Kissing in Manhattan (28 page)

Thomas pondered all of this in his heart as he sat in his kitchen and stared at his salt and pepper shakers. He began to wonder very practically whether a demon hadn’t taken up house in his church. Or maybe it’s an angel, Thomas hoped. Maybe it’s Gabriel or Michael and they just smell nasty to mortals and no one knows it. Whatever the visitor in black was, though, Thomas knew that it was no ordinary man. He knew only—through the gifted empathy that had become almost a muscle—that the visitor was male, and deeply troubled, and capable of an immense concentration of mind. For, as the man in black stood in the shadows and Thomas delivered his sermons, the priest felt power drain out of himself toward the man. Normally, Thomas hoped his words might be a fuel of sorts for his parishioners, a boost to their humors, an option of grace and kindness. But, for Thomas, facing the man in black was like rapture, or a duel to the death. The man seemed to be listening to Thomas with a palpable greed, a forward incline of the head, a voracious ear for truth. Thomas grew physically conscious of the words leaving his mouth, of their becoming a vapor that the man in black sucked into his lungs and took away from St. Benedict’s. Each night, when the man left, Thomas all but collapsed on the altar. He closed his eyes, felt sweat on his forehead. His fingers shook on the chalice.

“Are you sick?” asked Margaret Merchant.

“Have you puked?” said Mary Jude.

Esther made grunting sounds, clung to Thomas’s arm.

Margaret touched her nephew’s cheek. “What’s gotten into you?”

Thomas set his jaw, answered no one. He almost did feel sick and nauseous. He began preparing his sermons with the man in black in mind. They were severe, loud, apocalyptic sermons that the stranger seemed to call out of him, as if Thomas’s decades of watchfulness and gentleness had been one extended gathering of strength for the battle that had now arrived.

“There is no favoritism with God,” Thomas preached. “All moments are equal in the eyes of the Lord.” The priest stared past the candles at his single, shadowy target. “If God has filled your life with joy, or chosen to show you His dark side, it’s of no consequence to your actions, either way. Saint Paul instructs us to pray that we don’t become articulate in evil matters. But if we do grow familiar with evil, and we understand it, we’re no less obligated to speak against it. To live beyond it.”

When Thomas spoke this way, his parishioners fidgeted. Esther worried her pink ribbon around on her thumb, and several regulars stopped showing up. Nobody seemed to want to hear about evil, but Thomas couldn’t help himself. The smell of the man in black was drastic and otherworldly, and judging by the fine cut of the man’s overcoat, it had nothing to do with poor personal hygiene. It had to do with evil, Thomas thought. As he stood on his altar and spoke to the figure beyond the candles, Thomas’s knees quivered slightly beneath his robes. Somehow, he knew that the man’s bitter smell was the scent of a rank and blistered soul. Beneath the man’s coat and kempt appearance lay some monstrous violence, some hatred or grudge or some aberrant sexual appetite. Perhaps the man wasn’t even aware of his own fetidness. But, for reasons he himself couldn’t fathom, Thomas would have bet the bank that the man was carrying a gun.

“We’re worried about you,” said the Merchant triplets. They had Thomas at the warehouse for Sunday lamb and Sluice, but he picked at his food and played his cards wrong.

“You’ve lost weight, Thomas,” said Margaret.

“Yeah,” growled Mary Jude, “and your sermons are getting psycho.”

Mabel raised her hand. Her sisters went quiet.

“Thomas,” said Mabel. “What is the matter?”

Thomas stared out the window at the October moon.

“There’s someone I have to help,” he said.

“Who?” said the sisters.

Thomas shook his head. “I have to do it alone. I’m the only one who can . . . speak to him.”

Mary Jude slapped the table. “Him who, dammit?”

Thomas met his aunt Mabel’s eyes.

“Him,”
whispered Thomas.

The confrontation happened months later, on a Saturday night, in the dead of winter. Thomas was in the two-doored, closeted room at the rear of St. Benedict’s, hearing Confessions. In his chamber of the closet Thomas sat on a small stool, listening through a grille to the sins of his kneeling parishioners. It was early in January of the new millennium, and the invisible voices through the grille pondered how they should repent, what resolutions they might pursue. Thomas generally closed his eyes when he heard Confessions. He enjoyed the oaken smell and the darkness, but he was embarrassed by the physical intimacy of the closet. It often seemed to Thomas that the person inches away from him through the wall was naked, in the changing room of some very important clothing store or else in the solitary-confinement box of a prison. Thomas could hear every sigh and every sob with a proximity that, despite his office, made him feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. His strongest natural faculty, his vision, was denied him, and Thomas had to reach across the darkness with other, faultier senses. So, even on a good evening, Thomas disliked hearing Confessions. But it was with pure dread one night that Thomas heard the click of the door in the chamber opposite his. This dread prickled over his skin, stirring goose bumps, for coming through the grille now was a familiar, scalded smell.

“You know who this is?” said a low voice.

Thomas shuddered, crossed himself, covered his nose with a handkerchief. “Yes.”

“How do you know?”

Thomas’s mind raced. He’d thought there’d been a pact between him and the figure in black, an unspoken agreement that whatever this creature wanted from Thomas, it would get it by keeping its quiet distance beyond the candles and listening to Thomas’s sermons.

“I just know,” said Thomas.

The stranger sniffled fiercely. “You’re wondering why I’ve come to you now. After all this time.”

Thomas’s heart pounded. He sensed, correctly, that the pews outside the closet were empty. It was nine o’clock, and the hearing of Confessions had technically ended. But there would be no sending this creature away. Thomas drew a breath, opened his eyes to the dark wall between him and the stranger.

“Yes,” said Thomas, “I’m wondering.”

There was a rustling, then a silence. The stranger had settled in.

“I’ve come to tell you,” said the voice, “that human lives are absurd.”

“I see,” said Thomas.

The hidden stranger laughed. “I doubt that you do. But, even so, human lives are absurd, and I’m going to end one.”

Thomas kept his handkerchief to his nose. “You’re going to end a human life?”

“Yes.”

“Your own?”

“No.” The stranger seemed to yawn. “I’m going to kill another man.”

Like an athlete Thomas cleared his mind. He ignored the stench around him, prayed a prayer for himself and the stranger.
Lord Jesus, help us
is what Thomas prayed.

“Say more,” said Thomas.

“The man’s name is James Branch,” said the stranger. “He’s my roommate. I’m going to shoot him dead.”

“Why?”

In the quiet Thomas could almost taste the man’s sneer.

“There is no why, Father. There’s only absurdity. People die. That’s all.”

“I’m afraid that sounds terribly convenient for someone who’s considering murder.”

“Go to hell, Father.”

Thomas sat in silence, waited. He thought of things in his life that he’d stared at and marveled over. He thought of Jocelyn Rich’s abdomen, of dead flowers, of the hands of beggars.

“What could you possibly know about absurdity, Father?”

“A little, I suppose.”

“Really. Well, I know a great deal about it. A great deal.”

Thomas kept his mind a blank slate. He forced his thoughts away from suspicions that the unnamed man was armed.

“My brother was killed when he was a boy, Father. He was killed at an amusement park by a man dressed as a cartoon character. A giant Guppy fish.”

Thomas waited. The dank, bitter stench of the stranger had seeped completely through the grille now, filling the confessional like an outhouse.

“You can go ahead and laugh, Father. I know it’s funny.”

“I don’t feel like laughing. I’m sorry about your brother.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you are.”

Thomas was getting a feel for the stranger’s voice. It was a young man, after all, a powerful, cynical young man who needed to speak his piece.

“Tell me about James Branch,” said Thomas.

“I’ll tell you what I feel like,” snapped the stranger.

“All right.”

Moments passed. The darkness was a limbo.

“I’ll tell you about my women.”

“All right.”

“I have tons of them. They’re like a harem. I’m rich and I take these women out to dinner and they come over to my apartment every night and strip and I tie them up and they do whatever I say.”

“Sounds like a rare setup.”

“Shut up, Father Merchant.”

Thomas was surprised to hear himself named. It sounded like a conscription notice being read out.

“These women,” muttered the young man. He sounded disgusted, compelled. “These women can make me . . . they can make it hurt less inside me. Sometimes.”

Thomas thought of men and women in Manhattan. He thought of them in restaurants, waiting for coffee, or tensely, wordlessly sharing elevators with each other, or kissing one another in Battery Park, or arguing in their beds. Then, in a flash, Thomas saw his way into the young stranger’s mind. He understood.

“This James,” guessed Thomas. “This James Branch. He’s taken one of your women. Fallen in love with her.”

The figure through the grille said nothing.

“And she’s fallen in love with him,” said Thomas. “And she’s your favorite.”

Thomas heard breath seething out of the man.

“There’s no point in having favorite people, Father. God only takes them away.”

“Not always. And if He does, He was just lending them to you anyway.”

“Quiet, priest.” The stranger stirred in his cage. “Don’t get all wise with me. There’s absurdity out there and you know it.”

Thomas closed his eyes again. “Then why have you come?” he asked gently.

The visitor was quiet for a long moment.

“You’re right about the girl,” he said finally.

Thomas’s mind was a black satin bedsheet now. Spread across it was a naked young woman with hair the color of honey.

“So why kill your friend?” asked Thomas.

“I never said he was my friend. He’s my housemate.”

“Even so.”

“I can’t let . . . He’s trying to . . .”

The stench in the closet intensified. Thomas wondered for the first time whether there might be a base, supernatural odor, a redolence, that happened when one human soul tried to control another.

“Can’t your housemate have this one woman?” asked the priest. “You say you have a harem. Aren’t they enough?”

“In my life,” hissed the other, “nothing is enough.”

Thomas breathed only through his mouth. He was hunched forward now, his face close to the grille, his eyes still shut. “Are you carrying a gun?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you never come to Communion?”

“Yes.”

“You believe that the things that you do and the thingsthat you think are so awful that God could never approveof you?”

The stranger’s teeth made contact with each other. “Yes,” he said.

Thomas wiped his brow. His head throbbed with the weight of another man’s life. Thomas’s past, his aunts’ rearing of him, the clarity of his own heart, had come to a sudden point. There was only one thing left to talk about.

“Listen,” said the priest, “you can’t kill another human being. It’s against the law of God and you know it or you wouldn’t have come. But there’s something else you don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“God does approve of you.”

The stranger sucked air in, released it. “How do you know? How in hell could you know?”

“Because God gave you a special gift. A smell.”

“A smell?”

“Don’t laugh,” urged Thomas. “I’m serious. Every night, when you come through the doors, this church fills up with a smell like something burning. It’s bitter and awful, and nobody smells it except me. But it’s not the candles or anything else that makes that smell. It’s you.”

The darkness didn’t move.

“You’re crazy,” whispered the stranger.

Thomas nodded, agreeing with the ridiculousness of his own words. But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, he thought, and it’s time to scare the hell out of this guy.

“I can smell you now,” said Thomas quietly. “It’s disgusting. It’s almost unbearable.”

“You priest.” The young man was on his feet in the closet. For the first time there was panic in his voice. “You crazy goddamned priest.”

Thomas stood too. He faced what he couldn’t see. He opened his eyes. “You should be grateful. This smell of yours is a gift, a warning sign. God gave it to you because He loves you, but He knows you’re tempted to use your gun.”

“Shut up,” sputtered the young man. He jiggled the door of his chamber.

“Now that you know you smell,” said Thomas, “you’re not going to let yourself hurt anybody.”

Both men were out of the confessional now. The figure in black fled toward the church doors.

“You think you’re weird and hopeless,” called the priest, “but you’re not.”

“Fuck off,” yelled the young man. He blundered his way out onto Wall Street, disappeared.

Thomas Merchant drew a clean lungful of air. He hurried to the rectory, wanting the phone and his coat. There hadn’t been any contrition or absolution, but Thomas buttoned himself into a parka. After all these years he was ready to leave his hermitage, the cave of his mind, ready to take action, ready to follow into the streets the awful grace that had been loosed upon the city.

James Branch was nervous. It was the second Saturday in January, and he was out with Rally McWilliams, his new love, for dinner at Flat Michael’s. They sat at a corner table and ate Chicken prepared with garlic, rosemary, and some unknown wine. When they finished eating, they drank coffee. Their waiter was a little man named Juan, who, delighted with their bliss, bowed to them and fetched their requests.