The possibility that the rest of this place might reveal itself to be as mutely appealing had in fact already occurred to him. “I’d love to get the full tour, if you have time,” he admitted.
“Of course.” The brother nodded, content, even pleased in a gentle monk-like way. As Kyle set his single bag beside the single bed, Brother Luke drifted out into the narrow white hallway. Kyle followed.
The monastery grounds were apparently large, as it had previously functioned as a working farm. Black-and-white photographs of monks in those timeless robes riding tractors and holding up garden hoes lined the walls of the small hallway adjacent to the cafeteria. The carpeting was industrial gray, and the few chairs stacked in the corner were monotonous, standard-issue office furniture, the kind anybody could pick up in the back of an OfficeMax or Staples. Institutional Catholicism always looked the same, he thought. Bad furniture, fluorescent lighting, industrial carpet, men in dresses.
“This is Brother Albert, you’ll see him often as he is usually here at the front desk,” Brother Luke told Kyle. “This is Doctor Wallace, he is going to take over the infirmary this week, while Dr. Murrough has his operation.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Brother Albert nodded, as he offered his hand.
“It’s an honor to be asked,” Kyle replied, and he meant it. He felt like his best self, the self he always hoped he would someday be, was somehow waking up and taking charge of the show all of a sudden. Without even doing anything these monks were improving his manners.
“I hope we don’t give you too much trouble.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“I’m sure we will,” Brother Albert replied. His tone carried an acerbic edge.
“Brother Albert is one of the oldest members of our community,” Brother Luke observed, as if that were a real distinction here.
“Oh my yes, I’m certifiably ancient.”
“If you have any question about the history of the monastery, he’s your man. Or if you’re a Merton fan—”
“Which I am not,” Brother Albert interrupted.
“He was his secretary, for a number of years.”
“You knew him?” Kyle asked.
“He was a good writer, but a bad monk,” Brother Albert informed Kyle, as if he had asked his opinion of the great man. “He was a child. He was allowed to be a child. He was just terribly neurotic. Oh, don’t get me started. The things I know. I opened the man’s mail!” He beamed at them with a schoolboy’s wicked glee.
What was the story? Merton was a womanizer of some sort, but the specifics eluded him. Not a womanizer, per se—that was Augustine. Augustine, that terrible prude; once he’d sown his wild oats, he turned on sexuality, it was the road to hell, and women were culprits who would lure you there. That’s right, you could talk to women but only if you were guaranteed not to have any sort of sexual relation to them. A meeting of the minds alone. The guy had a blissfully fulfilling relationship with his mother, whom the church had obligingly canonized after her death. Still, Augustine was better than Aquinas; that guy had announced that women were nothing better than deformed male fetuses. Kyle remembered the sniggering delight with which he and his friends had received this information from the Jesuits who taught them religion in high school. The memories were so close to the surface here. Lousy cafeterias. The terrifying and fascinating otherness of women. Alison.
She had never had much use for the Catholicism which completely drenched every aspect of their lives. That was apparent from the first time he laid eyes on her, at a Friday night football game, of all things. Saint X versus Moeller High. A crisp October night, white lights pouring over that mythic and insane ritual which taught boys to leap and attack one another for the sake of catching a ball. Desperate to make any kind of connection with the guys he knew from school, he agreed to go to these things even though he didn’t like them. He barely understood the rules. And then there she was, straggling behind a gaggle of Catholic school girls. Hanging out in the parking lot, clearly hoping to meet boys.
Dennis, of course, knew one of the girls in her cluster and when he sauntered over his group followed. This was the real ritual of Friday nights in Cincinnati, high school boys prowling, girls gathering to be prowled.
Those eyes of hers really were something. A green so startling, the edge of the iris melted into a darker rim, utterly unique, that you felt like you were looking into the eyes of a wood goddess, or maybe just a trickster. Because she grinned at him, as soon as she saw him, as if they had known each other for years. He was young, and pathologically lonely, even then. How did this girl with the astonishing eyes know him, already?
At sixteen he had no defenses. He had no game either. Some utterly forgettable and forgotten girl said, “This is somebody, and this is some other girl, and this is Alison.” The whole evening was a blur from then on. She was funny and shrewd and sure of herself, and he followed her around like a dork, barely coming to life when she agreed she hated football.
“Oh, God, it’s awful,” Kyle admitted. “I don’t know why the church condones it.”
“Oh, the Catholic church, they condone pedophilia, what do you expect?”
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Is it?” Alison turned to give him a full blast of those eyes. He knew he’d never recover. By the end of the evening they were making out under a corner of the bleachers, the crowd roaring around and above them. Apparently it was a pretty good game.
“I’m going to show him the chapel, and then the rest of the grounds,” Brother Luke told Brother Albert.
“Thank God I don’t have to go to choir anymore,” Brother Albert replied. “When I turned eighty-four, they decided to let me off the hook.”
The tour concluded with a visit to the bookstore, which looked like an unexceptional gift shop, crowded with books and fudge and prefabricated figurines of Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. But the ladies behind the counter, the first women he had seen all morning, were straightforward and friendly, and they welcomed him with a cheerful Kentucky twang.
“You’re not going to want to leave, that is what I predict,” declared the older of the two, a large woman with bright blonde pigtails affixed to both sides of a round face. “People come down for the retreats thinking just to stay for maybe two days, but some of them come back and back and back, they find it so restful.”
“Oh yes, it’s just wonderful here, we love it here,” agreed the other, a luscious young thing in tight jeans and a pale blue tank top. “I heard you saw Father Timothy this morning; we’ve been real worried about him, he looks like he’s just wasting away and no one can get him to eat a thing! He’s real confused, too.”
“He’s very frail,” Kyle said, trying to acknowledge her concern without assuaging it. “I’m going to see him again tomorrow.” It was a trick he had worked on for years: Don’t sound like anything is too dire, but don’t offer hopeful assurances either, even tonally. In a pediatrician’s office these guarded pronouncements rarely extended to concerns past the effects of a flu shot. It had been a long time since he had had to withhold so much professional judgment around questions of life and death.
“Well, God willing, you’ll be able to help him, ’cause he is real special to me and Leeanne,” asserted the round-faced woman. “Here, let me ring that up for you.” She reached over and took the two books he held out of his hands. “The Seven Storey Mountain and The Sign of Jonas, anything else I can get for you? You didn’t want any fudge or cheese?”
“No, thank you.”
“That’ll be thirty-two fifty-three.”
Kyle paid and then headed to the infirmary, where he spent the rest of the day acquainting himself with its limited resources and doing internet research about dementia in the elderly and its associative symptoms. He downloaded several articles about Alzheimer’s disease and nutrition. He studied Father Timothy’s files and put a call in to Dr. Murrough, who returned it immediately—that hernia surg
ery wasn’t scheduled till the next day—and got him to fill in the blanks on Father Timothy’s medical history. Then he waited and read, uninterrupted; there were no further patients that afternoon. At 5:30 Kyle called it a day and went back to his monk’s cell to unpack his few things before dinner.
The room was spare and silent. He sat on the bed and considered taking his phone out to the designated area underneath the trees next to the parking lot, so that he might call Van and tell her about this place. The image he carried in his head, of her and Maggie going about their daily routines in the kitchen and the backyard and the park, seemed distant and irrelevant. Or maybe it was he who was irrelevant. A sudden panic jolted through him. This affectless cell was substantial in a way that he was not. Why had he come here? What was he looking for? Time and space opened around him like an empty balloon. The thought that God might make an appearance and explain a few things to him shot through his mind as a complete, terrifying absurdity. What was the use of faith itself, when it went hand in hand with the knowledge that God wasn’t going to show up? The longer he stared at the phone, the less he felt like making any move to communicate to anyone at all, much less his wife. And now, ever, and again, there was Alison crawling around the corner of his brain. Making out underneath the bleachers. Cool night air. The memory of joy, of first young love.
He looked at his watch. It read 5:52. Dinner was at 6. He had eight minutes to kill. His mind was restless, refusing to look at itself, but also refusing to be silenced. His roving attention landed on the paper bag on the bed and was caught with the quick efficiency of a hook landing firmly in the mouth of a trout. He picked up the small package and tilted it forward, allowing the two books inside to slip into his hands. The Seven Story Mountain and The Sign of Jonas. He had bought them both almost out of a sense of duty, wanting to let all these nice people know that like everybody else who made a pilgrimage to this monastery he was mightily impressed with the famous monk. He glanced at Seven Story Mountain and rejected it because that was the one everyone read. The cover of The Sign of Jonas presented a photograph of a monk in those robes—which had come to impress him more and more with their straightforward beauty—striding across a lonely landscape. He opened the book and started to read.
Five minutes later, he set the book down, his eyes smarting. The voice of the writer, landing with astonishing clarity across the years, smote him. “I have a peculiar horror of one sin,” the monk wrote. “The exaggeration of our trials and of our crosses.”
Kyle stared at his hands. He felt his heart move.
eleven
ALISON MOORE hits the big time. It wasn’t that long ago that she was a total nobody he felt perfectly justified in snubbing at a nothing cocktail party. Now look at her. A gorgeous brunette with a crazy sexy haircut. Shocking green eyes. Great smile. A standard PR shot from some afterparty during the Tribeca Film Festival. Didn’t see that coming.
Seth clicked the server off and turned his attention to the fucking pile of press invites which had been dumped on his fucking desk in his fucking cubbyhole. There must have been fifty of them, and he was expected to cover them all, in twenty-two days.
The sheer physical impossibility of needing to be two or three places at one time was not actually the problem; the real problem was how utterly fucking boring it all was. He had been on the culture beat at the Times for only four months but it was seriously ruining his life. His job was, literally, going to parties and then writing about them, and then fielding phone calls from hysterical press representatives who didn’t like the way he covered the parties. BAM 50th Anniversary Gala! Tribeca Film Festival Opening Night! 1,000 Stars Fashion Benefit for Breast Cancer! Come Celebrate the New Wing at MoMA! Come Celebrate the Award Honoring Somebody Ridiculously Famous Who Really Doesn’t Need Awards! The exclamation points were plentiful, the graphics gorgeous, the paper stock superb.
Everybody who knew anything knew this was a total shit gig. Hi, Jessica! You look fantastic! Can I grab you for a few minutes to talk about your know-nothing role as a gun-toting whore in Evil Dead 12? Matthew, hey, how are the kids! Fantastic! How do you feel about being overlooked by the Tonys this year? Nicky, hi, can I grab you for a minute? Just heard about the deal you signed with Warners, congratulations! You stood in a line and got two minutes of their time as they paraded off the red carpet, on their way to the cocktail event. And then you went to the next one of these things, asked the same questions, and then you went back to the office to type this shit up, and then you went home and thought about murder.
But of course he was surrounded by idiots who thought this whole song and dance was so exciting. The would-be models and actresses he met at bars and clubs and parties all over the city couldn’t get enough of it. He had never really had any trouble getting laid, New York was a wonderland of party babes, truth be told, and half the guys in town were gay. A relatively decent-looking, moderately successful writer who had gone to Harvard was never going to have a problem here. But this beat had taken his sex life to a whole new level. The girls who fluttered around these A-list events were international beauties—Brazilian, French, Italian, Swedish—who floated back and forth between Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Cannes, Lake Como—on the arms of some of the ugliest men Seth had ever laid eyes on. They were never terribly interested in talking to him at the different events, where the photographers got much more of their attention, but they were happy to say hello at the private clubs and downtown hipster bars to which he had been suddenly granted insider status. The guy from the Times who covered “culture”—God, he couldn’t even think of the word now without putting it in quotes—was someone everyone wanted to know.
Arwen the office intern once again had clipped the collated schedule of events to the back of the packet of invites. It made him irrationally angry; he had told her repeatedly that he preferred the schedule clipped to the top of the pile, where he could glance over it without going to all the trouble of unclipping the entire packet, which made a mess. The fact that she had also left him a red velvet cupcake with a little note pissed him off even more. Dial it down, his brain warned him. She wants you to like her she wants to be a writer you are her hero she doesn’t even get paid don’t hurt her feelings. He slumped back in his Aero chair and sighed. A cupcake, a fucking cupcake. They were omnipresent these days. You came by them so easily, they had ceased to be special.
He opened the note. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!! the note announced, in capital letters. HAVE A GOOD ONE!!! For a moment his impatience with this overexcited piece of punctuation almost clouded the information that had been presented to him so unexpectedly. But there it was. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!
It’s my birthday? He thought about it for a moment. Is it really?
He clocked the date on his computer screen. September 9, that was it all right. How Arwen had found it out was more of a mystery than the fact that everyone else had forgotten it. Birthdays were passé, and generally the source of slightly too-aggressive ribbing in his so-called band of brothers. How old are you? Thirty-three? Where’s the Pulitzer? The names of those who had won Pulitzers in their twenties were not something you wanted to think about on your thirty-third birthday, when you were on your way to the red carpet at Fashion Week, so you could write a snappy three-paragraph column for the internet edition of the fucking New York Times. Birthdays were a pain in the ass. Red velvet. What the hell is that, anyway? There was some news item floating around about how they were using ground-up insects as red food coloring because the other stuff had chemicals in it. Ground-up bugs equals organic food coloring. Another Pulitzer-worthy bit of information. He picked up the cupcake and tossed it in the garbage can at the side of this desk.
The tents in Bryant Park looked like they had floated down from some other universe. The air was fresh and cool, as an early autumn breeze had swept through Manhattan and contributed to the festive spirit. Elegant men in black suits opened limo doors and held their hands out to the mysterious figures in the backseat, in a gesture of benign
invitation. Come out come out. Before barreling across the street to plunge himself into this mess, Seth stopped, suddenly taken by the timelessness of the city’s rituals, on a night that was touched with stardust. He would not have been surprised to see twelve dancing princesses hurry by him at the streetlight, eagerly throwing themselves into the celebration.
No such luck. The red carpet tent was packed and while the evening was cool, there was a sheen of humidity which had gathered, a literal wet blanket, right on top of the crowd of photographers and reporters. Someone should have turned on the air conditioning—he felt sure somehow they knew how to air-condition those fucking tents—but apparently the freshness of the late summer night had fooled the event organizer and her three assistants, who were walking around smiling serenely even though tiny beads of perspiration were popping up all over their faces. As usual, there was a problem, squishing that many bodies into a space that had no circulation. And for all the humid claustrophobia, this didn’t look like much after all. The pretty girls in the photo line were obvious nobodies, certainly nobodies that he was not going to be able to write about for the Times. Not even for the online edition.
“Hey, Fraden.” A voice called to him from the crowd of reporters, a hand with a Bic pen lifted itself above their heads.
Most of his fellow culture beat scribes were serious-minded girl reporters with digital recorders, who asked the same questions over and over and nodded professionally as they did so. Lou Schaeffer, on the other hand, was two hundred and forty pounds of sweating romance. Schaeffer thumbed his glasses back up his nose and squinted past Seth, as if something, anything worth writing about, might be hovering. The guy always looked completely out of place at these things. A beached whale with stringy hair, Schaeffer always had three or four pens clipped to the pocket of his bargain-basement cotton shirts; he would have fit in better at a sci-fi convention. But his prose was impeccable. If they actually did give out Pulitzers to losers who wrote about culture on the internet, Schaeffer would have six or seven.
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