The Abstinence Teacher

  “Okay,” she said. “Sure. I don’t have any plans I can’t change.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “It’ll be great to catch up with you.”

  And just like that she had a date, her first in a long, long time. And not a blind date, either, but something better, a date with a man she already knew, a boy she’d grown up with, and, more to the point, her first lover. She’d read a couple of articles recently about couples reconnecting at high-school reunions, rekindling romances from their youth. The thing everybody mentioned was how strong those old bonds remained despite the passage of time, how meaningful a shared history could be. Over and over, people talked about picking up right where they’d left off, not missing a beat, as if the intervening decades had never happened.

  Sensing that she was getting carried away, she did her best to put the brakes on. After all, she hadn’t seen Paul Caruso in a long time. For all she knew, he was bald and weighed 350 pounds. Plus, she realized, he had never really answered her simple question about whether he was married, which struck her as a bit worrisome. On the other hand, people who were happily married didn’t tell you it was “a long, complicated story,” so she felt fairly optimistic on that count.

  Ruth, I think about you a lot.

  The whole thing was just so sappy and romantic and out of the blue, she couldn’t wait to tell Randall all about it. She got to school a few minutes early, and was rushing down the hall with a latte in each hand, whistling the chorus of “Peace Train”—the song had been stuck in her head all morning—when Joe Venuti popped out of his office and planted himself directly in her path. He looked the way he always did in the morning, like he’d been up half the night sweating on the toilet.

  “Excuse me,” she said, trying to veer past him on the right.

  “Ruth,” he said, blocking her way with an outstretched arm, “I need to talk to you.”

  “Can it wait?” she said, gesturing at him with the coffee cups. “My hands are full.”

  “Not really,” he said.

  On a normal day, Ruth would’ve told him that she was busy just then and would be happy to talk to him during one of her free periods, but she was feeling a little too cheerful to make a fuss, so she sighed and followed him into his office. If she’d been thinking a little more clearly, she wouldn’t have been so surprised to find JoAnn Marlow and Superintendent Farmer inside, scowling at her and shaking their heads, and she certainly wouldn’t have blurted out, “Hey, guys!” in such an excited, high-pitched tone of voice, as if she were thrilled to death to have been invited to this particular party.

  God’s Warrior

  TIM KNEW IT WAS A BAD IDEA TO STOP AT THE BAR ON THE WAY back from Ruth Ramsey’s. It just seemed like a better idea than going home to Carrie just then, and not much worse than what he’d been doing for the past half hour anyway, which was driving aimlessly around Stonewood Heights listening to Workingman’s Dead, thinking about how much better it would be to kill an hour or two in a bar than it would be to go home to Carrie.

  He must have orbited the Homestead Lounge four or five times—this was after casing and rejecting the Evergreen Tavern and the Brew-Ha-Ha, both of which were much too conspicuously situated on Central Avenue in the heart of downtown—before working up the nerve to pull into the parking lot, conveniently tucked away in the rear of the building, which meant that he at least wouldn’t have to worry about Pastor Dennis or anyone else from the Tabernacle driving by at exactly the wrong moment and wondering if that was Tim Mason they just saw going into that gin mill, ’cause it sure looked like him.

  Even so, he felt shaky and exposed—but also oddly joyful, like a convict tiptoeing away from prison—as he crossed the patch of cracked blacktop that separated his car from the back entrance, his heart hammering against his rib cage the way it always did at moments like this, the blood roaring so loudly in his ears that it drowned out the panicky whimpers of his conscience. It was one of those things that hadn’t changed with age: he’d felt just like this at sixteen, buying a bag of pot in the high-school bathroom, and at twenty-one, ducking into XXX World, the sleazy “Adults Only Boutique” out on Route 27. The same heady mixture of exhilaration and dread had raced through his veins at thirty-two, the first time he’d cheated on Allison, and again two and a half years ago, when he shook off a host of doubts, and stepped through the doors of the Tabernacle, a sinner hoping to be cleansed. It was impressive in its way, this lifelong ability to forge ahead in spite of his better judgment, to wade into one sticky situation after another with his eyes wide open.

  Inside the Homestead, he hesitated for a few seconds at the end of a short entranceway, grappling with a sharp sense of disappointment. When he’d seen the old-fashioned neon-martini-glass-sign from Lorimer Road, he’d imagined a dim, smoky bar, the kind of place where a man could skulk anonymously in a corner, nursing his shame to a sound track of Sinatra and George Jones. But that, he realized, was the movies; this was Stonewood Heights on a Tuesday night. The place was bizarrely well lit, the air disconcertingly fresh—the statewide smoking ban had been in place for over a year—and there wasn’t a jukebox in sight, just a half dozen TVs strategically deployed throughout the room, all of them playing ESPN with the sound off. A handful of patrons were stationed at the bar—one youngish guy in a suit was tapping away at his laptop—and a few others were shooting pool, and damn if every last one of them didn’t swivel their heads more or less in unison and stare at Tim with the same look of hungry welcome in their eyes, as if maybe he was gonna be the one to finally liven things up a bit around here.

  “Come on in,” the bartender called out. He was a chunky, friendly-looking guy with a goatee and a green-and-white-striped apron tied around his waist. “We don’t bite.”

  Tim returned the smile and took a couple of steps forward, into the light and back in time, before suddenly remembering who he was, whirling around, and fleeing for his life.

  CARRIE WAS in bed when he got home, watching Nancy Grace on the little TV on top of her dresser, a guilty pleasure she only indulged in when he was out of the house. Tim couldn’t figure it: wars, elections, and natural disasters barely made a blip on his wife’s radar screen, but if someone killed a family member, or a pretty teenager went missing on a tropical island, she was all over the case like Encyclopedia Brown, spending hours listening to windbag legal experts split hairs about a defense motion to limit discovery, or the significance of the fact that authorities were still calling the husband a “person of interest” rather than a “suspect.”

  Tim didn’t say a word or even raise an eyebrow, but Carrie grabbed the remote and turned off the TV the moment he entered the bedroom, before Nancy could finish explaining just how sickened and offended she was by this latest outrage against common sense and human decency.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

  “That’s okay. I know you don’t like her.”

  “Really, Carrie. Watch whatever you want.”

  She shook her head dismissively.

  “I wasn’t even paying attention.”

  “Whatever,” he muttered, unbuttoning his shirt. “Just don’t feel like you have to do it on my account.”

  “I’d rather talk to you anyway,” she said. “We’ve hardly seen each other all day.”

  This was true, though not unusual. Carrie started work an hour earlier than he did, so they rarely spent more than a few minutes with each other at the breakfast table, and dinner was equally dicey; they only managed a real sit-down-and-talk meal a couple times a week, on those evenings when Tim wasn’t working late, and neither of them had to rush off to Bible Study, soccer practice, band rehearsal, or a small group meeting.

  He pulled the change out of his pocket and dumped it into a glass jar on his dresser. When the jar got full, he gave it to Abby; there was usually close to thirty dollars in there by that point, a windfall that used to be a lot more exciting to her when she was younger, before her mother married a rich lawyer. Now it was just a
habit, more money she took for granted. He turned to Carrie.

  “Did you see the sandwich I left you in the fridge?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Sorry about the onions. I told the guy twice not to put them on.”

  “That’s all right,” she assured him. “I just picked ’em off.”

  She kept her eyes on him as he undressed, but as far as he could tell, it wasn’t for the purpose of admiring the relative flatness of his belly, or marveling at the way his middle-aged butt continued to resist the relentless claims that gravity made on flesh. Nor was she gazing at him with the kind of critical eye he sometimes turned on her, issuing mental demerits for the stubble on her legs, or the ominous plumpness of her upper arms, which were going to be a problem down the road if she wasn’t careful. It seemed to Tim that she barely noticed his body at all; she was just trying to get a reading on his mood, so she could adjust her own behavior accordingly. What she didn’t seem to understand was that her constant scrutiny affected his mood, made him annoyed with her and vaguely ashamed of himself, implying as it did that he was a sullen, difficult guy who needed to be humored and coddled for the sake of domestic tranquility.

  “So how was the group,” he asked. “Good turnout?”

  “The usual. We barely got to discuss the reading, though. We spent most of the night trying to cheer up Patty DiMarco.”

  “Her mother?”

  “The doctors thought she was responding to the medication, but she’s right back where she started.”

  “Poor Patty.” He tossed his dirty clothes in the hamper. “As if she didn’t have enough troubles.”

  “What about you?” Carrie asked. “Everything go okay?”

  “I think so,” he said, stepping into a pair of plaid pajama bottoms. “I had to eat a little crow, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

  She pondered him for a moment, smiling thoughtfully.

  “C’mere,” she said. “Let me give you a back rub.”

  “That’s okay.” He still hadn’t gotten around to notifying her of his decision to put their sex life on hold for the time being. “It’s kinda late.”

  “It’s no trouble.” She pursed her lips, a pouty little girl. “You seem tense.”

  “Really, Carrie. I’m fine.”

  She threw off the covers and stood up. She was wearing a sleeveless white undershirt of his, tight enough to emphasize the fullness of her breasts, and a pair of tattered maroon gym shorts, also his. It was a cute look for her, much better than the long-sleeved flannel nightgowns that he’d found so depressing the first few months of their marriage.

  “Come on.” She took him by the arm. “It’ll feel good.”

  “Carrie, please.”

  “Let’s go.” She spoke firmly, a nurse addressing a skittish patient. “Lie down.”

  Tim was about to protest again, but he was distracted by the sight of her nipples pressing against the flimsy ribbed cotton of the undershirt.

  “All right.” He sighed. “But just a quick one.”

  He lay facedown on the bed—the sheets were still warm and fragrant from her body—feeling both annoyed and excited. A soft grunt escaped from his lips as she sat down on top of him, straddling his hips with her knees and settling the bulk of her weight directly on his ass.

  A full chapter in Hot Christian Sex was devoted to “The Loving Art of Marital Massage,” and Carrie had clearly given it some study. Her early efforts had been timid and ineffectual, but recently she’d become bolder and more proficient, kneading and mashing his muscles with gratifying savagery.

  “Oh yeah,” he croaked. “Right there. Little higher.”

  “I can’t believe how tight you are. It feels like a bunch of tennis balls under your skin.”

  She took her time—Carrie was nothing if not patient—moving methodically down his back, karate-chopping his shoulder blades, digging her thumbs into the knotty channel along his spine. Ripples of calm spread through his body, filling the empty spaces where the tension had been. Sensing his relaxation, she lowered her mouth to his ear.

  “I was worried about you,” she whispered. “I expected you home a long time ago.”

  “I was just driving around,” he explained. “Trying to clear my head.”

  Her voice was warm in his ear.

  “Is everything okay? You haven’t seemed like yourself lately.”

  Tim felt a momentary urge to open up to her about his stubborn feelings for Allison, his close call at the Homestead, the sense he sometimes had that Jesus was losing interest in him, or vice versa, but it seemed like a shame, getting into a serious talk right now, when he was finally feeling loose and even a bit cheerful, so he clenched his butt cheeks and bucked his hips, not quite hard enough to knock her offbalance. She giggled and slapped his thigh.

  “Bad boy.”

  He did it again, and she laughed even harder. It was almost sad how easy it was to please her, like she was a little kid who just wanted a playmate. He bucked a third time, and she let out a whoop.

  “Yee ha!” she said. “Ride ’em, cowboy!”

  AS USUAL, Carrie fell asleep right after they finished making love, while Tim remained wide-awake beside her in the dark. Allison used to complain about the speed with which he dozed off after sex (at least on those nights when he wasn’t all coked up); she was one of those women who believed that a heart-to-heart postcoital conversation was as essential a part of the experience as a cigarette in an old movie, as necessary on the back end as foreplay was on the front. Tim, on the other hand, didn’t mind at all now that the roles were reversed. As comforting as it was to have Carrie curled up beside him, making the soft strangling noise that was the closest she ever came to snoring, it was a relief not to have to talk, to be able to follow his thoughts wherever they felt like drifting.

  Not that they were drifting all that far. His mind remained pretty firmly anchored on those few bewildering seconds he’d spent inside the Homestead Lounge, peering dumbly over the lip of the abyss, as if he didn’t know exactly what kind of misery was down there at the bottom, as if he hadn’t spent the last three years of his life dragging himself out of it.

  Something had made him turn away before it was too late, but what? It would have been nice to say that Jesus had come to his rescue, or that he’d heard Pastor Dennis’s voice crying out to him, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like pure chance. If the bar had been darker, or a good song had been playing, or a pretty woman had been sitting next to an empty stool, the night might have gone in a completely different direction.

  Where were You, Lord? he wondered. Why didn’t You stop me?

  He knew what Pastor Dennis would have said. He would’ve said that Jesus had better things to do—sinners to save, sick children to heal, a world of hurt in desperate need of His love. He didn’t need to be wasting His time telling people things they already knew, or helping them do things they were fully capable of doing on their own. And if a man like Tim—a warrior for Christ—wasn’t strong enough to keep himself out of bars, then maybe he’d never accepted Jesus into his heart in the first place.

  But I did, Tim thought. And You helped me. Don’t give up on me now.

  He would’ve been a little less freaked out if he’d had a clearer sense of what had brought him to the Homestead. It seemed obvious to him that Ruth Ramsey was at least partly responsible, but it was hard to say why. He’d said good-bye to her feeling pretty good about their meeting. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do—she’d accepted his apology and assured him that she wasn’t going to make any kind of official fuss to the Soccer Association—without experiencing any embarrassment or unpleasantness. She hadn’t insulted him, or made him grovel, or taken any cheap shots at his religion, with the possible exception of that one weird comment about Cat Stevens, and even that made a certain kind of sense once she explained it.

  On the contrary, she’d been polite and friendly, and he’d enjoyed her company, though not in the way
he’d feared. He arrived at the house with his guard up, remembering how attractive she’d seemed at the soccer game, but now he had to wonder if that wasn’t some kind of illusion created by the sun and the blue sky, combined with the aura of scandal that trailed her wherever she went (the one other time Tim had seen her, she’d been standing before a school board meeting, issuing a grim, clearly coerced apology for making inappropriate sexual comments in the classroom). During their brief conversation at halftime, he’d been struck, not only by the weathered prettiness of her face and the surprising litheness of her figure—if he wasn’t mistaken, she’d looked a bit dumpier in the auditorium—but by something stubbornly girlish in her demeanor, a combination of feistiness and shyness that he’d found instantly appealing, and that only made it that much more mortifying when she started screaming at him at the end of the game.

  At her house, though, she seemed older and more ordinary, a forty-year-old woman with tired eyes and a melancholy smile, hardly the formidable opponent he’d expected. She didn’t express any anger toward him, just treated the whole prayer thing like an afterthought, nothing either one of them needed to worry about, and he was happy enough to follow her lead, to be absolved from the responsibility of having to defend what he’d done, or tell her what he knew to be true, which was that she needed Jesus just as much as he did, and that Maggie did, too. Because, really, who was he to dictate how anybody else should live their life, especially when he was a guest in her house, asking for a favor, and she’d been so nice to him?

  Pastor Dennis would have seen the work of the Devil in that, and maybe he had a point; after all, how could you be tempted into betraying the Lord with your silence if you felt scared or repulsed by the tempter? All Tim really knew was that the moment he left her house, he found himself overcome by a strange sensation of emptiness and defeat, or maybe just loneliness, a feeling deep in his heart that what he needed more than anything else was some good music, a stiff drink, and a little more time away from his wife.