Priestdaddy
Page 8
“It’s foolproof,” he tells me, with the self-satisfaction of a man who knows he would pass. If he took the test, he would see only Batmobiles, but these guys would see the naked body of Robin. His beliefs about homosexuality are in general keeping with those of the church, with a few small but distinctive flourishes of his own. Earlier this week, for instance, he informed me Elton John became gay because he was “raised by too many aunts.”
When the seminarian took the inkblot test, he saw bunnies. “You saw . . . bunnies?” I ask. “Bunnies are fine,” he says with authority. “Bunnies are very wholesome. What you DON’T want to see is half-animal half-humans. That would show you were messed up.” Regular bunnies are just evidence you love Easter, but woe to the one who looks into the ink and sees a rabbit with the luscious lower half of a man.
Important: do you understand how badly I would fail this test? I would get something worse than an F. But my father refuses to even let me look at the Gay Inkblots. He’s afraid of what he might find. He knows he was saved from ever seeing me bring home a girl named Boots with screws in her ears for one reason and one reason only: because I got married when I was twenty-one to a man I met in cyberspace.
“We don’t know if it works on women,” they say cautiously, when I raise the subject amid the happy family clamor of the dinner table. “That’s not . . . we haven’t studied that yet.”
“In fact”—the seminarian sighs—“no one knows how lesbians work.”
“It’s easy,” I say. “You put one leg over her leg, and then she puts her other leg over your other leg, and then you brush each other’s hair forever while not going to church.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re not a lesbian, Tricia,” he tells me patiently. “You wear dresses.”
“If you’re so determined to figure out who’s gay and who’s not,” I say to my father, “then why don’t you ask someone who has actually met some gay people, gay people who haven’t had to pretend their whole lives not to be gay?”
Gaydar is not real, and I hope never to be in the business of perpetuating crude stereotypes, but the priest who owns his own harp and gets ten different brown-bagged magazines about the Royal Family delivered to him each month? Is possibly not a straight man. But Dad assures me the Gay Inkblot Test is quite sufficient for their needs. So a word to my queer brothers who are longing for a life in the Church: you are safer than houses, for the time being. Go with God.
• • •
THE SEMINARIAN TALKS FREQUENTLY about his “celibate powers,” which mainly consist of being able to get up extremely early. No, it doesn’t sound good to me either, though it’s plausible my extreme deficiency of celibacy is the reason I often sleep till noon. To protect and strengthen these celibate powers, he has developed a move called the celibacy block, where he holds up both arms in front of himself in the shape of a cross to ward off the person who’s trying to seduce him—mainly women, as he explains to me, who are “wearing volleyball shorts when there isn’t even any volleyball going on.” “You know what would be a better idea,” I tell him. “To just point a gun at any girl who’s cute and yell ‘I DON’T THINK SO’ at the top of your lungs.”
The celibacy block is necessary, it seems, because the woods are full of women who lust after men of the cloth. “We call them chalice chippers,” the seminarian explains one Sunday, piling his plate with the cold cuts and pickles my mother always sets out after the last Mass.
“They’re everywhere,” my father adds, vengefully forking a slice of roast beef, and goes on to tell us the story of a woman who once gave him “a teddy bear soaked with your mother’s perfume, to try and tempt me.”
How would that even work? Has any man who ever drew breath been seduced according to this method? Also, I would love to date a woman who soaks teddy bears in perfume and sexually gives them to priests, because she has got to be crazier in bed than any atheist ever dreamed of being. Maybe once you got back to her apartment you would see an even bigger teddy propped up against her pillow, soaked in holy water and waiting for you, with a Bible between its legs opened up to the Song of Songs. Maybe it’s for the best, after all, that the seminarian knows what a furry is. If they ever come for him, he’ll be ready.
• • •
I AM NOT SURE what the seminarian wants, exactly. He acts with admirable propriety at all times, despite the fact that all the chairs in this house are upholstered with velvet and leave perfect impressions of your hindquarters whenever you sit down on them. My mother obliterates the prints with the palm of her hand whenever she encounters them, but I sneak back in and sit on the chairs again when she’s not looking. The seminarian is unaffected by this campaign, however. His sights are set on something higher. The firmest desire I ever hear him assert is that he would like to have a lady wash his clothes, perhaps in a river.
“Why a river, specifically?” I probe further, carrying two mugs of tea in from the kitchen to fortify us against the doldrums of four o’clock.
“I want to watch her rub my clothes on the stones,” he responds.
I look down at him for a long moment, wondering if I should tip the tea out into his lap so he doesn’t get too turned on by my gesture of servitude, and he shrugs. “I like domestic stuff,” he tells me, his voice falling to a sudden romance-novel huskiness. So fuck a butler. Men, it bears repeating, are so weird. This is so far outside my area of sexual expertise it’s not even funny. Tell me you want to role-play a butlerfuck while pretending to serve your penis on a big silver tray and I will nod with understanding, and perhaps even offer to film it. But you want a woman to wash your clothes in a river? What are you, some kind of pervert?
• • •
A PRIEST’S UNIFORM INCLUDES the following: a white collar, either cloth or celluloid. A black short-sleeved shirt, black slacks and black belt, black shoes. Black Gold Toe socks. No other kind of sock is even considered. Underwear, I think. They buy these items from a special Sacred Clothing catalog, which for some reason is illustrated with pictures of priests laughing insanely, raising crunk cups to Christ, and posing in close embraces. No one knows what they’re doing, but they appear to be having just as good a time as the Victoria’s Secret models. Pillowfights do not seem far away. When my father started saying the Latin Mass, he gave up the short-sleeved shirts and slacks and took to wearing a cassock, which is just a long black dress for a man that everyone refuses to call a dress. (“It is a dress,” I have reiterated many times, trying to open people’s eyes to the truth. “And the pope wears what a baby would wear to the prom.”) The seminarian wears a cassock too, because he’s traditional, and he asked for thirty-three buttons on his: one for each year of Jesus’ life. On formal occasions, both of them affect a pompom hat, which has no utility as far as I can tell and which no one has ever been able to explain to my satisfaction.
“Really, a pompom hat?” I ask one day, when the seminarian and my dad are both sitting across the table from me decked out in their full regalia, looking like two dark Muppets from the realms of hell.
“It’s not a pompom, it’s a tuft,” the seminarian tells me. “A pompom would be silly.”
“We don’t call it a hat, we call it a biretta,” my father adds, his tuft going absolutely wild.
Ah. Why wear a regular hat, when you can wear a hat that sounds like a firearm. I begin flipping through the latest Sacred Clothing catalog and pause at a picture of a hundred-year-old priest and a twenty-five-year-old priest spooning each other in front of a stained-glass window. “Look at these incredible fantasy scenarios,” I say, turning the picture sideways. “I’m taking this upstairs with me. This is my Playboy now.” A few pages on, a photo of a female minister wearing vestments in all colors of the rainbow catches my attention. “Wait a minute, there are women in this?”
My father screws his eyes up very tinily, as if to cause the female minister and all others like her to disappear. “Those goofy Anglican
s,” he says, and then makes the distressing moo-cow noise he always makes when imitating the communications of feminists, who lurk in his imagination in rabid, milk-spurting, man-stampeding herds. “MooOOooo, we all gotta be equal, don’t we?” he mocks, with such perfect assurance of my agreement that I wonder if he has ever really looked at me, or heard a single word I’ve ever said. Perhaps, when all is said and done, I am more like a son to him than a daughter.
• • •
THERE IS A LOVE for structure in them that I recognize, and a desire to worship correctness that I know I share. When I look at them, I think: to prize traditionalism above all else in a church that began in revolution is to do a great violence to it. But I feel that same ache for the past in myself: to uphold the columns of literature, grammar, the Western tradition. The English language began as an upheaval; I am not protecting it when I try to guard it against change. The Jesus Christ of it, Chaucer, walked across the water telling dirty jokes, made twenty stories stretch to feed a million people, spelled the word “cunt” five ways, performed miracles. Any innovation I put down on paper is an attempt to remind myself of this. I am not modern. I was not born to blaze new paths or bring down walls. I break form against my nature to tell myself that revolution, too, is a tradition that must be upheld.
• • •
“THE SATANISTS ARE AT IT AGAIN,” the seminarian declares, bursting into the calm of the living room and waving a piece of paper urgently. “The Italian Satanists are at it again!”
Understand that hard-core Catholics get their news from different places than the rest of us. I look at the telltale paper in his hand. It’s probably a newsletter called Satanists: What Are They Doing Now? that he reads to keep abreast of their activities. The more people believe in a religion, the more they trust smudgy, paranoid newsletters printed off in a church basement by a woman named Debbie. I swear that for a while in the nineties, my father got a newsletter that listed every celebrity who had AIDS. He would pass through the room while we were watching The Brady Bunch, announce, “Big-time AIDS. Big-time,” or, “Guess what: America’s favorite dad had a secret,” and then continue on his way, leaving a couch full of distressed children in his wake.
“Did you say Italian Satanists?”
“Satanism is on the rise, especially in Italy,” the seminarian informs me, collapsing tragically into his favorite chair. “They roam the city in packs, and they throw rocks at priests as they walk down the street.”
That sounds kind of fun. I try to imagine these Italian Satanists, with their black-and-white checked tablecloths and their straw-covered bottles of blood and their accordions full of screams and their salamis made of Christian babies, hunting down priests for pure sport. Secretly the priests must enjoy it. Since the days of lions, there is nothing a Christian likes so much as to feel that he is in danger, simply for believing God was put on this earth in the form of a man with eighteen abs and a virgin mother.
“It’s not always the people you think,” he continues. “It’s not the goths. It might be . . . a businessman, with a family, and secrets in his basement.”
The scent of wrinkly black peppercorns and Old Bay floats in from the kitchen, along with the sounds of my mother’s out-of-tune humming. Every Friday we eat fish, as if we lived a hundred years ago. We used to abstain from meat on Fridays only during Lent, but now my parents do it all year round, rotating weekly through shrimp and cod and langoustines squeezed with lemon. Sometimes my father even contributes a dish of his own devising that I call Pasta Being Barely Touched by Clams.
We wait for the customary crashing avalanche of pans that comes halfway through her preparation of any meal, followed by a faint “It’s okay, I’m okay,” and when we hear it, the seminarian smiles. He loves those sounds of women in the kitchen. I am not a Satanist, I cannot lie, I love them too. She brings us each a glass of wine, her color high and happy, and he smiles again and says thank you. In a minute he will get up and slice cucumbers and tomatoes for the salad, or set the table with five neat places, or find some other way of helping her, but not just yet.
“What are we talking about in here?” she asks, in her wide, expectant way.
“Satanism in Italy,” we answer together.
Instantly her face empties itself of all contentment. “You know, it’s on the rise.”
• • •
I TRACE MY MODE of interaction with all men back to early encounters with seminarians. Somewhere along the line I got the idea that the most fun you could have with intelligent, studious men was teasing them. It was as easy as eating the apple. They were eternally deep in the writing of some paper. They adjusted their glasses and sat with one leg crossed over the other and made finicking movements with their fingers, as if they were playing small pianos. “Actually,” they told me, “actually . . .” What else could I do but tease them? I had no real power; it was men like these who were in charge of my life. If they decided tomorrow I had to cover my hair or wear skirts or pray separately, or be barred from reading certain books, or take certain pills and not take others, or be silent in the presence of men, I would have to do it. To have that bald dynamic of power on display in your home every day, pretending to arch over and protect you—it does something to a person. The seminarian calls women the “tabernacle of life.” The tabernacle, if you do not know, is an ornamental box that is largely important for what it holds. It is shut up and locked when the men go away, so the consecrated elements inside cannot be stolen.
I must still place some automatic trust in the office, though, because I find myself telling him all about what brought us here. While I talk, the phenomenon happens; I watch it happen. The bread is changed. The personality absents itself and he becomes a pure receptacle of listening. “You’re a good wife,” he tells me when I am finished, and I suffer vertigo for a minute, because there is no one in my waking life who would ever think to call me that. Yet there the designation sits between us, archaic and human as an old Greek head, still meaning something to someone.
• • •
IT ASTONISHES ME again and again how we know all the same people, though I’ve been gone from the Church’s country for years. There was a priest I was particularly close to in high school, who used to come to our theater rehearsals, perhaps out of loneliness. He was pink and oily and had flat black pebbles for eyes, and he combed six strands of black hair over the top of his head, and he was funny, and he seemed to especially love the citric humor of high school girls—which is eternal, but which tasted new to us at the time. My friends and I were four full oranges of it, with a resilient shine on our leaves.
The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis rose up across the street from the school. It was a Romanesque dome covered with greeny scales like a sea monster, full of wonders and mosaics and marble folds of robes, and it had an atmosphere of solemnity so dense that even high school girls couldn’t cut through it. In the middle of its darkness, I felt like a scintilla; I didn’t need to speak. If you melted down all the gold in that place, it would be the size of one of God’s fillings, enormous. It loomed in the background of everything we did, so that all our small dramas seemed to happen in relation to it. In spring and fall, we read our lines long into the night. The darkness that fell between my school and the cathedral had an enclosing quality, like the part of the blanket that’s tucked right underneath your chin.
Rehearsals were held in the school gym, which had a large, incompetent mural of a purple “Kougar” mascot on one wall, and a black empty stage opening up the other. Our dances were also held there, and I suspect that under the hungry gaze of the Kougar, the boys at our dances got fewer boners than usual. No matter how much we attempted to infuse the atmosphere of this gym with the fire-breathing intelligence of The Theater, it remained full of the ghosts of volleyball games, which gave the Holocaust play we were rehearsing a sportiness it shouldn’t have had. Whenever I raised my arm in a fine gesture, it looked like I
was about to serve. I have no idea why an all-girls Catholic school was putting on a Holocaust play in the first place. It was about an orchestra in a concentration camp, and I was required to pretend to play a trumpet and later to feed pieces of raw potato to my lesbian lover in a cattle car. It was called Playing for Time, a pun that seems gruesome in light of the fact that nearly all the musicians died at the end.
These were my friends: there was Mary, tall and brassy, who once stared at her desk ferociously as the teacher read aloud a sentence she had written about Emerson’s transparent eyeball; and there was Jamie, a showoff and a dancer, who had a streak of daffodil hair among coarse dark curls, she was born with it; and there was Elizabeth, with her witty bugged-out eyes and her deep-sea-crustacean privacy. She was the one the priest liked best. She knew absolutely everything about television, which at the time made her seem worldly and wise, rather than simply a person who watched a lot of television. We stayed after school and pretended to play our instruments, and the priest stayed too, for the entertainment. Picture that pageant of smooth-faced teenagers, practicing the rictus of real suffering while pretending to tootle on little flutes.
During school hours, the priest functioned as our sex-ed teacher, even though we knew everything about sex already. He used to waggle his head back and forth and say, “No beejays, girls! No handjobs!” There were three main things, in the nineties, that sophisticated people knew you could do besides have biblical intercourse. The third thing could not be spoken out loud, not in this room of the convent made almost completely of windows. The desks were arranged in a circle, which signaled it was an unconventional class where you could speak freely and ask the questions that really mattered, like could you get pregnant in a hot tub. Occasionally one of the mad downtown masturbators would appear at the windows to flash us, which was an education in itself, but by the time we called the police, they had always disappeared.