To: Cari Lang, carefreecari@gmail.com

Wed., Aug. 1, 2012, 7:14 p.m.

Subject: Us

Dear Cari,

Your email was most welcome. Yes, I’d like to see you again. In fact, I propose that I move in with you. No promises, no expectations other than being with you. We share a longstanding bond that I hope will continue in some fashion. Living together should tell us yea or nay on all levels.

I realize this email is more than direct. It’s blunt and no doubt blindsides you. Please call me so we can talk after you’ve had some time to think things through.

Most fondly,

Jason

He clicked send.

His phone rang two days later at nine in the evening.

“Hi. It’s me.”

“Hi. Good to hear your voice.”

“It took a Tullamore Dew.”

“Only one? Would’ve taken me at least a couple.”

She giggled. “I can hear your smile.”

“Musicians always have good hearing.”

“Hmm. Guess so.” She giggled again.

“How many Tullamores?”

“Maybe two? Okay, three. Stiff ones.”

“What do you think?”

“About what?

“My email.”

“Oh, that. Well, that’s why I called, isn’t it. I was happy when it came. Then I got kind of mad, then confused. Why is life so complicated?”

“Let’s simplify.”

“I do want to see you again.”

“Well?”

“It’s the moving in part. We’re different people now.”

“Heard that before.”

The sound of ice cubes rattling in a glass paused the conversation.

“I called to tell you it wouldn’t work. Now I’m vacillating. I just hate it when I get this way.”

“I won’t pressure you. Give it some thought and get back to me, okay?”

“Don’t hang up. I like hearing your voice.”

“I love hearing yours. Even if you are a bit tipsy.”

“I played the violin earlier. It helped.”

“Tullamore Dew and violin. What a nice combination.”

“Yeah. Wish you were here.”

“So do I. You sound sleepy. Why don’t you think about my email and get back to me? I want to be with you, but it’s your call.”

“Okay.”

“Good night, Cari.”

“G’night. Love you.”

He didn’t have a good feeling about bringing the call to such an abrupt end, but the conversation was going nowhere. Cari was tired, mired in ambivalence, and in her cups.

She emailed him two days later.

From: Cari Lang carefreecari@gmail.com

Fri. Aug. 3, 2012, 11:02 p.m.

Subject: Moving in

Dear Jason,

Boy, Ferris, you don’t beat around the bush. I wrestled with your offer—still am—but will take you up on it. I appreciate the “no promises” part of your message. When will you arrive?

Cari

Poverty has its rewards. For one, it simplified Jason’s address change. His car accommodated his clothing, toiletries, and a few books. The local Catholic high school accepted the life-size crucifix and over two hundred books. Jason kept the broken crucifix and his father’s bugle—two items he would never part with.

Poverty. A financial state appropriate for the Brothers of the Eleventh Hour, but how would he pay his way now that he had left the nest, a fledgling fluttering into a world unimpressed by and indifferent to a forty-year-old with a PhD in theology? Live off Cari? Out of the question. He would find a job right away. Any kind of job.

He laid the bugle on the dresser in the spare bedroom in Cari’s apartment. She agreed to his hanging the small crucifix on the wall next to the dresser.

“The head’s broken off. Why don’t you get a new one?”

“Because I inadvertently broke this one off in anger that summer. Most of it’s intact. I have a lot in common with it.”

“Like your head’s on your shoulders?”

“Like much of my faith is intact.”

“But your reason is gone?”

He turned to hang the headless crucifix on the nail he’d driven into the wall. “My reason is whole. My faith’s been damaged, but not destroyed.”

Despite the fact she seemed to have no problem with nudity, Cari told him up front that sex was out of the question. Incredulously, she was even willing to share her bed. Jason opted to sleep in the spare bedroom.

On the first night, knowing she was only a few feet away, he lay in the dark awake and alert to the sounds poking through the darkness: crickets, birds, car horns and engines, distant sirens, an occasional voice from the outside; the whir of the refrigerator, ice cubes crashing into the bin.

As a teen, he had read something by one of the Huxleys, whether Aldous or Julian he couldn’t recall, to the effect that every man is obsessed with sex. He had scoffed at the notion at the time—sure, he was obsessed; didn’t mean every man was, and obsessed might be a little strong—but the fact that he had never forgotten the idea always made him suspect it was true.

He wanted more than anything else to join Cari in her bed. He couldn’t recall celibacy being an unduly onerous burden when he was a priest, but now he couldn’t banish Cari from his imagination. Oh, sex had always hovered at the edges during his priesthood, but his commitment to celibacy had held it at bay. Now that the commitment was no longer in effect and sex was no longer entirely hypothetical, it seemed that thoughts of sex held his imagination captive most of the time.

An old priest in seminary had shared a way of dealing with temptation: Intellectualize the source. Think about its various facets from a strictly theoretical perspective. Allow the analytical approach to pose numerous questions and considerations, all of which might help remove your mind from the temptation at hand.

Not a bad idea in theory, but how do you intellectualize desire and the near proximity of the woman you desire? He smiled at the thought of the old joke in which a monk races up the stairs of the monastery, excited by the discovery of a misspelling in an ancient manuscript, yelling, “Brothers, brothers, it’s not ‘celibate’! It’s ‘celebrate’!” The joke, of course, was anachronistic because the word celibate always meant unmarried. Only in modern times had it come to mean abstinence from sexual intercourse.

A clock ticking off the seconds transcended all other night sounds. The steady ticking reminded him of a little used word going back to seminary days: finity, the opposite of infinity.

Overused and often misused, the word infinity speaks of time without end; whereas finity, like finite, reminds us that our time is limited, an easy concept to grasp, but what is infinity? If it means an unlimited amount of static time, how boring!

But what if we could die painlessly multiple times in a parallel universe and then live life over, but instead of making the same decisions we made the first time, we could or would (major distinction!) select the other choices we had, which in turn would lead to a new set of choices. Would we choose with an awareness of our previous life, or would we have no recollection of that? If those around us were going through the same process, it could literally go on forever because the variables would be infinite. Each person living an endless number of lifetimes, each one having new expectations, surprises and disappointments, the entire array of human experience and emotion replayed without end. How exciting!

Or could we take on completely new identities after each death? Literally infinite lives!

What was that scent filling the room? A delicate but definite aroma of honey washed over him on the cool air streaming through the open window. Jason slid from the bed and felt his way to the back door.

The wet grass on his bare feet stopped him for only a moment as the initial shock gave way to sensuousness and a delicious sense of nonconformity bordering on truancy. Outside the bedroom window, he found the flowers in the dark and leaned over to draw them to his face, the four-foot, sinewy stems bending easily in his hands. The soft, small blossoms grew in clusters and exuded an intense fragrance that transported him to the summers of his youth when he listened to Cari practice her violin while he lay in the dark thinking of her and what she wore.

He pulled up his t-shirt and pressed the velvety petals to his bare belly. The dew on the petals took his breath away for a second or two before giving way to plush warmth. Aroused, he reluctantly released the flowers and retraced his steps to the back door. After wiping his feet with paper towels, he was about to return to bed when the kitchen light flashed on. Startled, he wheeled around. Cari eyed him suspiciously, an uncertain smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

“What are you doing?”

“I went to smell the flowers outside the window. What are they?”

“They’re called phlox. Goofy name, but a wonderful perennial. Mine are a tall variety called Fairy’s Petticoat. They’re especially fragrant.”

“I can’t wait to see them in daylight.”

“Won’t have to wait long. It’s four in the morning, sunshine.” She kissed him on the cheek and returned to her bedroom.

Lying in bed minutes later, Jason recalled his longing from afar on those innocent nights, that same longing now distilled into an even more powerful desire because of her closeness. Yet she was as distant and unattainable on this night as then.

The sound of a violin drifted into the room. Cari hadn’t returned to her bed. She was playing his favorite of all time, “Somewhere My Love,” the theme music from an old movie, Doctor Zhivago. The haunting notes brought back his teen fantasies as he lay in bed listening to her practice. In warm weather, the scent of lilacs or honeysuckle accompanied the music and heightened his yearning.

Should he go to her now? No. He couldn’t take her rejection tonight. He wrapped his pillow around his head. The pillow helped but couldn’t entirely mute the music. The effect was to intensify his desire.

So much for intellectualizing.

The next morning he walked to the McDonald’s where he’d gone for coffee after that disastrous night in Cari’s bed. The Help Wanted sign was still displayed in the window. The manager turned out to be a tall black man, about forty, with a neon smile and an apparently congenital sense of humor.

“I need work.”

“Dude, I need help.”

All Jason could think of to say in the face of the man’s banter was, “Maybe we’re meant for each other.”

The manager laughed and extended his hand. “I’m Curtis Jackson. I go by Curt. What’s yours?”

“Jason Ferris. I go by Jason.”

Another laugh. “Fair enough. What have you done, Jason?”

“I taught in a college for ten years. For the last five, I taught in a prison.”

“Whoa! Tell me about that.”

“I left one kind of teaching for another.”

“You on parole?” The teasing look on Curt’s face made Jason smile.

“Just out of work.”

“Man, this is a new one for me. What did you teach?”

“Religion and philosophy. I was a priest.”

Curt tugged on his ear. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Man, the Big M never hired anyone with your background.” He motioned Jason to an open table near a window. “I took one philosophy course a long time ago and managed a C, but I don’t know Aristotle from Alexander the Great. What do you want to do long term?”

“I hope to find a permanent job. Other than that, I have no idea.”

“Why would I hire you? You only want to double park here until you find something better.”

“I could be gone in a month, but I’m trainable and dependable. I’ll give you plenty of notice when I find another job.”

Curt’s teeth flashed as he shook his head and chuckled. “Be any other time, I’d flunk you, teach. But three people just quit to go back to school. They were going to work part-time but decided to make the leap. Another one hasn’t showed in three days. You clean?”

“What?”

“Drugs, alcohol? Arrest record?”

“Oh.” Jason chuckled at his own naiveté. “None of the above.”

“Follow me.” Curt led the way to the kids’ play area. “No way is this by the book. I’ll have to be nimble with the suits. Can you be here in one hour?”

“I can be here right now.”

“Fantastic. I’ll scrounge up a shirt and apron and give you a crash course on cooking fries before the lunch crunch. That’s all you’ll do at first. We’ll take care of the formal stuff for corporate later. You won’t be official in the meantime. I’ll pay you cash for the time being.”

Curt jotted something on the back of a business card. “Here’s the code for our online application. That’s where the official process begins.” He shook Jason’s hand and looked down at his feet. “Always wear comfortable shoes. The sneakers you have on are perfect.”

Minutes later Jason found himself cooking French fries for the hungry hordes of St. Paul.

Cari stared at him in disbelief. “You’re doing what, where?”

“It’s an honest job until I find a better one. Think of it as my contribution to the Tullamore Dew fund. Where else could I gross $400 a week and eat free burgers?”

“You’ll need a good financial adviser.”

“My pay at the college wasn’t much better.”

“And didn’t have nearly the prestige.”

He ignored the dollop of reproach in her banter. What he couldn’t ignore was the tight blouse she wore.

On his Sundays off, Jason volunteered at a nearby Presbyterian church that prepared meals for over one hundred shut-ins. Cari joined him on occasion.

“A nice thing to do,” she said, “but you make minimum wage yourself.”

“When I was a priest, I made the rounds visiting shut-ins. We have untold numbers of people living heroic lives.”

“Heroic?”

“Heroic. And we don’t even know about most of them.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Twelve