Rabid (29 page)

Conroy should join the communion line. His desiccated tongue stuck to his arid molars, and prying it loose left membrane on his enamel. His vodka-seared mouth was so dry that his tongue might suck the trace of moisture in the gluey Host and reduce it to dust.

That might be heresy, too. Every goddamn thing was heresy.

The girls squirmed in the pew beside him, not quite misbehaving, edging towards infraction. They were whispering, trying to one-up the other in a petty contest.

The goal of the game was moral superiority.

Christine had, she said, sat entirely still and not moved the entire first part of the Mass.

Dinah was mortifying herself by breathing only when absolutely necessary, forgoing even oxygen.

They had both squirmed incorrigibly the whole time, so they were manufacturing virtues.

Perhaps this was how it started, little women deceiving themselves about their own honesty. Perhaps this was the training for how they would later gather superior genes and yet pen a submissive husband.

~~~~~

Leila wilted in the ass-torturing pew and watched Conroy shuffle in the communion chain gang. She had thought he would attend the noon one, damn it. His face had a hepatitis-virus pallor, and his walk was weak and slow, as if his blood wasn’t carrying enough oxygen.

She would have to leave quickly after the Mass and hope he hadn’t seen her. He had been pissed last week and, even though he had no right to any opinion about her Mass attendance or her talking to his priests, a shock might kill him in his hungover state.

~~~~~

Chapter Nine

After the Mass, Dante waited outside for Leila Faris. The sun filled the February afternoon with brightness, but a fog chill hung in the air. His breath gathered in front of him, obscuring his view. He exhaled out the corner of his mouth to avoid frosting people.

Leila hurried out the door, squeezing past the line of people who were waiting to greet the priests, and skipped down the stone steps.

“Leila!” Dante lifted his white, flowing alb to hurry after her. She turned and glanced back toward the church, then saw him stupidly loping after her in his ecclesiastical dress.

She waited for him to catch up, drawing a line in the parking lot gravel with the toe of her boot. Under her open gray coat, she wore a black skirt cut a whisper short of respectability and current fashion above her long calves and heeled shoes. She said, “I have to run.”

Dante took her cold hand in his, ostensibly a handshake. “We could talk in my library.”

“Can’t right now.” She glanced at the hand that was holding hers for too long, and her lower lip dropped. Wind bit through his white robes and pulled them as if his clothes whipped off his body and she could see everything, all the intentions he had hidden from himself. His impression that she was lost and searching would damn him.

From the church, a frozen dust devil swooped toward them and resolved into a beige-clothed Conroy Sloan.

Sloan grabbed Leila’s upper left arm with a proprietary grip. “What the hell are you doing here
again
?”

Dante stepped toward Sloan to defend the girl but as he released Leila’s hand, she grabbed her own captured arm, wrenched it away from Sloan, reversed the grip and twisted. Sloan gasped and staggered as her grip rotated his arm in his shoulder socket. His knees sagged.

Leila’s eyes were black with anger. She said, “Conroy, I warned you about that shit.”

Sloan crouched farther. He inhaled grunts, enraged, though Leila had wrenched his arm around so that his palm unnaturally faced the back of his own head.

One of them needed his help, but Dante wasn’t sure which one.

Leila tossed Sloan’s hand away and stepped backward. She nodded at Dante. “Some other time, Monsignor.” She strode through the parking lot to her car.

Dante rubbed his cold-stung eyes. “Would you care to explain that, Dr. Sloan?” That Sloan was having an affair with her seemed obvious from his assertion of ownership and from the familiarity of their fight. Sloan was not going to false-confess his way out of this.

“She’s angry because I broke it off.” He rubbed his shoulder and staggered to his feet. “She’s stalking me.”

Dante doubted that Leila was the one who was stalking. Sloan was having an affair with her, instead of, or in addition to, the Peggy person.

Dante should tell Bev about Leila.

But what did he know, really? Sloan had grabbed Leila’s arm. Sloan said that she had been stalking him since he broke it off with her.

At supper with Bev, he would have to say something or be silent, but either option must be a considered one, not an accident.

Dante turned, braved the stiff wind, and walked back to the crowded church steps, leaving Sloan gasping for breath and holding his elbow.

~~~~~

Later, in the lab, Conroy sat at the tissue culture hood, careful not to press his forehead on the protective glass barrier and leave expanding-forehead oil marks, and pipetted sonicated mouse brain soup onto silver dollar-sized Petri dishes filmed with cells. His lab notebook lay open beside him, and he had scribbled notes about sacrificing the mice and the state of their brains when he had scooped them out and sonicated the matter in cell media. All the infected mice were dead now, and he could finish these few experiments, get his grant, and be crowned the new Dean of the Medical College.

After Mass, his hangover had receded like a storm tide, revealing debris scattered in his head and his neurons short-circuited by salt. An IV pouch of Ringer’s and a few snorts of oxygen cleared that up, freeing him to contemplate Bev’s response if that priest tattled.

That grant could use some more work before he went home.

A lot of work.

Hours.

Conroy brushed his silvery hair off his forehead with one latex-gloved hand. His fingers felt condomed. He idled, pipetting frothy pink inoculum through the glass pipet, mixing.

Outside, the lab door clanked.

Fear killed him all the way to rigor mortis and, scared stiff, he watched the door to the main lab. He heard light footsteps.

He hoped it was Leila. Anyone but Leila was a disaster. But he wasn’t ready for Leila, either.

Leila walked in. She glistened with snowflakes and sweat.

“Christ,” she said and turned away from him.

His punching heart vibrated a frantic harmonic and one of its moorings creaked. His face stung, flushed and sweating. “Leila, wait!”

She stopped, turned, and leaned on the doorway. Her slim arms and legs wrapped her body like spiraling concertina wire. “What?”

He held the pipet, dripping virus-laden inoculum into the dish. “I’m sorry.”

Her black eyes narrowed, and she looked pissed. “You’re an idiot, Conroy.”

“Okay.” He finished inoculating that well, disposed of the pipet, and sat with his hands in his lap looking, he hoped, innocuous and contrite.

Her dark eyes were large with calm anger. She hadn’t blinked yet, literally, no flicker of humanity or normal reflex. “Don’t ever, ever grab me like you did, ever again.”

“I won’t,” Conroy promised. There was the slightest tickle in his head, a déjà vu, that this power play was another form of her kink. His eyes felt dry for her lack of blinking.

“If you ever grab me again, I will fucking break your neck. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of Grand Central Station. I don’t care if your wife is standing next to you.”

“I understand.”

This was all a corollary of her rules for casual fucking: Act as if nothing was going on, either in the commission or the omission of acts. “All right.”

Leila sighed, looked away, and finally blinked. “What the hell is going on with you, Conroy?”

In the hood, he selected another fragile glass pipet from the sterile paper bag and began inoculating the rest of the cells. “It’s a long story.”

“You’ve been here late every night. You got shit-faced at my apartment yesterday. If I hadn’t dragged you home, you would have stayed out all night, which is such a dead give-away. That’s not normal.” She flipped the switches of the other tissue culture hood, and the updraft whooshed and the neon light whined.

The chill air of the tissue culture room seeped through his damp shirt and stroked his back. “There’s a lot going on right now.”

Leila took dishes out of the incubator and slid them onto the stage of the inverted microscope. She focused and said, “Secret experiments again?”

“Just confirming Yuri’s results.”

“Bullshit.” She turned on the digital camera atop the microscope. The computer was behind her, and she stretched across the narrow room, wiggled the computer mouse to wake it, and tapped the space bar. The picture on the monitor froze. Neurons splayed their splatted cell bodies and long axon spikes.

Sick, spindly neurons.

Leila whipped the scope over the dish—the landscape blurred on the monitor screen like a roller coaster video—and she tapped the space bar, taking digital pictures.

She said, “Malcolm tried to pimp me for information yesterday after I told him you had the stomach flu.” (
click
.) “Butch from Liddy Lab had very specific questions she mouthed for her boss about your NIH trips.” (
click
.) “People are talking.” (
click
.) “You need to be more careful. A lot more careful.”

Leila could keep a secret. Conroy was surprised that, since their affair began seven months ago (
not an affair but casual fucking
), there hadn’t been a tinge of scandal. One of the reasons he had allowed himself to be seduced, or whatever had happened, was that she wouldn’t talk about any of her former men. Leila kept secrets like she kept her dogs, she said: until they were very, very old, and then they drifted away and she buried them someplace beautiful.

He leaned on the purring incubator. “My wife and I have been going to marital counseling.”

Leila’s head whipped around and she stared at him, angry. “Does she think you’re screwing around?”

“Yes, but she thinks it’s with someone out of town at NIH study group.”

The angry tension in her face softened. “That’s why Dr. Liddy was warning me. Do you have someone else?”

Leila approved! His stock rose and his dick got heavy with filling blood. Conroy looked down in mock chagrin and real dismay. “Well, yes.” Conroy batted the air, trying to knock the foolishness away. “The woman left some underwear in my suitcase and Beverly found them.”

Leila’s jaw dropped. She sat in one of the rolling chairs and leaned forward, hands clasped in front of her, the posture of a person conducting an intervention. She said, “Conroy, that woman is out to break up your marriage.”

“No, it was just an accident.” He waved his hand, cleaning the air as if wiping her words off a blackboard.

Her voice dropped lower, more serious. “You believed
that
.”

Conroy pressed his palms against the incubator behind him.

“Let me guess,” Leila said, “she wants you to spend more time with her. She does domestic things, like cooking, and she irons your shirt while you shower after sex.”