Salvation Boulevard (37 page)

“When?”

“It was about, I don't know exactly, about three in the morning.”

“Who kidnapped you?”

“I don't believe she was kidnapped,” Gwen said.

“Pas-
tor
Paul,
da
-ddy Paul,” she said in a mocking, kiddy singsong, and then in her own voice, “and that bastard Jeremiah.”

“Can't you see it?” Gwen said, almost yelling at me. “She's a whore. A cheap whore, with her school girl outfit, and her pornos. She seduced him, and now she's making up stories and lies, horrible, horrible lies. It's not true.”

Nicole turned on Gwen. “Those are
his.
” It came spewing out, full of anger and vituperation. “He comes up from preaching, and he's all full of himself, pumped up from all the loooove he gets and worship from everyone. And the first thing he does, all stinking of sweat from jumping around and preaching the
Worrrd,
is go to his computer, and he looks on the Internet to see what The
Enemy
is doing, what Satan is doing. And he looks at all the
evil
,
degenerate
,
secular
porn sites, and he gets a woody, his biggy-wiggy woody, and while he's looking at those videos, he's burning them onto DVDs, and then he brings them in here, and he shows them to me, and I have to say, oh yes, how
evil
it is, but when
we
do it, it's Holy, and I'm his innocent little schoolgirl, and we're in the house of God, so it's sacred, and I have to do whatever's in the pornos, or as close as he can come, since his biggy-wiggy is actually littlely-widdily. And I have to fake all the noises too. You want to hear me! Uh-uh-oooooh . . . ” She moaned loudly, then twisted the long, drawn-out syllable into a sneer. “Ooooh!”

“It's a lie, a lie,” Gwen yelled. “You claim you're locked in here. How do you know what he does out there? You're a liar. Carl, can't you see it, or are you mesmerized by the sight of what's between that whore's legs too!”

“You don't believe me?” Nicole yelled back at her. She rushed over to the bedside table, pulled open the drawers. With a second cry of “You don't believe me?” she began flinging the contents at us: vibrators, eggs, penis extenders, penis rings, tubes of lube, and more. I'd left the wild side just before the dildo explosion arrived, and there were several items that I'd never seen in person. Pastor Paul Plowright was way ahead of me. “
Christian
sex toys,” Nicole called out, “from
Christian
websites.” She reeled off their names: “My Beloved Garden, Covenant Spice.” A plastic vial with a prescription label, half-filled with blue tabs of Viagra, rolled across the floor to my feet. I picked it up and put it in my pocket.

“How do you know what he does out there?” Gwen yelled at her, pointing toward the offices beyond the wall. “How do you know if you're locked in.”

Nicole slowed down and stopped and looked lost and ashamed. “From before.”

“Before?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When . . . when I thought it was . . . when . . . ”

“I told you,” Gwen said. “She seduced Paul.”

Nicole looked to me, hoping I would be more understanding. “He performed
miracles
,” she said. “He was on
TV.
In front of millions of people, and all the girls wanted him.”

“If you don't like it, why haven't you left?” Gwen asked. “Why won't you leave with us?”

“Because Jeremiah wants to kill me. He's waiting for me to leave or even try so he can kill me. Pastor Paul thinks he can convert me back. Whenever we're not fucking, we're praying together and watching crap like
Left Behind
to scare me into being a good Christian.”

“How do you know that?” Gwen snapped at her. “You can't know that!”

“I know it because they said so.”

“Alright,” I said, glancing at my watch. We were still safe, but I wanted to calm this down, figure out what was going on, and get moving. “So you were having a”—I wanted to phrase it in the least
confrontational way—“a relationship with Plowright. And then you started to have one with Nathaniel MacLeod?” In spite of what Ahmad told me, that had to be it. What else could it be?

“No,” Nicole said adamant about it and sounding surprised by the accusation.

“You weren't lovers?”

“Nate was my
Teacher
,” she said, making the word a title, a deep honorific, like Guru or Sensei. And she became miserable again, tears welling in her eyes.

“Your teacher?”

“He led me from the darkness. He made the complex simple. He dispelled the mysteries. He taught me that I had a mind. That I could use it. I read now—books, real books, not Bible stories and adventures in chastity.”

“Let me understand this,” I said. “You're in MacLeod's office at three in the morning. Your lover, Paul Plowright, and his security officer come and take you away and lock you up here, and it's not about your leaving him for MacLeod?”

“You don't know. You don't know anything. It wasn't about sex. They wanted the e-mails.”

“You had e-mails?”

“Yes, Plowright's e-mails. And I was giving them to Nate.”

“E-mails between you and him, talking dirty, so MacLeod could launch another sex scandal about another minister and embarrass Christians again? Like that?”

“No,” she said, exasperated. “About the money.”

Nicole still wouldn't leave. I couldn't march her out at the point of a gun. But she was willing to talk. Things came out in bits and pieces and not always coherently. Partly because she was conflicted about her role and her self-image. The presence of Gwen, full of disapproval and distrust, made her even more defensive. Partly because we always lie to ourselves and others about our relationships. But mostly because she'd been assaulted and held prisoner, and the time frames kept snapping back and forth between a romantic then and a traumatic now and the various points in between, colliding and shattering each other into fragments.

This is her story, as best as I could sort it out, sometimes reading between the lines and making connections between the dots that she herself did not make.

 

Nicole said Plowright seduced her.

Gwen was certain Nicole started it. It sounded like a coconspiracy to me. With an edge toward Plowright. He'd been doing it for awhile and had probably developed a knack for finding willing conquests.

Once it began, Plowright told Nicole she was his chosen one, like Solomon's Sheba and David's Bathsheba. He also said that in the Bible, kings and great men had more than one woman. We now live in an age that doesn't understand that. Because the world is in a particularly dangerous and unstable period, an
unbiblical
time, it is
necessary to preach that one man with one woman is God's way for everyone. So, although it was really God's way for it to be different for his chosen leaders, they had to keep their love a secret. One day, that would change, and then they would be able to make their great love public.

He even admitted to her that there might be others. Solomon, after all, had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. But she needed to keep in mind that only one of them was named and remembered, only one of them was special. As the Queen of Sheba was to Solomon, so was Nicole to Paul Plowright.

He would summon her when the constraints and burdens of the world would permit it, and she would come unto him. That was the way it was for kings and their consorts. In biblical times, of course.

Was that Plowright's standard story, or had he been particularly smitten with Nicole? I guessed it was choice number one. His marketing and business training made him appreciate the economics of reusing what worked over improvising new tales every time.

Nicole hated Plowright now. Admitting that she had once been an eager participant was shameful and embarrassing and conflicted with her role as the victim. Still, it was clear that she had originally bought into the fantasy.

At one point, Nicole blurted out a story that was clearly intended to embarrass Gwen and tear at her illusions about our pastor's sanctity. It also revealed that the relationship was more than consensual; she had relished and reveled in it.

Plowright liked Nicole to play at being Mary Magdalene, the whore who could tempt even Christ. She would wash his feet, though not with tears as it's difficult to produce enough water that way, then dry them with her hair, which he found an incredibly sensuous experience. Then, like the woman at the Pharisee's house in Luke 7:37, she would anoint his feet. The Bible does not name the brand of the ointment used in olden times. Instead, Paul supplied Happy Penis Massage Cream from Book22, another online Christian sex store, advertised to produce a sensation of warmth and to be edible, which was important
because, in a slight reversal of the order of things in Luke, the anointing was to be followed by the kissing.

As often as being the other woman is a great thrill when adultery is new, disenchantment and restlessness are as certain to follow. Nicole was at least smart enough to know that the time Pastor Plowright had spoken of, when they could take their Solomon and Sheba act public, would never come. His image required that he publicly maintain his marriage with the mother of his five children. He could make sure she did a lot of traveling, but he was going to keep her. So, she didn't react by demanding more. Which was fortunate for her, at least in the short term, because if she'd threatened to make a fuss and reveal their affair or gotten herself pregnant, Hobson would have sent Alvarez and Polasky to straighten her out.

However, as the excitement began to wane, she began to see her hero as an actual person with limitations and flaws. The greatest of which was hypocrisy.

Actually, it was something more than that. It was not that he was preaching against adultery while committing adultery, that was practically normal. He was using the Bible to support both. It revealed the Book itself to be full of contradictions, which he could use for whatever he desired, instead of being what she had been taught, the Book of clear truths, direct from God, that said one and the same to everyone.

She figured it would be useless to confront him. Instead, she just sort of wandered off to see if there were other ways to think about all of it. Maybe because he railed against USW all the time, that was where she headed. She would go by the big lecture halls and look at the name of the class on the door, and if it sounded like it was something she might understand, she'd just walk in and listen.

Then she got a catalog and found that there was a course about religion. Nathaniel MacLeod's class. Even though it was a regular class, with just twenty or so students, she was interested enough to take the chance of being caught out. She was lucky, MacLeod was not the sort who took attendance. Though he noticed her, he didn't say anything and let her stay.

It was her first exposure to those sorts of ideas, and she was swept away by them.

She also had a natural inclination toward older men in positions of authority, and she was swept away by Nathaniel too. She became almost an acolyte.

However, she did not make a clean break.

She didn't say it this way, but even though she was the other woman with Plowright, it was as if her relationship with him was her marriage and her relationship with MacLeod was an affair.

As with a marriage, as with my marriage to Gwen, Plowright was not just a single person; he was part of the package that was her life. The Cathedral of the Third Millennium was her social network, her support system, and her habit. Singing in the choir, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday, plus rehearsals, more than anything except the dull and empty routine of work in the drug store created the shape of her week. It gave her feelings of accomplishment, purpose, and participation, and the music lifted her.

The university was still a strange and threatening place where she felt intimidated. She was not ready to throw it all away and go be a philosophy student.

Nathaniel was really the answer.

It was clear that she was in love with MacLeod—or wanted to be. If he would just take her, he would be the new older man who would guide her into a new world, a journey she was afraid to take on her own, and show her how to make a new life when she threw away the old one.

But, as I knew from Ahmad, MacLeod had turned her down. Out of altruism, he said. But maybe it was because he liked women who were older, better educated, smarter, more sophisticated. Like Teresa. Or maybe, after Teresa, he just needed a vacation from women altogether.

Nicole's relationship with Plowright continued. Sometimes she felt like she was “just a booty call, not the Queen of Sheba.” She was starting to say no. He would react by paying her more attention, flattering her, or trying to dazzle her. He succeeded often enough that he kept at it.

Then came the critical day.

It was after choir practice. Plowright came by. He was being particularly nice—a sign that he was particularly eager. He invited her up to the office. She was reluctant. Maybe she didn't want to go; maybe she knew that would get her more attention.

He said he had something special, really spectacular to show her.

When they got there, he turned on the computer and revealed 3D drawings of the city he was planning to build. He said it would have its own university, a real university, just like USW, and she could go there as a full-time student. She could even get a full scholarship if he gave the word. She wouldn't have to sneak around and just audit classes at USW.

It was the first time she had any idea that he'd been keeping tabs on her and knew about her secret life, inoffensive at it was. It creeped her out. Instead of being seduced, she got sullen and pulled away.