Rabid (56 page)

“Me? I’m cocky, I’m arrogant, and I’m a pain in the ass. Did I actually tell you that God is an evil son of a bitch that night?”

He smiled and ducked his dark head to sip the beer again. “You were intoxicated.”

She looked off at the bar and smiled at Monty, who was chopping limes that aerosolized citrus oil, their fizzy scent detectable over the stale smoke and spilled, rancid beer. “I can’t believe I let you in my apartment when I was so tipsy.”

“Nothing happened, if that is what you mean.” He sounded as if he were explaining it to a child. His studied, careful expression left no lines in his face, and he looked younger.

“I didn’t black out. I wasn’t that wasted.”

“Nothing would have happened. I am a priest.” He glared at his beer. “I am no danger.”

How many times had he mentioned that? Maybe every time she had seen him. “And how do you feel about being
not dangerous
?”

He looked up and his mouth half-curved in a weary smile. “Are you analyzing me?”

Psychiatry is easy. Just turn everything into a question. “Do you need psychoanalysis?”

He squinted a little. “Why do you ask if I need psychoanalysis?”

“Why aren’t you answering the question?”

“What do you want to know?”

Leila leaned on her folded arms. Nice of him to give her carte blanche like that. “Were you quite the Lothario before you decided to be a priest?”
Lothario
, that was Rowe, not Shakespeare. What was that Shakespeare quote about angels? Angels, something about angels and what they look like, their
brows
.

He stopped smiling and looked down at his beer again. “I am sorry?”

“Lothario,” she tapped a cigarette out of her pack and examined Dante’s chastened eyes, “Don Juan, Casanova,” found her slim lighter in the side pocket of the laptop’s case, “a playboy, a debaucher,” held the papery cigarette between her lips and said, “letch, libertine,” she ignited the lighter, inhaled sweet smoke, and blew a stream of it over the unoccupied booth on her right while Dante worked on a tentative smile, “a philanderer, a womanizer, a swinger, a player,” she offered him the pack of cigarettes but he waved it off, “stud, dog, tomcat, wolf.”

He stared, waiting for more, then chuckled. “
Un donnaiolo
, in Italian. Quite a list.”

She collected them. “They’re so much better than the female equivalents.”

He inclined his head, acknowledging this, and flicked his glass of mahogany brew with one finger. More bubbles joined the head at the top. “Why would you ask that of a priest?”

“Because you keep saying that you’re harmless, tamed, or
caged,
and those are all loaded words. It implies that you think your nature needs caging, that it’s murderous or dangerous, that you’re a criminal who needs a jail or a wild animal that needs a zoo, like a wolf.”

Dante stared at his beer, unblinking, and his lower eyelids stretched open just a bit more. He reached out with his left hand, and his bare ring finger quivered before he grasped the glass.

“Of course,” Leila leaned back in the booth, “this could all be bar talk, ethanol and caffeine. Idle language, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” More
Macbeth
. Her neurons must be finding ethereal bubbles of neurotransmitter sparks.

Dante grimaced a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “You would have made a good psychiatrist.”

She hadn’t meant to pry, but if he was going to hint all the time, that was going to happen eventually. “How about them Knicks? Them Madrid Real? Them Manchester United?”

“No, you’re
right
.
Caged
. It is a—how you say—a
tell
, like in poker.”

She hesitated, wondering if she was trying to be too smart, but surely he knew all this, and if he didn’t, he was fooling himself. “There are other things, like the condescending way you look at other guys, like you could tell them stories, but you refrain.”

“No,” he said, frowned, and shook his head.

Her fingers touched her own anxious chest. “And the way you behave around women. A couple weeks ago, when Joe and I were here and you were shit-faced at the bar,” Dante winced at her choice of words, “you reached at me across the booth, but you didn’t reach over to touch my cheek. Your hand was too low and cupping upward. You were reaching for the back of my neck to drag me over to you. You’ve done that a thousand times.”

“I wasn’t going to do it.”

“Come on.” She knew his moves as well as he did. She had dated men like him. She liked men like him. Hell, she
was
men like him. “Consider who you’re talking to, here.”

He looked up at her out of the corner of his eyes.

“And you have this stillness about you, a restrained energy, kind of Robert Redford, around
Gatsby
or
The Natural
.” Remembrance of those films, of sunlight haloing on Redford’s bright blonde hair, touched her, and the words
Angels are bright
resolved in her head. That was part of the line:
Angels are bright.
“It’s crouching, like you’re ready to spring, like you’re always sizing a woman up, deciding whether or not you want to have her.”

“Surely not.” He sounded dismissive.

She rapped the cigarette on the ash tray. “You do it in the communion line.”

He sat back. “I do not.”

She leaned on her arms on the table. “Don’t you ever wonder why eighty percent of your line is women?”

“Because women go to church. Skewed population sample, self-selecting.”

“Good try, but no dice.” She smoked. “Because they want you to feed them.”

A faint smile curled the edges of his mouth. “Now I know you are teasing me.” He bit his thumbnail, smiling over his hand at her.

Do you bite your thumb at me?
No, that was Romeo and Juliet. What was that Macbeth line?
Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.

Yes, that was closer.

She continued, “So you were a player.”

“I’m a priest, now.” He sipped his beer.

“How long ago did you take Holy Orders?”

“Five years.” His shoulders relaxed. Perhaps confession was good for his soul. “I was almost thirty.”

“So
why
, if you were a player and a doctor and a scientist,
why
did you become a priest?”

Dante held both his hands around his half-f glass. “I was studying madness and saints.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t enough of a reason. Especially since you’d already been to college and medical school.”

“Are you saying I was too old?” He smiled, and his black eyes twinkled, flirting.

He didn’t even know he was doing it.

She was so right about him. She blew smoke down and away from the table. “I’m saying you should have known better.”

He nodded, a sage oscillation from his strong neck that swished his black hair around his cheekbones. “In medical school, I challenged the professors. If the statistics are true and so many people believe some religion, why do we discount it, especially in psychiatry? If we’re trying to heal the mind, why don’t we ask about their soul?”

“And so you went to the seminary?”

“I was in Roma. If you’re asking about God, there is one place to go for answers. I asked my seminary professors the same things you are asking me. I challenged them. Why is God an evil son-of-a-bitch?”

At least she hadn’t offended him with that drunken comment. “And?”

“Eventually, to answer those questions, I had to explore farther.”

“So you fell into it.”

“I studied at the seminary, but I never intended to take Holy Orders. They accepted me into classes knowing that I was a scholar, not an aspiring priest.”

“But you were still a swinger.”

“At first.” On the lip of his glass, a drip of foam threatened to ride over the edge and fall, and he wiped it off.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
The brightest fallen angel was Lucifer, light-bringer. Bright angels become beautiful devils. “I still don’t see why you decided to be a priest.”

“One of the old priests who taught at the seminary had heard of my—what do you call it?— tomcatting around.”

Casual fucking
is what Leila called it.

“Some of the other seminarians discussed my indiscretions, commented that I dragged my sorry carcass into morning Mass wearing clothes from the day before and smelling like perfume and hangover.”

“We call that the walk of shame.”
She
was flirting. She straightened, crossed her arms over her breasts, and smoked her cigarette.

He scratched his ear. “I was atrocious. I try to pity my former self rather than despise that young man. I flouted every rule. They were lucky to have a doctor working for them, a psychiatrist no less, and I knew that nothing I could do would make them kick me out.”

“What’s your number?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. What number?” His eyebrows rose, perplexed.

Leila explained, “How many women have you slept with?”

“How terribly intrusive.” His prim smile and head tilt seemed amused, not offended. “I am sure I would not reduce women to mere numbers.” That sounded rehearsed.

“So you lost count.”

“No. I mean, I do not know.”

“You aren’t going to tell me that a woman broke your heart.”

“No.” He denied it so fast.

She ground out her cigarette in the ashtray, leaving a dark charcoal smudge in the middle. If she could just forget he was a priest, she could enjoy a nice conversation, but even the black shirt with the truncated collar tabs was enough to remind her, which was better for both of them, the caged one and the crazed one.

Dante said, “No one could say that I was unsuitable for the priesthood. I would have agreed. The old priest asked me to meet him in his office.”

The idea of a priest beckoning toward an office knotted her chest.

Dante rotated the empty beer glass slowly between his palms. He tested the air with one finger, and Monty glanced over at them, brows raised.

Dante called to him, “Irish, thank you.” He continued, “The old priest called me into his office, regarded me seriously and solemnly, and asked me why I screwed the women.”

Leila snorted a chuckle. Stupid old priest.

Dante said, “I laughed, too, but he smiled. He was a kind, thin, pink man with white hair, and smoked a thin cigarette while he waited for me to finish laughing, and he asked again.”

Monty delivered a small glass of light amber liquid to Dante.

Dante cupped his hands around the watered scotch. “I said because they were
women
, and I liked the
women
.” Dante socked down more liquor. He seemed casual but that draught of scotch was the air-gulp of drowning. His shoulders coiled inward as if he were cold, though his tone was light.

Leila leaned on the table, listening. Her own response to that question would have been similar: derision and tautology, and maybe the panic that clinched his shoulders.