Milk

by Darcey Steinke

  FOUR

  HE HAD THREE distinct headaches: one above his right ear, another below his left temple and the third, and worst, like a burr embedded in his brain tissue. The text for Sunday was the Bible story of Jonah, son of Amittai. When he was young the story of Jonah had been Walter’s favorite: the boat pitching wildly, the sailors casting lots to see who had pissed God off. Now he was more interested in Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale, the smell of salt and the feel of moist membrane. He remembered the slant of alley from the boy’s window, the flakes of snow and the boy’s yeasty breath. He wanted to write his own parables, more contemporary than the ones in the Gospels, but just as mysterious. In one, a man in a blue sweater would fall asleep on the subway and wake up in a green house surrounded by oak trees. In another, a child’s toy plane was equipped with a bathing car where men took showers. There was the one about the old woman sitting in her yard contemplating a silver handbag, and in yet another, a little brown dog sat on top of a dirty blanket.

  There was a knock, and the door pushed open. Junot handed him the mail, a church supply catalogue and another electric bill. Walter ripped open the envelope; if he didn’t pay by Friday, St. Paul’s electricity would be turned off. Walter reached for the list of chores he’d written out on an index card. Junot wore his usual baggy low-rider pants and an oversize Knicks jersey, “Sprewell” spelled out on the back. He stood just inside the doorway, looking past Walter’s head out the window to the snowy back garden.

  “The rug on the altar needs to be vacuumed, and if you have time, will you break down the crèche?”

  Junot nodded, but he didn’t move. “Did you ever feel evil, Father?”

  “On occasion,” Walter said. “That goes with being human.”

  “My mother says I’m evil.”

  “Why would she say such a thing?”

  “She says ‘De tal palo, tal astilla—que se hereda de los padres.’ She thinks I get it from my father.”

  Walter looked at the boy carefully. He wore his oversize shirt and pants ironically and his hair, which Walter always assumed was a lucky accident of nature, now appeared to be arranged with lots of hair gel.

  “Luckily, God is a lot more understanding than most mothers.”

  Junot’s face brightened.

  “Nothing against your mother, Junot, but her religious ideas have always seemed a little strange.”

  “You think so?” Junot said.

  Walter nodded. “I do.”

  Mrs. Newberry’s gray hair was short, and she was fragile as a dry leaf as she floated around her massive brownstone, turning on the lamp with the cream silk shade and bringing him a cup of chamomile tea.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said flinging herself down on the velvet couch. Mrs. Newberry conducted tours for schoolchildren at the Brooklyn Museum. She wore the docent uniform: a khaki skirt and white turtleneck. Buttercup jumped onto her lap, and she began petting the cat’s neck, staring down into the strains of white fur.

  “It must be tiring,” Walter said. He sat on the edge of a brocade wing-backed chair.

  “I assume this isn’t a social call,” Newberry said.

  “Well. No.” Walter had hoped they’d have a few minutes of casual conversation before he asked for the money. “Bishop Silk suggested I visit you.”

  Newberry raised her eyebrows and continued petting her cat in long, languid strokes.

  “I was wondering, I mean, we were wondering if you might want to make a donation.” He felt his face get hot.

  “To what exactly?” Newberry said.

  “The church, our building. We’re in rather dire straits.”

  “How much were you thinking of?”

  “Five thousand?”

  “That’s an awful lot of money, Walter.”

  “Three thousand then?” He hated the pleading quality in his voice.

  “You know Chase Bank let my daughter go. So I’m helping out there.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear Christine lost her job.” He hoped he’d gotten the daughter’s name right.

  “I also pay my grandchildren’s private school tuition.”

  “That is generous of you,” Walter said.

  She looked out the bay window. The lower Manhattan skyscrapers hung above the choppy East River.

  “Why do you think our people aren’t giving?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Walter said. “The economy is bad.”

  “I don’t think the economy has anything to do with it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Your sermons are rather depressing. Don’t you think? I mean, every week do we have to hear about racism and the poor?”

  Walter looked down at his hands. He would not defend himself.

  “Coming from you, I think people feel it’s a bit much.”

  Did she mean because he was gay? Or because of the boy from the church in Manhattan? He didn’t think she knew about that, but Walter realized she meant it more generally. Newberry felt he was diseased, spiritually diseased. He stared at the Chinese vase on the end table.

  “I’ll try and do better,” he said.

  “That’s my boy,” Newberry said as she pulled her checkbook out of her purse and began to scribble with a ballpoint pen.

  * * *

  Walter needed a drink. He still hadn’t finished his sermon, but inspiration would have to come at the bar. So he brought his notebook to the Two Potato and tried to formulate ideas on Jonah. Tomorrow morning, Mrs. Newberry would be sitting in the front pew. He could think of things to say about Jonah’s confinement inside the whale—how it was key to cultivate the difficult; that adventure was just misfortune correctly understood—but whether these ideas would fit in with Mrs. Newberry’s idea of the spiritual plane was impossible to calculate.

  For the first drink he had the notebook open, the pen beside the wire spiral, but by the second he closed the notebook and shoved it into the pocket of his coat. He’d never been this unprepared on a Saturday night before his Sunday sermon. Guilt bloomed in his chest with every tick of the Felix the Cat clock that beat over the bar’s cash register. He knew he should go home, but the Sanskrit boy haunted him—how his cock tasted slightly of metal, as if a roll of tinfoil had phoned up from Kansas. He couldn’t get the sensation out of his mouth. He searched the guys in tight jeans gathered around the dance floor; all had faces smooth as ceramic saint statues.

  There was no physical resemblance between the Sanskrit boy and Carlos. Carlos had olive skin and was Walter’s age. The similarity was all in the boy’s countenance. The way the Sanskrit boy leaned a little to the side as if uninfluenced by the rules of gravity. He’d seen orderlies roll Carlos off on a gurney after he died, and he’d picked up his ashes at the crematorium. But he couldn’t really believe Carlos was dead. His soul had flown to God but his physical qualities had been infused into everything, one man’s long eyelashes, another’s chaotic hand movements. Once Walter saw a pigeon cock his head in a gesture reminiscent of Carlos and, another time, saw a branch shift in the wind, the same way that Carlos, when surprised, swayed back on his heels. Carlos commingled with everything. Walter sensed his presence but could not touch him, and this made Walter lonely and morose.

  He ordered a martini and as the bartender turned away pulled his sweater back over his shoulders and looked to see if anybody had noticed he was wearing his clerical. But the sparse late-night crowd were round eyed, red faced and mostly wasted. Shame expanded and floated around inside his heart. Newberry was right; there was something wrong with him. He thought of the Sanskrit boy’s bed and took out his notebook and wrote the Sanskrit boy a letter which spoke of God and the thing against the other thing. And how Carlos had seen divinity in everything, the stained-glass window as well as the Styrofoam cup. He explained about the other boy, the high school boy from the church in Manhattan. The narrowness of his shoulders, his striped rugby shirt, the fact that at fourteen, he could speak perfect French. He tried to articulate why he’d become a pas
tor: Because at first I assumed the church held the same cozy qualities as your bedroom.

  He looked up and saw a man standing at the edge of the dance floor, his hand wrapped around a brown bottle of beer. Walter found the man’s wispy haircut and jean jacket devastatingly erotic, but after staring for a while, he gave up trying to catch his eye. Besides himself, there was only one other man sitting at the bar, a stocky fellow who clearly had hair transplants. Walter could see the plugs of hair like seedlings across his head. He wore a green sweater with an insignia and gazed at the men moving around on the multicolored dance floor.

  The door opened, and the Karaoke King of Chelsea came into the bar. Walter loved how he wore his silk scarf and leather jacket. Last call. Another martini with four olives, one for each of the Gospels. As he listened in on the conversation between the King and the fat man, he ate the olives. Talk turned to Ankara. The King took out a picture of the Rui Madria ripped from National Geographic, and the fat man bragged about the cheap brandy and anisette he bought in Tristaina last spring. It was impossible, the Karaoke King said, to visit Tristaina in spring because of monsoon season and mud slides. The conversation turned hostile, and the King slapped the fat man, jumped off his stool and ran out the front door and into the night.

  The fat man looked after him, his wet lips trembling, then put his face down so his cheek rested on the bar. Walter walked over and placed his hand on the back of the man’s head. His fat face streaked with water, and they watched snow whiz past the front window. A gust of wind flipped a woman’s umbrella and she was pulled across the street.

  Outside, new snow made a flat sound on the heels of Walter’s shoes, and at the corner the mixed dirt and snow looked like cookie dough. The fat man’s long sideburns framed his sullen features, and he wore a thin windbreaker, though the temperature was below freezing. Walter lit a cigarette and asked the fat man questions, but he just nodded and shrugged. Where are you from? got the same nod-shrug combination as I guess you’re not in a talkative mood?

  Their watery reflection in storefront windows was illusive and glamorous, and when he turned into an alley Walter realized with a thrill that the fat man wanted to have sex. At the end of the alley was a Dumpster filled with cardboard and the man seemed familiar with a patch of snowless cement, warmed by a dryer vent.

  Walter tried to kiss the man’s mouth, but his lips felt dry and muscular, and he could tell the man did not like kissing. He fumbled for the man’s cock inside his dress pants and as he located it, knelt. The man’s hand moved into Walter’s hair; he liked his hair stroked while he gave head, but then the fingers fisted, and Walter felt individual hairs pulled loose from their sockets as the man took hold of his cock and pointed the soft tip directly at Walter’s heart.

  A spasm of repulsion shot through his body. But then he felt the cold asphalt through the material of his preacher pants, and he heard the sound of a thousand bits of ice falling onto the metal lid of the Dumpster. Just let me take my coat off. He was shaking as he kneeled down again in front of the fat man, eye level now with his groin. Warm air tinged with the scent of fabric softener spilled out from the dryer vent as the fat man again took hold of Walter’s hair, but this time more gently. The urine made a flat sound and was warm and then cold against his shirt.

  FIVE

  WALTER’S DAMP SHIRT was icy against his chest as he glanced up at the blue television light that illuminated the rectangular window of the Sanskrit boy’s apartment. Certain details interested him immensely. The little potato that sat in a muddy patch of snow near the curb. Particular snowflakes. He’d fixate on the trajectory of one until it seesawed down and obliterated itself on the pavement. An aura seemed to be coming off everything; the streetlights of course, but also a mailbox and a pair of polar-fleece mittens in a store window.

  A man in a knit cap passed by, and Walter pretended fascination with a flyer advertising massages tacked up to the tree across from the boy’s building. Walter cataloged bits of foil on the ground and loose cassette tape in the crease of the curb. His hands were freezing and he couldn’t stop shivering, nor could he stop thinking about the boy’s warm bed: the blue sheets with little butterflies on them and how his comforter and pillow were stuffed with duck-feather down. A light went on in a brownstone and he realized he’d spoken out loud. A tall woman with black hair and a long robe clenched at the waist looked at him severely, and he crossed the street and rang the boy’s bell. He was buzzed in immediately. The boy had seen him from the window! The boy would be waiting with a shy smile and a cup of chamomile tea!

  In the elevator he decided he needed an excuse. He’d say he’d left his scarf, the cashmere one he’d bought last year in India. But he had his scarf on, the five-dollar one he’d bought on the street last week; so he yanked it from around his neck and shoved it deep down into his pocket. The apartment door was open and he walked briskly down the hallway into the boy’s living room.

  It was dark—there was only the gray light from the television and the sound of a woman’s voice speaking in French. Denim legs entwined on the couch; Walter realized the Sanskrit boy was lying with someone else. The boy glanced behind him, lazily holding out a twenty-dollar bill. His eyes widened as he recognized Walter, and he jumped up.

  “Can I use your bathroom?” Walter sputtered.

  “No,” the boy said, “I thought you were the pizza guy. That’s why the door was—”

  “Oh, let him,” the other boy said. He had a long soulful face and was sitting up now in the lotus position. “It’s at the end of the hall.”

  There was a film around the hole in the toilet and a lacy frost on the sink spigot. The shower curtain hung off the rod and a little jade Buddha lay facedown in the soap dish. He heard the two boys arguing as he flushed the toilet and ran water into the sink.

  Outside the bathroom, Walter felt himself sucked down the hallway and onto the boy’s bed. He lay in the dark, the comforter cool against his body, watching snow fall into the alley over the silver radiator. He heard footsteps and the overhead light flipped on and the Sanskrit boy’s face was red with rage.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Walter was going to sit up and say that he felt better now, that he had a condition the doctors could never quite diagnose, part low blood sugar, part narcolepsy. But instead he just closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. The boy stood there a minute and then pressed the numbers on his cell phone and spoke into the receiver. The other boy came and stood beside him, and both stared down.

  Walter slit his eyes just enough to see the pale orb of the Sanskrit boy’s head.

  Snow was slanted against the windows of the parsonage kitchen and the little yard was blanketed; just the tips of the azalea bush pressed up over the full line of snow. Walter still smelled of piss and his arm ached from where the Sanskrit boy had yanked him up off the bed. He walked with his glass of ice water and stood in the living room. There was a shape on the couch and at first he thought his eye was superimposing the scene from earlier tonight, Sanskrit boy and brown-haired boy melded together on the couch.

  “Father, my mother kicked me out,” Junot said, sitting up. “Mary said I could sleep here.”

  “That’s fine,” Walter said. “Are you warm enough?”

  Junot motioned to the blanket Mary had gotten from the hall closet. “It was awful, Father,” he said. “She said I was just like my dad. She kept saying ‘Arbol que crece torcido jamás su tronco endereza—cuando algo empieza mal, termina mal,’ and that I was a crook and a bloodsucker.” The boy’s white T-shirt glowed in the dark room. And Walter saw out the window how snow was piled up on the boxwoods so that they looked like angel food cakes. “She threw my boom box out the window and said I was going to hell.” Junot’s teeth were white as sour cream and the expanse of his eyes was a liquid black.

  “It sounds terrible.”

  “I guess I give her problems,” Junot said sadly.

  “Get some sleep now,” Walter said as he moved
up the stairs. He wore only his underwear, and his cock was getting hard. An ice cube in his drink cracked. “In the morning, we’ll shovel.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Junot said.

  Walter rolled over, pressed himself into the mattress and covered the back of his head with a pillow. Junot’s lips, his eyebrows, the baby hairs at the nape of his neck. The way his jeans rode low on his hips. His skin was milky brown and he smelled like Carlos, crème soda and black pepper. Walter couldn’t take it anymore and stood up by the side of his bed. He put his hands on his hips. Snow rushed past the window, the darkness offsetting the chaotic pattern of rushing white.

  Walter kneeled down and pulled out the enamel canister. The lid stuck at first, but by using the file on his nail clipper, he levered the top off, and there, in a plastic bag tied with a twisty, was what remained of Carlos. He looked at the white ash and bits of gray bone matter.

  That people you loved died was unacceptable. Also that people you fucked wanted you to vanish was unacceptable. But really it was mostly that people you loved died—this was completely unacceptable.

  He sat the canister on the nightstand and lit a cigarette, blew out a tendril of smoke. Carlos had been explicit about his ashes; he wanted them scattered down by Bargemusic. Walter had been putting it off, but as soon as it got light he decided to walk down to the bridge. He thought of the ashes floating down into the East River, the fine gray dust burnt clean and pure.

  PART III

  JOHN

  ONE

  JOHN SHAVED OFF his beard, then laid his surplice out on the bed along with the gold ring the order gave him when he’d taken his vow. He moved around his cell slowly. He was worried about rousing Brother Peter, with whom he shared a bathroom and who was a notoriously light sleeper.

  He’d been winnowing his possessions for weeks and had just a stack of old letters secured with a rubber band, an envelope of money he’d saved from his weekly allowance and the crucifix that had hung over his bed. He wore khakis, a white button-down and his tennis shoes as he walked down the long hallway past the meditation garden with the dogwood tree and wood benches and through the common room, where the New York Times lay on the round table alongside the Christian Science Monitor. He saw the stone hand that sat on a side table and the photo of the order’s monastery in Zimbabwe.