Rabid (26 page)

The Blessed Virgin was silent on the subject.

Behind her, the door knocked against her shoulder blades.

~~~~~

Conroy could hear them inside that library, his wife’s alto and the priest’s rough voice, but he couldn’t distinguish words. He knocked on the door and there was a hesitation before the priest shouted, “Yes?” and the heavy door nudged away from the frame as if a secret had been lifted from it.

Conroy pushed the door open. “What’s going on in here?”

His wife stood across the room from the priest, who smoothed his robes as if they had been hiked up around his waist. Beverly looked inordinately happy. She was hiding something.

Conroy repeated, “What’s going on?”

Beverly smirked and sat in her chair. “Nothing.”

The priest raised a groomed, Italian eyebrow.

Conroy sat in his chair, but the two of them, his wife and the priest, seemed to be sending each other subtle signals, flickers of eyebrow and eyelash, curves of mouth and fingers and hip.

“So this is how it’s going to be,” Conroy said. “The two of you, ambushing me.”

“We didn’t discuss you at all, Dr. Sloan.” The priest steepled his fingers, a pose designed to be benign and thoughtful, but it looked like pondering harsh judgment.

Beverly said, “Conroy, we need counseling more than once a week.”

Conroy shrugged. “I’m too busy.”

Beverly said, “You weren’t too busy to have an affair.” 

“I’m too busy at the lab right now.”

The priest said, “We need you here, Dr. Sloan.”

Trust this creampuff who had allowed himself to become God’s prison bitch to not understand the battlefield of marriage, the subterfuges and feints. Trust him not to know that
talking
about a relationship is the woman’s cavalry and field artillery. If, by some miracle of morale, if the battle tide turned and the man made some headway, her territory was mined with bouncing betties, old arguments that she somehow remembered and tossed up that shot off bamboo spikes, and the guy would be tweezing out eighteen-inch splinters of sneaky allusions for days afterward, and he would still lose the fight.

~~~~~

Dante rubbed his aching eyes. “Dr. Sloan.” He used the title to reduce antagonism. The skin on Dante’s face itched and tightened as though he were driving while exhausted. He couldn’t relinquish control of the conversation and reinforce Sloan’s obstinate behavior. “Dr. Sloan, what do you want to be the result of this counseling?”

Sloan’s forehead pleated.

Bev breathed quietly, leaning forward, and Dante watched her watch her husband.

Sloan drew a breath and said, “I want everything back the way it was.”

Perhaps there was more to that answer than a mere wish not to have been caught screwing another woman or irritation that he must make an effort to save his marriage. “Yes?”

“Routine,” Sloan said. “I want everything to be calm and routine. No blow-ups. No worrying if I’ve done something that looks suspicious.” He looked up at Dante, glaring. “She’s holding a grudge.”

As if it had been suspended in a spider web, Dante’s heart fell. “It has been less than two weeks since you were caught having sex with another woman, and you want everything to be normal?” Air rushed into Dante like the anger of God. “You think that people are like puppets dangling before you, but we’re not.” Dante pointed to Bev, whose brown eyes were shocked wide. “She’s not.”

“Dante,” Bev said. “Please stop.”

“This is what is wrong!” Dante wanted
God
to hear this.
If
there was a God,
since
there was an absence of evidence that there was no God, He should know about the miscreants He had created. “It is obsession with self. You don’t believe in humanity. People are objects to you, Sloan,” like children were objects to that damned, damned pedophile.

Sloan turned to Bev. “This isn’t counseling. He’s just a priest threatening damnation.” He spun and flicked his finger at Dante. “You priests make up rules and then threaten everyone else with some stupid punishment that even you don’t believe in. You have your own problems, asshole.” He stalked out, leaving Dante ashamed at his temper and exhausted, alone with Bev.

Bev rubbed a tear off her cheek. “It took so much to get him to come to counseling.”

“I thought he would see that he was hurting people. But he did not,” Dante said. At confession the next morning, Dante drew a few prayers in penance for his outburst and another sad grimace from Samual.

Her eyes dropped tears and she rubbed them off her cheeks. “Now what?”

“It’s up to you.” He scratched his scalp and finger-combed his hair back. Dante wished he were back in his lab discussing brains and cells and proteins and not screwing up people’s lives. “There are the children to consider.”

“I don’t know how this happened. A couple of weeks ago everything was fine.”

Dante pushed himself up, walked past the neat bookshelves, sat in Conroy’s still-warm chair and held Bev’s cool fingers. “One thing leads to another. It is a succession, a chain reaction. I think that about Nicolai, too.”

Bev scrubbed at her reddened cheeks with her other hand.

He petted her hand. Swollen veins sneaked under the surface of her skin like thick threads in raw ivory silk. “For pedophiles, first there is the pornography.” Dante turned to Bev, who was leaning forward, staring down. “He told the Dominicans he was doing
research
on pedophile priests, that he wanted to testify before the American bishops.”

“So Father Nicolai wasn’t a pedophile!” Her hand covered her chest, her cleavage, her heart, which Dante broke anew.

“That is what they all
say
. They
all
say that it was research. Every last one of them tries to convince you that the boxes and crates and metric tons and terabytes of raped children are
research
. It is a cliché.” Dante’s hands fell in his lap, useless. “If he had been researching pedophiles, he would have known what a ragged old excuse that is.” 

Bev looked down, saddened again. Damn, he hated himself for bruising this sweet woman. The blue carpet in the library still smelled musty though he had vacuumed it. His imagination picked up whiffs of spunk and turd. Beside his shoe, the carpeting was torn in a right angle, a handhold. He should rip it all up.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes.” Dante couldn’t even lift their linked hands, so he rubbed the back of her hand with his thumb. “It’s incremental. First the pictures, then small transgressions which could be explained away as play or wrestling or an accident and, as they improve their lies and their manipulations, large transgressions.”

“You make it sound so clinical.”

“It’s not. Each step is a betrayal and destroys people.”

Bev rustled, shifting in her chair, and she turned her hand over so they held hands palm to palm. Her hair was loose. Usually, her dark gold hair was knotted or twisted somehow, but today it hung across her shoulders, and she looked so young, like the co-ed she had been when Conroy had met her. “So what should I do about Conroy?”

Dante was the Church, there in his medieval mourning clothes and ringless fingers and blood rushing at the sight of the light touching the gold in her hair, and he knew that she would take his slightest cue as the Word and that he was condemning her to living with an adulterer but he said, “The girls,” and over their joined hands she watched him with solemn brown eyes.

“Well, then.” Bev’s fingers slid away and she stood, brushing wrinkles out of her skirt, “I need to think about it. Instead of counseling on Monday, do you want to come for supper?”

If he went to her house for supper, there would be the opportunity for another incremental movement toward each other, but Dante could handle women friends. Eventually they became sisterly and platonic. He could guide women away from the romantic path because, before he took Holy Orders and had done his penance for betraying them all, he had steered crowds of them down that path to its final, dismaying, nebulous conclusion.

“Supper would be nice,” he said.

~~~~~

After he had stormed out of counseling, Conroy pounded on Leila’s door, and she yanked it open and pulled him in. She held his biceps in her strong grip and whispered, “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.” Conroy grabbed her arms, crinkling her silver shirt, and kissed her.

“It’s never nothing.” The buttons up the back her shirt slipped in his fingers, but he pushed each one through its buttonhole.

He swept the shirt off her shoulders and reached for her fly. The rose perfume on her skin left a bitter residue on her belly, but he licked it as he worked at the yet-more buttons of her fly. The door lock clicked behind her, and then her young, bronze hands slid through his whitening hair.

He was not selfish. He licked lower.

~~~~~

Bev said, “One more thing,” and fidgeted with her purse. She set it on the chair behind her because she had to do this even though she didn’t want to. “Is Father Sam around?”

“Father Sam is at St. Jude’s, performing Mass. After that, he goes to St. Theresa’s.”

She swallowed even though her mouth was dry. “I need to confess.”

“You’ve committed mortal sins since last week?” His head tipped, amused.

She had grown up confessing to a priest. It was habit. It was comforting. She picked up her purse and stepped toward the heavy library door. “I could wait for Father Sam.”

“Bev, I’m still a priest.”

“All right.”

He rummaged in his desk and pulled a slim, purple stole from the drawer like a recalcitrant purple snake from its den. Holding the cloth in his open palms, he closed his eyes, muttered, kissed the center, and looped it around his neck.

Confessing to Dante was going to make everything worse, but one must confess before taking communion. She held her breath, hoping for strength, but none came.

~~~~~

Leila buried her fingers in his hair and held on, gasping, then released Conroy. He sat sideways on the floor while she held the doorknob and panted. She asked, “What is going on?”

“Nothing.” Conroy lurched to his feet and smoothed his hair. He slid his hands in his pockets and slouched. “Sometimes I’m unpredictable.”

Unlikely. Something weird was going on with Conroy. He didn’t go for cunnilingus. “Do you want some coffee or something? I think there’s still coffee.”

“Got any of that vodka left?”

“Yeah.” She tugged her jeans up over her hips and buttoned them on the way to the kitchen. Meth, her deaf black dog, lay in his basket in the living room, asleep. She poured one scant shot of vodka into the screwdriver and knife-stirred it. Conroy’s odd behavior was unpredictable, and she didn’t want him to be unpredictable and drunk.

He was sitting on the couch when she handed him the drink.

He sipped and seemed twitchy, like a dog with an itch. “Thanks.”

He scratched his neck, put the glass down, and jiggled his knee.