The Fancy Dancer

was awful —even worse than the hamburger-stretched-with-bread-crumbs that Father Vance and I ate.
    “And then,” said Doric, “the fatal moment comes. We meet the person who makes all our prayers and our decisions seem like a sick joke.”
    “Where did you meet Andy?”
    “He came to a dance clinic at Denver U. last summer. I was doing some summer counseling, and taking a couple of courses here at Regis. The sight of him drove me insane. My indecision just about drove him insane.”
    I summoned up enough courage to take a dig at Doric. “He doesn’t really look your type. How old is he, anyway?”
    Doric’s brown eyes flashed up at me with a hard kind of amusement. “If you call me a chicken hawk, I’ll deny you absolution.” He took another mouthful of meatloaf. “Andy’s twenty.”
    “He looks like an angel.”
    “He isn’t, really. Just naive and shy, with a kind of vision that goes beyond conscience.” Doric’s eyes were still digging back at me. “Vidal is exactly what I would have predicted for you.”
    “Oh?” I said.
    “Let’s face it—you’ve led a pretty sheltered life. Suddenly you show up with this biker, this half-blood leather man who looks like something straight out of Colt magazine. I have a theory, Tom. The first lover is always the closest we come to fantasy.”
    “I guess you’re right. My feelings were so foreign to me that I picked a foreign kind of guy. I mean he is kind of exotic ...”
    My eyes were making one of those paranoid sweeps around the dining room to make sure that nobody was listening. About two hundred priests, religious and laymen were decorously eating their meatloaf and discussing abortion or whatever. I wondered if anyone else was talking about the same subject as we were.
    “You don’t like Vidal,” I said.    >
    “I know where his head is at, and he knows I know,” said Doric. “He knows a lot, and there’s a lot to him, and he’s taken you a long way. But he’s a honky-tonk queen.”
    I was ready to get mad at Doric for this remark, but remembered just in time that butch gay men seemed to like insulting each other by using the feminine.
    “Gays are always arguing about which is better, monogamous or polygamous,” said Doric. ‘Vidal is the polygamous type. Be ready for it, Tom. Because you’re the monogamous type.”
    “Is this the way you counsel?” I said. “It’s pretty brutal.”
    “I’m not counseling now,” said Doric. “I’m talking 180
    to a good friend. I was watching him last night. Eyes everywhere, on me, on Andy, on you too, of course.” “Well, we’re not married, for Chrissake,” I said.
    “Take your head out of the sand, Tom. Be ready when he moves on.”
    “He’s not like that. He loves me.”
    “Has he told you so?”
    I was silent.
    “It’s so easy to get hurt the first time,” said Doric.
    The cafeteria was at its peak noise level, trays clattering, people scuffling, the cash register ringing, the cooks yelling in the kitchen.
    “Did you?” I asked.
    “Yes, I did,” said Doric.
    “Andy?” I said.
    ‘Yes.”
    “He seems so gentle.”
    “Gentle people are the most dangerous kind. They don’t ever mean any harm.”
    We finished eating, shoved our trays onto the conveyor belt, and left the dining room.
    Outside, we walked across the campus, scuffing along the sidewalks. The trees were already showing the first yellowed leaves. Fall comes early in the high country. The Cottonwood ranchers always said there were two seasons: winter and July. And July was over.
    “Think a lot more about this decision to leave the Church,” said Doric.
    “What else can I do? What good am I?”
    “Don’t make a soap opera out of it. You’re a priest, that’s what good you are. Being gay shouldn’t prevent you from functioning. And like I said earlier, you’ll take the priesthood with you wherever you go.”
    “The funny thing is,” I said hollowly, “the whole thing has made a better priest out of me. I was getting too action-oriented there, too proud of my balanced budget. This whole thing set me back on my heels, made me take a second look at myself and other people. But... how can I function in a state of mortal sin?”
    “Did it ever occur to you that it’s not a mortal sin?” My mind floundered at this.
    “Vidal and I have talked about that. He even tried
    to show me how the Church is misinterpreting Scripture.”
    “It’s all tied up with the other sex issues. Women not being allowed