Uncross My Heart (10 page)

So how did your afternoon in the woods go with Cruella?”

Dennis asked, between chews of the cafeteria’s just-short-of-lethal chili dog. “You didn’t call me over the weekend to confide in me, so I assumed you lived through it.”

“I think she’s mistaken me for the entire church and is out to get me.” I bit into a piece of pizza that could have served as road-surface material and quickly put it down, distracted by another bad lunch.

“We’ve got to get out of the contract with this food vendor before he kills us all. I’m going to talk to Hightower.” I tossed the pizza aside and felt my tooth to see if it was still in one piece.

“So what did you talk about?” Dennis stayed focused on Vivienne.

“She thinks I’m an inauthentic priest.”

“That’s interesting.” He maintained a studied nonchalance and I eyed him for signs he agreed with her. He caught me looking at him.

“I do not think you’re inauthentic, just routinely misguided,” he said wickedly.

“She had information on my early days at Berkeley. I don’t know what she’s trying to do.”

“I think she’s attracted to you,” he said, clearly unconcerned, between bites. For a priest, Dennis was an odd and alternating mix of liberal and conservative views that often collided in the same sentence.

I pushed my food tray aside and my stomach knotted. “Well, don’t
you
?” He continued. “I think it’s pretty obvious by the obsessive focus, the attacks on you…almost as if she’s angry about the fact that she likes you.”

“That’s one of your stranger theories.” But something inside me was leaping around in my chest, fluttering my heart, making my head buzz.

“Maybe.” He chomped down on a second chili dog. “You ever been attracted to someone of the same sex?”

I glanced around to see who was nearby and refrained from telling him to lower his voice. “I don’t know what you call attracted.”

“Wanting to touch, kiss, sleep with—”

“Are you getting your thrills vicariously these days?”

“Who was she?”

“Stop it. You’re acting like some Freudian pervert.”

“A lot of very religious men were gay and there was nothing shameful about it,” Dennis said.

“Have you checked with your pope on that?”

“I have a friend who works at the Vatican. You can’t put that much testosterone around great gowns, terrific art, and a host of pretty boys and not expect them to get a little confused.”

Eleonor breezed by with her red plastic food tray filled to its edges.

“When you two are through throwing souls under the bus, Hightower wants to see you.” Her nod was in my direction.

“Any reason why?” I asked.

“He’s had his ass in a knot all day—shootin’ off enough lightn’ bolts to blow out a transformer.”

I yanked my napkin off my lap and slapped it down on the table, thinking I was still hungry, and excused myself.

“Hey, you never told me who she was—the attraction. Clever the way you redirected our conversation but I want to know who.”

“Gladys Irons.” I gave him a cheesy grin.

“Better be careful, that’s how rumors get started.”

* * *

Hightower paced across his office, a newspaper in his right hand, slapping it into the palm of his left. I felt like a dog who’d peed on the carpet and was about to get smacked. “So obviously this was left off your curriculum vitae.”

“I didn’t think it relevant.”

“Roger Thurgood III thought it extremely relevant.”

I fell back in my chair, exhausted from this childishness. “Harry, does Roger run this school? Since when do we allow ourselves to be frightened or blackmailed by our own students? I like to write and teach. I like it less, however, when my students are behaving like World War Two Nazi children turning in their parents.”

He dismissed my remark with a little irritated wave, but wild thoughts were swirling around in my head.
How could she have done
it to me again? How stupid could I possibly be? I walk into the lion’s
den to be bitten twice?
And before I could edit myself I confided that Vivienne was at the root of my problems. “She must have given him the article because she gave me a copy in a recent meeting.”

“Why were you meeting with Vivienne Wilde?”

“You set me up, remember?”

“And then I unset you. I forbid you to see that woman again.” The words reverberated around me as if I were in a huge echo chamber that time traveled back twenty years ago to San Francisco and a jail cell.

A young man signed the paperwork and freed me. Out on the street a military limo waited, the windows blackened. The young officer held the door and I got in beside my father, who never turned his head in my direction as he spoke. “I forbid you to see that woman again.”
Is the
echo in my head or in the room with me now?
“She’s dangerous and she will ruin your career.”
Is Hightower speaking or my father?
My head swam. I felt faint.

Hightower’s face floated above mine. Then it was Eleonor’s pretty black face looking worried, coming in and out of focus. Words like “nurse,” “fainted,” “weak pulse” spun around in the air like tangible items. She must have rung Dennis because soon large, strong hands were lifting me up off the floor and I was leaning back on my old friend.

“You okay now?” he asked.

“Maybe you should get her over to the school nurse. Eleonor can go with you.” I could tell from Hightower’s tone that whatever had occurred was an embarrassment to him and he wanted me out of his office as quickly as possible and was willing to donate any staff to make it happen.

“I’m fine, really.” I teetered slightly as Dennis supported my arm and guided me to the elevator.

“Horizontal clerics are not nearly as useful to Claridge as vertical ones. Pick a place and take two weeks off.” Dennis spoke as if I reported to him.

“Who died and left you in charge?”

“I also perform the duties of campus chaplain, in case you’ve forgotten,” he shouted after me as I walked to the parking lot, swaying slightly, and got into my Mustang, glad I’d let Ketch stay home today.

Dennis caught up with me and tried to snatch the keys away, but I fired up the engine and swung the car out of the lot as he waved his hands above his head for me to stop. I was unstoppable, headed for Vivienne Wilde’s office, seething over the fact that she had given that article to my nemesis.

The building stood over twenty stories, skinned in sexy, black glass, from which workers could see out but I couldn’t see them—
suits
her soul,
I thought.

I entered the revolving door that whooshed 180 degrees and ejected me into a marble foyer that faced a bank of elevators, where a crowd of perhaps a dozen people were in various stages of boarding.

Recognizing the back of Vivienne Wilde’s golden hair and the well-fitted suit jacket that showed off her nicely formed body, I fell in behind and got on the elevator with her and several other people. She didn’t see me until we all turned to face the doors.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice sounded oddly ebullient.

“I came to see you.” Others in the elevator took little notice, although an older woman smiled at us as if to say, “Isn’t that nice.”

Silence ensued. Still fuming from my Hightower beating, I added cheerily, “Curious why?”

“No, just glad to see you.”

The doors opened and all but the smiling woman got off on the eleventh floor. Before the doors closed again I said, “Why did you give Roger Thurgood the newspaper article?”

“Who is Roger Thurgood?”

I ignored the question, certain she was playing dumb. “Getting me fired seems to be a full-time job for you.”

The older woman frowned as the elevator jolted to a stop on fifteen. I pointed to the door, reminding her that this was an elevator, not a soap opera, and she should tune out now. She left, tossing us a worried look over her shoulder.

“You may find this hard to believe, but I am not personally responsible for the bad things that happen in your life.”

“Really? Then why don’t you stop contributing to them?”

The elevator doors opened on twenty and Vivienne marched ahead of me. We breezed past a reception area and down a long carpeted hallway with cubist furniture and into a corner office that was glass.

See-through glass desk, Plexiglas chairs around a bottle-glass coffee table, and floor-to-ceiling glass windows. She hit a button on her phone and told Joyce that she was not to be disturbed. Swinging around to face me she said, “I’m all yours.”

I exhaled abruptly in response, caught off guard, and momentarily felt that buzzing, off-balance sensation in my head.

“Well, speak, Reverend. How have I, a mere mortal, “ruined” your life and career?”

A voice in my head reminded me I’d like to strangle her while at the same time registered that she looked sensational standing there with one hand on her hip, leaning on the corner of her desk and addressing me with unabashed drama. She must have read that thought, because instead of arguing further she poured me a glass of wine from a small bar on the wall adjacent to her desk. I refused it.

“So how did he get the article if not from you or through you?”

“It’s public record if anyone cares to look.”

“For more than twenty years no one has. Even you must deem it interestingly odd that you and my student find it on virtually the same day.”She shrugged. “Things get in the air or on the Web. Why do two inventors claim an invention in the same week, across the world from one another and have never met?”

“Cosmic coincidence?”

“Or someone other than me trying to do you in.”

“Which brings me back to why you would publish something so incorrect and so harmful about me. You have hurt me deeply and endangered my—”

“I apologize.”

Her simple words ground my tirade to a halt.

“Tell me why—”

“Why?” she interrupted brusquely.

“Because I don’t want to believe it’s a character flaw and that you would do it viciously.”

“Why do you even remotely care?”

“I don’t know, I just do.” I felt embarrassed and out of control, as if I had a crush on my teacher.

“So you can pray for me? You’re wrong for this whole religious game, you know.” The look came back. The soft, sensual eye contact that made me want to dive into her soul. Her words came out warm and slow. “You’re a deconstructionist at heart and now suddenly you’re in support of rigidity, spreading lies under the guise of duty and tradition. You fought for the truth. What in God’s name happened to change you, Alex?”

Alex?
My heart lodged in some narrow space in my chest.

Perhaps it was the tone of her voice—so intimate—or the casual way she truncated my name, giving it a masculine strength, but my head was swimming and I felt I might pass out again.
Good God, is fainting
like a Civil War matron going to be my new MO?
She saw that I was incapable of response.

“The old articles said you moved in like lightning. You were in the thick of it—the woman who went to jail protesting the church’s stance on homosexuality.”

“I’m leaving. Don’t write about me again or…I’ll sue you.”
How
dare she invade my life, my privacy, endanger my career? Who the hell
does she think she is?

“Does my knowing who you are make you that uncomfortable? Don’t you think one of us should…know who you are?”

“I know exactly who I am.” I shook my head slightly as if trying to regain consciousness and left her office, touching the wall with my fingertips for balance and the assurance that I was still in my body. I heard her voice behind me telling me to wait, but I was waiting for no one. I was getting the hell away from her.

Moments later, I was driving and not really aware of where I was headed, my mind now possessed by Vivienne Wilde.

Like human truth serum, she invaded my thoughts, my speech, my history, and demanded that I time travel to a place I had sworn never to revisit—a place where I’d fought alongside a woman older than I, who vowed to lift people up by bringing the church to its knees. A woman who on that flowering spring day was there when my father’s limo pulled up on Center Street, surprising even me, who had just recently spent twenty-four hours in jail and now sat alongside him as Jeannette and her husband came into view—standing solemnly on the corner as if they’d been told to wait there for us.

The limo slowed and then stopped in front of them. The driver got out and stiffly held the door for me. I was a physical and mental wreck as I stood before this woman I had known intimately, who now, strangely, appeared not even to know me by name.

“Tell her everything,” my father commanded. Jeannette looked at the cement. Her husband turned his head at a ninety-degree angle as if unable to bear the words.

I felt the buzz of my cell phone and my mind leapt back from Center Street to the present as I tried to retrieve the call while driving.

Too late, I got the message and not the messenger. Eleonor’s chipper voice recording said a visitor on campus was trying to reach me and she’d left a number for me.

I phoned and a strong, low-pitched voice answered immediately, buoyant over having reached me—Lyra in town on business and wondering if I would join her and Jude for an early dinner. She apologized for the late notice.

I was looking for an escape from my mental hauntings, so I agreed to meet them at a little chop house on the east side of town.
Maybe it will
get my mind off Vivienne.
I made a mental note that when I had a few hours I needed to analyze why Vivienne had imprinted on me the way she had. It didn’t seem to matter whether she insulted me, attacked me, or spoke nicely to me. I simply couldn’t quit thinking about her, even when I was running from her. Not about her motives or her betrayal or her investigation of me but just thinking about
her
—wondering what she was doing, how she was doing, and who she was with.

I realized as I pulled into the parking space that I needed to sort out my feelings.
Perhaps it’s just that she has a spark, a fire I don’t have
anymore.