The Dark Path (10 page)

“We're not bagging it,” Mara insists, wiping her eyes. “It's important to you . . . so it's important to me.”

•   •   •

FROM IOS,
she and I take the ferry to Athens. We take a train to Yugoslavia and then get up into the mountains to Medjugorje by bus. The terrain is free of vegetation. Among the dirt and rocks is a church, and pilgrims visit a hillside spot where visitations have allegedly happened. We see candles and crucifixes around a shrine. Most of the pilgrims are middle-aged Americans in windbreakers. I arrange for Mara and me to piggyback onto a tour group as they meet the eldest visionary.

She is a young woman named Vicka, and speaking through a translator she answers questions. I ask Vicka what she or for that matter Mary feels about the world's many religions and the bitter divides among them. Once she understands my question Vicka smiles and speaks to the translator.

“Vicka says,” the translator tells me, “that there is only one God.”

Later in the day we go to the nearby seaside town of Dubrovnik. While Mara goes off to take photographs I duck into a church. There's an American tour group celebrating Mass. They've just been to Medjugorje and are soon to fly home. Several people in the group keep glancing at one woman among them. She is around fifty, and the others nudge her to talk. She shakes her head until the group's priest asks if she'll please tell the story just one more time. She stands.

She says that a few years ago she had malignant tumors in her head—a large one at the base of her brain, and a smaller one on the left side—and that surgeons removed them. She convalesced, losing her hair and lots of weight. She eventually came through it, but she had a paralyzing fear that the tumors would come back.

Then in Medjugorje she was on the shrine hill during a prayer ceremony. Afterward a man came up to her. He was Latvian and spoke no English, and he could communicate only via his friend, who translated. He told the woman that during the ceremony he'd been in the crowd below her. He said that he'd seen two glowing images on her head, one larger one near the base of her skull and a smaller one on her head's left side. He said that they were faces shining in her dark hair. He said that he believed he'd seen the face of Christ.

“So I just know now that they . . .” The woman gestures at her own bowed head. “They're gone for good. I'll die someday, but not from them.”

When the Mass ends I hurry to the city's castle ramparts where Mara and I agreed to meet. She's sitting on a giant black ship's anchor.

“What happened?” she asks. “You look keyed up.”

“There was a woman at church . . .” I try to tell the story, but it comes out puny and false.

“Did you believe her?”

“I don't know.”

Mara squeezes my hand, but looks off at some clouds. She knows that whether or not I believe the story, I want to, whereas she requires only the day and the sky and Dubrovnik and me.

•   •   •

BACK IN TÜBINGEN
I will myself not to fret about Mara's upcoming July visit. For a while I distract myself, because Tübingen is summer-beautiful. Each morning there is bright dew on the lawns around Waldhäuser Ost. The Neckar River is rapid with bubbling mountain runoff and every day is sunny. Graham and I have classes all day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but then, incredibly, a five-day weekend each week. We throw Frisbees and cook dinners with Audrey and Nicole.

And then Mara arrives. Her first night in town there's a giant party in a dorm called Studo. Beer flows and there's no air-conditioning and the dance floor is a packed, bouncing fire hazard. Mara's wearing a peasant-green dress and purple, pottery-made earrings I bought her and we dance and dance.

When “Love Shack” comes on, we tug each other down a hall. Clattering into an empty, echoing women's shower room, we sneak into a shower stall, kissing and groping. I hike up her dress and pull off her underwear and she leans back against the wall. I'm hard and ready and Mara's eyes on mine are warm with urging. I tell her that I love her.

I kiss her neck while the B-52s tell me to Just Fuck This Girl Already.

My arms are wrapped around her. My cock stays on the brink, uncommitted.

Go on
, I tell myself.
This is what lovers do!

I kiss her shoulders and neck. We stand there, with me wavering. I wish, God how I wish, that I were anyone but me, that I could believe anything but what I do. When Mara finally sighs, it's a death knell. I slump against the wall, my cheeks red-hot and emasculated.

“David, the fact that you can't . . . the fact that you
won't
 . . .it makes me feel like I disgust you.”

I taste something acidic in my mouth. I stand there naked, sorry. “Mara, please. Mar.”

She turns away and leans her temple to the tile wall, hanging her head, letting gravity do what it does to her hair. I see the river-rapids scar on her neck, vulnerable and crooked. I reach out and touch it.

“Help,” I say, like I have a thousand times. “I'm a ship caught in these river rapids. Somebody help.”

Mara whirls around, her eyes wide and afraid and she hugs me hard. “What's happening, honey?” she cries out. “What're we
doing
?”

Ending, I think.

Just weeks later we're back at Georgetown. Mara and I break up and she starts dating and sleeping with a Hawaiian guy named Akoni, and my fairy tale is done.

A MONTH LATER,
on an October morning of my senior year, I sit in the office of Father Roy Tillermacher and tell him that I want to become a Jesuit priest.

An hour beforehand I paced around on Copley Lawn, trading telepathies with inanimate objects.

I'm afraid
, I told a stone wall.

You're ready
, the wall assured me.
Take the leap
.
You'll still be you once you're a priest. Just a stronger you
.

I'll be lonely
, I thought toward the John Carroll statue.

God's grace will get you through
, the statue said.

Finally I closed my eyes.
All right, Lord
.
I love You. I'm all Yours
.

Father Tillermacher has an office just a couple buildings away from the Jesuit Residence, known as the Jez-Rez. The Jez-Rez is a red-brick building containing Jesuit apartments and the white-linen Jesuit dining hall, which students can visit only with a priest.

I'm confiding my vocation in Father Tillermacher rather than Father Prince. I still love Father Prince's Masses, but he scares me. He never swears or even gossips, and he's so emaciated that it looks like God took a knife to the guy and whittled him down. I love playing Ultimate Frisbee too much to want to look like that. I want to be strong. A warrior priest!

Father Tillermacher is more approachable. He's originally from South Dakota and has muscles and says “fuck” sometimes. As I sit with him, he asks me why I want to be a priest.

“I can't stop thinking about it. I feel like God is inviting me to do it for Him and I don't think I can live with myself if I say no. And because of . . .”

“Yes?”

The clock in his office tings and tongs.

Because of the dark path
, I think.
It's where I come from and it's where I'm headed and it makes no sense to live on it alone, but I have to. I have to empty my life and go there and worship God from there
.

“David?” asks Father Tillermacher. “You were saying?”

I clam up. I don't talk about the path with anyone. “I can't think of anything gutsier that I could do.”

Father Tillermacher raises his eyebrows. He asks if he can give me some Scripture passages to read and pray over with regard to my feelings. I agree. He asks if I've discussed my vocation with anyone else. I say no.

“Is this something your parents encouraged you towards? Giving a son to the priesthood can be a great honor for parents, but it can also be a pressure that they place on—”

“They've never suggested it.”

“You came to this on your own?”

I nod.

“And it's just between you and me, for now?”

“Yes, please,” I say. “For now.”

•   •   •

I LIVE IN
a house off campus with five other senior guys: the Alabama Boys (they're now a force of three—Mason, Daniel, and Austin—because Bob fell away somehow), and a painter and an actor. Our living room has ratty purple couches. The Alabama Boys and the painter have girlfriends, so any one of these couples can usually be found on the couches. On the walls are oil-on-canvas works that the painter made, inspired by notes we've left around the house. My favorite says
WHO DRANK MY FUCKING MILK?

I get home one evening to find Mason standing on one couch, rapping from memory the song “My Hooptie” by Sir Mix-A-Lot. Mason's girlfriend and the other Boys sit on the opposite couch, laughing. Cross-legged on the floor is Daphne Lowell, a pretty brunette from Vermont who shares a dorm room with Mason's girlfriend.

“Hey, cannibal!” Mason yells as I come in. “Get in here!”

I join the others. Mason stands astride the couch, glaring down at me. “I saw you today, going into that secret dining hall with What's-His-Face.”

“Father Tillermacher,” I say.

Mason folds his arms. “What goes on in that place, Schick? Isn't it suspicious that I, a lapsed Baptist, don't get invited, but you get the inner sanctum buffet?”

“Here we go.” Austin sighs. He and the others are used to watching me and Mason go at it.

I say, “Father Tillermacher's a really good guy.”

“They're
grooming
you, Schick!” Mason stomps his foot. “The Jesuits are fucking recruiting you and I won't let it happen.”

Daphne smiles to herself. Besides being beautiful and smart, she's the only other person in the room who was raised Catholic and still goes to Mass. She gets a kick out of it when Mason goes apeshit on me. Also her voice and laugh are wonderful and she might be my wife.

“Mason,” I say, “why is it so bad if I have a harmless lunch with—”

“
It's not harmless!
Those priests are fucking sneaky and you're my buddy!” He paces on the couch. “You're not like them, dammit, you're like
us
!” He stabs his finger around at our friends. “You can't be a Jesuit, Schick. Don't beat your head against that two-thousand-year-old wall. I want you to be free!”

I point a finger at him, too. “You want me to be free the way a Bolshevik wants a man to be free. Meaning, as long as I bail on believing in God and thinking that maybe that requires something of me . . . as long as I bail on all that,
then
I'm free.”

He looks like he'll leap down and punch me.

“Guys, enough,” says Austin.

Mason unclenches his fists. “Schick. If you become a priest—You. Will. Be. Miserable.” He storms off to his room.

A few weeks later Mara invites me to her apartment for dinner with her and Akoni, her Hawaiian boyfriend. All fall she's been inviting me to do things, but I've declined. I can still smell the skin over her ribs just by thinking of her, and I've jolted awake many nights after moving my lips toward what my sleeping body still trusts will be the nape of her neck beside me. This makes me sure that any post-breakup time spent with her will be torture, but Mara keeps calling me, insisting that we're friends who can stay close. Maybe she just wants to see if I'm okay. Finally, stupidly, I agree to dinner.

Mara says on the phone that we'll be having pasta
aglio e olio
, our old favorite. I arrive at her apartment with a bottle of Chianti. Mara greets me at the door, looking killer good in a green sweater and black stretch pants. Behind her stands a tall, beefy, black-haired guy who looks like maybe his ancestors sacrificed virgins in volcanoes. Mara and I hug awkwardly. She holds her hand out, indicating the Polynesian elephant in the room.

“Dave, have you met Akoni before? Akoni, Dave. Okay, Dave, you're on garlic duty, you're the pro at that, and I'll be on oil and pasta, and Akoni, you pour wine.”

We go to our stations, do our jobs. The meal goes fine until dessert, by which point Akoni is a bit drunk and stroking Mara's hair and sneering at me. I focus on my dessert, a dish of vanilla ice cream with crushed Skor bars. Mara and I ate this regularly sophomore year and I know that she's served it now to make me comfortable.

“So, Dave,” says Akoni, “you're pretty Catholic, yes?”

Mara clears her throat. “Don't ask him about that, please.”

I say, “I guess I am.”

Akoni keeps stroking Mara's hair. They're sitting across from me. His hand keeps a lazy rhythm on her, up and down, then burrows into her hair to where her river-rapids scar lies.

Don't touch that scar
, I think toward his hand.
It's hers and mine
.

“I hear that you take the Catholic stuff really seriously.” His sneer hasn't quit. “Like, you don't even believe in having full premarital sex.”

Mara slams her spoon down. “What did I say?! Don't ask him about that!”

“This has been wonderful.” I leave. Mara follows and catches me on the landing outside. She holds my arm.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers.

“What'd you think would happen? He's a guy, I'm a guy . . .”

“He's heard so much about you from me that this is hard for him.”

This is hard for
him?
“I should go.”

“David—I saw you yesterday talking to that cute Asian girl from the nursing school.”

I have sweat behind my knees. I wonder if a sharpened Skor bar could be stabbed through Akoni's eyeball, into his brain.

“She seems great. You were making her laugh, and Reston tells me he's seen her going to Mass, so she probably believes the same things that—”

“Mara, don't.”

“Ask her out, honey.” She squeezes my wrist. “Please, I need you to be happy. Call her, okay?”

We say a tense good-night. I go to the campus pub and drink and dance. “Tenderness” by General Public plays, and I move with the beat, stomping my feet on Akoni's face, which is really just the dance floor. Swaying couples around me look pissed, but I keep it up. “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals comes on and I morph to the beat. My father's father was a solo flyer on dance floors, too. He, Grampa Joe the farmer, would escort my grandmother to hoedowns in barns. She'd head home early, but he'd stay and whirl in the sawdust till the fiddlers quit.

I stumble home from the pub at two a.m., sweaty and chilly and weaving along the Reservoir Road sidewalk. The wind stings. I stare at trees and shadows.

One sentence, Lord
, I pray.
Just talk to me once. Tell me I'm moving in the right direction
.

I hear nothing. The wind whips. My armpits are raw with sweat. When I get home I collapse in my clothes on my bed. The room spins. A knock comes on my door.

“Who's there?” I croak.

“The Bolshevik.” Mason lets himself in. I aim my face at the wall, not looking at him. He pulls off my shoes and tosses them, then sits on the floor near my head.

“Are you drunk, Schick?”

“Yes.”

I'm still facing away from him.

“So . . . I guess dinner went well.”

I tell him what Akoni said.

“Schick, you know that Mara's probably still in love with you, right? And that you're definitely still in love with her?”

I nod. Mason sighs. My eyes adjust to the dark and I see on my wall the things I've hung there, a crucifix, and a poster for the vampire film
The Hunger
. I wonder why people my age have to put shit all over their walls that says
This is who I am!

Mason says, “Can you tell me again why you stopped fucking Mara? You're afraid of knocking her up? You're afraid of abortion?”

I close my eyes. “That's part of it. But mostly . . .” I pause. “You think I'm a simpleminded papist. Why do you care?”

“I'm your buddy.”

The spins get to me and I open my eyes. On my movie poster of
The Hunger
, standing over a corpse, is David Bowie in a tailored dark suit and sunglasses. Also crouching over the corpse, licking blood from her lips, is a sexy Catherine Deneuve.

“I can't fully fuck someone I'm not married to,” I say to the wall. “It taps a part of me meant only for God. If I married Mara, then that part of me would
become
fully meant for her, with God's approval, and I could make love to her completely. Please don't tease me about all this tonight.”

“I'm not.” He's quiet for a minute. “So today you had that Pixies song ‘Debaser' blaring in here and you were singing it crazy loud.”

“Sorry.”

“You sing it a lot. Tell me why you're so into it.”

“Mace . . .”

“Just tell me.”

I think about it. I turn to face him. “Even though it mentions creepy stuff like sliced eyeballs, the song isn't creepy, it's just fast and great. And I love how Black Francis and Kim Deal sing together. It's fucked-up but perfect.”

Mason is nodding agreement.

I say, “I wish I could sing with someone like that. Or write something like that.”

“News flash, buddy. We're both going to grow up to be debasers and that's a good thing.” He stands. “Go to sleep.”

He leaves and closes the door.

•   •   •

A MONTH LATER
I'm in Father Tillermacher's office. We've discussed some Scripture passages and now he's showing me pictures of Jesuit novitiate houses around the United States. For a man to enter the Jesuits, he has to apply to a Jesuit province and upon acceptance begin novitiate training, living in community with other novices, studying, ministering in charity, and firming up his commitments to poverty, chastity, and obedience. Father Tillermacher is urging me to apply to the New York province since I'm a native New Yorker.

“And how was your Agape retreat?” he asks.

Last weekend I attended a campus ministry retreat in the Virginia mountains. Unlike my silent retreat freshman year, which was about a personal relationship with God, this retreat was social, focused on community. Thirty Georgetown undergrads attended. There were spiritual discussions, but also touch-football games and skits.

“It was pretty good.”

“You're lying,” says Father Tillermacher.

“It was somewhat dorky.”

“Why?”

On the retreat I met many wonderful people who weren't dorky. But somehow there was dorkiness in the air. “Someone kept playing ‘Shower the People' on guitar and people sang along.”

“So?” Father Tillermacher looks like he's waiting for me to display something a Jesuit novice will need, something like insight.

I spill what I feel is the truth. “‘Shower the People' sucks. Jesus never showered the people. He healed them and scared them. He was gritty and dangerous and never a dork. Agape was dorky. It was too . . .” I'm not sure of the word. Too spiffy. Too upbeat. Too bubbly-safe. “I don't think I'm above a retreat like that, but when I was on it I couldn't feel God's danger. I couldn't find the Bottom, the . . . the dark of God.”