Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  “How’d you guess?” she asked him. I was raised never to admit who I was to strangers, but I suppose that already this man was no stranger to her—she was, of course, mad for priests, especially if they looked like misfits.

  “You were …” He gestured. He seemed to be struggling for words. He smoothed his beard. “I knew what you looked like,” he said finally.

  “What a great way to start,” Sarah said, taking my arm.

  “I thought you’d need a hand,” Father Mileski murmured, shifting from foot to foot. “I hope I made the right decision. I have a car. I can take you to your new apartment.”

  “It’s just wonderful,” said Sarah. She tugged at me and looked up into my face, smiling. Her eyes seemed dazed with happiness, as if the appearance of this thick and towering priest had somehow anointed us, blessed our beginnings in Chicago with a promise of good luck and purpose. Whatever misgivings she had about tagging along as I followed the tracks I’d laid before I’d even met her were instantly dispelled by Mileski’s coming to meet her. Now she belonged in Chicago, too. She was longing to be needed and now she was. Her happiness was so quick and so complete that I was glad for the priest’s coming, too.

  But as the saying goes: Little did I know.

  “YOU’RE DRINKING TOO much,” she said. “It’s not funny.”

  “When was it funny?” I asked. A drunk loves to be hassled when he’s pouring; I gave myself a little extra.

  “Don’t run it around in circles,” she said.

  “No, no, I’m curious. When was it funny? If we can trace it back, then maybe I can make it funny again.” I pointed the bottle in her direction, offering her a bit. An unlikely proposition. It was midnight. She was in her domestic-looking terry cloth robe, the one with coffee stains on the sleeve, the one that always smelled like buttered toast.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked. “Are you having trouble sleeping? School?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, everything.” I took a drink. It felt as if I’d sloshed a little on my chin, but when I felt it with my palm I was dry.

  “Don’t do this to me,” she said, in a low, even voice.

  “What am I doing to you?” I asked, with a cool grin, Johnny Darkness off on a toot.

  “I don’t want to look after you this way. It’s a pain being the girl in her bathrobe telling the boy to be careful.”

  “Then don’t.”

  She stepped toward me and knocked the glass out of my hand. There was bourbon on my shirt, ice cubes in my pocket. The glass rolled back and forth on the little Oriental carpet and then off the edge and onto the gray wooden floor.

  “How very persuasive,” I said.

  “You talk like a college boy,” she said, turning away. “You didn’t talk like that when you were in the Coast Guard.”

  “I can’t do very much right with you, can I?” I said. I picked up the glass, took the ice out of my shirt pocket and put it back into the glass, and then poured myself another drink. It felt as if I were winning an incredible victory. The cold wet spot on my shirt touched directly onto my heart.

  FATHER MlLESKI BECAME her best friend and I found myself in the cosmically stupid position of becoming jealous of a priest. There was a lot of attention that year being paid to priests leaving their orders to marry. Nuns were going on talk shows to announce they planned to have children. I never really suspected her, but I pretended to, trying, I see now, to cover up a deeper, more painful jealousy: a meeting of souls that excluded me. They worked ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours at Resurrection House, while I sat around with sharpies and sellouts and ambitious up-from-under boys like myself, studying contract law, the warp and woof of the Constitution. It was hard to compete with the emotional rush of life at Resurrection House, with its crises, its incandescent moments of passionate friendship: the little boy who finally talked, the rapacious landlord forced to cough up a little heat, the shootout across the street. My conversation seemed anemic next to what Sarah and Mileski—Steven, now, by his own insistence— talked about daily.

  Their clients were largely Mexican.They had small, smooth faces, stiff blue jeans, socks with bright silver threads. There were a few furious white holdouts who used the settlement house because there was basketball, a Coke machine, but the whites in that neighborhood were Appalachians and as distrustful of the Catholics as they were of the browns and blacks.

  Sarah lost weight. She developed purple half moons beneath her eyes. Her breath stank of cigarettes. Something savage entered her lovemaking and at times this vehemence was hypnotic, catching, and at other times it was merely scary. I am remembering her now on top of me, thrusting up and down, wildly, like an angry man, with her fingernails digging into my shoulder so that when she was finished and took her hands away she’d dug eight little frowns into my skin.

  One night, she brought Mileski home for dinner, along with a new addition to the priory named Father Stanton, and Sister Anne. Stanton had come to Chicago from Rhodesia and his nerves were shot. He’d seen torture, fire fights; the headlights of his Land Rover skittered over the thorn bushes, behind any one of which could be lurking a man with an automatic rifle. He’d lost favor with both sides—with the blacks because of his color and with the whites because of his sympathies. He was tall, with gray hair, large ears. He was a shattered man. His hands shook; sometimes he opened his mouth to speak and nothing came out but a dull, gagging noise. Sister Anne taught English at Loyola but put in her twenty hours a week at Resurrection House. She was a large-boned, red-faced woman with thick, steely hair, a man’s jaw, pale eyes that split in two behind her rimless bifocals. Stanton brought a bottle of red wine; Sister Anne brought a salad of green beans and chick-peas. Mileski came with a package of sugar doughnuts. Stanton was attempting to tell us about sidewalk etiquette in Salisbury—how the blacks would have to leave the pavement if a white person was using it. We drank the wine, with me leading the charge. Sarah sat next to Father Mileski and when she wanted him to comment upon something she patted his leg. Suddenly, the very unlikelihood of their becoming lovers seemed proof of its inevitability: Sarah liked nothing more than a nice stiff swim upstream. She was a sucker for painfully unconsummated love affairs. (I was remembering that window in her bedroom back in New Orleans and those steamy charades for the boy a million miles away across the street.)

  Sister Anne was asking me what contribution I could make to the priory and its work, once I had my law degree.

  “You’ve got some of the oiliest, most corrupt lawyers in the city working for the diocese,” I said.

  “Yes, but what we’re trying to accomplish is something very different,” she said. “We’re a church inside a church.” And now her eyes narrowed and behind the thick, distorting spectacles they looked like those flat little fish the light shines right through.

  “Are you Catholic?” she asked me.

  “Half,” I said.

  “You can’t be half Catholic,” said Sister Anne.

  “Watch me,” I said, and drew an imaginary line with my finger, starting at my forehead and going down to my belly.

  “Don’t argue with him,” said Sarah. “He likes it too much.” She got up from her seat next to Mileski and sat on the arm of my chair. She did a takeoff of someone shaking her lover by the shoulders.

  “So, Steven,” Stanton said, finishing his wine with a manly flourish, and then crossing his legs, “what are we going to do about getting these two decently married?” His accent was Rhodesian, fancy yet blunt.

  “It’ll happen,” said Steven. He had a modish sense of fatality, a strain of passivity that he could carry because of his sheer physical power.

  “She has a genius with children,” Stanton said to me. His teeth seemed to lack a protective enamel; they were bruised from just one glass of burgundy. “She’s just so lovely with them. It’s a comfort to see it.”

  “I don’t think I’m her type for that sort of thing,” I said. I really did say this in a high style and I’d meant it to be someh
ow amusing— as if I were so confident of Sarah’s and my perfect love that I could play at trashing it in public. But they didn’t know me well enough to get the joke and I probably didn’t deliver it with half the aplomb I’d intended. My heart began to race as my words hung like smoke in that small, poorly ventilated room. Our dinner guests in black looked at me with their exhausted, sympathetic, yet strangely cool eyes—for, of course, they were not thinking how I would survive the awkwardness of this moment so much as they were wondering if this sack of blood they saw before them held within it a soul destined for heaven or for hell.

  A SUNDAY AT the lake. We were at that place people in Hyde Park call the Point, a promenade of huge, colorless rocks encircled by the gray, slightly sinister busyness of Lake Michigan. It was a hot summer day and people were sprawled out on the rocks like lizards. Sarah and I were with Father Mileski. He wore a brief, iridescent bathing suit, such as a swim racer would wear, and his legs looked massive, like brown, furry trees. Sarah was wearing a pale green bikini that was a little small for her. She kept fiddling with the elastic around her legs, tucking her pubic hair in at the sides. I was the only one who wanted to swim. There’d been talk in the papers about the water’s being polluted, and though the city insisted the problem had passed, it seemed that Sarah and Mileski stayed dry for political reasons.

  I watched them as I trod water; they were each propped on an elbow, talking away as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. When I returned, I leaned over for a towel and saw Sarah’s eyes: they seemed to be holding back torrents of tears. I asked her what was wrong. I crouched down and put my hand on the side of her face.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Steven was just reminding me what Jesus said to the Pharisees.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. Then, trying to cover the callousness of my incredulity, I asked Mileski what in fact Jesus had said.

  Mileski shrugged modestly and seemed reluctant to go into it. “This was when the Pharisees wanted to curry favor with him. And Jesus explained why he was going to keep his distance and he said, When I was hungry you would not feed me and, you know, when I was naked you would not clothe me, and … and when I had no place to live you offered me no shelter. And the Pharisees said, Wait a minute. We never had a chance. We never saw you hungry or naked or without a place to live. And Jesus said, Every time you saw a hungry man and didn’t feed him—that was me. And every time you saw a naked man and did not clothe him—that was me. And every time you saw a homeless man and did not give him shelter—that was me too.”

  I looked down at him. The sun, like a dumb animal, was trudging toward the west and it was slightly behind Mileski now. I had to squint to look in his direction. A half dozen wisecracks gathered within me and the pressure of not saying them felt like the suppression of an enormous sneeze. What if it really was that simple, I thought to myself. What if all we were required to be was good, what if there really was a guide, a standard upon which to measure our actions, and by doing so we could serve both heaven and earth far more valuably than we could ever hope to through a life of calculation and compromise?

  Sarah rolled onto her back and put her hands behind her head. She crossed her legs and I looked at the bottoms of her feet, pale and creased as ancient hands, and I felt a warm river of sentiment going through me, and then I thought: They’re right. We must do something.

  THAT NIGHT, I was sitting at my desk, reading the Harvard Law Review by the light of a green glass lamp. I could hear the dull roar of the shower and when Sarah stepped into the spray the difference in the sound seemed to suggest the exact shape of her body. The pipes changed and then she moved away from the spray. The water hit the tiles in an undifferentiated rush and when she stepped forward again she carved in silence another replica of herself. A few minutes later she emerged from the shower. She was naked except for a yellow towel she’d wrapped around her hair like a rooster’s comb. Her body was blotchy from scrubbing. I glanced up and then went back to my reading. I don’t know why I was being so difficult. It was my awful way of flirting, daring her to court me. She came to me. She leaned over my back and put her arms around me. “I want to have a child,” she whispered into my ear.

  Like a man in a trance, I rose from my chair and turned to face her. I put my arms around her and held her. Silently. Headlights from passing cars arced across the room. We were breathing together and she pressed herself against me. “Just do it, OK?” she said. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  I carried her to the bedroom. She was not a small woman but she felt light to me that night. I placed her on the bed and she put her hands behind her head and watched me as I undressed. She parted her legs and then brought them tightly together. “I want you so much,” she whispered. My erection was enormous, absurd. I threw myself onto the bed, kissing her, feeling her, making her ready. I slipped right in; she seemed larger than normal but her great silky spaciousness was somehow more erotic than any slight skid of resistance. I was inside her as far as I could go. She opened herself wider and pressed me tighter against her. A moan of pleasure hummed at the back of her throat, and as I began to move I was falling through a trapdoor of sensation. It was the first time I’d ever made love with such mortal purpose, the first time it seemed possible that the whole history of the world could be altered by one ejaculation, and I was overwhelmed by the newness and gravity of it—this loss of my real virginity, this coupling that made all the others seem trivial.

  Sarah felt my swelling and she clasped me still closer. I put my mouth on hers in a large indistinct kiss and just before my semen and its innumerable genetic messages were about to flash out of me I felt the heels of her hands, hard and panicked against my chest. “No,” she said, frantically. “Stop. Please stop.” Quickly, guiltily, I pulled out of her. An ache went through me; the air seemed heavy, an alien atmosphere. Sarah drew her knees up and closed her eyes.

  “Did you come in me?” she asked. She reached over and felt my cock, running her finger over the tip. “Sorry,” she said, trying to laugh. “I thought … I just can’t do this.”

  I didn’t know what to say. An hour ago, I hadn’t even thought about a child, but now I wanted one with a deep irrational hunger. I lay back on the bed as she slipped out of it. She went to the bathroom. I could hear her washing herself, like a whore. When she came back to the bedroom she asked me if I wanted her to put in her diaphragm so we could make love anyhow. I said no. Did I want her to give me head, jerk me off? No. No. She shrugged and picked up her clothes, carried them out of the bedroom. That was it. I listened to her footsteps, heard her pants zippering up. Then there was silence, a long, long silence. I got up, out of bed. I walked into the living room and she was gone.There was a note. She needed to walk, to think. She’d be back in an hour or two. She signed the note with Love. I sat on the sofa with the note in my hands, reading and rereading it. Then I stood up and poured myself a drink and turned on the TV. It was the little black and white GE television that used to be her grandfather’s. His handprint was worn into the enamel on the top of it.

  9

  AT THE LAST minute, the goddamned Republicans thought they could make an issue over the fact that I was an out-of-towner, a New Yorker no less, and they decided to put a man into the race against me.

  They chose a fellow named Enrico Bertelli, a Chicagoan by birth, a resident of the district for forty-one years, the owner of a little Hyde Park coffeehouse called the Golden Portal, where you could have cinnamon-flavored cappuccino and listen to Vivaldi coming through the KLH speakers. Bertelli was barrel-chested, white-maned, light on his feet, vaguely bohemian—berets, Argyle socks under his sandals, paisley ascots. He was so godawful lovable you wanted to tell your troubles to him, you wanted to sit at a little wobbly table eating sourdough rye and cheese and listen to him spout the philosophical clichés that professors used thirty years ago to get freshman girls to give them blowjobs: life is so tragic, we must make beauty, peace, love—lower my pet, lower. It was a brilliant pi
ece of casting; I had to give the Republicans credit for that. If there was going to be a resentment vote against me, Bertelli was a perfect magnet for it. A charming old dodo without a political bone in his body, Bertelli could count on the fifteen percent of the district that was somehow Republican and after that who knew how many cappuccino lechers and hometown boosters he could rustle up as well. It didn’t seem he was actually going to defeat me, but suddenly I had a race to run.

  The Republicans announced him four days into the new year and Kinosis’s boys, with their customary tact, at first tried to say it was too late, that the ballots for the special election were already on press. But a finger to the wind hipped the gov that people weren’t exactly thrilled to have their right to vote taken away by a printing press, so the next day he made a big show of announcing that new ballots would be made up, this time with a name in both the Democratic and the Republican column.

  Kinosis was irritated that now an actual campaign would have to be mounted in my behalf, but Isaac was thrilled. “I didn’t particularly care for you slipping into Congress completely unnoticed,” he said, calling me with the news. “With someone running against you, people will have an opportunity to hear you speak. You’ll be building a constituency.”

  I was at home with Juliet. Our version of a cozy winter afternoon: she at her desk and me at mine. She was reading a book about infamous art forgers which I’d gotten her for Christmas two years ago, but which she was just getting to now. I always had the idea that Juliet, if the world ever got really screwy, could be an art forger. She was so meticulous and knowledgeable, and heaven knew a little elegant larceny might be just what we needed—as a couple, that is. Of course, when Sarah drifted toward the receiving side of the law I went rubber-legged on her and refused to follow. When it was time for her to start taking serious risks, risks that finally, and literally, exploded in her face, I was nowhere near her. Was I like that moral coward in the Camus novel who looked the other way when a woman leapt off a bridge and who then spent a drunken, misty middle age wandering Amsterdam, looking for another leaping woman so he could behave better next time?