The Dark Path (5 page)

Austin rubs my shoulders like I'm a prizefighter. “Let's hear it, Schick. Out of all the girls in the world, Who Would You Do?”

I drink my MGD, panicking.

Austin says, “Pick a girl on campus. A first-year, someone we all know.”

“I . . . um . . .” My mind gallops. “Sitting Still,” my favorite R.E.M. song, comes on. I like the Alabama Boys, but I'm nervous around them. They seem to belong to one another, and the beer and music belong to them, too. They seem in control of the ways they enjoy the world and I feel an opposite way. When I drink beer, like the MGD I'm holding, I belong to that beer while I'm drinking it. The same conquering thing happens to me when I hear “Sitting Still” or watch sunlight in the raindrops hanging from leaves on the Healy Lawn oak tree. The beauty of the world can own me.

“Our judges need an answer,” says Bob.

“Um, Sara Draper,” I say. “I'd do Sara Draper.”

Bob snorts. “That flat-chested punk rocker from Darnell dorm?”

“With the dyed-pink bangs?” asks Daniel. “Why her?”

“Because . . .” I think it through. Sara Draper has elfin cheekbones. When I see her on campus, my heart asks,
Are you my wife, Sara?

“I can't explain,” I say.

“Damn straight you can't,” says Bob. “Pick a girl with some curves and some tits.”

Mason punches Bob's thigh. “Let Schick want who he wants.”

A week later I'm out on Copley Lawn, next to Healy Lawn. I gape around at creation, grateful to be healthy. I do this a lot now that I'm out of my sickbed. There are crimson leaves on the trees, and frost on the statue of John Carroll, the university's founder.

“Hey,” says a voice. “Hey, you're Dave, right?”

I look to one side and there stands Sara Draper with her nutty pink hair. She's smiling, drinking black coffee from a white cup. I almost touch her to make sure she's not a joke.

“You're Dave, right? I'm Sara. You sit near me in Map of the Modern World class. You had that awful mono, right? Are you feeling better?”

“Better,” I manage to confirm.

“Listen, there's an M Street club I was hoping to go to Sunday night. Supposed to have great dancing. I thought we could go together. What do you think?”

I'm floored. I think,
I can't believe this is happening, Sara. You are pink and strange and I adore your cheekbones
.

“Church,” I blurt. My voice is a squeak of panic. “I, um . . . I'm sorry, but I can't go to the club because I go to church on Sunday nights. The late Mass.”

Sara gives me a look, knowing as well as I that there are about thirty Sunday daytime Masses I could opt for. “You mysterious Catholics.” She smiles and walks off.

The Alabama Boys holler at me in my head.
Chase her! Tackle her! Drill her, and keep drilling her!

I almost take a step in Sara's direction, then I don't.

•   •   •

THE PRIESTHOOD ACHE
is a daily need, a fear, a confusion.

I want to be a good person. In my heart there's a path, a private way. It's a mysterious path, hard to discern, shifting with shadows, but it leads to the truth. It leads to less me and more God. It's the path of a man, not a boy. Growing up, watching my father, I learned that you have to be a man and know what your strength is. His strength, my father's, is green grass, morning Mass, our family, and General Motors. My strength is green grass, haikus, running, and pining for girls.

But my strongest strength, I think, is darkness. The solitary path. The Priesthood Ache. And the more that I know this, the more I want to look away from it, walk away, ignore it. Because I suspect that this path will have terrible demands. Costs.

•   •   •

IN FEBRUARY
I get set up to attend the Sadie Hawkins dance with Mindy Falippis, the roommate of Daisy McKay. Mindy is in Georgetown's nursing school. She is fragile and emaciated, sort of like me, which is probably why Daisy and the Alabama Boys set us up. Under no circumstances, though, am I to make a major move on Mindy. Daisy tells me this in the New South stairwell before the dance.

“Mindy is special,” Daisy warns me. “So behave yourself.”

I stand itching under the collar of the tuxedo Mason loaned me. Unlike me, many of the guys on my floor own tuxedos, like junior James Bonds.

“Listen,” Daisy continues, “Mindy wants you to sleep in her bed tonight, and you may. It'll be cute and nice for you both. But if you try more than a kiss, I'll hear about it and I'll castrate you where you stand. Are we clear?”

Daisy's lecture is unnecessary. Mindy and I not only don't kiss, we spend the night lying side by side on her bed, both fully clothed beneath the blanket. Mindy keeps her arms and legs ramrod straight, never touching me, while I stare at the ceiling until dawn.

A couple weeks later I have my only other “date” of the year. It happens late one weekend night when my roommate's away. I'm lying in bed when a large, drunken girl named Tabitha stumbles into my room, shuts the door, and lies on top of me. Her breath is bright with whiskey. I barely know her, but she shoves her tongue in my mouth.

“Missed you, Joey,” she slurs.

“Tabitha, it's me, Dave. I'm not Joey, I'm Dave. This is Dave and Adam's room. You have the wrong room.”

I try to squirm out from under her, but her body has gone relaxed and heavy on me, and my arms and legs are still fatigued from mono.

“Kiss me, Joey.” Tabitha gives me more mouth-to-mouth. She's a girl and I'm lonely, so the kissing is nice. But I break my mouth away once more.

“I'm not Joey, I'm Dave.”

“Blow you, Joey?”

Oh, my God. Her hand fumbles at my crotch. She unzips me, which no girl has ever done. Her head moves south.

Look, Lord!
I think.
Trouble on Jupiter! Go check it out, Lord, we're all good here on Earth for a few minutes . . .

A second later Tabitha is snoring on my stomach, out cold. I wait, hoping that she'll have some miracle revival. When she doesn't, I struggle out from under her. I find the freshman phone directory and call her roommate to come pick her up.

•   •   •

ONE NIGHT I'M
in my dorm room talking with Mason, the Alabama Boy with whom I'm closest. We've shown each other poems that we've written. Tonight we're talking about books and authors.

“What about Kerouac?” I ask him.

Mason snorts. “Too in love with himself.”

“Hunter S. Thompson?”

“Same.”

We are both big on Ken Kesey's
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. Mason loves the Southern giants, Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. As for me, I'm in love with chapter three of
The Great Gatsby
, the one about Gatsby's mansion party on a shimmering summer night. I love that party so much that I need it to be real. I need to attend it, to hear the “yellow cocktail music”
that plays at it. I tell Mason this.

He nods agreement. “We're both going to write like that, Schick.”

“We are, huh.”

“Yep. And it's going to get us laid.”

Suddenly a hissing sound comes from the direction of my closed door to the dorm hall. A muffled voice on the other side of the door says, “Here you go, Jew.”

A large liquid puddle spreads across my linoleum floor. The liquid is streaming in from under the door crack.

Mason points. “Is that piss?”

I leap up, but I'm barefoot and it takes me a second to step around the puddle and open the door. Whoever just pissed on my threshold has disappeared into the stairwell and is racing away, cackling.

Mason says, “Pike . . . that Nazi asshole.”

Brett has calmed down recently, but not Pike. Lately he's been shaving off the eyebrows of guys who have passed out drunk in our lounge. It happened to my friend Rod and he wants revenge.

Meanwhile there's piss on my floor. Adam is in Bethesda visiting family, so Mason helps me clean up, and an hour later we're in my room again, talking, with the door closed. This time rather than hissing we hear retching, and then puke leaks in under the door crack.

Mason stares at it. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I fling the door open and there's the shit-faced Pike, his fingers shoved down his throat, purging onto my doorstep. He grins and runs down the hall. I chase and tackle him. When I flip him over and kneel on his chest, he lolls his head and pukes more. It pools under his neck as I grab his shoulders and shake him.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I yell in his face.

His skull bounces in vomit as I shake him. His eyes are spidered with red glee and hatred.

“The Jew-mate,” he whispers.

Our RA pulls me off Pike. Mason and I explain what happened and the RA orders Pike to clean up the vomit. Pike lurches his way back to my door. His mopping efforts last seconds, then he collapses giggling in the puke, rolling around in it. Mason and I grab his ankles, drag him next door, and heave him into his room.

•   •   •

AT MASS ONE
night, Father Prince says that during our upcoming spring break, Campus Ministry will host a five-day silent retreat based on the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits' founder.

“The retreat will take place,” Father Prince says, “in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. It's remote and quiet. Many of you usually head to Fort Lauderdale, and I know what happens on that sort of vacation.” He looks out at us in the pews. “But maybe some of you want a different kind of vacation. Maybe some of you feel called to . . .”

Is he looking at me?
He is, isn't he?

“. . . to something higher,” says Father Prince.

I go to the Campus Ministry office. The retreat brochure says that the vow of silence involves no talking for five days, except for one short session per day with your priest advisor. It says that the silence might allow us to meet and hear God in new ways.

That hooks me. I want to hear God's Voice irrationally, totally, the way I want sex. The whispers I hear when I pray at nightly Mass make me impatient to move even closer to God, to hear more of Him. I twist my soul on some days to wring the Priesthood Ache out of it (
Priests never fuck!
I warn myself.
They rarely floss! Their breath stinks!
). But I can't shake it.

So I go on the retreat. I'm the only freshman who does. The retreat house is a country estate in the Pennsylvania hills. There are austere hallways and bedrooms inside, and outside is a footpath through forestland.

The priests running the retreat give talks. They tell us to imagine our way into Christ's life, to imagine that we're drinking wine at the Cana wedding feast, or seeing Lazarus walk out of his tomb. We're told to be specific in our imagining . . . How strong is the wine? What shade is Lazarus's skin? After such reflection, we're told to clear our thinking and go walking, to wait and see how God might make His presence known to us.

I do the reflections and walk on the footpath. It's late winter and early spring at once. The branches of trees are sleeved in ice, but the smell of growing things pushes up from the grass and shrubs. I breathe in the grounds. The footpath isn't as bewitching as my path back home, but it has good shadows. The silence—which I've observed for two days—is cool and clear around me and inside me. It reminds me of running, the silence does, because when I run I hone myself down to just flesh and breath, and this silence is a honing too, a switching off, an emptying out, an invitation to God to come fill that emptiness with Himself.

But I still haven't heard His Voice and it frustrates me.

On the third day we're each scheduled to meet with our assigned spiritual advisor for confession. I'm paired with Father John Wilhelm, a philosophy professor with crazy black hair. For the past two days I've said little in our sessions. In confession, though, I'll have to talk. I'm nervous. I haven't been to private confession in almost ten years.

In his talks to us Father Wilhelm has been serious but whimsical. So I write a list of my sins to bring to confession. I make it serious but whimsical.

The priest and I sit in chairs in a quiet denlike room.

“What's that you're holding?” he asks.

“A list of my sins. I'd like to read it if that's okay.”

He nods. I begin to read. My list, arranged in two columns, is as follows:

I get maybe thirty seconds into reading aloud when an old feeling comes over me. A headachy, nauseous feeling. I stop speaking and stare at the notebook in my lap, the list. A point of pressure beads up in my forehead, above my right eye.

“Keep going,” says the priest.

I can't. My list is bullshit. None of it is a lie, but it's bullshit anyway. It is nifty and pastel colored. It is bubbly-safe, a dilly.

Some part of me snaps its fingers in my face.
Quit fucking around
, it says. And then
pop
, one strong memory is in my head.