Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  Dante said, “I think we need to talk.”

  Bev blinked twice. “Okay.” He followed her into the living room.

  He raised his glass and sipped. If he drank much more, he would to have to call a cab to get back to the rectory, that whitewashed house where Father Samual would be sanctimoniously sitting in the living room, no matter what time Dante made it home. Sam would glance at his watch when Dante tumbled in, belatedly snooping on his fellow priests, displaying for Dante’s approval that vigilant Samual couldn’t, couldn’t have deciphered devious Nicolai’s intrigues.

  Dante drank.

  He should leave. He shouldn’t pass on unsubstantiated conjectures that might shred Bev’s home.

  Sloan had admitted to an affair with Leila by saying that he had broken it off with her. Now he was spending evenings with Leila, certainly not avoiding the near occasion of sin.

  Perhaps Sloan’s admission was a lie, but in the church’s parking lot, their fight looked like a lovers’ spat. Dante would never have grabbed one of his grad students around the arm like that.

  Dante had written down Leila’s address when he had looked up her phone number Saturday. The card was in his wallet. If he could find her, he could ask Leila if she had had an affair with Sloan. Maybe they could talk about theology, too, or philosophy.

  He should not go there. He should not even call her.

  “I should go.” He inched forward on the couch.

  Bev stepped back. “You wanted to talk about something.”

  “I should go.” He stood and swayed a little.

  “All right,” she said.

  Dante would know better how to counsel Bev after he had talked to Leila. He smoothed the creases from his pants.

  Bev was too close to him, and he could smell her lemony perfume and see smile lines near her nose, minor, gentle mars that reminded Dante of the first few creases on the faces of monks who had meditated for decades upon compassion.

  He had been doing so well staying away from her. His body wanted to step forward.

  Bev had been wronged. Sloan had taken advantage of the softness of her skin and the sweetness of her spirit. Dante couldn’t use her, too.

  His hand reached forward, seemingly of its own accord. He didn’t remember deciding to reach for the back of her neck, to cup her fragile skull.

  Her head tilted, falling into his palm, golden and oak hair cobwebbing his hand.

  She felt so good. All women felt so good to him.

  Bev closed her eyes.

  Dante opened his arms and stepped against her, a hug, an innocent hug. Anyone who thought differently had a dirty mind. It was practically research, it was so innocent.

  The pressure of her arms around his waist was another step in an incremental, stuttering path, each individual pressure and touch seemingly innocuous. Her breasts warmed his chest, but her pelvis tipped away.

  He wondered if his own buried experience was gathering her body to him, if she was revenging herself on Sloan, if she was lonely, or if he was a fraud.

  His chin rested atop her fresh, honey-brown hair. “I should go.”

  He untangled his arms from hers.

  ~~~~~

  Leila had never found a drunk Monsignor on her doorstep before.

  She stopped a few yards away from him in the corridor and asked, “Can I help you?”

  Father Dante looked up at her, sideways. He looked younger, crouched and inebriated on the carpet, sipping Diet Coke. His voice lilted with drink, “Are you having the affair with Sloan?”

  “No.” Whether Conroy’s priest wanted to grill or counsel her didn’t matter. Before she had met the priest, his publications suggested he would be interesting: surmisings about the origin of the notion of the Divine in the hippocampus and contrasting the symptoms of garden-variety schizophrenia versus mental illness manifesting as possession by exotic species of demons, but Conroy’s whole freak show was too much for her.

  Leila stirred her purse and found her keys.

  “But, he grabbed your arm, and your reaction.” The priest wagged his head.

  He was trying to head-shrink her there in the hallway, where the walls were the color and heft of eggshell. Four doors down the hall, a grad student from chemistry was shacked up with a mycologist. The woman next door monitored Leila’s comings and goings like she was Homeland Security and Leila was a half-Egyptian, rootless wanderer. “My neighbors will talk. Let’s discuss this inside.”

  He retracted his legs and steadied himself on his knees. “I just want to know.”

  She jiggled the key in the locks and pushed the door into the dark apartment. Having a drunk man in her apartment didn’t worry her. She had a dog and a gun. She wasn’t afraid of goddamned anyone.

  “It’s not your fault.” The priest followed her inside. He reeked of ethanol metabolites: acetones, ketones, and aldehydes. “You are not married. You are not breaking vows. Sloan has a history of these things.”

  “It’s none of your business.” She flipped on lights and twisted switches under beaded lampshades.

  The priest stared at her apartment, decked with thick silks, plaster moldings, delicate carved woods, and lush, muted hues. “It is like Paris.”

  “Yeah.” Leila set her purse on the Louis Quatorze entryway table. The priest was probably gay, considering the reverence with which he was eyeing the pink-gold plasterwork recovered from Parisian apartments, heavy moss green drapes pooling on the floors, and rococo-framed paintings by minor artists. She breathed out, relieved. She hoped he was gay. Sometimes it was hard to tell with Europeans.

  She shucked off her coat and tossed it on the coat tree. “My dad was into antiques.”

  The priest found a coaster, set his soda on the end table, and sat gingerly on her couch.

  A straight man wouldn’t have thought of a coaster. Leila relaxed a little more, even though he was a priest.

  Meth the black Labrador dog slunk out of Leila’s bedroom, glanced at the priest and found him uninteresting, and greeted Leila with a hand-snuffling.

  She asked, “Can I call you a taxi?”

  He sipped the soda. “I drove.”

  Leila slapped the counter of her kitchen pass-though and he jumped. “You’re drunk.” She walked over to him and held out her hand. “I can tell you’re drunk from five yards away. Give me your keys. I’ll drive you home or call you a cab.”

  Between the priest and Conroy, she was the local drunk patrol, ensuring everybody got home.

  Monsignor Petrocchi-Bianchi hesitated.

  She had come on too strong, especially considering he was not only an adult but Mediterranean man with machismo appropriate for a descendant of Caesar, but surely he wouldn’t balk. Surely an iota of maturity came with being a priest, and her own callowness amused her.

  Her hand was flat open between them, and she rippled her spread fingers, waiting.

  “I would appreciate if you would call a taxi,” he said.

  Her hand fell back to her side. “I’ll make sure you get in it.”

  She called a cab company. They said they would be there in a few minutes. She reported the schedule to him and he thanked her, pensively tracing the thick braid that rimmed the satin upholstery on the couch arm.

  “I am embarrassed,” he said. “I should not have driven like this.”

  “No one got hurt this time. Get a card from the cab driver.”

  In spite of his prying into her personal life the way all goddamn priests think they have a right to, Just-ah Dante was Byronic in coloring and tragic air and inebriation, and his body and his smooth posture cast a confidence that she had noticed in O’Malley, an ease around women that came from having nailed many.

  Priests shouldn’t be like that. Sick chills crawled up her back.

  Guys. He had probably nailed many guys. She tried to relax again.

  “Just so you know,” the priest said, “whatever you say, I will not tell. You could tell me under the confession seal, and I could tell to no one.”<
br />
  God, she hated busybody priests. “It doesn’t matter. You’ll say whatever you want, anyway.”

  He held his temple with one hand, quite the tortured Heathcliff.

  “You priests make all the rules and get pissed off when people don’t follow them, threaten them with made-up curses and punishments. You don’t even believe in Hell, do you?”

  The priest’s eyes widened like speeded-up black roses blooming. “Yes, I believe in Hell.”

  “Real Hell? Under the ground?”

  “No,” he said. “But we humans are adept at creating our own, personal Hells on Earth.”

  He walked over to where she stood by the kitchen. His hand darted toward her face and retreated, and she jerked back.

  That reach for her was unconscious, a habit, like in the bar. He wasn’t gay. He was in her apartment because he wanted some ass.

  Her heart shook and her breath cowered in her chest. “Don’t touch me.” She stepped toward him, and the aggression in her step drove the priest backward. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

  Leila glanced at the Caller ID on her ringing phone. “Your taxi is downstairs.”

  The priest stood and gathered his black coat around him. The white square of his Roman collar peeked out. “I would like to talk to you more.”

  Prying jerk. “Your cab is waiting.”

  He stepped into the hall and said, “Let me buy you dinner tomorrow, to talk.”

  “Goodbye, Monsignor.” She closed the door. She watched from her window as the priest got into the cab.

  Asshole. Thought because he was a priest that he could ask anything he wanted and pass judgment on her.

  Fuck him.

  ~~~~~

  Tuesday morning, Conroy sipped his coffee at the kitchen table while his girls chattered and Beverly cooked.

  Only a few more mornings until he could wake up alone.

  Bev asked, “Is scrambled all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Maybe his cholesterol would go down if he didn’t eat Beverly’s eggs fried in butter three times a week. “I found another empty wine bottle in the recycler last night. Were you drinking?”

  “No. Dante had one glass. I didn’t have any.”

  “That priest was over here again?” His cup rattled on the table. Damn sneaky priest.

  “For supper. Since you’re never home.”

  This was turning into arguing and the girls were right there, but Dinah pushed two lumps of egg around her plate, racing them. Christine stared at her lap, oblivious.

  He asked, “If the priest only had one glass, why is the bottle empty?”

  “I poured the rest down the drain.”

  “You did?”

  “That’s the rule. No leftover alcohol in the house.”

  “All right.” Conroy drank the rest of his coffee and went to the lab.

  ~~~~~

  Dante’s hangover tapped his temples but didn’t ricochet inside his skull. He called a cab, ducked into the rectory’s Volvo in Leila’s parking lot, and drove over to Bev’s.

  He stood outside the strong door of Bev’s house, toying with the brass knocker and trying to decide whether the affair between Leila and Conroy was ongoing or over. The cold February wind lapped his coat and ungloved fingers, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets.

  He rang her doorbell, and moments lapsed. Relief played in his chest. He didn’t have to do this, he could think more about whether he was right or not—but Bev answered the door.

  “Oh!” Her brown hair was bound into a ponytail, and she wore slacks and a red tee shirt. “Come in out of the cold. Want coffee?”

  His temple squeezed, the beginning of a dark caffeine jones. “Yes, thank you.”

  Bev giggled. “I needed a little extra coffee this morning, too. How do you take your coffee? Light? Sweet? Irish?”

  “With cream or milk,” he said. In the kitchen, she poured two cups, and they sat at the kitchen nook with windows facing the tree-enclosed back yard. The trees were stark, frozen wood.

  The coffee was weak and bitter. Hazelnut flavoring attempted to compensate but failed. Italian coffee was never so dilute, and Roma was never this cold, either. Weak coffee and cold air, the New World was a tepid place.

  She studied him and laid her hand on the table between them.

  He swirled his cup and stared into the beige opacity roiling in blue ceramic. “Bev, I’m sorry. I don’t want to say, but I think Sloan was having more than one affair.”

  “Oh.” She retracted her offered hand and stirred her coffee. She stared out at the back yard, where swings swung in the wind. Her spoon clinked on the cup, and scraped, and clinked. “How do you know?”

  “I saw them together. I talked to the woman.”

  She set her spoon on her saucer and sipped. “It’s not so shocking the second time.”

  The coffee cup cooled between his palms, imparting warmth into his chilled hands. He reached out and rested his now-warmed hand on her shoulder, near her neck. It was a priestly gesture, a measure of comfort after bad news.

  Bev asked, “What should I do?”

  Her shoulder was soft under his fingers: thin shirt, bra strap, softness, resilient muscle, and crisp bone. His words were asinine vibrations in the air. “I can’t counsel you to divorce.”

  Bev sipped her coffee, and sinew and flesh shrugged under her shirt and his hand. “I’m a substitute teacher. I can’t take care of my girls alone.”

  “There is alimony and child support,” he said.

  Bev scooted her chair over so that they looked out the window side by side. He bent his arm so that his hand stayed on her shoulder closest to him and reached no further. He shifted, but retracting his hand was another injustice.

  “The courts don’t do that anymore. Women should be able to take care of themselves and their children and look foolish if they believed marriage vows. After divorce, the children always sink to the socioeconomic level of the ex-wife, which is always lower than the ex-husband’s. Men are rewarded for divorce.” She sighed. “The girls would have to go to public school. I know it isn’t a tragedy, public school. OLPH feeds into Xavier Prep. Xavier sends ten or twenty girls to Ivy League schools every year, and the next fifty to top Catholic universities and the Sisters. None of the public high schools around here send more than the valedictorian to good schools. I know my girls can overcome challenges, but I thought I could give them a good education.”

  She laid her head on his shoulder. Her head wasn’t heavy, but her weight squeezed the deltoid muscle around his shoulder. He was too aware of her weight and his body. He should back away, but he could stop this at any time and she was frail right now.

  She said, “And being alone. I haven’t been alone for thirteen years.”

  Dante dragged his innocent arm around and held her shoulders. He was only comforting her. He wasn’t a slave to his body. He would not break his vow of celibacy. He should be kind, supportive, and compassionate. This woman was in crisis.

  She said, “I don’t want to uproot the girls.”

  She turned her head on his shoulder. Dante stared at the red and yellow plastic swing set huddled in the dry winter grass. None of the colors in Leila’s apartment had been so uncomplicated. Auburn and pinks burnished the old gold plaster in the living room. The mossy curtains were tinged with sunlight glints and navy blue, deep-water shadows, like being sunk in a pond.

  He smoothed her schoolgirl hair. As a psychiatrist and a priest, he should maintain a professional distance from this woman’s soft body.

  Heat drove though her tee shirt and melted his black clothes.

  She said, “I don’t know what to do.”

  He couldn’t tell her to divorce. He wouldn’t counsel her to stay.

  Her arm wove around behind him.

  Outside, a straw-brittle vine clung to a tree skeleton. Her breath whispered on his neck, just above his Roman collar.

  A discordant note rang in his mind and clenched his spine. His weak flesh th
at he had laid before the altar when he had taken Holy Orders, defied him, blooming and heating from that point where her breath touched his bare neck.

  “Tell me what to do,” she whispered, and her lips touched his neck, a spark jumping.

  His voice leaked through his clenched larynx. “You have to decide.”

  He should leave. Thoughts skimmed: that Bev was storm-tossed in the choppy seas of her breaking marriage, that he had committed not to touch a woman’s soft shoulders and hair like this, that his Holy Orders were the dividing line between a wasted era tipping women into his bed and a time when he looked higher and averted his eyes from his own flesh, that staying in her arms that were pulling him closer would cement for her that men were rutting beasts, that he was a beast, that she needed comfort and that pulling away would prove to her that she was undesirable, that he had waited too long to pull away, that his soul was damned and that he had never believed in the existence of the soul.

  Her breath rasped on his neck and traveled down his veins to his heart, which slammed in his chest and splashed his blood in his arteries against his skin, and he turned to ask her to stop but her lips were on his, sweet with sugar and hazelnut and whiskey.

  Her hands moved on his black shirt, and his shirt pulled on the scruff of his neck, and he should stop, he should stop, he should stop.

  He stood, knocking over the kitchen chair, and she stood with him, still kissing.

  Elemental habits were ingrained in his male body like striations in wood, deep through him, each the accumulation of years. The mortifications during his short time as a priest hadn’t permeated his flesh or charred away the marks that years of women had left under his skin. The vestments, the alb, and the cassock had camouflaged the man who liked to taste women, touch them, and herd them into his bedroom.

  He lifted her in his arms, that little bit of woman that he wanted to press himself into and pin to a bed, crash into her, and habit and lust ripped through his cloth-thin, priest-black plating.