Our Lady of Infidelity

by Jackie Parker

  And the one who would come to be called the moon-faced man, who appears in the dark with a brown shopping bag, a small canvas stool, sits himself down, turns his shining white face to the window and remains on the sidewalk all night.

  The ones who changed everything.

  The ones who would say they’d been waiting.

  CHAPTER 36

  They had taken Ryan out in the fifth: two innings before Walt even arrived. He found a seat in the section reserved for the Chargers in the top, half-empty row. Gwen had grimaced as he mounted the stadium stairs; his daughter grasped onto her mother and Gwen’s arm went around her. Tight. He had tried to focus on the action on the field, to cheer the team back (they were down eight to one). In the shadow of the dugout, his son huddled off by himself, his cap pulled down over his eyes, his face entirely erased. After the last Charger had been called out, Gwen and his daughter had rushed down to the field along with the other parents. “What the hell happened to you?” Gwen asked when he caught up to them.

  “There’s something going on at the car wash,” he said.

  “I’m talking about your clothes.”

  Then Gwen started across to the dugout but was stopped by a group of her friends.

  Jen had pulled her face away when he went to kiss her. “Dad,” she breathed. Everything he feared contained in that motion. She followed her mother across the field, joining a circle of Charger parents standing in well-groomed splendor. He had become unused to seeing so many people who were good-looking in that way. Walt said his hellos, and they barely gave him a glance. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Jen, then went to the dugout to let Ryan see he was there. The kids on the benches looked beat. Ryan hunkered down in his green Chargers cap, the coach going on about how lousy they’d played, the insults flying off his tongue like spittle. When he started in on Ryan, Walt walked away.

  In the parking lot he managed to slow them down long enough to suggest they go out for a meal. “Give me the keys, Mom,” Ryan muttered, as Walt tried to convince them it was still not too late to salvage a piece of the day. “I know you’re disappointed in a lot of things right now, but it isn’t as bad as you think.”

  “Fuck you,” Ryan said.

  “Ryan, try to hear this, buddy. We don’t only get one chance in life. We get as many chances as we take.”

  “Bullshit,” said Ryan.

  “Oh God, Dad,” cried Jen, “Please don’t do this. You’re just making it worse.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up is all I am telling you.”

  “You weren’t even there. You didn’t see it. I folded. I cost us the game.”

  “Are you drinking again?” Gwen asked. “Is the plan to humiliate us, showing up looking like a derelict?”

  “I’m not drinking,” Walt said.

  “Or do you clean those cars with your shirt?”

  And they looked at him then, the three of them standing by the hood of Gwen’s red Jag, he having stepped back a little, maybe to show them he wasn’t dangerous, but at any rate stepping a little too far out in the lane with the exiting cars, ignoring the drivers and their horns. Suddenly, he was seeing right through their shame to the fear. Their fear for him, for what he had become.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said.

  Then Walt remembered the earrings and fumbled in his pocket. He took out the box and stepped toward Jen, but she shook her head, too much for her even to look at that little white box. “It is not always going to hurt like this,” he said, “I promise you. Take the earrings. Just take them, honey, please. I want to give them to you.” He placed the box in her palm and closed her fingers around it. She looked at the box, “J. C. Penney?” His daughter had never been in a J. C. Penney.

  “It’s not a Tiffany year.”

  And she had laughed. A small delicious sound that went through him like water.

  “I like the blue,” she said when she looked at the stones.

  “Oh, honey, good.”

  Then he turned to his son, to Gwen who was mercifully silent. “There’ll be other games,” Walt said. “Other dinners. Times I will look like you like me to look. You had a great season. Don’t punish yourself for one loss. I am so sorry I was so late.”

  “You used to never be late,” Ryan said, his breaking voice, bringing to Walt’s mind the unbearable limb-split tree.

  “I’ll do better for you next time. I promise.”

  “Do you have any idea how hard you are making this for them?” Gwen said, then she put her perfect red polished thumb on the Open button, and the little chirp sounded, and the buttons of the Jag popped up.

  “Bye, Dad,” said Ryan. As he was getting into the back seat, he paused and looked at Walt and nearly smiled. “See ya.”

  Watching them drive off as he stood in his blue-blotched rag of a shirt with the mark on his pants from where Luz had kicked him, Walt felt unaccountably calm. He walked to the Civic, just one more thing that made his family ashamed to know him. How did he ever do that—show them that a way to know people is through their cars? What in him agreed to that way of knowing?

  All of himself, he realizes. All of him had agreed. And for most of his life. And when it had all fallen from him, he had expected they would understand. It was a minor scandal. Title company kickback. He hadn’t even known until the indictment, though now he would have made it his business to know. There had been many deals like that. Kickbacks to the title company, fairly routine. His secretary put the day’s Orange County Register on his desk, and halfway down he saw his name. They were all being sued. He called his lawyer. Easy to get out of it. We’ll just settle. People lost their shirts. Not him.

  “I’m done,” he told Gwen. “Good, go retire. Maybe I’ll see you once in a while.” “No, I’m stepping out of this. I need some time to reassess.” “Reassess away,” she says, “But know I’m not moving. I’m not moving the kids.” “Honey,” he said, “we can cut back. We don’t need to live like pashas. The kids don’t need—”

  She brought him his salad. They were in the small dining room, ten-foot French doors open to the garden, pool beyond, shimmering blue. One hundred thousand in palm trees. “Try this. Heirloom tomatoes. The greens are organic. The cheese is trucked down from Sonoma.”

  Living in the guesthouse of friends, he started going to a gas station with a self-service wash. He’d never even noticed they had one. Cutbacks, he thought. And paid the six bucks and drove through. Something happened to him when that water rushed down. He wept. Every day for a week he went back.

  One weekend he tried to take the kids camping. Get them away. Just be together. Somewhere new. A whole different scene. Camping? Like he’d suggested they sleep on the street. Alone, he drove out to Joshua Tree, spent three nights in the campgrounds, early spring, the whole place blazing with color. Ended his trip at a diner, sitting in a window booth eating strawberry pie, looking across the freeway at a for sale sign. Twenty acres. Saw, saw the thing he would build. A car wash.

  Gwen thought he was joking. Then she thought it was the depression talking. And then, when he checked into the Infidelity Motel, though she knew they were pretty much done, she drove down and tried with everything she had to bring him back.

  He still can’t explain it, what he’s doing. But somehow he trusts it will be for their good. He cannot say how. He only knows this, how far he has come in only three years, how much closer to the tenuous filament that is Walt.

  He started the Civic and turned on the air conditioning. Seeing his face in the rearview mirror, he was startled. He looked so alive.

  The whole drive home he replayed the trip, the way he used to replay Ryan’s moves on the mound: how Jen had cried and taken the earrings, the surprise of her laugh. How Ryan had looked at him finally, full in the face with a hint of a smile, the sound of his voice when he told Walt good-bye.

  And as he nears Infidelity, Walt allows himself to think again of the morning, of the faces he had seen and the little girl Luz. The joy expand
s through him once again, the heat and the gentle openings in his body. He grows certain in all that is happening, feels he is being moved past the known boundaries of his life.

  Now he approaches the steep Infidelity grade, hoping the Civic won’t overheat and strand him, as it has been known to do. He watches the gauge moving a little into the red and laughs, thinking of the first time he hit the Infidelity grade: the Mercedes sailed up the hill effortlessly.

  The Civic sputters and balks, having reached the top under protest. Platz’s garage on the right then the descent, straight into the bowl of the town. In the pink hazy distance he sees the signs: the motel—lurid pink neon, the diner in white. Across from them, Immaculate Autos, its neon deep blue. Infidelity—a blip on the map, his blip. He is almost there. Before him he sees a long line of cars, steady red brake lights, turn signals flashing. The image Walt’s been carrying for three years in his mind’s eye. It is here.

  CHAPTER 37

  When the Feast of the Assumption has ended, the game tables folded and put back in storage, icicle lights boxed, and all his people have gone home, Father Bill walks stiffly in familiar darkness to the rear of his church and lets himself into the rectory. His thighs ache, the long muscles agonizingly tight from contending with Luz on the sidewalk, so far past exhaustion he won’t even be able to sleep.

  Still, he checks his office in case there’s a message, certain there will be none, but he is wrong. A soft-voiced woman, who speaks halting English, in an accent he recognizes immediately as the voice of a Salvadoran, has asked that he call her at 9 a.m. Stockholm time. “In your time, this is midnight,” she says. The phone number is fourteen digits long. She repeats the numbers clearly, two times, but does not leave her name.

  He sits down slowly in the hardwood desk chair, then leans back and raises his legs out before him, placing his feet on top of his desk, careful not to scatter his papers. He replays the message, copying the number on a new yellow pad. Stockholm, he writes.

  He has only just learned from Hope Merton there are Salvadoran exiles in Stockholm, one thousand strong. Many are former guerillas, young boys when they fled eight years earlier, now men. Refugees all. The boys are not likely donors for Josefina, Father Bill knows. But still, there are others, who might have been from the capital, might have known Professor Raphael Reyes, or Josefina herself, someone who brushed elbows with her family, a past patron of her father’s toy stores, a friend of a cousin, a student. A stranger with a blessed heart who would agree to be tested, tissue-typed, blood-typed. He has it all written down, what’s required, the tests and the forms, the numbers for the transplant center at the High Desert Hospital, the numbers of her physicians. An act against the odds, this kind of search. Act and let go. He has put this entirely in God’s hands. All the calls: Seattle; San Antonio; El Paso; Montclair, New Jersey; Berlin; San Jose, Costa Rica. And suddenly this message from Stockholm, a city not yet on his list.

  How he will explain his August phone bill to the bishop, he has no idea. Perhaps he will simply tell the truth. He has a parishioner in trouble, indigent and ill. They are trying to locate a family member; her family is scattered all over the globe. A half-truth then, these are family, the ones who, like Josefina, had sought asylum and been denied. The ones who could not prove they had been persecuted except by the scars on their bodies, a category of proof not included on the document for seekers of asylum at the embassy or the border. The illegals, driven through Mexico by people like him, avoiding the borders, ferried to churches, hidden in private homes. Hope Merton’s.

  A Salvadoran from Stockholm. He cannot stop the rush of excitement. The stirring of premature hope. Twenty-five minutes to midnight. In Stockholm, it is morning, twenty-five minutes to nine.

  He gets up and goes to the rectory bathroom, leans over the small blue sink, turns on the cold water and bends to it, washing his face several times then letting the water run over his hands and wrists. As he buries his face in the towel, his own smell comes at him and a vague uncleanness. He has not done the laundry since Josefina got sick.

  He returns to his desk with time to review his questions, to look through his papers and rearrange them with the most important on top. Time for the necessary moments for prayer.

  He cannot deny, as he begins his gratitudes, that the day has been full of gifts, so many that Luz herself has begun to seem at this late hour, muted at least, a part of the day, no longer the whole of it. This call, of course. Those extraordinary moments of realized grace. Yes, even the one that came to him on the sidewalk so insistent and deep that when it was over he was surprised to find himself not in his church, humbled that he had been able to share it and with so many. That there had not been a vision, even for that he is grateful. Especially for that.

  When he moves into prayer, he goes deeply and quickly, a thing he has not been able to achieve in months. So deeply he does not hear the rectory door when it is opened. As he so often does, he has forgotten to lock it. When the human sounds work their way through to his senses, he opens his eyes.

  “Father?” says Walt. “Are you sleeping at your desk tonight? You should at least lock the door.”

  Father Bill tries to stand up but is stopped by the burning in his thighs.

  “I didn’t want to call and disturb your sleep. But here you are, awake.” Walt says.

  There are folders and papers strewn over Father Bill’s old desk, battered mahogany, the surface of worn maroon leather where Walt has so often sat with this man, trying to sort out his life.

  “Were you working this late?” Walt asks.

  “In fact, yes, I am.”

  “I have to discuss the situation at my car wash.”

  “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

  “Do you know what’s going on there?”

  Suddenly, the morning looms up again, insisting itself through Father Bill’s consciousness when he has all but succeeded in shutting it down for the night. His stomach clenches as it did when he first saw Luz in rapture and had vomited.

  “Sit down. I only have a few minutes.”

  A few minutes, Walt thinks, as he pulls up a chair, feeling slapped. Where to begin? With which of his miracles?

  “There are people still out there on the sidewalk. And the cars keep coming.”

  “Really? Still? This late?”

  “Still. There may be a hundred parked in the field now. And there are tents.”

  “A hundred, that many. Are they my people? Our people?”

  “Some, but mostly not. Mostly strangers.”

  “I see. And what did you say, there are tents?” Father Bill asks, trying to picture one hundred tents on a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot sidewalk.

  “Out back in the field.”

  Josefina did not mention tents. She did not mention strangers appearing at the car wash. He had discouraged his parishioners’ talk about the sidewalk. Forbidden their questions about Luz. All those silent communings and visions that have lit them like present-day mystics. Even the word is insubstantial and suspect on the tongue. Father Bill picks up his pen and draws a box around the fourteen-digit phone number. “Did you call the highway patrol?”

  “No. Do you think I should?”

  “I suppose they don’t need to be called. They’ll see it. Are you afraid you’ll be cited?”

  “What?”

  “Are you worried you’ll be fined for the people on your property?”

  “A fine? It didn’t occur to me.”

  Walt shifts in the chair. This is not at all the conversation he has intended to have with Father Bill; it has gotten off on the wrong track. He has glories to discuss. Miracles he has witnessed, extraordinary things he has seen and felt within himself.

  “Are they peaceful? Are they making any kind of disturbance, these people?” Father Bill asks, not looking up from his pad.

  “Quiet. Very quiet. There were flowers and candles burning under my window, though I took them away. No one objected.”

  Father Bill nods. No
w Walt is growing impatient. What is it with that yellow pad? That long line of numbers Father Bill is doodling around, as if this conversation is only mildly important and what happened today at the car wash and is happening still a trivial event. “I told them not to put anything under the window. That I’d throw it away.”

  “That was good.”

  Now Walt can hardly get his hands on what it is he really wants and struggles to retrieve it. For a moment the men are silent. Father Bill has managed to distance himself from the whole of it, Walt thinks. Except, what was it Bryant Platz said? Something Father Bill had done with the crowd after Walt left. Walt had dismissed it as exaggeration. Bryant Platz had been angry. He didn’t like Luz sitting out there, the people gathering. He didn’t like who he saw there, the strangers with their flyers. He had been over the top with his fears.

  “Do you think Josefina and Luz will be back there tomorrow?” Walt asks.

  “I know they won’t.”

  “You’ve discussed this with Josefina?”

  “We are in absolute agreement.”

  Ah, thinks Walt, slammed with disappointment at the finality of it. Again, he feels he should plead for something. For what? For Luz to return? For the beauty of Luz, of the faces which he has not told Father Bill he has seen? Some people were saying that Father Bill had blessed them. Blessed the event. To ask if it’s true now seems absurd. It was only a rumor, just as Walt thought.

  “Two minutes, Walt, then we have to stop.”

  With only two minutes what can Walt ask?

  “If there’s nothing else, let’s continue tomorrow. I have someone waiting for my call.”

  A midnight phone call, Walt thinks. Whom but a lover do you call at midnight? Father Bill has already spoken with Josefina.

  Walt stands up, disgusted with himself. How completely the conversation has failed to represent him. If only he could find a way back in. “How was your feast?”