Gospel (9 page)

Lucy was led from the tavern, up the narrow alley and into Radcliffe Square, which had been her main landmark. The scenery took a moment to settle when she looked at it—she was really hammered. The dome of the Radcliffe Camera and the spires of All Souls were surreal in a bluish light from the moon; there were millions of stars. She really ought to get to bed. Go back to the guest room and drink five glasses of water, take some aspirin.

“You're the first American I think I've ever talked to. I don't even like your bloody country. Not one decent band anymore.”

“Who do you like?” asked Lucy, stung at having her country abused.

Duncan named half a dozen one-indie-hit wonders and Lucy lamely said she'd heard of a few of the bands but didn't know them well. Her last British record purchase was a Phil Collins cassette.

“Well, you can have him.”

Lucy appraised Duncan out of the corner of her eye. You suppose this guy
likes
her? Lucy thought it over. A little short for her, a bit rough looking. But suddenly the idea of a rough boyfriend from the mean northern streets appealed; those late-movie British black-and-white '50s Kitchen Sink films starring Laurence Harvey replayed in her head. But she'd just met him! Well, she'd have to say no, cute accent or not. Well, why would she
have
to say no, come to think of it.

“Saw you talking to those wankers,” he said, meaning Ursula and her friends. “God, I despise Braithwaite. Sodding snob-collection of public school gits…”

Lucy asked, if he disliked Oxford so much, why he was here.

“Maths. And they give me money to come, so I couldn't say nah. Fuckin' boring subject. Can't help it that I'm good at it, now can I? Better keep me voice down,” he added, as some rowdy young men passed by across the street, “if I don't want me head kicked in.”

Lucy deciphered as they walked. “There are students who'd beat you up just for how you talk?”

“No, the townies. Pulverize any bloke from outa toown, they will. Beat up the students. Not that ya blame 'em there. Not that ya blame 'em at all. We're a-taking our life in our hands coming out now; England's played Sweden tonight, qualifying round.”

“Soccer?” Lucy guessed.

“Aye, football.” Duncan surveyed the city streets, dead from pub-closing time after eleven. “Ah, shouldna worried. Closed down like a friggin' typical tomb, Oxford is.” He scanned the High Street. “Now the van is usually here.”

They decided to try St. Aldate's Street in front of Christ Church College, imperious as a prison, heavily presiding in the spotlights.

“But mostly,” Duncan rambled on, “Oxford's fuckin' boring. Ah, if ye're like Ursula in the Tessa the Bloody Cow set and made of fuckin' dosh, it's allreeght for ya, otherwise this town's got fuck-all for titillation.”

They spotted the van:
AHMED'S DONER KEBAB.

Lucy approached the simple vending truck with its giant slab of lamb meat on a vertical spit. There was a line of three people waiting—a skinhead, a drunken damned-looking young man sniveling sadly in a stained tux, a pink-faced burly guy in a sweatshirt blazoned with the Guinness logo. All drunk. What an odd collection of humanity is Oxford, thought Lucy. Duncan guided her through the kebab-ordering process. Ahmed himself, a friendly Pakistani with bad skin, parted a pita bread and filled it with salad, tomatoes, onions, hot sauce, ground cheese, and some slivers from the giant cylinder of meat. Lucy gave him two pounds in return.

Lucy and Duncan talked some more and ate their kebabs as they walked back to the Braithwaite gate. Lucy heard herself tell Duncan some outrageous things … she knocked her age from twenty-eight down to twenty-three when Duncan said he was twenty-one … she said something about being Dr. O'Hanrahan's assistant, traveling the world over, chasing lost gospels across the Middle East … she had invited Duncan to come to visit in America and she said she'd help him pay for it.…

“You allreeght, lass?” he asked her, looking concerned.

Lucy discovered she was sitting on a damp stone wall. She felt worse than bad.

“You're gonna toss that kebab, I can tell.”

“I'm perfectly fine,” she said.

The last thing she said before she blanked out.

J
UNE
22
ND

Lucy awakened and felt ill. There were bells making a lot of unnecessary noise, too many for too long in the established Oxford fashion. She turned over and closed her eyes hoping she might retrieve her sleep.

No.

How does O'Hanrahan do it? she wondered, slowly lifting a hand to her pounding head. Apertifs in the paneled room, all that wine, the Headbanger at the Turf, and that kebab thing she ate … My God. Did she throw up in front of the one cute British guy that had given her five minutes of time? Lord, speak to me and assure me no, no …

(Yes, yes.)

Okay, she decided, maybe I'll just die in this bed. It was the most she'd drunk since a Theology Department party her freshman year. No wonder they close the pubs at eleven, she thought, if this is how they drink
until
eleven. It must be noon, thought Lucy.

(It's 7:45
A.M.
)

After a merciless visit to the toilet to be sick, she dragged herself achingly to the bed, hoping to still her stomach and the revolving room. Two hours later she awoke again, only then knowing she had slept again. She dared herself to raise her head, and finally put feet to floor and stood up slowly.

From that act, Lucy risked standing on her bed to peep out her high window in the slanted attic roof of the Braithwaite College guest room: a gray and rainy morning. She opened the window for needed fresh air and listened to the British noise, extracting meaning as only a first-time tourist can do; the rain had a foreign rhythm, the snatches of British conversation, the European ambulance siren song, the rumble of trucks with differently revving engines.

She combed her hair, pulled on a sweater, and looked for a time in the mirror and thought: I am on the verge of failure. I can't report anything back to the department on O'Hanrahan's project, and I don't have a clue what has become of Gabriel. During the brushing of her teeth she felt an imminent nausea so she scurried to lie down again.

She fixated on the ceiling, sighing. Gabriel O'Donoghue.

Gabriel was in her kindergarten class back in Bridgeport, born and bred there like herself. He was a crybaby, she remembered, a weepy, pious Catholic boy who went through “phases.” A rebel, a pious altarboy goody-goody, then getting in trouble for hitchhiking to Milwaukee, then announcing he was going to take vows as a priest, then for eleventh grade wearing an earring and being a hippie, then wanting to be an actor his senior year.

Lucy and Gabriel were reunited at St. Eulalia Catholic High School for four years, then Gabriel started seminary at Notre Dame, then dropped out, then went back to South Bend for a degree in geography, of all things, then applied for grad school at Chicago. He was bright, he was cute—though Judy disagreed—and Lucy had a crush on him when she was younger. He was tall and olive-complexioned, his eyes were very big and sad, and something about his hands turned Lucy on. There was something so unlikely about Gabriel as a sexual partner that Lucy thought about it all the time. Against all advice and her own inclinations, she had felt affection for him creep back as they spent their gradschool years together in Hyde Park.

“I don't see Mr. O'Donoghue making a woman very happy,” Judy said not too long ago, “if you know what I mean.”

He's had girlfriends, Lucy had said defensively.

“Yeah, and they were
just
friends,” Judy went on. “Gabe seems to be the only one who doesn't think he's a fairy.”

Fairy, thought Lucy. The prejudice as tired and old as that terminology.

“Christopher has more of a chance with Gabriel than you do,” Judy concluded.

Christopher was a mutual friend in the department. A gentle, wispy Catholic boy—boy, hell, he was twenty-five for God's sake—who was even more timid and reedy than Gabriel, pretty in photographs but his lack of strong facial features made him less appealing in real life. Gabriel was always animated around Christopher, whom Lucy never could get to say enough to prove his being intelligent or stupid. Lucy would try to make Christopher say a few sentences in a row but often as not the result was Christopher saying, “
You
know what I mean, Gabriel. We were talking about it the other night.”

Judy redux: “Gabriel may not know it himself but he wants to screw Christopher. You better watch it, Luce. You don't want to end up a fag hag.”

Now that was just
typical
of Judy.

So supremely sure of what “category” a person was. Well, some people like Gabriel and, for that matter, herself, resisted such simple definitions. Gabriel was just unsure of himself and some day, Lucy figured, both of them at some unspecified, unpredictable time would stumble into some form of romance. Okay, that was a bit vague for a romantic wish, but that's what she wanted, that's what she'd hedged her bets for. For several years now.

(But that was not your only interest in Gabriel.)

No, there was an arrangement they'd discussed in the late hours of the night that Judy must never hear about—the ridicule would be endless. Lucy sort of envied Gabriel for deciding to join the Franciscans last year. At least, he belonged somewhere. There were so many important works to undertake and with the support of an order, think how rewarding it all could be. Lucy had suggested that she might be a Poor Clare and maybe she and Gabriel could start a homeless shelter together, a clinic for inner-city kids, maybe an AIDS hospice.

(There was nothing ridiculous in any of those ideas.)

But Lucy, upon continuing with grad school after her master's, had staked out a different path—she would never be a nun now. Being a nun meant defeat. It meant surrendering to Mother and her maiden Aunt Lucy and the Holy Roman Church and all the abominations of nunhood at St. Eulalia's Catholic High School. That's all the Church could proffer a woman: obedience, subjugation, humility, submission to God in Heaven and the Crusty Old Bachelor Fathers while on this earth.

“Women who become nuns,” pronounced Judy, “are just scared of sex. They're like the invalids of the last century who took to bed rather than get out there and take control of their life. Or they're all lesbians.”

God, Judy got on her nerves.

The truth of it was this: if Lucy was going to ditch a religious vocation, she should have made the break at eighteen when there was still time to exploit her youth to the fullest, for travel, for adventure, for men. I had one foot in and one foot out of the secular world, she realized, and the years began to fly by, 24, 25, 26 and I had missed out on too much life. Each year would pass and I would say, Okay girl,
this
year it will all change. And each year it never happened. I might as well be a nun for all my proximity to normal life, Lucy pined, a life most women take for granted. If I'd met Sister Marie-Berthe from the Acolyte Supper when I was younger and joined her thinking-woman's order, well, that would have made things simpler.

“I don't think you're going to see any action on the Gabriel front,” predicted Judy upon hearing of Gabriel's desire to be a Friar Minor. “Why don't you stop looking in that goddam Theology Department? There's not a guy in that thing that isn't screwed up royal!”

For Judy's information, Lucy had a natural popularity with these effeminate church-types anyway. All the overmothered Catholic boys she knew from the Youth Group at St. Bridget's, the Drama Club would-be actors from St. Eulalia's, half of the seminary candidates en route to Loyola or Notre Dame, the young men of High Church leanings in the department—Lucy had an immediate bond with these guys. They weren't officially homosexual, perhaps, but something similarly different, an orientation with the fetid taint of Church. She was never short an invitation to coffee or to sit beside someone at a lecture.

You see, Lucy had worked up a persona: the cool, practicing-Catholic broad, 1990s style. Rebellious, antipapal, reform-minded, but mass-going and serious about it. Look, anyone could pull off this performance as a
lapsed
Catholic, but it was a tougher act to stick with the Church, and it seemed to underpin the trust young men like Gabriel and her fellow Theology Department pals had in her.

“I can talk shop with the boys,” she told Judy once. “I have so many male friends because I don't have a female view of religion.”

“And just what's that female view?”

“Something imprecise and spiritual and embracing and mysterious. See, Judy, I can talk theologians and doctrinal points, the nitty-gritty, with the best of them. It's like discussing the Standard & Poors with business majors or baseball stats with sports fans. I play on Augustine's turf.”

“And you get to hang around a lot of faggy, repressed men who aren't going to sleep with you that way,” Judy responded, not able to allow Lucy one, not one little social victory of any consequence!

Lucy was determined now to meet the English morning, queasy or not. It was nearly eleven.

Lucy first found herself strolling through Oxford's Covered Market, where none of the indelicacies of butchery are spared the customer. Game birds hung headless, upside-down calves were being stripped of their skin, entrails of swine were being publically chopped and arranged. Lucy examined a forlorn pig's head.

“I know how you feel today.”

Feeling herself reel again, she decided to moor herself to a table in a workingman's café within the market, ordering a strong cup of tea. As she stared at her cup, she heard the dull march of her life back home on its mission to retrieve her, bolt the gates of new experience. Yep, Lucy decided, Judy's maybe got it right. That's my of stomping grounds: sensitive, repressed, intelligent men with a streak of some religious feeling.