Can I Get An Amen? (30 page)

“Ellen, what’s the matter with you?” demanded my mother.
I couldn’t answer; I could only recall the things I had said and done just two nights ago, reframing them in this shocking new context.
I want to be with you,
I had whispered as I undressed myself. I once had a friend in college who took a job as a dancer at a high-end strip club. A women’s studies major, she spun her lucrative employment as liberating, a sort of feminism 2.0, until one night, a few minutes into her routine, she saw her uncle in the audience, looking stunned and excruciatingly uncomfortable as the German businessman whom he was entertaining stared at her appreciatively. I instantly had greater empathy for both of them.

It was all I could do to keep from running from the building right then and there, but I knew that I had to get out with as little notice as possible. Hunching so deeply that my face was practically on my knees, I looked through the program while my mother cast me sidelong glances. I would bide my time, then slip out calmly, as if just going to the restroom. Mark would never see me, never know I had been there.

I kept my eyes down as he spoke, his words becoming just sounds, unintelligible and meaningless as I concentrated on breathing, in and out. “Ellen, for goodness’ sake,
sit up
,” ordered my mother. We were called to stand and the music began again. I dared to sneak a glance up at the stage. Mark was watching the band, singing with the rest of the congregation, his head nodding rhythmically.

When the music ended, he opened his Bible and turned the pages carefully. Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he began to speak: “Romans 8:28 says, ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.’ ” It was one of my mother’s favorite scriptures, and she’d often say, “Even what seem like problems can become blessings in the Lord’s hands.” When Mark
was finished, he looked up at the congregation, then closed his eyes. “Let us pray.”

It was a beautiful prayer,
my mother would later tell me, but I couldn’t recall a word of it. As soon as it ended, there was another song; then Mark invited us to greet one another. As my mother quietly shook hands with our neighbors, I reached into her purse and pulled out her keys.

“Where are you going?” she hissed as I slid smoothly from the pew.

“I’ll be in the car,” I whispered, a desperate edge to my voice.

My hands were on the metal door push when I heard my name echo over the church’s PA system, drowning out the murmured exchanges of welcome among the congregants. “Ellen.” It wasn’t a question; there was no uncertainty in his voice. Frozen, I glanced back at the pulpit. He was staring at me, looking confused and pained and shocked.

Our eyes met for only a moment. Then, pushing the door open just wide enough to slip through, I escaped into the foyer and pressed the door shut again behind me. I flew through the second set of doors and outside, immune to the cold as it hit my burning face. Overwhelmed and stunned, I swatted unwelcome tears from my eyes. I didn’t know why they were coming. As I began to walk purposefully toward the car, my heart jumped as I heard the doors lurch open behind me. “Ellen!” he called. “Wait!” My pace quickened and I felt my stomach make panicked flips. His hand caught my arm and suddenly he was in front of me.

“Ellen, please,” he said, trying to catch my eyes.

For a second, when our eyes locked, I wanted to collapse against him. But that feeling was almost immediately overtaken by a deep sense of indignation and betrayal, which neither began nor ended with Mark.

“So
the Need Alliance
, huh?” I asked caustically.

“Just walk with me?”

I clutched the collar of my coat closed. “I don’t want to walk,” I said flatly.

“All right. I’ll say what I need to say right here.” He tried to take my hand, but I pulled it back. “I’m sorry I lied to you, Ellen. There were so many times when I wanted to tell you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because of this.” He gestured to the space between us. “Because with every day that passed that I didn’t tell you, it became harder.”

“Why did you lie in the first place?” I asked, pretending that it was his dishonesty that caused my repulsion, forgetting my own initial omissions.

“Ellen, women either
won’t
date me because of my work or they
only
want to date me because of my work.” He laughed humorlessly. “Neither really works.” I looked to see the members of the church beginning to peer from around the side of the building, taking cautious, wary steps toward us. “I really care about you. I didn’t want you to find out like this. I hoped it wouldn’t matter, but I can tell that it does.” He looked at me, waiting for me to contradict him. I couldn’t.

My mother emerged from the church, followed by several congregants looking protectively at “Pastor Mark” and suspiciously at me. Walking gingerly toward us, Mom looked back at the group and offered a nervous, apologetic smile.

“Hi, Pastor Mark,” she said as she reached us, her sugar-sweet southern accent kicking in. “I don’t know if you remember me, Patty Carlisle; I went with y’all to the family center a few times?”

Mark forced a smile. “Hello. How are you?”

She looked back and forth between us. “Is everything all right?”

“Mom, can you give us a minute?”

“Do y’all know each other?” she asked hopefully.

“Mom…”

I pulled Mark farther away. “Listen. This is clearly not the place to discuss this. Let’s talk later.”

He nodded. “I’ll pick you up,” he said. “What time?”

“No…,” I said quickly. “Let’s just meet somewhere.”

“W
ell, I think it’s wonderful that your boyfriend is a minister,” clucked my mother as she merged onto Route 78. “I don’t understand what you are so worked up about, why we had to leave church, for goodness’ sake.”

“He’s
not
my boyfriend. We went out a few times, during which he never told me the truth about what he did.” I found myself quickly trying to unweave the fabric of what Mark and I had become, pulling at the loose threads and frayed edges of our relationship, not knowing where to stop, not knowing whether to unravel it completely.

“He didn’t exactly lie,” rationalized my mother defiantly. “Churches are nonprofit organizations.”

I couldn’t even summon a response.

“He’s a good man, Ellen. He had every option in the world and he dedicated his life to Christ.” To hear Mark put in those hokey, idiomatic terms made me want to plug my ears and
scream, but my mother went on. “If you had just
stayed
to hear his sermon, you would have seen what he’s all about. I’ve never heard another minister preach so beautifully on God’s love.”

“Look, Mom, I’m sure he is a wonderful, talented preacher and a good, kind man.” My intonation indicated that there was a large and burdensome
but…

My mother turned to me, her pool blue eyes looking so much like Kat’s. “So what’s the problem?”

I contemplated the answer to that question all afternoon, right up until the moment I walked into the little café at Back Door Books. Mark was at the table where we had sat just a few weeks ago. He had a glass of water in front of him.

“No coffee?” I asked as I hung my coat over the back of the chair.

“I was waiting for you.”

Walking up to the counter, he ordered a black coffee for himself and a latte for me.

“Here,” I said, trying to hand him a five-dollar bill to cover the tab.

He looked down at the folded money in my hand like it was a particularly mean-spirited joke. “It’s okay, Ellen. I’ve got this.”

We took our seats back at the table and Mark stared into his coffee cup.

“I’m really sorry that things turned into such a scene today at church,” I said awkwardly, the words not feeling right in my mouth. “Did everyone… understand?”

“It was fine,” he said, his words so quick and reassuring that I was sure it
wasn’t
fine, that it was uncomfortable and difficult. “I’m just sorry you had to find out that way.” His being a minister seemed shameful and secret, and I shifted in my chair as I
remembered him up behind that pulpit. As if reading my body language, he continued. “But I am not ashamed of what I do, Ellen. I should have told you in the beginning, but I didn’t and I’ve been trying to figure out how to make you understand why. And I think the best way is to ask you this: if you knew I was a minister, would you have acted differently around me?”

Yes.

His eyes searched mine. “Would you have been able to get to know me, the way you did?”

No.

I’m sure he knew my answers, as the questions were for my benefit, not his. He went on. “But I should have accepted that. I should never have misled you. I was weak and I regret that.”

It was here that I was supposed to say that I understood, that I knew what it was like to fear divulging the truth. Instead I said, “Is this why… the other night…?”

“Yeah,” he said sadly, quietly. “I let it all get out of hand.”

My voice lowered to a near whisper. “Have you ever been… with a woman?” He looked disappointed that this was my first line of questioning, that my insecurities had elbowed their way to the front of the line.

“I wasn’t always a minister, Ellen,” he said simply, and I recalled the way he had touched me that night.

“What made you want to join the church?” I had to force myself to say the sentence fluidly, naturally. As my mother had put it, Mark had
every option in the world.
And I probably would have been thrilled with his choosing any one of them over this one.

He sat back in his chair and, with crossed arms, studied the edge of the table. “I was working on my doctorate. My focus was on economic solutions to poverty in the developing world. My
parents were missionaries and they saw God as the only way to improve people’s lives. They thought that if you had Jesus, everything else would fall into place and God would take care of all your needs. I fought against that idea; I wanted to develop the policies that would accomplish all that. It was when I was writing my thesis that I had a sort of epiphany, I guess it was—about me, about who I was.

“My father had come to visit me in New York. He had me go with him to a shelter run by an old friend of his for runaway teens. Some of these kids had fled the most appalling circumstances. We spent the night just talking with them, hearing their stories, listening. They were so grateful to have someone listen. It was God that was working through my father that night, allowing these kids who felt like no one cared for them to feel his love.” He was now looking me in the eye, speaking with a kind of restrained passion that I was sure he brought to his sermons. Though I maintained eye contact, I uncomfortably judged the proximity of the other patrons, whether they were within earshot, whether they could hear Mark sounding like this, sounding like a Christian.

“I don’t know; I guess I realized then that if my thesis, this thing I was pouring hundreds of hours into, did as much for one person as my father did for dozens on that night, I’d be lucky. I wanted to help people in a tangible, one-on-one way. I wanted God to work through
me
.”

But,
I thought.
But.
My objections were nothing I could verbalize. “Is this something you think you’ll do forever?”

He paused for a moment. “I don’t have any plans to leave the ministry right now. Not with God doing such amazing things at Prince of Peace.”

Instantly, the life we would have if we stayed together played
out in my mind. In rapid succession I pictured myself in Mark’s house, surrounded by his books, my legs stretched over his lap. I pictured trips to Africa. I pictured adoption. But when I started to panic, when the picture became too vivid, was when I saw myself sitting in the front row of Prince of Peace Church. It was then that I again felt the urge to run for the door. Because the problem wasn’t that I was afraid I didn’t fit there, but that I
did
, that I had been drawn blindly to an inevitability. That I was destined to sit wringing my hands and waiting for a deaf God to solve my problems. That religion would define me. That I would become my mother. That I already had.

I met his eyes. “I admire you,” I said, my voice heavy with caveats. “But, Mark…”

He leaned closer, his forearms resting on the table. I thought about what a compelling policy maker he would have been. “I understand it’s a lot to digest,” he said patiently. “And I know that my choices have implications for whomever I am with, both good and bad. But I really care about you, Ellen.” He laid his warm hand on top of mine.

“Mark,” I said, not knowing how to say what came next. We sat in silence for a second before I continued. “I care about you, too. I just…” I couldn’t stop thinking of my grandmother, the preacher’s wife.

He only nodded, expecting as much. He slid his hand slowly away and gripped the handle of his coffee mug.

And suddenly I wanted desperately to get away. “I better get going,” I said, my chair screeching against the tile floor as I pushed it back to stand.

“Ellen?”

I looked him in his eyes.

“Take care of yourself.”

My heart ached. He was altruistic and good, too good for me, to the very end.

. . .

My mother was waiting for me in the kitchen when I got home. “How was your date with Mark?”

“You mean
the Buddhist
?” I asked sarcastically as I sloughed off my jacket. I irrationally felt as though our breakup was her fault. It was her fault for having a Jesus fish on her car when she picked me up at school and sending me to Christian camp. It was her fault for telling me to “rest with the Lamb” and that I should cast my burdens at the “foot of the cross.”
She
did this.
She
made this happen. It was so much easier for me to resist what my mother believed than to divine my own faith. It was so much easier to blame.

She gave me a look.

“Listen, Mom, I don’t think it’s going to work out with us,” I said, wanting to cushion the blow. Mark was a dream come true, an answer to her prayers. She was like an old Italian mother coaxing her firstborn son into the priesthood in order to get a backstage pass into heaven.