Rabid (32 page)

The priest’s eyes widened like speeded-up black roses blooming. “Yes, I believe in Hell.”

“Real Hell? Under the ground?”

“No,” he said. “But we humans are adept at creating our own, personal Hells on Earth.”

He walked over to where she stood by the kitchen. His hand darted toward her face and retreated, and she jerked back.

That reach for her was unconscious, a habit, like in the bar. He wasn’t gay. He was in her apartment because he wanted some ass.

Her heart shook and her breath cowered in her chest. “Don’t touch me.” She stepped toward him, and the aggression in her step drove the priest backward. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

Leila glanced at the Caller ID on her ringing phone. “Your taxi is downstairs.”

The priest stood and gathered his black coat around him. The white square of his Roman collar peeked out. “I would like to talk to you more.”

Prying jerk. “Your cab is waiting.”

He stepped into the hall and said, “Let me buy you dinner tomorrow, to talk.” 

“Goodbye, Monsignor.” She closed the door. She watched from her window as the priest got into the cab.

Asshole. Thought because he was a priest that he could ask anything he wanted and pass judgment on her.

Fuck him.

~~~~~

Tuesday morning, Conroy sipped his coffee at the kitchen table while his girls chattered and Beverly cooked.

Only a few more mornings until he could wake up alone.

Bev asked, “Is scrambled all right?”

“Yes, thank you.” Maybe his cholesterol would go down if he didn’t eat Beverly’s eggs fried in butter three times a week. “I found another empty wine bottle in the recycler last night. Were you drinking?”

“No. Dante had one glass. I didn’t have any.”

“That priest was over here again?” His cup rattled on the table. Damn sneaky priest.

“For supper. Since you’re never home.”

This was turning into arguing and the girls were right there, but Dinah pushed two lumps of egg around her plate, racing them. Christine stared at her lap, oblivious.

He asked, “If the priest only had one glass, why is the bottle empty?”

“I poured the rest down the drain.”

“You did?”

“That’s the rule. No leftover alcohol in the house.”

“All right.” Conroy drank the rest of his coffee and went to the lab.

~~~~~

Dante’s hangover tapped his temples but didn’t ricochet inside his skull. He called a cab, ducked into the rectory’s Volvo in Leila’s parking lot, and drove over to Bev’s.

He stood outside the strong door of Bev’s house, toying with the brass knocker and trying to decide whether the affair between Leila and Conroy was ongoing or over. The cold February wind lapped his coat and ungloved fingers, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets.

He rang her doorbell, and moments lapsed. Relief played in his chest. He didn’t have to do this, he could think more about whether he was right or not—but Bev answered the door.

“Oh!” Her brown hair was bound into a ponytail, and she wore slacks and a red tee shirt. “Come in out of the cold. Want coffee?”

His temple squeezed, the beginning of a dark caffeine jones. “Yes, thank you.”

Bev giggled. “I needed a little extra coffee this morning, too. How do you take your coffee? Light? Sweet? Irish?”

“With cream or milk,” he said. In the kitchen, she poured two cups, and they sat at the kitchen nook with windows facing the tree-enclosed back yard. The trees were stark, frozen wood.

The coffee was weak and bitter. Hazelnut flavoring attempted to compensate but failed. Italian coffee was never so dilute, and Roma was never this cold, either. Weak coffee and cold air, the New World was a tepid place.

She studied him and laid her hand on the table between them.

He swirled his cup and stared into the beige opacity roiling in blue ceramic. “Bev, I’m sorry. I don’t want to say, but I think Sloan was having more than one affair.”

“Oh.” She retracted her offered hand and stirred her coffee. She stared out at the back yard, where swings swung in the wind. Her spoon clinked on the cup, and scraped, and clinked. “How do you know?”

“I saw them together. I talked to the woman.”

She set her spoon on her saucer and sipped. “It’s not so shocking the second time.”

The coffee cup cooled between his palms, imparting warmth into his chilled hands. He reached out and rested his now-warmed hand on her shoulder, near her neck. It was a priestly gesture, a measure of comfort after bad news.

Bev asked, “What should I do?”

Her shoulder was soft under his fingers: thin shirt, bra strap, softness, resilient muscle, and crisp bone. His words were asinine vibrations in the air. “I can’t counsel you to divorce.”

Bev sipped her coffee, and sinew and flesh shrugged under her shirt and his hand. “I’m a substitute teacher. I can’t take care of my girls alone.”

“There is alimony and child support,” he said.

Bev scooted her chair over so that they looked out the window side by side. He bent his arm so that his hand stayed on her shoulder closest to him and reached no further. He shifted, but retracting his hand was another injustice.

“The courts don’t do that anymore. Women should be able to take care of themselves and their children and look foolish if they believed marriage vows. After divorce, the children always sink to the socioeconomic level of the ex-wife, which is always lower than the ex-husband’s. Men are rewarded for divorce.” She sighed. “The girls would have to go to public school. I know it isn’t a tragedy, public school. OLPH feeds into Xavier Prep. Xavier sends ten or twenty girls to Ivy League schools every year, and the next fifty to top Catholic universities and the Sisters. None of the public high schools around here send more than the valedictorian to good schools. I know my girls can overcome challenges, but I thought I could give them a good education.”

She laid her head on his shoulder. Her head wasn’t heavy, but her weight squeezed the deltoid muscle around his shoulder. He was too aware of her weight and his body. He should back away, but he could stop this at any time and she was frail right now.

She said, “And being alone. I haven’t been alone for thirteen years.”

Dante dragged his innocent arm around and held her shoulders. He was only comforting her. He wasn’t a slave to his body. He would not break his vow of celibacy. He should be kind, supportive, and compassionate. This woman was in crisis.

She said, “I don’t want to uproot the girls.”

She turned her head on his shoulder. Dante stared at the red and yellow plastic swing set huddled in the dry winter grass. None of the colors in Leila’s apartment had been so uncomplicated. Auburn and pinks burnished the old gold plaster in the living room. The mossy curtains were tinged with sunlight glints and navy blue, deep-water shadows, like being sunk in a pond.

He smoothed her schoolgirl hair. As a psychiatrist and a priest, he should maintain a professional distance from this woman’s soft body.

Heat drove though her tee shirt and melted his black clothes.

She said, “I don’t know what to do.”

He couldn’t tell her to divorce. He wouldn’t counsel her to stay.

Her arm wove around behind him.

Outside, a straw-brittle vine clung to a tree skeleton. Her breath whispered on his neck, just above his Roman collar.

A discordant note rang in his mind and clenched his spine. His weak flesh that he had laid before the altar when he had taken Holy Orders, defied him, blooming and heating from that point where her breath touched his bare neck.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered, and her lips touched his neck, a spark jumping.

His voice leaked through his clenched larynx. “You have to decide.”

He should leave. Thoughts skimmed: that Bev was storm-tossed in the choppy seas of her breaking marriage, that he had committed not to touch a woman’s soft shoulders and hair like this, that his Holy Orders were the dividing line between a wasted era tipping women into his bed and a time when he looked higher and averted his eyes from his own flesh, that staying in her arms that were pulling him closer would cement for her that men were rutting beasts, that he was a beast, that she needed comfort and that pulling away would prove to her that she was undesirable, that he had waited too long to pull away, that his soul was damned and that he had never believed in the existence of the soul.

Her breath rasped on his neck and traveled down his veins to his heart, which slammed in his chest and splashed his blood in his arteries against his skin, and he turned to ask her to stop but her lips were on his, sweet with sugar and hazelnut and whiskey.

Her hands moved on his black shirt, and his shirt pulled on the scruff of his neck, and he should stop, he should stop,
he should stop.

He stood, knocking over the kitchen chair, and she stood with him, still kissing.

Elemental habits were ingrained in his male body like striations in wood, deep through him, each the accumulation of years. The mortifications during his short time as a priest hadn’t permeated his flesh or charred away the marks that years of women had left under his skin. The vestments, the alb, and the cassock had camouflaged the man who liked to taste women, touch them, and herd them into his bedroom.

He lifted her in his arms, that little bit of woman that he wanted to press himself into and pin to a bed, crash into her, and habit and lust ripped through his cloth-thin, priest-black plating.

~~~~~

Meanwhile, Conroy finished the phone call with the dulcet-voiced apartment agent—he could have the townhouse Saturday and planned to move a few of his things on Monday evening, which was the fifteenth and the day of the department committee meeting—as Leila hurried into his office. She closed the door behind her and braced herself against it. “That priest showed up at my place last night.”

Conroy jumped and his knees rapped the underside of his wooden desk drawer. “What?”

“Monsignor Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi, asking all sorts of stupid questions. He asked if I was sleeping with you. Are you sure your wife doesn’t know about me?”

“She doesn’t know.” He should have kept Leila’s rules. He shouldn’t have screwed any of those other women. One of his eyelids twitched as if it couldn’t decide whether to blink.

“Okay,” Leila left his office, still preoccupied.

Conroy opened up a new window on his computer and typed,
Dearest Beverly
.

~~~~~

In the deep dark of her curtained bedroom, Bev could barely breathe from Dante’s weight, though he didn’t move, and she closed her eyes as one last crest lifted her and her body clenched. A sunlight sliver poked through the curtain gap and laid a knife of light on the sheets beside her hand.

Her body, ferocious bone and skin around her soul, had liberated her because she understood why her husband screwed around: it was just sex, instinct and friction, not her soul, not her heart. She had barely touched Dante, her friend, her
priest
, and he had leapt at her as if she were prey, and that’s all that sex was, a movement of biology, a reflex. An orgasm, even a molten-spine, skull-blasting orgasm, wasn’t a tremor of the soul.