Any Bitter Thing (21 page)

Tell me again, Jack, why that particular sacrifice.

Sacrifice? Sure. Call it a sacrifice. Our gift to God. But isn’t it also our gift
from
God? A means to reject the corporeal and embrace the spiritual? A channel for maintaining the great, ongoing conversation? Not that I don’t complain at times. I do.

What does God say then?

Celibacy’s not for sissies.

Hah.

Jesus chose it, Mike. St. Paul chose it. You could do worse for role models.

You’re right about that.

We keep our vows, they keep theirs—fidelity in marriage, constancy in friendship. We show them how to keep tough promises.
And anyway, if we fully belong to someone else, how do we husband our parishioners?

Now he’s annoyed by Jack’s logic. He does not say:
She’s married, Jack, did I mention that?
Instead, he reminds his confessor:
But I do belong fully to someone else. I have a child. And here’s the thing: she’s made me more available. Really, she has. I love my parishioners more because of her. I understand what they want for their children.

Do you understand what they want from you, though? That’s the trick, Mike-o. Are you hearing me?

Yeah, I’m hearing you. I hear you.

Then why do I get the impression you’ve gone stone deaf?

It’s a man-made law, for Pete’s sake. God didn’t make this one up.

But you chose it, Mike. And still you wound up with a kid. Are you grateful?

Yes, of course. of course I’m grateful.

Then say thank you and move on. God gave you a gift-wrapped present the rest of us can’t have, and you’re ticked that he left off the bow.

That’s Jack for you. Not a man to mince words. The road unwinds, reddish trees lacing above him. He keeps his hand on the Breviary—his talisman, his dialogue.

Once home, he stops in the empty church to kneel in the sacristy, communicating his weakness and also his resolve. Then he waits for that feeling, that white, interior blooming that signals God’s forgiving presence. He is almost glad for his feverish urges, to have something messy and pressing to wrestle with; the rest of his life is too easy. His arrogance returns, for he has won another struggle, which he offers to God as a trophy.

He goes into the house. The bachelors twine through his legs. He strokes Boo’s silky fur, admiring the ingenious design of this animal, the grace and muscle, the gloss and striping, the mysterious internal mechanisms that produce a trippingly lovely sound at the merest touch. It’s coming on dark but he doesn’t
flick the kitchen switch. Instead, he feeds the cats in the soothing dimness and goes straight to his bedroom to get ready for bed. He’ll read from his Breviary, watch the news, sleep the sleep of the righteous, dream the dreams of the chosen.

On the bathroom hook hangs a robe he got from Lizzy and Mariette last Christmas—an embarrassing sea-green bathrobe with cat appliqués on the pockets that he wears every night anyway. He completes his ablutions, snaps on his reading light, picks up his Breviary, and settles in, Fatty and Mittens squashed companionably into his lap, Boo staring from atop the dresser. Next door, Vivienne would be moving through her house, getting the boys to bed or doing up a few dishes. He imagines Lizzy and Mariette in the attic with a board game, listening to the lightness of those footfalls.

“Michael?”

The cats scatter. He bolts up, heart flapping like a trapped bat, and cracks open his bedroom door.

Astonishingly, it is Vivienne, standing in the middle of the parlor.

“What happened?” he cries, pulse still jumping, hand gripping the doorknob. He registers her gold earrings, the touch of lipstick.

“They’re fine,” she says. “Pauline’s at the house.”

Swept-back hair. White dress dotted with tiny, cherry-red snowflakes. Not even Snow White on her bower, covered with rose petals, glistened so.

“I’m sorry to bother,” she says. He feels caught and idiotic in this ridiculous bathrobe. Hairy legs sticking down. Broad, flat, hairy feet.

“I heard you drive in,” she says, very quietly.

He tries to hear the insides of her words but nothing arrives except a pulsating silence, a freighted, ringing, something’s-happening brand of silence.

“Construction,” he says. “I had to turn back.”

“I, too, I had to turn back,” she says. “But I didn’t.”

What does he do now? Should he ask her to leave, change clothes, meet her in his office? Instead he steps back, dopey and stuck, like a boy at his first dance, hands dangling off the ends of his arms.

“Michael.”

It’s his name,
Michael
, spoken in this new way, that tips him over. His Christian name, iridescent as a butterfly, lolloping into the stark little room. Such a beautiful name, spoken this way. A secret, fluttering thing, spoken this way.

At this moment he loves his name more than any other thing in Heaven or on Earth. His name becomes food and water and miles of sky and ten thousand violets. His body fully wakes now, listening for his name.

“Michael.” She comes to him. The door swings to, whispers halfway closed behind her.

His arrogance vanishes. As if he has any gift God wants! As if this wretched aching is a gift God gives! What of the gifts God took back? Mother, father, brothers, sister. Rage, shocking and elemental, stuns him; it crashes over the breakwater of prayer and intention and routine and good sense and responsibility that he has constructed so fervently, so dutifully, so
sincerely
over the years. He braces hard, but over the wall it roars:
I have lost so much
, he cries inwardly, seeing her here, her eyes wet, her hair freshly brushed, all his losses converging in a soupy craving that he cannot bear, he truly cannot, it seeks release, it seeks a home, and so he takes in his name and lifts his arms and lets her walk straight into them.

God made her
, he breathes to himself as her hands twine his neck and pull his face toward hers. God made her powdery skin, the scent of warm ground floating from her worked hands. This woman, Vivienne, in his arms—a joy unlike any in his repertoire of joy. Unlike the dizzy joy he feels for this season. Unlike
the layered sympathy he feels for a congregation at prayer. Unlike the gut-twisting longing he feels for Lizzy. Something else altogether, this: another facet of God’s mystery emanating from her face, her apple-clean lips. Caught and helpless, he tries to speak but can manage only a pitiful bleating, he is pitiful, he is nothing but a garden-variety, all-purpose, ordinary sinner. What relief.

For a second, eyes closed, buffeted by his own breath, he sways on his feet and she catches him.
Thank you
, he says, laughing a little, and then she laughs, returning him abruptly to his real life. He is a celibate man wearing a bathrobe with cats on it. The woman he has always desired—there, there it is, he has always desired her—rests against him in a pretty dress she picked out thinking of him.

But he is spoken for. As is she.

He lifts his head, eyes wide open, clasping this small, soft woman. He understands how the world was born, how trees and sky and dogs and lava and dragonflies and water came to be: the whole saturated mess sprang from the swamped insides of God’s unutterable loneliness.

She touches his face, a soft pressure on his cheeks. He feels like a freshly released exile returned to the world with his faculties altered. She studies him, her own confusion surfacing as a slender discord in her features, a slackening of her eyebrows, a fidgety lower lip. He gentles his hands to her shoulders—how narrow they are beneath the soft, small cotton sleeves of that dress—and nudges her away, a motion so shreddingly painful he could be tearing off his own skin.
Oh
, he says,
oh, I wish
, and that is all, the rest is just noise, a muddy whimpering, but he has done it, it took all his might but he’s dug out this space between them. To bridge that space again, to move so much as a knuckle, will be to practice, with his faculties intact, the forked gift of free will.

Something drops in the parlor. Vivienne’s eyes spring open:
Oh mon Dieu, it’s Ray.
The door hitches as Vivienne
collapses to the bed and grasps the quilt to hide herself in one swift slide, but it is not Ray who pushes the door open but poor, shocked, mute Mrs. Hanson, her eyes shifting toward the bed and the blurred shape clawing to hide itself. He yelps at her, furious and ashamed. Mrs. Hanson holds up a pair of eyeglasses, filling the doorway absolutely, muttering something he can’t catch before he slams the door in her face.

Vivienne, Vivi
, he whispers, tendering his hand, helping her wriggle out of the quilt in which he will recall her scent only minutes from now.
It’s all right, it’s no one.
She gets up, squinty as a child after a nightmare, her fingers working at her hair.
I thought it was Ray
, she cries,
I thought it was Ray.

But he tells her no, it wasn’t Ray, Ray’s out fishing, it was no one, just Mrs. Hanson, she saw nothing, that’s her car leaving just now, don’t cry. Thoroughly rattled, he nonetheless thrills to be comforting her, a balance returning, his lately up-ended world righting itself. He becomes the leader again, not the led; once again he retakes full charge of this ambiguous dance.

It must be a sign—
, she says.
If anyone did see . . . You would be required to leave. What would become of me if they required you to leave?
But he tells her nothing will happen, no one saw, and he begins to believe it. He has not been caught; Mrs. Hanson was merely embarrassed to find him in his bathrobe; she thinks the motion in his bed was cats, the cats she complains about endlessly, how they’re always chasing each other over the furniture, knocking things over, causing a ruckus.

This was another test and he passed.

Forgive me, Michael
, she says,
I’m so foolish. So ashamed.

Don’t worry
, he says.
Nothing happened
, he says,
we won’t speak of this again
, holding her, calming her, urging her toward the door and out of his scraped, wounded life, offering up his misery and grateful for his name.

SIXTEEN

This is how marriages end
, I thought, parking my car on the slope of Hanover Street. It had begun to occur to me that I was having the equivalent of an affair, but here I was anyway, back on Harry Griggs’s doorstep. Same three flights, same dark hallway, same badly fitted door, same hollow sound when I knocked.

Harry opened the door, cheerier than usual. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey!” Boomy and expansive—energized, I thought, by his weeks of restitution. He ushered me inside and offered me a Gatorade. “It’s been a hell of a day,” he said. “You picked a hell of a day.”

“What happened?”

“I deboned my last goddamn chicken. It was one of those take-this-job-and-shove-it kinda moments.” He laughed, loud and wide-mouthed. A back tooth was missing, I noticed, and the other teeth looked flattened by old fillings.

“What are you going to do for money?”

“Man, it felt good,” he said, missing my question entirely. “No more Cambodians clackety-clacking at me all day. I got a bellyful of them in the war.”

“You were stateside,” I reminded him, accepting my drink.

He pointed at me. “You listen too close. Bad habit.” He stretched out in the tweed chair. “Free at last, free at last, free at last.”

“Well,” I said. “Congratulations, I guess.”

“You said it!” He laughed again—a new laugh, not the pleasant, rueful chuckle I was used to. This was a big, loud, horsey, vaguely libidinous chortle. His face got very red. Drinking, I figured—but not much, I hoped.

“I missed you last week,” he said, pulling his chair close to mine. “This place was a goddamn tomb.”

“How was your Thanksgiving?”

“I sat here and ate a chicken that was still half froze. You?”

“We ate at Mariette and Charlie’s. Mrs. Blanchard made mince pies,” I said, extracting a package from my bag. “Here. I saved you a piece.”

It disappeared in two bites. “She’s good,” he said.

“The boys were both home, too, Buddy and Bernard? We played cards for about six hours.” I took a languid sip of my drink. “It’s kind of amazing how easy it is to pretend to be living a normal life.”

“You said it!” Sipping from Loreen’s prissy cups, Harry resembled a bear at a tea party. “What’ve you got for me today?”

I had few stories left, and we both seemed to know it.

He lifted the cup to me. “You must have something. Give me the ending.”

“A house full of strangers,” I said. Or near-strangers. Father Mike was gone and in his place appeared some men I knew a little—Father Jack and Monsignor Frank—and a woman with a big, frightening smile. She asked me questions I didn’t get and showed me dolls with no clothes on and urged me to tell the truth, which, when spoken aloud, sounded like the exact opposite of the truth. In the end I fled to the back of the house and hid in our coat closet, cowering in the muffling dark, listening to them
look for me and hoping to hear his voice lancing through the noise. I stood under the hangers and pulled the arms of his jacket around me because it was the closest I had to the real thing. Clutching the empty arms, I picked and picked at the cuff, working at a hole that had started with a swipe of Boo’s claws, then worrying the nub where a button had come off as the strangers in my house called my name. He was already gone. He was not coming back.

I shut my eyes. I was back there. I’d been waiting in that closet, comforting myself with my uncle’s empty coatsleeves, for long enough.

“What’s wrong?” Harry asked.

I sighed. “I’m out of stories.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I’ve kinda been waiting for this. Somebody’s dead as Moses, all the stories in the world won’t bring them back.”