Priest (21 page)

Sterling shrugged one shoulder, as if I were being either deliberately obtuse or deliberately precious, and he didn’t have time for it any more.

“So what’s the heart of the matter?” I asked, sliding the photos back into the envelope.

“Pardon?”

“You said you wanted to move past the posturing.” I tossed the pictures on the pew next to me and stood up straight, crossing my arms. I was happy to see that Sterling also straightened up, as if unhappy with the extra inch I had on him. (In height, I mean. [Although a really awful, crass part of me was ridiculously pleased to know that I was the biggest Poppy had ever had.])

“Yes. Well, here it is, Father.” He said the word
father
as if it had quotation marks. (I allowed myself another brief fantasy where I slammed my fist into his eye socket.) “I want Poppy to come home with me to New York. I want her to be mine.”

“Even though you’re married.”

He gave me that look again, that slightly incredulous
are you an idiot
look, and it would have bothered me if I didn’t have the moral high ground in this competition. Except…I couldn’t really claim any part of any moral ground now, high or low, could I? That thought depressed me immensely.

Luckily, Sterling didn’t notice and continued on. “Yes, even though I’m married. Marriage isn’t a sacrament in my family—it’s a tax write-off. And I have no intention of holding a legal arrangement above what I want out of my life. I’ve never loved my wife and she feels the same way about me.”

“But you love Poppy?”

Sterling pressed his lips together. “Love and want are essentially the same thing,” he elided. “Not that a man like you would know that.”

“I respect your honesty, at least,” I said. “You’re not lying to yourself, and I assume you won’t lie to her.”

This unexpected compliment seemed to surprise him, but he quickly recovered. “Poppy doesn’t care about that as much as she thinks she does,” he told me. “You may labor under the illusion that she won’t come back with me unless I love her, but she’s not like you. She knows numbers, sense, mortgages. I’m offering her the currency she knows—money and lust and security—and that is why I will win.”

I thought of her crying in the confessional booth, of the moment we’d stood together in the sanctuary, bathing in God’s presence. She wasn’t merely a spreadsheet with spread legs, and Sterling was an idiot if he’d grown up with her and managed to miss all the deeply spiritual, deeply emotional facets of Poppy Danforth.

“She’s so much more than that.”

“That’s sweet. That really is.” Sterling put his sunglasses back on. “And just so you know, you are so much
less
than I expected. Here I was, expecting Alexander Borgia, and instead I find Arthur Dimmesdale. I was so prepared to fight dirty, and yet I suspect I won’t have to fight at all.”

“It’s not a fight,” I said. “It’s a person.”

“It’s a woman, Father.” Sterling flashed me a white, wide grin. “Soon to be
my
woman.”

I didn’t respond, even though every neuron was firing
you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong
. Instead, I simply watched as he tossed me a wave and strode easily down the aisle to the door, his hands in his pockets as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

The difference between envy and jealousy is subtle but distinct, once you know the flavors and contours of both. Jealousy is wanting what someone else has, like for example, wanting the same kind of car or house as a neighbor. (Or wanting to be the man who owns your girlfriend’s heart rather than some WASP-y asshole who probably has a drawer just for all of his cuff links.)

Envy is hating the fact that someone else has something you don’t, and hating
them
for having it, like wanting to slash your neighbor’s tires because he doesn’t fucking deserve a BMW and everyone fucking knows it, and if you can’t have it, then it’s no fucking fair that he gets to have one either.

Sterling fell into this last category. It’s not that he wanted Poppy necessarily, not beyond the way he probably wanted other things in his life—a new vacation home, a new yacht, a new tie bar. But the idea of someone else having her chewed away at the inside of him, an insatiable parasite of possession worming away in his gut.

I had a lot of time to think about this today because Poppy was apparently MIA. At first, after Sterling had left, I’d tried to play it cool, pacing in my office and calling her and then texting her, the manila envelope like a scarlet letter burning a hole on my desk. What would I say if she picked up? I would simply tell her that Sterling paid me a visit, and oh, also he’s been stalking us, and oh, also he’s blackmailing me into letting you go, totally normal Friday, want to watch Netflix tonight?

But she didn’t answer my calls or my texts, and answering promptly was something she normally did, and I spent a long hour walking tight circles around my office. I should just go over to her house. This was really important, and we needed to talk about it right now, but with Millie’s confrontation still front and center in my brain—not to mention this fucking black-hole-burning-pyre-beating-guilty-heart of an envelope inches away from me—I was too frightened to walk over to her house lest we be caught…
again
.

And then I wanted to yell at myself for being such a pussy. We needed to figure this out and that was more important than anything else. And I would just go on another run, that was all. Everybody was used to seeing me running at all hours of the day and night, and if I happened to run past the old Anderson house, nobody would think it odd at all.

I quickly changed into my running clothes and strapped my phone to my arm, and I was at Poppy’s house in less than two minutes. Her Fiat was in the driveway, but when I slipped into the garden (grateful once more for the overgrown shrubs that provided such great cover) and knocked on her door, there was no answer. Where the fuck was she? This was pretty important shit and she was unavailable? Was she taking a nap? In the shower?

I knocked and waited. Texted, knocked and waited. Paced and waited and knocked some more and then growled
fuck it
and unlocked the door with the key under the bamboo plant pot.

But I could tell the moment I walked in that she wasn’t napping or in the shower. There was the kind of silence filling the corners that only came with emptiness, with absence, and sure enough, I saw that her phone and purse were gone from the place she usually kept them on her desk, although her keys were still there. So she’d gone somewhere without her keys. Had she walked into downtown? To the coffee shop or maybe the library?

I turned to leave, and then a thought formed and stabbed me in the chest like an icy blade.

What if she was with Sterling?

I actually sagged against the wall. It made sense. What, I had thought he’d come all the way up here just to warn me? That he’d declare battle and then wait a few more days to fire his opening salvo? No, he’d probably gone straight to Poppy after leaving the church, and while I had been pacing the worn carpet in my office like an idiot, he’d been here persuading Poppy to go somewhere with him. To dinner. To drinks. To some sleek hotel in Kansas City where he’d fuck her against a floor-to-ceiling window.

That icy blade stabbed me over and over again, in my throat, in my back, in my heart. I didn’t even bother to fight the twin dragons of jealousy and suspicion as they coiled around my feet, because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was right. There’s no other reason she would be ignoring my calls and texts.

She was with Sterling. She was with Sterling and not with me and I was utterly powerless to make it otherwise.

After realizing that Poppy wasn’t at home that afternoon, I’d run by the coffee shop and the library and the winegarden, just to double-check that she hadn’t stepped out to work someplace other than her desk. But no, she hadn’t been any of those places, and when I’d gotten home and unstrapped my iPhone, she still hadn’t texted or called.

Bishop Bove had.

I didn’t call him back.

That night at youth group, I was a mess. An angry, distracted mess, but luckily it was Xbox game night, and my frustration and tension blended in with those of the rowdy teenagers also playing with me. And at the end of the night, I made our prayer brief and to the point.

“God, the psalmist tells us that your word is like a lamp to our feet—that even though we don’t always know where you are leading us, you promise that you will show us the next step. Please keep your lamp burning for us, so that our next step, our next hour and our next day, is clear. Amen.”

“Amen,” the teens mumbled, and then went home to their concerns that (to them) were as troubling and stressful as mine. Homework and crushes and unsympathetic parents and a graduation date that seemed too far away. I remembered those problems acutely, even though they’d been so massively overshadowed by Lizzy’s death. Teenagers felt differently than adults—they felt keenly and powerfully, without the frame of experience to remind them that they wouldn’t be broken by a bad grade or an unrequited love.

But I had that frame of experience. So why did I still feel like I could be broken?

After youth group, I sat in my living room with my phone in my hands, wondering if I should call the bishop back, if he’d called because Millie or Jordan had told him about my shattered vows, wondering if I could even keep up my own pretense if he
didn’t
know. And that’s when I saw it—the picture message.

It came from an unknown number, but I knew who it was the second I opened the message and saw the picture, a shot of Poppy in a car, her face turned away toward the window. The light was low, as if the person taking the picture hadn’t used a flash, and it appeared to be taken in a back seat, which made me think that they had a driver. I could just barely make out the wisps of hair around her neck and ears, the glimmer of the small diamond studs she sometimes wore, the pearlescent sheen of her tie-neck blouse.

Sterling wanted me to know that he was with her. And I knew it could be something as innocent as dinner and conversation, but honestly, when was dinner with an ex ever completely innocent?

I tried to swallow down my feelings of betrayal. What claims did I have on her time, when I could only give her stolen slices of mine? I was not the kind of boyfriend—or whatever I was—to want her to account for every one of her minutes, every one of her thoughts, in the jealous hope that this would keep her faithful. Even if I had the right to demand her fidelity—which I didn’t, given that I was unfaithful in my own way, cheating on her with the Church—I still wouldn’t. Love is freely and unconditionally given, and even I knew that much.

Besides, this was exactly what Sterling wanted. He wanted me to stew and fume, he wanted me to brood over his victory, but I would not grant him that satisfaction and I would not do Poppy the disservice of lobbing accusations via text or voicemail.

We would wait to talk about it until she came back. That was the reasonable thing to do.

But strangely, having a plan of action (or a plan of inaction, as it were) didn’t help. I tried to watch TV and read, I tried to sleep, and in every pause of dialogue, in every paragraph break, was that picture of Poppy and all the unbidden, awful images of her and Sterling talking and touching and fucking. Finally I gave up on it all and went downstairs to the rectory basement where I lifted weights and did sit-ups until the moon started to sink, and then I drained four fingers of Macallan 12 and went to bed.

I woke up that morning with sore muscles and an even sorer conscience and a phone still devoid of missed calls or messages. I indulged in the quiet fantasy of dropping it into a boiling pot of water and walking away or maybe microwaving it—punishing it for everything that had gone so terribly wrong in the last twenty-four hours—but I settled instead for leaving it behind as I went to prepare for Mass and then for the pancake breakfast.

The morning went by in a robotic blur—especially after Millie told me that Poppy had called in sick to volunteer (this was followed by a look that was not exactly scathing but was certainly grumpy and I must have looked fairly pitiful, because she relented and gave me a dry kiss on the cheek before she left.)

And then I found myself with a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do but try to avoid feeling my feelings, and you know what? I decided that I was going to work out some more.

And drink. That too.

When I finally finished cleaning the church basement and went home, I saw that Bishop Bove had called again and sent me a badly garbled text message that also included several what I assume were accidental emojis.

I should call him back.

But instead, I changed into my gym shorts, grabbed the half-empty bottle of Scotch and trotted downstairs, where I turned up the Britney as loud as the speakers would go, and brutalized my screaming muscles with more weights, more sit-ups, more squats, chugging whisky straight from the bottle in between each set.

I would drink and sweat until I forgot that Sterling existed. Hell, I would drink until I forgot Poppy existed.

And I was getting close. The drunk push-ups were beginning to drive home how much my body did not appreciate the concurrent intoxication and exertion, and my arms were about to give out when the music stopped abruptly, and I heard my name called by the only voice I wanted to hear.

Startled, I got to my knees as Poppy walked over to me, wearing the same pale tie-neck blouse that she was wearing in the picture last night. Did that mean she spent the night with Sterling? The Macallan and exhaustion destabilized me enough that I wanted to ask—no,
accuse
—just that.

But then she got to her knees too, and without hesitation, wove her fingers into my sweaty hair and pulled her face to mine.

The moment her lips touched me, everything else flared up and burned away, like so much flash paper thrown into the air. I forgot why I was punishing my body, why I was drinking, why I hadn’t been able to sleep last night.

She slid her arms around my waist and parted her lips, beckoning me inside her mouth, and I went where I was summoned, finding her tongue with mine and kissing her with everything I had. I seized the back of her neck with my hand, gripping her in the way that I couldn’t grip her commitment or her time, and my other hand reached under the wrinkled pencil skirt she was wearing and found the lace of her thong, pushing it aside to find the soft skin between her legs. Without preamble or prologue, I pushed a finger inside of her pussy, which was tight and not entirely ready for me, although I could tell that she was getting there.

She moaned into my mouth at my intrusion, breaking our kiss with a gasp as I started rubbing her clit with my thumb while I crooked my finger inside of her.

She leaned against me as I worked her cunt, and God forgive me, I was so jealous that Sterling might have touched it the night before that I couldn’t discern whether I was touching her for her benefit or mine—as if I could reclaim her if I made her come.

Watching her pant into my shoulder with her day-after hair and day-after makeup, her creased clothes, that general walk-of-shame look, was so fucking hot and so goddamn infuriating at the same time, and it was no wonder she flinched at my voice when I said, “On your hands and knees. Facing away from me.”