Milk

by Darcey Steinke

  “It’s been nice talking with you,” Walter said, “but I have to meet a friend.”

  Sta-fon gave him a sad smile and looked at him directly; his eyes were green again, the green of new leaves.

  On MacDougal the snow was icy and coming hard. Ice had already encased the evergreen, naked now and lying on the sidewalk. He felt his heart throb and his body felt fragile and empty, like a delicate glass vase. Fuck Sta-fon and his love of middlebrow novels. He headed down Sullivan toward the Two Potato.

  His rage flew out and attached to objects. He hated the red gloves in a store window; he hated the cold that made his cheeks burn and bit through the thin material of his pastor pants. He hated the ridges of dirty snow and the sky; he really hated the sky which was completely starless. He saw two men holding hands. He hated them. He saw a man and a woman holding hands. He hated them. He saw an older man walking his dog; he hated the man for living so long and he hated the stupid little terrier that continued to shiver even though it wore a kelly green sweater.

  Inside, the bar was warm and barely lit, and Walter felt relieved, as if he’d been covered over with a layer of warm earth. The scent of sweat and gin was like a tranquilizer, and even the red carpet, covered with a constellation of cigarette burns, was comforting. Mirrors covered the walls and a few stray bits of disco-ball light flew over the bar like flakes of ghostly snow. He ordered a Jack Daniel’s straight up and looked around the bar.

  Businessmen in button-down shirts and loafers clustered around the jukebox; a German man in leather gazed at the blond boy dancing alone. This place was definitely holy. Mostly because of the longing. God loved longing and imbued it with sanctity. All through his life, things outside the church were just as holy as the crosses and statues inside: rain and hard rain particularly, which made his mother’s apartment cozy and complete; his book of fables with the picture of the sad lion with a thorn in his paw; the way, on youth group retreats, Silk read a Jane Austen novel out loud as he drank cognac from a tiny red glass. In high school the janitor had taken him down to see the furnace. The gray-haired man had swung open the metal door and Walter had felt he was getting a glimpse of eternity. Carlos’s body was definitely holy, his black chest hairs, and the way his hip bones stuck out from his pelvis.

  The ice cubes dissolved into his last swallow of bourbon. Fuck Sta-fon and his love of Cajun cooking. The bartender, unseasonably tan in a tight mesh tank top, asked if he wanted another. Walter nodded and watched the blond boy sway on the dance floor. His eyes were closed and his face freaked with disco-ball light.

  Just the thing against the other thing. In this case the blond boy’s cock against his taste buds and, really, there wasn’t much else to report, Walter thought, not drunkenly exactly but definitely from another room in the heavenly mansion, one filled with black glitter and gnaw. He opened one eye, saw the young man’s white tennis shoes near his knees and how the black light in the Two Potato’s back room scintillated bits of lint on his jeans.

  The motion of the young man’s pelvis sped up. Just the thing against the other thing. Just the bottom of a glass against a wood table or a chair pressed up against a wall. The thing against the other thing; that was the most human of all, the most embodied, not flesh infused with spirit. No. Just the thing against the other thing. It was holy no matter how sleazy the circumstance, as it was the sensation beyond the reach of God. The feel of soft hair against his lips made him see colors: green and pink as he hung in the dark; the black light showing white buttons on one man’s shirt; and the yellow beads around the neck of another.

  Just the thing against the other thing. Walter tried to remember Carlos’s body. His black hair and brown eyes. His lankiness. When he laughed his dark eyebrows rose up in his forehead and his mouth opened. But dead people, no matter how fascinating, didn’t hold up in fantasies. Carlos had no body. His physical form was ash, ash in a canister Walter kept under his bed, and so in reality to fuck Carlos would be to fuck dust, which could be like fucking God. But before that thought got him anywhere, the young man came salty and acidic as a margarita, and Walter felt many things, including degradation and peace.

  TWO

  THE ALEPH HAD come to represent to Mary an outward manifestation of her soul. For a while Walter was fascinated by how she claimed to have seen her mother as a girl chasing a chicken on one shiny disk and on another a lady watching television. There were on other disks noisy baby birds waiting for their breakfast and a nighttime parking lot. Not to mention the dead boy with red running out of his nostrils, and the white tulip moving slowly back and forth on the tiny circular screen.

  But after a few weeks of her insisting on talking about the aleph over breakfast and dinner, as well as bringing it up in front of Mr. Cabalaro, the head of the church trustees, Walter was growing frustrated. He explained to her how, when the present became unbearable, the brain’s happy hideout was the supernatural. He urged her to wean the baby and get on the pills, but she refused. Seeing his discomfort, she tried to replicate the aleph using tiny mirrors she found in a store on Canal Street and suspending them with dental floss from the ceiling of her room. In the evening, after extinguishing the lamp, she shined a flashlight on the glass slivers and described the internal sensation that accompanied the sightings. A sucking sensation, as if her heart were sucked by the nozzle of a vacuum, and mental deterioration, similar to the mind’s assignations on mushrooms, the brain’s surface texture changing from hard metal to something damp and porous like bread.

  She was becoming, even Walter had to admit, a sort of spooky chick with her delicate frame, its angular elegance akin to a skeleton’s and her limp hair hanging around her face. A dozen times he found her praying inside the closet. She seemed to prefer the one on the third floor where he had first found her, but he also discovered her inside the kitchen pantry, kneeling among cans of tomato juice and rolls of paper towels.

  Mary said she needed to talk to him, and he decided that if she started up about the aleph, he was going to suggest again that she wean the baby and get on the pills. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. He did. But if God wasn’t going to make his message known, there was nothing Mary could do to force it.

  He’d known other people who got obsessed. One, a pale southern boy in seminary, was fixated on kudzu, its viscous growth pattern and how the noxious vine infiltrated America. Walter remembered how, in Old Testament class, this young man always tried to use kudzu as a metaphor for God’s motivations in biblical narratives. The other was a cousin, who, after John Lennon was murdered, became convinced that his spirit inhabited all cellular life, so that even a blender had qualities of the most complicated Beatle, as did her tennis shoes.

  He looked up and there was Mary walking down the stairs. She seemed thinner, less materially substantial, as if thousands of her atoms had disintegrated. Walter stood.

  “Is his fever better?”

  “I gave him a little Tylenol,” she said, taking the chair by the fireplace. Walter sat across from her on the couch. He glanced at his watch; he was having dinner with the bishop at eight.

  Flitting her hands around, she talked about the renovation schedule. The painting that still needed to be done, the work she and Junot had already accomplished and what they hoped to do by working consistently through Lent.

  “But that’s not what you wanted to talk about?” Walter said.

  “No,” she said. “I want to ask you if you think it’s possible to break into time?”

  Walter blinked. “How do you mean?”

  Mary looked at him. “Let’s say a tiny animal, a squirrel or a chipmunk, had, encoded in its very DNA, in its skeleton, the equation that would stop time and bring about a Second Coming.”

  Walter watched her face carefully; he tried to imagine he was watching Hildegard or Mathilde, any of the early mystics who had experienced God firsthand.

  “It’s possible, right, if we find the right posture, the correct way to hold our skeleton, the door between this
dimension and the next will fly open and there’ll be only the slightest difference in density between myself and my dead mother?” She paused and looked directly at him, in an effort, Walter knew, to guage his reaction.

  He knew these ideas were somehow connected not only to the aleph sighting but also to her weekly visits with the monk. What transpired between them Mary never let on, though she came home wanting to talk about the spiritual connection between making music and feeding the poor. She was an odd sight with her strained features and her hair half-black and half-blond. She hadn’t dyed it since she had found out she was pregnant and so there were a good six inches of black at the roots, and she seemed to be wearing the same jeans every day and either her gray sweatshirt or her blue one.

  He understood what fueled her longing. It was unconscionable to live separated from God, like a cork held under water; the urge for union was often untenable. But what Mary wanted was technically impossible: to feel God’s touch physically manifested.

  “What you’re saying is interesting, and I don’t doubt what you suspect is true. If one believes in a divine presence that connects everything, a fine web of interrelatedness, then inside any object, be it a squirrel or a refrigerator, resides particles of eternity.”

  Mary sat forward; she pressed her hands together, threading her fingers. He imagined he could see the green tiles on the fireplace behind her right through her forehead.

  “And I can understand both your desire for unification with the Godhead and the hope that time might give way to infinity.”

  “So you don’t think it’s possible?” Mary said, looking into the fireplace filled with ash. Her face had clouded over.

  He knew from reading saints’ biographies that there was always a point of disassociation from reality, from the material world; there was, as doctors would say, the schizophrenic break that led either to the asylum or to greater knowledge. Joan of Arc’s vision of the Virgin gave her the courage to go to war, and Walter had just read about a woman who, after her mental collapse, wore an apron with “THE PILGRIM” spelled out in felt letters. She walked miles with a radiant smile on her face and spoke to anyone who would listen about saving the earth.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Walter said. “I’m saying that what you suspect is happening all the time. Just think about the crazy foliage God sends up in the spring, those green tulip tentacles coming up out of the dead leaves, and what about snow?” He gestured to the window. “For God’s sake, look at it.” He held his hand high as if directing the tiny bits of crystallized ice. Flakes moved as they had all winter past the bay window in a gentle and glittering trajectory.

  “See what I mean?”

  “I guess,” she said, deflated. “You think I’m being too literal.”

  Walter shook his head. “No, I think you’re not being literal enough. I mean religion insists on paradox. Everything is wonderful. Everything is terrible. Both at the same time. That’s how it is with everything, degradation and divinity, the material and the corporeal, all unified so on one level a blade of grass is an everyday object, but in another way it’s a supernatural thing.”

  Mary hung her head; she was clearly disappointed, and he could tell this by the way she’d rested her hands, fingers spread, on her knees.

  “I understand my soul is like a piece of God implanted in me, and while it’s the same substance as God, it’s much more cloudy because it’s so hard to be human.”

  Walter stared at her. In her own way, he thought, Mary was spiritually advanced.

  THREE

  BISHOP SILK WORE his white cap and biretta, the latter at a jaunty angle like an artist’s beret. He was elfin and smiley, and there was something oozy about him, as if between his skin and musculature was a layer of molasses. Walter watched him talk as the red wine hit his system and an aura formed around the restaurant’s chandelier and the paisleys on the wallpaper shifted like tadpoles.

  Silk complained about his nemesis, the New Jersey bishop, who was so poisoned by New Age philosophy he’d led a joint retreat with a space alien expert. Things in the dioceses had been crazy. I’ve been putting out flames right and left. A priest up in Inwood had fired off a round from the rectory back door, and another down in the Village got caught having sex in the sacristy. Thank God, in both cases we kept the press out of it.

  Silk sighed as two steaks, bruised blue with peppercorn cream and mashed potatoes, were set down before them and the heavyset waiter with the red face poured more cabernet into their goblets, joking that they didn’t need to worry, the cook had blessed the bottle in back. Silk grinned and tipped his head coquettishly. He’d always been equal parts Liberace and Saint Sebastian. Walter watched his pale blue eyes as he chewed; his cincture was embroidered with glittery red thread. Walter touched the notebook in his pocket; he had all the figures neatly written out but he didn’t know how to get started.

  “You don’t look good, Walty.”

  Walter cringed at his old nickname. He’d asked Silk not to use it. But after the incident with the boy uptown, Walty had reappeared. Silk’s gaze was unnerving; his pale eyes like water.

  “I read that Walter Wink book,” Walter said.

  “What’d you think of it?” Silk asked. Like a lot of religious people Walter knew, Silk wasn’t particularly interested in theology.

  “I like the idea that everything good that happens in the world is rooted in prayer.”

  “That is a nice idea,” Silk said.

  “And that there is no part of creation that hasn’t been redeemed.”

  Silk looked at him, then motioned to the waiter. “Can we have more of that delicious sourdough bread?”

  Walter felt the notebook in his pocket; he better speak up before he said anything stupid again.

  “We’re short again this month.”

  The bishop’s face stiffened. Walter recognized the expression from earlier times: when he’d told him about first meeting Carlos on Fire Island, and the time before in seminary, when he’d had his crisis of faith. The bishop was known for his communication skills, but Walter noticed that there were certain impenetrable subjects the bishop was not willing to discuss.

  Walter continued. “The heating bill alone is higher than a whole month’s collection.”

  The bishop stabbed a piece of steak with his fork and swung it back and forth in the cream sauce. “What about the money I gave you in September?”

  “The leak in the roof wiped that out. The whole ceiling had to be plastered. If you could float us one more month the stewardship committee is planning a phone-a-thon at Easter.”

  “What about Newberry?”

  “I went to see her last week. Blessed her cat, looked at her photos of Tuscany, the whole nine yards.”

  The bishop smiled and held his eyebrows up. “I’d go over and talk to her again. Be more explicit this time.”

  “Do you want me to beg her?” His voice sounded angry, but he didn’t care, remembering how Mrs. Newberry had gone into the kitchen to get him something but returned with a package of pasta instead of her checkbook.

  “I thought you understood, Walty. You need to make a go of it out there,” he said as he reached in his pocket for his wallet and took out three hundred-dollar bills. “This is a gift, Walty. But I am deeply disappointed. Your mother would roll over in her grave if she could see you at this point.”

  Walter thought of his mother sleeping in their tiny Queens apartment; in her polyester nightgown she had snored away on the foldout couch.

  Walter was in a light-headed state of postcoital bliss as he lay beside the blond boy on his narrow twin bed. After he left the bishop, he’d found the boy at the Two Potato, and they’d come over here. The radiator in the corner hummed reassuringly, and he looked past the slats of the fire escape to the darkened apartment building across the alley. One window showed a gingham potholder hanging over a stove. The boy slept in a flannel shirt and his body smelled like wet dirt. He shifted and asked Walter if he was okay; he sa
id it so sweetly, his breath against Walter’s collarbone, that he turned to the boy and began kissing him again. His cock hardened against Walter’s leg; his testicles were huge, each like a brown egg. Physically, he was nothing like Carlos, but his earnestness was similar. And he was a good kisser, understanding that kissing was all about the nuance of touch rather than touch itself.

  “What do you do, anyway?” the boy whispered. “I mean for money.”

  “I sell insurance.”

  “Oh.” He was clearly disappointed. Walter remembered that earlier the boy had said he studied Sanskrit.

  In an effort to make up for his dull profession, Walter slid down between the boy’s legs and ran his tongue up the length of his cock. The boy’s fingers moved through his hair and pressed Walter’s head into his pelvis. After a while the boy came, and Walter lay back down and looked up at the ceiling. He remembered how Silk had wiped the corners of his mouth with his linen napkin and pushed his chair out from the table. A crack near the far wall resembled an octopus tentacle, and the light in the alley was extinguished so the objects in the room looked vague and mysterious, like algae-covered refuse lying on the bottom of the sea. The bourbon was wearing off, and Walter held his white arm straight up in the dark room.

  When he got home Mary’s door was ajar. In the slant of light from the hallway he saw the baby in his terry-cloth sleeper and Mary lying fully clothed beside him, asleep but at an odd angle, legs akimbo and arms out like a drunken sailor. In the corner where her aleph had hung, now bits of masking tape dipped down from the ceiling. He saw, too, that she’d stacked the small mirrors on top of her chest in little columns like spare change.