A Slow Hand in the Sanctuary

I'm Nolan, thirty-four, and I sing tenor at St. Margaret's Community Church choir, which sounds fancier than it is. It's a converted basement with worn carpet and a piano that's been out of tune in the same two keys for years, and every Thursday night about twenty of us fold ourselves into metal chairs arranged in arcs and work through the hymns. I've been doing it for eight years now. It started because a coworker dragged me along and stayed because it turned out Thursday was the night I needed most.

Thursday nights have a rhythm. Rehearsal runs seven to nine. Then the core group walks two blocks to the Fox and Hound and we take over the big table in the back until the bartender starts giving us the look around eleven. Same order every week, same arguments about whether the alto section drags on the descant, same jokes. When you're single in your thirties in this city, you learn to protect your routines. They're the spine of the week. Everything else, the dating apps and the first dates and the texts that taper off after three days, floats around the spine and mostly dissolves.

I'd done my share of dating in those years. There was a violinist I saw for about three months when I was thirty-two, which is the closest I'd come to anything serious, and she ended it politely and I agreed politely and it was finished. The truth I don't love admitting is that I've never felt entirely sure of myself in bed. Not bad, exactly. Just never sure I was doing the thing the other person actually wanted, never sure I wasn't performing some version of a man I'd seen in movies. So I dated around and I stayed friendly and I kept my Thursdays.

Three weeks ago, a Thursday in early October, Josephine brought somebody new.

Josephine is our soprano section leader, thirty-two, been in the choir longer than me. She's the type who adopts people. She'd been saying for weeks that a friend from her office was moving to the city for a graphic design job and might like to sing. Then that Thursday she showed up at rehearsal with a woman I hadn't seen before and planted her right in the alto arc.

"Everyone, this is Bethany," Josephine said, hand on the woman's shoulder. "She's twenty-nine, she's new, and she claims she can read music, which we'll see about."

"Josephine is exaggerating her own importance in this story," Bethany said. "I can read music fine. Her taste in lunch spots is what's questionable."

That got a laugh out of the altos. I remember thinking her voice was lower than I expected, warm, and that she looked straight at you when she talked. Steady eyes. She caught me looking once during the second hymn and didn't look away fast the way new people usually do. She just raised an eyebrow a little, like she was amused at having been caught being watched.

I won't claim I understood anything yet. I just noticed I wanted to be near her after the last hymn, and I stayed near her, helping stack chairs when I normally slip out early.

At the pub she ended up in the chair next to mine, which I'd like to claim was strategy but was actually Josephine shoving people around the table to make room. Bethany ordered a cider and I got my usual pint and somewhere in the middle of the evening the table split into two conversations and we ended up talking to each other.

"So how long have you done this?" she asked, nodding at the room. "Choir thing."

"Eight years. It started as one of those favor-to-a-friend situations and then I couldn't quit."

"That's how they get you." She tapped her glass against the table edge. "Josephine got me with the promise of a free dinner after."

"It's a cult with sheet music."

She laughed, and the laugh did something to the space between us. I noticed a few things over the next hour, the way you do. She'd moved here six months ago. She liked her job but hated her commute. She asked real questions and waited for the answers, which is rarer than it should be.

Then at some point she said, "Can I ask you something? You seem really comfortable. Like, in your own skin. Was that always there or did you learn it?"

I took a drink before I answered because I didn't want to say the glib thing first.

"Honestly? I'm still learning," I said. "I think I look more put together than I am. The comfort is mostly practice and a decent singing posture."

"That's a better answer than I expected," she said, and she was smiling into her cider.

"What was the answer you expected?"

"Something about loving yourself first. Some poster thing."

"I've got a poster somewhere but I never read it."

She laughed again and our shoulders touched when she did, just for a second, and neither of us moved away from it fast. The rest of the night went easy. When we split up outside the pub she said goodnight to the group but she said it to me last, and she said my name, which I noticed.

Nothing happened that night. Nothing happened for a week, either, except I thought about her more than I'd thought about anyone in a while.

Then the following Wednesday my phone buzzed and it was her. She'd gotten my number from Josephine, she said, with permission.

Hey, this is Bethany from choir. Weird question. Is there any chance you'd be open to talking about something private sometime? No pressure and no weirdness intended, I just don't totally know who else to ask.

I read it four times. My first thought was that something was wrong, she needed help with something bad. My second thought, I'll admit, was a whole flicker of other possibilities, which I shoved down because guys who leap at those possibilities are exactly the guys I've never wanted to be.

Sure, I typed back. Whatever you need. After rehearsal Thursday? Josephine keeps a lamp in the hall for late practicing so it's actually quiet there.

That works. Thank you. Really.

Thursday came slow as syrup. Rehearsal itself was fine, normal, she sat in the altos and we did the descant three times because the sopranos kept flubbing it, and I sang okay and tried not to stare at her. Around nine the crowd thinned out. Josephine gave me a look on her way up the stairs that I chose to interpret as friendly and not knowing anything, which was probably generous of me.

By twenty past we were the only ones left. Bethany shut the door at the top of the stairs, and the basement went to that particular church-basement quiet, just the furnace ticking somewhere and the lamp on the piano throwing a warm circle across the carpet. We took two folding chairs and turned them toward each other by the piano, close but not touching.

"Okay," she said, and then she sat quiet for a second with her hands around an imaginary cup. "So. I moved here six months ago, right before summer, and I don't have people yet. Josephine's the closest thing and I can't exactly ask her this."

"Ask me what?"

She blew out a breath. "This is going to sound insane. I've been thinking about trying anal sex. Like, actually trying it, not joking about it with my friends over wine. And I've never done it, and the one serious relationship I had before, with a coworker, ended when I was twenty-seven and it was not the kind of relationship where I could have asked anyway. And I don't want to do it with some guy off an app who thinks it's a box to check. I want to do it with someone patient. Someone who actually knows what they're doing, or at least knows how to be careful. And I know we've talked twice. I know how this sounds."