The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  Phoebe breathed and scowled and seemed at times to dream. The nurses came and went. Rebecca found herself feeling extraordinarily tender toward these cheerful or beleaguered messengers from a world that trundled on out there somewhere, a brisk reality where people hurried from task to finite task and kept appointments. Phoebe’s room was like another country, with customs and a language of its own, an exotic climate and a terrain as forbidding and as beautiful as the Tibetan plateau. The air was thin and time didn’t matter much. She wondered if the nurses felt that. She wondered if they knew how badly she had lost it.

  When Mike showed up on Wednesday morning, Rebecca realized that she had forgotten all about him, which was scary. He looked harried; there had been a laundry crisis at home. Mary Martha had wanted to wear the red jumper outfit that Phoebe had given her for her last birthday, even though she had worn it every day that week. Mike had tried to wash it but had used warm water, and it had bled and faded. There had been tears—a lot of tears, Rebecca gathered. She could picture the scene. Mike felt awful. He felt he had taken part of Mary Martha’s grandmother away from her. He felt that he had let Rebecca down.

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca told him. “I’ve done similar things myself.”

  “She insisted on wearing it anyway—it’s all pink and blotchy and a little tight on her now. I think the woman at Bee-Well thinks I’m a bad parent.”

  “The woman at Bee-Well is a first-class pill.”

  Mike looked down at the floor. “I took Mary Martha by the church again,” he confessed. “We lit candles. It was the only way I could get her to stop crying.”

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca said again. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, that she thought he was a hero. It was hard to imagine ever doing anything again except telling people she loved that she loved them.

  She took his hand. Mike glanced up at her, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes.

  “I love you,” she said. “I’d be lost right now if it weren’t for you. And Mary Martha loves you too. In twenty years, all she’s going to care about is that you were here for her now. She’s going to remember lighting those candles.”

  “The tag said ‘machine wash cold.’ I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”

  “I love you,” she said. “I love you. I love you.”

  That afternoon, Dr. Pierce took Phoebe off the ventilator. He was afraid that Phoebe would get “respirator brain,” that she wouldn’t be able to resume breathing on her own. They all stood tensely around the bed for a while after he had taken the tube out, but Phoebe seemed to be breathing all right on her own. Dr. Pierce conceded that this was a good sign. He seemed a little abashed, even chagrined, and Rebecca realized that he had expected her mother to die right there.

  Through the afternoon, Mike kept vigil with her, sitting beside her in the chair that Rebecca had come to think of as her father’s chair. He caught her up on the news from home. Jeff had called, in a fresh panic, trying to find out when Rebecca might be able to come back to work. Apparently his nobility had faltered. There’d also been a message from Bonnie, expressing her sympathy and asking where some of the lightbulb man files were; Jeff had piled the job onto her for the moment. And Rory had called, twice. He’d pleaded no contest to felony possession and his sentencing hearing was in three weeks. He wanted Rebecca to show up as a character witness, to vouch for his commitment to good fatherhood, to say he was a nice guy and an asset to his community.

  “That nervy bastard,” Rebecca said.

  “He seemed humbled.”

  “For as long as it takes to get what he needs. I hope you didn’t commit me to being a nicer person than I am.”

  “I told him you’d be in touch.”

  “Good. Let him stew.”

  Mike had even managed to retrieve the car, which was running fine again. She was afraid to ask him how he had paid for it, but he showed her his shiny new credit card proudly, like a kid with a movie pass.

  “You’d be amazed how eager these companies are to give plastic to an ex-monk with no visible means of support,” he said.

  “It’s the American way, I guess,” Rebecca said, but she was touched. She’d never had a man plunge into unmanageable debt for her before.

  It was strange, watching Mike assume her errands and duties, like watching old 8mm family movies, the beloved figures a little speeded up and herky-jerky in a flickering light. She loved him for it, and yet as soon as he left that afternoon, to retrieve Mary Martha, cook the dinner, and staff the phones, she was back into the all-absorbing immediacy of just being with Phoebe, alone on the special planet of her meditation at the bedside, sinking beneath the waves of what seemed to her now like a vast sea of grief.

  Maybe this was why people went into monasteries, Rebecca thought, smoothing her mother’s hair, the fine, soft hair so much like her own, which she’d always despaired was too limp. Maybe this was why monks embraced such fathomless silence: they’d glimpsed how deep grief really was and understood that to grieve properly they had to sink from sight. They’d discovered the love that lived at the bottom of grief, the love you couldn’t bring to the surface because the daylight and the bright air and the business of everyday life twisted it into something unrecognizable, something that inevitably seemed crude.

  She had never allowed herself to grieve wholly before, she realized now. Not for her father, not for her grandparents. Not even for her marriage: she’d never allowed herself to face what it meant to fail in the central relationship of her life. To really remember that shining, innocent love she’d felt and everything that had happened to it. And this was why, of course: because some pragmatic, self-protective sense had told her that grief was bottomless. Skirting this sea, she had dipped her toes in; she’d wondered what would happen if she crossed the line, but it had always seemed that it could only be a kind of defeat, a drowning, a death. And so it was. But maybe it was not the end, to be defeated by life. Maybe that was even part of what it meant to be a human being: to recognize the ways in which life had finally defeated you, to accept the ways in which death had come, to stop looking away from the failures of love, and to grieve. To keep your heart open in the sea of this silence; to drift in it, surrendering to its currents, baffled and without recourse. And at the bottom of it, to be surprised anew by love’s simplicity. To feel that nothing had been lost.

  The little windup clock she’d bought for Phoebe ticked away the hours; Rebecca held her mother’s hand and finally dozed, and dreamed. She was at the beach with her parents; she was Mary Martha’s age. Her father lifted her up and carried her into the waves, with Phoebe beside them; and her mother dived beneath a breaking wave, her body slim and lithe and tanned. She surfaced, laughing, shaking her head in a spray of water droplets. Another wave rolled in, and John Martin lifted Rebecca over it, then eased her into the water, and she was paddling toward Phoebe, whose arms were stretched out toward her. She could feel how fast her heart was beating, but she was not afraid. It didn’t seem so far to swim at all.

  Rebecca woke. The room’s heavy curtains glowed gray; it was light outside. She rose and crossed to open them, and the autumn light filled the room. She stretched stiffly and turned to find Phoebe squinting at her, blinking at the morning.

  “Is that too bright?” Rebecca asked, amazed by how natural it seemed.

  Phoebe shook her head.

  “Boodifuh,” she said.

  “‘Beautiful’?”

  Her mother nodded contentedly.

  “It is beautiful,” Rebecca said.

  PART VI

  how should tasting touching hearing seeing

  breathing any—lifted from the no

  of all nothing—human merely being

  doubt unimaginable You?

  E. E. CUMMINGS,

  “i thank You God for this most amazing”

  Chapter Twelve

  Three days later, Rebecca and Mike drove out to Phoebe’s house in Marin to pick up a few essentials. Phoebe had st
arted her physical therapy the day before and was demanding a decent bathrobe, some lipstick, skin cream, a toothbrush, and a hairbrush, a heartening array of necessities. Her condition since awakening continued to improve day by day. Dr. Pierce conceded that he had no idea what had happened. Somewhere deep in her brain, Phoebe had worked something out. Pierce fluttered around her bedside every day now, moving Phoebe’s limbs and asking her questions, most of which she answered incorrectly. She still wasn’t sure what year it was or what city she was in. She couldn’t even consistently come up with Rebecca’s name, but Rebecca had stopped being disturbed by this. It was plain enough that her mother loved her.

  The day was bright and beautiful, real autumn now, brisk and crisp; Halloween had gone uncelebrated, and Indian summer had passed into November while Phoebe languished, and the northwest wind off the ocean had a bite to it. It felt odd to be out and about in daylight, to not be on her way to the hospital. Moving around the city the past few days, Rebecca had half expected strangers to walk up to her and ask how Phoebe was doing. But San Francisco bustled on heedlessly. At home, there were a host of new pictures by Mary Martha on the refrigerator and messages on the answering machine: Jeff Burgess, sounding frankly desperate; a sheepish Rory, still needing her to con the judicial system for him; and a surprising message from Moira Donnell saying that she was keeping Phoebe in her prayers. It was hard to picture Moira actually praying, but the thought was moving.

  Beside her, Mike quietly smoked a cigarette, his window rolled down, his fine brown hair stirring a little in the breeze.

  “I think you’re going to need a real haircut soon,” she said, and he laughed.

  “That would be a novelty.”

  “I can do it for you, if you want. Unless you want something fancy.”

  “I liked the blue Mohawk that guy had on Haight Street.”

  “I can do a blue Mohawk. But then Mary Martha would want one too.”

  “I’m sure the woman at Bee-Well would appreciate that.”

  Rebecca laughed. The parental banter was one of a host of subtle changes she’d noted upon coming home from her long hospital vigil. The dish drainer, even now, was full of china plates and bowls; Mike, apparently under the impression that it was the mundane norm, had been using the Messenware, and she hadn’t had the heart to disillusion him. The beds were all made differently, no doubt according to monastic standards, and there was a pile of freshly laundered clothes on the couch, ineptly folded, with some of Mike’s T-shirts, socks, and underwear mixed in. There was shaving equipment in the bathroom and a battered copy of Thomas Merton’s Contemplation in a World of Action on the bedside table. There was a newspaper on the kitchen table, open to the sports section. Mike, that devotee of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, turned out to be a 49ers fan as well.

  The ocean beyond Tamalpais was slate blue, seared with whitecaps. The coastal mountains had already settled into winter dun, and Stinson Beach was deserted, with gulls milling in the parking lots of the galleries and knickknack shops. An SUV lurched by them at the stop sign, an avid couple with binoculars around their necks, in search of southbound birds. Rebecca let them roar off toward the lagoons beyond the town and turned onto the gravel road to Phoebe’s. As she pulled up in the empty driveway, she was conscious of the jagged edges of this journey to an abandoned house. It felt a little like looting, like saving what could be saved from a sinking ship.

  She and Mike entered the cottage in silence and moved about separately for a time, gathering the items Phoebe had requested and whatever else seemed relevant. A thin layer of dust had settled on everything, and the answering machine was full of outdated messages. There were dishes in the sink and Rebecca washed them, wondering if Phoebe would ever use them again. The VCR, programmed to record, had faithfully taped a week’s episodes of General Hospital before the tape ran out. Phoebe’s book club had sent the automatic selection of the month, a fat multigenerational saga of an Irish family that Phoebe would have loved, if she had still been able to read it, and Rebecca hesitated before putting it in the bag. Maybe her mother would want it read to her.

  She assembled a makeup kit from the array on Phoebe’s vanity; she packed her mother’s toothbrush and shampoo, her cold cream and silk dressing gown. Phoebe, newly able to sit up in bed, had visions of wandering the hospital hallways in style. Rebecca considered several sets of earrings, trying to decide what would go with the robe, before she realized that she was about to cry. For some reason, it was especially painful to accessorize.

  She retreated to the kitchen and found an open bottle of 1989 Château Margaux red; even Phoebe’s vin ordinaire was typically extraordinary. Rebecca poured herself a generous glass and took it out onto the deck. The beach was empty, a sweeping stretch of desolate sand that seemed to fit her mood. She’d just managed to get a cigarette lit in the brisk north wind when Mike, looking haggard, came out the sliding door with a bottle of Czechoslovakian pilsner in hand. He’d missed one of Phoebe’s orchids during his previous watering run and it had died. He was near tears too.

  “I broke down over the jewelry,” Rebecca told him. “I think it’s because so much of it is from my father.”

  “She can’t remember anyone’s name, but I’ll bet she’s got every flower clear in her mind,” Mike said. “God, I feel awful.”

  Rebecca smiled in spite of herself; she knew perfectly well that Phoebe wouldn’t give him a hard time over the orchid. Her mother was still sure that Mike was a priest. The first thing she had said to him when he walked into the room after her return to consciousness, in a conspiratorial whisper, had been, “Last rites?” Mike had glanced uncertainly at Rebecca, who had given him a trace of an I-told-you-so smile.

  “We already did that,” he’d told Phoebe. “But you’re not going to die.”

  “Aren’t we cocky,” Phoebe had noted dryly, with a flash of her old wit, and the two of them had laughed together. It hadn’t seemed particularly funny to Rebecca, but her mother’s sense of humor had always been a little beyond her.

  “She’s not going to be able to come back here alone, you know,” she said now. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with her.”

  “She can move into the in-law apartment,” Mike said.

  Rebecca laughed. “And then what will I do with you?”

  “You could marry me.”

  A line of half a dozen pelicans came into view just beyond the breakers, heading south, their big dark wings flapping stolidly. Rebecca watched them until they rounded the point and passed from sight. Beside her, Mike waited quietly.

  “You want me to marry you to free up the in-law apartment?” she said.

  “I want you to marry me because I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Her cigarette had burned down to the end. Rebecca looked at it uncomprehendingly for a moment, and Mike reached over, took the butt out of her hand, and stubbed it out on the railing.

  “It’s not always going to be as much fun as it’s been the last few weeks,” she said, and he laughed.

  “It’s so strange,” he said. “All those years in the monastery…It always seemed like a particularly galling kind of failure to me, to just fall in love and live your life, to shop at Safeway and to watch TV. To say goodnight and good morning, to brush your teeth together. To buy turkeys at Thanksgiving and hams at Christmas. To worry about money and sign report cards and try to explain gravity to a six-year-old. All that stuff just seemed so overwhelming.”

  “All that stuff is life.”

  “I know. It’s terrifying, isn’t it?”

  Rebecca laughed and reached up to run her fingers through his hair, savoring the ripple it made, like wind in a wheat field.

  “You were such an awkward little gosling when you first showed up,” she said.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Rebecca picked up her wine.

  “I can’t even settle on some jewelry for Phoebe right now,” she said. “Give me a few weeks. Give me a m
onth.”

  “A month!”

  “Maybe two,” Rebecca said. “And for God’s sake, come help me pick out some earrings for my mother.”

  She had several more glasses of Phoebe’s Bordeaux before she was able to decide on the jewelry and to pick out one of the photos of her father from her mother’s bedside table. At sunset, as they walked out to the car to go home, laden with sentimental loot. Rebecca found that she was a little drunk.

  “Maybe you’d better drive,” she told Mike. “If you think you can handle it?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You do know how to drive, don’t you?”

  “I hear it’s like riding a bicycle,” he said, accepting the keys with a wink and opening the passenger door for her. She was struck by the jaunty way he joggled the keys in his hand. It took her a moment to place the new note, but as he started the car and accelerated out of Phoebe’s driveway, spinning the wheels ever so slightly on the gravel, she realized that he sounded just like an American guy. He was overconfident, macho, and showing off for his girlfriend. It was strangely reassuring.

  Sure enough, his driving was fine. Between the work being done and the abundance of wine she’d drunk, Rebecca found herself in a surprisingly celebratory mood. They rolled the windows down and played the radio—Mike had it tuned to an oldies station, which made sense, of course. This was a guy who probably hadn’t heard any new music since the heyday of Wham. They wound up and down the twilit cliffs, the only car on the road, singing along to corny hits from the seventies and smoking cigarettes. She felt vaguely guilty, acting so carefree with her mother still in the hospital, but she couldn’t imagine Phoebe begrudging her the moment. Mike had a lovely, modest baritone, which he attributed to twenty years of Gregorian plainsong. Rebecca loved the exotic feel of that. She was driving along on a clear cool evening with a man who had spent most of his adult life chanting psalms from the twelfth century but who could still remember all the words to “Piano Man.” It had begun to seem to her that she might get through this after all.