Being Zoe

By James Cortese

From the precocious adolescent seducing Father Dauphinais while confessing her sins, to the legendary L.A. photographer touring the environs of the Hotel Paradiso with Henry L. Mencken, Zoe’s account is one woman’s erotic and spiritual journey through the last half of the 20th century, as she interacts with celebrities and public figures in movies, business and politics. A woman of beauty, intellect and talent, she fiercely pursues a life-long quest for an answer to the question, "Who am I?" and discovers that the answer is not so much a matter of who, but why.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Cortese
• Release date: Feb 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780982896037

Book preview

Being Zoe

A Novel

James Cortese

Smashwords Edition

© Copyright 2011 James Cortese

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 9781453798515

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010933925

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names of real public figures and personalities, both living and dead, are used for satiric purposes, and their presence here in the form of imaginary characters is not meant to assert or infer that their portrayal bears any relation to anything they might have actually said or done.

Also by James Cortese

After Gideon

Freak House

Year of the Slug

Women of the Book

The Very Last Thing

What the Owl Said

For Romana

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices

That if I then had wak’d after long sleep

Will make me sleep again and then in dreaming

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me that when I wak’d

I cried to dream again.

—The Tempest

Contents

Foreword

Father D.

Born Again

Party Scene

Quest for Zero

Mr. Right

Sea Cruise

Addiction

The Meaning of White

True Love

Ever After

Jungle Fever

Dreams

Convergence

Door of Light

Hotel Paradiso

—

Appendices

Foreword

I am thinking of aurochs and angels…

—Humbert Humbert

It was never my practice to contribute any sort of commentary to another living writer’s book, but my current circumstances (I am dead) and my great admiration for this particular novel have induced me to break precedent. With literally all the time in the world, I sat down—metaphorically speaking—and composed a few random thoughts that might be of interest to those fortunate enough to have this book in their mortal hands. At the outset, let me state that I will have nothing to say about the special arrangements required to make these thoughts available to living readers, aside from pointing interested parties to the novel itself, where the subject is treated at some length. Those familiar with my own books will undoubtedly recall that I took a particular interest in the interrelationship between the deceased and the living, especially in my intriguing short novel (excuse the plug), Transparent Things. My readers will also remember that I also had a fondness for bogus commentaries, which, to my great amusement, caused not a few people to wonder whether I actually existed or not. Time to set the record straight: I did and I do.

Unfortunately, though everyone seems to agree that I was, not everyone is convinced that I am, including the purblind publishers of this book, who have insisted I put quotation marks around my name. It was a procedure I once advocated for the word reality, and so I have no objection and am content to oblige them. In the end, we are all good citizens of our Author’s imagination.

Let us be clear what sort of book this is. It is a book that appears to have no other purpose than to inspire the kind of physiological response that I had hoped my own books might inspire. Whether or not it does so, each reader must decide for himself. As I once—apparently famously—told my students at Cornell:

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.

In the end there is no accounting for taste, so I am sure there will be some readers who will experience no such spinal tingle and may feel a less pleasurable sensation further down at the other end of their spine. Back when Lolita first arrived on the scene, not a few good readers, missing the entire point, dismissed it out of hand with such comments as, There comes a point where the atrophy of moral sense, evident throughout this book, finally leads to dullness, fatuity, and unreality. I’m pleased to report that Kingsley Amis has since apologized for that remark, and we have become fast friends over the chess board.

The genre of the fictional autobiography was always a favorite of mine, going back to some of my early Russian novels and concluding with my last American ones. I found that the form provided the ideal literary nexus—a point of convergence, very much like zero in this novel, between the finite and the infinite, the real and the imagined, the known and the unknown, the rational and the irrational, the actual and the potential, and, yes, the living and the dead. Let me hasten to add that fiction founded on this grim schematic is inevitably doomed to fail. Successful narratives are built primarily on interesting characters and compelling incidents. However, a narrative that fails to address issues greater than itself will ultimately be condemned to the ignominy of the bestseller lists. (The fact that at least one of my own books spent time on these lists is beside the point: popular opinion, which is usually stupidly wrong, can sometimes be stupidly right.)

When I was writing The Original of Laura—my last and, at the time, unfinished novel—I felt I had largely exhausted the possibilities of the fictional autobiography. That was, I see now, an unwarranted opinion. Being Zoe, I’m happy to say, takes the genre in a number of rather audacious new directions. I was never a proponent of the theory that the fictional characters of a novel are in fact its authors, dictating as it were, their stories to a mere scribe, however non-fictional he might be. To me, the author of a book is the God of his fictional creation. This is not to say that the characters do not partake in some mysterious way of the Divine Essence and contain within themselves a certain amount of autonomy required to make them live on the page. As an author, I tended to believe that this so-called autonomy was but a trick of my craft, but my characters very likely had an entirely different opinion on the matter. Having mentioned The Original of Laura, I would like to take this opportunity to express my disappointment that my last emphatic instructions to my son Dmitri that this stillborn manuscript should never be put on display, like some pickled foetus in a jar, no matter how loud the entreaties of the morbid rabble, were ultimately ignored. It is not without a sense of sad irony that I perceive how easy it will be for Dmitri to utterly disregard this latest expression of pique from what appears to be a fictional character.

In the interest of frankness, let me note one of the few things I dislike about Being Zoe is its use of topical materials—real persons and events—things I scrupulously avoided in my own work. That being said, I myself very much enjoyed appearing in these pages, having on more than one occasion made similar appearances in my own fictions, and I very well understand what the author is up to here. However, I was never convinced that such ephemera would add much of value to my work, which strove energetically to avoid the philistinism and meretriciousness of popular culture (a patent oxymoron). It is true that in Being Zoe popular culture is a prime target of the author’s satire, as it was in some of my own books, but I never believed that actual artifacts from that world had to be hauled into one’s fictional universe. There are, after all, degrees of reality. Do we write boring prose to give the reader a real sense of boredom? Many writers apparently think so. I’m sorry to disagree with the author on this point, even if he succeeds brilliantly, particularly in the interplay of real and fictional elements, especially toward the end of the book, as the former is gradually transformed into the latter and vice versa; I simply have no interest in topical trash. As I have said elsewhere:

The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book.

In my own writing I was never an enthusiast of lengthy dialogue, either in Russian, my native tongue, or in English, my adopted tongue. Frankly, writing dialogue requires a sensitivity for spoken language that I never had in great abundance. Nevertheless, I might have made a credible attempt to master this skill had I not always believed that much more could be accomplished through narrative, with its singular ability to address multiple levels of reality at once. Dialogue works best in drama; its inclusion in narrative works best when it is used sparingly. Too many writers resort to dialogue to carry the entire burden of telling a story—as if the novel were no more than a script for a film or stage play. I wish Being Zoe had less dialogue than it has, but I am pleased to see that the author has employed his sensitive ear to advantage and composed scenes that can be unbearably funny, as exemplified by the ingenious dialogue-within-dialogue passage in the confessional scene of the first chapter.

The great surprise and daring of Being Zoe is that the result is not at all the picture one might have expected at the outset. It is a picture, at least in my understanding, of a world outside the narrative, the result of the protagonist’s strenuous, if not heroic, efforts to transcend her condition and arrive at the truth of who she is. In this regard, she is very much like all of us, driven by a desire to make sense of the stories we call our lives.

Much more can be said on this fascinating topic, but I am loath to do so for fear of spoiling the reader’s pleasure of exploring the topic unbiased from any speculative interpretations of mine, which—horrors!—some might be tempted to confuse with those of the author himself. It is not my place to speak with authorial authority, however much one is tempted to do so. But I cannot help but think that the author will have no objection to my passing on one small piece of inside information, namely, that despite the presence of a psychiatrist in these pages, the author has made no attempt to weave a Freudian theme into the warp and woof of his narrative. At long last, the Viennese witchdoctor, it seems, has finally been defrocked and exposed as the pretentious quack he always was. Do not get me started. Vera is calling me to dinner, and I must presently go.

—Vladimir Nabokov

Father D.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they're pretty, even if they aren't.

—Marilyn Monroe

Already at the age of ten I was in a deep funk. It was 1957—need I say more? Except for the beatniks, this was the Decade of Group Think. My father, as usual, summarized it perfectly. When the waterholes run dry, he said, the herd breaks for the mirage.

Here’s what I hated. I hated the way you had to be like everyone else. I hated the way you had to pretend to like what you really hated. Basically, I hated having to hate so much. All the clocks in childhood run agonizingly slow, but time in the fifties, like Zeno’s arrow, seemed as though it would never get to the end of the decade. The years kept plodding drearily on, right into the sixties, right up until John Kennedy, war hero, boy president, heartthrob of America, was blown away sitting on top of the world, next to his beautiful young wife in her designer pink suit and pink pillbox hat. So lovely. They said that Zapruder’s film would never be shown. A few years later, there it was—the President’s head exploding, Jackie crawling across the limo’s trunk to get away.

We lived in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, having moved there from Boston when I was still a baby. My father had gone west to make his fortune, and he had, several times over. Once, when I asked my father if we were rich, he said, It’s all relative, Zoe. Be glad of the advantages you have, repeating something along the lines of what was told to Nick Carraway by his father. Years later, I felt a jolt of déjà vu, reading those famous words at the beginning of Fitzgerald’s most famous book. A memorable moment—the first time I began to suspect I was a fictional character.

My father was a well-known psychiatrist with lots of celebrity patients, my mother was a stay-at-home drunk. I was a spoiled-rotten only child. We had more comfort and advantages than we knew what to do with, and, perhaps because of that, we also had our own personal shrinks. From the outside it really did look like the American dream.

As far as I know, all those advantages never did me any good. My mother claimed it was my attitude. She was Irish, a fatalist, a born believer; she believed in everything, anything, including contradictions, which she believed were tests to be overcome in order to believe. I wasn’t like her at all. I hated believing just to believe. I hated it when people said: "This is the way it is. This is what you have to believe." It wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe, it was just that I wanted to know why. I wanted belief to be so believable that it wouldn’t even enter my head to question it. It didn’t seem like too much to ask. In the Bible passages that we studied at St. Cletus Elementary, the Catholic school my mother insisted I attend, Adam knew Eve. But Eve never got to know Adam. It didn’t seem right, even if I wasn’t too clear about what exactly it is you know when you knew.

My father was not a believer, although he felt it was his civic and parental duty to keep that opinion to himself. A second-generation Italian, he had inherited the Italian male’s paradoxical combination of respect and contempt for the church. If he believed in anything, it was in the absolute necessity of not believing. He was a rationalist and put his faith in the facts. Belief for him was a form of dementia. Look at your mother, he would say whenever he wanted to prove a point about crazy convictions.

That's right, look at me, my mother would shoot back. My mother loved laughing at his so-called facts. Look at me! Look at me! He thinks I’m the nut, but look who’s happy! My mother had a wonderful delusion that she was happy.

My father was mostly away, either at his office battling the epidemic of neurosis then afflicting L.A. glitterati, hanging out with his celebrity pals at famous watering holes, or fooling around with some poor talentless showbiz kewpie, beauteous of body, empty of head—the very incarnation of the cliché. I often had the feeling that I was just an endearing appendage to his life.

Once when I complained that he wasn’t paying as much attention to me as my best friend Miranda Finch’s daddy paid to her, he responded by saying I should probably see a professional. Not all daddies are alike, sweetie. I didn’t like my daddy very much, and I’m sure I’d be a better person today if I could have talked to someone about it when I was a kid.

"I want to talk to you about it, Daddy."

I know you do, sweetie, but Daddy’s just not the right person. It’s not advisable. It’s not, well, professional.

Why Daddy?

Because in my line of work, he explained, professional stuff and family stuff have to be kept separate.

What happens if you don’t?

They’ll send me to jail, sweetie. You wouldn’t want Daddy to go to jail, would you?

Just the thought of my being responsible for sending my father to jail was enough to make me break down into a fit of shameful tears. It was a long time before I figured out my father’s penchant for mischievous lying. Of course, he never thought of it as lying. He saw it as just a funny way he had with words, part of his unique sense of humor.

My mother had long gotten over his sense of humor. She came from a wealthy family of famously pious Catholics in Chestnut Hill (friends of the Cardinal, friends of the Papal Nuncio). My parents had met in New York (where my father was doing his residency at Columbia and my mother was visiting her aunt) just after the war at some sort of charity affair, fell in love and were married—all within a few weeks. My mother was a virgin; my father had probably never been a virgin. I came along nine months later, having been conceived, according to my father, in the presidential suite of the Plaza Hotel (my father had a pal working the front desk). Marital bliss ended abruptly for my mother when, shortly after my birth, she discovered one of my father’s affairs.

She was never the same. One night as she got up to bottle feed her new daughter, she passed a mirror in the hallway and saw the Devil staring back at her. The Devil told her it might be a good idea to strangle me. She resisted the suggestion, and later, in the psychiatric hospital where my father had her stay for several months, an angel of the Lord appeared in the form of a glint of light and apprised her of the fact that she was in danger of damnation for having renounced her childhood faith. She decided there was nothing left to do but make an all-out effort to save her soul, and when she returned home, she fell back into the bosom of the Church and became, in my father’s memorable phrase, a mommy nun.

To leave no doubt she was a changed woman, she took up important charitable causes—the hungry in Africa, the oppressed in Eastern Europe, the impoverished in Asia. Then she took up with Mother Teresa, went to India, and we didn’t see her for a long while. Mostly I was looked after by nannies—Deirdre, Josephine, Imelda, Maria.

Our relationship was restrained and correct. My mother routinely demanded dutiful kisses on her cool powdery right cheek, but never felt I was owed any in return. In the beginning, before she understood that she had a duty to right the wrongs of the world, she usually kept to her room, spending a good part of the day on her knees, her face having a look of beatific serenity. She explained it simply, telling me one day, Zoe, the Lord dwells in my heart.

Really? I said, utterly awed. I was about eight years old.

Yes, really! He comes to me. Just like warm milk filling a glass.

I looked into her eyes and saw nothing. She wasn’t looking at me, but through me. I was intrigued, maybe even envious. She was so certain. So complete. So contented. As if she were being infused by a divine drug. How do you get Him to do that? I asked her.

You have to make yourself worthy.

Can I make myself worthy, too?

Now her eyes were actually looking at me. Yes, you can.

How, Mother?

You must be pure, child. In here—she pointed to her heart. Just like God. God is pure and is drawn to pureness.

How do I become pure? I asked, thinking that pure had something to do with frequent baths.

Keep out the world, child. Never let it in. Because then you let Satan in. Evil enters and kills purity. Then you become something detestable, something ugly in the sight of God. Something worthy only of being destroyed.

What if I already let the world in?

Then you must drive it out! Her voice rose. Like I did. Drive out all the reasons, all the vain hopes, all the pride that has been keeping you from seeing the truth.

Do you see the truth now?

Yes, I do, she said softly.

Tell me, I pleaded. I want to know. I want to know the truth.

Tears welled up in her eyes. Believe, she said. "Believe with all your heart. Believe no matter what."

Tell me what I must believe, Mother. I want to know.

It’s so simple, child. So obvious. So easy. Don’t you know? There was an awful sadness in her eyes.

I shook my head. I felt ashamed. Stupid. Worthy only of being destroyed.

I’m sorry, she said, turning away. I’m so very sorry.

That night I found myself crying helplessly in my bed. What was wrong with me? Who were these strangers who were my parents? What was going to become of me? Better to be born with a defective heart or a cleft lip or a big nose than this missing piece inside, this critical part of you that made it possible for people to love you, for you to be happy, that made it possible for you to believe.

At some point my father realized his wife had little interest in being a mother to his daughter, and so set out on a sustained effort to make up the difference. One day he showed up in my room and handed me one of his cameras (he liked to think of himself as a serious amateur photographer). It was his 1938 Leica III. This is my favorite, he said. I want you to have it. Then he proceeded to give me a lesson on shutter speeds, f-stops, depth of field, and other photographic arcana. I felt like Eve holding the magic apple. Let’s be as categorical as possible: It was a moment that changed my life.

How had he figured out that I would become so interested in photography? He knew even before I knew. Or was it just my desire to please him as a daughter by taking an interest in a subject I knew he was interested in? Did I really fall in love with photography or did I just think: You’re down to one parent, kid, better watch out you don’t lose the other one too. Or perhaps both—two strands combining into a double helix that would come to define my future.

I remember the very first picture I took with that Leica. It was of my mother, on her knees in the kitchen by the window, bathed in a shaft of early-morning light. I took it from behind, so she wouldn’t see me. I remember spending a good deal of time composing the shot and worrying that my exposure settings might not quite capture that ethereal beam of light. When the camera clicked, she turned abruptly around with a cross look on her face. I felt very strange for having done what I did. Years later, I came across something Diane Arbus had said about photography, and it seemed to fit me exactly: I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do. That was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.

After giving me his camera, my father was always available to tutor me on such things as lighting and composition, and when I set up my own darkroom, suggestions on how to manipulate the various chemical baths and use the enlarger. I always looked forward to Saturday afternoons because I knew that no matter what, my father and I would spend several hours together in the darkroom. He wasn’t an affectionate man, nor one who liked to talk about his feelings or inquire about my own—that territory was for me and my shrink to explore—and the subject of our talk was always the business at hand. But in the end all those hundreds of hours we spent huddled together in the dark under a single red light bulb turned out to the happiest of my childhood and defined the direction the rest of my life would take. By the time I reached high school, I had pretty much decided what I was going to do. I would become a world-class photojournalist.

Because the TV said that the family that prays together stays together, we went regularly to St. Cletus Catholic Church in Brentwood. We dressed up in our Sunday best and sat in the same pew on the right-hand side of the nave, specially built so that every word that was said over the PA system was garbled beyond understanding. Every Sunday was the same. My mother went into a kind of holy trance, my father fell asleep. My mother always received communion, my father never. My mother was reluctant to leave after the Mass was over, my father couldn’t wait to get home to his Bloody Mary and his Sunday Times.

As with every other group activity during this period, I hated church and all that went with it—a herd within a herd. And a holier-than-thou herd at that. It represented the opposite of everything I wanted. It was boring and good. I wanted to have fun and be bad. It didn’t help that the whole thing struck me as an elaborate scam. These strange unmarried men in black getting everyone to buy into their con. But since this was the fifties, with a former general in command as president, and I was just a kid at the mercy of adults no matter what crazy ideas they had in their heads, I understood the importance of pretending to believe.

In the summer of 1962, Marilyn Monroe had just died (not far from where we lived), and that was supposed to be a lesson to anyone who thought you could not believe in anything and get away with it. People still believed that nobody got away it. It was all very demoralizing. I was in high school, more precocious than I needed to be, or that was good for me, reading everything I could get my hands on. I read Catcher in the Rye and Howl and Peyton Place, of course, but also The Kinsey Report, and even The Organization Man. But they only made me unhappier because they confirmed everything I hated about where I lived, how I lived, and what everyone expected of me.

I had actually met Marilyn Monroe when I was six or seven. She was at a celebrity wedding we all attended in Hollywood. What a beautiful little girl! she said, shaking my hand, her big bright red lips and billows of bottle-blonde hair looming over me like a giant parade balloon. With her giggly laugh, Marilyn seemed like a kid in an adult body. I immediately liked her and thought she would make a great friend, someone you could confide in, take baths with. I wanted to show her my dolls. I wanted to play hopscotch with her. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Why did men act so strangely when her name was mentioned? The smirks, the bug eyes, the va-va-voom’s. Sitting behind her at the reception in West Hollywood, I overheard her talking to another woman about enemas, then about Joe DiMaggio, the baseball star. She had decided, she said, to go back to him. Gosh, that big lunk must be the dumbest man alive, but maybe that’s what makes him so darned sweet.

Little of what she said made much sense. I remember going up to my father, who was talking to Frank Sinatra, one of his pals, a fellow paisan, and asking him what an enema was, and both of them suddenly breaking out in a duet of laughter just as the orchestra cranked up Sentimental Journey.

A couple of months later, she was dead.

In retrospect, it was a milestone. Things were changing—we just weren’t aware how profound those changes would be. Suddenly we had Sputnik and pantyhose and enough H-bombs, if need be, to destroy the world. We had a fat easygoing Pope who improbably tried to wake up the church from its deep centuries-old sleep, and then, having accomplished that, he suddenly dropped dead. We had blacks who had come out of nowhere and demanded to be treated like everyone else. And we had Elvis. Elvis was apparently getting away with it. I remember during religious instruction at St. Cletus, when I tried to imagine what God looked like, I imagined that he looked exactly like Elvis. Jesus, I thought, had probably looked like James Dean, Mary like my mother, and Joseph like Monsignor Gigot, the pastor of our church. Even so, it was hard connecting with the people mentioned in the Bible. They were all strivers and believers and self-deniers—people who thought they had a special in with God.

People shouldn’t have special ins with God, I thought. God should be above playing favorites, he should be above wanting people to grovel in front of him. What kind of a God got a kick out of that? Maybe the people who wrote the Bible had gotten it wrong. Supposedly God had spelled it all out. But maybe those ancient scribes weren’t paying close attention. Or maybe they just hadn’t liked what they’d heard and came up with something that people would prefer.

By 1962, I’d pretty much decided that this was not the kind of God I could believe it—a God totally dedicated to everybody’s personal whims, a Fairy Godmother God. A God who gave you bonus points if you were a member of the country club or brushed your teeth twice a day or kept up your pledges to the church. This couldn’t be a real God. A real God, I figured, would have gotten things right from the beginning and long ago stopped making so many people so damn stupid.

Father Dauphinais liked to tell us that God was our friend. I remember I confessed to Father D. that I had doubts that God was my friend. The word doubt always got him worked up. Father’s D.’s reply was always the same. All the important answers were mysteries, and all the really unpleasant mysteries (like tidal waves that wipe out whole villages and babies dying of cancer) were part of God’s plan.

He asked me why I felt this way, his voice soft and sexy—a real waste for a priest, I thought, juiced up on my new teenage hormones, nothing much making sense, my head focused on a single all-encompassing idea: boys. I told him I’d always prayed to God but never had much luck with it. For example, I was constantly tempted by impure thoughts, but no matter how hard I prayed, they just wouldn’t go away. In fact, the harder I prayed, the worse they seemed to get: I’d find myself thinking about the very thing I was trying so hard not to think about. What was going on? Father D. said this was God’s way of testing me.

I didn’t like the idea of being tested. It reminded me of school. Tested for what? If life was like school where I was a star troublemaker, things did not bode well for the future. Was Hell like an eternity in the principal’s office?

I was quite familiar with the principal’s office, since I was constantly being sent there for one act of misbehavior or another. The ultimate punishment was being rapped on your knuckles with a steel ruler wielded by Sister Severina. Early on I made it a point never to cry, the usual response of my classmates to the intense pain, and I think Sister Severina took this as yet another example of my willfulness and unchristian attitude toward chastisement.

You again! Sister Severina would say as I was led into her office. Let’s see if the medicine works this time.

It never did. They tried everything. They made me sit in the wastebasket in the front of the class, or sometimes on the floor in the well of Sister’s desk. When corporal punishment and shame didn’t work, they resorted to psychology. Once, in the fifth grade, after Sister Aloysius warned my unruly class that the next person to speak out of turn would have their tongues removed with the aid of a special tongue-removing liquid called Andronicus, I immediately said to Jimmy Buongiorno, sitting in front of me, "We should get that bottle and put it on her tongue."

He turned to look at me and caught sight of my impromptu impression of a tongueless Sister Aloysius trying to speak.

Jimmy tried to contain his laugh but failed. He gave out with a loud snort through his nose, where the thick mucus from a cold exploded onto his desk—a sight that immediately aroused the vocal disgust of Kathleen Reilly, who was sitting in the seat beside him.

Sister Aloysius had an uncanny ability for zeroing in on the source of classroom disruption. Zoe, up to the front of the class! she bellowed.

As I stood there, Sister demonstrated the amazing eradicating power of Andronicus by making a few words written in ink disappear from a piece of paper.

Open up! she ordered. Stick out your tongue!

I did as I was told and remained that way while Sister fulminated, sermonized, procrastinated, and finally had second thoughts. In the end, she decided to be merciful—this time—and sent me back to my seat.

At some point in the seventh grade, I decided it made no sense to keep bucking the system and set about to reform my behavior. It was my first lesson in playing the game, and I became very good at it. From hellion to model student—a St. Cletus success story. I was now everyone’s favorite. The Church loves the idea of redemption. The unfailingly merciful God—its most popular feature.

Father D. was young for a priest. He was our church’s superstar. All the girls giggled and swooned when he smiled and patted them on their heads or shoulders or arms or sometimes, if no one was looking, on their shapely backsides. My best friend Miranda Finch confessed she had a crush on him. Miranda was such a copycat. She’d gotten it from me.

It was true I had a crush on Father D., but I never actually thought it could go anywhere. I knew the score. He was a grown man, and I was a kid. Plus, he was a priest, and priests weren’t supposed to be interested in girls with crushes. Even so, there was always something funny about the way he would sometimes look at me—an intensity in his eyes. What was all that about?

Once, tired of being bored and having just finished Lolita, for some malicious fun I confessed to Father D. that I’d done something forbidden and horribly sinful with a married man.

I thought he would tell me to quit pulling his leg, but he didn’t. He was very serious and wanted to know if the man had taken advantage of me. I had to laugh. No, the whole thing was my idea, I said. The guy was someone I knew, a friend of my father’s. My father knew lots of famous people—many as patients, some as friends, some as both. I didn’t tell Father D. who it was, but like a lot of people in the country, he would have known had I said the name. I told Father D. I’d developed a terrible crush on this man and had decided it was time to see what everyone was talking about.

Talking about?

You know!

Ah, yes.

I explained to Father D. how I called up this man and confessed my interest in him. Turned out he felt the same way about me (not surprising, in retrospect, since he had those same feelings for a lot of girls my age). A few days later, he picked me up as I walked home from school. He had a big blue Mercury convertible, with a push-button radio and wide vinyl seats.

What were you thinking, my child? Father said.

I told him I was thinking that I was just like Lolita.

Father sighed. I knew what he thought of Lolita. I’d heard him preach against her. Well, not so much against her as the book about her—that scandalous novel, which, but for his condemnation of it, no one would have bothered to read. I know I wouldn’t have.

Father D. was very quiet. I told him how we drove to Malibu and found a deserted beach parking lot—it was a stormy, cold day—no one was there—and how this older man grabbed me passionately in his arms, and—getting as quickly as I could to the main point—how his hands were all over me.

Where did he touch you, my child?

I told him. But apparently not detailed enough. He wanted clarification. I clarified. He asked me if I felt this was wrong.

Yes, it made me feel very wicked, Father. I felt like God was watching me.

And so you felt ashamed?

Not exactly. I tried as best I could to explain how much I enjoyed the feeling of being wicked, sitting in this man’s lap, this man who was married and older and famous, and doing everything I’d imagined Humbert doing to Lolita.

"Did you read this book?" he asked.

I told him I had. I heard him sigh again. He asked me if I knew I was being taken advantage of.

"I didn’t think of it that way, Father. I thought I was taking advantage of him."

How so, my child?

"He was a man, with,