Forbidden Fruit by Annie Murphy, Peter de Rosa

bedroom door opened and closed.
    My racing heart asked, What next? What did I want to happen? I had had enough surprises for one day.
    Minutes later, I saw the doorknob of my room turning slowly. An exciting moment. How was he coming to me, as a priest or a
     lover? Would he be dressed in full pontificals, so to speak, and tell me, “Sorry, I made a mistake.” Or was he coming to me
     naked in body and soul to confess his need?
    The door edged open and he entered in stages. First his head with the keyhole eyes. A long-distance call perhaps? No, enter
     his sturdy torso in a dressing gown over pajamas with—no small detail—the cord of his gown tied so tight it almost cut
     him in half. He had a glass of brandy. Was this his shield, his comforter, or a painkiller for the big good-bye? If the last,
     what anesthetic had he brought me?
    As he closed the door and came slipper-slapping toward me, he handwarmed the big glass globe. Watching the brown liquid going
     round and round, I felt drawn into a whirlpool. His body and mine entwined and eddied in the act of love. He and I were inside
     the glass, lovers’ eyes hypnotized, mingling inextricably one with another.
    He sipped the brandy. The first move had to be his.
    “I had to say Mass today, Annie.”
    “Don’t you always?”
    He nodded. “But after what happened last night…”
    Happened. He made it sound less like something we did than an act of God, say, a volcanic eruption.
    He went on. “I felt I had to go to confession.”
    Ah
, I thought,
so this
is
good-bye
. He couldn’t live with a bad conscience. But why hadn’t he said so by the fireside? And why get into pajamas and come into
     my room to say it? Was he wanting me to play the part of Eve so that he could enter my bed, enter me, and plead not guilty?
    Sitting on my bed, he explained that he had told his confessor that he had had physical relations with a woman.
    I hated that. A “woman.” Wasn’t Eve, mother of all trouble, called “Woman” in the Genesis story? And why the ambiguity of
     this phrase
physical relations
? This was plain, glorious, earthy sex. We weren’t just wrestlers, for God’s sake. It worried me that he used words to camouflage
     reality.
    “My confessor told me to break it off, Annie.”
    Ah, his confessor had seen through the smoke screen. This
was
good-bye. It had been fine for the few hours it lasted.
    “I told him, Annie, I didn’t agree.”
    I gasped.
    “ ‘I have an obligation to this woman,’ I said. ‘She is badly damaged in body and mind and can only be healed by a deep love.’
     “
    He was speaking of me in the third person like a medical client. Was he to be my therapist or my lover? Was last night’s wandering
     over my body with his hands a benediction, his priestly way of making me a good Catholic?
    Eamonn was so like my father. Was that why I was so attracted to him? Daddy, too, had a split personality and enjoyed equally
     the good and bad in himself. His denial of the bad, like Eamonn’s, was unconscious because it was necessary for his survival.
     He had been beaten by his German mother and his denial of the bad was his way of coping with the results.
    In Eamonn’s case, the abuse was spiritual. Mother Church had imposed unreal guilt and shame on him when he was a child, and
     this is the worst form of abuse there is.
    Daddy was a gifted doctor, a devoted husband and father, a fighter for the downtrodden. At the same time, he drank so much
     he sometimes had to take a three-day break from his practice; and I know he whored around.
    Eamonn was a marvelous, self-sacrificing pastor but he, too, drank too much and badly needed a woman.
    Another similarity: Daddy and Eamonn were both jazzmen. Jazz entered deep into my psyche because Daddy had it in his bedroom,
     his car, he even had it piped into his bathroom so he would never be without it. Both he and Eamonn had a superb sense of
     rhythm. Most of all, they played life, they
made up
life as they