The Natural Order of Things (18 page)

Perhaps by harping on the ubiquitous nature of suffering and loss, the Jesuits hope to alleviate the anguish she has experienced these past two years, but if they fail to cheer her up, it’s because beneath their gentle words of consolation, they secretly despise her and feel that some form of cosmic punishment has been meted out. But how can she begrudge them for having these feelings? Batya is an alien among them, a stranger, an exotic creature from an ancient bloodline, and she has, at least so far, proven herself completely immune to their priestcraft and medieval scholasticism. They are forever talking of the mysterious workings of God, but to these men, God isn’t a mystery at all. God they can explain with the greatest confidence, and they often wax poetic about what
happens to a person after death. It’s
life
that perplexes them; it’s life that they cannot explain. “Only through divine revelation,” they say, “can humanity hope to comprehend this vale of tears.”

The irony doesn’t escape Batya. All religious experience, she believes, is a matter of concealment, not revelation, and faith is merely a metaphysical game of self-deception, a way to disguise deep-rooted fears and weaknesses.

At precisely six o’clock, there comes a hesitant knock. The hulking monochromatic form of Frank “The Minotaur” McSweeney fills the doorway. He steps into the light, looking a bit disheveled, out of breath, his shirt clinging to his back and bulging biceps. He holds the essay out to her.

“Please,” she says, “come inside. You look parched. Would you like anything to drink? Some tea perhaps?”

Her voice trembles when she asks the last question. She doesn’t want to know how ridiculous she looks right now and is careful to avoid passing in front of the mirror. In the top desk drawer, she finds two dirty mugs and the essential bottle, all prelude to the ritual men and women have been performing through the ages. Only the gun is new to this otherwise ancient rite. Not that she needs it, of course, but these days one can never be too sure. She strokes the handle and closes the drawer before he can see it.

The boy comes into the office, a bit reluctantly, and stands near her desk. He fidgets with his hands, doesn’t seem to know what to do with them.

“The great books tell us that intoxicants are beneficial to the soul. They have transformative powers. Nectar of the gods, manna from heaven, nepenthe, opium.” Batya pours him some tea and points out the window. “A long time ago, before the white man came and built his dark satanic mills, Indian tribes lived in this valley, and they brewed a tea made from a plant whose scientific name is
Pedicularis densiflora
. It’s not actually a plant at all but a parasite that attaches to the roots of other plants. The Indians claimed it had magical properties and could turn men into birds and coyotes. During our hikes in the valley, my late husband and I occasionally came across a few specimens growing at the river’s edge. We made batches of the tea. It’s absolutely sublime. Excellent for one’s spirit and stamina.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s kind of cool.”

He’s not really paying attention to her, she can tell. Trying to restrain her anger, she pushes a mug across the desk toward him. He lowers his nose and sniffs it like a dog. Eventually he picks up the mug and drinks the tea, and she watches to make sure he swallows it all down, a good little boy taking his medicine.

“My husband was a botanist. He taught at the university for fifteen years. A brilliant man. Misunderstood, maybe. The students never much cared for him. Most had their eye on the professor’s wife, I think.” She laughs.

The boy glances at the clock on her desk. “There’s this party tonight. I sorta have to be there …”

“Oh, then we better drink our tea quickly. I have a party to attend as well. It’s Halloween, isn’t it? I nearly forgot.”

After only one cup, the boy’s pupils are big and bright, like shiny, black marbles wobbling around a concrete bowl. She pours him another cup. This time he gulps it down, and Batya is startled by his rapid transformation. Suddenly the boy won’t shut up. He leans against her desk, tells her all about his cowardly father and his overprotective mother, both of them completely oblivious to the fact that their son wants to do something unique with his life. “They think I’m a dumb jock. But I’d like to become a writer one day, a real Renaissance man. Maybe I can study journalism, work as a sports columnist, give people an athlete’s perspective of the game.”

Batya pretends to be interested. She nods her head at all the right places and pats his knee. This is the part of the charade she hates most, listening to yet another chronicle of wasted time and playing shrink to these misfits who vomit up all of their inconsequential problems and yearn for someone to dissect their souls, unraveling the tangled threads of character and conflict, one from the other until their lives are a heap of nonsense piled on the floor at her feet, words without greater context, bled of their significance. At moments like this, Batya truly misses the tactics of a more experienced man—naughty movies flickering on the television screen, lubes, gels, battery-operated toys. Cheap and tawdry, that’s how she likes it. Dirty. Vile even. Deviance turns her on; it always has. Of late, the men she has been involved with are excruciatingly polite, overly cautious, terrified of life. Too much like her husband. The Jesuits have yet to hire a fallen theologian or a mad scientist who yearns to conduct radical and lascivious experiments on a middle-aged female subject.

She is running out of patience. The boy is just
standing there
, blabbering on and on about nothing at all, another amateur of intimacy unwilling to make the first move. It isn’t natural for an 17-year-old to be so timid. But why should this surprise her? Most of these schoolboys are a little too tidy, too polished, their lips too prissy, their hands too dainty, their eyes brimming with too much vulnerability. Despite their claims to be otherwise, she suspects they are not sexual absolutists. Even the most heterosexual man is capable of buggery, and she often wonders how many of her students are closeted homosexuals.

Batya decides it’s high time to take matters into her own hands. She must either face the brutal emptiness of another lonely night or seek consolation in the unlikely companionship of her pupil. For her the choice is an easy one. Celibacy has never been a realistic option. Emboldened by the tea, she finds that she is willing to live with the consequences of her actions. She brushes up against the boy’s legs. He doesn’t withdraw from her touch, and this she takes as a good sign. She touches him with her fingertips, then begins to massage him through his pants. Without stammering or turning his eyes away, he presses up against her hand, another good sign, and lets her unbuckle his belt. She sits in the chair and pulls down his zipper.

“There’s no work on your part,” she assures him. “None whatsoever. Just relax. Relax and enjoy.”

“What if someone catches us?”

“No one visits my office. Least of all the Jesuits. It’s six flights up.”

“I don’t know …”

“Trust me. Here. Let me help you with that.”

“I’m not so sure about this.”

“You want to pass my class, don’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Plagiarism is a serious offense, my boy, and you don’t really expect me to believe that you’ve written that essay all by yourself, do you?” She can barely hear herself speak the words, her heart is racing so fast now. “Wait. Let me take it out. That’s no
petseleh
you have there,
gunsel
.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“This won’t take long, will it?”

“That’s all
up
to you.”

She marvels at his size. It’s like a king cobra charmed from its basket with a few erotic licks on a flute. Initially, he is nervous, wooden, almost cadaverous. With the exception of the rigor mortis that sets in below his waist, the boy remains motionless, his hips frozen, his legs shackled by the pants around his ankles. Even his face has a look of mute absence.

“What the hell was that?” the Minotaur croaks.

But she is too consumed in her work to notice anything at all. After arousing him, she opens her blouse and lets him have a look at those things the sculptors, painters, and poets have either avoided or ignored altogether.

As the first beams of moonlight filter through the window, the boy becomes aggressive. He hoists her effortlessly from the chair and tosses her onto the desktop with more force than she would like. Flashing a crazed grin and with a mouth ravenous and eager and almost dangerous with its snapping jaws and gnashing teeth, he lifts her skirt and starts tasting every inch of her, his wet tongue lapping at her navel and thighs and perineum, that patch of no man’s land her squeamish husband called the Devil’s Half Acre. He turns her around, stretches her across the desk so that her legs are splayed. She shudders with gratitude and remorse, caught up in the thrill and pandemonium of his unrelenting punishment.

“Oh, hurt me!” she cries. “
Hurt
me!”

As they both near climax, he tarnishes things by shouting out her first name. Despite the intimacy of this encounter she prefers to be addressed in a formal manner, and after he is finished, and they both collapse panting on the desk, she makes a point of correcting him on this matter in a voice that is at once breathless and stern.

A man’s presence often lingers long after he is gone, and sometimes it is best to erase all evidence of him. She intends to feed the boy’s essay to the shredder the moment he leaves her office. Even to use it as kindling would be taboo. She studies his face and finds that he looks not unlike those clean-cut college boys who used to enroll in her husband’s botany courses, but then again all of these young men look alike—the same simian forehead sprinkled with acne, the same unintelligent eyes that cast a hubristic gaze over the world. Uncouth children who snort and cough and scratch themselves and unleash pestilential clouds of stale breath. But ghosts of the living as well as the dead haunt the imagination, so it’s only natural that she sees her former lovers everywhere she turns.

At least this boy has enough sense to pull up his pants and start making excuses.

“The party …” he murmurs.

“Yes,” she says, “I must be going, too. People are expecting me.”

He slinks toward the door, but instead of hurrying away, he stops at the threshold, his shirt untucked, his belt dangling between his legs, his rosy red cheeks suddenly drained of color. He looks back at her, terror in his eyes. Something is out there, something that frightens him. Her husband’s ghost? Has he followed her here? Has he been watching the entire time? The boy steps into the hallway, stumbles over his own feet, and presses his back against the wall as though afraid of falling into a black pit. Letting out a little bleat of alarm, he dashes down the stairs.

Batya laughs. Fully aware that she’s been ensnared in some kind of trap, she checks her makeup in the mirror, the mascara, the royal blue eyeliner. She buttons her blouse, straightens her skirt. No need to rush. It’s not quite eight o’clock, still time for a little more tea. Drinking straight from the bottle, she stands at the window and looks out over the quad. Several boys stagger like zombies, arms outstretched, clothes in tatters, faces painted goblin green. Others are dressed as priests and grand inquisitors. A solitary figure with a mangy tail and pointed ears comes bounding across the jumbled cobblestones and howls up at the gothic tower. Off to their drunken masquerades, no doubt. Buffoons, one and all, with no sense of decorum. She finds it puzzling that the Jesuits tolerate this sort of mischief. Don’t most clergymen regard Halloween as an abomination, a mockery of their most cherished beliefs?

She puts the bottle down on her desk and from the drawer retrieves the .38. Only then does she walk to the door. What she finds there makes her smile. In fact, she is so impressed by the menacing stagecraft that she wants to applaud and shout, “Author! Author!”

Like an infestation of scuttling green bugs, the plastic soldiers swarm the hallway outside her office, a hundred battle-hardened men, wounded, scarred, disfigured, their bodies weighed down by heavy belts of ammunition, their eyes fixed on a distant point in space. They have been sent here on a secret mission and are determined to achieve their objective. But what exactly
is
the objective? To hunt down and exterminate the ravenous cougar that prowls these corridors at night and feasts on innocent boys? Since the Church can no longer use coercion as a tool, it must rely on intimidation. It’s just as well. After all, it is not violence but the threat of violence that has proven so effective the world over. People are driven by fear and self-preservation, and powerful men know how to exploit this weakness to achieve their own wicked ends. But Batya refuses to be guided by these base emotions.

Though her husband left behind no note to explain or justify his actions, he did leave her this fine gun, and she puts the steel barrel to her head now. She has contemplated squeezing the trigger many times before, and never once has she experienced even a fleeting moment of mortal terror. In this regard, the gun has been very instructive, a pedagogical tool unmatched by any textbook; it’s a way to test her willpower, her soundness of mind.

She counts backwards from ten and then lowers the barrel. The test complete, she puts the .38 in her purse and grabs the broom and dustpan. This has become standard procedure for her, sweeping up these toy soldiers, and after she dumps them in the trashcan, she turns off the lights and leaves her office for one more day.

On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Tom Wentworth is summoned to the principal’s office, where there awaits a quorum of priests, eleven in all, faded men in high-backed chairs whose arthritic fingers fumble with the books of matches piled high in ashtrays stationed at every corner of the room like bowls of holy water at the entranceway to the school chapel. The office is a precise space—tidy, carefully curated, scrupulously scrubbed and polished—and the priests sit hunched and pensive in the tapering shafts of prismatic light like stone icons, their eyes fixed not on the door but on the branches of the ancient elms and sycamores that scratch at the windowpanes like shunned souls contending with one another to claw their way into Paradise.