The Abstinence Teacher (11 page)

“That must have been scary for you.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’m glad it was you,” she said, rolling her neck in a lazy circle. She’d recently begun putting blond highlights in her hair, and he liked the way they glinted against the darker gold of her robe. He’d always enjoyed her hair; she used to tease him with it when they were making love, sweeping it across his face and belly like a broom, and she never complained if he pulled it when they were playing rough. “I woulda had a heart attack.”

The conversation flagged for a few seconds, just long enough for him to register the music playing in the background; it was the Dead, a live version of “Cassidy” he’d never heard before. He grunted with surprise.

“What’s this, a bootleg?”

“One of those Dick’s Picks,” she said.

“Since when do you—?”

“I always liked them,” she said, a bit defensively.

“News to me.”

“I appreciated the music. I just didn’t like all the drugs and craziness.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

She looked at him with what felt like real curiosity.

“You still into them?”

“Not so much. I’m trying to put all that behind me.”

“Must be hard.” She smiled sadly, acknowledging the depth of his sacrifice.

“A little easier every day.”

“Good for you.” She paused, letting Jerry finish a jazzy little run, that clean sunny sound no one else could duplicate. “So how’s Carrie?”

“Fine.” He didn’t like discussing his wife with Allison, though she was more than happy to discuss her husband with him. “Same as always.”

“Well, tell her I said hi.”

Tim nodded, feeling momentarily disoriented. Sitting across from Allison in this gorgeous kitchen, listening to the Grateful Dead on Sunday morning, it was easy to believe that this was his life—
their
life—a new improved version of the one he’d screwed up so royally. Abby was with them, and Mitchell and Logan and Carrie were just people they knew, and not especially important ones. It was such a convincing sensation that he had to make a conscious effort to remind himself that losing that life, painful as it was, had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. God had a plan for him, and it involved something more important than a big house and a beautiful wife and a happy intact family. He slid off the stool and pressed his palm over the lid of his coffee mug.

“I better be going,” he told her.

MOST OF
the time, Tim felt pretty good about his new condo—it was a two-bedroom townhouse with wood floors, central air, a gas fireplace, and Corian countertops—but it always struck him as cramped and dingy after he returned from Greenwillow Estates. Everything was all squashed together—the closet-sized half bath a step away from the front door, the kitchen table wedged between the refrigerator and the dishwasher, forcing you to turn sideways when serving or cleaning up. The furniture, which was perfectly nice, and not cheap by any means, seemed common and nondescript, and even slightly tacky, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on.

He had a similar reaction to Carrie, who was sitting on the living room couch, flipping through
Parade
magazine. With Allison fresh in his mind, she seemed paler and less vivid than usual, vaguely disappointing. He must have stared at her a moment too long, or with a
little too much intensity, because she put down the magazine and looked up with a worried smile.

“Everything okay?”

Fine.

“How’s Abby’s mom?” For some reason, Carrie insisted on referring to Allison in this way, and Tim could never quite decide if she meant it as a subtle dig or an expression of respect.

“Hard to say. I just stopped in for a minute or two.”

She nodded, keeping her gaze trained on his face, as if awaiting instructions. Though she was already dressed for church, he knew she was expecting him to take her by the hand and lead her up to the bedroom, the way he did on most Sunday mornings, taking advantage of this brief interlude—their first free moment of the weekend—between dropping Abby off and heading to church.

But Tim just stood there, hands jammed into his pockets, reminding himself of the promise he’d made to Pastor Dennis after Wednesday Night Bible Study, not to touch his wife until he cleared his head and purified his heart. Because it was deceitful and disrespectful, making love to Carrie after being aroused by Allison, turning one woman into a substitute for another.

“You look upset,” she said. “Can I make you some eggs or something?”

He shook his head, feeling a sudden wave of affection for her. Carrie was a sweet girl and wanted nothing except to make him happy. He stepped toward the couch and extended his hand, as if asking her to dance.

“Pray with me,” he said. “Would you do that?”

TIM AND
Carrie had been married for less than a year. Pastor Dennis had introduced them at a church picnic shortly after Tim had found his way to the Tabernacle and been reborn in Christ.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he said. “I think you’ll like her.”

Tim was pleasantly surprised when the Pastor led him over to the condiment table, where a folksingery blond was struggling with a big Costco bag of plastic forks, spoons, and knives that didn’t seem to want to open. Unlike most of the single women who worshipped at the Tabernacle, she was young and reasonably cute, with long straight hair and startled-looking blue eyes. In the strong afternoon sunlight, Tim couldn’t help noticing that her peasant blouse—a gauzy embroidered garment, the kind of thing pothead girls wore in the late seventies—was translucent enough that you didn’t have to strain to see the outline of her bra underneath, which was about as much excitement as you could hope for at a gathering like this. Her breasts were plump and pillowy, not what he normally went for, but he had to make a conscious effort to stop staring at them. He wasn’t proud of himself for behaving in such an ungodly way, but he’d been lusting after women since he was twelve, and it was turning out to be a harder habit to break than he’d expected.

Pastor Dennis relieved Carrie of the troublesome bag.

“You’re fired,” he told her. “Now get outta here. And take this guy with you, okay?”

Carrie smiled sheepishly at Tim, wiping the back of her hand across her sweaty forehead.

“Hey,” she said. “You’re the guitar player.”

“Bass,” he corrected her, momentarily distracted by Pastor Dennis, who was having no more luck with the bag than Carrie had. He was tugging at it with both hands, grimacing fiercely, like a man trying to rip a phone book in two.

“Gosh darn it,” he muttered.

“That’s really thick plastic,” Carrie warned.

With one final heroic grunt, the Pastor tore the bag asunder, unleashing a mighty cascade of utensils all over the table, including a few
knives that landed in a bowl of bean dip. Tim and Carrie tried to help him with the mess, but he shooed them away.

“I’m okay,” he insisted. “You two go and get acquainted. I bet you have a lot in common.”

THEY SAT
in the shade, drinking lukewarm soda, watching the kids tie themselves together in preparation for a three-legged race. The Tabernacle was a relatively new church at that point—it had only been planted for two years, after Pastor Dennis and a handful of disaffected families had split off from the Living Waters Fellowship in Gifford Township, which he accused of being “a namby-pamby, touchy-feely bunch of mealymouthed hypocrites who loved their cable TV better than they loved Jesus Christ”—so there were only about a dozen contestants in the race, ranging in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen.

On the whole, Tim couldn’t help thinking, they were an unprepossessing bunch, the boys scrawny and somber, the girls overdressed for such a hot day, visibly uncomfortable, nothing at all like the confident little jockettes Abby played soccer with. They stood at slouchy attention, nodding earnestly as Youth Pastor Eddie explained that sin was like a third leg, a foreign growth that hobbled us on our walk through life. If we could just cut ourselves loose from it, we’d run like the wind, with our Savior at our side.

It was an interesting metaphor, and it didn’t seem to spoil anyone’s enjoyment. When the first heat began, the little kids leapt forward, managing a few herky-jerky steps before squealing in alarm and toppling onto the grass with their partners. After a few seconds of hilarity, they untangled themselves, got up, and started over, dragging that extra limb around as best they could.

“You’ve had such an interesting life,” Carrie told him. “I haven’t done hardly anything.”

As far as he could tell, she wasn’t exaggerating. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, raised in a strict evangelical home, who hadn’t
gone to college or even lived on her own. She rarely dated, had no close friends outside of church, and spent her days running the office of a Christian insurance agent who was a friend of the family. The way she described it, the only act of defiance she’d ever committed was to follow Pastor Dennis to the Tabernacle, against the wishes of her parents, who’d stayed behind at Living Waters. It made sense that she’d be intrigued by Tim’s checkered past, especially the rock bands he’d played in when he was her age.

“That must have been incredible,” she said, as if he’d told her that he’d climbed Mount Everest or fought in a war. “I can’t even imagine.”

“It seemed like fun at the time,” he conceded. “But I was selfish. I hurt a lot of people.”

“But now you’re saved,” she told him. “So it’s okay.”

For a second or two, he wasn’t quite sure if she was putting him on. It happened a lot to him in his first few months at the Tabernacle, before he’d spent a lot of time with hard-core Christians. He’d gotten so used to hanging around with wiseasses, liars, and addicts that he was easily thrown off-balance when someone spoke to him in a forthright manner, without doubt or irony.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “But I’m carrying a lot of guilt around.”

He told her about Allison and Abby, and the regret he lived with every day.

“We lost a house,” he said. “I put the mortgage payments up my nose.”

“I’m a sinner, too,” Carrie told him.

He nodded, understanding that her intentions were good, even if what she was saying was pure bullshit—Christian boilerplate designed to make people like him feel a little better, a little less alone.

“You don’t look like a sinner,” he told her, glancing toward the field, where the second heat had just begun. The eleven-year-old Rapp twins, Mark and Matthew, were running in perfect unison, sprinting way ahead of the pack, as if their third leg were the most natural thing in
the world. Carrie laughed, a little more loudly than he expected, and touched him lightly on the forearm.

“Doesn’t matter what you look like,” she assured him. If he hadn’t known better, he might’ve thought she was flirting with him. “Matters what you do.”

THEY WERE
thrown together a lot in the weeks that followed, way more than could have been accounted for by mere coincidence. Pastor Dennis would invite him to dinner, and Carrie would be there, too, along with a couple of ringers, so it didn’t look too obvious. If he volunteered to paint the sanctuary on Saturday morning, it turned out that she’d signed up for the exact same shift. When he offered his Saturn to the Jesus Jam Festival car pool, she just happened to end up in his passenger seat. He understood exactly what was going on—there weren’t a whole lot of singles in the Tabernacle, and Pastor Dennis regularly warned them of the dangers of dating nonbelievers—so he tried, as politely as he could, to let her know he wasn’t interested.

The thing that baffled him was why a good Christian girl like Carrie would even
want
to get tangled up with a guy like him. Couldn’t she see he was damaged goods—a divorced father, a recovering addict, a musician who could have qualified for his own episode of
Behind the Music
, if only anyone had ever heard of him?

The flip side of his inability to see what was in it for Carrie was an all-too-clear awareness of what
wasn’t
in it for him. Because the sad fact was that, even now, after he’d accepted Jesus into his heart, turned his back on drugs and alcohol, and committed himself to walk in the light of the Lord, he still couldn’t manage to get himself all that excited about good Christian girls. Certain kinds of toothpaste, it turned out, were harder to get back into the tube than others.

Partly it was just habit—at least he hoped it was. The women he’d gone for in the past, Allison included, had been smokers and drinkers and sexual troublemakers, bad girls in tight pants who let you take
Polaroids, and laughed about the time they gave that cute stranger a handjob on the Greyhound bus, because it was a long way from Harrisburg to New York, and what else were you going to do to pass the time? It wasn’t that Tim wanted to be attracted to women like that, he just
was
, and it sometimes seemed to him that his sexuality had gotten so twisted over the years that he’d never be able to straighten it out.

The whole subject was so fraught and muddled that he didn’t even know where to start when Pastor Dennis took him aside after Sunday worship, about a month after the picnic, and asked him why he was being so cool to Carrie, when she’d obviously developed a deep affection for him.

“I—I … don’t know,” he stammered. “I mean, she’s a sweet girl and everything. But she’s just so young. It’s like we’re living on different planets.”

Pastor Dennis didn’t seem too happy with this response.

“You both love Jesus,” he said. “That sounds like the same planet to me.”

THE PASTOR
had a point, but it was a lot easier for Tim to mutter about the discrepancy in their ages than it was to tell him the truth, which was that he was involved in a strange and stupid affair with a married woman who was the complete antithesis of Carrie, and, sad to say, a lot more to his liking.

Deanna Phelan was an addiction counselor he’d met a few years earlier in what, for him, at least, turned out to be a spectacularly unsuccessful outpatient rehab program at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. She was his group leader, a cute, foul-mouthed woman who alluded frequently, and with great comic effect, to her own impressive history of chemical dependency and self-destructive behavior. She’d called a couple of times to check up on him after graduation, but he’d been too busy to call back; the day after completing the program, he’d done a triple back somersault off the wagon and embarked on the epic coke binge that
ended his marriage and ultimately brought him face-to-face with his Savior.