The Prodigal
Fifty-two
“IT WAS ME, WASN’T IT, TONY?”
Kate and I were lying in the big bed on Sunday afternoon. I had been given ownership of the big bed for the long weekend—Friday with Melody, Saturday with Lissa, now Sunday with Kate and tomorrow with Wendy. We weren’t alone in the house. Melody was off on a play date with Bree, but Lissa and Wendy were enjoying each other downstairs in the room we still called Wendy’s, even though it was mostly a closet. The four of us had had lunch together and Wendy seemed to be thoroughly enjoying Lissa’s attention—and vice versa.
Kate and I made love, but we were spending lots of time just talking. We’d been on wedding plans a few minutes ago. The abrupt change of topic threw me.
“What was you?”
“In your newest panel. It’s beautiful. It might be my favorite, even though from the floor of the chapel most people won’t be able to see the detail. I went up on the lift to look at it yesterday. I could see your eyes. I could pick out Wendy and Melody and Lissa and everyone else. I can put a name to every person in that picture—and wow! I had no idea Morgan was such a fox. But it’s the one who’s missing—that his hand is reaching out to touch. It was me.”
“Well. Yeah. It’s about nothing being able to replace what is lost.”
“Do you still feel I’m lost? You left me out of the picture and your eyes are so sad.” I told Kate about my conversation with Ellis and how I wanted to make a point about what it takes to grow past the scars.
“I don’t feel the anger or bitterness or the gaping hole anymore. But I don’t feel the same innocence either. I remember them as well as I remember the scent of your arousal and the taste of your lips. We are growing stronger than ever before. But I still think of the wonder and disbelief I had that first night when you pulled my hand to your breast.”
“You have an amazing memory for emotion and image. I love it.” Kate sat up and then turned around to straddle my legs facing me. She held my face in her hands so I couldn’t turn away from her amazing eyes—not that I would have. “I understand. I felt hurt, uncertain, angry. I didn’t know the depth of what I was doing. I didn’t know how much damage I was doing; I was so wrapped up in my own petty problems. You’ve taken me back, and you’ve given me this ring. I’ve said yes to your marriage proposal. But what I haven’t said is this. Tony, I love you with all my heart and I will never, ever leave you again. I will do everything I can to make sure that hurt and anger and loss are never seen in your eyes again. I can’t submit to you like Wendy does. God knows, we don’t want to try that again. But I will be your partner, your lover, your biggest fan, and most demanding critic. I will challenge you and demand your challenge. But Tony, I will never leave you. I hid behind my age, saying I was too young to make a commitment. Well, I’m twenty now and realize the commitment I’m making is exactly the same as the one I wanted to make when I was seventeen. That hasn’t changed and never will. I love you. And I am yours.”
Kate was dead serious. I’d never seen more intensity in her eyes. They bore into me. She still held my face between her hands and as she looked into me, she must have seen my acceptance and joy at what she was saying. Her face broke out into the smile that always took my breath away and made my heart sing. When our lips met, our bodies joined and I made love to my wife to be.
“They’re going to what?” Kate exclaimed. I’d just told her about my conversation with the archbishop. Most of it. The important part was that he wouldn’t allow the painting that we both loved so much in the chapel. “We need to talk to our advisors. Call Doc. I’ll call Clarice. Come on. Get dressed.”
“There isn’t anything to talk about,” I complained. “I’m collateral damage in a holy war. Al-Qaida could send a bomber and blow it up. No one cares what is right. They only care about who is right.”
“Tony, you taught me that I should depend on the people who care for me. Now you need to do the same thing. Make the damned call.”
I called. Clarice and Doc both agreed to meet us at the chapel. We talked. Clarice made a couple of phone calls. Bob Bowers showed up and added his perspective. He’d warned me I was a piece in a minor religious war between the Jesuits and the archdiocese. I thought the only skirmish I was involved in was getting the commission. I was beginning to see a bigger picture, but still wasn’t sure what to think about it. Monsignor Grundy, the Vicar General, had taken personal offense at the Jesuits’ independent stance.
“It’s done. They will be here Tuesday,” Clarice said.
“Who will?” I asked.
“Erika and Gerhardt Strauss. Jade will be working with them. We’ll get the appropriate scaffolding ordered on Monday.” I knew Erika was going to come to photograph Kate’s Stations, but I thought Jade was going to do the photos for my fresco prints.
“We debated this quite a long while,” Doc filled me in. “We planned to have Jade photograph all the panels in the chapel including the mosaics for your book, but we weren’t sure what to do about the limited edition prints. Gerhardt says that Erika has become quite proficient and he is willing to supervise her in creating your prints. It will be her project, but he’ll watch over it.”
“That’s wonderful! But why are they coming now? I only have a little over half the panels finished.”
“It may take them as long to photograph them as it takes you to paint them. But if we want this panel preserved, we need to act quickly.”
“This panel?”
“Tony,” Clarice explained, “the Church and the archbishop can dictate what is in the chapel. They have no say over what is in the book or what art print you create. That was clearly in your contract. The creation of collateral pieces, including posters, limited edition prints, the book, slide shows, DVDs, movies, licensing, and everything else are solely under your control.”
“Holy shit!”
It still irritated me that I was going to have to destroy my own creation, but Doc had a solution to that as well. He told me to paint over it instead of scraping and re-plastering. I was confused because that would mean this panel would no longer be buon fresco. The new work would be à secco, or painted on a dry surface. It wasn’t that unusual in the Renaissance to cover large areas of a wall in dry painting between areas of fresco. But the à secco paintings usually flaked off with age so all that was left was the fresco with blank spots between.
“Dear me, you did learn something in class,” Doc laughed. “You mean that in a hundred years or so, what you paint over this piece might flake off and only the original would be left? How sad.”
That devious old bastard. I laughed until I was exhausted. I had things in the vault, but nothing I intended to wait 100 years to display.
Erika and Gerhardt arrived Tuesday and set straight to work on the photos. It was great to see them and when Jade showed up with her intensity, the whole environment in the chapel changed. Gerhardt was being taken care of by Clarice—whatever that meant—and Erika was given our guest room. The blonde dynamo fit into our household like a natural. The first time she walked into the kitchen in the morning with no clothes on I blew coffee out my nose. I felt a hand slip around the front of my robe to grasp my cock and Kate whispered in my ear.
“See something you like? I told Erika we often didn’t wear clothes around the house unless the boys were home. She’s fine with that.”
Erika walked right up to me, pushed herself against my erection, and kissed me. Then she pressed even closer so she could reach Kate’s lips next to my shoulder. That kiss and the two naked beauties sandwiching me did nothing to relax my boner.
“I did mention that I spent a month with Erika last summer, didn’t I?” Kate teased.
I got the word from Father Michel on Friday that they had caved to the archbishop’s demands. Clarice joined me for the final negotiation. I agreed to paint over the offensive scene and to show no exposed male genitalia in any other paintings in the chapel. Nothing was said about further inquiries by the archbishop or the vicar general. Andy quietly told me that he was instructed to make a weekly report on progress, but that no other interference was expected from the archdiocese.
Erika and Jade had finished the photographs of that panel. My family had all come to see it, as had many of the models.
“The only thing I’ve ever posed for,” Morgan sighed.
“I hope it’s not the last thing,” I said. She smiled at me and I thought there was a little more bounce and sway beneath that baggy shirt and jeans as she walked away. Well, maybe that was my imagination.
I was still angry. I knew that somehow, I had to make sure the archbishop held to his agreement. Kate didn’t know the mosaics had ever been in danger, nor would she ever if I could ensure it. She sat with me as I lifted my brush to begin painting out the figures with a new concept. I would leave the man intact with just the addition of a drape across his loins. The scene would remain the same, but I was painting sheep over each of the female nudes. Some sheep leaned in to sniff at his ears. Another knelt before him. Each grouping of the sheep reflected the original grouping of women.
“We’re hos for our art,” Kate sighed as I replaced Wendy with a white ball of wool. “We haven’t progressed in six hundred years. We still need sponsors and patrons in order to paint what we want.”
“I’m not a whore,” I said, almost convincing myself. “If it comes to that, I’ll quit painting.”
“You can’t quit being yourself,” she answered.
“I’m no Michelangelo. I don’t need to paint churches.”
“No, but you are an artist. Churches are as good a canvas as any.”
She sat with me, talking softly, keeping my anger at bay, for the entire day as I repainted the scene.
“What story will you tell?” she asked when I was finished. Andy hadn’t shown up for his usual request to tell him the story.
“I won’t,” I said. “This one is in the Bible. Matthew 25:33-34. ‘And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.’ It’s a long parable. I’m not going to comment further on it.”
The next Saturday was too crazy to paint. Adolfo and Morgan did the arriccio plaster on the last six panels. Erika and Jade had finished photographing the first twenty panels, plus the one I had to paint over, so Erika and Gerhardt flew back to Georgia Saturday morning. Erika promised she’d be back in a couple of weeks to do the last twenty panels. She took ten of the fourteen oil pastels that Kate painted with her to photograph in the studio.
Whitney had her first track meet of the season in Tacoma and we went down to watch her set new school records in both the hundred and four hundred hurdles. Andy joined us so he could fully experience the 12.68 seconds. The girl was getting faster than ever. We hardly had a voice after the fifty-plus seconds it took her to run the second race.
“Hi guys,” she said when she found us after her races. She was as sweaty as if she’d just come off the racquetball court after an hour-long match. How does a minute get you just as heated up as an hour? Sweat or not, she gave each of us a big hug and kiss, lingering especially long with Lissa. “Hi, baby,” she said, patting Lissa’s tummy.
“Baby wants to rub tummies,” Lissa whispered just loud enough that those of us nearest could hear.
“Can we rub other things, too?” Whitney asked. “Melody? Okay?”
“There’s gonna be lots of rubbing going on tonight. Believe me,” Melody laughed.
“I’ll come over as soon as I get off the team bus.”
“Hey, not to be a wet blanket on what sounds like a promising evening, but we’ve got a commitment tonight,” I reminded them.
“Oh crap, I forgot about Roller Derby,” Lissa moaned.
“Roller Derby? I’m in,” Whitney laughed. “But I might take you under the bleachers.”
“Matt, how would I go about putting damaging data on a powerful man’s computer?” I asked. Rio’s boyfriend met me for coffee Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t had much opportunity to talk to him lately, but I’d talked to Andy a lot about church politics since my confrontation with the archbishop. I’d finally come up with an idea.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Matt answered. We got up and left the coffee shop with our paper cups and headed toward the water. It was a decent day out and even though you couldn’t see the mountains across the Sound, you could almost believe they were there. “First off, if I told you how to blackmail a powerful man with data that you put on his computer, I could be prosecuted as an accessory to a crime. Worse than that, I could lose my job. I happen to like working at Google.”
“I thought it was like a slave-camp over there.”
“It is, but they feed me well.” He patted his round stomach. He wasn’t as proportionally overweight as Rio, but it was close. “But to get to the point, the best bet is always to expose something the guy already has and not try to plant something fake. Never add something to someone’s computer. Discover what they have or get them to add it. Too many things could go wrong otherwise.”
“But I don’t know how to do that either.”
“Why don’t you tell me about this powerful man and why you want to get control of him? You make it sound like you want something in reserve. Or are you thinking about releasing something to the press?”
I told Matt the whole long story. He’d heard about the artwork, of course. Rio had posed and had come to look at it before it was painted over. She’d fumed for a week. It was when I told Matt about the archbishop’s threat to remove all Kate’s artwork, though, that Matt blew up.
“He threatened Kate? He told you he’d make sure she didn’t work in a church again?”
“The specific threat was that he’d have all Kate’s and my art removed from the chapel. And Jerome’s, too. It was me he said would never work in a church again.”
“I’ll tell you, Tony, if he made that kind of threat against Rio, I wouldn’t warn or threaten him. I’d just rip him a new one. Take him down so fast and so far, he could never threaten anyone again.”
“Shit, Matt. Look, if Kate found out that I painted over one of my pictures to save her art, I’d have hell to pay. Not to mention the fact that she’d do something like rip her own work out for spite. You see my predicament? At any time he could expose the whole thing.”
“But threatening to expose him could push him into confrontation.”
“It would if it was just something to hold over his head. But if it’s linked to something he wanted, that would change his mind.”
“How dangerous is he, Tony? Would you be safe?”
“If you believe Dan Brown, all the archbishops are all-powerful and command armies of black ops spies. The answer is I don’t know.”
“So, tell me what you want to link the threat to.”
“The archbishop is a politically motivated person. You’ve probably got them around Google. He’s a corporate climber. He was a priest, then a bishop, now an archbishop. The next step is cardinal. I think they’re called that because of their red hats or something. Andy might have been being sarcastic. Anyway, the cardinals elect the pope. There are a whole bunch of political appointments that can be made in there, too. The Archbishop of Seattle wants to become a cardinal. As it happens, the Cardinal in Chicago is nearly eighty and even though it’s not required that he step down, he can no longer vote. That means there may be a search for a new cardinal soon. This whole artwork thing was to curry favor with his vicar general’s highly-placed sponsor.”
“Church is just a big corporation, isn’t it? You know pagans don’t have any hierarchy like that.”
“Well, what I want is to let the archbishop know he could be too controversial, unholy, or deceitful to be considered.”
Matt tossed his cup in a waste bin and sat looking out over the ferry terminal. You could practically see the gears turning in his head. I suppose in a digital world that doesn’t compute.
“Okay, here’s what you do,” he said at last. I looked at him. “Nothing.” I shrugged. It was a long-shot that he’d help me anyway. “I’ll do the research. I can get into everything that’s digital. Computers, servers, banks, traffic violations… anything. Once I find something, I’ll let you know what we’ve got. Don’t you do anything. You don’t even know something is being done. Got it?”
“Thanks, Matt. I owe you.”
“Not yet. I’m still paying back what you did to Rio. Whatever it was, it got us where we are today. There’s just one thing. If the guy is doing something criminal, all bets are off. I’ll turn him into the police and I’ll make sure he gets busted by the Vatican. That stuff’s not Church politics.”
“Agreed.”
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