Keeping his eyes half shut, to protect his fragile idea, he left his office and went up the hallway to the hateful door. With someone’s volition, his own or God’s, he knocked.
The response was immediate and sharp. “Yep.”
Russ pushed the door farther open. Ambrose, seated at his desk, looked over his shoulder. To judge from his expression, Russ might have been a blood-soaked apparition.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Um—sure,” Ambrose said. “Come in.”
Russ shut the door and sat down on the sofa where the young crowd received its counseling. Its springs were so shot that his knees ended up higher than his head. He shifted to the edge of a cushion, trying to gain height, but the sofa insisted on his being lower than Ambrose. And just like that, in no time at all, despite his loving intentions, he was engulfed in hatred. Engulfed in the misery of being made to feel smaller than a man half his age. There was a reason he’d shunned Ambrose for three years. It was only in the madness of Frances that he’d forgotten. She had no concept of the enormity of what she’d asked of him.
“I suppose,” he said stiffly, “I should begin with an apology.”
Ambrose was now glowering. “You can skip it.”
“No, I have to say it. It’s long overdue. I’ve been—childish—and I apologize for that. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I apologize.”
The words rang completely hollow. Not only did he not expect to be forgiven, he didn’t even want to be. He struggled to find a way around his hatred, but it had grown so large in three years, and thinking of Clem helped him not at all.
“So,” Ambrose said. “What can I do for you?”
Russ leaned back on the sofa and looked at the ceiling. He wanted to be gone, but to run away now, it seemed to him, would be to admit that he would never have Frances, never regain Clem’s respect. He opened his mouth to see what he might say. “What do you make of all this?”
“All this what.”
“You, me, the situation. What do you make of it?”
Ambrose sighed. “I think it’s a misfortune. I won’t pretend I don’t blame you for it, but I understand that your pride was badly wounded. To the extent I made it worse, I regret it. I apologized to you at the time. I can apologize again if you’d like.”
“No. Skip it.”
“Then tell me what I can do for you.”
The tokens of love and adulation in Ambrose’s office had proliferated since Russ was last in it. Above the desk were poems and messages in female handwriting, on pages ripped from spiral notebooks. Hundreds of snapshots were thumbtacked on top of one another, teen faces peeking out from the lower strata. Silk-screened posters now entirely covered one wall, right up to the ceiling. Feathers and rocks and carved sticks and scraps of watercolor painting crowded two long shelves. The cup of Ambrose ranneth over.
“I don’t even know how it happened,” Russ said. “How I came to hate you so much. It goes way beyond pride—it’s basically consumed my life, and I don’t understand it. How I can be a servant of God and feel this way. Just being in this office is a torture. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I can’t control it. I can’t think of you for five seconds without feeling sick. I can’t even look at you now—your face makes me sick.”
He sounded like a little girl running to her parents with hurt feelings. Mean Rick made me feel bad.
“If it’s any comfort,” Ambrose said, “I don’t like you, either. I used to have a lot of respect for you, but that’s long gone.”
Beneath them, the bass vibrations crescendoed and stopped. That Russ could hear the crowd’s cheering at all, at this distance, suggested that it was very large. It really should have been a comfort to know that his hatred was reciprocated, but now it only reminded him of Clem’s disrespect.
“Be that as it may,” he said, “we can’t keep doing this to the church. It’s just too obscene. I don’t know how to get out of it, but we have to find a way to be more—civil.”
“It was brave of you to knock on my door. To take that step.”
“Oh my God.” Russ clutched at the air and made his hands into fists. “Talk about things that make me sick. That little tremor in your voice when you tell someone they’re brave. As if you’re the world’s leading authority on courage. As if your opinion is of the utmost importance.”
Ambrose laughed. “That was a brave thing to say.”