The Abstinence Teacher
PRAISE FOR
The Abstinence Teacher
A
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle
,
Boston Globe, USA Today
, and
Publishers Weekly
bestseller
“Abstinence is really a gateway for Mr. Perrotta to tell a much bigger and more complex story about religious identity in America. … [A] deeply moving story of a man and a woman who see each other on opposite sides of a religious divide.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“With abstinence programs and disputes over what can be taught in schools regularly making the front page,
The Abstinence Teacher
hits on prominent social fault lines. This has become something of a hallmark for Mr. Perrotta, who has developed a knack for combining hot-button cultural themes with flawed and complicated characters. … While his stories bear the sheen of satire, they are actually sharp though compassionate investigations of human relationships. They can also be very funny.”
—
People Magazine
(four stars)
“A soul-searching comedy.”
—
USA Today
“A sad-funny-touching story that looks at the frustrations and perils of life in suburbia through darkly tinted, not rose-colored, glasses … pitch perfect ear for dialogue … moments of genuine hilarity… as readable as anything Mr. Perrotta has written, thanks to his easy, conversational prose.”
—The New York Times
“Fifty years after John Cheever turned a comic eye toward New England’s Wapshot Clan, Tom Perrotta reigns as a mischievous bard of the ’burbs for the twenty-first century. … Perrotta is an acute observer of social mores among the affluent middle class.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Perrotta’s balance of humor and pathos has no equal; he’s naughty and nice … he brings this world to life with a few strokes. He never condescends to modern suburbia—instead he mucks around its corners, opens closets, and reveals oddball secrets.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Confusion and regret are as much the subjects here as religious controversy. Ruefully humorous and tenderly understanding of human folly: the most mature, accomplished work yet from this deservedly bestselling author.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“In his timely suburban satire, Tom Perrotta implores: Let’s talk about sex … education. He resists giving firm answers to the thorny moral questions lurking in his material.”
—
Vogue
“For Tom Perrotta, suburbia is a place in which the rift between red and blue states is enacted on a single verdant, erotically charged battlefield … Perrotta finds entertainingly scabrous material in this setup.”
—Elle
“The comic tone is there in numerous laugh-out-loud moments, but Perrotta’s writing displays wisdom, too. … His books combine profound ideas and readability in a way not often seen.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“Over the course of five novels and a collection of short stories, Tom Perrotta has laid claim to the prime real estate of upwardly mobile suburbia, hilariously probing its leafy, soccer-obsessed, McMansion-lined streets. … [G]enerous, amusing, shocking, thought provoking, and more than a little familiar.”
—The Miami Herald
“The Abstinence Teacher
is certainly Perrotta’s most sensitive novel to date … tender, witty, and wise.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A startlingly relevant and stunningly perceptive examination of the evangelical takeover of American exurbia … a hilarious and tender story about faith, divorce, and parenthood that also manages to contain our panoramic drama in miniature.”
—
Men’s Vogue
“Eloquently written, Perrotta hits a chord by giving readers a riveting look at the angst and sexual tension that can polarize people as they struggle to weigh their personal wants with societal standards. … Perrotta weaves a masterful satire that is sure to make readers stop and think.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“Undeniable power … Perrotta—like satirists since ancient Rome—attacks excess, hypocrisy, and intolerance wherever he finds them. … His two souls, lost in confusion, reach out in the darkness. What they find surprises them both.”
—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Perrotta spins another perceptive take on modern life with this strong novel … Perrotta’s observations are at all times unsparing.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“What keeps the book from getting too heavy-handed, besides the sharply written humor, is the fact that Perrotta makes his evangelical Christian protagonist less of a zealot than the atheist … his characters are older and have had the shine rubbed off them. As a result, they’re ultimately more satisfying to be around.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Perrotta, as always, is deft and sure with his satire … Perrotta still manages the incipient romance with charm and humor.”
—Daily News
“The novel is wicked and witty yet infused with compassion for the characters.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“Perrotta, who proved himself adept at reconciling dichotomies in the smart novel
Election
and
Little Children
, its deeper, darker successor, gets this unlikely couple together with maximum intelligence, minimum melodrama, and a sharp, funny sense of irony. … It’s also very tartly written.”
—The Denver Post
Also by
Tom Perrotta
Little Children
Joe College
Election
The Wishbones
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies
FOR JOE GORDON
Acknowledgments
Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise
.
—PROVERBS, 19:20
In the course of writing this book, I’ve been lucky to receive invaluable advice and instruction and assistance from Maria Massie, Elizabeth Beier, Dori Weintraub, and Sylvie Rabineau—my gratitude to them all. Carol Luddecke of the Lentegra Mortgage Group provided me with an insider’s perspective on the mortgage business. My friends Mark Dow and Kevin Pask were intrepid companions at a Promise Keepers’ weekend in Baltimore. As always, though, my biggest debt is to my wife, Mary Granfield, and to our kids, Nina and Luke, who give me lots of good reasons every day to abstain from work and have a little fun.
And if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck
.
—THE GOSPEL OF MARK
PART ONE
Some People Enjoy It
Miss Morality
ON THE FIRST DAY OF HUMAN SEXUALITY, RUTH RAMSEY WORE A
short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn’t have worn on a date—not that she was going on a lot of dates these days—let alone to work. It was a small act of rebellion on her part, a note to self—and anyone else who cared—that she was not a willing participant in the farce that would unfold later that morning in second-period Health & Family Life.
On the way to homeroom, Ruth stopped by the library to deliver the grande nonfat latte she regularly picked up for Randall, the Reference Librarian, a fellow caffeine junkie who returned the favor by making the midday Starbucks run. The two of them had bonded several years earlier over their shared revulsion for what Randall charmingly called the “warmed-over Maxwell Piss” in the Teacher’s Lounge, and their willingness to spend outlandish sums of money to avoid it.
Randall kept his eyes glued to the computer screen as she approached. A stranger might have mistaken him for a dedicated Information Sciences professional getting an early start on some important research, but Ruth knew that he was actually scouring eBay for vintage Hasbro action figures, a task he performed several times a day. Randall’s partner, Gregory, was a successful real-estate broker and part-time artist
who built elaborate dioramas featuring the French Resistance Fighter GI Joe, an increasingly hard-to-find doll whose moody Gallic good looks were dashingly accentuated by a black turtleneck sweater and beret. In his most recent work, Gregory had painstakingly re-created a Parisian café circa 1946, with a dozen identical GI Jeans staring soulfully at each other across red-checkered tablecloths, tiny handmade Gauloises glued to their plastic fingers.
“Thank God,” he muttered, as Ruth placed the paper cup on his desk. “I was lapsing into a coma.”
“Any luck?”
“Just a few Russian infantrymen. Mint condition, my ass.” Randall turned away from the screen and did a bug-eyed double take at the sight of Ruth’s outfit. “I’m surprised your mother let you out of the house like that.”
“My new image.” Ruth struck a pose, jutting out one hip and sucking in her cheeks like a model. “Like it?”
He gave her a thorough top-to-bottom appraisal, taking full advantage of the gay man’s license to stare.
“I do. Very Mary Kay Letourneau, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“My daughters said the same thing. Only they didn’t mean it as a compliment.”
Randall reached for his coffee cup, raising it to his lips and blowing three times into the aperture on the plastic lid, as though it were some sort of wind instrument.
“They should be proud to have a mom who can carry off a skirt like that at …” Randall’s voice trailed off diplomatically.
“…
at my age
?” Ruth inquired.
“You’re not that old,” Randall assured her. “And you look great.”
“Lotta good it does me.”
Randall sipped his latte and gave a philosophical shrug. He was a little older than Ruth, but you wouldn’t have known it from his dark curly hair and eternally boyish face. Sometimes she felt sorry for
him—he was a cultured gay man, an opera-loving dandy with a fetish for Italian designer eyewear, trapped all day in a suburban high school—but Randall rarely complained about the life he’d made for himself in Stonewood Heights, even when he had good reason to.
“You never know when opportunity will knock,” he reminded her. “And when it does, you don’t want to answer the door in a ratty old bathrobe.”
“It better knock soon,” Ruth said, “or it won’t matter
what
I’m wearing.”
Randall set his cup down on the Wonder Woman coaster he kept on his desk, next to an autographed picture of Maria Callas. The serious expression on his face was only slightly compromised by his milk-foam mustache.