True Believers(56)

“Right,” Gregor said.

Chickie George turned away and began walking up the stone path to the church’s front doors. Gregor watched him go, not sure which Chickie he was seeing now, the swish one or the real one. What an odd young man, Gregor thought.

Then he turned away himself and crossed the street to St. Anselm’s.





FIVE





1


For almost three years, Dan Burdock had known that there would come a day when he would have this particular request sitting on his desk. The only thing that surprised him, now that it had come, was that he was so calm about it. That was a good thing, because Aaron Wardrop was watching him, very intensely. If he showed the least sign of distress, this interview would change character in no time at all. Dan was no stranger to the shifting emotional landscapes of true believers. Ever since he had come to St. Stephen’s, he had imagined himself in the role of Sane Older Friend, the one who wants to hold the hero back from doing something foolish, the one nobody listens to until it is too late. The ones like Chickie George were bad enough—and Scott Boardman. Everybody said that Scott had been trying to commit suicide most of his life. Dan thought all that crowd were, the ones who went trolling in the bathhouses at four o’clock in the morning, the ones who kept score in five figures, the ones who thought that if you did it stoked to the gills on vodka and methamphetamine, it didn’t really count. Except, Dan thought, that wasn’t really true about Chickie. Or might not be.

“What?” Aaron said.

“I was thinking about Chickie George,” Dan said. “About how I always think of him as being like Scott, you know, because of the camp. But I don’t think he is.”

“This isn’t about Chickie George, Dan. Why don’t we try sticking to the subject.”

Dan looked down at this desk again. Aaron, of course, did not go trolling in the bathhouses at any hour of the day or night. He would consider it beneath his dignity, and he was far too fastidious to put up with the dirt and mess. This form had been fastidiously done. It was so perfect, it might have been produced by a professional printer.

“You must have run this through the scanner,” Dan said. “I’ve never seen one of these so flawlessly done.”

“I was just being careful. Under the circumstances.”

“Under the circumstances.” Dan pushed the paper away, off the felt blotter, onto the polished hardwood of the desk. “So what do you want me to do, Aaron? Say yes? Say no? Give you a fight with me or a fight with the bishop or a fight with the city of Philadelphia? What’s the point?”

“The point is that Marc and I have been together for twenty-three years, and now we would like to make it official.”

“Quite.”

“That really is the point, Dan. I’m not saying there aren’t other points, but that’s really the important one and has been for the past six or seven years. We would like to make it official. We think we should have the legal right to make it official—”

“But you don’t.”

“But we don’t,” Aaron agreed. “So we’re looking to do the next best thing. We’re looking to have our church, this church, where we have given of our time and our money and our devotion for a decade—We’re looking to have our church validate our union  . That’s it. It’s not hard, Dan.”

“When Scott died you were warning me not to do anything too—obvious—that might jeopardize my position here.”

“I know. At the time, I thought, Marc and I thought, that we would want to do this quietly. Just a small gathering. Nobody would have to know. We’ve changed our minds.”

“Why?”

Aaron shrugged. “I don’t know that it’s only one thing. Marc has always been more intense about this than I am. He’s always taken more risks.”

“Well, this would be a risk, all right. Forget the bishop, for the moment. Forget the media. Think of our friend Roy down the road. Do you really think you and Marc would be able to have this ceremony without a lot of unwanted company?”

“What makes you think it would be unwanted?”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“That means I’m arguing your side of this issue, Dan. At some point, we’ve got to be honest about it, about ourselves, with other people. If we’re not honest about it, we only feed into people like Roy. We don’t want anything camp. Marc isn’t going to dress up in a white gown like Dennis Rodman, and neither am I. We don’t intend to put on a freak show. We just want what any other two human beings who have been together as long and as faithfully as we have been together would have by right. We want to get married. And since we can’t actually do that, we want the closest thing we can get. Why is this so hard?”