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leaping over couches
Her first time here had been nearly thirty years ago. It had been easy then, a game, toying with her inquisitor, thinking that she had been pulling the wool over his eyes. Fourteen years old, wise to the world, the import of her experience lifting her like a hawk to a point from which she saw everything and everyone. She imagined also that she’d discovered a way to see also their intentions and secrets. She had been wrong, of course; Eleanor had no super powers. She was only a girl, one who would always walk with a slight buckle in her gait.
Across from her, the man crossed and uncrossed his legs. He could have been almost anyone — a friend, a therapist (like the first person who had asked of her experience), her father, a stranger — in this instance he was a man of God, a Pentecostal preacher. She could have identified him as such even without the striped tie, the Sears suit-in-a-box, the spindly ankles that stretched between the cuff of his pants and his loafers, thin and sock-clad and looking much like exposed bone, the meat of which, his attire, had in this one place been chewed away.
She had known many men of God. And she had known some of them — two, in any case — far better than she probably should have. She did not trust the average priest or preacher or minister or reverend any farther than she could throw them. And yet who else could answer questions? Other than the sadly cute man in the frayed camouflage, the one who sat day after day on the bench in front of the pet store, holding his water-warped sheet of poster board with its God quotations of the day — "Behold, I am tired of your shit," it had read yesterday — who claimed such a direct line of communication with God? She had gone through stages with preacher-types; as a girl and in her twenties, she had challenged them, thrown the hard questions at them, gloated secretly when they failed to return her serve. She had gone through a period of complete subjection, allowing one priest in particular to steer her towards faith, which had turned out to be nothing more than a series of tasks she had to accomplish, hoops to be flung through, none of which brought her any closer to God, but made her a Better Catholic. Now, on the downward side of her thirties and with a sinking feeling that hers might be a life cut short, she was desperate for real ideas, ideas that led to answers, answers that led to safety and contentment, and ultimately, she hoped, to that voice again.
She had met him at her mother's funeral a week ago. He had come to her as she sat, stiff and staring, alone on a pew at the front of the church. He'd hovered at the boundary of her peripheral vision for a moment without speaking; she dreaded anybody's company that day, and hoped that, whoever he was, he would leave her be.
"You're Paul's daughter," he said.
Without looking at him, she nodded.
"Your father, he talks about you all the time," he went on, and came closer to her. "My name is John Palmer." He extended his hand, and Eleanor gave in and looked up at him, and shook his hand loosely. He shifted his grip, turning his hand so that it cupped hers; with his free hand he patted the back of her hand gently. "You can call me John, or Brother Palmer — whatever you prefer."
She didn't know what to say.
"I'm very sorry about your mother."
Eleanor nodded.
"God works in mysterious ways," he offered.
Eleanor pressed her lips together. "My mother didn't believe in God," she said.
John Palmer sat down beside her, still patting her hand. "We all believe in God," he said. "Even when we don't know it. Our souls know he is there. It's just our minds and bodies that get in the way."
Eleanor didn't argue against his logic. She repeated, "My mother didn't. She really didn't."
"Do you?" he asked her.
She reclaimed her hand and tucked both beneath her thighs. "I don't know," she said.
John Palmer nodded. "I think that's probably the healthiest answer," he said. "Better than denying God without reason, at least," he added.
Eleanor said nothing.
He waited several minutes with her, never taking his eyes off of her. It made her a little nervous, the way he seemed to be waiting for her to break apart any minute now; how he almost seemed to be hoping she would, preferably while he was here to gather her up and offer some kind of comfort. The last preacher who had offered her comfort had fucked her in the prayer closet, then sternly admonished her with the same thing John Palmer had said moments ago: "God works in mysterious ways. But sometimes secret ways. Tell anybody and God will withdraw his blessings in your life."
Eleanor hadn't told anybody, but not because of his pathetic threat.
John Palmer said, finally, "Can we talk?" He softened a bit, nodded in the direction of her mother's casket. "After, I mean. Paul has told me a little of your story, and I confess I am deeply intrigued."
She didn't answer him.
He put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a platonic squeeze. "Well, then. Find me afterward, if you like." He stood, turned to go, then stopped, and turned again. "I met Deirdre just once," he said. "Your mother was a very sweet woman."
"So I hear," Eleanor muttered.
The preacher shifted his weight uncomfortably. "Well, like I said…" He trailed off. "I mean, if you'd like to talk. At all," he repeated, and walked away a little too quickly, leaving Eleanor alone on the cold, hard pew, staring ahead, staring right through her mother's cherrywood box, staring a disaffected hole right through the building and at the interminable horizon beyond.
That had been a week ago.
She'd left the cemetery like an apparition in the afternoon fog, weaving slowly between the disorganized tombstones, seeing them but not reading the names engraved on them, her mother's fresh dirt and the small tangle of mourners receding behind her. She didn't think she'd ever see that ground again. She could feel John Palmer's eyes on her as she slipped away. Mercifully, she thought, he let her be.
But she woke three days later and, sitting in silence at the sat bar in her father's apartment kitchen, she found herself thinking of him. "Dad," she said over her shoulder. Her father had been parked in the old recliner by the window since the funeral, trying to read, trying to watch television, but his eyes were all-too-often unfocused and gray. He wasn't a drinking man, but if he had been, she had a feeling he'd be unconscious. He could use a little unconsciousness, she thought.
He gave her directions, grateful, she thought, to have anything else to think about, and Eleanor followed them to a rather understated church miles from the ocean. The building was anything but ostentatious, unlike most of the churches in Anchor Bend. She parked her father's Pathfinder next to the only vehicle in the lot, a well-traveled Volvo wagon, and approached the glass doors. She tried them and found them locked, so she cupped her hands and peered inside. She saw a vast room, and a light from an open door at the far end. She knocked, as loudly as she could, until the light flickered, sawed through by an approaching silhouette.
John Palmer paused in the foyer, squinting, then recognized her and smiled broadly as he unlocked the doors. "I'd hoped to see you before you left," he said. "Your father said you were in town for the funeral only, so I thought I'd missed my opportunity." He wore that expression of stock benevolence that all ministers seemed to carry around in their back pockets. "I didn't want to call," he explained. "The timing and all."
Eleanor said, "I want to talk."
"Happily," he said.
"But," she said, and went on in a rush: "No debates. And no anger. And no defensiveness, and no evasion, and no excuses, and most of all no platitudes. No patronizing me."
His eyebrows climbed steadily higher as she went on. "How about just conversation," he said.
"Answers, if you have them," Eleanor said. "Honesty when you don't."
John Palmer considered this. "I can do my best," he said. "Will that be alright?"
Eleanor said, "It'll be a start," and he stepped back, pressing the door open with his body, to allow her passage. She stepped past him into the church.
All her life, churches had fascinated and frightened her. Paul and Deirdre Witt had raised their daughter far removed from the walls of a church, each of the young parents turning in their own long, slow arcs away from the faith their own childhoods had steeped them in, Paul from his lazy southern Baptist upbringing, Deirdre her white-knuckle Catholic indoctrination. They avoided churches on all occasions, even those special days when the sparest of believers put aside their impatience with religion and humored their families by attending yet another pageant or christening. Eleanor felt strange in churches and synagogues and temples, an alien cast off on a strange planet, barely able to breathe the thin air, all of her familiar landmarks inverted. The fine woodwork and towering statues, the stained glass panes and mood lighting. She clicked across vast seas of marble, stared up at ceilings so vaulted and high that they might have been supporting God's own living room floor.
But this church was different. John Palmer led her through an ocean of simple wooden pews, past rows of folding chairs and benches used for filler, beside stark and unadorned walls. Slowly turning ceiling fans cast patient shadows across the floor, each pass marking time. She followed him up the platform steps at the front of the sanctuary, past the pulpit and mute instruments, through the ghost-town choir loft to an unmarked door disguised to match the wainscoting. He opened the door, stepped back, held it open with one outstretched arm. "Please," he said.
She stepped into a room that startled her with its secretive, gentleman's-club atmosphere: the stereotypical bearskin rug stretched flat and dead before a stone fireplace, flanked by two fat leather sofas, walled in by a library of books and bibles. The carpet was a deep, dried-blood rust color, anchored by a massive oak desk.
"Wherever you like," he said, closing the door, indicating the sofas.
The fireplace was unlit, and the room was surprisingly cool. She chose the nearest sofa, and clutched at the arm of it when she sank more deeply than she expected into the cushions.
"I keep this room mostly to myself," he said, circling the sofa and pulling his sport coat off. He flicked it onto the branch of a coat rack made of many animal antlers. "People think this is a supply closet, I imagine. More than one person has stumbled in looking for a vacuum after Sunday morning service. I like my privacy."
She blinked widely when he suddenly turned and vaulted the sofa opposite her. He landed clumsily on the cushions, off-kilter, and flailed briefly at the air to right himself. He laughed, breathing hard. She couldn't decide what her expression must have said to him, and he must have been unsure as well. "I try to keep myself young," he explained. "All those crazy teens are hard to keep up with. Sometimes we have basketball games in the parking lot on Saturday nights, and they always leave me feeling like one of our elder parishioners."
"There must be better ways of staying fit than leaping over couches," Eleanor said.
John Palmer laughed, then serioused right up. "So, Eleanor Witt. Where do you want to start?"
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