Gospel (74 page)

The teenage boy who could polish off two fifths of vodka before dinner and couldn't remember peddling his behind on the street for twenty dollars and another fifth. The woman who accidentally killed her baby daughter driving drunk, running into a telephone pole. The once-respected doctor who drunkenly misdiagnosed someone and got his license revoked and was in the midst of Illinois's most expensive malpractice suit. The man who owned an office supply company and drank himself out of power, out of his home, out of a family, out of his money … What
losers!
What cowards and morons!

Booze ruined their lives—it made mine tolerable, beautiful, it was Grace, it was the currency of social relations for me! You see, they were losers who became bigger losers with booze. In fact, I would not even have had to endure the clinic episode if I'd been born in Ireland, for God's sake, where my social role was honored, raised up, venerated!

“And you, Patrick?” asked the bald, lisping doctor hugging his clipboard, speaking in his cruise-director's soothing tones. “Will you say you're an alcoholic?”

“I'm a heavy drinker,” he said, though he wouldn't have been embarrassed to confess murder and rape before this group-therapy circle of losers. “I don't think I could go a week without drinking but then I don't want to…”

No laughter, no conviviality, not with this crowd. They were huddled together here to compete in misery, to be magically cured of all their sins and insufficiencies. Suckers!

“But you are,” said the doctor, “an alcoholic.”

Who was this clown, this necrophile greedily picking over the corpses here assembled? What did he get out of this?

“I'm not sure I
am
an alcoholic,” O'Hanrahan protested mildly.

A thin man who was, apparently, drunk and glassy-eyed just to come down from his room to this session, broke in: “That's what I once thought too. It's denial. You have to face it, Patrick.” How did this bomb-out get on a first-name basis with me? “You have to look in the mirror and say it out loud:
I am an alcoholic.
”

After this sterling session, everyone ate a dreadful meal of healthy things, and retired to their chambers. O'Hanrahan got up in the night to walk down the hall to the bathroom and heard shiverings and withdrawal episodes, tears and sobs … Beatrice, you self-righteous old cow, can I come home now and get out of this funny farm? Oh Jesus God, six more days of this hell …

(It didn't do you one little bit of good, did it?)

Why should it have?

(In fact, you managed to corrupt the circle of patients there, drag them further down. You remember your friend Lila, don't you?)

Oh. I hate to think of her, actually …

(Let Us bring this fine episode back in vivid detail:)

Lila Gantry of Springfield, Illinois, wife to a state senator, started out drinking at parties being social, ended up a big political embarrassment. This was her fifth try at drying out here at Doster's. Lila didn't appeal to O'Hanrahan at first, but as these group-therapy-circle afternoons wore on she became more tolerable. She never said anything in the sessions. Just sat there and smoked; she was a product of smoking. That cured-ham tint of her skin, the leathery lips, the voice down in the Lauren Bacall range, sophisticated, taking no crap from anyone, least of all the doctors at this joint.

“Notice you don't say much,” she said, setting her cafeteria tray down beside his in the solarium.

“Just counting the days,” said Patrick.

“I bet I wouldn't shock you if I said I could get my hands on some hooch.”

He laughed as he put down his fork before the vegetarian casserole. “You got my attention.”

“I'm on the first floor,” she whispered. “The window's narrow, but it can be climbed out of. There's a gas station that sells beer and, as I've discovered, a bit of the hard stuff. Half a mile, if you like a moonlit walk, sport.”

“Sounds romantic,” Patrick said lightly. But under the table he felt her stockinged foot climb up his pant leg and nestle in his groin. He looked across at her and saw her parted lips, smoke rising up from this frog-mouth. “Come by my room,” she breathed, “after lights-out.”

(And of course you did.)

It was a comedy squeezing O'Hanrahan through the window, scraping his arm and tearing his trousers, but he got through it. Lila climbed through next and the two conspirators trotted down to the truckstop along the U.S. highway. Had a decent meal at the diner, with beer in brown bags, so guiltily enjoyed, and then the man who ran the garage displayed a selection of half-fifths with no state tax stickers, direct to his regular customers from the truckers, who smuggled it from distributors farther south in Kentucky.

Lila had finished the bottle, virtually, by the time they were creeping back to the Doster Clinic, stumbling in the snow before the massive Victorian farmhouse. With much giggling and shrieking vulgarities—which no doubt gave their escapade away to the staff—he pushed Lila through the window and, insensate to injury, squeezed himself through as well. Before he could stand upright and dust himself off, she was all over him. Her talon hands raking his back and slipping between his stomach and his belt, her smoke-breath and hot mouth attacking his face.

Oh Beatrice! It was the only time I cheated on you with someone our age. Yes, there were silly little undergraduates, but after forty it's a man's
duty
to sleep with anything under twenty-five if the opportunity presents itself! But Lila was the indiscretion that made
me
feel guilty, that showed me my own depths. Her bony hips, her lovemaking sounds, so needing and guttural and animal, her repartee—she'd forgotten my name, it was just a catalogue of what she wanted done, faster, more, this, no that, her husband never touched her, never put his hand there, he had another girl on the side, the bastard … then somehow it was over, and she got up and strutted to her sink. Washed her mouth out. Washed her hands.

“You better go,” she said in her baritone.

“I'm going,” Patrick said, hurriedly grasping for his trousers and dressing in a rush.

“Maybe you ought to give up drinking,” she said, not looking at him. “It takes its toll on a man, if you know what I mean.”

Yes, that's how this kind of woman would be, he thought, trying to retie his tie, dying to be gone, feeling sick. Sick at the first booze in days, sick at the greasy diner meal, and this disgusting woman.

Lila was rushing him along so he wouldn't see her throw up blood in her sink: “Aren't you gone yet?”

In two more days the clinic released him, the ordeal was over and Beatrice came to pick him up. She'd driven down and her eyes were full of hope, a young woman's eyes. Oh, it was all going to be better now. She looked up at him with those eyes, not unlike when they had first met in Korea. She kissed him warmly, put him in the car, and seemed on the verge of singing, she was so happy. She sped down the highway satisfied, happy to be with her husband again.

“I really missed you,” she said, adding, “dear,” with all her bravery.

(And there was your chance, Patrick. The amount of chances people have with other people they love is surprisingly small, take it from Us. The possibilities of chance and good timing align themselves so infrequently that if you do not seize them you will find quickly a landscape of regret and impossibility. And that was where you should have mended the scars and told her you loved her, Patrick, and that you missed her too.)

But I turned away, remembered Patrick, to the indistinguishable winter fields rolling by, dead under the absent sky.

*   *   *

Lucy went down to meet the late-afternoon shipment of returning pilgrims from Athos. She stood at the dockside and watched the bearded monks walk off the four
P.M.
boat, the elderly priests helped off the ferry by the young men with many profusions of blessings in return for this small charity. A few tourists, looking worn and exhausted with 10th-Century living, aimed themselves with animal singularity toward the portside restaurants.

No Dr. O'Hanrahan. And the Poseidon Hotel had no message from O'Hanrahan as well. O'Hanrahan was now two days late for his telephone call, and Lucy had expected him back in person by now as well.

Lucy took her paperback, which she had abandoned and now wished to revive, under a shady tree until the sun got so low and mild that she began to prefer the waning light. Lucy then took a stroll on the pebbly coast, then once or twice around town, a groove she'd worn into the ground. She then went back to the room, having extinguished ninety languorous minutes since her last visit to the suite. Postcards, she informed herself: I should write another round of insincere postcards to lots of people who will never send me one.

Lucy flopped down on the bed and again removed the bookmark from
So Hot the Sun.

In the final pages, true love won out. Lucy looked at the torn, trashy cover depicting an American redhead in modern dress and a veil, being embraced from behind by a shirtless sheikh, saber unsubtly prominent. She decided that this seminal work of literature was better on a second read; the complexities revealed themselves …

She heard a muffled sound of a door closing in the next suite.

Good! Stavros was back for his afternoon primp before his assault on the disco scene. But was that … was that girlish laughter Lucy heard as well?

Lucy went to the adjoining wall.

She pressed her ear to the plaster.

Well, she lectured herself, what if he
is
in there with another woman? You didn't want to marry him, after all. Though I could turn all this into a festival of self-doubt and self-persecution, I won't. I mean, I have this in perspective. It was only sex and that's hardly the biggest deal in the world.

(You seem to have changed your mind since the other day.)

Well, sex with Stavros isn't the biggest deal in the world. Lucy decided she would fix herself up and go to the disco as well and maybe meet someone new, scope out the guys with Tracy, have a few drinks. It's not really like me, she thought, as she applied lipstick before the mirror, making a clown-face to paint her lips.

(No, not like you at all.)

*   *   *

Night was beginning, in the tall trees, appearing under the bushes and shrubs, accompanied by noises of summer insects, frenetic, hissing and clicking, telling O'Hanrahan he was intruding.

O'Hanrahan had passed through the phases of hunger and was now merely sore inside. He had happened upon a
kathisma,
a lone hermitage and an abandoned well, but there was no device for him to bring up any water. He dropped a pebble down into it to torture himself with the sound of the splash. He then saw a long vine and then considered his shoe. Sitting on a tumbled-down stone wall he tied the green vine to the laces and tied the laces to the vine over and over—this was not going to end in the farce of his losing his shoe. He lowered this vessel and in a panic brought up some water, fearful the vine would break. The water was metallic and no delight, being borne by his rancid shoe, but this was survival. In fact, having drunk his fill he was inordinately pleased with his ingenuity.

The worst, he comforted himself, was over and the sea had been spotted again through a mountain pass. In the meantime, he would have his pick of any of the abandoned hermitages in this once-populous northern extreme of the holy preserve. O'Hanrahan found a shelter in the last light of the day; a simple stone room, a ledge for a candle, a worn place of ground for sleeping and at one point, before it had rotted, a wooden door. There was a primitive painting of St. John the Evangelist, and on the other wall Jesus and Mary, who would watch over him tonight.

That's right, he remembered, Holy Mt. Athos is John's fault.

St. John was steering the boat which found the storm and shipwrecked himself and the Virgin Mary on this peninsula. That's when the Old Girl fell in love with Athos and said something like “O beauteous Athos, how I admire thee—you shall be My garden alone, consecrated to My adoration and worship, forbidden to all women except My Resplendent Self, and those who pray and toil here I shall intercede for with the Son and the Father…” Knowing that prima donna, I bet she said just that, O'Hanrahan imagined, lying down upon the dusty floor.

Always hated St. John, thought O'Hanrahan sourly.

All that Greek crap. All the troublemaking passages. All that junk John has Jesus say about his Sonship. Jesus is the Messiah-deliverer and Christ-Anointed One in the other gospels; in
John
he's God's very own little boy, spouting theology about his trinitarian personhood. Rubbish like
the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees his Father doing; for whatever he does, that the Son does likewise … The Father judges no one but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father,
blah blah blah—this in the mouth of a man who told simple parables to the poor! Jesus never said anything like that!

(Sure of that, are you?)

I would have made a great Anti-Logoite. Dionysius, disciple of Origen, Bishop of Alexandria, who proved in 259, for pete's sake, that
Revelations
ought to be thrown out of the canon. Paul of Samosata thought the
Gospel of John
heretical in declaring the Father and Son identical. As early as the late 100s, many fathers of the Church ignored
John,
and Justin Martyr was known to revere only the other three—heck, these guys knew people who knew the
real
John and they didn't want the
Gospel of John
in the Bible! It was Irenaeus, obsessed with having four gospels and a perfect number, who got his way and put
John
and all that Greek gobbledygook in the New Testament.