The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  His eyes strayed back to Carrie, who still hadn’t managed to extricate herself from the conversation with Evelyn. It wasn’t much of a conversation, really—Evelyn did all the talking; Carrie just nodded or shook her head, occasionally touching the older woman on the arm. Even so, Tim could see how intently Carrie was focused on her, and how comforted Evelyn was to be enveloped in the cocoon of her sympathetic attention. He felt a surge of respect and affection for his wife; she was a good woman, and he was a fool for letting himself lose sight of it. He made up his mind to join her, to take some of the burden of consoling Evelyn off her shoulders, but he received a hard slap on the back before he’d managed to take the first step in her direction.

  “Hey, coach!”

  Tim turned to see his friend John Roper, a man of alarming girth, looming over him with a big Sunday morning grin on his face. Tim returned the smile, momentarily startled—he reacted the same way every week—by the sight of his assistant coach in a suit and tie. Until a few months ago, Tim had only ever seen him in sweats.

  “How’s Abby?” John inquired.

  “Okay. A little woozy last night, but she felt fine this morning.”

  “Praise God.” John stepped toward Tim, spreading his arms wide. “Gimme a hug.”

  With a reluctance he hoped he managed to conceal, Tim submitted to the larger man’s embrace. It wasn’t that he was squeamish about hugging other guys—it was standard practice at the Tabernacle—but as a smallish man, he found it embarrassing to be crushed in the arms of a big lug like John, a former offensive tackle at Montclair State who had to outweigh him by a hundred pounds. It made him feel childish, like a little boy who needed to drink more milk.

  John kept his arms wrapped tightly around Tim well after the two men had exchanged the obligatory three thumps on the back. These extralong hugs were a habit of John’s, his way of saying thanks. It was Tim who’d invited him to the Tabernacle over the summer—he’d seen an opening after a conversation in which John had complained about middle-of-the-night panic attacks, a dizzying sense of peering down into an endless void—and Tim who’d acted as his spiritual guide and sponsor in the subsequent months, much as Bill Spooner had done for him. Pastor Dennis called it the Rescue Chain: I save you, you save the next guy, and he’ll save someone else.

  “That was an awesome game yesterday,” John said, giving Tim a final, anaconda-like squeeze before letting go. “I’m still on cloud nine.”

  “Well, we’ve got this one to thank.” Tim nodded at John’s daughter, Candace, who was standing next to her father, nervously plucking at the Livestrong bracelet on her left wrist. “That was an amazing goal. I can’t believe how fast you got upfield.”

  Candace blushed; she was a lovely girl with the long neck and regal bearing of a ballerina. Tim caught himself gazing at her with a little too much interest—she wasn’t even twelve, for Pete’s sake—and hastily shifted his attention back to her father, who wasn’t nearly so pleasant to look at.

  “She almost flubbed it,” John said with an affectionate chuckle. “For a second there, I didn’t think the ball had enough juice to make it across the goal line.”

  He reached out to muss his daughter’s hair, but she swatted his hand away.

  “Daddy.”

  John drew back in mock surrender.

  “Sorry.” He rolled his eyes for Tim’s benefit. “I keep forgetting. The hair’s off-limits.”

  Tim shook his head in parental solidarity. He wondered if it was weird for John, watching his little girl grow into such a striking young woman, a long-legged blonde who, within a year or two, wouldn’t be able to walk down the street without causing a physical disturbance in every man and teenage boy within a hundred-yard radius. It wasn’t nearly so complicated for Tim, at least not yet. Unlike Candace, Abby still seemed a long way from puberty, even if she was disconcertingly adolescent in some of her behaviors and attitudes.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Tim said. “By that point, I didn’t really care if we won or lost. I was just so proud of the girls for not giving up.”

  John’s face grew solemn. He dropped a beefy hand on Tim’s shoulder.

  “That was a gutsy thing you did after the game.”

  “It was no big deal,” Tim muttered.

  “Yes, it was,” John insisted. He spoke softly, looking Tim straight in the eye. “It was a very big deal. You stood up for the Lord, and I want to thank you for it.”

  PLAYING MUSIC was a bit like making love, Tim thought, as the Praise Team launched into “Marvelous,” the upbeat kickoff to their three-song opening set. Sometimes you were right there in the thick of it, completely at one with your partner, your entire being submerged in the act. Other times you were oddly detached, floating above yourself, watching with mild interest as you phoned it in, thinking how you were overdue for an oil change, or wondering when it was, exactly, that you’d lost your taste for chunky peanut butter.

  Today, he could tell, was going to be one of those half-there days. His fingers were hitting the right notes, and his voice felt strong as he leaned into the mic, smiling at the lead singer, Verna Deaver, as they harmonized on the chorus:

  The Lord has done this,

  And it’s fabulous,

  Miraculous,

  Wonderful.

  The Lord has done this,

  And it’s marvelous

  In our eyes!

  But his mind was far away, drifting insistently back to the prayer at the end of yesterday’s soccer game, the nagging sense—only compounded by John’s praise—that he’d done something foolish, or at least gotten himself into something a little messier than he’d bargained for.

  He’d never asked the team to pray with him before, had never even considered it a possibility. But it had been an emotional game, and when the girls gathered around for the final cheer, a feeling of such love came over him—all those sweet, flushed, youthful faces gazing up at him—that he spoke from the heart, without premeditation.

  “Let’s hold hands,” he’d said, “and give thanks to God.”

  None of them complained or even hesitated; they didn’t seem to feel threatened, or even the least bit uncomfortable about what he’d asked them to do. They linked hands and sat down on the grass as naturally as if they prayed together every day. It wasn’t until Maggie’s mother came running up with that look of horror on her face that it occurred to Tim that he might have overstepped his bounds.

  He’d known she was there, of course. They’d met at halftime, and had a nice chat—she was friendlier than he’d expected, with a surprisingly girlish laugh—so he had no excuse for not anticipating her reaction. In fact, he wouldn’t have blamed her for thinking he’d orchestrated the whole incident simply to antagonize her.

  But the truth was, he’d forgotten all about Ruth Ramsey by then. The latter part of the second half—everything after Abby got knocked out—had been a blur to him. He’d been so terrified to see his daughter lying motionless on the grass—there was one nauseating moment when she’d honestly looked dead to him—and so overcome with relief when she finally opened her eyes, that he still wasn’t thinking straight when Maggie’s mother showed up and started screaming.

  He’d tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen. She just yanked her daughter away from the team, with all the other girls watching, and told him that her child’s days on the Stars were over. Maggie burst into tears when she heard this—she was a tough little girl, and he remembered thinking she cried like a boy, angrily, like she’d been betrayed by her body—and that was the thing he couldn’t get out of his head.

  He wasn’t sorry about saying the prayer, and he certainly wasn’t sorry about offending someone like Ruth Ramsey, but he was deeply sorry about putting Maggie in that awful position, embarrassing her in front of her teammates, taking what should have been a nice moment for all of them and turning it into something ugly and confusing.

  And now he was going to have to apologize to Maggie’s mother, as much as he
hated the idea. Because he’d be heartbroken if Maggie left the team, and not just because she was his best player. He’d be heartbroken because she was a great kid who loved the game, and because she shouldn’t have to stop playing it because of a dispute between adults, something that didn’t involve her at all.

  TIM STARTED to perk up a bit on “Jerusalem,” the final song of the opening set. He could tell from the moment Verna Deaver hit the first note that autopilot wasn’t going to cut it; he’d have to step up his game if he didn’t want to get left behind.

  “My soul is weary,” she called out, the richness of her voice frayed by a ragged edge of grievance. “And my body is tired!”

  Tim and Bill Spooner supplied the baritone response.

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

  “But my faith is burning with a heavenly fire!”

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

  A large black woman of indeterminate age, Verna was the newest member of the Praise Team. Tim didn’t know much about her, except that she worked at the KFC on Route 23, seemed to be raising a couple of grandchildren on her own, and suffered from some kind of chronic foot ailment that forced her to rehearse while sitting in a chair. On Sunday mornings, though, she always stood straight and proud at the microphone, waving her arms and swaying gently from side to side, as if God had granted her a temporary waiver for the relief of pain.

  There weren’t a whole lot of black people who belonged to the Tabernacle—even by the most generous standard, Stonewood Heights could not be considered a diverse community—but their number had been increasing steadily over the past year, as word had spread throughout the surrounding area of Pastor Dennis’s charismatic leadership and uncompromising denunciations of immorality.

  Verna had been among the first wave of African-Americans to join the church, a core group of a dozen or so mostly older women who’d arrived last winter, around the time Pastor Dennis began appearing on a weekly cable access TV show called The Good Seed. Tim had a vivid memory of the first time he’d seen her, because she’d been accompanied by a gorgeous young woman with dreadlocks, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes—she wore a tight skirt and shiny knee-high boots—who didn’t return the following week, or ever again, though Tim still hadn’t stopped looking for her.

  Verna asked to audition for the Praise Team in late spring. The guys were skeptical at first; she had no previous experience as a singer and didn’t seem like she’d fit in very easily with a group of veteran musicians who’d been playing in rock bands since they were teenagers. But these objections disappeared by the time she finished the first verse of “Amazing Grace”—it was instantly clear that Verna was a natural, endowed with a big expressive voice and an instinctive sense of how to use it. There was none of the stumbling you expected at an audition, the newcomer following the band instead of leading it. Verna just stepped in and took over, and no one begrudged it for a second.

  “Let the first be last and the last be first, uh-huh!”

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

  “Help me, Lord! Lift me up now!”

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

  Over the summer, the Praise Team had undergone a major transformation, changing from an ensemble of equals—up to that point, Bill, Tim, and the keyboard player, Gary Rawson, had traded off on the lead-singing responsibilities—to a backing group for a virtuoso vocalist. Or, as Bill liked to say, “We used to be Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; now we’re Big Brother and the Holding Company.”

  “My feet are sore! But I got to keep on walking!”

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem!”

  “Oh, Lord! I’m right here at your side!”

  “Goin’ up to Jerusalem.”

  During the same period, their repertoire had shifted slowly but decisively away from the slightly bland pop/rock that had been their default mode toward more traditional gospel music, which was what Verna sang best. The longtime church members had been mystified at first, especially by the ecstatic improvisational runs built into the end of the songs, during which Verna sometimes worked herself up into quite a lather, clutching her head and punching herself repeatedly in the leg as she testified, but lately they’d come around. In the past few weeks, the worshippers had begun clapping along with the music, making a tentative but still joyful noise that was new to the Tabernacle, and surely pleasing to God.

  THERE WAS no applause when the song finally ended, nothing to suggest that anything in the way of a performance had occurred. The musicians just put down their instruments—Tim and Bill each took one of Verna’s arms as she stepped down from the stage, breathing hard, her eyes wild and unfocused—and took their seats among the worshippers.

  For Tim, this was one of the most satisfying moments of the service, the one that captured what it meant to be a Christian. It wasn’t a question of Us and Them—the band set apart from the audience, the special people lording it over the drones—they were all one, the believers, the people of the Tabernacle.

  For as long as he could remember, Tim had been drawn to this feeling of community; it was something he’d sought, at very different points in his life, from both punk rock and the Grateful Dead, and in each case, for a little while, he’d found what he was looking for. But it hadn’t lasted, and in any case, the communities in which he’d claimed membership were disappointingly narrow and homogenous compared to this one. The punks and the Deadheads were overwhelmingly white, suburban, and young; almost everyone wore similar clothes and hairstyles, and had had more or less the same experience of the world. Not like here, where you saw grandmothers and little kids, people in wheelchairs, whole families, interracial couples, immigrants who barely spoke a word of English, college teachers, twelve steppers, cancer patients who’d lost their hair, lonely people who didn’t have a friend in the world until they stepped through the door of the Tabernacle.

  Tim nodded at the familiar faces and patted a couple of acquaintances on the shoulder as he made his way to the empty aisle seat next to Carrie, who was watching him with the usual mixture of affection and worry. She squeezed his hand and gave him a quick smile before turning her attention back to the podium, clearly curious, as he was, about who would be delivering this morning’s sermon.

  Tim wasn’t sure why, but Pastor Dennis had been cutting down on his preaching this fall, and not because he was sick or out of town. For three out of the past four weeks, guest speakers—a missionary who’d worked among the poor in Guatemala, a nurse who spoke about Christianity and medical ethics, and an ex-gay man who’d renounced his homosexuality and was now a married father of two—had addressed the congregation while Pastor Dennis listened intently from the cheap seats.

  This phenomenon had caused a great deal of discussion among the people of the Tabernacle, who couldn’t help speculating about the reasons behind the Pastor’s uncharacteristic retreat from the spotlight. Was he feeling burnt-out? Was he worried that the church had become a “Cult of Personality,” as a disgruntled letter writer had charged in the Bulletin-Chronicle? Or was there some broader, subtler purpose behind his choices that would gradually make itself known over the next month or two? While different people gravitated toward different explanations, there was a near-unanimous feeling among the congregation that the guest speakers had not been very good, despite their interesting life experiences. It was one thing to talk about yourself; Pastor Dennis had the rarer talent of inspiring others, using his words to connect with his listeners and draw them closer to God.

  The ex-gay man—he introduced himself simply as “Troy”—was the most problematic speaker for Tim, and not only because there didn’t seem to be anything “ex” about him. Tim understood that it was unfair to stereotype, but he was pretty sure he could recognize a gay guy when he saw one. It wasn’t just Troy’s effeminate voice, or his exaggerated gestures, or his suspiciously buff body, or even the flirtatious way he put his hands on his hips, cocked his head to one side, and said, “People, I am sooo not proud of my behavior.” Any one
of those things could have been pure coincidence, but taken together, the whole package just seemed to scream, “I’m still gay!” Tim wondered how Mrs. Troy managed to convince herself that everything was on the up-and-up when she stood before him in a filmy negligee and saw the look of profound indifference on his face, unless she happened to be a recovering lesbian herself, in which case she was probably more relieved than anything else.

  Most of the time, Tim did his best to be a good Christian and toe the biblical line, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get himself all worked up about the sin of homosexuality. It just didn’t seem that bad to him, certainly not worth banishing someone to hell for, and probably not worth all the time and energy Pastor Dennis and lots of other people spent obsessing about it, especially since Jesus didn’t have a single word to say on the subject in the Gospels.

  It seemed like a glaring omission, considering that Jesus had a fair amount to say on other points of sexual morality, including one that was particularly inconvenient for Tim: “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery.” You couldn’t get much clearer than that, and yet Pastor Dennis hadn’t objected to Tim’s marriage to Carrie, far from it. He’d just let the whole remarriage-adultery thing slide, tempering God’s harsh law with a dose of human compassion. Tim couldn’t help feeling like gay people deserved a similar break, a recognition that a choice between a life of sin and a life of celibacy was no choice at all.

  IT WAS amusing for Tim to find himself so squarely in the camp of sexual tolerance because it was a long way from where he’d started out. He’d been a teenager in the late seventies, part of the last generation of American boys who could say the word “fag” with an air of innocence, without it even occurring to them that someone somewhere might have a right to be offended. The mere thought of two men getting it on was enough to send him and his buddies into paroxysms of disgust. At the same time, they joked about it constantly; it was the rare conversation that ended without the ritual invitation to “suck my dick.” They devoted lots of fevered speculation to the nightmare of prison rape, especially the variety in which a large black man claimed you as his steady girlfriend.