The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  “I didn’t think you’d actually come.”

  “I said I would, didn’t I?”

  “Well, I worried you might not anyway.”

  Paul cast his eyes around the room. “So this is where you live?”

  “For better or worse.”

  Luca pointed out his roommates, of which there were five. Renaldo and Elise shared a bedroom; Luca and the other three guys split the other two. Elise was the one who’d convinced Renaldo to let him move in; Luca knew her from art school. The others were okay—his roommate Berto was barely around. But one person he really didn’t like: Sandro, who shared a room with Guillermo. To identify his nemesis, Luca jutted his chin at a man standing near a lamp across the room. Curly light brown hair pulled into a tiny ponytail, white pants, green cowboy boots, tight black shirt. His extremely bored expression poleaxing the face of the person talking to him.

  “Why don’t you like him?” Paul asked.

  “Because he’s an asshole.”

  “Do the others think that too?”

  “Elise doesn’t like him, but the others don’t mind him so much. I hate him the most.”

  Paul could imagine well enough: Sandro would guess what kind of man Luca was and hate him for it.

  “Anyway,” said Luca, “can I get you something to drink?”

  Paul looked at the mug Luca held, four fingers wedged into the negative space within the handle. “What are you drinking? Coffee?”

  “Chianti.”

  “In a mug?”

  “I like the heaviness of it,” he said. “It feels more special that way.”

  Paul smiled: the idea had a strange logic to it. “I’ll do that too, then. Chianti in a mug. As they say, when in Rome.”

  Luca shook his head slowly. “Please. Never say that again.”

  Paul could count on one hand the number of mixed parties like this he’d been to in the past decade. The last had been the bush party his cousin Fred brought him to the second summer after he’d gotten his B.A., when he was home visiting his parents. A mild night, a clearing in the woods, a bonfire, and thirty, forty young people like him drinking lukewarm Blatz as a car radio played songs about California girls. Most were Fred’s year, but a few were his elementary school classmates, names attached to vaguely familiar faces he hadn’t seen since he’d left for seminary the fall he was thirteen. The bonfire warmed one half of him, then the other, as he followed Fred around his circle of friends, feeling both the distance of his difference and the dim light of their respect. Few chose his path in life—only two others from their parish in the past few years—but, being Catholic, they respected the sacrifice, the commitment. Like soldiers, priests were held slightly above: noble men, slightly mysterious, admired. Some girl, visiting from out of town, probably a little drunk, had clucked at hearing he was a priest, said, Well, that’s a crying shame, and he was flattered, as he always was when women implied he was good-looking.

  That night, he had very quickly stopped feeling the anxiety he’d arrived with, but tonight was going to be different. Luca was no easygoing Fred—in fact, he seemed nervous himself as they eased their way into the fringes of a group containing Elise and Renaldo and a few others. A chubby faun of a man with red-tinted glasses was holding forth about the acid trip he’d had in Venice over Christmas, and as he talked he looked only at Naldo and the man beside him. Wasn’t it odd how feeling invisible in moments like this could threaten to drown you in some awful realization about your unworthiness, about the real feelings of the world toward you? When it was nothing at all? Paying attention to the story the best he could, Paul gulped down his wine quickly and then, when it was gone, faked sipping to have something to do. Only when the story ended were they acknowledged. Luca introduced him as his American student friend from the park, but it was clear Elise and Naldo had been told nothing else. They asked him what he studied and where, and he answered.

  “You’re being serious?” Elise asked. She glanced at Luca for confirmation and he nodded yes.

  Renaldo, who was clearly very drunk already, took a closer look, one eye open, one eye squinted, like a sea captain looking into an invisible telescope. “I mean, he looks like he could be. Don’t you think?”

  Elise ignored this rudeness. “You’re so funny, Luca,” she said instead. “Always so mysterious.”

  Luca shrugged. If this was so, Paul thought, wonderful. It was true, of course, that since the day his family drove him to the campus of Sacred Heart he had enjoyed being seen as more special than most. Who didn’t like to feel special and have evidence to back it up? But recently—especially since Norb’s happy, guiltless shedding of their status—he hadn’t been able to work up the old assurance his standing in the world once gave him. The reliable ego boost. What he had actually been craving lately was a way to feel less special, more down-to-earth. In fact, it occurred to him, as he stood there with his empty mug of wine, this desire was what had prompted his longer walks, his lingering over that which he usually walked right past. It was the reason he found himself here.

  To Elise, that he was an American was perhaps more interesting than his being a priest. Wisconsin she hadn’t heard of, but Chicago, yes. Al Capone and gangsters and, most recently, the riots there before the Democratic National Convention. The brave young protesters. He provided a sketch of where he studied, where he lived. Then Naldo asked him if he could ask a personal question, and Paul knew exactly which question was coming. Even ready for it, his ears burned hot. No, he responded, he hadn’t ever had sex.

  “See?” Naldo said. “That’s the killer right there. No way in hell could I do that.”

  Elise snorted. “No shit.”

  “How do you even deal with that, man?” Naldo said. “Knowing you’ll never do it? Doesn’t that make you, like, totally frustrated?”

  Naldo wasn’t right for Elise, Paul saw that immediately. But women made stupid decisions when it came to men. Britta was doing that too, according to their mother.

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Luca said.

  “It’s fine,” Paul said. “I guess since I don’t know what I’m missing, it’s easier.”

  “So what then,” Naldo said, “do you guys, you know, take care of yourselves? Or do you just pretend it’s not there?”

  “Jesus Christ, Naldo!” Elise said. “Show some respect.”

  “What? I’m curious.”

  “Don’t even listen to him,” Luca said. “He gets even more stupid when he’s drunk.”

  “Okay,” Elise said. “Sorry. Change of subject. How about this instead: What’s the worst confession you ever heard? Can you talk about that?”

  Here, he actually had a story that might satisfy her. “Well,” he said, “the worst one was actually a prank a friend of mine played on me. Another priest. He got into the confessional and pretended to be one of the students where I taught and told me he’d fallen in love with one of the cows on his family’s farm. Buttercup, if I remember correctly.”

  At this, Elise burst into beautiful silent laughter.

  “Would you do that for me?” Naldo now said.

  “Do what?” Paul said.

  “Hear a confession.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Elise said.

  “No, seriously. I think it’s about time I get some things off my chest.” Naldo looked at Paul. “Couldn’t I just whisper it in your ear or something?”

  Elise looked at Paul with bugged eyes and shook her head. “Naldo, you’re being a shit.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “But we’re not in a church,” Paul said.

  “Does it have to be?”

  “Yes,” he said, but he realized he wasn’t completely sure. “That’s the standard, at least,” he added.

  “But would you? If I asked you to? As a personal favor?”

  “I feel like you’re putting me on.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Naldo said. “There’s something I’d like to get off my chest.”

  Paul tried
to read his face to see if he was serious, but Naldo’s swimming eyes made it impossible to tell. “If you’re serious then, fine. As long as you haven’t killed anyone.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” someone said behind them.

  Given the green light, Renaldo came slowly toward him, laid a hand on his shoulder, and moved them both away from the circle. Swaying a little, he leaned in, put his mouth close enough to Paul’s ear that Paul could feel his heat and smell his bad breath. “Okay, here it is,” he whispered. “I jerk off too much, I killed my brother’s ferret on purpose, and I’ve cheated on Elise three times.” He paused for a moment, wondering probably if there was more to say, decided against it, stepped back. The expression on his face, the dare in his eyes, told Paul everything was true.

  He should have known not to glance at Elise, but he did.

  She frowned. “Wait, what did he say?”

  Paul looked down at the hardwood floor.

  “What did you tell him, Renaldo? Did you say something about me?”

  “It’s a confession, Elise,” Naldo said. “The whole point is that it’s confidential.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Naldo! That’s not fair!” She looked at Paul. “Was it bad? Can you at least tell me that?”

  Paul blinked very quickly. “I really can’t say.” Though, he thought, maybe I’ll tell you on the way out. Slip you a note. Though that would be even worse than never agreeing in the first place.

  “Fuck,” said a sleepy-looking somebody on the fringes. “Must’ve been pretty heavy.”

  “You have to tell me what you said,” Elise told her boyfriend. “Right now. I’m not kidding.”

  Here Naldo decided to change his tack. Paul could sense the lightbulb going off and then watched his face soften, a little curl appear in his lip.

  “Elise, relax,” he said. “I made it all up.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not. I wanted to get a rise out of him, that’s all.”

  “Okay. Then tell me. If it’s made up, what’s it matter?”

  “Exactly. If it’s all made up, what’s it matter? Exactly.”

  The sleepy guy looked at Paul. “If he was lying you can say it, right? I mean, that changes the whole thing.”

  He felt ashamed: he’d turned a sacrament into a party trick, and it had blown up in his face. But he wouldn’t hurt this woman. There was a whole evening to get through. “It’s really up to him,” Paul said.

  Elise looked at Naldo, waiting, and when Naldo looked back at her, shaking his head, throwing up his hands in the exasperated Italian way, she hated him once more and walked across the living room and into their room, slamming the door shut.

  “So fucking sensitive,” Naldo said.

  Now Luca looked at him. I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of this, his eyes said.

  It’s my own fault, replied Paul’s.

  In the awkward minutes that followed, Paul had the urge to flee. Luca had said that if he wanted to leave, he would go with him, to where he’d never said. But Paul didn’t want to look back on tonight and remember himself as a coward. Was he so weak that he couldn’t handle some mockery? Was he so delicate? No, he thought, I’ll push on. Fall, if need be, into the role of anthropologist, as Luca had suggested he do. To understand Britta better. To get a flavor for her life. When Luca apologized for Naldo and asked if he was okay (he apparently looked a little pale), he said yeah, he was, it was fine. And they resumed their wandering.

  Talk in one huddle was of a band simply called Love and then of a Super 8 film two of the huddlers had been extras in, some hippie take on “Jack and the Beanstalk,” with the giant played by an actor dressed up as the prime minister. Then people slid into a discussion about a magical human named Tony Piazzi, deemed “wacko” and “hilarious” by all who knew him. Paul had little to share—besides jazz, his tastes in music tended toward classical, a little bit of early Dylan, and Peter, Paul and Mary, and he couldn’t feign the drowsy awestruck demeanor the others had if he tried—so he simply sipped his now-refilled wine. But when one of the guests asked him who he was exactly and discovered he was American, and when one of the interlopers from the Naldo farce piped in that he was not only that but an American priest, he found himself again the center of attention.

  “You don’t support the war, do you?” one of them said, and he’d had the pleasure of saying no, he didn’t. The Church did, still believing it met the criteria for a morally just war, but there he and the Church disagreed (this perked people up). Not wanting to disappoint, he shared the story of how an old classmate of his had grown his hair to his shoulders, driven around in a VW Bug with daisies wound around the antenna, and been disrobed for holding secret Masses at his brother’s place, where collections went toward the printing of antiwar pamphlets and where he’d given Communion to all in his red silk pajamas. Having hooked them, he then laid out all the sensational details he could recall about the disobedient shenanigans of Fathers Philip and Daniel Berrigan: how the Baltimore Four had poured chicken blood on draft records there, how the Catonsville Nine had burst into a draft board and burned draft records with homemade napalm. Maybe he’d too greedily lapped up the attention and let them assume, by his eagerness in spreading the details, he was as headstrong and political as the characters he trotted out before them. But of course, when they did directly ask him if he felt the same way, he had to admit he did not. The whole Berrigan thing stunk too much of righteousness, a hunger for attention. There were better, less combative ways to protest. One of the huddlers, whose name he never did find out, came forward then, a swollen look on his face. “You call that combative? When innocent fucking women and children are being slaughtered at My Lai? The war is fucking combative. The problem with those guys is they didn’t go far enough.” By this, the man meant, quite literally, that someone needed to kidnap Pat Nixon and the Nixon daughters and hold them for ransom. For ten minutes they sparred. The man was intelligent and frightening, and little flecks of spit flew from his lips the more passionate he became. But Paul liked the chance to argue for moderation. It felt like he was defending his perspective on life.

  When the discussion hit a lull, Paul excused himself to the bathroom. He was a little drunk now, and after he’d peed two mugs’ worth of processed Chianti into the dank mouth of the toilet, he communed with the mirror. His eyes were the ones swimming now, his face damp. Wasn’t he doing fine out there, holding his own? His intelligence was his life preserver, even here. Also interesting was that, during the entire argument in the kitchen, Luca had stood beside him, sipping his wine, nodding at him whenever he looked over, hoping for confirmation. Loyal already, though they’d been through nothing together. If he wasn’t mistaken, he’d seen pride in his friend’s eyes at knowing someone who knew so much, who was so good with words, even in his second language. This man liked him, this Luca whom he had tried so hard not to think about these past few days. But what did he want? What did he see in him, someone so unlike himself? Was Paul more trustworthy than these people? Less likely to hurt him? Had he seemed a kindred lonely spirit? Or was it as simple as he could tell they were the same in that other, important way?

  Blood thumped in his ears, like a second heartbeat. Lust whistled up and down the inside of his stomach. Be careful, he told his reflection. Remember who you are.

  A low Arabic saxophone solo from some jazz record played him back into the living room. A man and a woman were ravenously making out on the sofa, their grasping faces tinted pink by the lamp wrapped like a head injury with a gauzy red scarf. As if inspired, but feeling more experimental, three cross-legged people had begun a drowsy back-massage train on the bare floor mattress, two men bookending a woman, all eyes closed, the masseuses’ hands probing blindly, the man in front with his palms on his knees like a yogi. From the kitchen, though, there was still the serious energy of conversation, to Paul’s relief. And when he entered, Luca was where he’d been, leaning against the sink, half listening to an argument abo
ut the Italian soccer team. On seeing him, his friend brightened and walked over.

  “Hey,” Luca said. “You want to see my room?”

  “Your room?” Paul said. His mind wasn’t right. He sensed his own fear.

  Luca’s head tilted like a dog’s. “Yeah. My room.”

  An innocent request, Paul realized. But tell that to his steaming red ears. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”

  The twist of a doorknob, Luca pulling the chain to the lightbulb, and they were inside. The room was a bit bigger than his own at Il Castello, though considering Luca shared it with a roommate, smaller, really. Far less privacy. Paul’s room had no windows, as it was on the inner ring, facing the Castello’s courtyard, but this had a little square one. Flush against the far wall was a wooden twin bed and a flaking metal bunk bed that gave the room a boyish, military flavor. A shabby lamp sat on the floor beside the bed. A big grubby rug lay over the floor, two corners bent slightly up, suggesting a grounded magic carpet. A stereo flanked by two tan speakers sat under the window. Paul was going to ask which bunk was Luca’s, but then he noticed, hanging by a strap from the top farthest bedpost, a small but serious-looking silver camera and, taped randomly to the ceiling above and the wall beside the top bunk, an irregular assortment of white-rimmed photographs. Another difference between them, then. Never would he have taped pictures directly to the wall, without frames, much less done it in such an erratic way. And yet they formed a pleasing, irregular whole, the way a flock of birds could, or stars.