“He’ll show,” Phoebe seconded. “Just relax, sweetheart. The man’s a goner.”
“If he needs to pray or drink at this point, we shouldn’t be doing this,” Rebecca said, but she was surrounded by resolute Pollyannas, and she took a deep breath. It was, clearly, a moment to simply exercise her inner resources and cultivate serenity. To Zen out, as Phoebe liked to say. Unfortunately, all that came to mind in terms of spiritual substance were the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance. Rebecca had been cruising along in what she thought was acceptance until five minutes ago; but apparently that had just been denial, because she was seething now, in the old familiar way. It felt like she had spent most of her adult life in stage two of grief over her relationships with men.
Rory looked the way he always looked when he had managed to escape a social gathering for a while, like he had just had two hits of something in the bathroom.
The back door swung open just then and Rebecca’s heart leaped instantly into the purest stage five, without transition, but it was her daughter and her ex-husband, who had slipped out to look for Mike. And, it was clear at once, not found him. Mary Martha, looking a bit flushed in her pink flower girl dress with its even pinker ruffled front and puffy sleeves, had an air of uneasy compliance with circumstances beyond her grasp, like a dog on the way to the vet’s. Rory looked the way he always looked when he had managed to escape a social gathering for a while, like he had just had two hits of something in the bathroom. He was wearing his only suit, the blue off-the-rack thing he kept on a hook for court appearances.
“No sign of him,” he informed Rebecca, trying to look appropriately downcast and managing to keep it short of gleeful. But she couldn’t begrudge him a little legitimate schadenfreude. No one wanted their ex’s wedding to go perfectly, it was too much to expect of a human being.
They still did the books by hand out here, the nearest paved road was six miles away, and the monks used the place’s single computer mostly for playing blackjack.
“He’ll show,” Phoebe said.
“Has anyone tried his cell phone?” Mary Martha asked.
Everyone chuckled indulgently, it was so cute and precocious and postmodern, and then they all reached simultaneously for their phones, because it was actually a great idea. Mike had resisted getting a phone for quite a while, but the dance of urban coordinations centering around Mary Martha being in first grade had eventually broken him down.
Bonnie, with her phone stashed for instant access in a nifty white satin dress-up purse the length of a tampon and the width of a pack of Kit-Kats, won the race to get the number dialed. They all waited hopefully, but after a moment she shook her head and said, “No signal out here.”
It made sense, unfortunately. The Bethanite monastery that had been Mike’s home for twenty years until he’d left the year before was so far out in the second-growth redwood forest on the coast of Mendocino County that it always seemed like a surprise that they had running water. They still did the books by hand out here, the nearest paved road was six miles away, and the monks used the place’s single computer mostly for playing blackjack.
Rebecca peeked through the door into the chapel again. Chelsea Burke had quieted her baby by opening her blouse and beginning to breast-feed. The monks sitting near her were all looking straight ahead toward the altar and had taken on an air of rapt absorption, as if they were listening to faint tendrils of angelsong.
“He’ll show,” Rory said, generously.
That did it. Rebecca thought of her wedding day with Rory, of waiting on the beach, four months pregnant with Mary Martha, surrounded by a handful of stoned hippies, her horrified mother, and a minister of the Church of the Perfect Wave who had gotten his certificate over the Internet, while Rory bobbed beyond the breakers on his surf-board. If it hadn’t been a little choppy that day, Rebecca had always suspected, he might not have come ashore at all. Rory’s wetsuit was still dripping when they finally got around to the ceremony, and his lips had been blue from the cold for their first conjugal kiss. It felt like marrying a seal. Rebecca had hoped for a different ceremonial spin, this second time around.
It felt like marrying a seal. Rebecca had hoped for a different ceremonial spin, this second time around.
“I’m going to go find him,” she announced now, and she started for the door in don’t-mess-with-me fashion. Everyone hesitated, uneasy with the move, then leaned back to let her by. They’d all seen her lose it before, at one time or another, and God knew, it wasn’t pretty.
She felt better the moment she was outside; the tiny chapel had begun to feel as claustrophobic as a sitcom set. The May afternoon was chilly beneath a low, thick sky and her bare arms rose at once into goosebumps. Mike had assured her that late spring was a glorious time in the monastery’s woods, and in fact it had been clear for about twenty minutes just before noon, but the balance between land and sea had already tilted back toward the cool air streaming off the Humboldt Current and threads of incoming mist wove through the upper branches of the tan oaks, firs, and redwoods, muffling the greens into funereal gray. It was probably a warm, clear day in the low eighties a couple of miles inland, but it was way too late to get married somewhere sunny, secular, and sane.
It was probably a warm, clear day in the low eighties a couple of miles inland, but it was way too late to get married somewhere sunny, secular, and sane.
Rebecca skirted the jumble of cars in the muddy clearing serving as the monastery’s makeshift parking lot. Ahead and to her right was the main complex of Our Lady of Bethany. Rebecca went first to the refectory where the monks took their silent meals, on the off chance that Mike was in there washing the lunch dishes or something. He was prone to such obscurities of menial service and she knew that washing dishes always calmed him down. But the only one in the kitchen was a fresh-faced novice in an apron with “Taste and see that the Lord is good” written on it, who was laying out a tray of some kind of neo-Benedictine hors d’oeuvres for the reception. Rebecca saw a young Mike in him for a moment: the shaved head, the air of sturdy resignation and determined cheerfulness, and the heartbreaking innocence.
“Have you seen my bridegroom anywhere?” she asked.
The kid shook his head. He seemed distressed by the breakdown of the sacred routine and was clearly groping for something spiritual to say, but Rebecca had no time for it. She grabbed one of the bottles of Dom Pérignon that were stuck into one of the monastery’s washtubs of ice like beer cans at a picnic, gave the startled young monk a wink in lieu of further clarification, and breezed out again.
The kid shook his head. He seemed distressed by the breakdown of the sacred routine and was clearly groping for something spiritual to say, but Rebecca had no time for it.
On the muddy driveway again, she paused, the champagne bottle dripping on her off-white pumps. To her immediate right lay the dormlike residence buildings, the slapdash office, and the cute little misplaced abbatial chalet, crammed now with the rented medical paraphernalia of Abbot Hackley’s prolonged demise. Beyond that were the monastery’s gardens and its foggy peach orchard and artichoke patch. Men had been disappearing into that complex since the monastery had been founded near the turn of the century by three peevish hermits seceding from the Cistercians; whole lifetimes of devotion had circled the holy drain and vanished into its depths, and it offered no end of nooks, niches, and refuge for those inclined to renounce the world of weddings and other mundane complexities. Rebecca, however, knew her man, and she took the barely discernible trail to the left, deeper into the forest.
What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee.
There were two ways in, through fire and through water, and he turned into the fire, having learned by now in every nerve ending that the water’s oasis was a mirage, a comfort that bloated, rotted, and stank; that the only peace, the unimaginable freedom, lay at the heart of the flame, after every oasis had dried up and every seeking after comfort had burne
d away. It was the precise opposite of what any child learned, touching a hot stove; but it was no trick. It was more the wisdom of a camel, poisoned once at a certain spring, resting on later journeys in the seductive shade: tempted every time, panting for a moment over the glittering liquid, scraping a dry tongue across baked lips, before turning into the dryness of the next stretch of desert. It was a thing your bones came to know, a thing burned into your bones by time and suffering. And this was prayer.
I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.
It was a thing your bones came to know, a thing burned into your bones by time and suffering.
Mike sat on the floor in the middle of the shack, legs crossed, with only a scrap of dirty white prayer mat woven from thick strands of raw wool, a gift from a visiting Shaivite monk some twenty years ago, between him and the concrete floor. There was a prie-dieu with a wooden kneeler built into the east wall, below the shelf shrine to St. Martha, Our Lady of Bethany, but Mike had never used the thing. Neither, though, had he ever bothered to dispel anyone’s impression that he did. His early contemplative experiences had come as a teenager, among Zen Buddhists, and he’d always found the basic cross-legged position best. But he’d had to fight so hard to get this sanctuary built at all that he hadn’t wanted to push his luck by revealing his preference for a posture that might be interpreted as pagan: the prie-dieu was his story, and he was sticking to it.
Mike had proposed the idea for the hermitage to Abbot Hackley a year and a half after he’d come to Our Lady of Bethany, believing it at the time to be a slam dunk: a prayer retreat, after all, at a monastery.
It was strange to be here, back in the center of this rough floor, with the fog seeping in as coolness from every edge and corner of the shack, bearing witness to the thing’s unlikely and haphazard construction. Strangest of all, perhaps, was how easy and true it felt, how much it seemed, sinking into this simple presence, that he had never left, that this was the reality and that all the adventures, the drama, dilemmas, and bafflement in the year between sittings here had been the drifting of a forgetful instant, a hazy space-out between the moment of remembrance and the moment of return.
Mike had proposed the idea for the hermitage to Abbot Hackley a year and a half after he’d come to Our Lady of Bethany, believing it at the time to be a slam dunk: a prayer retreat, after all, at a monastery. The activity of building itself seemed another selling point: a sweaty project, calluses and holy blisters, exertion and tangible results. His abbot was relentless in his sense that Brother Jerome gave entirely too little energy to robust service. But Hackley had seen it differently, had smelled at once a failure of humility, the stink of holy ambition. And defiance, the incapacity to submit to the discipline of obedience.
True enough, Mike thought, looking back. He’d definitely wanted too much, at every step of his journey; but in the long run that too-muchness was a soul-greed that only God could really cure. And as for the defiance …He’d paid dearly enough for that. The fights with Hackley had blocked out the horizon of his prayer life for years. Mike suspected it had been as much a catastrophe of ego, a soul distraction and a circle of hell, for the abbot as it had been for him. But once the battle had been joined, it went on, and on, mostly because neither man was willing to lose. So much for the contemplative community as a peaceful incubator of the love of God, a garden of serene devotion: the monastery was the world in small—petty, prickly, and in your face. To be in it but not of it was still the impossible goal. You realized that, at some point, and got on with it.
They’d cut a deal of sorts eventually: Mike could build the shack, but it had to be done in his free time, and with scrap materials only, nothing that could be used for anything else. Since there really was no free time in the round of the monastic hours, and precious little went to waste in Our Lady of Bethany’s frugal economy, where they were all by strict design pauperes cum paupere Christo, poor men sharing the poverty of Christ, the abbot had no doubt believed the conditions sufficiently impracticable to allow Mike to knock himself out; while Mike had just been glad to get to work.
So much for the contemplative community as a peaceful incubator of the love of God, a garden of serene devotion: the monastery was the world in small—petty, prickly, and in your face.
The new refectory had been being built at that time and Mike had taken to rummaging in the dumpster beside the construction site at two in the morning, in the still hour before the community chanted Vigils. As he seldom found any scraps larger than about twenty-three inches, he’d used the chunks of leftover board like bricks. Aside from the obvious, that Mike could build only in the dark, in forty-five-minute eruptions of insomnia flanked by prayer and prayer, the limit on the pace of construction at that point had been the nails: He’d gotten amazingly good at finding bent discards amid the sawdust and the mud, and straightening them by candlelight, though his left thumbnail was soon perpetually black, and his hands battered, from hammer blows delivered in the dark.
He started falling asleep during the communal Mass, and during the daily self-examination of faults against the Rule, his dogged confessions of pride eventually began to draw smirks from the other monks.
For some time, the shack’s walls had eased upward overnight in semi-sedimentary fashion, like an accumulation of wooden dew, an inch-and-a-half at a time. But Mike had lost ten pounds in the first month, and his eyes sank back behind soggy bags of black, like bruises. He started falling asleep during the communal Mass, and during the daily self-examination of faults against the Rule, his dogged confessions of pride eventually began to draw smirks from the other monks. He was a walking lesson in spiritual hubris. The rainy season was coming by then and the project more than ever seemed utterly quixotic. Abbot Hackley, meanwhile, continued to be serenely tolerant of Mike’s exertions, apparently feeling the work to be essentially penitential, if not Sisyphean.
The turning point had come when the construction crew realized what was going on. For some reason Mike’s struggle caught their imaginations, an underdog thing, perhaps, and suddenly a much higher quality of materials began to appear, mysteriously, in and around the dumpster: actual two-by-fours, whole boards consigned to the scrap pile for dubious degrees of warping, bags of nails with the merest tinge of rust, an entire piece of plywood someone had used for a sign, and another sheet that had been used as a walkway. Just when the shack’s frame was finally up, a skeleton without much hope of a skin, half a roll of battered but viable tar paper got thrown away; several sheets of flashing and a slightly damaged tube of sealant appeared at a crucial moment in the roofing.
It all took place quietly, invisibly, under cover of darkness and silence, and by the time Abbot Hackley even realized he was losing, the fight was almost over.
It all took place quietly, invisibly, under cover of darkness and silence, and by the time Abbot Hackley even realized he was losing, the fight was almost over. To add insult to injury, on the day the cement truck came to pour the final flooring of the new refectory, Mike was summoned from the monastery’s silent lunch by one of the workers “to help them find a place to dispose of the extra concrete.” He’d conceded that he had a place to dump it, and they’d backed the massive truck as far as possible into the woods and used a wheelbarrow for the last stretch of trail, hauling just enough cement for the shack’s rough floor. The crew had poured out the gray stuff cheerfully, shared a cigarette with Mike and given him a wink, and driven off. Mike had been called back to his own monastic duties before he’d been able to fully level the floor, and even now, twenty years later, you could set a marble in the northeast corner and watch it slowly make its way southwest, like a spawned salmon winding downstream to the sea, to bump at last against the far wall. But the thing was done.
Mike had knocked together the prie-dieu the next morning, having saved up a chunk of unblemished two-by-six; he’d never knelt on it himself, but in the years since then
, the kneeler had come into its own: there were two distinct impressions hollowed into the unpadded board, the knee-shapes, decades deep now, of several generations of other monks. Despite its problematical history, the renegade prayer shack had quietly become an integral part of the monastery’s life. For some years now, you’d even had to sign up in advance, particularly during Lent, for time in what had come to be called, formally, The Retreat House, though the old-timers still called it Brother Jerome’s hut, if Abbot Hackley was not around. There had even been talk recently of rebuilding the structure, of making a proper chapel here, with a consecrated altar, a side cell, sink, and toilet, running water, possibly even electricity: a pious haven of stone stability. Mike hoped this would not happen. As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world. A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.
Is not my Word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?
Is not my Word like a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?
He had drifted; you always drifted. Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world. The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned, and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. It was his wedding day, and then it was any day; it was nothing, and then it was forever.
Acknowledgments
Gratitude first and foremost to Renée Sedliar, my beautiful and brilliant editor at Harper San Francisco, for her poetic touch and Dante tattoos, and for her savvy and unerring taste. Thanks also to Calla “The Devlinator” Devlin, for her Midas touch and Frank’s last name; and to Margery Buchanan, Miki Terasawa, Chris Hafner, Priscilla Stuckey, and the rest of the awesome team at HarperSF. An ancient debt of thanks to Elizabeth Pomada for a sympathetic reading and encouraging response to the first draft of this book in 1988; and more recent gratitude to Judith Ehrlich for a timely and insightful perusal of the evolving text, and to Carolyn Brown for a genuinely synchronistic and fruitful edit. Thanks too to Sybil MacBeth for the poetic meditations on prayer as manicure, which I ripped off shamelessly; to my Aunt Mary Ann, SNJM, the only person I know whose copy of John of the Cross is more beat-up than mine; and to Anne Poole for her title suggestions, her watercolors, and for our many shared gin and tonics.
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