After three long counseling sessions, Gus wasn’t really up for number four, Stephanie Daedaleux, but there was no way to get out of it. He had become possessed of a thorough understanding of his situation. He knew exactly why Reverend Daniels had resigned to take a job at a small church in the Florida panhandle. He knew exactly why Elizabeth Hapsenfield no longer made any pretense of looking for a replacement for Daniels. He had a full appreciation of the downside of the overall venality of the pact into which he and Elizabeth had entered, and through which, he further understood, his downside was but her line item personnel reduction.
Each new visit to the chaplain was thus but a fresh astringent to Gus’s wound. Self-inflicted, to be sure, but painful nonetheless. And being used was only the half of it. Had he not misrepresented himself in one of the more profound ways possible?
As he watched Stephanie shake her handsome, patrician head just enough to send the blond page boy into a double-reverse gyration with flow-back lock—twice to one side, twice back, then back to exactly the same place as it had started—Gus felt all his chickens roosting in his brain. Flapping around. Pecking. Doing nasty chicken things. It was awful. One of his greatest aversions in life was listening to somebody else’s petty problems. Now that was his job every afternoon of the week. It wasn’t even Biblical. It was bigger than that. Olympian, maybe. Cosmic. Certainly advanced jurisprudence: punishment during the crime.
Or maybe he was judging himself too harshly. He was hardly in the ranks of the Great Pretenders—no Elmer Gantry he; not even a Jimmy Swaggart. Looking alternately at Stephanie’s robin’s egg-blue eyes and five-thousand-dollar Chiclet teeth, Gus reflected how he could scarcely even claim to be a faker.
You could be a de facto Man of God in the Army, ad-libbing a prayer for a young man in your command hit by a tank during a snowstorm, bleeding in your arms with his ribs sticking out of his chest, without having so much as a fake diploma from the PTL Club. It was simply that you chose to minister. That’s all Gus was doing. He was choosing to minister. He was choosing to have a job, to be employed, to be an upstanding citizen of the finest city in all of the South, if not the North American continent. He was a Presence. He was—
“—but now it’s been three weeks and I don’t know and I just can’t tell anyone and. . .” Stephanie stopped speaking. She wasn’t crying, but her face, normally as healthy as you would expect from a girl of her breeding, seemed filled with grayness.
Before Gus could anticipate what was about to happen, the young woman leaned forward and a spew of the day’s lunch—pasta Florentine and Caesar salad—shot across the top of his desk and directly into his chest. Since it was more a spray than a stream, the expulsion also speckled his face, his trousers, and a good part of the white-paned window overlooking the dormant soccer field.
Stephanie’s head dropped onto a stack of absentee reports and turned slightly to one side. For a moment, she looked like a chicken waiting for the mercy of the hatchet. In reality, she was the possible salutatorian of the senior class. In further reality, she was breathing from the corner of her mouth into a green-brown pile of half-digested lunch. Her dark blue T-shirt was damp and wet down to breast level, and her hair was thick with her own misfortune.
Gus sagged against the leather head rest on his chair, thoroughly splatted. Like someone shot but not yet ready to accept the reality of the bullet, he enjoyed an instant of denial. Pell-mell in his head, compressed into one of those moments which constitute infinity, came a cascade of conflicting insights. The proof of his theory about the value of punishment during the criminal act was one of them. That was quickly followed or superseded or overlaid by an escapist path of thought—this time, not of sex—in which he was back in the Tennessee hills worrying about attendance figures at the Garden of Dixie and whether the log plume scaffolding needed a safety inspection. I.e., Gus was not here, in the aching, pungent Present.
He snapped to right away. He had promised Bonita he would stop wishing he were somewhere else. He had promised to Occupy Space. That space was now. “Oh, shit,” he said, and got up.
Stephanie was sick. Completely. She was sick in his office. She was sick all over herself. She was sick all over him. She was sick all over his Mac. She was sick over portions of the walls. And it was an excellent bet she was pregnant.
“Ohhh . . . ohhh . . .”
Now up from his chair, with but a cursory flick of his hand to dispatch some of the larger chunks, Gus was around the desk and gently lifting her, then maneuvering her back to the couch. She slumped back, moaning low.
Gus locked the office door. The shade already was pulled, as was the courtesy during chaplain hours.
“Don’t move. Don’t get up.”
“Ohh. . .”
He gathered a stack of paper towels next to the coffee pot and knelt in front of the girl, wiping her as clean as possible. That wasn’t much. Looking around, he saw a bottle of mineral water Jackie Numann had left and used it to dampen more cloths and so eventually wipe the worst of it from Stephanie’s face and hair.
She seemed to have nearly passed out but as Gus ministered to her, the blood returned to her face. Then her eyelids opened and she was looking at him. He had a terrible, terrible thought. She was quite pretty. But the thought passed—no more of a thought than the kind which comes on an accidental glimpse of exposed thigh on a stranger in a restaurant, or church pew.
“I’m so sorry—”
“It’s okay. Don’t worry.” He gave her a cup of water.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
“I know.”
She started to get up, but fell back again. She shivered an instant, and then began to sob so deeply Gus thought she might be choking. The sobs became more regular. She cried a long time. Somewhere in there, she said, “I know I’m pregnant,” and then cried again.
Gus held her hand, then cradled her.
When she stopped, they sat silent for some time. Footsteps and voices came from the hallway and at least once person knocked but that was in another world and Gus and this young woman were in a place all too familiar to some and all too terrible if you weren’t wanting to be there.
He had no idea what to do. He had decided very early on in the counseling game that he would not divulge confessions. It was Angie Ballew’s admission about sleeping with Agon Hapsenfield that enlightened him in that regard. The sanctity of the confessional was good for all parties concerned, not least the confessor. Gus had learned plenty in two months on the front lines of young women’s hearts. They trusted him—even the wild ones like Angie who mostly liked to see if they could shock him, and often did.
Essentially, they were correct. Gus could be trusted. He could keep his mouth shut. And yet, that same Gus-within-a-Gus, the Shadow Gus, the Gus known to Corina Youngblood and possibly to Bonita, the Gus which dared him to lie in order to get a job and had even perhaps sent him South to seek his fortune was also capable of who knew what when in possession of the secrets of the daughters of the rich and powerful? Gus did not like this about himself and often swore to maintain a high ethical posture. The philosophers would say: What is that? Gus knew—anyone does. But did not St. Peter himself succumb to weakness in what should have been his finest moment?
Gus poured fresh water on another towel and wiped Stephanie’s brow and lips, where a slight, unsightly crust had formed. “Why do you think so?”
Her mouth crinkled again but she set it firmly. After a moment, she answered, “You know.” Her eyes fastened on him as if they were in some kind of primordial understanding.
Gus moved back. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
She shrugged and sniffled. “It was stupid,” she said, and began to cry.
Gus stood, pulled over a chair from the other side of the desk, sat down, and watched her.
“My parents will kill me.”
“Well—”
“They will. Oh, God—”
It went on like that for a quarter hour. Mostly crying. Fear of Family. In that time, the obvious occurred to Gus. Stephanie was telling him all this because she had no one else to talk to. No one else to trust.
He felt like his spine had been plugged into the wall socket.
She was totally dependent on him.
She thought he was a Man of God.
Quickly reviewing his qualifications, he reached the expected conclusion. Well, he could talk to her as a wise uncle, maybe.
He inched his chair closer and took her left hand, pressing it between his own. It was cool, damp. Scared. “Let me just ask you, are you sure this could have happened?”
“Yes.”
He took a breath. “Why do you think that?”
“Because he did it to me.”
“Sex, you mean. Made love.”
“Yes.”
“And this was without a condom or anything.”
“Well it wasn’t like we planned on doing it. We just did it. We didn’t—”
“Okay. I’m just trying to be sure.” In fact, he was trying to buy time. He couldn’t tell anyone in the school, and he couldn’t tell Christopher Daedaleux, and the Hapsenfields weren’t on the list at all. But what could he do?
“Have you been to a doctor?”
She stared up at him. “You mean a doctor?”
“Yes. A gynecologist, something like that.”
She looked down and attempted to corkscrew into the couch. In a very quiet voice, she said, “No.”
“How about a test? Have you used one of those tests like on TV?”
She shook her head. She continued to avoid his eyes.
“But you think it’s true? That you’re pregnant?”
She nodded.
“Have you told the boy?”
Her eyes shot up in a flash, held his. He looked away.
“Have you told anyone?”
She shook her head.
He nodded and sat back. “More water?”
“Yes, please.”
He took her glass and went over to the bookcase to fill it up with Evian. As he poured the glass, late afternoon light drifted across the room and into the glass and the glass grew rosy yellow in one of the fullnesses of physics that interfaces with our consciousness and translates as beauty. Then the light was blocked—a cloud, unaware of its aesthetic sundering. The refraction ended and the glass was as glass: clear and full in his hand. And his head was possessed of a bizarre idea.
Gus carried the water to Stephanie, standing like some kind of shy waiter, as she drank. When she had finished he sat back down. Moving the glass aside, he took her hand again.
“I have to tell you the truth. I’m a little new at this, and I’m a man. I think I’d like to have you talk to a friend of mine. A woman. She might be able to help you decide what to do.”
Stephanie’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Someone here?”
“No,” he shook his head vigorously. “Definitely not. No, not at all. I had in mind someone no one here knows. But someone I find, well, insightful.”
“I just don’t know what to do.”
“I know. But I think Reverend Youngblood could help you.”
“A preacher?”
“Yes, a minister.”
Stephanie’s eyes softened again. “I’m Catholic. I should go to a priest, if anyone.”
“Sure, of course.”
She looked at him carefully. He could tell she was weighing it. “But I can’t—I mean I don’t want to—I don’t like them.”
“She’s black.”
Stephanie’s head cocked slightly.
“Does that bother you?”
“Well—” Weirdly, he could tell it didn’t, but that she was waiting to see if he wanted it to bother her. Rather than pursue all those implications, he dropped the line of inquiry altogether.
“She’s very good.” He pressed Stephanie’s hand in reassurance, even enthusiasm. “I go to her on occasion with my own problems.”
Stephanie seemed to come to full attention. He had the feeling she was suddenly trying to peer inside him. He wouldn’t let her.
“What kind of problems do you have?” In her shift of topic, he knew she had consented to go. It was the way of Southern women, sidling up to that which was too demanding face-on.
“I don’t want you to worry about that. So you’ll go?”
She looked away. “I guess, if you say.” Then she fastened her eyes on him again. “Can I go soon?”
“I’ll call her now if you wish.”
She nodded.
He went back to his desk and dialed information. St. Jude Lamb of Light had a working number. He smiled at Stephanie as he wrote it down. Then he called. The reverend answered. Yes, she remembered him. Why hadn’t he come back? He had “unfinished business,” she said.
He told her about the girl, and lied only slightly in saying he was her teacher. He didn’t want to get into the chaplain saga in front of his referral. Referral? How easily it rolled from his tongue. The reverend said she would be more than happy to read the girl—did she want to come on over? Could she make it before nine?
“Want to go now?” Gus asked Stephanie.
She nodded. “But I have to clean up.”
He relayed the agreement and said the girl would be over in an hour or so. The matter of a fee came up. Gus said he’d take care of it, but, not wanting to discuss details in front of Stephanie, listened to the terms, saying only “yes” or “yeah, don’t worry” or “I will.” The agreement was that Reverend Youngblood would take the referral and Gus would pay when he came by, which was to be no later than Monday.
It was now well after school hours and the halls were silent. Stephanie arose. She could say she’d spilled something on herself if anyone caught her before she got to her room and the shower. She was worried about the smell and Gus didn’t have anything so he sprayed her with Lysol, which transformed vomit to lilac with far more success than either of them expected. She thanked him and promised to call him at home after she got back. He gave her cab fare and the address.