Peter Landesman: Blood Acre

His face burns. His embarrassment is fierce. The entire room is looking at him. Why is he here? Why did he bother to come at all? Didn't he say his good-byes to Maria this morning with no witnesses but the dead and maybe that priest to clear the way? But here Nathan feels close to the truth, just the simple factual truth. Just as Maria last night watched, spellbound and terrified, her neighbor in her death throes, now Nathan has come to observe Maria, out of the hospital, on her way. His own dress rehearsal. And there lies her outer crust, her pod.

He wipes his hand across his sweaty forehead. "You shouldn't let Benny see his mother like that," he says.

But someone insists, "No, he should see." It is Cleary standing before him, taller somehow than this morning. The priest looks nervous, his face with that blushed, babyish swollenness of someone just woken, or sick with worry.

"Isn't all this a little fast, the funeral, the burial?" Nathan protests. "Don't you have to wait a while or something?"

Cleary's expression darkens. He glances nervously toward the door.

"Who are your friends?" Nathan asks.

"I don't know who they are," Cleary assures him. "I half believed they came with you."

"They may have," Nathan murmurs. Nearby, the heads of those talking quietly wheel around. Nathan looks at his watch. "It's getting late."

Cleary nods. "Yes, it is."

"I'm tired.”

"I understand."

"I don't think you do," Nathan replies, wondering if the pain in his stomach comes from eating nothing but his pills. He looks longingly to the back table where food is piled high.

"This tragedy will unite you and Christ in a sacred way, Cleary says.

His mind shut down behind that delicious hermetic seal, Nathan sidesteps the priest and heads for the back and picks a shortbread cookie of no identifiable shape. He slips it past his teeth. His eyes close. He can taste nothing; there is no feeling on his tongue or the roof of his mouth. The tips of his fingers, for that matter, feel like brass thimbles. It's been climbing him these last two days, this slow paralysis, giving him the strange sensation that he is turning to stone. Bites of cookie thud like pebbles at the bottom of the pail inside. This last pleasure gone.

"Nathan."

Blindly, Nathan extends his hand. But it is Cleary again.

"Do you hear me?" he asks.

"Sure.”

"You should make amends."

"What for?"

"Because a man lives his life and he has to make that important. Whether he's a priest or a lawyer. Or a bum."

"Did Maria?" Nathan demands.

Cleary squints, his expression bitter, as if Nathan has insulted his kid sister. "That woman looked death straight in the eye."

"She was Catholic," Nathan insists, as if that matters somehow, an emotional stand grounded on nothing.

"That doesn't have anything to do with it," Cleary says. "However she did it, she took death in and made it her own. She was in charge. She stopped breathing when she knew exactly who and what she was, what she accomplished."

"No one finishes all of his tasks," Nathan says, hateful, then gives Cleary a sharp nod, hoping he'll go away, or burn himself out.

Instead, a small inconclusive smile plays on the priest's lips. "You are, of course, talking about yourself."

But before Nathan can protest, Cleary's hand comes up. The priest isn't through: "You didn't know her, Nathan," he says. "You don't know what you had."

"I think I do."

"No, you knew her body. Understand me-she was stunning. I don't fault you for wanting her. But your women are piled high, one on top of the other. You know something about the way they look but what do you know of their souls? You've kept yourself busy like a rat in his little cage, running his treadmill, faster faster, wanting more and getting it, but in the end only standing still. You treat them all indifferently and only care where the next one is coming from."

Nathan holds fiercely to the cookie, sniffs it, and smells-now he expects it-nothing. She gave it to me, he wants to say, but Cleary has backed away and receded, just one tree in the forest now, and like the others-all the others-is blank with shock and horror. The crowd has hushed. The priest heads up the aisle toward Maria.

Where the hell is everyone? Nathan wonders, looking around. Where are my parents? Ruth? Even Schreck, the fuck? Where's their respect?

He sits amidst strangers, his face bunched and spotted like a baby's, poised to come undone. The long pews keep filling. Blacks, whites, Hispanics. Nathan is astonished Maria knew so many people, people of different stripes and heights and weights and ages, until he realizes she didn't, that these are merely church members, Cleary's recruits, commanded by some inner voice to show up to the unveiling of every coffin that comes through these smoked-glass doors, to fill out the audience, to loan their respect, so that no one, especially paying customers, should go out so alone. Women in pillbox hats, boys in powder-blue tuxedos, old men like storks in their black summer-weight suits, the blacks of this ruined neighborhood who drop their tithe into the mahogany box at the head of the aisle, below the church scoreboard, the letters and numbers replaceable from the back like an old baseball scoreboard, the church's 537 paying customers in attendance last Sunday, the scales tipping, last week's eighty-seven dollars and fifty-nine cents against Lucifer's untold millions, bottom of the ninth and the church needs one hundred and forty-five dollars to fix the pews, to fix the men's toilet, to replace the broken windowpanes, the colored cellophane-

The choir stands, its adolescent singers, jogging up the aisles to the front like the faithful rushing to the man laying hands and healing them of their limp gawkiness and their very youth. Here and there the cellophane sucks in and out in time to night's heavy breathing. The windows flash. The choir raises its voice over the volleys of thunder. All of it to Nathan like a final prayer meeting on a ship hit and sinking in battle. He wants out. He wants out of it, this, everything, and looks once to the casket, as if for permission. He is crying. He is, in fact, crying hysterically. And Maria, lying there in her plasticine stillness, willfully says nothing.

Claire watches from the door as Nathan pushes himself up from the front bench and slides awkwardly along the wall, to the exit, not surprised to see him running. Though she is taken aback by his tears.

She touches his arm as he passes. "I want to talk to you."

"What are you doing here?" he asks, quickly trying to compose himself. He glances over his shoulder, toward Maria in her casket. A reflex, Claire knows, by now as quick and natural to him as drawing breath. He will always try to keep his women apart, keep them from knowing about each other, even when they already do, and even in death when it wouldn't matter.

Claire smiles. Maria's death, somehow, is registering with her unexpectedly. Maria is taking with her a piece of Claire as well.

"You asked me to come, remember?" she says. "As your representative. Then I heard you got your little gift, your get-out-of-jailfree card, but I decided to come anyway. Out of respect, as you said yourself. That was a nice little trick, by the way, coming up with those tax returns. I thought the judge could have made the condition a moonwalk and you'd be as likely to fulfill it. I underestimated you."

"They weren't my returns, Claire. I'm being set up."

"You're being set up? Please, Nathan."

He nervously scans the room. "Someone sprang me. Someone wants me in the game."

"Don't flatter yourself," she says.

Nathan looks at her, uncomposed. "Thanks, anyway, for coming."

Now he is peering through her fearfully, toward the door, the weather out there.