Communion Is a Kiss: A Short Story Read online



  Communion Is a Kiss

  By: T.K. Kenyon

  Published by Malachite Publishing

  Copyright 2012 by T.K. Kenyon

  Discover other books by T.K. Kenyon:

  TKKenyon.com

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  "WHAT'S NEXT? WHAT'S NEXT?"

  "RABID is a solid good read by first time novelist TK Kenyon, a gifted writer who has crafted a book of such mystery that you find yourself, at midnight, on the edge of your seat, asking, 'What's next? What's next?'"

  -- Thom Jones, Award-Winning author of: The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap, Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine

  ~~~~~

  "A GENRE-BENDING STORY"

  *STARRED REVIEW* A priest, a professor, the professor's wife, and his mistress--it sounds like the set-up for a dirty joke, but debut novelist Kenyon isn't fooling around. What begins as a riff on Peyton Place (salacious small-town intrigue) smoothly metamorphoses into a philosophical battle between science and religion. You would think that in attempting to deal with so many different themes-- shady clergy, top-secret scientific research, marital infidelity, lust, love, honor, faith-- Kenyon would run the risk of overwhelming readers. But, and this is why Kenyon is definitely an author to watch, she juggles all of her story's elements without dropping any of them--and, let's not forget, creates four very subtle and intriguing central characters. This is a novel quite unlike most standard commercial fare, a genre-bending story--part thriller, part literary slapdown with dialogue as the weapon of choice (think Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf)-- that makes us laugh, wince, and reflect all at the same time. Kenyon is definitely a keeper.

  - David Pitt, Booklist, December 1, 2006

  ~~~~~

  Of God and Glycoprotein: Rabid for Religion and Science

  September, academia's spring, brings with it rebirth and resurrection. Ideas breed with renewed enthusiasm as minds meet afresh. The new season means, for me, opportunities to join up with others who dwell in the ecological overlap zone of science and religion.

  Perhaps in part because I inhabit this overlap zone, I greatly enjoyed a few days' visit to T.K. Kenyon's own hybrid labworld/churchworld. In Rabid, Kenyon pulls together all the beauty and terror found in religion and all the beauty and terror found in science to create a fictional space where every person seeks light, whether at the lab bench, or at the church altar, or both. We all of us are seekers and sinners; we, the devout and the damned, are all the same.

  -Barbara J. King, Bookslut

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  Cover Photo by Cia Bjork of Sweden. Photo manipulation by TK Kenyon.

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  Table of Contents

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  Communion Is a Kiss

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  About TK Kenyon

  Review this ebook and get free stuff!

  Special Bonus: The Law of Large Numbers

  Praise for TK Kenyon’s Books

  ~~~~~

  Communion Is a Kiss

  Why Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi Became A Priest

  ~~~~~

  Dante awoke again in a strange woman’s bed, in a bedroom not his own, in a house he didn’t know, in a part of the Eternal City far from his home. He pressed his arm over his sore eyes and feigned sleep to ignore her ringing phone.

  Hangover slime coated his throat. If the bed did not stop spinning, he was going to puke. He found the lacy edge of the bed with his other hand and held on.

  Clattering as someone found the phone, and a woman’s soft voice beside him asked, “Allo?”

  Silence. Blessed silence. His stomach settled. His headache eased.

  She said, “All right. Goodbye.” A soft click. “Dante?”

  “Che? What?” He ventured lifting his sandpaper eyelids, and sharp Roman sunlight shocked his eyes.

  A slim hand shook his arm over his eyes. “Dante!”

  He groaned and glimpsed her beyond his arm. She was pretty, blonde, and mascara-streaked. She glanced at the bedroom door. “You have to go. My husband will be home in a few minutes.”

  “You’re married?” Such a cliché, but he did not like to sleep with married women. Irate fathers caused him enough problems without the additional problems of irate husbands. He didn’t really care that much, though.

  The blonde said, “Yes. He just called from a taxi. He will be here any minute.”

  Adrenaline quelled Dante’s hangover nausea. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. A slimy, flaccid condom lay beside his still-shined shoe, and he stuffed it deep into the crackling paper in the trash can.

  His watch read seven-fifteen. Late again. “Merda, I’m late for Mass.”

  “You didn’t say you were a priest,” she said. “I slept with a priest? Oh, my God.”

  “I’m not a priest. I’m a psychiatrist. I didn’t tell you that I was a priest, did I?” Certainly he hadn’t lied to a woman to get her into bed. It was easy enough without lying.

  On a lace-covered table beside the bed, a picture showed her on good morning standing next to a man who was wearing camouflage and holding a rifle.

  Worse, the husband in the picture was Vidal Delestraint, Dante’s boss. Anger replaced alarm at an impending husband’s arrival. “Your husband is Vidal?”

  “How do you know Vidal?” she asked.

  How had frumpy, bullet-bald, French Vidal met such a beautiful woman and married her? Certainly Vidal should have paraded her around so that Dante would know who she was. Dante stuffed his socks into his shoes and found his underwear. “Why have I not met you at the university?”

  “Are you at the university?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He finger-combed his black hair out of his eyes so he could look for his shirt but it was not on this side of the ruffled bed. He could not leave it here, not with Vidal on the way.

  “Neuroscience?” she asked.

  “Of course neuroscience.” He still could not find his shirt. He lifted the lace dust ruffle of the bed and felt the smooth wooden floor, but it wasn’t there.

  “Oh, merda.” She asked sarcastically, “Are you a Baptist or a Tauist?”

  His shirt, or something black, was under the sheet near her pale arm. “It doesn’t matter. Hand me my shirt, there.”

  “Oh, it matters.” Sarcasm flattened her voice. She tossed the black shirt to him and Dante snagged it out of the air. She pulled a green robe over her slim, lovely, naked body.

  He whipped his shirt around. The soft silk settled on his arms, but it stank of cigarette smoke and whisky. A stiff spot on the front suggested something had spilled. He buttoned it. His pants were a wrinkled black mess on the floor, and he pulled them over his sticky body.

  In the oval mirror, Dante looked like an uncollared priest who had been dealt a glancing blow by a whisky truck.

  He picked up his shoes and started out the bedroom door. “I’ll call you.”

  She grabbed his arm. “Not that way. My mother-in-law’s room is down there.” She hustled him down a narrow hallway to stairs. “Out through the kitchen.”

  He pattered down the stairs with the blonde woman behind him and into a tiny kitchen. An elderly lady sat at the table, facing away. Her hunched spine creased her thin, black dress. The mother-in-law had awakened early and was now sitting sentry.

  Dante had only a moment to try one of his tricks.

  Dante hopped across the kitchen, rapped on the wooden door, and opened it.

  By the time the old woman wrenched herself around, he was poking his head into the house.

  He turned so that the old woman could see his black shirt. “Buon giorno. I’m Father Petrocchi-Bianci. Is this the house of la signora Bracciolini?”
>
  “No,” his pretty blonde said and, misunderstanding him, started to get upset because he got her name wrong.

  The mother-in-law turned back to her coffee.

  “Wrong house. Mi scusi.” He grinned at la signora Delestraint and withdrew.

  She smiled as she understand his sleight-of-hand, and the door closed, leaving him on a narrow street in a nice part of town. He took his cell phone from his pants’ pocket to call a taxi.

  He could not remember the blonde la signora Delestraint’s first name.

  Dante was a cad when he was drunk. Un donniolo.

  Yes, and what of it? Dante was happy this way, happy to wake up in a different woman’s bed every morning, happy to fight his morning hangover, happy to drink himself stupid every night.

  It was one of the universe’s angry ironies that he could remember each morning’s hungover hustle out the door but none of the nighttime drunken sex with the beautiful women.

  ~~~~~

  The murmuring ritual of the Mass soothed Dante’s sore head, and he tried to quietly sneak away from the seminary’s chapel so he could shower before rounds and patients. He hurried down the church’s stone steps toward a taxi waiting in the street when his arm jerked backward as if snagged on a spike.

  Dante turned. The seminary’s token punk held his elbow. Dante asked, “Yes, Luigi?”

  Luigi tossed his head, and his modest Mohawk quivered. “You were late again. You stink like last night’s whore. If you don’t want to be a priest, why are you even here?”

  “Let go of me.” Dante wrenched his elbow free and turned to get that precious taxi cab.

  “It’s offensive,” Luigi said and tried to catch Dante’s arm again. On Luigi’s hand, scribbled tattoos leaked from under his black suit coat. “We’re here because we’ve been Called, and you slid in because you’re some kind of doctor, and you’re taking someone’s place. Someone who wanted to be a priest.”

  Dante’s snarling hangover wanted to punch out the punk, but his post-coital lassitude did not care enough to bruise his knuckles.

  ~~~~~

  The hospital’s harsh disinfectant and the man’s urine-soaked diaper made the exam room smell like a dirty mouse cage.

  Dante smiled—and he hoped it was an encouraging smile and not a hungover slug-like grimace—at the middle-aged woman and wizened man. Dante consulted the man’s chart, scanning his notes from the past dozen visits. It was hopeless, of course. The man was slowly drifting out of life, getting farther away with each visit.

  The middle-aged daughter was becoming more distraught and exhausted each month.

  Dante couldn’t reverse the course of the disease. He could only smooth the way for the inevitable. They shouldn’t fight it. Fighting the inexorable only made it worse.

  The woman clutched an advertisement for an Alzheimer’s drug torn from a women’s magazine in her plump fist.

  The old man’s watery eyes watched dust motes meander near the acoustic ceiling and neon lights.

  The worst part of Alzheimer’s is the incomprehension. It is like waking up next to a woman and not knowing how one arrived in her bed, and then a moment later, a strange woman you’ve never seen before demands an answer to a question she never asked, and then a stranger, a woman, appears out of thin air in a room to which you’d been kidnapped because it is not your room and she screams at you.

  Dante wished he could do more for the man in his senile fear, but nothing could be done. Dante wished he could do more for the overworked, pleading woman, but he couldn’t.

  Dante exhaled, steadying his hands and his nerves.

  The woman shook the glossy magazine advertisement and said, “But this drug might help him, Dr. Petrocchi-Bianchi.”

  “Signora Calabria, this drug does nothing.” Crushing hopes was one of the worst parts of Dante’s job. “It does not help, no matter what the pharmaceutical company says.”

  The old man startled and batted the air. A dust mote carried on the air conditioned breeze must have dive-bombed him, but he could not interpret whether it was dust fluff or a rock or a building collapsing on him because it was just suddenly there, flying at his head.

  The man was in his late sixties, far too young for such a degenerated brain. He probably had two of the bad genes: APO E4.

  “But on the internet,” the woman said, “I found websites, and my support group says that it helps.” Her black and gray hair, piled high in stripes, quivered.

  Dante shook his head. “We do not even know what causes Alzheimer’s Disease. It might be the beta-amyloid protein that forms the plaques on the brain,” the beta-amyloid Protein, called BAP, as the BAP-tists thought, “or the tau protein that builds up inside the brain cells,” as the Tauists maintained, “but we know this drug doesn’t do anything for either one of those proteins. The theory that this drug was based on was proved wrong.”

  “My support group says it helps,” she insisted. She looked up at the exam room’s opening door and smiled brilliantly. “It will help him, won’t it, Dr. Delestraint?”

  Dante whipped around. Vidal lounged in the doorway.

  Vidal’s pretty, blonde wife must have confessed. Vidal might have a gun. This might be Dante’s last moment.

  Prey must feel like this—racing heart, sweaty skin, wild eyes, alive—right before Vidal shot them.

  Dante said, “Vidal, didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Signora,” Vidal said and smiled sadly, “this drug might not help much, you understand? You mustn’t expect too much of him?” Vidal’s Italian still bore a French taint, even after all these years.

  “Yes, but it’s something,” she said.

  Vidal turned to Dante and asked, “How is his liver?”

  “Healthy as a forty-year-old.” Dante wrote the useless prescription. “There you are, Signora. Maybe it will help, some.” Signora Calabria’s father followed her out of the exam room like a separation-anxious toddler. The Alzheimer’s drug was one more chemical in a brew of cholesterol medicines, vitamins, and anti-oxidants that the woman insisted he take every day, in the hopes that something, anything, was better than nothing.

  Dante did not want to live so long. At least he could remember when women, like Vidal’s beautiful wife, threw him out of their beds in the morning. His daily morning escape was a moment of daring that punctuated his litany of demented patients, exacting scientific research, and lecturing priests.

  And yet, he had no memory of having sex with the women. His brain’s lack of function scared him.

  Vidal asked, “Are you going to eat lunch, Dante? There is something we need to discuss.” His manner seemed mild, like a hungry tiger sauntering up to an oblivious deer.

  Dante said, “I was planning to lunch in my office. I have papers to read.”

  “Oh, there is always time for lunch with your boss. There is a new bistro with a wonderful wine list we could drink our way through.”

  They had been professional acquaintances for years, lunching often. Surely Vidal would not kill Dante for screwing his wife. Surely Vidal would not kill Dante at a cafe, or make a scene.

  Vidal had not even introduced Dante to his new wife. As far as Dante remembered, he had never even seen a picture of her after she and Vidal had eloped earlier in the year.

  “I can’t stay too long,” Dante said. “I have classes, and then I visit my mother.”

  ~~~~~

  Dante and Vidal ate at a sidewalk table beside window boxes of thyme and lavender baking in the unseasonably warm autumn noon. Dante kept his long legs tucked in, away from the crowds that jostled the table. Aggressive sparrows scavenged crumbs. One bedraggled bird flew at Dante’s face, escaping trampling feet. He batted it away.

  Dante ate a veal cutlet with pasta that Vidal had suggested. The sliver of meat was excellent, tender and sweet, just as Vidal had promised. Maybe the meat tasted sweeter because Dante was mindful that it may be his last cutlet if Vidal leapt across the small café
table and throttled him.

  Would the mob walking by their table notice if Vidal tried to strangle him? A scuffle might go unnoticed in the self-absorbed throng.

  Dante was not really in fear for his life. Vidal was French, and Dante was Italian, and they were both men. These things happened. Dante was even remorseful.

  Maybe Vidal was waiting for a confession, or for Dante to expose his unfaithful wife. Dante would not tattletale, currying favor with his boss at the expense of Signora Delestraint. No, Dante would not betray her, too, whatever her first name was.

  After the second bottle of numbing wine and idle departmental chitchat, Vidal leaned toward Dante and said, “You know, you can prescribe those inhibitors. They have almost no side effects, except for the placebo effect on the caregiver.”

  “I hate lying to them,” Dante said and was aware of his own hypocrisy. Vidal should not have squirreled away his very young wife—she looked in her early twenties, and Vidal was over fifty—and not allowed anyone to meet her. Vidal should not travel so much for medical conferences and meetings.

  Vidal should know his wife went to nightclubs and picked up sleazy men.

  Dante said, “I wish we had a pill that works, but we don’t, and we won’t. St. Augustine said that the memory is the belly of the soul. A pill isn’t going to bring a soul back.”

  “A disease of the soul,” Vidal said. “Can even God create an organic disease that destroys the immortal soul?”

  “It was a metaphor,” Dante said.

  Vidal leaned back in his chair. Sultry Roman sunlight shimmered on his pointed, bald head. “You’re using the immortal soul as a metaphor?”

  “Sure, it’s a metaphor.” Dante shifted, a little buzzed on the wine. The derision in Vidal’s voice rankled him. Usually, his fellow doctors’ theological sarcasm did not reach into his stomach and heat his blood. “Don’t your patients believe in God?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Vidal said. His eyeroll was derisive.

  “Normal people, putatively normal people, pray, go to Mass, and take Communion, and this is not pathology.”

  “Who says it’s not pathology?” Vidal scoffed.

  “It is the normal state. Most people profess a belief in God. Why do they believe it so strongly that they risk ridicule to say it aloud?”

  “Mob psychology,” Vidal said. “Peer pressure.”