by Mark Rader
“I like it,” he said of the space, not sure if he really did.
“It’s tiny,” Luca said. “But I don’t mind little spaces. My mother always said I was happiest playing under the kitchen table.”
“It smells different in here too,” Paul said, just noticing.
“No incense. It’s bad enough out there, with Elise.” Instead, here, a faint breeze of lemon, the origin of which was the homemade fruit fly catcher on the floor under the window: tapered funnel of paper taped to the mouth of a dirty vase; within, a limp browning lemon wedge crawling with fruit fly captives. Sister Angelique, one of the cooks at the residence, used them too.
“I presume those are yours up there?” Paul asked, pointing to the ceiling above the top bunk.
“Yeah. You want to see them?”
“Of course.”
They walked over and Paul pressed his chest against the bed frame, tilting his neck to look up.
“Pretend you like them even if you don’t,” Luca said.
What this was, Paul felt immediately, was the Sistine Chapel experience in miniature: the eager looking up and literal pain in your neck, gravity’s hard push on your forehead. Except no figures here, no discernible story. Double exposures, all of them, instead, just as Luca had described. Some were a kind of visual joke: in one, a man’s face (whose? Paul wondered), eyes and mouth closed, overlaid with the open mouth of one of the fountain gargoyles found around the city, a stream of water pouring out. In another, a tiny hunched-over woman stood in the palm of a cupped hand. The rest, though, were harder to pin down, absurd or haunting or both: A long-nosed woman’s profile superimposed on a sunrise, the sun where her brain would be. A ghostly mother and son, hovering over a cemetery. An overly bright brown river, the Tiber, surely, and hovering above, the dark genderless shadow of an angel, a friend wearing a winged costume of some sort, arms outstretched. If the images had a theme, it was that there is a real world and a dream world, and a place where they intersect. The world of the naked eye wasn’t enough; enhancement was needed. As he looked at them, Paul realized that underneath his attraction to Luca had been an arrogant assumption that the young man was somehow beneath him, not his intellectual equal. But how flat and stale that logic seemed now. Luca was lovely and formidable. Paul could never have dreamed these up; his mind just didn’t work that way.
Paul dropped his head and looked straight at Luca. “I really like them.”
“Thank you,” Luca said. “Have you seen the film Persona?”
“Last year, at the Venetio, in fact. They had a Bergman night.”
“That’s when I saw it too.” Luca paused. “Remember the way he put one half of the one woman’s face next to the other half of the other woman’s face, to make a new face?”
“Of course.”
“That was the inspiration.”
Actually, Paul remembered the movie very well. Norb had spent most of the walk back home trying to shed light on the mysteries of the movie using what he knew of Jungian psychology—but he, Paul, hadn’t been in the mood to parse it out. He’d felt gonged in the heart, rapt with the movie’s dramatization of the perfect confessor, more perfect than even God, in that a human confessor had eyes to look back at you with, to forgive or accept you with. The disturbing, alluring idea of losing yourself in another person. Merging. The bit about the tryst on the beach, the nurse’s long-repressed ecstasy. Thinking of it again, now, he actually felt its addictive darkness, distilled into the pungent smell of lemon constant in the room.
Luca was waiting for a response, looking at him.
“I think they’re fantastic,” Paul said. “Your professors should have their degrees revoked.”
“Thank you,” Luca said. “Maybe you could write a letter and tell them that.”
“If it would help, I would.”
The job of looking done, Paul smiled quickly at Luca but felt terrified. Luca was looking at him differently now: waiting himself, it seemed. What else was there to show a person in one’s room?
“Anything good in there?” Paul said, nodding to the two crates of records stacked beside the turntable.
But before Luca could answer, the door opened and the head and torso of Sandro appeared. He jerked up his head once. “Hey. Father.”
“Yes?”
Sandro nodded at Luca, a cool Mafia sneer on his face. “Be careful with this one.”
“Leave us alone, Sandro,” Luca said.
“What do you mean?” Paul asked Sandro. He instantly wished he hadn’t.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he’s…you know”—Sandro put out a limp hand and wobbled it—“a little funny. Just saying, you might want to watch your back. Never know what he might try to pull.”
Paul flushed and went mute. What he was supposed to say and what he might say if he could express his anger pulled him in two directions. So he just stood there, hands in his pockets, vibrating and paralyzed and looking at Sandro so as to avoid Luca’s eyes.
“You’re such an asshole,” Luca said, more mournful than angry.
“See? He doesn’t deny it. He gets angry but he doesn’t deny it.”
“Get out of here. Now!”
“As you wish, sweetheart,” Sandro replied. Then he tipped back his bottle of beer, two big swallows, and nodded at Paul before closing the door.
When Paul turned to look, Luca was blinking his eyes at the magic carpet rug, shoulders hunched, hair grazing his eyebrows, breathing deeply. Hot eared and full of a sour energy. So strong was Paul’s urge to go over and embrace him, maybe kiss him passionately on one hot ear, that he made a fist, pressing his nails into his palm to stop himself. Maybe ten seconds passed, until he said, “Listen. It’s okay. I had a feeling.”
“I like women,” Luca said. “Just not, you know…”
And here Paul did something completely out of character. Was it bravery? Giving in? He wasn’t quite sure. “I’m a bit like you too, you know. In that regard. Exactly like you, in fact.”
Luca looked up quickly at this. Alert to it, but not shocked. It was the look of a person who had wondered but not given it much of a chance of being true.
“Really?”
“You’re surprised?”
Luca smirked. “I thought it might be possible.”
“That’s only for you to know, of course,” Paul added.
“Of course,” Luca replied with a nod.
For a while they just looked at each other, then Paul looked down at the floor. When he looked back up, Luca had broken into a bemused little smile.
“So,” he said, “should we head back into the fray?”
Paul replied, “How about we take a walk?”
The piazza nearby might be a place to go, Luca said, and Paul agreed that was fine, though he didn’t care either way. In the new light of what had been said, as they took the stairs down, Luca seemed more familiar to him, maybe a pal he’d gone to school with. Though, no—that scenario didn’t work. Luca’s difference was part of it too—his not being American. A person he’d needed to cross the ocean to find. Just out the door, Luca pulled a joint from his jean pocket, then a matchbook, and offered Paul a hit, as if the streets of Trastevere were the private spot and the apartment crawling with cops. Paul waved it off—now was not the time to find out how marijuana affected him—and felt worried, despite his happiness. Was he not fun enough by himself? But he shook it off. Maybe Luca simply wanted to relax. Because he was feeling something too.
Luca said it was a little chillier now, Paul agreed, and they walked side by side, footsteps barely audible on the concrete. His parents had walked together in the beginning too: that’s what he thought of. How bold, young Anna Dombrowski pursued quiet Virgil Novak, dropping by with the sour hard candies he liked whenever she saw him plowing the fields. How she’d walked beside his slowly moving horse, getting him to talk, to laugh, tart little lumps in their cheeks as they said the words that made them fall in love.
“Can I ask you a ques
tion?” Paul said, seeing that someone needed to start.
“Of course.”
“Why do you live with these people if they’re not really your friends?”
Luca squinted one eye. “Elise is sort of a friend. More than the others. I needed a place to live and they let me pay less since I do all the dishes and clean things up. That’s our agreement. I can’t afford much more.”
“Your mother doesn’t help even a little?”
“I told you. I haven’t seen her in two years.”
“Can I ask why?”
Inhale, exhale. “I’m no longer her son anymore. Her son is dead to her.”
“She found out,” Paul said. It didn’t even need saying.
He didn’t nod but said, “I was so stupid.”
(They were on a wider street now. A radio high up somewhere was booming opera. An old woman yelled, “Just bring me the damn ice tray, Gio!”)
“She found some pictures under my bed,” Luca said, hands in his pockets. “Dirty pictures, you know. Or maybe you don’t. Anyway, I usually kept them in the back of this art book I had. But I forgot to put them away one night. They were just lying under the bed, plain as day, and she saw them when she was cleaning—even though I asked her not to. That day, I was in class all day, and when I came back home, she was sitting in the kitchen, smoking, looking out the window with this strange look on her face. Ravel was playing on the record player, which she usually only plays when she has a big meal to cook and is tired and needs something to get her going. But nothing was on the stove. When I asked her if something was wrong, she didn’t answer me. Then I asked her again. And she wouldn’t even look at me. Then, finally, she said, ‘I packed your things.’ Very calmly. Still looking at the floor. And I asked her, ‘What do you mean you packed my things? Why would you do that?’ Because, you know, this was my mother. ‘Go to your room,’ she said. ‘Look on your bed.’ And even then—even when she said ‘bed’—I had no idea. But when I saw the pictures laid out on the pillow, my heart just sank. The thought that she’d seen that. And she wasn’t kidding: everything else was in garbage bags and boxes. It must have taken her half the day.”
“That’s awful.”
“I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I knew how she felt about, you know, men like me. But I always hoped if something happened she’d understand. When I went over to her, just to touch her shoulder, she pushed my arm away. ‘How could you?’ she said. ‘First Papa and now this?’As if I’d done it on purpose to break her heart. And the more I tried to touch her, the more she shoved me away. And then she stood up and slapped me, hard—bam!—on the face.”
They were approaching the piazza now; Paul could hear faintly the hollow hooting of a pan flute, lazy guitar chords.
“That first night, I didn’t know what to do. I was panicking. I couldn’t eat, but I threw up anyway—I didn’t have a place to go. I couldn’t bear to even put the sheets back on my bed before I slept. The next morning, she was gone by the time I woke up, and I thought maybe we could talk about it, maybe she just needed to get it out of her system, and I decided to wait for her. But in the afternoon, I heard somebody messing with our front door, and it was a locksmith. He told me he’d been told to come change the locks on the apartment—that my mother said there’d been a robbery. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t stay.”
Paul’s head felt hollow, his guts pinched and aching. His mother would have been crushed too, but would have gone straight to crying, to praying for his soul. That was how it would have gone: she would have been determined to save him.
“But she’s your mother. How could she do that?”
“When my father left us, she changed,” Luca said. “Her heart got tough. She was already not very nice sometimes, but when he left, that sort of killed her.”
They passed an open bench and Paul suggested they sit. Halos encircled the streetlights. Some hippies were drawing chalk outlines of each other on a section of the square, like whimsical forensics experts.
“It was very sad,” Luca continued, as he lowered himself to the bench. “I had nowhere to go, nowhere to live. I didn’t have any friends at school, and nobody would give me a job, probably because I seemed a little crazy. For a while, I slept in the park, but one night I was beat up—one of them was a cop, I know because I saw him later on his horse. I was just washing my face and feet in the pond, and they came over shouting at me, shoving me. And when I kicked the smaller one in the nuts, they beat me up. You should have seen me. I was in the hospital for three days.”
“You kicked a cop in the nuts?” Paul said.
Luca raised his eyebrows. “Yes. Bad idea.”
Paul smirked, then sobered. Back to the plot. “I can’t believe this.”
“It wasn’t even a year ago.”
“So when did you move in with Elise and everyone?”
“Eight months ago? Something like that.”
“And in between? You were still in the park?”
“Well,” he said, “I…” And he hesitated. “There was a man who I stayed with for a few months. But I didn’t like him. He was disgusting.”
Paul could guess at the implications. The arrangement, the deal. He thought of the tarted-up old queens he’d seen and been made sickly dizzy by in La Dolce Vita: wrinkled, prancing, dressed in silk kimonos. He thought of the American money Luca had dropped at the café.
Paul looked up from the ground he’d been staring at, glanced at the square, the lounging, squatting, drawing hippies. So. Sleeping with a man for a place to stay. The whore’s droopy breast he’d seen earlier in the night flashed into his mind, and he was thankful not to be facing Luca now. He felt disappointed, knowing that this knowledge would make it harder for him to love Luca purely. But then as his mind fell on the mother, and the man who’d taken advantage, the judgment fell quickly, surprisingly away.
Instead he felt angry. And he wished he were the right man for the job of comforting Luca now. The truth was he wasn’t the comforting type. Britta, of course, had run to him for comfort, crying when she fell and skinned her knee, horsing around in the barn, and there was the time she’d jumped off the silo ladder and twisted her knee, and he’d run in to get help and told her it would be okay when he got back. But his guidance had always come paired with a scolding. A lesson. She was wild and impetuous—always getting into trouble—whereas he was smart and together. His job, as brother, was setting her right. He thought of her as a wayward pest, and he sighed when he had to help. The quicker he could flee, the better. At seminary too this had happened, when his roommate Ted Willabrand found out his father had drowned during a fishing trip on Lake Michigan. Thank you for being there for him, Ted’s mother said, when she came to pick him up three days later, but he hadn’t really been there. In the days after, he’d made himself scarce, always heading off to study elsewhere. He’d felt not up to the job. Tell me if you need anything, he said, that first morning after, hoping to God Ted didn’t ask for anything, and mercifully Ted hadn’t.
“You can go if you want,” Luca said. “You don’t have to stay.”
Intensely, Paul could feel the safety of his room, the companions that were his desk and bed. But he didn’t want that now. “Please,” he said. “I’m not going to leave.”
He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. Luca flinched a bit, blinked quickly, and searched his eyes for something good, not relenting until he was sure it was there. Then he looked down. They sat there awhile like that. A peal of female laughter erupted on the other side of the square—a hunched-over American girl with long blond hair shielding her face like a weeping willow, pointing at something her friend had drawn on one of the chalk outlines.
He could give advice: Well, Luca, if you ask for forgiveness, God will forgive you.
Let he without sin cast the first stone. But words felt mealy in his mouth.
His hand was still where he’d put it and by now seemed to belong there. The silence they sat in had become something solid but light,
like a cloud. After a while of searching for something to say, he gave up trying.
“You got more than you bargained for tonight, didn’t you?” Luca said finally.
Paul snorted happily at this, relieved to be back in the world of language. “Well,” he said, “beats pretending to read all night.”
At the door of Luca’s apartment, they first shook hands, army private to army private, but after the shake, Luca’s eyes went liquid and he stepped forward with his arms out, and they embraced, his thin chest pressing against Paul’s, the warm imprint of his hand on Paul’s back.
“I’ll see you soon,” Paul said, not having any idea what that meant. Back to playing bocce together? Continue to meet for drinks? But neither path seemed right. Why regress, why plateau, when obviously this was a beginning?
“Yes,” said Luca. “I hope so.”
The worst had been aired, their cards were on the table, but now what? Where did this thing go? The question stalked Paul in the days to come. Beautiful Luca. His face, his lean body, his dangerous, pitiable past, his clever, slippery mind. The quickening in his heart at the thought was more intense than it had been with his other crushes. For a simple reason too: with Luca, there was finally a chance of being wanted back.
Of course, to even think in love was utterly ridiculous. For someone in his position, for Father Paul Novak, the master’s candidate in Scripture, the committed celibate, to be thinking in such gooey terms was laughable. Something Britta would think after two dates. And yet, there it was. More than simple attraction, more than simple camaraderie. More, he felt, than friendship. An overflow. A new combination. Okay, he thought one night, when he should have been making flash cards for Liturgical Practices: Love. Let me do some clearheaded thinking on love. Come at it like a space alien, the way Father Benton always said we should approach the familiar. So he flipped through Buber’s I and Thou, jotting down its ideas about the other as “thou,” not “it.” He unfolded Norb’s letter, reread the psalm in all its bold and flowery language, a poem about love of God, but still. For the three millionth time, he thought of good old Achilles and Patroclus, good old Alexander the Great and Hephaestion—brief, comforting touchstones always quickly rebutted by a voice saying that they were pagans, untouched by the truth of Christ. Not worth much.