"Like?"
"Earn a living. Set up a place to live."
"We all have to adapt to that," Damien said impatiently.
"And. uh, to women."
"Yeah, I bet," Jerry said. "But what's new? I bet they've always flocked all over you."
"Maybe. But that's the very thing I was running from. Women meant marriage and kids, at least those were the only two options a Polish Catholic boy could come up with. . . ."
They laughed, with him.
"But I don't see how----" Matt went on.
"How? How's simple."
"I don't see how to do it right. How to do what we asked every Catholic teenager in our congregations to do: stay pure, meet a nice girl, marry her, go to bed with her, have children. I mean, how does anyone do it in that order? Nowadays."
The laughter lasted longer this time, but so did the silence afterward.
"Specifics." Damien pulled out a pipe and sucked on it, but never lit it.
A phallic substitute? Matt wondered.
But the observation distracted him from his own situation.
Why should he give specifics? Why should he name names, including those for his conflicting feelings? Why should he expose himself?
"Okay. There's this woman." Another laugh. "She and l were . . . meshing. Not. . . literally,"
he said into the face of more laughter, will be boys, even ex-priests.
"And then, her . . . old boyfriend comes back into the picture.
And . . . she joins him. I don't understand--"
"What's not to understand, Matt? An old boyfriend?"
"An ex-lover. I'm not that naive. She had been living with him when he vanished. I think she expected that they would get married."
"Women always do."
"She is not a rote 'always' kind of woman. She had made a commitment. She meant it."
"And him?"
"He looked like a total rat. Walking out on her without a word, only she never believed he had. She thought something had happened to make him go. And she was right. When he came back, there were extenuating circumstances."
"Then it's a happy ending. Go with it."
"He's not . . . good for her, no matter the sincerity of his intentions."
"And the sincerity of your intentions?"
"I . . . I really care about her. But I was working out this thing with my stepfather and--"
"When did the old boyfriend come back?"
"Around Halloween."
A bark of appreciative laughter from Damien. "Appropriate."
"So . . . why didn't she rake up with him right away," Nick wanted to know, or did she?"
"No. That's what's so maddening. She didn't go running hack to him. We were still . . . well, friendly. And then I went home to Chicago for Christmas, and events with my stepfather and my mother came to a head. I was finally working free of the past, ready to, I don't know, to meet her on her own ground. And--"
"And?"
"He showed up in New York. She was visiting her aunt there for Christmas. He threw a ring at her. Not a diamond. He. . .took her to bed."
"The romance was back on."
"And I'm off, sitting here, wondering what happened. It doesn't seem fair. I mean, I was within hours of being ready to consider a serious relationship with her--"
"How wonderful for you," Nick said.
Matt, reliving the trauma of his own story, could still read the sarcasm despite his anguish.
And he was expressing anguish. The Cagey acolyte had become an eager convert, bleeding all over their group therapy circle like a hereditary hemophiliac. And now, seasoned sharks scenting fresh blood, they were turning on him.
"No! Not wonderful. I'll live with it if l have to, but I don't understand." Laughter.
He was spilling his guts, and they were amused.
The anger came in a tidal wave; luckily, rage tongue-tied him, so the others went on talking, unaware. Or maybe they weren't so unaware.
"You are a classic case, you know that?"
"Classic?"
"Do you have any idea what you put that poor woman through?"
"Put her through?"
Sage nods from several of the circled chairs.
"We all do it, Matt," Jerry said. "We get so wrapped up in the angst of leaving our vocation.
We weigh each hair, struggle through faith and fury. Examine our consciences until they are shredded wheat. And women, whew, that's a big one."
"Speak for yourself," Norbert said.
"All right. The big one is sex, gender aside. Maybe we've been pure as the driven communion wafer. Maybe we've stumbled and felt like hell. Still, we're not priests anymore. We can do anything we want. Anything we think we can do.
"And we can't do squat," Jerry admitted. "We're conscience-bound. You don't throw off maybe decades of holy celibacy just because you can."
"So we meet a nice woman," Nick said, "and we tell her, eventually, our little problem."
"Which is that she's the devil we've been avoiding all these year's." Jerry shook his head.
"Speak for yourself." Nolbert's chorus made Damien shoot him a poisonous glance.
"Anyway," Nick went on, "we explain so carefully that we have to go through a lot of soul searching to decide if we can make the transition. Are you getting this, Matt? Are you hearing the underlying message we're still sending?"
"But we can't change overnight," Matt protested. "We took the celibacy seriously, most of us. We have to take the . . . non-celibacy just as seriously."
"What do you believe in?" Damien snapped. "Premarital sex?"
"No! Well, I can see it's not as cut and dried as that--"
"You'll get married first, then, and then you'll find out if you can hack marital relations at all?" Jerry suggested. "Fun for your bride, all right. Might as well play Russian roulette."
"What about children?" Norbert wanted to know. "You said you had a fear of having them.
How can you be sexually active and remain in a church that forbids birth control?"
"I don't know . . . things hadn't gotten that far."
"They'd gotten far enough. How far? Anything confessable?"
"No, not really."
"Not even in intention, if not in act?"
"It's . . . hard to say. She's an honorable woman--"
"And you respected her previous relationship, even if it was unsanctioned by marriage?"
"Yes! She loved the man. She expected permanency, or hoped for it, or she wouldn't have consummated the relationship. I know that."
"So . . . you didn't interfere, did you? You let him walk back in and resume his old role of lover. Let him take the risk, not you"'
"No! He'd been back for a while and she still hadn't ... taken up with him again. I thought--"
"You thought you could string her along forever, with no promise of anything concrete until you had worked through your problems."
"Well, yes. But my problems--"
"--were so much more delicate, so much more serious, so much more spiritual, and more important than hers."
"I didn't think of it that way."
"You didn't think, Matt. You didn't think of the woman you say you love."
"Would you have married her?" jerry.
"Of. . . course."
"In the Catholic Church?" Damien.
"Well--"
"Is she Catholic?'" Nick.
"No. But . . . a fallen away Unitarian could be anything."
"A mother? Does she want to be one? How many kids?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to be a father?" Norbert.
"I told you that I don't know if I should be," he said between clenched teeth.
"Well, then. . . ." Nick.
"Well then, what?"
"What were you really prepared to do with her?" Nick was obviously head teacher around here. Head interrogator. Head devil's advocate. "You don't know. Do you know you could get married in a renegade Catholic ceremony? Birth control would be A-okay. But you wouldn't be really in the church. Or why not try the Unitarians; they are a very accepting sort. They'd overlook your orthodoxy. Or a true Catholic ceremony? You're eligible, you played by all the rules, but could you promise to accept all the children God sent you after what you've said here about your upbringing.' Could you live with that? Could she live with your uncertainty on every matter relating to sex and family that there is? You are separated by a chasm from most people, my son, and from most women by the Grand Canyon.