Father Sergei smoked thoughtfully. Dante, the psychiatrist who worked with neurological disease patients, noticed that the cigarette smoke wavered from a quiver in the old priest’s hand. That oscillation could be mere age, caffeine, or an early Parkinsonian tremor.
“Few people enroll in my class,” the old priest said. Father Sergei taught eschatology, the end of days when God would come to judge the world by fire. “They prefer to think of the world as it is, not what will come. It is a class for those with a rather delicate, dark view of life. I don’t like teaching it, but it weeds out those with a taste for suicide cults.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette. “I might have worried about you, but you’re not going to be a priest, are you?”
The thought of Dante becoming a priest was ludicrous. His mother would have been happy if Dante had become a priest, but now she would not understand. Becoming a doctor was pretty good, too, in her opinion, so she had been mostly satisfied with his choices, back when she could process such things. “Certainly not.”
“Certainly not,” the priest mocked gently. “Why not?”
“Oh, come on.” Dante rubbed his scruffy chin. He had gone home and showered, but as he had had no patients that morning, he had not bothered to shave. He would shave before dressing for the evening.
“You would make a good priest,” Father Sergei said.
“No, I wouldn’t.” Strings of contemptuous comments formed in Dante’s head, but he did not say them. “Trust me on this.”
Father Sergei gestured toward Dante with his cigarette, a beckoning wave. “You are at Mass every morning, sometimes a little late, sometimes a little drunk, but you show up. Then you see patients over at the university hospital. Then you come to classes, because you are seeking something, and even though we are not giving you what you need, you still come.”
Dante had had such hopes when he had enrolled, believing seminary classes to be a philosophical debate where people delved into faith and belief and the soul. They were, however, just another series of lectures, like undergrad, like medical school, like grand rounds every Wednesday. Yet he continued to enroll, as if the mere act of belief that the classes could be better would somehow transubstantiate them.
Father Sergei said, “And then you visit your mother, la signora Rosa Petrocchi-Bianchi, even though she doesn’t know who you are.”
Dante’s breath rolled into his chest. Had the priest followed him? Had Luigi the eyelinered goth followed him? “She may not know who I am, but I know who she is, and that’s none of your business.”
“And you visit every day, long after your sisters have stopped.”
“Did you follow me? Do you know where I go after that?”
Father Sergei’s smile was sad and kind. “You go to nightclubs, and you go home with a different woman every night, and you never sleep alone, and never in your own bed.”
Dante’s knees shook as he stood. He wanted to press his face against the stones and melt into their quiet but he was marooned. “You had no right to spy on me. I’m quitting the seminary.”
“You should be a Jesuit, Dante,” the old man said. “The Ignatian spiritual exercises are what you need.”
The Jesuits, the most atheistic of the priests. Dante’s mother would have said that he needed more faith, not less. “I need women. Lots of women.”
“But you are destroying yourself with the women. Your medical practice is suffering. You cannot decide what you want, the priesthood or medicine. You can’t even decide which protein to believe in, beta-amyloid or tau.”
Dante stopped pacing. “How in the Hell would you know that?”
“I talked to your boss.”
“Vidal? You talked to Vidal?” Dante scrubbed his harsh cheeks. His hand grew raw.
The priest blew smoke. “He has no idea you are sleeping with his wife.”
Sweat popped on Dante’s skin. “I should hope not. He’d kill me.”
“You have a penchant for sleeping with women who might get you killed. The married women. The rather young women with angry, American fathers. What are you searching for, Dante, in the drink and in the women? Why do you sit in a class three times a week and listen to me drone on about unleashing the horsemen and the armies of the Anti-Christ? Are you searching for your own annihilation?”
“I’m not suicidal.” He did not want to die. Surely he wasn’t seeking death.
If he died, no one would visit his mother and make sure she was getting the best treatment. His sisters didn’t visit her much, not even once a week.
His patients would have to find new doctors, who might over-medicate them for the sake of expediency. They would suffer.
And Gio would get all the women.
No, Dante could not die.
“Then what? What do you want that you can’t find in being a doctor or in women or in a bottle or in the end of the world? What are you looking for?”
Dante strode out of the priest’s office, trailing rage and resentment at this little man who had had him followed and had stuck his dick in every aspect of Dante’s life.
~~~~~
That night, about two in the morning, at a small, dark nightclub called The Top Meatball, his third bar of the night, Dante watched women dance to the stomping music. Dark teak, polished beams trussed the walls and ceiling and reverberated with slamming rhythm. Amid all the sinister wood, even the light fell to the floor and slithered like fog.
Dante sipped his stinging-strong drink. The priest’s voice echoed in his head, asking him what he was looking for, his own annihilation, his own suicide?
His mother crawled closer to death every day. Suicide usurps the privilege of the dying.
What was he looking for, the old priest had asked while his cigarette trembled.
“What are you looking for?” Dante asked a black-haired beauty beside him.
“Gin and tonic,” she said, but she was not too friendly.
Dante should laugh at her joke. Women like to think themselves witty, but he could not muster the energy to chuckle. Dante ordered her drink from the bartender.
She leaned toward him, and her low-cut neckline surged. “I would ask what you’re looking for, but I know the answer to that.”
He combed his hair away from his face with his fingers. “So what am I looking for, then?”
“Ass,” she said. Bitterness laced her voice. “You’re looking for ass. Thanks for the drink.” She started to turn away.
“Heaven forefend,” Dante said. “I’m just here for the liquor.”
“‘Heaven forefend?’ How quaint.” She looked more closely at him, at his black silk shirt with the Nehru-like collar, at the holes to snap in the white insert that was in his pocket. “Are you a priest?”
“Why would you ask that?” It was the shirt.
She settled back on her bar stool and turned toward him. “You have that kind but morose quality that priests have when they’re slumming. You’re not one of those lecher priests who uses his collar to get women, are you?”
“Heaven forefend,” he repeated. “And I’m not wearing the collar.”
“That’s true,” the woman said. “I’m flying wingman for my sister. My mother thinks she’s having an affair.” She gestured into the crowd, toward the portside wall, strung with bobbing sea lights.
Dante glanced over at the beautiful blonde woman, Crista Delestraint, who was dancing with Dante’s idiot cousin Gio.
Dante’s molars ground against each other. “Oh, my God.”
“Yeah, she got all the looks in the family.” The black-haired woman stirred her drink. “She’s a natural blonde, too. Just ask her.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Dante turned back to the bar and the beautiful woman with hair as black and thick as his own. He would not tattle on la Signora Delestraint to her sister. “She’s dancing with my cousin. He’s an ass.”
The sister stirred her drink and asked, “Do you think he’s the one she’s hav
ing an affair with?”
“I doubt it. And you are prettier than she is.”
The woman laughed. “Only a priest would think so. Look at her. She’s perfect: blonde, long legs, la bella figura, perfect.”
“I’ll bet she has stubby eyelashes,” Dante said. Crista’s sister had long, dark, elegant eyelashes. She probably didn’t wake up with running mascara.
The sister slowly started smiling, then laughed aloud. “It’s okay that she’s prettier. I got the brains.” The woman stuck out her hand. “Angela Ferrari. I’m at the university, a postdoc, neuroscience.”
Dante must have been too busy with seminary classes and clinic hours to notice the incoming postdoc crop, or too drunk in the mornings. He shook her hand and asked, “Are you a Baptist or a Tauist?”
Her elfin chin dropped, and she turned away from him a little in suspicion. “Baptist. Mutations in the amyloid gene equal disease. Who are you?”
“Dante, just Dante. But with beta-amyloid, genetics are not destiny. Amyloid mutations only correspond to increased risk of disease. Even a homozygous APO E4 genotype,” the very worst kind, as Dante knew, as those were his genes, “is not a prophecy.”
“But the mutations do correspond with increased incidence. Are you in the field?”
Dante said, “The penetrance is low, and even the number and density of amyloid plaques in the brain do not correlate with severity or onset of dementia, while tau tangles do. Whose lab are you in?”
“Vidal Delestraint. Who are you?”
Dante choked, but a slow thrill gathered at the base of his spine. The dark wood around the bar brightened and glimmered. “Your sister married your boss?”
Dante realized that Angela hadn’t mentioned that relationship yet, but he sipped his drink and didn’t elaborate.
“Yeah, can you believe it?” she said. “I invited my boss home for supper once, once, and he fell in love with my own sister. Whirlwind courtship. They got married six months ago, and now she’s running around on him.” Angela looked a little desperate. “What should I do?”
Dante shrugged. He should escape this little bar. He should never see either of the two beautiful sisters again. The two of them could sabotage everything he had built at the university. “Is your loyalty to your sister, your blood relative, or to your boss, in whose lab you are doing your postdoc for what, two years, and then you must move on?”
Angela’s head bobbled side to side. “Yeah, when you put it like that. And I’ve only got six months left in his lab. And he’s such a tightass.”
“There you go,” Dante said. The thrill tightened and spiraled. The danger of hunting this woman, Crista’s sister, Delestraint’s postdoc and sister-in-law, enticed him.
Angela asked, “So what should I do about her screwing around?”
Dante shrugged.
“Aren’t you priests supposed to disapprove of that sort of thing?”
“I’m not that kind of a priest.” Dante wondered what the hell he meant by that.
“Oh? What kind of a priest are you?”
Dante plucked his empty collar. “None to speak of.”
“Oh. Right. Incognito.”
Dante winked at her. He wanted to take this beautiful Angela somewhere and bed her properly, for hours. He wanted to make sure Angela was never jealous of her sister again.
Angela smiled, and she was gorgeous when she smiled like that, more sexy than serenely beautiful.
“Buena sera,” Crista’s voice said behind Dante.
Gio’s strong hand thumped Dante on the back.
Angela looked up, startled. “Hi, uh, Crista.” She flicked her hand at Dante’s chest, where his heart clapped with eagerness to the hopping music. “This is Dante. Dante, my sister Crista.”
Gio grinned his most prideful grin. “Crista, this is my little cousin, Dante.”
Gio was six-feet-three, two inches taller than Dante. Their height rivalry had started with they were five years old.
The blonde sister, Crista, smiled slyly. “We’ve met.”
Gio’s eyebrows flicked up. Angela’s clenched down.
Crista said, “Dante works with a friend of mine.”
Gio leaned in and ordered a drink. “Oh?” he asked. “At the university?”
“Yeah,” Crista said. “Dante, you just happened to meet my sister?”
“Imagine that,” Dante said.
Behind Dante’s shoulder, Gio growled near his ear, “Crista is mine. Go away, or I’ll tattle to your mother that you’re drinking again.”
Dante’s lips curled in. That asshole should not be let out without a muzzle. Because Gio hadn’t visited Dante’s mother for two years, he didn’t know how far gone she was. “Shut up, Gio.”
Crista touched Dante’s chest, overly familiar with his body. Angela watched Crista’s hand on Dante’s black shirt, and her eyes became coldly logical.
Indeed, Angela had gotten the brains in the family.
Dante looked down at Crista’s hand, then up at the bartender. He leaned away from her hand, toward Angela, and the expression that he cultivated in his bored mouth and flicker of eyebrow was, Well, this is inappropriate. Dante said to the bartender, “Another Jameson, please.”
In his peripheral vision, Angela glanced up to her sister. “Crista,” she said, like a toddler’s name used as a reproach.
Ah, Angela was possessive of him. That was promising.
Crista’s hand pulled away from Dante’s shirt, leaving a warm spot that cooled in the Roman night air flowing in from an open door behind the bar.
Christa looked troubled and anxious, like she had offended Dante and wanted to make it up to him.
Ah, Dante had them, both of them. Gio would go home alone again.
Dante smiled and drank his whisky.
~~~~~
Dante hadn’t drunk as much as usual, despite his long night at the bars. He did not fall unconscious, and he remembered too much.
The dark-haired sister blended in with the night, like a warm wind that rocked Dante to and fro. The blonde sister was an arc of cool moonlight.
In those drunken hours, Dante was embraced, but night lurked beyond the walls, waiting for quiet so it could infiltrate the walls and seep between Dante and the women.
Afterward, they slept, though Dante tried to talk to them. “Don’t you wonder sometimes,” he asked their drowsy pale flesh, “how people can believe in God? What are they looking for? What makes them that way?”
Angela opened a sleepy, dark eye. “Neurotransmitters. Stupid ones.”
Dante stared at the hotel room’s white ceiling. Two women curled around his body. a total of about two hundred and thirty pounds of soft female flesh. Their hair smelled like cigarette smoke and oranges.
The night soaked through the plaster walls and filled up the room, until Dante finally left them there, sleeping. He paid the bill at the front desk and walked into the dawn twilight.
Crista and Angela, he had bedded them both that night, the wife and postdoc sister-in-law of his boss and friend, the hunter who owned an arsenal of guns.
Maybe Vidal had a sister. If Dante screwed Vidal’s sister, too, then surely Vidal would kill him.
In Dante’s mind, a black cloud gathered on the horizon of his thoughts. He felt the rumblings of thunder, shaking him.
At a liquor store, he bought several bottles of single malt scotch, opened one bottle, and lit a cigarette while he stumbled home. The quick whisky reinforced his buzz and staved off hangover. Teetering on the tightrope of inebriation without falling into alcohol toxicity took finesse and years of practice.
Dante was a cad. Un donniolo. He was nothing but a user of women.
Sometime soon, he would not be a young man who liked to prowl the nightclubs. He would be a pathetic, lonely old man, and then he would be a demented husk of a man.
A church rose on his left during the short walk to his apartment. Rome is lousy with churches a
nd liquor stores. Sideways sunrise light struck the rough plaster, and darkness drizzled in the crenellations of the architecture.
Most of Dante’s childhood had been spent in churches and liquor stores.
Each day before school, Dante had assisted at Mass.
The priest, Father Ignatius, had been beset by the demons of Alzheimer’s, Dante realized much later. Between Masses, Ignatius had stared blankly into the church, as if he was merely a machine for Mass, and if he was not officiating and blessing, he came unplugged.
One day, when Dante was twelve, the old priest had forgotten the words during the communion rite. Father Ignatius stood with both arms braced around the pyx of communion wafers and the chalice of wine. His scrunched mouth worked around his dentures, and it looked like his false teeth had torn loose inside his skull and eaten the words.
Dante broke the bread and mingled it with the wine, and said to the old priest, studying his blinking eyes set in his hanging skin, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit, Your death brought life into the world.”
Incomprehension bred terror in the old man’s jaundiced eyes.
Dante said, “By Your body and blood, free me from all my sins and from every evil.”
The old man raised a trembling hand to the cracker, took it from Dante’s soft fingers, and said, “Keep me faithful to Your teaching, and never let me be parted from You.”
Father Ignatius presented to the chalice to the assembled. “This is the Lamb of God.”
From the pews, Dante’s father glared at him.
The old priest ate a wafer and sipped from the plain silver chalice. He wiped the rim with a square of white linen and held the chalice for Dante. “The blood of Christ.”
Dante said, “Amen,” and sipped the watered wine. The chalice rim was still warm from the old man’s mouth.
That day in school was wasted. Dante alternated between sneaking slivers of happiness at performing part of the communion rite, and dread.
After school, his father thrashed him for being so presumptuous as to bless the Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and then Dante stocked shelves in his father’s liquor store until dark.
His mother met him on the doorstep, coming home from her job, and he told her about saving the Mass. She had smoothed his hair and smiled. “You will make a good priest someday,” she said, “if you can get your temper under control. You haven’t been fighting at school again, have you? You’re a mess.”