The question was so ridiculous, even Aaron couldn’t ask it and go on looking him straight in the face—and Aaron could do anything. Dan had seen him negotiate with sharks. Still, Aaron walked away, to pretend to be looking at the stained-glass window. Dan looked down at the form again, the answers typed out instead of handwritten in pen, the questions printed slightly bolder and numbered in green. The odd thing was, although he was upset, he wasn’t upset for the reasons Aaron probably thought he was. The idea of performing a marriage for two gay men didn’t bother him. He was sure that, twenty years from now, that would happen in the Episcopal Church as a matter of course. It would happen because it had to happen. It was the only right thing that could happen—the only way this problem could be resolved in a way that was consistent with Christian love. There were bishops in the church right this moment who agreed with him, and more than a few laypeople. Spong had ordained a sexually active gay man in Newark. One of the new women bishops was rumored to be a lesbian. If she wasn’t, she had a lot of sympathy with gay “issues.” Dan made a face and rubbed his hands against his forehead, as if he were wiping off sweat. There was no sweat. If anything, he was far too cold. He hated the words that were used in cases like this. Issues. Community. Outreach. Maybe he would have felt better if he had been a priest in the Diocese of Newark. Maybe he wouldn’t have, because as much as he admired Spong’s stands on a lot of things, he did not like Spong’s relentless skepticism.
He looked up to find that Aaron had crossed the room from the window and was standing right next to the desk.
“Well?” Aaron asked. “Will you do it?”
“Of course I’ll do it. That’s why you brought it up in the first place. Because you knew I’d do it.”
“We guessed, yes.”
“Have you got a date picked out for when you want it done?”
“The end of the month, we thought. We aren’t interested in having any sort of big reception, if you know what I mean. It’s not the way either of us operate.”
Dan nodded. “What about banns? Do you want us to publish them?”
“That’s up to you.”
“What about announcements? Do you want to put one in the paper? The Inquirer would probably take it. I don’t know about the Star.”
“I thought you were interested in keeping this quiet.”
“Not exactly.” Dan got up and took the form with him. There was a filing cabinet on the other side of the room where he kept “official” papers like this, but of course the whole parish was now run on a computer. If he gave this form to Mrs. Reed, she would copy it laboriously into her files, and then it would disappear, the way all forms disappeared, so that if they should desperately need it again, they would have to go through her elaborate system of classification to find it. He hesitated over the filing cabinet, then walked past it and into the outer office. Mrs. Reed was already off to lunch, or somewhere. None of them quite knew what she did or where she went, only that since she had come there had never once been a problem with scheduling or the budget. Dan put the form down in the center of her desk, where she would be sure to see it, and then looked for a moment at the small framed photograph of her two daughters and their children. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine her any younger than she was now, with her hair streaked grey and held back in a knot on the nape of her neck, with her shirtwaist dresses and her string of pearls. Years ago, the marriage form had asked for the bride’s name and the groom’s. Now it asked only for the names of the “communicants.” Dan didn’t know if that was lucky, or what.
He went back into his office. Aaron was sitting in the big leather chair, his legs stretched out in front of him. He would have looked better if he had been smoking a cigarette. It was that kind of pose. But men like Aaron Wardrop didn’t smoke cigarettes anymore.
“There,” Dan said. “It’s done. We’ll see what Mrs. Reed has to say about it.”
“She won’t blink an eye.”
“Probably not.”
“Maybe you ought to take the rest of the day off and see a movie. It’s a weekday. Nobody will be expecting you around here. Except that you always are here.”
“I’m fine,” Dan said. He reached into his trouser pocket and found a tube of soft mints, half-eaten. He took it out and offered one to Aaron.
Aaron hesitated. Dan could see his ambivalence as if it were a physical thing. There was something wrong with the atmosphere in this room. A woman would have gnawed away at it. A gay man like Chickie would have made fun of it. Aaron didn’t know what to do with it. At some other time, Dan might have helped him out. Now he only waited, almost desperate for Aaron to be gone. That was in the air, too.