The Unspeakable by Charles L. Calia Page B

something else. Something we both knew but were afraid to acknowledge, that many priests were afraid to acknowledge.
    He was talking about sex.
    I thought about it too, and just like Marbury I often used another word to describe it, though in the end it was still sex. Creeping middle age hasn’t slowed these thoughts either—not that I’m sure I want them slowed. Like slowing up a part of life. Even celibate I could still feel. I had to feel, for it was only by feeling that I could fight off the very temptations that gnawed at me, that sent every other temptation running for cover. The temptation for peace. A home, a wife, a family.
    Not that I was perfect. It was the sixties and I grew up like every other boy, stealing pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Anita Ekberg from my mother’s movie magazines, then taping them inside my locker at school. When I hit sixteen, I decided on the real thing. A girlfriend. And I found the perfect one. Her name was Molly. She was a sheepish-looking girl with great, thick bifocals. As far as I knew, Molly had few other friends, which only made her the more accessible to me. I tried with the other girls in school, the cheerleaders and musical types, but I never seemed to get anywhere with them, which only pushed me back to Molly. She gave of herself freely, ending my own adolescent torment one night in the back of my parents’ station wagon, a Country Squire. It was roomy and spacious, this car, especially constructed in Detroit—I was convinced of it—for exactly such encounters.
    It’s strange, but even now I still think about her. The eyes that squinted when she took off her glasses like some cartoon caricature. The fumbling, nervous way that she undressed, cautious and fearful, for she had much to fear. A predator takes his carrion any way thathe could get it, and I was no exception. I preyed on Molly for the worst of all possible reasons, because she was willing.
    Marbury looked at me and grinned. “I’m human. I know I do—miss it.”
    â€œDo you ever think about marriage?”
    â€œSometimes. But then I remember my vows. I’m pledged to God.”
    â€œPledged or just flirting?”
    â€œNo, it’s the old ball and chain with me now.”
    Marbury’s humor I took in stride. In seminary I remember him as a man who walked around like he had the world by the tail. That he was once involved with women, probably a great number of women, nobody would deny. But he wasn’t the Lothario that we all expected. Marbury wasn’t the first one to talk to any woman who happened by, whether visiting family or friends, and he didn’t seem twinged with that same kind of desperation that affected many of us. Whether wrestling with our sexual identity as some did, or just wrestling with the notion that sex was a part of the world, Marbury never seemed touched by the struggle. He was comfortable with his celibacy, almost relieved by it, as though he was pleased to give it up.
    I only saw him waver one time in those years. It was our last autumn together. Marbury was nowhere to be found, spending most of his time, I discovered later, volunteering at a hospice for the terminally ill in Des Moines. I didn’t consider this out of the ordinary for him. He was fascinated by death and dying, and he always wanted to work with people suffering what people had to suffer in life. But who he really wanted to work with, I think, at least I think this in retrospect, was the director of the hospice.
    She was a striking woman with dark eyes and hair, who was just a few years out of college herself. She radiated a youthful charm and ebullience that Marbury gravitated to, as she in turn gravitatedto him. I saw them together only once, by accident, when I was visiting a friend’s mother who was dying of cancer. I saw Marbury there and he introduced us. She mentioned that she had heard all about me, that Marbury kept her up on the gossip and