The Girl of the Lake Page 17

  “Tremendous,” Caroline said, and pointed where to go.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what a strange answer that was, really, as if she’d said, “Very, very large.”

  No one was at the bar, which was fancy and very, very clean in a wooden alcove built among big structural columns—a chilly, industrial space, tremendous in the actual sense. We took a private-looking spot between columns, just three barstools, one for our jackets, two for us, this close together, basically hip to hip the way you aren’t at a table. He ordered a manhattan on the rocks, whiskey where I’d been thinking maybe that glass of wine. I felt a flicker of mistrust. But part of me is a big believer in pairing drinks with dates.

  “Manhattan,” I said. “Straight up.”

  “Okay, straight up,” he said, satisfyingly following my lead.

  Part of me couldn’t leave it alone: “You wear the collar because women want to conquer it.”

  “No, I wear it because I’m an Episcopalian pastor.”

  “You’re a challenge wearing that, and you know it.”

  We sipped our drinks. Tears seemed to have come to his eyes. “I’m sorry, but you’re upsetting me,” he said. “I haven’t done this before. I have read all the tips, though. I understand I’m not to speak of my widowerhood, my loneliness, my worries, but in fact I am a widower, still missing my wife. I long for companionship. I long for a rather extensive change in my trajectory, which has peaked long since. This is abstract, I know, and as of yet has nothing to do with you.”

  “ ‘As of yet.’ I like that.”

  “You’ve been on a date or two, I gather.”

  “How so?”

  “Just your cynicism.”

  “All this formal language. You sound like you’re giving a sermon. But I like the idea of a priest who uses his mysterious church-given powers to seduce women.”

  “My goodness, this is a strong drink. I’d forgotten.”

  “Go slow, Father.”

  “My name is Paul,” he said.

  “You wrote those letters,” part of me said. “To the Corinthians, the Ephesians.”

  He shook his head sadly: he’d heard that joke before. “Tell me yours.”

  “It’s Jayden,” I said, but that was made up.

  “It’s not that I’m lonely,” he said.

  “Just cruising HotLava,” part of me wanted to say, and so said it, immediately regretful.

  “Ours is not to judge,” he said, significant flicker of the eyes: I was on HotLava, too, he meant. And what’s more, I was @ProwlerPink. He sipped his drink, said, “May I tell you a story?”

  “Make it a parable,” Jayden said, irrepressible.

  “It’s a parable, all right.” He sipped his drink, sipped again, gazed at me, eye-to-eye over the rim of the heavy glass. Those eyebrows, the abyss of his eyes, his hunger, all the stuff he knew about the greater life. Plus his beauty. He wasn’t a guy who was going to go bald, all kinds of hairline, gray at the temples, otherwise mostly pepper, wavy, uncombed. He looked again very briefly at the freckles of my cleavage, said, “The story is about a minister doing pastoral counseling, a big part of his work. He goes into a home in which a teenager has been acting out—some serious bad behavior, very destructive—and the parents have called him in, parishioners he cares little for, though he has tried to apply God’s love. They are heavy smokers and high achievers just coming to middle age and clearly very miserable in their new recovering-alcoholic lives. The house reeks of smoke and misery. But bless them. The daughter is seventeen yet only a sophomore in high school, having been held back twice over the years. She has been caught, this girl, shoplifting alcohol from a mom-and-pop store in town, and in her family’s state-of-the-art minivan, the police found one thousand OxyContin pills, which are very powerful painkillers, Schedule I narcotics. Also one hundred twenty thousand dollars in cash, not enough for liquor, apparently. And a weapon, one of these enormous new handguns, a three-something-something, fully automatic something-something, armor-piercing bullets, if I’m getting it right, with a magazine that holds enough to kill everyone in Michigan. The men she was with ran off at sight of the cops, later that evening to be arrested in an actual shootout. They’re in their twenties, two of them, a third in his late forties, my age. And the situation was that she was going to have to go off to a program in Arizona, a kind of boot camp for juvenile offenders, not a pretty picture, though (if we can get her to agree to it) there’s another option: she can attend a rehabilitation facility right here in town and with a few promises avoid the year in what is basically prison and then, if she’s good, avoid the adult-court date when she turns eighteen. The boyfriends got fifteen years each, by the way, and not in any boot camp—swastika tattoos, that kind of person, shaved heads and jackboots. The older gentleman in their cohort was able to post bail and skipped out of the country. I’m her pastor, as our parable opens, but I’ve never spoken to her, and these desperate, abandoning parents ask one of their maids to show me to the kid’s room back in the barn wing of their house, which is a gargantuan old-money mansion set among the fields and orchards of a glorious estate—he’s some kind of investment banker, the dad, these new-money people in their old-money house, but bless them, this neglected child alone and holed up alone among her designer shoes and electronics.”

  He saw that my drink was gone, so guzzled the other half of his, put a finger up, and the little sphinx bartending brought us two more in our silence, which had extended long enough for her to make them, my priest still leaning forward confidingly with his story, and I trying not to look at his face too much, this utterly handsome man, trouble. Think of the most handsome actor ever—that’s who would play him, and me no Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn. Someone smart, a very smart actor to play this guy, who was clearly my equal in guile, equal to that part of me, I mean. The bartender dropped our drinks with a kindly, reverent gaze for him and something else altogether for me, the oddest look, probably nothing at all in it but my own sense of being one of Paul’s new-money people in an old-money house, dating-wise, I mean, what he no doubt referred to as God’s house. Oh, how I liked that our priest didn’t particularly look at the bartender. She was an eyeful, clothes like skin. But bless her.

  In our column-bound alcove he just started in on his story again: “So this unfriendly housemaid lets me in the kid’s room and walks off down the corridor, and here’s this young woman, not a kid at all, lounging on her bed in a camisole and underpants and headphones. And I sit on the other bed. She’s got two kings—her room’s like a hotel suite—and try a calm gaze, try waiting her out or waiting out whatever song it is she’s listening to. She doesn’t so much as look up at me; I’m invisible, barely a presence, song after song.”

  I gave him a long look, said, “This started out as a story about some anonymous priest doing pastoral counseling, and now it seems to be about you.”

  He liked that, said, “And you, you gave me a false name. I’d feel better knowing the real one.”

  “Okay, it’s Carol.”

  “And that’s another fake.”

  “Daisy.”

  “You’re quick at thinking of them. Disturbing.”

  “It’s Frances. It’s really Frances.”

  “Thank you, Frances.”

  “Your parable. It’s about you. More a confession. Do you have confession in the Episcopal Church?”

  “ ‘All may. Some should. None must.’ ”

  “Which one is you?”

  “Some should, I suppose.”

  “Continue, Father.”

  “Paul. And please, I don’t regard this as confession, but an offer of friendship: the total person standing before you, totally vulnerable.”

  “You are sitting.”

  He looked wounded. I mean really.

  I said, “Okay, I’m sorry. Continue. I’m listening.”

  “I know it seems bizarre, my talking about this other woman.”

  I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all. I said
, “ ‘None must.’ ”

  He smiled faintly, finally continued with the unburdening, if that’s what it was: “Our priest wasn’t good at waiting her out. Because although he is a dedicated man of the Lord, he is also a widower after a years-long ovarian cancer story and intensely lonely and sitting not knee’s length from this young woman in her underpants, and her legs are long and attentively tanned and her camisole is short and worn and her belly is flat and glistening with lotion and her navel is taut and nothing short of darling, as is her face.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry. Is it too much?

  “It’s like Court TV. Or the Victoria’s Secret Sports Illustrated swimsuit special. I can’t tear my eyes away.”

  He looked puzzled. Had he never watched TV? He said, “I’m just compelled to honesty.”

  “Well, go ahead, young George Washington.”

  He had such a nice smile, generous and self-deprecating at once. He said, “She well knows her pastor is due to visit, and this is how she has chosen to greet him. Her power excites her—not sexually, don’t get me wrong—it excites her to simply be there in her underpants with her minister waiting her out on her other king bed.”

  I downed my drink in a gulp and said, “No, the minister was excited, and you do mean sexually, and you’re projecting this on a mere child, or maybe projecting through her, trying to get your movie to play on me. Which might work. But I’m not some blank screen.”

  He finished his drink as fast as I had and it made him grimace. But he liked that I’d just basically declared my interest, the push-pull of my interior monologue like two paths to the same barn. “No,” he said, “I’m not trying anything like that. Because, in fact, this minister didn’t know it, didn’t see her power, no idea; you see, he thinks he’s just waiting out the young woman and that he will eventually prevail. He can clearly hear whatever music it is she’s listening to, profane hip-hop by the sound of it, and her foot tapping just enough that a cord in her inner thigh is flexing and unflexing and a gape in her underpants is opening and closing and there are these unholy glimpses of her most intimate self.”

  “Unholy glimpses! You are a minister. And by the way? She knows exactly what she’s doing. Poor old goat with his appetites. And now he’s going to suppress them all saintlike and do God’s labor. Yes?”

  The little bartender dropped more drinks. She was outrageously pretty, now that I looked at her. My date gave her no notice, not the slightest twink. When our drops of moisture were wiped up and our fresh napkins laid and our drinks plopped down and she was gone, he looked a little crestfallen, said, “Should I go on?”

  I nodded: he should.

  “All right, then. Our minister kept staring, and when the young lady’s playlist was suddenly done she caught him, and their eye contact then was very rich. In the old days you’d insert something here about the devil in her, some glint of evil in her eye, but none of that, she was just well adjusted to a certain kind of life and a certain kind of attention and a certain kind of control and power which she knew must be used at best discretion, plus she’d been kept in what amounted to solitary confinement. She held my gaze and all languid took those five-hundred-dollar headphones off and said, ‘Are you here to save me?’ And I said, ‘That’s not really my job.’ And she said, ‘I’ve been marooned here in this house six weeks.’ ‘That is the judge’s order,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got quite a long while to go.’ You try to keep your tone neutral. But marooned, that was a good word. And suddenly I got this whole complete shimmering idea in my head. So I said, all neutral, something about how if we could just get her to agree to pastoral counseling, that would get her off the hook for both juvenile boot camp and adult sentencing and maybe even rehab (her lawyers had recommended voluntary rehab), just a little something I could arrange, the judge and I being old friends, I told her, true enough, old tennis pals. And she said she didn’t care much for counseling, sultry gaze, this seventeen-year-old. And she lifts her leg just so. And absolutely I’m looking. It’s obvious that I’m looking and it’s obvious that I’m supposed to. And she says, ‘Marooned,’ again. And that was my moment, the moment I could do right or do wrong. And I did wrong. I said, ‘Marooned.’ Something about the old-fashioned word in that context. And she said, ‘There’s a lock on the bathroom door. If you’re chicken. No one’s going to think.’ ”

  “And you’re telling me you went in the bathroom with her?”

  “I am. I did.” He kept his tone neutral, I noticed, no shame or self-judgment, no pride either: “She sat on the counter in there, two sinks and very fancy fixtures, sat right on the granite, and we barely had to shift clothing. Very urgent on both ends of the equation.”

  “And God didn’t strike you with a lightning bolt?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes, He did. Coup de foudre.”

  “One of your hobbies.”

  “Hm?”

  “French. You listed French on your HotLava profile. Under hobbies.”

  “Ah.”

  The bartender slunk past like some exotic cat. Had she been listening? My minister gave a subtle nod and soon she was making us two more drinks.

  “We’d better eat,” I said. “We’d better eat a lot.”

  THE FOOD WAS TERRIFIC, that’s what I remember, right at the bar, though no particular dish comes to mind, haze of whiskey. Oh—miniature swordfish burgers on a bed of caramelized shallots with roasted cherry tomatoes. Like tapas, only they didn’t call them that, little sexy plates of everything. A cheese selection. An olive selection. Bottle of wine with a pig on the label, everything calculated for the farmgirl. These splayed scallops barely cooked and with pink candied rose petals dropped in the crease.

  “Like little cunts,” my increasingly inebriated date says. He’s testing me: Can I handle a vulgar priest?

  Of course I can, the drinker in me: “Too bad no bratwurst.”

  Then he’s putting bites in my mouth. And more surprising, I’m putting bites in his. His lips are soft, kind of overly full. His teeth are okay, crooked and white. I love his nose, it’s got various planes and angles. I want to put my tongue in his nostrils, so clean. He nips my fingers and I more or less kiss his, getting every flavor. There are these chickpeas in some kind of yogurt and cucumber sauce on bread rounds. And his hand’s in my lap, and mine’s in his, very close to the hot center of things, little squeezes back and forth. I accept that he’s playing me. Probably he’s not even a priest. Probably he just goes to a costume shop.

  But no: “These manhattans are disinhibiting,” says my definitely, really priest, dizzy nod of his head. He’s scooting the hem of my dress up and then he’s got a finger under my panties, and not just any panties but La Perla, in case he thinks he’s got himself hold of a hillbilly.

  “I haven’t many inhibitions in any case,” Jayden tells him, increasingly her own being. But I cross my legs, capture his digits, which keep wriggling in place, not quite home, he didn’t get. Lovely.

  And suddenly we’re kissing in our little alcove at the bar, lung kissing, a gross high-school girlfriend used to call it, breath and tongues involved, exchange of fluids down to the very molecules and atoms and even muons, but also that rhythm, excited breath, some of the flavors of our food and the whiskey, sweet manhattans. Also, another secret no doubt, he’s had a cigarette in the last several hours, I can taste it, something a little cloying and chemical and off back there in the far corners of our kiss. And we’re eating, and our little bartender is walking back and forth past us with a pleased smile on her pretty face and a second then a third button open on her shirt. But not for us: in the next alcove a foursome of noisy young men in suits has arrived. My date withdraws his mangled fingers from the hot grasp of my mule-wrangling thighs. I wish I were pretty as the little bartender, and unlike my other self, who considers herself supreme, I’m sure my minister wishes the same. But Jayden knows we’re beautiful, in this moment we’re so fucking beautiful, and the knowing crosses over to me, a
nd for once I am complete. His last name is Gerald, of all names. At some point I’ve asked him and he’s told me: Gerald. Paul Gerald. Pronounced kind of Frenchily. For a joke I’m calling him P.G., and he says his mother used to call him that.

  The bartender. His eyes do not follow her, not a second look. She can’t get enough of him, though. The boys have been buying her shots. Another button and her shirt will fall off. He’s ordering cognac, I think, something French, and in long French sentences. How did that girl learn to speak French? Anyway, the old brandy comes in snifters. He’s either the most honest man we’ve ever met or an excellent liar. Either way, we’ll take him.

  P.G. AND I ARE RIDING the forty-one country miles to my little farm in the back of a taxi and kissing comfortably and there’s the infidel’s brown eyes pleased in the mirror, everyone pleased to see us kissing. I’m sorry I said infidel—he’s just an elderly Iraqi guy, very pleasant, a lot of Muslim faith around here, huge mosque in Flint, several other mosques in the countryside around me. “You two kids, you’re in love,” he says reverently and a little thickly, and turns up the music, another kind man in the world.

  Paul plays his fingers nicely among the candied rose petals and I’ve made a bun of my hand for him and the thing is we’re still talking, talking, like our words don’t care what our actions are up to, or like we can each be two at once.

  “You tell me a story now,” he says.

  I know just which one and I place it in his ear with only a break now and again for gasping and panting and so forth. “We had an intern at the farm.”

  “What’s the name of your farm, by the way?”

  “Lakeview. I’m not the one who named it. Mmm.”

  “You can see the lake.”

  “No, it’s sixty fucking miles.”

  “We’ll rename it, then. Something like . . . Lovestruck Acres.”