The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (2 page)

“How are you?”

“You’re catching me at a pretty down time.” His eyes are green, he’s looking right at me but there’s not a glimmer in there and I think:
Jeez, the light’s been bludgeoned out of this guy or maybe he’s on something — antipain, antidepressant
.

“What happened?” I point to his right foot, which is enormous, wrapped in white gauze up to the knee like the limb of a mummy.

“Oh, bad infection. They had to amputate a little.”

“Wow, sorry.”

“Ah, well,” he says. “Stepped on a stupid screw in the driveway. Life.” He shrugs, chuckles. “I’ve got diabetes. You remember how I liked my Coca-Cola.”

“Yep. I do.” I glance toward the hall, wanting to move outside, somewhere private.

“You look good,” he says. “Your dad had quite a belly by your age.”

I’m thrown at his mention, his memory, of my father, who he met, I think, maybe twice. I start chattering.

“Well, I’m an actor and the work’s very physical, keeps me fit.” In my skull I feel the buzz of words and how they’re utterly weightless and how it’s our bodies that are grave somehow, communicating, catching up. For my bones the whole experience isn’t thirty years away but three feet.

“I see,” he says. “You work in the theater, then?”

“Yeah. Uh-huh. Some TV. Plays and musicals sometimes. I sing and . . .”
Christ, Marty
, I think,
why not just give him an uptune and a ballad? Lord, he’s got just the lost, ugly mug you’d expect in a news item on pedophiles—pasty pale, geeky glasses
. “It’s always eight shows a week, very rigorous . . .” This sharp lament moves through me as I think how much the course of my days has been affected by this broken being in front of me. “But Broadway pays pretty well, when you can get it.”

I watch him push, with an index finger, his glasses up the bridge of his nose, then scoop his bangs to the right. The gesture (
exactly
as I remember it) sends a tremble through my chest. It’s as if I’m forty-two and twelve at once.

“Are you in New York?”

“Yes, I’ve been in Manhattan twenty years now.” This sentence, somehow, gives me a sense of center, of pride. “I live there with my . . . my boyfriend, Henry. We’ve been together for seventeen years.” I want him to know, I realize, that I’m all right, that I’ve found success, stability. “Do you remember the last time we saw each other?”

“I do,” he whispers, dropping his head, tripling his chin. “You were, what? Fifteen? You drove all the way to my place in Sunshine Canyon without a license. We sat by my empty fireplace and you told me you were ashamed that we’d ever met and that you never wanted to see me again.”

I’m stunned and, oddly, flattered that he remembers it—the scene, my words—exactly as I do. It seems to say that it, that I, meant a lot to him. Is that what I’ve come for? I wonder. To see if I’m as vivid for him as he’s been for me? That I wasn’t just another little boy, an easy target, who gave it up to him?

“That tore my heart out,” he says. “I curled into a shell that night after you left, for nearly two months.”

He’s speaking the truth, it seems. Or is he playing me? The confusion feels familiar. I finger the button of my recorder but don’t push. I’m afraid it will click too loudly.

“Did you know, Bob, that this weekend will be thirty years exactly since we first actually met? April 7, 1972.”

“Oh, I’m not aware.” He shakes his head so that his hair falls back into his eyes. “Dates are fuzzy. I couldn’t say the exact—”

“Oh, I can,” I tell him. The man in the other bed coughs. He is watching a TV fixed high on the wall. I’m concerned he might hear me, and then I try not to care: “It was three months after my twelfth birthday. Except for my head, I didn’t have a hair on my body. I didn’t know a thing, barely what a wet dream might be.”

“Let’s go outside,” he says, scooting across the bed toward his wheelchair. “Let’s go outside.”

A
PHOTOGRAPH HANGS
in my study of a boy standing in a kayak at the edge of a pond, holding an oar triumphantly over his head. He’s wearing a shy, crooked smile, a Speedo swimsuit, and a life-jacket. He’s a tiny twelve, this boy, and no matter how many times I look at him, I’m astonished that it’s actually me. The me of thirty-plus years ago, spring of 1972.

The picture was taken up in the Colorado Rockies about two hours west of Denver, the town where I grew up. We lived, two parents and four kids, down in an alphabetical neighborhood—Grape-Glencoe-Holly-Hudson-Ivy-Ivanhoe—rows of identical houses known as Virginia Vale. In 1960, when my Dad and Mom bought the place, nineteen-grand got you a single-story shoebox-shaped house with an unfinished basement and a square chunk of dirt to call your own. The feature that distinguished one home from another was the color of brick. Red, yellow, gray, and the occasional orange. And every other house had a big porch, the houses between, a little porch. We had a big porch. Red brick.

We lived in Virginia Vale but, somehow, what seemed most important was that we belonged to Christ the King, our church and school up the hill. And I felt a great deal of pride (which is a sin) about my school. Once they asked me to cover the phone when the office nun got ill. I just happened to be passing by on my way to the multipurpose room and, always anxious to please, I was thrilled to take her seat for a few minutes. Pretty soon the phone rang. I picked it up.

Hello, Christ the King
.

I was in heaven.

Or, later, when I was on student council and had to dial out into the worldly world for bank balances or Styrofoam cups:

Hi, this is Christ the King calling . . .

Usually there’d be a pause on the line and I’d experience, right inside my breast, a little burst of glee.

Most of the kids in my neighborhood went to public school. McMean or Fallis Elementary. I kid you not.
Edwina Fallis
Elementary. She was a beloved kindergarten instructor. Still, I just think it’s one thing when your school is named after a dead teacher and another when it’s named for the Risen Savior.

Every classroom at Christ the King had, hanging from the front wall, a clock and a crucifix. And every day, during math or spelling, I would stare up and watch the hands ticking past the numbers, while Jesus’s remained nailed at quarter to three. They were stuck there on the yellow brick like an odd couple that seemed, somehow, to be dueling. My eye would bounce back and forth: Time . . . Eternity, Earth versus Heaven. It was like watching
Now
spin toward the hour of death.

Sister Agatha was our third-grade teacher. She was a heavy woman, in every sense of the word. She wasn’t much taller than us nine-year-olds. She was shaped like a box. A black box. A moving cube of church. She was, among the many nuns in my life, the most intense. Often, before we’d go off to the restroom, Sister would turn, face the front wall, and raise her cloaked arms in the shape of a V, as if pleading to be beamed up. With one hand she indicated the hour and with the other our near naked Lord. “We line up by one but we live by the other,” she would proclaim in her crackly voice. Crackly because there was always something like grief or cheese caught in her throat. Sometimes in the midst of a lesson, especially if she was annoyed with you, she would gesture up to the cross then look at you and blurt out: “He died to set you free!” And I’d think,
Free from what? From where?

There was a brief moment one afternoon (I was little, first grade) when I thought I’d cracked a piece of the Catholic code. It was when the bell rang, as usual, at 2:45 to release us for the day. Alleluia! I grabbed my satchel and as I did I glanced up to realize that the clock and Jesus told the exact same time and I thought,
That’s it
. But, right away, I knew whatever it was He’d done it was supposed to mean more than just getting to leave here, being set free to go home. Nothing could be that simple, could it?

Sister Agatha had a very particular method for teaching cursive. She’d put on 45 records of simple songs for each different letter of the alphabet—“Farmer in the Dell” for
W
, or “Three Blind Mice” for
G
.

“OK children, letter
G
. Remember the tail; every letter has a tail so they can connect, make meaning.” She’d plop on the record; we’d clutch our number 2 pencils as she sang, “Three blind mice . . .
tail
. See how they run . . .
connect!
” One afternoon late in the year, right in the middle of drawing letter
G
, she just froze, staring at her chalk. We sat there until, finally, Carol Buell went to the office to get someone. They came and took Sister out into the hall and we never saw her again.

Christ the King or CK, as we called it, was situated on a little hill at Eighth and Fairfax, sandwiched between Holy Ghost to the west and Most Precious Blood (a rougher neighborhood) to the east. Little Catholic fiefdoms all over town, fiefdoms of the soul, concerned, of course, with matters of the
hereafter
. That’s something you get from the time you’re tiny:
After
is what you’re shooting for.
After
is what counts.
Here
is basically a problem. We made a mistake, we fell, and we’re stuck
here
in this unreliable flesh, struggling to earn our way toward a bodiless eternity in a very nice place with all the saints.

And, lucky you, you learn this, that there’s a huge army of the Good and the Dead just waiting to be called upon, prayed to, because they’ve been through the earthly wringer and
released
. They’re part of the oxygen. Their stories are everywhere, stained into chapel windows, pressed into books and calendars, like Catholic celebrities, sacred movie stars. There’s a saint for every day and a patron for every profession. Cecilia for music, Luke for doctors, Genesius for prostitutes and actors. You’ve got Jude for desperate causes and there’s even Saint Claire of Assisi, who saw visions on the wall of her cell, of events unfolding far, far away. She’s the patron saint of television. It got so you recognized the saints’ hairdos or their particular wounds. Sad Saint Lucy with her eyeballs on a plate, or the virgin Agatha with her breasts on a platter, or Saint Denis, carrying his own head down from Mont Martre. Halloween is nothing to a kid from Catholic school. Everywhere you look, there’s blood and gore and metaphor.

Sister Agatha was passionate about the saints. I remember how annoyed she was on the feast of Saint Martin when I replied to her inquiry that I didn’t know much about him.

“If you’re lucky enough to share a name with a saint,” she said, “then you should know their feast day. Agatha’s, for example, is the fifth of February.” Sister picked up a piece of chalk and wrote on the board in beautiful, curvy letters:
AGATHA
. “It means ‘good girl’ in Greek. She was the first, the very first virgin martyr of the church.” Sister touched her chest, leaving a smudge of white over her heart.

She made me stand and read Saint Martin’s story aloud from
Miniature Stories of the Saints
. When I opened to the proper page there was a dreamy drawing of him: long brown hair, handsome face with dark eyes gazing up toward . . . up. I knew right away that if he lived here-now instead of Rome-then, he would have been captain of the team and picked me right away.

The book told how he was a soldier who met a freezing beggar in the street one day. Having nothing but the cloak on his back to offer the poor man, Martin took his sword and chopped his cape and gave half of it to the beggar, who, lucky for Martin, turned out to be God.

That day during recess, Ricky Flynn cornered me. “Give me half of your Mars bar.”

“No,” I responded.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m the beggar, you be the saint.”

I didn’t see how, with his mean eyes and snotty nose, Ricky’s could be the face of God, but that’s the tricky part. So I ripped my candy in half and Ricky just laughed with his mouth full. “Thanks, Saint Martin.” I felt stupid and mad and more unsaintly than ever. You see, we’re supposed be like them, the saints, but they’re all holy and dead and it’s hard to know where to begin.

One day we third graders were having a silent study period, waiting for the hands to reach 2:45. I should have been reading but I was dreaming about Wesley, the neighbor boy who occasionally babysat my older sister and me. I didn’t know why but I longed to sit next to Wesley as next to a fire on a winter’s night. But he always remained alone and silent at the end of our living room couch, studying his geometry while I sat on the floor doodling his name in my workbook. It seems that during my daydream I stuck my hands in my front pockets. Suddenly, Sister Agatha was in front of my desk.

“Stop that,” she whispered, or hissed, really, as if she’d transformed into the serpent of Eden she talked of incessantly. I sat up straight, my hands still caught in my corduroys. “Do you need to make a trip to the toilet?”

“No.”

“Then stop it.” She pointed to my pockets. Mortified, I pulled my hands out and folded them on top of
Phonics for Fun
. She was trembling. Or that’s how my mind’s eye, my body, remembers it: this hallowed nun quaking at my offense. “That’s nothing down there,” she said “to be toying with.” I didn’t know why, but I knew well, my body was fit to blame.

She walked to the front of the class and clapped three times—her signal that it was time for another lesson about how we’re bad.

“Children, if the devil has his way, we’ll never reach our greatest desire:
Union with God in the life everlasting
.” She straightened her little round glasses and looked right at me. “There’s a war inside of us, children, because the Kingdom of God dwells within but so does our sin. There’s not a lot of room in there”—she placed a hand on her stomach—“and they are both going at it, white knight and black, angel and devil, tangling us up. And if”—she raised a finger—“
if
you allow . . .” She stepped toward me and the bell rang. She never finished.

I
T WAS A
hot afternoon in June, soon after I’d made it through third grade, and my new friend, Nathan, knocked at the back door.