Future Home of the Living God(27)



“Did you always want to be an angel?” I asked.

“They always make me a shepherd,” he said.

“Or a wise man?”

“Baby powder on my beard and a velvet robe. All it takes.”

I looked too long into his sweet eyes. His stare was calm and kind. Before I knew it, we were on the floor.

They had closed the church. Turned the lights off from the top of the stairs. Didn’t see the bulb burning far back in the storage closets where I was looking first at the honey-colored slats of the old wooden ceiling, then at Phil very close-up and personal, then at the marble chips embedded in the polished terrazzo floor. The prop closet was too much for us. We stayed hours, all night. I tried a gown on, a mantle, a veil, the helmet of a Roman centurion. He wore sandals. I suppose it was sacrilegious, but it was also hilarious. We made love dressed as Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Angel Gabriel, and Santa Claus. We were the Three Wise Men. Herod, Pilate, and two gay shepherds. And at last we made love as ourselves. We slept in a pile of clothes, woke at dawn, hung the costumes back up, and walked away, exhausted lovers plodding through a new world.

We kept seeing each other, but I tried to space things out. To stay away from him, if I could. Most of the time, I couldn’t. I decided that if he didn’t ask about birth control I would keep not using it. But then he did ask, in a way that let me know he wanted me to use it. Not a dad, then, I decided. In late spring I bought a test and when I knew for sure that I was going to have you I sat down outside in my tiny backyard. I leaned against the trunk of the beautiful old sugar maple that grows there; it was just putting out the festive red tassels that precede its new leaves.

All I knew for certain was that I wanted a child.

I wasn’t sure I loved your father right then. Oh, I loved to be with him, there was no doubt of that. I was even compelled, infatuated? And he let me know that he was wild about me. But durable love is more complex and comes from deep knowing. I think you need both the instant and the deep to classify as love—we definitely had the first. The thing was, except for Glen, men had messed me up. And lately, in general, they had become militantly insecure. Within many churches, men were forming supersecret clubs with even secreter subchapters. There was no telling whether Phil was part of one or not. If he belonged to one of those clubs he wouldn’t tell me even if I asked. On the day I took the dipstick test, the phone rang while I was sitting underneath the maple. I bolted inside to answer it. As soon as I heard his voice I said I’m pregnant and then I slammed down the phone and locked myself in the bathroom, where I ran a hot bath and got into it and lay there until it got cold, whereupon I ran more hot in and so on even though eventually I heard your father pounding at the door and yelling. I didn’t answer the door. I had decided that although I maybe loved him, I didn’t trust him. Was I crazy? I don’t think so. The question is whether I am crazy now.

*

“I am not going back, you know.” Phil looks at me as he starts eating his sausage sub. “I belong here with you and our baby.”

Phil’s a vegetarian most of the time but he loves meat and becomes carnivorous in times of stress. His family is Italian and Spanish, but from way back a century ago at least when they came out to settle Pig’s Eye, as St. Paul was called then. Phil’s ancestors worked the building trades, put up the basilica and the cathedral. Stonemasons, carpenters, tile setters, bricklayers, artisans of plaster and paint. And Phil ends up a parishioner in an unattractive modernist-style church with no details other than geometric stained-glass windows—a rhomboid and a parallelogram. Our church has an austere cockeyed bell tower. A props trove inherited from two Catholic schools bulldozed long ago. Plain wood pews. Abstract hangings. And that terrazzo floor polished to a high gloss, it turns out, by reformed drunks.

So do I love him at last? Child, I need him. It is hard to tell the two apart.

Yet Phil is the rarest of animals, a genuinely good person who doesn’t make a big deal about his unusual niceness, and who, in spite of this niceness, has a sense of irony.

“I’m going back to my place just long enough to pack my stuff,” he says, “and I’m taking a key so you can’t lock me out.”

Phil’s happiness radiates across the table. He reaches out his big square hand and cups my balled fist. I haven’t ever had to depend on anyone like this since I was a child—for food, shelter, safety. I don’t want to depend on anyone now in this way.

“Have you told any friends about the baby? Have you told your parents?” he asks.

I’ve talked constantly to Phil about Sera and Glen, perhaps because I am so worried about them, but I haven’t told him about the strange, sweet voice answering their telephone. I haven’t told him how many messages I left, or about the one I found slipped under the door. Now, when I do tell him all about these things, he looks so serious that I’m immediately struck through with tremors of anxiety. My chest hurts suddenly; I can’t seem to take a deep breath. His voice catches when he tries to speak. He clears his throat in distress.

“I don’t know how to say this—”

“Oh my god I hate when people say that!”

“Okay. Cedar. It is now a crime to harbor or help a pregnant woman. So if Glen and Sera know maybe they decided to disappear.”

Hearing that you are suddenly a danger to others, besides wanted and hunted, gives a peculiar jolt. I’m thrown into myself, and can hardly answer.

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