Rabid (31 page)

The cordless phone was across the room, but she hesitated. She didn’t know what to say to Conroy. She hadn’t said anything to him since she had bawled him out for being drunk Sunday morning and told him to get his butt to Mass and now she had to talk to him in front of Father Dante. Oh, good Lord. The floor tilted again, and she stepped to counter the shifting ash dunes.

Father Dante stood and held her elbow.

An elbow is a friendly place for a man to hold, not the intimate touch of palms, not too near the swell of the breast.

She smiled at Father Dante and he let her go. She dialed Conroy’s office.

~~~~~

Conroy found his jingling office phone between stacks of papers under the split-open book
Immunobiology
and lifted the receiver on its third ring. To the phone, he said, “Sloan.”

“Conroy? Everything all right?” Beverly asked.

“Yes, yes.” She should have figured out by now that he just wouldn’t be home for supper. Surely she wasn’t so dense that she was waiting for him. “I’m sorry, Beverly. I should have emailed. Leila and I were editing her paper.”

“Leila Faris? Oh, all right,” Bev said.

“Yes, it’s almost finished.” Leila’s svelte shadow sashayed by his open office door. “It’ll be a few hours. Around eleven. I’m sorry, Dearest.”

~~~~~

Dante, horrified that Bev had said
Leila Faris
, waited until Bev laid the phone in its cradle to ask, “He said something about Leila Faris?”

“Sure.” Bev moved the phone farther back on the table. “Do you want a cocktail?”

His silk shirt clung to his back, which had sprouted sweat. “Sure.”

Perhaps he could obtain enough information to interpret what it meant when Sloan grabbed Leila’s arm and yet accused her of stalking him.

“What do you want?” She opened a cabinet and removed a couple of boxes of dried pasta to reveal a cubby stocked with liquor bottles. “Screwdriver? Sloe gin fizz? Long Island Iced Tea? Neat?”

“Whatever you’re having.” 

“Long Island iced tea.” Bev tipped bottles, splashing several types of alcohol into each of the two glasses and a finishing jolt of Diet Coke, and handed one glass to Dante. The drink looked like tea. It tasted like tea to his wine-numbed tongue.

During medical school, after a spate of exams, he and some of his classmates had toasted each other with a similar drink (“We drink to cope!”) and then there was a long white space and flashes of naked female flesh from various angles, like an ill-tuned satellite dish burping pornography, and he woke the next morning with two women twined around him and around each other, and he was ashamed to not feel mortifying disgust at his stupid, carnal self. They had cooked breakfast, omelet and fruit. Their names were a mystery.

Dante said, “I think we need to talk.”

Bev blinked twice. “Okay.” He followed her into the living room.

He raised his glass and sipped. If he drank much more, he would to have to call a cab to get back to the rectory, that whitewashed house where Father Samual would be sanctimoniously sitting in the living room, no matter what time Dante made it home. Sam would glance at his watch when Dante tumbled in, belatedly snooping on his fellow priests, displaying for Dante’s approval that vigilant Samual couldn’t,
couldn’t
have deciphered devious Nicolai’s intrigues.

Dante drank.

He should leave. He shouldn’t pass on unsubstantiated conjectures that might shred Bev’s home.

Sloan had admitted to an affair with Leila by saying that he had broken it off with her. Now he was spending evenings with Leila, certainly not avoiding the near occasion of sin.

Perhaps Sloan’s admission was a lie, but in the church’s parking lot, their fight looked like a lovers’ spat. Dante would never have grabbed one of his grad students around the arm like that.

Dante had written down Leila’s address when he had looked up her phone number Saturday. The card was in his wallet. If he could find her, he could ask Leila if she had had an affair with Sloan. Maybe they could talk about theology, too, or philosophy.

He should not go there. He should not even call her.

“I should go.” He inched forward on the couch.

Bev stepped back. “You wanted to talk about something.”

“I should go.” He stood and swayed a little.

“All right,” she said.

Dante would know better how to counsel Bev after he had talked to Leila. He smoothed the creases from his pants.

Bev was too close to him, and he could smell her lemony perfume and see smile lines near her nose, minor, gentle mars that reminded Dante of the first few creases on the faces of monks who had meditated for decades upon compassion.

He had been doing so well staying away from her. His body wanted to step forward.

Bev had been wronged. Sloan had taken advantage of the softness of her skin and the sweetness of her spirit. Dante couldn’t use her, too.

His hand reached forward, seemingly of its own accord. He didn’t remember deciding to reach for the back of her neck, to cup her fragile skull.

Her head tilted, falling into his palm, golden and oak hair cobwebbing his hand.

She felt so good. All women felt so good to him.

Bev closed her eyes.

Dante opened his arms and stepped against her, a hug, an innocent hug. Anyone who thought differently had a dirty mind. It was practically research, it was so innocent.

The pressure of her arms around his waist was another step in an incremental, stuttering path, each individual pressure and touch seemingly innocuous. Her breasts warmed his chest, but her pelvis tipped away.

He wondered if his own buried experience was gathering her body to him, if she was revenging herself on Sloan, if she was lonely, or if he was a fraud.

His chin rested atop her fresh, honey-brown hair. “I should go.”

He untangled his arms from hers.

~~~~~

Leila had never found a drunk Monsignor on her doorstep before.

She stopped a few yards away from him in the corridor and asked, “Can I help you?”

Father Dante looked up at her, sideways. He looked younger, crouched and inebriated on the carpet, sipping Diet Coke. His voice lilted with drink, “Are you having the affair with Sloan?”

“No.” Whether Conroy’s priest wanted to grill or counsel her didn’t matter. Before she had met the priest, his publications suggested he would be interesting: surmisings about the origin of the notion of the Divine in the hippocampus and contrasting the symptoms of garden-variety schizophrenia versus mental illness manifesting as possession by exotic species of demons, but Conroy’s whole freak show was too much for her.

Leila stirred her purse and found her keys.

“But, he grabbed your arm, and your reaction.” The priest wagged his head.

He was trying to head-shrink her there in the hallway, where the walls were the color and heft of eggshell. Four doors down the hall, a grad student from chemistry was shacked up with a mycologist. The woman next door monitored Leila’s comings and goings like she was Homeland Security and Leila was a half-Egyptian, rootless wanderer. “My neighbors will talk. Let’s discuss this inside.”

He retracted his legs and steadied himself on his knees. “I just want to know.”

She jiggled the key in the locks and pushed the door into the dark apartment. Having a drunk man in her apartment didn’t worry her. She had a dog and a gun. She wasn’t afraid of goddamned anyone.

“It’s not your fault.” The priest followed her inside. He reeked of ethanol metabolites: acetones, ketones, and aldehydes. “You are not married. You are not breaking vows. Sloan has a history of these things.”

“It’s none of your business.” She flipped on lights and twisted switches under beaded lampshades.

The priest stared at her apartment, decked with thick silks, plaster moldings, delicate carved woods, and lush, muted hues. “It is like Paris.”

“Yeah.” Leila set her purse on the Louis Quatorze entryway table. The priest was probably gay, considering the reverence with which he was eyeing the pink-gold plasterwork recovered from Parisian apartments, heavy moss green drapes pooling on the floors, and rococo-framed paintings by minor artists. She breathed out, relieved. She hoped he was gay. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Europeans.

She shucked off her coat and tossed it on the coat tree. “My dad was into antiques.”

The priest found a coaster, set his soda on the end table, and sat gingerly on her couch.

A straight man wouldn’t have thought of a coaster. Leila relaxed a little more, even though he was a priest.

Meth the black Labrador dog slunk out of Leila’s bedroom, glanced at the priest and found him uninteresting, and greeted Leila with a hand-snuffling.

She asked, “Can I call you a taxi?”

He sipped the soda. “I drove.”

Leila slapped the counter of her kitchen pass-though and he jumped. “You’re drunk.” She walked over to him and held out her hand. “I can tell you’re drunk from five yards away. Give me your keys. I’ll drive you home or call you a cab.”

Between the priest and Conroy, she was the local drunk patrol, ensuring everybody got home.

Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi hesitated.

She had come on too strong, especially considering he was not only an adult but Mediterranean man with machismo appropriate for a descendant of Caesar, but surely he wouldn’t balk. Surely an iota of maturity came with being a priest, and her own callowness amused her.

Her hand was flat open between them, and she rippled her spread fingers, waiting.

“I would appreciate if you would call a taxi,” he said.

Her hand fell back to her side. “I’ll make sure you get in it.”

She called a cab company. They said they would be there in a few minutes. She reported the schedule to him and he thanked her, pensively tracing the thick braid that rimmed the satin upholstery on the couch arm.

“I am embarrassed,” he said. “I should not have driven like this.”

“No one got hurt this time. Get a card from the cab driver.”

In spite of his prying into her personal life the way all goddamn priests think they have a right to, Just-ah Dante was Byronic in coloring and tragic air and inebriation, and his body and his smooth posture cast a confidence that she had noticed in O’Malley, an ease around women that came from having nailed many.

Priests shouldn’t be like that. Sick chills crawled up her back.

Guys.
He had probably nailed many
guys.
She tried to relax again.

“Just so you know,” the priest said, “whatever you say, I will not tell. You could tell me under the confession seal, and I could tell to no one.”

God, she hated busybody priests. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll say whatever you want, anyway.”

He held his temple with one hand, quite the tortured Heathcliff.

“You priests make all the rules and get pissed off when people don’t follow them, threaten them with made-up curses and punishments. You don’t even believe in Hell, do you?”