You are one God in many authorities, come to judge the living and the dead … Rhonda thought this but then silenced her mind. She stalled this sinful turning away and told herself it was good to be in God’s eyes, and in the eyes of His divine Son become man.
On the corner, Kitty Towns slouched against a pole, having her breakfast of cigarettes. Kitty was in her forties, younger than Rhonda’s mother, but she was always bent, looking over the edge of her own precipice. Rhonda had the impression she might, at any moment, disappear. Kitty lived in the apartment next door with her surviving children, four boys and two girls. Rhonda liked the kids. They were friendly and well behaved, loved fiercely by their mother, but for years, when she was drunk or mean with heartache, Kitty could be heard through the walls yelling at them: “You not better than me! You ain’t shit and ain’t never gonna be shit, you hear me?” Before Rhonda crossed the street, Kitty’s eyes twitched up and she waved hello. Rhonda held her breath against the odor of menthol and hoped that Kitty wouldn’t ask her for a dollar.
If he had known Kitty, Father Grancher would have given her the same message about the power of prayer. He would have told her that she should get down on her knees, that she was low, yes, but not low enough. As Rhonda passed the shuttered storefront of the botanica and the lean tabby licking itself in the doorway of Benny’s bodega, she thought about Father Grancher’s lined forehead and feathery eyebrows, his pointy nose and yellow lipless mouth. With his robe and his frosted laurel of hair, he used to remind her of depictions of ancient Greeks, as if he were an old philosopher or some other white man of great wisdom and influence. Now, in her weaker moments, she felt he simply had the face of a liar. He’d said Rhonda’s prayers would still matter, even though she hadn’t been baptized, even though her family was AME and she attended St. Paul’s only to avoid the local public schools. When she’d told him months ago that her mother was behind on the tuition, he smiled and said she could pray about that too. He said the only real cost of being a Christian was giving up the habits and desires that did not align with the will of God. Well then, did God want Rhonda to remain in the ever-deepening shadow she’d been in all her life? Did God want her mother to die?
The facade of the church, its gray brick and stone, looked cold enough to burn her hand. It stood impervious to the springtime rays of the sun. Rhonda felt sick to her stomach again as she passed it. The red high-school building was next door. Students, mostly boys, lingered outside, standing at the foot the stairs that led to the entrance or sitting on the chipped metal handrails. Wilfred Jones and Ignacio Hernandez were reaching for the hem of Liz Barnes’s skirt, as if it hadn’t been rolled up at the waist enough already. Wilfred, who had become awful lately, blocked Rhonda’s path as she attempted to sidle by. His lips pulled into a smile, revealing teeth starkly white against his dark brown face.
“And what do you have under there, huh?” he said. Ignacio and Duncan Wardell laughed like this was the funniest thing they had ever heard. “You know I’m okay with a big girl,” Wilfred said. “I’m okay with a big nasty girl.”
Rhonda sidestepped and walked up the stairs. She still felt his presence though, and when she turned she saw him following her, his head close, level with her upper thighs. He sniffed at her and said, “Smells like pork and beans. I woke up hungry for some pork and beans.”
He said other disgusting things, but Rhonda didn’t respond. Even now, as she thought about her mother and this meeting she was walking into, she hated that his attention, repulsive as it was, also thrilled her. Wilfred was the best-looking boy in their class, tall, with a wide, sculpted face. He already had muscles that pressed against his uniform. Best of all, he didn’t accept any nonsense from the teachers—or at least this used to be true. Recently, he’d been acting out in boring, typical ways. Still, Rhonda felt worked up by him. Though she had this in common with many of the other girls, it didn’t unite her with them.
Wilfred stayed close until she got to the doors, and though he didn’t follow her inside, the agitation she felt from his words did. As she approached the principal’s office, she prayed under her breath. She prayed against the inexplicable feeling that this beautiful, audacious boy aroused in her. But she also kept thinking about her modified prayer, about the possibility that Father Grancher was a liar, about the possibility of God and His son as no different from the housing authority sign, no different from Kitty drunk and yelling at her children.
Wolf told Chucho and Duncan to stop laughing like a pair of idiots. He drank the rest of his beer and handed off the finished pint. When he took a step toward Fat Rhonda, a hand clasped his shoulder.
“Hey, man,” Chucho told him. “We were kidding.”
“Get off me,” Wolf said.
“It was just a joke, right?” Chucho said to Duncan.
“Yeah, just shits and giggles.”
Wolf shrugged out of Chucho’s grip and straightened his blazer, giving them all, even Maritza and Lizzie, a cold look. They didn’t understand. This wasn’t a joke at all.
As he approached Fat Rhonda, the shriek of a microphone tore through the room. Everyone looked up, shaking their heads and mumbling complaints as they used to at morning assembly. When Wolf slid closer to Fat Rhonda, he could see that Father Grancher, standing with the assistance of a current teacher, was about to address them. Using his familiar slow, deadpan sentences, Grancher delivered a monologue that described the establishment of the church. Early parishioners had referred to it as the “Cathedral of the Bronx.” He detailed the reconstruction of the rectory and tower in the 1890s, and the subsequent building of what was then a primary school. As Grancher droned on about the history of St. Paul’s, Wolf glanced at Fat Rhonda, but she ignored him. He inhaled the cloying spice of her perfume, and though the room was chilly from too much air-conditioning, the heat of her body warmed him. Grancher ended his speech by saying, “Never forget the power of prayer.” He asked everyone to bow their heads, but faltered then, unable to recall what they should be praying for. This made it all the more obvious that his mind and health were in rapid decline. As people kept their eyes closed or gazed at the floor, Fat Rhonda sipped from one and then the other of her cocktails.
“I’m in from out of town,” Wolf said to her. “You remember me.” He made sure it wasn’t a question. Sterling, he imagined, would have done the same.
“I do?” The bits of citrus pulp floated and slowly swirled in her drinks. She stared at them, rapt, as if each glass contained its own galaxy.
Drunk, he thought. Or ashamed now, after all this time, even though she had been the one to spread the rumor. A girl’s shame was a scab Wolf knew how to pick.
“Twenty goddamn years ago,” he said, “but sometimes it seems like last week. Not even. More like yesterday.”
Fat Rhonda’s head snapped up and she met his gaze. Her round face was touched lightly with makeup and, underneath, her pores weren’t visible at all. Her skin, as deeply brown as his own, had a dewy appearance. “I don’t know what kind of life you been living,” she said.
Wolf wagged his finger at her in playful accusation. “What are you doing here?” he said. “It’s a hell of a surprise.”
With a sudden motion she guzzled one of her drinks and placed the empty glass on the cake table. She extended her arm straight out and made a gun with her free hand, aiming it at targets in the room. “Shot by a cop,” she said. “Bang!” She jerked her hand and flexed her thumb, an imaginary shot she kept repeating with different targets: “Strangled by a boyfriend. Bang! Stabbed by a cousin. Bang! Blown up at war. Bang! Hypertension. Heart disease. Cancer. Bang! Plane crash. Car crash. Broken neck. Broken heart.” Satisfied with her pretend kills, she blew on the tip of her finger and then opened her hand to make the gun vanish, all but saying Presto. “You know what’s a surprise? That there’s so many here,” she said. “The Class of nineteen hundred and whatever: luckiest group of little hoodrats in the mystery of the country.”
Wolf chuckled. “Real
est talk I’ve heard all day,” he said. “Realest talk in a long time.”
“Makes you think. Probably they’ll bomb this whole place to smithereens like they did—where was that? Philadelphia? Everywhere?”
Wolf pointed up. “A bull’s-eye right there on the roof.”
“That’s right.”
“Could happen any damn second now.”
“We better get out of here then,” she said. “Go somewhere safe.” Her face lit up pleasantly for the first time.
Wolf grinned. So she wasn’t ashamed. She was still the person who had spilled about being with him. He wanted to know who that person was. “You serious?” he said. “Just like that?”
She tilted her head back and drank the rest of her other cocktail in slow voluptuous swallows. “I’m not serious at all,” she said with a laugh. “Nowhere’s safe. But we should go there anyway.”
So it would be this easy. Wolf enclosed both of his hands over hers, took the empty glass, and set it aside. As they went past his old friends, he acknowledged them by flipping the bird. The room got quieter as the two left.
Wolf chuckled. “They’re watching us.”
“Us?” Fat Rhonda said. “They’re watching me. I’m the belle of the ball.”
He walked behind her as they made their way through the main room of the bar, watching the jumps and undulations of her ass in the green dress. He’d developed a fascination in recent years for larger women, he realized, but he also recognized that none of them had ever satisfied him.
It was strange, but what Fat Rhonda had said was true. She was the belle of the ball, the center of attention. Wolf had another thought: whenever he had watched the St. Paul’s dismissal from across the street, in the wake of another disappointment with his father, he had never seen another Fat Rhonda either.
Evening greeted them outside. The air was moist, the sky oddly green. They were near Willis Avenue, where a dentist’s drab sign hung unconvincingly on the corner. Down the long block, toward Alexander Avenue, was a series of dusty businesses, all different from the ones that had been there before: a pharmacy, a Mexican restaurant, a 99-cent store, a pizza shop, a grocery with a half-lit logo. A couple of children scooted by with restless expressions on their faces. Wolf wondered where they were going. Behind the bus stop, where the arcade used to be, was a store that sold mobile phones. It was closed and appeared to have been that way for a long time.
“So where to?” Fat Rhonda said.
Wolf played along. “Not your place, I guess.”
“I go from place to place,” she said. “Dodging those bombs.”
He smirked and rubbed his jaw.
“I can find us a place. Won’t be much to look at though.”
“Forget that. Tell you what, I got an idea.”
“Honey, too many of those will wear you out.”
“Not too many,” he said. “Just one. And it’s not a bad one. It’s good.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I’ll have myself a weak moment and pretend I still know the difference.”
“My idea’s good.”
She looked him up and down, admiring the quality of his suit. “Let me guess. You already have a place, and a key. To a room in a nice Manhattan hotel.”
“I’m not talking about that,” he said. “When’s the last time you went to church?”
“Oh.” She picked at her dress, suddenly occupied by the act of grooming herself. In the street a car sped past with its windows down, playing bachata.
“Well, what do you think?” With his chin he pointed toward Alexander Avenue, where St. Paul’s Church loomed on the corner.
She blinked slowly at the building before she spoke. “You think that’s a safe place?”
Wolf took a deep breath. He was getting annoyed by this back-and-forth. “Cut the shit,” he said. “What, you just playing games with me?”
After a long moment, Fat Rhonda started toward the church, walking without saying a word. Wolf eagerly followed, but he had a sense she might go anywhere.
The school day hadn’t ended yet, but Rhonda wasn’t in class. She had decided to skip history. The green marble pillars of the church appeared garish and unfamiliar, and the many panels and flourishes of gold leaped out at her. Above the main entrance, in the gallery, the organ pipes flanking the illumined windows looked intensely gold as well. Even the uniform rows of wooden pews glowed a fiery red. Rhonda had never noticed how tacky the place was. It was as if gauze had been peeled from every surface of the interior and now, when no one was supposed to be there, she was seeing it as it truly was.
Other than the occasional noise, something like a clumsy footfall or a hard object being dropped, the place was silent. She was standing at the front, where Father Grancher stood as he placed communion wafers in people’s hands or on their tongues. Not being Catholic, Rhonda had to shift her thick legs to the side to let other students pass from the pew to the central aisle to receive the Eucharist during school Mass. They often stared or huffed at her, complaining that they still didn’t have enough room to go by. School Mass had always been frustrating and mysterious to her. Urged or sometimes forced to be present, she was simultaneously held outside the circle of its mysteries. She liked when Father Grancher swung the censer from its chains and spread the fragrant smoke out over the pews. She could smell faint traces of the incense now, slightly sweetening the air, but knew she was inhaling something she didn’t understand at all. The idea of the sacraments had also appealed to her, but she wasn’t permitted to pursue them.
The meeting with the principal hadn’t gone well. Without payment of tuition and fees, Rhonda wouldn’t be able to graduate. All morning during classes she had been apportioning the blame for what was happening. Her mother’s dormant faith, which couldn’t be called “faith” at all. Her insistence that Rhonda, effectively, live without faith too. Father Grancher’s lies, which made her believe her prayers were anything more than useless kneeling and begging. The school itself: the principal telling her its charity had already reduced the amount of money her family had to pay, telling her nothing more could be done. Now even the dignity of graduating would be deferred, if not denied. Rhonda wouldn’t even get the pleasure of the ceremony. She blamed them all, and she blamed herself for accepting the nobody role they had cast her in: a non-Catholic in a Catholic school, praying in a Catholic church to a Catholic God about people and matters of absolutely no interest to Him.
Another noise, the fourth or fifth one since she’d been there, startled her. When she looked to her left, Wilfred was standing in the same doorway she’d come through. A passageway through the rectory connected the school and the church. Wilfred walked right up to her, grinning. He glanced back at the tabernacle and then up at the painting of the Last Supper. He rubbed a section of the altar cloth between his fingers and then placed his large hand on top of the communion table, patted it a few times.
“We should do it right here,” he said.
Wilfred would also sit idly in the pews during Mass while others got up to accept the Eucharist. He wasn’t Catholic either. For some reason this similarity had mattered to Rhonda. It had been a factor in making her listen rather than walk away when he’d come up to her in the library and said more disgusting things, whispering in her ear what he wanted to do to her in the back stairwell or the boys’ bathroom on the third floor. It had influenced her when she’d called him Wolf, which she’d never done before, and told him to meet her here instead.
“No, I know where,” she told him now.
Strong light poured in through all the stained glass windows, as if the sun were a fiery ring surrounding them. They made their way down the central aisle.
“Don’t worry about anyone coming in,” Wilfred said. His friend Juan, an altar boy, had assured him.
“I’m not worried,” Rhonda said. She turned and maneuvered her body along the pew that led to the window of the Good Shepherd. Like the other features of the church, it was brightly lit in a grotesque way.
“Here?” Wilfred chuckled. He was standing behind her, close.
She turned for a moment and saw him looking up at the stained glass. In her mind, she repeated the line from her invented prayer: You are one God in many authorities, come to judge the living and the dead …
“You want me to kiss you or something?” he said.
The folds in the Shepherd’s red and white robe were dense black lines, and his left arm, holding the staff, emerged out of pure darkness. In his other arm, the lamb was small and starkly white, with the elongated face of a pouting child.
“I know you don’t want to do that,” she said.
As Wilfred’s hands undid the buttons of her shirt and hastily pulled her breasts from the cups of her bra, she was captivated by the background, which she hadn’t taken notice of before. I believed these and all the lies … The landscape and sky were both rendered in wavelike sections. It was hard to tell where the land ended and the sky began, and the variety of colors—orchid, brass, royal blue, rose, crimson, and aquamarine—made Rhonda think of a terrible, unpredictable storm.
Wilfred’s hands grabbed and slid across the folds of her stomach while she studied the disk of light around the Shepherd’s head. He touched her back and she leaned toward the window, resting her elbows on the tops of the pews. She saw that tiny pearls described the entire curve of the Shepherd’s nimbus. His skin was white, almost as white as the lamb’s wool, but it was the eyes she was most interested in. As Wilfred’s hands fumbled under her skirt, Rhonda thought of her mother and Father Grancher. Your authority deceives and must be deceived … She leaned even closer and tried to find the Shepherd’s eyes underneath his lids, hoping to feel something real and blatant and sharp, much more than she’d managed to feel or convey with her old prayers, something the Shepherd’s downcast eyes couldn’t ignore.
Before Wolf reached for the wrought iron handles he knew the doors would be locked. He’d had a glimmer of hope because the gate was open, but as he’d suspected, the church was inaccessible.
A Lucky Man Page 21