Page 17 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
The first time we’d made love, she’d been my communion, a new covenant that I was making between her and me and God. I had thought that was the most intense—the most luminously spiritual and carnal—moment we could ever share, but somehow that covenant had grown, until now every time I looked at her, I felt like a convert newly baptized. I felt like the Apostles witnessing the Transfiguration.
God was my god. But Poppy…Poppy was my prophet.
I opened my mouth to tell her this, but then she pressed a finger to my lips, her mouth lilting into a mischievous smile. “I hear someone outside,” she whispered.
I did too, the clinking of ice in a glass, the droning tones of yet another WASP-y dialogue about horses and boats. We stood there, frozen, Poppy fighting off a fit of near-teenagerish giggles at almost being caug
ht in the coat closet. When the conversation finally died away as the speakers moved into another room, we let ourselves out of the closet and scampered up to our room, where I covered my protesting prophet in kisses and herded her into the shower, where we proceeded to get clean—and then dirty—and then clean again.
It wasn’t until the drive home that it came.
The idea.
Poppy had again drifted off, after making me promise to help her put up the Christmas tree once we got home. Once she started snoring, I figured it was safe to turn off the Christmas music she’d put on and listen to my audiobook again.
The narrator was relating the story of Theseus and the Labyrinth of Crete, and as I thought about the labyrinth itself, I began to think of other iconic symbols in mythology. Celtic knots and crosses and triskelions and spirals. And then I thought only about spirals as I drove down the wet but mostly empty highway, and then it came to me why I struggled with jealousy over Anton, even though I’d let go of my jealousy over Sterling.
Life is a spiral.
As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.
My jealousy was my north, and perhaps I was wiser than the last time I had encountered it. Perhaps this time it would be easier to master, and then when I inevitably faced it again, it would be even easier…
But my mind didn’t stop there. Because I realized that this didn’t just apply to individuals. It applied to institutions too. Like churches. Like the Catholic Church, actually. Because historically, the church had its own spiral, times where it had been forced to modernize or adapt, great leaps forward in humanitarianism and philosophy, and giant leaps back with dogma and persecution.
The Church didn’t need me to tell it how to change. It already knew how, because it had done it so many times before.
The Catholic Church doesn’t need a prescription for reformation, I composed mentally, wishing I were at my laptop and able to type this out. The Church only needs a call to awaken…
Oh my God. Had I really broken through the barrier of my dissertation’s conclusion? Could I finally write this motherfucker?
Excited, I sped up the truck and glanced at the clock. Only a couple hours until home. And then I would start kicking this rewrite’s ass.
“I thought you said we’d put up the tree together?” Poppy said, her arms folded.
I was on my way out the door, and I’d stopped to give her an absent-minded kiss—rookie mistake. Because then she’d noticed my laptop bag stuffed full of snacks and deduced that I was planning on being gone the whole night.
I ran a hand through my hair. I hated disappointing her—Poppy loved Christmas the way most people loved babies—fiercely and sometimes irrationally—and we’d put up the tree together every year since we’d been married. On the other hand, every minute I stood here arguing with her was another minute wasted, when I could be tapping out the words that would finally bring this cursed thesis to its end.
“Can we put it up another evening?” I asked, trying to sound penitent and genuinely eager. (I was neither.)
Her lower lip bowed into something dangerously like a pout. My heart lurched at the sight, but then my brain chanted write write, finish finish, at me, and my heart stopped with the guilt.
“It’s the day after Thanksgiving,” she said. “That’s the day Christmas trees are supposed to be put up, but if you want to wait…”
“I do, thank you. I promise the minute I finish this thing that we can put up seven Christmas trees, okay? We’ll put up as many as your mom has at Pickering Farm.” I dropped another kiss on her unmoving lips. “I’ll be done with this thing so soon. I swear.”
Her arms were still folded when I walked out the door.
The next afternoon, I knocked on the open door to Professor Morales’s office. “Professor? Can I come in?”
Morales stood at the small window of her office, rubbing her lower back with the heel of one palm. She didn’t give me an immediate response, so I just hovered at the threshold like a vampire, until she finally turned to me. Her lips made a flat, unhappy line, and her eyes were distant and murky.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked. I’d nearly jumped up and clicked my heels in the air when I’d seen her light on as I walked from my tiny shared office to the library, and I decided to take the chance to show her my latest revision. I’d spent the night at the library last night, coming home late this morning to shower and indulge in a quick nap before I drove to campus in the latest round of freezing sleet. Poppy hadn’t been home—I’d assumed she’d run off early to prepare for the gala—but the Christmas tree was in the living room to greet me instead, a seven-foot monument to my failures as a husband, winking away in the dim gray light of winter.
I told her we could put it up later, I’d thought irritably. Putting it up without me seemed rather passive-aggressive, and I’d let the resentment rankle in my chest as I showered and lain down to nap. I’d finally had a breakthrough, we were finally at the end game, and she was going to start doing things without me now? Now, when we were so close to the end of all this bullshit?
But I wasn’t programmed for anger. I was programmed for guilt. And it wasn’t long before my irritation was superseded by depressing fantasies of Poppy hanging ornaments herself, drinking eggnog by herself, singing off-key carols by herself.
