The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast by John L'Heureux

Author:John L'Heureux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Public Space
Published: 2019-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE PRIEST’S WIFE: THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

1. The priest and his wife were seen skiing together before they were married; or, rather, she was seen skiing and he was around, somewhere.

She took the lift to the slope reserved for advanced skiers. She was wearing a black parka and formfitting ski pants, also black. Her blond hair hung loose and straight.

Those who watched with binoculars from the deck of the lodge said it was an exercise in discipline. She allowed herself none of the indulgences of the advanced skiers. She plunged straight down vertical slopes, shooting off at an angle over horizontal ones, slaloming between invisible poles even when her momentum would have seemed to indicate certain disaster. She never shifted weight suddenly from one leg to the other. She never skidded, never fell. She crouched, swerved, straightened, her body always completely in control.

An exercise in grace, someone said. No one could take their eyes off of her and so no one was sure who said it. It may have been the priest.

Snow had begun to fall, so they all went indoors for hot buttered rum and a little fooling around by the fireplace. Every now and then somebody would look out the window and see her mounting once more that precipitous slope, and then the lightning descent, the perfect turn around the invisible poles.

Among twenty snowy mountains she was the only moving thing.

2. After he met her the priest was of three minds regarding what he ought to do. After he watched her skiing on the slopes he was of one mind. He wanted to be a poet and write perfect love songs. For God, naturally. And then eventually perhaps for publication. And finally just to create a good thing. To make something. He was of one mind about that.

With such an attitude, it was inevitable that in time he left behind him the order, the priesthood, and—he sometimes thought—common sense. Burdened with an artist’s drive and a priest’s training, he did what anyone would do. He married her and became a teacher of high school English.

3. She had a face like a woman in a novel. Her grandfather said that to her once when she was nine or ten, and it pleased her. It gave her an existence out there, in the real world, in a book.

She was Katharine Stone, age nine or perhaps ten, and she was called Kate. Her father was a psychiatrist and her mother was a psychiatric nurse; they employed a cleaning woman, a part-time gardener, and a part-time cook. These people, and her German shepherd, Heidi, were her serious world. Her play world was at school where nothing was serious, really, not for a girl who had a face like a woman in a novel.

When Kate grew up she scrutinized novels, old ones particularly, in an effort to discover what her grandfather had meant. When she grew up some more, she turned to psychology in an effort to discover which woman in which novel she might be.

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