The Fancy Dancer

wafers. It seemed impossible that they couldn’t see the blackened, twisted state of my soul. Any one of them was in better spiritual shape than I was probably. They didn’t know it, but their priest was betraying them.
    I went along that row of kneeling people, slipping wafers into their opened mouths. One by one, they rose and shuffled back to their pews, heads bowed, hands clasped, carrying in their mouths that treasure that stayed miraculously unstained despite my having touched it
    Though I didn’t raise my eyes, I knew that my lover was sitting there shamelessly in the very front pew. Vidal wasn’t devout enough to go to communion, and I didn’t pester him to go. It was a curious reality of my dilemma that I, a shepherd, should actually want one of my sheep to stay away from the Holy Sacrament. Slipping that wafer into Vidal’s mouth would have been too painful a ritual parody of our relationship.
    That face of his seemed to have been formed in my consciousness long before my birth, as much a part of me and human history as original sin. Sometimes I felt that I had been bom with that face marked on my soul, as sure a fiery stamp as the marks of baptism, confirmation and ordination that came later. In the Bible somewhere was a line, “I am thine from my mother’s womb.” That was me.
    He sat there quietly watching me, that mask of indifference settled firmly on his face. I knew very well that he wasn’t there because he loved God. He was there because he wanted to look at me. Every morning he was there now, even at the low mass I celebrated every weekday morning. It meant that he had to get up forty-five minutes earlier, but he did.
    That being physically together in the same church, thirty feet apart, not speaking to each other, with the lie on both our faces, was one of the few times during the week that we could see each other.
    » 8 «
    Even after the Mass, we couldn’t get together right away. Vidal went home, and I kneeled at the prie-dieu to make a thanksgiving. It wouldn’t look right for Vidal to hang around the sacristy waiting for me.
    I had always made my thanksgiving in front of the altar of Mary. In recent years, Catholics’ devotion to Mary had slackened a little, just as their devotion to a lot of older forms had slackened in the face of obsession with new issues and new ideas. But from the time I was a teen-ager, I had always had a very real (I thought) devotion to the Mother of God.
    Now, however, after these sacrilegious masses of mine, my “thanksgiving” was full of black and guilty thoughts. Staring at Mary, I had to rethink my devotion to her, and what it meant in terms of my sexual orientation.
    The fact was, several of Mary’s tears at the cross must have fallen because of me personally. By rejecting heterosexuality and the Church’s teachings on sexuality, I now rejected her divine motherhood. The Incarnation, and all the events that followed it, were God’s keystone in the arch of heterosexual sex.
    Not only that, I now realized that I loved Mary because she, of all women, threatened me least. A virgin who bears a divine child has to be the ultimate comfort for a man who shuns mortal women.
    It all made me think again about that dubious virginity of mine that had survived twenty-eight years, only to be lost to Vidal. I had always assumed that I had kept it because of my feeling that I would be a celibate priest. A couple of times, with Jean, I had made stabs at losing it. We had done some heavy petting, and she was ready to go all the way with me.
    Now it dawned on me how worthless and phony that virginity of mine had been, and how it was nothing more than the cover for the deep unacknowledged homosexual feelings that would someday come pushing up. Even my vocation was phony—it was a running away into an occupation where I couldn’t be pressured to perform as a heterosexual. I was a fraud.
    Vidal had talked a lot about closet occupations. “Either they help you hide better,” he said, “or they give you better opportunities.” Surely the greatest closet job of all was that of the celibate in any religion.
    a » s
    The logistics of a closet affair in a small town can be compared to planning a major military invasion of the Far East.
    Discipline and split-second timing and original thinking are very important. I began to understand why so many gay people want to lose themselves in the big cities. In a place like Cottonwood, the straight line from prying eyes to