''Brave? Me?"
He nodded. ''In every way it counts. Mentally, emotionally, spiritually."
"I'm not . . . spiritual."
"I didn't say religious. We're all spiritual, under the skin. And sexual."
Uh oh.
Matt shifted position on the sofa. Temple tried not to jump. She succeeded.
"Okay," he said.
He was laying all this out very logically, like the good teacher he was. Temple wasn't fooled.
Homework was coming due. She listened intently as he went on.
"You have to realize that you're dealing with an overage but classically confused adolescent male. You know the home life I grew up in, the abuse. You don't know how deeply that undermines self-esteem. No matter that my grades were good in school, my behavior preternaturally perfect, that the abuse didn't scar me, that my looks were above average. To me, all that stuff outside the home was a lie. When people said I was smart, or well-behaved or handsome, I didn't believe them, because I knew how I really deserved to be treated no matter what I did or was. I hated their praise. It struck me as phony. My looks I hated worst of all. I wished for zits, buck teeth. I knew that--inside--I was really the ugly picture of Dorian Gray in the attic."
"That's terrible! Horrible. That's like an anorectic, who has what every woman in the world nowadays is brainwashed to desire, supreme slimness, and still sees herself as fat in the mirror when she's skeletal."
"Same issue, different approach. I hated it when girls, even some of the lay teachers at school, started cooing over my looks."
"You became a priest because you didn't believe you were handsome?"
"No, it's more complicated than that. I didn't have a decent role model for sexual relationships. There was the dirty little secret of the violence at home. I was mostly terrified of becoming like him, Cliff Effinger. To me, sex was violence. The physical outlet of martial arts let me glimpse the rage beneath my gold-star deportment. I didn't want to risk a sexual involvement, because I might find rage there too. Most of all, I never wanted to have children, never wanted to risk doing what was done to me to someone else."
''People don't usually become what they hate."
"Except in cases of abuse. There are three routes for a child of abuse: become a perpetual victim, become a perpetrator and victimize others; overcome the past and do neither. The last path is the least taken, because the early patterning is so unconscious, so impossible to overcome. I'm right to fear my own rage."
''But you understand the process so well; you help others with it."
"Knowledge isn't everything. I'm still surprising myself: Look at what I did to this place when I heard Effinger might be dead."
Temple looked around the restored but barren room. "You damaged things, not yourself or others."
"Brave new Temple." Matt looked down, then took her hand, the one that was still worrying at her hem. "When I saw you take that in stride, I really got scared."
Oh, Temple thought, this is so mature. This is such important stuff. And, oh, rats, Temple thought again. Maybe Matt is right. Maybe this is too much for me. I'm walking wounded myself.
"So," he said, "the priesthood saved me from the family demons. I could hide from women and children, yet serve them, care for them from a distance. My real father vanished, my 'fake'
father was a monster, but the parish priests were my ersatz fathers, and so encouraging of my vocation. By becoming one of them, I could become perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect, to paraphrase the New Testament. No one would think it odd that I avoided sex; it was part of the job description. The priesthood was a great place to hide out, and everybody praised me lavishly for my choice, especially since I was so good looking, they said. Even that became palatable as long as I didn't use it."
"When did it fall apart?''
"When I grew up, grew more confident in my ability to function in an abuse-free environment, I started analyzing more than my spiritual state of grace, and my outward actions.
I found some pretty corrosive, un-Christian buried emotions. By the time I applied to leave, I had built a case that clearly showed misguided motives. That's why celibacy was no problem for me.
I'd learned to deflect even the mildest sexual message. A lot of priests are casual nowadays about wearing the collar, but I clung to it. It was my wedding ring to Mother Church; it warned women off."
"And challenged some, I bet, even some Catholic women."
"Teenage girls, and older women. I was the pet of the flower society ladies, who were all over sixty. Still, I kept it harmless. The last thing I was going to do was take advantage of it."
"Poor things," Temple said, thinking of all those starry-eyed women mooning over Father Devine, who was so nice and so handsome and so impossibly unattainable, by vocation and inclination. No, not by inclination, by upbringing.
"I agree. What a waste of everybody's energy, including mine."
"So now what do you do?"
"You asked that at the tacqueria after I administered the anointing to Blandina Tyler, and my answer is still as muddy. I'm trying to settle my anger with the old days. You're right, given my lifelong abstinence and fear, I'm finding celibacy a hard habit to break. It's so safe, isn't it? So removed. I can even feel superior in a secular way, because of AIDS."
"And," Temple added, "your religion looks on most sexual behavior as sinful in some way, as far as I can tell."
"That's another reason I left. I was having a tough time reconciling what some of my parishioners did--good people trying to lead decent lives--with the letter of church law.
American priests have a particularly hard time with that; that's why we're called liberal."
"So you still don't know what you'll do?"
"No."
And he was still holding Temple's hand, which she was holding motionless. In fact, she was holding her entire body and mind in a state of suspended animation.
"No,'' Matt repeated, looking her hard in the eyes, "but now I at least know what I want to do."
Temple tried not to swallow, which was so obvious. "What?" she asked softly in a voice as hoarse as if she had laryngitis.
He answered with another question. "Would you ever consider... I'm not used to all these euphemisms ... sleeping with me, making love?"
"That's easy. I have considered it. Often." Temple saw more in his eyes than the surface question. "But whether I would actually do it would depend."
"On what?"
"On what's going on with you, and with me, and with us."
"You wouldn't have to be married . . . ?"
She shook her head. "I never have been. I've had hopes. Especially with Max. I made it out of high school a virgin, and was most disappointed about that. I mean, it wasn't the done thing, even for Midwestern girls, who are a bit socially retarded. There was a guy my freshmen year in college. We were both desperate to become worldly wise, and didn't have much chance of that with each other. But we liked one another and accomplished the landmark initiation without any trauma. I had a solid but unexciting long-term relationship with a man in Minneapolis, before we agreed to split. Then along came Max."
Matt lifted her hand, kissed the top of it.
Temple's suspended animation melted like milk chocolate in a hot saucepan.
"Max was your Real Thing," he said, gently prodding the past out of her, as she had nudged it out of him.
"So I thought. I mean, he swept into the Guthrie for a weekend stand and he swept me off my feet--literally--and out of there so fast it made my whole family's heads spin. It was so flattering, and exciting, and, God knows, I was in a rut there. But when you're dropped to ground after that kind of rush, the downfall is brutal."
Matt kissed her hand again. His brown eyes were warm with empathy and understanding and the intense fascination of dawning infatuation. No one had seen him look like this, Temple thought. No one but her.