Rabid (21 page)

Sonofabitch. “We don’t talk. We’re not in a relationship. I’m
fucking
you.”

“But we could talk.” He emphasized his words with his open palms still locked to her bed above his head, as if he were handing her his idea.

“No, we couldn’t. This is just casual fucking, Conroy. This is not a friendship. In the lab, you’re my boss. Here, we fuck. And that’s all.” With a little luck he would storm out, and she could stop worrying about how to break it off with him.

Conroy’s lips compressed into an angry crease. “I just wanted to help.”

“I don’t need help.” Leila leaned over him so that her face was inches above his. He could only cram his head into the pillow to back up. She widened her eyes. Anger is best dealt with wide-eyed. Narrowed eyes led to hysteria, a noun with roots in the word
uterus
, like hysterectomy, coined when men thought a woman’s uterus could wander up her body and cause insanity, which stemmed from a fear of cuckoldry. Leila’s uterus wandered wherever the hell she wanted it to. “Don’t talk to me unless it’s about my PhD research.”

Conroy blinked. “Fine.”

“Do you want to stop doing this,” her finger stirred the bedsheets, “and go back to being just labmates?”

“No, no.” Conroy sighed. “You just seemed so sad last weekend.”

“I shouldn’t have gotten emotional on you.” She was embarrassed and ashamed about it. Intimate knowledge was power, and Leila feared Conroy having that power. She unlocked his handcuffs. “Come on, Conroy. We both have other things we should be doing.”

After she dressed and left Conroy sitting in her apartment, Leila sat behind the wheel of her car for ten minutes. Her gloved hands clamped the cold steering wheel, and she held it hard to control the terrified vibrations scrambling up her arms.

Damn it, Conroy was getting too close. Eventually, she would destroy him, just like she destroyed all the other men in her life.

Her father was the first man in her life who had died badly. Others, if they survived her, were ruined. Her only route to save them was to fuck them a few times and then throw them away. A few screeching notes played on their heartstrings were better than their damnation.

~~~~~

In the Sloans’ sparkling glass dining room, where the chandelier twinkled on the glass table and its reflection re-reflected on the window glass like a new galaxy just outside the window, Dante sipped the tart Pinot Grigio between bites of the excellent chicken and al dente risotto, and watched Bev Sloan and her preoccupation with the wine.

Bev helped herself to another scoop of risotto and drained the remainder of the wine from the bottle into her glass. She watched the pale wine dribble, and Dante saw sadness drag at her eyes when she contemplated the end of the bottle.

Christina and Dinah ate happily, squishing the risotto into sculpture, outdoing each other with towers and caves of rice.

They didn’t notice their mother becoming tipsy and obsessing about the wine. Her intoxication was not, then, something they dreaded. A child of an alcoholic counts drinks and judges drunkenness because there are repercussions.

Dinah broke through the back wall of her cave and produced an Arborio arch.

If Bev were so good as to invite him for supper again, perhaps he should bring flowers instead.

The girls ate their sculptures and asked to be excused. Bev granted permission and the girls folded their napkins and scampered off.

Bev swallowed the last of the wine in one gulp and licked her glossy lips. Her tipsy cheeks pinkened. She leaned on one elbow and rested her chin on her palm. Her head tilted to one side, perky, flirty, and odd in a woman and mother in her mid-thirties. “So,
Father Dante, why did you become a priest?
”

Dante sat back in his chair. He was a priest, her marriage counselor, a spiritual authority. He was not to be flirted with. He crossed his legs away from her. “That is a complex issue.”

“Did you
hear
a Call?” She blinked, twice, rapidly,
batting her eyelashes
. Her face was pretty, even when she resorted to girlishness. “I’ve always wanted to ask a priest that. It seems so mystical, so holy.”

He looked down, watched his own rough hand toying with a fork. “It’s rather private. It is like asking someone about their sex life.”

“I didn’t mean to pry.” She sat back, and her hand fluttered before it dropped below the table. This seriousness and fluster, her usual demeanor, was more appropriate.

He said, “We discuss the Call
ad nauseam
in the seminary. The theologians simultaneously seek to discover if one has had a divine intercession and they strip all the mysticism away to make a priest who will toe the Catholic line, will adhere to doctrine, and leave superstition to the laity.”

Bev lifted her eyebrows, less flirty. She was prettier when she was less coquettish.

Dante leaned on his elbow toward her and uncrossed his legs. He responded to her not-flirting, reinforcing the mature behavior, and yet he ought not respond too much, as she could manipulate him with this if he allowed a pattern to establish.

Bev said, “I’m not sure what I imagined the seminary to be. Praying, I guess. Memorizing the Mass, special Masses, other rituals, but I don’t know what else.”

“Doctrine, homiletics, the history of the Church, dogma, theology, eschatology, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic.” Dante smiled and looked away from Bev, who hadn’t looked away from him. “I finished my residency in psychiatry before I entered the seminary. The professors wanted black and white answers because Catholicism is biased toward good and evil. They wanted shining knights, defending the faith.” He ducked his head, embarrassed. “I was a problem student.”

Bev leaned over her elbows, not too flirty. “You argued.”

“There is this old moral puzzle about the sacrament of reconciliation, and how a priest should divide his mind and act as if he does not know anything that is said to him under the seal of confession. It is this: If directly before Mass, a man confesses to you under the sacrament that he poisoned the chalice containing the sacramental wine, deadly poison, no antidote, an absolute death to touch your lips to it, what should you do?”

Bev raised her eyebrows, and her gaze sharpened. She didn’t seem fuzzily intoxicated at all anymore. “That’s a horrible thought.”

“The answer that they want is that you should drink it, and you should allow others to drink it because you must act as if you do not know what is said in confession, because the seal of confession is sacred, and that our mere corporal lives are far inferior to the sacred nature of the soul and the hereafter. Martyrdom is also encouraged.”

Bev began to waver backward. “You would break the seal of confession?”

“I would not commit suicide, and I would not allow innocents to be murdered.” He shrugged. “I will not be used as a tool of evil.”

“But he confessed!”

“I said that I would give the man the penance of confessing his crime and ensuring that no one drank the wine. If he did not do this, then I would know that he had not been truly contrite, that he was not dreading the loss of Heaven and the pains of Hell,
et cetera
, and he had not resolved to confess his sins, do his penance, and avoid the near occasion of sin. Thus, if he did not save everyone from drinking the poison, he had not made a true confession and the sacrament of reconciliation was void, so I was under no obligation to allow the murders to proceed.”

“So you’d break the seal of confession.” She looked horrified, eyebrows down and upper lip contracted, as the old priest had.

“The hypothetical confessing man had not made a true confession, he was not forgiven for his sin, and therefore I was under no onus to act as if he had. Indeed, if I had not hypothetically acted, the sin of murder would have also stained his hypothetical soul.” Again, the debate flared, not intellectual, but righteous. “A priest must not allow himself and the Church to be used as an instrument for evil.
If
the Devil exists,
since
the Devil exists, we must not allow the Church to fall into diabolical hands.” It was a variation on Cardinal Newman’s postulate—
If
God exists,
since
God exists—a desperate scrambling of belief.

Bev stared at her empty, cream-smeared plate. “It still seems wrong.” 

“They felt I was quibbling with the letter and spirit of the law. I was angry that the larger issue, that of true confession, went unremarked upon.”

She looked away and tucked her honey-brown hair behind one pearl-studded ear. “And they think the laity are superstitious.” She shook her head.

“It is why they did not believe the reports of sexual abuse. They are generals discussing strategy of battle, lines of skirmish within semantics of doctrine. Most have not been in a parish for decades. They have been locked in the Roman Curia, debating the nuances of Aramaic words or the order of words as they were written in Latin, investing them, I think, with far more content than remains. They think all the priests are like they are: scholastic, ambitious, political. Since I have been here, working at a parish, which I have not done since my regency, I am astonished at how little the Curia knows about the people of the Church. They don’t remember a normal life. Few of them have had normal lives, since many of them entered the Church when they were fifteen or so. They don’t understand the world, or its pressures, or what children are like.”

Bev shook her head and rested her temple on her hand.

Dante confided, “They thought ‘streetwise youths’ were tempting vulnerable, innocent, naïve priests.”

Bev glared at him. Her alcohol fog had burned away.

The twinge twinkled in Dante’s temple, a reminder of his sleepless nights. “The seminary was designed for right and wrong beliefs. It was easier to be admitted to a seminary if one believes in absolutes or if one is convinced of one’s own partial divinity, meaning if one was emotionally immature or a narcissist. Especially, I have heard, in the States.”

“No.” She shook her head and straightened her silverware to square with the edge of the table, like the careful placement of the Host on the altar.

The flicker in his temple grew insistent, became a sting. “American seminaries were notorious for demanding absolutes, encouraging shallow reasoning, admitting anyone who showed the slightest interest in the priesthood, even men who obviously, in their applications, were repressing their sexuality and attracted to vulnerability. They turned away men who evinced interest in having a family because they thought, rightly, that these men would eventually leave the priesthood. They turned away the normal homosexuals because they proselytize that homosexuality is a sin. Thus, they eliminated normal, heterosexual and homosexual men and admitted those who were hiding their sexuality.” The backs of his legs ached as he repressed pacing.

Dante said and tapped his fingers on the edge of the glass table, “They told the young men that the vow of chastity precluded sex with women. If they did horrible things to a child, that was sinful and they should repent, but it didn’t break their vow of chastity.” He shook his head. “They used to hand out paddles to young men in the seminary to tuck in their shirts, so they would not accidentally touch themselves and be tempted to sin. Insanity.”

Bev grunted, an expulsion of disbelief.

“As a horrible result, the seminaries allowed the self-selection of damaged, childlike men and churned out classes enriched with pedophiles.”

Bev stared, horrified, and yet Dante couldn’t stop talking. It must have been the wine. It must have been the stress and the horror. He said it all, everything in his heart that hurt so much. “These emotionally stunted men were sent to dioceses where they were given the least prestigious duties: altar boys and youth groups. The young priests—impressionable, ignorant—saw the young men in the youth groups experimenting, searching, learning things they themselves should have learned as teenagers, and they identified too strongly with the young men, saw themselves as the leader of the pack, which indicates they were wolves. They established preferences, predilections, habits, and techniques.”