The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  She pushed her chair back with a grinding sound—the kitchen floor was covered in a fine dusting of sand—and made like she was brushing crumbs off her knees. “Shit, man. Sounds like a thrill.”

  I spoke facing into the cabinets while I replaced the pot. “I tried that ‘living for work’ thing. You know, instead of ‘working to live.’”

  “And?”

  “At least this is clean. I don’t hurt anyone. I protect things no one wants to steal. I get the mornings free to go surfing before all the goons arrive. I get to sleep early. It’s nothing terrible.”

  She’d slouched in her chair and folded her arms. “I’m not one to judge,” she said, making a Vanna White wave along the length of her body, “not when I’m, well, as you can see. But you don’t have much of a fire lit under you, do you?”

  I winced inwardly. Outwardly, I tried to cover it with a sleepy smile. It must have looked off, because Cindy frowned. That had been my father’s phrase. My boy, he’d say, with the fire of God lit under him. Back when I’d been in love with the Lord and everyone else through Him. When I was the fresh, lily-white face of a rising church’s youth program. Before my sister, Ellen, died, before God—the tricky one, the mean and silent one, the one conjured by a sand-blown heap of Greek and Aramaic letters written and rewritten by how many hands, hands that had grasped and clutched, thieved and hit, groped and fucked, caressed and pulled away—before that God had become inscrutable, insensate, absurd. That fire was transmuted by doubt into something else. Something that led me to resent other people’s love and the way they continued to find something in prayer, that led me to drink, led me to tell my wife and daughter that I had nothing to celebrate, that none of us did, before a display of unopened presents and a birthday cake with my name scrawled on it in a five-year-old’s hand—that led me into another blackout across several days, a limbo of losing myself. Having a fire lit under me was the last thing I’d ever needed.

  “Extinguished,” I said.

  We looked at each other a moment. I thought I recognized something there, recognized her recognizing it in me. An intensity. A need to account. A failure to do so. She’d grown stiff and uncertain, was eyeing me in a different way—not just sizing up my usefulness or wondering to what degree she would laugh at the memory of me, this odd old man she’d crossed paths with, once she’d moved on. There was some glimmer of hope in that look, and a lot of loneliness. Then she leaned forward, cradling an invisible nozzle in her hand, and made the sound of fire-retardant foam streaming out toward me.

  “Alright, alright,” I said, waving the imaginary spray from my face. She stopped.

  “Nah, I’m just playing,” she said. “It’s all fine. ‘Working to live’—isn’t that everybody? At least, I don’t see anybody playing at it.” Her laugh was bitter, a little condescending. I recognized that, too.

  I nodded, finished the coffee, and rinsed my cup in the sink. “Okay, then,” I said, feeling exhaustion stretch itself out in my limbs. “I have to catch some sleep. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Try the TV at your own risk. Don’t run off with all my stuff. You’re not going to run off with my stuff, right?”

  She raised a hand like a Boy Scout. “Swear to God,” she said.

  “No, not Him.” I hadn’t said it meanly, but something must have come through in my tone. Cindy looked at me in confusion, a bit of that wary-dog look returning. “To me,” I said. “I’m the one paying attention.”

  5.

  HUNGRY AND BORED, I CAME BACK IN THE PREDAWN DARK AFTER wandering the sodium-lit corridors of the industrial complex I patrolled. The other guy I worked with had called in sick, and I avoided chatting with the subs. The house lights were out, so I put the key in the door silently, lifted on the knob, pushing in toward the jamb to ease the creak, and went into the living room. I expected Cindy to be sleeping on the couch, but I could sense in the darkness filling the room that no one was on it. That meant she had gone, maybe with an armful of my things, or that she was in my bed. One prospect was more uncomfortable than the other. Parts of me fought to decide which. I moved down the hallway, opened the bedroom door, and flipped on the lights. The bed was empty, the comforter as flat as the surf at La Jolla Shores in the summertime.

  Every room was devoid of signs of her. With the sense of emptiness came sadness. I didn’t know what kind of sad this was, but like all sadnesses it was complicated.

  Like all sadnesses, too, it was best dealt with by dulling the senses through gustatory self-hatred, but all I had were three frozen pizzas. I put one in the oven and then heard the sound on the patio. I couldn’t place it and stayed motionless to hear it more clearly: a muffled cough. The glare on the glass was too thick; I couldn’t see through it. I opened the door and stepped out, not knowing exactly what I’d find until my eyes dilated and my body recalibrated to the sudden lack of light.

  “He returns,” a voice said from the dark. “You do work the late shift, damn.” It was Cindy. Her voice had a rough-sanded quality, and there was a smell of clove cigarettes and the lower, swampier stink of burned tobacco brewing in still water. Her form was still black on just lighter black.

  “I thought you were a burglar.”

  “A pretty shitty burglar,” she said. “But I couldn’t get these chairs over the fence, and then they were just so damn comfortable. Maybe that’s something you should try at your job: make things so awesome that robbers just don’t want to leave.” She laughed a little too hard at her own joke, and something glass clinked.

  The backyard brightened as my eyes adjusted. The patio came into being, a series of nearly indistinguishable deep grays delineating the darker forms of the table and chairs, the lighter forms of concrete and skin—long, slender arms and bare calf where a pant leg of gray sweats had ridden up. There was a case of beer at her feet and one of my coffee mugs on the ground next to her that she ashed into.

  “I’ll see if we can swing pinball machines in all the buildings and let you know.”

  “And if you don’t put quarters out, you could even make a little money on it in the bargain.” She took a pull from the beer and waved her cigarette at the case. “Take one, sit down, relax.”

  I walked over and took one from the box. I should have said I was sober, that I had been for years, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat in one of the other chairs and twisted off the cap. The bottle was sweating, a nauseating not quite cold. It felt weighty in my hand, and the bready scent fired off something in my olfactory bulb that cinched my gut. I focused on the sensation of my hand warming the glass where I held it. That would help keep me from taking a drink—focusing on the hand and asking why it had decided it was a good idea to hold this, to pretend to a self. Cindy looked happy to have company. Bad hand, I thought. Bad rest of me.

  “So who’d you con out of the free beer?” I asked.

  Cindy giggled in a guilty, pleased way. “Yeah, sorry. I have money. I don’t normally go home with a guy I’d scammed lunch off of.”

  I nodded, not angry but more thinking about the beer going tepid in the bottle I held, the skunky flavor of it. My hand felt clammy. I tapped the bottle against the edge of the table. “Don’t go rushing for your wallet,” I said.

  “I’ll get you back,” she said, stretching her legs across the table in my direction. I could make out the follicles on her calf. “Tomorrow or something. I swear. Maybe it should be a burger and fries. You know, quid pro quo, an eye for an eye, all that bullshit.”

  “Maybe we should think about breakfast first,” I said.

  “Mm, breakfast. Yes. I’m definitely going to need some breakfast here soon.” She reached her arms above her head and arched backward over the chair until I thought she might tip over. The pale, sand-colored band of her stomach showed in the dim light. “Did you know you only get PBS on that junker of a television in there? All night, animals eating animals, stiff hosts who’ve lost the ability to modulate their voices, and the fucking British. Christ.”

  She was being c
harming. She knew she was being charming, was working that angle again. It made sense. She was good at it. But sometimes it made her seem like a drunk socialite trying to flirt her way out of a DUI arrest—like the rest of us were only so real. There was too much need in it, a touch of the desperate. But if I was being honest, that was the part that had me curious, more than the rest.

  “And speaking of Christ,” she continued, “why’ve you been playing the fool?” I thought of my soft-shoe in Angelo’s when I first met her, the small steps to build trust and get someone to accept help, which I could enact as if by muscle memory, the bottle in the sober alcoholic’s hand. But when she said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a thumper?” I was confused and a little relieved to avoid confronting those other things.

  She didn’t wait for me to respond, still playing out this routine she must have been running to herself while waiting for me to return. “I thought you might have been, with that joke about hell. But when you didn’t try to trade a joke and a burger for a new convert in your strip-mall pews, I figured I was being paranoid. Those books you’ve got, though! Systematic theology, the ‘historic’ Jesus, pastoral care and counseling, and sin and this, sin and that. . . . Christ, man. You’re the full-fledged, real-deal Bible thumper, aren’t you?”

  I almost took a swig from the beer without thinking about it but caught myself. “I thought I could trust you with my things.” The books were in the back room. She must have been snooping around.

  “I didn’t take any,” she said. Her voice was so loud I was worried about waking the neighbors. “Why would I want to? Lies and guilt trips is all that is. Besides, you never said anything about not looking at your stuff. Even that I could only do for so long. Just don’t try to Greg Laurie me, okay?”

  She seemed to know something about it, if Greg Laurie could be a verb in her vocabulary. Still, I didn’t like her imagining me mounting a one-man, run-down Harvest Crusade out of my kitchen. “I’m nothing like that,” I said. “I barely believe in breakfast, and those are old books. Haven’t read them in fifteen, maybe twenty years.”

  “It’s cool,” she said. “Let your freak flag fly. I used to be a Jesus freak, too, so I get it. But just don’t come at me with it. I’d be gone in a minute. I’d rather sleep in a ditch.”

  “I don’t believe in anything. I have nothing to push. I’m reformed, as they say.” Unformed was a better phrasing of it: to have removed all traces of that structure that my parents had poured my childhood being into, the tower I’d built up from that poor, sand-soft foundation.

  “Why keep the books?” she asked. “I would have made a bonfire from them and roasted marshmallows over the embers.” She smacked the table with a palm for emphasis, and the inset glass rattled gratingly in the frame. It was getting broad, her reaction, and it made me want to go small—but I didn’t think it was insincere.

  “Sentimental reasons.” I considered leaving it at that but figured it didn’t matter—she’d already found the books. “I used to be a pastor. This is a long time ago. And when I gave it all up, God and the job, I said goodbye to a lot of people. A lot of the books were gifts. Some from my parents. They’re dead.” Now that I’d started, I wanted to try to explain more: how the books had lost their luster and meaning, but the shell of them had retained some magic of the gifting, of the gift giver. But I couldn’t work it out in words just then.

  “Ah. Sorry?” she tried out, unsure of whether my parents’ being dead was a bad or good thing. She picked some felt off her pants. I realized I was clanging the bottle against the table a little too loudly, a little too frequently now. The neighbors really were going to squawk if we kept this up.

  “What brand were you?” she asked in a softer, more intimate tone, as if she’d read my mind.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Sect, denomination, flavor. You know.”

  “Pretty fundamentalist,” I said. “Bible based. Literalist. Conservative. Two degrees away from bombing abortion clinics. We called it love.” Even I had my stock phrases and scripted responses, a series of words that didn’t quite touch on who I had been.

  “Love. Right.” She worked her fingernail under the label on her beer bottle and began peeling it from the glass.

  I asked her if she knew something about that kind of love.

  “Masturbation,” she said. “The rub-up of hypocrites. That’s what I know about it. A big show of caring, which’ll go on and on until it actually costs them something.”

  There was some turmoil in her. I could recognize it like déjà vu, could feel it more in my chest than in my head. She wasn’t like the young people I’d counseled, the ones who struggled with doubt, with anger, with the unreasonable terms of their families and lives. Those people I’d tried to make see how they were still arguing with God, even when they turned away from Him. But with her, it was different. Maybe she was closer to me, not angry at God for anything He’d done or ordained but angry at Him for being a ghost, a figment, an illusion—angry at the minds of some indefinite number of prior selves who had been fooled by the movement always on the edge of vision, the feeling of being watched that never went away, that sense of a presence who granted the deepest wish: never to be alone.

  “Hm,” I said. “What was your brand?”

  “No special name. Pretty evangelical. The place was called Canaan Hills, if that’s any indication.”

  “Sounds like a housing development.”

  “Big rock-band worship services, mission trips and prayer retreats every few weeks, the whole shit show. It’s like living in Disneyland when you’re young.”

  “What happened?”

  “I stopped being young,” she said. “You figure out there’s a guy inside the Mickey suit. He’s a dick. He’s pulling down Ariel’s Lycra tail to fuck her in the mop closet on Tuesdays. He’s getting blown by Prince Eric in Monstro the whale’s mouth on Wednesdays. The Queen of Hearts is a full-blown racist. Goofy’s a dog, which means he doesn’t have a soul and is going to hell. So there’s that. And the food just makes you fat and sick and broke.”

  I let her see my smile at that. It was shtick, a script she’d learned to slip into conversation as a spontaneous and charming rant. Who was I to judge? But also, who was I to pass up a chance? The rote patter showed she’d told this before, and the pleasure she took in it wasn’t just about getting a laugh. No, she relished talking this way, which meant it wasn’t too long ago that she would have registered saying these things as blasphemy. There was still enough rebellion there, a turning away that she wanted someone or some idea of something to see and be dismayed by. Talking about Disneyland was pure Californian. That’s all we can do. It’s our foundational experience. The first time I saw fireflies I couldn’t stop thinking it was nearly as good as seeing their twinkle-light cousins while knocking down the lazy river on the Pirates of the Caribbean. But the rant also showed her youth, which was something I kept losing track of with her leg stretched out before me.

  I said “hm” again.

  “What did it for you?”

  “That’s between me and the God that doesn’t exist,” I said. It was her turn to laugh. She didn’t. Maybe she smiled. I couldn’t tell.

  A light offshore wind began to blow, filling the silence with the tittering of dry leaves in the trees. I didn’t want to talk about the dark days, days when I drank in hopes of dying. When I regained something like consciousness in the middle of shouting at my wife or throwing every article of clothing my family owned out the window of our second-story apartment. I didn’t talk about how, for the longest time after, I’d missed believing, felt it pulsing sometimes like a phantom limb working its way around the inside of my rib cage.

  Her stomach growled, and I remembered the pizza in the oven. “Let me get you something to eat,” I said, and went inside. It wasn’t quite done, so I waited in there a couple minutes, still holding the beer bottle in a kind of death grip. Then I poured it down the sink and watched a thousand bubbles foam and sputt
er and slide into the drain.

  I went back out with two plates and four slices. Cindy had pulled her heels up, wedged her legs against the edge of the table, and fallen asleep with her head on her knees. If she wasn’t a child, I didn’t know what was.

  So I set the plates on the table and moved to lift her, putting an arm behind her back and the other under her knees. As soon as I touched her, her body scrabbled upright. One arm caught me, hard, on the head, and I stepped back quickly, holding my hands up.

  “I was just bringing you inside,” I said.

  She wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t know where she was looking. Her breathing was deep and fast. She began slowing it by force of will. “Okay,” she said. She was holding the arms of the chair like the ground had just shifted sideways.

  “You fell asleep,” I said. “I thought you’d want to sleep on the couch.”

  She kept looking right through me. “Okay,” she said again. “It’s okay. I believe you.”

  “Sorry. Look, take my bed tonight. I can do the couch.”

  “No,” she said. “No, the couch is fine.”

  “Really—”

  “The couch is fucking fine,” she said more forcefully.

  I felt thrown back into myself. I was trying to be kind, wasn’t I? I’d felt some fatherly affection there for a moment. And it had come across wrong, she’d taken it differently, and I felt lecherous, predatory. I had to admit—that was my phrase of choice, the habit of forcible admission, the practice of not letting an ill-fitted stone of thought go unturned, never wanting to forget the worms beneath—that since I’d met her I’d been thinking about sleeping with her. She was beautiful and lonely, and I was lonely, too, it turned out. I hadn’t intended to act on the impulse. Or, I had to admit, only would have if she made some definitive first move. But her reaction resonated with the buried intention, and I felt caught, accused, guilty.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her gaze shifted. She was seeing me now. But she also looked lost—truly lost—for the first time since I’d met her. “No,” she said. “It’s fine. You were just being nice.” She looked away and stood up.