The sound of Mary Martha’s laughter rose from the backyard. She sounded almost giddy. Rebecca edged over to the coffee machine to get a pot of French roast started.
“So how’s the hermit?” Phoebe asked, mercifully changing the subject. Rebecca had told her mother about her new tenant, and, predictably, Phoebe was delighted with the notion of a monk downstairs.
“He appears to be coming out of his shell a bit. He’s out in the backyard right now doing battle with the weeds. Mary Martha likes him a lot.”
“Ask him if he does baptisms.”
Rebecca laughed. “Why? Are you pregnant?”
“Not me, Sherilou just had a kid. She wants to have some kind of ceremony, a touch of spirituality. Though if you ask me, she’d be better off having some kind of father around. But it’s too late for that, alas.”
Sherilou was one of Phoebe’s projects, a thirtyish poetess living on food stamps and prone to rants. The two of them spent a lot of time at Phoebe’s kitchen table eating Oreo cookies and dissecting the work of Adrienne Rich.
“I doubt that Mr. Christopher is doing any freelance sacramental work,” Rebecca said. “I get the impression he left the monastery on an awkward note.”
“Just a few words in the proper spirit is all we’re looking for. A soupçon of ritual. It’s not like Sherilou is looking to renounce Satan and his works or anything. It’s a fragmented culture. We don’t need the whole nine yards.”
“I’m sure the man just wants to be left alone, Mother.”
“Of course, of course.” Phoebe paused. Rebecca could picture her mother, spry and lean in charcoal gray Nordstrom slacks and running shoes, her silver hair cut short, looking out her kitchen window at the Pacific Ocean, one foot thumping like a rabbit’s, her mind already on to something else.
Sure enough, Phoebe said, “I should get going. We’ve got an opening today and I promised Jack I’d help set up.”
“Of course. Love you.”
“Love you too, darling. Are you going to get up here this weekend?”
“We can’t; Rory’s got Mary Martha. Theoretically.” Rebecca glanced at the clock. It was almost eleven. Her ex-husband, a professional surfer, kept vampire hours and seldom showed up before noon for his every-other-week bit of fatherly quality time. More often than not, he took Mary Martha straight to Ocean Beach and left her on the sand all day with his current girlfriend and a bag of potato chips while he tried to coax a ride out of the chop. But Mary Martha adored him. “Maybe next weekend?”
“I suppose that will have to do. Kiss Mary Martha for me and tell her Grandma loves her.”
“I will.”
“And ask the monk about the baptism. I think the fact that’s he’s a renegade will appeal to Sherilou.”
“He’s not a renegade, Mom. He’s a sad man having one helluva midlife crisis.”
“All the more reason to get him involved in something meaningful. I’ve really got to run. Kiss-kiss.”
“Kiss-kiss.” Rebecca smiled as she hung up. The coffee was ready. She poured herself a cup and went to the back window again. Christopher was on his knees again, wrestling with a deeply rooted weed. He had cleared about three square feet of ground by now. The dark earth looked fresh and raw against the burned yellow skin of the rest of the yard. Mary Martha was sitting contentedly on the bottom step in her pajamas, watching him with perfect absorption, offering the occasional comment or advice.
On an impulse, Rebecca opened the window.
“Hey, there, Don Quixote, how about a cup of coffee before you finish off that windmill?” she called down.
Christopher glanced up, startled and even a little alarmed, apparently unprepared for conversation with a grown-up. “Oh! Hello!”
“Good morning. Would you like some coffee?” she repeated.
“Coffee?” Christopher echoed, as if the word were new to him.
Rebecca laughed. “Didn’t they have coffee in the monastery?”
“They had the world’s worst coffee, actually,” Christopher conceded. “Gallons of it.”
“Well, I make the world’s best, if I do say so myself.”
“I wouldn’t want to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble at all. It’s already made.”
Christopher hesitated, clearly seeking a way to gracefully refuse. He looked so much like a deer in the headlights that Rebecca felt a moment’s compassion for him. All the poor man wanted was to be left alone.
“I hope Mary Martha’s not bothering you,” she said.
“Mom!” Mary Martha exclaimed indignantly. “I’m not bothering him!”
“Not at all,” Christopher affirmed.
“Okay.” Rebecca paused. “Well, you let me know if you change your mind about that coffee.”
“I will,” he assured her, with obvious relief, and turned back to his weeding. Rebecca watched for a moment more, then shrugged and closed the window. There were worse things, after all, than a reticent tenant bent on cleaning up the yard. The last guy who’d lived downstairs had played the drums.
Dear Brother James,
It is common courtesy to thank you for your most recent letter, yet I continue to feel you are misguided in your zeal for communication. You seem gripped by an ambition to save my soul. But I assure you such a hope is in vain. The word monk comes from the Late Greek monakhos, “solitary,” and ultimately from monos: “alone.” The first monks were men who went into the Egyptian desert to be alone with God. That dangerous solitude is still at the heart of the monastic vocation. (If I can still speak of a monastic vocation, in my own case. Perhaps I am called to a simpler ruin.) All monastery walls, in principle at least, are the borders of a wasteland, and every monk is a man who lives alone. But what we learn in the monastery, eventually, is that the walls are false, a convenience and a lie. There are no borders to the wasteland. The desert is everywhere; it is that which we call the world. And every man is a man alone.
You fear that in leaving Our Lady of Bethany I have somehow pronounced the life I led there—and thus, by implication, the life you lead there—“irrelevant.” You may find my real sense of the issue more disheartening still: I believe it is a mistake even to ask whether the monastic vocation is relevant. It is no more relevant now than it ever was. The truths of the desert are useless truths. A man alone is a useless thing. And it is a useless thing to speak of God.
It is to such lucid uselessness, I still believe, that I am called. But I may well be perverse. We expect God’s presence to be thunderous, spectacular, monumental; but it is our need that is so large. The real presence slips past our demands for spectacle. It slips past our despair. Not just like a child—sometimes it is a child. She walks down the blistered steps to where you kneel and says the simplest things. She is entertained by butterflies. She has opinions about unicorns. She does not seem to care that you are ruined and lost. She does not even seem to notice. Find an earthworm in the neglected loam and she will make you feel for a moment that your life has not been wasted. Name a flower and she will make you feel that you have begun to learn to speak.
May your own path lead you, dear Brother James, to whatever degree of relevance you desire.
Yours in Christ,
Michael Christopher
Mary Martha came trooping in from the backyard just before noon, pink with sun and a little manic. Mike had had to go to work, she announced. He had gotten a job at McDonald’s. This sounded suspiciously like a six-year-old’s fantasy career to Rebecca, or some kind of miscommunication—perhaps Christopher had said McDonnell Douglas, or Macintosh, though what an ex-monk might do at either corporation was beyond her. Still, whatever the factual basis of the rumor, it was good to hear that Christopher had found work.
She hustled Mary Martha into the bathtub and out and had her daughter dressed in jeans and sneakers, with her overnight bag packed with a change of clothes and a traveling contingent of unicorns, by 12:30. Rory didn’t show up until just after 1:00, which was not bad, all things cons
idered. Any appointment was an approximation with her ex.
Rory bounced in wearing his wet-suit bottoms and a T-shirt that said Maui Legends, trailing sand and smelling of marijuana smoke. He had promised Rebecca after endless battles not to get stoned in front of Mary Martha, and according to his strict constructionist reading he abided by the rule, taking his last hit in his car out front before he came in to pick her up. Rebecca hesitated, wondering as always whether to call him on it. The spirit of the law, she felt, was not to be stoned in front of Mary Martha. But it was a hard thing to fight about with their daughter right there and Rory already toked into imperturbability and acting hipper-than-thou. And she just didn’t have the energy to fight it anymore. Maybe that was what your life became, eventually: a series of stalemates you had fought to the point of exhaustion.
“Flying high, are we?” she said impotently, hating herself.
“Always,” Rory smiled. He met her eye and almost, but not quite, winked, riding the edge of her irritation like a tricky wave before he ducked away to give Mary Martha a hug. He didn’t quite have rock-star good looks, though he acted like he did and usually pulled it off. He was actually a little funny looking in a lopsided Irish way, with an off-center grin and a face like an amiable fisherman’s, bright blue eyes, and an air of perpetual, puppylike alertness. He had a tough, square body, thick through the chest and bandy-legged. He’d kept his waistline, burning endless calories in the cold Pacific, but there were distinct threads of silver in his long, dishwater-blond hair, which Rory had worn pulled back into the same monotonous strand for twenty years. He was going to do the gray ponytail thing. He was going to play forever.
“Mike said I could plant some flowers,” Mary Martha told him.
“Wow, flowers, wonderful!” Rory exclaimed, readily enough. “Who’s Mike?”
“Our new tenant downstairs,” Rebecca said. “I finally got the in-law apartment in shape.”
“He’s a monk,” Mary Martha announced.
“Wow, a monk, no kidding. Does he wear a robe and sandals?”
She giggled. “No, silly.”
“Does he keep you up all night with his incessant chanting?”
“No!”
“He’s very nice,” Rebecca said, before things got out of hand. “Very ordinary. Just a guy. Makes his own coffee, keeps to himself.”
“I suppose it was inevitable you would end up with an ascetic, on the rebound from me.”
“I’m not on the rebound from you, Rory. And all I did was rent an apartment to the man.”
“Of course,” he said, maddeningly. He bent to Mary Martha again. “Are you ready to go, Number One?”
“Yes.”
“There’s an eight-foot break down by Half Moon Bay, I hear. Are you up for that?”
“Yes!”
“Make it so, then. Warp speed.”
“Aye, aye, Captain!”
“She’s already had her lunch,” Rebecca said. “There’s a snack in the bag, for later in the afternoon. And some sunscreen.”
“Okay,” Rory said, clearly humoring her. He picked up Mary Martha’s bag and took her hand, and they walked together toward the front door. Rebecca followed and watched them down the front steps to Rory’s ancient Rambler station wagon, with his long board in the rack on top and his boogie board in the back.
Seeing her daughter off with Rory, she always had the sense of sending her out to sea in a paper boat. Rory would bring Mary Martha back on Sunday evening, and she would have had nothing to eat in the meantime but 7-Eleven food, plastic-wrapped tacos, Fritos, and Mountain Dew. Her nails would be painted some weird shade of industrial green by Rory’s current girlfriend. She would be sunburned if the weather had been good and chilled to the bone if the fog had come in. She would have done nothing in his apartment in the Haight but watch Star Trek reruns. Rebecca knew these things not just from debriefing Mary Martha—who found nothing particularly wrong with the time she spent with her father—but because she had lived this way herself with Rory for years. They had cherished a few artistic aspirations and a vague, drug-fueled sense of mission. But the dreams they’d had had come to nothing.
It wasn’t that Rory was stupid, though he liked to pretend he was. He was widely read in literature and philosophy; he was at home with Hesse and Camus and could ramble on about Buddhism and the Tao. He was perhaps too at home with Alan Watts. But essentially Rory lived for that clean moment when the wave lifted him free of everything but the Zen of balance. He called that freedom, and he had built his life around it. It seemed like enough to him, and it had seemed like enough to Rebecca for what, in retrospect, was an embarrassingly long time. If she hadn’t had Mary Martha, she thought, she might still have been sitting there on the tailgate of the woody, doing her futile little watercolors and drinking Budweiser out of cans, oohing and aahing every time someone found a wave to work offshore. She might have been painting her nails industrial green and living in the eternal moment from joint to joint. Waiting for Rory to grow up.
Rebecca realized that she was fingering the guitar pick that hung over her heart. She let go of it self-consciously, irritated with herself. She was really going to have to put the damned thing in a drawer someday. At the curb, Mary Martha waved from the passenger seat as Rory turned the key and the balky ignition labored.
“Seat belt!” Rebecca hollered. Mary Martha nodded and obeyed. The Rambler’s engine caught at last. Rory put the car in gear and gave Rebecca a jaunty, slightly condescending wave, which Mary Martha echoed. Watching them drive off together, side by side, Rebecca had to admit to herself that the two were unmistakably father and daughter. Mary Martha had Rory’s eyes, his coloring, and his grin; she had his nose and something of his bandit leprechaun’s twinkle. But that was something Rebecca usually tried not to notice too much, because really, if you dwelled on it, it could break your heart.
The prospect of a free afternoon was almost daunting. She’d brought her current project home from the office on Friday, intending to dutifully ruin her weekend with it, but in the unaccustomed silence that settled over the house after Mary Martha’s departure, Rebecca could not bring herself to plunge right into the work. Maybe it was seeing Rory, still flaunting his freedom from the trappings of responsibility; she knew how appalled he would be by her spending a Saturday afternoon yoked to her computer, in the service of a paycheck. In a way, she even appreciated his sturdy sense of spontaneity. Say what you might about her ex-husband, he had always given her the courage to play. She wondered sometimes now whether she had lost that courage without him.
At the far side of the kitchen—beyond the counter she kept meaning to clear off, the one cluttered with a broken toaster, a 1992 Makaha Surfing Festival Souvenir Cutting Board that Rory had given her, which could not be used because the paint flaked off, and a misshapen Play-Doh pot full of wooden spoons, made by Mary Martha at the age of three—the door to the garage was ajar. Mary Martha was learning to take out the trash, but she had not yet mastered doorknobs and locks. Rebecca moved to close the door, then on a second thought opened it and descended the stairs into the garage. Sometimes Mary Martha put the garbage in the wrong can too. Michael Christopher did not look to be a man who would generate much trash, but Rebecca liked to keep things as separate as she could.
In the dim light, the garage was crowded with debris, useless utensils and objects of dubious sentimental value, broken bicycles and broken rakes, the paddles to a lost canoe, and boxes whose contents had long since passed into obscurity. One of Rory’s old surfboards lay askew against the near wall, mottled with dings he had never bothered to repair. The square space that Rebecca had cleared in the back corner for Michael Christopher to use for storage was the only empty spot in the whole garage. The previous tenant had filled that space almost to the ceiling with amplifiers, bongo drums, and boxes of old LPs, but Christopher had put nothing there and the austere expanse of bare concrete seemed vaguely like a reproach.
Mary Martha had managed to drop th
e garbage into the right can but had failed to replace the lid. Rebecca secured the plastic top and started toward the stairs but paused near the middle of the garage, where an old easel with a sheet thrown over it jutted from the jumble of shadows. In the poor light it looked vaguely like a tombstone.
The dream had been that they would live off their art: she would paint her Turneresque seascapes and Caspar David Friedrich skies and sell them to tourists, while Rory surfed professionally; they would wander the earth together, skipping lightly along the border between the ocean and the sand, stopping at the occasional flea market or boardwalk show to unload a canvas or two and hitting all the big surfing events. The plan had even worked for a while. She’d acquired a glib knack for sunsets and sailboats, and her work had sold well, while Rory in his prime could count on enough prize money to keep them in beer and sandwiches and gasoline. But in the end, the hustling had worn them down. As Rebecca’s work had grown subtler and more structural, less Turner and more Cézanne, she’d found herself resisting and finally abandoning those Jonathan Livingston seagulls scything against an azure sky and the neat white sails beneath the Golden Gate, which the tourists loved so much; while Rory in the long run had had little patience for the discipline of competition. And so there had been restaurant work, and janitorial work, and some dealing on Rory’s part. There had been brushes with landlords and the law. By the time Rebecca had gotten pregnant with Mary Martha, the dream of living free, brave artists’ lives had been muddied by the simpler scramble for survival, and with her daughter’s birth the easel had been relegated permanently to the garage.
The Monk Downstairs Page 3
