Probation (4 page)

I back out of the driveway and he runs back to the house, doing a surprisingly nimble one-handed jump over the gate. The dogs are all over him. I roll down the window. Halfway down the block, I can still hear them howling at the dying moon.

I take the piece of paper with the phone number from my pocket, intending to toss it out the window. Something stops me and, at a red light, I fold it carefully and slip it into my wallet. I know I’ll never use it. Still, I want to keep it. Who knows? Maybe some night when I can’t sleep, when I’m tossing and turning in the single bed in my mother’s house, I’ll think about picking up the phone and calling.

Hey, Duffy, remember me? The guy who thought he could never be as pathetic as you?

“N
o, Matt, I did not make up the name Duffy Donlan. I swear.”

“Why do you sleep with men you don’t like?”

“I did not
sleep
with him. And who says I didn’t like him?”

“Did you like him?”

“He was all right, I suppose. I didn’t really get to know him.”

“Are you interested in knowing him?”

“No. Not really.”

“Then why did you keep his number?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you call him?”

I stare at him, no less astonished than if a bare-assed Santa had just dropped down my chimney and was waving his furry caterpillar in my face.

“That’s ridiculous. He lives in fucking Cleveland.”

“You think it’s ridiculous to call and say it was nice meeting you and to ask how he’s doing? I bet he’d love to hear from you.”

I’m sure he would. I doubt his phone’s ringing off the hook. He probably gets as many calls as me. None.

“I wouldn’t know what to talk about.”

“What do you talk to other people about?”

“Shelton/Murray Design Concepts!” I bellow in my best carnival-barker tones. “Tomorrow’s retail spaces today! Bold! Stimulating! Effective!”

“Why don’t you cut the crap?”

“Whoa, that doesn’t sound very professional to me,” I say, feigning shock.

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“I am not. Here we are, having a pleasant conversation and you have to go all aggressive on me.”

“I’m the one who’s aggressive? How would you describe that little sales pitch?”

I know where you’re going with this and, buddy boy, ain’t no way you’re going to coax the words
passive-aggressive
from these lips.

“Let’s try it again,” he says. “What did you talk about with Alice?”

Hearing her name,
Alice
, spoken in this suffocating room, is unbearable. For the past six weeks, he’s barely alluded to her. I’ve never properly introduced the two of them. He knows nothing about her; she’s a complete stranger to him. It’s disgustingly presumptuous of him. He’s taking liberties, dragging her into this sordid little exchange.

“I can’t believe you would ask me that,” I say—no—hiss, angry enough to want to smash his head against the floor and crush his smug face with the heel of my shoe.

“Why?”

He peels the foil from a Hershey’s Kiss, pops it in his mouth, and tosses a candy to me. He must think he’s Pavlov and I’m his goddamn poodle. I swat it with my fist and watch it sail over his shoulder.

“You’re comparing some fucking hookup who came on my pants in a peep-show booth to my wife!”

“Your ex-wife, Andy,” he says, not unkindly.

“Not yet!” I shout.

“So I take it the circumstances of your meeting somehow make him unworthy?”

“No,” I say, hesitating. “Yes,” I admit.

“Why do you pursue these sexual encounters if they make you unhappy?”

“They don’t make me unhappy.”

“Okay. Distressed. They distress you. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough.”

“Then why?”

“Because I’m horny. Because I have a huge sex drive. Because I need to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Have sex.”

“Does it need to be this kind of sex?”

“What do you mean? As opposed to what other kind of sex?”

“How often do you masturbate?”

What an asshole you are, I think.

“Why does the question embarrass you?”

I stare at him in disbelief, as if anyone would need to ask such a question.

“Come on. We’ve been seeing each other, what, two months? You haven’t spared me the details of your colorful little adventures. No, I’m not being judgmental. Just accurate. Isn’t this sudden modesty just a little bit inconsistent?”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I retort. “Admitting you jack off is admitting you’re a loser.”

“So you don’t masturbate because it would make you feel like a loser?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what did you say?”

“I said no one wants to admit they jack off. How often do
you
masturbate?”

“I ask the questions here,” he says.

“See? You use the therapeutic relationship to avoid having to answer the question. You’ve got the perfect excuse for not admitting the question embarrasses you.”

“Fair enough.”

Actually, once the question is raised, hostility gives way to curiosity.

“I mean, uh,
can
you masturbate?”

Matt throws back his head and howls.

“Let’s see,” he says, holding up his right hand and wanking the air. “Yep, I guess I’m still capable of making a fist and jerking off. Seriously, what do you think?”

I honest to God don’t know. It was a sin when I was a kid, something that had to be confessed before you could take communion.

“Christ, I remember the humiliation after I’d progressed from impure thoughts to impure deeds. That fucking Father Gillen…”

Matt laughs.

“…he was stone deaf. I almost jumped out of my skin when he screamed
Keep your hands off that thing!
I almost fucking died when I had to face all those pious ladies waiting to confess, one of whom was, of course, my mother.”

Matt thinks this story is hilarious. Wouldn’t have figured him to have a trite, situation-comedy sense of humor. Roll laugh track.

“So you haven’t answered my question,” I say.

“I thought I did.”

“No. About whether it’s still a sin.”

“Not in my book.”

“It’s not your book that counts. Christ, what do they teach you in the seminary?”

Not a smart move to challenge him.

“What about your book?” he asks. “What’s a sin in your book?”

Funny that it’s taken me until now for me to realize who it is Matt reminds me of. It must be all this talk about sin. It explains a lot, maybe everything. It certainly explains my escalating pulse that first evening I pulled into the driveway and saw him stripped to his skivvies, well, his swim trunks, damp from the hose spray and glistening in the brilliant sun. It explains why I’ve been so resistant to him, fighting a natural impulse to draw close, become intimate, not physically (not that I would mind, but I know better than that), but emotionally, beyond the boundaries of our “therapeutic relationship.”

You look alike.

You walk alike.

At times you even talk alike.

I could lose my mind.

When Fathers are two of a kind!

“I just figured out why I don’t like you.”

“Why?” he says, surprised, maybe (and this could be my imagination and some wishful thinking) a little hurt.

“You remind me of someone.”

Father Timothy Hovis. The substitute priest sent by the Diocese of Charlotte to tend the flock of St. Matthew Parish while Father Gillen recovered from the first of a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. Tall, dark, chiseled, only one generation removed from County Mayo with an athlete’s build and a cleft chin that looked like the thumbprint of God. He was only a few years out of the seminary and still enthusiastic about his vocation, serving the Trinity and the Church as passionately as he followed his beloved Red Sox. He was a man’s man and a priest’s priest. I almost burst with pride when he singled me out for praise in his
pawk-the-caw
Beantown accent:
Well, Mr. Nocera, it sure helps a homesick Boston boy to hear a good dago name like yours.

“Are you going to tell me who?”

“Some priest.”

“That’s it?”

I’d fought the old man tooth and nail. This time he was insistent. My mother’s gentle persuasion—
Why, Tony, maybe we should wait another year when he’s a bit older
—would not prevail. She must have known it was hopeless to oppose his will. One of the very few possessions he’d brought from Philadelphia was a formal black-and-white portrait of him and his best-loved brother, only a year apart in age, solemnly staring down the photographer, dignified beyond their years in their crisp white cassocks. Goddamn it. I was going to be an altar boy too, even if it killed me.

I thought it would. I shrank in terror whenever old Father Gillen barked at me to pay attention. I cowered in the presence of the other boys, my mortal enemies, wounded by their sneering disdain. And then one Sunday morning, Father Tim appeared. Even the old man was impressed by my sudden commitment to my sacred duties. I volunteered to serve at seven o’clock mass two or three times a week. I offered to do double duty on Sundays. Anything to spend a few precious hours with Father Tim.

“Just some priest,” I repeat.

“I suppose you ought to tell me why you dislike him so much since I’m guilty by association. Or by reminiscence, to be accurate.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“What is it I’m thinking?”

The sordid. The reprehensible. The predictable sad tale of predators and innocence betrayed.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” I say, regretting introducing the subject.

“Well, it obviously wasn’t a small deal.”

“He was a jerk.”

“Why?”

Actually, Father Tim was perfect. Father Tim could do no wrong. Father Tim was my inspiration. We loved the same black-and-white movies, Karloff and Lugosi. He made me a Red Sox fan, much to the chagrin of my Philadelphia loyalist father. I’d decided to follow him into the seminary. I spent endless hours lost in reveries of the Adventures of Father Tim (mysteriously unmarked by age) and Father Andrew (all grown up), together conquering the world for God, inseparable, the closest of friends.

One Sunday morning he showed me and Billy Davenport the Boston College class ring he’d been left by his recently deceased father. I, who knew Father Tim so well and could sense his pride in his inheritance, was effusive in my praise. Only a true friend would know how important that ring was to him. So it was the ultimate betrayal, a stinging slap in the face, when, after Mass, I overheard him mimicking my high-pitched, effeminate voice for the amusement of Billy Davenport.

Oh, Father Tim! It’s gorgeous!

“Ouch,” Matt says, genuinely touched by the pathos of it all. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m still sorry that someone made you feel that bad.”

I was made of stronger stuff than you might know, Matt. Sure, I bawled my eyes out once I was alone in my bedroom. But I adamantly refused to ever serve another Mass despite the old man’s threats of medieval forms of punishment. It took his apoplectic promise I wouldn’t be able to sit for a week to force me downstairs to speak to Father Tim, who’d taken time from his busy schedule to persuade me to reconsider. No, sorry, I said, politely, but firmly. He bent down to put his arm around my shoulder and asked the question in his most empathic voice.
Was it something one of the other boys did?
No, I answered truthfully, pulling away from his arm as if it were a red-hot branding iron.

“Shame seems to be a recurring theme in your life,” Matt concludes.

No kidding.

“What about you? Aren’t there things you’re ashamed of?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“So, do you masturbate?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he sighs, exasperated. “Well, I’ll tell you this much. If I did, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. Time’s up. Same time next week.”

I stand up and, session over, extend my hand, offering a gruff good night.

“I bet Father Tim would be impressed by that firm handshake today.” He laughs.

It happened, of course, over a period of years, the awkward ones, plagued by pimples and blackheads, wet dreams and inconvenient erections erupting at the most embarrassing times. But it felt like a sudden metamorphosis, a revelation, a mutation as startling and unexpected as the magical transformation of Peter Parker after being bitten by the radioactive spider. It seemed as if overnight I towered over my mother and stood facing my father, staring eye to eye. Dark hairs spiked through my pores. My voice dropped several octaves, rough as gravel, loud and harsh. A musky scent, like the old man when he rolled out of bed in the morning, followed me from room to room. The changes mystified me, as if some creature, weird and wonderful, had possessed my body. I stood in front of my mirror, studying this stranger for hours, fascinated by his thick eyebrows and the stubble growing on his chin. I could make his small but impressive biceps flex simply by squeezing my arm and force his chest to swell by swallowing a deep breath. I ran him through his drills, teaching him to squint like Steve McQueen, grunt and mumble like Bronson, intimidate like Dirty Harry, how to stand, walk, even how to throw a punch.

An ancient speed bag, its black leather worn to dull gray after years of pummeling by my father, still hung from the basement ceiling. When I was small, I would sit on the steps, mesmerized by the hypnotic beat as my old man pounded at his frustrations, jabbing and punching with blinding speed. The bag had been neglected for ages, waiting for the day I would stand and confront it, determined to make it sing. My first swing missed and I struck the wall with my fist. Determined not to let it conquer me, I read every library book on the shelf on boxing training, studying the simple line drawing instructions on how to stand, where to hold your elbows and fists, the motion for a circle punch, how to throw a jab, where to find the belly of the bag.

My arms and shoulders ached for days and my fingers were swollen and bruised. But pain and frustration wouldn’t stop me from mastering the bag. I bought a pair of cheap Everlasts to protect my hands.

Left, left, left.

Right, right, right.

Jab, strike.

Left, right, left, right.

Pow, pow, pow.

I descended into my dungeon every afternoon and punished the bag for every slight and insult, real or imagined, for all the frustrations and humiliations of the day.

Left, left, left.

Right, right, right.

Jab, jab.

Strike, strike.

Pow, pow, pow.

Da-dum-dum-dum.

Da-dum-dum-dum.

I knew my old man was standing on my old perch on the steps, watching. I picked up the speed, controlling the bag with a skill that surprised even me, making it sing with a voice it feared had been lost forever.