When worship ended, a man wearing a white button-down and a robin’s-egg blue tie had gone up on stage and declared that God was good, and then invited everyone to greet someone around them. Paul had thought it a safe moment to duck out to the bathroom, but on the way back to the sound booth, he had been accosted. Faces—faces he’d never seen before, coming up to him, welcoming him with big smiles, saying his name and telling him how happy they were to see him here. “So good to see you, Paul!” “Paul, I’ve heard so much about you from your mom. Wonderful to finally meet you!” It took all his self-restraint not to walk out of the building and head down the road toward his house, car or no car. “I tried, Mom,” he would tell her when she came home and found him in his bedroom, under the blankets. “I tried, but it’s just not going to work.” But he managed to escape back to his sound booth, and after the announcements, it was time for Pastor Eric’s sermon.
Paul had been ready to detest the patriarch of this pseudocult his mom had fallen into, when he met him yesterday. His mother had introduced them in the church parking lot. Eric Moyer was a good-looking middle-aged man with a warm smile and a gravelly voice that pleasantly offset his clean-cut appearance. When he had told Paul it was so great to finally meet him, it was hard to believe that he didn’t mean it. He had invited Paul to come inside to his office. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but he was surprised by the room’s stately elegance, with an oak desk and an Indian rug on the floor. It was surprisingly … normal.
The interview didn’t last long. Pastor Eric sat behind his desk and asked him a few questions about school and the city, which Paul was able to deflect with vague responses, and a few more about his proficiency with sound equipment and instruments, which Paul could be a lot more direct and specific about. Eric laid out the responsibilities of the job, which ranged from sound technician to roadie to all-around handyman at the church and VBS. He would also be expected to accompany the VBS on its end-of-program weekend camping trip in the Adirondack Mountains (a small detail that Paul’s mother had failed to mention). After making sure Paul was comfortable with the duties involved, Eric paused and then said, “Well, Paul, I’d love to give you the job. If anything, it appears you’re overqualified, and we’d love to have you here. But I do have to be honest and tell you that we’ve never had anyone work at New Life who hasn’t made a firm commitment to Christ and the church.”
Paul didn’t say anything. It seemed the wisest thing to do at the moment.
“Usually,” Pastor Eric continued, “we prefer them to be members as well. That being said, I know you’ve been going through a tough time recently”—Paul tried not to wince. How much had his mom told this guy?—“and I firmly believe that the scripture teaches to give everyone a chance. But I’m just curious to know where you are right now, spiritually speaking. What are your thoughts on what we believe here?”
Paul wasn’t sure what to say. He could remember only one thing close to a spiritual encounter in his life. It had to do with heckling a street preacher in Union Square one late drunken night.
His second summer in the city, the latest manifestation of the Seizures had opened for a group in the East Village. It would be the biggest act the band ever opened for. Cross Breeze was a five-piece from Bushwick, described by a prominent blogger as a “dreamy synth-pop act with close boy/girl harmonies and a hint of 1960s revivalism.” A few weeks ago their single, “Forever Summer,” had been included in The Brooklyn Regulator’s monthly, “Songs You NEED to Hear Now.” Paul had listened to the song after they got the gig and had found it both catchy and utterly insufferable. He had proposed to the rest of the band that they do a cover.
Niles, his bass player, apartment mate, and frequent voice of reason, was skeptical: “What? Why would we cover the biggest song of the group we’re opening for?” It was Niles who had gotten them the gig with Cross Breeze. He was reasonably well connected.
“It would be ironic,” Paul replied.
So they had closed out their set with a raging and bitingly scornful version of “Forever Summer.” When the crowd caught on, there were jeers and boos. And Paul, who had snorted two lines of coke before the set, raised a middle finger to the crowd, knocked over the mike, and walked off stage.
Ten minutes later, he and the rest of the Seizures were packing their instruments and equipment into their van as fast as they could. Paul was handing his guitar up to Colin in the back of the van when Niles had appeared beside him.
“Yo, I’ve got a friend inside who wants to meet the idiot responsible for this disaster.”
Paul groaned. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“Trust me, man,” Niles said, “you’re going to want me to introduce you.”
Paul followed Niles back into the club, to the far end of the bar, where a girl sat with a mixed drink in front of her. Her name was Sasha. Inside a minute, Paul was in love, or else just high and drunk and wanting to fuck and was there a difference?
Sasha had told him she liked their cover, that it improved on the original, and Paul had said thank you and that she was probably the only person in here with that opinion.
“Drink with me,” Sasha commanded.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve worn out my welcome at this particular establishment,” Paul said, looking around the club. So far, no one seemed to have noticed him.
Sasha placed an arm on his shoulder, guiding him to the empty stool beside her. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.”
Paul ordered a beer. Sasha observed that he had looked pretty angry up onstage. She wondered where all that rage came from. Paul assured her it was all a facade, that he was really a quiet, well-adjusted boy from a small town upstate. He asked whether she was a Cross Breeze fan. Sasha shook her head, told him she’d gone to high school on Long Island with one of the singers—her boyfriend was the fan. Where was her boyfriend? Somewhere around. Paul met him after doing a line of coke with Sasha in the bathroom. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the boyfriend he pushed, but one of the boyfriend’s friends. They were thrown out by a bouncer before it could turn into any sort of brawl.
Out on the street, they stood dazed. “I’m dizzy,” Sasha told him. “Carry me.” She leaped onto his back and wrapped her legs around his waist, and they wandered down Fourteenth Street, a laughing, looping mess.
When they reached Union Square, they stopped at a gaggle of people crowded around an old man standing on a box. He had a shirt wrapped around his head and was telling everyone to repent, for Jesus was coming back soon to separate the sheep from the goats.
“Is that a literal soapbox he’s on?” Sasha asked, still on Paul’s back.
Paul wondered aloud whether he was a sheep or a goat.
“I’d rather be a goat,” said Sasha. “Sheep are too … white.”
And then someone—maybe it was Sasha, maybe someone else—began to chant, “Goats! Goats! Goats!”
The man on the box looked out at the crowd chanting for goats and shouted, “And they were cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth!”
Paul would like to remember his first time with Sasha as a night of tenderness, two people newly in love and in awe of each other’s body, rather than as the cocaine-and-alcohol-fueled haze of grappling, fumbling flesh that it had actually been. He remembered only fragmented images of them groping at each other on his mattress on the floor. And he remembered, near the end, trying to come, and Sasha breathing in his ear, “Is Jesus coming back tonight?”
Paul had let out a moan.
“Is Jesus coming back tonight?”
“Jesus is coming back.”
“Should I repent?”
“You should repent.”
“Father, forgive me for my sins. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.”
In his office, Pastor Eric cleared his throat. Paul blinked and realized his mind had gone somewhere else. Did he ha
ve to speak now? Spoken words from him now seemed necessary. He opened his mouth, but it was dry. He coughed. “Yeah, no, okay … I, um, I guess … I’ve never been really spiritual or anything. I’ve always kinda put that on the back burner of my life, I guess you could say. But now I have a lot of questions, like about God and the afterlife and all that. And I think working here would help me, you know, start to sort those questions out and maybe find some direction for my life.”
He stopped. Pastor Eric was nodding and smiling, as if this was exactly what he had wanted to hear.
It had been a week now, and though Paul had yet to grow used to this place, he was beginning to understand the appeal it had for his mother. For anyone alone in life, anyone lost, afraid, or struggling, it must be a relief to find a group of people who didn’t know you but were nevertheless ready to welcome you with open arms into their family. The only problem was the stipulations. You couldn’t be part of the family if you didn’t believe the world was created in seven days by a being in the sky. You couldn’t be part of the family if you had sex with people of your gender. But was there any group of people who came together and accepted everyone without any conditions or expectations? Paul didn’t think so, it was just that these people’s conditions and expectations happened to be particularly stupid.
Paul was on his back, cigarette between his fingers, staring up at the locker-room ceiling, when he heard the door creak open. Fuck, he almost said out loud, without looking up. It would be the janitor, or one of the teenagers, and they would tell Pastor Eric he’d been smoking down here, and that would be the end of yet another failed episode of his life. Briefly, Paul contemplated what sort of person couldn’t even hold down a job at a church. But after a few seconds, when no words of reprimand came, he propped himself up on his elbows and looked at the boy standing in the doorway.
For a second, the boy seemed to consider turning and leaving the room, but something about Paul—maybe it was the cigarette—kept him there. He shut the door, came into the room, and leaned against the lockers.
Paul sat upright. “Hey, are you supposed to be down here?”
The boy nodded at the cigarette. “You supposed to be smoking that cig?”
Paul looked sadly at it. “I’ll put it out.”
“You don’t gotta do that. I like the smell.” The boy sank to the floor, his head against the lockers and his knees pulled up to his chest. He closed his eyes and took a breath.
Paul couldn’t help smiling. “What’s your name?” he asked, taking a drag.
The boy opened his eyes. “You gonna rat on me?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
The boy studied him for a moment. “DeShawn,” he said at last.
“You’re living with the Waid family, aren’t you?” Paul asked. It was hard not to notice when a white family suddenly acquired an adolescent black son.
“Don’t remind me,” said DeShawn.
“Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Yeah?” said Paul. “I lived down there for a few years. Just got back, actually. What part of Brooklyn?”
“Brownsville,” DeShawn answered with disdain in his eyes, and Paul suddenly felt stupid. He nodded. He had lived in Williamsburg, and all he knew about Brownsville was that when he first moved to New York, it was one of the places his friends had warned him never to go.
“So why are you here?” Paul asked. Then, realizing how that sounded, he added, “I mean, here in the locker rooms. Why aren’t you up with everyone else?”
“Why aren’t you up with everyone else?” said DeShawn.
Paul shrugged. “This is my break before I have to start tearing down.”
DeShawn nodded and closed his eyes again. “This is my break, too, then.”
Paul took another drag and watched him. DeShawn looked as if he might fall asleep right there. He was trying to think of something more to ask him when the door burst open and April Swanson stood in the doorway. She looked from Paul to DeShawn, back to Paul, searching for an explanation that wasn’t presenting itself. DeShawn stood up. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered, “I gotta get back to my tribe.”
He tried to push past April, but she placed a hand on his shoulder. “DeShawn, this can’t happen. You cannot just leave your group whenever you want without telling anyone. We were all looking for you and were very worried.”
“Yo, get your hands off me!” DeShawn snapped. He pulled away from April as if she were a hot iron and rushed out of the room. April gave Paul a look, somewhere between angry and pleading, before turning around and following DeShawn. Paul stubbed the last of his cigarette out on the bench and tossed the butt in the trash can on his way out the door. He followed the two through the basement hall, up the stairs, and back into the brightness outside.
After DeShawn had been safely returned to the rest of his tribe, April turned to Paul, as he knew she would, and asked if she could speak to him in private. And following her across the parking lot to the other side of the green, Paul had a sharp flash of déjà vu: twelfth-grade math, 2004. Ms. Swanson had been the teacher. And though he hadn’t been much of a student, Paul had still been a little bit sad when his mother told him it was the same woman who had taught him how to solve for x who was responsible for the vacation Bible school monstrosity.
It was a little destabilizing. Back in high school, Paul had liked April (or Ms. Swanson) more than he would ever have admitted to his friends, the stoners and future dropouts of Grover High, who called her things behind her back, reciting the paraphrased line, “April is the cruelest bitch,” after being forced to read The Waste Land in English class. Maybe it was only that he was a confused, horny teenage boy and she was the only one of his female teachers under the age of forty, but for Paul there had always been something enticing about her. Looking back, he thought it had been a frank and unsparing self-awareness, a hard-earned knowledge about the world that made everything she did and said feel just short of knowingly ironic. She was in on the joke. And as a teenager, Paul had wanted her to see that he was in on it, too, that they shared an existential understanding that, were it ever to be plainly articulated, would have boiled down to something like none of this really matters.
Probably, though, she never gave him a second thought. He had kept a passing grade, but only because school came easier to him than to most of his friends. He didn’t need to try very hard to keep from failing. He did remember one instance, though, when he had forced his math teacher to give him her undivided attention. It was after he’d missed his final precalculus test, which counted for more of his grade than he could afford to throw away. He had approached her later that day, when his hangover wasn’t quite so debilitating. “I don’t have a good excuse, Ms. Swanson,” he told her in the hallway outside her classroom, “other than that I made a really bad decision and I wish I could take it back.”
She had looked at him evenly with her arms crossed, frowning slightly. He had to avert his eyes to the floor. Finally, she said, “Well, Paul, I don’t normally do this, but in your case …” She trailed off with a sigh, and he never found out why she had made an exception just for him, why he was different. She just told him to come to her classroom, final period.
During the makeup exam, alone in her classroom, he had tried to focus on the problems, but he kept glancing up at her, sitting at her desk, grading papers. She had taken off her cardigan, and her bare arms were swathed in afternoon light slanting in through the window. He had the stupid urge to say something to break the silence and kept biting his tongue.
When he finished, Paul went up to her desk and handed her the test. “Thank you for this, Ms. Swanson. I was lucky to have you for a teacher this year.”
She laughed. “Don’t lay it on too thick, Mr. Frazier. You already got your makeup exam.”
“No, I mean it, I—”
But she cut him short. “Have a good summ
er, Paul.”
He turned to go. And just as he was about to leave the room, she said his name. She looked at him over her reading glasses.
“Take care of yourself, okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I will.” Out in the hallway, Paul was surprised to find that his heart was beating fast.
It was this memory that always came to him when he thought of April Swanson, and now, following her across the lot, he found his heart was beating in much the same way. She stopped under the shade of a small red maple, away from the joyful clamor and chaos of the camp. Paul could see golfers, getting through the hole before the light went.
April massaged her temples with her forefingers. “Okay, I’m trying to figure out what exactly was going through your head down there, and I just can’t come up with anything. You wanna help me out?” She put her hands on her hips and looked at Paul.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, help me understand what made you think it was okay to be down in the locker room, smoking cigarettes with a eleven-year-old boy.”
“You make it sound like we were passing it back and forth.”
April held up her hands. “For all I know, you could have been!”
Paul laughed and shook his head. “Look, I was down there by myself, taking a break, and the kid just showed up. He was only there for, like, five minutes before you found us. Don’t worry, I didn’t offer him a smoke.”
“Did it occur to you that he probably shouldn’t have been down there, that there were probably people looking for him—people who were concerned and worried?”
Five minutes ago, while following her across the field, Paul had been preparing an apology for April. But now all he could find inside him was anger and defensiveness. “Hey, I’m sorry, but it’s not like the kid is really my responsibility. I’m just the sound guy.”
“That’s a great way to look at it. Very mature of you. But not all that surprising, I have to say.”
Paul felt an unsummoned smirk rising to his face. “Let’s make sure we’re sticking to the matter at hand, how about.”
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