Chapter Twenty-Four

 

 

 

Margaret

 

When Paul was forced to take a leave of absence from the university, back when the Julian story first broke, I think he was relieved. When the Dean ‘suggested’ that he take some time away, he didn’t even fight it. He had been leaving the university for some time, I think. He just couldn’t admit it to himself. Yet another thing he couldn’t admit to himself.

He used to love nothing more than his research. Back in grad school and during his first few years at the university, he was so energized by his work. He’d come home from the office still buzzing with excitement over some new idea, some new discovery. The work he published was so good. It was Paul at his best, really, the person I fell in love with. I loved the way his mind worked. He helped you see behind surfaces. He helped you understand the interdependence of parts and structures, the way everything added up to some greater whole. Despite whatever personal struggles might have been motivating him, the only things that ended up on the page were the things that mattered—data and observation and clinical analysis. It was so persuasive.

But at some point, the science became less important to him. His publications—particularly the book that came out of the Effeminate Boy Project—put him in a different orbit and gave him an audience outside of the academy. His work helped these people make sense of their struggles, and it confirmed them in their politics. Paul offered scientific justification for everything they believed about the world. He offered understanding instead of contempt, hope instead of despair. He offered change, which was exactly what people wanted.

But as Paul found himself increasingly immersed in this new world, a world of rallies and political strategy and expert testimony, he became—and I hate to say this, but it’s true—less smart. I watched it happen. His thinking became blunt and inflexible. Less interesting. No more nuance, much less precision. Just hard, cold certainty. The only lesson he could learn was one he already knew.

And what he already knew came from two sources—the Bible and the war that was raging inside him. Research was no longer necessary. Thinking was no longer necessary. There was only truth. Only right and wrong. It was as if he had realized that science wasn’t going to save him, but Jesus might. He put all his eggs in the Jesus basket.

The Jesus basket. We found such different things there, but it took me a long time to realize this. At first we were on the same page. When I showed up at college, I was so tired of being who I was. Everything about me was an act, and it had become exhausting. I had been living in a play, and the people I knew were just actors, not to be taken seriously. To the extent that I could call any of these people my friends, they were pretty much like me, flitting from one pose to another to avoid having to confront the lack of any real substance in the world, or in each other, or in themselves. Never believe that The Catcher in the Rye only appealed to sophisticated boys from Manhattan. This hick girl from Georgia felt like she could have written it.

But when I got to college, something shifted. My classmates were different from the people I had known. They were the least ironic people I had ever met. For them, other people were who they said they were, and the world was what the Bible said it was. Everything was as clean and easy as a perfectly calm lake.

I had gone to church my whole life, more out of obligation than desire. “I don’t ask for much,” my mother would say, “but I insist on this. Those people are going to see my daughter with me in church every Sunday. That’s just the way it is. You better get used to it.” It was easier to surrender to my mother. If you didn’t learn that early, you were wasting your time.

But the people I met in college weren’t there because someone was making them. They had chosen this. They wanted to be there with all their hearts. They believed, and they cared about others, and they couldn’t wait to talk about it all. They couldn’t wait to talk with me about Jesus.

Then I met Paul, and he was a more specific version of this new feeling, this sense of clarity in the world. I was immediately attracted to him. There’s something so attractive about a man who doesn’t know he’s attractive, who thinks that all he has to offer a woman is kindness. He’s a village just waiting to be plundered.

I trusted him. With him, everything was exactly what it was. We had lived in that trust ever since. I know it sounds crazy, but even his falls didn’t seriously shake my trust in him. Because even when he fell, I still knew exactly who he was. He was a man struggling with something he hated, and he needed my help. I was happy to help. I was eager. His struggles confirmed the fundamental truth of our lives together. We were the answer to whatever difficulties we faced.

For a while, it worked. We found in each other what we needed—comfort, peace and love. I found those same things in Jesus, so it all held together. It felt like a miracle. But I gradually realized that, for Paul, Jesus was becoming something very different. For him, Jesus was pain and struggle. Jesus was a purity that he couldn’t achieve. Jesus was a man he could love who could never love him enough. In Jesus, he found a confirmation of everything he believed and a condemnation of everything he felt. I don’t know how he held those two pieces together for as long as he did. It was heroic, in a way. But he did hold them together. For me. For Jacob.

Despite his best efforts, we were growing apart and had been for a while. Which I guess isn’t that surprising. Preacher husband cheats on wife with anonymous men in parks and rest areas. Pretty much a recipe for ‘growing apart’. But it was more than that, bigger than that. When we first met, I was so hungry for what he could provide, a view of the world that made everything hang together. A clear sense of right and of wrong. A selfless surrender to the certainty of faith.

But as I got older, as life became what it became, the certainty was harder to hold on to. The clean, easy answers were less appealing. There was a whole world outside of easy knowing, and I wanted to know it.

But Paul wanted nothing to do with that world. He wanted only what he already knew, and he wanted it more and more. That became our problem. That was what came between us. His ridiculous falls? Those I could deal with. They were messy and complicated, and I had begun to understand messy and complicated. But the single-minded fervor that grew out of them? That I wanted nothing more to do with.

Look at me. Still capable of such self-deception. Still trying to see myself only as I wish to be seen. The free-thinker. The somewhat late to the party, though finally arrived, modern woman.

Let me try to be honest about this. That single-minded fervor I so easily dismissed just a moment ago? I did need it. I needed it one last time. I needed it because of Jacob.

When it became clear to us that Jacob was what he was, I trusted Paul to fix it. I begged Paul to fix it. I wasn’t going to have my beautiful boy become like those men Paul met in rest stops—sad, lonely and desperate. I knew what people would say, that it doesn’t have to be like that. That homosexuals can live happy and healthy lives. But I knew what homosexuality was. I’d seen it up close. And Jacob was better than that. He had to be.