by Otto Penzler
“I’ll never forget you,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “But we were doing something wrong. We threatened both our souls. You have to understand—everything I believe tells me this is wrong. That we’re damned for it.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. “I’m doing this for us, Pete. I hope someday you can understand.”
He looked over her shoulder at the others in the shop, at the couples sitting across from each other, the people laughing at the counter or reading over class notes with their hands in their hair: all the world. He was about to become just another part of it.
“We love each other,” he told her. “I believe that. What you’re doing is a mistake. And I think you understand that already.”
She winced.
He stood. He thought about kissing her, once more, but he was angry, and he wanted, finally, to make his point, and he was tired and hungover and ready to weep. But the moment he walked past her—and again, when he stepped onto the sidewalk and zipped his jacket against the cold fall air, and with every step, and years later—he wished with all his heart he had.
He and Rachel had decided: Pete should confront the boy—whose name, which Rachel had finally written down, was Everly, Ben Everly—where he worked. The bookstore where she’d met him was too public. He lived with his family and couldn’t be approached there. And the golf course was a county away from Clarksville, where no one knew Rachel or Allen or their church. Pete had told her he’d played there, knew the place—if he went early Monday morning, he’d probably be able to get Everly as a caddie and have him alone anywhere on the course he wanted. And even if other people were around, Everly wouldn’t make a scene. Not where he worked.
“What should I do?” Pete asked her. “You don’t want me to—threaten him, do you?”
“No,” she’d said. “He’s a Christian, and he knows Allen’s a pastor.” Her face twisted with shame. “It won’t be hard to make him feel guilty.”
The next day, Sunday, Pete slept in, then woke and spent the better part of the day planning, all the while telling himself he was an idiot, that he’d never be able to pull this off.
Allen wasn’t even human. Pete had no idea what went on in his head, except maybe the turning of a few shiny gears. His insides were his outsides. He was tall, straight-backed, had a full head of hair. He’d spent all his life drenched in moral authority.
Pete was short, tubby, nearly bald. He couldn’t choose a soda from the refrigerator without due deliberation. Allen was a teetotaler; Pete was drinking himself into blackouts. Allen had the love of the world’s most perfect woman. Pete had lost her in the worst way, and a wife besides.
And how was he supposed to confront Everly? He wasn’t sure he could do it even if he was going as himself. Pete could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d ever raised his voice—and two of them were with Rachel. The only fight he’d ever been in he’d lost. A drunk had said something to Maya on one of their first dates, and Pete had swallowed hard and told the man—a reedy guy with a ball cap and a farmer’s tan visible even in the bar—to fuck off, and the guy had looked him over almost wearily. “All right, then,” the man had said, and had punched Pete so hard he nearly passed out. Pete scrambled for his legs, but the man kicked him in the gut and then left—maybe he was ashamed. Pete sat in Maya’s kitchen later, trying not to wince as she swabbed at the scrape on his cheekbone. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t want a bruiser.” She’d kissed him delicately on the tip of the nose.
What was he supposed to do to Everly? Make him feel guilty, Rachel had said. So was Pete supposed to open up a Bible and point out to Everly where he’d broken the rules? A ten-year-old who’d been to Sunday school could win that argument with Pete.
But the more he thought it through, the more he wondered if he wasn’t overthinking things. Everly didn’t know Allen. All he knew was that Rachel had a husband. That husband, if he showed up in person, only needed to be scary, hurt, aggrieved. A man who’d discovered a secret, who’d suffered a loss. That wasn’t that hard, was it? Pete looked himself over in the mirror. He pointed at himself, tried to keep his face stoic. “Quit fucking my wife,” he said.
His voice sounded soft already, like he was pleading. And had Allen ever cursed in his life?
No. But he might curse now. Let Everly know how serious things had gotten.
He deepened his voice. “Quit fucking—”
This was going to be a disaster.
Rachel had told him where Everly went to school; he looked up its Web site. Kirkwood Baptist Bible College and Seminary, in Worley, Georgia. The Web site showed a bunch of white boys in polo shirts smiling serenely at the camera. He read the information page for new students. Women had to wear skirts at least four inches below the knee. Men and women could speak in a dormitory room, provided the door remained open and the visitor logged in with the floor’s “upperclassman spiritual adviser.” All this, and then Mr. Ben Everly had found Rachel crying in his arms. No wonder it had happened quickly.
Pete dressed the part. It took more effort than he’d first supposed.
The clothing, at least, was easy. Golf clothes weren’t a hundred miles removed from good-Christian-pastor clothes, and he had an outfit already, from his yearly golf game with some of his old buddies from Purdue. He looked at his sorry old shoes and decided new ones were in order. Allen always looked fresh.
He went to a thrift store down the street and bought a crucifix on a thin gold chain—Allen, he remembered, had one that matched Rachel’s. He bought a gold wedding band, too. He’d thought of using his own, but—despite everything, despite the ridiculous tarnished mess of his marriage to Maya—he couldn’t do it. He heard her voice: Pete, I never thought you could get more spineless, but here you are. He slipped on the new ring—it was a little big, but wouldn’t slide past his knuckle. He turned his hand in front of the mirror. Only a month without his old one, and already the feel of the ring on his finger was alien, like a growth on his flesh he couldn’t help prodding. He shaved his stubble and dressed in his golf clothes. Should the crucifix hang out? No. Allen wasn’t ostentatious about it. Just a hint of chain at the neck.
The fact remained that he was bald and Allen wasn’t. And that was only one of a hundred ways in which Pete didn’t look a thing like Rachel’s husband. Allen had six inches on him, straight white teeth. He didn’t wear glasses. Rachel was sure this Everly kid had never seen Allen. But how did she know? The kid was obsessed, and Rachel was, even now, as naive as they came.
Pete ran another Internet search, this time on Allen. His church had a Web site, but no pictures were posted. Good, humble Allen Purcell—he’d emphasized the church and not his own face. But surely he’d been photographed somewhere. In the house? No—Rachel said she and Everly had only ever used a motel or the car. What if he’d looked in her purse? Their wedding picture had run in the paper. Maybe the kid had gone to the library, looked up the announcement, sizing up the competition. Pete would have.
But still—a photograph was different from flesh. And he’d have the advantage of surprise.
Pete settled on a cap. He also shaved the dense black fur off the backs of his hands and his forearms. Without the hair his arms looked spindly, sick. He’d still better wear a long-sleeved shirt, just in case. And, for good measure, he rushed down the street to a hairdresser. He caught them a half hour before they closed, and talked them into dyeing blond what little hair he had left.
“I’m an actor,” he told the stylist. “I need it to look pretty real.”
He and the stylist looked at himself in the stylist’s mirror; both of them, Pete thought, looked dubious.
“So is it for, like, a movie?” the stylist asked.
“A little independent thing,” Pete said. “For a friend of mine. Can you do the eyebrows, too?”
Pete went home and dressed and put on his new shoes and his cap and the crucifix. He looked at his white-blond eyebrows, the pale tufts just above his ears. He’d have to shav
e pretty close, but early in the morning he just might be able to pull off blond. He remembered Allen, in his tuxedo, waiting to be married. The knowing little smile on his lips. Pete stood straight. “I’m Allen Purcell,” he said. “And I know who you are.”
He tried the smile and had to admit he came close to nailing it.
After Rachel told him good-bye, Pete tried his best to forget her. He couldn’t, so he began to drink as heavily as he could. He kept away from the phone. Rachel lived on the other side of town, but all the same he stayed inside; he couldn’t bear running into her on the sidewalk. School was harder. He talked to the professor of the course he was taking with Rachel and explained that he was having an emergency and needed to drop it. He thought the professor looked as though she might know why, but she allowed it.
He called his ex-girlfriend, who listened to him for five minutes and said, “I’m hanging up, Pete.”
And—his worst moment—he ran into Daniel the violinist reading in the corner of a study lounge in the library. Pete, hands sweating, went up to him.
“I’m Pete Shumaker,” he said.
Daniel gazed at him. “I know,” he said.
Pete sat next to him. “I don’t need to know the details,” he said. “But how’d you get over it?”
Daniel stared at him for a while, his bald head gleaming under the bright fluorescents. With precision, with bottomless contempt, he said, “Get over what?” Then he closed his books and stood and walked out of the room.
By the time the semester ended, Pete had lost fifteen pounds. He’d taken up smoking. He’d met a newly divorced woman at a bar, and they sometimes met for sex that made him want to weep with distaste. The woman’s smell was wrong. Her hair was too coarse, her fingers too stubby. He caught her looking at him sometimes in a panic, probably thinking the same things. He took a job stocking supermarket shelves after midnight, which allowed him to sleep away the sunlight.
When Rachel called him in early July, he was sure he was imagining it.
“Peter,” she said, “I’ve missed you.”
He was lying on his bed, naked. It was four in the afternoon.
“I missed you, too,” he said, voice cracking. He was ready to tell her anything then. Whatever she asked of him, he’d agree to. He’d go to fucking church if she’d only hold him again. If she’d say his name one more time.
“I just—,” she said. “I’ll understand if you won’t, but—”
Yes. He’d take her back. Of course. He’d come and get her right now. They could go anywhere—
“You’ve meant so much to me. I wish I could see you at my wedding.”
He almost threw the phone across the room.
“Can we send you an invitation?”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Will Daniel be coming? He and I could share a room.”
She was silent. “Nothing happened with him,” she said softly. “Not like with—not like that.”
He began to weep. “You’re something, Rachel. Really something.”
“I want us to be friends,” she said. She was crying, too. “Remember—remember before? When we used to talk? That was—I’ve never had a friend like that—”
He covered his eyes.
“I was thinking it wouldn’t hurt us to—to talk on the phone every now and then.”
“Rach, I don’t know—”
“Can I at least send you an invitation?”
He had to get off the phone. Now. “Sure. Whatever you want. Good-bye.”
He hung up and screamed into his pillow. She didn’t call back.
The invitation came a few days later, typically complicated and lacy. He could just see Rachel, pouring all her energy into designing it, Allen nodding benevolently over her shoulder. The wedding was in two weeks, a few hours away in the hinterlands near the Kentucky border.
Rachel had included a handwritten note:
It’s too late to RSVP. But please know I miss you. You’re a good person, Peter. It breaks my heart that you think I’m unhappy. And that you’re not as happy as you deserve. Please come.
He looked over the note. Read it a hundred times, looking for coded messages. The woman he was sleeping with looked it over, too. “You should go,” she said. “If for no other reason than to bury her. Maybe you just need to see it end.”
That made sense. Or maybe he’d entered a state of mind which called for even more pain. A chance to find the bottom. He watched himself prepare as if in a nightmare. He booked a room at the hotel listed on the invitation. He drove home for his suit, still in the hall closet at his parents’. He set the alarm. He gassed up his car. He stopped in a grocery off I-74 and bought a card and signed it with a pen he found rattling in his glove compartment. He wrote on the envelope: For Allen and Rachel. He drove the interminable interstate and told himself the same thing he would ten years later, after another horrifying request: that he loved her, and this was proof. His gift to her.
He arrived at the church a half hour before the wedding. He knew only a few faces—some of Rachel’s churchy friends he’d met only once or twice at Purdue. One—in a pink bridesmaid’s dress—saw him and bolted. He sat down in a back pew, and then a few minutes later the same bridesmaid knelt next to him and squeezed his hand and said, “She’s so happy you came.”
What was he supposed to say? That he was happy for her? That he was glad he’d come, too? It was all he could do not to weep.
“Tell her I said hi,” he told the bridesmaid.
A few minutes later the music started. The groomsmen filed in. Pete watched as Allen took his place, ramrod-straight, followed in lockstep by his father and his carbon-copy brothers and friends from his college—all of them with identical haircuts and beatific smiles. All of them staring at the doors to the chapel, except for Allen. The disgusting fucker looked straight up. As though God was up there nodding, mouthing, You’re welcome.
And then everyone stood up, and Rachel was moving down the aisle, tidally slow. She passed Pete’s row, and he tried to see her face through the veil. Look at me, he urged. She didn’t.
The pastor actually asked the old movie question: Does anyone here know any reason… ?
Pete’s throat ached. His throat tightened, his mouth opened. But he couldn’t do it. He looked at his scuffed shoes throughout the rest of the ceremony.
He was sure he couldn’t watch them kiss—but he did; he watched Allen’s face descend, Rachel’s rise; he knew her body, her posture, well enough to see her melt into the kiss as the church applauded; he saw Allen’s eyes glitter. Because it was okay now. Because God had said, Go ahead. Pete wished Allen’s throat was collapsing under his thumbs.
They marched out of the church. Pete hung his head until they were gone.
Everyone in the chapel stood and began to file out. He realized then, with numbing panic, that he’d have to pass Rachel in the receiving line. And he couldn’t. He couldn’t. That was asking too much—even Rachel would have to understand that. He spotted an exit sign near the front of the chapel and shouldered his way down his row. “I’m going to be sick,” he told an usher—one of Allen’s brothers—and then fled for the doorway beneath the sign.
It let him into a hallway. He followed it, vision blurred, and, naturally, got lost; stairs led him down into a warren of hallways and rooms in the basement, where the air was thick with the churchy smells of old paper, varnish, bad punch. He found an empty room—where they taught Sunday school, from the looks of things—and sat in a child’s chair, knees to his chin. He’d wait until the place cleared and then sneak out. He’d drive back to West Lafayette that night. Maybe farther. Maybe he needed to go stare at mountains in Canada.
Forty minutes later he heard footsteps in the hallway outside. He sat still in the dark, watching the doorway, until he saw the silhouette pass—the wide shimmering bell of a dress, the shadow of a trailing veil. Her footsteps stopped down the hall; he heard, he thought—he knew—Rachel’s tears.
He almost believed then in
miracles. How could a bride slip so far away from the crowd upstairs, to so dark and secret a place, without being seen? The guests must have all left for the reception. Maybe Allen was holding forth, being worshipped, and she’d found a brief window. But she’d done it.
Pete found her sitting on a folding chair, just inside the open door of one of the side rooms—or rather, he saw the ruffled hem of her dress, her slippered feet crossed at the ankle and tucked under her chair.
He said her name, and she looked up at him. He could see her eyes in the shadows but not much else, though he knew, just by the angle of her neck, the expression that would be on her face.
“You didn’t go through the line,” she said. “I was watching for you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” he said.
She buried her face in her hands and shook.
He knelt in front of her, put his arms around her. He lay his cheek against her bare smooth shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing with her elbows. Her cheek was damp against his. She smelled not like her single, simple perfume, but rather hundreds—flowers and fruits and musks and her own astringent sweat—like she’d been ritually anointed, prepared for mummification or the bier. He felt her convulse, once, twice, a dozen times.
He knew then, but even so, even holding her, he had to convince himself it was true. Rachel knew she’d chosen wrong. She’d loved Pete more, after all. He rubbed his hands up and down the ruffled sides of her bodice, along her ribs, across the thin satin straps that crisscrossed her pale shoulder blades. He found the mole underneath her left shoulder with his thumb, felt its downy raised surface, stroked it.
He whispered her name to her, over and over.
She clung to him harder. He touched, delicately, the complicated pattern of her hair, settled for tracing a strand that waved artfully down in front of her ear.
And that was, he thought, when he lost her. It was easy to see now what she needed, why she’d ever been with him at all. It should have been easy to understand then. She had kept him close not just because she loved him, or because he loved her. That wouldn’t have been enough.