Church. Even via Waugh’s mild, dumpling-esque visage, two thousand years of papist absolutism projected itself.
“Yep!” I said, getting irritated only five minutes after Waugh’s arrival — a new record.
“No sir, you can’t. You were baptized, I assume. Took first communion. Confirmed. You’re with us for life.”
Something occurred to me then. “Hey Gord,” I yelled into the next room. “Was I baptized?”
“Of course you were baptized, what in Christ is wrong with you?”
“I’m just wondering because of being adopted.”
“You came into the world surrounded by nuns, sonny boy.”
I frowned. No getting around it; no escape clause. Father Waugh just sat there turning the Chinet plate of squares, smiling liplessly.
And the lousy thing is, he was right. You don’t just decide not to be a Catholic anymore — it doesn’t work that way. Catholicism is something that soaks into your skin like vitamin D. You can’t just stand there as the sun pours down upon you, saying, None for me, thanks. It seeps into your world view; it dictates how you act and everything you think you know. I see this now — thanks to writing down what you told me twenty years ago.
So you were right too, Adam — you’re up there in the Paunchy Sages Club with Father Augustine Waugh. I see it. I admit it. I had then, and have now, a virgin/virgin complex when it comes to women. I had, and have it, because I am, and will always be, a Catholic boy at heart.
There is only one person I can really blame for this.
I can’t believe I tried to depict her to you as a glimmer of light. I’m embarrassed about that now. It’s so obvious. I am very nearly forty years old, have not been inside a Catholic church since 1986, and I’m still as conditioned as a Pavlovian dog. Holy Mary Mother of God. Why didn’t I just put her in virginal robes, describe her ascending into heaven, hands over heart, eyes in the clouds?
All my girlfriends too, every last one. I see it now. You don’t know about them, because I figured I was being a hero. Protecting them from you, and making myself sound like some kind of holy celibate along the lines of Father Waugh in the process, when needless to say — you knew me in school — I’m not. But also, needless to say, Gord wasn’t the only one who considered Kirsten — a girl so inflated by the holy spirit her feet barely ever touched the ground — marriage material. And it’s no accident, I realize now, that she was the only one I ever felt that way about with total certainty.
I can’t remember much about the girls we knew in university. I remember the night we both had sex with whatsherface, and I remember being angry, and I remember you brushing it off with Kyle’s “Paris in the twenties” line although I could tell you were a bit freaked out yourself. But I can’t remember which one of you, exactly, I was pissed at. I can’t remember what I might have done or said or how I might have acted with women to lead you to the conclusion that I had a virgin/virgin complex.
Truth be told, and I never would have admitted this that night, I considered myself at least as much of a player as Kyle. But that’s not how you saw me, clearly. Somehow, before I’d even spoken one word to you about Sylvie, you called it. You had me pegged.
Even now, speaking to me from twenty years ago, you have me pegged.
Which makes no sense when I think about your book. How is it you could have me so nailed down, and still get everything so wrong?
08/05/09, 2:31 p.m.
Okay so, fuck it. Here’s Kirsten.
Kirsten had her own curse word, tailor-made to be inoffensive to the Lord, which nonetheless she used only in moments of supreme agitation. It always made me howl, reminding me of my mother’s little-used cache of Franco-Ontarian curse words, which in English translation sounded ridiculous, not to mention utterly inoffensive: chalice of the tabernacle! Kirsten’s preference was to take four innocuous “curses” and smash them together as if to enhance their execratory power.
Darnfriggerbumheck!
She had dark hair, enormous blue eyes, and long bangs that stopped precisely at her eyelashes. She cut them herself about once a month, and I don’t know how she got them so straight and perfect every time. They were fantastic bangs, childish and sophisticated all at once. They were