lowered my head, suggesting intense soul pain.
“It must have been hard for you.”
“It hasn’t been easy.”
Abruptly he turned his head toward the dark door in the back of the room and yelled: “Michael! Michael! Come here and see someone who is really suffering. Come and meet an actual human being.”
Michael stepped into the room buttoning up, the impeccably white shirt closing in on a chest smooth and hairless. He was blond and blue-eyed, incongruously handsome in the Blue Island dreariness, sporting the square jaw of the American movie star.
“The young man here is from Bosnia. Do you have any idea where Bosnia is, Michael?”
Michael said nothing and strolled over to the coffee table, throwing his shoulders model-like. He dug up a cigarette from the coffee table wreckage and walked out, leaving a wake of anger behind.
“He smokes,” the priest said, plaintively. “He breaks my heart.”
“Smoking is bad,” I said.
“But he works out a lot,” the priest said. “Absent in spirit, but present in body.”
I had a selection of magazines just for Michael, I said. Men’s Health, Shape, Self, Body + Soul, all of them covering a wide range of interests: workout regimens, fitness tips, diets, et cetera.
“Michael!” the priest hollered. “Would you like a subscription to Body and Soul ?”
“Fuck you,” Michael screamed back.
The priest finished his Scotch and pushed himself awkwardly up from the couch to reach the bottle. I was tempted to help him.
“If there were a magazine called Selfishness, ” he grumbled, “Michael would be editor in chief.”
He refilled the glass and returned into the depth of the couch. He scratched his dome and a flock of skin flakes fluttered up in its orbit.
“Michael wants to be an actor, you see. He is nothing if not vanity and vexation,” the priest said. “But he has only managed to be a fluffer in the odd adult movie. And to tell you the truth, I cannot see a future in fluffing for him.”
It was time for me to go. I was experienced enough to recognize the commencement of an unsolicited confession. I had stood up and left in the middle of a confession before—no doubt adding to the confessor’s flow of tears—because it had been the prudent thing to do. But this time I could not leave, perhaps because the drama was titillatingly unresolved, or because the priest was so minuscule and weak, whole parchments peeling off his forehead. Having been often pitied, I savored pitying someone else.
“I’ve known Michael since he was a boy. But now he thinks he can go off on his own. It is not good that the man shall be alone, it is not good.”
Michael appeared out of the room in the back, his hair immaculately combed but still quivering in exasperation. He stormed past us and left the house, slamming the door behind him.
The priest finished off the Scotch in the glass in one big gulp.
“We all do fade as a leaf,” he said, and threw the glass toward the coffee table. It dropped on top of the mess, and rolled down, off the table, out of sight. It was time for me to go; I started getting up.
“Do you know who Saint Thomas Aquinas was?” he said, raising his finger, as though about to preach.
“Yes, of course I know,” I said.
“When he was a young man, his family did not want him to devote his life to the church, so they sent a beautiful maiden to tempt him out of it. And he chased her away with a torch.”
He stared at me for a very long moment, as though waiting for a confirmation of my understanding, but it never came—understanding was not my job.
“Be not righteous overmuch,” he said, fumbling the word “overmuch.” “I never had a torch.”
The door flung open and Michael charged back in. I sank into the chair, as he walked to the priest and stood above him, pointing his index finger at him, shaking it, his jaw jutted sideways with fury.
“I just want to say one thing, you sick fuck,” he said, a few loose hairs stuck to his
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