by Trish Ryan
“He’s single,” Will told me one night.
“Who is single?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know the relationship status of every other male member of our church.
“Steve,” Will replied, humoring me. “You know, the guy who matches the description of ‘your type’ to a T?”
“He’s single?”
“Yep. He’s single. His mother keeps asking him when he’s going to find a wife. Did I mention that he plays hockey? You like hockey, right?”
Despite Will’s good-natured teasing, I was determined to remain indifferent, to keep my pearls to myself rather than tossing them out to be trampled. I remembered the wise words my friend Deidre’s grandmother told her about how a girl should guard her heart: “Remain cool,” Grandma advised. “Not hot, not cold, but cool. Let a man make his intentions clear to you; until then, keep your feelings, and your heart to yourself. Don’t give yourself away.” I’d never exercised this much restraint in my life, but this time I was determined to heed her wise words and lie low. When you send the right guy, Lord, I prayed, let him make his intentions clear. Protect us from ambiguity. If he’s Your man, let him make the first move toward me, and let him want the type of relationship You created us for—exclusive, devoted, contemplating marriage. Don’t let me get all worked up again over the wrong guy.
STEVE BECAME a regular in our group that summer. Little pieces of information leaked out about him as the weeks went by: he’d grown up in Cambridge, he worked for a biotech company, he had season tickets to the Red Sox (back when they hadn’t won a World Series in eighty-six years and only genuine fans still cared). He’d been raised by an Italian mother he adored, and had turned to Jesus after September 11 convinced him that something bigger was going on in the world, making him anxious to be, as he put it, right with God. The more we got to know him, the more I struggled to maintain the facade that my interest was merely that of a conscientious small group leader. I felt like Steve was a special exhibit—a sample, so to speak—sent by God to show me that He still had some good guys up his sleeve. But everyone knows that you don’t get to take home the sample.
One night at church, one of the associate pastors offered to pray for the singles, asking God to bring us awesome spouses and great marriages. Amy and I scrambled over the chairs to get to the front, grinning at each other and trying not to laugh. We were expecting our husbands to arrive at any moment; this seemed like a move in the right direction. As we gathered in a corner, Steve appeared next to me, his tall frame blocking my awareness of everything around us.
“Weren’t you dating someone?” he asked, looking at me with a puzzled expression.
“I was,” I blurted, “but I’m not married . . .”
“Oh. I guess that’s true,” he responded.
Just as I started to clarify my single status, Pastor Val began to pray for us; I gave up and closed my eyes. I’ll tell him when we’re done, I reassured myself. But when Val finished and I opened my eyes, Steve was gone.
After that night, it seemed like Steve was everywhere—sitting in front of me in church, next to me in small group. We had tiny moments of connection—we both read the same online devotional each morning, and Steve brought me a hardcover copy as a gift. We talked about hockey and living in New England, and how hard it was to pray before work when small group kept us up late the night before. In any other context, this would be flirtatious banter, and I’d have dropped hints about how fun it would be if we could get together sometime to talk more, “grab coffee,” as the standard non-date suggestion went. But I didn’t suggest. Steve was polite and attentive, but that’s it. Our conversations were the model of Christian propriety, the perfect supportive, platonic dialogue between a brother and sister in Christ. That’s all this is, I told myself firmly. Stay cool. Over and over, Steve wandered into my thoughts, and over and over, I cast him out, thinking about the latest antics of my adorable nephew or the cute earrings I’d seen at Target. I was tired of conducting relationships in my mind, of living in a fantasy world with no real participation from the subject of my daydreams. Please God, help me stop this, I prayed. I can’t handle getting hurt again.
HE WAS ONLY twenty-nine, I discovered. I was thirty-four. That pretty much settled it.
“CAN I TALK to you for a minute?” Steve asked one Sunday, grabbing me on my way into church.
“Sure,” I said, surprised. We stepped out of the stream of people and I looked up at him expectantly. “What’s up?”
“I just finished the Vineyard 201 class,” he said. “They told us to discuss the material with our small group leader—can you help me with this?”
“Sure,” I said, struggling to hide my disappointment. I was his small group leader—that’s all. “Let’s meet before service next Sunday.”
“Great! I’ll see you then.” He disappeared into the crowd and I ducked into the ladies’ room, fighting the urge to slam the stall door and hurl rolls of toilet paper against the floor.
Don’t make anything of this, I told myself the next Sunday. You are helping him with his class, nothing more. I didn’t dress up that day, not much anyway. And I used only a little extra lip gloss.
We sat down together in the school cafeteria (the gym was the church sanctuary, the cafeteria the all-purpose prayer and meeting room) and talked about some of the Bible’s suggestions for getting the most out of life. He seemed to have a handle on things—financially, emotionally—and I admired the way he talked about his family, his job, his friends. Remembering the coma advice I’d read in that book, I wondered what my life would be like if Steve were left in charge. If this conversation is any indication, I thought, my life might be better if I checked out for a bit and signed things over to him. Our friend Julie walked by as we were finishing, bemoaning a date that hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped. “He’s a Christian,” she moaned, “but let me tell you—that alone isn’t enough.”
As she left, Steve turned back to me and said, “Dating—wow. I don’t know how to think about that here in church, where even to start.”
Exasperated by months of comforting disappointed women who all thought the same few guys liked them (guys who made frequent vague gestures of interest but didn’t follow through), I let him have it: “Whatever you do, whoever you’re interested in, can I say on behalf of all the women at the Vineyard—please, ask her out. Don’t equivocate, don’t beat around the bush, don’t hint or ask her to some noncommittal event like coffee. If you like a girl, ask her out!”
Steve was quiet, eyes glued to the table. The air between us filled with a long, awkward pause as he gathered up his papers. Finally, he looked up at me and said, “In that case, I have something to ask you. . . .”
The next night my phone rang. It was Steve, with plans for our first date. “I thought we could check out the Rembrandt exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts on the day after Thanksgiving—how does that sound?”
How does that sound? I thought, incredulous. That sounds amazing. “Great,” I said, fighting to maintain my composure. “The MFA sounds great.”
I HEADED HOME for Thanksgiving with an odd mix of anticipation and dread. I despised Thanksgiving. No other holiday so highlighted my abject failure as an adult. Over the years, as my siblings added spouses and children to their lives and our gatherings, I’d shown up alone, taking back roads to avoid the one-dollar toll in New Hampshire, with just enough gas in the car to get me home. It was pathetic. My boyfriends had never invited me to join their families for turkey and stuffing (except for Jewish Jon who relished the chance to shock his mother)—it had always been the day when I’d realize once and for all that me and Mr. Man of the Moment weren’t building any sort of a future together. This was why I didn’t want to tell my family about Steve: it was too embarrassing. I’d done this so many times before, regaling them with news of some new guy who just might be the one. My sister even joked that she might put together a slide show of all the men who’d sat on my parents’ couch, then disappeared into
the ether, never to be heard from again: Chip, Josh, Tim, the Bobs, Drew, Mark . . . the list went on and on. When we were growing up, my dad always heralded our young breakups with the declaration, “He’s in the book” (presaging, perhaps, this very memoir). By all accounts, my book was a little thick.
But I thought about our upcoming date all day on Thursday, secretly wondering if this time, things might turn out differently. We’re going to the Rembrandt exhibit! I thought over and over again. I loved the sound of it—so sophisticated, so interesting. I’d always wanted to be the kind of girl who caught the important exhibits when they came through town. I wasn’t—in truth, I hadn’t been to the MFA since a field trip in the seventh grade—but I wanted to be. I felt like Cinderella, like my life might be transformed by magical things to come. Which means, I reminded myself, that this could all disappear at midnight, and I’ll be back toiling in the embers of a burned-out fire.
“HI,” I SAID, opening the door for Steve the next day.
“Hi. This is for you.” He handed me a flower—a single, perfect, gerbera daisy.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling. “Come on upstairs. Let me find something to put this in and then we can go. This is Kylie, by the way,” I added, pointing to my beloved pup, who was spinning madly in anticipation, hoping Steve would pet her. “She’s our resident guard dog, but it seems like you’ve passed muster.” I left the two of them together in the living room and searched frantically through the kitchen for a vase of some sort. We’re not really a fresh flowers kind of household, I realized, finally sticking the flower in a plastic iced tea bottle pulled out of the recycling. I promised myself I’d find a better home for it that evening, once I knew for sure if there would be a second date.
I walked back to the living room and found Kylie sprawled on the floor with her paws in the air, reveling in the attention as Steve scratched her belly. She doesn’t do that for everyone, I observed, remembering the guys she’d snubbed over the years—backing away from them, growling, even stealing food off their plates when they weren’t looking. Score one for Steve, I thought.
I grabbed my coat and we headed out to the car. Steve opened the passenger door for me with an easy nonchalance, not making too big a deal out of it. Chivalrous, but not obnoxiously so. Nice. I glanced around for clues to his personality. The car was clean, but not so perfect as to hint at anal retentiveness. There was no overpowering scent of a “Spicy Vanilla” or “Razzy Raspberry” air freshener masking smelly habits; it just smelled like car. I looked at his CDs and saw Dave Matthews and Blues Traveler—music I had in my own collection. By the time Steve settled into the driver’s seat and fastened his seat belt, I was cautiously optimistic.
“I preordered the tickets,” he said as we walked into the museum, pulling them from his wallet and leading me past the crowd surrounding the main counter. A man renting tape recorders came toward us, giant black machines swinging awkwardly around his neck. “Do you want a taped version of the tour?” Steve asked.
“Not really,” I said, “I don’t really like them. It feels too much like the machine puts you in your own little world so you can’t talk about what you see.”
“I feel the same way,” he agreed. “I want to know what you think, not the expert on the machine.”
We toured slowly through the exhibit, laughing and talking as the crowd jostled us together. Several of the paintings were biblical—portraits of Jesus, Mary with her cousin Elizabeth when they were both pregnant, different scenes from the Gospel stories. There was no choice but to talk about Jesus, which felt weird on a first date, in such a public setting. Why is that? I wondered. I used to talk about astrology everywhere—bars, at the gym, with random people on the subway. I didn’t care if people thought I was crazy. But here I am on a date with a guy I met at a Bible study, surrounded by pictures of Jesus, and suddenly I’m waxing poetic about Rembrandt’s use of color?
I leaned down to make out the details of a tiny drawing, called something like Farmer at Home with His Wife in the Afternoon, as Steve looked over my shoulder. Then I realized that the farmer was in bed with his wife that particular afternoon, his head buried between her meaty thighs. “Wait until I tell my friends you took me to a porn exhibit for our first date,” I teased Steve, trying not to blush. “So much for your Mister Nice Guy image.”
“We’ve seen nine hundred pictures of Jesus—no fair focusing in on the happy farmer,” he countered, laughing and following behind me. “Besides—the farmer was taking some time off to be with his wife—isn’t that what the Bible instructs husbands to do?” The way he handled this awkward situation was impressive—not making too big a deal of it, not dwelling on it or making lewd comments. He dismissed it with a casual joke, then moved on. Classy. I smiled at him, wondering what would happen next. Hyperaware of his every gesture, I waited for him to take my hand, or put an arm around me. Resisting the urge to lean into him, I tried to focus on what I saw: self-portraits, copper etchings. Steve stood beside me, so close our arms brushed from time to time. By the end of the exhibit, I was exhilarated, and not by the intricacies of great European art.
After the museum, Steve took me to a restaurant that had been a Cambridge landmark for almost a century. It was comfortable—not too showy, but a significant step up from the Golden Arches. When the waitress brought our dinners, Steve looked at me before touching his plate. “Shall we pray?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, melting into my seat. He says grace! I screamed inside, trying to hide my glee.
“Lord, thank you for Trish, and for our time together. Thank you for this food. Bless our conversation, bless this meal to nourish our bodies, and bless the hands that made it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
“Amen,” I echoed, smiling like a three-year-old at Christmas. He thanked God for me! No one had ever thanked God for me before, except maybe my mom and dad.
We chatted through dinner, about family and school and church and art. When the bill came, Steve grabbed it, waving off my offer to contribute. And on the way out to the car he reached for my hand, weaving his fingers with mine and assuring me that I was indeed on a date.
“Would you like to come up for a few minutes?” I asked as we pulled in front of my house.
“Sure,” he said, putting the car into reverse and maneuvering into a tiny spot. Kylie greeted us at the door, and we sat down on the couch to talk. Before I knew it two hours had passed, and my admiration for him had completed its journey from cautious optimism to warm delight. I listened hopefully for some suggestion of a second date. Don’t force it, I told myself. The ball is in his court.
“I should get going,” Steve said, rising from the couch. “I have to help my friend paint his new house tomorrow—his wife is pregnant, so we have to get everything squared away so they can move in before the little one comes along.”
“I’ll walk you out,” I said, disappointed. I admired his willingness to help a friend, but if he was interested, wouldn’t he want to spend more time with me? (It was a few weeks before I understood that in Christian circles, a guy leaving early can indicate that he’s exceptionally interested in you, and knows to leave because he can’t do anything about it until you get married.) I leashed Kylie up for her evening walk and followed him down the stairs.
“I had a great time today,” he said, turning to face me on the sidewalk and pulling me close for a hug. He smelled warm, like a blend of shaving cream, fabric softener, and testosterone Kristen used to call “good boy smell.” Steve has good boy smell in spades, I thought, breathing deeply. That’s when he tilted his head until his lips touched mine. His hands encircled my waist; I rested mine on his shoulders, and we fell together into a series of soft kisses that made the streetlights around us blur.
Fast-forward one hour: we were still standing there, still kissing. My roommate came home from work, went to the gym, and returned again. Kylie climbed back up on the porch and lay down, realizing that her walk wouldn’t be happening anytime soon. It started to rain,
and still we stood there, talking and laughing, enjoying the best ending to a first date I could have imagined.
“Can I see you again tomorrow?” he asked, kissing me one more time.
Chapter Twenty-two
What If Jesus Dated?
And just like that, I had a boyfriend. We watched a movie at his place the next night, and sat together that Sunday at church. He shoveled out my car after snowstorms, opened doors for me when we went out, and called after work to see how my day went. He made plans with me weeks in advance for New Year’s Eve. It was like a dream come true, as our dates spilled out over the following days like they’d been predestined since the beginning of time.
As I got to know Steve, it was clear that if I fell into a coma, Kylie would be safe in his hands. He told me, bit by bit, how his life had changed over the past few years: he’d lost seventy-three pounds, moved from a job selling sneakers to a salaried position for a biotech company, started following Jesus, stopped smoking pot. I realized that if we’d met ten or five or even three years earlier, it wouldn’t have worked—we weren’t the people we were now. I waited to stumble on to the awful part, the caveat or exception that would make him like the other men I’d dated. I was used to glossy surfaces hiding a mess underneath, so I fully expected Steve to look into my eyes one day and confess a criminal past or illegitimate children or underground mob involvement. Instead, on our way home from a Christmas party one night, Steve parked the car on my snowy street and leaned over to kiss me. After a minute, the windshield was covered in white powder, and we were ensconced in our own little world. Kissing my forehead, Steve looked into my eyes and said, “I am so in love with you.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say—I didn’t want to rush things or ruin what we had, and after all we had only been dating for one week. My brain went into a blur: I really did sort of like him, and some people might call that love, but not smart people, because smart people know you can’t possibly be in love after only one week, and I wanted to be a smart person, only I didn’t know what a smart person might say. I sat there, smiling at him, panicking. After what felt like an hour of silence, I opened my mouth, determined to deliver a neutral, safe response.