by Tom Perrotta
“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I know it’s unprofessional to admit this, but I had quite a little crush on you back then.”
“Huh,” he said, flattered and alarmed at the same time. He slid his hand out from under hers. “I had no idea.”
“Yeah. I wanted to ask you out, but you never returned my calls.”
“Ask me out?” he said. “We were both married.”
“I’m not saying it was a smart move.” Her expression grew sheepish. He felt her foot rubbing against his ankle under the table. “I don’t know. I kinda have a problem with monogamy sometimes. I mean, Jack’s a great guy, but twenty years is a long time.”
Tim listened to this confession with equal parts desire and dismay. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of. Or was it exactly what he’d been hoping for?
“Don’t you get like that with food sometimes?” she asked. “You know, you love chicken, chicken’s your favorite, you could eat chicken every day. And then one day it’s like, wham, you don’t even want to look at chicken.”
“I—I’m fine with chicken,” he said, moving his ankle away from her foot.
“I am, too,” she said. “That was just a hypothetical.”
Summoning a panicky sense of resolve, he drained the tepid dregs of his latte and jumped up as if he’d heard a gunshot.
“This was a real treat,” he said. “But I gotta get back to work.”
“Right now?”
“Yeah, I, uh—”
“Did I scare you?”
“Not at all. I have an appointment. I completely forgot about it.”
“All right,” she said, pursing her lips together in a sweet little pout. “Will you call me sometime?”
“Sure,” he said, sticking out his hand as if concluding a business transaction. “Great seeing you.”
“Same here,” she said, mimicking his manly tone as they shook hands. “Great seeing you, too.”
TIM KNEW he’d dodged a bullet, and swore to himself that he wouldn’t let it happen again. Two days later, though, Deanna sent him an e-mail at work asking if he was busy that night. He replied that he had no plans. She asked if it would be okay if she dropped by his place for an hour or so. He saw a perfect opportunity for clearing the air between them.
“NO,” he wrote. “IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY. PLEASE DON’T TEMPT ME LIKE THIS. THIS IS NOT HOW I WANT TO BE CONDUCTING MY LIFE!!!”
He pondered the words on the screen, feeling proud of himself for holding fast to his convictions. But even as he congratulated himself, he felt an exhilarating sensation of surrender spreading through his body. He had been strong for so long. And weakness was such a good old friend. He held down the backspace key until the screen was clear, then typed, “Sure, that would be great!!!”
He spent the rest of the day trying to talk himself out of what he’d just set in motion. He couldn’t eat or concentrate on his work, just kept trying to think of strategies for keeping Deanna at bay. He could leave his apartment, or hide inside with the lights off. He could leave a note on the front door telling her to go away. But he was kidding himself. Eight o’clock found him showered and clean-shaven and trembling with excitement as he opened the door. She stepped inside, wearing sneakers, Lycra shorts, and a pink-and-purple sports bra. She kissed him hard, running her hand down his belly to his belt buckle.
“You better make me sweat,” she told him. “I’m supposed to be at the gym.”
THAT’S ALL the affair ever amounted to—a lot of e-mailing and an hour of illicit sex once or twice a week. And yet it seemed huge, casting a dark shadow on everything else in his life, including—especially—his personal relationship with Jesus. Because how could you love Him the way He deserved to be loved if you couldn’t keep yourself from sinning, or worse, if you looked forward to sinning? And how could you praise Him the way He deserved to be praised when your heartfelt prayers for strength fell on deaf ears?
To his credit, Tim wasn’t going down without a fight. Every time they were together, he swore to her that this was it, that as much he enjoyed her company, he could no longer continue living as a hypocrite, betraying the solemn promises he’d made to himself and to God. She acted like she believed him, nodding sorrowfully and telling him he had to do what he had to do, that she completely understood, and would miss him very much. But then, a few nights later, as if the conversation had never occurred, Deanna would show up unannounced at his doorstep in gym clothes, and the whole farce would repeat itself.
As the weeks went by, their encounters grew increasingly hostile. It seemed to him at times that she delighted in his weakness, deriving some perverse pleasure out of watching him crumble, as if his inability to control himself reflected well on her as a woman. But what really irritated him was the air of innocence that surrounded her, as if he were the only morally compromised person in the bed.
“What happens?” he asked her one night, as she was performing oral sex on him. “Do you go home and kiss your sons good night with that mouth?”
She looked up, more surprised than hurt.
“I brush my teeth first, if it makes you feel better. You think I should gargle, too?”
“I don’t care what you do. I was just curious.”
A few minutes later, when Tim was reciprocating, Deanna suddenly said, “I wonder what Jesus would do.”
He raised his head. “What? What did you say?”
“I wonder if he was going down on me, would he do that swirly thing with his tongue? It’s a pretty fancy move.”
“Leave Him out of it, would you?”
“Do we have to?” she said. “You guys could double-team me.”
That should have been the last straw. He should have gotten up, gathered her clothes, told her to please leave and never come back. But he just lowered his head and went back to work.
Later, when he tried to figure out why he let her get away with insulting the Lord like that, he came up with two explanations. The first, which made him feel a little bit better, wasn’t so much an explanation as an acknowledgment of the fact that he’d asked for it, that she never would have said a word about Jesus if he hadn’t provoked her by raising the subject of her sons. In this version of events, he let her off the hook out of guilt and an instinctive sense of fairness, knowing that he’d crossed the line of decency and that she deserved to retaliate.
The second explanation, on the other hand, didn’t make him feel better at all. Because the more he thought about it, the more he could see that her mockery of his religious beliefs had excited him as much as it offended him, and that it had this effect precisely because part of him—the old Tim, the cynical addict who was hanging on for dear life—agreed with her, or was at least willing to consider the possibility that this Jesus kick had outlived its usefulness. Sure, it had been a great crutch, helping him to finally break his dependence on alcohol and drugs. But maybe that’s all it was. Maybe now that he’d gotten himself clean, he could ditch Jesus and go back to his old ways, stop trying to live up to what was turning out to be a pretty damn rigorous code of conduct, a path so straight and narrow that a lonely forty-year-old man had to beat himself up every time he made love to a pretty woman who came to his door and offered herself to him with an open heart and no strings attached, the kind of windfall that at any other time in his life he would have celebrated as a miraculous gift from above.
WHO KNOWS how much longer it would have lasted, how much lower he would have sunk, if he hadn’t been rescued by a knock on the door one Thursday night. It followed so swiftly upon Deanna’s departure that Tim automatically assumed she’d come back to retrieve something she’d left behind, or to give him one last kiss, which was why he answered the door wearing only sky-blue boxers and a dopey grin that melted away at the sight of his visitor’s grim face.
“Wow,” he said. “I wasn’t, uh …”
Pastor Dennis slipped past him without a word, pausing just inside the door to sniff at the air with canine concentration.
Without waiting for an invitation, Pastor Dennis crossed the room and sat down on the couch, as if this were a casual social visit. He was younger than Tim by almost ten years, a wiry guy with thinning blond hair, visible jaw muscles, and unfashionably large eyeglasses. In pressed khakis and a navy polo shirt, he looked exactly like what he used to be—a geek who sold computer equipment at Best Buy—before the Lord tapped him on the shoulder and entrusted him with a new set of responsibilities.
“Nice place you got here,” he said, glancing around the sparsely furnished living room. “A real swinging bachelor pad.”
“It’s a dump,” Tim told him. “But it’s all I can afford right now.”
He’d lived here a full year, but the TV was still resting on a milk crate. The hideous plaid couch and woven synthetic curtains had been left behind by the previous tenant, an elderly man who’d pleaded with Tim to adopt his two trembling, rheumy-eyed dachshunds—they weren’t welcome in the assisted-living complex his kids were forcing him into—then called him “a heartless S.O.B.” when he declined.
Pastor Dennis reached for the Bible Tim kept on the glass-topped coffee table, the one decent piece of furniture in the apartment—someone in Greenwillow Estates had put it out for trash, amazingly enough—and began flipping through the pages. It was something Tim had seen him do numerous times at Addicts 4 Christ meetings, and it rarely took him longer than a couple of seconds to locate something uncannily relevant to the situation at hand.
“Been studying the Good Book?” he inquired.
“Every day,” Tim assured him. “First thing in the morning and right before bed.”
“Impressive.” The Pastor slammed the Bible shut and tossed it back onto the table with a carelessness Tim found disturbing. “Looks like you learned a lot.”
Tim’s face burned with shame. Despite his fig leaf of underwear, he felt naked and damned, like Adam standing before God with a fruity taste in his mouth.
“Maybe you read it more carefully than me,” the Pastor continued. “I never came across the verse that said it was okay to entertain whores in your apartment.”
“She’s not a whore,” Tim said. “Don’t call her that.”
“Whatever.” The Pastor shrugged. “You never told me you had a girlfriend.”
“She’s not my girlfriend. She just … stops by once in a while.”
“How convenient. You don’t even have to buy her dinner?”
“Look,” Tim muttered. “I’m sorry about this.”
“She’s cute,” the Pastor said. “Have to give her that. I tried to talk to her, but she seemed to be in kind of a hurry. You think someone’s waiting for her at home?”
Guilty as he was, Tim began to bristle at the interrogation. He was an adult, a divorced man who lived alone. He was entitled to a private life, just like anybody else.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m not proud of what I’m doing. But it’s really none of your business.”
“None of my business?” Pastor Dennis looked hurt. “You’re one of my flock. I don’t want you to get lost again.”
“I’m not lost,” Tim insisted. “I just get lonely sometimes. I’m only human, okay?”
The two men stared at each other for a long time before the Pastor finally nodded, conceding the point.
“Fine,” he said. “Do what you want. But I don’t want to see you in church this Sunday. Adulterers aren’t welcome in the Tabernacle.”
“What?” Tim was taken aback. “I can’t come to church?”
“Not mine.” Pastor Dennis rose from the couch. “Take your sin somewhere else. I’m not going to tolerate it.”
“That’s not fair. You can’t just—”
“I’m sorry.” Pastor Dennis’s voice was flat and hard. “We’re trying to set an example. You know that.”
“Wait.” Tim grabbed at the Pastor’s arm as he headed for the door. “Don’t do this to me.”
“You’re doing it to yourself.” The Pastor’s voice faltered, and Tim was startled to see him wipe a tear from his cheek. “I misjudged you. I thought you were one of my warriors.”
“I’m doing my best,” Tim protested.
“No,” Pastor Dennis told him. “I refuse to believe that.”
For a few seconds after the Pastor left, Tim stood stunned and angry in the middle of his living room. Fuck you, he thought. And fuck your church, you sanctimonious asshole. He should’ve known it wasn’t going to work out. There were people who could live within the rules and people who couldn’t, and he had always been one of the ones who couldn’t. It didn’t matter who was spouting them—parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, fellow musicians, women he was sleeping with, and now a minister. It had been crazy for him to imagine that it could have been otherwise.
But then it hit him. No, he thought. No way. This can’t be happening. It was impossible, intolerable, at this point in his life, to just be left with this—lousy job, cruddy apartment, the wasteland of the TV and the computer, the emptiness relieved only by Saturdays with Abby and a visit from Deanna once or twice a week. Sure, there were other churches, churches where the busybody Pastor wouldn’t make a house call to tell you you were going to hell, and wouldn’t cry if you disappointed him. But what would be the point of belonging to one of them?
He was out the door and running barefoot across the still-warm slate of the walkway before he remembered that he wasn’t really dressed for it. Luckily, Hillside Gardens wasn’t the liveliest of places at this time of night. He made it all the way to the parking lot without encountering a neighbor, and saw to his immense relief that Pastor Dennis was standing by the trunk of his Corolla, head bowed in prayer.
“Wait,” Tim called out. “We gotta talk.”
He slowed to a walk as he crossed the nubbly blacktop, trying to catch his breath and compose his thoughts. Before he could speak, though, Pastor Dennis opened his arms and began walking toward him.
“Hallelujah,” he said.
Tim was a little self-conscious at first, embracing another man in a public place while wearing so little clothing, but the embarrassment passed quickly. He closed his eyes and let himself be held.
“I’m right here,” the Pastor whispered, pressing Tim’s head softly against his bony shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere.”
IN AN effort to get right with God after this fiasco, Tim began attending one-on-one prayer and counseling sessions with Pastor Dennis, in addition to his weekly Men’s Bible Study and Addicts 4 Christ meetings. The Pastor believed that Tim needed to look deep inside his heart and decide once and for all if he was with Jesus or against Him. He also believed it would be an excellent idea if Tim asked a certain young Christian woman on a date.
“Just take her to the movies,” he said. “If you don’t get along, I’ll never mention it again.”
Tim agreed, more out of guilt than enthusiasm, and had a better time than he’d expected (they went to Spider-Man 2, and to the Rustic Barn Diner afterward). Carrie was easygoing and surprisingly non-judgmental. She asked a lot of questions about his life, and he answered them as fully as he could, at one point giving her a detailed explanation of the differences between freebasing and smoking crack that she seemed to find fascinating. At the end of the night, he walked her to the front door of her parents’ house to say good night. He thought about kissing her, but played it safe by sticking out his hand. She giggled and pecked him on the cheek.
“I had fun,” she said.
They went to King Arthur the following Friday, then took a long walk around Blue Lake after Sunday meeting. It was a spectacular day, and he could feel her exerting a subtle gravitational pull, drawing him slowly but irresistibly into her orbit. Halfway around the lake, he worked up the courage to take her hand. She let out another nervous giggle as their fin
gers intertwined.
There were more movies as the summer slipped away, a couple of dinners, a day trip down the shore, some sweet kisses. But it wasn’t like falling in love, at least not as Tim had experienced it in the past. No physical fireworks or emotional roller coasters, just a calm feeling of acceptance, a surrender to something so obvious it quickly came to seem inevitable. By late September, they’d begun tiptoeing around the subject of marriage.
Not that he was without the occasional misgiving. Unlike most of the women he’d been attracted to over the years, Carrie wasn’t much of a conversationalist; sometimes they had trouble finding things to talk about besides themselves and the Tabernacle. And then there were those jarring moments when she drew a blank on what for him was a shockingly obvious reference—Muddy Waters, R. Crumb, Agent 99. Trivia mostly, but he never failed to suffer a jolt of deep disappointment when it happened, a sense that the distance between them was vaster and more unbridgeable than he’d realized.
In mid-October, Carrie’s parents invited him over for dinner. Mr. and Mrs. Frischknecht were stern, solemn people, old enough to be Carrie’s grandparents. They’d lived overseas for many years, working as missionaries in places like Bolivia and South Korea, but had returned to America in the late seventies, when Mrs. Frischknecht began suffering from debilitating migraines. Carrie had arrived a few years later, long after her parents had resigned themselves to a barren marriage.
The Frischknechts were polite to Tim, but clearly wary. He did his best to put them at ease, speaking truthfully about the troubles in his life, and the astonishing transformation he’d gone through since accepting Jesus. He told them about Abby, too, what a good student and talented athlete she was, wanting them to know that he was a dedicated father, while not sugarcoating the fact that he came with baggage.
“She’s a good kid,” he said. “This year she’s gonna be Hermione for Halloween. You know, the smart girl from Harry Potter?”
