Ian shrugged. “She knows everything.”
“She should mind her own business.”
“She’s just worried about you.” Ian sat down next to Paul and put his arm around his shoulders. “Tell me what happened.”
“It’s starting,” Paul said. “The board sent Mike Davis to confront me about my ‘inappropriate relationship’ with you.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should kick you out of the house.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe I should get an apartment. I wouldn’t have to stay there. I’d just have an address.”
“You really want to spend money on that?”
“It might help you.”
“I don’t want you to do that. It’s like going backwards. It’s too late, anyway.”
“You told him?”
“No, but I didn’t exactly deny it.”
Ian removed his arm from Paul’s shoulder and looked down at his knees. “I’ve screwed everything up for you.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Things were fine for you before I came along.”
“No, they weren’t. They were just more… stable.”
“What happens now?”
“I’m going to finish this bottle of wine.” Paul put the bottle to his lips and drank the remaining wine directly from it.
Paul expected immediate repercussions from his discussion with Mike, but that is not how communities work. They operate at their own pace. It takes time for an issue to percolate and vibrate through the group until there is enough critical mass to address it. For the next few weeks, Paul and Ian lived in a state of purgatory. Paul could sense the growing current in the congregation—what should we do about the problem with our minister? He saw judgmental glances everywhere, even where they did not exist. He no longer felt the church belonged to him. His detractors owned it now, and they were only allowing him to stay and go through the motions for a trial period while they planned their next move. He still had to perform all of his regular duties, hospital visits, social events, and Sunday services. He did them with a forced smile and an imitation of compassion because he could not focus.
Ian stopped attending Bible class. There were no more playful suggestions from Ian in the sanctuary. In fact, they hardly spoke to each other at all during the day. It wasn’t something they had agreed to do, it was just something that had happened. They both sensed they had to keep their distance. If you didn’t know them and saw them pass each other in the hall, you would most likely assume they were old enemies based on their cold looks and their gruff “hellos.” Paul ate his lunch in his office so as not to risk sitting by Ian in the lunchroom. Ian stayed out of the office as much as possible. The cheerful banter with Julie was gone. Instead of waiting for Paul with his elbows on her desk, Ian would finish his work, sign out, and wait for him by the car, quietly smoking a cigarette.
The strain exhausted both of them. They would come home, complain about the atmosphere at the church, share any new gossip they might have overheard, and then collapse in front of the television for a couple of hours before falling asleep and waking up to face the church again.
The irony was that regardless of what anyone else might have thought, Paul felt his love for Ian was of a much purer form than his love for Sara. This was not to say that he had not loved Sara deeply or that his motives for marrying her had been anything but sincere. But his union with her had given him social standing. He had been a respectable married man, doing what a man of his age ought to do in society. He had always understood that, as a man, one day he would fall in love, marry, and support his family. He had married her at the right age, when he felt it was time. The story existed in his mind before he even met Sara. She was the one he had chosen to cast in the role.
Ian fit no narrative at all. He could offer Paul nothing in the world. Ian did not bring social standing. If anything, he could only erode it. Yet Paul loved anyway. Ian sparked his imagination and touched his soul. That was all he could offer. Wasn’t that more pure and more sacred? It was a strange inversion of the way the world imagined it—the blessed union with Sara, the profane union with the young man.
The Meeting
Mount Rainier is a vestige of her former self. Some geologists believe that the peak once rose to 16,000 feet, nearly 2,000 feet higher than the current summit. It is a site of constant change, of destruction and revision. The mountain, the very symbol of strength and permanence, is in a state of constant change, crumbling, fracture, and cleavage. Ne
w crags and new shapes are cut with violent wrenching—perpetual re-creation. The peaks and ridges are transformed but remain awesome and sublime. “Mountain decay,” wrote the nineteenth-century arts writer Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, “is a sculpture of beauty.”
Ian was at Emily’s desk, in the dark, chewing on the nail of his middle finger. Paul watched him from a few feet away, at Marlee’s desk. He had a strong urge to hold Ian’s hand but didn’t dare. They were sitting with the lights off so that no one who walked past the office window could see them.
The board had specifically asked Paul not to attend the meeting, which would allow the members of the congregation to discuss their concerns about the minister and his alleged affair with the custodian. At the end of the meeting, they would be taking a vote as to whether or not Paul should remain in his position.
So many wanted to attend that they had decided to hold the meeting in the sanctuary. This gave Paul the opportunity to listen in via the speakers that piped the Sunday service into the office. Julie had agreed to turn the microphone on. So Ian and Paul sat in the darkened office, listening to the discussion like a pair of criminals.
“We’re talking about firing Paul for something we suspect is happening, but do we have any proof of it? Has he actually said that he is involved with Ian?” It was a woman’s voice that Paul couldn’t quite place.