Page 61 of Saint
“I sometimes feel guilty that I didn’t do things sooner. That I didn’t do things the right way,” I say.
“There’s a right way?” he asks. We aren’t really making out anymore or even groping each other, but he still has his hands on my hips and I still have mine on his shoulders. It feels like the horny version of slow dancing. It’s amazing.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I feel like I should have been Aiden Bell, Bisexual more quickly. It took me until I was in my thirties to tell my dad and my brothers, and even then I felt like I was stumbling into it.”
I’ll never forget the look on Sean’s face that night, after he’d found Elijah at my farmhouse. He’d been stunned—and stung. Stung that he hadn’t known, stung that I hadn’t told him. I’d had to inform him that it wasn’t actually about him and his feelings—it was aboutme, and Elijah too, in a way. It was about when I would be ready. Me. No one else.
But then Mom died.
She died without knowing about the most important person in my life, she died without knowing about a very, very important part of me, and after that...
I don’t know. I guessreadyfelt different then. I told the rest of my brothers and my dad, and I started bringing Elijah to work functions and things like that. Family had been easy, work a little harder.
But Elijah had been worth any amount of hard.
I think for a moment, and then add, “I should have been braver too. Brave like you were.”
Elijah looks down. Not at my thighs, but at my belt, where a small wooden rosary hangs. “It didn’t feel brave,” he says after a minute. “You know? Or quick. I’d known I was gay since middle school, but I waited until college to come out to my parents. I kept thinking that eventually I’d find the right words, the perfect moment to say them in. Like one day I’d wake up, and there’d be an angel of the Lord in my bedroom telling me that today was the day and not to have any fear, because the Holy Spirit would teach me the right words to say.” He gives a little noise then, a small laugh. It’s not bitter or cynical. It’s almost affectionate, as if he wishes he could travel back twenty years and give that version of himself a hug. “In the end, I had no choice. You know my parents—a judge and chief physician at our biggest hospital? They’re all over our city. They’d hear about me dating someone the minute it happened, and I knew it would be so much worse if they found out that way instead of from me.”
He pulls his hand out from under my habit and takes the small crucifix of the rosary between his fingers.
“I learned then that there’s so much room between a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario. That they could listen to what I was saying, and that they could say so many of the right things back, and yet there could be so much else that was unsaid too. And so I do sometimes wish that I had waited longer. Not for the angel to appear in my bedroom, but maybe a few more months, when I was more certain of what my adult life was going to look like, and after I’d spent more time with queer friends and heard more of their stories. Maybe if I’d waited those few months, it would have been easier for me.”
He gently sets the crucifix back against the fabric of my habit, looking up to meet my stare. “There’s no one right way, Aiden. Even running off to become a monk isn’t the wrong way.”
“Maybe I just wish I hadn’t wasted all that time,” I say softly. “That we’d had more time together.”
He doesn’t reply, but he tucks his lip between his teeth and his eyes are full of things I can’t quite decipher.
And I feel so full right now, so full of every feeling, and I’m not supposed to be here in my ex-boyfriend’s lap with his hands all over me and my mouth chafed from his stubble, but also I can’t be anywhere else, and it’s a problem for later, it’s a confession for later, everything else can wait. Because right now he is my pillar of flame in the desert, my light, my urgency.
Elijah’s watch chimes, and he looks down at it and then closes his eyes.
“We need to go if we don’t want to be late for dinner,” he says, reluctance in his voice, and indeed, there’s reluctance even in his hands as it takes me pulling against him for him to let me go.
I can’t bring myself to assure him that we’ll kiss again, or to tell him that I’m dying to play our little monk game from earlier. Speaking the sins against celibacy out loud seems worse than committing them, somehow.
So instead I straighten my robes and find our beer bottles, and by the time I’m done, he’s waiting for me at the chapel door, framed in the colors of encroaching evening. He once again looks like a stained-glass saint, and it’s blasphemous maybe that the sight of his beauty pushes a prayer out of my soul. A prayer of pure love, pure gratitude to God that Elijah exists. That he is here and beautiful and perfect, and God has made him so.
Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest is my beloved among the young men.
His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved, this is my friend.
35
Dinner isa simple but delicious affair of bread, oil, and herbs, and a creamy seafood soup called bourride, all of it set off by the light honey beer they brew here at the abbey. (It’s as delicious as Brother Xavier made it sound—crisp and floral and the perfect amount of sweet.) And while the meal is silent in theory, it’s a light silence that settles easily over the room.
At Semois, there was a thickness to the quietude that made it feel watchful, almost like a sentient thing, but here the silence comes as gently as a breeze, lifted by smiles and the inevitable happy food noises that we all make as we eat. Noises that turn inahhhs and excited claps when two of the brothers emerge from the kitchen with cast iron skillets of something called flaugnarde—which is a custard-y thing made of sweet batter and fresh fruit from the abbey’s small grove of fruit trees.
I finish Elijah’s serving for him when he can’t eat it all, much to his amusement.
And then afterward, like another soft breeze, the silence drifts away, and conversation fills it. We help clear away the meal from the long wooden trestle tables, and then Abbé Bernard invites us into the cloister for more beer and proper introductions.
The cloister is surrounded by covered walkways, all made of stone and original to the original twelfth-century abbey. Between each arch is a low but deep ledge, perfect for sitting on, and the monks quickly find spots that seem to be personal favorites, sitting cross-legged or with knees pulled up, chatting as they wait for Brother Luc to return with the beer. A fountain trickles brightly in the middle, like it wants to chat with us too.
There are only thirty monks here, which is a little surprising given how much they produce. The lavender itself accounts for several different products—soaps and essential oils and eaux de toilette—and then there is the honey, which is sold on its own and turned into candies and nougats. And of course, there is the brewing operation that creates the rarest beer in the world, the beer that people are willing to steal from literal, actual monks for.
