lightning flickered across the walls of his room, lighting up the closed dark door to the hall. If it weren’t for his insistence on keeping the door closed for privacy, there might have been a slight chance of generating a cross-breeze.
On the other side of the door, the hall led to the rooms of Ralph Lauzon and Gerry LeBlanc, two men who slept soundly. Jerome could picture them both: Gerry thrown face down on his bed in a heap, breathing deeply, a child of a man who would scramble into action immediately upon waking; Ralph on his back, spread-eagled over the wide mattress of his pastor’s double bed, his face undistorted, his businessman’s mind still at work down in the wells of sleep.
Still propped up on his elbows, Jerome looked down the length of his long body and kicked the thin cotton sheet loose from his right foot. His poor wilted penis jiggled slightly like an infant limb. Limb of God, he thought, sadly, have mercy on me.
He envied the others their sleep. Like their lives, it came so easily to them. They could exhaust themselves each day with their work; they spent themselves on meetings, telephone calls, appointments, lunches, prayers, mass, errands. For him, though, there was something wrong; there was something desperately wrong with his ability to sleep. For months now, he had been continually paralyzed by exhaustion, day and night, so that even sleep had become a bizarre workload for which he did not have enough energy. He only fell into short periods of unconsciousness after hours of unsettled tossing upon his old lumpy mattress. Once asleep, he travelled all night, always ending up in that mysterious black infinity. And then he woke, exhausted, lonely, and worried about what was happening to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, undisturbed, through an eight-hour night.
He lay back down and listened to the water trickling from the roof into the eaves that passed just below the window. His large hands rested one above the other in the black hair on his abdomen. The rain was stopping. Evidently the disturbance was only a small cloudburst.
He closed his eyes and saw Ralph’s face pass before him, smooth and unmarred, with its cleanly shaved, darkly shadowed jaw. Then Ralph’s car, glittering black with that fine red line of trim running along the doors and fenders. Ralph was like his car: clean and glossy, good-looking. Uncomfortable, he moved again, seeking a better position. In his memory, he could hear Ralph’s deep masculine voice crooning snippets of tunes from old movies. It was one of several things about Ralph that he admired. He liked the way the man swung his long legs in and out of his car, the way he sported up any staircase two steps at a time, the way he rattled the ice cubes in his highball glass when they ate at the Bishop’s and boomed out “Where the Sam-Hill’ve you been?” to someone he hadn’t seen in a while. Jerome wished he could do those things and tired himself out with the longing to do so. But eventually his envy always reduced him to shame. What kind of a wasted prayer was it to beg, “Dear Father in heaven, make me like another man, make me different than I am?” Where was the vocation in that? Where was the love of God, the gratefulness for the life that had been given to him? In the dark, oppressive heat, Jerome shifted yet again and answered his own question.
His large spatulate fingers began to rove searchingly over his skin. They stopped to examine a small pimple beside his navel, but that was only to pretend that he wasn’t going to do it again, that it wasn’t already underway. It was a habit left over from childhood, when he’d believed that God could look down and see absolutely everything that anyone was doing at any given time. In a moment his fingers resumed their small circling motions and moved on. Softer than bird wings settling into place, St. Augustine’s prayer passed over Jerome’s lips: “Dear God, enter into my heart and whisper that you are here to save me.”
He’d tried masturbating earlier. His hand had worked for nearly half an hour. He even gave up worrying about whether or not Ralph and Gerry could hear the creaking of his old bed or about whether he would give himself a blister. He did everything he could to make himself come, until, without warning, his mind suddenly emptied and his hands fell away. While his penis withered, he turned over on his side, facing the wall to wait for sleep. But, as abandoned as he felt, talking to God was a hard habit to break. And so, for the one-millionth time, he bargained with God for the return of regular, restful sleep in exchange for his chastity.
But now it occurred to him that the bit of cooling breeze that had touched his leg might be enough to help him out. His promise to God was already broken for that night; it didn’t matter that he had been unsuccessful—he had tried, and that was enough to break the promise. You didn’t give God half-promises.
If Jerome could have had a say in the matter, he would have preferred that the capacity of a penis for which a priest had no use would die. The ridiculous organ lay in wait all day in his underwear like a jack-in-the-box, ready to spring at the least provocation. At night, after it seduced him into touching it and rubbing himself to climax, it tormented him by stirring to life again within minutes, wanting more. Or, worse, it often humiliated him by wilting in his hands before ejaculating, leaving him lying naked in his sagging bed feeling like a failure. He had come to think of his penis as a wicked demon trickster attached to his body for the sole purpose of tormenting him, and he fervently wished to be rid of it.
And yet God, in His infinite wisdom, had made the organ the way it was. And He had made a priest what he was. A human. So Jerome reasoned that there must be a purpose in the brutal antagonism between his body and his soul. In fact, he wondered if abstaining from masturbating when he wanted to, when he thought he should try to, was a kind of underhanded insult to God. If St. Augustine was correct in believing that nothing about man could be corrupt because he is made in God’s image and nothing about God can be corrupt, then this urge to touch himself must have some godliness about it. God made the urge as well as the organ. Perhaps the evil lay merely in the senseless enjoyment of stimulation, in the blatant favouritism towards one part of the body. Jerome didn’t enjoy any other aspect of his physical self so much. In fact, he loathed his craterous complexion, his boils, his large clumsy limbs and uncoordinated gestures. But alone in a dark sweltering room, he overly loved a rubbery wand of temperamental fibrous tissue that resembled the neck of a skinned turkey. Perhaps God wanted him to succumb to this behaviour, not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of learning: to experience his baseness, his separation from God. If this was God’s intent, how graceless to refuse the lesson.
Besides, Jerome was certain that in this soul-sapping heat, if he could just come once he would be able to sleep. All his sleeplessness would flow out of him. With sleep, he would be able to discipline himself. With discipline he would begin again to travel in the footsteps of Christ. He would work all summer to put himself back on track and be ready to serve with renewed vigour by the time school resumed in September.
While he continued to rationalize, his hand passed down through his pubic hair to his penis. His fingers began running little tests. They fluttered, stroked, moved in small, light circles. The earlier discomfort was gone. It would be worth trying again, just for the sleep that would follow.
He kept his eyes firmly closed to concentrate. Travelling slowly across the smooth old sheet that was worn to the softness of newborn skin, the open palm of his free hand found the edge of the mattress, no longer a firm sharp ninety-degree angle, but now compressed and rounded by age to the width of a woman’s throat. His hand slid back and forth, back and forth along this column. His breathing, as well as his other hand, picked up the rhythm. After passing over imagined collarbones his hand searched for and found the partially firm mounds of budding, mattress-lump breasts, which he squeezed, first one then the other, one then the other. With each squeeze, he felt his testicles firming. This could have happened had he chosen another life; if people led parallel lives, this could be part of his life with a woman; this could be his marriage. There could be a soft warm breast filling his palm. Nipples could be rising on his tongue. There was no sin in merely enacting what could have been. This was normal; this was good. He hadn’t noticed that he had pulled both his lips into his mouth and was sucking on them.
He was erect now, filling his working
