Milk (6 page)

Walter felt the notebook in his pocket; he better speak up before he said anything stupid again.

“We’re short again this month.”

The bishop’s face stiffened. Walter recognized the expression from earlier times: when he’d told him about first meeting Carlos on Fire Island, and the time before in seminary, when he’d had his crisis of faith. The bishop was known for his communication skills, but Walter noticed that there were certain impenetrable subjects the bishop was not willing to discuss.

Walter continued. “The heating bill alone is higher than a whole month’s collection.”

The bishop stabbed a piece of steak with his fork and swung it back and forth in the cream sauce. “What about the money I gave you in September?”

“The leak in the roof wiped that out. The whole ceiling
had to be plastered. If you could float us one more month the stewardship committee is planning a phone-a-thon at Easter.”

“What about Newberry?”

“I went to see her last week. Blessed her cat, looked at her photos of Tuscany, the whole nine yards.”

The bishop smiled and held his eyebrows up. “I’d go over and talk to her again. Be more explicit this time.”

“Do you want me to beg her?” His voice sounded angry, but he didn’t care, remembering how Mrs. Newberry had gone into the kitchen to
get him something
but returned with a package of pasta instead of her checkbook.

“I thought you understood, Walty. You need to make a go of it out there,” he said as he reached in his pocket for his wallet and took out three hundred-dollar bills. “This is a gift, Walty. But I am deeply disappointed. Your mother would roll over in her grave if she could see you at this point.”

Walter thought of his mother sleeping in their tiny Queens apartment; in her polyester nightgown she had snored away on the foldout couch.

Walter was in a light-headed state of postcoital bliss as he lay beside the blond boy on his narrow twin bed. After
he left the bishop, he’d found the boy at the Two Potato, and they’d come over here. The radiator in the corner hummed reassuringly, and he looked past the slats of the fire escape to the darkened apartment building across the alley. One window showed a gingham potholder hanging over a stove. The boy slept in a flannel shirt and his body smelled like wet dirt. He shifted and asked Walter if he was okay; he said it so sweetly, his breath against Walter’s collarbone, that he turned to the boy and began kissing him again. His cock hardened against Walter’s leg; his testicles were huge, each like a brown egg. Physically, he was nothing like Carlos, but his earnestness was similar. And he was a good kisser, understanding that kissing was all about the nuance of touch rather than touch itself.

“What do you do, anyway?” the boy whispered. “I mean for money.”

“I sell insurance.”

“Oh.” He was clearly disappointed. Walter remembered that earlier the boy had said he studied Sanskrit.

In an effort to make up for his dull profession, Walter slid down between the boy’s legs and ran his tongue up the length of his cock. The boy’s fingers moved through his hair and pressed Walter’s head into his pelvis. After a
while the boy came, and Walter lay back down and looked up at the ceiling. He remembered how Silk had wiped the corners of his mouth with his linen napkin and pushed his chair out from the table. A crack near the far wall resembled an octopus tentacle, and the light in the alley was extinguished so the objects in the room looked vague and mysterious, like algae-covered refuse lying on the bottom of the sea. The bourbon was wearing off, and Walter held his white arm straight up in the dark room.

When he got home Mary’s door was ajar. In the slant of light from the hallway he saw the baby in his terry-cloth sleeper and Mary lying fully clothed beside him, asleep but at an odd angle, legs akimbo and arms out like a drunken sailor. In the corner where her aleph had hung, now bits of masking tape dipped down from the ceiling. He saw, too, that she’d stacked the small mirrors on top of her chest in little columns like spare change.

HE HAD THREE distinct headaches: one above his right ear, another below his left temple and the third, and worst, like a burr embedded in his brain tissue. The text for Sunday was the Bible story of Jonah, son of Amittai. When he was young the story of Jonah had been Walter’s favorite: the boat pitching wildly, the sailors casting lots to see who had pissed God off. Now he was more interested in Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale, the smell of salt and the feel of moist membrane. He remembered the slant of alley from the boy’s window, the flakes of snow and the boy’s yeasty breath. He wanted to write his own parables, more contemporary than the ones in the Gospels, but just as mysterious. In one, a man in a blue sweater would fall asleep on the subway and
wake up in a green house surrounded by oak trees. In another, a child’s toy plane was equipped with a bathing car where men took showers. There was the one about the old woman sitting in her yard contemplating a silver handbag, and in yet another, a little brown dog sat on top of a dirty blanket.

There was a knock, and the door pushed open. Junot handed him the mail, a church supply catalogue and another electric bill. Walter ripped open the envelope; if he didn’t pay by Friday, St. Paul’s electricity would be turned off. Walter reached for the list of chores he’d written out on an index card. Junot wore his usual baggy low-rider pants and an oversize Knicks jersey, “Sprewell” spelled out on the back. He stood just inside the doorway, looking past Walter’s head out the window to the snowy back garden.

“The rug on the altar needs to be vacuumed, and if you have time, will you break down the crèche?”

Junot nodded, but he didn’t move. “Did you ever feel evil, Father?”

“On occasion,” Walter said. “That goes with being human.”

“My mother says I’m evil.”

“Why would she say such a thing?”

“She says
‘De tal palo, tal astilla
—
que se hereda de los padres
.’ She thinks I get it from my father.”

Walter looked at the boy carefully. He wore his oversize shirt and pants ironically and his hair, which Walter always assumed was a lucky accident of nature, now appeared to be arranged with lots of hair gel.

“Luckily, God is a lot more understanding than most mothers.”

Junot’s face brightened.

“Nothing against your mother, Junot, but her religious ideas have always seemed a little strange.”

“You think so?” Junot said.

Walter nodded. “I do.”

Mrs. Newberry’s gray hair was short, and she was fragile as a dry leaf as she floated around her massive brownstone, turning on the lamp with the cream silk shade and bringing him a cup of chamomile tea.

“I’m exhausted,” she said flinging herself down on the velvet couch. Mrs. Newberry conducted tours for schoolchildren at the Brooklyn Museum. She wore the docent uniform: a khaki skirt and white turtleneck. Buttercup
jumped onto her lap, and she began petting the cat’s neck, staring down into the strains of white fur.

“It must be tiring,” Walter said. He sat on the edge of a brocade wing-backed chair.

“I assume this isn’t a social call,” Newberry said.

“Well. No.” Walter had hoped they’d have a few minutes of casual conversation before he asked for the money. “Bishop Silk suggested I visit you.”

Newberry raised her eyebrows and continued petting her cat in long, languid strokes.

“I was wondering, I mean, we were wondering if you might want to make a donation.” He felt his face get hot.

“To what exactly?” Newberry said.

“The church, our building. We’re in rather dire straits.”

“How much were you thinking of?”

“Five thousand?”

“That’s an awful lot of money, Walter.”

“Three thousand then?” He hated the pleading quality in his voice.

“You know Chase Bank let my daughter go. So I’m helping out there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear Christine lost her job.” He hoped he’d gotten the daughter’s name right.

“I also pay my grandchildren’s private school tuition.”

“That is generous of you,” Walter said.

She looked out the bay window. The lower Manhattan skyscrapers hung above the choppy East River.

“Why do you think our people aren’t giving?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Walter said. “The economy is bad.”

“I don’t think the economy has anything to do with it.”

“Then what?”

“Your sermons are rather depressing. Don’t you think? I mean, every week do we have to hear about racism and the poor?”

Walter looked down at his hands. He would not defend himself.

“Coming from you, I think people feel it’s a bit much.”

Did she mean because he was gay? Or because of the boy from the church in Manhattan? He didn’t think she knew about that, but Walter realized she meant it more generally. Newberry felt he was diseased, spiritually diseased. He stared at the Chinese vase on the end table.

“I’ll try and do better,” he said.

“That’s my boy,” Newberry said as she pulled her checkbook out of her purse and began to scribble with a ballpoint pen.

* * *

Walter needed a drink. He still hadn’t finished his sermon, but inspiration would have to come at the bar. So he brought his notebook to the Two Potato and tried to formulate ideas on Jonah. Tomorrow morning, Mrs. Newberry would be sitting in the front pew. He could think of things to say about Jonah’s confinement inside the whale—how it was key to cultivate the difficult; that adventure was just misfortune correctly understood—but whether these ideas would fit in with Mrs. Newberry’s idea of the spiritual plane was impossible to calculate.

For the first drink he had the notebook open, the pen beside the wire spiral, but by the second he closed the notebook and shoved it into the pocket of his coat. He’d never been this unprepared on a Saturday night before his Sunday sermon. Guilt bloomed in his chest with every tick of the Felix the Cat clock that beat over the bar’s cash register. He knew he should go home, but the Sanskrit boy haunted him—how his cock tasted slightly of metal, as if a roll of tinfoil had phoned up from Kansas. He couldn’t get the sensation out of his mouth. He searched the guys in tight jeans gathered around the dance floor; all had faces smooth as ceramic saint statues.

There was no physical resemblance between the Sanskrit boy and Carlos. Carlos had olive skin and was Walter’s age. The similarity was all in the boy’s countenance. The way the Sanskrit boy leaned a little to the side as if uninfluenced by the rules of gravity. He’d seen orderlies roll Carlos off on a gurney after he died, and he’d picked up his ashes at the crematorium. But he couldn’t really believe Carlos was dead. His soul had flown to God but his physical qualities had been infused into everything, one man’s long eyelashes, another’s chaotic hand movements. Once Walter saw a pigeon cock his head in a gesture reminiscent of Carlos and, another time, saw a branch shift in the wind, the same way that Carlos, when surprised, swayed back on his heels. Carlos commingled with everything. Walter sensed his presence but could not touch him, and this made Walter lonely and morose.

He ordered a martini and as the bartender turned away pulled his sweater back over his shoulders and looked to see if anybody had noticed he was wearing his clerical. But the sparse late-night crowd were round eyed, red faced and mostly wasted. Shame expanded and floated around inside his heart. Newberry was right; there was something wrong with him. He thought of the Sanskrit boy’s bed
and took out his notebook and wrote the Sanskrit boy a letter which spoke of God and
the thing against the other thing
. And how Carlos had seen divinity in everything, the stained-glass window as well as the Styrofoam cup. He explained about the other boy, the high school boy from the church in Manhattan. The narrowness of his shoulders, his striped rugby shirt, the fact that at fourteen, he could speak perfect French. He tried to articulate why he’d become a pastor:
Because at first I assumed the church held the same cozy qualities as your bedroom
.

He looked up and saw a man standing at the edge of the dance floor, his hand wrapped around a brown bottle of beer. Walter found the man’s wispy haircut and jean jacket devastatingly erotic, but after staring for a while, he gave up trying to catch his eye. Besides himself, there was only one other man sitting at the bar, a stocky fellow who clearly had hair transplants. Walter could see the plugs of hair like seedlings across his head. He wore a green sweater with an insignia and gazed at the men moving around on the multicolored dance floor.

The door opened, and the Karaoke King of Chelsea came into the bar. Walter loved how he wore his silk scarf and leather jacket. Last call. Another martini with four
olives, one for each of the Gospels. As he listened in on the conversation between the King and the fat man, he ate the olives. Talk turned to Ankara. The King took out a picture of the Rui Madria ripped from
National Geographic
, and the fat man bragged about the cheap brandy and anisette he bought in Tristaina last spring.
It was impossible
, the Karaoke King said,
to visit Tristaina in spring because of monsoon season and mud slides
. The conversation turned hostile, and the King slapped the fat man, jumped off his stool and ran out the front door and into the night.

The fat man looked after him, his wet lips trembling, then put his face down so his cheek rested on the bar. Walter walked over and placed his hand on the back of the man’s head. His fat face streaked with water, and they watched snow whiz past the front window. A gust of wind flipped a woman’s umbrella and she was pulled across the street.

Outside, new snow made a flat sound on the heels of Walter’s shoes, and at the corner the mixed dirt and snow looked like cookie dough. The fat man’s long sideburns framed his sullen features, and he wore a thin windbreaker,
though the temperature was below freezing. Walter lit a cigarette and asked the fat man questions, but he just nodded and shrugged.
Where are you from?
got the same nod-shrug combination as
I guess you’re not in a talkative mood?