Eden

By the graying light he could begin to see Rob, and this was when Rob started to stir and stretch. It must have been four in the morning, the light before light, and Rob yawned, “I need to get home.”

“It would defeat the whole fucking in the dark and not seeing each other thing,” Frey said.

Rob turned around and smiled at him.

“It’s not that,” he said, “I don’t want to wear out my welcome, and I have to leave some time.”

Frey nodded and turned over on his stomach pressing his face into the pillow. He felt the bed lifting as Rob climbed out of it.

“And I have to take my dad to church at six. He goes to Mass every day.”

Frey looked up, shielding his eyes, though there was as yet no true light.

“And you wait outside for him?”

“No, I go in with him.”

Frey watched Rob dress in the semi dark, and then he said, “Are you sure you have everything?”

“I do.”

In the distance there had been a whistle, and now the train came charging past them, and it was the sound of wind and engines and chugging and neither of them said anything while it passed. Rob just stood there, his shirt out of his pants, feed cap over his face, his cigarettes in his breast pocket.

“Are you going to be here a while?” Rob asked.

“I think,” Frey said. “I don’t know. I came on a lark. Who says lark anymore? I’m not sure how long I’ll be here, but I’m not leaving today.”

“So you’ll be here tonight?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure I will be. Yeah.”

“Can I come back?” Rob said. “Would you mind that? I mean, like to try it?”

“Sure. What will we do?” Frey said, a little unnecessarily.

“I don’t know.”

Rob shrugged, putting a cigarette in his mouth, putting one cigarette on the bed for Frey. “Fuck again. Whatever.”

“When are you free?” said Frey who’d had many men ask something like this and never show up again.

“I’m off work at seven.”

“Hit me up then,” Frey said. Standing up, naked, he said, “I’ll walk you to the door.

He only pulled on his underwear. At-the-door protocol was always strange, but this ended in a hug. He thought about kissing Rob, but didn’t. He closed the door, and from the window watched him walk the little yard, go up the steps past the hedge, watched the lights of the truck turn on, watched him make a u-turn and head down the road, rolling over gravel. The sky was dark grey now. Frey’s body felt a quiet, tired joy after the night of lovemaking and conversation. He told himself it was unlikely he would ever see Rob again, and satisfied with what had been, made his way to the bedroom, and to deep sleep under the covers.

The sun was starting to come up when Rob came to the old split level at the end of a row of split levels. He measured that he had about an hour or so before six. He yawned and parked on the street and then walked around to the back of the house. He stood in the darkness of the kitchen for a while, and for a moment forgot who he was. Then he walked down the stairs, pulling off his shoes midway. In his the basement he thought how he didn’t want to shower. How he liked the smell on him of last night, and he longed to return to that man’s bed, to not have this life he had to come back to right now. But even as he thought it, he pulled out clean clothes and then went upstairs to use the first floor shower and stand under the heavy drops and their low water pressure.

His father had coffee on when Rob was finished dressing. When Rob sat down, his father pushed a cup of coffee then the cream and sugar across the table to him, and they drank in silence until the older man looked at his wrist and Rob nodded and stood up, crossing the kitchen to take the keys from the wall by the old rotary phone.

“When I start driving again I’m going to go back up to that little church in LaPorte,” his father was saying as they drove down Brooklyn Street. “I used to go there when I was a little boy, and I remember one Sunday I went and there was this man, and he lived on the streets. He was always coming 0to the church. And it was communion time, and he was in the line, and when the cup came ot him, he drank the whole chalice and then walked away. He did that a few times a year.”

Rob could tell this story now. He knew it. He could even tell its variations. It shifted. As they turned the corner of Gerald Street, a man was riding his bike and his father said. “I probably need to put more air in my tires. So I can ride my bike again. He sits on his seat. I never sit on my seat when I ride my bike. You think the bike needs more air? I probably haven’t ridden it in about two years. It’s been two years since the stroke, so it would be two years.”

Not that his father was ever silent, but it seemed like the stroke had made him more talkative and certainly less accurate. As they turned the corner and came before Saint Augustine’s, the little limestone Catholic church, Rob thought how the good thing about the stroke was that once his father started talking, he never had to add to the conversation. He never even had to say yes, or uh huh or oh really. In fact, he could say anything. As they parked in a space before the east wall, Rob tested this out by saying, “Like sandfleas?”

“Exactly,” his father nodded his head and got out of the other side of the car.

Together, his father hobbling a little less stable than he had once done, a lot thinner than he had been before, they came through the side door into the little transept of Saint Augustine’s. Rob dipped his fingers in holy water. The place smelled faintly of frankincense from morning prayer. He crossed himself and genuflected after his father, and they sat in the transept of the quiet church. This is how he liked churches, when they were six thirty a.m. quiet with only the faithful, or the caretakers of the faithful, and the modern lantern lights shining on the terrazzo floor. He could look to his right and see the people, most of them old, coming in through the front door, crossing themselves. Rob and his father were to the left of the modern altar, which came out like a slightly raised dais, and had a wooden screen behind it where the tabernacle was kept, and where some people, a couple of African nuns, that old woman who worked at the library, the weird guy at the grocery store, were coming out. Above the altar was suspended a modern crucifix, and while Rob looked at it, Father Rafferty, Bill Rafferty’s older brother, came out in his white and green robes and announced, as he held the missal in his hand, “Good morning, let’s start out by singing, ‘City of God’.”

It wasn’t so much an announcement as a friendly suggestion to open up the Glory and Praise, and his father, though old, had been young in the Eighties, and was still high on the days of folk guitars and a time when people assumed women would soon be priests, and the church would be a kinder, gentler place. That was still the church his father belonged to, why he had no problem singing very loud and acapella though Rob was put off by it.

“….A new day is dawning for all those who weep.
The people in darkness have seen a great light.
The Lord of our longing has conquered the night.

Let us build the city of God.
May our tears be turned into dancing!
For the Lord, our light and our love,
has turned the night into day!”

The church in LaPorte his father talked about so often was Saint Pancras, and even though he liked coming to Saint A’s with his dad, and the gentleness of these morning masses, he longed for a bit of the incense and statues, and the formality of a high mass.

Before they had moved here, they had gone to a huge old church. That’s when Rob was a little boy, and he had been an altar boy in his white robe and served the priest, and at that church they had still rung the bells. They were doing that again sometimes, so many bells, when the chalice was lifted, when the bread was lifted, when it was put down. And Rob had felt important. He was sure that he would be something important. He, in his robe, almost a little priest himself. Back then he’d thought maybe he would be a real priest some day. After all, didn’t he love God? And after all, did he really need girls?

It had been some time later he’d discovered he didn’t like girls because he was a faggot, and that maybe the reason he had felt at one with the priest was the priest probably was too. There was that whole time in his life when he was scandalized hearing about priests seducing altar boys, hearing about how priests had often themselves been seduced altar boys. Now he wasn’t scandalized at all. No one was really that special. No one was really holy. But we wanted to believe someone was, that he could be at least a little bit special.

It was time to stop thinking now. That was his problem. These thoughts. All scattered, coming and going and never leading to anything.

“….He asked me, ‘Have you seen this, son of man?’
Then he brought me to the bank of the river, where he had me sit.
Along the bank of the river I saw very many trees on both sides.
He said to me, ‘This water flows into the eastern district down upon the Arabah,
and empties into the sea, the salt waters, which it makes fresh.
Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live,
and there shall be abundant fish,
for wherever this water comes the sea shall be made fresh.”

That was another part of it. Holiness took some sort of stamina, some resolve that Rob had never had. He didn’t have the resolve to try to understand the obscure things in the Bible. He didn’t have the resolve or the curiosity to ask or wonder for very long. He had a general love of shiny things, incense and feeling special. He didn’t have the resolve to pray past “Jesus make me good”, and in the end, he didn’t have the resolve to be good.

Resolve.

The night he’d gotten the phone call that said, “If you ever want to see your father alive, you need to come down to the hospital,” was a blessed night, and he would always look at it that way because it was the time when he finally got to have resolve. When he was being called a faggot in junior high, he didn’t have the resolve to wonder if he was, and when sex presented itself in the shady way it eventually had, he didn’t have the resolve to resist. All of his life was an accumulation of little surrenders and lacks of efforts, and for the first time, in the hospital sitting next to his father, or walking him up and down a crooked path through rehab, pushing his wheelchair while he farted, Rob learned resolution. When his mother was gone to Chicago and Rob, still living on his own, moved into the house to take care of a man who was just getting his mind back and, without his wife, had sunk into delusions, resolve came. Goodness came.

“God came,” Rob whispered.

“What?” his father, who never heard half of his conversations, but was able to hear things Rob had not meant him to, said.

“Nothing,” Rob said.

Mass was over by seven. He had to be at the store by nine. Almost two hours to lay on the bed and be half in and half out of sleep. The rest of his life was normal, was standing behind a counter and stocking beer in freezers, was the same customers, the same fluorescent lights, the same pick up trucks rolling in and out of the gravel lot outside. But coming to Mass with his father he felt something special, like maybe he was special, a little bit, like maybe this life was special.

He had learned how to handle sex by now. Most of his sexual experiences were forgettable. They were part of life, often born out of something that rose and needed to be taken care of and, once taken care of, was put aside. Some sex was best forgotten. This morning, in his house he kept on thinking of last night in that man’s house. Frey’s house. Last night had lasted into the morning, which had lasted so much longer than he’d meant it too, which didn’t have the disappointments of most experiences. He lay on his bed waiting for work, half asleep with his alarm set, his mind drifting between Mass this morning with the brass lamp light on the terrazzo floor and the darkness and cigarette smoke, the beer and the flesh and the fucking of last night, and his body longed for Frey.