Part Twenty Three

Ordinarily the fall semester ended a few days before Christmas and the spring semester began in late January. That year DJ had his own place and Jen was spending all of her time with her boyfriend and I was bored as hell. So shortly after New Year’s I went back down to Annapolis and begged Ilona to come back early, too. She relented toward the end of the break and we had a few very nice days to ourselves in that old house. Then we had a few so-so days. Then we had a couple of days when we were ready to kill one another, and it was with some relief that we greeted Preacher and Moira, returning to Annapolis a couple of days before classes resumed.

I was sitting in the living room in sweats watching cartoons and eating cereal and Ilona was in the dining room trying to get some reading done and wishing she had some other place to stay when they came in laughing and shaking a few snow flurries off. I hadn’t even noticed it was snowing. Moira was wearing jeans – the first time I ever saw her in pants – and a cowboy hat. Preacher’s coat still had a lift pass on the zipper. Cold air billowed through the door around them and rifled to the back of the house, fluttering papers and stirring Ilona and I out of our cranky stupors.

This is a cozy domestic scene, Moira said, looking at us. Ilona managed a smile. I was about to say the same thing, she said. Where have you two been all month?

Hither and yon, Moira said. Preacher took off his jacket. I didn’t expect to see you guys here, he said.

New Jersey in January, I said, and I shrugged. What more could I add?

Tell me about your trip, Ilona said, thirsty for someone else to talk to.

Moira took off her coat while Preacher took a suitcase upstairs. She told us about Nashville and Memphis and New Orleans and Galveston and Austin and Albuquerque and, finally, Telluride, where he learned to ski for the first time.

I rolled my eyes as I suffered a mental image of Preacher Haywood staggering about for thirty seconds, and then qualifying for the Olympics by the end of the day. Because that’s just the way he was. And I suspected Moira was the same way. If you took away Preacher’s self-deprecating air and replaced it with ball-busting, and made him way better looking, you had Moira.

They talked about the music they’d heard and Moira expressed her disappointment at real live cowboys and Indians both; give me, she said, a nice superficial Hopalong Cassidy movie any day. Preacher made a fire in the fireplace and brewed some tea (I had instant coffee) and I forgot to be annoyed with Ilona, I was so busy being annoyed with them. The worst time to encounter two people in love is not when you are lonely, but when you have just realized how irritating your significant other actually is.

Ilona wasn’t nearly so analytical. She was just grateful to have someone else she could talk to.

Later in the afternoon they left for Moira’s place. Don’t wait up, Preacher said to me as he left, which was supposed to be a reassuring way of telling me that Ilona and I would still have the place to ourselves for the night. Instead it made me want to hit him.

When the semester started up again Ilona and I gratefully parted company. It was too soon, she said to me. We needed a few more months of living apart.

Live and learn, I said.

Preacher and Moira seemed to have found a new equilibrium, too. Preacher wasn’t over there as much. And when he did go, they sometimes would leave the house and engage in meaningful social interaction with the rest of the world. While the entire student body knew they were sleeping together by the second day of classes, the only way the administration found out about it was because different faculty members began to report seeing them together in restaurants and at the movies.

I didn’t know, at the time, about Moira’s sexual tutelage of my housemate. But I now know that it continued that semester, despite the fact that they had finally admitted to something other than a teacher-student relationship. Maybe that means Moira was serious about all the “training your natural gifts” crap she was spreading back at the beginning. But not necessarily. I never underestimate anyone’s capacity for self-delusion. Including my own.

We started up the poker nights again. It wasn’t the same without Ellen, but we still had a good time. Preacher was a slightly cagier poker player, I must say. If learning every possible human sexual position makes you a better poker player… then life is just too fucking unfair for words.

Moira insisted – INSISTED – that Preacher do something without her during Spring Break. She told me, when I interviewed her, that she didn’t want Preacher to completely miss out on the “ordinary debauchery” of a student’s life that year.

“As opposed to the extraordinary debauchery he was experiencing under your mentoring?”

“Precisely,” she said. “I had read a review of Lolita. I remember it distinctly. It said the book was about the Old World debauching the New, until suddenly you realized it was the other way around. And I thought, my god, that’s us.”

“Lolita.”

“Not Lolita per se, but… all of the sudden it hit me that not only was I not in charge of the relationship, but Preacher had so deftly taken control of the situation that he was able to still let me believe I was in charge even when he was the one running things.”

I said nothing. He could do that, I knew.

“So I wanted him to go out and be a normal college kid, so I could have a couple weeks to become a normal college teacher, and we could go back to where we started out. With me in charge.”

“Did it work?”

“Of course not. I missed him terribly. When he came back I told him that I loved him.” She laughed at the memory of it, pushed her hair back, laughed again. “What a sorry, sorry debaucher I was. I mean up until he left I told myself it was just… it was just sex. Oh, sometime during that Christmas holiday together I admitted to myself that I liked him, that there was something there outside of the sexual relationship, but when he left…” She shook her head. “It wasn’t even the whole two weeks. I called your place after a week to see if you or the other one – Mark, was it? – knew where he was or how I could get in touch with him. I kept having these mental images of him cavorting with these bikini-clad co-eds.”

I knew that in her worst nightmare, she still imagined herself better looking than any of these phantom rivals.

“And instead he answered the phone,” she said. “On the first ring. He said he was getting ready to pick up the phone and call me. He was probably lying. But anyhow, he came over, and that was when I told him. Before I told him I forbade him to say it back to me.”

“So what did he say?”

“He said, I was wondering how long it would take you to admit that you feel the same way. Cocky bastard.”

“And that was the end of the sex training?”

“Yes,” she said. “Actually… I sort of left some details out. Details that you will find when you go through those notebooks, so I might as well tell you now. Shortly after I was called on the carpet at the dean’s office – this was before I told him to go away for Spring break – we had gone into another… phase of his training. We got a hotel in Baltimore for a weekend. I had made some discrete inquiries. We went to a certain pub near the hotel and invited a gentleman back with us. Preacher did… as he’d been trained, I suppose. He wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but exploring your homosexual side and dealing with multiple partners were both a part of the program. And once I tried women I had become a firm believer in bisexuality and I suppose I figured Preacher would react the same way.” She looked up, rather wistfully, if someone like Moira is capable of a wistful look. “But he just… he just detached himself. Which was part of what he was supposed to be learning anyhow – transcending desire. I thought he had done it before, but he did it even more that night. But performed admirably. We did all the things I set out to do.”

I was getting my head around Preacher having sex with another man. A three-way with Moira – that I found very easy to believe. But Moira watching while he put on… an exhibition, essentially, with some guy they found in a swingers’ bar?

“Anyhow,” she continued, mistaking my shock for a studied silence, “a couple of weeks later we went back, and to the same bar, and this time I picked out this darling dark-haired girl. I figured this would help him understand better. And the same thing happened. He just… removed himself, even farther than usual. Technically, he was flawless. That girl should have just entered a convent the next day, because the rest of her sexual life was going to be disappointing by comparison.” She laughed. If Preacher had told the story, it would have been a self-effacing laugh. That was one of the principle differences between Moira and Preacher.

“So you stopped?”

“So he’d graduated,” she said. “I mean, we weren’t studying tantra. Not in any meaningful way. I guess that’s important to clarify, what with Preacher’s future occupation as a guru. Real tantra Buddhism takes a lifetime, and the sex part is just a small part. He was no tantric yogi. But he’d learned what I set out to teach him. The technical skills plus the… distance. When I first met him I told him he liked the person better than the act. But those two weekends – he didn’t give a damn about either one, he wasn’t particularly attracted to either one, and I think in both cases he didn’t like seeing me with them. But he did what his training taught him to do. And did it superbly, I must say. It was the act, not the person. That was, in the end, the goal.”

I didn’t tell her what Preacher thought about all that. I didn’t tell his line about the importance of unlearning what she’d taught him. I didn’t even tell her about my one long talk with him about her, shortly after she left.

“And after that?”

“After that – we only had a couple of months after that, and I unabashedly gave him my heart,” she said. “And vice-versa. He told me he would transfer to Oxford, can you believe that? I told him I would look for a job in the States. We were both horrible liars. And the year ended, and I got on the plane. And just like before, after a week I couldn’t stand it and I called the house. Left a message. He never called back. Which… he was right. It was best to just not try to communicate at all; a broken heart heals faster that way. It’s not that he didn’t call me back that bothers me now. It’s that he was, in the end, stronger than me.”

Which brings me to my one and only prolonged conversation with Preacher Haywood on the subject of Moira Callahan. It was right after she left.

The setting was McDermott’s; Preacher had been moping for two days and Mark and I decided to take him to our favorite local watering hole to drown his sorrows. We sat at a table and ordered beer and Mark and I both tried to be sympathetic.

“Let me tell you,” I said, “what worked for me.” My only real experience as the dumpee was when Ellen and I split up, and I recovered pretty quickly, but I had milked the experience for all it was worth at the time. “First, you need at least two weeks in the same sweatpants. Second, you can’t eat anything other than Fruity Pebbles and Pop-Tarts for a month. Third, you have to play the Cure’s Disintegration album at least 250 times.”

“You can just play Fascination Street over and over again,” Mark suggested.

“What flavor Pop-tarts?” Preacher said, and gulped down his beer.

“Brown sugar and cinnamon,” I said.

“Chocolate frosted,” Mark said.

“I thought only women used chocolate after being dumped,” I said.

“Maybe it's a gay thing,” Mark replied, shrugging and downing his beer, too.

“And you should start smoking,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Preacher took it out of my hand and took a big drag. Then he started hacking.

“Can’t miss someone if you’re coughing your lungs out?” he gasped.

“Something like that,” I said, taking it back and puffing away happily.

About eight rounds later the bartender wouldn’t serve us anymore, so we bought a big bottle of Jim Beam and staggered for home. Yes, we sang “Fascination Street” along the way – what of it?

We got home and Preacher found three highball glasses because I had returned a little of the beer to the Annapolis soil on the way home and he wasn’t about to let me drink from the bottle. We sat down at the table and he put The River – both disks – in the CD player and Mark poured the first round.

We sat there in silence for a moment. “To Bruce Springsteen,” Mark said, and we all raised our glasses. “To Bob Dylan,” I added. “To Woodie Guthrie,” Preacher noted.

I refilled the glasses. “Who comes before Woodie Guthrie?” Mark said.

“Jimmie Rodgers,” Preacher and I said simultaneously. Son of a bitch, I thought. Now he’s ruined me, musically.

“To Jimmie Rodgers,” Mark said.

“To Ginger Rogers,” I said.

“To Ginger Baker,” Preacher said. He refilled the glasses.

I don’t remember what came after that. I do remember that later Mark was sitting in the chair with a glazed look in his eyes, his drink sitting untouched before him.

Serves you right, you know, I said to Haywood.

What?

Serves you right, I repeated. It might not have sounded that clear.

How you figure? Preacher said.

The bottle of JB was mostly empty.

You were… that guy.

What guy?

That guy. You know. That… guy.

He refilled our glasses. I doubted that would help me be MORE articulate. I considered my options, shrugged, and picked up the glass.

What guy? Preacher said. In those days he could hold his liquor better than me. At least he could maintain better. Now, of course, the remnants of my liver would make a mockery of his. But even Preacher had reached the point where he couldn’t feel his lips anymore.

The guy with… the wings. Brueghel guy.

Icaraus.

Yeah, him. You were him. Flew too fuckin’ close to the sun, man.

No, Preacher said. Not Icarus. Phaeton.

Mark arced his hand through the air and made a whistling sound that ended with a crash.

Right, Preacher nodded at him.

What’s the difference? I said, a little angry. They both didn’t listen to their fathers. They both crashed and burned.

Technically, Mark said, they burned and crashed.

Preacher laughed and took a big swallow. Icarus was just careless. Phaeton was trying for… arête, he said.

That’s what you were doing? Striving for excellence?

Yep.

I took a swallow and mulled on it. Mark tried to raise his glass.

Reach for the one in the middle, man, I told him. We watched him carefully raise the glass. Arête, he said in toast, and we repeated it and all drank again.

I don’t see it, I said after a pause. Then I raised my glass. Parrhesia, I said. We managed another swallow.

Another long pause. I was supposed to be… getting skills, Preacher said. Agape, he toasted, and we all drank again. The woman knew everything there was to know about sex. I mean we did some… some kinky shit, he said. I mean… you know how long I can go without coming?

Whoa, Mark said, trying to decipher that combination of verbs.

Me neither, Preacher said. Not anymore. As long… as long as it takes. I make the little map, and I find the little buttons, and just… wind me up and press play.

What the fuck are you talking about, I said to him, laughing.

It’s like… he said, and stopped. I learned how to fuck. I learned how to fuck so good that I don’t really actually even want to fuck anymore.

Wore you out? I said. Come on.

No, not that, he said. He looked over at Mark, who by this time was resting his head on the table. I just… there’s no more mystery. No more uncertainty. No more fun. Just… technique. I mean. Don’t get me wrong. It was… some of it was… wow. But the thing is that knowing how to do all those things made it like…

I understood. Mostly because I was as drunk as he was.

And the thing that bothers me the most is that I love her, man, he said to me. That absolutely wasn’t supposed to happen. And she… I mean, sex was supposed to be this, this thing, over here – and he gestured with his hand – this separate thing, like playing the violin or making eggplant parmesan, and… And I got that. I really got that. I didn’t fall in love with her because of all the sex. I fell in love with her despite the sex. I fell in love with her for the times when we were clothed and upright and… but you can’t love a woman that… that’s so… what’s the word? For her?

Hot, I said.

Right. Hot. You can’t love a woman that hot and not want to have sex with her. But when we had sex it was… it pushed us apart. It was… It was fucked up. That’s what it was. Except at the end when we both could admit what we felt. What had happened. Then we had, we only had, we only had two goddamn months to try to fix it. Two months to learn a whole new way to do it, a way where you loved the person more than the act. Two months to enjoy it… in our… hearts.

I looked at him closely. If he started to weep, I would have hit him in the face with the bottle. But he didn’t. Just sat there staring at his now-empty glass.

We finally put down those stupid sex journals and put aside everything else and just… just tried to touch each other. And I finally… she finally closed her eyes. We both did. We both finally just let go and looked for something else, something… that wasn’t just nerve endings. And… it was much harder, and we had to stop because she had to go back to Ireland, even though she could have stayed another two weeks, she left right on schedule like she said she would before we had enough time to make it right.

Let me get this straight, I said, splitting the last two fingers from the bottle with him. You’re pissed off because all you had was an entire school year of mind-blowing sex with the hottest woman you’ve ever seen? Is that really what’s bothering you?

He finished his drink. That’s what’s bothering me, he said. She could have ruined either sex or love, but instead I think she’s ruined both for me.

Now, finally, you’re drunk enough to sound just like everybody else who’s ever been dumped, I said. I’m going to go throw up and then we can put the Cure back on.

When I woke up in the bathroom the house was quiet. I stumbled into my room and slept until noon and then the three of us sat very, very quietly in the living room, trying to figure out which variation of the fetal position was most effective. Late in the afternoon Haywood made an emergency phone call and a townie he knew named Greg showed up at our door with a bag full of Burger King hamburgers. The grease treatment was timed just right, and we slowly rejoined the living, and Preacher never mentioned her to me again.