Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 16

Losers Weepers

A thin dribble of what looked like tobacco juice was all the coffee urn was dispensing.

Matt tossed his stained Styrofoam cup and turned as a departing group member paused to say hello and goodbye.

Damien talked earnestly, and tediously, about a list of recommended books. Matt was tired of reading about being all that he could he, whether it was Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain or Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex. Or maybe The Joy of Sex was a Seven Story Mountain.

"You're out of coffee and they're finally out of steam," Nick noted, coming up after Damien, clutching his pipe, had faded away. Nick zipped shut his windbreaker and pulled on a tweed cap.

"Cheer up, Matt. The worst is over. And the first time is always the worst."

"That sounds like . . . sex. I gave them a red-carpet invitation, didn't I? Why is knowing that everybody else has made the same mistakes as you have supposed to make you feel better?"

"Misery loves company."

"Then you're saying that misery is as good as it gets?"

"No, no. I'm saying that we all have to go through an awkward adolescence when we leave the priesthood, and some of us were much older than you. Call it vocational acne."

"I never had acne," Matt said gloomily.

"Of course not. You never had anything that would have been a detriment to an active teenage social life, except an allergy to the opposite sex. You ever think that life is exceedingly perverse?"

"I never had an allergy to the opposite sex; I wanted to avoid being human in general.

Apparently I did a dam good job of it."

Nick shrugged and waited while Matt pulled on his sheepskin jacket and tried to figure out how old the older man was. lron-gray hair and metal-framed bifocal glasses enhanced a face that must have been all nose and chin before age had softened the features. Matt detected the faint moonscape pitting of acne scars.

It wasn't fair; he himself had a enjoyed a golden adolescence, but he hadn't used it for anything but running away from life. At least the other men here had run to something. Hadn't they?

"Cold out." Nick clapped his palms together as they emerged into the dark parking lot.

Matt couldn't help checking for the ghost of Kitty O'Connor. The muscles in his stomach had tensed.

"People don't realize the desert gets cold at night," Matt agreed.

"No, to most people Las Vegas is just one big, hot, bright, noisy oasis. Boy, a deserted parking lot is kind of spooky! Only my car left and that motorcycle. That's not . . . yours?"

Matt, having spent a couple hours splitting the finer hairs of truth with a hatchet, didn't know how to answer him. "It is mine, and it isn't. My landlady loaned it to me, but it was given to her."

"Been around."

"Used to be His."

" 'His'?" Nick didn't know how to interpret the capital H in Matt's tone. In their circle, capital He's and His's meant the Deity. "Ah." Nick suddenly understood. "So you get the motorcycle, on loan, and he gets the girl, for keeps."

The words struck Matt so sharply that Kitty the Cutter might as well have been there.

"Thanks, Nick. Nice way to put it."

"Sorry. It's just that I get a much better picture of your rival when I see that machine."

"He's not a rival if he's won. But--"

"What?"

"Maybe it's part of my malady. Despite everything, I have this wild, fervent conviction that if Temple and I are meant to be together, we will he. Call it an act of faith."

"That's just it. Infatuation is the ultimate act of Faith. A manic state. Delusional. Frustrated infatuation is a manic-depressive state. One minute you're positive everything will go your way; the next you're pounding your head on the sidewalk, hoping the worms will crawl up and eat you."

"This is normal? This is what men and women are supposed to go through?"

"And boys and girls, which you and I have tried mightily to head off in our priestly pasts."

"Yeah, but . . . I had no idea they felt like this. It's not a sane state. I can't believe all the advice I was handing out to 'master their feelings' and 'do the right thing.' "

"You think it was bad advice?"

"No. Just pretty impossible to follow when your heart and mind and body and soul are all acting like they have St. Vitus's dance."

Nick leaned against the cast-iron railing that bracketed two crummy concrete steps down.

Matt settled against the opposite barrier, even though it felt like a chilly rack.

"Tell me about this girl," Nick said.

"Temple." Matt suddenly realized that he had so far sheltered her name from the circle inside.

Nick nodded. "interesting name. Spiritual almost."

"If you told Temple about 'temple of the Holy Ghost' she'd think you were seriously psychic."

"She has a sense of humor."

"How can you tell?"

"You smile when you talk about her."

"That's scary, isn't it? Seeing one person through another? I do feel she's become a part of me, maybe my better part."

Nick nodded again. "An honor."

"Then how can l live without it?"

He sighed. "You'll have to, Matt, if she's recommitted to her previous love. Look. There's isn't a soul, male or female, walking on this planet, who hasn't cared deeply for someone who's been unwilling or unable to reciprocate."

"You?"

Nick nodded seriously. "I may look like an old codger, but there was this brown-haired girl in grade school--"

"Grade school!" Matt scoffed.

"No, Matt, you don't get it. We get these glimpses. Sometimes we see through people like water in a mountain stream: where it's been, where it's going, how much we'd like to flow with it.

Moments of such clarity they cut like glass. And nothing happens. We both flow on, whether we're eight years old or forty-eight. Everybody has a path not taken. A person not known."

"Even priests?"

"Even priests. You're unusual in that you stilled your instincts at such an early age because of your abusive background."

"Then you . . . other guys knew what you were giving up."

"Not really. Mind if I smoke?" Nick pulled a pipe from his jacket pocket.

Matt quickly nodded. He needed to hear what Nick said more than he cared about secondhand smoke.

Nick sucked at the pipe as it took slow fire from a long farmer's match, and smiled when it finally offered enough smoke to expel.

"I was not Mr. Cool in high school," Nick began.

"Neither was I."

"But you passed, l didn't. I was precast as either a grind or a nerd, or a seminarian. And l was happy with that life, that commitment. Until I left."

"Why did you?"

"I'd . . . had theological difficulties. I couldn't stand the faces I'd counseled to do the impossible. I get the impression celibacy was not a problem for you. Not for me either. We were reared in an environment that rewarded the considered act. Desire seemed . . . unreliable, quirky, an adolescent imperative. How strong we felt to conquer it."

Matt thought. Yes. He had "overcome" life. His abusive childhood, any instinct to mate. He was a higher being, next to an angel.

"You can look at me, Matt, and not believe it, but I have enjoyed one of the greatest love stories of all time. Midlife, middle-aged, midcareer." Nick smiled.

"I do believe. The world doesn't have to be telegenic. Haven't I always known that, even while people have envied me my . . .charisma?"

"My wife. She's thirty pounds overweight, and thinks she's fifty pounds beyond the pale. She won't believe that I think she makes . . . oh, Raquel Welch look like a cheap substitute. You ever see this great old forties film, The Enchanted Cottage? Two terminally plain people connect, and everybody wonders what they see in each other, except when they go into this cottage, We see them as they see each other. And they're Robert Young and Dorothy Maguire. Love is like that.

Love puts this aura on the beloved. Maybe it's a halo. Think what a halo means, an other-worldly spiritual charisma. Attraction is religion, Matt. It's not cheap, it's not tawdry, it's agape."

"A fancy Greek word for spiritual love. If we're in the market for fancy Greek words, why not eros?"

"It is eros. Love is eros. That's what you don't know until you try it."

"Or. . . you don't try it."

"Your acquaintance with the world, the flesh, and the devil getting too close for you?" Matt looked down at the concrete steps. "When l first began to think about Temple in that way, I rushed to a priest l knew to confess my 'bad thoughts.' it was really meant to validate his priesthood and my fallibility; I'd been in a position to know his weaknesses and the advantage made me ashamed."

"So you found some shame of your own to show him."

Matt nodded. "Tenet of the church: Always make others feel good about themselves before yourself."

"So?"

"So . . . I've progressed--regressed?---to a lot more specifically 'bad thoughts' than the vague piddly ones I confessed. And I haven't told a soul, in church or out." Nick laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Out here, we call that a 'rich fantasy life,'

and we don't worry about it."

"What about a rich spiritual life? We used to talk about that in seminary. The odd thing is that what I'm experiencing with Temple is clarifying some parts of my religion I used to take for granted"

"Like what?"

"Like in the New Testament, when Christ walks by the Sea of Galilee and gathers his disciples by asking them to drop their nets and come follow him. I always read about this testimony to his charisma, his sacred mission, and thought, yeah, yeah. Now that I've suddenly been plummeted into this dazzle for Temple, l finally believe it. I believe that in an instant a stranger, or even someone you know fairly well, can suddenly draw, pull, attract, hypnotize otherwise rational beings into mindless orbit.

"And all those times in prayer I sought to find God, reach something so immaterial yet all-encompassing, experience divine love, and utter faith. . . Now I find myself possessed of all the irrationality of faith, but not for God--for another human being, for the rightness of my own belief in that other human being. Beyond the desire, which is so mind-blowing, there's this bottomless cup of unconditional love for her, the world, myself. I can't deny the physical imperative, but it isn't just that. It's . . . a mystery."

Nick was silent for a while. "If the physical pull becomes too frustrating, well, even the church recognizes that in some circumstances it's better to . . . there is self-gratification."

"We spent years in seminary learning to resist it. But even the term betrays itself. How l feel, l know l could relieve it but my satisfaction isn't the point. It's finding satisfaction with another, for another, giving satisfaction."

"So after years of saving yourself for God, so to speak, you're saving yourself for a woman who is committed to another man."

"A new secular vocation, huh?"

"You're sure you're not simply afraid of the intimacy and have become infatuated with an impossible situation to avoid facing it?"

"I'm not sure of anything but my love for Temple. Maybe I'm an obsessive personality.

Certainly following a vocation in a church that forbids its priests sexuality caters to obsession; hunting down my stepfather was obsessive to a point. Now that I've lost the intensity of that quest, maybe I've just translated the monomania to Temple. It's true that I knew her and we even played at dating and I didn't feel what I'm feeling now. Maybe l imagined that she has any feelings for me at all."

"My poor boy. Your Temple of the Holy Ghost cares for you.

She may not be able to love you as you would love her, but at least she is not insensible, insensitive, indifferent. That is a gift.

Take it and go elsewhere."

"How?"

Nick inhaled deeply from his pipe of wisdom. "Date other women. How many have you really known? Get some CDs. Leonard Cohen, a poet-turned-songwriter who offers a master class in the bittersweet push-pull of love and desire, of loss and fulfillment. He's Jewish, but his work has an occasional Christian bite.

Do you have a VCR? Get Gigi, a film musical from the fifties based on a tale by Colette. A girl from the courtesan class, a literal family of mistresses, meets a man of the world. Her love for him makes him innocent again. Wonderful moment. It's a Cinderella Story, how a girl reared for sex feels love, and transforms a man reared for sexual distance into someone who can enjoy intimacy.

Buy some romance novels, the ones with the covers you wouldn't be ashamed to check out of the library; they make those nowadays and an awful lot of women read them. Find out what women want--or fantasize that they want--when it comes to men, love, and sex. See other women. Live a life. You've a lot of time to make up for. Do it."

"But how do l do it honestly, without sin?"

"What is sin? "

"I know the letter of the law--"

"Put the letter of the law into a sentence you can live by."

"Sinlessness. To love God and not hurt anyone else."

"Including yourself?"

"Including yourself. I suppose."

"Don't suppose. Live! You'll make mistakes. You will 'sin' by some people's lights. But if you love God and yourself and your fellow/sister man/woman, you will not do wrong."

"I see you've mastered the politically correct slash."

"The slash is our salvation. We are not all black or white. We are gray. We are human. We are two genders and one soul. We have choices."

Matt shook his head. Too much. He was to go forth, and multiply his involvement with the mysterious species woman. He was to remain true to his school, his vocation, his first love.

Maybe he'd got it right at the beginning. A true love: a vocation. A lifestyle: celibacy. A libido: confused. A heart: broken.

Coming here had only compounded his confusion.

And yet, when he thought about it, there was only one bottom line, and always had been since he came to Las Vegas looking to lay his past to rest.

Temple.