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Three, for reasons I haven’t yet figured out, Beth needs me more than she wants me to think she does. That’s the variable. I have to find out what she wants.
Going in, I knew about Tom’s affiliation with the church. He explained it in only a way Tom can, methodically and at length. To tell you the truth, details I don’t care about bore me, so I tuned him out. I wasn’t interested in Tom’s perspective on religion, or why he was involved. I was interested in Tom. I was interested in having a place to live. Most of all, I was interested in someone footing the bill.
I do recall him explaining that new members are assigned a sponsor.
“What, like A.A.?” I’d asked.
“I don’t know that acronym.”
“Alcoholics Anonymous.”
He apprised me carefully, his green eyes on fire with concern. “You’re not one of those, are you?”
“No,” I said with the flick of my wrist. “I hardly drink.” Keyword being hardly.
“I don’t know what they do at A.A. I can only explain the church.”
I shrugged. He’d pretty much lost me there, but he went on. “We have rules. Sponsors help us adhere to those rules.”
“Who wants that kind of life?”
“I do.”
“Oh,” I smiled. “Then it can’t be that bad.”
He didn’t respond.
The first time I see Mark Jones, he is wearing a robe. A long, red, velvety-looking robe. He enters the church, hands folded neatly in prayer, tucked under his chin, the widest grin you’ve ever seen. There is a processional of people behind him. My job is to take up the collection of cell phones at the door. Most people leave them at home; they are forbidden during service, Tom informs me. But sometimes members forget, and my husband assures me this assignment will serve me well. “You’ll get to know everyone this way.”
“Melanie,” they each say, greeting me, taking my free hand into theirs. It’s like they’ve known me all my life. I don’t know what to say, so I plaster a smile on my face and freeze it there. At one point, I have to massage my jaw. I’m afraid it might be permanently stuck there.
“You must be Melanie,” a couple says, holding me hostage. Service is about to start. Or at least I assume so because the music has changed, and my eyes have locked on to Mark Jones. Same as everyone else. “Who is that?” I ask as the woman shakes my hand vigorously. She refuses to let go. But eventually, she turns her head. “Oh, that, dear, is our fearless leader. That is Mr. Jones.”
He stares so deeply into my eyes it feels like he’s x-raying my soul.
“We’re so glad to finally meet you,” the woman tells me. “We’d better take our seat.”
This feels like a lie because the wives were not so happy to meet me, not at first.
Here, in the church, everyone is happy. It’s like a coliseum more than a church, I tell Tom later. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. In the few times I’ve ever attended church, either for a wedding, or a funeral, or just to pretend when my father’s parents were in town, it wasn’t like this. In my experience with organized religion, people wore fake smiles they stretched across their face. They had to grin and bear it, but they were glad when it was over so they could get back to their judging and their sinning. So long as you made it right on Sunday, you were allowed your indiscretions on the other days of the week.
Here it is clear from the beginning: it is not that way.
I listen to Mark as he speaks, and I am fascinated. I don’t fall asleep like I’d planned. Mark is too animated, too over the top, too…interesting. He is a white flag on a mountaintop, showing us we too can be saved. He also happens to speak on a topic I find fascinating. He explains DISC theory, a topic I am quite familiar with.
“People are happiest when they are submissive to a loving authority,” he tells the congregation, and it is like he is speaking directly into my soul. “Compliance,” he says, “only leads to resentment. Submission,” he assures me and everyone, “is key.”
He goes on to explain inducement. He doesn’t have to tell me. I already know. Inducement is the act of seducing someone into your way of thinking and dominating them so completely that what you want is what they want. Inducement is making the other person, or other people, depending on the context, happy to give it to you. That is the secret to life, to marriage, to everything, he says.
But it’s what he doesn’t say that interests me most.
Women are far better at inducement than men.
“His psychology is a bit outdated,” I say to Tom in the parking lot. “But it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected.”
He doesn’t respond.
“What did you think?”
