Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  “What?”

  He looked me right in the eyes. “A little out of control.”

  “Lukie, come on! You know how Kat and Mom completely blow things out of proportion. It’s the one thing they have in common.”

  “All right, but you should probably chill out a little. You need to start figuring shit out, you know?”

  “What do you mean?” I was on the defensive now. “What do I need to figure out?”

  “Like, what you’re going to do for money?” he began, astounded that I needed him to recite what should have been my ever-present concerns. “When you’re going to go up to Boston to deal with stuff? Where you’re going to live?”

  I took a sip of wine, angry that Luke had managed to sour what was hitherto a perfectly enjoyable evening. “Well, thank you, Luke, for accurately framing for me what a train wreck my life is right now.”

  Luke sat back and eyed me with that same look of serious yet tentative concern that I had seen on the faces of my parents, my sister, my childhood friend, even the occasional bartender. It was clear that the sudden change in my mood confirmed in Luke’s mind everything that Kat and my mother had been telling him. Breaking eye contact, he searched about the room for something, anything else to discuss with me. We spent the rest of the evening making the kind of meaningless chitchat that you might hear between two acquaintances who happened to sit next to each other on the bus, when they would really rather have ridden in silence.

  I had driven to Hoboken and taken the PATH train—New Jersey’s version of a subway—into the city. After the de facto interminable wait during the non–rush hour time period, I finally boarded a car and made the trip back to my side of the Hudson. Hoboken was a busy town on a Friday night, chock-full of the sort of fresh-to-the-workforce college grads who slipped out of their Brooks Brothers suits and into baseball caps before heading out for drinks. I made my way past the bars, their flashing flat-screens eternally tuned to ESPN, to the parking lot where I had left my car. It was an unseasonably warm evening, so I walked slowly, catching snippets of sidewalk conversations between friends, lovers, and those who fell somewhere in between. On the drive home, I was beginning to feel the nagging call for self-reflection that always followed sobriety, so before heading back to my parents’, I pulled off the interstate and headed to the bar that I had gone to with Kat on that very first night—and many nights since.

  The bar masqueraded as a restaurant, so there were a few tables of customers finishing a late meal of pretentious but unremarkable fare. The bar was large and U-shaped, and the decor tried to approximate what the owners must have viewed as a New York look, but it was sadly a miss. Above the bar’s shiny, galvanized steel surface hung sleek, modern-looking pendant lights, which fought to illuminate the charcoal gray walls. It looked as though the renovation was a couple of years old, and all the clean lines and sleek surfaces had started to show some dings and dents, making the place look cheap and prematurely past its prime. The crowd was the usual, traders who should be home by now but were looking for a balm for the wounds they suffered daily in the floundering market; older men on dates with blond, manicured women who were hoping to achieve the enviable title of second wife.

  I sat down and ordered a scotch on the rocks, which had become my go-to drink, as I imagined that men found it sexy to see a woman with her hand curled around a lowball full of the rich amber liquid. So much more sophisticated than any sort of idiotic ’tini. When ordering, I pretended to care about the liquor’s age and provenance, but all that mattered was that it would be soothingly numbing. As I watched the bartender add one, two, three cubes of ice, I noticed a man sitting across the way who seemed utterly out of place. He looked like he belonged in a hip New York boîte, not in this slick Jersified imposter. He had honey brown hair that was just long enough to look slightly disheveled as it brushed the frames of his thick black glasses, the sort that could be worn well only by a man with his sharp, chiseled features and strong jaw. His fitted, faded gray T-shirt looked like it was tailored explicitly to showcase his long, well-defined muscles. He was a man at whom everyone in the bar, female and male alike, found themselves involuntarily sneaking glances. But no one approached him. Something about him was too uncomfortably authentic. In a bar that was full of pretense and posturing, he sat sipping a bottle of Budweiser and quietly laughing with two of his friends.

  I had to will myself not to stare at him, at all three of them. But he, in particular, looked so comfortable in his skin, so en-grossed in conversation with his companions, that I found myself involuntarily drawn to him. After a few minutes, one of his friends, the tall, thin one, picked up a skateboard that was leaning against his stool, stood, gave his buddies a combo high-five/handshake, and left, still smiling as he slipped past frowning men and Botoxed, expressionless women on his way to the door. My eyes followed him out, and then I turned back to look for the man with the glasses, only to see that he had been watching me. His expression was not arrogant or mocking, but kind. I blushed and immediately turned away to see that someone had taken up the seat next to me, a man who looked about my age with a quick smile and well-cut suit.

  He extended his hand. “Hi. I’m Ted.”

  I smiled and shook it. “Ellen.” He launched into chitchat and I was not at all surprised to learn that he was in sales. He was attractive enough, in a sort of frat-boy way, and had the kind of thick, dense body that looked strong and solid, but without much definition. He was easy to talk to, though, and provided a distraction from the man across the bar.

  “So, where are you from?” he asked as he reached for the Asian snack mix in a small black bowl in front of us, pushing away the pieces that he didn’t care for and digging around for the sesame sticks.

  “Well, originally here, but I just moved back from Boston.”

  “Boston! Nice!” he said, happy to find a connection. “I went to school in Boston.”

  We went through the Boston thing. Where precisely I had lived, restaurants I liked, all of that. I steered clear of any reference to my marriage.

  “So, Ellen from Boston, Sox or Yankees?”

  I hated this question. Baseball didn’t mean a thing to me, but to the type of person who asked this question, it definitely did. And ambivalence was unacceptable. I tried anyway. “Oh, I don’t know… Baseball’s not really my thing.”

  “Come on,” he said, playfully pressing on. “You’re from Jersey but you lived in Boston; you have to be either Sox or Yankees.”

  I could tell he was not going to give up. “Fine,” I said, lifting my hands as if weighing my options. “Sox.” It would be my final act of loyalty to Gary.

  He lifted his glass in a toast to my apparently correct answer. “I knew I liked you, Ellen.” And he bought me a drink. But unlike on dozens of evenings past, I found myself unwilling to overtly flirt, as I was constantly aware of the man across the bar. Ted was clearly interested, and he continued to try to make conversation, turning the topic first to real estate and then back to sports.

  “I have a few trips planned to Boston this winter.” He was staring straight ahead now, but I could see that he was gauging my every reaction, hoping to find my sweet spot. “My buddy works in management for the Celtics, so I go up there for some home games. I get amazing seats.”

  “Oh, I love the Celtics!”

  Bingo. His eyes brightened and something flashed there that I didn’t quite recognize. I would later describe it as victory. He turned his whole body to face me. “Really?” he asked, clearly pleased. “You like hoops?”

  I nodded, thinking back fondly to a very different time and place. A very different me. “Yeah, I do.”

  “You know, I’ve met a lot of those guys,” he said, referring to the Celtics. “I have a basketball signed by last year’s starting five.”

  I paused, remembering Daniel’s face, ecstatic and engrossed, as we sat in the thundering Fleet Center, watching agile, superhuman bodies rocket themselves off the ground. “I know someone who woul
d love to see that.”

  He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the door. “It’s in my car right now. I just brought it for an appraisal. Want to check it out?” He saw my hesitation. “My car’s literally right outside.”

  I didn’t really want to leave the bar to check out a basketball, even one signed by the Celtics, but Ted looked so eager, so proud. It would have been like disappointing a child. “Sure. Why not?” I said with a shrug.

  I walked next to him with my arms crossed over my chest. Ted’s hand hovered behind my back to guide me in the direction of his car, which was on the ground floor in a nearby parking garage. I started to feel inconvenienced by walking even the block and a half, which by definition was not literally right outside. Ted seemed like a nice enough guy, but I found myself wishing I’d found a way to politely decline.

  It was late and the parking garage was all but empty, illuminated only by the streetlights outside. Ted hit a button on his keys and a huge black SUV gave an alert double-beep, beckoning us in its direction.

  We were a few feet away from his car when I heard him stop. I reflexively tensed, some long-dormant, primal, preylike sense awakened. Glancing nervously back, I saw him gesture forward toward the car. “It’s right in the backseat,” he said with a smile that under the shadowy light no longer looked so innocent. “Just open up the door.”

  Only then did it occur to me how strange it was that he happened to have a signed basketball in his car. Frame by frame, I played out what was about to happen. I would open the car door, leaning in to look for the basketball, with a 225-pound man behind me in a dark, barren parking garage.

  The car’s interior light was on, but by now I didn’t expect to see the ball. “Actually, Ted, I really need to get going.” I started to step back, but he was right there. Spinning around to face him, I was now backed up against the cold, black metal.

  “Come on, Ellen,” he said, reaching for the handle and effectively wedging me tight between him and the car. “I thought you loved the Celtics.” He was still playful, but this no longer felt like a game. None of it did.

  “No, Ted, I really have to go.” My heart started to race and I tried to push past him, but he caught me around the waist and pulled me into him from behind. Laughing and swaying, he held me tight, his arms reaching up around my chest to restrain me. From a boyfriend or lover, it would have been an affectionate hold. “Whoa, where you going, huh?” he whispered in my ear, his breath thick with alcohol.

  “Let me go!” I yelled, trying to twist free, but his hand darted up and clamped down over my mouth.

  “Shhhh,” he said, chuckling. “Relax, baby. I know you’re the type of girl that likes to have a little fun.” I could feel now how hard he was. He wanted me to feel it as he pressed himself against me. His damp mouth was again at my ear. “I’ve seen you before.” And finally the tears came. They rolled down my cheeks in frantic, crisscrossing lines, forming tiny pools where they met his hand. I wondered if this was how it always happened, if all the aggregate mistakes of a lifetime suddenly crystallize the very second it becomes too late.

  I didn’t hear any footsteps and neither did he, but I felt him startle when we heard a man’s voice from behind us say, “Let her go. Now.” Strong and clear, the words overtook the empty garage.

  Ted’s body reluctantly relaxed; his grip loosened. An on-looker definitely put a crimp in his plans. I immediately broke away and reeled back to see the man with the glasses standing with his arms crossed, staring—almost menacingly—at Ted.

  “Hey, man, listen,” started Ted casually—he had slipped right back into his charming salesman mode—“I can totally see what this must have looked like, but I was just joking around. I wasn’t going to do anything.” He was so convincing, so totally believable, that I almost wondered if I had been imagining the danger, wondered if I was some hysterical girl who constantly had her finger on the trigger of a can of pepper spray, certain that every man was a potential rapist.

  Without taking his eyes off Ted, the man with the glasses pointed in my direction. I was trying to steady my breath and control my tears, halting gasps ineffectively filling my lungs. “Does it look like she thinks it was a joke?”

  Ted made a face, a petulant little puckering of his mouth that made clear it didn’t matter what I thought. It was probably the same face he had been making since middle school: at teachers, at his parents, and at women he just happened to meet at bars. “Dude, whatever,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “That chick is nuts. I was just trying to calm her down when you came.”

  The man with the glasses moved immediately, grabbing Ted by his shirt and slamming him hard into his shiny black car. Their faces were now inches apart. What the man said, I couldn’t hear; I wasn’t meant to hear. He spoke in low, whispered words, and from my vantage point all that I saw was Ted’s face change. After a few breaths the man with the glasses slowly let go, then tentatively turned to me, as if not to alarm me.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me softly. I only nodded, as I was still fighting the hysterical breaths escaping my mouth. “Come on,” he said, his head tilted toward the street. “Let’s get you out of here.” And not for one moment did I hesitate.

  We walked quickly and without speaking. I kept turning back nervously, expecting to see Ted following us, expecting to see him rush the man with the glasses from behind. “Don’t worry; he won’t come anywhere near you,” he said, suddenly stopping. “My name is Mark, by the way.”

  I managed to speak, though my words came out in jagged, halted spurts. I sounded like a hysterical child. “My car… is on Summit… Street.”

  He shook his head. “No, you’re in no shape to drive,” he said definitively. “I can take you home.”

  “No, wait…” I squeezed my eyes shut to think. Though I felt an instinctive and almost reflexive trust in Mark, I knew that the sensible thing to do would be to call a cab, call Kat, anything but get into a car with another strange man. “I should just call my sister.”

  Mark nodded, seeming to follow my train of thought, and stood a respectful distance away while I pressed my cell against my ear. I expected to hear Kat’s sleep-laden voice, reproachful and annoyed, but instead without so much as a ring I was sent to her cool, brief voice-mail greeting.

  After I was hung up on by one cab company and never actually reached a human being at the other, Mark looked at me hesitantly, his hands in his back pockets. “Sometimes they just let it ring and ring at this time of night.” I nodded and looked around, as if expecting some other solution to suddenly materialize. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you just let me take you?” I looked at him, searching his face for something that would give me pause. “I promise I’ll get you home safe.”

  “Okay.” Tears began to well up in my eyes again. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  He smiled a small, sympathetic smile. “My car’s this way,” he said, leading us on. It wasn’t until much later that I realized his car was in the opposite direction of the parking garage from the bar. He didn’t just happen upon Ted and me on his way home. He wouldn’t have. How and why he found me there would become one of the many questions that I longed to ask him.

  We approached a nondescript blue Subaru and he opened the passenger door. The seat held a scattering of papers and books, and he quickly gathered them up and tossed them into the backseat, muttering an apology about the mess before gesturing for me to sit and closing the door behind me.

  I took a deep breath and rested my head against the headrest, letting it all hit me. The gratitude, embarrassment, humiliation, and fear. I had been so stupid. Fresh tears began to spring from my eyes and I quickly brushed them away as Mark opened the driver’s side door. He sat down and pulled an iPod from his pocket, plugging it into a tangle of wires and adaptors hanging from the dashboard. Bob Dylan blasted unexpectedly loudly from the speakers before Mark quickly adjusted the volume. Afraid to look at him, I stared toward the ceiling, hoping to maintain some c
ontrol. I felt his hand hover lightly above my forearm, and I let my eyes focus first there, then on his long arms strapped with sinewy muscles, before meeting his eyes. He had the most sincere, intelligent, dark brown eyes.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. In the dim light of the car, I took in his face. He was also older than I had thought, probably a few years older than me, with a smattering of crow’s-feet and long fine lines running across the width of his forehead, which added an element of depth to his otherwise surreally handsome face.

  “I’m okay,” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t entirely true.

  He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair before sticking his key in the ignition and coaxing the engine to life. The wagon was a standard, and he stepped onto the clutch and grabbed for the gearshift. He was about to move it into reverse when he stopped, as if deliberating, and turned to look at me. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again before finally saying, “You shouldn’t punish yourself.”

  I didn’t know if he meant for tonight, for what had happened with Ted, but it seemed that his meaning went deeper than that, that though I had never laid eyes on him before, he had somehow seen what I had been doing, and he knew why.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He waited while I wept into my hands. Like any man, he tried for a while to calm me down, saying how sorry he was for upsetting me, that he only meant I hadn’t done anything wrong, not to blame myself. But then he just sat wordlessly. When I finally stopped, I apologized. “I’m so, so sorry,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean to ruin your night.”

  He smiled kindly. “You didn’t ruin my night. But maybe now you could tell me your name?”

  I blushed, realizing that this man who didn’t even know my name was witness to so much. “Ellen.”

  “Ellen,” he said, trying the name out in his mouth. “So, where do you live?”

  I launched into another round of apologies, saying how I couldn’t believe that I had just let him sit there, how inconsiderate I was. But he chuckled good-naturedly. “Please don’t worry about it.” Glancing at the clock on his stereo, I saw that it was two thirty in the morning.