The Prayers in Rossford

“But why me? I don’t understand.”

“Because we share something. Because of Christmas. Because of before,” Keith said.

“Noah, you were there. You were there back then, and we’re together now in the present. You’re the only one who knows things from both sides. Don’t you feel that?”

“Yes. I guess. I mean, yes I do. I do get it.”

“At first. On Ash Wednesday, when I left, I told myself, I told God, that I would do all the things I had been tempted to do. Instead of a Lent I would have… a carnival, no restraints.”

“It got old, didn’t it?” Noah said. “You can only screw so much, snort so much, smoke so much. It’s not that many people who can make it interesting.”

“No,” Keith said, wistfully. “Everyone’s not Janis Joplin. But, no… I didn’t even get to that. I just… I didn’t know where I was going to go. All I knew was religious places or old friends or family to stay with. I… I kept thinking, now I can do all the things I feel tempted to. I actually thought I could go do a movie with Guy.”

“He would have loved it if you did.”

“Yes,” Keith said, “Probably. But I couldn’t get to it. I didn’t want to. And I thought I would at least start by watching those movies. They used to turn me on so much. More than turn me off. I’d have to literally get up and have… and do…”

When Noah saw that Keith had a hard time saying the word “sex” he said, “Would you like to get out of here?”

Keith looked around.

“It’s a friendly little church, isn’t it? Not scary at all. It’s a beautiful old place,” Keith said. Then he said, “Yeah, We could go to the little park across the street.”

Noah nodded.

“You’re really sure you don’t have something better to do?”

“No,” Noah said, rising and crossing himself in a perfunctory way. “I’m telling you, I’m sure this is exactly the reason I came here.”

“I was still… excited by them,”Keith said. “But it wasn’t like before.”

Noah nodded. He hugged himself even though the late May breeze felt good.

“I mean, maybe you don’t know what it was like for me,” Keith said. “Everyone’s not the same. But… I’ve heard junkies talk… I met junkies when I was gone—I’ve been so sheltered, Noah—and I was like them. I needed to see a dirty movie. I would start to shake and chatter and almost hurt if I didn’t see porn. And then when I saw it I had this almost violent reaction unless I had sex with someone. I literally could not not have sex.”

“I thought that sex addicts were…” Noah began, “I thought that it’s like because people don’t like sex, anyone who just likes to have sex is called an addict. But there is a difference between… liking to drink, liking to drink a lot and… just being not able to not drink.”

“Right,” Keith felt as if they were both trying to make sense of this. “It’s like that, only different. But here’s the thing, Noah. When I was free to do what I felt, I didn’t feel it like that. I mean, I still had desires, but not like that. I wasn’t self destructive. But I was still afraid. Afraid I would screw up, afraid I wouldn’t feel free anymore. That’s how I felt. I felt free for the first time in my life. But it’s hard to be free. It’s hard to stay free, Noah. And it’s scary. It’s a fight. I feel like I’m in a new place, but the same old fears come up every day.”

Noah nodded.

“You know what I mean, then?”

“Yeah,” Noah said, lightly. “And I feel like… if I’d stayed the same person, it would have been easier in some ways. Or even if I’d done like… You remember Danny Wulf?”

“Yeah.”

“He got saved. Made a three-sixty change. I never made that change. I’m still me. I still love sex. I never say I won’t make a movie again. I’m just pretty sure I won’t. The change is slow for me. Every day. And it’s hard.”

Keith was nodding the whole time.

“But what about you?” Noah said. “You’re not finished with your story, yet.”

“Right,” Keith remembered.

“I finally went to this monastery,” Keith said. “I was going from place to place, staying with cousins, and this voice was in my head telling me how I could sneak out with guys, do all of these crazy things. And I wasn’t doing them. I didn’t have the energy for it. I didn’t want to get on the Internet and search out men or… anything like that. So I went to this monastery down south a little bit.

“It was wonderful, and I think I was sort of proud of myself. And the music, Noah…”

“Once, me and Paul went to a monastery down in Florida,” said Noah. “It was incredibly cool. I acted like it wasn’t, at the time. But it was.”

“How is Paul?”

“He and his boyfriend went to Chicago.”

“Um,” Keith said. “That’s too bad.”

“But the monastery?”

“Yes,” Keith remembered.

“Anyway, I went to bed one night, and I was deep in sleep when I heard this fiddling around and someone crawling into bed.”

“What?”

“Yeah. And then he blinked at me and he said, ‘You’re not Brother So and So.’ And I said no. Brother So and So was gone. And he said, how would you like to take his place?”

“What are you saying?” Noah sat up, prickly and incensed.

“Apparently this was a brother, and one of the other brothers was his lover. But he was gone, so he asked if I’d like to have sex with him instead.”

Noah just looked at Keith, and then he said, in a brittle voice.

“Are you going to ask me if I did?” Keith said.

“I really don’t want to,” Noah said.

“Well, I did,” Keith said.

Noah felt repulsed, even though he knew he had no right.

“I did it and then I felt betrayed. I was trying to get away from this and at the safest place in the world I started fooling around with one of the monks.”

“Well, if you’re gay, a house full of men probably isn’t the safest place in the world.”

“But I never ever fooled around with another seminarian. I never did,” Keith said. “You’re the only one I’ve told this too, Noah.”

And then Noah took a breath. He understood what Keith was saying now. Noah was his confessor. How many nights in the dark had Noah spilled out things to James, things James didn’t want to hear? But Noah had needed someone to hear them, and James had been there.

“The whole time I was there I was sleeping with this man,” Keith said. “I cut my stay short because… I didn’t like him. He was living a lie. And that meant I was living a lie too. I really started to despise myself. We slept together a couple of times, but… I wasn’t addicted to it. For once in my life. It wasn’t like when I made the movies and did the whole Jekyll and Hyde thing, turning from Keith McDonald to…”

“Bick Throbbing.”

“Yes,” Keith turned an embarrassed smile. “I was me, with all of my shame and embarrassment. I was ashamed of myself. But at least I wasn’t disassociating.”

“So what did you do?”

“That,” said Keith, “is what I’m about to tell you.”

Nell sat on the edge of the bed, pushing her hair out of her face.

“I’ve never done anything like this before!” Charlie announced, pulling back on his pants and reaching for his shirt.

“Me neither,” Nell said, her hand searching for her panties.

Charlie handed her the bra.

“You’ve got to believe that,” said Nell. “I’m not just trying to sound… Chaste. I… I can’t remember the last time.”

Charlie beamed down, excited, almost looking foolish. He held her face in his hands. His hair was a mess, not the well combed thatch it would be on the news tonight.

“Me neither,” he said. “Isn’t it awesome? I…. My relationships are always failures. I just came out of one that lasted three years where the girl I thought was going to marry me, I’m pretty sure was cheating on me.”

“Oh, dear,” Nell said as she buttoned her blouse and searched for her skirt.

“And I know you don’t like to talk about it, about your past,” Charlie said. He was adjusting his shirt and his tie hung around his neck, undone, “so I suppose that you have some pretty unhappy stuff too.”

He sat on the edge of the bed looking much too young and incredibly cute to her. She couldn’t believe they were having sex. And then her mind flashed back to the heat, the wetness of it all, the way he was in bed. Yes, they were having sex.

Charlie said:

“Look Nell, I’m not stupid. We’re not exactly a serious match. But we are fun,” he said. “We’re a lot of fun, and if you would like to keep on having fun, then so would I.”

He took her hand in his now, and put on a silly face.

“Now, Nell Reardon, would you like to keep on having fun?”

She turned away from him, embarrassed, wanting to laugh. But he turned her face with the edge of his finger, to look at her.

“Yes,” she said.

He kissed her quickly, and then, just as quickly, knotted his tie and winked at her.

“Great.”

“It doesn’t matter what the hell you wear for graduation,” Layla was saying. “It’s going be covered up by those ugly gowns.”

“I know!” Dena made a face. “Aren’t they hideous? It’s not like this in the movies at all—”

Dena heard the door open down below, and held up her hand, running out of the room.

“Mom! I was thinking,” she said, coming down the steps, “I don’t really need you to take me to get a new dress for graduation. I figure, I’m seventeen, and I’ve always got what I asked for and sometimes you just give me a little too much. I can wear what I have on right now because no one’s going see me through that—”

And then she stopped, mouth wide open, and there was Nell, mouth wide open, and beside her there was Charlie, mouth wide open.

“I mean… Nell… Not mom,” Dena began, “because… there’s no way you could be my… well, when… Mom gets in, Nell, NELL, you tell her that your old friend Dena wants… uh….” Dena faltered and then said in a rush, “I’m going upstairs now,” and ran back up the steps.

Charlie just stood there looking at her.

“That’s…” Nell began. “Oh, hell, I cannot disown Dena, she’s the one who made me online date, anyway.”

“Your… daughter?” Charlie said.

“Yeah.”

“Who is… seventeen?”

“Yeah. Sort of. I mean. Yes.”

“That would make you….”

“Old enough to have a seventeen year old,” Nell said with forced cheer.

“Not thirty.”

“I am thirty…. Plus some.”

After a while, licking his lower lip and frowning to come up with his next thought, Charlie said, “Um.”

“Yeah,” said Nell.

“Ummmm.”

“But what did you do?” Noah said.“After you left the monastery? Where did you go?”

“I went back to my seminary,” Keith said. “Where I had studied. I didn’t tell anyone about the bishop releasing me. I just said I was on break for a bit. I didn’t tell anyone anything about…. Anything.

“But for the first time I thought to myself, ‘I am gay’. Which I know sounds silly, but I thought, for the first time, of myself as gay. And I started looking for books. I wanted to be with someone, but I wasn’t an addict like before. Suddenly there was more to it than just getting nailed, or nailing someone.

“So I got this book out. It’s enormous, Noah, and I’ll loan it to you. Give it to you, whatever. But toward the back there was this huge part about gays and religion.”

“It had that?”

“It had everything. It had stuff about safe sex, good sex, civil unions, boyfriends, threesomes, everything.”

“I gotta see this book.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “And the article on religion said something about how ancient shamans were queer, and queer people were the religious people who went to the edge and came back with all of this vision, that they were all priests in ancient societies. And I remembered all those jokes people said about priests, about what we were really up to. And I thought… how I had always felt on the edge, different, away from everything.”

“Stop,” Noah interrupted.

“What?”

“I always felt that way. Weird, strange. Different. Like I was missing out on something everyone else was going through. Something that… I didn’t necessarily think was that great, but that everyone else had. And… But I always thought it made me bad. Made me less.”

“I always felt the same way. I thought that me being the way I was… was a hindrance to being a good priest. I never thought that it helped.”

“But maybe that’s why everyone here likes you. Maybe that’s why everyone thinks you’re such a good priest.”

Keith said nothing to this. It embarrassed him a little, actually.

“Noah, I read this one part about a retreat this guy went on, maybe your age. He was real religious. A Lutheran. It was for gay religious people and I remember what he wrote, he wrote: “we fucked and prayed and fucked and prayed. It was terrific.” And that was like the biggest weight off my shoulders ever. That you could… fuck and still pray, and not be guilty or ashamed. It was like a revelation. And then I knew that’s the kind of life I wanted. I didn’t want to not be sexual. I didn’t want to be celibate anymore. I wanted to find a way to keep being religious, to be a minister, and to pursue a love life. Or even a lovemaking life.”

“But you’re right here.” Noah said. “You’re here at Saint Barbara’s now.”

The swaying branches above them made a shimmering shadow on them and Keith shrugged.

“I’ve got no one to love right now. Or make love to. I can still be a priest for now. But… now you know where I’m headed. Now you know I’m not going to be ashamed anymore.”