“You come to my office sometime and we’ll talk man-to-man about the finer points of Christianity, okay?”
“I prefer speaking with Lauren,” I said, and he gave me a look that let me know that was definitely the wrong answer.
“Well, when you get serious about Jesus, I’ll be here. Young men like you need mentors and that’s a man’s job, son. Lauren’s a fine Christian young woman, no doubt. But she brought you to us for a reason. You come see me, okay?” He winked—I shit you not—and then shook the next person’s hand, so Lauren and I moved on to lunch in this basement gym where tables and chairs had been set up and everything smelled of sweaty socks and pot roast.
“So what did you think?” Lauren asked me over plastic plates and red Solo cups.
Church was okay, I guess. I liked the singing part, and the organ. But mostly the whole thing just seemed sort of silly to me. I was smart enough not to say that to Lauren. Instead I went into Bogie mode and said, “You look very pretty in that dress.” It was a deep violet number, knee-length, with spaghetti straps. She was like one of those exotic plants that lure insects into their sticky sweet traps and then eat them. When I looked at her, I wanted to be eaten.
“Thank you,” she said. “So do you think you want to give your life to Jesus?”
I was just about to lie when this muscle-y blond football-player-looking kid snuck up behind Lauren and started to massage her shoulders. “Hey, buttercup,” he said.
Buttercup? Really?
“Hey,” Lauren said in a way that let me know this wasn’t just any old church member. He looked like the Johnny kid in the pamphlet and nothing like me. “Leonard, this is my boyfriend, Jackson. Jackson, this is Leonard.”
“I hear you’re serious about making Jesus Christ your Lord and savior,” Jackson said to me. “It’s definitely the way to go.”
“Do you enjoy parking?” I asked, although I’m not sure why. Probably because I was angry and just wanted to leave. I felt so tricked by Lauren. Being eaten by her was one thing, but introducing me to her boyfriend after she’d led me on—that was entirely unacceptable. She used her femme fatale skills to get me into her church, bait-and-switch style, when she already had a boyfriend who was much more normal-looking than me—a completely different type. “Do you guys park?”
“Leonard!” Lauren said, because she definitely got the reference, although it took her a second.
“What are you talking about?” Jackson said and made a confused face.
I looked up at the clock on the gym wall—I remember it was protected by mesh wire so basketballs wouldn’t smash it.47
“Quarter to one already?” I asked, and then started to lie again, only these were escape lies. The Bogie-Bacall fantasy had been temporarily shattered, so I just wanted out of this church. “Holy shit! I have to roll my grandmother over in her bed. She gets bedsores if I don’t do it every four hours or so. My grandfather does it when I’m at school, but he refuses to do it on the weekends. He says, ‘The weekends are mine,’ which seems mean until you know that he has Alzheimer’s, so you really can’t hold it against him. Okay. Off I go.”
I stood up and walked out of the gym, up the stairs, and out into the afternoon.
Lauren followed me and kept saying, “Wait up. Let’s talk. What’s going on here? I thought you were serious about Jesus?”
I spun around and said, “I’m a devout atheist. I don’t believe in hell, so none of this scares me. I really just wanted to go parking with you, like the kids do in that pamphlet you gave me, because I think you’re beautiful—like Lauren Bacall—and so unlike the girls at my school. And I sort of admire your standing at the train station all alone giving out pamphlets, trying to save people. You seemed so interesting when I met you—like no one else I had ever met before. But you don’t seem the same in your church—like there’s no risk being Christian here because everyone is Christian in your church. You’re just one of many here, where at the train station you were one of a kind. And I’m a one-of-a-kind type of person, and that’s just the way it is. So we’re definitely breaking up. And I can’t believe your boyfriend looks like Johnny from the pamphlet. Jesus Christ, you could do better!”
Lauren just stood there with her mouth open.
“I’m sort of crazy. I’m mostly lonely,” I said, because she looked little-kid confused and I was starting to feel bad for her again. I guess I only liked her when we were alone. “I follow sad miserable-looking adults on the trains all day sometimes and so I thought we had weird-train-station behavior in common and—”
“You all right, Lauren?” said Jackson who was now somehow rubbing Lauren’s shoulders again and glaring at me like he wanted to kill me before I could accept Jesus Christ into my heart, and would therefore—in his mind—end up burning in a sea of fire.
“She’s all right,” I said. “I’m leaving. Problem solved.”
I left.
TWENTY-TWO
I’d see Lauren at the train station from time to time but she pretended like she didn’t know who I was, and I pretended like I didn’t know who she was either.
This went on for a year or so.
Then one day, I saw her in Center City being harassed by a bum, who was following her and yelling, “Give me a sandwich and you think you saved the world? It don’t work like that! You think God sent you to give me two pieces of bread with a slice a cheese and a flimsy circle of bologna and cheap bright-yellow mustard and that’s supposed to make up for ten years of living in a cardboard box? That’s what you want me to believe? God loves me because you gave me a half-assed sandwich? I’m homeless—not crazy!”
The guy had wild eyes and a lion’s mane of gray hair that made his head look like a frozen sun or something.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” Lauren said.
“That ain’t good enough,” the bum said. “I gotta few things you can tell your god the next time you pray in your nice warm house with a toilet in it and a whole refrigerator of food that you’d never give to bums like me because it costs too fucking much and so it ain’t bum food. I bet you got a dog that eats better than me.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I’m sorry.”
It was kind of funny seeing Lauren getting verbally beatdown by a bum, and I was totally on the bum’s side, but Lauren looked so rattled that I had to intervene. And so I went up to the bum and said, “I was sent to you by the Atheist Society of America. We believe in chaos and no god at all, and want to congratulate you on putting this uppity Christian in her place. As a reward we’d like to give you twenty dollars that you may use to buy a superior sandwich or whatever you’d like. No strings attached.”
The gray lion-haired bum looked at me like I was insane, but he snatched the money out of my hand and walked away.
“He’s just going to buy alcohol or drugs, you know,” Lauren said, which made me sad, because she didn’t know that man at all, let alone whether he had a dependency problem.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before. I’m Leonard Peacock,” I said and stuck out my hand confidently, putting on the Bogie charm.
“I remember who you are,” Lauren said, ignoring my outstretched hand, playing hard-to-get Bacall again. She looked really shook up, so I didn’t take offense. “Why do you think he got so angry at me?”
I didn’t feel like listing all the reasons why she deserved the verbal beatdown from the homeless man—mostly because I knew that wouldn’t help my cause—so I just changed the subject. “You’re welcome.”
“What?”
“You no longer have a bum trailing you, yelling at you.”
“Oh,” she said. “I was fine. God would have protected me.”
“Maybe god sent me to protect you,” I said, playing devil’s advocate.
“Maybe.”
“God says you should have coffee with me right now?”
“You want to have coffee with me? Why?”
“We can talk more about god,” I said, giving her the line she wanted.
“What you said to Jackson and me at my church,” Lauren said. “It was really rude.”
“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” I said just to get her to have coffee with me, because her face was all red from being harassed, and she looked so femme fatale—so much like she needed saving—that I didn’t even care she had trap written all over her.
“I’m not going to park with you,” she said in this really serious way that depressed me; I only had so much Bogart in me, truth be told, and I was already running low.
“Do people in your church really use the word park as a euphemism for having sex in cars? Do teenagers really have sex in cars? I don’t even drive.”
“If you’re just going to make fun of me for going to church and believing in God, I don’t want to have coffee with you, Mr. Atheist.”
Her calling me Mr. Atheist really deflated me because it felt like a wall—like my personal beliefs were going to keep us from being friends and ultimately kissing. It was like once again someone was labeling me and putting me in a box just as soon I expressed myself. Suddenly, the whole deal didn’t feel like a game anymore.
Consequences, Herr Silverman says. Consequences.
I abandoned my plan. I made a real attempt. “I’m not going to make fun of you, okay? I just want to understand you. Maybe we can have an exchange? Maybe we can talk about our beliefs over coffee without trying to change each other. What do you think?”
“I’m not going to kiss you.”
“You have Jackson to kiss, right?”
“I’ve never kissed Jackson either.”
“I thought he was your boyfriend.”
“I’m saving myself for my husband.”
“Saving yourself?”
“Yep.”
“So you won’t even kiss someone before you get married?”
“Not the way you’re thinking of kissing. A peck on the lips or cheek doesn’t count.”
I must say, her never having been kissed was really attractive to me for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I was drawn to Lauren’s innocence. Maybe it reminded me of whom I was before all the bad stuff went down.
I said, “You owe me one cup of coffee for getting the homeless man off your back. I know this place around the corner. What do you say?”
“We’ll talk about our religious beliefs. Like an exchange, right?”
“Right.”
And then we walked to this coffee shop that had crazy huge couches that were random geometrical shapes like triangles and rhombuses and circles. It was like being in a day-care room for giant babies.
We got a seat and I ordered a double espresso, because I thought that would sound really sophisticated and cool and was the most Bogart-like thing I could order since I couldn’t order gin or scotch. Lauren ordered a peppermint mocha, which made her seem like a child again, and I also liked that about her,48 so I called the waiter back and said, “I’ll also have a peppermint mocha.”