The Fancy Dancer

everybody you deal with. That’s the way you are. That’s your way of being gay, and that’s your way of being a minister too. When you first started counseling me, I thought you were being extra special with me because you were attracted to me. But after a while I realized you were giving me the same treatment you give everybody.”
    “I can keep that attitude, and not be a priest,” I said. “I’ll go on being a Catholic, for Chrissake.”
    Vidal shook his head. “It won’t be the same, and you know it.”
    He sat up and leaned back against the wall and 243
    the pillows, his long hard legs sprawled with ease in the faded jeans. The Yucatan wedding shirt, much-washed and getting faded now, was open, showing the silky black hair on his chest. He looked every bit as fine as the famous Jim French models I had seen in the gay magazines, but his eyes didn’t have that hot come-on look. They studied me with a certain anxiety. On the wall behind him, my memory made the fancy dancer visible.
    Uneasy, because I knew he was right, I said:
    “Why did you go for me? Do you know? I mean, I’m not your type.”
    He dropped his eyes and shrugged. “I’ve always thought about that a lot. I think I had a real resentment against priests because of the way that one guy treated me when I was fourteen, when I tried to talk to him. Maybe my motives weren’t exactly nice when I tried to get to know you. Sleeping with you was a way to degrade the Church and get back at him. And the idea of a gorgeous number in a cassock was . . . fun.”
    He shrugged, and looked back up at me with that disarming grin. “But I wound up getting more emotionally involved than I’d planned.”
    “That night you first came to confession,” I said. “Was that a terrific acting job, all that bull about your sins that you wouldn’t tell me about? Or did you really mean it?”
    He cocked his head. “Maybe a little of both. I mean, I did need help, didn’t I?”
    All summer Vidal had been my Virgil, leading me through a part of earth that I’d never seen before. Now he was the Beatrice, tugging me toward a paradise that I was half-afraid to look at.
    “Time to go,” I said. “Father Vance will be wondering where I am.”
    I kissed him. “This is for tomorrow,” I said.
    The next morning, Vidal and I had breakfast at Trina’s for the last time. Neither of us ate much, and Vidal actually played with his frijoles.
    Trina came by and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
    “Adios, my bes’ customer,” she said.
    After breakfast, we went back to Vidal’s house to get Patti Ann and the baby. It was amazing how little they had—a few cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases, some odd things tied up in a pillow case, and the dogs. The furniture stayed with the house, which was rented furnished. Vidal was shipping the bike to Missoula, where he had rented a basement apartment in an old house near the campus.
    Somehow we piled or tied all the stuff onto the bumpers and luggage rack on my sports car, so that it looked like some swinger’s version of an Oakie truck in The Grapes of Wrath. The three of us, the baby and the dogs squeezed into the car, and we chugged back over the river, to the Rainbow Hotel.
    Bus depots in small Western towns have a certain melancholy that must be tied up with the times and the slow death of the railroads and the airlines. It’s the longest, cheapest, most uncomfortable way to travel. You leave, and you may never come back. Or you come back because you’re fed up with the rest of the world.
    The Cottonwood depot was at the desk of the Rainbow Hotel. We walked into the musty little lobby, where the cleaning lady was just cleaning the stand ashtrays. Several ancient leather chairs sat along the lobby windows, along with the couple of the eternal dusty rubber plants. In one of the chairs, a weatherbeaten old man in a cowboy hat and khaki pants sat reading The Montana Livestock Reporter.
    Vidal walked up to the hotel desk, where the Greyhound sign hung. The bus schedule was posted on the wall. He pushed a ten across the counter.
    “Two one-ways to Missoula,” he said. “Is the ten-thirty bus on time?”
    “Fifteen minutes late,” said the desk clerk, pushing the tickets and the change back.
    The bus was half an hour late. There was just a little feeling of anticlimax, as we sat in the hotel coffee shop and had a last cup of coffee to pass the time. I would be going back to the rectory shortly to pack my own things, which