by T K Kenyon
He bent his knees so that he was at the level of her face, though her eyes were hidden. He wanted to brush her dark gold hair away from her face. “I want you to keep coming to counseling, even if Mr. Sloan doesn’t.”
She sniffed. “What good would that do?”
Her left hand clutched the chair arm. He laid his hand over her tiny, pale hand, just as he had his first day in America when she had been distraught. “We could discuss coping strategies. I will expect you Wednesday. Are you eating enough?”
“I’m fine.”
“Eat something when you get home.”
She still didn’t look up. She probably wouldn’t eat.
“Do you still have my card with the phone numbers?”
She nodded, and her hair rippled like ruffled feathers.
“Call if you need to talk, anytime. I don’t sleep much.”
“Okay.”
She slipped her hand out from under his, and the chair arm was warm where their hands had crossed. He said, “I’ll see you Wednesday.”
She left.
The mere marriage counseling was such a relief, compared with his other counseling. He wanted that break in his day.
Everyone at this parish was hunted, stricken, damaged. Though Nicolai had been the predator, Samual had not protected the children, or their parents, or the women. Even Dante could have done a better job than this.
Dante brushed his temple, where a headache was beginning to worm in. What a thought, that Dante should have been a parish priest rather than a Vaticanista, and he smiled at the incongruity.
The smile tightened the muscles in his temple, and the headache probed farther.
~~~~~
Mary, Laura, and Lydia and the rest of the choir watched Father Dante watching Bev Sloan as he wedged himself beside her on the piano bench and she paged through the hymnal. The stained glass windows above were dark. The atrophied winter sun had fallen off the horizon.
Lydia asked, “Do you think he’s going to nail our Bev?”
Laura whispered, “Stop it!” and the ferocity of it slapped Mary and Lydia, who leaned back. “Stop it!” Laura whispered. “Father Dante is a good man. He’s a good priest. He wouldn’t do anything like that.” She turned away from the both of them, disgusted. “And Bev is the sweetest woman. She would never do anything like that, never.”
Lydia raised her eyebrows at Mary, who raised her blonde, feathered brows in return.
Mary said, “Of course she wouldn’t.”
“Well,” Lydia said, “Did you hear the one about Jesus walking though Heaven?”
“No,” Mary said. Laura still wouldn’t look at them.
Lydia said, “Jesus is walking through Heaven, and He sees a gambler running a dice game and prostitutes lounging around. Farther down the street, He sees a drunk lawyer screaming wrathfully at tobacco farmers. Finally, He can’t take it, so He goes over to St. Peter and asks him why he’s letting all these sinners and miscreants into Heaven.”
Mary reached over and patted Laura on the shoulder, and Laura touched her hand without looking back.
It hadn’t been an accusation. There was something else.
All right, something else.
Lydia rubbed Laura’s other shoulder. “And St. Peter says to Jesus, ‘I keep turning them away, but Your Mother keeps letting them in the back door.’”
Laura chuckled a sad, low huh-huh-huh like a car engine straining to turn over after an icy night, and they sat, Lydia and Mary patting Laura, until Bev announced the next hymn.
~~~~~
Wednesday morning, Conroy sat at his desk—the gels in his grant filled the wide computer screen—and watched Leila walk by his doorway through the lab outside like a blue-clothed, black-haired bruise walking through the glaring day.
He watched the word-processing screen, and the black bands on the white gels blinked, shivered, and transformed into giant, red X’s. “Leila!”
Danna, his other female grad student, pretty in a scrawny and frowsy way, peered into his office. “She’s taking off her coat.”
Conroy’s fist shook to dispel the athletic anger. He wanted to punch the huge screen and under his fist feel it break or bend or do whatever plasma screens did when someone pummeled them. “Grant, gels, screwed up.” He caught his breath. “Turned into big, red X’s again.” He stopped. “Danna, you wouldn’t know what’s wrong with it, would you?”
Danna turned sideways and yelled, “Lie-la! Dr. S. wants you!”
Lazy-ass grad students.
Leila walked in, holding coffee and scratching her sleek head. “What happened now?”
“This, this grant.” He held his hands toward the screen as if preventing it from lunging at him. “It keeps turning the gels into god-damned red X’s.”
Leila flapped a hand at him to move him over so she could see the screen. He moved. She said, “You’re overloading the memory again. There, I’ve spliced it into three documents. Work on ‘braingrant3’ and grab me the day before you mail it to format the page numbers.”
“Okay.” His beautiful gels were back.
“You’ve got to teach me how to run a gel that clean.” Leila pointed one slim finger to the glowing screen.
Damn, if she suspected the gel was faked, he couldn’t show it to her anymore, even if the sonofabitch computer mutated his gels into red X’s again. “Western blot, monoclonal. Lots of blotter.”
“Yeah. Right.”
“And a fetal calf serum block.”
She probably didn’t suspect him of fabricating the gel. Everyone knew he was hopeless with computers, and graphics software was especially obtuse, and there was no way that he could drag-draw ellipses, fill them, warp, blur, pixilate, and paste them onto a gray rectangle. Maybe he should add some smudges for non-specific binding, maybe a fingerprint.
“Leila,” he whispered and cleared his throat. “Are you free tonight?”
~~~~~
The email that was received at noon, Wednesday:
Dearest Beverly,
I’m going to have to work through dinner again. If I get the grant, it’ll mean that I have three R01s, which will better my position with the Medical College Dean search committee.
Yours, Conroy
The email that was sent at one o’clock, Wednesday:
Father Dante,
Since my husband is working late again tonight, why don’t we have dinner about seven?
Bev
The reply:
Si. Grazie.
~~~~~
Wednesday evening, Bev laid the good silverware and the contemporary china on the table. She rinsed wine glasses in case Father Dante brought wine again.
Her rules were strict. No buying alcohol. No keeping alcohol in the house. No drinking alone. No hard liquor. For social alcohol, none before six o’clock at night. No more than three drinks a week, and no more than two in an evening.
Her girls would not have a drunk for a mother. They would not be embarrassed by their drunk mother showing up at school, stinking of whiskey. They would not have to hide from their drunk mother.
Because their own mother was a better example, they would not endure delirium tremens before their own weddings.
The girls were upstairs, being quiet. The occasional cascade of girly giggles reassured her that they were not too quiet, like the time they had given their dolls crew cuts or tweezed out each others’ eyebrows—all their eyebrows.
The doorbell chimed its five-note cascade.
Bev answered the door a little out of breath. Father Dante was so Italian in the trim black silk shirt fitted with the Roman collar. She kind of liked it, though she knew she shouldn’t.
“Supper is almost ready,” she said. “Chicken and risotto.”
Father Dante drew in his breath and he smiled. “Risotto.” He offered her a green bottle.
The girls vaulted down the stairs and stopped short of the priest.
“Hello,” said Christine, and Dinah said, “Hello, Father Dante.”<
br />
They prayed without prompting this time. They had practiced saying grace every night that Conroy missed supper, which was every night.
Not saying grace when a priest was in the house, good Lord, why didn’t she just curse God, commit adultery, and kill someone, too?
~~~~~
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” Leila said, “what is wrong with you, Conroy?” They had gone back to her place and now, standing in her bedroom, he wanted to talk. “I was drunk. Let it go.”
Meth, the black Labrador, frowned at Conroy and began circling in preparation for a nap. His toenails clicked on the wood floor as his unbalanced circling wandered away from his blankets heaped by the side of Leila’s crimson-draped bed.
“If you wanted to talk,” Conroy said, “I’m here for you.”
“Strip and get on the bed.” She unlaced her boots. The bones in her feet decompressed.
Meth, having meandered too far from his bed, ambled back to the blankets and initiated the circling routine again. Poor dog. He was getting so old.
“Do you only talk about important things when you’re drunk?” Conroy unbuttoned his blue shirt and pulled it off.
“Nope. I only decide important things when I’m drunk.” She yanked at her boot. The damned thing wouldn’t come off, and she pulled so that her foot was almost eye-level. She was looking at her own stiletto heel. Leather frays hung off the saddle-stitched seam.
“Like what?” he asked.
If he didn’t shut up, she was going to throw him out. In two hours, the Irish pub was going to be full of her rowdy, drunken friends who expected her to show up and would call her cell phone mercilessly if she didn’t. “When I seduced you at the conference in San Diego last summer. When I committed to your lab. When I opted for grad school instead of medical school.”
Meth groaned as he lowered his tired dog body onto the blankets.
“Those decisions deserved careful consideration. They affect your whole life.”
She wrenched off her other boot. “Shut up.” She pulled off her socks, top and jeans but left on her push-up bra and panties. Lingerie is power.
Conroy had slipped under the covers, demurely. He looked like a spirochete, a skinny gray-and-white blood worm, cozy in a crimson nest. She flipped away the comforter.
“Hey!”
She crawled on top of him and pushed him down into the bed, kissing him hard. The red gauze twisted up in the wrought iron bed frame fell around them, enclosing the bed in a claustrophobic bower, tinting the lamplight creeping in the window from the parking lot outside and pinkening Conroy’s skin.
“It’s cold,” he said under her lips and groped for the comforter. His legs and arms dragged the sheets, trying to reach it.
She grabbed his left arm, wrenched it above his head, and clipped the handcuffs hanging from her headboard around his wrist.
“Hey, what the hell?”
She handcuffed his other hand.
He grabbed the chains and dragged his skinny body across the red sheets. “Don’t you want to talk?”
Maybe she should threaten him with the handgun she kept in her nightstand to get his attention, but she shoved that idea aside. You didn’t aim a gun at anything you aren’t planning to destroy. Leila had never pointed it at another human being. It was only for self-defense.
Leila sat back, butt on her heels, hands on hips. “What is wrong with you?”
His blue eyes were sappy. “I’m concerned about you.”
Oh, God. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Conroy’s lined face was earnest. “Your father,” he said. “You miss him.”
“It was an anniversary.”
“You must have loved him.”
“That’s it.” She stood up, pushing aside the red film of the bed’s curtains, and tossed the keys from the nightstand on his naked, small belly above his garter snake dick. She struggled into her jeans. “Unlock yourself and get out.”
“But you should talk about it. And I can’t reach the keys.”
Sonofabitch. “We don’t talk. We’re not in a relationship. I’m fucking you.”
“But we could talk.” He emphasized his words with his open palms still locked to her bed above his head, as if he were handing her his idea.
“No, we couldn’t. This is just casual fucking, Conroy. This is not a friendship. In the lab, you’re my boss. Here, we fuck. And that’s all.” With a little luck he would storm out, and she could stop worrying about how to break it off with him.
Conroy’s lips compressed into an angry crease. “I just wanted to help.”
“I don’t need help.” Leila leaned over him so that her face was inches above his. He could only cram his head into the pillow to back up. She widened her eyes. Anger is best dealt with wide-eyed. Narrowed eyes led to hysteria, a noun with roots in the word uterus, like hysterectomy, coined when men thought a woman’s uterus could wander up her body and cause insanity, which stemmed from a fear of cuckoldry. Leila’s uterus wandered wherever the hell she wanted it to. “Don’t talk to me unless it’s about my PhD research.”
Conroy blinked. “Fine.”
“Do you want to stop doing this,” her finger stirred the bedsheets, “and go back to being just labmates?”
“No, no.” Conroy sighed. “You just seemed so sad last weekend.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten emotional on you.” She was embarrassed and ashamed about it. Intimate knowledge was power, and Leila feared Conroy having that power. She unlocked his handcuffs. “Come on, Conroy. We both have other things we should be doing.”
After she dressed and left Conroy sitting in her apartment, Leila sat behind the wheel of her car for ten minutes. Her gloved hands clamped the cold steering wheel, and she held it hard to control the terrified vibrations scrambling up her arms.
Damn it, Conroy was getting too close. Eventually, she would destroy him, just like she destroyed all the other men in her life.
Her father was the first man in her life who had died badly. Others, if they survived her, were ruined. Her only route to save them was to fuck them a few times and then throw them away. A few screeching notes played on their heartstrings were better than their damnation.
~~~~~
In the Sloans’ sparkling glass dining room, where the chandelier twinkled on the glass table and its reflection re-reflected on the window glass like a new galaxy just outside the window, Dante sipped the tart Pinot Grigio between bites of the excellent chicken and al dente risotto, and watched Bev Sloan and her preoccupation with the wine.
Bev helped herself to another scoop of risotto and drained the remainder of the wine from the bottle into her glass. She watched the pale wine dribble, and Dante saw sadness drag at her eyes when she contemplated the end of the bottle.
Christina and Dinah ate happily, squishing the risotto into sculpture, outdoing each other with towers and caves of rice.
They didn’t notice their mother becoming tipsy and obsessing about the wine. Her intoxication was not, then, something they dreaded. A child of an alcoholic counts drinks and judges drunkenness because there are repercussions.
Dinah broke through the back wall of her cave and produced an Arborio arch.
If Bev were so good as to invite him for supper again, perhaps he should bring flowers instead.
The girls ate their sculptures and asked to be excused. Bev granted permission and the girls folded their napkins and scampered off.
Bev swallowed the last of the wine in one gulp and licked her glossy lips. Her tipsy cheeks pinkened. She leaned on one elbow and rested her chin on her palm. Her head tilted to one side, perky, flirty, and odd in a woman and mother in her mid-thirties. “So, Father Dante, why did you become a priest?”
Dante sat back in his chair. He was a priest, her marriage counselor, a spiritual authority. He was not to be flirted with. He crossed his legs away from her. “That is a complex issue.”
“Did you hear a Call?” She blinked, twice, rap
idly, batting her eyelashes. Her face was pretty, even when she resorted to girlishness. “I’ve always wanted to ask a priest that. It seems so mystical, so holy.”
He looked down, watched his own rough hand toying with a fork. “It’s rather private. It is like asking someone about their sex life.”
“I didn’t mean to pry.” She sat back, and her hand fluttered before it dropped below the table. This seriousness and fluster, her usual demeanor, was more appropriate.
He said, “We discuss the Call ad nauseam in the seminary. The theologians simultaneously seek to discover if one has had a divine intercession and they strip all the mysticism away to make a priest who will toe the Catholic line, will adhere to doctrine, and leave superstition to the laity.”
Bev lifted her eyebrows, less flirty. She was prettier when she was less coquettish.
Dante leaned on his elbow toward her and uncrossed his legs. He responded to her not-flirting, reinforcing the mature behavior, and yet he ought not respond too much, as she could manipulate him with this if he allowed a pattern to establish.
Bev said, “I’m not sure what I imagined the seminary to be. Praying, I guess. Memorizing the Mass, special Masses, other rituals, but I don’t know what else.”
“Doctrine, homiletics, the history of the Church, dogma, theology, eschatology, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic.” Dante smiled and looked away from Bev, who hadn’t looked away from him. “I finished my residency in psychiatry before I entered the seminary. The professors wanted black and white answers because Catholicism is biased toward good and evil. They wanted shining knights, defending the faith.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “I was a problem student.”
Bev leaned over her elbows, not too flirty. “You argued.”
“There is this old moral puzzle about the sacrament of reconciliation, and how a priest should divide his mind and act as if he does not know anything that is said to him under the seal of confession. It is this: If directly before Mass, a man confesses to you under the sacrament that he poisoned the chalice containing the sacramental wine, deadly poison, no antidote, an absolute death to touch your lips to it, what should you do?”