Did he need a buffer between himself and the church now? Temple's presence, as a non-Catholic, might help him view the sacrament of mass with some distance. Since leaving the priesthood, he had found himself reluctant to attend. Was that the result of guilt, or envy?
One thing he knew: how hard it was to watch other men perform the rituals learned by heart and soul so long ago. At the masses he had attended since leaving, he seemed to view the rite through the wrong end of a telescope, as if he were standing at the church door watching a distant puppet show. Attending mass only emphasized his unique and separate status.
So maybe he wanted Temple there as a partner in crime. After all, now he had "last night" to fret about. Despite himself, he felt the same over scrupulous sense of guilt and edgy self-justification he had suffered in high school about confessing sexual sins. Not that he had allowed himself many, of those, but thoughts would come and demand to be classified as "impure" or not. Feelings came as well, and nocturnal emissions. They were all examined, agonized over, omitted from the confessional roster, then rejudged in harsher terms and presented with shame and self-disgust.
A few Hail Marys and Our Fathers usually sufficed to erase the errors, but Matt always felt that he had been lucky, that he had gotten off too lightly. In the triumph of time, he had erected such a barrier to these bitter failings that they seldom occurred.
Now the curtain of the temple--Matt winced at the aptness of that expression under the circumstance--had been ripped away, and then some.
Nothing . . . confessable, he devoutly hoped. He was so inexperienced, so armored against all sexuality, that he wasn't sure. One thing he was sure of: he was ''free" now. Free to marry.
Free to make the same impulsive mistakes other men did, free to take comfort in another's trust and tenderness. Free to reach out and touch someone, and call it wonder instead of weakness.
He was an ordinary mortal who had discovered that mutual compassion was the royal road to passion. Still the ancient anxieties stalked his mind, nipping relentlessly at every thought, every feeling, instilling savage terror. Would God strike him down if he received communion without confession? Last night he had violated the inner litany of no's he had obeyed--and hidden behind--since high school.
He knew that he must walk away from that ancient road in the name of mental health and healing, but old habits die hard, especially when being hard on oneself has become the strongest habit of all.
Matt smiled and stared almost fondly at his ugly old phone. He was lucky to have someone willing to walk new roads with him.
Temple was waiting in the lobby when the elevator cranked him down. She looked like a Sunday school kid in her beige linen short-sleeved suit, with matching pumps and a purse that wasn't the size of Communist China.
Matt was almost disappointed not to see white, wrist-length gloves on her hands, but the signature fingernails were uncovered, lacquered in a red as vivid as her unsuppressible hair.
''You're dressing the part," he suggested as they walked into the early morning warmth.
"Dressing what I think is the part. I still wish I had a cream lace mantilla." Her fingernails unconsciously both fluffed and poked at her curls. "I guess I;m not the Spanish type."
"What is your nationality?"
"Oh, bits of everything--English, Scots, French."
"Good Lord, your ancestors got around."
She shrugged. ''So did yours."
He shook his head. ''Half Polish, and reared all Polish. What my . . . real father was I don't know. Mom didn't want to talk about him."
''Devine. It could be French: de Vine."
"Whatever its derivation, it was always a pain to explain. I stood out like a sore thumb at St.
Stanislaus School, and later--"
"I'll drive," Temple said as they arrived at her car.
She unlocked the driver's door, then leaned across the seat to unlock his door, before donning her prescription sunglasses.
The car started eagerly and once she got it in motion, she smiled at him. "And later ... I bet you had a hard time living it down. No matter what role you played, that name was just too perfect."
He nodded. "Maybe. But I didn't mind it as much as you might think, the teasing. At least it wasn't Effinger.' "
Matt rolled down the window, since Temple hadn't put on the air conditioner. He decided not to tell her his new resolve: to pursue the enigma of the corpse that might be Effinger until every question was answered. A soothing breeze wafted into the car. Temple's casual presence took an edge off the Sunday obligation, made him feel part of an audience, rather than a performer.
Her easy resumption of their ordinary day-to-day relationship released any clinging guilt.
Life was a usually predictable, placid river with places to go; its whitewater patches were intermittent intensities--crises, pain, passion.
As they drove onto the school playground that functioned as a church parking lot, Matt studied the families trickling up the shallow stairs through the big wooden double doors of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He noticed the nuns greeting parishioners at the door, and felt self-conscious suddenly about being with Temple. How would Sister Seraphina construe this? As defiance, bringing a non-Catholic woman? As loudly and clearly announcing his ex-priest status to her?
''How nice to see you again, dear," she cooed at Temple when they had made their way to the top of the stairs.
Sister Superfine cooing?
Temple seemed to think nothing of it, she merely glanced with what she thought was surreptitious speed at the nuns' bare, grizzled heads.
''Matt." Sister Seraphina took his hand in her own cracked aged one. She squeezed, hard.
"Good to see you here."
He breathed easily once past the gantlet of nuns at the gate, but Temple suddenly pressed his forearm, her longish nails biting into his skin.
"Oh, God. I mean, excuse me. Molina!" she whispered in throaty despair. "Does she always go to this mass?"
"I don't know." The homicide lieutenant was entering by a side door with her daughter, who was wearing jeans, t-shirt and a defiant expression.
Matt paused by the Holy Water font to touch his fingertips to the cool sponge and make the sign of the cross.
Temple waited, but eyed the yellow sponge stranded in its grandiose stainless-steel-lined white marble bowl as if it were something dead washed up on a beach.
He leaned down to her, automatically whispering in church. "These old Holy Water fonts were once filled with blessed water, but since the trick with the red dye, I think Father Hernandez capitulated to modern times and converted to a Holy-Water soaked sponge. It's less messy and more economical."
"And it discourages pranksters," she added, nervously eyeing the impressive width and length of the central aisle.
For a split second he saw the familiar sight of a church interior through a stranger's eyes.
The ranked pews gleaming with golden oak polish, the elaborately carved and plastered altarpiece, the altar, the hanging vigil light beaming its red greeting. He had always found this scene awesome, inspiring and calming, especially when the deep-throated chords of an organ swelled to fill every crevice and linger among each bit of holy bric-a-brac.
Temple teetered on her modest heels and bit her lip. Matt took her elbow and steered her behind the last row of pews, to a side aisle. Halfway down, he gestured her into one of the pews.
She slid in and sat quickly, looking around. "I'd have felt like a Miss America candidate or something worse--maybe a bride--going down that big aisle, "she confided in the accepted whisper."
''Nobody's looking at anybody," he whispered back.
''Oh, yeah? Molina is giving us the Big Eye, or didn't you notice?"
Matt glanced around until he spotted the lieutenant and her daughter across the aisle. If she had been watching them, she wasn't now.
Matt pulled two paperback missalettes from the rack on the pew-back before them and handed Temple one. The corners were curled from previous use
. They seemed so disposable, compared to the black leatherette-bound missals of his mother's day.
"Is there a lot of kneeling?" she asked anxiously. "I'm not good at kneeling--bony knees."
"You can always sit instead, and you should have seen the old days, at the Latin mass they held at St. Stan's. But the kneelers are padded, see."
She dubiously eyed the folded kneelers.
Then a small bell rang and the altar boys were entering-- Matt winced, knowing few Catholics would be able to regard them with as innocent an eye now that several scandals had surfaced.
Everyone stood at Father Hernandez's entrance--why did he keep couching every action in the terms of a play? Matt wondered--and Temple followed suit, playing her part like a diligent bit player.
Matt was suddenly glad for his instincts and her presence. She was the cautious stranger in his world now, as he had been in hers last night. Each had their uncertainties and strengths.
And then the ritual began, the words and actions that were as automatic as breathing, and Matt was watching, listening, thinking, partaking, released from being any more than what he was now, what he might become later.
Beside him, Temple read along and recited where the missal called for it; she sat and stood and--when called for--watched him flip down the kneeler and then settled upon it so gingerly that he almost laughed out loud.
Before Matt knew it, the central sacred part was unfolding as Father Hernandez held up the chalice and the Host. And he was able to watch, to participate in a passive sense where once it had been active. And, thanks to Frank Bucek, he felt his heart lighten and pride for Father Hernandez suffice this moment, a pride for himself that he had answered the ugly question without creating any more unnecessary ugliness. Like Christ, Father Hernandez had been falsely accused. Unlike the Savior, he had been privately found innocent and spared the public trial and crucifixion. Innocence is often hard to prove in life. Matt thought, and one's own innocence is the most ambiguous of all, but this case was closed. And, Matt knew, he would never have been able to act, to ask, had he not seen Temple refuse to leave unanswered questions lie like sleeping dogs.
So he saw it as a serendipitous circle: himself and his new life, the anguish of his old life.
Temple a key opening locked doors in both. By Communion time to hesitate seemed craven, even insulting to everything and everyone he cared about.
Matt edged past a sitting Temple to the central aisle, where he jointed the two parallel lines shuffling over the rough tiles to Father Hernandez.
When his turn came and the priest placed the bland white circle of faith in his palm, saying,
'The body of Christ," Matt looked into his raven-dark eyes without guilt or reserve.
He saw joy teetering on the brink of tears. Father Hernandez had never stood on the sacristy steps to judge Matt, but indeed had felt judged himself all during the terrible time at Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Seeing Matt before him, taking Communion, told the priest that Matt did not judge him and find him wanting. Matt did not see him as a priest who had buckled in the face of enormous pressure, nor as one possibly guilty of unspeakable sin, as charged by the bitter Peter Burns.
Matt knew all of Father Hernandez's secrets and could keep them in good conscience.
He returned to his place beside Temple in a daze, blessed with relief. He knelt, his face in his hands, in prayer.
Then this part was over. When Father Hernandez faced the congregation and instructed them to exchange the Kiss of Peace, Matt found himself shaking hands with people behind and forward. Temple did likewise, handling this assignment like the crack PR lady she was.
Finally there was no one to greet but the one in the same pew. Matt turned to her last, taking her hand, then bending to kiss her mouth.
He could feel her hand tense at the kiss, a quick, caring gesture. As he drew away, he saw she was terribly pleased.
Suddenly self-conscious, he glanced around for Sister Seraphina. Instead, he found himself exchanging glances with an unknown woman--well-groomed, her hair both silver by age and gilded by frosting, perhaps fifty-something. She was watching him with the look he had always surprised on women's faces, one of speculation, distance and unsettling ache.
Matt, feeling naked, wanted to look away. He had always looked away. Then, caught up in the moment, the mass, he smiled at her instead. For a moment her face was blank, confused.
Then she returned his smile, sheepishly, shyly, as if to mouth that catch phrase of women in department stores, "just looking." The unspoken admission liberated him. Perhaps he had misinterpreted the women's eyes and smiles all the time. Perhaps it wasn't his looks they admired, making him feel phony and unworthy, but his instincts, his warmth. Perhaps they saw unlived life in him, and wanted to call it forth.
He glanced at Temple, who was pretending to concentrate on her paper prayerbook, but smothering a smile. She had seen the byplay and she wasn't threatened. In fact, she approved.
Matt realized such looks might not be invasive and judgmental, but wistful expressions of an other person's warmth or joy, or seeming self-possession.
Now that he had experienced this Kiss of Peace in the congregation, he pitied the priest in his lonely role at the forefront, the instructor who urged acknowledgement on others, but always held himself apart.
Matt felt the shards of his guarded, stainless-steel inner self drawing together as by a magnet. He felt a cooling inner bath, as if immersed in an immaterial font.
Like Father Hernandez, his swell of self-acceptance put him on the brink of tears. Instead of the altar boys, he saw his former self carrying the tall candelabra. The small boy from that house of shouts and sudden crashes, whose inner mantra was "I will never cry, never."
Matt had never before seen it as so adult to cry. He didn't know whether this moment's epiphany was a symptom of a fresh peace with the past, with his new role in his religion, or of falling in love with Temple, or something as simple as falling in love with life, with being alive in ways he had never allowed himself to be before.
He would need time to decide, to deal with these galloping new emotions arid insights.
He and Temple filed out with the shuffling crowd, silent. He slipped past the clogged line waiting to greet Father Rafe afterwards; he was too overcharged to trust himself. Leaving church always meant a plunge into the bright of daylight. Here in Las Vegas, the sun was even more shocking, almost blinding as it bathed the pale buildings. The eyes hurt for a second, and he wanted to reach for sunglasses.
He waited for a moment, hoping the welling tears in his eyes would mimic a response to strong sunlight, but also not anxious to shield himself from too much illumination. He had done that for far too long.
"Father Hernandez seemed uncharacteristically upbeat at the . . . end," Temple was saying, digging in her tiny purse for sunglasses. Like all redheads with blue-gray eyes, she was sun sensitive.
"I imagine he's relieved to have the parish troubles pretty much over." Matt was conscious of speaking on two levels. He took Temple's arm to guide her down the shallow front steps as she concentrated on searching her bag. ''Let's go to breakfast."
"Great."
"How about that tacqueria--Fernando's?"
Temple stopped. ''I don't know. . . ."
"Isn't it open on Sunday?
"Sure, I suppose so."
Matt was conscious of people streaming around them as they paused, chattering of family plans and food. He'd never been part of this exodus before, had always stayed behind, disrobing, putting away the artifacts of faith, thinking about his Sunday schedule of visits and duties and paperwork.
He felt as free as a schoolboy now, but Temple was looking oddly hesitant.
''Don't you want to eat out?" he asked.
''Yes, but Matt--isn't that hot Mexican food kind of hard on the mouth?"
What was she talking about, she had dived right into Fernando's hottest the last time? Then.
. . .
&
nbsp; Matt discovered' that despite his recent epiphany of self-acceptance, spiritual release and preceding sexual sophistication, his ears felt hotter than Fernando's green chili sauce.
He started fumbling for his sunglasses too.
Chapter 44
Maximum Impact
Temple returned to her condo humming the only song from the service that she had recognized,
"Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine."
She unlocked the door and welcomed the familiar quiet, broken only by the eternal hum of her air conditioner.
Today the hum was amplified, for who sprawled like a sultan on the ivory sofa but His Majesty, Midnight Louie in purrson?
''You look proud of a job well done,*' she told the cat, opening the French doors across the room to let a butter-warm oblong of sunlight spill onto the walnut parquet floor.
She stepped onto the patio for a moment, standing in the shade of the overhang, taking approving inventory of the wooden tubs of cheerful blooming oleander and her white wrought-iron cafe table and chairs. A perfect place for breakfast for two. The air was cool, and the afternoon still new enough for her to enjoy it. She reluctantly returned inside to sit beside Louie, careful not to make the cushions jiggle, and stroked his side.
Louie's big black head lifted. He allowed his ever-vigilant eyes to slit half-shut in tribute to the tranquility of home, sweet home. Temple continued to stroke the solid, soft-furred body as Louie's purr escalated to the level of a Hoover vacuum cleaner.
"Looks like your wandering days are over for now," Temple said. "About time. For a while, I wondered if you were running out on me permanently."
Louie's eyes shut completely as he twisted his face to permit Temple to scratch his chin a little lower and to the left.
He looked almost as contented as she felt.
She sat in the quiet of her rooms, full as a tick on IHOP lingenberry pancakes with whipped butter, taking inventory.
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