Death is coming

One summer you’re stroking a different girl’s legs every night, and the next you’ve got a girlfriend who wants to have sex in a church. That’s how it is for everyone — let’s say sixteen years of living in the same town, knowing the same people, chewing hours to dust in the same basements and backyards and parking lots, until you reach the acme of all that, which is a place where you’re so filled with a kind of deep intuition and easy love for everything around you that living isn’t even something you have to think about anymore, it just happens and it’s comfortable and right. And then you give it all away for something that seems greater. And you’re outside the library with the engine running because you want to give her the opportunity to change her mind, but she looks at you with that stupid look she has and says “I want you to fuck me in the front pews.” And all that easiness and inertia you spent years trying to cultivate fucks you over, because you don’t know how to stop anything anymore.

She was simple. She desired things, and then she took clear, rational steps in the direction of those things. The Greeks believed, I think, that that’s how all people behaved — in search of the good and all that — but they didn’t have stuff like irony or marketing or mass media-cultivated insecurity and self-loathing to contend with, and they fucked teenage boys in bathhouses. She was cute. Or she wasn’t all that cute, I guess, but she was cute enough and I had been without a girlfriend for long enough that no one gave me much shit for hanging around with her. Her name was Stephanie.

“I want to have sex in a church,” is what she said. We were at the rec center, out in the grass on the Little League fields, and our other friends were a little further away, whipping empty soda cans at each other. Note that she did not say that she wanted to have sex with me in a church.

“All right,” I said.

“In the middle of the night with no one else around.”

“All right.” And then I literally did not even think about it again until we rolled into the church parking lot a few nights later.

How did we get there? I really don’t know. I’m sure it was just another night with a bunch of us hanging out in a parking lot somewhere and then splintering off into smaller groups until it was just me and her, preparing to soil a holy place. The first thing I remember specifically was pulling up right by the door and waiting for her to laugh it off. Which she did not.

“We shouldn’t park here,” I finally said. “Someone might see the car.” I suggested we drive over to the library, which was right next door. A car outside the library late at night would have been just as conspicuous, but I guess I thought whoever saw it would assume people were fucking in the library or maybe on the other side of the big gravel pile in the empty lot between the library and the Agway. It was after 10 anyway, and the town is dead enough after 10 that they turn the stoplights off, but you can never be too careful.

I was still buckled in and hadn’t turned off the engine. Stephanie turned to me and gave me her weird sexy “I’m a bad girl” look that always made my stomach turn. I’ve never understood the overt display of sexuality. Very gauche, in my opinion. Maybe done well it might be appealing, but I’ve never seen it done well.

“I want you to fuck me in the front pews,” she told me. What was left for me to say after that? Did words not cease to function as soon as those syllables left her mouth? “This is not something I am interested in” — would that have meant anything different in that moment than “ok” or “you look beautiful under this moth-clouded lamplight” or “wrist-slit motherfucker I forgot to check the mail today?” No; it was all the same. She left language squished and twitching at our feet. There was only physics left — force, acceleration, inertia.

The front door was unlocked. This was the church I’d gone to my whole childhood. It felt somehow newly dark — like when you’re walking through your house, turning off the lights before you go to bed, and it seems darker than it is, because your eyes haven’t adjusted. But you know every step. This was how I convinced myself that breaking into a church to perform sexual acts was a familiar and known thing.

We stood just inside the door, as if deciding where to go. I peered into the Sunday school rooms and that was the first pang like, oh boy. I really fucking missed my friends, but I never got them back, not in the same way. They’d all done the same thing I had — gotten restless and run off after other things. Stephanie and I turned the other way and crept into the chapel room.

I stopped her there. The chapel room seemed like a fine compromise. “I can’t wait any longer,” I croaked, which was savvy, because nothing less would have stood a chance. She kissed me too hard; I winced. She grabbed at me in the vicinity of my penis, but she just got a lot of scrotum and some hair and I said “aah ow.” She ran up to the big sliding sanctuary doors and whooshed them open with one big, thundering shove.

I expected something here — a change in the air, or a big booming minor chord on the organ. There was nothing. In front of me, Stephanie had gotten down on her hands and knees and was doing this heaving, clumsy crawl into the sanctuary, looking back at me with her eyebrow cocked. What a bizarre thing. Was she trying to look like a sexy baby, or an animal? Was that the game? Why then that unpracticed lurch? That canny look? It didn’t hold together. I felt a great tenderness for her then. I thought, what are you doing? You are somebody’s daughter! It was a stupid, condescending thought. She was her own person. And yet, the things she wanted for herself I would not have wished on anyone.

In my head, I screamed, WHO ARE YOU, but I followed her in.

She sat on her knees in front of the front row of pews and waved me over. The church was not very large. It was old and Puritan-seeming — simple and clean, with one small stained glass window of Jesus and some stupid-looking lambs that wasn’t original to the place — nothing like that would have flown with the wet, homesick Protestants who settled this town. I sat down in front of her. “Let’s go back to the chapel room,” I said. My voice was small in such a small space. You’d think a church would echo.

“I want to do it where Jesus can see us.”

“Jesus can see us everywhere,” I said, which is not something I believed so much as it was the kind of thing you learn to say as a little kid to prevent such things as having a girl pull your pants off in front of a stained glass window of Christ from happening.

She began to blow me, is the most artful way I know how to say it. Truly there is nothing less pleasurable to me. The sexual politics of it — the domination, the degradation. Isn’t that what it is? It is a regressive act. I refuse to believe anyone enjoys having a dick jammed down their throat, I’m sorry. And it’s an ugly thing — the tendons and veins in the neck bulging out as she throws herself around like a dumb, exhausted piston. Looking up with doe eyes, batting eyelashes, as if to look like a bashful child — I am meant to be attracted to this? The mind reels. I’m not unaffected, of course. Certain stimuli simply overwhelm the brain’s most sincere, revolted objections. The lobster boils in hot water, no matter how much he resents it.

Anyway after a while of that, she got up and sat on my lap. My arms hung. She shoved her own shorts down to her feet and put her arms around my neck and pulled my head into her chest. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. It would have been a way to die and be found, like that. But it’s weird to care about those things. When you’re dead that stuff doesn’t reach you. I felt like I had already gotten there — let go of these earthly things, because death is coming.

“Are you all right?” She sounded concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said. I’m fine — what could I have been thinking?

She busied herself trying to pull off my shirt. I reached into the rack nailed to the back of the pew and grabbed a hymnal by the spine. It did not occur to me, even for a second, to hit her with it. Evidence of my being a decent person is hard enough to come by that I cherish this small thing. Instead I reared back and slugged myself in the jaw with it, as hard as I could.

Stephanie jumped off me — I think she thought I had been attacked. I stood up and we stared at each other. Everything was quiet. I hit myself again, right across the bridge of the nose. I could feel the blood crawling through it. Then I held my arm back as far as it could go and whipped the old book right at my face — a corner got me in the eye and I doubled over.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I could barely see her through tears and my eye swelling. She was asking me this, as if I could have answered. I picked the hymnal off the ground and laid it on the pew. She ran off, angry or embarrassed.

I heard the door slam off in the back of the church and I sat down to collect myself. Jesus frowned down over the pews. There was nothing in it — no meaning, no message for me. It was just a window. I pulled up my pants and walked out.

Back in the parking lot I saw Stephanie waiting by the car, arms crossed, pouting. On the one hand, it made sense — it’s not like she could have hailed a goddamn cab. But I still kind of couldn’t fucking believe it.

I do feel bad for her now. Of course I do. I ruined her dream. I’m sure she found someone else to fuck her in a church in the years since. But I must have cheapened it for her.

I left her there and walked home. It was like a mile and a half, but I wasn’t driving her anywhere. In the morning I biked down to pick up the car and found all the windows smashed in. I thought, well done. The librarian came outside. I hadn’t showered so my hair was pretty unkempt and there was still dried blood ringing my nostrils and the librarian looked like a deep well of pity and good feeling for me, like she wanted to take me home and hug me for a day or two. I swept broken glass off the driver’s seat with an ice scraper and drove home.