by Mark Rader
They played Scrabble and crazy eights. Every so often a check from Norb’s parents arrived, and Norb bought a bottle of good sherry and then they were sophisticated and tipsy as they played Scrabble and crazy eights. Walking around the city, Norb glanced blatantly at the breasts of young Roman women, once dreadfully using the term “milk wagon” to describe the rack on a girl of maybe eighteen, and referenced certain pretty girls back home, Roman versions of which seemed to be everywhere. But his ardor for the opposite sex had seemed harmless, in the way of a twelve-year- old boy, or wistful, in the way of an old man long out of the game.
When Norb completed his degree and returned home to Cincinnati at the end of Paul’s second year, Paul knew he would be lonely. He’d always been the type to latch on to a single person a little too much, to put all his eggs in one basket. There were three new Scripture students that fall—Tom and Dale from Michigan, Dom from Indiana—and it fell to him to show them around, play the role of knowing old vet. But they had their own thing going, those three, all of them oppressively witty. So that third fall he read Le Carré and Agatha Christie paperbacks bought for cheap from the American bookstore’s bargain bin. Listened to the Ornette Coleman records Norb had bequeathed him, trying to not resent them for being chaotic. Became friendly, after a forced study group, with two ruddy-faced Benedictines from Alsace-Lorraine, with whom he’d gone skiing in the Alps over the Christmas holiday, practiced his conversational German, and drunk too many hot buttered rums. But it was small consolation. They weren’t just down the hall; they didn’t play chess. He had arranged his life so as to have privacy, and that’s what the others had given him. Sometimes he wondered if anyone would even have noticed if he didn’t leave his room for a week, just stayed inside smoking and playing solitaire.
They had promised to write, he and Norb, but managed only one exchange that year after Norb left in July. Paul’s long letter, sent in August, hadn’t been answered until early October, a few weeks later than he would have liked. Norb’s first letter had mentioned nothing of Sister Marie specifically, only that he and Father Gary, the other young priest who taught in his department (a bit of a priss but likes Ping-Pong), had been going to Sunday dinner with a few nuns who worked in the campus ministry office (pretty good gals). Lots of half-interested students, lots of numbing paperwork, was the verdict, though the dean was a good guy. A fellow lover of dessert wines. Paul had replied right away, complaining uncharacteristically of the slog that third year was turning out to be, mentioning only in passing the three newbies, and in return there had been nothing but a Christmas card: embossed angel, star, manger, and two lines of generic holiday greeting inside, a promise to write more later. But then in February, the bombshell.
Rome was eternal, sure, but it also existed in 1970. As unbelievably strange and still stranger things had happened over the past three years back home, Paul had followed along, of course, as did all the Americans. Three copies of the Times and two copies of the Tribune were bought and set out in the common area every day, courtesy of the recreation budget, and they pored over everything, the way Paul’s father always did on Sundays, his one day for catching up on the world. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination had led to a prayer meeting; the same had gone for Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam was proving hopeless. Sea changes were happening everywhere—you saw that even in Rome, where crowds gathered to oppose the war, where grizzled, languid hippies, who looked exactly like the hippies back home, were yelled at by old men with their undershirts showing: Lazy beggars! Get a fuckin’ job! Britta had become one of them—that was the subject of most of his mother’s monthly letters. She wasn’t going to church anymore, just because it was run only by men. As if that was a reason. And yet—and on paper he could hear his mother’s tone of utter disgust—she seemed quite unopposed to sleeping with as many men as she pleased. She was getting swept up in the tidal wave of the times, and his mother prayed every day for her soul. Could you talk to her? she had asked. I hate to bother you when you’re so busy, but she might listen to you more than me. So he’d called home, to hear it straight, and called Britta three times at the number his mother had given him, but when she finally called back, the conversation had led nowhere. Her stubbornness, actually, was what Norb’s response would immediately remind him of. She knew what he believed: she’d gone to the same schools, had the same nuns, had the same parents, been confirmed and done First Communion and all the rest just like him. And she got that it was his job to keep his sheep in line, being a shepherd of souls and all. But what it came down to was that he didn’t understand the first thing about what it was to be alive and young right now, and she was sorry, but she wanted to find out.
I understand the appeal of doing things a new way, he’d told her. That part I get. But what you’re talking about doesn’t sound like love, meaning her sleeping around. You’re too smart to get caught up in all that.
Funny you say that, she’d said. Because I think I’m too smart not to.
That had been in the summer after his second year. Since then they hadn’t talked or written at all, except for the birthday card she sent him. I’m fine, don’t worry, it read. Hope you are too. With love, your pagan sister.
For the past nearly three years, whenever he felt the need for a walk, Paul took one of three little routes he had devised, all of which took around an hour, making a jagged loop in the city center that brought him back on schedule. But in the wake of Norb’s letter, an hour hadn’t seemed long enough, so he’d gotten more adventurous. The walks went farther out, lasted sometimes two hours, sometimes three. Sometimes he just jumped on a bus and walked around in a neighborhood he hadn’t seen before, on the edge of the suburbs. Noon to four, the dead siesta hours in the city, was supposed to be study time, but Paul found it hard to sit still and concentrate in the middle of the day.
One day he took a bus north and wandered up into the Borghese Gardens. During the dead hours of the city, it was still more or less alive and cooler for being up higher. Mothers pushed their strollers; the usual hippies lounged on blankets, playing their guitars. Sometimes handstands. Sometimes dancing or competitive paper airplane flying.
In one spot near the Fontana Rotunda, a group of older men were playing bocce. Paul knew the game. He’d played it a few times with the monsignor in the first week he’d spent in Rome and a few times with Ernie Betterman, who used some of his parents’ allowance to buy himself an actual set. Paul was quite good at it, which he attributed to having played horseshoes on the farm and at the seminary. And there was the stone-throwing game he and Britta would sometimes play on the farm: who could get closest to a certain dandelion, a certain fence post. At six-two, two-ten, he’d been recruited for the seminary basketball team, but he was disastrous at team sports. If the game required reacting to many things at once, responding on the fly, he was doomed. But games that asked you to master one movement, one thing, and do it well, over and over—with those he could hold his own. He didn’t dare ask to play with the old Romans: they were in their world; he was in his. Instead, he decided to sit awhile and watch. Dip into his Le Carré mystery if need be. But that hadn’t been necessary. It was entertaining, listening to the old men curse at each other, and tease, and quibble about the measuring done with a piece of string. The two youngest of the group—men maybe in their late fifties—were very good.
He returned twice, sat, kept his distance, pretended to read, watched. But on his third visit, someone new was playing with them: a small, skinny young guy, early twenties, a hippie type. Mess of black hair, pinned-back greyhound’s ears, a few days’ stubble, and he wore a white T-shirt that was a little baggy at the neck. Quite beautiful, in a gangly way, and his method of bowling the ball was telling. Deliberate, cautious. His crouch low to the ground, the release all long, fine fingers. Knowledge swooned through Paul’s stomach. Though the bigger, broader mystery, of course, was why these old-timers put up with such a delicate young man at all.
Though Paul’s book was open, he had
n’t read a word. Instead, he watched and strained to hear a name, but this wasn’t a place where names were needed. The young man held his own, though twice he faltered at the crucial moment. When he listened to one of the men’s stories, he looked innocent, like a boy. When it wasn’t his turn, he set the ball in between his feet and stood with his arms hugging himself. The signs weren’t glaring, probably, to the old men but glaring enough to Paul. Such a rarity, especially here. In his mind’s eye, Paul imagined putting down his book and boldly walking over, asking if he could join in the next game. The old men would give him his due respect once he said he was un padre; it was the young man he had to fear. His judgment, his serious dark eyes. But he wasn’t actually going to do that. He watched as the young man and his partner lost. The partner, it seemed, had a chance to win, or at least extend the game, but missed. The young man had shaken his head no, smirked sympathetically, and too firmly gripped hands all around. Compensating, clearly. Then Paul watched the young man leave, pedaling away on an old orange bike, mop of hair flouncing around his ears. The young man glanced at him as he passed. The sensation took a long moment to fade, like a sunspot when you close your eyes.
Paul told himself the next time he came to the park—he’d come the next day at the very same time—that he hoped the young man wouldn’t be there. Easier to try his luck without competition. But when he was there again, Paul felt no irritation at all. Quite the contrary.
At one point, the old Italians took a break, uncorked some of the homemade red wine they’d brought to drink. The young guy walked off, heavy on his heels, and bought a Fanta from the old woman sitting on a bench with a tin washing bucket, bottles of sodas floating in what had once been ice. On the way back, he looked Paul’s way and stopped.
“Are you a cop or something?” he asked in Italian.
“I’m sorry?” Paul replied in Italian.
“Weren’t you here yesterday?”
“Yes. This is the time I take my walk,” Paul said. “I’m not a cop.”
“You’re an American,” said the young man.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Ah—yes,” the young man replied in English.
Paul nodded. His neck flushed. “I played something like this back home,” he said, nodding in the direction of the old men. “Well, sort of.”
“You played this in America?”
“Something like it. Horseshoes. But it’s different.”
“Do you want to play?”
“I wouldn’t be very good.”
“Yes, but do you want to?”
“I wouldn’t want to intrude.”
“I’ll say I know you,” the young man said. “No problem.” He drank the soda down and had a beautiful neck.
They exchanged names. Luca reached out his hand.
This was their beginning.
The old men were annoyed that Luca had added to the ranks of those who were not old men, but they shrugged and let Paul play, this Americano, about whom none of them asked anything.
Luca explained the rules, and though Paul knew them already, he listened as if he didn’t. He took three practice rolls, to get a lay of the course, throwing too hard, still too hard, and then pretty well. When he’d played before with the monsignor it had been on the grass; the difference was considerable. It was more like playing pool than bowling, really—the way you had to calculate your banks off the side, hit other balls glancingly to move them around. The subtle grooves in the hardpan lane that pushed the ball right or left were his greatest disadvantages: everyone else knew them by heart.
“How long have you played with these guys?” Paul asked Luca in Italian, after the first game ended.
“Since I was a kid. I used to come along with my grandfather. Three of them were old war buddies of his. Now there’s just Gustavo.”
He imagined little Luca: mop of hair, dark eyes, gangly boy arms. “The First World War?”
Luca nodded. “Grandpa was their commander. He hung out with Mussolini, actually. Y’know, before he was Mussolini.”
“Is that right?”
“He always beat him at cards. Or so the story goes.”
There was a twinkle, as they say, in his eye: he had loved his grandfather, obviously.
“Are you on holiday?” he asked.
“No, I live here. I’m a graduate student,” Paul said.
“What for?”
“I’m studying the Bible. Scripture.”
“Oh,” said Luca. He frowned. “Are you a priest?”
After he was first ordained, he was so proud to be able to say, Yes, yes, I am. Father Paul at last! But now he felt like saying, Yes, but…But what? I’m not what you think? I’m more than just a priest?
“I am, actually. And you?”
“I’m not a priest, no.”
Paul laughed. “No. I mean what do you do?”
Luca shrugged. “Try to survive, mostly.”
“Are you a student?”
“I was. In photography. But I quit. Now I just work in a restaurant, waiting tables.”
“Why?”
“Why did I quit?”
“Yes.”
“It was a horrible school. All they cared about is the figure, the figure.”
“As opposed to what?”
“Everything else! They didn’t care about anything new. Anything not traditional, you know. Overexposures, double exposures, the pictures that look like a mistake…that’s what I liked doing. But they thought I was crazy. Besides, I couldn’t afford the film anymore. And the darkroom made me throw up. And my mother stopped giving me money.”
“She didn’t like you doing art?”
“No,” he said. “Not that.” Luca stared at him and weighed a thought in his mind.
“So do you like waiting tables?” Paul asked.
Luca frowned. “No, of course not. I hate it. I’m horrible at it. I’ll probably get fired today, actually. Last night I spilled Alfredo sauce on a very important person.”
Paul laughed.
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “The way you said it sounded funny.”
“Yeah, but…without my job I can’t pay rent.”
Chastened, Paul asked where he lived in the city. It was occurring to him that he hadn’t really met a new person in quite some time.
“Guess.”
“Trastevere,” Paul said.
“Correct,” Luca said.
Trastevere: hippie central, the Haight-Ashbury of Rome. He looked like its poster boy, actually.
“I’m not a lazy bum, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said. “I make my own money. It’s not like I’m a freeloader.”
“I didn’t think you were. Plus, I already know you’re a successful waiter.”
Luca studied Paul for a second with a smirk on his face, eyeing him up and down. It was as if being brushed by a very soft wing.
“They don’t make you wear the priest suit, huh?” Luca said.
“No,” Paul responded. “Only for formal things. When you’re a student, it’s different.” He paused. “Do you ever do this with your friends? Play bocce, I mean?”
“No. They only want to smoke grass and play pinball. I don’t know how much I even like them anymore. They say I’m a fussy old lady.”
This moved him, this admission of vulnerability. They had something in common: they lived with many others but felt alone.
“Maybe we can team up again tomorrow,” Paul said.
“Okay,” said Luca. “I’ll try to come at two.”
“I’ll be here,” Paul said.
They looked at each other, waiting for the other to say something.
“Well,” Paul said, “I’d best be off.”
“Nice to meet you, Padre.”
“No ‘padre.’ Call me Paul.”
That night, Paul sat at his desk trying to absorb the notes he’d taken on Father Bennini’s lecture about the recently discovered Ras Shamra tablets (an example
of Ugaritic or Hebrew poetry? it was unclear). But what kept rising up from his legal pad, unbidden, was Luca. His face. How he’d rolled the ball, gently, vulnerable on his heels. How natural it had felt to tease him, when he wasn’t at all a teaser. What this was, at the very least, was an opportunity for camaraderie. As it had been with Norb, except Norb was Norb, and Luca quickened his heart the way Troy O’Neal had in seminary, when he was fourteen.
As early as eight or nine years old, he’d figured out that he didn’t feel about girls the way his classmates did, and he had suspected something was truly wrong with him in sixth grade, because of how red his ears would get when he watched Rudy Helmsbach, their sometimes hired hand—a handsome, wiry kid of sixteen—pound nails, shirtless, into the roof of their tool shed. He’d dreamed of Rudy stripping off his clothes to jump into a lake, unaware he was watching. But he’d not realized there was a name for what he was until first year of seminary, the year he turned thirteen, when he heard a group of classmates talking about someone being a faggot. As if that were the most horrible thing one could be.
Troy had liked girls, very clearly so, which was why Paul chose him to pine after, naturally. The impossibility made the longing safe. Oh, the things he thought about Troy! The vivid scenarios he begged forgiveness for! That was around the time he came to learn some interesting things about ancient Greece, poring over the chapter on homosexuality, his head growing lighter, the most stirring passages already underlined by someone else, probably a gay predecessor. (And wasn’t Troy’s name, as in the Greek city of Troy, some sort of sign? Yes, he decided, it was.)
Historical facts soothed him. Achilles and Patroclus had been in love with each other. There was Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, his boyhood friend. These, the bravest of soldiers, had had their young lovers. And wasn’t that beloved culture the foundation of everything to come? Whenever needed, these arguments found their way into his thinking. But the fact was that he was now thirty-one, a man who knew nothing about it.