The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  HE STILL felt a bit rattled at work the next morning—jittery and furtive and antisocial—though none of his colleagues seemed to notice anything amiss. They were used to Tim’s keeping to himself in the morning, heading straight to his cubicle and getting a jump on his e-mail while the rest of them made a slower transition into the workday, analyzing last night’s episode of Lost, or catching up on the latest escapades of Aimee, the hot twenty-three-year-old loan processor whose complicated love life was the source of enormous vicarious pleasure to the mostly female staff of Loanergy Home Finance.

  “So it’s back on with me and Vinnie,” she announced, ostensibly addressing Rita Mangiaro, but speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear. “We went out for a drink last night, like just to talk, right? And sure enough, I woke up in his bed this morning. I’m like, Hello, Aimee? You are such a slut!”

  “You did not!” Rita gasped. She was the office’s top producer by a long shot, a retired teacher who got tons of referrals from her former students at Bridgeton High. Sitting next to her all day, Tim never failed to be both amazed and irritated by her inexhaustible appetite for gossip and idle chatter, which somehow didn’t interfere with her ability to make four times as many loans as he did.

  Aimee gave one of her patented what’s-a-girl-to-do shrugs. She was a round-faced, voluptuous blonde with a salon tan, stiletto heels, and a cheerfully ditzy personality. She would’ve been a textbook bimbo, except for the fact that she also happened to be the best processor Tim had ever worked with, a fastidious, punctual, almost pathologically organized master of complicated paperwork who had saved his and everyone else’s bacon ten times over. The whole office would have fallen apart without her.

  “It was crazy,” she admitted, with a rueful mixture of pride and embarrassment in her voice. “And then I had to get up and do the walk of shame, right past his mother. I’m like, Hi, Mrs. Ruffo, long time no see.”

  “Ouch,” said Kelly Willard, a single woman a few years older than Tim who was always going on adventure vacations to places like Tanzania and Chichén Itzá, then complaining that she hadn’t enjoyed herself. “Why didn’t you just go to your own apartment?”

  “His was closer,” Aimee explained. “We were kind of in a rush. And I definitely wasn’t planning on spending the night.”

  “I’m sure his mom was thrilled to see you,” said Rita.

  “Totally,” Aimee agreed. “I’m like her most favorite person in the world.”

  Even Tim had to laugh at that. Without really trying—the office had an open floor plan, so it was hard not to overhear—he’d been following the saga closely enough to know that Mrs. Ruffo hadn’t been particularly fond of Aimee even before Vinnie, a short-tempered bodybuilder, had gotten himself arrested for assaulting Gary Wilkinson, the married real-estate agent she’d been seeing on the side. According to Aimee, Gary had been unaware of Vinnie’s existence, so he didn’t know enough to be alarmed rather than creeped out when this angry muscle-bound dude approached him in the locker room of the Ultra-Body Health and Racquet Club and asked if he wanted to see a picture of his girlfriend.

  “Uh, sure,” Gary said, thinking it impolite to refuse. “I guess.”

  Vinnie produced what was described in the police blotter as an “intimate Polaroid snapshot of a mutual acquaintance,” then gave Gary a couple of seconds to study it before punching him in the face. He squeezed in a couple more shots before being restrained by three bystanders in various states of undress, including an off-duty cop in a jockstrap. In the end, Vinnie pled guilty, and Gary’s wife filed for divorce.

  “Was this a fluke?” Shelley Margulies asked. Too-frequent Botox treatments had left her with a single expression, an all-purpose grimace of unpleasant surprise. “Or are you guys really back together?”

  “I don’t know,” Aimee replied. “We’ve been through this so many times, I’m kind of scared to say yes. But I really think we’ve grown a lot in the past few months.”

  “The thing I’m wondering,” Rita said, “is what he’s gonna do about that tattoo.”

  Tim had actually been wondering the same thing. After their most recent breakup, Vinnie had gone through a Billy Bob Thornton-style crisis that he’d resolved by modifying the “Aimee” tattoo on his massive left bicep so it now read, “Aimee = Bitch.” Tim knew this because he’d been present the day Vinnie barged into the office to display his revenge to its victim.

  “I told him he could keep it.” Aimee smiled, tickled by her own magnanimity. “I’m the first to admit that I deserve it. And you know what else? It kind of turned me on to see it there. Plus, it’s really nice work.”

  Like a lot of people her age, Aimee was a tattoo aficionado. She had four of them herself, including one she’d gotten just a couple of months ago, placed so low on her back that she’d had to undo her pants so her office mates could admire it.

  “Tim,” she’d said, right before the big unveiling, “you may want to turn away.”

  Tim’s coworkers knew he was a born-again Christian and a recovering addict; he’d told them early on, as Pastor Dennis had advised, and kept a Bible and a book of Devotions on his desk in case anyone forgot, along with a Gospel-Verse-a-Day calendar that Carrie had gotten him for Christmas. Today’s selection was Mark 9:50: “Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”

  “Thanks,” he’d told Aimee. “I’ll cover my eyes.”

  Although Pastor Dennis frequently warned his flock to expect persecution and/or mockery as Christians in the secular workplace, this hadn’t been Tim’s experience at Loanergy. At worst, he suffered from a mild, intermittent sense of apartness, as if there were an invisible wall separating him from the rest of the office. If anything, his coworkers treated him with a little more solicitude than necessary, apologizing for using profanity in his presence, or telling him to plug his ears while they discussed The Da Vinci Code or one of Aimee’s drunken hookups. He sometimes had the feeling that they enjoyed having him around to shock, and he did his best to play the role assigned to him, though it wasn’t always easy to pretend to be scandalized by the revelation that drunken young women sometimes had sex they regretted, or that a fellow loan officer who happened to be a grandmother might call a double-crossing client a “shithead.”

  Come on, he occasionally found himself thinking. If you ’re gonna sin, at least do something interesting.

  Though he had to admit, he did like Aimee’s tattoo. He’d meant to turn away, but there was something riveting about the sight of an attractive young woman unbuttoning her pants in the middle of an office. She only tugged them down a couple of inches in the back, just far enough to reveal the sweet slope of her hips, the triangle of a pink cotton thong, and three fairly large Chinese characters, which she said stood for Strength, Loyalty, and Perseverance. He didn’t look for long—just enough to admire the thickness, precision, and startling blackness of the calligraphy, and to trade an appreciative glance with Antonio Morris, the only other male witness—but it was apparently long enough for the image to sear itself permanently into his brain, so he could conjure it at will in those odd moments when something like that came in handy.

  HE LEFT the office around eleven for his twelve o’clock lunch with George Dykstra of DBH Design & Build, one of the bigger residential developers in the area. It was an important meeting for him, a rare face-to-face with a serious player in the industry, and he thought it would be a good idea to take a little walk beforehand, to clear his head and think about how he wanted to present himself.

  As ironic as it was for someone with his abysmal credit history to be working as a loan officer, Tim enjoyed his job and considered himself pretty good at it. He’d gotten into the business four years earlier, after building the kind of spotty résumé that might have been expected from a musician with two years of college and a problem with substance abuse: a little temping here, some construction work there, a failed attempt at r
unning his own landscaping business, followed by a hodgepodge of retail and restaurant jobs, and capped off by a three-year stint as an agent for Lucky Rent-A-Car, during the sober, responsible period that followed Abby’s birth. It wasn’t a terrible gig, and he drew frequent praise from his superiors for his ability to calm irate customers. There was talk about a possible promotion to Assistant Manager, but it died down around the time he returned to his true vocation of snorting coke, at which point the job stopped looking like a stepping-stone to better things and revealed itself to be a deeply annoying distraction from the serious business of getting high and fully deserving of the contempt with which he began to treat it.

  Divorced and precariously sober at the age of thirty-seven, he was searching for a new career path when he came across the classified ad in the Bulletin-Chronicle—“Mortgage Professional, Experience Preferred, Will Train”—and decided that he had nothing to lose by applying. His timing couldn’t have been better: shockingly low interest rates had triggered a tsunami of residential refinancing, and warm bodies were needed throughout the industry to perform the humble but nonetheless critical work of matching eager borrowers with appropriate (or at least willing) lenders.

  Within a week he was on the phone, identifying himself to prospective clients—their names and numbers had been purchased from a telemarketer—as a representative of the Dream House Mortgage Company, a start-up run by three former frat brothers in their mid-twenties who didn’t seem to notice, or at least weren’t overly concerned about, the hard-to-explain gaps in Tim’s employment history. His “training” consisted of a quick lesson on how to read a rate sheet and price a loan, a one-day seminar at the Warrenton Marriott, and whatever on-the-fly advice he could grab from his bosses, who didn’t spend as much time in the office as he might have expected.

  For two full years, Tim stayed afloat doing one ReFi after another. With rates hovering around 5 percent, the decision was a no-brainer for most homeowners. All you had to do was lay out the facts, no arm-twisting necessary. You felt like you were doing your clients a favor, arranging things so they had hundreds more dollars in their pocket every month, while making a nice little commission in the process. It was one of those rare situations in life where everyone came out a winner.

  Dream House went out of business around the time rates began creeping up—one of the partners moved to Florida, and another decided to go to physical therapy school—and Tim made the jump to Loanergy, a more established firm, signing on as “Senior Mortgage Consultant.” With the ReFi market losing steam, he had no choice but to shift his focus to purchases, transactions that were more satisfying on a personal level—he got to work much more closely with his clients—but also fraught with pressure and the potential for bad feelings. Deals fell apart all the time, due to unpredictable contingencies, rigid deadlines, and the sometimes unreasonable demands of lawyers, sellers’ agents, and lenders, not to mention good old human error (Tim learned the hard way what happened when you failed to lock in a good rate the day before the Chairman of the Federal Reserve made a big announcement). But deals got made all the time as well—the papers got signed, the checks got written, the property changed hands. His income varied widely from month to month, but on the whole he was doing better than he’d imagined possible when he’d started.

  About six months ago, though, after years of booming, the real-estate market went flat. Houses sat all spring and summer with FOR SALE signs planted in their front yards. The buyers disappeared. Ever since he’d started at Loanergy, he’d gotten most of his leads through the Tabernacle—Pastor Dennis encouraged his flock to do business with other believers whenever possible—but it was just too small a niche to keep him going. Feeling the need to branch out, he got new business cards, did some mass mailings, even started buying lists from telemarketers again. He tried making inroads into some of the other evangelical churches in the area, but it turned out that Pete Gorman of Faith Financial had them pretty well locked up.

  With the slow winter season looming, Tim had come to see the situation as urgent, if not dire. He still had some savings, and Carrie had a steady job. Allison and Mitchell were rolling in money, so he figured no one would begrudge him a missed child support payment or two if he explained his situation. But that was just the short term. Taking the long view, it was clear that the profession was about to undergo a contraction, and that a fair number of people weren’t going to survive. Tim was determined not to be among those left behind. It wasn’t just that he liked his job; he needed it. Because he could imagine all too well what it would feel like to wake up in the morning with nowhere to go, the whole day stretching empty in front of him, and the Devil hovering at his shoulder, whispering all sorts of suggestions as to how a guy like Tim might want to fill it.

  THE HOSTESS at Cosmo’s Diner directed him to a window booth where a barrel-chested guy dressed like a construction worker was squinting at The Wall Street Journal through a pair of half-frame glasses perched on the tip of his nose. It took Tim a second or two to connect this formidable figure with George Dykstra, the sunburned goofball in board shorts and wraparound shades he’d met a couple of months ago at an instructional clinic for youth soccer coaches.

  “Hey,” said Tim. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  George waved off the apology and folded up his paper.

  “You’re not late,” he grunted, gripping the edge of the table and beginning the arduous process of extricating himself from the booth, which clearly hadn’t been designed to accommodate torsos of unusual girth. “I was early.”

  George led Tim through an elaborate series of greetings—handshake, back slap, manly hug, hair tousle—before sucking in his gut and wedging himself back into his seat. As Tim followed suit, George drew his attention to the young, olive-skinned waitress in tight black pants filling water glasses at a nearby table. He admired her for a moment, then leaned forward with a confidential air.

  “I’m telling you, Timmy. I don’t know who does the hiring around here, but I’d like to write him a thank-you note.”

  “She’s a nice-looking girl,” Tim observed.

  “I think she’s Greek. Cute little accent.” George’s eyes narrowed with calculation. “Wonder if Cosmo’s slipping her the old souvlaki. I wouldn’t put it past the bastard. Bring ‘em in on the boat, ship ’em out when you get bored. Pretty good deal, eh?”

  Tim replied with a noncommittal bob of the head, doing his best to maintain a neutral expression. George removed his reading glasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. Deprived of their senatorial gravity, his face looked shrewd and boyish, suddenly familiar.

  “I’m just curious,” he said. “You ever fuck a Bulgarian?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Tim.

  George nodded slowly, as if pondering a subject of great complexity.

  “Only reason I ask, I dated this crazy chick for a while before I got married. Yanka. That was her actual name if you can believe it.” He gave a nostalgic chuckle. “Total nympho. Used to claw at my back and thrash her head around like she was having a fit. Loud, too. Touch her in the right place, and she’d scream like the Russians were invading. I could never tell if it was just her, or something they put in the water over there.”

  Tim forced a smile, thinking that it would be a good idea to find some gentle way of cluing George in to the fact that he was a Christian. They’d spent a whole morning together at the coaches’ clinic, but the subject of faith hadn’t come up, and George had clearly developed a mistaken impression of what kind of guy he was. It would spare them both some awkwardness if he came clean, but how to do it without casting a chill over the meeting was a thornier question. Sometimes the wiser course was just to let things unfold naturally and wait for the right opening to present itself.

  “It’s nice to see you,” he said, hoping to steer the conversation in a healthier direction. “I really appreciate you meeting with me.”

  George was staring at the waitress again, his gaze so insisten
t that she put down the pitcher and asked if he needed something. He grinned and shook his head, then turned back to Tim.

  “Sorry I had to cancel on you last week. We had a big disaster out at Fox Hollow. Whole shipment of granite countertops came in, and they were all too big. Had to send ’em all back to the quarry. Now my tile guys gotta sit around for two weeks with their thumbs up their asses while the counters get recut. That job’s been one headache after another.”

  “I hear it’s a pretty big development.”

  “Twenty units. Almost all presold, thank God. Just got in under the wire. I know some guys who are all set to break ground on big projects next spring, and believe me, they’re all shitting their pants. Nobody’s buying jack.”

  “It’s a tough market. I’m feeling it on my end, that’s for sure.”

  “You wanna know who’s really fucked? My cousin Billy. Asshole bought himself a Hummer dealership. Try selling a fucking Hummer these days. I warned him, but he’s a stubborn little prick. Serves him right.”

  “It’s a weird time, all right. Kinda scary.”

  After the waitress took their orders, George excused himself to go to the restroom. Tim took advantage of his absence to remind himself of his strategy for this meeting, which wasn’t to whine about hard times but to sell himself as an experienced, up-and-coming, can-do loan officer with a solid client base, someone a guy like George Dykstra could be proud to be in business with. Not that he was expecting much, at least not right off the bat; he understood all too well that a high-volume developer like DBH probably had long-standing relationships with a whole stable of mortgage brokers. All he really wanted was a foot in the door, a chance to prove himself, to show that he could play with the big boys.

  “Damn,” George said, as he squeezed back into the booth. “Those fucking mochaccinos are worse than beer. I’m pissing every ten minutes.”