Uncross My Heart (4 page)

If you believe the text literally, in its entirety, then you could never approach the altar of God because of the defect in your eyesight…due to the peanut butter.” I threw the peanut butter in to take the onus off a perceived attack on his vision.

He spun to leave, and I bolted from my chair and caught him by the shirtsleeve and hauled him back. “Okay, wait, let’s try this again.”

He glared and I continued. “Please, Roger, have a seat.”

He sank in a desultory slump in the wooden swivel chair across from my desk.

“Talk to me,” I pleaded, in what most likely should have been my first approach to the problem rather than my second.

He was silent, seemingly trying to form his thoughts, then finally spewed out, “My grandfather’s a big shot at this place. He gives a lot of money, and people care if he’s pissed.” Using the word “pissed” wasn’t a good sign from a respect standpoint.

“I fully understand that ‘piss’ not only rolls downhill in third-world countries but also uphill to administrative offices in seminaries.

But my job is to teach you something, not worry about which way piss is traveling. What question do you hope to have answered when you leave this school?” My mind suddenly jumped track, and I envisioned Sylvia’s face as we sat at her bar when she asked me about my secrets.

“What secret do you have to share, Roger?” And I realized that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to ask him, but Sylvia’s image had made me blurt it out.

His lower jaw moved off center, two inches left of his upper jaw, as if he were casually stretching his facial muscles. “Question I most want answered? How do I get out of your class? Secret I want to share?” he hissed at me. “I will get you fired, trust me.” Roger stood up and walked confidently out of my office.

* * *

“How did it go?” Dennis asked, striding along at my side, his black cassock billowing at the edges, making him look distinguished in addition to holy.

“Not well. Roger’s a fundamentalist at heart and vengeful. He recommends firing for those who take positions that don’t align with his own.”

“He threatened you?”

“He’s feeling threatened,” I said.

“Why are you being so tolerant?”

“It won’t last long. I’m just trying out the feeling.”

“A lot of nuts getting their training wheels here.” Dennis huffed.

“John the Baptist—smelling like an old gym sock, crunching down on a lunch of locusts, trying to lure people into a pond for a little baptizing—was ‘nuts’ to some in his day. For all we know, Roger could be a prophet-in-training.”

“Don’t twinkle those eyes at me. I think you delight in twisting theology for your own amusement,” he admonished.

I peeled off at the fountain’s intersection and headed for my meeting.

“Hey, wait up, will you?” He cut left and followed me.

“I have an appointment with Vivienne Wilde.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I don’t tell you everything.”

“What did she say when you invited her to come here?”

“She said, ‘Pear-fct.’”

“Does she talk funny?”

“No, she just has an odd way of saying that word. Kind of arty or British or something.” At Roger’s quizzical expression, I added, “She has a great voice. That’s all I can tell you about her.”

As I hurried toward the chapel, I left him behind. Anticipation of sparring with a woman of intellect on this crisp morning had my blood up. I’d read her article on the cranking out of fundamentalist crazies by seminaries that cared more about their profits than their prophets. I knew her stance on religion in general, that it was the last great traveling salvation show, akin to medicine wagons and magic acts involving bodies sawed in half.

I rehearsed answers to supposed questions.
It’s up to the student to
find the religious training that speaks to him or her and then determine
how it will fit into a life and a career. Many of our students never enter
the church at all but become better businesspeople because of the
underlying spiritual understanding they’ve gleaned from Claridge.

I rounded the corner of the chapel prepared to educate or do battle, and there, directly ahead of me, seated on a marble bench, a woman in an electric orange leather jacket, her short hair framing her face, fed a large gray squirrel. Stopped in my tracks, I watched the light cascade down through the branches of the elegant old tree and create reddish highlights on her golden hair. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Perfectly manicured hands, the fingers artistic, in the act of lining up small nuts on the bench for the patient little rodent, who paused before selecting one. She laughed softly as the furry animal munched down on the treat.

I was transfixed, as if I’d been transported to another time, another dimension, a place outside my knowing. I felt at peace and slightly disoriented, as if I’d just left all care and worry and, in fact, couldn’t even remember what had been troubling me. The mid-1800s painting by Sandys flashed through my mind of the fearless Mary Magdalene—who cast out seven demons, was accused of being a prostitute, and guarded Jesus’s body after his death—her hair gorgeously sunlit like this woman’s at this divine moment.

The woman on the bench looked up as if to inquire of my stare, and when her eyes met mine I must have sighed. She was breathtaking.

“You’ve tamed the forest creatures,” I said.

“Not my intent. Beauty is in the untamed.”

My heart jolted as I recognized the voice, and my head involuntarily tilted to match the angle of hers.

“Would you by any chance be Vivienne Wilde?”
Vivienne Wilde
sounds great and looks spectacular? If I have to fight Hightower’s
demon, it’s a blessing she looks like an angel.

“Yes.” She seemed momentarily surprised, gave me a quick appraising glance, then stood up brusquely. Her demeanor changed as she dusted off her hands and offered one in a solid handshake. “Are you Dr. Westbrooke?”

“Alexandra. Welcome to Claridge.” I felt light-headed as I took her hand, and my mind fanned through the various reasons why that might be, settling on my not having had enough protein for breakfast.

“Would you like to finish feeding—”

“No, let’s take the tour.” Even in her orange spiked heels, she was still a bit shorter than I and hardly seemed to be the theological terrorist Hightower described. “So it’s Alexandra without the
i
? Unusual name.”

“My father wanted to name me MacArthur, thinking Mac a perfectly acceptable female name, but my mother intervened and the compromise was Alexandra, after Alexander the Great.”

“Maybe he thought you’d be a fighting priest.” For a moment I could envision an ancient battle in which warriors fought for someone as lovely as she.

“Very peace-loving, actually,” I reluctantly confessed.

“You weren’t while you were at Berkeley.” I cut my eyes at her as if to ask how she knew that. “I Google everyone I’m meeting. You were particularly interesting—early liberal leanings.”

“Youth ultimately learns its lesson.” I let the topic die, preferring to hone in on the tour and avoid any discussion of my past. Big stone walls framed us at odd angles around the campus, each a buttress for ancient artifacts—paintings and glassed cases filled with ecumenical writings dating back centuries. Vivienne kept up remarkably well despite the stiletto heels and her shorter stride. She took no notes, as I expected she might, and merely listened intently as we strolled in and out of buildings.

I ended the tour in the nave of a tiny historic chapel, used mostly as a museum. She leaned close to the glass case to observe the stone artifacts lying there.

“Are these pagan rune stones?” she asked, more knowledgeable than I would have expected.

“Christian rune stones that existed alongside pagan burials in Scandinavia in 650 a.d.”

She lingered behind for a moment, focused on the stones, as I walked ahead. She caught up with me down the aisle at the steps to the chancel, where I stopped at the foot of the Cross. Before us hung an emaciated Jesus, palms pierced against the wood, head wreathed in thorns, blood dripping down the full breasts.

“A woman?” she asked quietly.

“Female Christ crucified. The original once hung in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York.”

“It has special meaning for you.”

“If Christ is Father, and simultaneously Son and Holy Ghost, then God is most likely also simultaneously Woman.”

“
If
Christ is Father? I thought you accepted that as fact.” When I didn’t answer, she continued. “You’ve chosen to teach at a school that turns out fundamentalist ministers who believe men are chosen by God to do all the thinking for their households. Yet you value that part of Christ that is the feminine. How do you reconcile that?”

“We’re not a fundamentalist seminary, although fundamentalism is an option. We don’t encourage or discourage any spiritual pursuit. We also graduate students who go on to become Methodist and Presbyterian ministers and Episcopal and Catholic priests. We lead people to God by many paths.”

She looked at me as if she sought conviction of that belief.

“Let’s go over to my office and have a cup of coffee and you can bore in on me.” I tried to sound slightly teasing but Vivienne Wilde seemed serious now.

I shortened my strides, falling in beside her on the walkway.

Students acknowledged me as they passed, one particular group of young boys shouting loudly to get my attention from fifty feet away. I waved at them and Vivienne smiled, causing me to lose pace with her for a second as I caught sight of the glow cast across her face. She had a beautiful mouth. Someone in her family could have done her a great service by reminding her to smile more often.

“Did you say something?” She seemed to pick up on my thoughts.

“No, but I could. When you smile, you look radiant. It’s a wonderful and disarming quality. In fact, I can hardly believe a woman with that kind of smile could write such infamous articles about our seminary.”

“I do it while smiling.” Her broad grin reduced itself to just a hint of a smirk, and I realized this woman might not be easily won over.

We entered another stone building under an archway bearing the carved name McGuire Hall, with its narrow corridors and heavy plank doors that sealed off each perfectly square office with its double set of windows. As we reached Room 111, Sally, the blond student, slid to a stop in front of me.

“I’m sorry to interrupt. Dr. Westbrooke, would you help me understand some of the notations on my paper? Just talking it through would…drive it into my skull, I think.”

“Catch me after class tomorrow. We’ll do it then.”

“Great.” Sally beamed at me and scampered down the corridor. I turned the large brass doorknob at the same time I inserted the key into the giant
Alice in Wonderland
lock.

“Do all your students have a crush on you?” My head must have snapped round as I felt a nerve twang in my neck. “Power,” Vivienne remarked. “They can smell it even when they’re young.”

“Are you always this suspicious of people?”

“I read them. She has a crush on you.”

I stared for a moment too long, then moved to the coffeepot I kept at the ready on my bookshelf and punched the Brew button. Vivienne sat opposite my desk and crossed her legs. She had long, slender legs for a person of perhaps five feet five inches, and the red light on the coffeemaker seemed a silent alarm to stay focused. “So what questions haven’t we covered?”

“Claridge ousted Professor Elliot Emerson for being a gay man.”

I exhaled, my reaction completely unrelated to the topic and merely in response to her physical presence.
Why is the gay topic popping up
in every conversation? First my father warning of gays in the church,
then Jude appearing out of nowhere, now this woman asking why we
ousted a gay professor.

“I’m not a board member and wasn’t privy to the reasons for firing him.”“I’m told he had many God-fearing friends here.” The way she enunciated “God-fearing” tinged the idea with lunacy. “How is it that he was fired without a whimper and left in the dark of night?” Her face was steeling up.

“You would have to take that up with Dr. Hightower or with Elliot himself.”

“Elliot Emerson committed suicide in Argentina.”

“I’m very sorry. He was obviously troubled, maybe even so much so that he couldn’t help himself, much less those who seek so much from their priests and ministers.”

“So flawed people don’t make good priests?”

“All people are flawed.”

“Perhaps a flawed person, like Emerson, knew the truth and couldn’t stand the pain and pressure, or the stupidity around him, and fighting it simply wore him out and he gave up.”

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“He interned with me years ago. I admired him because he stood for who he was and didn’t knuckle under.”

A voice in my head said this was going in a bad direction. Mere words couldn’t alter her belief that her friend had been ousted unfairly, and my trying seemed to anger her.

“I’m sorry he’s no longer in your life,” I said, and let a few moments of silence float on the frigid air.

Vivienne must have realized her tone was combative because she suddenly took a deep breath and started over, changing the subject, chatting about mundane things, inquiring about our student programs, and laughing easily. I liked this beautiful, intense woman poking into my business, despite her sidebar into the world of her friend Emerson.

“Could I offer you lunch?”

She smiled that incredible smile and said she had to be going. As she thanked me for the time I’d spent with her, she shook my hand. Her touch sent a shiver across my chest and I wished that we were friends.

I wished I had her home number and I could call and simply ask what she was doing or even who she was verbally crucifying today. While I was lost in those thoughts, Vivienne Wilde disappeared out of my office and most certainly out of my world.

* * *

It was Wednesday morning and I was sitting in my office just after sunup reading the local news events on my laptop when the electronic headline leapt off the computer screen at me. Dateline Claridge: FuTure chancellOr says suicide naTural selecTiOn FOr gay PriesTs. Byline: Vivienne Wilde. My heart raced and I felt dizzy just as the phone rang.