The Dark Path (6 page)

“David?” asks Father Wilhelm.

I sit there, caught in the memory. When I was a McQuaid junior, a senior named Jerry had an accident one spring day in the parking lot. He was riding on the hood of a buddy's car while the buddy steered around the lot. Jerry slid off the hood by accident, hit his head on the pavement, and died before nightfall. Though I'd been in the musical that spring with Jerry, he and I had never spoken. I went to his funeral with everyone from school.

After the funeral, a girl I knew from the Catholic girls' school near us—along with some of her girlfriends—picked me up and drove me to Lake Ontario for some distraction. And despite not having known Jerry and despite feeling no true sorrow at his death, I manufactured tears and hung my head during that drive to the lake. I felt fine, but to make the girls in that car cry and pat me with caring hands and whisper to me that I'd be all right, I put on a show of grief.

“David?” asks the priest. “Are you all right?”

“Father, I . . .”

Maybe it was a tiny sin. But something like airplane turbulence is jolting my stomach. What I did wrong overwhelms me. A real human being, a boy like me, a son to two loving and devastated parents, died, and I capitalized on his death to boost my ego.

A sob lodges in my throat. I am so sorry that I can't meet the priest's eyes. Inside me, all the items on my list get swallowed up in God's darkness,
whoosh
, they're gone. I'm bawling, my chest heaving hard. It's partly relief, because I do suddenly feel forgiven. But I also feel like some cosmic vacuum cleaner just got turned on. I feel how entirely my dark God wants my love and wants to pull out of me the truth of who I am.

I drop my diary on the floor. Sobs rack through me.

Stop it,
I tell myself. But I can't, and it's scary. As I cry, Father Wilhelm watches me in a way that I can't read at first. When I finish weeping, he hugs me.

“Schickler, there's not a competition going, but man, what a confession.”

Afterward I walk alone on the footpath outside. My eyes are raw from crying.

Wait,
I think.
What was that? That was real, but I couldn't steer it, and wait, wait, wait . . .

•   •   •

DEEPLY SPOOKED, I
hurry back to Georgetown almost as fast as I ran from the chapel that night last fall. I need a break from God, I decide. I need the Alabama Boys and springtime. And they're here for me. The weather warms, girls switch from jeans to skirts, and on Copley Lawn the cherry blossoms explode like sweet pink redemption. On my dorm hall another brand of redemption arrives one night when Pike is found passed out drunk in the lounge. Rod and Adam are summoned, and they go to work.

I don't know about it till the next morning when I'm coming back down the hall from the showers and I see a creature emerging from Pike and Brett's room.

“Whoa,” I say.

The creature is wincing like he's hungover. His eyebrows have been shaved off, along with most of his hair. Tiny tufts of hair have been left on his skull like stubborn black crabgrass. Rod has also used black indelible marker to draw all over the bald parts. There are dark mushroom clouds and dark grim reapers and the giant words
FUCK
and
CUNT
and
I HAD THIS COMING
.

“Hi, Pike,” I say.

He looks down and away as he passes.

A night later I go with the Alabama Boys to a house party off campus. Once we get there, the Boys melt off into the arms of girls. I find myself in a crowded kitchen. One guy is passing around giant plastic cups of Tanqueray gin and tonic to some girls.

“Want some gin?” he asks me.

“No thanks. The juniper berry is the worst kind of berry.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

I think about it. “I don't know. Give me some gin.”

Soon I'm zippy on Tanqueray. I wander outside. On the back lawn stands a giant garbage can filled with rocket fuel, which is liquor mixed with cherry Kool-Aid packets. R.E.M.'s “Gardening at Night” plays on a stereo and I drink rocket fuel, feeling the springtime in my blood.

An hour later I'm somehow hanging out of a second-story bedroom window of the house, holding on to the window ledge with my feet. I'm not sure how I got here—a dare?—but I look down at the crowd on the grass. They're all walking on their heads. When I try to pull myself back up into the house, I can't. The crowd below drags the trash can of rocket fuel over underneath me.

“Go for it,” someone calls.

“Into the drink!”

“Cliff dive, motherfucker!”

I try again to pull myself up into the window and can't.

“Help,” I yell, scared now. “Someone help!”

Two guys I don't know scurry into the house and find the upstairs bedroom I'm in. Each grabs one of my feet. They strain, trying to reel me up and in. The crowd claps and shouts.

“Cliff-dive-cliff-dive!”

My right foot slips in its holder's grasp. “Don't let go,” I beg.

Then I see Pike in the crowd below. He's not cheering, just looking up at me, his eyes locked on mine. With the mushroom clouds and the
F
UCK YOUs
on his scalp and the leer on his face, he looks like the ringmaster of some apocalyptic circus. He's grotesque but riveting, almost marvelous, and I can't look away from him, and his eyes say,
You have this coming, too. A reckoning. Just wait.

BY SEPTEMBER
of sophomore year I'm all but certain that I'll join the Jesuits. As priests go, they're a damned smart bunch. The ones that teach at Georgetown run an impressive gamut. There is the Mystic, Father Prince—my favorite—but there's also the Bodybuilder, Father Kelleher, who teaches acting and whom girls around campus call Father What-a-Waste because of his good looks and huge pecs. Then there's the Cut-Up, Father Raminski, who teaches economics and who gasps and falls on the floor, twitching like a heart attack victim, when students give especially stupid answers to his questions. These are urbane, funny men, very different from Father Anselm, the nifty priest I grew up with. Jesuits travel the world and some say “fuck” a lot and I often see Kelleher and Raminski sitting in the front-window table at Georgetown's finest restaurant, eating rack of lamb on the university's dime. I could get used to rack of lamb.

But I'm keeping my Priesthood Ache secret from everyone until I'm sure.

To hide my feelings of priestly vocation and to advertise myself as a Cool and Normal Guy, I start wearing a tie-dyed poncho everywhere I go. It's midnight blue with long sleeves and psychedelic ribs of color radiating out from the solar plexus. When I walk around campus, hippie types come up to pet my sleeves and give me mellow kudos.

One day, a week into school, I walk down O Street with an actor friend. I'm feeling tough and radiant not only because I'm in my poncho but because all summer long I painted houses back home in Rochester, so I'm tan and I have two rugged-looking scabs on my jaw where a coworker's electric sander grazed me.

The actor nods at a row house up ahead. “I need to stop in here and say hi to someone.”

The sun is shining and making my jaw scabs tingle. “I'll wait outside,” I say.

“She'll probably give us beer.”

“I'll come in with you.”

We go into the row house, which is tall, but so squished and narrow across that it looks lifted from a Roald Dahl story. The girl-who-will-probably-give-us-beer is sitting on her couch, looking through a box of mix tapes and laughing to herself about something. She's barefoot in jeans and a plain white T-shirt, with waist-long straight and bright red hair. Her head is down, studying a tape cover. I can't see her face. Not having acknowledged us yet, she goes on laughing and the laugh is a low, brimming murmur that makes it sound like something is cooking and warming inside her.

The actor says, “Dave, this is Mara Kincannon.”

“Hi,” I say.

The girl looks up, smiling. She has pale, clear skin and her blasting green eyes knock my breath back down to my stomach. When her glance finds mine, her smile falters. The air between us gets goose bumps.

“Hey,” she says softly.

The actor watches us staring at each other. “Uh-oh,” he says.

•   •   •

THE HOUSE I
grew up in was literally packed full of girls. Almost every weekend my two elder sisters had girlfriends sleep over, often for huge slumber parties. The guests were usually dancers, my sisters' fellow students from pointe, jazz, or tap. In our living room they'd push their pink and purple sleeping bags and all our furniture against walls and then choreograph and perform routines until three in the morning. In the years when I was five to seven or so, I was stuffed into leotards and thrown into these performances. I was given cameos while “Hey, Big Spender” or “Crocodile Rock” played on the stereo. If I made the girls happy, I would be group hugged. If I screwed up, I'd be banished to my bedroom, where I would grab my notebook and write disgruntled haikus:

You guys are unfair.

I am a good jazz dancer.

Let me back downstairs.

If Olympic gymnastics were on TV, our living room became a hushed church, with the girls and I in pajamas watching the screen breathlessly. The night in 1976 when Nadia Comaneci scored the Olympics' first perfect ten on the uneven bars in Montreal, my sisters and company wept for joy. Misty-eyed, I yelled to my father, “She nailed the landing, Daddy, oh, she nailed it!”

The Miss America pageant was a high holiday. The year I was ten, there must've been two dozen girls sleeping over on pageant night. They were twelve and thirteen years old now, and bitterly critical during the swimsuit competition:

“Gemma, check out Miss Oregon's suit. It looks like our costumes from ‘Off the Wall.'”

“You're right. Sick. I hated my butt in that costume.”

“We all hated your butt.”

“Miss Florida has roots.”

“Miss Delaware's voice is too nasal.”

“Miss Nebraska has stork thighs. Gross.”

I gazed at the TV screen, frowning. I thought Miss Nebraska's thighs were wonderful. Plus she'd played the flute well. Plus, I hadn't hated Gemma's butt in her “Off the Wall” costume. I'd really appreciated her butt.

When these girls hugged me, their hair smelled like rain and strawberries. When they shrieked at one another, it meant they were angry or, more often, bored. They twirled around me year after year, and they did my face up like Ziggy Stardust with rouge and eye shadow.

Outside my house, close to me always, was the dark path and God. But inside my house, just as close, was the other great mystery: chicks. One autumn Saturday night when I was ten, I came home from a walk on the path. I'd been out talking to God about infinity. Infinity really screwed with my head and I was still going over some details of it in my mind with the Lord, getting a little pissed off at Him about it, as I came into my house and took off my boots and walked down into the basement.

Dear God
, I thought,
if You really exist outside of time and space, that is messed up, because You haven't given us brains that can comprehend anything outside of time and space, and so haven't You made it hard for us to want infinity with You since we can't even imagine what infinity feels or looks like?

I rounded a corner and found a dozen thirteen-year-old girls in nightgowns lying on top of one another on the carpeted floor, in two stacks, six to a stack, all of them laughing.

“We're seeing which stack will fall first,” shouted someone.

“David, have you read
Mommie Dearest
?”

“David, push them over.”

“No, push
them
over.”

“David, sing ‘Rainbow Connection.' I knooow it's your favorite.”

“Hey, David,” said my sister's friend Tina Cosgrove, who already had an amazing figure. “I hear you like Beth Vandermalley.”

The other girls made teasing
Oooo
sounds at me.

I tried to defend myself. “Oh yeah, Tina, I hear you like Phil Kincaid.”

Everyone shut up. Tina burst into tears. Her pile of girls fell and they all started patting her back.

“David, what the hell?”

“Yeah, David, that was mean.”

Wait,
I thought.
What? Not fair!

Phil Kincaid was apparently a touchy subject. He'd spoken to Tina on Thursday but not on Friday. Disaster.

“Go away, David,” said one girl, “you've done enough.”

So I went into my room, my thoughts caught between infinity and nightgowns.
Dear Lord
, I prayed.
Tina Cosgrove is psychotic. And hot. Is she my wife?

•   •   •

MARA IS
a Georgetown sophomore like I am. She's from a small town near Kittery, Maine, and I happily suspect Catholicism in her family when she tells me that she has four sisters back home.

I start showing up at her row house each afternoon. One day we sit on the couch and listen to an album by Joan Armatrading (whom Mara worships). Mara taps the scabs on my jaw.

“Where'd you get those?”

“Knife fight,” I say.

She rolls her eyes.

“Lightsaber fight,” I say.

“Come on . . .”

“One night last summer I broke into someone's mansion. There was a guard dog Doberman and he lunged at my face. He was out for blood.”

She laughs her murmuring laugh and I want it never to stop. Her laugh makes me gutsy. It short-circuits my shyness.

“And who lived in this mansion?” says Mara.

“A girl.” I bump her knee with mine. “This amazing girl I just had to get to.”

She's sharing her row house with five girlfriends. It feels like back home.

On an October Saturday, Mara and her housemates throw a party. I arrive in my poncho. There are sixty revelers crowded into a living room meant for twenty. The Housemartins blare from the stereo, and Mara and some others teach me the drinking game Zoom Schwartz Profigliano. It's a weird blast of a game, where keeping or breaking eye contact with people makes you drink or not drink . . . but mostly drink. Mara matches me shot for shot with the Jose Cuervo and by midnight, she and I are plastered and making out in the kitchen.

“Hold up a second,” she says.

Leaning back against the counter, she removes her T-shirt and bra and stands topless before me. There are foodstuffs on the counter behind her, so what I see from left to right is: jar of flour, jar of sugar, Mara's naked breast, Mara's other naked breast, bottle of olive oil, box of Froot Loops.

Are you my wife?
I think, looking at Mara.
Are you?

She murmurs her laugh and we kiss again. Minutes later we've abandoned the party and we're in her upstairs bedroom. We climb onto the upper level of her bunk bed and fool around, holding things at third base. But a week later, on a night after a black-tie ball, she and I are naked in my Copley dorm room bed. I lie on top of her and keep my face buried in her neck as my body finds its way inside hers.

She grips me close. I crush my hips into hers and kiss her neck and come seconds later. We roll away from each other, both panting slightly.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” She has her back to me.

I wonder whether she was a virgin, too. The waterfall length of her hair fascinates me and I pet it. When it falls to one side, I see a scar at the back base of her neck. The scar has three small bands of raised skin like ridges on a washboard. I run my fingers over these ridges and try to make a joke.

“Help,” I make my fingers say out loud. “I'm a ship caught in these river rapids. Somebody help.”

Mara doesn't laugh.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper, removing my hand. “What gave you that scar?”

“I don't know you well enough to tell you yet.”

“Oh.”

I go into my bathroom and sit trembling on the toilet.
Wait
, I think.
What? We can fuck, but I can't ask about scars? Not fair!

I'm confused, flushed drunk with longing for her, and afraid. I decide that intercourse with her was a one-time thing, a mistake, a sin that will never happen again.

I don't see her for four days, but I think of her constantly. On the fourth night, I go drinking with Mason at an underground pub, The Tombs. We have good fake ID.

“You gonna visit her on the way home?” Mason asks.

“Hell, no.”

“Dude, you know you want to see her.”

I drain my mug of Rolling Rock.
David,
I think,
you're on a path toward solitude, toward God. You don't need distraction from that.

Mason laughs. “You're totally going to her place.”

“Fuck off, Mace.”

We split a pitcher of Sam Adams and then it's two in the morning, and I'm weaving alone down the O Street sidewalk, or sidewalks, since there appear to be three of them. When I get to Mara's row house, her front door has been blown open by wind, which she told me happens sometimes. I chivalrously step inside and close the door behind me, because what if some drunk guy saw it open and just wandered in?

“Hello?” I call.

There's no answer, and this saddens me. I miss Mara. I have to tell her something vital, though I can't recall what. When I crawl into bed with her, I'll remember.

I fumble up the stairs and pause on the landing. There's one bedroom on the left, another on the right. I enter the latter, knowing that the top bunk in the far right corner holds Mara. I stand squinting in the dark at her bed, trying to make out her shape or the shape of her stuffed-animal toucan, Gabriel Puffalump. Her upper bunk looks higher than it did when we hooked up in it last week.

I cross the room and start climbing up to her. There are dresses and clothes hangers in my way as I climb, and I swat them aside. The hangers clatter.

A female voice gasps in the dark below. “Oh my God, who's there?”

I arrive on Mara's bunk. She's not there and neither is Gabriel Puffalump. Instead there are textbooks and women's hats. In a rush I throw these off the bunk, worried that Mara is trapped beneath them. The textbooks slap the floor below.

“What the fuck?” cries the same female voice. The voice isn't Mara's. “Who's there? What the fuck!”

“Where's Mara?” I finish clearing books off and lie down and close my eyes. The bunk feels hard, like a plain wooden slat, and it's thinner across than I remember, and there's no mattress, no blankets, no comfort.

“Mara,” I wail.

“Wait . . . Dave?!” The female voice turns accusatory. “Dave Schickler?”

“Mara's not here,” I moan.

“Of course she isn't! You're on the top shelf of my closet, you fucking idiot!”

The slat gives way under me. I fall through clothes hangers and hit the floor. Lights come on. I'm at the feet of Mara's housemate Melanie. She's standing in a long green nightshirt with her hands on her hips. There are textbooks and hats everywhere.

“You're in the wrong room. And you just scaled my closet. Are you on drugs?”

Mara comes in from the hall, from the direction of her bedroom, the one I thought I'd entered. She looks sleepy and beautiful. “Dave?”