Yours in Christ (as ever),
Mike Christopher
Rebecca woke earlier than usual on Saturday morning, with a trace of a headache and a sense of bleak lucidity. I’m glad we didn’t open that second bottle of wine last night, she told herself. It seemed like a very middle-aged thought.
She still wasn’t sure whether she was glad that Michael Christopher had kissed her. She was unsure in theory, at least. Viscerally, she was delighted. Even now, she could savor the warm thrill of the moment, the small melting of surrender, the unexpected authority of Mike’s lips. She could feel the bristle of his late-night growth of beard and smell his weirdly comforting male smell. His hand had come up to her cheek, in a tender, tracing gesture. She had felt buoyed and enveloped; everything had stopped. It was the moment she had secretly been longing for. But the moment she’d been longing for was just a moment. This was the next moment.
She felt like making phone calls: to Bonnie, to her mother. The situation called for consideration at length. But she suspected that both women would be unreservedly supportive of the kiss and its potential consequences. Bonnie believed that love could be competently assembled from available elements like a casserole, and Phoebe believed in destiny; this made both of them a little rash in matters of the heart, in Rebecca’s opinion. Certainly she didn’t have Bonnie’s confidence in her own cooking skills. She had believed in destiny herself, of course, once upon a time; but Rory had been her destiny then. You looked at your destiny differently after a slightly messy divorce.
Am I spoiled for life? Rebecca asked herself. Ruined by cynicism? Truly, I don’t think that I am. I am a woman who bailed her first husband out of jail last night. I am a realistic single mother with too much to do already. Love is all very well, but the bathtub hasn’t been scrubbed in weeks.
She resolved to keep her balance. In all likelihood, Christopher would pull a Fulmar Donaldson on her anyway and act like nothing had happened. And maybe that would be for the best. She needed the downstairs rent more than she needed half-drunken high school make-out sessions. If anything, she was sorry to have blown what seemed like a promising friendship.
But she kept thinking about the kiss. The weight of Mike’s lips on hers appeared to have sunk right to the center of her body, where it spun imperturbably on an axis of its own, exerting its own dense gravitational field. It was embarrassing; she was a black hole of romance. Had she learned nothing since her sophomore year of high school?
Still, it had been a lovely kiss.
The sound of Mary Martha dragging a chair to the counter in the kitchen so that she could reach the cereal cupboard brought Rebecca out of her reverie. She climbed out of bed and pulled on her coziest terry cloth bathrobe. In the kitchen, Mary Martha had already settled in at the table with her Cheerios. She seemed pleasantly surprised to see Rebecca up so early, which cost Rebecca a pang of her recurrent weekend guilt.
“Good morning, Miss Bright-and-Early,” she said, giving her daughter a kiss. “I missed you last night.”
“Something important came up,” Mary Martha allowed, so precisely that Rebecca realized her daughter must be quoting Mike. Apparently he had taken a minimalist line in explaining her absence.
“It sure did,” she said. “But it’s all taken care of now. Did you have a nice time with Mike?”
Mary Martha nodded happily, her mouth full of cereal.
“What did you do? Did you watch The Little Mermaid?”
Mary Martha hesitated, then confided, “Mike didn’t know how to work the VCR.” Clearly she felt that this reflected badly on him.
Rebecca laughed. “I guess they didn’t have VCRs in the monastery.”
“They had one, but Mike never had to work it. He didn’t know how to work the microwave either.”
Her daughter’s tone of generous indulgence was touching. Rebecca asked, “So what did you do?”
“He cooked some spaghetti on the stove, and we played unicorns. He was the big unicorn and I was the small one.”
“Was he a good unicorn?”
“Of course,” Mary Martha said, as if this went without saying.
“And how was the spaghetti?”
Mary Martha rolled her eyes.
“Oh, Mom,” she said, with the slight exasperation she showed sometimes when Rebecca was just a little too slow. “You can’t mess up spaghetti.”
Later, after her daughter had gone to her room to prepare for Rory picking her up, Rebecca stood at the sink washing the dishes. She was just starting to rinse the second wineglass from the night before when Michael Christopher came out the garage door into the backyard below her, dressed in his usual jeans and wearing a light jacket against the fog that had come in overnight.
She leaned forward expectantly, to make herself as visible as possible in case this was some kind of bashful reconnaissance, but Mike kept his eyes averted from the kitchen window. He was carrying a pair of clippers and seemed prepared to go to work in the garden as he often did on Saturday mornings, as if nothing had happened.
Though she had told herself it would be this way, Rebecca felt a bleak thud of disappointment somewhere in her abdomen. She was surprised by how pained she was. He was a Fulmar type after all; there was nothing but awkwardness ahead. And now she was going to have to recover from that delicious kiss as if it were a case of food poisoning.
But Mike, moving briskly, spent a few minutes clipping poppies, nasturtiums, and a sprig of lavender; and once he had a bouquet assembled he mounted the back steps without hesitation. Rebecca was so startled by his approach that she was slow to respond, and he knocked on the back door before she could move to open it.
“Good morning,” Mike said shyly, when she did finally get to the door. The confidence of his ascent had vanished sometime between his knock and her answer. His eyes were lowered and he held out the flowers without quite looking up. “For you. I’m afraid they’re not exactly up to professional standards—”
She took the bouquet. “Not at all, they’re beautiful. Thank you.”
“I hope I’m not being…presumptuous.”
Rebecca laughed. “You were presumptuous last night. This is common decency.”
Mike met her eyes for the first time, saw that she was teasing, and gave her a tentative smile.
“Would you like some coffee?” she asked, conscious suddenly of her bathrobe, her bare feet, and her uncombed hair, but thinking, What the hell, here he is. The collision of high courtship and dowdy domesticity was disorienting, but she felt quietly elated. What good was all her prudence if it disappeared at the first sign of actual danger? She felt pleased enough to make all sorts of wild mistakes.
“I’d love some coffee,” Mike said.
She stepped back to let him in. He entered the kitchen diffidently, blinking as if at a brighter place and looking around as if he had never been there. This sudden advent of Relationship was as vertiginous for him as it was for her, Rebecca realized. Maybe even more so: she’d had one eye out for intimacy all along. That empty half of the bed could seem like a failure or a promise, but in any case she had often imagined it being filled, while Christopher’s celibacy all these years had been voluntary. It had been part of who he was. He probably felt like he was jumping off a cliff.
Mike sat down at the table, settling into the chair he had used the night before as if he were afraid someone had sawed halfway through the legs in the meantime. Rebecca found an empty vase for the flowers, filled it with water, and set the arrangement at the center of the table. Then she moved to the cupboard and stretched to take two china coffee cups and saucers off the top shelf. Phoebe had given her a complete set of Messen chinaware as a wedding gift, no doubt with visions of family dinner parties in the genteel tradition, but Rebecca hadn’t laid a single setting during her entire marriage to Rory, whose catch-as-catch-can meals seldom called for more than paper plates or eating Chinese takeout from the boxes. After the divorce, she had used the china for everything for a while, china bowls fo
r breakfast, china salad plates for lunch, the whole china array for defiantly elegant dinners, complete with candlelight, while Mary Martha sat across the table in her high chair and ate her mashed peas and carrots out of a china finger bowl. But that routine was exhausting, once Rebecca had started working again. Also, the casualty rate on the finger bowls was very high. Eventually the china had been relegated to the highest shelf and more or less forgotten.
“I hear you failed the VCR test last night,” she said as she poured the coffee.
“It was a bad moment,” Mike allowed. “Mary Martha was incredulous, like when I had no swimsuit. I felt very third world. But she was tolerant, in the end. We ended up playing with her unicorns. Did you know they all have two names?”
She brought the coffee to the table. “Milk’s in the carton, sugar’s in the bowl,” she said. “Two names? You mean, like first and last names?”
Mike busied himself with his coffee. She had suspected he would take it black—monastic austerity down the line. But he used an unascetic splash of milk and a truly worldly amount of sugar.
“No,” he said, stirring. “More like a public name and a secret name.”
“The unicorns have secret names?” Rebecca repeated uneasily, adding her own milk, no sugar. She prided herself on keeping up to date on Mary Martha’s unicorn lore.
Mike looked uncomfortable. “I hope I haven’t been indiscreet.”
“No, I’m glad she felt she could confide in you.” Rebecca shook her head. “She’s a deep kid. She scares the hell out of me sometimes. Just when I think she’s surprised me for the last time, a whole new angle opens up.”
“I don’t think people are ever done surprising each other.”
Rebecca laughed. “Well, that’s for sure.”
Their eyes met. Mike flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“I did,” Rebecca said. And, as he still seemed flustered, “It was a very good kiss.”
“That’s a relief. I mean, I thought so too—” he added hurriedly. “But I was afraid there had been…you know, changes in fashion, or something, in the meanwhile. New techniques developed.”
“No, no, the fundamental things apply.”
They sat for a moment, looking, inevitably, at the flowers at the center of the table. The bright orange of the poppies and the deeper orange-red of the nasturtiums worked surprisingly well together, Rebecca noted. It had seemed like such a naive bouquet when he brought it up the steps.
“Questions of technique aside—” Mike began resolutely, if a little reluctantly.
“It was just a kiss,” Rebecca said. “A relationship doesn’t stand or fall on a single kiss.”
“But it changes with one.”
“Only if you want it to.”
“No, it changes,” Mike insisted, and she felt a warm thrill pass through her, because he had insisted, and because he had caught her in a kind of slickness. She realized that she had been giving him a handicap in her mind, making allowances for a monk’s presumed ineptness, playing things casually and a little too broadly. But he was very precise.
She said, “I suppose that what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t think we need to be in a big hurry to decide What It All Means. I just got out of a relationship with a man who had everything mapped out from the get-go, and let me tell you, I’d much rather endure a little creative uncertainty.”
“That’s Bob?” Mike asked, with just enough endearing relief that she realized he had been worried about her availability. “The guy I met at your mother’s party?”
“He’s dating my best friend now, and I couldn’t be happier for them. I expect a wedding invitation by the end of the month. He’s a single-minded man.”
“And you don’t want a single-minded man?”
Rebecca groaned. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t start asking me what I want, as if I’m ordering a pizza and you’re the only place in the Outer Sunset that delivers. I want reality.”
“Pot luck. Whatever the delivery guy has in the box.”
“To strain the analogy.”
They were silent for a moment, and she was sure that she had been too brusque. But after a moment Mike offered, tentatively, “I’m pretty clear that I don’t want anchovies.”
Rebecca laughed, surprised and pleased. She had noticed before that Mike didn’t so much roll with her punches as he turned them into something else. It was a kind of droll conversational judo.
“Or pineapples,” he went on, heartened by her response. “Have you ever had one of those so-called Hawaiian pizzas? I mean, it’s like a beach after a typhoon, with pineapples and coconut and all sorts of other tropical debris—”
“You make a good point,” she conceded. “In fact, I think we can rule out fruit on pizzas in general.”
“Well, there, you see? That’s all I’m looking for, a few broad principles to start with.”
Rebecca started to reply, but a movement in the doorway caught their attention. They turned simultaneously. Mary Martha, dressed for the beach with one of Rory’s West Coast Surfing Championship T-shirts billowing around her like a poncho, stood quietly contemplating them with her bright blue eyes.
“Are you going to have pizza for breakfast?” she asked, disapproving but intrigued.
“Of course not, sweetheart,” Rebecca assured her.
“Not if it has anchovies on it,” Mike said. He was really very firm about it.
Rory showed up to pick up Mary Martha half an hour later, just after ten o’clock, which was very early for him. But he had somehow found time to get a disconcertingly bad haircut since the night before. His ponytail had been lopped off with the crudeness of a battlefield amputation and the rest of his hair hacked short with no clear plan. It was a haircut like a kind of punishment, or a penance. Rebecca suspected that he had done it himself.
“How do you like my new look?” Rory demanded at once, subdued but defiant.
“It’s terrible, as you must know. Did you have a fight with your girlfriend or something?”
“I just thought it was time for a change.”
Rebecca decided not to rub it in. The arrest had obviously shaken Rory more than he’d been willing to let on. Maybe this was his way of backing toward maturity, a transitional phase, the sloppy molting of a used-up adolescence. Or maybe it was just another childish gesture.
She tried to keep Rory in the front hall while she went to get Mary Martha, but his animal sense led him straight back into the kitchen and she had to introduce him to Christopher. The two men nodded to each other genially and chatted about the weather, which they agreed was dreary. Rory was surprisingly civil, and Mike paid grave attention to his small talk. Rebecca noticed that Mike had stayed in his seat, while Rory lounged awkwardly by the sink. She liked it that Mike had held his ground.
“China cups,” Rory noted laconically. “Well, la-di-da.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Mike offered, before Rebecca could wave him off.
“No thanks, I never touch the stuff,” Rory said. “I believe that caffeine is part of a government conspiracy to keep the zombies working.”
“It works for me,” Mike conceded, cheerfully enough.
Mary Martha came in with her little overnight bag. She kept her eyes downcast, a dinghy riding out a storm of adult politeness. She was markedly cool toward Mike, Rebecca observed, with none of her usual flirtatious sparkle. But no doubt Mary Martha felt her loyalty to Rory as a constraint.
Rebecca hurried father and daughter toward the front door before anyone’s goodwill could falter.
“You might have mentioned…” Rory said, pausing on the porch while Mary Martha skipped down the steps toward the Rambler.
“It’s none of your business. But he’s just a friend.”
“Yeah, right.”
The sarcasm had no bite to it, though. Rebecca realized that she felt sorry for Rory. He looked so bedraggled and discouraged, and he clearly thought that Mike had spent the night. What was
more interesting to Rebecca was how impersonal her pity was. Some secret balance had tilted, just since last night; whatever she felt for Mike, wherever that kiss took them, she felt free of Rory in a way she never had before. Not free of longing—she had been done with wanting Rory long ago. But free of bitterness, able to take him lightly.
And Rory felt it too. She sensed his groping for the abrasive grip of their usual exchanges and sliding off this sudden new equanimity. He seemed disoriented without her exasperation, and strangely diminished. How conscious had he been, all these years, of needing that morbid friction? How conscious was he, now, of what had actually changed? She had done a cruel thing, it seemed. She had moved on emotionally.
Mary Martha, waiting in the Rambler’s front seat, honked the horn impatiently.
“Oops, Her Highness awaits,” Rory said.
“Have fun. Bring her back in one piece.”
He started down the stairs, then stopped and turned. “By the way, you were right about me having a fight with Chelsea. I swear you’re psychic sometimes.”
Rebecca recognized the old pattern. Rory never talked about anything serious without at least one foot out the door and his escape route clear; their most important conversations had often taken place with his car motor running. “Because of the arrest?”
“She says it’s time I cleaned up my act. The same old crap.”
“Is that what this haircut’s about? Cleaning up your act?”
“I was so pissed off at her this morning that I cut it myself.” He gave her an odd, appealing look. “Be honest now. You really don’t like it?”
“It’s the rough draft of a haircut, Rory. It’s got great potential.”
“I look like a fucking loser.”
“It’s nothing eight dollars at Supercuts won’t fix.”
“It’s like Samson and Delilah, except I cut it off myself,” Rory said bitterly. “I fucked myself. As always. It should be on my tombstone: A helluva surfer, but not so great on dry land.”
The Monk Downstairs Page 12
