Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories (19 page)

“I never knew you anointed dogs,” said Adrian.

“Well, we usually don’t, except on the feast of my own namesake. It’s coming up next week, in point of fact. We do cats and canaries, dogs and goldfish. We’ll bless, as the fellow said, ‘all creatures great and small.’ But she was in a panic, what could I do? And she told me it was a ‘Catholic’ dog. Couldn’t I see that by the white cross on its chest and its obvious piety—a fucking head case—still, harmless enough, is what I thought.”

“The next night she came over about the same time. She had a plate of brownies. She looked, well, done up, you know. She had some perfume on. She said that Dante had crawled into bed beside her and slept like a baby and she was forever in my debt and would do anything at all to repay the kindness. ‘Anything, Father,’ she kept saying with those eyes of hers looking up at me, ‘anywhere, anytime, anything at all, Father.’ I thought she was going to break into that James Taylor tune.
I won’t say she made a pass at me, Adrian, but there is about Mary De Dona a generosity of spirit I’ve not encountered in our species before.”

“Did you have sex with her, Francis?”

“No, no I didn’t…really…couldn’t.”

“You’re a better man than I am then.”

“Not better, Adrian, just different.”

That his friend could be so tolerant of sin in general and yet so scrupulous in the observance of his priestly vows was at once both perplexing and impressive.

“So what did you tell her about me, Francis? That I was abandoned and desperate and horny?”

“I told her you needed a babysitter. I said that we needed a night out. And yes, I think I mentioned that you were on your own…and might have said something about loneliness. I’m not sure I ever used the word
divorce
. Nor did I say that Clare had left you, I’m sure I didn’t. Only that you were a good man, dealt a bad hand, and we needed a night off.”

“Well, I’ll have plenty of time off now, it seems.”

“The blighters,” Father Concannon seethed, “the fucking wankers.”

THE FLOWERS
that Adrian Littlefield took to call on Mary De Dona were sunflowers. The vase that she put them in was fluted and blue. She stood at the kitchen sink, in her condo in the former convent, cutting the ends of stems, setting them into the vase, waiting for Adrian to think of something to say.

“You shouldn’t have. They’re beautiful.”

The black dog that had barked fiercely when Adrian walked up the porch steps and sniffed his groin and buttocks when
he entered the house now lay on the floor at the woman’s feet eyeing Adrian warily.

“I wanted to say how very grateful I was—”

“Grateful?”

“For the other night.”

He wanted to tell her it had been like grace to him, the way she’d given herself, the way she’d come to him. It was free, abundant, unearned, a gift. Amazing grace, he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her that she had saved his life and restored to him a sense of worthiness. He wanted her to know how damaged he had felt, after Clare had left him, after his marriage failed, how he’d been despairing and depressed and beside himself and how ever since the other night he’d been filled with an inextinguishable sense of general benignity, and that even though he’d been suspended by his bishop from all pastoral duties and hadn’t a clue what he was going to do next, he was certain he’d been changed for the better and immeasurably improved by what had happened between them the other night. He had rehearsed words to this effect but could not think of how to say them.

“I’m grateful too,” she said. “It was lovely. Do you want to do it again?”

“What?”

“Do you want to have sex with me again?”

There was such decorum about her speech, a daintiness, at odds, it occurred to Adrian, with the boldness of her question.

“Well, yes, but…Yes, of course I do.”

“Who’s watching your children?”

“Francis…well, Father Concannon. He’s taking them for burgers and a movie—
The NeverEnding Story
.”

“How very good of him.”

Mary De Dona set the sunflowers in the blue vase on the kitchen table, banished her giant dog to the back porch and the fenced yard, and took Adrian’s hand and led him upstairs to the tiny room that was her bedchamber. She closed the door behind them, lit a small candle on the bedside table, pulled the curtains by, and turned to face him. Then she slowly, wordlessly removed his clothing and just as slowly, wordlessly removed her own. Whereupon the two of them fell into intimate if predictable embraces, kissing and licking, touching and sucking, holding and beholding and savoring each other for all of an hour, then another. Then they bathed together in her tub. She dried his back and rubbed some scented oil on him, and let his hands rub some of it on her, and though they agreed he really should be going, that surely
The NeverEnding Story
would be over now, before he could bring himself to put his clothes back on, he fell to his knees and pressed his face against her, whereupon they took up their embracing in earnest again.

Stretched out on Mary De Dona’s narrow bed watching the ceiling fan slowly circling above them, Adrian could not keep from thinking about the latter days of Job, blessed by the Lord with fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. He thought he might see his children and his children’s children and die old and full of days.

“
SEX WITH
a generous stranger,” wrote the Reverend Adrian Littlefield, in the first paragraph of what would become
Good Riddance
, “is balm to the wounds of the broken hearted.” He
searched that sentence for something wrong, at odds as it seemed with his religious training, but in his own ears it rang entirely true.

The visitations of Mary De Dona had been a balm to him.

“Divorce is not, it turns out, the worst that can happen. The sky does not fall. The clocks do not stop. The buses run on schedule. Life goes on. The world is full of possibilities.”

It was consorting with Mary De Dona—the illicit sound of which exited him—that made him certain of these things and emboldened him to write them down. Their copulations—from the Latin for “fastened together”—had restored his faith in divine providence. Fastened together with Mary De Dona was, he was certain, a state of grace. It always left him grinning and grateful, dreaming in all tenses and feeling infused with what he took to be gifts of a holy spirit. If he did not speak in tongues, the two of them no less spoke with tongues and fingers and mouths and hands, with the caught breath and perfect hush of touching, and all of the interlocking, interweaving, intersecting limbs and parts that had become the parties to their intercourse, such as it was. They hardly spoke. What more was there to say?

She came over on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening. She’d play with Sarah and Damien, help with their dinner and bedtimes, sometimes throw in a couple of loads of laundry and tidy the house, then make love to Adrian Littlefield, like any other household duty or routine chore. This too excited him, her matter-of-factness with him. Then she’d go home. On Saturdays, he’d arrange a babysitter, and go to the former convent where she lived, bringing fresh flowers and massage oil, eager to repay her lovely body for all of the kindnesses it had shown his during the week.

“I want to worship at the altar of your every pleasure,” he would whisper.

“Hush, churchman! On your knees! Come into the holy of holies,” she replied, with a come-hither smile, feigning sacrilege and shyness, taking him by the hand to her tiny room. “Light the candles, like a good altar boy.”

“
GOD IS
good,” he wrote with newfound conviction, “and has given us each other to magnify that goodness.”

“Paul was wrong,” he wrote in a line that would later be quoted in and out of context. “It is good for a man to touch a woman, and good for a woman to touch a man.”

Paul’s confusion of sex and sin seemed to Adrian at odds with the essence of human nature. How, he asked himself, could the goodwill he bore toward Mary De Dona, the gift he saw her as, the grace he felt awash in when with her, the thanks that was overflowing in him since she came to him, the sign he reckoned that she was of God’s love—how could it all be anything but good? What sin could leave one so manifestly at one with creation, at peace with one’s being and another’s? In Mary De Dona all the dull notions he’d studied in seminary were happily incarnate—resurrection, reconciliation, communion, and rebirth. She was Easter, Christmas, epiphany and apocalypse, a blessing and beatitude, a feast for his soul. Christ might have gone to the cross for him, but Mary De Dona had come to bed with him. Jesus might have raised himself from the dead, but Mary De Dona had restored Adrian to life itself—the life of the body and the mind and spirit that had been killed by the failure of his marriage. Paul was wrong. Adrian knew it now. And if Paul could be wrong, why not James and
John and Job and the rest? Not entirely wrong, just occasionally. Just enough for reasonable doubt, a little wiggle room for questioning—that’s all he was trying to establish. What if the Bible was only a book, the authors of it merely men who felt, for reasons he could now more fully comprehend, inspired by the loving breath of God?

How had it taken him so long to arrive at this intelligence? It made him want to read it more closely. It made him love the words and fear them less. As human text, a record of mortals searching for glimpses of God, it was engaging and inspiring. As holy writ, inerrant transmissions through prophets and apostles, it seemed as silly now as all pronouncements of infallibility. Still, Adrian had to admit to himself that until very recently, he had accepted the King James Bible as God’s Word dictated to and carefully transcribed by such scriveners as God has chosen for reasons best known to God and God alone.

And it was Paul, that great poser and epistler, that first circuit rider in the cause of Christ, the model for John Wesley’s bold remark that “the world is my parish,” whom Adrian now read with the grain of salt that put the wonder into everything, everything. For never was a man more wrong about women, and therefore wrong about the men who coupled with them, than Paul was when he wrote to the Corinthians. That Paul regarded men as brutes and women as temptresses, fit only to keep each other from “incontinency,” and marriage as a better station than passionate, erotic sex, but not as good as celibacy, struck Adrian as unfair to women like Mary De Dona, who seemed to him quite proper vessels and dispensers of God’s mercy and grace. To be welcomed into another’s bed, into another body, not for the promises you might make, or the
shelter you might provide, or the babies you might bear or sire or for all the future possibilities, but rather for the gifts you might bring to the here and now, the moment at hand, not the past or future or pluperfect tense, but for the moment at hand—now there’s the thing, thought Adrian, the gift like grace.

God is love
, he quoted the beloved apostle,
and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.
Whenever Adrian replaced the word
love
in this dictum with the name of Mary De Dona, apart from the idolatry, the sentence rang entirely true. He felt reborn, re-created, and alive in her.

By Halloween he had over a hundred pages. Part rant, part methodical reasoning—it had become his manifesto, a statement of faith in flux.

“We are God’s gifts to one another. We come to one another like grace—out of the blue.”

By Thanksgiving he sent what turned out to be the first three chapters to an agent in New York who sent back an agreement for Adrian to sign which gave 15 percent of any sale to the agency.

When a check came in the first week of January for over forty thousand dollars, he could not help but see in it the saving hand of God, coming as it did in the same mail as a letter from the district supervisor detailing how, “after prayerful reflection and full consideration of the needs of the faithful in the Western Ohio Conference, we feel some changes have to be made.”

“The second half of the advance will be paid upon delivery of the completed manuscript,” wrote Adrian’s agent from New York. “Get to work.”

“We’d like to offer you a chance to truly expand your ministry through our Pastoral Exchange Program,” wrote the district supervisor. There was a pamphlet on the Worldwide Ministerial Exchange of the United Methodist Church and a “call” to trade places for three months with “the Reverend Gilson Miller and his family” from somewhere unpronounceable in England.

“The ‘geographic cure,’” said Francis Concannon. “Bishops are mad for it. Outta sight, outta mind. First they move ya, then they lose ya!”

“Might be good for the children, a change of venue, a chance to see a bit of the world.” Mary De Dona said travel was good education. “Three months will go by in a blink.”

“Would you come with us?” Adrian asked her.

“An international scandal?” she laughed.

She thanked him for asking but said it would be better for him to travel light. She had her work to do and he had his.

HE HAD
never heard the voice of God or seen anything that made him certain of God’s direction. His “calling” to the ministry of the Methodist Church had never been a road to Damascus experience. It had happened to him like the rest of life had—the slow accumulation of events, some memorable or remarkable, most others not, which taken together had become his life.

Things happen as they are supposed to happen, Adrian told himself. If God did not speak to him, he thought, God was nonetheless the one in charge. This was largely a default position, faith arrived at by the servants’ door. If Adrian was not in charge of all that happened—and he clearly wasn’t—and
yet unable to abide the prospect of no one in charge, then God was whoever was left in the room. This was the only article of faith he still clung to: there was a God and he was not it. So life happened the way it was supposed to happen. If God wasn’t directing things, God was at the least watching. Everything might not work out for the best, but everything would be over soon. It was enough on most days to keep him going forward, this knowledge that whoever was in charge here was carrying on.