“To—” She floundered briefly. She could feel that old dangerous vagueness in herself, the sudden gape of longing, blind and fierce and ravenous for some impossible delicacy. For a music she had never quite heard but always suspected was there, if she could just listen right. For a love that did not fail. For the surprise of goodness. But it all sounded wrong, clumsy, fervid.
Their glasses were still raised. Mike seemed to be in no hurry. She was grateful for that. Their eyes met, a quiet look, and Rebecca realized that she didn’t have a thing to say.
“God, I don’t know,” she laughed. “To a decent moment sneaking in once in a while, I suppose, against all odds.”
“To decent moments sneaking in,” Mike agreed, and touched her glass with his.
They sipped their wine. Rebecca was struck again by how easy it was to be with him. He was not like Fulmar Donaldson at all. He paid attention, he was right there. Like a grown-up.
“I feel like I should ask you about the monastery,” she said. “I’ve been wanting to ever since you moved in. But I don’t even know where to start.”
“Ah, well, the monastery.” He considered his wine. “I don’t know where to start either.”
“How old were you when you went in?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three.” Rebecca tried to picture him: a young man, not a boy anymore. Someone who had had some to time to live, some time to sin. Meaning, she thought, amused with herself, time to have had sex.
“I had this on-again-off-again college career,” Mike said. “I was a philosophy major, supposedly, but I kept dropping out and looking for meaning.” He heard himself and shook his head, smiling. “I used to be able to say that with a perfectly straight face. ‘What are you doing, son, now that you’ve thrown away your scholarship?’ ‘Well, I’m looking for meaning.’ I was a dreamy kid, maybe a little spoiled. Academic philosophy really had nothing to do with what I wanted. I wanted Truth with a capital T. I was shocked by the suffering in the world. And I had an unhappy love, a long-term relationship that didn’t work out, which really loosened my moorings for a while. It was all very Kierkegaardian, I suppose. To make a long story short, at around that time I spent a weekend at a Bethanite monastery in Mendocino County and had a big mystical experience. One thing sort of led to another from there.”
“So God caught you on the rebound.”
Mike laughed, clearly taken off guard. “That’s one way of looking at it. At the time I believed that I had seen through the empty values of the modern world and exhausted my personal delusions.”
“And now?”
“The values of the world still seem empty enough, on the whole. But I’ve begun to suspect that my personal delusions are inexhaustible.”
Rebecca laughed. “And your tragic love? Did you ever get in touch with her again?”
Mike’s gaze drifted to a point somewhere near the ceiling in the far corner of the kitchen. “I did, actually. I wrote to her several times from the monastery, during my probationary period.” His eyes tracked memories for a long moment; Rebecca waited respectfully, and at last Mike’s gaze returned to her face and he shook his head, as if to apologize for a lapse. “She even wrote back, very graciously. I’m afraid my own letters were insufferable—full of Thomas Merton on the ascent to God and the amazing grace that had saved a wretch like me. I mean, if you look at it from her point of view, it was mostly my life with her that I was crowing about being saved from. She never gave a damn for all my metaphysical tumult; she saw my spiritual searching as a kind of neurosis. But she loved me anyway. That was incomprehensible to me. I thought my metaphysical tumult was me.”
“How did you finally leave it with her?”
“The last time I saw her was when she came to the ceremony when I was accepted into the order as a novice. She looked exceptionally beautiful, I remember; she had gone to some trouble to look good. It’s strange, but I think that the two of us still had a chance at that point. Or maybe that was just my hunger for drama, my way of sharpening the edge of my renunciation.”
“Did you feel torn, seeing her there?”
“No, I felt very serene; it didn’t shake me up at all. I remember watching her walk back to her car, knowing that I was seeing that self-possessed sashay of hers for the last time, and feeling…I don’t know, benevolent. I’d just shaved my head, my vows were fresh; the robes covered up a multitude of lies, and the world seemed well lost. There was a sense of poignancy, at most. It was only later that the doubt crept in.”
“Doubt has a way of doing that.”
“I suppose I was hoping God would protect me, somehow. Reward me for all my glorious renunciations. But deep prayer, prolonged prayer, is a terrible mirror—kneel there long enough and everything shows. There’s no way out of eventually seeing your phoniness and dishonesty. Years later, decades later, I would catch myself during a meditation, running after her to the car in my mind’s eye, seizing her shoulder, spinning her around and kissing her—”
“Making wild love in the backseat,” Rebecca suggested.
Mike smiled. “Making wild love in the front seat. On the trunk. In the parking lot. Making love in the monastery visitors’ room. You’d be shocked at the amount of sexual fantasy that goes on in prayer.”
“Single mothers are pretty much unshockable, actually,” Rebecca said, and they laughed. The wine was having its effect, she noted; everything seemed a little slower and warmer. She could smell a ripe peach, in the fruit bowl on the counter. The kitchen seemed like a tiny island of light in the night sea of the house. She could almost hear Mary Martha’s heartbeat in the deep silence, a comforting pulse, like waves on a shore. She felt dangerously content.
On an impulse, she stood up and cut the peach into slices. The blade slipping easily through the luscious flesh seemed so blatant, so outrageously erotic that she almost giggled and pointed it out to Mike. But she caught herself. She wasn’t that drunk, Rebecca told herself sternly. She was handling a knife, after all, she was being competent in the kitchen, entertaining a guest. All this talk about sex had just made her a little giddy.
She arranged the slices into a sunburst pattern and brought the plate back to the table a little self-consciously. She and Mike each took a slice. The peach was perfect, firm but yielding, juicy and sweet.
“Oh, God,” Rebecca murmured. “To hell with sex. If I got stuck in prayer for years, I’d dream of ripe peaches.”
“The monastery had an orchard,” Mike said. “In season, I had all the ripe peaches I could eat.”
This struck them both as hilarious somehow. They laughed as quietly as they could, stifling the noise like high school kids after curfew, conscious of Mary Martha down the hall. Mike’s glass was almost empty too, Rebecca noted. She was seeing everything with a hypervivid clarity, a realness somehow realer than real. Superreality was as useless as unreality, of course, in the long run. But it was so much more satisfying while it was happening.
“Try sipping your wine with some peach in your mouth,” she said. “You’ll never long for sex again. Your existence will be complete.”
Mike complied and made appropriately orgasmic sounds of appreciation. He was so loose, it was starting to feel like an evening with Bonnie, the girls on a tear. His brown hair had finally grown in enough to stand up ruggedly, and Rebecca suppressed an urge to reach across the table and rub against the bristly grain.
Instead, she reached for the wine bottle and filled both their glasses. The Bonnie analogy left a lot of leeway. This wasn’t a date, after all. They were just two friends talking about life over a bottle of wine. Or, alternatively, she was getting drunk with the baby-sitter.
Besides, he was the one who’d left the bottle out on the table in the first place.
“So, she walks off into the sunset, leaving you to a life of deep prayer and all the peaches you could eat—” she prompted, after a sip of wine. “Or am I crudely distorting the religious life with all this emphasis on relationships?”<
br />
“If you don’t get your relationships right, one way or the other, there is no religious life. There’s no one nastier than a contemplative with a grudge.”
“So—?”
“So it was easy at first to think I’d done us both a favor. I rode the monastic routine, and I cultivated my little epiphanies. I was a good monk; I stayed out of trouble, more or less, and I persisted in my prayer—”
“You ‘kept your costume on and attended all the events.’”
Mike smiled appreciatively. “Exactly. And somewhere in the long course of getting to know myself it became clear to me that I hadn’t renounced intimacy at all. I had simply failed at it.”
“Oh, come on. That seems too harsh.”
“At first, maybe. It’s rough on the old self-image. But eventually there’s a kind of liberation in a truth like that.”
Rebecca considered this for a moment.
“I know what you mean, I think,” she said at last, tentatively. “There is that lightness that comes when you realize that you’re not going to be able to make something work, no matter how hard you try. When you finally let go of wanting, out of pure exhaustion.”
“I never let go of wanting for more than fifteen seconds at a time,” Mike said. “But oh, those fifteen seconds…”
They laughed.
“It’s the other twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty-five seconds that will get you,” Rebecca said. “I think single mothers are the real monks.”
“To the fifteen seconds,” Mike said, and they touched glasses and drank.
It really was just like being with Bonnie, Rebecca told herself. It was free and easy and jolly and occasionally deep; it was friendship. They told each other their stories, and they sympathized and commiserated; they laughed together and they drank together and they would go to bed alone.
“That’s quite a collection of artwork you’ve got buried down there in the garage,” Mike offered as he refilled their glasses.
Rebecca stiffened. He noticed at once and said quickly, “It’s not like I’ve been pawing through it or anything. I just couldn’t help but notice—”
“Oh, it’s all right. I’m a little touchy about it. Embarrassed, I suppose.”
“You’re very good, from what I’ve seen.”
“I thought you hadn’t been pawing through it.”
Mike laughed, acknowledging.
“It’s kid stuff,” Rebecca said. “I fought this big teenage war with my parents over it. My father wanted me to be an architect. Phoebe was ‘supportive.’ But she always treated my painting like a hobby, this cute little parlor trick—hang-it-on-the-refrigerator-level stuff, death through benign patronizing. It was something to do until I found a husband and had kids of my own. So I came to California.”
“And?”
“Hooked up with Rory. Had a kid of my own. Found out Phoebe was right.”
“Nonsense,” Mike said.
Rebecca shrugged and let a pointed silence settle. Mike, clearly inclined to pursue the subject, reached for the wine bottle by way of reinforcement and found that it was empty. They looked at each other, humorously teetering on the brink of opening another one.
“It’s been such a lovely night,” Rebecca said at last. “I’d hate to spoil it by becoming an ugly drunk.”
“That would be interesting,” Mike demurred, but he rose amiably enough.
He seemed as pleased as she was with the way things had gone, Rebecca thought. Even this final prudence was a kind of acknowledgment, a refusal to force the evening’s advance onto ground too uncertain. She put the wineglasses in the sink and walked Mike out to the back porch, where they paused to look up at the stars. The fog had not come in and the sky was clear. Over the ocean, a waxing half-moon seemed surprisingly bright.
“I really can’t thank you enough for taking care of Mary Martha tonight,” Rebecca said.
“That’s all right. It was refreshing to feel useful.”
“Did the woman at Bee-Well say anything? Like, what a terrible mother I am?”
Mike looked uncomfortable. “Not at all. You’re a wonderful mother.”
“What did she say?”
“Well, she was definitely unhappy. It was pretty late and the place was empty. She said Mary Martha was the last kid to be picked up, every day.”
“That’s not even true. Well, for the last couple weeks, maybe.” She looked at the sky. “God, maybe it’s finally happened.”
“What’s that?”
“When I first left Rory, I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to support Mary Martha without working so much that she and I wouldn’t really have a life together. I could just see myself becoming this work machine that made the money to pay for her day care, where I would stash her so that I could continue being the machine. And so on—around and around she goes. Then I lucked into this job at Utopian Images—very low-key place, wonderful people, a bunch of artists, lots of slack. It was perfect.”
“Sort of like McDonald’s,” Mike said.
Rebecca laughed. “Well, there were no free french fries or anything, but it was a pretty nice gig. But lately the company has been changing. We’re hustling corporate jobs, with real deadlines, high-pressure work. I used to be one of the first mothers at Bee-Well every night—I’d cut out of work a little early and beat the rush. But this latest project just eats the hours up. I look at the clock and the day is gone and I feel like I should work all night too. I’m not putting in the time I should at work, but I’m still always late picking up Mary Martha. And then at home I’m preoccupied about what I’m not getting done at work.” She caught herself and shook her head. “God, listen to me. A couple of glasses of wine, and you get the whole poor-poor-pitiful-me spiel.”
Mike was silent for so long that she began to fear she had overwhelmed him. But at last he said, tentatively, “I could pick up Mary Martha any day you have trouble getting away in time.”
Rebecca laughed. “No, no, that’s not what I was angling for. I mean, it’s very generous of you. Insanely generous. But really, it’s just been one of those days, on top of one of those weeks, inside of one of those periods. I’ll be okay. I just needed to complain.”
“But seriously, I could—”
“No. Don’t you see? That takes all the fun out of it.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of this—” Her hand took in the kitchen. “You and me sitting here in the quiet after the fray. This luxury, this rare thing, a quiet moment. You pick Mary Martha up once, and it’s a favor, and a novelty. You pick her up regularly, and it’s a chore. If you only knew how much I hated it tonight, calling you—”
“I was glad you called.”
“But will you be glad the next time? And the next? Or will you hear the phone ring at quarter of six and think, Oh, shit, I’ve got to go pick up that kid again?” She glanced at him. “Were you really going to call, by the way?”
“What?”
“If I hadn’t called you tonight. Were you actually going to call me?”
Mike looked sheepish. “Well, I wanted the timing to be right.”
Rebecca laughed. “Oh? And how is the timing now?”
Their eyes met. She was surprised by how close his face was, and by how easy it was to be this close to him. He was obviously thinking about kissing her, which seemed so fraught with complications that her mind flailed for a moment and then stopped working. She just stood there quietly, wanting to kiss him too.
“It seems about right,” Mike said, and he did kiss her, tenderly and confidently, a kiss as fine and firm and ripe as the peach, spiced with rosé. She had been kidding herself, of course. It was not at all like being with Bonnie.
Chapter Six
Dear Brother James,
Please forgive the vitriol of my last letter. I have been feeling much too sorry for myself of late, and clearly I took it out on you. As I told a friend recently, there’s no one nastier than a contemplative with a grudge. I “got plugg
ed in,” as they say out here in the big bright world, mechanizing the sin of anger. Or, as my colleagues at McDonald’s put it, “My bad.” I’m sorry I dissed you.
The ritual response to a penitential “My bad,” incidentally, is a benevolent “It’s all good.” The drama of Christ’s gift of forgiveness is reenacted a dozen times a day over the deep fryer and the grill, by teenagers, with refreshing succinctness.
Did I mention “a friend”? No doubt your ears pricked up at that, you who have been urging me to expand my social horizons. You may feel I have overdone it, indeed: I feel more than a little sheepish, after all my insistence on the emptiness of my existence, to report that I am in love.
I won’t bore you with the details. She is beautiful, smart, talented, and funny, and I am a preposterous buffoon; it is the age-old story. Our profession should have prepared us for miracles, but this one has taken me off guard. I thought I was finished with life, in some deep sense; I was prepared to spend the balance of my days perfecting my resignation, going round and round the center of God’s silence like water circling a drain. There was even a kind of peace in that. But it appears that God will not let me off so lightly.
Forgive me if this all seems a bit abrupt. Like Lazarus, in the grave too long, I am afraid that I stink as I stagger forth into the glare of this unanticipated resurrection. But I find that doesn’t matter. Jesus said that the first and great commandment is to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind; and that the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. I have spent the better part of my life wrestling with that first commandment, and God alone knows what it has meant. But it is only recently that I have begun to love my (upstairs) neighbor.
Perhaps I have taken the New Testament too literally. You and I have exercised ourselves with our dialogues on what it means to be “in the world” and what it means to be free of the world; we’ve drawn all sorts of exquisite lines no prudent soul should cross; we’ve postured and professed. But one whiff of love makes all that seem like nothing. Heaven and hell are the merest sand for castles, Brother James. I’ll take the living rose, wherever it may be.
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