Rabid (24 page)

Dante noticed Leila and raised his eyebrows. “Do I know you?”

“You use that line on all the girls?” Malcolm asked.

The priest wilted, not that the guys noticed squat. Leila felt sorry for him.

Joe and Malcolm laughed and Joe pulled out his wallet to pay Monty. “You want anything, Leila?”

“No, thanks,” she said, but the priest’s eyes widened at her name.
Damn.

“Yes,” the priest said, “Leila, the Coptic Catholic who attended Mass.”

“Leila, at Mass?” Malcolm leered at her. “Explains that lightening storm Sunday, eh?”

“Shut up, Malcolm.”

Malcolm clapped Dante on the shoulder. “What’re you drinking there?”

“Macallen,” Dante said and gazed into his glass.

“Well, any man who knows a good Scotch knows that I’m one, too. Why don’t ya join us there, eh, Father?”

Dante smiled. “Why not, indeed?”

Leila considered leaving, either for home and her dog or for the company of nonjudgmental drag queens, but Joe steered her back to the cigarette-burned wooden booth, and Malcolm and Dante sat across from them.

Introductions ensued. The priest shook her hand perfunctorily, no more contact than with the guys, and called himself “Dante, just Dante,” no
Father
, no
Monsignor
.

Maybe Leila could sic the priest on Malcolm so they both would leave her alone.

Conroy would have a conniption if he knew Leila was drinking with his priest, of whom he evidently felt proprietary, but it was an opportunity to pimp the priest to figure out how he was a priest and a shrink and a scientist, and it was an opportunity to prove to herself that she could survive this.

She plastered a calm smile over her trembling jaw.

~~~~~

Monty finished pouring the Guinness with a froth of head like whipped cream above the deep beer. Malcolm appreciated Monty’s art. He slapped Joe’s Murphy in a glass.

Leila liked lighter beers, though last Friday, when she had been there with her other friends—some of them girls but all of them dressed like women—she had been drinking scotch like a man. Monty had joined them at the other bar for dancing ‘til dawn. He had been careful to dance with the girls, not with the he-shes. He held nothing against them, but he wasn’t going to hold them against himself.

Nathanial, at the end of the bar sipping an expertly poured Guinness, had rechristened himself Natalie last weekend, just for fun, to fit in with Leila’s funny boys. She had drawn eyeliner on his lids in the women’s bathroom, straddling his skirted lap, and told him how beautiful he was. He had popped a chubby, but she had been polite and not mentioned it.

That night, Nathanial, with his curly blond hair, huge blue eyes, and full lips, had been twice hit on by straight guys.

Tonight, he had been hitting on chicks all night with no luck.

If he was more attractive as a woman than as a man, what did that mean?

~~~~~

Dante had needed a drink after he had left Bev standing in her house, face turned up, eyes dreamy. At the rectory, Father Sam maintained that there was no alcohol secreted anywhere. Sam had been vigilant about
alcohol
, because
alcohol
could be a problem with priests, the
coglione
.

Dante had driven around the college town of New Hamilton, strangling the steering wheel and kicking the pedals, until he had finally found the bar-lined main street. The sports bars were full of ebullient frat boys, not the atmosphere for liquor and remorse. The medical student hangout held the well-dressed crowd sipping martinis and smoking cigars. The Irish pub, a canopy above stairs leading down, a tattered pool table behind the jukebox playing rock, blond wood railings and an empty spot at the bar, seemed the place for whisky and soliloquy.

Damn it, no priest held onto a woman like that, projected his own skin onto hers, felt her warmth and smelled her pheromones and perfume until his own mammalian body responded. Even if she was lonely, he could only harm her and, presumably, damn his own soul.

Part of his recent vulnerability was loneliness, he knew. At the Vatican, he and his friends gathered at each others’ apartments or the Jesuit residence and played poker late into the night, or partook of culture, or drank and pressed books into each other’s hands. Dante’s sister also took him in, like a good priest’s sister, and he had platonic lady friends, Roman matrons, who were used to platonic priests.

Here, he was either judging or counseling everyone he knew.

But he shouldn’t punish Bev for his temptations.

While this thought might have edged into rationalization in many priests’ heads, Dante had inhabited the unfriendly territory of exacting celibacy and needy woman for a long time.

And so Dante drank and tried to hone his soul to a fine, sharp, rigid blade.

When a few regulars had challenged him, he had held his peace. No use getting in a bar fight merely to release pent-up aggression.

But the Coptic Orthodox girl had been there, and she had picked him out of the crowd and told the men about him. The small collegiate town was roped by gossip vines, and now he was ensconced at their table and had been introduced as “just Dante.” He smiled at the requisite
Inferno
jokes and asked, “What else do you know about me, Leila?”

She blew cigarette smoke out the corner of her mouth into a part in the crowd and smiled. Dim lamplight silver-lined her as if she was a bronze cloud at sunset. Ah, before he had taken Holy Orders, when women smiled at him like that, his heart rate had doubled and his skin warmed and tightened with the hunt.

His body responded to Leila’s smile out of ingrained habit. His lips filled with blood. The gold-shaded lights in the bar brightened. Cool air brushed Dante’s throat through his open collar and drained down his chest.

Dante said, “At Mass, you knew my name.”

Leila said, “I searched for your name on the Internet. Found your lab.”

“And how did you know to do that?”

She shrugged her thin shoulders, and her dark red blouse slithered and clung to her. Dante still liked to watch the silky movement of women’s clothes on the litheness of their bodies and breasts. This type of woman, slender, beautiful,
una bella figura
, had haunted Roma for him like legions of ghosts. They paced the stones of the streets, lingered at the fountains, and smiled coyly at him because he was a harnessed, muzzled priest.

The bartender brought the beers and slid them across the table.

Leila said, “Dr. S. wanted information on you.”

“And who is that?” Dante sipped his smooth, sweet scotch. He had needed a strong drink since he had arrived in America. The liquor lapped at his mind and soothed it, like being petted.

She said, “Conroy Sloan.”

The scotch lumped in his throat but Dante swallowed it down. “Sloan?”

“Joe and I,” she jerked her thumb at the beige man next to her, “are in the Sloan Lab at the university. Malcolm is with Lugar Lab down the hall. We study some pretty similar things to your lab.”

Joe raised his beer at Dante and asked Leila, “So who is this guy?”

Leila smiled at Joe, and they seemed chummy. She said, “He’s modest, this ‘just-ah-Dante,’ but he is, and I’m not sure of the order of the titles, Monsignor Professor Doctor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, Society of Jesus, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the University of Rome, and the Vatican. His lab studies schizophrenia, molecules to anatomy, soup to nuts.”

Dante, flayed professionally, felt his jaw click, but he smiled at her. She was a landmine, this woman. If he trod wrongly, she would tell Sloan that his priest had been pub crawling, and gossip in this town ricocheted like a laser in a hall of mirrors.

Yet, an information source about Sloan might be valuable. “You are thorough.”

Leila shrugged and smiled again. “So how can you be a priest and a scientist?”

Dante said, “There is an artificial divide between the rational and the spiritual, yet most people believe in God.” He watched Leila’s eyes flicker upward, an aborted roll of her eyes. Ah, an unbeliever. “But no one studies faith. It’s too abstract.”

Leila said, “I’ll believe in God when you show me a molecular mechanism for it.”

Sloan had used practically that exact phrase, wanting the molecular mechanism for possession. Dante kept his face passive. Like confession, counseling did not exist outside the room. “We believe the Srk kinase pathway is involved.”

Leila laughed, and the men joined in. The Srk kinase pathway is involved in everything, from replication to apoptosis, and they got the joke. Dante stretched his legs under the burnt, graffiti-scrawled table. He could exit as soon he finished this scotch. It was foolish of him to go to a bar in this small, gossipy town.

Leila leaned on the table. Her challenging eyes didn’t flirt. “Really, how can you be a scientist, work in neuroscience, and still believe in God?”

Joe and Malcolm blocked the uncomfortable conversation by raising their inside shoulders, turning away from Dante and Leila and in toward each other.

Dante smiled back. In the seminary, holier-than-thou priests had disparaged science, rounding on him in stone-faced hallways and demanding to know where the Bible mentioned quarks or neurons or the hippocampus. His secular colleagues latched onto him in the tiled, sterile hospital halls and cited studies that equated religious practice with obsessive-compulsive behavior. “Why are a religious belief and science incompatible?”

Leila held her cigarette just beyond the edge of the table but shielded it with her elbow jutted out so no one would back into it. “Because religion used to be all-powerful in all areas: origin of man, creation of the Earth, structure of the universe, and we had to worship Him or else He would smite us.” Her capitalization was audible and nearly spittle-flecked. “Science stole all that. The universe began with the Big Bang, and all the stars are red-shifted. The Earth coalesced from a swirling disk of dust around a third-generation star. Humans evolved from apes, which evolved from other chordates, back to fish, back to cells, back to chemical reactions around thermal ocean vents. There is no
reason
for it. There is no one to
smite
us. So there is
nothing
to worship.”

Dante smiled. “Reductionism. Interesting. But you can’t prove that there is no God.”

Leila’s joking manner sublimed and re-crystallized as anger that stretched her black eyes and her lovely mouth. “In that you can’t prove a negative statement, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But,
Just-Dante
, it’s still
absence
. We have found
absence
.”

“If one apple falls up…”

She finished it for him. “It will disprove the theory of gravity, but apples
don’t fall up
.”

Dante quoted, “‘The Bible teaches us how to go to Heaven, but not how the Heavens go.’”

“Galileo,” she said, identifying the author of the quote and startling Dante. “The Inquisition imprisoned him and forced him to recant the truth.”

Dante flinched at the Inquisition reference.

“Guys, guys,” Joe broke in. “How ‘bout them Knicks?”

“Oy,” Malcolm said. “The Knicks are overpaid, Neanderthal poof-kahs. The Suns, now
there’s
a basketball team.”

The ash from Leila’s cigarette drooped, and she slid the ashtray out of the table’s back corner to flick the cigarette. She smiled at Dante. “Basketball is skewed by the officiating.”