The Abstinence Teacher

by Tom Perrotta

  “It’s a little weird at first,” Tim agreed. “But you’ll get used to it.”

  As they approached the counter, Jay cast an irritated glance at the cardboard sign taped to the wall above the beer taps: NO ALCOHOL SALES AT THIS EVENT.

  “That sucks,” he said. “I could really use a cold one.”

  RUTH DID her best to put on a cheerful face as she entered Bombay Palace. She hadn’t told Randall—or anyone else, for that matter—what had happened that morning in the Principal’s office, and she figured the news would keep for a few more days. Right now, she just wanted to have a pleasant dinner with her friends and a drink or three to help them celebrate whatever good news it was they wanted to share with her.

  Besides, now that the shock had worn off, she wasn’t quite as upset about getting the axe as she’d expected to be. As angry as she was about the shabby way she’d been treated, she was also deeply relieved not to be the abstinence teacher anymore, not to have to function as the mouthpiece for an agenda that, as JoAnn rightly pointed out, she had never believed in. Remedial math would be a drag, she wasn’t kidding herself about that, but at least it wouldn’t make her feel unclean, like she was depriving her students of information that might help them lead happier, healthier lives. And who knew? Maybe the Wise Choices program would flop, and in another year or two, Ruth would return, vindicated, to once again preach the honest truth about human sexuality to the benighted students of Stonewood Heights. In her mind it played like a Hollywood movie, Michelle Pfeiffer standing before an audience of earnest, good-looking teenagers, rolling a condom onto a cucumber as triumphant music swelled in the background.

  She headed across the dining room to join Randall and Gregory, who were sitting side by side in a booth along the back wall, holding hands—something she’d never seen them do in public—and whispering to each other with the kind of rapturous expressions you only saw on the faces of new lovers, or old couples who’d just made up after a near-death experience. As soon as she sat down, Randall poured her a glass of beer and proposed a toast.

  “To our good friend, Ruth, who saved our relationship.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Gregory.

  “Me?” Ruth laughed. “What’d I do?”

  “You remember when we were talking the other night?” Randall asked. “I was complaining that Greg wouldn’t propose to me, and you asked why I didn’t just propose to him?”

  “You told me it was a stupid idea.”

  “He reconsidered,” Gregory informed her.

  Ruth turned to Randall, a smile spreading across her face.

  “You didn’t.”

  Randall blushed. “I had a lot of time to think things over.”

  “So how’d it happen? Did you get down on your knees and all that?”

  “I did it over the phone,” Randall admitted. “It wasn’t very romantic.”

  “That’s not true,” Gregory said. “It was very romantic. I could hear how hard it was for him to pop the question, how much courage it took. But it was the perfect solution. We’d fought so much about me not proposing to him that it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. Partly out of pride, I guess, but also because it would just seem like I was doing it because he wanted me to and not because I wanted to myself. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Kind of,” Ruth said. “I’m just really thrilled for both of you. Congratulations.”

  They touched glasses again. The happy couple exchanged another glance.

  “But that’s not why we asked you here,” Randall said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “We’re serious,” Gregory insisted. “We asked you here tonight to see if you’re free on August nineteenth.”

  “I guess.” Ruth shrugged. “Probably.”

  “You better be,” Randall told her. “Because we want you to be Best Woman at our wedding.”

  “Your wedding? You mean like a commitment ceremony?”

  “No,” Gregory said. “Our wedding. We’ve booked this cute little inn in the Berkshires. It’ll be a legal ceremony, endorsed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  “But you’re not citizens. And they don’t let—”

  “We won’t be out-of-state,” Randall informed her. “We’re moving to Cambridge. Or somewhere around there. Dan and Jerry said they’ll help us find a nice place to live.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Her friends nodded.

  “When’s this gonna happen?”

  “As soon as possible,” Gregory said. “There’s really no point in waiting.”

  “I-I don’t understand.” Ruth was still smiling, but her voice didn’t match her face. “This is so … sudden. I didn’t even know you were thinking about moving.”

  “It’s sudden for us, too,” Randall agreed. “But we know it’s the right thing.”

  “Once we got engaged,” Gregory explained, “it just seemed so obvious. You get engaged so you can get married. And right now, there’s only one place where we can do that.”

  “And besides,” Randall added. “We’re getting a little tired of Stonewood Heights. We need more excitement in our lives.”

  Ruth wrapped her fingers around her beer glass, but couldn’t seem to lift it up.

  “What about me?” she asked in a soft, wounded voice. “What am I supposed to do?”

  It wasn’t like she expected them to say, Come on along, come live with us in Cambridge, but she would have appreciated something more than the blank, puzzled looks they were directing at her. They were her best friends; they should have understood how she felt. But the truth was, even Ruth didn’t understand how she felt until she buried her face in her hands and heard herself sobbing like a lost child.

  TIM HAD never seen the Grateful Dead perform at the Civic Center Auditorium—they tended to prefer the larger outdoor venues in the area—but he had seen a number of concerts here in his younger days, including shows by .38 Special, The English Beat, and a couple of different incarnations of the Allman Brothers. In some ways—at least if you factored out the thick cloud of pot smoke that used to hover over the festivities—it felt utterly familiar to be sitting up here in the cheap seats with his buddies, looking down on the tiny musicians rocking out on stage, completely continuous with the rest of his life. He wondered how many other Faith Keepers could say the same thing, how many of them had batted beach balls into the air while waiting for Supertramp to take the stage, or passed drunk girls overhead while Little Feat played a third encore.

  After four songs, the Faith Keepers band yielded the stage to the emcee, Brother Biggs—Tim remembered him from last year—a rotund, light-skinned black man with impish charm and a booming voice. He got the crowd going with some stadium-style call-and-response, pitting the floor against the mezzanine, the left side of the arena against the right.

  “Who loves Jesus?”

  “WE DO!”

  “Who hates sin?”

  “WE DO!”

  “Who do we love?”

  “JESUS!”

  “What do we hate?”

  “SIN!”

  “All right.” Brother Biggs grinned, his face enormous on the jumbo screens mounted on either side of the stage. “Now I know y’all got a bracelet when you came in tonight, am I right? That’s a pretty good deal, don’t you think? Don’t ever say we’re not taking care of you. I’m not sure if you noticed, but there’s a word printed on that bracelet, and it’s our motto for tonight. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Undaunted,” the crowd replied, but the response seemed hesitant and disorganized, even though the word was flashing on the big screens.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Brother Biggs with a sad chuckle. “I don’t want to insult nobody, but that was kind of sissy-sounding. I thought y’all were a bunch of red-blooded Christian men, but you sounded more like a Brownie troop or something. So let me ask you again. What’s our motto for tonight?”

  “UNDAUNTED!”

  Broth
er Biggs mopped his forehead with a handkerchief and released a big sigh of relief.

  “That’s much better. Y’all had me worried there for a minute. Thought I’d wandered into the wrong event. Not that I got anything against Brownies, but you guys just not cute enough to wear those sweet little dresses.”

  Brother Biggs wandered up to the edge of the stage. On the screens, his face grew serious.

  “Now I know y’all came here for a good time tonight, a celebration of our shared love for Jesus Christ. Get you some of that good, old-fashioned praise and fellowship with a couple thousand like-minded Christian guys. Trust me, fellas, we gonna give you that experience. But first we got a little work to do on confronting our fears. Oh, I know, that doesn’t sound like much fun, but it makes sense when you think about it. Because you can’t feel true joy when you’re afraid, can you? You gotta conquer your fear. And that’s what undaunted means. It means you may be scared, but you don’t run. You stand tall and keep walking, right straight into that fear. Because the Lord’s right there, He’s walking with you. Say Amen.”

  The crowd said it.

  “So like I told you, we got a great event planned for you. But before we get to that, I want to give you your mission for the night. Three simple tasks. Not two, not four. Three. I put ’em in a little rhyme so they’re easy to remember. The first thing we gonna do, we gonna face our fear. Then—and this is the hard part—we gonna embrace our fear. And after that, with the help of Jesus, we gonna erase our fear. You got that? Face, Embrace, Erase. Why don’t you say it with me? What are we gonna do first?”

  “FACE!”

  “That’s right! What comes next?”

  “EMBRACE!”

  “And then?”

  “ERASE!”

  “Excellent,” said Brother Biggs. “You guys are starting to get the hang of this. Sounds like we got a bunch of strong, undaunted Christian men in the house! Now let’s get this party staaaarteeeed!”

  MIDWAY THROUGH the keynote address—“Optimizing Jesus: Seven Ways to Put Your Faith to Work in the Workplace”—Tim got up to use the restroom. It wasn’t an emergency, but a half hour into the lecture, “former corporate CEO and sought-after Christian motivational speaker, Bob Mallott” had only made it through three of the seven ways, and Tim was starting to get a little restless.

  He killed a few minutes in the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face and chafing his hands together beneath the automatic dryer long after there was any need for it. When he finally emerged, he wasn’t completely startled to find Jay waiting for him in the hallway, a cardboard boat of nachos in his hand. All evening long, Tim had felt the new guy sneaking glances at him, making faces and generally trying to get his attention, despite the fact that Pastor Dennis and Youth Pastor Eddie were sitting between them.

  “There you are,” Jay said, in a weirdly accusing tone. “I thought maybe you ditched me.”

  Tim was puzzled by his word choice. How could you ditch someone who had no claim on you whatsoever?

  “I was just using the men’s room,” he said.

  Jay nodded, but he didn’t seem fully convinced. He leaned in close to Tim, keeping his voice soft.

  “You enjoying this?”

  “It’s okay. I mean, it’s not the most exciting night I’ve ever had.”

  Jay made a soft, incredulous noise.

  “I’d rather drive a spike into my head than listen to this shit.”

  “It was better last year,” Tim assured him. “They had a comedian.”

  Jay held out his nachos. Tim waved him off.

  “Come on, don’t be shy. Take a cheesy one.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  Tim selected a particularly goopy chip with a jalapeño slice on it. Jay watched him chew with an interest that verged on rudeness.

  “What?” Tim said.

  “Nothing.” Jay gave a cryptic shrug. He had a plump babyish face, but there was a shrewdness in his eyes Tim hadn’t noticed before. “I’m just glad we’re finally getting a chance to talk.”

  “Me, too,” Tim said, though he was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable.

  Jay glanced left and right. There were a fair number of guys wandering around the corridor, but none of them were from the Tabernacle.

  “From what I hear,” he said, “we’ve got some things in common. You know, issues in our past. Struggles and whatnot.”

  “That’s possible,” Tim allowed. “I’ve had my share of issues.”

  Jay hung his head.

  “It’s not easy,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I wanna be good, don’t get me wrong.” Jay looked up. “But it’s so fucking boring.”

  “That can be a problem,” Tim agreed.

  Jay rubbed his chin with the tip of his thumb. “All I know is it’s a good thing I’m not driving tonight. ’Cause there’s a pretty great strip club a couple miles from here, and if I had a car—”

  Jay caught Tim’s warning glance and clammed up. John Roper had just emerged from the exit ramp and was heading straight for them.

  “Hey, guys,” he said, in a voice full of false cheer. “Whassup?”

  Tim pursed his lips. Jay muttered something indecipherable.

  “You were gone for a long time,” John told them. “The Pastor was getting worried.”

  “We’re fine,” Tim assured him.

  “Just having a little chat,” Jay added. “Getting to know each other a bit.”

  “That’s cool,” John replied. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “No problem,” Tim said. “We were just about to head back in anyway.”

  RUTH DIDN’T cry for long, but the guys still felt terrible.

  “I’m really sorry,” Gregory said. “We should’ve been more considerate.”

  Randall agreed. “We were so caught up in our good news that we didn’t stop and think about how it might affect you.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ruth told them. “I really don’t know why it upset me so much. I guess you just caught me off guard or something.”

  Randall reached across the table and patted her hand.

  “I know it’s been a tough year. Things are bound to get better.”

  “I don’t see how,” she said. “My job sucks, my kids are ashamed of me, I’m not in a relationship, and my best friends are leaving town.”

  “You can visit us whenever you want,” Gregory told her. “It’s not that far.”

  “Thanks.” Ruth forced a smile. “I’m really happy for you. I know you’ll have a beautiful wedding, and I’m honored to be included.”

  The guys assured her they wouldn’t have it any other way. Ruth blew her nose in a cloth napkin.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said Gregory. “What happened on your big date the other night? Nobody told me.”

  Ruth shook her head. “It was a bust. Paul’s a nice guy, but we don’t have anything in common.”

  “Too bad,” said Gregory. “He sounded promising.”

  “You’ll meet someone,” Randall said. “It’s time to get cracking on those internet dating services.”

  “I’ve done that,” Ruth reminded him. “It’s a wasteland. There were seventy-year-old men who wouldn’t date a woman over forty.”

  “This time we’ll do it right,” Gregory said. “We’re gonna get you all dressed up and take some sexy pictures. You know, good lighting, flattering angles. Then we’re gonna put our heads together and write you a new profile. And you know what? If you want to say you’re thirty-four, I won’t tell on you.”

  Ruth tried to smile, but it just made her tired.

  “Whatever,” she said. “I don’t even care anymore.”

  “Can’t hurt to try,” Randall reminded her.

  “What’s the point? There just aren’t a lot of decent guys out there.”

  Gregory brushed his fingers across Randall’s cheek and looked at Ruth.

  “Honey,” he said. “All it takes is one.”

>   “Besides, it’s not like your phone’s not ringing.” Randall turned to Gregory. “Some married guy drunk-dialed her at eleven o’clock the other night. He wanted to stop by for a little chat.”

  “My daughter’s soccer coach.”

  “The Christian guy?” Gregory said. “The one who makes the girls pray?”

  “Yup, that one.”

  Gregory’s eyes widened with interest.

  “Is he cute?”

  “What difference does it make?” Ruth asked. “He’s a drunk married Christian.”

  Randall pondered this for a moment.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” he told her.

  AFTER THE lecture, there was a brief, enigmatic theater piece about two troubled superheroes dressed in full leotard-and-cape regalia who meet in a psychiatrist’s waiting room. Jetman used to be able to fly, but has recently been plagued by a crippling fear of heights (“I looked down one day and it just didn’t seem safe, way up there in the sky like that.”); Mr. Asbestos, famous for his ability to walk through flames, has developed a sudden aversion to fire (“That stuff is hot!” he tells Jetman, flapping his wrist at the memory). After sharing their sad stories, they flip through magazines and glance impatiently at their watches.

  “What time do you have?” Jetman asks.

  “One thirty,” says Mr. Asbestos.

  “It’s strange,” Jetman replies. “My appointment was for one o’clock.”

  “Couldn’t be,” says Mr. Asbestos. “My appointment was for one o’clock.”

  Puzzled by this coincidence, they search for the receptionist but can’t find one. Finally, they decide to take drastic action, and pound on the psychiatrist’s door, which has a huge DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on it. When they get no reply, they crash through the door and into the office, only to emerge seconds later, more puzzled than before.

  “The room’s completely empty,” Mr. Asbestos says, scratching his head.

  “You know what that means?” Jetman says in an ominous voice.

  “I do,” says a frightened Mr. Asbestos. “It means we’re on our own.”

  The spotlight lingered for a moment on the forlorn superheroes, then went dark. Moments later, the stage lights came on to reveal that the band had returned. They were playing a simple chord progression, their heads tilted heavenward, the music soft and comforting. Just when Tim expected the singer to burst into song, Brother Biggs walked onto the stage. His swagger was gone; he seemed uncharacteristically solemn.