The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  She was trying to show him he hadn’t been foolish to be wary. But it was odd how quickly she’d jumped to this particular thought.

  “You can’t even imagine it, can you?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Me in a relationship. You think I’d have no clue.”

  “It’s not that!” Her face curdled, protesting too much. “Of course I can imagine it.”

  “I’m not as innocent as you think,” he said. “I’m not even a virgin.”

  She blinked. “Really?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It happened when I was here, actually. The end of my last year. I was in love with him. He’s partly the reason we’re here.”

  “You’re being serious.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I am.”

  For a long moment, she looked at him, as if for the first time. “Does anyone else know about this?”

  “No, you’re the first.”

  “Not even Tim?”

  “Not even Tim.”

  She didn’t seem to know what to say, so he kept talking.

  “You know the bocce court I pointed out today? That’s where we met, actually. I would sit and watch Luca play with the old men there, until he finally came over and talked to me.”

  “Luca,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Luca Aurecchio.”

  For a while, Britta said nothing, slowly absorbing the news. Above the big Persian rug in front of them, invisible dust was still settling from the crash of this meteor. The lamps seemed stunned, unable to do anything but obediently shed their light.

  “I honestly don’t know what to say,” she said. “Here I was reading my Mormon murder book, and suddenly you’re telling me you had a boyfriend.”

  “Sorry to kill the mood.”

  “It’s okay. I just need a second to get used to it, that’s all.”

  “I understand.”

  “Have there been other guys since then? Or just him?”

  “No,” he said. “Just him.”

  It was true, but hearing himself say the words out loud, it didn’t feel true. There had been other men besides Luca—they just hadn’t known it. Crushes that lasted a few months and stopped, like Charlie Evans, the shy mechanic son of his deacon Bill, who sometimes served Communion, the faint outline of grease forever on his fingernails. Crushes that lasted years, like John Barnes, a boyish man well into his forties with a woman’s long lashes, husband of Gail, who always shook his hand firmly on the way out of church and had lent his pickup to the landscaping project they’d done on the church grounds years ago. And in a different category altogether—a place built purely for lust—the mysterious young man he’d summoned to his hotel room in Chicago, during a conference the year after he’d discovered Luca had died. Bobby. Though who knew if that was his real name. Dark hair, dark eyes, according to the woman on the phone. But he’d never seen the man’s face. When Bobby had knocked three times on his door, his courage had failed him. A condom in his pocket. Hands shaking. He’d slipped ten twenty-dollar bills under the door and told him to leave, and for years after had rewritten the ending a dozen different ways.

  “I know the Catholic Church wouldn’t approve of me saying this,” Britta said, “but I’m happy that happened to you. And I’m glad it was with someone you loved.”

  Paul nodded. “Me too.”

  “Having said that,” she added, “you realize you’ll have to pay me to keep this a secret now.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” he said.

  “Okay, fine.” She was faintly smiling. “I won’t. On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You need to tell me the story.”

  He looked at her: her eyes were bright and curious. “That’s a pretty big condition,” he said.

  “I mean, you’ve gotten this far.”

  He nodded. He had. And what an odd destination it was. Here in this apartment in Rome. Late at night and strangely not tired.

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” she said.

  “Okay,” he said. He smiled and took a deep, shuddering breath. “In that case I guess I’ll tell you everything.”

  III. Everything

  The first of the strange events that transpired early that spring in Rome was the arrival of Norb Sensenbrenner’s shocking news, airmailed from Cincinnati.

  It arrived a week into February, three months before Paul would finish his exams and return to the States. Inside the envelope were two folded sheets of impossibly thin paper. Blue ink. His friend’s unmistakable microscopic lettering. The usual niceties to begin, but then a revelation that had made him literally break out into a cold sweat and sit on his bed. Norb was putting in his papers; it was already in the works. All for some nun named Sister Marie.

  I’m sure your mouth is open wide enough to stuff a golf ball inside right now, the letter began. It surprised me too. I’m sorry if this disappoints you. I know from our conversations how you thought it best for certain people to leave if their hearts weren’t in it, but I’m sure you never counted me among them. To be honest, neither did I. But she’s a great person, Paul, and I’m in love with her. I want you to know that. She’s prettier than I deserve and the kindest woman I’ve ever met. You’d like her, I think. She sees the absurdity in things like most women don’t and that’s probably one of the things that struck me about her. I hope you can be happy for me.

  Holding the letter in his hands, Paul had considered the possibility that it was a hoax. Stupidly, he looked for another sheet, behind this sheet, with GOTCHA! written big. The priests they both knew who had already left—a dozen at least—had seemed either ambivalent from the start or the hale and hearty sorts who had realized, a little late, that they couldn’t waste their manly charms. But Norb? Norb Sensenbrenner? It hadn’t seemed possible. And now here was Norb, wanting his support.

  In the three-page reply he’d typed up that very night on his portable Smith Corona, Paul tried, admirably he thought, to keep his emotions largely out of it, choosing instead to eloquently log his concerns, as was his obligation as a friend. How long had Norb actually known her? Was it possible, considering he had so little experience with women, that he was mistaking friendship or a crush for something more? Could this desire for an escape be a knee-jerk reaction to the boredom of having his first real job? What about his plan to open the eyes of the masses to the surprising complexities of Scripture? Had he talked to anyone about this?

  This wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.

  This was disowning a whole life.

  The tone of his response, he’d thought, was just right—deeply concerned without scolding—and Paul had expected a long reply, a bulletpoint defense. But Norb had returned only a short paragraph. He understood Paul’s concerns, the note said, but it was as simple as this: he was following his heart. I don’t think the wedding will be until next spring, Norb concluded, so unless you plan on staying on as assistant doorman at the dorms, I presume you’ll be back. I really do hope you’ll be able to make it. Then, under his typed initials (NFS), as if to squelch any further debate, he’d typed out an excerpt from the Song of Songs.

  My beloved speaks and says to me:

  “Arise, my love, my fair one,

  and come away;

  for now the winter is past,

  the rain is over and gone.

  The flowers appear on the earth;

  the time of singing has come,

  and the voice of the turtledove

  is heard in our land….”

  To satisfy his inner scold, Paul imagined the flak Norb would surely get back home from his relatives, the scoffing of some of their fellow classmates in Rome. But he knew that all that would be temporary. In a few years, once Norb and this Marie person had escaped the shadow of their past, they would seem just like anyone else. A normal man and woman doing what normal men and women did. They’d probably even have kids. No one would know. And if they did, they wouldn’t much care.


  Whereas if he were to leave for love, if such a thing was even possible, he’d never be forgiven. His parents, his mother especially, would be destroyed. His hometown, family, and friends scandalized. All the reason not to even consider it. Except that he did. Hopeless and reckless as it was, he considered it all the time.

  By that first spring of the new decade, he’d been in Rome nearly three years, there to get his master’s in Scripture. He’d chosen to go to graduate school mostly to avoid teaching the boys at Sacred Heart, the minor seminary he’d gone to himself ten years before—the job he’d had since his ordination. He’d thought he’d like it, teaching biblical history and American history, but he hadn’t. He hated having to entertain and discipline the boys; resented the conveyor belt of mediocre student papers, the feeling that he’d stopped improving his own mind. The excellent teachers, like Father Ketchum, who’d taught Latin, and Father O’Hara, who’d taught Greek and Roman history, took an obvious contagious pleasure in sharing what they knew. They were natural performers and they cared. He wasn’t and didn’t, not as much as he should. He’d been at the very top of his class, loved to learn, loved the subject matter for its own sake. It was having to explain it to others that was annoying. When he admitted to himself that he wasn’t happy with what he was doing, he’d appealed to the bishop to let him return to school. Three years of graduate studies in the Eternal City, the idea being that maybe he’d then go on for his Ph.D., teach older, smarter students at a college somewhere where he would feel more fulfilled. All that beauty, all that history, and only the expansion of his mind to worry about. His bishop—a kind, bug-eyed old guy with a penchant for cigars and an arch sense of humor—had agreed. Go forth, young man, and bring back the treasures you find had been his exact words.

  Young Paul hadn’t done a ton of traveling, but he wasn’t some country bumpkin either. Twice he’d been to Chicago, once to Minneapolis and St. Louis. Even so, Rome might as well have been Mars. Its narrow, mazelike streets, all its layers of history there but not there, worked on him like a pulsing lingering subconscious. Turn a corner and there was the Pantheon. Turn another, Piazza Navona. The endless foul-smelling Gypsies and beggars. The business girls made up like Brigitte Bardot. Grime and splendor, splendor and grime.

  He’d immediately fallen in love with the energy of the place, though often those first few weeks, walking through it, he’d felt afraid. Not of being pickpocketed so much, though he’d been warned about that. It was the ordinary Romans who scared him. The boisterous men and women who were everywhere, shouting, laughing, arguing, thrusting their arms and stirring the air with their hands as they talked. Staring at you like a cat when you walked by. Was he supposed to be this way too? Would he need to be? But soon, as the boundaries of his life got settled, he’d seen it was silly to worry. His world and theirs wouldn’t intersect much. If he did find himself walking past a group of young machos eating their bagged lunches against a wall on one of the days his clerical collar was required, he wasn’t expected to be anything but who he was. Just like the people with whom he went to school and the members of his parents’ church back home, the Romans wanted to hold their priests slightly above, or at least apart. When he passed, they nodded with a neutral look in their eyes.

  Buon giorno, he’d say. And they’d nod back. And that was that.

  The place where he and the other American graduate students lived was a building its residents lovingly called Il Castello. The castle. Set into the city a block from the college and a ten-minute stroll from Trevi Fountain, the building had served as a convent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and sometimes, when the place was quietest, Paul was able to imagine dozens of Sally Fields in their white flying-seagull headdresses moving serenely down the halls, polite ghosts. Now the ancient lease served to house seventy to eighty American priests. Open the gigantic castle door, and you entered a tall three-story atrium. At the middle stood a gray stone fountain, radiating silence. Faded peach impasto walls wept soot black and seaweed green. Up above, walkways wound around walls, leaving a trail of closed wooden doors. A sanctuary. But they weren’t monks. You heard conversation, laughter. The place was old but alive.

  Most of the residents were on the bishop track, here to study canon law. A few others had come for degrees in liturgy, choral music, and history. But only he and Norb were here for Scripture, Norb a year ahead. From the get-go, Monsignor LaRouche had paired them up; they couldn’t have avoided the other if they’d wanted to. And in this way, they’d come to be friendly and, after a few tentative months, friends.

  Norb was strange looking but had developed the ability to joke about it. This was his long-established defense against teasing. Short, thin, stooped; sporting a protruding Adam’s apple, a weak chin, close-set eyes, thick horn-rims set on a big nose, pockmarked skin from adolescent acne; bowlegged as a cowboy—it was hard not to imagine Norb getting bullied as a kid, and, as it turned out, exactly that had happened, his personal schoolyard hell having played out behind his grade school in suburban Cincinnati. Like Paul, he’d been an academic ace all the way through. Loved philosophy and Barth, baseball more than football, and had gone through a martyr phase as a boy, every abuse merely setting the stage for his eventual sainthood. Unlike Paul, he’d grown up with money, the son of a successful accountant and a devout mother, so was a connoisseur of things Paul couldn’t have afforded to appreciate even if it had occurred to him to: as a boy, catalog-bought seashells and stamps; more recently, Spanish sherries and jazz. A little full of himself, Paul’s mother would have said, had she heard him criticize Mass wine as being too sweet or seen him snort at the cheap Michelangelo’s David replicas for sale in the little shops near the school. But Paul had developed a far higher tolerance for snobbery than his mother. He wanted himself, and all things within his domain, to be better than just good enough. Had he not been ambitious, he would never have made it off the farm. His high standards were a gift.

  Neither of them was part of the social scene. Some of the guys were friendly enough, good for a game of chess or a quick salted pretzel and beer at the hofbräuhaus nearby, but the dominant force was a loose fraternity of loud, boastful, and moneyed guys from the bigger cities who seemed to spend a lot of time zipping around on the Vespas or in the Fiats their parents had bought them; playing pranks; having loud, self-serving arguments about Johnson, then Nixon; going out of town for four-day weekends; doing the New York Times crossword; and playing hearts or pinochle. Everything, it seemed, but study. Norb had no problem asking them to keep quiet when they were hooting too loudly at someone’s Bob Newhart record, but Paul feared their scorn too much to be so bold. When he did occasionally enter their orbit, during the beer hall dinners monsignor set up twice a quarter, or happened upon a little group in the cafeteria, he tried to be pleasant. He had always been very intentional about being pleasant; by taking careful note of those mannerisms people associated with homosexuals and ironing the few that came to him naturally out of his repertoire, he’d managed to avoid getting teased—and had managed to arouse little suspicion from most everyone. In the company of the other residents, he laughed at the good jokes, told stories about odd professors, colorful characters from back home, like Otis the junk man. He was liked well enough, nodded to, abided…but they understood he didn’t want to be part of their world. And vice versa. It was fine. They did their thing; he did his.

  Mostly, his thing was studying, reading for pleasure, playing chess with Norb, and, when he could spare the time, taking walks around the city. Lectures ran from eight to noon every day, then it was studying all afternoon, a break for dinner, and more studying late into the night. He was used to this rhythm by now, but the first year had nearly killed him. The language classes were murder. He already knew Latin and some Greek and a little German and French from seminary. But now he was required to learn Hebrew and Italian too. And to add to the degree of difficulty, the Hebrew section was taught in Latin by a Spaniard with a strong accent, who sometimes switch
ed from Latin to Italian for his more off-the-cuff remarks. It’s like the Tower of Babel around here, Paul wrote his parents that year. But no miracle in sight. Years later it made for a funny anecdote—Who’s on First, priest edition—but at the time it had been hell. He was used to digesting things quickly, sinking deeply into books, but here learning seemed to be done on the fly. Words flitted off professors’ lips, and he had to grab them before they flew out the window. Worse, all the final exams were in Latin and few were written, as he was used to. Instead you were to stand in front of your professors and answer questions while being looked at, waited on. He had survived in the end, of course. Worked his tail off and had prayed every morning at Mass for the strength to keep his focus, and thought, more charitably than he ever had when he was in front of them, of the future seminarians back home who were counting on him to get through the program, so he might bring back the secrets they did not know.

  And secrets were what they felt like, when that second year began. What he hadn’t known—what his education even as an undergraduate studying theology hadn’t taught him—was staggering. The catechism he knew inside out. The rules, yes. And Bible verses he could quote at length. But how had it come to be? How had it been put together? What had been left out? All this had been willfully, it seemed now, kept in shadow.

  His professors here were odd, formidable, and razor-sharp. Scripture wasn’t a given, as he’d been taught to think as a child, but a puzzle, a pastiche, carefully constructed for certain audiences and contexts. An onion of many layers to be unpeeled. The detective novel buff in him liked the feeling of tracking something down, of homing in on original intentions, of determining where errors were made, where a translator went wrong. It was, as he’d hoped, more stimulating than teaching, and he would often take a moment to feel thankful, at Mass and at night, as he had since he was a boy, and also while walking around Rome after dinner, hands clasped behind his back or smoking a Nazionale, as he absorbed the roiling energy of the place, the molten light of evening bleeding over the ancient buildings. It was a solitary existence made less anxious because whenever he wanted a little companionship he could simply go knock on Norb’s door and vice versa. Theirs was a friendship of the mind, of convenience. In his life there had been other friendships, two where he was attracted to the friend, errant but welcome daydreams of something more. Handsome boys. But Norb was just Norb. Goofy, harmless, and straight.