As she watched, he pivoted the board and paddled hard to catch a rising swell, then popped to his feet with that easy, almost nonchalant air he had on even the most dangerous waves. He worked the three-foot break lovingly, cutting back and forth to generate a little excitement before he found a smooth long line in the heart of the curl and leaned into it, effortlessly, racing the collapsing edge.
He was so beautiful in his element, Rebecca thought. It was the moment she had married him for, the weightless glide that promised to go on forever, right up until it crumpled into churning foam.
She turned away as the wave gave out and Rory pointed his board back out to sea. He would do the same thing twenty or thirty times before the day was through, she knew; he would be out there for hours yet. But she wasn’t waiting anymore for Rory to come ashore.
When she got back to the house, Michael Christopher was in the backyard. Her heart gave such a glad spontaneous leap that Rebecca realized she had been fooling herself. She wasn’t over him; she wasn’t resigned. She hadn’t been hardened by life to a durable toughness. She wanted love and she wanted it now and she wanted it with this dear, fallible man on his hands and knees in her backyard, pulling up brown clumps of expired petunias.
“It’s Mike!” Mary Martha exclaimed. She had been keeping an uneasy eye on the abandoned backyard for weeks. She ran toward the door, and Rebecca drew a breath, thinking to stop her, then let her go. It felt almost like cheating, letting Mary Martha break the ice. But she was in no mood to play by the stupid rules.
She gave her daughter ten minutes, then followed her down the stairs. When she got to the backyard, Mary Martha and Mike were discussing pumpkins. Mary Martha wanted to grow a pumpkin in the two weeks before Halloween. Mike was saying he didn’t think that would be enough time.
“It might be,” Mary Martha insisted.
“We might be able to grow a small pumpkin by Christmas,” Mike said and turned to acknowledge Rebecca. “Hello,” he said, careful but pleased.
“Hello,” she said, conscious of his physical closeness. Mike hadn’t shaved that day, and she could almost feel the stubble rasping on her own cheek. It seemed unnatural not to touch him. They’d had such great sex that her body still felt the world should have rearranged itself.
“We’re going to grow a pumpkin for Halloween,” Mary Martha told her.
“I heard Christmas,” Rebecca said.
“The seeds may not even sprout, this late in the year,” Mike admitted. “I suppose we could set up a cold frame.”
“There’s no need to go overboard.”
“It’s not overboard!” Mary Martha exclaimed.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Mike agreed.
“I’d hate to see you get too involved,” Rebecca insisted. She met his eyes, pointedly, and after a moment he smiled, conceding. Her heart leaped again because the gesture was perfect, wryly acknowledging and yet dogged, the shrug of a man prepared to pay full price.
“It would be my pleasure,” he said.
They all stood for a moment looking at the shabby beds of dead plants.
“I thought you’d given up on it,” Rebecca said.
“Well, it’s seasonal,” Mike said.
“More like trial and error, it seems to me.”
“Mike, can we plant the pumpkin today?” Mary Martha asked.
Rebecca said, “Mary Martha, why don’t you run inside for a while and let the grown-ups talk?”
“Oh, Mom—”
“We can plant the pumpkin tomorrow,” Mike said. “After I make the cold frame.”
“What is a cold frame?”
“Mary Martha—” Rebecca said sternly.
“All right, all right,” Mary Martha said. She turned and ran up the stairs, closing the door at the top with a distinct bang.
“How embarrassing it is sometimes to be a mother,” Rebecca said. “I don’t suppose you have a cigarette?”
“As a matter of fact—” Mike produced a box of Marlboros and lit one for her, then one for himself.
Rebecca breathed in and blew smoke toward the sky. It was a beautiful afternoon. She felt almost giddy. Everything suddenly seemed very easy.
“I’m sorry—” Mike began after a moment, resolutely, as she had known he would.
“I’m sorry too,” she said. “I completely overreacted.”
He looked at her warily. “I panicked.”
“So did I.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. My panic manifested as rage. A preemptive strike. It’s a lifelong pattern.”
“My lifelong pattern is withdrawal. Also preemptive.”
Rebecca took a drag and blew a perfect smoke ring.
“Look at that,” she said. “There’s a lifelong pattern for you.”
“It’s exquisite,” Mike said. He hesitated. “I’m determined to go slowly this time.”
“‘This time’!” she laughed.
“If that’s not presumptuous.”
“Are you asking me out?”
“Do people still do that?”
“You were in a monastery, for God’s sake,” she said. “You weren’t on the fucking moon.”
The next morning, Mike was out in the backyard again, banging together a large wooden box with transparent plastic stretched between the slats. He’d soaked a handful of pumpkin seeds in water overnight, and he and Mary Martha planted these solemnly in three little mounds, watered them again, and covered the bed with the frame.
After lunch, Rebecca dropped Mary Martha off at a friend’s house for the afternoon, and she and Mike went for a walk.
By her reckoning, the outing counted as a date. He’d asked her to go, and she’d accepted. It felt very formal at first, like something out of a Jane Austen novel; she half-expected him to offer her his arm.
They strolled self-consciously into Golden Gate Park at 41st Avenue and walked along beside South Lake watching the slightly fanatical old women feed the ducks. It was a perfect Bay Area Indian summer day, with fluffy white clouds in a blue sky, and the park was packed with people. They had to keep stepping off the sidewalk to let roller-bladers, bicyclists, and joggers pass. It was all very distracting, and Rebecca was about to suggest that they leave the park and find a nice quiet bar when Mike took her elbow and steered her gently off the sidewalk into the woods. The path seemed overgrown and un-promising, but she was so glad for his touch that she went along without a murmur, and within a few minutes they were deep in a stand of fine old pine trees and the traffic noise had faded.
They walked along the sandy path. Mike had fallen silent, a comfortable silence that made their small talk amid the traffic seem a little forced, in retrospect. Rebecca was conscious anew of their recent fiasco. It was not an uncomfortable thought. There was even an odd intimacy in the memory, as if they had survived a shipwreck together. And soon enough it would be time to talk about what had caused the wreck and whether they would sail again.
“This is nice,” she said. “Like a secret forest, through the looking glass.”
“It’s actually possible to get lost back here.”
“That would be refreshing.”
He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
They walked for a time in silence. A gull wheeled in the sky above them, the sunlight gleaming on its white wings. The pines around them were alive with chittering finches.
“I thought you were just going to move out,” Rebecca said at last. “Pack up your bags and go back to the monastery or something.”
“I thought about it,” Mike conceded.
“For a while there, I was even hoping that you would.”
He shrugged. “You don’t go into a monastery just because you haven’t got anything better to do.”
Rebecca felt an unwilling exasperation; the reasons one might or might not go into a monastery seemed irrelevant to her. The real issue was whether the two of them were going to be in love or not. It was embarrassing, to feel that so baldly; she wou
ld have liked to have been a deeper person, one who included the big cosmic factors in her heart’s decisions. But she really didn’t care about the big cosmic factors at the moment; the big cosmic factors seemed like a distraction, a cop-out, even. No doubt she’d burn in hell for that.
Mike seemed to have read something of this in her silence because he said quickly, “I didn’t mean to sound sanctimonious.”
“And I don’t mean to seem…irreverent.”
“All I meant was, there’s God, and there’s girl trouble. It doesn’t do anyone any good to confuse the two.”
Rebecca laughed. “And you feel like you’ve got girl trouble?”
“A guy can hope,” he said.
They had reached a fork in the path. To the right, the trail was rutted with bicycle tracks, running downhill back toward the main road; the less-used left-hand path meandered beyond a fallen pine tree, into forest hedged with what looked like poison oak.
Mike asked, “Are you in a hurry to get back?”
“No,” she said, and he led them off to the left. He stepped over the broken pine’s trunk first, then paused and offered her his hand. She took it as she climbed over, feeling a crackle of electricity. Her body definitely remembered his body. He released her after she had hopped down to the other side. They skirted the poison oak and entered a grove of eucalyptus trees, their footsteps muted by the carpet of fragrant leaves.
She had never been in this part of the park before. Within the grove the autumn light was different, milder, steeped by the eucalyptus to a delicious blue-green. The air was cooler too, and Rebecca shivered a little. Mike, gratifyingly alert, offered her his jacket at once.
She hesitated; it seemed so intimate. If she let him put his jacket on her, there would be that moment when they looked at each other, that moment when she was warmer because of his action, enclosed in his warmth, safe and warm and silly with his sleeves dangling past her hands. It would be so easy just to kiss him then, to bypass all the negotiations. But she felt that the negotiations were important. She wanted to let him know that there would be hoops to be jumped through in this relationship, responsibilities, duties. She wanted him to assure her that he would be up to the challenges. That was what this walk was about. But she was chilly in her thin blouse, and he was wearing a flannel shirt. And she had to admit that the gallantry of the exchange was appealing.
She nodded, as casually as possible; Mike took off his jacket and held it up for her, and she slipped into it, one arm and then the other, with a sense of disappearing into warm depths. Sure enough, as she made the little ballet turn to shrug on the second sleeve, their eyes met. She did want to kiss him, and she saw that he wanted to kiss her. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Mike smiled gently and turned back to the path in a way that left the possibility of the kiss vividly between them, like the last cookie on a plate.
For the rest of the walk the kiss was there. She could feel it when they paused at views, when they stopped to look up at a hawk circling above the trees, when they sat down to smoke a cigarette on a fallen tree beside a horse trail: a promised sweetness growing more delicious with delay. The negotiations Rebecca had planned never really happened; they talked instead about late-season pumpkins, the delights of Indian summer, and what they had wanted to be when they grew up. Mike said that he had wanted to be a cowboy for quite a while, and then a deep-sea diver. Rebecca conceded that she had wanted to be a painter and that she had briefly owned a beret. It was all very charming and harmless, like the walk itself, a meandering intimacy lit with tender playfulness, two people quietly pleased with the fact that they were going to be kissing each other soon.
In any case, who could really say what might happen with an ex-monk who had wanted to be a cowboy? Rebecca suspected that Mike was determined to say what she wanted to hear anyway, that he had convinced himself he had learned something from the previous debacle, that he believed he was up to loving a single mother in a secular world. Her own gut sense was that he might be or he might not be. All she really knew for sure was that she liked the way his jacket smelled. She liked his laugh. She liked how easily they moved around together and the fact that he was willing to send pumpkin seeds on a kamikaze mission for Mary Martha.
They did manage to get lost for a few thrilling minutes, and they made the most of it, giggling and pretending to fret over the unlikelihood of ever being found; but inevitably they stumbled out of the trees onto the park’s central bike path, beside a meadow where a vigorous volleyball game was in progress. They turned west again, walking past the polo field and the fly-fishing pond, and ended up at the windmill where the park opened out to the ocean. Rebecca made a quick call from a pay phone and established that Mary Martha could eat dinner at her friend’s house, then she and Mike crossed the highway and stood on the concrete boardwalk, leaning on the wall. The sun was easing toward the sea, and the beginnings of a rose glow promised a spectacular sunset. A slight breeze had come up, and Rebecca was glad for the jacket. All along the boardwalk, sunset watchers were beginning to cluster. Beyond the breakers, a handful of surfers bobbed, none of them Rory. It was one more aspect of the moment’s perfection.
“I’m not sure I could take it if we were to try again with each other and mess it up again,” Rebecca said.
“We’re not going to mess it up this time,” Mike said, as promptly and as firmly as she could have hoped for.
The declaration had the ring of truth; there was a very dry, light serenity, almost a resignation in his voice. He sounded like a man prepared to embrace his fate.
“It’s not all walks in the park and sunsets,” she persisted, with a conscious effort to be sensible. “A real relationship is something that survives everything the world can throw at it, not something that happens instead of the laundry on my one free weekend this month.”
“Bring it on,” Mike said, which seemed crazy. She even believed him, in the dazzling moment, which seemed crazier still. But she kissed him anyway.
Walking home after the sunset, hand in hand, they stopped for dinner at a little Chinese restaurant on Judah. Mike ordered kung pao chicken, joked easily with the waiter across the language barrier, and proved surprisingly deft with chopsticks.
“You seem much too worldly to have been a monk,” she told him as he filled their tiny cups from the pot of green tea. “Way too at home in Chinese restaurants. And in bed, for that matter.”
Mike laughed. “Being a monk doesn’t mean you don’t know how. It just means that you don’t.”
“And now you do.”
He smiled. “Eat Chinese food?”
“And the rest of your secular activities.”
Mike busied himself with his tea.
“So what changed?” she persisted, dismayed by the faint note of truculence in her voice but needing somehow, however blindly, to probe this part of him. It was like throwing a stone into a lake at night, to hear it plop. “I mean, is this a sin, for instance?”
“Is what a sin?” he asked warily.
“Us. Is it some kind of fall from grace for you to be in a relationship at all? You once were found but now are lost?”
Mike laughed and shook his head. She was afraid that he would let it go at that and make her go after him again, but after a moment he said, “There was a guy who came into the monastery about a year after I did, a heartbreakingly sincere kid, Brother Mark. He was a passionate type, volatile, very mystically inclined, took everything hard. He used to weep during mass sometimes, especially during Lent. He’d beat his breast and rock back and forth moaning, ‘I’m a sinner, I’m a sinner, I’m a hopeless sinner!’ It was pretty unnerving, and whenever he started up, I would glance over at the older monks, to take my cue from them. And I would always see them nodding quietly—sort of amused, you know, but also very sympathetically.”
“Meaning that the kid was a hopeless sinner?”
“Meaning, as I saw it, that we all were. Compunction 101.” A strand of Rebecca’s hair had fa
llen across her face. Mike hesitated, then reached across the table to move it back into place. They smiled at each other.
“Anyway,” Mike resumed, “this went on for quite a while, for years, off and on—I’m a sinner, I’m a sinner, and so on. It got so that you could count on it. And then one day Brother Mark stood up, right in the middle of the matin psalm, and started hollering, ‘Holy, holy, holy! Everything is holy!’ Which was also a little unsettling, to tell you the truth. But I looked over at the older monks, and, sure enough, they all were nodding.”
Rebecca was silent for a moment.
“So it’s a paradox,” she said at last. “The moral of the story is that we’re all sinners, and yet everything is holy? It’s some kind of Zen thing?”
“You could read it that way,” Mike said. “Personally, I think you just never could tell what Brother Mark was going to say next.” He was silent for a moment, looking at the unopened fortune cookies on the plate. Then he said, “I suppose that what I’m getting at is that I don’t think sin is the point with you and me.”
“What is the point, then?”
“Redemption, maybe.” She shot him a dubious glance and he laughed. “Maybe that’s too glib. But I have this sense of having finally plunged into the real work of my life. Abbot Hackley used to say that real love doesn’t sit around on its ass. It gets up and goes. I always thought he was just saying that to get me to put in more time in the monastery vineyard. He wanted me out there stomping grapes and heaving oaken barrels around for God. He wanted me visiting the sick and praying novenas for the hungry and the lame, and all I wanted to do was let the Big Wheel stop. But I feel now like I might finally be getting it, like I might finally be going.”
“Going where?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure Hackley ever really said.” They laughed.
“But seriously, folks—” Rebecca said.
The Monk Downstairs Page 15
