Kissing in Manhattan (27 page)

Elvetta took a sharp breath. “What?” she whispered nervously. “Thomas, what?”

Thomas didn’t speak or blink. He was lost suddenly in the young woman before him, the blue galaxies of her fears, the vastness of her heart. Everything else went black and Thomas stared into Elvetta, into stories that either she was imagining or he was, stories where Elvetta was tied to a rock, being devoured by a sea monster, stories where Thomas and Elvetta were naked together and she lay in his lap and he counted every hair on her head.

“Stop it,” hissed Elvetta. She didn’t want to lose, to look away. “Stop it, Thomas.”

Thomas gazed on, at another story behind Elvetta’s eyes, a story where she was holding a man by the throat.

Elvetta slapped Thomas’s face. “Stop it!”

Thomas blinked, woke from his reverie. He was back in class, seated on a hardwood stage, his cheek stinging. He rubbed his cheek, while Elvetta glared at him.

“Why did you do that?” asked Thomas.

The teacher hurried over, breathless with hope.

“Yes, why?” said the teacher.

Elvetta blushed. The whole class gathered around.

“Thomas was . . . being rude,” said Elvetta. She stood, left the class, and never spoke to Thomas again.

Thomas was stunned. He was stunned even further when Elvetta quit the Shakespeare production the day after this acting exercise.

“Why are people afraid of me?” Thomas asked his aunts. He still lived at the warehouse during his college days. It was only ten blocks from school.

“Because you aren’t afraid of anything,” said Mary Jude.

Thomas thought about this. He was drinking coffee with his aunts, playing a card game they called Sluice, a game only he and his aunts knew the rules to. It was February, and the tree branches outside the window were sleeved in ice. Thomas was twenty. Mabel was smoking a briar pipe.

“I’m not a hero,” muttered Thomas.

“I never said you were a hero.” Mary Jude snapped up a card. “I said you weren’t afraid of anything.”

“And you play the piano wonderfully,” added Margaret.

The three sisters nodded simultaneously. They agreed on very little, except for Thomas, and the peculiarities of his nature. Every evening, Thomas came back to the warehouse apartment and collapsed on the couch, his mind frazzled and spent from the input that Manhattan threw at him, the bodies, the walls, the trash, the food. If an object that he stared at seemed peaceful or whole in its nature, like a tree or a watchful baby, then Thomas drew strength from focusing on that object. But more often he felt, through a sort of draining visual empathy, the terrors that gripped Manhattan’s denizens. He read haste and greed in graffiti and in the propped-up ceilings of bodegas. At clubs he gazed at women in slick black dresses, wishing he could fall prey to their magic, sensing instead that they had sad, splintered hearts. At a party once, when he shook the hand of a young man, Thomas felt a conviction in his fingertips that the man would beat his girlfriend that very night.

In the end Thomas had few friends, because he didn’t know how to joke about women or sports or tragedy. It took a back rub from his aunt Mabel—the sister with the strongest hands—and cups of her brandied coffee and several rounds of Sluice before he could fashion into words the strange truths that had assailed him that day.

“I saw a woman in the park today,” said Thomas one night.

The Merchant sisters exchanged glances.

Margaret touched Thomas’s wrist gently. “What was she doing, Thomas?”

“She was sitting on a bench.” Thomas gazed at his cards, threw one on the table. “She was tearing at the cuticles on her thumbs. Tearing and tearing.”

Mary Jude plucked up the card Thomas had cast away. She laid down what she held.

“Sluice,” she said.

“Shoot,” whispered Mabel.

“This woman was bleeding,” said Thomas.

Margaret poured Thomas more coffee. The heat vent in the corner ticked.

“How long did you watch her?” asked Margaret.

“A long time.”

Mary Jude pulled her hair back, clipped it. She faced her nephew, her widow’s peak a black dagger point on her forehead. “That woman isn’t your affair, Thomas.”

“Mary,” warned Margaret, “let him talk.”

Thomas looked at the floor. “She was making herself bleed. She was weeping.”

Mary Jude frowned. She wanted to break her nephew of his obsession with fellow feeling, his penchant for compassion. She wanted him to want whiskey, and girls, and joy.

“Forget that woman, Thomas,” growled Mary Jude.

Thomas smiled sadly at his aunts.

“I can’t,” he said.

Two years later Thomas was in a seminary in Pennsylvania. He’d been baptized a Catholic, and though his aunts had never taken him to church, the warehouse had fostered Thomas’s instinct for contemplation. He’d stared so long and intensely at the furniture of the world—at chairs and people and the sky through the warehouse ceiling—that his mind had asked for more. Thomas explained this as best he could to his confessor and novice master, Father Reese, as they sat in Father Reese’s office.

“You mean,” said Father Reese, “that you’ve discovered Christ at the root of creation?”

Thomas shook his head. “I mean God’s the only thing that can stand me thinking about Him all the time.”

“That sounds prideful,” said the priest.

Thomas shrugged. He was twenty-three years old.

Father Reese, a portly man and an avid golfer, leaned back in his chair. When he raised his eyebrows, his forehead dented.

“What about women?” asked Father Reese. “Can you stand thinking about them?”

Thomas looked into the priest’s eyes. He thought he saw gluttony there, a love of red meat, a keenness for pleasure.

“I’ve been in love,” sighed Thomas. “I’ve been with women.”

The priest smiled. “And?”

“They don’t know enough about their own beauty for me to be in awe of them.” Thomas scratched at a pimple on the back of his neck. The priest’s office smelled like cigarettes.

“Is that right,” said Father Reese.

“None of us knows enough about his own beauty,” said Thomas.

Punk, thought the priest. Snot-nosed punk.

“And who’s going to teach us about our beauty, Thomas? You, by becoming a priest?”

Thomas gazed deeper into the man before him, gazed past the long putts and the London broils, until he saw jealousy in Father Reese’s eyes.

“No,” said Thomas. “I’m not a hero. I just see things.”

“You see things.” Father Reese had large feet. He wiggled his large toes inside his large shoes. “Have you heard the line from Scripture,
No one shall see the face of God and live?
”

Thomas sighed again. He hated semantics. In fact on most days, Thomas hated talking, period.

“I’m not trying to see God’s face,” said Thomas quietly. “I’m trying to see His mind.”

Father Reese snorted. Good luck, kid, he thought.

Thomas graduated seminary when he was twenty-six. He got his master’s in divinity, then did an intern stint at a Brooklyn parish. When he was thirty-two he applied for and received the sole pastoral position at St. Benedict’s on Wall Street. St. Benedict’s was a dark, moody cave of a church, with a red carpet down the center aisle and great stands of white candles back by the doors. Priests traditionally groaned when assigned to St. Benedict’s, but Thomas liked the place for its silent stone walls, and its sparse patronage. Most of his Wall Street neighbors were busy making money and running the world, so Thomas was left with an audience of aging Irishwomen clutching rosaries. This suited Thomas absolutely. He was a mystic, not a missionary, and he preferred a subtle, monkish obedience to and contemplation of the Divine over any heroic work in conversions. Every day at St. Benedict’s was like a quiet, solemn Christmas, and Thomas, at the daily five o’clock Mass, gave sermons on discernment and grace, rather than abortion or politics. When he delivered these sermons, Thomas stared from the altar over the heads of his parishioners to the clean white candles gleaming at the far end of the church. They were a reliable focus point, the candles were, and if enough of them were burning, they gave off a light, pleasing incense. Thomas found that if he stared at these candles intently enough, and took in their scent, good words came out of him.

Thomas’s three aunts took the subway down from Harlem once or twice a week to hear their nephew preach and to wink at him slyly from the pews. Thomas still joined them for Sunday lamb dinners at the warehouse, while on weeknights in the rectory basement he ran the small St. Benedict’s soup kitchen, which served the first fifty mouths that came in off the street. Thomas’s favorite homeless person was a mute woman named Esther. Esther looked to be in her late fifties, and she was missing one front tooth. She was thin, tiny, and given to smiling. She wore a bedraggled pink ribbon in her hair each day, she never missed Thomas’s Mass, and she nibbled ham sandwiches quietly by his side every weeknight between seven and nine o’clock.

So this was Thomas’s life. He passed a decade and a half in delightful peace at St. Benedict’s, reading, praying, feeding the hungry, smiling at Esther. He baptized an occasional baby and said his share of funerals, but mostly he stared at his candles and delivered his sermons and was quietly, reverently happy.

The change came when Thomas was forty-seven. It began on a cool Monday evening in late September. Thomas was delivering his sermon—the one about the vineyard workers that the master hires late in the day—when he noticed a man standing in back by the candles. At least, it seemed to be a man. Beyond the candles was darkness, and Thomas could just make out the hunched shoulders and lowered chin of what looked to be a tall man in a black overcoat. The man stood stock-still, like a hunter or a bodyguard, and he seemed to be listening intently. Thomas also noticed a sharp stench of something oily in the air, but attached no importance to it at the time. The moment that Thomas finished his sermon, the church doors whispered and the man was gone.

The next day, after lunch, Thomas sat at the rectory kitchen table, staring at the salt and pepper shakers. The Bible lay open before him. This was where Thomas sat and stared daily as he composed his evening sermon. Today, however, Thomas’s focus was broken. The man from the night before, the figure in black, stood in the hallway of Thomas’s mind, a distant but definite figure. Thomas wondered what the man could have wanted, lurking in the shadows like that, leaving before the real ceremony had taken place. Perhaps the man had been homeless and hungry. Perhaps he was a Wall Street trader who’d lost a fortune and needed redemption. Or maybe, Thomas thought, a lover of architecture, come to admire the St. Benedict’s ceiling. Finally, Thomas shook the man from his thoughts, fixed his mind on the Bible.

That very night, though, the man appeared again. He slipped inside the church just before the gospel, and stood in the shadows. Thomas paused in his preaching, got a bead on the man’s proportions. The stranger was over six feet tall, and again wearing the black overcoat. From the cut of the man’s torso and the quick way he’d entered the church, Thomas figured him to be young, perhaps in his early thirties. More disturbing, though, was the acrid, burnt smell that seemed to have come into the church with the man, a smell that overpowered the fragrance of the candles. Thomas had a lifetime of experience gazing into the heart of things: he could predict the weather with a knack that alarmed even him, and, on his hospital visits, he knew at a glance how many hours left on earth this or that cancer patient had. But now, as Thomas stood before the altar, he’d never been so jolted by the smell, the aura, of another human being. The stench was clearly emanating from the man in black.

“And—and Christ will reach you where you live,” stammered Thomas, trying to return to his sermon. “He’ll work with whatever circumstances you find yourself in. . . .”

Thomas paused again, tried to breathe only through his mouth. The smell was noxious, unrelenting. It was a bitter, dark smell, not like garbage or dung or an unwashed person, but like acid-soaked wood that had been torched and charred and was polluting the air around it. Thomas stared at his parishioners. Esther sat in the front pew, smiling at him. Esther, Thomas thought, Esther who plugs her nose at the smell of tuna fish or even burned toast. She seemed to smell nothing tonight, and when Thomas checked other faces in his small crowd, they were at peace too.

Thomas was amazed. He fought his way through his sermon, and when he’d finished, the man in black vanished once again. When the doors of St. Benedict’s clicked shut, Thomas took a gulp of air, and coughed.

“Guuh? Gunh?” From her pew Esther grunted and frowned up at the priest. She knew something was wrong.

Thomas breathed in and out. The bitter stench was gone. There were only the candles.

“I’m fine.” The priest wiped his forehead, cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”

It began happening nightly. The man in black and his terrible odor would arrive just before the gospel and leave just after the sermon. The man stood always in darkness, and Thomas realized after a few nights that his parishioners were oblivious to the man’s presence. Despite the putrid air the faithful in the pews never turned up their noses or tried to spy out the source of the poison. After the first few Masses the man in black attended, Thomas asked Esther and his aunts casually whether they’d smelled anything funky in the air.

“You know,” he chatted, “like a burnt smell? Like maybe the vents are failing?”

The women shook their heads no, but Mabel Merchant studied her nephew carefully. She was the sister most sensitive to intrigue and shady goings-on. Every year, around Easter, Thomas found one pure gold coin in the collection plate and knew without asking that his aunt Mabel had slipped him some treasure. He knew now, meeting her eyes, that she sensed a mystery afoot, but when he held his tongue, Mabel nodded softly and turned away. Thomas wanted to confide in his aunt, but he was honestly frightened. How could a man radiate a filthy, bitter essence that only a priest could smell? Why would the man materialize only for the gospel and for Thomas’s sermon and then melt away again?