Crossroads

“Definitely.”

Haefle, who was sixty-three, seemed to weigh Russ’s failure against the agreeable prospect of working less. “Rick does seem to be doing a bang-up job,” he said.

From the senior minister’s office, Russ went to the church secretary and asked her to instruct Ambrose to direct any future communications to him in written form. Later that day, after getting the message, Ambrose came and tapped on Russ’s door, which Russ had locked. “Hey Russ,” he said. “You in there?”

Russ said nothing.

“Written communication? What the fuck?”

Russ knew he was being childish, but his hurt and hatred had a horizonless totality, unrelieved by adult perspective, and beneath them was the sweetness of being thrown upon God’s mercy: of making himself so alone and so wretched that only God could love him. He refused to speak to Ambrose, either on the day following his humiliation or ever after. While he performed his other duties vigorously, starting a women’s circle in the inner city, reaching new heights of political eloquence in his sermons, earning his paychecks and proving that everyone else still valued him, he avoided Ambrose and lowered his eyes when they accidentally met. By and by—Russ could sense it—Ambrose began to hate him for hating him. This, too, was sweet, because it gave Russ company and helped sustain his own hatred. Though he had some hope that the congregation was unaware of their feud, there was no hiding it in the church offices. Dwight Haefle kept trying to broker a peace, calling meetings, and the shamefulness of Russ’s refusals, the knowledge of how childish he appeared to Haefle and the secretarial staff, even to the janitor, compounded his wretchedness. His grievance with Ambrose was like a hair shirt, like a strand of barbed wire he wore wrapped around his chest. He suffered and in his suffering felt close to God.

The torment for which there was no reward came from Marion. Never having trusted Ambrose, she blamed him entirely for Russ’s humiliation. Russ ought to have been grateful for her loyalty, but instead it made him feel all the more alone. The difficulty was that he could never tell her the real story of the shaming that Ambrose and Sally had inflicted on him, because the story hinged on his having admitted to Sally, in a fit of admittedly poor judgment, that he and his wife very rarely made love anymore. This had obviously been a terrible betrayal of Marion. And yet, by a curious alchemy, as the months went by, he came to feel that Marion herself had been the cause of his humiliation, by having become unattractive to him. In the illogic of the alchemy, the more Marion was to blame, the less Sally was. Finally there came a night when Sally appeared to him in a dream, wearing an innocent but breast-accentuating argyle sweater, and meltingly gave him to understand that she preferred him to Ambrose and was ready to be his. Some unsleeping shred of superego steered the dream away from consummation, but he woke up in a state of maximum arousal. Creeping from the bed, his self-awareness attenuated by the darkness of the parsonage, he paid an onanistic visit to the bathroom. Into the sink came concrete substantiation of Sally’s complaint with him. He saw that it had been inside him all along.

Every man seeking salvation had a signature weakness to remind him of his nullity before the Lord and complicate communion with Him. Russ’s own weakness had been revealed to him in 1946, in Arizona, where his susceptibility to female beauty had aggravated a crisis of faith in the religion of his brethren. The image of Marion’s dewy dark eyes, her kiss-inviting mouth, her narrow waist and slender neck and fine-boned wrists, had come buzzing, like a huge and never resting hornet, into the formerly chaste chamber of his soul. Neither the imagined fires of Hell nor the very real prospect of breaking with his brethren could still the buzzing of that hornet. Although the result had been a permanent estrangement from his parents, he’d resolved his spiritual crisis by adopting a less stringent but still legitimate form of Christian faith, and he’d solved the problem of his weakness by lawfully wedding Marion.

Or so it had seemed. In the wake of his taboo-upending dream, he saw that he hadn’t actually overcome his weakness—that he’d merely repressed it from his consciousness. Now the dream had opened his eyes. Now, at forty-five, he saw beauty at every turn—in the forty-year-old women who turned to him with startling friendliness on Pirsig Avenue, the thirty-year-olds he glimpsed in passing cars, the twenty-year-old candy stripers at the hospital. Now he was beset not by a single hornet but by a chaotically swirling swarm of them. Try as he might, he couldn’t shut the windows of his soul against them. And then along came Frances Cottrell.

The afterfeel of her teasing little kick was persisting in his hip as he piloted the Fury through heavy snow on Archer Avenue. Three cars ahead of him, an orange truck was flashing yellow lights and strewing salt, but he had yet to see a snowplow. Frances had fallen silent, and he felt obliged to say something, if only to defuse the charge of her having foot-prodded her pastor in the vicinity of his genitals, but the Fury’s tractionless tires were palpably shimmying. If he got stuck in the snow, significantly delayed, the outing would become a misadventure that Marion, the next time she saw Kitty at church, might naturally remark on and thereby learn that Frances, not Kitty, had come along with him. As if he were one with the Fury, he willed himself to keep a grip. It was vital to avoid hard braking, but the momentum of events was frightening—Perry’s giving drugs to Frances’s son, the painful conversation that Russ was now obliged to have with him, Frances’s invitation to smoke marijuana with her, and the risk that if Russ declined her invitation she would look elsewhere for company on her youth quest; the upsetting fact that she’d already been looking elsewhere, not more than an hour ago. She’d sat chatting away with Rick Ambrose, against whose hipness Russ had abundantly demonstrated he could not contend.