The Wanting Life

by Mark Rader

  “I guess I should listen to you more often,” Paul replied.

  “Anyway,” Luca said, “I don’t want to keep you. I was going to suggest we meet for coffee, like you said. But now that you’re sick…”

  Paul felt offended that Luca might even consider not seeing him. Unfair, of course, as that was exactly what he’d considered on the bus. “No,” he said. “I want to see you. Of course I do. I still have a week. I want to say goodbye.”

  “You’ll give me the flu to remember you by…”

  “You don’t like that idea?” Paul said.

  “We’ll be careful. No touching whatsoever. Not even a handshake.”

  Warmth rippled through him.

  The tenth, it was decided. Coffee at the place just across the river. The Thursday before he flew out.

  By the next morning, the ache and fatigue had lifted, and Paul was in the clear. He had a week before the exam, and in that time, he crammed like his first-year self again: the growing tree of all he’d learned pushed its branches all the way out, sprouted leaves, and he climbed up and bounded from limb to limb, until he knew every knot, every flutter.

  On the appointed day, his questioners were tough, but there were no big surprises. When he got a question he was less confident in answering, he stalled by giving context and setting the foundation, before winding his way forward to an answer. In answering the questions, he was reminded of the breadth of what he’d discovered, how far he’d come. At the end of his defense, each member of his committee shook his sweaty hand, and he passed, as he expected to do. A seven plus, which was very good, though not great.

  Then two yawning days remained. Freed of the burden to know things, his head felt light. Also, his stomach hurt and he felt impossibly distracted. He packed up his suitcases, took a few long, meandering walks, made one last visit to St. Peter’s because he felt he should—who knew how long it would be until he returned to Rome? There was a farewell dinner—all the graduates, good Pinot Bianco, and he got unusually drunk.

  The next morning, he woke up with a pounding headache. Rain had fallen all night, and when he left to meet Luca, there were puddles in the shallowest spots on the streets to avoid, glaring with a harsh gray light.

  Walking along those damp streets, he felt detached from his body, as if it were a puppet he was only partially operating. He was going to see Luca to say goodbye, probably forever, yet this was an absurd thing to do. In the days since they’d spoken on the phone he’d vaguely justified this one last meeting: he’d be busy studying; he didn’t want to overdo it, sour the lingering good feeling. But now he cursed himself for being so stingy. They should have spent as much time together as they possibly could. He should have found the time.

  He arrived at the café first, ordered a macchiato, and sipped it nervously, keeping watch out the window. About ten minutes past the hour, Luca finally rolled up on his bike, stopped, looked around inside, waved. He had a new, unfortunate haircut: that was the first thing Paul noticed. Too much off the back, not enough in the front, like a curly black mushroom.

  “Don’t say a word,” Luca said, first thing. “I need someone to fix it. I tried doing it myself.”

  “I didn’t say a thing,” Paul said.

  Since it was awkward to sidle around the little table he was sitting at, Paul didn’t stand up to embrace him, so Luca just sat down. At first, they talked only of the previous few days. There was some horrible news: Luca’s camera had been stolen, and he suspected Sandro, though Sandro denied it. And Luca had no proof. People did get robbed, and Elise’s glass-blown ashtray was also missing, though of course Sandro could have stolen that to keep up the appearance. Paul was pleased for this drama to listen to, the chance to tell Luca he was sorry. To feel something other than his own sense of loss. Luca asked Paul how the last little while had been, since he’d been sick. Paul summed up his test and his wanderings, exaggerated how busy he’d been.

  “I can’t believe I’m actually going back,” he said. “It hasn’t sunk in yet.”

  “You were here three years, right?” Luca said, though he knew.

  “Yeah, three years.”

  “I wish we’d met sooner,” Luca said.

  “Me too.”

  “I’m going to miss you,” Luca said. “I feel we have a very special friendship.”

  Paul teared up: very special, yes. But please, this was more than friendship. He had the useless urge to take Luca by the hand and walk him into Il Castello and up into his room, where they could lie again, naked, curled into each other one last time. “I will too,” he said. “But you already knew that.”

  “Yes,” Luca said. “I did.”

  They veered toward inevitable talk of the future, and he steadied himself. Luca thought maybe he’d show his portfolio to some art magazines, see about moving into a new apartment—put up a ROOMMATES WANTED sign at the pinball hall. Paul talked of the worry he still had that, even after all this, he wouldn’t like teaching, when it was the thing he was supposed to do.

  “What about being a priest at a church? In a parish?” Luca said.

  “No,” Paul said. “I don’t think so. I’m not that good with people.”

  “I’m a person,” Luca said. “And you’re good with me.”

  “You’re not like most people though,” Paul said. “You’re not like the people I’d be asked to serve.”

  “See, I think you don’t know yourself that well,” Luca said. “You think you’re so cold and smart, like a robot, but you’re not. You’d be better than most of the deadbeats they’ve got doing the job. I mean that.”

  Paul didn’t know what to make of this: Was this truth, or the biased perspective of a man who loved him—or who seemed, at least, to love him? He’d always looked down on the yeoman’s work of being a pastor. He was too smart to waste his mind on something so pedestrian. But maybe that was another way in which he was ignorant. Maybe he’d dismissed that life because he was secretly intimidated by it. Maybe being in the trenches trying to help people make sense of life was an even greater challenge than educating the future priests of America in Scripture. Of course it was. Of course.

  Outside, a dog barked, and they both looked its way. An old lady reached into her purse as a schnauzer jumped up on its hind legs with an embarrassing level of excitement.

  “So you leave tomorrow then?” Luca said. “The afternoon?”

  “That’s right,” said Paul.

  “I don’t know what else to say,” Luca said. “I wish you could stay.”

  Paul bit down on his lip to keep from crying. “There’s nothing to do about it now,” he finally said.

  “I guess not,” Luca said.

  For a while, they just sat there. People biked past the window, rushing off to who knew where.

  “I have something to give you,” Luca said. He sat up, reached into his pants pocket. And what he laid beside Paul’s coffee cup was a print of him in the hotel, in bed by the window. The photo paper was slightly curled. He looked younger without his glasses. Look alive—that’s what Luca had said the moment before he snapped it.

  “I think it turned out nice,” Luca said.

  “I look a little out of it.”

  “You look dreamy,” Luca said. “There’s a difference.”

  Holding the picture lightly with his fingertips, Paul suddenly wished himself to be Italian, and single, someone who might live around the corner. One of the young men all around them, with no reason to ever leave.

  “Luckily, I took out the film before Sandro stole it,” Luca said. “If not, I think I would have killed him.”

  With this, finally the tears came, and Paul put his hand over his eyes as his back shook.

  “Hey,” Luca said, and when Paul looked at him, his chin was shaking too. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Paul nodded, opened his mouth, bottom teeth out, breathed. Luca set a few coins on the table, then Paul followed him outside. Luca unlocked his bike, then turned to Paul, grabbed his forearm,
and pulled him into a hug. In view of the café, Paul held on a little too long, and Luca lowered his head to Paul’s shoulder. Then, too quickly, Luca pulled away and moved to his bike. He swung a leg over the frame and straddled it.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again someday,” he said.

  Paul nodded. “I hope so.”

  “Travel safe.”

  Paul nodded. “You too.” Which didn’t make sense, exactly, he realized. Though maybe it did, in the bigger picture.

  Luca set his foot on one of the pedals, then stood up to push down on it, and the wheels turned. Paul watched him roll away—the moppy back of his head, the little wedge of skin exposed between the bottom of his shirt and the top of his jeans—until he turned onto a street and out of sight. Then he lowered himself to the ground and wept.

  There were tears in Britta’s eyes when he finally grew silent.

  The furniture that held them seemed precarious, as if instead of a hardwood floor below them, it was the membrane of a giant balloon.

  “Is he still alive, or you don’t know?” she asked.

  “He died years ago,” Paul said. “Almost twenty years ago, I think it was the fall of 1990, I tried to track him down. This was before the internet, of course, but I ordered a Rome phone book and had it shipped to me and found his mom’s number. When we talked, she told me he’d died two years before. From the way she described it, I’m pretty sure it was AIDS.”

  Britta nodded. “So that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was it.” He cleared his throat. “We did write letters for a little while after. But then he stopped writing back.” Five letters total on his end, three total from Luca. What he’d told himself, when the replies stopped coming, was that Luca had lost the return address or moved out of town. But in his heart he knew it was just that Luca, being so young and free, had decided that he couldn’t live in the past; he needed to keep his heart open for the next one who would come along.

  “The summer you got back was the summer I was pregnant with Maura, wasn’t it?” Britta said now.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I remember when I came home to see you, you seemed sadder than usual. Quiet.”

  “I was.”

  “I thought you just missed living it up in Rome.”

  “That was certainly part of it.”

  “But most of it was missing Luca.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She nodded, appreciating how it all made sense.

  “Mom could see something was wrong and kept asking me what it was. But then, lucky for me, once you told everyone you were pregnant, she stopped worrying about me and started worrying about you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Britta replied, a smile in her eyes.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you for that.”

  He wondered if she ever thought about the conversation they had one morning that June, a month and a half before she’d told their parents her news. Right after breakfast, they’d gone for a walk in the woods—her idea—the way they had as kids, on the hunt for the wild morels their dad liked to eat fried up with butter. As they walked, dew dampening their shoes, she asked him what he’d been up to since being home, what he missed the most about Rome, whether Mom was driving him crazy yet. Then he asked her to tell him about Ray, whom he’d heard about only from the letters their mother sent. She said that he was very good-looking, like a more handsome Mick Jagger, but that she wasn’t sure if she loved him. That sometimes she hated his guts. And then, in a clearing, a few moments later, she stopped and told him she was pregnant. Almost three months along.

  She looked surprised more than scared when she said the words, as if she still couldn’t believe it was true. I presume this wasn’t planned, he said, and she said, No, it wasn’t. She always imagined having kids someday, she told him, just not so soon. Not only did she and Ray barely make enough money to afford their shitty little apartment, but she didn’t even know if she wanted to stay with him long term.

  To be honest, she said, hesitating, I’m not even sure I want to have the baby.

  You’re talking about adoption, I hope, he said.

  No, she said. I’m not.

  His heart had sunk at the thought. If their parents knew that their daughter was even contemplating an abortion, they would have been heartbroken—though, at this point, probably not shocked. Which was why, of course, she hadn’t told them.

  You know how I would feel about that, he said.

  Yes, I think I do.

  I obviously can’t tell you what to do, he continued. You’re going to do what you want. But I worry, Britta, knowing you, that if you don’t have the child, you might regret it the rest of your life.

  She nodded. I worry about that too.

  If you gave it up for adoption, you’d make some other family very happy, he said, as hard as I know it would be to do that.

  She looked down at the ground, avoiding his eyes.

  But if you ask me, he continued, I think if you did have the child and decided to keep it, you would make a wonderful mother, whether you had your life figured out or not.

  At this, she lifted her head. And he saw what he’d not understood: that she secretly wanted it and hoped he was right.

  Ray doesn’t want you to have it, does he? he said.

  No, she said.

  But you’re not sure if you agree.

  She sniffed and nodded. Yes.

  Looking at her then, in the morning light of the forest, he’d imagined her as a mother for the first time: long Venus de Milo hair, big white caftan, warm laugh—cradling an infant in her big freckled arms. The most natural thing in the world. There was a little life growing in her, he realized. Three of them were present. And as they stood there in silence, the strangest thing had happened: he’d imagined he heard its cry—clear as day. Her cry. The creature that would become Maura.

  After they’d embraced and brushed their teeth, Paul went to bed feeling lighter—for having finally told the story, maybe, or for having relived that spring so long ago. That night, he had a wordless dream in which he and Britta had paid a visit, here in Rome, to an older man with a big mop of white hair, whom he understood to be Luca, if he were still alive—room upon room of his apartment filled with giant photographs of faces overlaid with birds, sky, buildings. The next morning, around six, he woke to the patter of light rain, a sound he usually loved. But as he lay in bed listening to it, an old man alone in a bed in a rented room in Rome, any remnant of relief the previous evening had given him curdled into sadness. Little by little at first, and then, without warning, a free fall.

  Tomorrow morning, he thought, they would fly back, and this desperate little grace period would end. And then no more distractions. Nothing left to do but suffer and die. As he lay there, looking up at the ceiling, he sensed the poison in his cells gathering like storm clouds. His side throbbed, his head hurt, his tongue was dry. Feeling suddenly, achingly, claustrophobic, he got up as quickly as he could, walked to the bathroom, filled the water glass he kept there, and drank it quickly down. In the mirror was his face, fear glinting in his eyes.

  When he went into the living room, last night’s sofa and the chair Britta had pulled up beside it reminded him of his confession. But instead of lingering in the relief he’d felt in its immediate aftermath, the adrenaline that had coursed through him as he’d lay down to sleep, his mind, no longer under the spell of last night, delivered a stark and bitter truth: just as he’d survived the sharing of his secret fully intact, he would have survived leaving the Church. He’d always wondered what it would feel like on the other side, and now, too late, he knew.

  By the time Britta emerged from her room in running shorts and a T-shirt, his defenses had deserted him. It was nine in the morning, he was sitting stunned in Britta’s chair, and he felt despondent.

  “Paul?” she said. “What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  “I’m such a coward,” he said. Bile climbed his throat.
He felt faint.

  “Are you talking about not leaving the Church?”

  “Yes,” he said. “What else?”

  “What happened this morning?” she asked. “I thought we had a good night.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Listen,” she said. “I know you’ve been stuck on feeling regret lately. And it’s your right to feel whatever you want. But I have to say, when I look at your life all I see is how much good you’ve added to the world. I mean, Paul, seriously. Just think how many people you’ve helped.”

  He said nothing.

  “The things you did at Iggy’s had a real effect on people. A profound effect. I mean, how many people can really say that?”

  “A lot, actually,” he said.

  “Oh, stop.”

  “I know I’ve done good things. Everybody has. But I could have done good things and had a partner too. If I’d left.”

  At this, Britta didn’t know how to respond. Good, he thought. Now you’re getting it.

  “I mean, look at you and Don,” he continued. “Think of how happy you were together. Do you really think you would have been as happy on your own?”

  “But we were lucky,” she said. “Not everybody’s so lucky.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I could have been lucky too.”

  She lowered her head. “What would you have done for money? If you left?”

  “I don’t know. Teaching. Counseling. Something like that.”

  “Would you have stayed in Northfield?”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe Madison or Milwaukee. Maybe Chicago. For a little while, I thought I might move to St. Louis, to be near you.”

  “Oh, Paul,” she said.

  “Nothing to do about it now.”

  He wanted this to be the end of the discussion. He wanted to wallow in awful certainty. But Britta said, “I feel the need to remind you that you’re depressed, by the way. You can’t trust everything you’re feeling now. This isn’t the real you.”

  “It is though. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “It’s part of you. But it’s not all of you.”

  “Fine. But it’s an important part of me.”