The Fancy Dancer

down and the Shoups had gone, I sat shaking like a leaf, not hearing a word of the first talk.
    What on earth had made Mrs. Shoup decide that abortion was so important? As far as I knew, the only thing Mrs. Shoup felt strongly about was dirty books and Mr. Shoup didn’t feel strongly about anything. Vidal would probably tell me I was paranoid—but could they have followed us down there to spy on us? It didn’t make sense.
    At lunch with the Shoups, I was calm and blah, and knew for the first time that my acting abilities were approaching their limits.
    When the conference adjourned around four-thirty,
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    I grabbed a taxi to York Street, where the Botanic Garden was. Doric was waiting in front of the conservatory.
    As we walked through the hot humid place inside, the closeness of all the rare palms and ferns and orchids started to choke me. I told Doric about the Shoups.
    “What’ll I do?”
    Doric was silent for a minute. “That’s one of the beauties of being out,” he said. “You look back on those fears of being exposed like it was a bad dream.” “Speaking of bad dreams—” I said.
    Doric listened in silence as I told him about the dream. We walked slowly, brushing past the plants, hardly looking at them. Great staghorn ferns dripped down from the ceiling, where hght poured through the glass. We finally stopped by a rock cliff overplanted with all kinds of creeping ferns and mosses. A tiny waterfall trickled down it, into a pool edged with baby’s tears. I kept my voice down, because there were other people wandering through the conservatory.
    “So now you know,” said Doric softly.
    “I want to go to confession,” I said. “I don’t really know what I want to confess, but I feel so sick ... so vile.”
    “Now you know. The Bible,” he said softly, looking at the tiny waterfall as it dripped down through the maidenhair ferns, “is only an excuse.”
    I searched his face. “For what?”
    “So they can have something easy and simple to slap us with,” he said. “So they don’t have to talk about the hidden collective fear that you’ve finally confronted in that dream.”
    “My mind must be incredibly dirty,” I said. “No wonder Mrs. Shoup is after me.”
    “Is that what you want to confess? That you had the dream? You’re really convinced that you committed a grave sin?”
    “I don’t know. I just feel confused and filthy.”
    ‘The dream is nothing more than the fact that you’ve finally lanced the boil and the poison is coming out.”
    “You’re going to rationalize it?” I said.
    “But isn’t it the core fear at the heart of Christian spirituality? Isn’t that what happened when the simple gospel of love that Jesus preached came up against the flesh-hate of man that became part of Christianity? The fear that we might slip and love Jesus as a man?”
    The horror of the dream was coming over me again. I wanted to float away screaming through that steaming glass grotto.
    “Isn’t that why they’ve made theological criminals of us?” Doric persisted. “Don’t you see it now?”
    “But that’s a monstrous idea,” I choked.
    “No, it’s not,” he said. “Don’t get so excited. Let me finish. Doesn’t the Church use the language of heterosexual love to describe the relationship between the Church and Christ, and the soul and Christ?”
    “You mean the Mystical Bridegroom?”
    “Is there—could there be—any sexual intention on the part of the soul?”
    My mind was floundering around in terror. As usual, Doric’s thinking was way ahead of me, and I was panting and running to try to catch up.
    “Maybe,” I said. “God knows we’re carnal creatures. We can’t help that. But by giving us grace, He changes that carnal thing into something pure. Isn’t that what the love of the mystic for God is? It’s love where even the passion has been raised to a higher plane.”
    “Exactly,” said Doric.
    He turned and looked at me with a curious unseeing intensity, as if his mind was lit by such a strong light that it blanked out his eyes from behind.
    ‘Then,” he said, “if the straight people dare to talk about Christ die Divine Bridegroom, maybe we gay people can dare to talk about Christ the Divine Lover.”
    This idea sounded so shocking that I almost felt faint.
    “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “The air’s too close.” We went out into the bright sunshine, and walked through the famous rose garden.
    All around us, wide beds of tea roses