fun at the time,” he conceded. “But I was selfish. I hurt a lot of people.”
“But now you’re saved,” she told him. “So it’s okay.”
For a second or two, he wasn’t quite sure if she was putting him on. It happened a lot to him in his first few months at the Tabernacle, before he’d spent a lot of time with hard-core Christians. He’d gotten so used to hanging around with wiseasses, liars, and addicts that he was easily thrown off-balance when someone spoke to him in a forthright manner, without doubt or irony.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “But I’m carrying a lot of guilt around.”
He told her about Allison and Abby, and the regret he lived with every day.
“We lost a house,” he said. “I put the mortgage payments up my nose.”
“I’m a sinner, too,” Carrie told him.
He nodded, understanding that her intentions were good, even if what she was saying was pure bullshit—Christian boilerplate designed to make people like him feel a little better, a little less alone.
“You don’t look like a sinner,” he told her, glancing toward the field, where the second heat had just begun. The eleven-year-old Rapp twins, Mark and Matthew, were running in perfect unison, sprinting way ahead of the pack, as if their third leg were the most natural thing in the world. Carrie laughed, a little more loudly than he expected, and touched him lightly on the forearm.
“Doesn’t matter what you look like,” she assured him. If he hadn’t known better, he might’ve thought she was flirting with him. “Matters what you do.”
THEY WERE thrown together a lot in the weeks that followed, way more than could have been accounted for by mere coincidence. Pastor Dennis would invite him to dinner, and Carrie would be there, too, along with a couple of ringers, so it didn’t look too obvious. If he volunteered to paint the sanctuary on Saturday morning, it turned out that she’d signed up for the exact same shift. When he offered his Saturn to the Jesus Jam Festival car pool, she just happened to end up in his passenger seat. He understood exactly what was going on—there weren’t a whole lot of singles in the Tabernacle, and Pastor Dennis regularly warned them of the dangers of dating nonbelievers—so he tried, as politely as he could, to let her know he wasn’t interested.
The thing that baffled him was why a good Christian girl like Carrie would even want to get tangled up with a guy like him. Couldn’t she see he was damaged goods—a divorced father, a recovering addict, a musician who could have qualified for his own episode of Behind the Music, if only anyone had ever heard of him?
The flip side of his inability to see what was in it for Carrie was an all-too-clear awareness of what wasn’t in it for him. Because the sad fact was that, even now, after he’d accepted Jesus into his heart, turned his back on drugs and alcohol, and committed himself to walk in the light of the Lord, he still couldn’t manage to get himself all that excited about good Christian girls. Certain kinds of toothpaste, it turned out, were harder to get back into the tube than others.
Partly it was just habit—at least he hoped it was. The women he’d gone for in the past, Allison included, had been smokers and drinkers and sexual troublemakers, bad girls in tight pants who let you take Polaroids, and laughed about the time they gave that cute stranger a handjob on the Greyhound bus, because it was a long way from Harrisburg to New York, and what else were you going to do to pass the time? It
wasn’t that Tim wanted to be attracted to women like that, he just was, and it sometimes seemed to him that his sexuality had gotten so twisted over the years that he’d never be able to straighten it out.
The whole subject was so fraught and muddled that he didn’t even know where to start when Pastor Dennis took him aside after Sunday worship, about a month after the picnic, and asked him why he was being so cool to Carrie, when she’d obviously developed a deep affection for him.
“I—I … don’t know,” he stammered. “I mean, she’s a sweet girl and everything. But she’s just so young. It’s like we’re living on different planets.”
Pastor Dennis didn’t seem too happy with this response.
“You both love Jesus,” he said. “That sounds like the same planet to me.”
THE PASTOR had a point, but it was a lot easier for Tim to mutter about the discrepancy in their ages than it was to tell him the truth, which was that he was involved in a strange and stupid affair with a married woman who was the complete antithesis of Carrie, and, sad to say, a lot more to his liking.
Deanna Phelan was an addiction counselor he’d met a few years earlier in what, for him, at least, turned out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful outpatient rehab program at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. She was his group leader, a cute, foul-mouthed woman who alluded frequently, and with great comic effect, to her own impressive history of chemical dependency and self-destructive behavior. She’d called a couple of times to check up on him after graduation, but he’d been too busy to call back; the day after completing the program, he’d done a triple back somersault off the wagon and embarked on the epic coke binge that ended his marriage and ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.
He didn’t see her again until shortly after he’d turned his life around at the Tabernacle, when they ran into each other at a Jiffy Lube on McLean Road. Tim was reading his Bible in the waiting area when she stepped in through the service bay door, talking on her cell phone so loudly and unself-consciously you would have thought she was alone in her own house.
“I’m not running a fucking restaurant, honey. You want something different, you can cook it yourself.”
Her voice seemed instantly familiar—it had a ragged, slightly belligerent quality that made him look up in spite of himself—but it took him a few seconds to place her. She’d worn her hair in a long ponytail at the hospital; now it was as short as a boy’s, giving her a pixieish look that went well with her lanky figure and tough-girl demeanor.
“Too bad, kiddo. You’re stuck with the mother you got.” She blew a raspberry into the phone. “I love you, too. Now go do your homework.”
She flipped the phone shut and pounded her palm against the side of her head, as if trying to dislodge water from her ear.
“Teenagers,” she told him, by way of explanation.
Tim smiled; her eyes widened in recognition.
“Holy shit,” she said. “It’s Mr. Deadhead.”
Flattered to be remembered, he stood up and shook Deanna’s hand. She gave him a careful once-over as they reintroduced themselves.
“You look a helluva lot better than the last time I saw you.”
“I’ve been clean for a year,” he told her, doing his best not to grin like a kid who’d gotten all A’s on his report card.
“Good for you,” she said. “Twelve-step?”
He showed her his Bible.
“Jesus.”
A familiar look of disappointment passed across her face. People who weren’t saved didn’t want to hear you talk about Jesus. It made them uncomfortable, like you were bragging about a great party they hadn’t been invited to, though of course they had.
“There’s a lot of that going around these days,” she said.
“I wasn’t strong enough to do it on my own,” he explained. “I needed His help.”
She looked like she wanted to say something dismissive, but then thought better of it.
“Hey,” she said, giving him a congratulatory squeeze on the shoulder. “Whatever works. Your wife must be thrilled.”
Tim’s face heated up, the way it always did when the subject of marital status arose.
“We, uh … we’re not together anymore.”
He gave her a capsule version of the saga, stressing that he didn’t blame Allison for leaving him and insisting he was thrilled she’d landed on her feet so quickly, finding a man who could give her the kind of life she’d always dreamed about.
“I’m serious,” he said, detecting a certain amount of skepticism in Deanna’s nods. “The woman deserves a medal.”
“You have a little girl, too, right?”
“Good memory. Only she’s ten now, not so little. I’m playing catch-up. I feel like I missed so much of her childhood.”
“It goes fast,” she said. “Our boys are in high school now. They don’t even know how to talk anymore. It’s all just grunts.”
The Jiffy Lube guy called out, “Blue Saturn,” and Tim went to the register to pay. He stopped on his way out to say good-bye to Deanna.
“It’s really good to see you,” he said.
She slipped a business card into his shirt pocket.
“Drop me a line if you ever need to talk to someone,” she said, surprising him with a hug that lingered longer than he expected. “I’m really proud of you, Tim.”
HE STUCK the card in his wallet—it had Deanna’s work phone number printed on the front and her e-mail address scribbled on the back—and told himself she hadn’t meant anything in particular by giving it to him. She was just a friendly acquaintance, making the usual insincere offer to keep in touch. It was ridiculous to read any hidden meanings into it.
Except that he was lonely—he hadn’t touched a woman in months—and as horny as a high-school sophomore. And a voice in his head—the worldly voice of the corrupt, selfish man he no longer wished to be—kept reminding him that grown women didn’t slip their phone numbers into your pocket if they weren’t interested in hooking up. It didn’t matter if they were married or not. He’d been around the block enough to know that some people were more married than others.
Through sheer willpower, he managed to get through two weeks without contacting her, the business card burning a hole in his wallet the entire time. But then Pastor Dennis gave a sermon on the subject of “Temptation” that made him rethink his strategy.
“You know what temptation is?” he asked. “It’s a fungus. It hides in the dark corners of the soul, those damp cracks and moist crevices we’d prefer not to think about. Well, I’ll tell you what, people. You can’t ignore temptation. Nuh-uh. That’s how it thrives. You pretend it’s not there, and pretty soon this tiny speck of mold turns into a giant poison mushroom with deep, twisted roots. Then see how easy it is to get rid of it! No, the thing to do with temptation is face it head-on at high noon! Right away! The second you realize it’s there! Expose it to the fresh air and sunlight of Jesus Christ! Because you know what, friends? That slimy fungus can’t stand the light of day! It just shrivels up and dies! Amen!”
After the sermon, Tim went home and wrote a long e-mail to Deanna, telling her all about the Tabernacle, what a beautiful positive force it had been in his life, and how compelled he was to share it with his friends. He didn’t know where she stood on the subject of Jesus, but he thought it might be a good idea for her and her family to come visit on Sunday. It might be an especially powerful experience for her sons, who, as teenagers, were exposed to so many evils that they might not be morally equipped to face. He hoped she didn’t mind his being so forward, but he believed that God had brought them back in touch for a reason.
“I know you’re searching for something,” he wrote. “We all are. I’m living proof of God’s mercy. My only job is to praise Him and spread the word.”
“Nice to hear from you,” she wrote back. “I’m sorry to say that I’m not the least bit interested in your religion. But I’d love to meet you for a cup of coffee. Weekdays are good for me.�
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IN THE name of facing temptation, Tim met Deanna at Starbucks the following Thursday morning. She wore a skirt, high heels, and a shirt with a plunging neckline, and he couldn’t keep from telling her how good she looked. Even as he paid the compliment, though, he berated himself for setting the wrong tone, which he’d hoped would be cordial but not flirtatious.
“Thanks,” she said, nervously fiddling with a bead bracelet. “I’m glad you approve. I must’ve gone through six fucking outfits before settling on this one. It was hard, ’cause I wasn’t really sure what kind of a date this was.”
“It’s not a date at all,” he assured her. “It’s just … you know, old friends meeting for coffee. Nothing datelike about it.”
“Okay, good,” she said. “I’m glad you cleared that up. We’re old friends meeting for coffee.”
And that’s what it felt like for a while. They talked about kids and jobs and the challenge of staying sober, and swapped war stories from their druggie days. She gave him updates on some of the members of his group at St. Bartholomew’s, including one guy who was in jail and another who died while driving drunk.
“That could’ve been me,” he said. “I did so many stupid things back then. It was only by the grace of God that I didn’t kill myself. Or someone else. You know why the judge ordered me into rehab that time?”
“Some kind of DUI, right?”
“It was after a gig. The guitar player was sleeping in the passenger seat, and I started driving the wrong way down the parkway. Not just driving, speeding. It was four in the morning, but there were a fair number of cars out there, and I thought they were the ones who were confused. I kept honking my horn and flashing my lights and screaming at those stupid idiots to get out of the way, and I guess that’s what saved me. I musta drove a good five miles before the cops showed up. Apparently I was completely indignant when they put on the cuffs. I kept asking why they were picking on me and not those other crazy fools.”
Deanna laughed and shook her head. Without warning, she moved her hand across the table and rested it on top of his. The gesture felt so natural and unpremeditated that he didn’t think to resist.
