Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

The envelope also contained a coupon for spaying at the "veterinarian of your choice."

Matt sighed as the animal massaged his calves, leaving short black hairs on his slacks. He gave it a cursory pet and it began purring. It had spent some time with Temple, all right.

He checked his watch--almost eleven. He wasn't used to winding down at this early hour, but the television in the bedroom didn't attract him. Maybe getting the cat settled would distract him, not that it meant that he would keep it. Her.

She followed him into the kitchen as he moved the food, and leaped atop the countertop with a happy chirrup.

"I hope you're not a spy, Caviar," he told her. "I don't need any turncoats reporting back to Temple; she's nosy enough already."

His voice echoed strangely in the rooms bare of rugs and furniture. He realized that he never had anybody visit him here, that he was always utterly alone in his home and as

silent as a monk in his cell.

Matt wasn't sure that having a cat to talk to was much improvement in his private life. He went into the bedroom, where the futon was perpetually unrolled on the floor, where the small color TV sat on a secondhand brass stand, where two cheap particle-board bookcases formed the biggest solid front of furniture in the place.

He turned on the television without checking the channel or the program schedule from the Sunday paper. Was this room that much different from the cell Peter Burns was occupying at this moment? Was he himself as imprisoned by his lifelong past with the church as poor, crazed Peter, whose obsession with what he hated about the church had directed his entire life?

Matt sat on the lone kitchen chair that served as an informal clothes tree and took off his shoes--black wing-tips left over from parish priest days and still so suitable for more formal civilian occasions. And socks, also black.

He threw them across the room. They silently hit the wall and fell to the floor, looking like dead bats.

Temple was crazy! Out of her mind to mess with his life that had already been messed up so thoroughly by other people. By family, such as it was. She didn't know, even with her investigative instincts, what she was getting involved in. He had wanted to hit her with the ugly reality, to shout it out. The church's dirty laundry was coming out in the wash with a vengeance these days, and the statistics, although vague guesstimates shrouded in secrecy, weren't pretty, given the traditional noble concept of the priesthood: up to fifty percent of priests were not celibate; as many as thirty-five to forty percent were gay. Most priests, however sincere their vocation and their spirituality, had found a home in the church precisely because their families had failed them in some way. Some families had failed so spectacularly that young seminarians were unconscious of the hidden booby traps in their own psyches. Now, in public, idols were falling on all sides, all answering to the name of ' 'Father."

Not him. Not anymore. And he had made none of the traditional missteps, had nothing sinful to hide. Perhaps that was his biggest failing. He had been too successfully inhuman.

Matt shut his eyes in the bright room. He knew his own history like a long-term shrink. He knew the whens, the whats, the whys. The only thing he didn't know was how to escape it, overcome it, resolve it, integrate--in psychobabble jargon--the past with present and future.

His sexual future was the least of his worries, and now Temple had confronted that in her own inimitable way. He was surprised to find himself smiling in the middle of his sober thoughts. He knew no one--no woman--who could have confronted the issue in that innovative, intuitive way and pulled it off.

She had literally taken him back in time to a point from which he could now consider a different path. And she'd done it with such a brilliant, whimsical and determined piece of role-playing that to disappoint her and not play along would be like taking a Baby Ruth bar from Shirley Temple. Despite her small size, her youth, her fey good looks that she always felt held her back, Temple was implacably supportive and a very wise old soul in her way.

For the first time, Matt's eternal, invisible force field of restraint, of distance, of sexual repression, had cracked all at the same instant, and the breakthrough had seemed so natural, so innocent for the fractured seconds of the high-school kiss.

After Eden came the flaming sword. He winced as he metaphorically peered into the closet in his soul and the emotions Temple had triggered that night peeked out. Some surprised him. Fear, and pride. Fear of acting like a fool, of being bad at something any man his age knew inside and out. Fondness and begrudging gratitude. But no guilt. It was a Perfect Prom for him, too, like the music she had provided that was neither too fast nor too slow, too little or too much, too cold or too hot--a swift trip to the past, with no more pressure than he could handle at the moment.

Emotions he could control; he had been doing it all hislife. Where emotion and instinct and hormones intersect, though, is a true battleground. He still had hormones, Matt was discovering now that he was alone, despite his long and mostly successful attempts to disown them. The instant they raised their imperative heads, he summoned conscience to beat them back.

Temple had recently been deserted by a man who had meant a great deal to her, he reminded himself. She was vulnerable; perhaps she was attracted to him precisely because he was certain not to rush her into more than she could handle now. And there was the challenge: women couldn't resist the kind of challenge he represented. And the more they tested him, the more he resisted, as if his life depended on remaining unmanipulated, uncontrolled.

And then there was that teenage self of his, who longed for love and understanding, who had sacrificed sex in order to be something better than he thought he was and who now, disillusioned to his sensitive, randy soul, was perfectly capable of being just what Temple wanted, because the closet door could burst open now that Father Matt was no longer there to guard it and so much time had been lost, and she was a sweet, mostly safe human being and he could think about taking advantage of her, using her to ease his own way into the real world he had never been part of.

That realization made him understand the priests who had failed, made him understand that he could still very easily become one of them, despite having left the priesthood.

Matt opened his eyes to the empty, dazzling-white walls, then went to the bathroom. He knew what he should do now: the seminary cold-shower trick that they all had joked about. "The needles of death.''

He stripped off his clothes quickly, as if disowning them, but he was not quick enough to avoid glimpsing his bare body in the long slit of mirror on the bathroom door. He avoided seeing himself in mirrors, dressed or undressed. Being a stranger to himself was part of being a mentor to everybody else. But for a split second, he saw himself as someone else, a true stranger, and he glimpsed for the first time what others might find attractive in his face and body, what a woman might be drawn to.

The insight scalded him with unwanted intimacy with himself. He was used to thinking of himself as the edited outline of a man, like the male figure sent into space by NASA, genitals diplomatically erased like evidence of an unfortunate malformation, as in so many images of modern men. Today's vaunted sexual frankness built its bawdyhouse on the same foundation of nineteenth-century prudery and shame upon which the church had erected its sexual orthodoxy.

He stepped into the deep white bathtub and reached for the shower knob, an old-fashioned porcelain ship's-wheel shape with the word "COLD" printed at its center--cold water like a dash of reality, shriveling, almost painful. But he wasn't in the seminary anymore. He reached instead for the knob marked "HOT" and turned it slowly.