Any Day Now

by Denise Roig

  The pages were spread between them on the dining room table. Six in all, his day’s labours. He’d always wanted to write. And now there were no weddings, no baptisms, no people coming with unanswerable questions. Why, Father? Tell me why.

  The candles on the table flared and dripped. He watched the wax moving in ways that should be impossible for something inanimate.

  “The paschal candle,” said Rich.

  “Missed that,” said Louise.

  “Every year we made a paschal candle for Easter. We’d save all the candles from the year, then melt them down into one giant candle. Thick. I wish you could have seen it. Every year it was different. So many talented people…”

  He drifted on, knowing she was used to these fragments by now, pieces of his old life offered up in no specific order.

  “You should suggest it to Fritz,” Louise said, picking at the wax. “It’s a lovely idea. It’s one more way for people to participate. To claim Christ as their own, don’t you think?”

  Rich didn’t answer right away, lined up the edges of his pages. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea, this nightly sharing, as Louise called it. It felt more like baring, reading his day’s work aloud at the dinner table. She was such a good audience, listened like an enchanted girl, eyes focused across the room, hands in her hair. But maybe it was too soon. The words were hardly out of him, hardly dry.

  “You don’t think Fritz might be threatened by my suggesting we do something I used to do in my old parishes?” he asked. Threatened was probably too strong a word for the mild young priest at the parish that was Rich’s, but not Rich’s, now that he was a mere follower. Once or twice Rich had made suggestions. When the situation in Rwanda worsened the previous summer he’d suggested directing a week’s worth of parish donations there.

  “We could consider that,” Father Fritz had said.

  Yet the money continued to go, hard-earned dollar by dollar — St. Monica’s was a true working-class parish — to missions in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Father Fritz might consider any number of new ideas, Rich now realized. The young priest prided himself on being open, “ready to dialogue.” Yet he would actually do very little that hadn’t been done before.

  “Let’s do coffee, darling,” Louise was saying. “I stopped in at the coffee place on the way home. The girl talked me into the most expensive decaf beans. Costa Rican. La Bella Minita. I loved the name.”

  “I love you,” Rich said, watching the generous lines of his wife retreat into the kitchen. “Si, caffè, ma bella!” he called after her.

  “That’s Italian, not Spanish.”

  Rich looked down at the pages in front of him, reached into his shirt pocket for his pen. Was it too soon to edit? The instructor at the community college had urged them to go easy with the red pen. “Just get it out first,” he said. “Then we’ll work at getting it right.”

  My theme song, Rich thought, and was hit with a soft, staggering melancholy. It flowered; it grew leaves.

  “Let me help!” he called.

  But Louise was back already, plates of cake in hand. Every night she made dessert. She loved to bake, mostly the recipes of her German grandmother — heavy on nuts and chocolate and whipping cream. “No more austerity!” she liked to say.

  “Did I ever tell you I once lived on Ry-Vita and Coke?” he said as she went back for the decaf. “When I was seventeen.”

  “Yum,” she said from the other room.

  “It was the closest I could get to bread and water. Besides, I was probably hooked on Coke. I pretended it was water. After three days, I was convinced I saw God.”

  Louise sat down, poured coffee into his mug, barely looked away from his face. “Tell me about it.”

  His need for her attention had once again placed him where he was not quite himself. He felt the soft thud again. Leaves trembled.

  “Well, I only thought I saw God,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers. Amazing how willful he was finding himself to be. There were now moments with Louise when he locked his knees, refused to be led. He’d been different in the beginning. She could have dragged him anywhere.

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it? With God, it’s all…all…” Louise gestured around the room, her lovely round arm sweeping everything in. For a large woman she was grace itself. Where had she come from? he wondered again. Had she always been waiting for him? Had God set her aside just for him, just for his use? The word startled him, almost made him blush at his own dining room table, while, for her sake, he did an earnest search inside for the memory of those hungry days when he was seventeen.

  “I got quite high that first day. Felt eager for everything. I think I even read the Bible out loud,” he said, aiming for lightness.

  “And then…?” Louise wanted more.

  “Second day I was faint. Nauseous even. Oh, for God’s sake, Louise, I was a kid. I can’t remember.”

  Louise put down her cake fork. “Well, there I go being Miss Christian Mystic again,” she said, but he could see she felt batted away.

  He helped her clear the table; then Louise called her mother in Maine, as she did several times a week. While she talked — listened mostly, from the sound of it — he went back into his office, the small end room that until recently had served as a guest room when Louise’s family was in town. He tinkered with the last of his six pages. Deleted a line that felt too florid. Put it back, because, damn, he liked it.

  The paschal candle. Rich hadn’t consciously thought of it since two Easters ago, the last one he’d made since…departing. He still hadn’t come up with the appropriate word. In the early days when he was still having to deal with people’s shock, he’d used the phrase “moving on.” With Lawrence, his best friend, a priest who’d left the church not to marry but to move ever more left in his politics, a true practitioner of liberation theology, Rich had used the word “defecting.”

  That last candle had been a beauty. A member of the parish, a misunderstood older Polish man, had painted the candle with exploding colours. At the heart of the explosion was a tiny crown of thorns, every leaf exquisitely delineated in silver.

  “It’s like the aurora borealis,” Rich had told the man.

  “No, it is like an orgasm,” the man answered, looking straight into the eyes of his priest. It was a word Rich in all his years of counseling and listening and shepherding had never heard spoken aloud. Infidelities, out-of-wedlock babies, impotence — the whole sad string of human sexual failings had paraded into and out of his various offices. But the word, the miraculous experience itself, had never been called by name.

  “Yes,” said Rich, carefully, because he found his heart beginning to race. Did this man know something? “It is very beautiful. Thank you.”

  Rich hadn’t mentioned the inspiration behind the image to the priest he worked under. He’d had a hard enough go convincing him to let “members of the community,” as the diocese now called the faithful, make their own candle each Easter.

  “We can buy the damn candle,” Father Frank Kennedy had insisted. He was an old Irishman who liked order, obedience and whiskey, and disliked unnecessary work.

  “It will get more people involved,” Rich had pressed. “When I was chaplain at NYU, it brought all kinds of people together. It’s a group thing, very galvanizing.”

  “More people, more problems,” said Father Frank. “Don’t forget, Rich, my man. Granby, Mass., is not New York, New York.”

  As if he needed reminding. The truth was the candle hadn’t caught on right away at NYU either. Not so much churchly resistance to new things, as youthful enthusiasm that wasn’t matched by youthful follow-through. The first year was a real hassle. The volunteer in charge of collecting the stubs of chapel candles ran off with a Black Panther and Rich had had to buy up and melt down defective candles from a bankrupt candle company.

  Still, those were the years to be a priest, the kind of priest he wanted to be. Sometimes now as he watched TV, read the paper, shopped in one of those endless
malls that seemed to be springing up all over western Massachusetts, sometimes in the middle of a droning homily, he thought those were the best years to have been alive, period.

  The second year at NYU, he’d gathered together a trio of his favourite students. They’d drunk wine — too much — smoked a little — very little — weed and melted those suckers down. The smell of wax stayed in his kitchen for weeks, long after Holy Week had left its softening mark on them all. He’d fallen in love with Trish, the bright-faced, unknowingly funny, youngest of the three that night. Fallen in love. He smiled at the recollection, at how easily he could even use those words back then.

  “I fell in love all the time,” he’d confessed to Louise the night everything spilled between them. “I can’t explain exactly why it was so innocent, but it was. They loved me and I loved them. These girls were so full of happiness and promise and problems. I never did anything about it. It was so innocent,” he’d repeated.

  “So human,” Louise had said and had laid her hand on his chest.

  That trio — Trish, Greg and Sam — held together for eight of his years at NYU, the good years. After the Kennedys and before Watergate, he used to say. And every year, no matter who was doing what, they got together, usually with a few other less constant kids from the Newman Center and made the paschal candle. One year, Greg painted a Russian Orthodox cross on it that glowed like an ancient icon. And then that got melted down the next year, part of the new candle, one year melting into the other. Wax to wax. Dust to dust.

  “Come to bed,” Louise said now from behind him, her arm crossing his chest, securing him against the back of his chair. “There’s something I want to show you.” He stood. She led.

  It was still so new. Close to four hundred nights now — he was counting — but a mere moment in the total of his life as a man. To lie in a bed all your life alone, some nights your skin dying from the waste and desolation of it, your mind full of good reasons and mighty rationalizations. And then in one moment to take everything off, every last thread so that your solitary skin burned against another’s. It still shocked him. Sometimes he’d startle while he was inside — his body inside! — his wife’s and wonder: Where am I? The shock, he was beginning to understand, was part of the pleasure.

  She was turning him on now, lying behind, her front to his back, stroking his thighs, fingers trailing up deliberately? accidentally? to his balls. “Have I ever showed you this?” she whispered into his hair. “We used to call it spooning.”

  “Spooning?” he asked, his voice far away from her hands. This tripping away from the actual, from the room itself, had only rarely happened in all those solitary meetings with his own susceptible flesh. The M-word, the mum word in the Church. He’d hated it when mothers of teenage boys would come to him in his last parish and say, “Father, he’s abusing himself, what should I do?”

  “Perhaps we should not look on it as a sin,” he’d once said to a woman. She’d given him a bruised look. If masturbation wasn’t a sin, what could one lean on, now that meat on Fridays was OK? What was going to hold them all up?

  He was losing himself again under the knowing hands of his wife. Every night she wanted him and wanted him to want her. She slid her body underneath his, her forty-five-year-old flesh just solid enough, just soft enough, to make him dizzy. He raised himself, grasped her shoulders, let her guide him into the place he’d imagined for fifty years, a half-century of conjuring and erasing. He heard his voice, then hers. The ancient call and response.

  As he dropped into sleep later, his hand in hers, he felt again the rustle of those leaves. But I regret nothing, he thought, a loud thought that woke him up. He spent the next hour watching Louise sleep and peering at his watch. He thought about waking her, about making love again. No more austerity! But he let them both be.

  “I will talk to Fritz about the candle,” Rich told Louise over breakfast. Breakfast was his job. He had more time, with Louise still employed as a social worker at the county health centre. They figured she’d work another five years, then they’d travel. “Or just putz,” Louise said.

  Breakfast was also his favourite meal. He liked lining up the eggs on the counter, cracking them into the blue ceramic bowl — a present to Louise before any of this — timing the toast, running back and forth from toaster to stove, grabbing the jam jars out of the fridge before the toast had cooled, getting the coffee on the table just as the yolks in the eggs turned solid.

  “You should have been a short-order cook,” Louise said one morning, as she watched. And then they’d looked at each other and laughed, getting it at the same moment. He had been that.

  “I’ll call Fritz first thing this morning,” he said to her at the door, after he’d made her change hats. “This one makes you look like Garbo,” he said. “Lady of mystery.”

  “Do you think I should?” he asked again, since she hadn’t applauded his first announcement.

  “Listen, it’s our parish, right?” she said. “And most priests know that if they can’t engage their people, they won’t come back. They know church attendance is way down. Do what you have to.” She kissed him. “Love you. I’m late.”

  Do what you have to. The words didn’t leave with her; they stuck in the air, came back with his second cup of coffee. He’d never liked it when people said this to him. It implied an unpleasant, but necessary deed, something that was morally, technically right but would hurt you or someone else. One of the elders in his last parish would say this when he felt Rich needed to crack down on parish protocol. People weren’t dropping in enough coins when they lit votive candles or weren’t using the right envelopes for collection, or something equally serious. The bishop in Springfield had said the same words when Rich had gone to him a year and a half ago, having rehearsed “Sir, this hasn’t been an easy decision…”

  He went into the kitchen. Twenty to nine. Father Fritz was probably just finishing the 8:00 a.m. mass. Rich cleared the breakfast dishes, loaded the dishwasher, tried to read the front page of the newspaper. He wandered into the dining room. The candles were where they’d left them. Pieces of purple wax lay in the ashtray. Louise couldn’t stop herself. “It oozes so wonderfully between the fingers.”

  The house often felt like this in the first hour after Louise left. Full of echo, chilly. He would go around turning up the thermostats in each room. Then he’d have to go around and turn them all down an hour later. He’d tried going out right after Louise left, to one of the local coffee shops to read. Or into Northampton to walk and browse. But it only made him feel the displacement more. He missed New York; he even missed Granby, the town only half an hour, but now a lifetime, away. His last parish.

  He’d been in Granby only six years. Six Easters, six Advents — the way he measured his life as a priest. He’d asked for the transfer there, even put some force into it.

  “But you’re made for this life,” his superior at the New York archdiocese had countered gently. “You’re an inspiration to the rest of us who couldn’t do two days of late-adolescent angst. I swear, Rich, I don’t know how you’ve lasted as a university chaplain for the past thirty years. Not just lasted. The kids love you.”

  “It’s not lack of love,” Rich had tried to explain, finally getting the transfer granted when he pleaded the need to regroup, rethink and regain some kind of life for himself. “Spiritually I’m pretty burned out,” he said. “The kids need a lot.”

  But it wasn’t the kids. God bless the kids. Greg and Trish and Sam had all long graduated. In fact, Sam was a professor himself now at Penn State. Of course, no one could ever really replace the original trio. Just like no one could ever bring back the late sixties. That kind of crazy hope was never coming back. That’s what Sam himself had said the last time they’d met in the city.

  “The kids now, they’re not like we were, are they?” Sam was drinking a double latte and dunking a croissant into the foam. Some of the foam stuck to his new goatee. He still looked like Kid Sam.

 
“No. Thank God,” Rich said. “I couldn’t handle all that earnestness all over again. All that earnestness at 3:00 a.m.” They smiled at each other.

  “We were earnest, weren’t we?” said Sam.

  “And arrogant and polemical and argumentative and full of yourselves.” Rich stopped, suddenly choked by memory. “God, I loved you guys.”

  For the most part, he found eighties kids arrogant, full of themselves and practical in a way no one under forty had a right to be. But the kids who came to see him, the kids who hung out at the Newman Center were still basically tender-hearted and smart and funny. The ones who were searching reminded him of the ones who’d been searching two decades before.

  It wasn’t the kids that made him want to leave New York, the university, his nifty little life of galleries and plays and good taste and good causes. He’d begun to think about women in a new way. They’d moved in close. No. He’d moved them in close.

  He’d always been a looker, an appreciator.

  “Of course I look,” he’d once confessed to Sam and Greg. “I’m a man. I look.”

  “And you don’t feel guilty?” Sam had never been afraid of asking direct questions.

  Rich was about to explain that looking and doing were two different things, that old argument. But that would have been glossing over the truth. These two young men had earned, at least, access to his ambivalence.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted.

  “When?” Sam pressed.

  “Sam,” warned Greg, who still sometimes wanted his church, his priest, to be Bible-story pure.

  “When I use the looking to fuel…”

  “What? Fantasies?”

  “I guess,” Rich said. “Yes.”

  This was what had begun to ever so slowly change. A length of leg, a swell of buttock, a surprise glimpse down a neckline. He began to hoard the images. Even this wasn’t so new. Except the ferocity. Except the space they filled. What do I want? he asked, trying not to scare himself. He’d been tempted before: all those gauzy Indian tops, no bras, tight, ripped jeans. He’d survived all that and he’d been a younger man. What was this?