Cavanaugh looked down through his Irish, Hardy thinking he might be trying to stare right through the table with his X-ray eyes. They’d been talking and drinking, starting with light stuff and getting heavier as things wore on, for the better part of three hours. Cavanaugh kept going in and out of focus.
“Maybe anybody can do anything,” Hardy said, “you give ’em enough juice.”
“Anybody-anything,” Cavanaugh repeated.
“Not a priest, but-”
“Ha. The things I know priests have done, you wouldn’t believe.”
“I probably would. High school there were some guys like springs, they were so wound up. I’d hate to see what would happen if they let go.”
Hardy and Cavanaugh, slowing down, just a couple of guys, finishing their drinks, closing a place. Half hearing each other, half listening to Billy Joel doing “Piano Man,” that old bar-closer.
“You know what an incredible pain in the ass it is being a priest sometimes? That old turn the other cheek? Both my cheeks are callused turning them back and forth.”
“Yeah, but you do it anyway. You keep doing it. What I’m talking about is guys who snap. Zinc buildup or whatever.”
“Sex, you mean?”
Hardy nodded.
“Sex is easy. I mean, at least it’s tangible, or understandable. You either get the physical release somehow or you, as we say, offer it up. But either way, it’s out there and you can deal with it.”
“You saying sex doesn’t bother you guys?”
“What do you think? We cut our nuts off? I’m just saying that it’s not always the hardest thing.” He grabbed at his glass, swirled the ice and drained it.
As if by magic, Hardy thought, the waitress came around for last call. Cavanaugh ordered the round: “Give us a couple doubles.”
Hardy didn’t fight it. It was get-down time for him, too, that old “since we’ve already passed propriety time, let’s hang it out and see where it goes.”
“There’s just no release ever,” Cavanaugh was saying. “It’s not a job where some guy goes to work and gets off at five and then gets drunk or fights somebody. It’s like you can never ever”-he stabbed at the table-“ever do anything that really lets the valve loose. That’s the hardest part.”
“Hey, Jim, that’s just adulthood. Who ever really gets to blow it out anymore? And you think you’ve got it tough, try being a cop.”
Cavanaugh shook his head. The girl came back with the drinks. “Priests can make cops look like Boy Scouts.”
Hardy paid for the round. “Cops can’t let out a thing, Jim. They gotta keep it in control.”
“Yeah, but they also let out a lot. You get the adrenaline pumped up pretty good and you’re allowed-hell, you’re supposed-to do something, direct it to something. Shoot a guy, make an arrest, get in somebody’s way. I mean, there’s something there. You don’t go walking off-Mr. Mellow-and read your breviary.”
Hardy took a good swig of his own Irish. “Cops don’t let out near enough,” Hardy said, defensive. “Why you think you got drinking cops? You got cops on drugs? You got just plain mean motherfuckers?”
“What I’m saying is just multiply that by about twenty for priests.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It isn’t. Maybe that’s where the sex comes in. Your cop at least has that option.”
“So why do you do it? Why do you guys keep at it?”
Cavanaugh drank again. “I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know at all. You believe in the theory, I guess. You believe that the suffering is worth it.”
“You believe in God?”
“You had better do that. You sin and you sin and you sin again and you keep thinking maybe it’s going to get easier someday and you won’t have to feel like breaking out so often, that maybe God’s gonna give you a break. Take a doctor with a headache, he knows fifty ways it can be terminal. You, it’s a headache, it’ll probably go away. A doctor knows it could be a tumor, cancer, the beginning of a stroke, or whatever. Same with priests. We can’t even allow ourselves to think we’re going to be okay. If we do, that’s pride! The number-one sin. But if I think I’m a totally worthless piece of shit, then that’s false modesty, another sin. Everything’s a sin, Dismas. And if it’s not, it’s a near occasion. Being a little loaded right now-sure it’s a release, but it’s also one of the seven deadlies. Drunkenness. There’s no escape ever,” he concluded, reaching for his glass again, putting down half of what remained. “None. Ever.”
Hardy sat back, shaking his head. “All this from the perfect priest.”
“Who thinks that?”
“Erin Cochran.”
Cavanaugh sucked in a breath. “What does she know?”
“One would think she knows you.”
Cavanaugh sighed. “She’s God’s reminder to me that I’m not perfectible, much less perfect.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means, you’d think after twenty, thirty years, the old spell she throws would wear out.” He started to lift his glass, then put it back down carefully, as though afraid he might break it somehow, maybe squeezing it too hard. “Sometimes I still… I think I’ve been in love with her since the day I met her. And I wasn’t close to being a priest back then.”
Hardy wanted to ask, but Cavanaugh answered before he could get it out. “You don’t think I haven’t wanted to make love with her like any other man…?”
Hardy lifted his own glass and took a drink. He thought about Jane, about getting back with her, their hurried and aching coupling after the years apart. He said, “That must be very tough.”
The priest made some noise, like a laugh, but he wasn’t laughing. “They say love and hate are so close. Sometimes, I don’t know, I hate her, I hate ’em all…”
And there he was, unbidden, that old panhandler again, reaching out his hand. Hardy looked at the hand a minute, then flipped a quarter that fell into the middle of his palm.
“Yeah, I’ve been tempted to wipe out all the happiness I see there. Why should they get it all? You think that seems fair?” He stared at Hardy, not seeing him, looking inside himself. “There was a moment, God help me, when I was almost happy about it, about Eddie being dead. Let them feel what it’s like to have things go wrong, to have your love lost, the sum of your life reduced to zero. Erin thinks I’m perfect, huh?
“Not close, Dismas. Not even close. If I could feel like that, even for a second, when the boy was like my son, my only son…” He put a hand up to his face. “Going back to the Cochrans’, burying Eddie”-he shook his head again-“after feeling that, as a penance. You believe in a good God, you believe you’re doing something worthwhile, that being around someone you love, denying it, is strengthening you, making you a better priest, a better person. Your reward is in heaven, after all.” He tipped up his glass. “You go back. You keep going back. It’s like the old Augustine monks who slept in the same bed with their women every night to test their celibacy. The roots go way back. Deny, conquer, deny again, sin, conquer it again. That’s the road to salvation, right? Ain’t it a piece of cake?”
Hardy sat in the lengthening silence, sipping at his drink, shaken somewhere even through the booze. Cavanaugh was in such obvious pain he couldn’t believe he’d been blind to it before.
“Hey,” Hardy said. “Let’s quit bullshitting around and talk about something we really care about.”
Gradually, Cavanaugh’s face softened. He laughed quietly. “You’re okay, Dismas.”
“You’re not so bad yourself, Jim.”
Another pause, then Cavanaugh saying, “So how ’bout them Giants, huh?”
“Humm baby,” Hardy said.
Hardy switched on the light in his hallway, shivering slightly from driving home with the windows open in the light fog. He hadn’t worn a jacket. On the way home, really cold with the Seppuku’s top down, he’d bounced along singing a dirty country song about rodeos. A good song. Kept up his good mood.