Empire Falls

every other woman was sunbathing in the nude. When we’re not there, I suspect Peter and Dawn do too. If she had a tan line, I sure couldn’t see it.”
    “How about Peter?” Father Mark asked. “Did he have a tan line?”
    “Didn’t occur to me to look,” Miles said, smiling.
    Father Mark smiled back. “Miles, you’re a true Manichaean. You seek out Mass in the morning and your friend’s wife’s tan line in the afternoon. Anyway, what is it they do again?”
    “Write television sitcoms. By next week they’ll have shut everything up and flown back to L.A. You should see the house that just sits there vacant ten months out of the year.”
    Father Mark nodded but didn’t say anything. Given the priest’s political leanings, Miles knew that he didn’t approve of personal wealth, much less conspicuous consumption.
    “Peter said an odd thing, actually,” Miles continued, even though he’d made up his mind not to tell anyone about this. “He said he and Dawn were astonished Janine and I stuck it out as long as we did, considering how miserable we were together. They’d been admiring for years the way we kept trying to work through our problems.”
    Father Mark smiled. “Remember, though, people from L.A. have pretty minimal expectations when it comes to coping with marital difficulties.”
    Miles shrugged, conceding this. “I guess I was just surprised that people saw us that way.”
    “Mismatched, you mean?”
    Miles considered. “Not really that so much. More that people saw us as unhappy. I wasn’t all that unhappy … or I didn’t know I was. So it’s strange to have friends conclude something like that. I mean, if I was so unhappy, wouldn’t I know?”
    “Possibly,” Father Mark replied. “But not necessarily.”
    Miles sighed. “Janine knew. I have to give her that. At least she knew how she felt.”
    At this point both men heard the shuffling of slippered feet in the hall. Father Mark closed his eyes, as if at the advance of a migraine. A moment later Father Tom, his gray hair wild, his collar askew, entered and fixed Miles with a particularly menacing glare.
    “You want to join us, Tom?” Father Mark suggested, no doubt hoping to head off trouble. “I’ll make you a cup of hot cocoa if you promise to behave.”
    Father Tom usually loved hot chocolate, especially when he didn’t have to make it himself, but it appeared he was thirstier for a good confrontation. “Where did that evil bastard come from?” he growled.
    Miles, also eager to placate the old priest, had been trying to get to his feet so he could offer to shake hands, but standing up proved no easy maneuver, since both the booth and the table were stationary.
    “This is no evil bastard, Tom,” Father Mark said calmly. “This is Miles, our most faithful parishioner. You baptized him and you married his parents.”
    “I know who he is,” Father Tom said. “He’s a peckerhead and his mother was a whore. I told her so too.”
    Miles sat back down. This wasn’t the first time the old man, inspired by only God knew what, had taken one look at Miles and offered a poor opinion of his moral character, though he’d never before insulted the memory of Miles’s mother. This was clearly an old man’s dementia talking, but for the second time that afternoon Miles fleetingly considered how satisfying it would be to send another human being into the next world. This time, a priest.
    “Look at him. Look at that face. He knows it’s true,” the old man said, taking in Miles’s paint-spattered overalls. “He’s a filthy degenerate is what he is. He’s tracking his filth into my house.”
    Father Mark sighed. “You’re wrong all around, Tom. First, it’s not your house.”
    “Is too,” he said.
    “No, the house belongs to the parish, as you’re well aware.”
    Father Tom seemed to consider the unfairness of this arrangement, then finally shrugged.
    “And Miles isn’t a degenerate,” the younger priest said. “He’s covered with paint because he’s painting the church for us, remember? For free?”
    The old man squinted first at his colleague, then at Miles. Always a frugal man in the extreme, Father Tom might have been expected to be mollified by this news, but instead he continued to glare fiercely, as if to suggest that no good deed could disguise the fundamental evil of Miles’s heart. “I may be old,” he conceded, “but I still know a peckerhead when I see one.”
    Father Mark, his patience