The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  For the past twenty years or so, the period in which she’d been in Massachusetts, they’d seen each other only a handful of times—family weddings and funerals, two Christmases. To bridge the distance, he sent birthday cards to her and her family, a fresh ten-dollar bill taped inside. On Facebook he liked every post about her kids and every post about art she liked, though most of the stuff (the abstract stuff especially) wasn’t his cup of tea. In return, only rarely did she like his posts back; the only card she sent was during Christmas. She was busy, what with her job as a graphic designer and her kids—her son, Evan, especially, who was a handful. Out of necessity, her focus was elsewhere. He didn’t hold that against her. But to be silent at the news of his impending death, well, that was different. Even Shade had texted him twice. Whatever she was going through, it must be all-consuming. She simply wasn’t herself.

  “You’re doing it again,” Britta said now, flicking him a sharp look. He was staring at her without realizing it, another side effect of the drugs.

  “Sorry.” He cleared his throat and swung his gaze to the road. A mailbox that looked like a trout passed by on the right, then one with a Packers decal on it.

  “You were giving me a very pitying look,” she said.

  “Actually, I was thinking about Maura.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, actually. It is.”

  When he looked back at her, Britta was staring ahead at the road, her jaw set, skeptical. Under normal circumstances, he would have said something to her by now about her drinking (and her eating and her smoking), but he didn’t have the energy to deal with the repercussions. He didn’t want them to argue. It was hard enough as it was. But she was right to imagine that he was secretly worrying about her. Judging her. With the tiny portion of his mind available for anything but beating himself up, he did.

  “Just for the record, you give me pitying looks all the time,” he said. It was true, he’d caught her at it exactly three times: once at the beach, twice in the kitchen. Raw little moments that burned with truth.

  “It’s not pity,” she said. “I’m just worried about you. As I have a right to be.”

  She paused to let him respond, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “You’re depressed and nothing I’m trying seems to help. If you were in my shoes, I think you’d feel exactly the same way.”

  He looked at the side of her big, round face. The dyed brown bob, dark with sweat at her temples. Her big, sun-kissed cheek.

  “You’re right,” he said, his annoyance already fading. “And I appreciate you trying, I do.” He just didn’t believe it would do him much good.

  The McNamaras’ cottage was a huge two-story Cape Cod, navyblue wood siding with bright white trim, set at the end of a pristine driveway flanked by little trees, each with a tidy collar of dark red mulch. Georgia had been angling for this for years, and after Gordon sold off his trucking business (surely in the millions), he finally said go for it. And Georgia had.

  Before they got out of the car, Britta offered Paul a Tic Tac (the meds did a number on his breath too), and they walked up together, him in front. From the stoop, Paul rang the doorbell and listened to it echo joyfully inside the house. Quickly, Gordon opened the door, boomed his hello, and Georgia stood patiently just behind, waiting, a wince of a smile on her face. They handled him carefully, Gordon barely gripping his hand when they shook, Georgia barely pressing herself into his chest during their quick hug. They’d met Britta once many years ago but introduced themselves again, then, skipping right over any awkwardness, ferried him and Britta into the living room, where their children and grandchildren were waiting.

  The kids, all in their twenties and thirties now, were pretty much as Paul remembered them, or maybe they were different—he actually wasn’t sure. Bemused, affable George, the oldest and only son, thirty-something by now, his pretty wife, their two boys. Tall, slim Alice, her husband, their twin girls. Plain, wry Casey, divorced with a sullen, chubby daughter. But no Sophie yet. She and Darius, her new Greek boyfriend, were out playing mini-golf, Georgia reported, due back any minute.

  Did he feel like a tour of the place? What could be said but yes? Each room was immaculate, filled with expensive, photoshoot-ready things. Five bedrooms—one for Gordon and Georgia, and one for every child and their family. The walls featured the grandkids’ drawings and paintings (crayon ninjas fighting dinosaurs, finger paint handprints radiating out like flowers) professionally matted and framed, set beside Cézanne-like landscapes of the area (or maybe it was Cape Cod) Georgia had probably bought at one of the galleries here. In the living room, a custom-built fireplace made from yellow quarry rock shipped up from Milwaukee; in the bathroom, a built-in marble hot tub the color of pumice stone. But the crowning jewel of the place was the dining room: a long, grand room with four giant windows facing the bay, and in the middle, an unusually large table with high-backed chairs, fit for a Viking feast. His friend Tim would be disgusted by this opulence, he who frumped around in his clerical shirts, baggy teal sweaters, and used chinos he bought at Goodwill. Even reasonable shows of wealth made him uneasy. The waste of it all! The good that could have been done with all the money! But Paul had always had an eye for quality. Beauty for beauty’s sake. He was vain, he knew, about his checked dress shirts; he spent a good deal more than he needed to for nice Italian leather dress shoes once a year; he splurged at least once a month on a thirty-dollar bottle of German Riesling. If God cared for only what was spartan and simple, he’d once asked Tim, why make the peacock? Or the human being for that matter? Why not take a wrecking ball to St. Peter’s? To which Tim, no fan of the pope, had shrugged and said, I can imagine worse.

  “Tell Father Paul what we saw outside here yesterday,” Gordon said, when they stopped in the kitchen. He was talking to the oldest grandson, maybe eight, who’d been shadowing them, taking long swaying, stomping steps, hands latched behind his back, like a drunk little Ichabod Crane.

  “A pileated woodpecker,” the boy said. He pointed. “It was in that tree.”

  “A what woodpecker?” Britta asked.

  “Pil-ee-ay-ted. They’re really big and more rare than regular ones.”

  Georgia rolled her eyes. “Gordon gets them all hot and bothered about this stuff,” she said to Britta. “He acts like they saw a leprechaun.”

  “Hey,” Gordon said. “You like expensive wallpaper, I like birds. To each his own.”

  To begin, at least, it appeared the family was content to carry on as though this were a normal visit—whether to put him or themselves at ease, it wasn’t clear. But once they found themselves in the living room, and everyone had regathered on the floor and sofas, and Georgia had glided over with glasses of lemon water, Paul could see his moment of reckoning had arrived. Hunched forward, Gordon asked him how he was feeling. Like a lawyer, it felt, which made him the deposed witness. He spoke of the morphine and the vivid, crazy dreams it gave him; Britta’s helpfulness; the strangeness of not saying Mass on Sundays—everything but the crucial thing: that he’d been regretting his life.

  “Now, I know some people think it’s nonsense,” Georgia said, flashing a stink eye to Gordon, “but have you looked into any alternative pain medication for all this?”

  “I didn’t say it was nonsense,” Gordon snapped. “I said I didn’t think it would do much at this point.”

  “I haven’t really, no,” Paul said, looking at Georgia. “I’m pretty conservative when it comes to that stuff.”

  “See,” Gordon said, pointing at him. “That’s smart.”

  Georgia arched her back to reimpose her dignity. “How much longer are you two staying up here?”

  Paul looked at Britta: this was actually something they needed to figure out soon. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I can’t seem to decide whether to stay another week or head back.”

  The Jaworskis, also parishioners of his, had offered up their cottage at a discount for two weeks, with the option of extending it if
he and Britta so chose. The two weeks would be up on Monday, and they’d asked him to let them know by tomorrow what he wanted to do. But he’d been feeling utterly unable to decide. Where to spend his remaining time in this world felt immensely important and simultaneously beside the point. Back home at St. Iggy’s he’d be in the company of people who loved him, which was good. But it would also mean the time had truly come to start falling apart, which was not.

  “What’s making it hard to decide?” Georgia asked.

  “I don’t know,” Paul said. “I’m sure it doesn’t help that I’m not firing on all cylinders lately.”

  “Well, I vote you stay two more weeks,” Gordon said. “Not that my opinion really matters.”

  “Wait a second,” Georgia said. “I’m going to write that down. ‘On July 8, 2009, Gordon McNamara finally admitted his opinion doesn’t matter.’”

  Along with the kids, his sister laughed—a real one, straight from the heart; she and Don had bickered like this too: the everyday friction of love.

  “I’m sure we’ll figure something out,” Britta said, turning to him. Like the mother she was, she patted his knee. “Maybe we can just flip a coin.”

  She smiled, a hint of coolness in her eyes. He knew he should smile back, so he did. A little. But her solution was no solution at all. Had he been the man he’d been even four months earlier, at this point in the conversation, Father Paul Novak, respected pastor, old man of some importance, would have turned to George or Casey or Alice and asked them about themselves. Or Gordon would have asked him how planning for the fall harvest fest was going or how his veggie garden was shaping up. But instead, sensing the awkwardness in the room, and his unusual shyness, Britta had taken the lead, wielding bright questions about the grandchildren, which Gordon and Georgia’s children answered, before returning the favor.

  “…Shade does computer programming stuff,” Britta was saying now, wrapping things up. Paul realized he hadn’t been listening for a while. “But I never remember his exact title. Do you remember, Paul? Shade’s job title?”

  “Head systems analyst.”

  “That’s it.” She looked at him. “Doped up on morphine and your memory’s still better than mine.”

  “It’s a blessing and a curse,” Paul said, and everyone, relieved that he was still able to crack a joke, laughed too hard.

  The arrival of Sophie and Darius was the sound of a car engine idling, then shutting off in the driveway, the door opening, and male and female voices murmuring. Sophie appeared first, hair pulled back into two little pom-poms, spry advertisements for her personality, a cautious look in her eyes. What demeanor was right for your last audience with a dying man? How natural or formal to be?

  And then behind her walked in Darius, the boyfriend, the sight of whom startled Paul so much the glass of lemon water he was holding dropped from his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and Georgia scuttled quickly to the kitchen for some paper towels to sop up the stain on the carpet at his feet (the glass somehow hadn’t broken). Gordon rose as if to help but then just stood there with his hands in his pockets, and Britta put her hand on Paul’s forearm and asked him if he was okay (yes, he said, he was). But Paul paid little mind to the commotion around him: his eyes were fastened on the man who’d walked into the room, the ghost of Luca from forty years past. It wasn’t the morphine either: Darius was the spitting image. The same head shape and dark eyebrows, widening as they headed toward the ears. The same long lashes, big-lobed ears, slightly too big forehead. The same stooped shoulders and wide-legged cowboy’s stance. His dark hair was a bit shorter and he had a slightly different-shaped mouth. But even those differences only helped Paul better remember. Bigger teeth, the wolfish eyeteeth; that swollen dark pink bottom lip….

  Sophie told him not to get up and held his hand with both of hers, a tender little clamshell. She smiled warmly, no pouty sympathy, thank God. Then Darius reached in to shake his hand too. “Nice to meet you, Father.” A deferential nod. Paul forced a polite smile, not wanting the man to mistake his shock for a lack of warmth. But he couldn’t speak. How were you supposed to talk to a ghost?

  It had taken a couple decades of emotional scouring to diminish Luca’s place in his heart. He’d prayed about Luca, told no one, conquered Luca, told no one, spoke sometimes to Luca, imagined how Luca would respond, told no one. During his fifties, a stretch in which he’d found himself strangely more energetic than his forties, his half-hearted sex drive had returned, and so had young Luca, often when he was in the shower, aroused. The Luca who graced the stall with him was Luca as he’d been during their weekend trip to Sperlonga, that night and that morning: thin-armed, soft-skinned, generous. Two faint stripes of sunburn running across his shoulders. While there with Luca, he could sometimes feel the love that had been part of the act. But often he couldn’t, or he didn’t bother to try to, and then it was as though he were using Luca like a puppet, his unwilling servant. After those sessions, he’d feel awful and dimly ask God for forgiveness. But that phase too had run its course, and he’d settled into a period of relative satiation. In the last, more chaste fifteen, twenty years, Luca had existed as the idea of Luca more than the man himself. Faded into an idea. But here now, in the flesh: this Darius-Luca, resurrected.

  By the time Georgia jangled an actual triangle dinner bell to call the family to the dining room, it was quarter past eight, and the sun was melting into the surface of the bay. Blood-orange sunshine obliged the space with an underwater light. It was, Paul thought, exactly the sort of scene Georgia must have imagined when she asked whomever they paid to build it, here on the west side of the house. The whole clan together. Not including, of course, the less cheery surprise addition of pale Father Death and his sister.

  Everyone found a chair. The adults quieted one by one. At the head of the table, Gordon stood, licked his lips a little, eyes flitting around the table, nervously, patiently waiting for silence. Oh no, Paul thought, he’ll want a prayer from me. They always did.

  But Gordon said he wanted to do it himself tonight. “That all right?”

  “Just this once,” Paul said, trying to conceal his relief.

  “Good,” Gordon said. “Because I was going to do it anyway.”

  Presently all the flittering, disparate minds formed a single beam that pressed into Paul’s chest; even as their eyes fell on the tablecloth, he felt it.

  “It’s so good to be here on this beautiful summer night to share this meal with Paul and his sister, Britta,” Gordon began. “We’re so thankful that they’re able to join us, Lord. And we’re thankful for all Paul’s done for St. Iggy’s all these years, and the many ways he’s helped others and taught us about the love of God. We’re also so grateful that he was able to marry off all three of our oldest children and say such beautiful things at the services. But most of all we’re grateful for his presence in our lives, for his example of living like Christ. May you be with Paul in the coming weeks and months and give him comfort. As it says in Psalm Twenty-Three, ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.’ And so may this be true.” Here he cleared his throat. “We ask this, in your name.”

  Everyone said amen.

  Paul faintly smiled and nodded to Gordon. He was supposed to be moved by this, but he wasn’t; terribly, he felt only relief that it was over. But as the hard dinner rolls were passed around in the slightly dumbstruck way people always passed around dinner rolls, that changed. He started to feel annoyed. His example of living like Christ—was that true? Was he any more Christ-like than any of them sitting here? He’d certainly given of his time and energy to the Church, despite the many ways in which he disagreed with the brass in Rome, but the impersonality of the compliment made him sad for how little they really knew him. They’d donated generously to the parish for nearly thirty years—more than anyone else. Gordon sometimes served Communion. Georgia had taught CCD. Every August, Paul would show up at their big pi
g roast and lead the group in a prayer. But all these years they’d kept their distance from each other when it came to talking about the awkward stuff of life. Instead, they’d had roles to play and played them well. How interesting it might have been if they hadn’t, though, he thought, as he speared a leaf of romaine with his fork.

  But too late for all that. Across the table, George’s wife was asking Darius and Sophie about their upcoming trip to Europe. They were planning to do a sort of upside-down U-shaped thing, Sophie said. Fly into Athens, drive up to Thessaloniki to visit Darius’s family first, then fly to Budapest and go west. Euro rail and rent a car from there. Stops in Slovakia, Prague, Munich, Brussels; two days with some friends of theirs whose parents lived in Alsace-Lorraine; and then Venice, Florence, and flying out of Rome.

  “Paul studied in Rome,” Gordon said. “Three years, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” Paul said.

  “And what is it that you studied?” Darius asked. He looked at Paul with interest, pinning him to his chair.

  “Scripture,” he replied. “And a bit of philosophy. I was there getting my licentiate degree, which is basically a master’s.”

  “That must have been a fantastic experience,” Darius said.