“No, you don’t know him,” she told her mother. “I barely know him myself.”
“Oh, dear, is that really wise?”
“We all make mistakes,” Rebecca said.
As soon as she had hung up the phone, Rebecca slid out of the bed and grabbed her bathrobe.
“I’m sorry—” Mike began as she was furiously knotting the belt. She had known he would begin that way. She had a sense that she knew everything, actually, from here on in.
“Sorry for what? That my mother is sure now that I’m a slut? I wish you’d told me sooner that I was in bed with someone anonymous.”
“It just came up so quickly.”
“Life is like that. Real people with real lives, telling other real people who they’re sleeping with. How long did you think we were going to be able to stay in bed without the phone ringing? At what point were you going to tell me that what we were doing wasn’t real?”
“It was real,” Mike said, clearly pained by how lame that sounded. “It is real.” She could see how much he wanted to get out of the bed and deal with this as a man with clothes on. He was eyeing the ten-foot stretch of floor between him and his pants like someone about to try fire walking. If she’d had any compassion at all she would have handed him his boxers at least. But she wanted him to suffer now.
“Let’s just say it was a mistake, then,” she said. “I suppose that’s the Christian thing to do.” And she turned on her heel and walked from the room.
She already had a pot of coffee started when he got to the kitchen about thirty seconds later, dressed now, shirt untucked, carrying his shoes and socks. Despite her rage, she was dismayed to see those shoes in his hand. He was way too ready to leave, and that only made her angrier.
“This is not for you,” she said of the coffee.
“Of course you’re angry—”
“Don’t pull that monastic psychobabble on me.”
“It was just too much, too fast,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”
“I see Rory, heading for the hills whenever life gets real. I see Fulmar Donaldson. I see every man on the planet, actually.”
Mike took a deep breath. “I’m going to put my shoes on.”
“Suit yourself.”
He sat down and tugged a sock on. His feet in the morning light were extraordinarily ugly. How could she ever have imagined she could live with feet like that? She’d been desperate, apparently. She’d been so lonely.
“You would have been such a lovely friend,” she said.
“Okay, I’m scared,” Mike said. “Is that so hard to understand? I’m afraid that I’m spoiled for real life. I’ve been pretty sure that I was spoiled, actually, for a long, long time. And suddenly with you it seemed for a moment that I might not have to be spoiled completely.”
“I don’t care if you’re spoiled, for God’s sake! I’m spoiled. We’re all spoiled, life does that. It’s what you do with yourself after you realize you’ve been spoiled that matters. It’s the life you make in the ruins.”
“That’s a cheerful thought,” he said. It had actually perked him up.
“It’s not like it’s rocket science, being a decent human being.”
“Actually, I don’t think anyone appreciates what a miracle a decent human being really is.” It was a joke of sorts, an offer of lightness, but she refused to smile. “A moment of terror,” Mike persisted. “One moment of terror, and you’re never going to talk to me again.”
“What are you saying? That you’ve gotten over it? That we should call my mother back and tell her who Zorro is?”
He hesitated, an echo of his first hesitation that would have been comical if she had not been so enraged. Rebecca realized that she’d gotten her hopes up again, just that quickly, and she hated herself for that. She snatched the still-filling pot off the coffeemaker and dumped its contents into a cup as coffee dribbled onto the hot plate and sizzled. The smell of burned coffee filled the room. She jammed the empty pot back into its spot.
“Put your other goddamned sock on,” she said.
Instead, he took the first sock off. They stared at each other. It was so spectacularly absurd. She could feel the corner of her mouth twitching; she was close to laughing. Rory had used to do the same sort of thing; she’d spent a decade of her life being mollified by simple existential charm.
“I’m not young anymore, don’t you see?” she said. “I can’t do the secret, complicated things anymore. I can’t do the half-ass things. I’ve got a wonderful, pathetic little life that is precious to me. I’m not looking for an affair.”
“I thought you wanted to keep things undefined.”
“That’s just something single mothers say when they’re not sure whether a man is worth telling their daughter about.”
“Ah,” he said, receiving it, endearingly, as information. She found herself feeling a dangerous compassion for him.
“Look, I like you,” she said. “You got in over your head, so did I. Let’s just let it go at that. No harm, no foul. You just do what you’ve always done: head for the hills. Slip away into God, and think about me once in a while when you pray and feel…benevolent.”
“Just like that.”
“Mike—” she said gently. “It wasn’t me who flinched.”
“It wasn’t you I flinched from.”
“No, it was just my life.”
He met her eyes briefly, then looked down and began to put on his socks again. And then his shoes. He was ashamed, she saw, and also strangely resigned. She thought of Rumpel-stiltskin: named and dismissed. But she did not have a sense of having actually named a complete truth. She had named his fear, and hers. But that seemed to be enough. She stood there with her coffee, which was way too strong, still hoping he would find the right thing to say. It was so much harder now that she wasn’t angry.
For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance the impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke.
Rory dropped Mary Martha off at six o’clock that evening, right on time, which was unprecedented. Rebecca had braced herself for another tricky conversation; Rory’s snide insinuations that she was sleeping with Mike were bound to be complicated now by the fact that she had. In a weird way, she had lost the high ground. But Rory didn’t even get out of the car, just watched Mary Martha up the steps to the front door. When Rebecca let her daughter in, Rory gave them both a glum wave and drove off in a staccato flurry of backfires.
Mary Martha came into the house cautiously, peering around like a deer stepping into a clearing. She obviously suspected that Rebecca would not be alone; she checked all the rooms, one by one, as she and Rebecca sometimes checked the place for monsters after a scary movie or a bad dream. Clearly, Rory had put his own spin on the Mike situation while he had his daughter’s ear. But Rebecca held off saying anything. She didn’t want to come across as nervous and defensive or to blunder into any booby traps Rory might have laid. It always took her a while to get back on Mary Martha’s wavelength anyway.
She cooked pigs-in-blankets, one of Mary Martha’s favorite meals, in her usual Sunday night attempt to invoke their customary intimacy; and Mary Martha, as usual on a Sunday night, barely touched her food. Rory had let her have two ice cream sandwiches late in the afternoon, an outrageous violation of their nutrition treaties even by his loose standards. After dinner, Rebecca ran a bubble bath with extra soap, another flagrant treat. Mary Martha, still preoccupied, sank deep into the foamy cloud of bubbles until only her face was showing.
“Is Mike going to sleep here?”
“What?” Rebecca asked, caught off guard.
“Rory asked me if Mike sleeps here.”
Rebecca weighed her response. Obviously Rory, true to form, had been as subtle as a train wreck
. “Sometimes when a man and a woman are in love, they sleep together.”
“Are you and Mike in love?”
“No,” Rebecca said. “He’s just a nice man who lives downstairs.”
Dear Brother James,
Please forgive my last, crazed note. I’m afraid I succumbed for a time to the exhilarating delusion that I had a chance to be a decent human being. But I have been purged anew of all such fantasies. I have looked through the open door into the garden and found myself unable to take the simple step.
The hideous truth is that I do well enough in my little hole. I am that absolutely spoiled thing, a “spiritual” man. I can’t convey how horrifying it is to come upon the crippled ego at the heart of all my furious devotion, after all these fervent years. It was never about God, I’m afraid. It was about hiding. It was about incapacity. I renounced things I never had the guts or the heart to properly pursue in the first place. My religious life amounted to the building of walls around a bubble, and now the bubble has burst and I am left with the walls, and the sticky emptiness.
Again, forgive my babbling. I did not think it was possible to despise myself more than I did when I left the monastery.
Michael Christopher
Chapter Eight
In the weeks after the fiasco with Michael Christopher, Rebecca avoided the back porch and the backyard completely. She was cautious even in taking out the trash, and she found herself letting bottles and cans pile up instead of recycling them because recycling meant an extra trip to the blue bin in the garage. She didn’t want to take a chance on running into her downstairs tenant under any circumstances; she was afraid he would try to explain himself, and if he tried to explain himself she was afraid she would hit him with a wine bottle. There were probably all sorts of deep religious reasons for Mike’s sudden recoil from intimacy. He’d been worked over by a life-denying church and had bought into all sorts of morbid medieval attitudes about the body, love, and normalcy. And of course, he was a man, his twisted monastic scruples aside. You didn’t need a theology to explain emotional gun-shyness in men. Maybe Christopher had been too close to his mother, or not close enough; maybe his faltering was neurotic or sadistic or just plain self-absorbed. No doubt he had Issues. But she just didn’t have time for that kind of battlefield psychotherapy anymore. Once a man started talking about why he couldn’t commit, the fun was over. For the duration of the relationship, he would make fresh vows, ask for slack, and generate theories. That well was bottomless.
In any case, Mike seemed as inclined to avoid her as she was to avoid him. He had stopped going out into the backyard to tend the garden, even when she wasn’t home, and the flowers and shrubs he’d planted were dying. Watching the summer’s aberrant burst of color withering day by day into the old familiar drab, Rebecca tried not to think of her breasts against Mike’s ribs and his thigh between her legs. She could still feel the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath her hand; in her mind, she could nuzzle her nose against his neck and breathe him in, the smell of him blunt and strangely comforting, the scent of their intimacy. And she could still go over and over their conversations, wondering how she’d missed the clues, wondering if she could have said something to make it turn out differently.
At the office, she tried to lose herself in her work, but it was hopeless. The mass of sketches, notes, and memos on her desk seemed like debris from a previous tide. The sense of unreality in things she had previously believed to be urgent was unnerving. Day after day, Rebecca turned on her computer and stared at the screen, waiting for Jeff to charge in and ask her how the PG&E project was coming along. She was going to be forced to admit that she hadn’t given the lightbulb man a moment’s thought. She had fifteen e-mails to answer, and then twenty, and twenty-five; they multiplied like Tribbles. She thought of Mike, beyond the reach of e-mail. He had heard of the Internet while he was in the monastery, he’d told her, but he hadn’t realized it was that big a deal.
Rebecca promised herself that this was the last time she was going through this ridiculous junior high school recovery process in her life, but such melodramatic vows only sharpened the pain. It seemed saddest of all to believe she was done with love. She had been much better off before she fell for Mike, believing she didn’t care. He’d blown her cover, with his sly contemplative charm; she hadn’t ever been a reconciled single mother after all, she’d been a love accident waiting to happen.
She would have liked to commiserate with Bonnie, but her best friend had just announced her engagement to Bob Schofield. She was so happy that Rebecca couldn’t find an opening to talk about her woes. She and Bonnie had built their friendship on the seemingly unshakable ground of the impossibility of men, but the ground had shifted. Bonnie now sounded like an infomercial on the seven habits of highly effective couples; all she could talk about was her great communication with Bob, the little things they did for each other, their mutual tenderness and respect. Rebecca found herself longing for a glitch in the relationship—nothing fatal, she assured herself, just enough to initiate a gripe session. But Bonnie sailed on happily and Rebecca was left feeling ashamed of herself, mean and false and lonelier than ever.
The two of them hardly ever had time to talk these days anyway. Bonnie had taken to showing up at the office later and later. Bob believed that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and Bonnie was cooking him lumberjack extravaganzas every morning. She would rush in half an hour late smelling of bacon and sausage, with pancake batter spattered on her blouse. She would also slip out early at the end of the workday—apparently dinner was crucial too.
Meanwhile, the office rumors had solidified into fact: Jeff Burgess and Moira Donnell were officially sleeping with each other. Not long after the affair began, Moira sought out Rebecca to ask for her advice.
Rebecca said carefully, “Moira, if you really want my advice on sleeping with your married boss—”
“No, no, I think I can handle that okay,” Moira said. “It’s basically just a matter of being clear and up front about your needs. But Jeff’s got a birthday coming up—”
Rebecca laughed. “Ah, well, a birthday present. That’s a little easier…. How about some discretion?”
“Those ties of his are terrible,” Moira said. “I think I might get him a decent tie.”
At home, after Mary Martha was in bed, Rebecca sat in the kitchen with her evening glass of wine instead of going to the back porch. She had all but quit smoking outside; she couldn’t bear the thought of Mike catching her unawares, and she would shut herself in the bathroom instead, blowing the smoke out the window and burning incense afterward to skirt Mary Martha’s wrath. Rebecca suspected that Mike was practicing a similar avoidance: she hadn’t smelled smoke from below in weeks. There was probably something amusing in that, she thought, something about love and bad habits, but she was beyond finding comfort in ironies.
The main thing, she told herself, was to just keep going. Her life was not really bleaker than it had been before, as a room was not darker after a flashbulb popped. It was just going to take a while for her eyes to readjust.
Dear Brother James,
Thank you for your letter, which I took as an attempt to cheer me up. But I am beyond being cheered by reassurances that I am “a good person at heart” and that “God will provide.” That kind of stuff just makes me suspect you aren’t really paying attention. I am a futility. The life of prayer begins with that. And God is not a comfort, to be offered like Kleenex. God is a poisoned sea, with broken syringes washing up on the beach. God is shopping malls stretching to the horizon and warplanes in the sky. God is a flat tire in a rainstorm and beer cans in the ditch, a bottle shattered on a highway overpass and the taste of gunmetal in your mouth. God is dying children.
Have you forgotten, cultivating your pleasantness? Or have you really never known that terrible enormity? You talk of faith as if we were not desperate men; you prescribe it like an antacid. But real faith is a failure and a defeat, vomiting blood;
real faith is a morphine drip; it is plastic bags whirled by the wind in an empty parking lot and a cigarette butt in dirty sand. It is possums squashed by trucks, and the slaughter on the evening news.
You consider me a project, clearly—community outreach or something, a target for your well-meaning nonsense about God. You walk around passing out hope like theological Monopoly money. But your colorful bills are no good here, Brother James. I am traveling in the desert, as you are; I’m off the game board. If we go on together, let’s go on like men who are lost, crying for love as men cry for water. Let’s not pretend we’re doing anything else.
Yours in Christ,
Mike
One Saturday in October, there was an intimidating letter in the mailbox from the Clerk of the Court of San Francisco, addressed to Rory. A summons to appear: his trial date had been set. Rebecca felt a brief surge of her old irritation, that Rory had given the city her address, no doubt to avoid the inconvenience of police officers at his real door. But Rory’s troubles seemed far away. That was one of the lingering side effects of her encounter with Mike.
She drove out to Ocean Beach that same afternoon to drop off the summons, just to get it out of the house. Rory’s Rambler was parked in its usual spot toward the north end of the beach; Rory liked the better waves near the rocks. The car was unlocked, as she had known it would be. Rebecca reached in through the open window to set the envelope on the driver’s seat, then straightened hastily, feeling a sense of trespass. She glanced uneasily toward the ocean. There were half a dozen surfers in the water, backlit by the late afternoon sun, but she could still recognize Rory instantly, from years of practice. He was sitting up on his board, seal-like in his black wet suit, looking out to sea with the quiet, poised alertness she had believed he could bring to everything in his life.
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