The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  Mike shrugged. “God, I don’t know. I hate to think that I’m finally coming around, after all those years of fighting with the man about contemplation versus activity. I mean, I used to pray for an extra half an hour sometimes just to piss him off. He hated to see me kneeling there with my eyes closed; he was sure it was just a waste of time and that I was a lazy bum angling for a religious excuse to shirk my chores. And I always thought he was a rigid maniac without an inner life, covering over his existential emptiness with frantic hustle and bustle.” He shook his head. “He would quote The Cloud of Unknowing to me: the devil has his contemplatives too. He said the silence that I experienced in prayer was just a natural quiet, not a divine infusion, and that I should work harder in mental prayer and keep my mind filled with holy words and images, or the devil would get me in the end.”

  “You guys both sound like a barrel of fun to me,” Rebecca said.

  Christopher laughed and attended to his orange slice. “I suppose the issues do seem a little obscure. Angels on the head of a nonexistent pin. A tempest in a monastic teapot.”

  “Let’s just say it’s not exactly the stuff that ends up above the fold on the front page of the Chronicle.”

  “It was my life. I was sworn to obedience, but I ignored him completely, of course, and just went deeper and deeper into the silence. It was pretty obvious to me by then that God had nothing to do with everything I thought about Him, that all my holy words were just getting in the way. And Hackley just seemed like a cartoon character to me. He was my abbot and my confessor, and I had to tell him about my prayer life and to endure his opinions, but he had about as much of a sense of the subtleties of contemplation as a plumber.”

  “And so you left, to prove him wrong.”

  “No, I left because my precious little silence finally went dead on me and I started to be afraid that he’d been right all along.” Mike hesitated, then said, “I think that at some level I always thought of the monastery as a sort of nest. And so in the back of my mind I always figured that someday I’d get pushed out and it would be time to fly. I had all sorts of theories about what it would be, to fly—union with God, sainthood, glory. Whatever. But then when the time came, when I did leave the nest, I just dropped like a rock and hit with a splat.”

  Rebecca smiled. “Are those the technical religious terms?”

  “A loose translation from the Spanish of St. John of the Cross.” He met her eyes. “The point is, with you, I’ve glimpsed what it might mean to fly. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t give a damn about the rest of it. I just want to try to fly.”

  “Flying with me is going to involve a lot of walking, and a certain amount of time on buses and trains,” Rebecca said.

  “Okay,” Mike said amiably, and reached for his fortune cookie, which said that all sorts of business opportunities were about to open up for him.

  After dinner, which Mike insisted on paying for out of a battered old wallet without any plastic in it, they stopped to pick up Mary Martha at her friend Patricia’s house. Mary Martha, a little giddy after a long afternoon of play and a Coke with her dinner, chattered all the way home. At Patricia’s house, she said, they had Coke with their dinner all the time. They had a big-screen TV that took up the whole living room. They had a pool table.

  “We’re a milk-with-dinner family,” Rebecca said. “We’re a small-TV family.”

  “Patricia has a hundred and seventeen Beanie Babies.”

  “That’s amazing,” Mike said, completely missing the parental point. Rebecca suppressed a groan as Mary Martha turned to him eagerly.

  “I only have eight Beanie Babies,” she said.

  “Eight Beanie Babies are a lot,” Rebecca said.

  “Oh, Mom,” Mary Martha said exasperatedly.

  “I doubt that Patricia is able to have the kind of deep relationship with her Beanie Babies that you have with yours,” Mike offered.

  Mary Martha peered at him warily, obviously suspecting that he was crapping out on her.

  “What are your Beanie Babies’ names?” he asked.

  “Dolphie, Zinger, Yogi, Bounder the Flounder, Hootie, Specs, Percival, and, uh—”

  “Elvis the Catfish,” Rebecca supplied.

  “—and Elvis the Catfish.”

  “You see?” Mike said. “That’s special. I bet Patricia can’t remember all hundred and seventeen names of hers.”

  Mary Martha walked in silence for a few steps, then said crossly, “Well, she can remember more than eight.”

  Back at the house, the three of them paused in the driveway while Rebecca considered the complexities. She’d never had to deal with end-of-a-date dynamics and a cranky Mary Martha at the same time. It seemed precipitous to ask Mike in, but there was so much she still wanted to say. And she wanted to kiss him again. There was that.

  “It’s been lovely,” she told him.

  “Yes, it has.”

  “I know you said that you wanted to go slowly this time….”

  He smiled. “I’ve been very happy with our pace.”

  “I’m freezing,” Mary Martha said plaintively. “And I have to pee.”

  Rebecca decided to dispense with the formalities. “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee or something?” she asked Mike.

  “I’d love to,” he said, not slowly at all.

  “Is Mike going to sleep here?” Mary Martha asked as Rebecca tucked her into bed.

  “I’m going to ask him if he wants to,” Rebecca said.

  Mary Martha hitched her big pink quilt more snugly under her chin and nodded uneasily.

  “Come on,” Rebecca said. “You like Mike. You’ve always liked Mike.”

  “Rory said Mike’s going to be my new daddy.”

  “Well, that’s not true. Nobody will ever be your daddy but Rory.”

  “Rory never sleeps here.”

  “You sleep at Rory’s sometimes.”

  “That’s not the same,” her daughter insisted.

  Rebecca sighed. There was no bluffing Mary Martha. She sat for a moment in silence, then said frankly, “Rory and I just don’t get along that well, sweetie. We don’t have a sleeping-together kind of relationship anymore. The main thing that we have in common is that we both love you.”

  Mary Martha considered this gravely.

  “So are you going to be all right with this?” Rebecca asked.

  “I guess so,” Mary Martha said. It wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, but it wasn’t “No,” and Rebecca thought it was good enough for now. She longed to tell Mary Martha that everything was going to be okay, but too much reassurance was probably as bad as too little for a child with Mary Martha’s keen sense of bullshit. They were just going to have to take it one step at a time.

  She kissed her daughter goodnight once, then again, and then a third time, an exorbitance that finally moved Mary Martha to give her a grudging smile.

  “Mom?” Mary Martha said as Rebecca reached for the light switch.

  Rebecca paused. “Yes, honey?”

  “Can we make a photo album with pictures of Rory, like Grandma Phoebe has of Grandpa?”

  Rebecca felt a stab of complex emotion, part chagrin, part poignancy, and part pride in her daughter’s emotional loyalty, in the way she was laboring to balance the shifting loads.

  “Of course we can, sweetheart,” she told Mary Martha. “We have a whole shoe box full of pictures of your dad.”

  In the kitchen, Mike was waiting quietly with a pot of decaf coffee. He stood up as she came in, and Rebecca kissed him uncertainly, afraid of a false note. But his kiss was perfect, tender and somehow humble.

  “This is not just about us anymore,” she said. “If that still freaks you out, then please, please, bail now. Because if you’re going to stay here tonight, you’re going to have breakfast with my daughter. You’re going to have to be a decent human being. You’re going to have to be a man.”

  “I would love to have breakfast with your daughter,” Mike said, and she believ
ed him as much as she could believe a man at this point in her life.

  Chapter Nine

  At work on Monday morning, a dress code had been posted prominently on the bulletin board in the employees’ lounge. A disgruntled crowd of technicians in jeans and graphics artists in variations on basic black milled and muttered over half-drunk cups of coffee.

  “You’re the only person here who’s not going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe,” Rebecca told Moira Donnell, who was looking spiffy and a bit smug today in a cherry red suit and a candy-cane-striped blouse with a ruffled collar.

  “Jeff’s all torn up about having to implement this,” Moira said diplomatically. Since she had started sleeping with management, she seemed to feel a certain responsibility for policy decisions.

  “I’m sure he is,” Rebecca said. Jeff in fact had seemed miserable lately. He’d shaved off his mustache and started wearing quiet blue ties and better suits. It was hard to tell whether the changes owed more to the pressures of courting corporate accounts or to Moira, who had a distinctly GQ sense of style and a high-maintenance attitude, but the trend was clear.

  Bonnie Carlisle wasn’t in her office yet. Rebecca wrote See me ASAP big news must talk on a Post-it, stuck the note to Bonnie’s computer monitor, and went on to her own office.

  She was still staring at the screen, thinking about Michael Christopher, when Bonnie charged in five minutes later, waving the Post-it with a condescending air.

  “If you think it’s big news that Moira sleeping with Jeff is having a bad effect on this company, you are sadly out of touch,” Bonnie said. “And don’t even get me started on this dress code nonsense.”

  “No, no, this just in,” Rebecca said.

  Bonnie settled on the edge of the desk to indicate that she was all ears. “So?”

  “Michael…Christopher.”

  Bonnie took a moment to place the name, and another to weigh the tone, and then her eyes widened gratifyingly. “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope.”

  “You and the monk?!”

  “We pretty much spent the weekend together.”

  “Well, well, well!”

  “We’d been kind of dancing around the possibility for a while, I think,” Rebecca said, sensing a critique in Bonnie’s exaggerated amazement and feeling compelled to present the relationship in its most favorable light. “It doesn’t even feel like it happened fast. It feels like it all happened in this exquisite slow motion.”

  “That’s a good sign,” Bonnie allowed. “How is he in bed?”

  “Very sweet. And…deft.”

  “Deft!”

  “Pre-monastic flings. I guess it’s like riding a bicycle.”

  “Has he gotten hit by the backlash yet?”

  “The backlash?”

  “Yeah, you know—guilt, morbidity, that kind of thing. Twisted religious scruples. Bad conscience.”

  “You’re an expert on ‘that kind of thing,’ are you?”

  “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, Rebecca. We’ve all read The Scarlet Letter. We all know the type.”

  “I was sort of counting on you for a little support.”

  “So you think it’s got a future?” Bonnie asked dubiously.

  “He’s already talking about love. I feel like the designated driver. But yes, I do. I hope so, anyway.”

  Bonnie was silent for a long moment.

  “What?” Rebecca demanded.

  “Well, it’s just…Are you sure you’re not just on the rebound from Bob?”

  Rebecca considered a range of nasty replies but managed to hold off. Bonnie, she knew, meant well. “I can do this with you or without you, Bonnie. It would be so much more fun with you.”

  Bonnie said stubbornly, “It’s just so sudden. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You and Bob were sudden.”

  “Bob and I were both very clear up front that we were looking for a mature, committed relationship.”

  “Oh, come on. You met on a beach, he played Frisbee with your dog, and within a few days you were cooking him French toast, sausage, and eggs over easy.”

  Bonnie wavered in a way that amounted to a concession, then countered slyly, “Well, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

  It allowed them both to laugh. With the tension broken, Rebecca leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I guess it is pretty sudden. Mary Martha seems a little wigged-out too. But things happen the way they happen. He’s really wonderful, Bonnie. We talk and talk. We laugh.”

  “Oh, I’ll get up to speed, I promise,” Bonnie assured her. “Who made the first move?”

  “He did, I guess. A kiss.”

  “Deft?”

  “Very deft,” Rebecca said happily.

  “Another good sign,” Bonnie pronounced, and it began to look like they were going to get through it after all.

  On her lunch hour, instead of the usual sandwich at her desk, Rebecca walked up to Market Street and browsed through several men’s clothing stores in search of the perfect underwear for Mike. She felt very serene and focused. The gay salesmen were all delighted with her, and one guy in particular entered immediately into the extravagant spirit of the mission. The two of them discussed Mike’s size with a slightly raunchy enthusiasm for much longer than was strictly necessary. He led her through all sorts of wicked options from silver lamé to frank red briefs before finally showing her a pair of royal blue boxers that were just right, Burmese silk like a soft, dark breeze, with subtle gold threading.

  The price was outrageous, but it seemed like cheating to flinch. The salesman found a stylish box with the store’s monogram; he gift-wrapped the package in heavy gold paper with a royal blue ribbon, and when the crucial moment at the cash register came he gave Rebecca a wink and typed in his employee discount number, which brought the cost of the grand gesture down from inconceivable to merely prodigal.

  On the street again, swinging her handled bag in the bright afternoon sunshine, Rebecca found a sidewalk table at a nearby café and ordered wine with her salad. She gave the bag its own chair. She felt free, light, and happy. The wine arrived. She lit a cigarette, wondering if that was illegal. But it felt so fine, it felt positively Parisian, and nobody said a thing. It was the middle of a workday, and all she felt like doing was basking in the sun. No wonder Bonnie was so worried. She’d just spent almost a week’s grocery money on underwear. Love was a dangerous thing indeed.

  Back in the office, she chewed some mints to get the wine off her breath and spent the afternoon trying to translate her pencil sketches of the lightbulb man into computer animation. The work was as maddening as ever, like trying to play a saxophone part on a kazoo. But she felt like she was finally starting to get the hang of it. By now she had about a minute and a half of the lightbulb man cavorting in his unwieldy, earnest way, with a touch of pathos and the hint of a self-deprecating smile, as if to say how ruefully aware he was that he was not Fred Astaire. It was a little ridiculous, Rebecca thought, how fond of him she had grown.

  She wrapped up early, feeling reckless and come-what-may, and left at five o’clock on the dot, carrying the bag with the gold-wrapped boxers and leaving her sketch case on the desk. She was still feeling uncommonly serene. She and Mike had agreed to let Rebecca have an evening alone with her daughter, to ease the pace of change, but they were going to meet on the back porch that night after Mary Martha was asleep, and the thought of the rendezvous had been like solid ground all day.

  The woman at Bee-Well was so surprised to see her on time that she didn’t say anything snide. Mary Martha seemed to be back to normal, chattering about her day while Rebecca ordered a pizza by phone, as a sort of treat and bribe. They ate off paper plates at the kitchen table and didn’t mention Michael Christopher once. That seemed like a very good sign, as did the fact that Mary Martha went to bed after an uneventful night of TV without insisting on any particular unicorn security measures. Rebecca read to her from The House at Pooh Corner with a sense of blessed
ordinariness until Mary Martha dozed off.

  As soon as her daughter was asleep, Rebecca hurried out the back door, feeling a little sheepish in her excitement. She and Mike had agreed to meet between nine o’clock and nine-thirty; it was just past nine. Mike was not outside yet, but the lamp in his apartment glowed behind drawn curtains, casting a square of muted light on a freshly planted jasmine at the base of the stairs.

  Rebecca hesitated, then slipped in the back door of the garage. The in-law apartment was just to the right, past the garbage cans and the blue plastic recycling bin. The tiny, somewhat ramshackle door looked like the entrance to an elf’s lodging in a tree. Rebecca knocked, feeling the plywood rattle beneath her knuckles.

  There was a pause, a seemingly startled silence, and then she heard Mike’s footsteps, the four strides it took to cross the apartment. The door opened and he stood before her, stooping to peer out. He was barefoot, dressed in a white T-shirt and khakis that seemed new; his hair was wet, with the comb lines showing, and his face was half lathered with shaving cream. A blue shirt, crisp on its hanger, dangled from the doorknob of the apartment’s minuscule closet. Rebecca felt a small thrill at the thought that he had been preparing himself for her.

  “No one’s ever knocked on this door before,” Mike said, which somehow struck her as utterly endearing. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, smearing them both with shaving cream. He met her lips, and then her tongue, amused at first and then passionately. She could feel the difference between the smooth, already-shaved parts of his face and the stubble beneath the shaving cream. She fumbled for the button at the waist of his pants, a little uncertainly, not wanting to presume. He responded by pulling her blouse over her head in one motion and unhooking her bra with an expertise that still seemed incongruous. Her breasts fell free, and he plunged his face between them and ran his tongue back up to the base of her throat.

  There was shaving cream everywhere by now. She kicked off one shoe and managed to close the door before they staggered toward the center of the apartment. Mike’s futon, the only furniture in the place, was neatly folded against the far wall, and rather than bother with it they sank to the floor, still entwined, shedding clothing haphazardly. The carpet was wonderfully lush, Rebecca noted in passing, with a landlord’s pride. She had been afraid they wouldn’t know what to do with each other, now that they had spent some time apart, immersed in what she still thought of as their real lives. But it didn’t seem like that was going to be a problem after all.