Gus Houston hated the city when it rained, which gave him a bad attitudinal backdrop a good part of the year, rain being to New Orleans what snow is to Montana. On the other hand, rain allowed him a certain morose, even melancholy stance, which he occasionally indulged. He’d been indulging for about an hour, waiting for the sixth-period bell. He wasn’t thinking big or deep thoughts, especially. Nagging, perhaps. He stared absently out the white-paned window in his office. Splat, splat, splat. Funny how rain seemed poetic coming down, until it was all the way down.
He glanced at the clock on the book shelf. Five more minutes till his first customer. He wondered if he should do anything special—get out a Bible, dust off the couch, fix his tie, something. But he wasn’t wearing a tie, the couch wasn’t dusty because he’d napped on it after lunch, and he’d forgotten to get a Bible from the library even though he’d made a Post-It note to himself to do so last Wednesday. All he could do was wait.
It was true that saying he had a year of seminary training in order to get a job teaching English at Miss Angelique’s Academy for Young Ladies could, in some circumstances, be considered a falsehood. But last spring the long-term implications of lying had seemed irrelevant. What the school needed, according to the classifieds, was someone on very short notice to teach fiction and composition to New Orleans’ “most exclusive” female teenagers.
What Gus needed was a paycheck. When Mrs. Hapsenfield, the owner and headmaster, had mentioned they were also looking for a part-time chaplain, Gus had just gone over the line. The funny thing was, it had taken less than a second. He’d barely even paused to catch a breath when the entire fabrication occurred to him. Having occurred, and having seemed dangerous and irresponsible, it was impossible to restrain.
Right there in Elizabeth Hapsenfield’s office, toasty warm in the soft glow of bleached blond furniture and Santa Fe rugs, Gus had invented as he spoke a story of having dropped out of seminary training at St. Sebastian’s Men’s Bible College, a small church-run institution, now closed due to declining enrollment, in San Marcos, Texas. He left, he said, because he really didn’t feel he could devote himself fully to the religious life. On the other hand, he said, he had come away from the experience with a true understanding of the human condition.
Then he kind of waved the whole episode off, as if to indicate it probably wouldn’t be of any help to the Academy, but he had seen a gleam of a budgetary nature in Mrs. Hapsenfield’s blue eyes. It matched the gleam of financial desperation in his own and he left the interview convinced he would be given the call. And though many were summoned—it being a time of recession across the land—he got the job.
Yet not until today had it occurred to (Acting) Chaplain Houston that the Academy could in any way be serious about needing a backup counselor for “our young ladies with particularly intractable problems,” as Mrs. Hapsenfield had put it. Not until today had the semester “walk-in” sessions been reinstated. He could definitely expect visitors. The girls loved to go to Chaplain to get out of classes, which was why the Academy had discontinued the service last year, that and the Rev. Daniels’s sudden decision to leave. Over the summer, the girls had pressured their parents to get Chaplain hours back. The headmistress had graciously acceded.
In the few weeks since school had started, Gus had become increasingly aware of the small part he was playing in a larger script. It wasn’t that Elizabeth Hapsenfield had been gullible enough to believe his seminary story; she had been conniving enough to. If Gus were later found to be a fraud, it was his neck, not hers. And in the meantime it was he, not the Hapsenfields, who would have to listen to all the complaints, sad stories, freak-outs.
That aside, Miss Angelique’s was pretty decent as jobs go, especially for somebody whose last meaningful employment had been night manager at a Tennessee theme park called the Garden of Dixie. And there was Mrs. Hapsenfield. The day she hired him, she’d been wearing a white silk blouse that came open at the third button. When she turned sideways, a little silken viewing tunnel opened to reveal a very robust cleavage neatly framed in a thin bra of ivory lace. She was a natural blond with a good tan. She liked to wear turquoise. Was it possible the brown rim of her aureole had inspired him to bear false resumé?
Perhaps that was poetic, too. Trying to get your head into being a phony man of God to minister unto the young by musing about your boss’s bosom. A shrink, on the other hand, might say Gus at that moment was engaged in avoidance, or denial, or whatever it was shrinks liked to say. Bonita, the woman he loved, the woman he lived with, the woman who would kill him for straying, would have a simpler explanation. She believed most men “think with their dicks” and would fuck a tractor if they could find the parts.
Not to mention they are engineered to endure short attention spans. How affirmed would Bonita be to know that his thoughts were as of that very second no longer applied to the convex fullness of Nordic lace but to a lush Cajun triangle of thick, curly, black hair? That in the very throes of avoidance and denial, Gus’s mind had stampeded to a fervent wish. At that moment he wished to be not at the school, in the school, nor anywhere having anything to do with the school, but in some faraway mountain lodge, on a goose down mattress, sweating buckets, looking up through the teacup breasts of his squirmy bartender, his life’s love, fire of his loins, etc. Her taut thighs astraddle his pelvis. Him about to explode. He could see that image as clearly as its complement: Bonita standing over his dead, cheating body with a shotgun.
The sixth-period bell trilled, as it does in the finer schools. Gus emerged from escapist sex and settled in behind his huge antique desk. The mass of dark oak was like a moat, protecting him from invaders. Agon, Elizabeth’s crane-like, blue-blood husband, had boasted that the desk and matching leather couch had once belonged to an Old Family on Henry Clay Street. The Academy had come into its possession after the Oil Bust, when priceless heirlooms often found new currency covering the tuitions of the daughters of proud gentry.
In the fraction of a second before the door opened, and with it the dread he had been awaiting—some young student thinking Gus was in any way competent to deal with her—the acting Chaplain had a comforting, though fleeting thought. Not a revelation. A revelation would be too Biblical, and Gus knew, if nothing else, he had to be secular, or at least ecumenical, in his approach if he were to fool anyone. His thought was that maybe his presence wasn’t entirely without function after all, for when it came to counseling young women, or anyone else, about wrongdoing, who could be more qualified?
“Hi, Mr. Houston.”
Gus recognized Angie Ballew, a tall, brunette senior. She was a medley of the times: jet-black jeans, black silk blouse, copious black eye-liner. “Can I come in?”
“You already are.”
“Yepper.”
Leaving the door ajar, as if it were not her custom to deal with such bothers, she half-slithered, half-bounced to an overstuffed vinyl armchair. A funny whump of rapidly compressing air escaped from the thick seat cushion as she dropped onto it. She sniggled somewhat gratuitously, and passed an official counselor’s pass across to him. Since he hadn’t given her one, he assumed she had stolen it. He looked it over, not unlike a blackjack player contemplating the first hit from a fresh deck.
“I guess you wanted to see me about sleeping with Mr. Hapsenfield.”
Gus smiled back and got up to close the louvered glass door. Outside, the second bell had rung and 367 young women were moving noisily through the resonant, oak-floored hallways of the converted Greek Revival mansion. Angie fastened her dark-lined doe-eyes upon him with something very much like amusement—or possibly malice. Gus tried to imagine himself in a job interview with St. Augustine. “Maybe you’d better fill me in.”