Angel, page 14
—1 Samuel 18:1-4
That spring, Ian enrolled in Paul’s Wednesday-evening Bible-study class. After dinner, Paul and Ian would ride back to the church. Paul was behind the wheel, of course. Ian sat in the passenger seat clutching his King James Bible. Their discussion of the evening’s passage began before they even got out of the car.
In the class itself, Ian hung on Paul’s every word. He asked lots of questions, sometimes so many that no one else had a chance to speak. He kept right on discussing the topic on the ride home, and then in the house, until Paul finally looked at him and said, “Ian, I’m off the clock.”
A couple of weeks after the class began, Ian mentioned in passing that Julie was going to take him to the store after work and she would drive him home. Paul thought nothing of it until that evening when they were getting ready for bed. When Ian took off his shirt, Paul noticed that his left shoulder was covered with a gauze bandage.
“What happened to your arm?”
“Nothing.” He turned away, trying to hide what Paul had already seen. “I can’t show you yet.”
“Show me what?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“But why do you have a bandage on your…. You didn’t get a tattoo.”
Ian grinned like the cat who swallowed the canary. “You’ll like it, I think.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I told you, I wanted to surprise you.”
“You got it for me?”
“Yeah, what do you think?”
“I don’t know what to say.” Paul didn’t know what to say because he was fairly sure that when someone tells you he just permanently altered his body as a token of his love for you, the answer he is hoping to hear is not, “Why the hell did you do that?”
“It’s not my name or anything like that?” Paul asked.
Ian picked at the tape surrounding the gauze. “I’ll show you, but it’s not very pretty right now.” He peeled back the gauze with a slight wince and revealed a heart about three inches across. In its center was a cross.
“You see, it has a double meaning,” Ian said. “It’s about letting God back into my heart. And you did that. So this is, like, the minister in my heart too.”
Paul reached out toward the image. “Don’t touch it,” Ian said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Yeah, but only for a few days.” He taped the gauze back in place. “Do you like it?”
“I really do,” Paul said. He really did.
Paul stood outside his own skin, marveling at his life. If anyone had told him a year before that he would be in his bedroom with a twenty-four-year-old guy who had just gotten a tattoo in his honor, he would have told them they were insane. It seemed incomprehensible on so many levels. First of all, Paul hated tattoos….
He could never have imagined that he would be moved almost to tears by such a gesture. What a leap of faith, to put something on your skin that will last forever, certain you’ll still want it there in twenty years. No one had ever made such a bold move for him. Paul was afraid he might not live up to it.
When his arm had fully healed, Ian asked Paul to take him to the mall so he could get a shirt without sleeves to show off the new artwork on his shoulder. Ian was immediately drawn to a shop Paul would normally have passed by without even seeing. Its sign was painted in a graffiti style, and the rock music blared a bit too loudly—a tool that was universally employed to drive middle-aged men like him away. Out of all the tank tops in the store, Ian honed in on one with a print of a skull with a knife jammed into the top. Paul shook his head.
“You don’t like it?” Ian asked. “I think it’s cool.”
“Get one with a plain color,” Paul was saying as the store clerk walked up. The clerk had bleached white hair, a nose ring, and his right ear lobe was stretched by a wide rubber spacer. He had poured himself into bleach-spotted jeans and a camouflage T-shirt, both of which seemed to be two sizes too small. He was clearly gay. “Swishy” was the word that popped into Paul’s mind.
I am not like him, Paul thought. He was not sure where the thought came from.
“Hey, Ian,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Where have you been?”
Ian knew this guy?
“Oh, yeah,” Ian said. “I haven’t been to the clubs in a while. I’m not drinking anymore.”
“No shit?! Ian Fucking Finnerty? Wow. That’s great. Since when?”
“Sober six months, almost seven now, right?” Ian asked Paul.
“Right,” Paul said.
“Congratulations. That’s great. Seriously,” the clerk said. “So is this your new boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” Ian said, grinning with pride. “This is Paul. Paul—Andy; Andy—Paul.”
Boyfriend. Paul immediately hated the word. Heaven help me, he thought. I have a boyfriend. This clearly should not have come as a surprise. He had been living with Ian for months now. Yet for the most part, they had existed in their own little world. Paul hadn’t let himself take much time to consider who they were to the larger world, who each was individually in society, and who they were together. Ian is my boyfriend. Paul tried the label on and tried to make himself comfortable with it. It wasn’t working.
“Nice to meet you, Paul,” Andy said. To Ian, he said, “He’s cute.”
Andy was part of Ian’s other world, a strange foreign place he inhabited that had never included Paul. Andy was ready to accept Paul into their world without hesitation. Paul was sure he didn’t belong. I’m not like him.
Ian chose three identical tank tops in different colors, and Andy directed them to the fitting room. Ian gestured for Paul to come in with him, which he did.
“Have fun, guys,” Andy said and left them alone together.
“Why did you tell him I’m your boyfriend?” Paul asked.
“You are, aren’t you?” Ian reached over his shoulders and pulled his T-shirt off over his head.
“Yeah, but you can’t go around telling people that.”
Ian tried the black tank on first. He was looking at himself from all angles. “Andy doesn’t care,” he said. “Anyway, who is he going to tell? I doubt you have any mutual friends.”
“You never know. We have at least one.”
“He won’t say anything.” He turned so his shoulder faced the mirror to examine the effect of the shirt and the tattoo. He eyed himself critically. “What do you think?”
He was suffering from the delusion that he might not look good in something.
“You look great,” Paul said.
“I’m going to try on the brown one,” he said, pulling the tank off.
“Why do you need to try it on? They’re all the same. They’re just different colors.”
“I want to see what the color looks like on me.”
“It’ll look great.”
“How do you know?”
“You always look great.”
“You’re biased.”
“Maybe, but I’m not wrong.”
As Ian tried on the brown and then the green tank, Paul drifted to his own thoughts. If Paul had a “boyfriend,” what was he? Was he gay, straight, bisexual? None of the check boxes seemed quite right. He understood the comic absurdity of his thought: I’m not gay, but my boyfriend is. Yet that was how he felt about things. He certainly couldn’t insist he was “straight” anymore, given the circumstances. “Bisexual” was the obvious (and least absurd) choice, but it didn’t feel right to him either. Paul had always associated that word with people who wanted to play around and experiment with sex. To his mind, it lacked commitment and serious intent.
His sexuality wasn’t confusing or complicated at all, really. He had fallen in love with Sara, and he fell in love with Ian. Simple. It only became complicated when he tried to fit that reality into the shorthand of official categories. That these labels failed to describe how he felt about himself should not have troubled him much, but so many people had faith in the categories that he was inclined to believe the problem was with himself, and not the check boxes. That was where he became confused.
Ian did end up taking all three shirts. He found the brown tank top most flattering and decided to wear out of the store. He ripped off the tag and took it up to Andy to ring up.
“You got another tattoo,” Andy said. “Nice work.”
“Thanks,” Ian said. He turned his shoulder toward Andy and gazed over it like an actress posing on the red carpet. He couldn’t make such a gesture seriously, so he raised his eyebrows and stuck out his tongue. Andy laughed and blushed.
Paul handed his credit card to the clerk. Something was bothering him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. As they walked out of the store, Ian turned his shoulder toward Paul and batted his eyes. “Well, how do I look?”
Paul was distracted. It was something Andy had said. Something had given him the idea that…. Finally, it dawned on him: “He said you got another tattoo.”
“What?”
“Andy, he said ‘you got another tattoo’.”
“Yeah.”
“Another tattoo.”
Ian looked confused.
“How did he know about the first one?” Paul asked.
“Ah,” Ian said.
“I mean it’s—” He gestured toward Ian’s hip bone.
“Yeah,” he said, putting his hand over the spot. “I don’t know. I guess he saw it once.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you sleep with that guy?” Paul was horrified by the idea. That guy!? Swishy, nose-pierced Andy the shop clerk?
“Can we change the subject?”
“No. Did you?”
“No.” Ian’s face wrinkled as though he were smelling Limburger cheese. There was more to the story.
“But?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s something.”
“There was… there was just this one night,” Ian said. “It involved a lot of tequila shots. I ended up at his place, but in between the shots and waking up at his place, it’s a little fuzzy. He always kind of had a thing for me. I don’t know. I don’t think anything happened. But that’s gotta be, you know, when he saw it. Okay?”
“You don’t think anything happened, but you don’t know. Something might have happened?”
“Some people are kind of prone to blackouts when they drink a lot. I guess I’m one of them.”
“So you’d just black out whole nights?”
“Sometimes. Yeah. Later on it got worse. But usually just bits and pieces, details. That night, it’s got gaps.”
“Like whether or not you had sex.”
“Like that. Yeah.”
“That’s kind of a big gap, isn’t it?”
Ian shrugged. His discomfort about the situation made Paul feel better. He believed something must have happened between the two of them that night. Why else would Andy have seen the tattoo? He could handle the idea as long as Ian regretted it. Imagining Ian as a willing participant was hard for Paul to bear. Ian the victim was sympathetic, a fallen angel in need of rescue.
“What’s that like,” Paul asked, “not knowing?”
“It’s weird…. Can we… can we please change the subject now?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Do you want to get lunch at the food court?”
“Yeah.”
“You look good in the shirt.”
“Thanks.”
When they got to the crowded food court, Paul went to stand in line and get their order while Ian looked for a table. This left Paul alone with his thoughts. Falling for Ian, he had inadvertently connected himself to a world he found distasteful and sordid. He imagined the gay clubs with go-go boys, drag queens, back-room sex and horny men who would take advantage of an angel like Ian because he was drunk and prone to alcoholic blackouts. But did they take advantage? Or had Ian never really tried to say no? Paul felt sick to his stomach. It was as far from Paul’s image of himself as his mind could possibly go. If people were to find out about the two of them, would they assume that was his world too?
Not compatible with Christian teaching.
He took the lunch tray and scanned the crowd. He spotted Ian chatting to a group of people at an occupied table. Even from the back, he recognized Julie and her husband, Jim. Ian was gesturing to the new tattoo on his shoulder.
“Hi, Paul!” Julie said as he approached. “You two came together? You must be joined at the hip.”
Ian smiled and laughed.
“We’re not joined at the hip,” Paul snapped. “He just needed a ride because he doesn’t have a car.”
Julie’s mouth fell open. Ian looked away.
Paul could not sleep that night. He sat at his desk reviewing the events of the day. Ian hadn’t said anything about Paul’s outburst with Julie. He didn’t have to. Paul kept playing it over in his head: his overreaction, Julie’s surprise, and Ian’s disappointment. Julie still did not suspect. She hadn’t meant a thing by her comment. It was Paul’s own reaction that raised suspicion. If anything was going to give them away, it would be Paul himself.
Paul envied Ian for his openness. The irony was that Ian was probably a better Christian than Paul. He didn’t judge. What judgments had Paul made about the clerk, Andy, based on his bleached white hair and feminine mannerisms?
After everything Ian had been through with his mother, he had come out of it unapologetic about who he was. He could stand in a store in the mall and say, “This is my boyfriend,” without a second thought. Paul wished he could. He tried to imagine what would happen if he stood up in church and said, “This is the new love of my life, Ian Finnerty.”
It was different for him. This wasn’t a clerk in the mall. This was his community, a community that had nourished him most of his adult life. He performed the weddings, the baptisms, the funerals, all the ceremonies that marked the group’s support and acknowledgment of the passages of life. Paul had been drawn to the ministry to be part of those rituals, to make sacred the truly meaningful side of life, the part that our life of work and business so often fails to value or even acknowledge. The community could make a person feel protected and whole and part of something larger than his own concerns. It was a vehicle for compassion and service. A community can do more than any individual.
Yet many of the same people who stood beside him to bless his union with Sara would shun him if they even suspected his relationship with Ian. The ones who praised him for “helping a troubled kid” would turn their backs if they thought he loved him. It was official church policy not to allow an “avowed, practicing homosexual” to act as minister. He simply couldn’t be both a minister and Ian’s “avowed” love.
This was the darker side of community. For a group to have a sense of cohesion, a sense of being “us,” it has to define what was outside of the group. It has to define a “them”—the excluded. Who “they” are changes over time and from society to society, but the process never changes. It is part of the nature of community life. To have an inside, a tribe must have an outer boundary. For most of the members of Paul’s community, young men dancing in gay clubs, people like Andy, were not “us” but “them.” Judging by his own reactions, Paul had to admit with some shame that he felt the same way. I am not like him.
Paul thought about Jesus, how he ministered to the outcasts, the people on the fringes of society—the poor, the unclean, the prostitutes, and the lepers. Paul had told these stories over and over, but he had never felt the full impact of them until now. How brave and extraordinary an act that was. Jesus didn’t have to associate himself with the outcasts. He could have lived a comfortable life as a carpenter, accepted by everyone in his community. He wasn’t a beggar or a prostitute or a leper. Yet he chose to associate with them without fear.
If Paul had gained any sympathy for the outsiders, and if he risked being associated with them, it was out of personal interest. He was motivated by his own needs and desires. Jesus included everyone because they needed him, not because he needed them. He risked everything for it. He was willing to give his life. That was love.
How small a sacrifice was being asked of Paul compared to that. Yet for the one person he loved most in the world, Paul could not risk being associated with the outsiders. Where was his courage?
The
Where does a mountain end? Mountains draw our focus to their snowcapped peaks and present us with the illusion that they are isolated, individual objects. We send postcards and take pictures and try to put a frame around them. But whatever border we create for the natural object we find beautiful is our own projection. The mountain spills out in all directions. It dips into the valley, which rises to the next peak. There is no place where you can stop and say, “The mountain ends here.”
Paul was staring at his computer screen. A Word document was open. It contained only one word: “The.”
That was as far as Paul had gotten on his sermon before his mind drifted and he forgot what the rest of the opening sentence had been. “The” was clearly not enough to go on.
Church attendance was up. There were many new members—younger members, families with kids. Pledges were up, and the board had decided they just might have enough in the budget to reopen the question of repairing the steeple. There was an open meeting to discuss and vote on the issue planned after services on Sunday.
It seemed like a foregone conclusion now that the steeple repair would be approved, something that had seemed well nigh impossible only a few months before—before Ian, before Paul’s new source of inspiration. He wanted to give one last sermon before the meeting to push things in the right direction.
The.
