SoC 2:4

St. John’s Sleeper

 

T he words of the New Testament reading hit Sheila Augustine like the proverbial ton of bricks.  For a moment, she sat stunned by them, then she just sat.

“Awake thou that sleepest…”

The ambiguity was disturbing: was she sleeping now, or had she been sleeping?  Had she awakened—she felt like it—or had she only been, as the scripture said, fellowshipping “with the unfruitful works of darkness?”

Sheila had spent the first portion of her graduate education on the road to a master’s degree in divinity.  Now, ten years later, she had a master’s and a Ph.D. in psychology instead, and had gotten what she had been warned was so difficult to do: a permanent job teaching psychology at a college. 

Attending St. John’s church was her continuing act of godliness, the vestige of her life at the seminary.

She sat alone, wearing the skirt she thought of as her most formal, just past knee length, navy blue wool, with a cotton v-neck sweater that showed off her olive skin.  She tried not to pick at the lint on the skirt, one of its drawbacks. 

The nearby pews were filled with family units of some type: some husbands and wives, though those were relatively rare; mothers with modestly grown children; mothers with grown children.  But Sheila sat there, trying to keep her back erect, proud to be there, alone.

James would not join her.  She had known the difficulty of luring him to church when they had begun dating, but recently, with the growing of Jacob, the tension about church-going was becoming more and more stressful on their relationship.  It wasn’t that they argued; it was just a constant state of impassiveness on his part. 

She knew Jacob was downstairs in the nursery, enjoying himself, with paints, glues, and blocks.  Only the atmosphere of Christianity proselytized him, but it was an atmosphere she thought, no, believed, was developmentally fundamental.  James did not disagree, he just passively refused to participate.

“Awake…”

She thought she was awakened and she wasn’t sure it was a good thing.

She had met Michael Payton at work, during an orientation session at the college on retirement plans.  He was there only as an observer and she was there as a new hire, attempting to make sense of the options available to new faculty.  She recognized, though it had been a rare thing in her life—especially for the years since meeting James -- an immediate spark, but she had ignored it for some time.  They were both married.  Michael had a child.  Now she did, too.

Sitting there, in church, she remembered him that day: tall, dark, not overwhelmingly handsome, but with kind blue eyes, a crinkle from laughing, and graying at the temples.  His mouth had a bit of a downturn, she suspected from all the contemplation.  Michael was the sometimes acknowledged faculty expert on things economic—he was the more accessible of the college’s two economists—and he spent a great deal of time pondering the dismalness of his science.

She and Michael had flirted that day.  Lightly.  Thinking back, she couldn’t even tell you what was particularly flirtatious about their conversation; it was just the general tone.  It wasn’t “all business.”

And she hadn’t told James.

That first year she’d shared an office in Mitchell Hall with the other “new” person, Ashley Martindale, who had never quite struck a chord with her.  She would talk occasionally to her department chair, but the personal relationship moments she looked forward to at work were her repartee with Michael.

He had his own office in the red brick building next to Mitchell, so she could sit there, uninterrupted, as he said “no one wants to chat with the economist,” drinking coffee. 

Occasionally, just twice a semester, coffee would turn into lunch, just a sandwich.

But she still didn’t tell James.

She had gotten pregnant in the summer after that first year, probably due to being off all summer for the first time in her life had left her and James with nothing much else to do but…she tried to put the act that had caused Jacob’s appearance in context.  Darkness?

She stood for the Gospel, from John.

Was she still in the darkness?

Father Rank, looking a bit tired and old for his forty-five years—they had arranged a birthday party for him just weeks before—began his sermon.  He left Ephesians to Sheila to decipher, and turned instead to the gospel and the amazingly non-paradoxical story of the blind man and Jesus’s miracle. 

Blind.  A whole different kind of darkness.

James had been a waiter in the café in New Orleans she had frequented the summer after graduation.  She had been running away and she ran straight into him.  When asked by anyone from back east, she had said she was seeing a beautiful man-child from New Orleans.

She had gone ahead to seminary, but he had followed.  She thought it was romantic.  Maybe it was man-child impetuousness. 

She sat, for a moment forgetting Father Rank and his sermon, remembering her own impetuousness.

Her own? She and Michael had been alone, as they had been so many times before, and they had been in Michael’s office, parting at the end of the morning.  Thursday.  She bit her thumbnail as she thought, remembered.  She didn’t see the pew ahead of her that she seemed to be staring at so intensely.

What had they been talking about?  Jacob?  Then she rose to go, reached to hug him, he hugged her, then they were close.  They had kissed.

Since then she had wondered if she had kissed him or he had kissed her.  That she didn’t know for sure reinforced her conviction that they were both complicit.  When they had parted, and the kiss had been electric, she had let him go a bit too quickly she thought and said “good bye,” almost subconsciously attempting to take the spark out of the situation.  He had said a quiet good bye to her back and she had gone.

They had not spoken since.  Or emailed.  Or anything. 

Funny, sitting in church, she didn’t feel guilty.

She remembered a line from Julia Roberts in a movie, “It was only a kiss.”

It was.  But in her mind it was something more.  A breaking of the darkness.  A light shining on her life, on her relationship with her husband, even with her infant son.  Her son was going to church, she was taking him, alone, but she was sitting here pondering acts that were hardly church-like.

She remembered the Julia Roberts movie.  It was about nasty things being done to people, couples, by people who professed to love them.  Jude Law.  She thought he was beautiful, too.  She smiled to herself thinking that James reminded her more of the other man, what was his name? The darker, heavier, more masculine one?  Or maybe it was just the coloring that confused her attempt to make the connection to the movie, or maybe it was Law’s sordid tabloid appearances shortly after she had seen it.

Betrayal. 

Stay away from the darkness, come into the light. 

She tried to think of James.  Young, beautiful James.  Was he Jude Law?  No.  She tried to avoid making him culpable, an actor in this play in which his role was both major yet ineffectual.

James wasn’t that kind of cad.

James was just…

She picked again at her navy blue skirt, tried to think about the service, but her head was elsewhere. 

Had James ever been the light of her life?  Did she act like the other actress—the one in Star Wars—in the Roberts-Law movie did around Jude Law, besotted?  She knew she wasn’t so perkily gorgeous, but had she fawned, begged, hurt?

No.

James’s pursuit of her had given her the power in the relationship, as Roberts and Law had in their other relationships in that movie.  She was modern enough of a woman to not let this bother her, but now she understood its greater implications.  James had followed her to god-not-quite-forsaken-Texas, taken her to bed, become her constant companion and reconfigured her as something other than a religious minister.  She probably should have been wearier when he arrived, unannounced, having left New Orleans, his waiting job, his fragmented college career.  That he had no job, no other focus in life, should have warned her.  But all that had mattered then was that he had followed her.  He was her disciple.

She had become something of a secular minister, sliding back to New Orleans—sexy, artsy, hedonistic, secular New Orleans—then back into the grad school trap.  He had waited tables, dabbled in an English major, worked at a book store.

They had married because there seemed nothing else to do with their relationship: they weren’t splitting up and forever-living-together suited neither’s sense of completeness. 

He had agreed on the move north, back toward her family, and away from his, without his ever having seen Springfield, taking on only her word for it; she had wondered if they shouldn’t make the trip together to “look around.”  It had become “her thing.”  “Her job.”  “Her school.” 

He had worked in the college bookstore for a few weeks after they arrived, then tried several work-at-home offers.  Now he said he had enough to do being a full-time dad for Jacob.  That one was hard to argue with.  And it was convenient.  Though she needn’t worry about day-care since the college had a program.

So, there was James, still beautiful, in an older, flabbier, more memory than activity sort of way, staying at home, handling their son, while she…

Now she had to keep from viewing Michael as the cad. He was no cad, either.

The kiss kept coming back to her.  No, she realized it wasn’t the physical kiss, it was the dark side of it, the emotions it revealed.  The Roberts character had been right, a kiss is just that, but context was everything.

The kiss had been a long time coming and she knew it stood symbolically for a complex of emotions.

She was a psychologist, though not this kind, not the kind that specialized in relationships.  She was an academic.  She had become a psychology professor not to be a therapist but to study causation; she wanted distance from her subjects, which therapy didn’t really allow.  She wanted to know how the brain worked, not only physiologically, but emotionally.  How people acted.  But she didn’t want to cure them, she wanted to study them in less messy conditions.

She had left the cure idea behind, in that seminary, in Texas, swept away in the wake of her romance with James.

After years of work, struggling, putting their lives together, so she thought, she had landed this job, the first tenure track opportunity they had agreed was acceptable.  The others she had turned down; or actually, she had never had to, letting it be known she was not really interested.

Now, she was happy.  She loved the students, the work, the atmosphere. 

She loved Jacob.  She hadn’t thought anyone could bring her such joy.  Seeing him develop, she understood her new discipline just a bit better.  She had given up saving people somewhere in Texas and now she “settled” for understanding them.

But James.

Beautiful James.

James was only in the background as she wondered if she was in love with another man.  Father Rank continued, his sturdy, compassionate voice intoning the gospel’s homily about the distinction between dogma and faith, and she wondered about other distinctions.

As a psychologist, she understood how to understand herself.  She had rigidly maintained that she was compassionate, idealistic, and not given to pragmatics.  She had a romantic side.  She hid all these behind a thinly veiled irony that led to many verbal jousts, many quips.

That had been how she had begun with Michael. 

But part of her compassion and her idealism was also her morality.  She sat in church, she thought, for a reason.

She was morally superior.

Wasn’t she?

She had kissed Michael Payton and it had sent a shock wave through her, almost physically. 

Now she had to sit in a pew, having been morally superior, and ponder being Julia Roberts’s character in a movie, in a plot, that was the antithesis to the identity she had created for herself.

Paul the apostle wrote, “all things reproved are manifest by the light.”  Reproved.

Her marriage?

Her affair?

It had occurred to her since Thursday that it was an affair.  Interpersonal relationships weren’t her area of expertise, but she taught enough of it to know that you didn’t need to have sex to be in an affair—that was Psych 101.  She was emotionally involved with Michael Payton.

Because of some talk and some coffee and a few sandwiches.

Michael hadn’t come across miles of flatlands unbidden to love her.  He hadn’t seemed overtly “interested.”  He wasn’t Jude Law.  Or that other, bigger, darker actor.  She tried to remember, with a smile, the name of another actor, from the HBO movie, the one with the man who thought in late middle age he should wear dresses and be a woman.  He reminded her of Michael, though Michael was more attractive, and younger.  He was a big, kind man. 

Or actor.

The service moved from the sermon to the prayers.  She knelt, tried to pay attention to the words. 

“Have mercy on us,” she recited, trying to pay attention to the service, not to her whole life.

Life was full of distractions, she told herself. 

“Have mercy on us,” she said again.

A deep breath, a quick thought about Jacob, who was probably coloring as she prayed, flushing at the flash of image in the office with Michael, a flash that she felt she needed God’s mercy from, then

“O Christ, hear us.”

Hear us?

The question of interpretation was in her face again: hear what?  Was she sleeping now or had she been sleeping before?  Was this the light? or was it the darkness that needed reproof?  Before she could dwell too long on the request that God hear, they were back to the litany,

“Have mercy on us, have mercy on us…have mercy on us.”

Yes, she needed mercy. 

She wasn’t sure exactly what for, but she knew intuitively that she needed it.

“Spare us.”

Ah, a different approach to mercy.  Spare. 

From what?

Yes, the temptation to kiss him again.

The pain of hurting one of them.

The pain of loving one, or was it both, of them?

God could do that, couldn’t he?

He.

Another struggle with the seminary.  The gender of god.  God. 

But Christ was unmistakably male.

He.

Spare us.

“Deliver us” she prayed, aloud.  From evil.

From temptation.

That first cup of coffee, in mugs in his office, brought from the pot in the administrative offices on the floor below, had been it.  He had smiled, laughed, teased, cajoled.  Light banter.

“Not from around here?” he’d asked.

She was a New Yorker, she had admitted.

“Oh.”

“What?”

“You don’t have the accent.”

She showed him. “I can pawk caws with the best uv ‘em.”

“Ah.”  He had smiled.  The skin at his eyes at crinkled, charmingly she realized now.

“Connecticut,” he’d said.

The picture of the beloved daughter stood there on his desk.  On the walls were prints, large ones, of non-economic scenes. 

“Did you go to school in New York?”

“Rutgers.”

“Ah.”

“You?”

“Trinity. Hartford.”

“Don’t know it.”

“Small, liberal arts.  Like here.”

“Oh,” it was her turn.

“Grad school?” he returned to the biographical line.

“Tulane,” she said, but let it go for a moment, ”there were detours.”

He smiled.  They didn’t talk then about the detours.

“You?”

“UMass.”

“Came south then?”

He chuckled to think of Springfield as south.  The winters, the past one even, the one they dealt with, between, the several, all belied “south.”  It was south of Amherst.

They had gone on to talk about the house she had found to rent, the department she had come into, his department of two, then his work.  He was an expert, “of sorts,” on the effect of the bond market on currency.  Or so he said. 

The Waterhouse prints, the pre-Raphaelites, the bookshelves full of novels and histories and strangely non-economic topics (why did he have a copy of Miss Manners on his shelf?).  

“We beseech you to hear us” she murmured, having lost the line of the liturgy.

She didn’t mean it.

Where was God in her life?  How did Michael fit into her notion of God, a moral life, any of it?  How did he fit into her idea of her life?

She wasn’t Julia Roberts.

The title of the movie came to her:  Closer.

She tried not to sigh audibly and murmured “beseech you” again.

She looked, unconsciously, but then consciously, at the empty pew next to her.  She realized that she sat here, getting closer to God, but somehow she was farther away from her husband.  The tension between James and what was right had been there from the beginning—she had warned herself to not get involved with such a young, erratic, beautiful, even self-involved man.  And she hadn’t.  She had gone on to the seminary.  And now, alone in a church fifteen hundred miles away, she was closer than she had been in some time.

“I believe in God,” she remembered James reciting, looking at the ceiling in a bed in New Orleans.  Was it that warm?  Was the window open?  Was the ceiling the ugly almost yellow of off-white that she remembered.

“I’m just not into the church.”  It was the way James talked.  She found it honest, attractive.

“Why not?” she had asked.  She was on her way to seminary; she was, in his language, “into church.”

He hadn’t looked at her.

“The whole church thing, you know.  They don’t really believe,” he’d said it with such intensity, “they just want to go on.  They meet to meet, they go on to perpetuate the species.”

She had dismissed this off as his having been raised Catholic.  He had laid there, his shock of hair disheveled from their love making, his skin a pale tan, his ghostly coloring never quite overtaken by New Orleans’s endless sun.  The sheet, a basic, cotton, white, tossed across his lap, the bare chest, splattered with a few sparse, curled, dark hairs. 

She looked around now and wondered how he made this judgment.  “They don’t really believe.”  They all said the words, repeated the litany, how did one know if they believed or not?  She did, and she knew her failing as a wife, maybe even as a mother, did not make her less of a believer.  Sin was part of the pattern; mercy, sparing, praying wasn’t about not believing, it was about believing.

But she hadn’t explained all that to him, though maybe she’d only become to know it later.  But she also hadn’t told him about the seminary.  She hadn’t told him about God, about Christ, about being one with Him. 

Closer.

Now she sat in church, alone with her thoughts, her demons, her darkness.

She looked again at the hands that looked aged, more wrinkled than expected of a “young” woman; motherhood, bathing, scrubbing, cleaning, had left her older.  Not Michael’s contemporary, quite, but not the young thing who had married James.

Definitely not Julia Roberts. 

So, here she was in St. John’s church, Springfield, a toddling son off in another room, a toddling husband off in another place, and her own identity lost.

“Awaken!”

They stood for the closing hymn. 

“Hover o’er me, Holy Spirit,
Bathe my trembling heart and brow;
Fill me with Thy hallowed presence,
Come, O come and fill me now.”

It wasn’t quite the darkness and light, but Sheila caught the connection, vague as it was.  As the organist flourished through a postlude, she remembered one bit that had missed its mark initially from Father Rank’s sermon: doctrines and rituals alone don’t help with this kind of blindness.

They adjourned and she smiled absently to the Stewarts, then Frank Gower, and then spoke for a moment to Melissa Dwight, the librarian, looking tall and classical in a wool cowl-neck and scarf, then she shook Father Rank’s hand.

“How are you Sheila?” he asked, looking at her like he really cared.

“Fine, Ned,” she answered, not sure she was really comfortable with his first name, but he seemed so genuinely to want to be on a first-name basis with everyone.  “Good service,” she said as a matter of rote.

“Thanks,” he said and moved on, as she did, too, sliding to the hallway to the nursery.

She was behind several clots of parents as she got to the nursery doorway, so she had to pause and look around them to see her son.  There at one of the short tables was Jacob, looking like a miniature version of James.  He was a beautiful child, made more beautiful by his naivete.   She watched him playing with a messy substance that she took to be brown clay, though it appeared to be mud.  She smiled as she realized the relevance of the dull colored mound—Jesus had cured the blindness with mud on the man’s eyes – and found the lesson charming. 

“Well, Jacob,” she said, breaking around the parent-child traffic jam, “what have you been up to?”

“We made mud,” he said, looking up at her and beaming. 

“So,” she said, looking at it.

“Can I bring it home?” he asked.  Sheila paused, making a cleaning-woman assessment of this idea.  The symbolism of it occurred to her.

“Sure,” she said, realizing that it could be cleaned and the symbolism needed to be played out.  Didn’t it?

Missy, the one nursery teacher, had a sandwich bag to pack the “mud” into (actually homemade playdough, she whispered to Sheila), and Jacob ran to the corner faucet, like the tables, set low for smaller people, and washed his brown smeared hands. 

“How about we stop over at the coffee place?” she asked her son.

“Hot chocolate?”

“Sure,” she responded.

She took his free hand and they exited on the sidewalk, then crossed the street at the corner that St. John’s dominated.  Down the street half a block was Just Java, the artsy coffee shop for those with leisure time for expressos, or to grab a to-go cup in the mornings on the way to work.  She and Jacob came in there regularly after Sunday service, as did a number of the congregation.

She ordered her coffee and Jacob’s hot chocolate to go and Jacob put his finger on the display case that held the morning pastries.

“Hello,” the voice shocked her.

“Hello,” she was able to respond.

Michael Payton looked a bit disheveled, unshaven, but somehow magnetic. 

“Hello Jacob,” he said, looking at her, then turning to her son.

“Hi,” was all Jacob responded.

“What do you have there?”

“Mud,” Jacob broadly responded.

“Mud.  Where’d you get it?”

“We made it in Sunday School,” he said, proudly.

“Oh.”

“Jesus put it on the blind man so he could see.”

Sheila was about to correct the inexactness of his description, but got no chance.

“Ah, yes, I see,” Michael returned.  “As I recall, some didn’t believe the blind man.”

Jacob looked at him but clearly that part of the Bible passage had either not been mentioned or Jacob had been focused elsewhere.

“That’ll be two seventy-five, ma’am,” the young man behind the counter said.

She handed him the three dollars, trying to focus on her purchase.

“Good to see you,” Michael said.

“Yeah,” she got out.

He was turning to go, then hesitated.  “I need to call you.”

“Yes,” she said, trying to regain her voice, “you do.”

He turned and she watched him amble away in his jeans and untucked long-sleeve polo shirt.  He slid into one of the ironwork chairs and looked back at her as he picked up part of the newspaper on the table.  He smiled and she smiled back.

Then Sheila turned to Jacob, picked up the two cups of hot drink, said, “come on,” and headed out of the poorly lit café.  She wished she had her sunglasses as she and Jacob stepped onto the sidewalk.  The brightness was almost too much for her, but she was happy to have the light.