The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  She called her regular baby-sitter, but the girl had a date. Rebecca’s backup baby-sitter wasn’t home, nor was her number three. Bonnie Carlisle wasn’t home either. No doubt she was out with Bob somewhere, enjoying a relationship with a man for whom she would never have to post bail.

  Even Phoebe was out. It was Friday night, and everyone had a life.

  Rebecca stared at the phone for a moment, knowing that she was going to have to call Michael Christopher. It felt like squandering something precious. She’d been savoring her anticipation of their next conversation; the weeks of unnatural silence had been a kind of marinade, and she had looked forward to tasting the result. But to call this way, in prosaic need, just ground the subtlety into hamburger.

  Still, she was out of options. He answered on the second ring. “Hello?”

  “Uh, Mike?”

  “Rebecca!”

  She took comfort in the fact that he had recognized her voice and that he sounded genuinely pleased. She could hear music in the background, a Bach mass playing on what sounded like a boom box. The poor man lived in the last bubble of serenity in the Western hemisphere, and she was here to burst it. “Mike. I’m so sorry to be disturbing you like this—”

  “No, no, I’m glad you did. I’ve been meaning to call you, in fact.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Well, you know. Just to thank you for the lovely outing last weekend, and so on. To say what a nice time I had.”

  Rebecca laughed in spite of herself. “That was two weeks ago, Mike. Almost three.”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “Plus, if I remember correctly, you ended up feeling like the whole thing had been a giant mistake. I had the impression that you were just glad to have survived it and that all you wanted afterward was to be left alone.”

  There was a silence, and she cursed her own big mouth. But Mike persisted wryly, “And yet still, I’ve been meaning to call you. Or at least to hang around suggestively in the backyard with a cigarette.”

  Clearly, he had been recovering. He was a solitary man, and his sense of social time was flawed. But it was nice to know he had been thinking of her, however ineffectually.

  “Well, that just makes me feel worse to be calling you up for a huge favor,” she said.

  “A favor?” he repeated.

  She hesitated at the sudden guarded note, decided to ignore it, and plunged on. “I’m stuck downtown with a crisis on my hands, and I’m not going to be able to pick up Mary Martha at her day care before they close the place. I’ve called everybody I know and—”

  “Uh-huh,” he murmured vaguely.

  “—and honestly I wouldn’t have called you if I weren’t at my wit’s end.”

  Mike was silent, for just long enough that she was about to tell him to forget it, it had been a bad idea. But in the nick of time he said, with passable sincerity, “Well, of course. Of course. I’d be glad to.”

  “It’s only a couple of blocks away, on 38th, just past Irving,” she said, ashamed to feel so relieved. “You can walk over and back in ten minutes. I’ll call and tell them you’re coming. And of course Mary Martha will be ecstatic. She thinks you’re wonderful.”

  “Well, I think she’s wonderful.”

  It was all so genial and love-thy-neighbor. She would much rather have had an uncomfortable conversation with him about what those two weeks of silence had meant. That was a relationship. This was glorified baby-sitting arrangements, and even then he’d only agreed after a truly unnerving hesitation, when she’d backed him into a corner.

  But apparently she needed a baby-sitter, even a slightly unwilling one, more than she needed a relationship. “Well, thank you,” she said. “You’re a lifesaver. You’re a saint.”

  Mike laughed, so easily dismissive of the extravagance that she felt reassured. “Hardly.”

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can, but if you could cook her up a box of macaroni and cheese or something—?”

  “Consider it done.”

  Rebecca gave him the address and thanked him again, then dialed the long-suffering woman who ran the Bee-Well Kindergarten Day Care to tell her the cavalry was on the way. The woman’s reply was clipped short with a you’re-a-bad-mother tone. Mary Martha was amusing herself nicely, she said, as if to underline the child’s heroic adjustment to a life of appalling neglect.

  Rebecca rolled with the punches and got through the call, but as soon as she hung up she began to cry. She cried for almost ten minutes, which seemed like a tremendous luxury, given all the things she had to do.

  She walked the five long blocks down Bryant Street to the city jail amid the remnants of the rush hour. The Friday evening happy hour was in full swing, but the bars soon gave way to discount mattress stores, boarded-up storefronts, and cheap cell phone outlets, the edgy waste of Bryant Street between the freeway entrances, a little too far south for comfort even in full daylight. Rebecca walked briskly, keeping her eyes to herself, trying to look like a woman who had a gun in her purse. She knew she’d been foolish not to take a cab. But she’d been so mad at Rory when she set out that she’d felt bulletproof.

  The shacklike shops of the bail bondsmen, hawking their services in lurid neon, announced the specialized country of the law. The street around the Hall of Justice was three-deep in police cars. Here too the weekend crush was just getting started: along with the uniformed men with guns, people in trouble came and went, with businesslike briskness. And people involved with people in trouble, Rebecca thought, people like her, people not really dressed for this—how did one dress for this?—all of them coming and going in the great democracy of trouble.

  She entered the main doors self-consciously, passed through the metal detector, and floundered briefly in the lobby before spotting the large sign directing her. The desk where bonds were posted seemed remarkably like the returned merchandise counter at a department store. Rebecca had been hoping for a touch of dark humor, for some shared appreciation of this aberrant transaction—a wink, at least, toward the sheer weirdness of this Friday night. She felt like making sure that the man behind the counter knew that she was no longer sleeping with the person she was bailing out, that that was over, done, finito, long ago. Sure, she had loved Rory once, but what did that mean? There were a host of subtleties and qualifications to be conveyed.

  But the clerk receiving her money seemed bored to the point of surliness, and she held her tongue. He dragged her credit card through the scanner, tapped some mundane data into his computer in a dry, pained way, and hit “Enter.” She signed off on the credit card slip. The printer beside him chattered and spewed a single sheet, and he stapled the yellow second copy of the credit card slip to it.

  “That’s it?” she asked as he handed her the receipt. It felt like a dentist visit that had gone too easily.

  “That’s it. Waiting area’s to your left.”

  “Don’t you at least have to call someone and let them know that—?”

  “It’s computerized…. Next!”

  Rebecca felt the flimsiness of those electronic impulses, the unlikelihood of anything so feathery tickling the machinery of justice into opening its jaws. But then, the whisper of duty and compassion that had brought her here seemed flimsier still. A hint, merely, like the residual background static of the big bang, imperceptible to normal instruments. And yet Rory had relied upon that fading buzz completely. Was that faith? The implicit trust in a genuine connection? Or was it simply cunning?

  Sitting in the waiting area with half a dozen other unhappy women, clutching her receipt, Rebecca suspected the worst. She was in the grip of a compulsive response. Her life consisted of a series of compulsive responses. She was just a big kneecap waiting to be tapped by a rubber hammer.

  By the time Rory appeared some forty-five minutes later, ludicrous in his baggy beach shorts, grinning his unfazed grin, clutching a plastic bag with his watch and wallet in it, she had worked herself into a furious state.

  “I thought you mig
ht have decided to just leave me to rot in there,” he said cheerfully.

  “Believe me, if it weren’t for Mary Martha—”

  “You’re an angel, Bec.”

  “I’m sure that angels do this sort of thing without wanting to kill the person they’re doing it for.”

  Rory just laughed, which only made her angrier. The depthless innocence of his blue eyes was untouchable. She had once seen animal joy in that pure blue. Now all she could think was that his T-shirt needed washing.

  “Are we done here?” she asked. “Is there anything else you have to sign?”

  “No, I’m all set. I’ve been surprised by the lack of paperwork. There’s no hard copy! I have the sense that if I could just hack into their computer and delete a file or two, I could make this whole thing disappear.”

  “It’s just a big damned romp for you, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t see any point in getting grim, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, you never could,” Rebecca conceded wearily, feeling the uselessness of her spite. The institutional clock on the wall read 8:45 beneath its grate. With a little luck on the bus transfer, she could be home by ten. She headed for the exit, with Rory trailing her.

  She was unwillingly conscious of his physical grace. She had cherished Rory’s sense of effortless balance long after she had begun to suspect that he would never grow up. It had been like believing in God because a sunset was beautiful. A faith that cheap could not endure for long. But even now, long after she’d seen how little his grace could actually redeem, the languid poise of Rory’s animal amble beside her soothed something in Rebecca.

  On the sidewalk outside she turned toward Ninth, with Rory still beside her. At the bus stop, she lit a cigarette.

  “You really ought to quit that,” Rory said.

  “Let’s not talk about lifestyle right now, Rory.”

  He shrugged and subsided. They stood together in silence. He still wanted something, Rebecca noted, though she couldn’t imagine what. She felt cleaned out.

  When the 19-Polk bus appeared in the distance, she turned to him and said, “I’m not going to tell Mary Martha about this.”

  She had guessed right: Rory looked relieved. “Gosh, thanks, Bec—”

  “For her sake, not for yours. But I don’t know what I’m going to say once you’re actually in jail.”

  “I’m not going to jail. This won’t stick. They set me up.”

  The bus pulled up. Rebecca dropped her cigarette on the sidewalk and crushed it out.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Goodnight, Rory.”

  He touched her arm. “Thanks a million, Rebecca. I won’t forget this. I owe you.”

  That meant something to him, she knew. She wondered how he was getting home. But Rory was never at a loss. He’d probably already called his delicate girlfriend. She’d come whisk him away and they would have passionate reunion sex. It would be beautiful, like a sunset. It would cost them nothing.

  “You’re welcome,” Rebecca said. And she climbed onto the bus. Real love cost so much more; and if Rory had taught her nothing else, it was to cut her losses.

  When she got home, the house seemed strangely dark and silent. She usually walked in to a cheerful glare and din; her teenage baby-sitters curled up on the couch with every lamp burning, and they all lived and died by the TV Guide. But the living room was empty and the television wasn’t on.

  Rebecca took an anxious step inside and noted with relief that the kitchen was lit up. Looking down the dark hallway, she could see Michael Christopher sitting at the table, absorbed in a book. She paused instinctively, not wanting to disturb him. Framed by the kitchen door, the scene had a timeless quality; it might have been a study by Vermeer, a luminous domestic moment of contemplation. Mike was dressed in jeans and a rough plaid lumberjack shirt, sea green and blue, with the sleeves rolled up; in the stark light of the single ceiling bulb, the fine golden hairs on his forearms were visible. His angular face in silhouette was poised in the tenderness of concentration. He turned a page, and the crisp ripple only made the silence more real; the way he cradled the battered paperback in his big, homely hands made her think of prayer.

  Rebecca could hear their old grandfather clock, the one that only ran in spurts, ticking in the living room. She didn’t want to move; certainly she didn’t want to speak. The labor of producing the usual noise seemed unbearable. She just wanted this silence to go on.

  A floorboard creaked beneath her feet. Mike glanced up, gently indulgent, no doubt expecting Mary Martha. She stepped into the light and smiled at him, afraid that he would think she had been spying. But he just smiled back, a simple smile of welcome. He’d been reading a Joseph Wambaugh novel, which struck her as funny. She had the odd sense, as she often did with him, that their intimacy had somehow run on ahead of them, like a dog on a beach. It was all so natural and easy.

  “I didn’t even hear you come in,” he said.

  “You seemed so peaceful I hated to disturb you. Did everything go all right here? Mary Martha was no trouble?”

  “Mary Martha was fine. We had a great time. And your crisis?”

  “It was a little overbilled as a crisis, I suppose. My ex-husband had gotten himself arrested.”

  Mike smiled wryly. “That sounds like a crisis to me.”

  “More of an aggravation. We’ve been split up for years.”

  “But you’re still friends?”

  “I don’t know if ‘friends’ quite catches it. An ex is really like another child. Rory is, at least. I can’t help but feel responsible for the failures in his upbringing, in some dark way. And bottom line, he’s Mary Martha’s father. I bailed him out and sent him on his merry way.”

  “Just like that.”

  She glanced at him appreciatively. “Well, that and a few hours of helpless rage seemed like enough for one night.” She set her sketch case down, shrugged off her coat, and hung it on the back of a chair. “I should go check on Mary Martha. Did she get to sleep all right?”

  “She made me read to her from The House at Pooh Corner until she dropped off.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  He had risen, apparently intending to leave. Rebecca hesitated. At this point, she would usually have paid off the baby-sitter and sent her on her way. But she hadn’t wanted Mike to be a baby-sitter in the first place, and it was impossible to imagine pulling out her wallet and handing him a ten.

  “Would you be shocked if I offered you a glass of wine?” she asked.

  Mike laughed. “Why in the world would I be shocked?”

  It always surprised her, the way his face lit up. She realized that she forgot something crucial about him when he wasn’t laughing; the natural melancholy of his features allowed a grimness to seep into her image of him. She would find herself suspecting him of secret judgments, of morbidity, self-righteousness, the bleakest extremes of dour religiosity. And then he would laugh. It was as if a light turned on and she could see him clearly.

  She said sheepishly, “Well, you know, with your having been a monk for so long and all—”

  “Monks are pretty much unshockable, actually. It comes with the territory. At Our Lady of Bethany, we were far from teetotalers. We had our own vineyard. We even had a drunk or two.”

  “Drunken monks?!”

  “Oh, yes. Monks drunk as skunks. Drunk monks in deep funks.”

  “Now I’m shocked.” She was flirting, she realized, which was crazy. He was flirting. Wasn’t he? Rebecca was pretty sure he was. Not that it could go anywhere. But it would be good for a giggle with Bonnie later.

  “Well, I’m going to go look in on Mary Martha,” she said. “There’s an open bottle of wine in the fridge, and you can grab a couple wineglasses out of the left-hand cupboard…Unless you would rather just go home?” she added hurriedly, in case she had misread him.

  He smiled unambiguously enough. “No, no, I’d be delighted to join you.”

  “I hope you don’t mind rosé.”
r />   “Drunk monks drink pinks,” Mike said.

  Mary Martha was asleep, which was a good sign. With baby-sitters she didn’t like, she would often stay awake until Rebecca got home, keeping the lamp on and surrounding herself with unicorns, chanting soft conversations to herself. But tonight only the night-light burned. By its faint glow, Rebecca could see that Mary Martha’s eyes were closed and her breathing was easy. With her brow slightly knitted, as if in concentration, she looked just like Rory in her sleep. She would always look like Rory, Rebecca thought, and she wondered if that would always hurt.

  Back in the kitchen, Mike was sitting quietly at the table with two glasses of wine, generously filled, arrayed before him like a still life. Rebecca noted that the open bottle was within easy reach. She wondered whether this implied that he didn’t expect to stop at one glass; had she been setting the table, she would have put the bottle back in the refrigerator and faced the refill issue in its own time. It was already late, after all; and what if they only had conversation enough for one glass each? She had grown cautious, wary of half-glass conversations, sipping all those months away with Bob.

  She sat down and reached for her wine; Mike reached for his in response, and they paused self-consciously over the lifted glasses. But even the pause seemed like a subtle kind of progress. Bob would have already declared, “To us!” Rebecca realized that her exhaustion was gone; the long day and its complications seemed far away. There was just this simple, interesting thing, this man she liked. This man she was just beginning to get to know.

  “To ex-husbands staying out of jail?” Mike suggested wryly.

  Rebecca laughed and almost agreed. It was the kind of toast she and Bonnie might have made, rueful and humorous, a toast to just having survived the day. But then she caught herself. “No. Let’s drink to something new.”

  He inclined his head. “All right. To something new.”