With a wry grimace of acknowledgment, the man retreated to the shade while Matt drew himself, dripping, onto the hot concrete bordering the pool.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
Matt's wet feet left Friday footprints on the concrete. He collected his towel from the elderly lounge chair beside the one Frank had settled upon with gingerly reluctance.
''Quite a quaint place," Frank said instead of answering, pocketing the intimidating sunglasses to squint at the Circle Ritz's black marble bulk shining like a mausoleum in the sun.
''Even a little sinister looking."
"Speak of the Devil." Matt looked Frank up and down, from the gray suit and tie to the wing-tip shoes resting so incongruously on the cement.
"Unwritten FBI dress code." Frank loosened the utterly unimaginative tie. "Out of the church and still in uniform."
"Still on duty?" Matt asked, throwing his damp towel on the lounge seat before sitting.
"Always. You still keep in good shape."
"Always. And swimming is so routine, it's good for meditation."
"Yeah," Frank said, "routine has its uses. Once we go the suit route in the hot, humid Virginia summers, the heat elsewhere doesn't bother us. And priests are used to overdressing."
Matt self-consciously dabbed chlorine-perfumed droplets off his shoulder. His damp bareness suddenly symbolized the vocation and past that he had thrown off like an itchy black suit.
''I still can't believe you're an FBI agent." Matt said.
"You'd be surprised how many ex-priests end up in law enforcement. Makes sense. We've acquired the education, the people skills, plus a highly overdeveloped sense of right and wrong.
We know how to knuckle under to rules and authority. We believe we can change the world, or at least the dirty under soul of mankind."
"Speak for yourself. So what brought you here besides rank curiosity?"
Frank laughed apologetically as he pulled a packet of cigarettes from his suitcoat pocket.
"Bad habit. Every good celibate deserves, or develops, a compensatory but less condemnable vice--food, drink or these. Mind?"
Matt shook his head, actually enjoying the acrid odor of the freshly lit cigarette Frank soon inhaled as hungrily as a man breathing air through a straw.
"What are your vices?" Frank wanted to know.
"Nothing. Yet. My greatest weakness was always my lack of weaknesses."
"Granted. Everybody is entitled to a weakness," Frank mused. "Makes us human. Maybe your apparent perfection was why you could leave with laicization. Few of us need apply for that rare status, because we won't be granted release from our promises."
He regarded Matt with piercing, almost painful curiosity. "Besides, the only allowable conditions are so humiliating. Either admit lacking free will and maturity at ordination, or confess to such insatiable lust for women that you can't live without one, or be dying in an unauthorized married state and facing eternal damnation without emergency laicization. Ugly, bureaucratic word, isn't it?" Frank eyed Matt. "You don't look like you have terminal anything, and didn't have a wife already. You certainly don't strike me as possessed of a manic lust for women as the church defines it, and you were the most mature seminarian in your class. How did you manage it?"
Matt stared at the pool, an emerald-cut liquid aquamarine glinting under a ceaseless spotlight of sunshine.
"I made my case, and they accepted it."
Frank hissed out an exhaust of smoke. "It's none of my business; I'm just a little envious. Of course I wondered what you were doing in the seminary, as everybody must have. Seminarians are always misfits of a sort, like raw recruits in the Army. You were so smart, so smooth, so self-contained. And you looked like a movie star. I wondered if your vocation was revenge, to drive some girl-all girls--crazy."
Matt laughed. ''My vocation was to save my own sanity, and it did. That's why it was misdirected. Too selfish."
''Laicization is seldom granted. Most ex-priests exit into a moral limbo of sorts. I had to marry in the Episcopal Church, but you're free to be Catholic--"
"I'm not free yet," Matt said abruptly. ''When you married. Was your wife the first woman--
?"
"No. I wasn't a virgin bridegroom. Went a little crazy after I left. I didn't know how to do it at my advanced age, have relationships. So I . . . experimented before I got it right."
Matt felt himself flushing. "I wasn't asking that. I just wondered if she was the first woman you dated. Usually former priests begin--and end--with ex-nuns, but you said she was a widow."
"Sandy's no ex-nun, for sure. Listen, Matt, if you're going to go around asking questions on any level, you better figure out how to phrase them exactly so you learn what you want to know." Frank's sideways glance was embarrassed. "Then you won't learn more than you need to know. Here we go again, me offering direction and you listening. At least I've been through the mill first. That's the worst, learning to socialize with the world of women in a whole different way. That, and overcoming all the avoidance therapy we get in seminary."
Matt nodded. "What about coming to terms with church doctrine? Now that I'm out here, it doesn't seem possible to live by it."
Frank's hearty laugh came like a burst of machine-gun fire. His heavy shoe ground out the cigarette on the concrete, then he picked up the flattened butt and wrapped it in a fast-food napkin he pulled from his pocket.
That was Father Furtive, terminally tidy, Matt thought. How had he made the awesome transition between the priesthood and the secular world?
"Feel a bit more compassion for confused parishioners during confession?" Frank asked.
''No, it's damn hard. We exit the priesthood as we entered, awkward ugly ducklings no matter the outward sophistication. We're overeducated, over-ethical and under experienced. Haven't you learned by now that there's no way not to sin, not without losing our humanity, and certainly our humility? The secret is to select sins that do the least damage, to others and one's self."
"First, do no harm,' " Matt quoted the Hippocratic oath taken by doctors. "Isn't that a principle of the Tao?"
''Yup. We grew up on a culture and a church that insisted we must do good, even if it meant imposing our notion of good on people who didn't subscribe to it. I've concluded that in matters of spirituality, the absence of malice is more important to the human soul than the presence of some rigorous system of perceived rectitude. More people have been hurt by being forced to fit someone else's notion of 'good' than by being allowed to be human."
Matt absorbed his words, realizing that Frank had become an automatic outcast by leaving the priesthood. His renegade marriage was just that, unsanctioned by the church in which he had grown up and made his promises to the priesthood. Matt still could be perfect, if he did things according to Hoyle and the Holy See.
He could marry in the Church, if he could find an un-divorced woman. If he was lucky, he would find a perfect life partner the first time out, commit only a few venial sins of longing and lust, and enter matrimony as virginal as Mary, avoiding the pitfalls of sexual trial and error. But then the onus would be upon selecting the right partner in the dark, and both of them would go half-blind into the most important alliance of their lives. Failure would push him into the divorce trap, which would forever enjoin the perfect ex-priest to lifelong celibacy again.
Matt began to see what Temple had meant when she had asked him what on earth he would do. Temple was shrewd, but she was also trouble. She wasn't Catholic, and didn't understand or kowtow to the culture. Maybe that was why he liked her so much.
"Theology and human behavior mix like oil and water, don't they?" Matt said finally.
Frank nodded. "Human behavior is always a conundrum, but inhuman behavior is worse."