Another Life

by Robert Haller

  The kid nodded. “Yeah.” And then he paused. “But he don’t want me.” He looked down at the guitar.

  Paul almost said, Yeah, mine didn’t, either, but stopped himself.

  After a second, DeShawn looked up. “I like Jimi Hendrix, though. Mr. Waid gave me all his old music. I like most of it, even if it is mostly by dead white guys.”

  “Yeah, well, rock and roll came directly from the blues. It’s just another thing we stole.”

  DeShawn looked at him—Paul couldn’t tell whether it was with curiosity or disdain—and then he stood up and carefully placed the guitar back on its stand. “I gotta go back or they gonna notice.” He hopped down off the stage and walked quickly out of the gym. No thanks for the lesson or even a see you later.

  Around five thirty, Paul had just finished with tear-down, putting away everything that needed putting away—the cones, tables and chairs, gym equipment, water coolers—leaving the church field empty except for the tents and the stage. He was heading across the parking lot to his car when he saw her daughter, sitting on the church steps at the front entrance. Hope sprang up in his chest.

  He didn’t know exactly what his plan was when he turned and headed over to Laura. But at this point in his life, Paul Frazier was making it up as he went along.

  Despite the still oppressive heat, Laura was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood up. Her head was buried in the phone on her lap, and when Paul reached her, she looked up at him in surprise.

  “Hey, Laura,” Paul said a little breathlessly.

  She seemed too startled to respond. The sweatshirt, which had “A&H Construction Co.” across the front, was much too big for her, and he wondered how she wasn’t sweating. “Hey,” she said at last.

  Paul nodded. “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” Laura answered, her voice nervous and fluttery.

  “So, your mom’s sick?”

  She looked confused. “Yeah, she’s not feeling well.”

  Paul looked around the empty parking lot. “Is she coming to pick you up now?”

  Laura shook her head and squashed his dumb blossom of hope. “No, Pastor Eric’s giving me a ride home once he finishes locking up.”

  Paul struggled not to show his disappointment. Laura studied him for a moment; then something in her expression changed. She leaned back against the steps, pressed out her chest, and cocked her head to the side with a smile. “Why? Are you offering me a ride, Paul?”

  Through her oversize sweatshirt, Paul could make out the shape of Laura’s breasts. He thought of the night he’d driven this girl home, the kiss she’d given him. He shook his head. “No, I … your mom—is it serious? Like, do you think she’ll be in tomorrow or …?”

  Abruptly, Laura sighed and her voice hardened. “Jeez, how should I know? I can’t read her mind, thank God.”

  Paul tried to speak, but Laura cut him off. “Look, if you’re just gonna ask questions about my mother, then I’m kinda busy, so …” She sat upright and went back to looking at her phone as if he weren’t there.

  Paul was stunned. He wasn’t used to being spoken to this way by a fifteen-year-old girl—or any girl, for that matter. He was used to girls freezing up in front of him or babbling on nervously. He was used to little girls giving him wide-eyed stares as they passed him on the street holding their parent’s hand. He was used to teenage girls calling out to him, “You’re cute!” in coffee shops before hurrying away in a fit of giggles. He was used to girls his own age giving him the eye in bars and then looking pointedly at the empty stool beside them. He was used to older women working at the DMV or the doctor’s office throwing him wide smiles and calling him “hon” and filling out forms for him, making his experience much faster and more efficient than it might otherwise have been. He wasn’t used to girls blowing him off, and he certainly wasn’t used to girls ignoring him. Wasn’t this the same girl he had caught staring longingly at him more than once these past weeks? Wasn’t this the same girl who kissed him on the lips in his car less than a month ago?

  But Laura didn’t look up again. And Paul, not knowing what else to do, gave her a dumb wave that she did not acknowledge, before turning and heading to his car.

  Paul’s good looks and debauched lifestyle of the past few years meant that sustained periods of isolation and, therefore, sustained periods of masturbation were not something he was very familiar with. But in the first few weeks after Sasha left him, he must have rivaled his puberty-awakened twelve-year-old self for the record in jerking off. Holding his dick in his hand, and Sasha’s body and face in his memory, he had made love to her in more passionate and creative ways than he ever did in real life. And then angrily, bitterly, and, at some point, callously. In his Brooklyn apartment, he had reached a place of total emptiness. His body became a shell, an arid wasteland where not only desire but all feelings seemed to have dried up and shriveled, leaving him hollow and dehydrated. To jerk off, you had to have something to hold on to and something to get rid of. He hadn’t masturbated since. When Paul got home, on his childhood bed, he held April in his mind and emptied himself onto the sheets.

  Paul hadn’t known what to expect on Tuesday, when he arrived for work late in the afternoon. Maybe she would be out again. Maybe she’d be there but would ignore him or tell him emphatically that it had been a mistake and to keep away from her. What he hadn’t expected was, the moment he got out of his car, to see April walking across the parking lot in his direction.

  He stood frozen, watching her approach. Everything about her said that nothing was out of the ordinary. She was wearing an outfit he recognized: shorts, a plain blue T-shirt, and sneakers. Her expression was neither playful nor serious, betraying nothing.

  “Paul,” she said when she reached him, and her voice was as blank as a new sheet of paper, “I know you just got here, but would you mind running to Walmart for some supplies for the camping trip? I would have called, but I don’t have your cell.”

  Paul looked at her face and then around him, bewildered. There was no one in the immediate vicinity, no one who could have heard them. Had she gone crazy? Had he?

  April cleared her throat. Paul looked back at her. She was offering him a piece of notepad paper. He took it hesitantly and glanced at the handwritten list: 5 large coolers, flashlights, 8 cans of bug spray …

  Was it code? Paul looked back up at her. Her expression was mildly impatient but otherwise not telling him anything. “How many flashlights would you like?” he asked at last, his voice a dry husk.

  But April shook her head. “I’m going to have to go with you. That’s a lot of stuff. We can take my car. It has more trunk space.”

  She passed him at a brisk walk, and he turned and followed.

  For the first five minutes in the car, they didn’t speak. April drove with both hands on the steering wheel, her eyes now hidden behind her sunglasses. In the passenger seat, Paul couldn’t seem to find the correct way to sit and kept repositioning himself. He waited for her to say something, but she didn’t. It wasn’t until they had pulled out of the church driveway and were well down the road that he worked up the courage to ask her, with only a hint of irony, whether she was feeling better.

  “What?” April glanced at him and then back at the road. “Oh, yes, thanks. Much better.”

  He waited a moment, but since she didn’t offer anything more, he began, “April, what are we—”

  She shook her head and cut him off. “Just wait. I can’t talk and drive at the same time.”

  When they got to Walmart, April pulled the car around to the empty excess-parking lot behind the building. She shut off the car, took off her sunglasses, and turned and looked at him for the first time with some acknowledgment in her eyes. “So I thought a lot yesterday,” she began. Then she closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples and looked at him again with a wry smile.

  “And?”

 
April breathed out loudly. “And I got nothing.”

  Paul didn’t know what that meant, so he didn’t know whether he should be smiling, but April was smiling, almost smirking, so he smiled back stupidly, hopefully.

  “This is dumb,” she said finally, and looked out the window.

  Paul wanted to grab her and kiss her. “When can I see you next?”

  She turned back to look at him. “Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? I haven’t even decided whether to continue doing … whatever it is we’re doing.”

  But Paul could tell from the way she was looking at him, from the slight tone of amusement in her voice, that she had indeed already decided. “I need to see you,” he said.

  “Even if I wanted to,” April said, “there are logistics to think about …” She trailed her finger on the stick shift. “Despite my single status, I’m not exactly free as a bird.”

  “I’m not supposed to come in to work tomorrow till late in the afternoon,” said Paul. “Come up with some excuse to go back to your house for an hour around one o’clock tomorrow, and I’ll meet you there. Your kids will be at church. It’s perfect.”

  April raised her eyebrows. “You thought that up pretty quick. Have you done this before?”

  Paul shook his head. “No, I’m making this up as I go, believe me.”

  She laughed, then placed her hands on her face and groaned. “I’m turning forty this Friday, Paul. Forty. Did you know that?”

  He grinned. “Your birthday’s in two days? We have to celebrate!”

  “That wasn’t what I was getting at, actually.”

  “Do you have plans?”

  She looked confused. “No, we have the camping trip this weekend, remember?”

  “I’ll think of something. But for now … we’re on for tomorrow?”

  “You’re making this sound like a date to the movies.”

  “Which I would be perfectly down with, but I don’t think anything good’s playing.”

  April nodded. “Okay, fine. Sure. Tomorrow. Great.”

  “One o’clock?”

  “One o’clock.”

  And so, without so much as touching, they had confirmed the next rendezvous for their affair as if they were confirming a doctor’s appointment. Paul found April’s poker face, her almost businesslike detachment, incredibly arousing. The next second, April opened her door and got out of the car, then turned and stuck her head back in, where Paul sat looking after her. “Come on,” she said. “I wasn’t kidding about all those supplies. We’ve got some shopping to do.”

  Paul was drawn back into the moment by the wave of grating feedback. The last person signed up for prophetic ministry had been called up and prophesied over, and Eric was now leading the congregation in a closing prayer, but there was something wrong with his mike; high feedback kept cutting through his words. Paul trimmed the EQ and adjusted the volume, and then, when the feedback had disappeared, he stood up, left the sound booth, and went out into the sanctuary to make sure the volume was at the right levels. He walked halfway down the side aisle, then stopped and leaned against the wall as Pastor Eric finished up the prayer with an amen. He was about to turn away when Dr. Langston, still standing on the stage, turned and, looking Paul straight in the eyes, said into his mike, “Brother, would you mind coming up here? I think the Lord has a word for you.”

  APRIL

  Forty was a semiperfect number, equal to the sum of some (but not all) of its proper divisors. It was an octagonal number and, being the sum of the first four pentagonal numbers, also a pentagonal pyramidal number. In the Bible, the number came up a lot. During Noah’s flood, rain fell for forty days and forty nights. Three separate times, Moses spent forty days and nights on Mount Sinai, waiting to hear from God. The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years before reaching the Promised Land. The giant Goliath provoked the Israelites for forty days before David challenged him. King Saul, King David, and King Solomon each ruled for forty years. In the New Testament, Jesus fasted in the desert for forty days and nights before his temptation by the devil. And after his resurrection, Christ remained with us sad people for a mere forty days before ascending back to heaven.

  April remembered, as a new Christian, noticing this number’s persistent pattern during Bible studies, and being intrigued by it. She had always liked deciphering hidden messages. What did it mean? She’d done some research that left her vaguely disappointed. It was probably just a question of translation. In Hebrew tradition, the number forty was often used as shorthand to signify a large number or long period of time. So most likely, all those forties in the Bible were not actual forties—they meant only “more than a few.”

  In only a few hours, April would be forty years old. As she pulled off the exit ramp and merged onto 87 North, leaving Grover Falls behind, she tried to invest this fact with the weight and import it apparently deserved, but in fact, she didn’t feel much about it, one way or the other. And she wondered whether she should be concerned about this indifference. Of course, she hadn’t expected to feel the way she had felt turning sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one—those milestones that, however manufactured, were deep and brimming with significance. But forty was an important year in one’s life, and she had expected to feel something, even if it was only existential dread, as she entered middle age.

  She remembered her thirtieth birthday. Ray had hired a sitter and taken her out to dinner. It was just when their marriage was at its zenith, soon after which it would begin its sudden and swift decline. She remembered more than once that night saying to her husband, “I can’t believe I’m thirty,” and meaning it. Thirty was an age deemed by all so momentous that it had become for April too abstract to apply to her life—she couldn’t fit herself inside the number.

  She didn’t feel the same way now, with forty, but maybe because, when she thought about it, the age was pretty much a total drag. It didn’t offer the excitement and trepidation of new adulthood the way thirty did, or the respect and maturity that came with turning fifty. Forty was limbo. Forty meant you definitely weren’t young anymore, but you were not so old that people had to respect you. It was the age of banality. Of backaches and migraines, menopause and midlife crises. The age when your kids ignored you, your parents now relied on you, and everything was your fault. Forty was the age to be realistic, the time to reassess your diet, try and fail at new exercise regimens, plan a better budget. It was the time to dream of vacations but never go on them. It was the time to reevaluate the choices you’d made, long after there was still time to do anything about them. And for April Swanson, apparently, it was the time to sleep with a twentysomething boy just for the hell of it.

  What had happened back there? April had done her best to keep from thinking about it, at least immediately afterward. She felt she needed a little distance, both physical and emotional, from the incident. The further away she got from the church, and the more time that passed, the more dispassionate her evaluation—at least, that was the hope. But now, as she sped north up 87, with no more turns to make or lights to stop at, nothing but open highway before her, she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about it.

  It had been hot in the church. So hot that when Dr. Langston called Paul up on the stage, April could attribute the sweat gathering on her forehead and trickling down the back of her neck to the temperature. Her pounding heart, however, had no such alibi.

  It wasn’t as if she had expected God to suddenly begin speaking through Dr. Langston, outing her and Paul in front of the entire congregation. She’d been going to church most of her life, and not once had she felt that God was speaking directly to her. It would be completely absurd and ironic for him to start now. And maybe, given the way she had come to think about God over the years—constantly subverting her expectations and prone to cruel humor—completely typical.

  She waited, hardly breathing, while Paul slowly too
k the stage and sat down in the empty chair before Dr. Langston and Pastor Eric. She tried to catch his eye, but he kept his eyes on the floor going up, and when he sat down, he closed his eyes and bowed his head. April didn’t blame him. What else could he do? Sitting there on the stage as the two men laid their hands on his shoulders, he looked so confused and frightened that April felt a surge of protective emotion rise up in her. She wanted to leap up from her seat, run up onto the stage, and throw her body over his, screaming at the men and at God, “Take me but leave the boy! If you must have someone, take me!”

  After Paul left through her bedroom window late Sunday morning, April had spent the rest of the day trying to go over recent events and the present situation in a calm, objective manner—and failed miserably. All she could think about was last night—not its implications or how to proceed in light of it, but how it had felt during, how it had felt to have his hands on her bare legs and breasts, how it had felt to have him inside her. She sat on her bed that evening, cross-legged, the lights off, watching the sunlight gradually fade from the window he had climbed out of. And by the time the room had grown completely dark, the one thing she knew for certain was that she wanted Paul inside her again.

  But April well understood the simple, sad truth that people did not necessarily want what was best for them, that many times those two things were diametrically opposed. So the next day, she called in sick to VBS and planned to take the day determining whether her desire to have Paul inside her again was greater than, or at least equal to, the consequences that the fulfillment of that desire might bring.

  Again she had been flummoxed. Instead of spending the day in a reasoned back-and-forth debate with herself, she’d spent it daydreaming about Paul and wondering what he was doing now at the VBS, whether he missed her, whether he was thinking about her. It got her nowhere. All she had by the end of the day was this bit of reasoning: For the past twenty years, April had spent her life working solely to make those closest to her happy, with varying results, and last night, she had made a big decision solely for herself. And now the world around her would have her feel that this decision had been bad, wrong even, and she just wasn’t sure that was fair. So tomorrow, Tuesday, she would approach Paul. She would talk to him alone, but she would not propose anything. She would wait and see what happened. That was all she would do: wait and see what happened.