Читать книгу A Place Apart - Maureen Lennon - Страница 10

He’d been taught that in the end, there was no one left but God. But what if God had also turned away? Then what did a person have? Worse, what did a priest have? Nothing, of course. Absolutely nothing. Nothing to embrace, nothing to fall back on. No wife, no children, no job, not even a hobby. The very thought ground Jerome Martin to an absolute halt one winter morning, right in the middle of celebrating mass. As he bowed in prayer over the shiny gold chalice during the consecration, he suddenly saw the face of an impostor looking back at him. He wasn’t changing bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ at all. He was droning sleepily over a stale wafer and sour cheap wine wondering where the draft was coming from because his feet were cold. He had no idea where God was. Or when the last time was that he had known.

He hadn’t slept again. The wretched dream. Over and over, night after night, wandering in an austere dark landscape, listening to haunting whispers. He’d recognized the voices right away: himself as a child, as an adolescent, and as a man, whispering the words to every prayer that he had ever uttered. But, as the dream clearly indicated, the prayers had never come to rest in the sacred ear they were intended for. Instead, they had lost their way and were wandering in the bleak, dark, dead end of the universe, like undelivered mail.

He twirled away from the altar in his stiff white and gold vestments and headed down the three steps towards the altar rail. He knew he could get help if he asked for it. There would be counselling, a new posting perhaps. Things would be tried to rekindle his devotion. And he would be pressured to make a tremendous effort to rediscover God for himself. He would be reminded that prayer was his most powerful tool, that he had only to use it faithfully. He began setting sacred hosts on the quivering extended white tongues of the faithful of St. Alphonsis.

But Jerome Martin was dead certain that he was beyond help. He’d already tried to wring one last bit of devotion out of himself, begging God, every day for months, for guidance. But whenever he closed his eyes in prayer, kneeling alone in the church after it had emptied out, rather than sensing God’s loving presence, all he could think about was how tired he was, how restful it was to close his eyes for a few moments. All he was certain of was that the stale words of his prayers dropped from his lips straight down onto the cold stone floor of the church.

Every night, the dream tormented him, pressing his nose right up against its whispering message. Every night he fled, flying through darkness, breaking through the surface, his eyes popping open to recognize, right there above his bed, splashed with street light, the familiar sloped ceiling of his dingy little room in the rectory of St. Alphonsis parish.

This was precisely how he awoke in the early hours of the first Monday in July, in the summer that he turned forty-six, rising once again into the familiar lonely solitude of the empty hours before dawn. He lay on his back, his long heavy limbs sunken into his sweat-dampened narrow mattress, his eyes tracking across the ceiling. Zigzagging right and zigzagging left, his eyes traced and retraced a jagged crack that resembled a staircase. Then they circled around and around and around over a patch of peeling paint that looked like the head of a bald man with a large round nose. Until recently, these small familiar things had usually helped to anchor him while the bad dream dissipated. But lately, the dream had begun to pursue him beyond the unconscious. He no longer felt safe now that he was awake. He lay in his bed with a racing heart. The voices that he used to leave behind when he awoke now whispered at him from inside the walls of his room.

And so, in the forty-seventh summer of his life, and the twentieth year of his ordination into the priesthood, Jerome Martin lay awake once again in his airless second-floor bedroom, staring at his ceiling, knowing that he had reached an impasse. God had never heard of Jerome Martin.

Through the window just beside his head, he could hear the sharp splash of rain on cement. It was the first respite from the summer heat in days. The heat and humidity had started early this year. Usually it was mid-August before the air grew so gauzy. Trying to sleep in a second-floor bedroom with only one window that faced east was nearly impossible without a fan. He had one, but it was still stored away on the floor in the back of his closet. Fetching it at this hour would only wake the others. After breakfast he could come back upstairs and see to it, since the heat looked like it was here to stay. The fan would be dusty and need a good wiping down and he had just the right worn old hanky ready to be retired from his drawer and reassigned.

The wispy window curtains suddenly lifted off the sill to let a thread of breeze pass beneath them. The delicate ribbon of cool air slid pleasantly down the outside of Jerome’s naked left leg. A dozen more of these and he might be enticed to fall back to sleep. But the curtains sagged back down onto the sill and settled. Out of habit, his hand wandered to the bedside table where he kept an old black sock futilely draped over his clock so that the faint glow from the illuminated face wouldn’t keep him awake. He lifted the sock and confirmed what he already knew. It was 3:05 a.m. Inhaling deeply, he let the sock drop. His arm followed, crash-landing across his brow, forcing his eyes shut. Three long, hot hours stretched out before him. At six, he could get up and prepare for mass.

Thunder rumbled outside. He supposed he could sit up and read. It wouldn’t put him back to sleep again, but it would ease his conscience slightly. Reading could always be considered a positive activity, even when undertaken to avoid something else. When the thunder rumbled again, he half-heartedly propped himself up on his elbows and turned toward the window. Blue reflections of lightning flickered across the walls of his room, lighting up the closed dark door to the hall. If it weren’t for his insistence on keeping the door closed for privacy, there might have been a slight chance of generating a cross-breeze.

On the other side of the door, the hall led to the rooms of Ralph Lauzon and Gerry LeBlanc, two men who slept soundly. Jerome could picture them both: Gerry thrown face down on his bed in a heap, breathing deeply, a child of a man who would scramble into action immediately upon waking; Ralph on his back, spread-eagled over the wide mattress of his pastor’s double bed, his face undistorted, his businessman’s mind still at work down in the wells of sleep.

Still propped up on his elbows, Jerome looked down the length of his long body and kicked the thin cotton sheet loose from his right foot. His poor wilted penis jiggled slightly like an infant limb. Limb of God, he thought, sadly, have mercy on me.

He envied the others their sleep. Like their lives, it came so easily to them. They could exhaust themselves each day with their work; they spent themselves on meetings, telephone calls, appointments, lunches, prayers, mass, errands. For him, though, there was something wrong; there was something desperately wrong with his ability to sleep. For months now, he had been continually paralyzed by exhaustion, day and night, so that even sleep had become a bizarre workload for which he did not have enough energy. He only fell into short periods of unconsciousness after hours of unsettled tossing upon his old lumpy mattress. Once asleep, he travelled all night, always ending up in that mysterious black infinity. And then he woke, exhausted, lonely, and worried about what was happening to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, undisturbed, through an eight-hour night.

He lay back down and listened to the water trickling from the roof into the eaves that passed just below the window. His large hands rested one above the other in the black hair on his abdomen. The rain was stopping. Evidently the disturbance was only a small cloudburst.

He closed his eyes and saw Ralph’s face pass before him, smooth and unmarred, with its cleanly shaved, darkly shadowed jaw. Then Ralph’s car, glittering black with that fine red line of trim running along the doors and fenders. Ralph was like his car: clean and glossy, good-looking. Uncomfortable, he moved again, seeking a better position. In his memory, he could hear Ralph’s deep masculine voice crooning snippets of tunes from old movies. It was one of several things about Ralph that he admired. He liked the way the man swung his long legs in and out of his car, the way he sported up any staircase two steps at a time, the way he rattled the ice cubes in his highball glass when they ate at the Bishop’s and boomed out “Where the Sam-Hill’ve you been?” to someone he hadn’t seen in a while. Jerome wished he could do those things and tired himself out with the longing to do so. But eventually his envy always reduced him to shame. What kind of a wasted prayer was it to beg, “Dear Father in heaven, make me like another man, make me different than I am?” Where was the vocation in that? Where was the love of God, the gratefulness for the life that had been given to him? In the dark, oppressive heat, Jerome shifted yet again and answered his own question.

His large spatulate fingers began to rove searchingly over his skin. They stopped to examine a small pimple beside his navel, but that was only to pretend that he wasn’t going to do it again, that it wasn’t already underway. It was a habit left over from childhood, when he’d believed that God could look down and see absolutely everything that anyone was doing at any given time. In a moment his fingers resumed their small circling motions and moved on. Softer than bird wings settling into place, St. Augustine’s prayer passed over Jerome’s lips: “Dear God, enter into my heart and whisper that you are here to save me.”

He’d tried masturbating earlier. His hand had worked for nearly half an hour. He even gave up worrying about whether or not Ralph and Gerry could hear the creaking of his old bed or about whether he would give himself a blister. He did everything he could to make himself come, until, without warning, his mind suddenly emptied and his hands fell away. While his penis withered, he turned over on his side, facing the wall to wait for sleep. But, as abandoned as he felt, talking to God was a hard habit to break. And so, for the one-millionth time, he bargained with God for the return of regular, restful sleep in exchange for his chastity.

But now it occurred to him that the bit of cooling breeze that had touched his leg might be enough to help him out. His promise to God was already broken for that night; it didn’t matter that he had been unsuccessful—he had tried, and that was enough to break the promise. You didn’t give God half-promises.

If Jerome could have had a say in the matter, he would have preferred that the capacity of a penis for which a priest had no use would die. The ridiculous organ lay in wait all day in his underwear like a jack-in-the-box, ready to spring at the least provocation. At night, after it seduced him into touching it and rubbing himself to climax, it tormented him by stirring to life again within minutes, wanting more. Or, worse, it often humiliated him by wilting in his hands before ejaculating, leaving him lying naked in his sagging bed feeling like a failure. He had come to think of his penis as a wicked demon trickster attached to his body for the sole purpose of tormenting him, and he fervently wished to be rid of it.

And yet God, in His infinite wisdom, had made the organ the way it was. And He had made a priest what he was. A human. So Jerome reasoned that there must be a purpose in the brutal antagonism between his body and his soul. In fact, he wondered if abstaining from masturbating when he wanted to, when he thought he should try to, was a kind of underhanded insult to God. If St. Augustine was correct in believing that nothing about man could be corrupt because he is made in God’s image and nothing about God can be corrupt, then this urge to touch himself must have some godliness about it. God made the urge as well as the organ. Perhaps the evil lay merely in the senseless enjoyment of stimulation, in the blatant favouritism towards one part of the body. Jerome didn’t enjoy any other aspect of his physical self so much. In fact, he loathed his craterous complexion, his boils, his large clumsy limbs and uncoordinated gestures. But alone in a dark sweltering room, he overly loved a rubbery wand of temperamental fibrous tissue that resembled the neck of a skinned turkey. Perhaps God wanted him to succumb to this behaviour, not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of learning: to experience his baseness, his separation from God. If this was God’s intent, how graceless to refuse the lesson.

Besides, Jerome was certain that in this soul-sapping heat, if he could just come once he would be able to sleep. All his sleeplessness would flow out of him. With sleep, he would be able to discipline himself. With discipline he would begin again to travel in the footsteps of Christ. He would work all summer to put himself back on track and be ready to serve with renewed vigour by the time school resumed in September.

While he continued to rationalize, his hand passed down through his pubic hair to his penis. His fingers began running little tests. They fluttered, stroked, moved in small, light circles. The earlier discomfort was gone. It would be worth trying again, just for the sleep that would follow.

He kept his eyes firmly closed to concentrate. Travelling slowly across the smooth old sheet that was worn to the softness of newborn skin, the open palm of his free hand found the edge of the mattress, no longer a firm sharp ninety-degree angle, but now compressed and rounded by age to the width of a woman’s throat. His hand slid back and forth, back and forth along this column. His breathing, as well as his other hand, picked up the rhythm. After passing over imagined collarbones his hand searched for and found the partially firm mounds of budding, mattress-lump breasts, which he squeezed, first one then the other, one then the other. With each squeeze, he felt his testicles firming. This could have happened had he chosen another life; if people led parallel lives, this could be part of his life with a woman; this could be his marriage. There could be a soft warm breast filling his palm. Nipples could be rising on his tongue. There was no sin in merely enacting what could have been. This was normal; this was good. He hadn’t noticed that he had pulled both his lips into his mouth and was sucking on them.

He was erect now, filling his working hand. He wanted to spit into his palm for more lubrication, but it was too dangerous to stop for even a second. If only God had made man flexible. He tipped himself slowly, carefully onto his side so he could lower his erection between the mattress breasts. His free hand was frantically spreading the breasts, opening up a space to receive him. If only the mattress could magically grow a little receptacle, something wet for him to slip into. He rolled closer, and as he did so, a trickle of perspiration ran down through the hair on his abdomen, mimicking the rapid steps of an insect. His torso jerked, his eyes flew open, his free hand let go of the breasts, swatted at the distraction, jiggling the bed, and his full hand suddenly emptied. Goddamn!

Defeated and ashamed, Jerome rolled onto his back. He felt like a grown man who could not overcome a temptation meant for a child. Exasperated, he closed his eyes, but it was clear that he was not going to fall asleep again. If he got up, he could at least occupy himself with making a cup of hot chocolate. The thought of the hot chocolate reminded him that a new housekeeper was coming in the morning. The daughter of a former parishioner of Ralph’s. They were low on cocoa and he should leave her a note to get a new tin. The trouble was his limbs were heavy as wet sandbags and the kitchen seemed a very long way away.

Outside, tires approached on the wet pavement. Jerome wondered where another human being could have been until this hour. What did people find to do that detained them until nearly dawn? Or was this someone just going out at this hour? He opened his eyes to watch which way the blocks of light from the headlights were going to travel around the walls. Right to left or left to right? If left to right, which way was the car travelling? Up or down the street? The squares appeared above his desk and began their curious ritual, travelling slowly across the wall to the corner. Then, like live things, they flashed into the mirror on the back of the door, raced past his head and shot out the window. Absurdly, he imagined that they had fled from the gloomy solitude of his life.

Finally he swung his feet over the edge of the bed to the linoleum floor. He pushed himself up and stood facing the window. They had warned him in the seminary that a priest’s life was one of constant temptation. But then they had ordained him; they must have seen something in him, must have believed in his vocation. It couldn’t have just evaporated. Churches had always attracted him. Their cool, cavernous solitude drew him inside, even when he was a young boy. He liked the crisp echo of footsteps retorting from stone walls, the silent little eddies of scented air that surprised him. That was something, wasn’t it? Some sort of sign?

Surely this insomnia was just something temporary. It had to be; he could not live out the rest of his life on so little sleep. He just needed to get back on track. A simple, small catalyst could knock him back into the right orbit. Maybe he should make a list of things that he could do to spark himself back to life. Things like painting this dull little room and getting rid of that annoying bald-headed man on his ceiling. He fished under the bed for his slippers and lifted his robe off of the back of the door. It would be cooler in the kitchen with the back door open.

The kitchen was located on the ground floor, at the back of the rectory. When Jerome pulled open the heavy wooden door leading to the backyard, the sharp smell of damp mouldy earth and the cool moist air that pressed against him like a wet cloth startled him. The sensation was so pleasant, so welcome after the stifling heat of his room that he remained standing at the door, looking out into the yard, mesmerized.

He had never really looked closely at the yard before now, although he had cut across it hundreds of times. His impression, by day, was of a grubby sad little patch of bare dirt and weeds, not worth a second glance. It had been years since anyone had cut the grass regularly and turned the soil in the gardens every spring. Now, the yard was ringed with trees of heaven and a few old maples that had long ago knitted a dense canopy overhead. The trees’ hundreds of unchecked suckers had braided themselves into the chain link fence, causing it to twist and bow outward in some places and to sag inward in others. Neglect and overgrowth had nearly erased the outlines of the original flowerbeds. The only thing that remained fresh and groomed was the path that ran from the gap in the fence in the back corner where the garage stood to the back door.

But now, lit by the pale glow of the yellow street light slanting through the rusting fence, Jerome found the yard strangely enchanting. Every illuminated surface outside of the yard glistened with rain: the sidewalk, the visible corner of the garage eaves, the grey metal garbage pails standing beside the garage wall, plant foliage growing outside the ambit of the canopy, a bit of the top rail of the fence. But beneath the canopy, the yard remained a haven of dryness, a compelling high-ceilinged green grotto. Looking back and forth between the wet and the dry surfaces, indulging in the sharp contrast between the two, Jerome suddenly perceived this reverse oasis as a small miracle. Dryness in a surround of glistening wetness. Then his mind leapt. Contrast. That’s all miracles were. Simple, startling contrasts. Dead Lazarus rising to life, the sick restored to health, one fish and one loaf, then fish and loaves in abundance.

Jerome pushed the screen door out into the fresh early morning air, descended the sagging back porch steps, and arrived, puffing with excitement, into the dead centre of this miraculous outdoor room beneath the magical green roof. His loosely tied robe had fallen open and cool air wandered deliciously into the folds of material and over his skin. He looked up. The treetops were alive with movement and sound. A party was underway. In the slumbering silence of the early morning. Another contrast. The trees were engaged in a joyous whispering conversation, every leaf and branch having something to say to its neighbour, while hundreds of gossiping water droplets slithered across smooth and rough surfaces, dropping down onto the next level to repeat what had just been said above. Now and again a little breeze wandered through the canopy, and hundreds of raindrops clattered softly to the ground. Jerome thought they sounded like hundreds of little feet, as if invisible elves or leprechauns were jumping out of the treetops and landing unseen bedside him.

He twirled around slowly, his head thrown full back so he could see the canopy that covered him. How freeing it was just to stand there in the cool temperature beneath the protective arch of foliage. He wondered why he hadn’t ever even noticed the yard’s chapel-like quality before. Had he known, he could have come out here every time it rained, stood here in the delightful chill and filled himself up on the thrill of this secret place. His mind leapt again. Of course. How could he not have seen it until now? This domed green chapel had been created just for him. Look how it contrasted to his room: large, cool, airy, filled with the present. Listen to the whispers. How joyous! The overhead trees must be filled with birds and insects. They must be tucked in up there, alongside one another, waiting for dawn. They would be beginning to groom themselves now, rooting beneath their wings, burbling softly to one another. Life. Bustling. What he so desperately desired. It was clear now what was going on. He was meant to discover this place. This humble little outdoor grotto was God speaking to him.