The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “Don’t make a bigger deal out of this than it is.”

  He shrugged and turned toward the car, then stopped again. “Thanks again for springing me last night. I’ll never forget that.”

  “De nada,” Rebecca said, uncomfortable with the swing from self-pity into mawkishness.

  Rory hesitated, then offered, frankly rueful, “I see that you finally took the guitar pick off.”

  Rebecca blinked in surprise. It was true. The guitar pick necklace, that absurd token of their funky engagement, was sitting on the back of the toilet, where she’d set it while washing her face the night before. It was the first time in ten years that she’d been up and around without it.

  Mary Martha honked the horn again. Rory looked like he might have had more to say, but he grinned and held up his hands in a what-can-you-do? gesture. He turned and bounded down the last few steps and across the sidewalk to the car with something more like his usual energy. As he started the engine, Rebecca could hear him giving Mary Martha a mock hard time for her impatience; freed of conflicting adults, Mary Martha was laughing easily. As they drove off, the Rambler gave one sharp backfire, and Rebecca ducked instinctively, then sheepishly straightened.

  She watched the station wagon until it was out of sight, then turned back into the house. Mike gave her a smile as she came into the kitchen. She would have poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down, but he stood up and took her in his arms.

  At least they weren’t going to talk about metaphorical pizza anymore, Rebecca thought as he kissed her. She wasn’t going to sit down at the computer, and she wasn’t going to vacuum or do the laundry. She wasn’t even going to finish washing the breakfast dishes. It was a different kind of Saturday for sure, with a man waiting in the kitchen.

  “There’s so much I should be doing,” she told Mike, when they came up for air.

  “I think this is very important too,” he said.

  They kissed and kissed, standing there in the middle of the kitchen floor like revved-up high school kids with nowhere else to go. In a way, it was true: the house was dense with passion-resistant domesticity. It was inconceivable to Rebecca that they could walk from this kitchen, with the breakfast dishes still soapy in the sink, past the entryway’s overloaded rack of coats and jumbled pile of shoes and sandals; through the living room, strewn with unicorns, the VCR loaded permanently with The Little Mermaid and the TV default set to Nickelodeon; down the hall, its walls lined with crayon masterpieces; past Mary Martha’s pink bedroom and the bathroom with the tampon boxes on the back of the toilet and Rebecca’s recently washed tights hanging from the shower curtain rod; and finally into Rebecca’s own bedroom, furnished with absolutely no one else in mind, plain and cozy and purged of the erotic, a soft-edged fortress against loneliness, filled with novels by women, for women. Apparently she had really believed her amorous adventures were over. The place was as sex-proof as a fifties’ sitcom set.

  Mike, however, seemed perfectly content to make out in the middle of the kitchen all day long. His kisses had a wonderful, unhurried quality. Rebecca found herself relaxing, persuaded by his tender absorption. It was all very simple. She felt like a fish, swimming upstream against the current of his tongue.

  And then she was leading him down the hallway after all. She couldn’t remember which of them had moved first, but she was holding him by the hand, his gentle, ungainly hand, so different from all the hands she had known. The house offered surprisingly little resistance, when push came to shove. She had a sense of moving without particular effort, at just the right speed. Things were very clear at the right speed. It was not intimacy the house resisted, it was falseness: the home she’d made with Mary Martha demanded something real.

  When they got to her bedroom, she moved self-consciously to straighten the unmade bed. Mike lingered discreetly by the window, looking outward with an air that somehow allowed for the possibility that they still might call this off. She liked it that he didn’t assume he’d bought a ticket on a train that couldn’t stop.

  “You can see the ocean from here,” he marveled when she had finished with the bed. He sounded genuinely delighted, a man who lived in a basement glimpsing the broader world. Rebecca walked right up to him and kissed him, because she was afraid that he was going to start talking again about what love meant. She didn’t want to talk about what it meant. He knew damn well what love meant, he’d spent twenty years in mortal combat with it. Whether he could handle it or not remained to be seen. But they both knew what it meant.

  PART IV

  Word I was in the house alone

  Somehow must have gotten abroad,

  Word I was in my life alone,

  Word I had no one left but God.

  ROBERT FROST, “Bereft”

  Chapter Seven

  They made love through the afternoon, something Rebecca had not done in more years than she cared to count. She was intensely self-conscious at first, afraid that she might catch herself in some ridiculous imitation of herself at twenty or twenty-five. There’d been a time when she was as slick in bed as a performing seal. But there was nothing of the practiced performance in Mike’s tenderness. It seemed to take him forever just to get her bathrobe open. She’d tied the knot loosely, for ease of access; the merest pressure would have done it. But Mike kept clear for what seemed an impossibly long time, concentrating his attentions on her face and neck, on her hands, on the V of skin the robe left open at her throat and the muffled contours of her body beneath the material, treating the terry cloth as a kind of absolute barrier, so that when his hands did finally slip to her waist and the subtlest tug unloosed the belt, Rebecca was actually surprised. The move seemed like such a daring escalation by then. As her robe fell open, she heard his breath catch, a gratifying little gasp, part pleasure and part awe.

  It helped that Mike was self-conscious too, an endearing self-consciousness that bordered on shyness, on modesty. When she finally got his shirt off, he muttered something embarrassed about the slight bulge at his waist and his monastic paleness, and she caught a glimpse of an American guy who’d grown up playing basketball and going to the beach, of the tanned and lanky kid he’d been. Rebecca could sympathize with his chagrin at that kid’s submergence in middle-aged flesh. They were both rediscovering their bodies after long intervals of neglect, assessing the damage of the years through each other’s eyes. There was an odd camaraderie in such vulnerability.

  She kept waiting for the Big Stupidity, the turnoff that too much dreary experience had trained her to expect, but it never came. Mike in bed was simple, warm, and direct; he was grateful without soppiness, generous without being cloying, and he could be unexpectedly, thrillingly decisive at just the right moment. Through the course of the afternoon, Rebecca found herself beginning to trust the suppleness of their rapport. It was like finally dancing with someone suitable after years of hearing her partners counting under their breath.

  She cooked them a breakfast of Texas eggs and scallions at sunset. They ate the meal off china plates while sitting on the couch in the living room and watching the evening news. They both were languorous, spent, and ravenously hungry; and it was a sly pleasure, after so many hours in bed, to note that the world had gone on with business as usual.

  After supper, Mike did the dishes with a naturalness that was as endearing to Rebecca as any of his more acrobatic moves over the course of the afternoon. She sat at the kitchen table and watched him at the sink. He wore some ugly white boxer shorts and a white T-shirt that had no messages or slogans on it. That was one more lingering aftereffect of his life in the monastery, she supposed, that none of his T-shirts said anything. His knees were bony and his feet were enormous, but he had very nice legs.

  “Fulmar,” she said contentedly. “I should call you Fulmar.”

  “Oh?”

  “Fulmar Donaldson was the resident philosophy geek at my high school. You reminded me of him a lot when I first met you.”

  “Uh-oh,” he laug
hed. “And now?”

  “So far, so good.”

  Mike rinsed the frying pan and set it in the drainer. He sponged off the counter, then rinsed the sponge and reached for a dishtowel to dry his hands. Through the window behind him, the twilight sky over the ocean was the deepest purple Rebecca had ever seen. It was a color like a gift, a color to wrap yourself in and savor.

  “I could believe in God on a day like this,” she said.

  “It’s easy, on a day like this,” Mike agreed, and she could hear the layers in his tone, the shadings and the promises of nuance, like echoes in a canyon at night. But she didn’t even want to start, on a day like this.

  “I think I’m going to have to buy you some underwear,” she said.

  Rebecca woke in the dark from a dream of being back in high school, electric with anxiety at some fiendish algebra test complicated by nakedness and no pencil, and instantly, acutely conscious not only that she was in bed with a man for the first time in literal years but that the man was praying.

  The bedside clock, level with her nose, read 4:06 in glowing red numerals. She wasn’t sure exactly how she knew that Mike was even awake. His breath was steady and even; spooned up against her back, with one arm draped gently around her ribs and the back of his big hand brushing against her breasts, his posture was that of a sleeping, sated lover. But it was as obvious to her as if he were reading under the covers with a flashlight that he was absorbed in prayer.

  Rebecca wondered what the etiquette was for such an unprecedented situation. She would have liked to have gotten up and gone to the bathroom, but that seemed rude, if not sacrilegious. Perhaps she should pray herself? But all she could manage was a variation on a thought she had had the night before, seeing her careworn hand resting on Michael Christopher’s chest: that she needed badly to get her nails done. The weird simultaneity of the longing for prayer and for a manicure produced a sort of hybrid in her still-sleepy mind, with sprawling imagery of holy polish sliding down hands folded into the supplicatory steeple, of crimson fingertips waving in the air to dry their lurid plea and red blobs of inept prayer blossoming like measles on the nearest stainable surface. Another botched makeover, in short. She’d never been particularly good in churches or in beauty shops. She needed her beautician, a deft Vietnamese woman with a firm grip, an emery board, and a brush stroke like Matisse, to make her hands presentable at all, and God knows what it would take to get her prayer life in shape.

  Mike stirred, and Rebecca felt the hand across her ribs ease subtly upward to cup her breast. Taking this as a sort of “Amen,” she moved her hand to cover his and half-rolled so that they faced each other.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  Mike made a gratifying little noise, not quite a chuckle, not quite a murmur, a lover’s noise. “Oops. Did I wake you?”

  “I was having the weirdest dream.”

  “Oh?”

  “I was getting felt up by a guy who prays in bed.”

  Mike laughed appreciatively, as if to say, Busted. She already loved his laugh, with an intensity that seemed way ahead of the relationship’s actuality.

  “Odd,” he said. “Yet strangely suggestive.”

  “What would Freud say, do you think?”

  “That prayer is sublimated sex, of course.”

  “Oh?”

  Mike shrugged. “I don’t think Freud prayed much, to tell you the truth.” His hand was still on her breast, and as she became conscious of this, Rebecca felt her nipple stiffen beneath his fingertips. Mike felt it too and smiled in the dark. “The apostle Paul, on the other hand, exhorted us to pray unceasingly.”

  “That horny old bastard.”

  Mike chuckled and began to pay serious attention to her nipple. After a moment he bent and added the fine, flickering pressure of his tongue. His hand slipped across her belly to the pointed bone of her hip, then found the curve of her waist. Rebecca closed her eyes and arched slightly toward him, surrendering to the slow rhythms of their intimacy, a rising warmth already familiar, like the first touch of dawn in the sky behind the hills.

  Somewhere down the hallway, a floorboard creaked and they both paused, instantly alert, listening to see if it was Mary Martha. She liked that about Mike too, his instinctive, ungrudging parental consciousness. But it had just been the house shifting. They smiled at each other.

  “All clear,” Rebecca said.

  “Thank God. I was afraid for a moment it was Abbot Hackley doing a bed check.”

  Rebecca laughed. “Did he do that?”

  “Oh, yeah. Though not for the usual reasons. Most of the monks were capable of getting home from the bars on time.”

  “So what was he checking on, then?”

  Mike shrugged and traced his finger thoughtfully along the line of her collarbone and then down between her breasts. Rebecca thought for a moment that he was going to just let the question go unanswered, but at last he conceded, “He wanted to make sure I wasn’t praying.”

  She smiled uncertainly. “You’re kidding, right?”

  His hand found her belly and rested lightly there. “Nope.”

  “But isn’t that—I mean, what else is a monastery for?”

  “We weren’t technically a contemplative order. The Bethanite charism is a graced balance of service and prayer, Martha and Mary, the active and the contemplative sisters of Lazarus in Luke 10. Abbot Hackley always felt I gave short shrift to service.”

  “And?”

  “I felt he gave short shrift to contemplation, obviously.”

  “And that’s why you left?”

  Mike’s hand drifted down her belly, as if in reply, his fingers filtering tenderly through her pubic hair. Rebecca drew a breath as a fingertip found her vaginal lips, still wet from the earlier play around her breasts. He stroked her gently, penetrating, and she softly moaned.

  “I suppose that we could discuss the relative merits of the life of service and the life of passive prayer,” he said.

  “I suppose we could let that discussion wait,” Rebecca breathed, and closed her eyes as his fingers moved. He was actually pretty deft for a guy who gave short shrift to service.

  The telephone rang on Sunday morning at precisely ten o’clock, startling Rebecca out of a deep sleep. She and Mike had been awake until just after dawn, talking in hushed, intimate tones, exchanging life histories and rapturous confidences like children at camp after lights-out. She knew now that he had in fact played basketball in high school and that if he had had a better outside shot his religious vocation would have had to wait. He had first been kissed in the seventh grade by his best friend’s cousin from Philadelphia. He could play the clarinet. She was the fourth woman he had slept with, and she knew the stories of the previous three disasters, which all sounded mild enough to Rebecca, even the star-crossed affair that had led him into the monastery. They still had not talked much about God, which was a relief in a way, because Rebecca could not imagine talking about God without sounding stupid and crude. But she was afraid that they were avoiding the topic the way you would avoid discussing the wife while having an affair with a married man.

  “It’s my mother,” she told Mike as the phone continued to ring. “Like a German train, the Sunday morning 10:01. I’ve finally trained her to not call before ten. She wakes up at six and starts tapping her toes.”

  “Let the machine get it,” Mike said languidly.

  “I can’t do that. She’ll fret.”

  “Let her fret,” he said, and buried his nose in her hair just behind her ear, which seemed like an excellent argument indeed for letting Phoebe fret.

  The phone rang for the fourth time, and the answering machine kicked in. They could hear Rebecca’s recorded voice in the kitchen, too far away to make out individual words but sounding excruciatingly chipper. Peppy, even, Rebecca thought. How had her machine greeting ended up sounding like a high school cheerleader’s? She vowed to change it at the first opportunity to something with a more existential tone.

&
nbsp; The hideous beep sounded, and Phoebe’s voice came on, droll and indulgent.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk to her,” Rebecca told Mike. “She’ll imagine the worst otherwise. She’s perfectly capable of hopping into her car and driving over here to administer CPR.”

  “I was hoping to do that myself,” Mike murmured, continuing with his attentions to her neck.

  She smacked him affectionately. They were already getting silly with each other. It was wonderful. “I just wonder how I’m going to tell my mother I’m sleeping with a guy who works at McDonald’s.”

  Phoebe was still chattering blithely away. Even from the other side of the house, it was clear that she was speculating on all the things that might be keeping Rebecca from the phone. Rebecca picked up before the theories got embarrassing.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “Were you in the shower?” Phoebe asked, without missing a beat.

  “Nope,” Rebecca said, amused at how smug she sounded.

  Phoebe picked up on the note instantly. “My goodness, Rebecca, you’re in bed with a man.”

  Rebecca smiled at Mike, who smiled back. He had a rumpled, drowsy air and needed a shave, but he seemed perfectly content to lie back on the pillow and watch her deal with her mother. She marveled anew at how easy it was to be with him. She had expected some awkwardness, first thing in the morning, passion’s sober backlash—a belated attack of celibate conscience, maybe, the bad moment in Eden. But Mike was simply acting…well, happy. It was almost disorienting.

  “It appears that I am,” she told Phoebe.

  “Do I know him?”

  Rebecca covered the phone’s mouthpiece. “She’s onto us already. Are we keeping this secret for any reason?”

  He hesitated, and her heart gave a little thud of dismay. No, she thought. No, no, no, don’t say it. But he said, “Maybe that would be best, for now.”

  She stared at him for a moment in frank dismay. It was probably too late for him to take it back, but she still hoped he might catch himself and try. But Mike looked away. Rebecca was keenly aware, suddenly, of the mass of him, of the sheer volume of his flesh beside her. A big naked man, she thought ruefully. A nakedness that could only get more awkward now.