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TWENTY-SIX
In the next two days Ididorder quite a bit of room service and Ididat first get a rather perverse pleasure out of the outrageous prices—$34 for a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream! On the second day I found Ralph eating M&M’s from the mini-bar. I gave him a stern lecture. He could have suffocated in my suitcase! He’d get us kicked out! Did he know how much those M&M’s cost? In truth, he was welcome company during the long nights when the wind shrieked outside the hotel like a banshee.
After a few days of walking along the Battery Park Esplanade through gale-force icy winds and eating expensive ice cream I was tired of feeling sorry for myself. On the twenty-fourth I called Annie and asked if I could spend Christmas Eve with her and Maxine.
“If you don’t mind delivering bread,” she told me.
I’d forgotten that she and Maxine donated bread to homeless shelters on Christmas.
“Sure,” I told her. “I can’t imagine a better way of spending the holiday.”
An hour later Annie picked me up at the hotel. The bakery van was warm and smelled like fresh bread. Annie gave me a bone-crunching hug that left me covered with flour and thawed the ice in my heart for the first time in two days. I promptly burst into tears.
“Spill it!” Annie ordered, pulling into traffic.
I told Annie about the breakup, about Rita and the WallStreet job and being left alone in a hotel room all by myself. I’d worked myself up into a snit of self-pity by the end of it.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said when I was done.
“About Paul?” I asked, shamming innocence. “I think I told you everything he said…”
“No, not about Paul. About what led up to Paul.”
“But I told you about the plane and the storm and Rita…”
“I don’t mean all that,” she said impatiently, shaking her head. Her dark curly hair was tied up in a high ponytail that swished angrily. I realized that some of the specks I’d thought were flour were gray hairs. “Paul would never have fallen in love with someone else if you hadn’t checked out first.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault,” I said angrily, remembering now how judgmental Annie could be sometimes. “I didn’t know you were such a big fan of Paul’s.”
“I’ve never said anything against Paul. As I’ve told you many times, I just didn’t think he was the right guy for you. I still don’t. If you had broken up with him I’d be saying ‘about time,’ but for him to break up with you means you haven’t been trying. And if you’ve been as out of it with him as you have been with me since September, I can understand why he went and fell in love with the first girl who held his hand on a bumpy flight.”
“Hey, that’s not fair!” I said, swiveling around in my seat to face Annie. “When you first got together with Maxine I barely saw you for six months.”
Annie raised one dark eyebrow but kept her eyes on the road as she turned onto Canal Street. “True,” she said. “So is that why I’ve barely heard from you these last three months? You’ve been having great sex with someone new?”
I began to splutter a denial, but one cool look from Annie silenced me. With Paul I’d been able to cling to the technicality that sex with an incubus—and one kiss with Liam Doyle—didn’treally count as cheating, but I wasn’t going to pull the wool over Annie’s keen hazel eyes.
“Sort of,” I answered. “It depends on how you define sex.”
“Well, hello, Bill Clinton!” Annie grinned. “And you’ve been keeping this from me because I’m so conservative and judgmental?”
“No, I’ve been keeping this from you because you’ll think I’m crazy.”
We’d pulled up in front of the Bowery Mission. Annie turned to me and shook her head. “Sweetie, who did I go to when I was thirteen and realized I liked girls better than boys? Who toldmeI wasn’t crazy, I was just gay?”
I returned her smile. “I’m afraid this is a bit more complicated, but if you’re sure you want to hear it…”
Annie crossed her eyes at me. “Complicated, crazy, unbelievable sex? Please, honey, start talking.”
And so I did. In between delivering fresh bread to more than a dozen shelters and soup kitchens, from the Bowery to Chelsea to Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side, I told Annie everything that had happened at Fairwick from the first visitation of the incubus to his banishment, and about all the creatures I’d met—the witches, fairies, brownies, gnomes, vampires, and magical doormice—and the tantalizing glimpse I’d had of the world of Faerie through the triptych door on the Solstice. She listened in silence, her lips pursed, her eyes focused on the city traffic, opening her mouth only to hurl invectives at an SUV with New Jersey plates that cut her off. I finished just as we reached our last stop, the men’s shelter at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
She switched the engine off and turned to me. I was expecting her to tell me that I needed to get professional help. Knowing Annie, she’d offer to go with me and support me in anyway she could. But all she said was “Come with me. There’s something I need to show you.”
She asked two of the helpers at the soup kitchen if they wouldn’t mind unloading the bread (they didn’t), and took me up a flight of back stairs to the cathedral. While at grad school at Columbia, I’d gotten into the habit of visiting the massive, unfinished Episcopalian cathedral. I didn’t consider myself religious, but I liked the peace of the hushed, vaulted space and the beauty of the stained-glass windows. I liked, too, the cathedral’s philosophy of interaction with the modern world. I had learned on a tour that each of the side aisle windows was devoted to an aspect of human endeavor, such as the arts and communication. These windows had secular and often surprisingly modern details—like a panel with Jack Benny playing his violin in front of a microphone in the Communications window. I also liked St. John’s mission. First constructed in 1893, the same year as Ellis Island, the cathedral was dedicated to aiding immigrants. There was a sense of inclusion and tolerance—symbolized perhaps most notably by the huge gold menorahs and Shinto vases flanking the altar, but also by the Chapels of the Seven Tongues which circled the apse, each one dedicated to an immigrant group. It was to the Italian chapel—St. Ambrose’s—that Annie now took me.
“Did you know I used to come here to pray when we were in high school?” she asked as we entered the ornate, Renaissance-style chapel.
“No,” I said, sitting down beside her on a folding chair. “I thought you gave up the Church in the eighth grade.”
