Tiffany Reisz - The King

“What are you doing?” Kingsley asked as he came to the piano and peeked under the open lid. He spoke with a steady voice.

“Your bass notes are flat.” Søren hit a key and turned a pin inside the piano. “You shouldn’t have the piano near the window. The temperature fluctuates too much.”

“I’ll have it moved.”

“When was the last time you had it tuned?” Søren asked.

“Never.”

“I can tell.” Søren hit another key, turned another pin. Kingsley watched Søren’s hands as he worked. Large, strong and flawless hands. His clothes had changed, he’d grown taller, more handsome, and now he was a priest. But his hands hadn’t changed. They were the same hands Kingsley remembered.

Søren stood up straight and lowered the lid of the grand piano back down.

“The action is stiff. Has it not been played very often?”

“You were the first. No one’s allowed to play it.”

“No one? Then I apologize for playing it.”

“Don’t apologize. When I say no one is allowed to play it, I meant...no one but you.”

Søren glanced up and met Kingsley’s eyes. It took all of Kingsley’s resolve, fortitude and the alcohol left in his bloodstream not to break eye contact. Søren always had this way of looking at him that made Kingsley want to confess everything to him. Even back when they were teenage boys in school together, he’d had that power. But Kingsley kept silent, kept his secrets. They weren’t boys anymore.

“I’ll call someone,” Kingsley finally said. “I’ll have it tuned.”

“Call a music store. They’ll be able to recommend a good tuner.”

Kingsley and Søren studied each other over the top of the piano.

“Do you want to keep talking about the piano, or should we have a real conversation?” Søren asked.

Kingsley gave him a halfhearted smile and sat down on the piano bench. The adrenaline had subsided, but the disorientation remained. If he awoke to find himself in bed and all this was a dream, he wouldn’t be surprised.

“So...parish priest? Dominican? Franciscan?” he asked, the old words coming back to him like a language he used to be fluent in but hadn’t spoken in years.

“Jesuit,” Søren said, taking a seat on the white-and-black-striped sofa across from the piano bench.

Kingsley rubbed his forehead and laughed.

“A Jesuit. I was afraid of that. I knew they wanted you in their ranks.”

“I wasn’t recruited. It was my choice.”

“So it’s real? The collar? The vows? All of it?”

He clasped his hands in front of him between his knees.

“It is the most real thing I’ve ever done.”

Kingsley raised his hands in surrender and confusion.

“When? Why?” He gave up on his English and fell back into his French. Quand? Pourquoi?

“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I’ve wanted to be a priest since I was fourteen,” Søren answered in his perfect French. It felt good to speak his first language again, to hear it again, even if every word Søren said stabbed his heart like a sword. “I converted at fourteen, so I could become a Jesuit. It was all I ever wanted.”

“You never told me.”

“Of course not. When I met you...”

“What?”

Søren didn’t answer at first. Weighing his words? Or simply torturing Kingsley with silence? Kingsley remembered those long pauses before Søren would speak, as if he had to examine every word like a diamond under a jeweler’s lope before allowing it to be displayed. Kingsley could live and die and be born again waiting for Søren to answer one little question.

“When I met you,” Søren said again, “it was the first time I questioned my calling.”

Kingsley let those words hang in the air between them before tucking them inside his heart and locking them away.

“Did you think I would try to talk you out of it?” Kingsley asked once he could speak again.

“Would you have tried to talk me out of it?”

“Yes,” Kingsley said entirely without shame. “I’ll try to talk you out of it now.”

“You’re a little late. I’m ordained. You know religious orders are sacraments. They can’t be revoked. Once a priest...”

“Always a priest,” Kingsley finished the famous dictum. He wasn’t Catholic, but he’d gone to a Catholic school long enough to learn all he needed to know about the Jesuits. “But a Jesuit? Really? There are other sorts of priests. You had to join an order that takes a vow of poverty?”

“Poverty? That’s your problem with the Jesuits? Not the celibacy?”

“We’ll get to that. Let’s start with the poverty.”

Søren leaned back on the sofa and rested his chin on his hand.

“It’s good to see you again,” Søren said. “You look better than the last time I saw you.”

“The last time you saw me I was dying in a Paris hospital.”

“Glad you got over that.”

“You’re not the only one, mon ami . I should thank you—”

Søren raised his hand to stop him.

“Don’t. Please, don’t thank me.” Søren glanced away into the corner of the room. “After all that happened, after all I put you through, terrifying a doctor on your behalf was the least I could do.”

He gave Kingsley a tight smile.

“You did more than terrify a doctor. I shouldn’t tell you this, but my...employer at the time had decided to burn me.”

“Burn?”

“Remove me from existence. Letting me die in the hospital was a nice, clean way to get rid of me and everything I know. The doctors, they’d been encouraged to let me die peacefully. I would have, if you hadn’t shown up and given the counter order.”

“I’m good at giving orders.” Søren gave him the slightest of smiles.

“How did you find me? At the hospital, I mean.”

“You listed me as your next of kin when you joined the Foreign Legion.”

“That’s right,” Kingsley said. “I had no one else.”

“You had our school as my contact information. A nurse called St. Ignatius, and St. Ignatius called me.”

“How did you find me today?”

“You don’t exactly fly under the radar, Kingsley.”

Kingsley shrugged, tried and failed to laugh.

“It’s not fair, you know. I couldn’t open my eyes that day in the hospital. You saw me last year. I haven’t seen you in...too long.”

“I was in Rome, in India. I’m not sure I want to know where you’ve been.”

“You don’t.”

“What are you doing with yourself these days?”

Kingsley shrugged, sighed, raised his hands. “I own a strip club. Don’t judge me. It’s very lucrative.”

“I judge not,” Søren said. “Anything else? Job? Girlfriend? Wife? Boyfriend?”

“No job. I’m retired. No wife. But Blaise is around here somewhere. She’s the girlfriend. Sort of. And you?”

“No girlfriend,” Søren said. “And no wife, either.”

“You bastard,” he said, shaking his head. “A fucking Jesuit priest.”

“Actually, a nonfucking Jesuit priest. They haven’t rescinded the vows of celibacy yet.”

“How inconsiderate of them.”

Kingsley tried to smile at Søren, but he couldn’t. Not yet.

“Celibacy.” Kingsley pronounced the word like a curse. It was a curse. “I thought you were a sadist. When did you become a masochist?”

“Is that a rhetorical question or are you looking for the exact date of my ordination? I’m a priest. Once you’re firmly convinced that God exists, it’s not that great a leap to ask him for a job.”

Kingsley stood up and walked to the window. Outside, Manhattan had awoken and stirred to life. He had CEOs and Nobel Prize winners and heiresses as his neighbors here on Riverside Drive. They were the men and women who owned the city. And yet the only person in the entire borough who meant anything to him sat on his sofa in the music room and didn’t have a cent to his name. Søren once had a cent to his name. A few billion cents to his name. And he’d given every last one of them to Kingsley.