Household Saints (21 page)

“I’ll put them up for you,” said Theresa. “I’d be glad to.”

It was so simple, Leonard couldn’t believe it had worked, not even when Theresa was actually sitting beside him on the living room couch, with
Bitch’s Brew
playing on the stereo. Though he knew that such scenes took place every day, it didn’t seem possible that he would be personally involved in one. Other men, maybe, but not Leonard—who had never had much luck with girls beyond a few uncomfortable college coffee dates. And now that it was really happening, now that he was clinking the ice cubes in his Chivas Regal (which, he discovered, he didn’t much like), he felt a peculiar detachment, as if he were somewhere else, far away, looking at a Chivas Regal ad in a magazine.

He reached out and took Theresa’s hand. As he ran his fingers over her palm, his detachment gave way to anxiety. What in the name of God was he supposed to do next?

Leonard knew, from his reading, how other girls reacted at this critical juncture: They swished across the room to check out the view from your terrace. They asked you to freshen their drink. They pointed out that the record on the turntable had run out. But Theresa did none of these things. She said, “The curtains?”

“Right,” said Leonard. “The curtains.”

He recognized this as the crucial point in a seduction—certainly no time to give up or get discouraged. Yet still he could not get it through his head that seduction was humanly possible.

“Come on,” he said. “They’re in the bedroom.”

Astonishingly, Theresa followed him into his room. After much searching, he found the dark blue fiberglass drapes in a box at the back of the closet. It was obvious that they were not the urgent problem he’d claimed to be facing, but Theresa didn’t seem to care.

“Anything to hang them on?” she said.

Leonard located a neatly stapled package of collapsible rods and pins. He pictured his mother buying them at A&S, barraging the salesgirls with nervous questions…. The last thing he wanted to be thinking about now was his mother.

Theresa sat on a chair by the bed and began slipping the hooks beneath the pre-sewn pleats, her fingers working so nimbly that Leonard was moved, and felt that he was witnessing some age-old—even primal—female activity. She stood on the chair to hang them, and Leonard was so stirred by the way her blouse tightened over her back that he was ready to risk anything for a look at the flesh beneath that white school-girl’s shirt.

And yet when he said, “Take off your clothes” (the words came out so garbled that he had to clear his throat and repeat himself), it was less out of lust than curiosity to see if such a thing could happen.

Acting as if she hadn’t heard, Theresa drew the curtains, got down off the chair and stepped back to admire her work. The afternoon light shone blue into the room. She had heard him, but it hadn’t sounded like Leonard. For the voice which had ordered her to take off her clothes was so commanding, its authority so plainly derived from some secret knowledge of her own destiny, that it never occurred to her to disobey.

Theresa turned to face Leonard. Then very slowly, looking straight at him, she undressed and lay on top of the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

In the blue light, she looked like a drowned woman, floating, pale and lovely, miraculously uncorrupted by the water. It was a sight so beautiful—so wondrous, so unexpected in his room—that Leonard began to pray.

“Blessed Lord Jesus,” he whispered. “Get me through this and I promise you, I’ll never do it again.”

But it couldn’t have been Jesus who showed him how to undress and lie down beside Theresa so quietly that she wasn’t even startled. How would Jesus have known how to hold her and kiss her, how to enter a virgin so slowly that it didn’t hurt? It couldn’t have been Jesus who told him to wait and let Theresa catch her breath, then gave him the go-ahead to move—slowly at first, then faster, like the expert Leonard knew in his soul he wasn’t.

And so, because it was not Jesus who had gotten him through, Leonard felt no obligation to keep the solemn vow he had made Him, and he and Theresa did it again and again and again.

As Leonard and Theresa piled sin upon sin, Theresa wasn’t thinking of anything so abstract as sinning. At the time, her mind was empty, but later, while Leonard slept and Theresa lay watching the light change from blue to black, she had plenty of time to think. And what she thought was: Her mind had not been empty so much as absent altogether.

Someone else had done those things in bed with Leonard.

The possibility of winding up in Leonard Villanova’s bed had honestly never occurred to her. Over the past months, she had come to think of him as a brother, a friend. And if he sometimes held her hand and kissed her … She knew boys liked such things. She herself had felt nothing impure. What was the harm?

Even as she undressed and lay naked on the blankets, she had felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. The saints spoke of floating out of your body, and that was how it was for her. She was not in bed with Leonard of her own free will. She was following someone else’s orders.

Now she wondered: Whose?

Obviously, Leonard was the one who’d told her to take off her clothes—but she’d never felt as if she were obeying Leonard. Traditionally, it was the devil who tempted and wheedled and dragged you into sin—but she hadn’t felt the devil’s presence in the room.

That left God. But why would God lead her into bed with Leonard Villanova?

Suddenly she remembered all the saints who had fornicated, lied and stolen, all the pickpockets and con-men and whores. Augustine, Magdalene, Mary of Egypt—Theresa made a mental list. She thought of the robber crucified with Jesus and saved, the great sinners plucked from the midst of their evil lives and sanctified. For a moment, she thought: Maybe St. Therese’s Little Way wasn’t the only one; maybe that was why God had brought her to Leonard Villanova’s dark bedroom.

She put her hand on Leonard’s bare chest, felt his measured breathing and experienced a rush of tenderness and awe. It was as if she were touching God there, in Leonard Villanova’s skinny chest.

Leonard stirred.

“Jesus,” he mumbled. A long time later, he said, “What time is it?”

Turning, Theresa saw a luminous plastic clock on the night table. It scared her, as if its dial were a human face which had been watching them all afternoon.

“Nine.”

“Won’t your folks be worried?”

“No,” said Theresa, doubly guilty for the lie and for the fact that her parents were probably very worried. Two sins, she thought. She felt confused, and heard that old refrain in her mind: What would the Little Flower do now? Even St. Therese had made her family worry. But she had never done the things which Theresa had done that day with Leonard.

“Mea culpa,” she mumbled under her breath, pretending to cough so Leonard wouldn’t wonder why she was hitting herself in the chest. Then she lay very still. This is it, she thought. I’m going to hell. She waited for a chill of fear, but all that came was a vague nostalgia and a not-unfamiliar disappointment. She felt as if she were remembering herself as a little girl and thinking of all the childish wishes which hadn’t come true: I wanted to become a nun, but I didn’t. I wanted to go to heaven, but I went to hell.

“Are you okay?” said Leonard.

“I’m fine. I just better get going.”

It was pitch-black, and warm enough, but Theresa dressed with her elbows drawn in and her arms across her breasts for protection. She thought of a painting Leonard had shown her at the museum: Adam and Eve after the Fall, so ashamed that they walked bent over, like old people. The painting had embarrassed her—Adam in his fig leaf looked a million times more naked than Jesus in a loincloth. But it was nothing compared to the embarrassment she felt now.

“It’s true,” she thought. “Afterwards, you walk different.”

Dressed, she switched on the night-light. The first thing she noticed was the brownish bloodstain on Leonard’s sheet, and her impulse was to cover it with both hands. For though she was still disoriented enough to think that she must have gotten her period, she never doubted that the blood was hers.

Without getting out of bed, Leonard eased her hands away and pulled up the blanket.

“Forget it. It’s nothing.”

“I’ll wash it for you,” said Theresa, her tone too urgent to be offering a casual favor.

“I’ll take care of it.” Now Leonard too was embarrassed, for nowhere in his
Playboys
had he seen this problem discussed. In all his fantasies about this first time in his room, he had never imagined a girl insisting on washing the blood off the bed linen. He understood that such things were important to women, and wondered if Theresa meant to take the sheet home and keep it, substituting another. Leonard felt a wave of possessiveness: It was
his
sheet, and now it was just as much his memento as hers. He pictured himself taking it to the laundromat with the secret satisfaction of knowing that his wash concealed the blood of a virgin. And besides, he was hardly about to jump up and hop into his clothes while Theresa stripped the bed.

“I want to,” said Theresa.

“I
said,
‘I’ll take care of it.’” Leonard’s tone was sharp.

Theresa dove for the corner of the sheet with such determination that Leonard knew: There was no way to stop her short of physical violence. It took him less than a second to weigh the evidence and decide: No dirty sheet on earth was worth using violence on the first girl he’d ever gone to bed with. If she wanted it so badly, how could he deny her?

So he got up and grabbed for his clothes while Theresa unmade the bed, folded the dirty sheets, then remade it with some clean ones he found for her in a drawer. Normally Leonard considered himself a gentleman. But as he watched Theresa fluff the pillows, he felt such pride, such a sense of accomplishment that he was taken out of his normal self and moved to think something which would never have crossed a gentleman’s mind.

“One afternoon in the sack with me,” thought Leonard, “and she’s begging to do my laundry.”

From then on, Leonard had only to say, “Let’s put up some curtains,” for Theresa to follow him into his room. After a while (when it became clear that Theresa didn’t particularly want them) Leonard dispensed with the preliminaries which
Playboy
claimed all women want. The love-making took only a few minutes which, Theresa told herself, were no more significant than any others in her day. Except that often, as Leonard finished, he would cry, “God!” And Theresa understood instinctively that it was not a blasphemy, but a prayer.

Then she would jump up and get to work. When Leonard’s room was spotless, she turned her attention to the rest of the apartment. The kitchen was a typical bachelor mess, and Theresa spent hours scrubbing jelly rings off the cupboard shelves. At first she blushed when Al and Vince came in to find her cleaning, but they treated her so politely that she overcame her shyness. And why should she be shy? She was doing it for them. Mercifully, she had no idea that they called her “the cleaning lady” behind her back. But perhaps she might not have cared. For already she was moving beyond the point of caring what people called her. A cleaning lady worked for money. A housewife worked for her family, her home, her husband—and by extension herself. But this wasn’t Theresa’s apartment, Leonard wasn’t her husband, and her service was pure, benefiting no one but Leonard, his roommates, and God.

Ever since that first afternoon in Leonard’s bed, she had decided that God could be served through Leonard Villanova. It was not yet a certainty—but she would never know for certain unless she tried. Meanwhile she enjoyed transforming the messy kitchen and took special delight in preparing complicated dishes—hot antipasto, mussels oreganata, tagliatelle, pasta with fresh pesto—with its rudimentary equipment. She served Leonard on trays in his room, and it pleased her to see the gratitude on his face. Clearly, Leonard was growing to love her, and she knew that loving another human being was one step closer to loving God. If nothing else, she was helping Leonard on his way.

Leonard
was
grateful, at least enough to endure his roommates’ teasing without ever making the kind of crude remark he’d heard in his mind that first afternoon. For even the most callous men never said such things about women they truly loved. And slowly, in his own fashion, Leonard was falling in love with Theresa. It was not just the thrill of going to bed with her, or the gratification of talking to her and seeing her suitably impressed by his expertise, but also the gentler contentment of watching her smile and hum to herself as she washed his coffee cups and sorted his socks. He loved the meals, the trays adorned with fresh flowers and linen napkins she’d borrowed from home. And as she set them in front of him, he couldn’t help thinking how much lovelier she was than Miss October.

His roommates’ opinion was that Theresa was one of those girls who go to college for their M.R.S. degree, and Leonard admitted the possibility that Theresa was trying to show him what a good wife she would make. Nevertheless, he assured them: The subject of marriage had never come up. If Theresa became pregnant, God forbid, he would do his duty as a Catholic and marry her. But Leonard had his heart set on a different sort of wife—a leggy blonde Grace Kelly-type whose idea of housework was a list of instructions for the maid. He imagined that you worked your way up to such a woman; along with the important business contacts came the wife to entertain them. And his passion for Theresa never grew much stronger than the love he felt for his education and would feel for his first job: She was someplace to start.

Nor was Theresa thinking of marriage—or not, at least, to Leonard. More and more, she saw her life with him as a test. Despite what she let him do to her, she still felt no more for him than sincere friendship; she’d seen enough movies to know that it wasn’t love. And if she could give herself totally to this boy she didn’t love, if she could make this dingy bachelor apartment her life’s work, these acts of devotion and sacrifice might reach all the way to God, and something would happen.