“Okay, let me ask you this,” Tyler says when I don’t answer. “When’s the last time you fucked someone you cared about? When’s the last time you fucked someone and hoped to God you never had to stop holding them?”
I swallow. “A while,” I lie.
Never is more like the real answer.
“Okay, last question,” Tyler says, and his voice is kind. “How much of that do you think is about Lizzy?”
I nearly jolt off the bookshelves at the mention of her name, shock and grief sizzling through me. “It’s fucked up to bring her into my sex life, man.”
“Think about it. How can sex be anything but ugly, anything but perverted and twisted, when it took our sweet, happy sister and killed her? How could we not have the idea that she was pure, innocent, and the thing that destroyed her was a man’s predatory desires?”
“I know it’s different,” I whisper, closing my eyes. “I know it is, I know it is.”
“The place where you know that is not the same place where your fears come from. And until you untangle your fears—that you are like the man who hurt our sister, that you have the capacity to harm someone innocent—you’re not going to be able to untangle your beliefs about sex.”
“I—” I take a breath, my eyes still closed. This is too much to think about, God and Lizzy and all the ways that those two people have wormed their way into my adult identity without my permission. “Did you have to untangle anything?”
“Yes,” Tyler says after a minute. “Yes, I did. I thought by being a priest I could atone somehow, that I could erase all the scars Lizzy had left. And the way I wanted sex—I felt fucked up about that too. I wanted it rough and raw, and what if I hurt someone when I was like that? What if I was like that with someone who’d already been hurt?”
“So how did you get around it?”
“There’s no getting around anything,” Tyler says, and I hear the rueful tiredness in his voice. “There’s only getting through things. I had to admit to myself that I didn’t fully understand my reasons, I had to shine a light into very dark corners and just look. Just see. See myself, and all the ways fear and guilt had trapped me.
“And I came to understand something while I was going through it. To be fully human is to be fully sexual, and while that doesn’t mean having sex or even sexual desire, it does mean being fully in your body. It means recognizing that there’s nothing any less holy about your body than there is about your soul, that as long as your body is treated with consent and respect and affection—and that you treat the bodies of others in the same way—there’s nothing inherently sinful about your flesh. About its desires or lack of desires. About what it does or does not do. You do not have the ability to tarnish her or yourself; that right isn’t given to any mortal person. She’ll be no more or less holy for sex; the same goes for the lack of it.”
“Try telling her Church that last part,” I mutter.
“Abstinence is asked of everyone at some point in their lives. Maybe a partner is not emotionally ready for sex, or maybe they temporarily aren’t able, like with Mom and Dad right now. And for some people, celibacy is not a struggle, just like fasting isn’t the same struggle for everyone…or giving up money or giving up spare time or giving up sleeping in late or—or, or, or…do you see what I’m saying? A life consecrated to God is a life where you give up personal desires to serve God instead, and there’s nothing more or less special about celibacy than there is about poverty or seclusion or sleep.
“And,” my brother adds, “it’s not always easy to discern God’s desires for us. Because He or She wants us to be fully human and love each other as fully human, and that takes as many different forms as can be imagined. You can consecrate a life to God and have sex seven times a day. You can consecrate a life to God and go live in a cave for the rest of your life. No way is any holier than another, because our bodies are holy no matter what, and our lives are holy no matter what. Monasticism and lay life are just different ways of loving the same God and showing His love to the world.”
“This is not an answer, Tyler.”
“I know.”
“For real.”
“It’s because there’s not an answer,” he replies. “Not one I can give you at least. I do have some advice, though.”
“How can you possibly have more to say after all that?”
“Ha. Ha. But here it is: don’t make Zenny part of your story with Lizzy, okay? It’s not fair to her and it’s actually not fair to you, either.”
I want to argue with him, I want to tell him that of course I’m not doing that, that of course I’m not dragging my Lizzy baggage into this—but I can’t speak the words.
Because they’re not true.
This is a world apart from what happened with Lizzy, and yet there’s a young woman—a little sister figure, even—and the Catholic Church and sex involved, and I can’t pretend that my reflexive fears of hurting her or discovering something monstrous about myself aren’t tied up in what happened with Lizzy. I never did therapy after Lizzy’s death; I was young and stubborn and certain I didn’t need it. Instead, I buried the pain and anger with drinking and sex and chasing after money.
And surprise, surprise, now it’s coming back to bite me.
“Okay,” I finally agree. “Okay. I won’t.”
“Good. She deserves to be treated like herself. Not as a proxy for a girl who died fourteen years ago.”
“Ugh. Stop being such a know-it-all.”
“I told you not to argue with a theologian.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
We say goodbye and hang up, and then I glance at the clock and see it’s time to go to Family Dinner. I text Aiden to make sure he’s coming and then I head out the door.
Chapter 10
voice message 7:23 p.m
Sean—
Hi. It’s Zenny. I don’t know if you have my number yet, and so I didn’t know if you’d know who this was, and I…um, I’m rambling now, sorry. I was actually kind of relieved when you didn’t pick up the phone because it’s easier to talk into the void, as it were, than to talk directly to you, especially when your voice does that thing. You know the thing? Where it goes low and rough and the tiniest bit hoarse, almost like you’re already in bed. Do you do that on purpose?
Uh…this is not why I called. To talk about the voice thing.
I called to talk about me.
When I got home this afternoon, I started flipping through my prayer journal. It’s something my novice mistress has me keep, and for the last year, I’ve kept it faithfully. But even though I’ve been detailed and diligent with it, I realize there’s something missing.
Openness.
You know my family, you know my parents. Dad is Dr. Jeremiah Iverson, physician-in-chief at the city’s top teaching hospital, and Mom is the Honorable Letitia Iverson, and they wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up...as long as it was a doctor or a lawyer.
So when I chose nursing and midwifery—and then when I decided I wanted to be a nurse-midwife for God—they were so upset. The private schools, the Jack and Jill meetings—it was all supposed to a make a certain kind of young black woman—and the young black woman I wanted to be was something different.