The Fancy Dancer

room, the picture window gave a view up the tumbled granite slope, where a little melt stream gushed down over the moraine. The breeze would smell of old snow and nude rock and emptiness. Here we were shut away from it, hermetically sealed behind the thick plate-glass window, smothered by air conditioning that seemed to circulate the cigarette smells from other people’s rooms into ours.
    Vidal was strangely silent. He walked over to the window and leaned against it, looking out. He was wearing Levi’s, and his feet and torso were bare. His body seemed as hard as the rocks beyond, and as twisted as the pines.
    “What’s the matter with you?” I said.
    He turned his head a little, his face coming into profile against the moraine.
    “I thought you’d stood me up.”
    “Father Vance stuck me with visiting an old lady on the way over.”
    “You could have called.”
    “I’m sorry. I just figured you’d know that something made me late. Don’t you trust me?”
    “I trusted you Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” he said bitterly.
    At the sight of his sad, handsome head, cut like a coin profile into the rock and snow beyond, all the theology went out of my head. I felt an agonizing need to try and recapture the good feeling of the day before. Maybe it was too late now.
    Unsmiling, expressionless, he watched me as I walked over to him. Though I didn’t look at it directly, his torso made me very aware of its nakedness. It had the brutal beauty of a man who lifted and shoved heavy metal all day long. It was softened only by the dark silky curls of hair across his breast, and the carelessly hung silver necklaces. I was even aware of the pulse beating in the side of his neck, of his navel moving as he breathed. Up close, the intensity of him was almost terrifying. It was like standing at the rim of a volcano about to erupt.
    The compulsion to touch him was there. Wasn’t I a very fond-of-touching person? Part of my ministry was patting the hands of old ladies, jouncing screaming babies at the baptismal font, putting an arm across the shoulders of the despondent—all gestures devoid of sex, but all full of caring and feeling.
    Slowly I put both my hands up and held his face 102
    like a chalice. He hadn’t shaved, and his thin cheeks were hot and harsh. Almost without thinking, I felt his cheekbones with my fingertips.
    “I just want to talk to you,” I said.
    My voice was so low that I wondered if I'd only thought the words.
    He smiled a little. “Talk away,” he said. That shade of irony in his voice again.
    A kind of revelation stilled my mind, as if an eighth seal had been opened. What I saw, in that silence that went through heaven, was Vidal’s face as it had always been, down in the deeps of my mind, even before I met him. I was the void, and he was the spirit moving over the face of the deep. In my beginning, his face and his body were the Word made flesh.
    His warm hands closed around my wrists, and I had to close my eyes. The heat of his face came close to mine. My fingers found their way into his hair, to the hot nape of his neck. At some moment that I hadn’t thought of, the grace of God had already gone out of me—for that is the belief, that the grace goes out as fast as when my mother puffed out her birthday candles.
    I kissed him on the mouth, and learned that kissing was everything it was supposed to be, providing you did it freely and not out of duty.
    At another moment I hadn’t noticed, his arms were around me hard and we were straining together as if our muscles would pull out by the roots. Now that I had gone this far, though, the habits of years kept dragging me back. When he tried to get his hands inside my clothes, I kept shrinking back.
    “Not yet. Not so fast.”
    “You’re not getting away with the Princeton rub,” he said. “Not with me.”
    That first time was less a textbook lovemaking than a free-form stop-and-start exploration. Vidal was wise enough to let me find my way with it. But, to turn Father Matt’s phrase around, he was firm too. After last night in the confessional, he knew now that the only thing that worked with me was shock. He shoved me straight to the bottom of the water and made me find myself there, drowning and fighting for life.
    I was a naked Jacob wrestling a naked angel on the deep red carpet. All the caring in my life was there, in my hands, my mouth, my body. I drew from his all the heat that I had tried for years to take from people, from