The Dark Path

by David Schickler

  Annabel zips up the hill through the crowd of students. She ducks inside the mansion through the back porch and finds Daphne and me. She is our accomplice.

  “Only the dance competition is left,” she says. “English is behind Math by five points and behind History by three. For a victory, you must take first place in dance.”

  “Thank you,” says Daphne.

  Annabel nods. She pulls me aside.

  “Thanks for helping,” I tell her. “Not just today.”

  She smiles. “Good luck, ornitorrinco.” She glances at Daphne, gives me one quick kiss on the lips, then scurries outside and back down the hill.

  I go to Daphne and we watch out the window. A large stereo system and speakers have been set up under the pine trees so the music is loud. Math teachers do the twist along to the Chubby Checker song.

  “I’m crazy nervous,” says Daphne.

  I tell her, “I’m swallow-my-tongue nervous.”

  “Can I borrow like ten Paxils?” She squeezes my hand.

  Two history teachers do the hustle and the kids cheer.

  “Dammit,” Daphne says. “The kids are loving History.”

  I remember my cross-country meets in high school. I couldn’t eat in the morning before races and I haven’t eaten yet today. My stomach is storming the Bastille.

  The hustle ends.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  Daphne shakes her head no.

  I take her hand and we walk out of the mansion. We move down the hill through the throng of kids. As they turn and see how we’re dressed, they start hooting and catcalling.

  “Sheeklah!” calls Kwan.

  “Ms. Lowell!” calls another student. “How ’bout some hip-hop, Ms. Lowell?”

  Daphne throws her shoulders back and raises her chin, like the first-class act she is. We step down through all the rowdies and take our place in the sun on a clearing in the trammeled grass. I pull Daphne near. She arches her back, resisting me like she should. Holding each other this way, we stay still.

  Gavin, the history teacher who hustled and who’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, calls out, “What’s this fancy crap?” The students laugh.

  Daphne and I stay still and wait. Her right hand holds my left. I have my right arm around her waist. The violin of “Por una Cabeza” begins, gentle but loud through the speakers.

  I move forward at Daphne and she steps back. There’s a slight splash of wet from the grass beneath our feet. We move with the rhythm, holding each other at bay with tension in our arms. There is still air between our bodies and not much danger yet.

  “Too slow,” complains a student.

  “Yeah,” says another.

  The violin climbs higher. I look deep into Daphne’s eyes.

  Her expression is aloof, pouty, and inviting at once. If you want me, prove it.

  I will. On the piano’s four-note solo flourish, I thrust her away and reel her in hard. Our torsos crash together and the crowd gasps and cheers.

  And that’s the spark. We’re off. Our bodies move like a shared fate over the lawn. I’ve never held her tighter. The violin is a heat between us and the piano notes are little cracks from a whip at our feet. The crowd might still be here, nearby, but I wouldn’t know it, because Daphne’s breasts are against my chest, her legs move with mine, and our eyes are locked together, having a once-in-a-lifetime pillow talk.

  This is as close as I’ll ever get to you, isn’t it, Daph.

  Yes.

  We’ll never kiss and we’ll never make love, will we.

  No, David.

  You’re not my wife.

  No, I’m not. But just for this moment, for this dance . . .

  I dip her so close to the ground that her hair teases the grass. Then I whip her back up, grip her tight, and tango forward. The music keeps on, moving toward crescendo. Our foreheads are touching and our eyes stay each other’s. Somewhere it is night right now, and the stars are candles, but behind that light, rolling in the darkness, are all the world’s lovers.

  I don’t know who she’ll be, Daph, but I’ll find her.

  I know you will.

  I’ll write my way toward her.

  You should.

  That’s my path.

  Then let’s tango.

  We make one last-ditch pass over the grass, really flying now, improvising. I sneer the way she wants me to. Still clinging to me, she flounces her head side to side with a strict, pert grace. We dash down past the crowd and I see each drop-jawed face, Gonzalo’s, JoBeth’s, a smiling Kira’s, and then glad, glad Annabel’s. I see Paul and Max punching each other and grinning and pointing at me. I see Clement looking happy, watching his daughter.

  Leaping onto the trammeled mark where we started, I stop my feet and strike a pose, with one foot extended out into the mud. Daphne sylphs her body around mine, adding one final intimate glimmer, then stretches out a leg to match and cleave close to mine. As her toes touch down softly to the mud, the music ends.

  The crowd leap to their feet. They go crazy with ovation.

  She and I are panting, still gazing at each other.

  “We just won,” she says.

  Chapter Fifteen

  FIVE YEARS GO BY. I teach full-time in Tapwood for two of them, then I move back to Rochester and teach English at an independent high school. To give myself a chance to write, I teach only half-time and to afford this, I live in my parents’ basement again. I stay on the Paxil. As long as I stretch and lift weights, my right hip stays mostly out of pain. I can run again and I do so around the grounds of Black Creek Country Club and on the dark path, though I have a hitch in my gait now and my right calf will forever be a slimmer, atrophied version of my left.

  Quietly and usually alone, I start going to Mass again. I go to Holy Ghost Church on Coldwater Road, near my grandparents’ old farm. They are buried in the churchyard cemetery. After Mass I sit in the grass by their graves. In church, in the graveyard, and on the dark path, I mostly just show up, attend, rather than petitioning. What I feel now in the shadows around me on the path, and occasionally in church, is that I’m hovering, caught, between God and Lack-of-God. I feel both His presence and His absence. I can’t break out of this paradox or dilemma. I also can’t articulate it, so I don’t speak of it.

  Instead I write fiction, every day. I throw myself into it. I try writing a novel about a spiritual little girl. It has sweet parts, but overall it doesn’t work. I try writing an erotic novel. It has hot parts, but overall it doesn’t work. Then I write my New York book, a love letter to the city, and it works. I call it Kissing in Manhattan. It features a short story called “The Smoker,” a story inspired by Annabel but not based on her, and “The Smoker” comes out in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue, and, incredibly, I get a book and movie deal. The deal is strong enough that I can stop teaching and write fiction and screenplays full time. It is the heady summer of the year 2000—my thirty-first summer—and I can barely drive my car because my hands keep shaking on the steering wheel, not from panic this time but excitement.

  In late September I do my first-ever reading from my book, at Geva Theatre in Rochester. At the cocktail reception afterward, a young woman introduces herself. Her name is Martha. She is a tall blonde with a killer figure, a shy smile, and deep brown eyes. There’s a crackle in the air between us. She says that she came to the reading alone, on a lark, after seeing it advertised in the paper. She loves horses and owns one and her eyes dance when she speaks of him. Martha comes out for a drink with me afterward and we kiss good-night leaning against her car. There is a scent to her neck skin. It is sweet and addictive, like warm vanilla something-or-other. We go out days later and she’s wearing a cool leather jacket and she still has that same scent. It isn’t a perfume. It’s her.

  I try not to think too much about Martha, though, because of My Plan. My Pla
n—which I devised ten seconds after I got my book deal—is to move down to New York City, the East Coast mecca for hotties. In Tapwood and since, I’ve had full-on sex with just two women and both times were mistakes. For whatever reasons, Catholic or neurotic, I simply can’t have complete intercourse until I’m married. But I feel skilled in the Everything But department, and Kissing in Manhattan is racy and romantic, and I want to use it as a calling card. I will be Hip and Racy Author David, and My Plan is to urge my book into the hands of ten thousand young women in Manhattan and let my writing melt their hearts and hopefully their clothing, too. I will take these ten thousand women to bed, one or two at a time, and get to third-and-a-half base with each of them. In my own Catholic, premarital way, I’m going to get repeatedly and spectacularly laid.

  In early October, I try to put My Plan into action. I drive down to Manhattan for a week to sign a lease for an apartment on Riverside Drive and to read a story from my book at a cocktail party that The New Yorker hosts for me at the Polo store in SoHo. At first I think it’s weird that the magazine is partnering with a fashion store for a literary event, but then I remember that I am Hip and Racy Author David and whatever happens is cool, baby, cool.

  It is a dream-perfect evening, this cocktail party. I read my story and people laugh. There are dream-perfect hotties in attendance, smart, stylish young women who work in publishing and fashion. One is a six-foot-tall African-American girl named Plesha, who is wearing a silver shift and who loves the films The Warriors and The French Connection, like I do. Another woman, a raven-haired Jewish fiction editor with a soft laugh and an Akris Punto drape-front dress, smiles at my dumb jokes and asks if I’d like to go sometime to Chat ’n’ Chew for mac and cheese.

  Both women give me their numbers and both seem to be what I’m looking for, sheer, wild, brilliant Manhattan hookups waiting to happen. The editor smells like the sweet red wine she’s drinking, and Plesha wears a perfume that smells like cinnamon danger. But neither of them smells like Martha, the vanilla woman I left upstate. Goddammit.

  I drive back to Rochester, just for a few days, to get my stuff, and while there I have another date with Martha, then another, then another. She keeps kissing me and smelling all vanilla-ish. She is ruining My Plan.

  When I move to Manhattan, Martha visits every other weekend and stays with me. I tell her that when she’s away, I will see other women. But I never do. Instead I call Martha every night that we’re apart.

  We make no sense together. Billy Bragg led me to expect a brunette, and Martha is blond. She doesn’t drink. She’s an erratically practicing Protestant. I’m a night owl, but if we go to an eight p.m. movie, she is out cold on my shoulder by half an hour in. The more crowded a room gets, the louder and gladder I get, but if I want Martha to make a peep, we can’t go out to dinner with more than one other couple. Her family is tiny. When I tell her that I have fifty-four first cousins, she lies down on my apartment floor, dizzy and terrified.

  I love trivia. One night when we’re walking down Broadway I ask Martha which U.S. state contains the geographical center of our country. She crosses Broadway to look in a shop window. I follow her, thinking that she must not have heard me. When I ask her the same question, she turns away from me to a street kiosk and buys some mints.

  I ask her what’s going on.

  “I don’t like being wrong,” she says.

  When we’re at bars with dance floors, I try to pull her out there with me. Almost every time, she’s having none of it.

  One night we’re sitting in the lobby of the New York Palace hotel. Attached to the hotel is Sirio Maccioni’s swank restaurant, Le Cirque 2000, where my younger sister, Jeanne, is a cocktail waitress now to support herself as a modern dancer here in the city. Martha and I are about to go in and sit in Jeanne’s section and gawk at the upper crust, but first I’ve pulled Martha aside here in the hotel lobby to tell her for the first time that I love her.

  She goes pale. “Oh, God. Please don’t say that just because I need to hear it.”

  I promise her that I mean what I’m saying. She hugs me close and says that she loves me, too.

  • • •

  I DON’T LIKE being wrong any more than Martha does. And about her I can’t afford to be. Because when we’re in bed and she’s asleep beside me, she smells not just like vanillaness but foreverness. Somehow her warmth and kisses are making me need God not only to be real but to be eternal and willing to share His eternity with the two of us. This simply has to be the case and I don’t know what to do. I’ve long since given up on expecting God to speak to me, but I need Him to be irrefutably there. I don’t know why, but I need to know He’s there before I can ask her The Question.

  I turn to my father. Over the holidays home in Rochester I help him decorate the outside of our house for Christmas. I give him a hand putting up Tannenbaum pine trees on the back deck. While we’re out there in the snow, stringing lights on the trees, I ask him when he knew that my mother was the one. He smiles and grimaces as he works.

  “Well, my dad, your grandfather, never said much about anything. But I brought Peggy out to the farm for dinner one night, and the next morning while Grampa and I were fixing his truck radiator, he said, ‘Jack, don’t let her go.’ Then he asked me for the socket wrench.”

  I nod. I’m trying to untangle strings of lights from out of last year’s wooden bins. Maybe the greatest pleasure of getting paid for my writing and having it go out into the world is that my father now believes that there are other people like me, who maybe love the things I love, and laugh at the things I laugh at, and who want to read about these things.

  “Son, there’s something I’ve been wanting to share with you.”

  He said son. I stop working and look at him.

  “I’m giving up the deaconate.”

  I can’t have heard right. He has spent a decade working toward this position in the Catholic Church. Just last summer he finished earning his master’s in divinity and my mother threw one of her swashbuckling parties to congratulate him. Everyone has been looking forward to the sermons that my tough-as-nails, heart-full-of-love father will preach, and no one’s looking forward to it more than I am.

  “Dad, what’re you talking about? It’s your dream . . . you’ve been driving toward it since forever.”

  He looks off at our snow-covered land. He does this when he needs to concentrate, to get a baseline reading on his life, to remember that he loves this place and his family more than anything else. One time when I was in college, I was watching TV on my parents’ couch at two in the morning and my father trudged downstairs in his pajamas and threw on his boots and coat. I asked him where he was going and he said he realized in his sleep that the birch tree out back was sick and he had to go check it out. He wasn’t kidding and he wasn’t wrong. The tree was sick with some tree disease and over the coming months he did something to save it, though I’ll never know exactly what. I think he just stood next to it and talked to it a lot.

  “I just can’t do it, David,” he tells me now on the back deck. “I can’t be a deacon. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve loved the learning, but my heart won’t have it. Catholic deacons are . . . those men are . . . sidelined. I can’t serve in a role where I’m . . .” He puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes. “David,” he sighs, “Schicklers just don’t like being told what to do.”

  “All right, Dad.”

  I go back to fiddling with an inoperable string of lights. There’s one faulty bulb somewhere on the chain, and if I don’t find it, the whole thing won’t work.

  • • •

  FOR MY NEW YEAR’S resolution I decide to start volunteering at the Manhattan Unplanned Pregnancy House. Its literature says that it’s a not-for-profit, Protestant faith–based organization that gives counseling and support to women and couples facing unplanned pregnancies. The place will not refer for abortions, but the literatur
e swears up and down that the House isn’t a political organization, that it doesn’t lobby against the legality of abortion, that it doesn’t proselytize Christianity to its clients, and that it uses no scare tactics, no personal appeals, no judgment.

  My urge to want to volunteer at M.U.P. House runs deep. Over the years several women I’ve known have had abortions and have confided to me about it. They’ve often spoken about the men involved, men who in almost every case weren’t there for them after getting them pregnant. I don’t presume that I have any great wisdom, and I know that I can’t relate to the experiences of pregnant women, and to the credit of the people at M.U.P. House, they never even allow male counselors to try to talk one-on-one with or otherwise counsel their women clients. But they do train male peer counselors to talk to the men in their client couples. And this is where I feel like maybe I can help.

  My own longing for women has stirred such fever, fear, and emotion in my own life for so long—and every fraught, naked moment I’ve ever shared with any girl or woman still lives so close to the surface of my skin and heart—that I know I can relate to the fears of men who feel unsure of their way in intimate relationships. But I can also still always hear the groans my father makes when he hugs and clings to my mother at each day’s end, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from those groans, it is that a real man doesn’t leave a woman in the lurch. Not that a woman can’t be deeply strong on her own if that’s what she chooses, but a real man who’s facing trouble with a woman doesn’t clam up, doesn’t bluster or bully or try to dictate, and he doesn’t cut and run. I feel very strongly about this, but I know I’ll be able to talk about it quietly with other men. I believe that I’ll be able to put my yammering Irish mouth to some use by doing so and I believe that I’ll be a good, nonjudgmental listener.

  And I have one more reason, the deepest possible, for wanting to volunteer at M.U.P. House. For the first time in many years I’ve asked God for something in my heart. I’ve asked, Dear God-if-You’re-There: If I do this volunteer work, if I devote myself to it with all that I have, and if, in conversation with other scared men, I try to feel my way through the good but confusing darkness of what it means to try to be one man standing by one woman, will You please give me some small prod, some nudge, some way for me to know that Martha is really my future, my wife? I know now that You’ll never talk to me, but can You give me some small prompt so that I’ll feel that You’re there and that Martha and I can move toward You together?