A Laicized Priest

Bryan Price          

B looks out his window. Wet weather. He likes to write while sitting on the left side of the couch, his typewriter on the coffee table, his shoulders and back hunched forward, the Madonna above him, to his right. He writes slowly, haltingly, then not at all. Thinking, paraphrasing. He looks out the window some more. Sky, a modern paint color on a modern car, asphalt. A body moves across the landscape as if it doesn’t want to be noticed or construed. It bobs like an object thrown into water only to be taken away by the currents. This is mostly what he does. He excels at it. Not writing but looking or thinking rather. He thinks of an old girlfriend who once bought him a bed because he slept on a bare mattress (no box spring or frame) that happened to be on the floor of the room he moved into. He was austere, always the type to abridge himself of superfluities. Or so he liked to think. She worried about bed bugs. The mattress store was next to the typewriter store. There are no more typewriter stores. Her name was Natasha. He can just make out her face now. For some reason in this particular imagining, she is wearing red lipstick. Not red but maroon or burgundy or oxblood. How does one look without being seen? Things come and go. Natasha lived an eccentric lifestyle. He didn’t know how else to put it. She was always hiding things. It was as if she kept a book of what she didn’t want him to know and the book was black and he was not allowed to look inside of it. When he dreamed of her she was older but looked the same as if he couldn’t imagine her ever changing and by extension, himself. He could tell her things in dreams that he never could in real life. Not mean or cruel things but things meant to square their account.  
          In the house across the street a former priest lives with his family. He has no more sacred orders. B read that the technical term is laicized priest. But he just prefers to call him the priest. They have two children, the priest and his wife. The two children are close in age and often play together. They have identical haircuts though they are not of the same sex. Was it love, B wanted to ask, that drove you from the priesthood. Or perhaps the need to procreate. (Need? biological mandate? Instinct?) There is a difference between the pleasures of sex and its product. Love, sex, childrearing. Something must have called to the priest, something to make him need to break his vows. Did he do it within the contours of the rules? Was he honorably discharged, so to speak. What are such rules? What is the process of detaching oneself from the priesthood? What is this specific priest’s relationship like with his god now? 
          The priest looks vaguely European or perhaps Mediterranean—dark hair and eyebrows, compact, thick muscular arms, square or rectangular face. Like Lino Ventura, which is to say like a man who looks as if he could take a beating. Ventura was born in Parma, Italy but died in France. He played a member of the resistance in the Melville film, Army of Shadows. B liked that film. That history appealed to him. Life had meaning then, true moral purpose. Even that film, made in 1969, was already trafficking in the same Manichaean nostalgia that B sometimes finds himself wallowing in now, which the presence of the priest only exacerbates. Some men with gruff exteriors (and the priest is one of them) have a warmth and openness to their faces. The priest’s face seems to have the answers to questions. Deep, complex questions about death and the universe. And, of course, the nature of good and evil. Subtler questions as well. Questions like what if a child is conceived without love? What if a child is conceived in indifference, even annoyance? Some people speak in terms of nature as if children are like trees or animals. Maybe the priest abandoned his flock to live in a cream-colored house with a terra-cotta roof and oleander bushes and ornamental olive trees. As a novice, maybe the priest fell in love with weeding and pruning, with managing a garden or landscape. Maybe he helped keep the grounds of some monastery in Andalusia or the Pyrenees. It all depends on one’s tolerance for disorder. In the end, the hands want what the hands want.
          The children like to play in the wet weather. They like to jump and splash. The priest watches over them from the porch. The sky is white now. Some might say gray but B knows this particular shade to be white. Not bright or brilliant white but dull like cotton in its natural state. B can draw from memory the palm tree outside his window, the power line that crosses at a slightly downward angle. On the same porch from which the priest watches his children he will come out late at night to smoke. He will turn out the porch light and sit there smoking like a man contemplating suicide or the future. Sometimes he’ll stand and under a heavy moon B can see a look of horror on his face. He does not behave like a man who knows or thinks he’s being watched. B watches the priest when he himself is up late, unable to sleep, unable to dream. In some such cases he writes letters, long letters. Letters with no destination. Each though are addressed, to you. It is never clear to him who you is. You could be a ghost or the memory of a ghost. No, B tells himself, you is not metaphysical but physical not metaphorical but actual. And yet, a placeholder. You, of course, can be a future or past self, a part of himself estranged or alienated by time and circumstance. The priest must have held secrets. His own secrets and, of course, the secrets of others. B wonders if being a priest is like being a homicide detective or crime-scene photographer. There is a substratum of the universe that laypeople are not meant to come into contact with. That nexus of pain and guilt known collectively as evil. Perhaps in the first flame of his cigarette lighter the priest sees the faces of the dead. But probably not, thinks B; most likely he sees the man with the tan bicycle. This man with the tan bicycle comes irregularly but always during weekdays when the priest is not at home and lets himself into the house. Maybe he is the babysitter or a family friend. The priest’s wife is named Désirée and on some days, B can just make out her figure in the doorway as the man with the tan bicycle departs. He doesn’t look (as the priest does) like a Roman Emperor. He looks undeterred by god. He is tall and slim with sad eyes, but he moves with purpose. Not in a quick or sneaky way but as a man who knows his way around a certain place or situation. It is hard not to imagine the priest belonging to a different age, a former or ancient age where certain boundaries had more salience. It occurs to B that despite the seeming competence of the priest, he may not have fully understood what he was getting himself into. Not in terms of women per se, but love.

•

One day (many years before) Natasha called B on the telephone. He still had a landline then. When he looked out the window that night it was still light out and a bit breezy. His windchimes sounded oddly intentional. She was living far away, in Rochester. There was silence, long pauses. She didn’t know what to say or was working up to something. She must have heard music and asked B what he was listening to. It was the local FM jazz station, he told her. It was, and he remembered this, something from that Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane record (most likely “They Say It’s Wonderful”). When she called the priest and his family had yet to move in. An older couple lived there and the house was in disrepair. The wife died and it went deeper into disrepair. It began to fester like a wound and it made him ache to watch the house droop and waste away, a material representation of the couples’ bodies or history together—their decaying union.
          Natasha told him she was a photographer now. A lot of family and wedding photos. B thought it seemed beneath her, but he didn’t say so. After some more small talk he got around to asking why she was in Rochester and she said she had married someone who took a teaching position at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a structural engineer. She told him she was pregnant with their first child. Finally though, it came out why she was calling—she was writing a memoir and wanted to run some of her memories by him. At that point, everything in his body tensed up and he found it hard to swallow. There were two specific points or events that she wanted to go over with him. Did he remember, she asked, the night he threw the bottle of wine against their bedroom wall. He was silent. Do you remember hitting me, she asked. B tried to focus on something else. It was getting dark outside. I never hit you, he said after a long pause, I’m not a violent person. Gentle people resort to violence all the time, she replied, it’s OK. A man walking his dog looked at B through the window and then looked away. I am not a person who hits people, he told her, why would I hit you? Because I pricked at something I knew would hurt you, she replied, some sensitive spot that I knew if I could get to, it would never heal. I wanted to show you your true self. Another silence developed. It was becoming a familiar feature of this specific conversation, which would never leave his memory, it would remain something he would always have access to. I wanted you to go, she said, I wanted you to remove yourself. I am trying to take responsibility for hurting you, she continued, but you need to be truthful to yourself. He refused to engage her further on that particular matter. After another pause he said, I know the other thing. Do you think about it, she asked. Sometimes, he told her. Rarely though lately. She said, love is strange and then hung up. As far as B could tell this memoir never appeared. He searched it out, obsessively at first, and then realized it (the phone call) must have been some kind of attack on her part. It was not in his nature to strike someone, but she planted a seed of doubt inside him. Not just doubt, but self-loathing. She had opened the door to his monstrousness or potential monstrousness, which was something he rarely contemplated. 
          After the phone call B wanted to take a walk, but he was loath to go out at night. In the morning he made his familiar circuit which included a long stretch over a land bridge that crossed a canyon. B had noticed that for some weeks a person had begun to make their home just off the sidewalk in the middle of that land bridge that crossed the canyon. There were blankets and clothes and food packaging and bits of food scattered everywhere. It was incongruous and definitely ugly, but it didn’t bother him as it bothered others because he knew that existence was difficult and to live in such a way had to be trying. The uncanny or strange part was that this person completely immersed themselves in a white blanket, which wriggled and moved but never betrayed the figure sleeping within its folds. No face or limbs or feet sticking out, no evidence of humanity besides its movements. It was as if someone was hiding in the worst of all possible wombs. The morning after the phone call, this person was gone. Some blankets and scraps of clothing remained but the white blanket was gone and B got the strangest sensation that whoever that person was had just melted into the landscape or otherwise disappeared into an alternative universe through some portal in the earth. It was obvious to him that they had been removed or were in the process of being removed but he could only think about how someone, after one miserable experience after another could, through sheer concentration, manifest their disappearance and escape the clutches of a world consumed with evil and bent on their destruction. 
          Further up the road on the other side of the canyon a man sold antiques out of his garage. B never or rarely looked over the man’s wares, but this time he felt like buying something. There is a long pathological history of people buying things to make themselves feel better. For some strange reason B settled on the portrait of The Madonna. She was austere looking. There was no child Jesus to be seen which made it better in his eyes, for he wanted the Madonna all to himself. It was a reproduction of something quite old. He wasn’t an expert but the original was probably from the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. There was something gothic about it, but it wasn’t campy. It was too serious. In fact, it was deadly serious. It was something that might make someone feel that the person who displayed it was a traditionalist, perhaps even a conservative who believed the world to be fallen or made up of fallen people. He hung it over his couch and it was the only thing in his house that could credibly be called art. It reminded him, of course, of Natasha. It had the quality of compressing their whole time together into that one telephone conversation. Not the events she wanted to discuss, but the specific experience of disclosure and confession centering on whether or not he had hit her. The question of violence seemed to always hang over that portrait of the Madonna.

•

While watching the priest watch his children play in the light drizzle B is reminded of his grandfather. That relationship was fraught, a strange kernel of violence at the center. B recalls his grandfather in a hospital bed on a snowy day. The priest and B’s grandfather have something in common. Something aesthetic or cultural. Something elemental. The priest must be in his forties and therefore born in the sixties or seventies. His grandfather was born in the twenties. But something links or tethers them. Now, when he looks at the priest he is transported. Transported, of course, to that hospital room, but also some other place in the past. In history. It must have something to do with Catholicism and its preference or wish for everything to remain timeless. He sat with his grandfather in the hospital after a long bout of estrangement. It goes without saying that men lose something in old age. Their capacity to terrorize diminishes. He remembered watching some old Super 8 footage of his mother and her siblings and their parents (his grandparents). B’s grandfather was vigorous and young. There was something about him that reminded B of lightning. He had been mesmerized by that footage. There was also something he could only call partial or perhaps fragmentary about it. It told one story, crowding out all the others, and was therefore untrue, even unreal. 
          There was once a gathering of men, his grandfather among them. They spoke of something that haunted B. He was very young, maybe eight or nine. There was something amorphous or veiled in their language. Something strangely secretive. It was an adult’s language, a male or masculine language. One that emphasized possession, taking, snatching, grabbing, holding in repose, holding against one’s will. It was a language of strength and action and quick decisive movements toward the consummation of some asymmetrical evil. In B’s memory he was appalled or perhaps terrified, but he didn’t know why. He was afraid of these men who did nothing to him, even cared for him, but for some reason he identified with the imagined victims of their desires, or their need to possess by brutal force. He remembered quite distinctly them talking of a waitress. A particular person who he never knew and never would know beyond her being reduced to her vocation but he always identified with her predicament of having encountered these men who talked of degrading her in some way he could not, at such a young age, fully fathom. B’s grandfather laid in the hospital bed like a felled animal. The light was soft and gray, illuminated here and there by the orange and green twinkling of the machines. Logically it was easy to reconcile, but in that physical space or moment, and even in its memory, it seemed impossible. 
          Watching or seeing the priest, B feels as if the priest would too lay in the same quiet stillness as his grandfather. He would be taken to the precipice and asked to account for himself. The priest would have to think whether or not his decision-making had been sound. It would be up to him to decide if his age, the moment in history when god inserted him into the world, was the right or wrong one. It would be the priest lying quiet and nearly mindless trying to make sense of what it meant to be human and then to occupy the bleeding edge between human and god and then to return and subject himself to the place where light and dark cancel each other out. 
          B gets up and watches through the window. As the priest continues to watch his children the rain grows heavier. So heavy it falls in sheets and the look on the priest’s face is one of consternation or even incredulity. As if he has just been asked a question he cannot answer or has been alerted to the fact, that despite what he has been told, the world does not end.