The Natural Order of Things (24 page)

That night if he lasts longer than his usual four minutes, it’s only because he, too, is cross-eyed drunk and keeps yowling with pain and pleasure whenever Batya, nimble as a gymnast, bends and slides and twists her glistening body over the bed. She slaps his ass, tugs his hair, wraps her legs around his neck and, in a style that can only be described as dictatorial, shouts filthy words in an ancient tongue, demanding that he make her scream with his
langer lucksh
, that he abuse her with his
batampte shmeckle
.

She yearns for abuse, wants to be dominated, victimized, but it’s all a ruse; she is in total control, Devin knows this perfectly well, and he tries to oblige her until the final moment, the
supreme
moment, when she groans between clenched teeth, “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach!”

To his credit, Devin has never brought a woman back home for the purposes of copulation (in fact, Batya is the first woman he has taken to bed since his wife left him), but this does not excuse the lurid and passionate caterwauling that keeps his son Tom up half the night. At first, Devin isn’t too terribly concerned about his naughty behavior. Surely by now Tom must understand that his father, like all men, has certain needs. Besides, teenagers these days are pretty savvy about the ways of the world. Nearly half the students in this year’s graduating class come from broken homes and have witnessed scandals of every sort, things unmentionable, unpardonable, excommunicable. In any case, this encounter with Batya was merely a moment of weakness on Devin’s part, nothing more.

“Sometimes a man’s weakness can be his best asset,” Batya tells him the next morning as she gathers her clothes from the floor. “Sin opens a door to a world of possibilities. Virtue only slams it shut.”

To his surprise, she says she wants to see him again, and in the days that follow, Batya liberates him from the pitiable consolation of masturbation and converts him to a whole new world of hedonistic pleasure. Suddenly his lonely nights are filled with delights and enchantments of every sort. The sex is raw, filthy, probably illegal in several states, and Devin, who resigned himself long ago to a life of celibacy, nearly weeps at this incredible stroke of good fortune.

Still, he has a sense of decency and wants to protect Tom’s innocence, so he takes Batya to a decrepit flophouse down the street, the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, where the landlady rents rooms by the hour. The seediness of the room adds an extra element of eroticism to their coupling, but the novelty quickly wears off. Domesticity is a force to be reckoned with, it tends to burn its heretics at the stake of public opinion, and while Batya is, in many respects, the most modern of women, she is also the product of an orthodox upbringing and cannot dispense with tradition altogether.

“Technically speaking, you’re still a married man,” she reminds him as they lie in bed. She puts an ashtray on his chest and taps hot embers from the tip of her cigarette. “You never divorced your wife. And here we are running off to some roach-infested room. What, you don’t think people will talk? The Jesuits? Your students? Your son?”

He doesn’t like the tone of her voice, the sudden seriousness of it, and rather than answer her right away, he takes a moment to study the cracks in the ceiling. He looks for patterns, tries to find the point where the fractures begin.

Batya sighs. “You realize what the real problem is, don’t you? After your wife flew the coop, you never sat down with Tom to discuss his feelings.”

“Fathers and sons don’t talk about those kinds of things. We internalize our despair, our rage, our angst. It’s perfectly natural. It’s inherent in the genes. It has something to do with evolutionary conflicts, group selection. Complicated stuff. Technical.”

“Dear God, listen to this man!” Batya says in exasperation. “Your son needs you, and all you ever do is talk monkey business.”

The truth is, Devin no longer understands his son. While most boys his age try out for the football team or write for the school newspaper or pilfer a few beers from the fridge to share with their buddies around a bonfire, Tom spends much of his time alone in the spartan cell of his bedroom, poring over his books of eschatology like some lunatic monk. What he does in there Devin cannot say, but sleep doesn’t seem to be part of the equation. Admittedly, Devin has pressed an ear against the door but has been reluctant to trespass on his son’s privacy. He is afraid of what he might find inside.

After one wonderful month of bestial rutting, Devin and Batya return to the relative respectability of home and hearth where their relationship becomes quite tame, conventional, uninspired. Though he has never been particularly susceptible to paranoia, Devin finds himself sitting quietly at the edge of the bed, having hardly broken a sweat during their brief roll in the hay, obsessing about the inadequacy of his cocksmanship. He counts the reasons why an attractive woman like Batya would remain faithful to him, her fumbling and incompetent middle-aged lover.

He is no sexual dynamo, he is willing to admit as much, but he believes that all men are inept lovers to some degree, clumsy and insensitive. On this point most women will surely concur. Among great apes, the sex act is not the stuff of sonnets and flower gardens. Male chimpanzees climax with quickness and ease; they seem to understand the brute necessity for reproduction and the importance of passing on their genes. Human males aren’t so different. On average (and in this regard Devin is quite average), a man has an orgasm in less than five minutes, a disheartening statistic for any woman hoping to fulfill some erotic fantasy, the details of which may have been carefully worked out weeks, even months, in advance. It is perhaps for this reason that most women in a committed relationship never bother with infidelity.

And yet there is a paradox here. Unlike men who tend to be visual creatures, always sizing up height and weight and firmness of tit, women are much more discriminating, selecting mates who will make for excellent long-term partners; they look for certain qualities in a man: stability, intelligence, sanity—a tall order to fill, no doubt. Chances are Batya will find someone or something—man, woman, vibrator—that can pleasure her physically rather than emotionally and spiritually.

On a Sunday morning in October, as he reads the newspaper, alternately shaking his head at the puerile arguments on the op-ed page and sipping a cup of instant coffee, Devin hears the sound of bare feet slapping against the linoleum floor and looks up to see his son trudging toward the refrigerator. A skinny, hairy, greasy mess of a boy, Tom resembles an obdurate Iron Age patriarch—angular, gaunt, hunched over, staring into
space with eyes that are bloodshot and crazed as if trying to calculate the distance between the present moment and the final one, the great mystery of death, so that the reality all around him is almost nonexistent.

“Good morning,” Devin says.

Tom mumbles something terse. He drinks straight from the carton of milk. He smacks his lips and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. After emitting a low, gurgling belch, he scratches his face and stands beside his father’s chair.

With some reluctance, Devin folds the newspaper and places it on the kitchen table, hoping Tom will take the hint and decide to leave him alone. Batya is right, of course. He should probably speak to the boy, ask what’s on his mind, but dealing with teen angst used to be his wife’s forte, not his, and he doesn’t especially want to hear about his son’s personal problems. It’s much too early in the day for that sort of thing.

Tom glances at the pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter. “Is Batya still here?”

“No, she left early this morning to conduct more research on her novel.”

Though he has never been permitted to read a single page of her book or invited to spend the night at her house in the country, Devin is thrilled to be involved with a creative type, a real bohemian, someone the Jesuits claim to respect and admire but secretly abhor and distrust. After leading an uneventful life, Devin has become a kind of double agent, a man of high adventure who obtains precious bits of information through subterfuge and seduction.

Tom crosses his arms. “Too bad. I was hoping she’d still be here.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I’m going to mass.”

“Going where?”

“To church, Dad. It starts in …” he glances at the clock “… less than an hour. I wanted to know if Batya cared to join me.”

“Did she express an interest?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Sort of. I’d ask you to come along, but I know how
you
feel about these kinds of things.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Religion. The hereafter. God.”

In this house, the topic of religion is taboo. Devin’s agnosticism must always be kept secret. Aside from the occasional wedding and funeral, he does not attend church services and tries to avoid them whenever possible. He can’t comprehend why so many otherwise perfectly rational people take solace in this nonsense, and it is only by consulting the dusty tomes written by his colleagues that he can distinguish between the warring factions of Christian denominations that flourish and spread like a green muck in the steaming malarial swamps of the American spiritual landscape. As much as he detests ritual, Devin hates scripture even more. The cloying and calcified style of biblical prose fills his mouth like the dust and grit of the Sinai itself, although he has, out of curiosity, skimmed a few passages from the Old Testament. He read about King Saul who, despite passing laws prohibiting his subjects from calling upon witches and mediums, traveled incognito to the desert oasis of Endor to consult a necromancer from whom he hoped to receive the guidance of the dead. From this story, Devin has devised a simple axiom upon which he can base all arguments about religious thinking:
The level of devotion among the faithful is in direct proportion to their hypocrisy
.

Now he pushes his chair away from the table and says, “Tom, let me ask you something. What kinds of things have the priests been teaching you lately?”

With an impudent smile, the boy answers, “Don’t worry, Dad. They haven’t been brainwashing me, if that’s what you want to know.”

In fact, it
is
what he wants to know. He sends Tom to the Jesuit school not for the tiresome tautologies of the elderly clergyman, but for the rigorous curriculum, the militaristic discipline, and, since Devin is a faculty member, the free tuition.

“Indoctrination, Tom, that’s what I’m worried about. Disinformation. Manipulation.”

“I’d just like to go to church, Dad. The Jesuits have nothing to do with it. I’m leaving in ten minutes.”

Devin stirs his coffee and watches the cream spiral slowly into an infinitesimal galaxy. By adding another drop of cream, he transforms the Milky Way into a rapidly expanding crab nebula. For a long time, he stares into his mug, contemplating the far-flung stars, and after some consideration, he agrees to accompany his son to mass. He wants to see what the boy is up to, surely he is up to
something
, all 17-year-old boys more or less are, but he is also curious to find out what the priests are up to. Over the years, Devin has become better acquainted with these men, with their values, their ethics, their politics, and though they profess to be well meaning, they are always a little too eager to take advantage of a boy who is susceptible to the Jesuitical arts of rhetoric and persuasion.

Intentionally designed to look out of place among the warehouses and factories of this industrial city in terminal decline, the little Romanesque chapel, built of flint and rubble masonry, is exactly the kind of structure an American traveler hopes to encounter while passing through an isolated Irish hamlet, and indeed the place seems to echo with the ghostly voices of peasants ground to dust by the rigid doctrines of a dying priestdom. The curious carvings on its archways seem so ancient and faded from wind and rain that they might predate Christianity, the work of recalcitrant pagans, barbarian invaders, heavy-browed Neanderthals. The enormous frescos that dominate the apse depict vengeful angels and valiant missionaries, legendary figures meant to instill the requisite awe and humility in the parishioners.

Today the chapel is filled nearly to capacity. Devin and Tom manage to squeeze into a back pew near the heavy wooden doors.
A dungeon door
, thinks Devin, and as he mentally prepares himself for an excruciatingly boring ceremony, he looks around and is surprised to see so many of his rambunctious pupils sitting in silence, their hands resting on their knees. If only they would behave this way in the classroom. Eager to record their unusual behavior, Devin reaches for the pencil and scratch pad he keeps handy in his coat pocket (no self-respecting scientist would leave home without these essential tools), but before he can jot down his observations, the pipe organ blares an alarming chord. The congregants jump to their feet, open their hymnals, and lift their voices high.

The principal emerges from a cloud of incense and marches down the aisle to the tabernacle. When the lugubrious singing finally ends, the priest raises his arms and recites the opening prayer. The ceremony goes slowly, and Devin is forced to suppress his yawns as he listens to the introductory rites, the act of penitence, the Kyrie, a reading
from the Gospel of Mark. It isn’t until the homily that he becomes fully aware of the boom and thunder of the principal’s baritone as it sweeps back and forth across the chapel, an impressive instrument that startles Devin out of a daydream about Batya’s tight abdominal muscles.

“Whenever we encounter evil in the world,” says the principal, “we must turn the other cheek. The Lord instructs us to do so. He asks us to tolerate and understand our ideological foes, demands that we refrain from casting judgment on our enemies. There is evidence for this in the scripture, certainly there is, but Christ also provides another kind of teaching, one that we must carefully consider in our own day and age.

“Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark deals with a man from Gadarenes who was possessed by a legion of demons. Shunned by everyone in his village, the man lived alone among the tombs near the sea. Upon encountering this poor fellow, Jesus quickly assessed the gravity of the situation and took action. Jesus did not ask permission to cast the demons into a herd of swine, nor did He ponder the ethics of slaughtering those innocent animals.