Communion Is a Kiss: A Short Story Read online

  Dante’s mania caught hold of him again. “If anything, it is the opposite, that they can’t admit they don’t believe. If faith is not pathology, we should study it, to study how the mind works. That’s part of our problem with Alzheimer’s research. We don’t know how a healthy brain thinks, other than you have to have two neurons to rub together, yet we’re supposed to figure out whether amyloid or tau interferes with it. Maybe, if the memory is the belly of the soul,” as St. Augustine had thought, “then faith is pure thought, and we should study it.”

  “No one dabbles in LSD to study drug addiction anymore.” Vidal wiped his knife on a chunk of meat atop his sharp fork. “Likewise, no scientist becomes a priest to study the soul.”

  Ah, there was the snide remark pertaining to Dante’s seminary classes. He had known it would emerge at some point.

  “Maybe I’m dabbling,” Dante said, “but it can’t merely be pathology. Don’t you ever wonder?” Dante finished eating and lit a cigarette. The first breath of smoke soothed his throat like drinking air with whipped cream.

  Vidal said, “I think it would be frightening to suddenly believe the impossible.”

  “Even if everyone believes it?”

  “It doesn’t make it less impossible, less superstitious.” Vidal’s chin dipped down, repressing.

  “Go ahead and say it,” Dante prodded.

  “Less stupid,” Vidal admitted.

  “What if it isn’t stupid? What if it’s normal? What if it’s adaptive?”

  At the next table, a man windmilled his arms as if fighting a ghost. Hungry birds flurried into the air.

  Vidal fended off the whirling flock by waving his arms. More birds joined the fray, circling like heat-driven sparks from a disturbed fire and swirling away. He said, “You’ve been wearing that priest-shirt a lot lately.”

  Dante touched the ecclesiastical collar on his silk shirt. “There’s a dress code at the seminary. Without the insert, it looks like a Nehru collar.”

  “Not really.” Vidal’s tongue peeked out from his mouth, licked his lips, and sucked in again. Had he discovered his wife’s crotch wet with another man’s spunk this morning when he arrived home? Dante swallowed a gulp of wine, yet his throat still worked, trying to swallow air.

  Vidal’s strong hand toyed with the stem of his wineglass as he might test the pull length of a trigger. One was supposed to smash a wine bottle to threaten someone with ragged glass, but a goblet’s jagged edge would cut deeply and embed delicate shards.

  Vidal inhaled but stopped himself before he spoke. His eyes flicked skyward. Whatever he was thinking about, he really didn’t want to discuss. Finally, he asked, “You don’t believe all that seminary stuff, do you?”

  “God, no,” Dante said. It was his standard answer to allay his colleagues’ fears, and he didn’t. Surely it was all superstition and people convincing themselves to engage in magical thinking.

  “Good.” Vidal signaled the waiter with his credit card. “People in the department are gossiping that you’re imbibing too much of the sacramental wine. They worry that you’ll try to faith-heal the patients or exorcise demons.”

  That was the problem? Vidal, et al, and the university were worried that Dante was going over to the other side.

  So Signora Delastraint had not confessed, and Dante didn’t have to worry about Vidal shooting him.

  This lunch was just to keep Dante from going over to the side of the angels.

  Scientists cannot bear it when someone breaks ranks.

  ~~~~~

  Dante held his mother’s hand. She was sedated, and she slept, mercifully.

  Her skin was like the waxed paper that she used to wrap snacks in for him to eat at his father’s store after school. Dark magenta and navy blue bruises bloomed under the waxed paper on the back of her hand and her arm.

  She wasn’t being abused at the nursing home, Dante was sure of that. In his practice, he saw patients who had been hit by staff—the broken teeth, the powdery bones that broke so easily—so he knew which nursing homes had problems, and he had placed her in the very best one.

  Her old blood vessels were so brittle that the slightest touch broke them, and then they bled, and bled, and finally clotted.

  Dante held her fingers gingerly, always wondering if this day was going to be her last. On that last day, he would grieve, he knew. He would be happy for her sake that she was finished with this suffering, because she had never wanted to live like this, but he would grieve because he knew that he was next.

  When their father had succumbed to early dementia, Dante was already doing his residency. He had tested his sisters and himself to find out what genes they carried and what their risk of Alzheimer’s was. His sisters, luckily, had low risk.

  The three siblings had toasted that night, with good wine, their good luck to have avoided a terrible genetic destiny.

  Dante had lied to them about his own amyloid genotype. His was the worst kind.

  He had an overwhelming chance of developing Alzheimer’s Disease and of getting it when he was young, possibly before he turned sixty.

  Dante held his mother’s hand as she slept.

  He could hear her breathing slowly, the bustle of the nurses outside the doors, and his own racing heartbeat.

  ~~~~~

  In the Neptune’s Lair nightclub in Rome’s Testaccio District, a transparent floor divided the first- and second-story dance floors. Clusters of red pinpoints whirled over the crowd, as if snipers scanned the crowd with laser sights from atop the screaming speakers.

  Most of the strolling men enjoyed the view from the lower floor, looking up, so Dante was one of the few men talking to the women whose bare legs were slurped over by men covertly fingering their dicks through their pants’ pockets below them.

  One of the few other men stalking on the upper floor was Dante’s cousin, Gio. Gio was a handsome devil, and he knew it. He tilted his drink to point out a lithe, red-headed woman and shouted to Dante over the thumping music, “No way that I would fuck her. Redheads freckle.”

  The redhead wore a shimmering bronze dress and looked like bronze statue, dancing. Dante said, “You could play connect the dots. How about the black-haired one behind her?”

  “I never screw brunettes if I can help it.”

  “Good God, Gio.” Dante gestured to the bartender Zan who doubled as a bouncer. Dante asked for another single malt whiskey and water. The bartender took a bottle down from the top shelf.

  Gio said, “The blonde beside her is too thick through the hips.”

  Dante scratched his ear to keep from either slugging Gio or laughing at him. “But her waist is small. She’s luscious.”

  “She’s fat.”

  “She is not.” The bartender handed him his drink and change. Dante did not understand why he was adamant about defending the anonymous blonde except that Gio was such a snob. Gio the snob slept alone most nights. “You’re in love with your own right hand, Gio.”

  Gio sniffed, insulted. “And you are not rigorous enough in your opinions of women. You see them all as two notches better than they are. You’re going to end up with an ugly wife.”

  Dante laughed. “I doubt that I will end up with any wife, at all.”

  Gio waved his hand to dismiss the comment. “Be a shame for you to end up with ugly kids. Our mothers married handsome men to produce good-looking kids. We can’t let these good genes go to waste. Aunt Rosa,” Dante’s mother, “will introduce you to someone beautiful. You wait and see.”

  Dante’s neck cracked, and he rubbed the ache there. Gio was a callous ass whose own mother would probably pick his wife for him, and then his mother would love that wife better than her own son because he was an asshole.

  Dante left Gio alone at the bar and swam through the sweaty crowd to the blonde with the curvy hips. “You’re a brave soul,” he said, bracing to project his voice over the bombarding music, “very brave, dancing up here in that skirt, with those nice legs of yours.”

  She smiled up at him. She had very white, very even teeth, and a nice smile. “I don’t know what you said,” she said in English with an American twang, “but it sure sounded pretty.” The last word came out as purrty. “Almost as pretty as you, you big, bad Roman man, you.”

  Dante translated loudly, “I said you are a brave soul, mia cara, dancing up here in that skirt, because you have-ah the nice legs.”

  “Hey, you speak English!” she said.

  “Enough to get by.”

  “I have been trying to get a drink here, but the Italian that my friend Sal taught me doesn’t work!”

  “Let’s get you a drink.” He led her over to the bar but far away from his idiot cousin Gio. In Italian, he called the bartender over. “Zan! Can we get a drink for the lady here?” He switched back to English. “What you would like?”

  She said, “Jack and Coke. Sal said you say that like,” in Italian, she said, “a cat with a hairball.”

  Dante laughed. “I think Sal was making sure that you do not get drunk and end up in bed with a big, bad Roman man. Perhaps he is the jealous type?”

  “No. He’s my priest. I assume he’s gay.” Zan handed her the Jack and Coke, which she accepted by saying, “Gracias,” which was Spanish. She turned back to Dante. “He said that Italian men would pinch my butt, and that Romans are the worst.”

  “Your priest is right. Roman men are the very worst.” Dante smiled at her and thought about taking her back to her hotel very soon.

  Behind Dante, someone pinched his butt. He jumped and slopped his drink on his shirt cuff. A woman’s low voice near his ear cut through the blaring music, “Buòna sera.”

  He turned. Vidal’s wife smiled prettily at him. Without mo
rning mascara streaks, she was pale and stunning. In the gloom of the bar, she looked platinum-plated.

  Oh, God. He switched back to Italian. “Signora Delestraint, is Vidal not home again?” He gathered the twitching blonde American under his arm as a shield.

  The Signora’s victorious smile verged on cruelty. “I told him I was staying at my mother’s. Is this girl your conquest for tonight?”

  “She’s American and doesn’t speak Italian. She seems a little young.”

  Vidal’s wife said to the American girl in English, “Pleased to meet you. I’m Crista Delestraint.”

  Oh, yes, Crista. Dante had to remember that.

  The American girl brightened and said, “I’m Nicole Casey. Nice to meet you.”

  And Nicole. He should remember her name, too. If he drank a little less, maybe tomorrow morning he might be able remember the whole night with Nicole.

  “How did you meet Dante?” Crista Delestraint shouted to Nicole.

  “Dante?” Nicole smiled up at him. “Dante, like in The Inferno. How fun. We just met. Is he, your,” and Nicole gestured between Dante and Signora Delestraint, indicating a connection.

  Crista laughed. “Heavens, no. I know Dante from . . . somewhere. You never did tell me, though, Dante. Are you a Baptist or a Tauist?”

  Nicole said, “I thought all Italians were Catholic.” She looked lost and wide-eyed. Wide blue-eyed, he noticed. Her eyes were electric blue.

  “I think they are artificial divisions within the field,” Dante said to Crista. “The answer may be amyloid and it may be tau, but it may be neither. There might be an upstream kinase that phosphorylates both tau and the amyloid’s gamma-secretase.” Both women’s eyes unfocused and wandered toward the flashing lights. Enough science.

  “I’m a physician and I work with Alzheimer’s patients,” he told Nicole.

  “Oh,” Nicole’s sympathy escaped as a sigh. “I feel so bad for people who have Alzheimer’s. It must be terrible to not be able to remember your kids. Sometimes, my dad gets forgetful, and it scares me that he might be getting it. I don’t know what I’d do.”

  Warmth flushed through Dante. Gio, that idiot, was not worthy of the little blonde American and would end up with a pretty, vacuous, mean wife. He squeezed Nicole with his arm. Her plush chest rubbed against his side, and he wanted to go to her hotel right away.

  Crista said, “A friend of mine, Vidal, also works with Alzheimer’s patients. One of his patients, Rosa, screams all the time because it seems like things appear all around her, because she can’t remember they were there a minute ago. It tears him up. They keep her sedated.”

  Dante did not want to know what Vidal told his wife during pillow talk. Disco ball spangles flashed in his eyes. A migraine threatened, so he downed his drink to anesthetize it.

  “But such things,” Dante said loudly and scanned the crowd for anyone noticing their melancholy discussion, “such depressing things we are talking about. The night is young. We are young. Let us have a drink. Zan!” he called to the bartender. “Another round, grazie.”

  ~~~~~

  The universe swirled into a vortex of silence and stars and lanced through Dante’s left eye into his skull. His feet swung around, pulled along by the gravitation of black holes, pulsating quasars, and dark matter.

  He reached for the edge of the bed to steady himself. He clutched the crisp sheet.

  Someone’s heart beat near Dante’s sore eardrum, poking it with every lub-dub, lub-dub.

  Someone else’s leg twined around Dante from the other side.

  He chanced opening one eye. The wide bed and bland white furnishings suggested a hotel that catered to Americans. A black suitcase perched on the rack, and clothes flapped out of its sides. Beside him, bright blonde hair snarled around white shoulders and white pillows.

  More blonde hair wrapped the pillow behind him.

  Two blondes. “Che culo,” he muttered and could not repress a wry smile. Gio would be jealous.

  The sleepy blonde in front of him opened her eyes. Bright blue contact lenses slipped over her gray eyes. Nicole asked in English, “What’s that mean, chay coolo?”

  Dante said, “It means ‘what luck,’ a good thing. Literally, it means, ‘what an ass,’ like it is good to see a woman with a nice ass.”

  “Yeah, you saw my nice ass last night.” She smiled and sat up, rubbing her eyes like a child.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Almost nineteen.”

  “Oh. Splendid.” He had hoped she was at least twenty or older. She was so very young.

  Vague memories slipped around his battered head: being encased in female flesh like a white, pulsating coffin, moments of air between gulps of woman, and hunger for them and for more women, all the time, desperate hunger.

  Behind him, the other woman shifted and pulled herself up on his shoulder. Her pretty face was mascara-marred.

  Dante said in Italian to Vidal’s pretty wife, “Bella cara, you should not wear so much mascara.”

  “My eyelashes are stubby,” Signora Delestraint replied also in Italian, “because I’m a natural blonde. Not like our little friend here.” The Signora squeezed his shoulder with her fingernails. The pinpricks took his mind off his hammering headache.

  Vidal would find out, ruin Dante’s career, and shoot him.

  Excitement crowded out sick hangover.

  He had spent two nights in a row with Vidal’s wife. It had been years since he had spent two nights with the same woman. There must be something wrong with him.

  But he could not remember Vidal’s wife’s name again. Nicole and. . . .

  Dante asked la Signora, “What is Vidal going to say when you come home in the morning?”

  “He thinks it is nice I am so cozy with my mother that I visit her so often, because I am such a nice, old-fashioned girl.”

  Nicole said, “Che culo,” in her ditsy voice, trying out her new Italian, even though she must not have understood a word of what they had said.

  Dante laughed.

  Nicole touched his mouth with her little hand. “Shhh. These hotel walls are thin as dry pasta, and my dad and step-mom are in the next room. Crista, we have to sneak you guys out of here.”

  Dante gestured to Nicole’s digital camera, lying atop her wheeled suitcase. “You might want to look at those pictures before you show them to your father, too.”

  Crista Delastraint laughed, and Dante covered her mouth with his hand, which made her laugh harder.

  Her body was soft against his skin, and he wished that he could have them both again, right then, so he could remember them, but he had to leave. He gathered all that warm, fragrant female flesh against him for just a moment, before they pushed him away.

  ~~~~~

  Cool air from the stone heights of the small room settled on Dante’s shoulders. This room might have been a monk’s cell when the seminary had been a medieval monastery, where generations of monks had slept between grueling hours in the library, illuminating manuscripts, grinding ink onto paper.

  The aged priest, Father Sergei, smoked a long, thin cigarette and tapped the ash into a coarse ashtray on his desk. Above his clerical Roman collar, his white-bristled Adam’s apple bobbled as if someone was trying to work a knife point through his pink skin from the inside.

  When the priest had called Dante into the office after class, the punk priest Luigi had watched with eager, knowing malice. A little sadness worked around Dante’s head at what this old priest was probably leading up to, but Dante was a grown man, a doctor with medical school and his residency finished. He was not a schoolboy, caught smoking.

  Yet, inside the seminary’s stones, it was so calm. Dante had enjoyed the calm. It would be a shame to not be able to enjoy it anymore.

  Outside, at his lab and the hospital and the hospice and the bars, the air seemed so busy and roiled that Dante fought to suck it into his body.

  Here, he could breathe.

  The old man asked Dante, “Why are you taking my class?”

  Dante was surprised but shrugged. “All the other afternoon classes were full.”

  The priest laughed. “Well, you’re honest.”

  Dante was not honest. He had screwed his friend’s wife twice in the last two days.

  “But why are you taking classes with us at all?” Father Sergei asked.

  “I wanted to understand religion better.”

  “Any religion?”

  Dante shrugged. “When in Rome.”