Glass Houses(105)

First, as soon as he woke up, he went to mass. He went to mass every day, and every day he received Communion  , too, because it was a check on his behavior. You couldn’t receive Communion   if you’d been out tomcatting the night before. You couldn’t even if you’d been to bed with a man you loved, or looked through magazines for Calvin Klein advertisements featuring young men in not much. Whenever he thought about Communion  , he thought about the one thing that had made him look into what Courage had to offer. It wasn’t, as Chickie thought, a form of self-hate. Alexander did not hate his homosexuality. It just was, the way his height just was, or the color of his eyes. What had brought him to Courage was a protest action staged by a group called ACT UP, where they had invaded Saint Patrick’s Cathedral during a mass given by the cardinal, made a lot of noise, then grabbed consecrated Hosts and trampled them underfoot. Chickie said that was wrong, that the Hosts had not been consecrated yet, but Alexander didn’t see why that should matter. If the Hosts were consecrated, then what had been committed was sacrilege. If they hadn’t been, then what had been committed was only intended sacrilege. In either case, the problem was a lack of respect and honor not only for the Christian religion but for God. Chickie thought he was faking it, but he was not. He believed in God. He not only believed in God, he was fairly sure he had experienced Him.

He called Chickie as soon as he got out of mass. Then he went down to the office to wait. He wondered where Dennis was and what he was doing and whether he really thought he could get away with all this. He opened blinds and started up computers and went around putting the office in order as if it were just any other day. He was sure that if he had been in Dennis’s position, he would have been smarter about it. He certainly wouldn’t have given the help the keys and access to all the computers.

He got up and cleaned off the end tables. The cleaning women were supposed to do it; but Dennis didn’t like paying decent money for his help, so they were mostly useless. He took the magazines off them and wiped them down with a paper towel he’d made slightly damp in the bathroom. He put the magazines back in stacks. The magazines were truly awful, the kind of thing you thought nobody at all ever bothered to read: Masterwork Knitting, Senior Road Travel, Bees.

He was just doing a global search on the files for Marlee Craine when Chickie breezed in, not as flagrant as the old Chickie, but still, somehow, indefinably Chickie. Alexander always thought Chickie could play Rupert Evert in the biopic.

“So,” Chickie said, “I think you’re nuts, you know that. And I’m blowing off work, which I shouldn’t do.”

“Not if you expect to make partner.”

“I will make partner, Alexander. I guarantee it. I always do what I set out to do. Oh, did I mention it? Margaret is taking, uh, final vows, I think it is, in May. I was going to go up. I’d like some company. Somebody who, you know, won’t embarrass me during the sermon.”

“Homily,” Alexander said.

“What?”

“Homily. It’s called a homily in Catholic churches. It’s only a sermon in Protestant ones. Where do you think Dennis has gone?”

“If he had any sense, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” Chickie said. “I don’t understand these guys. You see it on all those true-crime shows. They commit a murder and the next thing you know they’re behaving like they have IQs in negative numbers. If he acts like most of them, he’ll just start moving and keep moving. He’ll go to Mexico, maybe, or Canada. Mexico would be better. It would be harder to find him there.”

“I think he’s going to find himself a zone,” Alexander said. “I think he’s going to head for New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, someplace big, and find himself a zone. Somewhere where he can get the only thing he wants.”

“Well, that’s probably right,” Chickie said. “Since that’s probably the single stupidest thing he could do.”

“I know. Do you get attracted to six-year-olds, Chickie?”

“No, of course I don’t. What do you take me for?”

“Exactly.”

“Fifteen-year-olds, though,” Chickie said. “I don’t do anything about it. I’ve been a maniac on the subject of age of consent. But I do get attracted to them.”

“There’s a big difference between six-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds,” Alexander said. “It’s that—there’s something about the kind of thing Dennis does, Dennis and all those men, there’s something about that that’s wrong in a way that just being gay is not.”