by Mark Rader
“It was,” Paul said. “My first time out of the country too.”
“Have you been back since?” Darius asked.
“No,” Paul said. “I haven’t, actually.”
“I have to say,” Gordon said, “I still don’t understand that. You had a cat named Campari, for goodness’ sake.”
“He’s explained this before,” said Georgia sharply. “He prefers to see new places more than go back to old places.” She looked at Paul. “Isn’t that right?”
Paul managed a smile. “Yeah. That’s right. More or less.”
But Gordon was right to doubt his logic. There was more to it than that.
At first, he hadn’t wanted to return because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to prevent himself from looking up Luca, and that Luca would dismiss him or make him feel like a fool, this American priest still carrying a torch after what had, after all, been less than two months together. Or worse: that Luca would be as happy to see him as he would be to see Luca. Then, after he’d learned that Luca had died, back in 1988, he didn’t want to go back because he worried he’d destroy the magic the city still held for him if he dipped back into the old well, looking for something that had long ago disappeared, sunk to the bottom like a stone. And that’s what he’d mostly told himself ever since.
“You know what?” Darius said. “I’m this way too. Always new, new, new. When it gets boring, fft”—he sliced at the air—“try something else.”
Sophie looked at him, alarmed. “Oh yeah? Really? That’s your philosophy? Always something new?” Darius reared back. “What? Is that bad?”
“He’s just saying he likes a little adventure,” Alice chipped in. “That’s all.”
“Yes, of course,” Darius said. “What did you think I meant?”
“Oh nothing,” Sophie said, “I’m just giving you a hard time.” She casually laid her hand on Darius’s forearm, trying to sweep her fear under the rug. “It’s a good thing to be like that. It makes you less boring.”
“Well, good,” Darius said. “I don’t want to be boring.”
He smiled his lady-killer smile at her, then looked around the table, as if for approval. But the mood wasn’t light. The prospect of abandonment was out there now. It couldn’t be taken back.
The panic attack that hit Paul a few minutes later caught him completely off guard. He hadn’t had one for at least twenty years, at least not in public, but here one was, despite his daily Klonopin and the extra Wellbutrin he’d been taking to help him handle the anxiety that many people felt when they were close to death, or so he’d been reminded by Dr. Shah. Suddenly he felt as though he were separating from everyone, including, most frighteningly, himself. The room constricted and expanded like giant lungs. No one was noticing the change in him, but they would soon, and to prevent this, to recover properly, he knew he needed to be alone. For half a minute, his heart raced, and he couldn’t move. But then Britta touched his knee under the table, and when he looked at the recognition in his sister’s face, he excused himself to the bathroom, avoiding eye contact with anyone else.
Sitting on the closed toilet seat, Paul tried breathing deeply through his nose, to prevent hyperventilating. He imagined doing it into a helpful paper bag. What a stupid idea it had been to come. How narcissistic of him to assume they’d be crushed if he hadn’t. They would have been just fine.
After a while, Britta knocked tentatively on the door. “I’m fine,” Paul heard himself answering, falsely bright. “Just be a minute.” Then he did actually lift the lid, sit, and piss—why not?—but managed only a trickle. His urine was the color of cloudy orange juice now, and from what he’d read it would get as brown as beer near the end, as his liver stopped working.
At the sink, Paul lightly rubbed his cheeks with cold water and looked directly at himself in the mirror. He took a big shuddering breath. You look like a square version of Peter Fonda, a curly-haired woman had told him at Luca’s party that night—the one they’d left in order to take a walk. Everyone’d agreed and chuckled, because it was true. The big forehead, the square jaw, his big joker’s smile with the small teeth and receding gums. People in the years since had said so too.
But that handsome face, the one Luca had enjoyed, was no longer a thing in the world. Only its saggier, softer cousin remained. Though his eyes were still nice. He’d always liked his pale blue eyes.
A half hour later, they left. After dessert and coffee, Paul had followed Gordon down a long flight of wooden stairs to the water, where Gordon showed off the dock he’d recently built. Paul tried but failed to follow the arc of the detailed story of its creation; for long stretches at a time his attention drifted. On the walk back up, he suddenly felt so faint, he grabbed on to the railing with two hands, and when they entered the house, Paul sweating profusely, Georgia snapped at Gordon for making Paul overdo it. Quickly, Britta found her purse, and they said their goodbyes. Georgia and Gordon hugged him gently. We’ll drop by to see you when you’re back home, she said, and Paul said, Please do. The rest of the McNamaras knew to just wave, not wanting to put him through the hassle of embracing everyone. And Paul waved back, forcing his eyes and mouth into a smile. It wasn’t a goodbye worthy of the moment, but it would have to do.
They’d barely left the driveway when he nodded off. Fifteen minutes later he woke in the driveway of the rental. Britta was beside him, delicately rocking his shoulder back and forth, as if trying to slowly work it loose.
“We’re here,” she said.
He blinked at her, eyes gummy. “Okay.”
“Let’s get you inside to bed. You look totally wiped.”
He inhaled deeply. “Probably a good idea.”
As they walked to the front door, Britta linked her arm with his like they’d done with their mother during her last years at the home. Not that he needed this quite yet. But he knew what she was thinking: Just in case.
The next day, a Sunday, was the hardest yet. When Paul woke up, he didn’t want to leave his bed, but after having breakfast, going to Mass at Stella Maris in Baileys Harbor, and eating brunch on the water, his mood lightened; he wasn’t sure why. Maybe, a voice had whispered as he drank his sparkling water and squinted into the sun, it’s not as bad as you think. Back at the cottage it began to rain, the first time in a week. He watched it fall from the sliding glass door, thousands of white stars flashing at once on the rocking skin of the bay. Then, as if trying to hoard the calm feeling inside himself, he took a nap.
But when he woke, all was lost again: sadness thronged him and wouldn’t let go. The rain had stopped. The world was unspeakably quiet. The false hope that washed over him late in the morning had flown off, leaving him raw again, and as he stared up at the ceiling from his bed, the twist of regret tightening in his stomach, he couldn’t help but think again about how close he’d come to changing his life, to really doing it. The summer of 1990 that had preceded his first breakdown, or whatever you wanted to call it, that fall.
He’d been fifty-one that year, almost ten years into his life at St. Iggy’s; Rome was exactly twenty years past. In ’84, he’d felt down enough that he got himself on antidepressants, which had helped him greatly ever after. Though he still felt hungry for what he’d had with Luca, and though he still sometimes spent whole Monday afternoons wondering if the sermons he carefully crafted and shared made a shred of difference, or whether he was just a functionary going through the motions, he felt—if not exactly happy—not so disappointed. Happy enough.
Whenever he felt his life wanting, he’d muscle out of it. He’d think of all the good people who looked to him to be strong and assured in his faith; he’d see himself as if through their eyes and straighten up. When he felt like staying in bed, he’d force himself to get out in his garden, go for a long walk, slip into a book, do ten reps of curls with his twenty-pound barbells, toss in a DVD of Fawlty Towers or Peter Sellers for a laugh, call Tim or Sister Mary over at the settlement, or wander over to the church building across the hug
e parking lot to chat with Jean. Once the darkness burned away, he became logical. Found the root of the troubling feeling and dissected it, until it was a harmless little pile of bones. To win the battles that were his cross to bear, he’d learned how to fight.
In the spring of that year, however, a few cracks appeared in the facade he worked so hard to maintain. On a whim, during a visit to Chicago for a conference, he’d called up an old friend from seminary, Gus Vreeland, now a pastor on the North Side of the city. He’d thought it might be nice to catch up and Gus agreed. But instead of suggesting a restaurant, he’d invited Paul over to his apartment in Edgewater and picked Paul up from his hotel downtown in his big white Cadillac Seville.
On the drive, they’d laughed about their oddball instructors at Sacred Heart, and Gus narrated the history passing their windows. Just like old times. But then, upon walking into Gus’s apartment, Paul saw it wouldn’t be just the two of them for dinner: standing at the stove, sautéing what looked like onions and leeks in butter, was a man Gus introduced as his good friend Sven, a librarian at Loyola University, a Norwegian immigrant with John Lennon glasses, a trimmed gray-blond beard, and thin, pale hands.
From the way they moved around each other, the way they looked at each other, it was obvious. All of the lightness Paul had been feeling suddenly disappeared. He felt wary and slightly offended—ambushed, even. It was as if Gus was trying to say, Look what I’ve gotten away with. But after two bottles of cabernet, Paul changed his mind and decided Gus had no agenda but to honestly show him his life, and Sven was a nice guy. Even now, almost twenty years later, he could clearly hear Gus’s belly laugh, see the David Letterman gap between his front teeth. Still see sweaty Sven in his kiss me, i’m norwegian apron, carrying out the bowl of rabbit stew with juniper berries, a family recipe. The two of them had achieved an impossible domesticity, at what seemed to him little cost. Not publicly, sure. But they didn’t seem to be exactly hiding either.
On the short flight back to the airport in Green Bay after that Chicago trip, Paul knocked back two whiskey sours, as if trying to numb his envy. Well oiled and loose brained, he justified to himself why a Sven wasn’t in the cards for him. Tiny little Northfield wasn’t Chicago or New York or San Francisco. In a small country parish like his, everyone knew your business. Besides, what were the odds he’d find a Sven nearby? Not to mention there was Bishop Caldwell, who didn’t like him, who already thought him too liberal, who might take action at the slightest rumor. Even if there were a way to manage some sort of covert relationship, his parish work would suffer. He knew this as fact. Unlike Gus, who seemed so at ease with his choice in life, he would have felt constantly afraid of being found out.
So no, this was impossible. In his particular situation, impossible. That was what he’d told himself, thirty thousand feet above the ground. And yet a few months later, in the summer, he’d found himself thinking about Dan Cotton.
They’d met two years prior in a watercolor class at the community college. The instructor had encouraged conversation because she felt it led to looser, more natural brushwork, and he and Dan, a man a few years younger than he was, had chosen to share a table near the back of the room. Dan was an architect (mostly of malls and big-box stores), an avid birdwatcher, a lover of Australian-rules football due to a brief stint living in Perth as a boy, and recently divorced. For only a few months now, he’d been living in a bachelor apartment in Howard, about ten miles from Northfield. The decision to break up had been mutual, he’d said: his wife still talked to him, they were still friends. But his oldest daughter—who was nineteen and now dating a Presbyterian divinity student—wasn’t speaking to him. When Paul asked why, Dan said, It’s not because I cheated, not that you asked. And that was as much as Dan chose to divulge.
Which was fine: there was plenty else to talk about. The geological history of northeastern Wisconsin, for instance. Spinoza. Kierkegaard. Gardening. Ginseng farming. Early Christianity. The governor. The migration habits of herons. Agatha Christie versus John le Carré. Dogs. Music. Dan was the far better painter—well, almost everyone in the class was better—but Dan always found something specific to compliment about Paul’s clunky little attempts. A section that seemed “fresh.” A combination of colors that “popped nicely.” Paul’s goals for the class had been humble: to produce a few paintings he could frame and give away as presents at Christmas, maybe turn into thank-you cards. He came prepared the first night with photographs—the farmhouse he’d grown up in, the black-eyed Susans in his garden, a few pictures he’d taken of chickadees in the snow—whereas Dan worked loose, sometimes going off of a picture he’d pulled from a magazine, sometimes simply playing around with shapes. In that class, from seven to nine thirty once a week, he wasn’t Father Paul Novak, pastor at St. Ignatius in Northfield. He was a kid trying not to fall on his face.
At the end of their second-to-last class, Dan suggested they go out for a bite to eat afterward, and he accepted. In a booth at a diner Dan liked, they shared chicken tenders and drank coffee, and Dan told him the reason his marriage had broken up was that he was gay. Early in their marriage, he’d told his wife that he’d been with a man once in college, but that it was only a phase. He was bisexual, he said, and for years he—and they—believed it. But as the years passed, he understood that wasn’t true, and when she discovered the sexts he’d been sharing with a man he’d met online, she wasn’t exactly shocked. She didn’t want to break up, for the kids’ sake, and neither did he. But as soon as their youngest graduated high school—in fact, the June after the May ceremony—she filed for divorce. Which, as dramatic as that had been, was also a relief.
For the past six months, he’d been living in an apartment alone. He wasn’t dating anyone, but he’d started hanging out at one of the two gay bars in town and had become friendly with a few guys online who lived not in town but nearby.
“It’s scary as hell starting over at my age,” he said. “But better late than never, as they say.”
Paul could have said that he understood, the way he’d said it to Luca that night so many years ago. But instead he kept things pastoral. He said that on the matter of sexual orientation he and the Church didn’t agree; he told Dan what he’d done was brave. But that’s all he said because, though he wasn’t physically attracted to Dan in the least, though Dan wasn’t right for him, Dan was the sort of person who might help him make the leap. The perfect shepherd.
For a while they sent emails back and forth, but then Paul got busy during the fall and that waned. A Christmas card showed up at the rectory house and he’d sent one late in turn. And that was the last of it. Yet that summer after seeing Gus and Sven in Chicago, as he walked the country roads near his church in the evenings when it was cooler, yearning for someone to be with, a man with eyes to look into and a mouth to kiss and a body to hold close, he’d decided: If I really do want this, I need to act. And if not now, it’ll never happen.
What he’d do for money if he left had always scared him, so he made calls to counseling centers and asked whether a man with his advanced degrees would be qualified to make the jump over to counseling. (The answer was: it depends.) He called rental agencies not far from where Britta lived in St. Louis. He rehearsed his speech to his mother, who would be devastated. Indulged, dangerously, in memories of his time with Luca. Made different plans for spending the six thousand dollars he’d saved.
The quality of his pastoring that summer had suffered. He was distracted and irritable. Already mentally walking away. Secretly, he felt proud of how brave he was being and wished someone else saw this bravery. But he couldn’t tell Tim, or Britta, or anyone who might remember it later if it didn’t happen. Which had put him in mind of Dan. Of course Dan.
One night, he looked in the phone book and there was the listing: “D. Cotton.” He called the number, but it was disconnected, so he tried Theresa Cotton instead. The ex-wife.
Dan’s daughter answered the phone. And when he asked if she happened to h
ave the current number for her father, she paused and said, Who is this? He said he’d been in a painting class with her dad a few years ago. He was hoping to get back in touch.
Can you hold on a second? the girl asked, and then, a while later, another woman’s voice. Theresa’s.
Hi, she said, her voice alert and intense. Amy told me you know Dan?
I do, Paul said. I mean, I did. I was calling to see if you knew how I could reach him.
Well, she said, I wish I did.
He’s not in town anymore?
Oh no. He moved away more than a year ago.
Oh, Paul said. And he didn’t tell you where he went?
Well, she said. The last I heard from him, he was in Vancouver, working at a bar there. And before that he was in San Jose, doing temp work, so he could have his evenings to paint. She paused. He writes us letters every three or four months but doesn’t put his address on them. On purpose, I think.
Oh.
He says he’s trying to find himself, she said dismissively. Which, you know, fine. Go ahead.
Paul wanted to imagine Dan in a group of men, laughing, being welcomed as one of them. But for some reason he pictured him mostly alone.
Does he seem happy to you? he asked. It was the only thing he really wanted to know.
Happy? she said. I guess I don’t know. If he was unhappy, I don’t think he’d tell us. Especially not the kids. He wouldn’t want us to worry. If I could get him on the phone, I think I’d be able to tell. But he hasn’t called since he left. And he won’t give us his number. So your guess is as good as mine.
To some people, he knew, Dan’s story might have been inspirational: proof that huge changes late in life were possible, that you could really start over. But on hearing Dan’s wife tell of his disappearance, so to speak, he’d felt deflated. How sad to turn into an absence. How selfish and reckless and unkind. What Dan had done seemed less about chasing freedom than the act of a man fleeing the scene of a crime.