The Good Life (6 page)

“Is this smart?” she said.

“Highly.” Wetting his finger again, he wiped the cognac across her cheek, taking a stripe of the makeup with it. She closed her eyes, but he was afraid to go after the mascara, which might sting if he wet it.

“I have to leave tomorrow,” she said.

“Me too.” He slipped his fingers through her hair, now so smooth and short it had almost no weight.

“I'm married,” she said, pressing her head against his hand.

“Me too. But we'll always have tonight.”

“Who would ever think we could be lucky enough to find each other?” she said. Then he put his mouth over hers, so she couldn't ask any more.

 

 

 

A
FTER FOUR HOURS
spent locked in his office, gorging on cookies and grading sophomore philosophy papers, Father Thomas Murray seethed. His students, future priests who would lead the Church into the next century, were morons.

“Kant's idea of the Universal Law might have made sense back in his time, but today we live in a complex, multicultural world where one man's universal law is another man's poison, if you know what I mean.”
So there are no absolutes?
Father Murray wrote in the margin, pressing so hard that he carved the letters into the paper.
Peculiar notion, for a man who wants to be a priest
.

They didn't know how to
think
. Presented with the inexhaustibly rich world, all its glory, pity, and terror, they managed to perceive only the most insipid pieties. If he asked them to discuss the meaning of the crucifixion, they would come back with
Suffering is a mystery, and murder is bad
. Father Murray looked at the paper before him and with difficulty kept from picking up his pen and adding
Idiot
.

He had planned on spending no more than two hours grading and then going over to the track to put in a couple of overdue miles. But flat-footed student prose and inept, flabby, half-baked student logic had worked him into a silent fury, and the fury itself became a kind of joy, each bad paper stoking higher the flames of his outrage. He reached compulsively for the next paper in the stack, and then the next, his left hand snagging another of the cookies he'd taken last night from the kitchen. They were not good—lackluster oatmeal, made with shortening instead of butter—but enough to keep him going.
What makes you think
, he wrote,
that Kant's age was any less complex than yours?

Still reading, he stretched his back against the hard office chair, which shrieked every time he moved, and started to count off the traits lacked by the current generation of seminarians: Historical understanding. Study skills. Vocabulary. Spelling. From down the hall he heard a crash and then yelps of laughter. “Oh, Alice!” someone cried. Father Murray closed his eyes.

A month ago one of the students had sneaked into the seminary a mannequin with eyelashes like fork tines and a brown wig that clung to its head like a bathing cap. Since then the mannequin had been popping up every day, in the showers, the library, at meals. Students mounted it on a ladder so that its bland face, a cigarette taped to its mouth, could peer in classroom windows. Now a campaign to turn the mannequin into the seminary's mascot was afoot. Savagely, Father Murray bit into another bad cookie, then stood, inhaled, and left his office.

At the bend in the hallway, where faculty offices gave way to dormitory rooms, five students clustered beside an open door. The mannequin, dressed in towels, half reclined in the doorway to Quinn's room. Blond, morose Quinn, a better student than most, tugged the towels higher up the mannequin's bosom. The customary cigarette had fallen from the doll's pink plastic mouth and now dangled by a long piece of tape. “You should have seen your
face
,” Adreson was saying to Quinn. Father Murray knew and loathed the sort of priest Adreson would become: peppy, brain dead, and loved by the old ladies. “I thought you were going to faint. I thought we were going to lose you.”

“Jumped a foot,” added Michaels. “At least a foot.”

“Went up like a firecracker,” Father Murray suggested, and the seminarians turned, apparently delighted he had joined them.

“A Roman candle,” Adreson said.

“Like a shooting star,” Father Murray said. “Like a rocket. Like the
Challenger
. Boom.”

The laughter slammed to a halt; Adreson stepped back, and Father Murray said, “You men sound, in case you're interested, like a fraternity out here. I would not like to be the one explaining to the bishop what tomorrow's priests are doing with a big plastic doll. Although I could always tell him that you were letting off some steam after your titanic academic struggles. Then the bishop and I could laugh.”

“She fell right onto Brian,” Adreson murmured. “Into his arms. It was funny.”

Father Murray remembered a paper Adreson had written for him the year before, in which Adreson had called Aquinas “The Stephen Hawking of the 1300s,” not even getting the century right. In that same paper Adreson had made grave reference to “the Ax of the Apostles.” From any of the other men Father Murray would have allowed the possibility that the citation was a joke. Now he looked at his student, twenty years old and still trying to subdue a saddle of pimples across his cheeks. “You have developed a genius for triviality.”

“Sorry, Father.”

“I'm giving you a piece of information. Think about it.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“Don't bother thanking me until you mean it.”

“Oh, I mean it, Father.” Adreson pursed his mouth—an odd, old-maidish expression. “Sorry we disturbed you. Guess we're too full of beans tonight. Hey—you want to go over to the track?”

Father Murray felt a plateful of oatmeal cookies churn in his stomach. “Another time. I've still got work to do.”

“
Corpore sano
, Father.”

Father Murray snorted and turned back toward his office. He cherished a measure of low satisfaction that the one Latin phrase Adreson seemed to know came from the YMCA slogan.

 

He should, of course, have taken up Adreson's offer. By ten o'clock his stomach was violent with oatmeal cookies; his error had been in eating even one. As soon as he'd tasted that first sweet bite, he was done for. He could eat two dozen as easily as a single cookie. Tomorrow he would have to be especially strict with himself.

Strictness, as everyone at St. Boniface knew, was Father Murray's particular stock-in-trade. Fourteen months before, his doctor had called him in to discuss blood sugar and glucose intolerance. “You have a family history, is that right?”

Father Murray nodded. His mother—bloated, froglike, blind—had had diabetes. By the end, she had groped with her spongy hand to touch his face. He had held still, even when she pressed her thumb against his eye. “Doesn't everybody have a family history?” he said now.

“This is no joke. You are at risk,” the doctor said. “You could start needing insulin injections. Your legs are already compromised. You could die. Do you understand that?”

Father Murray considered reminding the doctor that a priest's job entailed daily and exquisite awareness of his mortality. Nevertheless, he took the doctor's point: Father Murray's forty-five-inch waist, the chin that underlaid his chin, his fingers too pudgy for the ring his father had left him. If he let the disease take hold, he would deteriorate in humiliating degrees, relying on others to walk for him when his feet failed, to read to him when the retinopathy set in. A life based wholly on charity—not just the charity of God, which Father Murray could stomach, but the charity of the men around him. The next day he began to walk, and a month later, to run.

For a solid year he held himself to 1,100 exacting calories a day, eating two bananas for breakfast and a salad with vinegar for lunch. His weight plummeted; his profile shrank from that of Friar Tuck to St. Francis, and the waist of his trousers bunched like a paper bag. The night Father Murray hit 150, ten pounds below his target weight, Father Radziewicz told him, “You're a walking wonder.” They were standing, plates in hand, in line for iced tea. Father Radziewicz's eye rested on Father Murray's piece of pork loin, slightly smaller than the recommended three ounces, stranded on the white plate. “How much have you lost now?”

“One hundred twenty-four pounds.”

“Enough to make a whole other priest. Think of it.”

“I'm condensed,” Father Murray said. “Same great product, but half the packaging.”

“Think of it,” Father Radziewicz said. His plate held three pieces of pork, plus gravy, potatoes, two rolls. “I couldn't do it,” he added.

“It's just a matter of willpower,” Father Murray said. “To the greater glory of God.”

“Still, isn't it time to stop? Or at least slow down. Maybe you've glorified God enough.”

“I've never felt better in my life.”

The statement was largely true. He had never in his life been quite so satisfied with himself, although his knees sometimes hurt so much after a twelve-mile run that he could hardly walk. He bought ibuprofen in 500-count bottles and at night, in bed, rested his hand on the bones of his hips, the corded muscles in his thighs. Out of pure discipline he had created a whole new body, and he rejoiced in his creation.

So he was unprepared for the muscular cravings that beset him shortly after his conversation with Father Radziewicz. They came without warning, raging through the airy space below his rib cage. The glasses of water, the repetitions of the daily office, all the tricks Father Murray had taught himself now served only to delay the hunger—five minutes, fifteen, never enough.

One night he awoke from a dream of boats and anchors to find himself pushing both fists against his twisting stomach. Brilliantly awake, heart hammering, he padded around the seminary, glancing into the chapel, the storage room that held raincoats and wheelchairs for needy visitors, the pathetically underused weight room. Finally, giving in, he let his hunger propel him to the kitchen, hoping that food would help him get back to sleep.

Holding open the refrigerator door, he gazed at cheesecake left over from dinner. He was ten pounds underweight. He had left himself a margin; probably he was getting these cravings because he actually needed some trace of fat and sugar in his system. And the next day he could go to the track early and run off whatever he took in tonight. He ate two and a half pieces of cheesecake, went back to bed, and slept as if poleaxed.

Since then Father Murray had hardly gone a night without stealing downstairs for some snack—cookies, cake, whatever the seminarians and other priests, those locusts, had left. He stored his cache in a plastic bag and kept the bag in his desk drawer, allowing himself to nibble between classes, in the long afternoon lull before dinner, whenever hunger roared up in him. Twice he broke the hour-long fast required before taking communion. Each time he sat, stony faced, in his pew, while the other priests filed forward to take the host.

At meals he continued to take skimpy portions of lean foods, so stuffed with cookies that even the plate of bitter salad seemed too much to get through. Father Bip, a Vietnamese priest he had often run with, told him that he was eating like a medieval monk. Father Murray slapped himself hard on the rump. “Brother Ass,” he said. That rump was noticeably fleshier than it had been two months before, and he vowed again that he would recommence his diet the next day. That night, anticipating the stark hunger, he quietly walked the half-mile to a drugstore and bought a bag of peanut butter cups, several of which he ate on the walk back home.

As he lay in bed, his teeth gummy with chocolate and peanut butter paste, his days of crystalline discipline seemed close enough to touch. The choice was simple, and simply made; he remembered the pleasure of a body lean as a knife, a life praiseworthy and coherent. Yet the next night found him creeping back to the kitchen, plastic bag in hand, not exactly hungry anymore but still craving. Already his new black pants nipped him at the waist.

 

After his one o'clock Old Testament class the next afternoon, Father Murray returned to his office to find Adreson waiting for him. The young man, who had been absently fingering a flaming blemish beside his nose, held out his hand toward Father Murray, who shook it gingerly and ushered Adreson into his office.

“How was your class, Father?”

“We entertained the usual riotous dispute over Jerome's interpretation of 2 Kings.” Then, looking at Adreson, he added, “It was fine.”

“Your O.T. class has a real reputation. Men come out of there knowing their stuff.”

“That's the basic idea.”

“Sorry. I'm nervous, I guess. I want to apologize for making all that racket in the hallway last night.”

“Thank you.”

“I knew we were being—”

“—childish,” Father Murray offered.

“—immature. I just thought you should know that there was a reason. Brian's mother has multiple sclerosis. Advanced, but he just found out last week. She's at home by herself with four kids, and she keeps falling down. I know it's killing Brian, but he won't talk about it. He just keeps going to class and services. It isn't healthy. That's why we put Alice in his room.”

“He may find it comforting to keep up his usual schedule. This may be his way of coping,” Father Murray said, autopilot words. Genuine surprise kept him from asking Adreson how a towel-wrapped mannequin was supposed to help Quinn manage his sorrow.

“He needs to talk, Father. If he talks to people, we can help him.”

“You have a lot of faith in yourself.”

“We're here to help each other.” His hand fluttered up toward his face, then dropped again. “If it were me, I'd want to know I could count on the guys around me. I'd want to know I wasn't alone.”