Rick Moody - The Diviners

Next, he invited himself to sit on the edge of her bed. She was standing before him because she was hoping he would leave, and he could see himself through her eyes. He wasn’t so stupid as to think that she would want him, because he was the one who’d baptized her, after all, and he was bald, with the worst kind of baldness, not even a widow’s peak, just patchy, and the hair sprouted everywhere else on his body, in his ears, in his nostrils, on his shoulders and back, and his brows grew together, and he had an ugly beard that grew all the way to his eyes, and he was puffy and soft, and he never ran, nor exercised enough to stem the tide of pudginess, and his appetite was enormous, insatiable, and the problem was constantly getting worse, and here were his squinting eyes, and his thick, embarrassing eyeglasses, and his bowlegs; he could go on with the litany of all the things that she could see in him, the first and last items being that he was old, old enough to have sired her. Where he’d once been young and revolutionary, now he was old. He’d gotten old in the church. And the church, it struck him, was exactly like this girl before him, a thing out of reach, a glimmering in the distance to which he could never quite get, because no matter how far he journeyed, it always seemed that he was still in the spot where he began. When would the heavenly annunciation be his annunciation? When would there be just a little whisper from the great voice in the ethereal skies? A pat on the back?

He could see himself in her eyes, and this should have stopped him.

What did he imagine he wanted? To offer some praise for her beauty that she would not have understood or that she would have thought cheesy, to use the language of the young? She was sixteen, or maybe seventeen, and even if she looked older, with her womanly breasts and her weary, off-kilter smile and her auburn hair and her green eyes, she was still a child. She would launch ships, maybe, or she would launch magazines and clothing lines, and there was no place in this for the likes of him. He can remember what she said next because she said it with a kind of generosity, and she didn’t need to. She could have screamed, called for her father. She could have screamed, but she didn’t. She said, “Reverend Duffy, have you maybe had a little too much to drink?”

Who hadn’t? Everyone had had too much to drink. His own wife hadn’t had too much to drink, because his wife was impossibly good, with reservoirs of goodness that debased him. She always had more energy for another homemade dessert that the kids would ignore. His wife had not drunk too much, but many others had, all the people who stayed too late at the party. If only drinking too much would explain it away, if only the gin bottle had an advisory about reckless behavior. Unfortunately, he’d drunk just enough to remember and to know better. Though his exact wording was lost, fifteen years later, the matter of his request was not. What he asked was if this sixteen-year-old girl would hold him.

When he reimagines it now, he reimagines it as if he were the fluttering dove himself, the holy spook, up near the corner of the ceiling, near some recessed source of interior illumination. Here he can watch as the Reverend Duffy asks a teenage girl to hold him. He can watch when, without waiting for assent or dissent, the reverend launches himself into her arms. What a foul tableau it is, for there is much music and merriment coming from elsewhere in the house. The music is the old rock music from the sixties, something like the Association or the Lovin’ Spoonful or perhaps the sound track to Hair. There are whoops of laughter from out on the patio, and the Reverend Duffy has launched himself into the arms of the goddess of wine. The girl doesn’t know she is beautiful yet, but she knows enough to recognize that she should not have a middle-aged man wrapped around her. She also knows that this middle-aged man should not be aroused.

Drink is said to increase the need and to decrease the ability, but it did nothing to dampen the arousal brought about by the teenage daughter. He could feel himself sweaty and desirous, in a way he had not been with his wife in a long time, though they had their loving and generous middle-of-the-night encounters. This was different; this was the lust that intended to conquer, that wanted to possess and overcome, that wanted to bend philosophy and history to its will and that broke the will of its subjects if it had to. This lust would admit of no opposition. What could the teenage daughter do to fend off the first part of the debasement? She crumpled backward onto her bed, with him piling onto her as though he were a rugby enthusiast. He was in her arms, or some portion of her arms, as little as she could get away with, and he tried to wrap his hands around her. In recollection, this is a fine moment in which to examine the particulars of her room, its immaculateness, the football team banner, the guitar case in the corner, the stuffed animals piled on the hope chest, the lacy curtains, the baby blue bedspread, the sliding closet door, which was open just enough to glimpse some of her girlish outfits.

She began to wriggle free. She spoke of his post, emphatically, “Reverend, Reverend,” the very thing that he was and is not, worthy of reverence, as if saying this would loosen him up somehow, and he was pouring out his all but drunken heart, the reservations that he had then and still has now, that any person of substance would have, that his profession was founded on the kinds of horseshit that you tell sensitive children to get them to sleep; he told her that we all lived here in emptiness and desolation, recognizing ourselves nonetheless as isolates in the infinitude of space, little asteroids of frozen rock in the endlessly expanding nothingness of creation; he tried to get out a couple of lines of poetry in some language that the girl could understand and then, and this is the worst part, he attempted to caress her breast. He remembers this part particularly well. He remembers that he attempted to touch her breast. He remembers that he put his hand down upon her breast, as if he might feel its fullness, as if he might feel where the nipple slumbered, where she would be as the Madonna once was, a feeder of human potential, and perhaps he even wished to suckle at the nipple of the girl, but the girl, who in this time had not ceased from saying “Reverend, please, Reverend, please,” pleading, came up with some surfeit of strength, and she heaved him sideways off of her, and with tremendous haste, she skittered into the bathroom next door, where he could hear the little ping of the push-button lock sealing her in.

His clothes were disarranged. His shirt needed to be tucked in. He went to the bathroom door. Probably she could hear him. She could hear him brushing softly against the bathroom door like a house cat against a shin. Most likely, she could hear him listening to her as she listened, and then she could hear him giving up, could hear the dawning of woeful recognition on his part as he headed down the staircase, straightening his tie. Maybe she could hear him talking to her father, telling John and Barbara what a fabulous party it had been and how he hoped to see them again soon, and then maybe she could hear him, just down the street, starting up his ten-year-old Volvo. If she could hear it, she did so without any pity, because no pity was owed.

That’s what he thinks about in the middle of the night. Waiting still, after all these years, for the repercussions.

On Monday, having slept fitfully, he is back at work on the sermon, for a few hours, before walking over to the church to see if there are any calls. There he will banter with the elderly widows who work for him selling picture postcards of the beautiful old church on the green and helping to plan potluck dinners and Bible study classes.