The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  Mr. and Mrs. Frischknecht regarded him with studied blankness, and Tim realized that he’d said something wrong.

  “I-I guess you guys aren’t big on the Harry Potter stuff. I mean, I know it’s full of witches and magic and that kind of thing, but the kids really love it.”

  Mr. Frischknecht nodded curtly and returned to his meal. Carrie looked at Tim.

  “We don’t celebrate Halloween,” she told him.

  “You don’t?”

  She shook her head.

  “Not even when you were little?”

  “It’s not a Christian holiday,” Mrs. Frischknecht interjected.

  “I don’t care to see a child dressed as the Devil,” Mr. Frischknecht added. “That I don’t find amusing.”

  “Hmm,” said Tim. “I hadn’t really thought about it like that.”

  Mr. Frischknecht explained that some churches had begun using Halloween for the purposes of Christian outreach—they set up truly creepy haunted houses that taught kids about sin and hell.

  “You get them good and scared to death,” he said. “And then they’re ready to hear about the alternative.”

  “There might be one in the area,” Mrs. Frischknecht told him. “Maybe you could take your daughter.”

  On the way home that night, it occurred to Tim that he and Carrie had effectively grown up in different countries. At first this seemed depressing to him, but after a while he came to realize that it was helpful to think about their relationship in this way, and even oddly comforting.

  If she’d been a Japanese or Turkish woman, say, he wouldn’t have expected her to know who Bad Company was, or to laugh at a passing mention of the Coneheads. He would have either explained the reference or told her that it wasn’t important enough to worry about. But he wouldn’t have been annoyed or troubled by her ignorance of something she had no reason to know about in the first place. And he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that she’d never dressed up for Halloween or gone trick-or-treating with her friends.

  It wasn’t like he was one of those losers sending away for a mail-order bride because he couldn’t get an American woman to give him the time of day. Not at all: he was the immigrant, a tourist who’d gone to a foreign country, met a local woman, and decided to stay. The point wasn’t to make her more like him, to fill her head with the same crap that cluttered his own; it was just the opposite—for him to become more like her, to leave the old country behind so he could create a newer, better version of himself. It was in this spirit of adventure and self-renewal that, a few days later, Tim asked Carrie to be his wife.

  THEY WERE married in a simple Christian ceremony at the Tabernacle, with Abby and the rest of Tim’s bewildered family looking on. The uneventful buffet reception at the VFW hall—no drinking, dancing, or secular music—couldn’t have been more different than the debacle that followed his first wedding, at which he’d gotten falling-down drunk, mashed the ceremonial piece of cake into his bride’s face, insulted her father, and had to be dumped into the limo at the end of the night by a couple of groomsmen who were only slightly less tanked than he was. He couldn’t remember anything after that, but had no reason to doubt Allison’s claim that the marriage wasn’t consummated until the following afternoon.

  This time the festivities were over by nine. The newlyweds waved good-bye to their guests and walked hand in hand to Tim’s Saturn, which he’d gotten washed and detailed for the occasion. Carrie’s billowy gown seemed comically enormous inside the car; Tim had to tunnel beneath the fabric to release the emergency brake. He kissed her before starting the car.

  “How ya doin’?” he asked.

  “Pretty good.” She gave him a sweet, slightly distracted smile. “I had a nice time.”

  He snuck a sidelong glance at her as they pulled out of the parking lot. She was sitting up straight in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her face calm and watchful. If she was worried about the next phase of their wedding night, she wasn’t letting on.

  “I’m glad Abby was there,” he said. “I think she really enjoyed it.”

  “She’s so cute,” said Carrie. “I just wish she’d warm up to me.”

  “She will. She just needs to get to know you.”

  “I hope so.”

  It was true that his daughter had been a bit standoffish—Tim had to coax her into giving the bride a good night hug—but that was to be expected. Abby and Carrie had only met a few times before tonight, and neither of them seemed to have any idea of how to communicate with the other. Tim blamed most of this awkwardness on Allison, who had poisoned Abby’s mind about the Tabernacle and the people who worshipped there, and a little bit on Carrie herself, who seemed not to realize that the onus was on the adult to initiate and sustain a conversation with a child. And it certainly hadn’t helped to have his family looking so grim and shell-shocked during the ceremony, and refusing to mingle with the church people at the reception. The sole exception was his father, a retired storm-window salesman who packed a flask in one pocket, a travel-sized bottle of Scope in the other, and prided himself on his ability to “get along with everyone.”

  “At least my dad had a good time,” he pointed out.

  “He’s funny,” Carrie observed. “He reminds me of you.”

  If Allison had heard this, she would’ve cracked up. For years, Tim had told her she had permission to shoot him if he started acting like his father.

  “He’s attentive to young women,” Tim said. “I’ll give him that.”

  Carrie patted him on the knee.

  “Your poor mother, though. She looked like she was at a funeral.”

  Tim had considered it a triumph just to have his mother show up. She was bitterly opposed to the marriage and had been threatening to boycott the wedding from the day it had been announced.

  “I’m sorry.” Tim squeezed her hand. “She did the best she could.”

  “She tried,” Carrie conceded. “She told me I was beautiful.”

  TWO DAYS earlier, at Pastor Dennis’s urging, Tim had gone to his parents’ house for dinner, hoping to make one last-ditch effort to change his mother’s mind. Late in the evening, after the dessert plates had been put away and his father had gone to bed, he sat across from her at the kitchen table, and listened yet again to her case against the marriage, impressed by what a forceful and articulate speaker she had become. She’d been a pushover when he was younger, a sad, frightened woman willing to believe whatever outrageous lie he told her if it meant she could continue to pretend that everything was okay, that her favorite son didn’t have a drug problem—the pot belonged to a friend, someone must have slipped LSD into his drink, he honestly knew nothing about the TV and stereo system that had disappeared from the rec room while his parents were away at the family reunion. But years of disappointment and Al-Anon had toughened her up, giving her a clear-eyed, slightly cynical view of his behavior, and a vocabulary with which to express it.

  “You’ve got an addictive personality,” she said. “And I’m worried that you’re using Jesus as a substitute for drugs, like methadone or something. And that’s great for now. But eventually you’re going to have to face the world on your own two feet.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Mom. But Jesus isn’t some kind of means to an end. He’s real. And I know what He wants from me.”

  His mother grimaced. “Please don’t talk to me about Jesus. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

  Tim had to bite his tongue to keep from reminding her that she called herself a Presbyterian and allegedly believed in Jesus herself. But they’d had this argument before—she insisted that his Jesus and her Jesus were two totally different things—and there was no reason to rehash it now.

  “I want you to know me,” he said. “I want to love and honor you for who you are, and I want you to do the same for me.”

  “I do love you. That’s why I’m telling you this is a bad idea.”

  “How about if I beg?” he said, making a puppy
-dog face. “Would that work?”

  Her expression didn’t soften. “You hardly know this girl. You said so yourself.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” he pointed out. “Allison and I were together for five years before we got married. We knew everything about each other. And look how that turned out.”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” she said. “You and Allison were perfect together. You never should have let her go.”

  “I didn’t let her go. She went on her own.”

  “No, honey.” His mother shook her head, as if she pitied him. “You made her go.”

  “Whatever,” Tim said. “She’s gone now, and I’m getting married on Saturday. You just have to accept that.”

  “I’d be fine with it if I thought it would make you happy. Do you really think it will?”

  “I don’t know. I’m leaving it in God’s hands.”

  “That’s a pretty big risk.” His mother looked straight at him, and he could feel her pleading with him at a level deeper than words. “Why can’t you postpone the wedding for six months or a year, make sure you know what you’re getting into?”

  This was a question Tim had asked himself numerous times in recent weeks; it was also something he’d discussed in a premarital counseling session, when Pastor Dennis first raised the possibility of waiving the usual waiting period for couples who wanted to get married in the Tabernacle. The Pastor firmly believed that it was time for Tim to remove himself from the temptations of bachelorhood, to stop questioning himself and his commitment to Jesus, to bind himself to someone who shared his faith and his priorities, and to get on with his life as a husband, father, and servant of the Lord. He cited 1 Corinthians 7: 1-2: “It is good for a man not to marry. But since there is so much immorality, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband.”

  It was a weird verse, Tim thought, encouraging marriage not as a good thing in itself, but simply as the best of bad alternatives. Hardly the stuff of love songs. And yet, like a lot of stuff in the Bible, it possessed a kind of hardheaded wisdom that resonated with his experience of the world and his circumstances at the present moment. From a Christian perspective, to be a forty-year-old bachelor was simply not a spiritually viable condition.

  “The wedding’s not gonna be postponed, Ma. And it’ll break my heart if you’re not there.”

  His mother let out a defeated breath and slumped back in her chair. She gave him a tired smile that made her look like an old woman.

  “It’s late,” she said. “And I haven’t been sleeping very well.”

  “Dad still snoring?”

  She laughed. “You wouldn’t believe the noises that come out of that man.”

  “Why don’t you kick him out? Send him to the guest room?”

  “I tried that,” she said, a bit sheepishly. “Got kinda lonely.”

  She walked him to the door and gave him the usual motherly peck on the cheek. But then, instead of letting go, she hugged him with all her strength, as if Tim were leaving on a long trip, and she wasn’t sure when she might see him again.

  * * *

  CARRIE SPENT a long time in the bathroom on their wedding night, so long that he started to worry.

  “You okay?” he called out.

  “Just a minute,” she replied.

  He couldn’t blame her for being nervous; he was suffering from a mild case of butterflies himself. Now that they were alone, the minutia of planning and the excitement of the big day behind them, the enormity of what they’d done had finally begun to settle over him. It’s one thing to take a leap of faith, he thought, and another thing to hit the ground.

  “Anything I can do?” he said.

  “Not right now.”

  He wasn’t sure if it helped or hurt to have this thick cloud of sexual suspense hanging over everything, like it was 1955 all over again. He hadn’t been this jittery about getting laid since junior year of high school, when Jenny Rego invited him over on a Friday night, told him that her parents were out of town, and instructed him to bring pot and protection.

  Even in his wild days, Tim hadn’t exactly been a Don Juan, but he was a relatively good-looking musician, and there always seemed to be women around who found him charming, especially the ones who shared his enthusiasm for controlled substances. On more than one occasion he’d lived out the rock star fantasy of waking up next to a girl whose name he didn’t know, or at least couldn’t remember.

  But he’d been a gentleman with Carrie, and he didn’t regret it. Somehow they’d gotten through their entire courtship without doing anything more than making out like teenagers, even though they could have slipped over to his apartment at any time. After their engagement, Carrie had even hinted a couple of times that she wouldn’t object, but he didn’t take her up on it. They’d both signed contracts with the Tabernacle pledging to refrain from premarital relations, and he was determined not to start things off on the wrong foot.

  In addition to not having sex, they’d also managed not to talk about it very much, aside from repeatedly telling each other how much they were looking forward to living together as man and wife. Partly, Tim thought, this was because it was hard for two people whose histories were so different to talk about sex in the abstract, and partly it was because Carrie became visibly embarrassed whenever the subject came up. He just assumed they’d jump in and figure things out as they went along.

  But maybe they should have discussed their fears and expectations in greater detail, he thought, when Carrie finally emerged from the hotel bathroom. Wearing a satiny white nightgown that was a gift from her mother, she looked like an old-fashioned pinup girl—curvy and soft and heartbreakingly young—and he would have been thrilled to lie down with her on the conjugal bed, if only her face hadn’t been so pale and terrified, her eyes so raw and puffy from crying.

  “Honey,” he said. “What is it?”

  She tried to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come. After two or three false starts, she shook her head in frustration and burst into tears. He took her in his arms and held her until she calmed down. He whispered that it was okay to be afraid, that it was natural to be nervous before your first time. He promised to be gentle, or, if she preferred, they could just go to sleep and try again in the morning, that is, if she felt up to it.

  “It’s not—” she began, but couldn’t complete the sentence.

  “Not what?”

  She took a big breath and made a visible effort to get hold of herself.

  “My first time,” she said.

  Tim was startled, but tried not to show it.

  “That’s okay,” he told her. “It’s not mine, either.”

  She laughed through her tears. He got her a glass of water.

  “Should we talk about it?” he asked.

  “I’ve wanted to,” she explained. “It’s just hard.”

  She sat beside him on the edge of the bed. In a quiet, quivery voice she told him about the spiritual crisis she’d suffered when she was nineteen, after the death of her grandmother. She lost her faith and ran away from home.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Buncha places.”

  “On your own?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. “Not always.”

  “You met a guy?”

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “That was a long time ago. It’s over and done with.”

  “It wasn’t just one,” she said.

  “One, two, whatever. Doesn’t matter.”

  She didn’t respond. He started to get a little worried.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “How many guys are we talking about?”

  “A lot,” she said. “Eight, maybe nine. I lost count.”

  “Really? How long were you gone?”

  “Couple months.”

  “Wow. You kept yourself busy.”

  “I strayed,” she said, finally working up the nerve to look into his eyes.
“I went a little crazy.”

  IN A funny way, Carrie’s confession served to correct an imbalance in their relationship that had nagged at him from the beginning, liberating them both from the rigid script in which he was forced to play the chastened older man seeking redemption from the saintly young girl. It also relieved some of the sexual pressure he’d been feeling in anticipation of the Big Night. He’d never understood the fetish some guys seemed to have for sleeping with virgins. The two times he’d done it—once in high school, the other in college—the experience had been painful for the girls and not much fun for him; it was a weight off his shoulders to know that there would be no deflowering taking place that night in the Honeymoon Suite.

  And the sex turned out to be fine, not nearly as delicate or somber an operation as he’d feared. Carrie was enthusiastic enough, if a bit on the quiet side—Tim liked to hear women purr and moan and talk dirty—but somehow completely herself. He looked down at one point and noticed an expression on her face—eyes squeezed shut, a small private smile playing at the corners of her mouth—that he’d seen numerous times at Sunday meeting, when she raised her arms aloft and swayed to the music. When it was over, she laid her head on his chest and let out a sweet sigh.

  “Oh Lord,” she said. “I am so happy to be out of that house.”

  CARRIE WAS, in many ways, an ideal Christian wife—modest, affectionate, sincerely devoted to his happiness. Tim knew how lucky he was to have found her, so he was baffled by the doubts and second thoughts that began plaguing him almost from the moment they moved into their first apartment, the upstairs unit of a two-family on Baxter Street.

  He had a few specific complaints. Carrie wasn’t much of a cook—because of her father’s stomach problems, her family had shunned any spices more exotic than salt and pepper—and Tim found himself mildly depressed by a steady diet of overcooked meat and potatoes. It also bugged him how little interest she had in politics or current events. He made an effort one morning to get her up to speed on the deteriorating situation in Iraq, but he could tell from the glazed look in her eyes once he began tossing around words like Sunni and Shiite that it wasn’t going to stick.