by T K Kenyon
Again, his dark head inclined. Priests shouldn’t have movie-star good looks. Priests were too dangerous to look like that.
What was that line from Macbeth? Something about how angels look. Her neurons probed other neurons, finding connections. “Have you been waiting down here for me?”
Dante sipped his beer slowly, a delaying tactic. For a psychiatrist, his tics were transparent. She could clean his clock if they played poker.
“Sometimes.” He sipped again and wiped the foam off his upper lip with his thumb. “I like to talk to you.” He looked up, and his black eyes were too vulnerable.
Flattery was an obvious ploy. She had expected a smart-ass answer or something priestishly waffling.
“Me? I’m cocky, I’m arrogant, and I’m a pain in the ass. Did I actually tell you that God is an evil son of a bitch that night?”
He smiled and ducked his dark head to sip the beer again. “You were intoxicated.”
She looked off at the bar and smiled at Monty, who was chopping limes that aerosolized citrus oil, their fizzy scent detectable over the stale smoke and spilled, rancid beer. “I can’t believe I let you in my apartment when I was so tipsy.”
“Nothing happened, if that is what you mean.” He sounded as if he were explaining it to a child. His studied, careful expression left no lines in his face, and he looked younger.
“I didn’t black out. I wasn’t that wasted.”
“Nothing would have happened. I am a priest.” He glared at his beer. “I am no danger.”
How many times had he mentioned that? Maybe every time she had seen him. “And how do you feel about being not dangerous?”
He looked up and his mouth half-curved in a weary smile. “Are you analyzing me?”
Psychiatry is easy. Just turn everything into a question. “Do you need psychoanalysis?”
He squinted a little. “Why do you ask if I need psychoanalysis?”
“Why aren’t you answering the question?”
“What do you want to know?”
Leila leaned on her folded arms. Nice of him to give her carte blanche like that. “Were you quite the Lothario before you decided to be a priest?” Lothario, that was Rowe, not Shakespeare. What was that Shakespeare quote about angels? Angels, something about angels and what they look like, their brows.
He stopped smiling and looked down at his beer again. “I am sorry?”
“Lothario,” she tapped a cigarette out of her pack and examined Dante’s chastened eyes, “Don Juan, Casanova,” found her slim lighter in the side pocket of the laptop’s case, “a playboy, a debaucher,” held the papery cigarette between her lips and said, “letch, libertine,” she ignited the lighter, inhaled sweet smoke, and blew a stream of it over the unoccupied booth on her right while Dante worked on a tentative smile, “a philanderer, a womanizer, a swinger, a player,” she offered him the pack of cigarettes but he waved it off, “stud, dog, tomcat, wolf.”
He stared, waiting for more, then chuckled. “Un donnaiolo, in Italian. Quite a list.”
She collected them. “They’re so much better than the female equivalents.”
He inclined his head, acknowledging this, and flicked his glass of mahogany brew with one finger. More bubbles joined the head at the top. “Why would you ask that of a priest?”
“Because you keep saying that you’re harmless, tamed, or caged, and those are all loaded words. It implies that you think your nature needs caging, that it’s murderous or dangerous, that you’re a criminal who needs a jail or a wild animal that needs a zoo, like a wolf.”
Dante stared at his beer, unblinking, and his lower eyelids stretched open just a bit more. He reached out with his left hand, and his bare ring finger quivered before he grasped the glass.
“Of course,” Leila leaned back in the booth, “this could all be bar talk, ethanol and caffeine. Idle language, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” More Macbeth. Her neurons must be finding ethereal bubbles of neurotransmitter sparks.
Dante grimaced a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “You would have made a good psychiatrist.”
She hadn’t meant to pry, but if he was going to hint all the time, that was going to happen eventually. “How about them Knicks? Them Madrid Real? Them Manchester United?”
“No, you’re right. Caged. It is a—how you say—a tell, like in poker.”
She hesitated, wondering if she was trying to be too smart, but surely he knew all this, and if he didn’t, he was fooling himself. “There are other things, like the condescending way you look at other guys, like you could tell them stories, but you refrain.”
“No,” he said, frowned, and shook his head.
Her fingers touched her own anxious chest. “And the way you behave around women. A couple weeks ago, when Joe and I were here and you were shit-faced at the bar,” Dante winced at her choice of words, “you reached at me across the booth, but you didn’t reach over to touch my cheek. Your hand was too low and cupping upward. You were reaching for the back of my neck to drag me over to you. You’ve done that a thousand times.”
“I wasn’t going to do it.”
“Come on.” She knew his moves as well as he did. She had dated men like him. She liked men like him. Hell, she was men like him. “Consider who you’re talking to, here.”
He looked up at her out of the corner of his eyes.
“And you have this stillness about you, a restrained energy, kind of Robert Redford, around Gatsby or The Natural.” Remembrance of those films, of sunlight haloing on Redford’s bright blonde hair, touched her, and the words Angels are bright resolved in her head. That was part of the line: Angels are bright. “It’s crouching, like you’re ready to spring, like you’re always sizing a woman up, deciding whether or not you want to have her.”
“Surely not.” He sounded dismissive.
She rapped the cigarette on the ash tray. “You do it in the communion line.”
He sat back. “I do not.”
She leaned on her arms on the table. “Don’t you ever wonder why eighty percent of your line is women?”
“Because women go to church. Skewed population sample, self-selecting.”
“Good try, but no dice.” She smoked. “Because they want you to feed them.”
A faint smile curled the edges of his mouth. “Now I know you are teasing me.” He bit his thumbnail, smiling over his hand at her.
Do you bite your thumb at me? No, that was Romeo and Juliet. What was that Macbeth line? Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
Yes, that was closer.
She continued, “So you were a player.”
“I’m a priest, now.” He sipped his beer.
“How long ago did you take Holy Orders?”
“Five years.” His shoulders relaxed. Perhaps confession was good for his soul. “I was almost thirty.”
“So why, if you were a player and a doctor and a scientist, why did you become a priest?”
Dante held both his hands around his half-full glass. “I was studying madness and saints.”
She shook her head. “That isn’t enough of a reason. Especially since you’d already been to college and medical school.”
“Are you saying I was too old?” He smiled, and his black eyes twinkled, flirting.
He didn’t even know he was doing it.
She was so right about him. She blew smoke down and away from the table. “I’m saying you should have known better.”
He nodded, a sage oscillation from his strong neck that swished his black hair around his cheekbones. “In medical school, I challenged the professors. If the statistics are true and so many people believe some religion, why do we discount it, especially in psychiatry? If we’re trying to heal the mind, why don’t we ask about their soul?”
“And so you went to the seminary?”
“I was in Roma. If you’re asking about God, there is one place to go for answers. I asked my seminary professors the same things you are asking me. I chal
lenged them. Why is God an evil son-of-a-bitch?”
At least she hadn’t offended him with that drunken comment. “And?”
“Eventually, to answer those questions, I had to explore farther.”
“So you fell into it.”
“I studied at the seminary, but I never intended to take Holy Orders. They accepted me into classes knowing that I was a scholar, not an aspiring priest.”
“But you were still a swinger.”
“At first.” On the lip of his glass, a drip of foam threatened to ride over the edge and fall, and he wiped it off.
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. The brightest fallen angel was Lucifer, light-bringer. Bright angels become beautiful devils. “I still don’t see why you decided to be a priest.”
“One of the old priests who taught at the seminary had heard of my—what do you call it?— tomcatting around.”
Casual fucking is what Leila called it.
“Some of the other seminarians discussed my indiscretions, commented that I dragged my sorry carcass into morning Mass wearing clothes from the day before and smelling like perfume and hangover.”
“We call that the walk of shame.” She was flirting. She straightened, crossed her arms over her breasts, and smoked her cigarette.
He scratched his ear. “I was atrocious. I try to pity my former self rather than despise that young man. I flouted every rule. They were lucky to have a doctor working for them, a psychiatrist no less, and I knew that nothing I could do would make them kick me out.”
“What’s your number?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. What number?” His eyebrows rose, perplexed.
Leila explained, “How many women have you slept with?”
“How terribly intrusive.” His prim smile and head tilt seemed amused, not offended. “I am sure I would not reduce women to mere numbers.” That sounded rehearsed.
“So you lost count.”
“No. I mean, I do not know.”
“You aren’t going to tell me that a woman broke your heart.”
“No.” He denied it so fast.
She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray, leaving a dark charcoal smudge in the middle. If she could just forget he was a priest, she could enjoy a nice conversation, but even the black shirt with the truncated collar tabs was enough to remind her, which was better for both of them, the caged one and the crazed one.
Dante said, “No one could say that I was unsuitable for the priesthood. I would have agreed. The old priest asked me to meet him in his office.”
The idea of a priest beckoning toward an office knotted her chest.
Dante rotated the empty beer glass slowly between his palms. He tested the air with one finger, and Monty glanced over at them, brows raised.
Dante called to him, “Irish, thank you.” He continued, “The old priest called me into his office, regarded me seriously and solemnly, and asked me why I screwed the women.”
Leila snorted a chuckle. Stupid old priest.
Dante said, “I laughed, too, but he smiled. He was a kind, thin, pink man with white hair, and smoked a thin cigarette while he waited for me to finish laughing, and he asked again.”
Monty delivered a small glass of light amber liquid to Dante.
Dante cupped his hands around the watered scotch. “I said because they were women, and I liked the women.” Dante socked down more liquor. He seemed casual but that draught of scotch was the air-gulp of drowning. His shoulders coiled inward as if he were cold, though his tone was light.
Leila leaned on the table, listening. Her own response to that question would have been similar: derision and tautology, and maybe the panic that clinched his shoulders.
Dante’s face was a slim, soft smile, empathetic, practiced. “And he asked again why I had sex with the women, what in me was so empty that I pursued women, women in plural, needing a different woman every night, staying out all night getting drunk and screwing the women when it was ruining my theological studies and my practice of medicine. He asked me what was driving me so hard that I could not sleep alone or sober or in my own bed. He asked what I was looking for. I laughed at him.” Dante’s face remained serene with that slight, superficial smile. “He asked what I wanted that these women couldn’t give me, that I needed so much that I was destroying myself.”
Leila’s hands were clamped over her own hollow chest, and she pushed her hands down onto the table. “What did you tell him?”
Dante splashed back the last of his dilute scotch and tapped the highball glass down on the table. “I did not tell him anything. It was as if I was flailing in deep water. He had stripped me until I was not anyone, anymore. I spent a week in my apartment, dead drunk.”
Leila’s hands pressed over her boxing heart. She probably would have done that, too.
“I knew there was something, something I needed, and that the women were not it.” He rotated the empty scotch glass between his thumb and index finger.
“And the priesthood gave you that,” she prompted.
“I took Orders.”
“And you found your answer.”
Dante slid sideways and stood up. “I should go,” he said. “You look like you have some reading to do.” He dropped a twenty dollar bill on the table and set the glass on it. He hitched his coat collar up over the nape of his neck and walked up the gloomy stairs. He stumbled, nearly fell, but righted himself and walked up.
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul must wear the brows of grace, Yet grace must still look so.
Shakespeare meant that angels and fallen angels, devils and demons, are bright and beautiful because they are both, at their core, angelic.
A third of the Heavenly Host fell into Hell with Lucifer.
This bright, beautiful priest was either angel or demon, for Leila.
~~~~~
Chapter Eighteen
The Daily Hamiltonian:
Wife to Stand Trial for Killing Doc
By Kirin Oberoi
At the preliminary hearing yesterday, prosecution attorneys sketched their case against Mrs. Beverly Maria Sloan, accused of murdering her husband Dr. Conroy Sloan on February 14th in his recently rented townhouse near UNHHC.
Prosecutors presented forensic evidence showing that Mrs. Sloan’s fingerprints were on the murder weapon, a steak knife, and that Mrs. Sloan’s clothes bore traces of Dr. Sloan’s blood. The defense offered no evidence or rebuttal.
The judge determined the evidence was sufficient to warrant a trial.
The trial date has not been set.
~~~~~
At Mass, Dante stood at the front of the communion line and listened to the light hymn while Bev played one-handed chords. He presented wafers to the long line of women and watched their eyes.
Most of the women muttered “Amen,” as he presented them with “The body of Christ,” but some of them did seem to look into his own eyes a little too long, and their eyelashes fluttered over brown or black or green or blue irises as he laid the wafer in their palms or on their tongue.
“The body of Christ,” he said each time.
“Amen,” the all said in return.
Their flashing eyes disturbed Dante, and he handed out the wafers more gingerly.
John the deacon assisted Father Dante with the sacrament of Holy Communion. Bev Sloan’s music drifted down on John and them all from the loft, sweetly, angelically, even with one arm broken to pieces.
John thought that a woman like Bev Sloan couldn’t kill her husband, no matter what he had read in the paper that morning. Maybe Beverly’s fingerprints were on the knife because she had tried to pull it out of Conroy’s chest.
There were a thousand possible explanations.
Herman Burkett received Holy Communion from John the deacon in his cupped hands and ate the wafer himself. He liked Beverly Sloan’s choice of light, fluffy hymns lately. They were easier to sing along to. He wondered who was going to take over the cho
ir when she went to prison because, as everyone knew, she murdered that cheating bastard of a husband and, if she got away with it, every wife would murder every cheating bastard and then where would we be?
Up in the choir loft, Bev picked out a majestic E-major with her right hand and bobbed her head to conduct the choir. Ever since the hearing, everyone had stared at her, and she worked hard at holding her cringing head up. Dignity was all she had left.
In the choir, Gomez Hererra sang the deep bass line of the hymn and watched Bev Sloan. Her head snapped back, and they all stopped singing, right on cue. It was amazing she had figured out how to play the pipe organ and conduct at the same time using only one arm. He appreciated amazing. He appreciated Bev Sloan, who was a stalwart, staunch Catholic when lesser people would have begged off. He appreciated Bev’s strong soul and her suffering, like now, when she thought no one was looking, and she bowed her head and her face creased with grief and pain.
~~~~~
On a Wednesday, Dante held sobbing little Dinah Sloan on his lap in the library.
He patted her back with a staccato, unpracticed rhythm. “There, there. Your mother, she will be here soon,” he intoned and prayed that Bev would hurry because nothing consoled this weeping child and he did not know what to do.
Bev slammed open the library door, which had been left open the proscribed hand’s breadth, and she crouched beside him, resting her broken, plaster-casted arm on the chair. She smoothed Dinah’s dark hair. “Did someone say something to her?”
“I do not know,” Dante said. “I can’t understand her. She ran in here and threw herself on me, something about the football game. There, there.” He patted Dinah on the back again. The girl had clambered onto his lap and clung to him even as he tried to untangle her from his limbs because he didn’t like the children to be so physical with him. “It is all right now. Your mother, she is here.”
Dinah twisted like a beartrap and grabbed her mother, dragging her closer. Bev’s head thunked Dante’s skull, and they both muttered, “Ouch.”