by Thomas Lynch
There were fathers with cell phones, their teenagers on holidays with their noncustodial parents—subversive daughters being courted by their new stepmothers, young boys bristling at the new men in their mother’s lives. There were young couples traveling en famille, with toddlers and infants and bored preteens.
He could see in the faces of the young husbands the fear he had felt in himself at that age, that he’d be overwhelmed at any minute by the duties and expenses and decisions.
He could see in the faces of their wives the worry and regret and second-guessing. How, they seemed to be asking themselves, had they gotten themselves into this predicament? They had been young and footloose and passionate and now they were homebound and bored and fatigued by motherhood and family life. They had been creative and well-read and interesting. Now they were dull, bored, vexed by the daylong needs of their off spring.
Adrian tried to reckon the ones who would make it and the ones who wouldn’t. He tried to guess, by something in the way they walked or interacted, which of the children for whom this would be the last real family vacation. In the future there would be other configurations of adults and siblings in their lives. Partners, companions, significant others, spousal equivalents, stepparents, stepsisters, half brothers. But for many this would be the last vacation where mother and father shared the same time of their lives.
He was aware of a kind of psychic wince that always registered wrongly as a smile on his face whenever he looked at children and thought of his own children’s pain, courageously borne in the years after their mother left. Of course, there was nothing he could do. Still he suffered a kind of survivor’s guilt that what had been the best change in his life and the lightning rod of his success had hobbled his son and daughter somehow, in ways he sensed but could not measure. He had been a good parent and a good provider but he had not loved their mother. And now, in their young adulthood, he could see in the lives of his son and daughter that essential mistrust of their own hearts, a wariness about the love of others that made it difficult for them to form intimate attachments. He looked for early signals of such things in the manner and conduct of the children passing by.
He could see as well the older men eyeing the younger women and felt a quiet kinship with them. Adrian had counted it among the blessings of age that the abundance of women he found attractive was ever broadening even as his sexual prowess began to falter. The older he got the more and younger women there were to look at. Their beauty, at every age, took more of his breath away than it had when he was a much younger man.
He’d quit begrudging Clare her infidelities. The sense of sexual betrayal had been replaced by an understanding of it as a failure of honesty. Not that she’d had sex with Ben or David or whomever else, but that she’d not been forthright with Adrian. He could forgive her giving into an urgency of desire, but did not forgive her hiding it from him. Nor could he much blame Ben for taking advantage of the situation. They were the necessary precipitators or necessary events—an evolution, a natural elaboration of an order whereby the universe of love and attachment purges itself of anomalies. A man of fifty-something—as Adrian was now, as Ben had been then—could not easily resist the proffered affections of a woman twenty years his junior. Nor could a woman unhappy in her home life, tired of small towns and small children, bored by her husband’s regular and routine affections, worried over the pressing and passage of time, be expected to travel in the off-season with a handsome artist to a distant island, to sail and walk deserted beaches and talk over dinner, idling away the remains of the day, and not offer her body to him. Especially when he had made a fuss over her as a girl. It was only natural for a woman at loose ends and a man in his fifties to fall into a fitful consortium should the occasion arise.
Adrian Littlefield had himself made a habit of confirming this in the years since, every chance he got, which was mostly at conventions such as the one he was currently hired to hold forth to. Attended as they always were by more than a few of the recently divorced, or recently traded in for a younger, fresher model, or recently disappointed in love or perennially discontented with life, these professional conferences provided cover for those occasions when the sexually rejected might reconfirm their sexiness. Chief among the obligations—Adrian knew this from his own experience—of every newly divorced man and woman was to demonstrate that it was not a sexual dysfunction that occasioned the breakup. As the keynoter and visiting expert at these confabs and conventions, Adrian was often the focus of much of the free-floating, unattached, ready, willing, and able sexual energy of the registrants, a number of whom, it never failed, would make known in the usual ways to Adrian, their availability for more intimate conversations on related themes. He was possessed, after all, of a certain celebrity in these circles. He was famously single, well-spoken, well-dressed, well-paid, and the center of an hour or two hours’ attention during which he would motivate, inspire, entertain, inform, and uplift his listeners. To be gracious, charming, self-effacing was easier after a standing ovation, handsome payment, and a line of supplicants waiting for a signature on a book that bore his face and name on the cover. He had no less an appetite for a stranger’s affections than any man or woman did. And while he sometimes missed the predictable lovemaking of the married life, he found it hard to count as anything but good fortune that the years since the dissolution of his marriage had been characterized by sexual encounters more abundant if more distant, more passionate if less precise, hungrier if less often sated, more memorable if often nameless. If each partner in these arrangements felt a little “used,” it was, to him and to no few of the women he had had sex with, still pleasant enough. That bodies could pleasure and could be pleasured, free of social, emotional, or intellectual encumbrances, seemed to Adrian a good and wholesome thing. And he made it his mission to attend to his partner in ways that would overwhelm whatever residual regret she might otherwise attach to the “one-night stand.” With several of these women he had maintained an ongoing correspondence, some of which had ended sooner, some later, and some of which remained pleasant and unpredictable addendums to his professional life. Sometimes he would invite one of them to join him on an extended speaking tour. They would spend a week, or maybe two weeks, together. They’d begin to behave like real companions. He’d remember how she drank her coffee and order room service accordingly. She’d pack and unpack his things between hotels. Each would pretend an intimacy they both knew did not, and likely would never, really exist. They would tell each other secrets over dinner. It warmed something in Adrian he could never quite identify. Getting to know someone after having sex with them was a reversal of the usual arrangement by which the business of intimacy was in the main conducted, but for a variety of reasons, it appealed to him. The flesh, Adrian sometimes pointed out in his workshops, is far less particular than the heart or the mind when it came to finding “suitable” partners. Sex between people who might not otherwise find anything to admire about one another could be quite, well, satisfactory, especially on a time-fixed basis. Whereas, he would likewise observe, there were people who could be attracted in every possible way, intimate in all ways in the conduct of their lives together, but sexually uninspired. These were but a few among the many mysteries his programs dealt with. And Adrian had seen in the faces of the registrants at Foxwoods, in the small talk of the NAFLA conferees, in the body language of their pairings and couplings and comminglings at the welcome reception the night before, chitchatting with wines and finger foods, the men in their best business-casual attire, the women wanting to look professional but sexy—he had seen it all—the whole register of human want and willingness and desire.
Adrian could see it now, watching from the long porch of the National Hotel, the parade of suffering humankind, bearing their various histories and fears of missed chances and discontents along the esplanade, the mercilessly sunlit day unfolding around them; it was inevitable. “The story of love,” as he often told his audience, “to quote Professor Bowlby
, is told in three volumes: Attachment, Separation, and Loss.” Or if the time allowed only a thumbnail version, “Love,” he would say, quoting Roy Orbison, “hurts.”
“No pair of words ever added up to more truth than that!” Adrian would often close his keynotes with the observation.
“Boudleaux Bryant wrote it. Roy Orbison sang it. Everyone in the room here knows it—Love hurts! We ante up, we go all in, we play the cards we’re dealt as best we can, and still it comes down to a simple two-word arithmetic, this fact of life: Shit happens, Jesus wept, Life sucks, Love hurts. And yet we keep on playing for keeps because Love heals, love sings, love haunts, love holds, love gives, love takes, love warms, love knows, love waits, love weeps, love laughs, love lives, love lasts, God is love and love never ends.” This litany of love, for which Adrian had become well-known, always signaled the end of his speech. He would let the last words settle in the air, careful to keep his gaze fixed above their heads, off in the distance beyond the back of the room, then step back from the lectern, let his hands fall to his side and his head bow slightly, which never failed to bring on the first round of applause. “Thank you,” he would say, holding his hands to his heart as the applause grew louder. “Thank you, thank you…you are so very kind…” It would bring them to their feet. He would bow again.
ADRIAN LITTLEFIELD looked down the long porch of the National Hotel and tried to envision his ex-wife Clare in her thirties seated at one of these tables with her old artist Ben, wizened and hirsute, each of them pleased with what they had just accomplished by getting sufficiently free of life’s entanglements to arrive here on the island together, off-season, unencumbered. Like Ben’s wife, Adrian and the children had been jettisoned, thrown overboard to the fish or gulls, somewhere en route between the mainland and island. How knowingly they must have smiled at one another, how free of any moral vexation, how entitled they surely must have felt to their mutual lapses of faith. Or maybe not. Maybe there was some whiff of regret. How could he ever know? How, of course, could Findlay, Ohio, flat and landlocked, compete with an island in the ocean? How could an associate pastor compete with a true artist or a sickly, sexless, disabled wife back in Westchester—how could she compete with a young and eager and interested girl?
ADRIAN PICKED at the elements of his meal. He wasn’t as hungry as he’d thought. He asked for the bill, left a large gratuity, and asked the waitress for another cup of coffee and a local phone book.
IV
FATHER FRANCIS Assisi Concannon phoned the Reverend Adrian Littlefield and told him to be ready at five o’clock.
“I can’t make it, Francis. I’ve got kids to watch.”
“I’m bringing a sitter. We need a night out.”
“No really, Francis, I really can’t.”
“Never cross a priest, Adrian. It’s bad karma. See you at five.”
Word about the marital woes of the associate pastor at Findlay’s St. Mark’s Methodist Church had gotten round all over that part of Ohio. If bad news travels fast, Adrian observed, news involving the private lives of the reverend clergy moved like wildfire. And the tongue is a fire, he recalled from the Letter of James. The tongue is set among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, as is itself set on fire by hell.
A tongue among my members would be just the thing, he thought, then tried to turn his thoughts to godly themes.
“The people who know you know you,” his father had told him when Adrian had shared his worry over the gossip that was circulating about his wife leaving him. “And those who don’t, don’t care.” But Adrian knew that people were talking. Clare had spent a few weeks in an apartment on the north end of Findlay, then moved to Bowling Green, then eastward on to Cleveland.
She kept giving Damien new phone numbers which the boy would sit repeating to himself until he had them memorized. To watch his son, just gone eight years old, holding the slip of paper, quizzing himself and his little sister Sarah on their mother’s new numbers hurt Adrian and angered him.
From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Whenever he heard some strand of a rumor about his predicament, he renewed his vow to keep silent rather than add his own fiery tongue—a restless evil full of deadly poison—to the general conflagration.
Oh, to put my tongue to better use, he thought, at the altar of some good woman’s pleasure…then caught himself again and tried to budge his brain from the parts of women.
Whether it was coincidence, correlation, or cause and effect, soon after Clare Littlefield moved out of the manse, her cuckolded husband’s sermons began to draw more listeners to church. Adrian thought it was mostly the spectacle of a churchman writhing in such worldly pain that packed the pews. Not many of you should become teachers, James the brother of Jesus advised, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
Folks from as far off as Fostoria and Columbus Grove, Bowling Green and Bucyrus would show up for the eleven o’clock services on the every other Sundays Adrian preached. Even his Wednesday night Bible Study, formerly a lackluster assembly of elders and widows, suddenly had new faces, younger faces, and more females than ever before. His former custom of preparing typed sermons, two minutes a page, eight pages per service of carefully constructed remarks on some biblical principal, gave way to a much looser, catch-as-catch-can delivery. This owed to the necessities of his newly single life as the custodial parent of two young children. He hadn’t the time proper preparation takes, to study the readings from the Lectionary, and find some way to connect those dots.
In the years of his marriage he’d spend every other Saturday night in his office at St. Mark’s, preparing his sermon for the following morning. He liked to think of members of the congregation, driving up and down South Main at all hours, returning from boozy dinners, late movies, the shift change at Cooper Tires, God knows what assignations—how they would see the lights blazing from his basement office and know he was hard at the Lord’s work late at night.
“You were burning the midnight oil again,” someone would always say, shaking his hand after Sunday services. Adrian thought it was a good thing to be known for. The Reverend Hinkston had a fairly comprehensive library, which he had generously opened to Adrian. It had volumes of old sermons, church histories, homiletic guides, and toastmaster’s resources. A formula for his homilies had emerged, by which he sought to speak to his entire flock, young and old, devout and backsliding, male and female, country and townie, educated and simple. He would pick out a couple of homey anecdotes with an evident lesson, maybe a verse from Helen Steiner Rice for the blue hairs, some folksy jokes, and something from the current music, “a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll,” to keep the younger crowd alert. To these he would add something from the day’s Scripture readings and tie them all together seamlessly, like the papers he wrote in seminary—five paragraphs, compare and contrast, beginning, middle, and end—methodical. Thus, Jesus would be our “bridge over troubled waters” and Moses was an example of “knowing when to fold and knowing when to hold them.”
He’d type them up with double spacing and wide margins for notes he might add in longhand afterward, shifting those points he most wanted to stress into capital letters and underlining things he might want to repeat. The old Underwood his father gave him had given way to an Olympia Electronic and then to an IBM Selectric. He would go into the darkened sanctuary and test his delivery in the vaulted acoustics of the worship space. “My brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus Arisen,” he would always open. He would listen for the echo of his own voice off the stone walls and open the articulation of the words to allow for this amplification. “Amen and Amen,” he would almost always close, in a style borrowed from a TV preacher he’d seen as a boy who would heal people by the laying on of hands. And though his sermons were, in their printed versions, carefully wrought and often very readable, and though he k
ept copies for his pastoral archives, the homilies he labored over were as enthusiastically ignored and as politely disregarded by his congregants as the Reverend Hinkston’s famous “three points and a poem” snorers. Regardless of what it was he was saying, he could effect no manifest change in the congregants’ response. The smilers kept smiling, the nodders kept nodding, the sighers kept sighing, the dozers kept getting elbowed by their wives. “Uplifting message this morning,” Mrs. Melzer would always say, shaking his hand and pressing the handkerchief to her nostrils. “Covered all the bases today, Reverend,” Clark Waters, the head of the DPW would say without fail. “A blessing, a blessing, words from the heart,” the breathless Donna Montgomery would always own, holding her right hand over her bosom and offering her left hand for Adrian to take in the kind of straight-armed feint he always associated with characters from a Tennessee Williams play. He would assume his place at the back doors of the church while half of the congregants made for the parking lot and the other half made for the fellowship hall where coffee and donuts and cookies were served.
