Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"This isn't bad," Matt admitted, forking up another bite.

The warm food and hot coffee, the combination of bitter and fiery tastes--the very alienness of eating Mexican food at eight O'clock in the morning--revitalized them both, as Temple had hoped it would. It was hard to stay down in the mouth when your taste buds were on fire. Temple doused her eggs with a speedy helping of onion-potato hash with cilantro.

For a few blessed moments, they just ate. When they had to take a respite from the culinary fireworks, they sat back by mutual agreement. Temple broke the silence first. Again, she always was doing that sort of thing, rushing in where fools would keep their lips zipped.

"You still didn't explain why an ex--priest can administer a sacrament in an emergency."

Matt dabbed his lips with the flimsy napkin, as if to brush away the meal's heat as well as its traces. "Once a priest, always a priest." He used the rueful, solemn tone that announced a truism said long before he had repeated it. "In any emergency, I'm called upon to perform priestly duties if no other priest is available. If I came upon a dying accident victim, for instance."

"Why did l get the feeling that Sister Seraphina was . . . I can't say glad, but why did I feel that she was challenging you to do this?"

"She was a grade-school teacher of mine. She knew when I went into the seminary, although I entered from college.

She knew when I left, although I was years and miles away by then. Talk gets back. Every parish is a news bureau; nuns have some kind of nationwide intelligence system . . . or the Holy Spirit whispers deportment reports on former students during prayers, or my Guardian Angel rattles on me--I don't know. But she knew, and she knew where to find me now, when she needed me. And she needed . . . she's disappointed in me, in my leaving, on some level that maybe she doesn't even admit to herself. She didn't mind forcing me to face my ambivalent position. I've left the priesthood, but the priesthood will never leave me."

"That's . . . cruel," Temple said.

"No, just harsh, a religious life does not fear harshness."

Temple shook her head. "I never would have guessed it." She thought for a moment. "Say, that's how you dredged up that black suit you wore when you played the organ for Chester Royal's memorial service! That's why you can play the organ at all!"

Matt held up his hands in surrender and laughed, out loud this time, and long. "You always have to put two and two together, did you know that? You're insatiable."

"Yeah, but what do I do when two and two add up to three?"

He sobered immediately.

Temple took another stab at her eggs, then rolled the corner of her napkin. "Matt. I have to tell you. we ex-Unitarians are pretty tolerant, but I have severe problems with religions that can't let others live and let live according to their honest lights."

"So do I," he said promptly.

"I mean, fundamentalists basically concentrate on judging other people and finding them guilty on all counts, whether they're Christian or Muslim."

"That's why there are so few Catholic fundamentalists, although there are a goodly number of conservatives."

"But, I mean, a church that in this age of AIDS won't condone safe sex with condoms because it's also birth control! Well, that's more than a harsh position; that's insanity."

He stirred in the hard plastic chair. "I don't want to argue theology or logic with you. A lot of these issues have liberal and conservative positions within the church, especially in America."

"Now l may be wrong," she said. "I don't pay a lot of attention to religious matters, to tell the truth. But, Isn't the church against premarital sex?"

"Yes."

"Against all forms of birth control?"

"Well . . . there are natural methods--"

"Against divorce?"

"Yes . . . but again, there are instances--"

"Against . . . masturbation?"

"All sexual acts must be open to the conception of children--"

"Matt!" Temple leaned forward, over her decimated plate of cooling food. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't have to take positions on any of these things anymore, now that I'm not a practicing priest. I don't have to tell anyone else what to do anymore." He seemed relieved, but he still didn't get it.

"Matt!" Temple knew that she sounded even more exasperated, but she couldn't help it. Conundrums demanded solving and she was sitting across from a walking, talking human conundrum who wasn't facing the facts of his new-how new?--existence. "What are you going to do? What can you do, now that you're not a priest? You move in any direction that's middle-class comfortable, reasonably independent and sexually active other words, normal--and you sin, right? Well?"

Chapter 16

Catechism

"Most of us marry ex-nuns, fast."

"Isn't that a little . . . limiting?" Temple asked.

"The blind leading the blind? Yes, but who else has anything in common with us? Why do you think I'm here-- doing my nightline job, living at the Circle Ritz? There were many good reasons l went into the priesthood, and some wrong ones. The church agrees that the wrong ones outweigh the right ones. Now it's up to me to figure out how to live postpartum, if you will; to decide what kind of ex-priest I'm going to be, what kind of Catholic, what kind of man."

Matt drank his cooling coffee, down to the dregs--and dregs did inhabit this bitter, strengthening brew; Temple could taste the grit of fresh grounds when she was halfway through her cup.

"I'm sorry you had to find out." Matt went on, almost to himself. "Sorry that Sister Seraphina had to find out, sorry that what I am is still less than what I was. I've got a lot to work out, more questions that I can't answer than even you could ask."

"I'm sorry. I'm nosy. I'm pushy--"

"You're right," he interrupted, without denying her unflattering self-description. "I'm facing a lot of contradictions."

He spun the oily black dregs of his coffee in the white cup as if looking for tea leaves to read--nope, too superstitious, Temple thought; an ex-priest couldn't even do that.

Temple studied the contradiction sitting across from her. She was attracted to Matt. had been from the first, even though---fresh from Max's inexplicable desertion--she knew better.

She found Matt handsome, but then, that was obvious. She had always squirrned at her attraction to the obvious, but she also understood that the very things that were not obvious about Matt attracted her even more. Now she was getting down to that nitty-gritty--with escalating interest! If she didn't know why he had left the priesthood, she could wonder why he had entered it.

"The girls in high school must have gone crazy when you went into the seminary," she mused, knowing she was dangling for history, for answers, for rivals.

He quirked a smile. "Girls always want what they can't get."

"Boys do, too. That's high school, isn't it?"

"High school must have been a piece of cake for you," Matt said matter-of-factly, expertly, easily, turning the spotlight from him to her.

"Why?" Temple was indignant.

"You're outgoing . . . I was going to say irrepressible. You're so easy with people. I bet you were the most popular girl in your class."

"Bet again! I was the shortest. With glasses, I never could adjust to contact lenses. I was known to get good grades and to be a 'good sport,' although I couldn't play sports worth a stinky pair of sweat socks."

"I wasn't good at sports, either," he said quickly, "Except for the martial arts."

"That's hard."

"But it isn't a team sport."

"Still, I bet the girls were angling for you."

His expression grew dreamy, softened as hers had when she had thought back to the adolescent wilderness of high school days, which did great things for a face that didn't need any help. "A couple of them actually asked me to the senior prom. They didn't know yet," he said.