The Natural Order of Things (23 page)

But now, after a string of successes, disaster suddenly strikes.

“What the hell is
this
!” George cries. “No cash? No booze. No pills?”

Rather than find anything of real value, Billy has engaged in a sort of spiritual espionage. While having no monetary value, the boy’s startling discovery does prove one thing: that the old men, stooped and bent with the unyielding cynicism they harbor for their fallen parishioners, are no better or worse than anyone else—they have their weaknesses, their secrets, their forbidden pleasures. George considers turning around and confronting them, just for the small pleasure of watching the priests choke on their guilt and indignation. “What sorts of disgusting things go on here?” he wants to ask them as they sit down to dinner. “You monsters, you’re to blame for my boy’s troubles. It’s you who have traumatized him. I’ve known it all along, and now I have proof!” At this point, George would step forward and hold up the deck of pornographic playing cards for all to see.

Billy lifts his head and growls at his father.

George stops, glances back at the rectory, pinches his chin. “I dunno. We should probably get home. It’s getting pretty late. And your mother isn’t a very patient woman.”

He flips through the cards one last time and then tosses them to the ground. Billy lets outs a high-pitched squeak and chases after them, an orgy of big-titted, suntanned harlots engaged in carnal acts with mustached kings, leering jacks, and a cross-eyed joker, his erect penis painted in motley and adorned in cap and bells.

When they finally get home, they see a figure sitting on the front steps. George’s wife yanks the bandanna off her head, releasing a shower of graphite dust, and then crushes out her cigarette with the heel of a steel-toed boot. She immediately lights another and exhales an iron spike of smoke.

George smoothes back his hair, searches his pockets for a stick of chewing gum. He can still taste Ms. Higginson on his lips. For the first time in months he looks at his wife with a tinge of remorse, with something that might even be described as old-fashioned Catholic guilt. She’s a scarecrow of her former self, shockingly thin, with dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes. She struggles every day to provide for the three of them, but somehow George suppresses this knowledge and has learned to live with his immaturity, his irresponsibility, his selfish pursuit of women and drink. The trick, he finds, is to turn his sins into virtues.

“No overtime tonight?” he says with a timid wave of his hand. He tries not to blink, not to turn away from his wife’s lethal stare. “Ah, you bought some cigarettes, I see.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

He grins. “Glad you asked. I was doing a good deed. For the Jesuits. The boiler sprung a leak. Over at the rectory.”

“The boiler?”

“Yes.”

“At the rectory?”

“That’s right.”

“Is this true?”

“Is
what
true?”

His wife glares at him. “I wasn’t speaking to
you
. I was speaking to Billy. Well? Was your father fixing the boiler?”

George laughs. “You know damn well the boy doesn’t talk. It’s your fault, if you ask me. You treat him like an infant.”

“He may not talk,” she says calmly, “but he tells me things, all sorts of things. Everything worth knowing, anyway. I’ve trained him, you see, trained him well. Didn’t I, Billy?”

George feels a small but noticeable change in the air. His smile fades, his stomach tightens. He wants to hurry down the street to the brewery, but since he is flat broke, he can only stand before his wife like the accused before a jury, helpless to defend himself against the trumped-up charges. With mounting horror, he watches Billy approach his mother. He looks like a toy soldier on the march, chin held high, shoulders back. A terrifying vision of precocity, a diabolical scourge. Suddenly the boy whirls on his heels, points an accusatory finger at his father and, flashing a malevolent grin, holds up the deck of playing cards.

Three years after his wife abandoned him (left in the early morning hours just before dawn, slid from under the sheets without letting the bedsprings creak, put the car in neutral, pushed it down the driveway and into the street before starting it), Devin Wentworth finally musters the willpower to attend a colleague’s party. Someone has just published a book or received a grant or had a marriage annulled—rarely is there a point to these kinds of things, any excuse to get drunk before the start of a new semester will do—and though he is a little uneasy about leaving the comfortable clutter of his books and the logic of his coffee-stained papers with their indecipherable marginalia, he is glad for the opportunity to socialize with old friends and to politely laugh at the same banal jokes they have been telling for years.

With a pensive grin, he enters the crowded house at the corner of Breyner and Andersen, but before he can say hello to the other guests or thank the host for inviting him, he is ambushed by a small, sprightly woman with short, boyish hair who takes him by the arm, leads him over to the makeshift bar in the dining room and selects, from the dizzying assortment of booze, a bottle of “homemade medicinal tea.”

“You have to try some of this,” she says, firing up a cigarette, “if only for the miraculous health benefits.”

He declines her offer, fixes himself a scotch and water, and as he waits for the liquor to take effect, he stands against a wall like a cornered animal and lets the woman do all of the talking. She proves to be exceptionally erudite, and for the next thirty minutes, without pausing to allow anyone to formally introduce them, she tells Devin that she is outlining a novel and demands a quick tutorial on the “ins and outs of monkey sex from a guy who knows his stuff.”

“The plot concerns a certain high school athlete,” she explains, “but that’s all I’m willing to divulge. I never discuss any of my current projects. I’m superstitious that way. Most writers are. That probably sounds ridiculous to you, a man of science.”

“Not at all,” he says. “In fact—”

“Listen. I absolutely
must
know the specifics about Bonobo chimps and their sex rituals. Surely our nearest relatives engage in … unusual sexual practices. Apes doing it doggy style. I’ve asked around, and everyone tells me that this is your area of expertise. Maybe you can recommend some recent books on the subject? A kind of Kama Sutra for concupiscent primates?”

Devin answers with an uneasy laugh and plays with the buttons of his sport coat. A bookish man, awkward, poorly dressed, horribly out of practice when it comes to engaging members of the opposite sex in casual conversation, he is not exactly sure how to respond to this outlandish woman. He feels trapped, cornered. There is a constriction in his chest, a painful throbbing behind his eyes. With a handkerchief that may or may not be clean (he’s not sure how long it’s been in the pocket of his sport coat), he dabs at the beads of sweat that have formed on his brow, and to calm his nerves, he gulps down his cocktail. Above the clink of ice cubes, he catches the woman saying something about the Whittelsey Indians and their belief in a malevolent spirit who presides over creation
and drives all of humanity to the brink of madness with loneliness and pointless suffering.

“Oh, how insensitive of me,” she says, raising a hand to her mouth, “to speak of suffering.” Like the other guests at the party, she knows all about his failed marriage, his schizophrenic wife. “I’m such a
farshikkert chaleria
. But I’ve never been one to shirk from the truth, no matter how embarrassing it might be. I’ve personally outed many people. And not just closeted homosexuals. Atheists, too. It’s all for the best, don’t you think? Cathartic. Let the cat out of the bag, I always say. Secrets are nasty things, bad for the soul. They’re the ruin of so many men I know. People are going to talk anyway. Sooner or later word gets around.”

Though he is not sure he agrees with this view, Devin indulges her with a smile, the way a man sometimes will when he knows he is dealing with a beguiling and slightly dangerous personality. Her eyes are crafty and unwavering, the color of the Mediterranean Sea as viewed from high on a hillside in the sunny Algarve, blue-green, silvery-teal, eyes made a little bleary by her medicinal tea. Devin isn’t sure why he thinks of the Mediterranean, of Portugal; he’s never been overseas. In fact, his travels have never taken him far beyond the great lake of his hometown, a body of water that for half the year is a frozen waste that shimmers like an enormous piece of sheet metal in the feeble gray light of winter. As he ponders this mystery, the woman says something that so bewilders him that he momentarily abandons his cherished principles of logic and embraces the romantic notion of kismet.

“As you can probably tell, I’m a passionate person. Until the auto-da-fé, my ancestors were sojourners in Portugal, and the Portuguese are a very passionate people—politically, theologically, sexually. I seem to have inherited a rapacious appetite for all things Portuguese. Their writing has a noticeable effect on my intellect … and libido.”

By nature and training, Devin is a devout skeptic and has learned to doubt his own intuition, but after carefully assessing the situation he arrives at a startling conclusion: this woman is flirting with him. When was the last time that happened? College? Graduate school? Primatology seems to be the last thing on her mind. It’s a matter of simple deduction. He observes the way she moistens her lips, plays with the ends of her hair, lets her blouse sink lower and lower to reveal her surprisingly ample cleavage.

With a haughty smile, she touches his hand and, leaning in close so that her breath makes his flesh tingle, she tells him how the work of Luís Vaz de Camões inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to write
Sonnets from the Portuguese
. “Allow me to give you a little recitation,” she whispers. “ ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’ ”

As the party winds down and only the seriously inebriated remain, Devin is given some sobering information.

“Ah, yes, that’s our newest faculty member,” says the principal. “Batya Pinter.”

The old man stumbles along the foyer to the front door, the last of the Jesuits to leave the party and one of the few in attendance who doesn’t attempt to disguise his penchant for whiskey with hypocritical proclamations about the wickedness of drink, the lure of the bottle. “From the way you two were yammering away, I assumed you already knew each other. She’ll be teaching English and editing the literary magazine. She boasts
a number of important connections in the world of letters. That’s why we hired her. She’s actually interviewed dozens of luminaries—Jose Saramago, Antonio Lobo Antunes, even the legendary Ricardo Reis. Last month she translated and published a posthumous collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa. She’s quite brilliant. But I’m afraid she’s also …”

The principal coughs into a fist and glances over his shoulder to make sure no one is within earshot.

“This information is strictly confidential, you understand, but since your son may come into contact with this woman, I feel you have the right to know.” He tries to enunciate his words, but the consonants are slurred, the syllables protracted and a bit garbled. “Some of us think Pinter is a sexual omnivore, bedding men and women as the mood strikes her, and that she may be guilty of, how should I put this delicately,
debauching
a few of our students, those giggling pimply-faced boys with grand ambitions of becoming the next Nabokov. Of course we can’t
prove
these allegations, not in the legal sense of the word, but we do have circumstantial evidence. She keeps strange hours, locks herself in her office late at night, requests certain students stay after school for reasons that are never made clear …”

Devin shakes his head and dismisses these allegations as the drunken maunderings of paranoid cleric. He has never taken seriously the rumors circulating around the school. The Jesuits are terrible gossips, worse than any cloister of women.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” says the principal, “that Pinter has taken a sudden
liking
to you. In fact, she seems overly friendly, if I may say so. A most interesting development. Yes, quite intriguing.” He places his hands on Devin’s shoulders. His breath smells of liquor and cigarettes. “Allow me to ask a small favor of you, Wentworth. Keep an eye on her. Get to
know
her better. Oh, I don’t expect you to
spy
on the woman, not exactly. Just find out if things are … kosher, if you get my meaning.”

Devin nods. He has always been a most ingratiating fellow.

The principal pats his back. “Ah, you’re a gentleman and a scholar!” He steps outside and totters along the sidewalk. “I know I can trust you to fulfill your mission.”

Devin offers a quick salute and then turns to the mirror in the foyer to check his reflection. He is as unassuming as a character in a Graham Greene novel—a bit ruffled perhaps but still presentable, guilt-ridden of course, that goes without saying, and maybe just a little desperate, but also poised, classy, determined. He lowers his head, pinches his chin, cocks an eyebrow. The scotch gives him a sudden surge of confidence, makes him brash, Bond-like. He struts boldly over to Batya, puts an arm around her waist, and suggests she accompany him back to his house a few blocks away in what the students call the Faculty Ghetto.

“We can ransack my shelves,” he tells us, “for books about the autoerotic behavior of Bonobo chimps. I’m sure we’ll find something that will … 
satisfy
you.”

She drops her cigarette into her cup of tea. “Let me get my coat.”

As they walk along the midnight streets, they listen to the familiar wail of police sirens, the flapping of newspapers in the trees, the loud splatter of urine from a bag lady squatting in an alley. Batya leans against Devin for support; she is very drunk indeed (“What kind of tea
was
that?” he asks her), but once inside his house, she lunges at him with animal ferocity, something Devin actually knows a little about and is able to assess the following morning by the severity of the scratches on his back and the number of bite marks on his shoulders and neck.