The Best American Noir of the Century

Jeffrey hated to talk about sex or at least that’s the impression he wanted to convey. He was a Jesuit priest when I first met him, waiting in line to see Nathan Lane go for laughs in a Neil Simon play— an original, not a revival. It was a cold and rainy Wednesday and the matinee crowd was crammed as it usually was with the bused in and the walk-ins. We both should have been somewhere else, doing what I was paid to do and, in Jeffrey’s case, what he was called to do. We made a valiant attempt at small talk as we snaked our way up toward a half-price ticket window and were surprised when we scored adjoining orchestra seats. “Now if the show is only half as funny as the critics claim,” Jeffrey said, “we will have gotten our money’s worth.”

We stopped by Joe Allen’s for drinks after the show and I had just ordered my second shaken-not-stirred martini of the afternoon when I invited Father Jeffrey to join the poker game, eager to fill the void left by Sal Gregorio’s spur-of-the-moment move to Chicago to tend to his father’s meatpacking plant. Even back then, Jeffrey seemed to me a troubled man, grappling with the type of demons I would never be able to visualize in the worst of my black-dog moments. I came away with the sense that he had reached the top of the well when it came to his chosen vocation, not sure whether it was the pedophile scandal rocking the church that did it or just the very fact that he was a modern man forced to live a sixteenth-century life. “Do you miss it?” I had asked him that day.

“What, the women?”

“We can start with that,” I said, trying my best to make light of what would have to be considered a serious deal-breaker in any contract talks that brought into play a lifetime commitment.

“There are moments,” Jeffrey said, “when I don’t think about it. It is, by a wide margin, the biggest obstacle a priest must overcome. At least it has been for me. But hidden beneath the cover of misery, a silver cloud often lies.”

“What’s yours?” I asked, maybe crossing deeper into the holy water than I should.

“That it’s young women who draw my eye and not innocent boys,” Jeffrey said, the words tinged with anger and not regret.

“Are you one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ and Mary Magdalene were more than just pen pals?” I asked, doing what I could to steer the conversation away from the uncomfortable.

“I am one of those rebels in a collar who think Christ was too much of a man not to be in love with a woman as beautiful and as loyal as Mary was to him,” Jeffrey said.

One year later, just about to the day, Father Jeffrey turned his back on his vows, handed in his collar, and walked out of the church life for good. Yet, in the time from that eventful day to this, he stayed celibate or, at least, so he claimed, though not from a lack of effort but more from a lack of experience. Now, of all the guys in the poker group, he was the only one Dottie liked, the one she didn’t roll her eyes or mumble beneath her breath if we ran into on the street or in a local restaurant. She even mentioned once that she had gone to church to see him celebrate mass and listen to one of his sermons.

“How was he?” I asked her that day.

“He looked like he belonged up there,” Dottie said about Jeffrey in the same awed tone I would have reserved for Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash. “But then again, it’s not like it was his first time.”

“Full house, kings high,” Jerry said, resting his hand flat on the table and reaching over to drag a small mountain of different-colored chips his way.

“Was that deck even shuffled?” Adam asked, shaking his head, thick hair covering one side of his thin face. “I mean, really, just look at all the face cards that are out. I don’t think it was shuffled.”

“You only ask that when I win a hand,” Jerry said. “There a reason for that?”

“That’s because the only hands you ever win usually come off a deck that hasn’t been shuffled,” Adam said.