The Art of Forgetting (2 page)

              “How long has it been since –”

              “You know damn well the last time I went to church, Roy.”

              “Andrew?” Father Roy studied the silhouette through the perforated partition. “Is something wrong?”

              “It started, Roy.”

              “I’m sorry?”

              “It has begun. How did Churchill phrase it?  Not the end of the beginning but the beginning of the end… or maybe I’m saying it all wrong. I don’t know, you’re the one with the fancy schooling.”

              “Maybe we should go in the Parish office.”

              “It’s been going on for months. I know you’ve seen it too. You just didn’t want to say anything and of course I’ve been trying to hide it. That’s the Copeland family way, isn’t it?  Ignore things, deny they’re happening, hide all the evidence and go about your business with a stiff upper lip. Isn’t that what Pops did?”

              “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he did know. He couldn’t deny that in the last year he had witnessed his brother’s worsening mood swings and those barely perceptible moments of hesitation that were becoming more frequent. Those same tell-tale signs he had witnessed in his father when the illness had yet to progress to its extreme. Signs that made Roy feel powerless, like a sandcastle on a beach in the face of a slowly rising tide. So he ignored it all, said nothing, and prayed.

              “At first I thought I was just overworked, you know,” Andrew said. “Pulling overtime, staying out late with the boys, getting burned by the candle at both ends, so to speak. Then this morning, I’m driving to work. I got my thermos and lunch pail on the front seat. I get on the Eisenhower, same damn route I’ve taken for twelve years. But today I get to South Damen and I realize I don’t know where the hell I’m going. I don’t have a fucking clue!”

              “Andrew, please.”

              He lowered his voice. “I don’t have a flipping clue, Roy. I pull over in front of Cook County and I start bawling like a kid in a department store who can’t find his mom.”

              “Have you been drinking?”

              “It’s not the booze, Roy. It’s not the damn booze.”

              “Have you seen a doctor?” the priest asked.

              “What for?”

              “They might be able to help.”

              “Like they helped our father... who art in heaven?” Andrew snorted. “You know there’s not a damn thing they can do.”

              Roy swallowed hard. He wiped beads of sweat from his upper lip as a rhythmic pounding grew in his temples.

              “You’re
frightening
me, Andrew.”

              “I’m frightening you?” Andrew let out a chuckle. “Hell, Roy, you never had nothing to be frightened of your whole life except God above.”

              Someone knocked on the door of the confession box.

              “Hold your piss out there! The stall’s taken,” Andrew said in a gruff voice. There was a timid shuffling of feet, then the resonating silence of the church. “Roy, I’ve never been good with words, and I don’t like to wear my feelings on my sleeve like a damn chevron, but I want you to know something. I want you to know that you’re the best damn brother I could have ever asked for.”

              Roy felt a pall of guilt draping over him. “I’m the one who should say that to you.”

              “Just hear me out. I know I haven’t always told you, but I’m proud of you. I’ve always been proud of you... even when you made us lose at stick-ball.”

              “Which was all the time.” The men chuckled.

              “You made me a better man,” Andrew said.

              “After all you’ve done for me I can’t bear to hear you say that.”

              “I thought this was a confessional. Don’t people come here to get things off their chests?”

              “They come to be absolved of their sins,” Roy said.

              “And you can do that?”

              “God can do that. It’s never too late to open your heart.”

              “It’s too late for me. But I do need to get something off my chest.”

              “I’m listening.”

              “It’s time to come clean with you about something, Roy. Something you should have known long ago.” Andrew rubbed his massive hands together, stopped suddenly and cracked his knuckles. “Two things we Copelands have always been able to do: hold our liquor and keep a secret.”

              “I’m afraid I’m not so good with the liquor part,” said Roy.

              “No, I suppose not, padre,” Andrew said with a wistful smile. The wooden bench creaked as he shifted his weight and leaned into the partition. “Now listen carefully. I can only stand to say this once.”

              The two men sat with their heads inches from each other as Andrew spoke in a hushed tone. At one point Roy let out a gasp and recoiled. Andrew paused as his brother gazed at the darkness hanging over the floor – the priest’s eyes darting about – and resumed his soliloquy when Roy leaned heavily towards him again.

              Andrew murmured for another minute or two. Finally, he straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as if to brush away the bitterness of the words from his lips. “Just promise, if something happens to me, you’ll take care of the bride and child.”

              “What’s going through your mind?” Roy said between heavy breaths.

              “Just promise me.”

              “You know I would never abandon them.”

              “That’s all I needed to hear.” Andrew cleared his throat and sat silently.

              Roy felt as though he were inching towards the edge of an abyss. That he would fall into the darkness if left alone to ponder his brother’s revelation. But an even stronger fear was pulsing through his veins. There was something in Andrew’s countenance:  an eerie sense of relief, a cool resoluteness that sent a shudder down the base of Roy’s neck.

              “Maybe I can come by the house tonight,” Roy said. He wanted to punch through the partition, to clench his brother and not let him leave.

              “You got customers waiting,” Andrew said. “Business is good for you these days.” Andrew got to his feet. “Good-bye, Roy.”

              “Godspeed, Andrew.”

              When Andrew opened the oak door of the confession box, a small man wearing a tweed jacket stood outside, a crest of wild gray hair spilling over his wrinkled forehead. The man’s eyes opened wide at the site of the large police officer stepping out of the confessional and he began to finger the well-worn fedora he held by his paunch, turning it in his hands as if it were a steering wheel. Andrew stopped in front of him and said, “Give a man a chance to pull his pants back up, will you?”

              Roy greeted the next penitent in the confessional but his mind remained on his brother. How was it possible to feel such dread and deliverance, contempt and gratitude, guilt and utter relief all in the same breath?  He had witnessed souls under severe strain shift from throes of laughter to sobs of despair in the span of a few seconds and always wondered how this was possible. But now he understood. He rested his head in his hands, elbows digging in his thighs, and tried to catch his breath.

              A sound like a hollow crack startled him. Not the sound of a kneeler. It must have come from outside. It brought his focus back on the words of the old gentleman who confessed that he lied to his wife about going to Cicero and losing fifty bucks at the Hawthorne race course, and that he harbored less than charitable feelings towards the Negroes who were moving westward into good Irish neighborhoods.

              The murmur of voices reverberated off the church’s arched ceilings. Then a single plaintive voice: “Someone call an ambulance. A cop’s been shot!”

              Chapter 1

             
May 27, 2012

              “
W
ill you hand me the condom, Dr. Copeland?”

              “Don’t call me that” Lloyd said with a flat voice.

              The Asian girl sat straddled between his legs, facing him, stroking him slowly with both hands. She cocked her head to the side and flashed a licentious smile. “Why not?  Does it make you feel dirty?”

              Lloyd stretched to reach the top of the nightstand, grabbed the square blue packet and tossed it with a jerk of his wrist. It spun, pitched and yawed, colliding on her bare bosom where she trapped it with one hand.

              “When’s your fiancé coming back?” Lloyd asked.

              The girl gave a playful frown. “I got it, Professor. Don’t worry. I’ll be a good little medical student and just shut up.”

              “I didn’t mean it like that.”

              “Yes you did. It’s okay. I don’t want anything from you, Lloyd.” Her voice was steady, composed. “I don’t need anything from you,” she opened the packet with her teeth, spit out the corner of foil, “except this right now.” She grabbed the base of his erect phallus a bit too firmly for his liking. “And when Craig flies back tomorrow, I won’t need this either.”

              Lloyd offered her a conciliatory smile but she didn’t look back. He could see that it pained her to have uttered her boyfriend’s name while she was in bed with another man. She rolled the condom on him with deliberate clinical professionalism, with the same concentration and detachment she might have used when practicing a medical procedure.

              Say what you will about medical students in the sack, Lloyd thought, they certainly weren’t squeamish. And they had few hang-ups when it came to the naked human body. Even the act of sex was often treated more like a didactic exercise rather than passionate love-making, which fit Lloyd just fine.

              Most other women had a natural inclination, almost a biological prerogative to form attachments after a roll on the hay – the nesting instinct. Screw them a couple of times and they’re romping around the apartment in your dress shirts, cooing in baby talk, dripping a sassy coziness as they smile that coy smile all girls learn by the time they’re twelve. Oh sure, it’s sexy as hell, but a sure sign that they’re marking their territory, exploring possibilities in their mind. Pretty soon they start to imagine a future together, they role-play like amateur improv actors to see how the relationship feels, how well it “fits”. The sight of a girl wearing his shirt, Lloyd knew, was diagnostic of emotional bonds congealing.

              But Alison would be all right. Lloyd had noticed her months ago when she rotated through the Neurology service – long silky black hair, sexy horn-rimmed glasses, low-cut blouse showing just enough cleavage to entice Lloyd to imagine the rest of her breasts. And then there was the way she looked at him when he gave impromptu talks on rounds, smiling at his jokes. No forced laughs like those idiots gunning for a better grade.

              When she completed the rotation, she had met the minimal criteria Lloyd demanded of his medical student consorts. She was a) near the end of her fourth year with b) no plans to do another Neurology clerkship (so she would never be under him again, so to speak) and she c) had plans to leave the city upon graduation to do her residency elsewhere. But with Alison, Lloyd had hit the jackpot, the mega-lotto in terms of imprudent relations with a medical student. There was a fail-safe assurance – at least as fail-safe as these things ever get – that virtually guaranteed they would never become emotionally entangled. Alison was engaged. To be wed!  This would be a strictly short-term, purely sexual affiliation.

              When they bumped into each other in the hospital lobby and she let it slip that Craig was heading east for a six-week trauma rotation, the die had been cast. They both knew at that moment how things would end.

              For the last two weeks he had volunteered to cover consults on the surgical ward where she was rotating. He made small talk with her, hovering just beyond the nurse’s station, not as attending to student, but as one colleague to another: a transparent but effective method of flattery.

              One particularly warm afternoon he invited her for coffee after work – a minimal commitment on her part. One small step for a woman, a giant leap towards Lloyd’s eight-hundred thread count Egyptian cotton sheets. She had gone home to change and arrived in a printed summer dress with spaghetti straps and a hem which rode up on her silky-smooth tanned thighs. Over Frappucinos, he insisted that she call him by his first name. Before parting they eagerly compared work schedules to arrange their next meeting. They agreed on a Sunday champagne brunch date. The forecast called for a hot, languid afternoon of bliss.

              And here they were, at last. Alison mounted him, her eyes fixed on his with a resolute intensity, biting her lower lip, her chest rolling with every breath. While on rounds at the hospital, Lloyd had tried to imagine her love-making face – a favorite hobby of his when studying women’s expressions. He pictured her grimacing, eyes tightened in an expression of sustained agony as she shrieked with pleasure. Instead, the first time this afternoon (with Lloyd on top) she had kept her eyes open, studying him the entire time. Instead of shrieking, she emitted a steady low pitched groan, like a loud purring. She projected a docile politeness – cautious and gracious. The result was a deliciously subdued climax which opened their eyes to the myriad, succulent, erotic possibilities and whet their appetite for more.