Mixed feelings like these had forced him to reevaluate his vocation. They weren't the only reasons, but they remained with him, months after his priesthood had become past tense.
His attention came back to his playing. His fingers had slipped into the familiar chords of "Silent Night, Holy Night," that most placid of Christmas carols.
He smiled, and glided into "Jesu Bambino," one of his favorites.
He played by heart, in the near darkness, his fingers finding the familiar chords as they read the oversize Braille of the ivory and ebony keys.
Overhead lights switched on in a crashing chord of utter illumination, flooding the blinding, wedding-white walls and furnishings. Matt blinked, feeling the equivalent of an optical migraine.
"I thought I heard the Phantom playing." Electra's voice was a bit breathless. "I expected a blank white half-mask, at least, or--even better--a hideous visage. You're quite a nice surprise."
She wore one of her eternal muumuus that bloomed like hibiscus against a white stucco wall.
"Maybe I do have a mask on. I came down to search for the Lost Chord, not operatic revenge, and not for a pretty soprano to dominate."
Electra smiled, plopping down on the butt end of a pure-white pew, next to a Madonna-as-Evita clone in a mothball-scented pair of politically incorrect silver foxes that looked utterly sad drooping over a fashionable shoulder.
"Quite a repertoire you've got there, Matt. What are you playing now? It's catchy."
"Now? I don't know. Your arrival shocked me out of the 'Jesu Bambino.' "
"Yeay-zoo what?"
Matt's smile broadened, but his hands kept cajoling the keys. "This is a melody Temple asked about once. She thought it was a wedding march."
"Kind of is, at that, although I run canned music now. The organ is for atmosphere or media opportunities if celebs drop by. Everybody wants speed, not mood. So what's the tune?"
"I'm embroidering it pretty freely, but the bones are Bob Dylans 'Love Minus Zero--No Limit'."
"Bob Dylan? Hey, that's my era, not yours. You were barely born in the folkie heyday. How'd you hear about him?"
"I'm not sure how anyone finds word- and mind-benders like Bob Dylan and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but we do."
"Who's this studly Hopkins fellow? A folkie?"
Matt laughed. "A monk. English. Late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Wrote poetry with an invented style, something he called sprung rhythm."
"Honey, I got something you could call sprung rhythm in my back, but I take pills for it." She sighed and braced her hands on her flower-trellised knees. "I could use a different wedding march, in case I ever decide to marry again. Don't want to hear the same old tunes that marched me to disaster before."
"You've been married more than once?"
"Oh, yeah." Electra sounded nostalgic. "See, I'm from the Liz Taylor generation. Think you're in love and want to sleep with a guy? Marry him. You can always get divorced. And we did. Liz and me, I mean. Not from each other."
"Serial divorce. I don't know if that's admirable or insane."
"I'm betting you'd say 'insane.' You strike me as a pretty straight arrow for these times."
"You don't know how right you are. I'm so straight I'm not sure the earth isn't flat, because otherwise people would be slipping and falling off, wouldn't they?"
"Maybe the earth is round, but people need to slip and fall once in a while. You never know what you find down the rabbit hole. Like that Max Kinsella. You never know where he'll turn up next."
"So I've noticed."
"I remember when those two first moved in." Electra grinned nostalgically. "All that energy and expectation. They were the cutest couple. You could tell they were waiting for their second AIDS tests. Temple was checking the lobby mailboxes for an envelope from up north twice a day. And then one day . . . well, I didn't see hide or hair of them for days on end. Oh, sorry. Guess tales of Love's Young Dream aren't going to cheer you up."
Matt had segued into a funeral man h without even noticing. "I was just thinking, none of the old songs celebrate getting your 'papers' certifying that you are plague-free."
"AIDS is a plague, isn't it? That sexual free lunch I saw all around me when I was just a little too old-fashioned to take advantage of it; I felt like such a square. That's what we called being a straight arrow in my day. Me and my marriages. And now it's all over, the sexual free-for-all. Or it should be. People want safety and longevity in relationships."
She nodded in time to Matt's increasingly upbeat dirge.
"Do you have children from any of your marriages?"
"Oh, sure. Adult children, although sometimes I'm not so certain about that. They move, I move. I write, they call. Now they wanta E-mail me. Can you imagine?"
He nodded, not in time to the soft organ chords. "I'd have a computer if I could afford one."
Electra shook her head. "To me, E-mail is like safe sex. Something's not quite all there."
"I suppose a couple, once they've established that each of them is disease-free, has quite a stake in the relationship, even if they're not married."
"I hope it makes 'em think that way, if they're sensible."
"Have you seen marriage rates go up, since AIDS, I mean?"
Electra was startled. "Gee. I don't usually think like a pollster. And I've haven't been here with my little wedding chapel since the Ice Age, lad. I just opened it five years ago, so I have no basis for comparison. I see a bunch of folks who shouldn't get married going right ahead and doing it, though. But what the hell? I shouldn't have a few times and I did."
"I grew up Catholic." Matt paused to consider if he really did grow up. "Anyway, staying married mattered a lot. Divorce was anathema."
"Oh. Catholic. What's 'anathema'?"
"Seriously forbidden, almost blasphemous."
"Honestly, Matt! Those big, bad words. A lot to heap on a child."
"They're a lot to heap on an adult."
"So you really expect to get married once, and that's it? Is that why you're still single? Waiting for a sure thing?"
"I don't know that I expect to get married, but if I did, I'd have to think that."
"Everybody thinks that, when they're on a hormone high. But that's just Nature making sure more people get born to ride the real-life roller coaster and then check out. That's a pretty big gamble: to think you'll get married and stay married forever."
"That's what I'd have to do."
"Hey, I don't knock anybody's religion, but to this old broad, that's either admirable ... or insane."
"Maybe the admirable is often insane."
"You got it! We drive ourselves crazy trying to live up to other people's concepts of how we should live. That's why I don't take marriage seriously. It's a party that often turns into a funeral, but more often into pure habit. So I had five husbands, so what?"
"Electra . . . five?"
Hey, Liz had eight or something. I've changed a lot in the last forty-some years. Wasn't always a plus-size. Wasn't always a real-estate magnate and prominent justice of the peace either.
"That's why you spray your hair all those colors, isn't it?"
"Sure. Punk Senior Citizen. Hey, if you can't go wild in some little area that's all your own, what's the point of being here?"
Matt stopped playing. He let his hands fall to his knees. "Maybe that's my problem. I don't have a wild little area."
"Your problem is you're a nice young man who thinks too much." She rose, came behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck in a bear hug. "Why don't you plan on coming up to my place for Christmas Day? I don't cook the whole turkey and stuff, or stuffing, but I scramble some goodies together, and a couple of my 'adult children' are coming. You'll dig my daughter the herpetologist. She's not too much older than you--"