The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “Oh, come on—”

  “No, it’s true. I was way too ready to believe that God had called me out of the desert to a new ministry—how’s that for bloated ego? Suddenly I had something to do, something priestly. It made it easy for a moment to believe I hadn’t wasted the last twenty years. As if somehow I could cash in my monastic experience for a nice new meaning, as if I’d gotten a good exchange rate, changing dollars into yen.”

  The afternoon was taking on unsuspected dimensions in retrospect. Rebecca drove for a moment in silence, not knowing what to say. Christopher brooded through the next three twists in the road, then sighed heavily into the window, fogging the glass in a ragged circle.

  “God, maybe Hackley was right,” he said.

  “Your abbot?”

  “He said when I left that I was running away from myself. That I didn’t have the guts to stick it out.”

  “I don’t think it’s possible to run away from yourself. Monastery, in-law apartment, mansion on the hill—it’s all pretty much the same, isn’t it? I mean, it’s basic bumper-sticker wisdom: ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’” Christopher said nothing, unhappily. “Except Oakland, of course,” Rebecca added, trying to get him to smile.

  The joke went right past Christopher; he was too intent on his own thought-thread. He said earnestly, “The really funny thing is that Abbot Hackley would have loved this whole scene today. New sacraments for a scattered flock. Ad-libbing the gospel. He was always trying to get me to plunge into the world with my sleeves rolled up and do God’s work.”

  “And that’s a bad thing, somehow?”

  He gave her a rueful glance. “For someone like Hackley, of course not. He was a dynamo, always had six balls in the air and a hula hoop spinning around his neck; he was the Lord’s original busy bee. I mean, the man thrived on activity, he needed it. And he needed to be surrounded by it, he fed off the buzz. But for someone like me…”

  His voice trailed off. Rebecca steered through a sharp switchback, cresting a rise and glimpsing the stars over the ocean before the headlights found the cliff face again and they started downward, angling into another fold in the hills.

  “For someone like you—” she prompted.

  Christopher shrugged, suddenly remote. “I just wasn’t that kind of monk.”

  “What kind of monk were you?”

  He drew a breath and hesitated, seemingly inclined to answer, then shook his head wearily and turned back to the window. In the backseat, Mary Martha snored softly and stirred in her sleep, then settled again. Rebecca waited, letting the silence sharpen. When she was sure that Christopher wasn’t going to say anything else, she ventured, gently, “You’re being too hard on yourself, Mike. It was a lovely baptism.”

  He snorted dismissively, without turning.

  “It was.”

  “It was theater. Feel-good stuff. And I was just a sideshow freak, the man neither here nor there.”

  “‘All flesh shall see the salvation of God’ is feel-good stuff?”

  He turned from the window to face her with a sigh, as if resigning himself to painful articulation. “John the Baptist and Isaiah both had teeth in their message: Repent, ye generation of vipers. The chaff will soon be sorted from the wheat. A real baptism begins with that insistence on the need for repentance, with an acknowledgment of sin. But I didn’t have the nerve to make a scene. I was too busy being Father Mike, everybody’s harmless New Age priest.”

  “You’re asking for too much. The thing had its own flaky loveliness. All anybody ever intended was to do something nice for Sherilou and the kid. Nobody really wanted more.”

  “I did,” Christopher said. “But that was foolish. That’s my point.”

  She was reminded anew of Fulmar Donaldson, brooding in the high school bleachers after the fiasco of the dance: all that misspent intensity turned inward on the metaphysical. But she felt humble too. Christopher was not the only one who had choked most of the life out of an ordinary afternoon, longing for miracles.

  They drove awhile in silence. The highway turned away from the sea and started up the switchbacked rise toward Mill Valley. She wanted to take his hand in the darkness. There was still time. She wanted to tell him that everybody was disappointed almost all the time, and not just about their failure to be prophets. But the truth was that on a road like this she needed both hands to drive and she hardly knew where to start, with all that God stuff of his.

  “I suppose it’s always a mistake to expect too much from a beach party,” she offered at last, as they crested the ridge, hearing her mother in the facile, bright summation. Christopher grunted a sort of agreement that was worse than silence, and Rebecca wished she’d had the nerve to hold her tongue. But it seemed like a kind of fate, to miss the mark with him. They rolled down the mountain, back and forth through the black groves of eucalyptus, and soon enough there were streetlights, and houses on either side of the road, and the night seemed like a smaller thing.

  PART III

  I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

  I’ve been circling for thousands of years

  And I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

  a storm, or a great song?

  RILKE, Book of Hours

  Chapter Five

  Dear Brother James,

  I have to admire your truly oblivious courage, in persisting with your chipper letters. Have I not been sufficiently abusive?

  You are determined to discuss the role of the monk in the modern world, the need for contemplation amid frantic secularity, the exemplary quality of a life of prayer, as we used to do so enjoyably. But you just don’t get it. I’m no longer the ambitious student of the saints you knew at Our Lady of Bethany. I’m just another guy who’s been busted up by life and is scrambling to cover the rent on a couple of shabby rooms. I work at McDonald’s, Brother James. Four days a week I stand at the grill and cook Big Macs. My supervisor, who is twenty-two years old, seems happy enough with my work. My coworkers are all teenagers preoccupied with girls and drugs, and afraid of dying in a gang cross fire at school. They look at me as an oddity, though they are remarkably kind. I come home to an apartment behind a garage, with no furniture except a futon and a phone. I eat spaghetti almost every night. There is a yard outside my back window, where I put in the occasional pleasurable hours clearing weeds and planting flower beds. I think I have a crush on my landlady, which strikes me as simply sad.

  Meanwhile, you are abuzz with your holy projects. Like Abbot Hackley himself, you want to “transfuse the world with a revitalizing monastic spirit, to offer the fruits of contemplation” like apples in a basket. But surely you are prepared to see the irony of your ambition, and our reverend abbot’s. As cloistered monks, you both have let go of the world and striven to be free of its enmeshments, yet somehow you feel compelled to insist that your renunciation is cost-efficient, and that its fruits are marketable. How do you manage, keeping one eye on the meter of love and peace? Does it not grow tedious? The sweatshop of your prayer seems very small to me.

  In any case, my best moments at Our Lady of Bethany came when all our revitalizing monastic activities seemed irrelevant and far away, like a hectic dream, and a perfect silence came upon me. It seems to me that all I ever really did in prayer was stay with that silence, while my grand religious career crumbled into ruins around me, while Abbot Hackley cracked the whip of good works above my head and the choir sang incessantly, proclaiming God’s loud glory. It seems to me that I have never gone anywhere except deeper into that silence, which is a kind of nowhere.

  Even now, once in a long while, the grace of that silence comes upon me anew, at the heart of my broken morning prayer, and everything seems all right. I sit quite still, with nothing moving in me and nothing, blessedly, wanting to move. It is a feeling so quiet that to call it joy seems a kind of distortion. It is peace. There is nothing else: no direction, no desire, no particular clarity about my place in the world. Just peace.

  I don
’t see how I could possibly offer that peace to the world, Brother James. It is only in dying to the world that such peace comes. Nailed to the rude cross of our inevitable failings, helpless and abandoned, we see the world slip away, in spite of our best efforts to cling to it…and that peace comes. Tell that to your seminars, proclaim it from the mountain-top: God is the nail that splits our palm to break our grip on the world. He is an unfathomable darkness. He’s not what you want to hear.

  Meanwhile, I’ve got to get to work. We’re having a big special this week, two Quarter-pounders with cheese for $1.99. You’d be amazed at the kind of crowd that draws.

  Yours in Christ,

  Michael Christopher

  For weeks after the gathering at Stinson Beach, Rebecca didn’t see Michael Christopher at all. The backyard continued to develop; beds of violets and petunias appeared, along with a border of lavender and yellow slipperwort. The patch along the back fence exploded into poppies, a glorious orange sprawl. But she never saw her downstairs tenant at work. Sometimes late at night she smelled cigarette smoke, but she never managed to catch him outside. She lingered over her own evening cigarettes on the back porch, hoping he would stick his head out and say hello at least, if only to take the edge off the awkwardness. But Christopher had snapped back into his hole like a spooked gopher.

  Rebecca blamed herself. She was sure that he had somehow picked up on her fantasies, even in their relatively undeveloped form. Of course he wanted no part of secular intimacy; he was still involved, however morbidly, with God. At best, he was on the rebound.

  She realized that she had begun to think of him as “Mike.” That was disconcerting. It had been easier when he was just some down-and-out monk to her, an object of amused compassion at best, or the guy renting the in-law apartment, “Christopher,” an opaque label for a relative stranger. But “Mike” was someone she could miss.

  There was little time to brood, in any case. She was suddenly intensely busy at work. On the Monday following the baptism, wearing her best red suit, she had bluffed her way through the preview of the lightbulb man cartoon with the representative from PG&E. With twenty-three seconds of mediocre video in hand, Rebecca had relied on her sketches and emphasized the first-draft nature of the animation. The clinching moment, she was sure, was when Marty Perlman, the PG&E rep, looking a little uneasy as “This Land Is Your Land” blared and the lightbulb man did his herky-jerky waltz, had started patting his pockets unconsciously. Rebecca had turned the volume down at once and taken him out on the loading dock for a smoke break.

  “I’m not so sure about that sound track,” Perlman had confessed, when they were alone with their cigarettes. He was a small man with angelically curly blond hair, a slight stammer, and a Stanford tie. The sound track, Rebecca knew, had been his idea.

  “I’m only leaving it in at this point to keep Jeff happy,” she told him shamelessly.

  “It seemed so much…I don’t know, hipper, at the brainstorming stage.”

  “We may have been aiming too high. But I think we can still create an endearing character.”

  “I’m afraid Jeff’s attached to the incongruity.”

  “Fuck the incongruity,” Rebecca said.

  Perlman met her glance and smiled uncertainly. She was left to wonder whether she had gone too far. But when they got back into the conference room, Perlman had said he thought they could go forward with the project, with a tweak here and a tweak there. Like maybe they could change the music.

  “But I thought you liked the incongruity,” Jeff had said, with a trace of his own relief.

  “Fuck the incongruity,” Perlman told him cheerfully. “I’m thinking ‘Singing in the Rain.’”

  Meanwhile, Bob Schofield and Bonnie Carlisle had started dating. Bonnie was downplaying it, but she could not hide her happiness. The new development had not been a total surprise, after the way they had romped together at Stinson Beach. Still, it had been a little awkward at first for Rebecca, who squirmed recalling her own months of snideness while she had been dating Bob, all the laments and exasperation she had dumped on Bonnie in the confidence of their chats.

  That awkwardness aside, Rebecca found herself teased at moments by melancholy, glints bittersweet like autumn light. It wasn’t that Bonnie’s going out with him had suddenly made Bob more attractive, nothing so embarrassing as that. But the two of them getting together had somehow made the notion of a healthy compromise real. They were actually doing things by the book, straight out of Bob’s library of Relationship, and it was working wonderfully. Bonnie’s serene sanity in the relationship was a revelation, as was her…satisfaction. Not smugness, there was too much humility in Bonnie’s attitude and too much respect. Bonnie was treating Bob as something precious; she was seeing the best in him and being clear-eyed and forgiving about the worst. It made Rebecca fear that she herself was somehow ruined, incapable of real relationship. That she was asking too much and giving too little. In her own mind, real relationship happened in a place where Bob had never even showed up. She had waited there, hopefully enough at times, right there at the center of everything, quiet and still and perfectly willing to be met, while Bob had blundered around somewhere far away, somewhere loud and hectic. If only he had been able to stop, she had always thought. Or even slow down a little. But Bonnie wasn’t asking him to stop. Stopping seemed to have no part in what Bonnie and Bob were doing, which was all very get-up-and-go. Maybe that was what real love was, being willing to charge toward the busy, noisy place that someone else inhabited and find what comfort there you could.

  The success of the presentation to PG&E caused a brief panic among everyone involved in the project. Jeff had apparently been half resigned to losing the gig on the basis of the terrible animation alone, and his renewed faith had a slapdash quality. There were hasty conferences and meetings, flowcharts scrawled on blackboards and storyboards pinned on cork. There were urgent e-mails cc-ing everyone in sight. There was more talk of a dress code, which was greeted by a dangerous rumble from the graphics artists and the techs.

  Complicating the office atmosphere was the fact that Jeff’s marriage seemed to be falling apart. He had moved out of his house on Potrero Hill and was living in an apartment near Civic Center. He told Rebecca that his wife and he were “just giving it a rest,” but late one Wednesday afternoon he lingered in her office with an open bottle of Glenlivet and two coffee mugs, talking about his woes suggestively enough for Rebecca to understand that he was quietly making her an offer, that he was ready for a fresh set of woes. She knew Charlotte, Jeff’s wife, a gifted, perky woman from Minnesota who had come to work at Utopian Images at about the same time as Rebecca. Charlotte had been the artist Jeff had slept with after Rebecca, in the days when they all seemed to be making the rounds. Now, it seemed, he was working his way back in the other direction, reconsidering missed opportunities. Later that day, after she had let him know as gently as possible that it was all way too messy for her, Rebecca saw Jeff at Moira Donnell’s station, sitting on the edge of the receptionist’s desk with the same bottle of Scotch, the liquid level much diminished, swinging his leg and confiding his woes with the same air of melancholy alertness. Moira, in a thin phase, looked like she might go for it. She had missed the free-for-all atmosphere of the company’s early days and so would have less of a sense of simply being the new Charlotte.

  As the first deadline loomed, the job grew more demanding. Rebecca was late picking up Mary Martha from day care several days in a row. When the phone in her office rang on Friday at a quarter of six, Rebecca looked at the clock and sighed, thinking it was the poor woman at Bee-Well again.

  “Rebecca Martin,” she said, picking up.

  “Now, Becca, don’t get mad—”

  Even if she hadn’t recognized his voice, there was only one person in her life who started conversations that way. Her ex-husband should have known better by now. But of course, that was part of why he was her ex. “Rory, whatever this is, I haven’t got time for it.
”

  “This is serious, Bec. I’m in jail.”

  “What!”

  “Two lousy ounces,” Rory said. “And the guy came up to me. It’s fucking entrapment, is what it is.”

  “What is it that you want from me, Rory?”

  “They’ve set the bail at fifteen hundred.”

  “Can’t Miss Green Fingernails come up with that for you?”

  “I can’t call her about something like this. She’s…you know, delicate.”

  “You mean broke. And unreliable. And a little too stoned.”

  “What I’ve always loved about you, Becca, is your ability to skip the crap.”

  Rebecca looked at the clock. If she left this minute and everything went perfectly with the trains, she was going to be half an hour late picking up Mary Martha. But it was hard to picture facing her daughter after leaving Mary Martha’s father languishing in jail. And harder still to picture explaining to Mary Martha where Rory was when he failed to show up tomorrow for his regular weekend with her.

  “You’re at the city jail?” she asked resignedly.

  “Mere blocks away. I’d owe you big time, of course—and you know I’m good for it—”

  “Oh, God, Rory, if I were keeping accounts…Do these people take MasterCard?”

  “As long as it’s within your credit limit.”

  “I’ve got to make a few phone calls, get somebody to take care of Mary Martha, close out here—”

  He laughed. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  That laughter stung. Rebecca could hear in its carefree note how sure of her he had been.

  “No, you’re not, are you?” she snapped. She slammed down the phone, reached for her address book, and began to rummage through it looking for someone who could pick up Mary Martha. She could feel the resentment halfway down her throat, a bone of helpless rage. She’d worked so hard to clean up her own act, to do right by Mary Martha, but what was the use? All it took was one phone call from Rory to drag her back into his mess. As if love were a blank check she’d signed all those years ago.