Rabid (54 page)

“LPUs?” he asked.

Leila smiled. “They’re not Least Publishable Units. I think some of them are big enough for
Nature
or
Science.
I owe you one for interpreting the fMRIs, and for helping with Danna’s parents.”

“I did nothing.” He sipped the smooth, layered scotch.

“Her dad liked you.” Leila chuckled and shook her head. “He thinks you guys are the same, under the robes, because he’s a minister.” Leila sipped. “How can you believe it? After everything, after being in science for so long, how can you believe those fairy tales?” Leila gulped her drink. “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a priest.”

“Why should you not discuss religion with a priest?” He wasn’t sure whether that was the Socratic questioning of a psychiatrist or the ecumenical debate of a priest. It didn’t matter.

“I’m usually not so mean when I drink. I’m more of the I-love-you-guys type.” Leila held her glass up to the light and studied the diluted scotch. “You’ve taken Holy Orders. You’re stuck. Why would I want to convince you of anything else?”

He could return later to her seeming reticence to challenge people’s prior commitments. “What makes you think you could convince me?”

Leila squinted at her scotch. “Self-evident truths. If there were a God, then he’s an evil son of a bitch. Wars. Famines. Genocide.”

“That’s your problem with God, that bad things happen in the world?” Dante laughed. “But that’s a child’s argument. There are many answers for that.”

“They all suck,” Leila said.

“Because the world is a vale of soul-making, a chance to do God’s work.”

“They’re all cop-outs, Dante. Even Keats.”

She had recognized where he had gotten the
vale of soul-making
quote.

“Even C.S. Lewis.” And she had recognized the rest of it, too.

She said, “We should discuss this when I’m not wasted.” She stood on her long, unsteady, naked legs and braced her feet in her stiletto-heeled pumps. Her calves were gorgeous. His hands could span her thighs, perhaps her waist.

Ah, the scotch was going to his head. Perhaps, all questioning aside, all counseling aside, it was a mistake to be in the apartment of a drunk young woman in the darkest part of the night, when he was aware of his own proclivities. He said, “I should go.”

“So soon? You’ve only had one drink.” She sipped her drink and teetered. “The night’s still young. We don’t have to debate theology.”

“You weren’t at the Dublin bar tonight.”

“I went out with friends, a girlfriend, Jody, dancing.” She swayed a little, and her lithe body must have swayed in the music, dancing in a crowded, tangled club like Persepolis in the Roman Testacchio district, music drumming their skin. His cheekbones heated.

He dragged the confession stole off his neck from one end—friction burned the nape of his neck—and he wrapped the stole around his hand like a boxer taping his fist. He stood and buttoned his coat around him. “I should go.”

She looked up at him, sideways. “I’m not so skittish around you. God, I used to want to claw my way up the walls to get away from you, but I’m getting used to it. You shrinks call that
desensitization
, don’t you?”

He nodded and said, “Thank you for the drink,” and walked out, closing the door softly behind him and waiting until he heard the lock click into place.

He could live with the questions for another night rather than risk staying in her apartment.

She was the type of woman with whom he had been helpless in Roma: beautiful, intelligent, and drunk.

~~~~~

Tuesday afternoon, Bev answered the ringing phone in the kitchen. “Hello?”

“Bev? This is Dante.”

“Oh, hi.” She sat on the counter and leaned against the cabinets, eyes closed. The tidy kitchen still spun in her head but at least she didn’t have to watch it whip around.

She didn’t want to talk to him. She had managed to avoid him all weekend, skipping Mass, staying home, ignoring the phone. She propped her caged arm on the coffeemaker.

A rumble of far-off thunder in the phone receiver reverberated in the kitchen. She opened her eyes and looked out the smeary kitchen window at the clear, blue sky above the swingset outside.

He must have cleared his throat.

She closed her eyes again.

More thunder. He said, “Could you stop by the library after choir practice tonight?”

“I can’t go to choir practice.” The phone next to Bev’s ear warmed as the heat from her skull seeped into it.

“I do not understand.”

“I can’t be in the choir, Dante. I can’t come to the church.” The kitchen, dissatisfied with merely spinning, tumbled sideways. “Everyone would stare.”

“I thought in this country, you are innocent until proven guilty.”

“I would be a distraction.”

“We have no one else who can play the organ,” Dante said.

“I can’t play the organ. My arm is broken.”

“The other hand? Just chords?”

“I couldn’t.”

“With Father Samual gone, I need you to choose the music and play the organ the best you can. Please, Bev.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You have to.”

“I don’t, and I can’t.”

“The church needs you. I need you.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Just rehearse the choir. Just tonight.”

She sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You should do this.”

She sighed again, and the sound whooshed through the phone and slapped the kitchen to a greater frenzy of spinning. “All right.”

“And stop by the library afterward?”

“Okay.”

Bev was mostly sober by evening despite the two little green pills at five o’clock, but she asked Mary to pick her up anyway. Mary loaded Bev into the minivan’s passenger seat and settled the girls in the back with her own brood.

While driving, Mary asked, “How’re you feeling?”

“Oh, fine. Thanks for the lift.”

Mary surveyed the light evening traffic and bit one side of her mouth. “What are those pills that the pharmacist gave you?”

“Just pain pills.”

“No, really. What are they?”

“I’ll look at the bottle when I get home.”

Mary bit her lip again. “Are you supposed to be drinking while you’re taking them?”

Bev looked out the window at the trees and houses whipping by. “I don’t drink.”

~~~~~

Dante read the same few pages about sexual abuse from the DSM-IV over and over again while the organ music trembled the library walls. The music that Bev had chosen seemed restful.

His feet slipped off the footstool twice but he recovered and tried to read. He ended up holding the book out in front of him at eye level with one hand while holding his hair at the crown of this head with the other. His neck twinged.

The organ lilted and exhaled, and chatter revved up. Bev should come to his office soon. Dante laid the book aside and paced.

Knocking quaked the door. Dante sat in his chair and lifted the book. “Come in.”

Bev pushed open the door. “Did you want to see me, Father?” She walked in and closed the door behind her. “Dante?”

“Please, sit down.” He set the book back on the side table, face down, and leaned forward with his elbows braced on his knees. His legs trembled as if to fall flat through the floor or leap up and run. “I am concerned.”

“About what?” She settled in her chair, the one she occupied when he was counseling her and Sloan, and flipped her dark honey hair over her shoulder. 

“I am concerned about you.”

“I’m fine.” She glanced at his bookshelves.

“You say that, but I think you are not.” He clasped his hands, winding his fingers into one huge fist.

“I’m as fine as can be expected.”

“The newspaper is saying there will be a trial.”

“I expect so.” She nodded and gazed away.

His trembling arms and legs locked, and he forced himself to breathe. “I think, for the time being, for now, we should be just priest and parishioner.”

“I figured that.” She examined her tidy oval fingernails, painted mauve. Her brown eyes flickered up at him, and she settled her hands in her lap. “Honestly, I figured we weren’t even that anymore.”

“I am still a priest,” he said. He wanted to reach for her, to touch her hair and her skin.

“I know.” She didn’t seem angry, just exhausted.

He was starving for a reaction from her. “I have to go back to Roma soon, in a few months, so perhaps it is better this way.”

She nodded.

He pushed harder. “And we are not in love.”

Her head dipped to one side and she nodded again, acknowledging truth, her amber hair swinging like silk curtain lit by gold light.

Dante exhaled, and a last shred of hope in his soul flew out his mouth, leaving dark, dry emptiness.

He had fallen in love with her at some point, probably because she had been kind to him when he was isolated in this new town. He wished he hadn’t.

~~~~~

The Daily Hamiltonian:

Slain Doc Fined for Having Affair

By Kirin Oberoi

Before his death two weeks ago, Dr. Conroy Sloan was fined a total of thirty thousand dollars in the last six months under a morals clause in his contract with the University of New Hamilton College of Medicine for continuing an indiscreet affair with an unnamed woman within the College of Medicine.

As was specified in his contract under a standard morals clause, Dr. Sloan was warned to discontinue the affair and, when the conditions of the agreement with the College of Medicine Board of Directors were not met on a timely basis, fined ten thousand dollars six months ago and a further twenty thousand dollars three months ago. The unnamed woman works for the University of New Hamilton College of Medicine but was not fined or disciplined and may not be aware of the charges.

Under the University of New Hamilton College of Medicine’s Sexual Harassment Policy, only the person in a senior position is held responsible because it is assumed that the other person was under duress.

Dr. Sloan died as a result of a knife wound allegedly delivered by his wife, Mrs. Beverly Maria Sloan, at his newly-rented apartment near the University of New Hamilton Hospitals and Clinics.

The trial date is pending.