The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “I can see that.”

  “Hi, Pheebs,” Rory said cheerfully. “Sorry for the ruckus.”

  “It’s all right,” Phoebe allowed. At least she wouldn’t have to die now. Or, worse, tell Rebecca that she hadn’t been able to dial 911. “Is there a chair available, by any chance?”

  “I’ll run grab one for you.” He hurried out and was back in a moment with one of the exiled kitchen chairs. Phoebe settled onto it gratefully. Mary Martha promptly clambered up onto her lap.

  “Mary Martha, go easy on your poor grandmother,” Rory said.

  “It’s all right,” Phoebe said, and gave Mary Martha a squeeze with her good arm. Her granddaughter was the only one who didn’t treat her like she was made of glass now. Mary Martha’s hair smelled of strawberries and cream. These tasty new shampoos. “So, what’s going on here?”

  “It’s a surprise for Mommie,” Mary Martha said.

  “That’s for sure,” Phoebe said.

  “A sort of wedding gift,” Rory explained. “She’s been wanting this wall out for years now. This kitchen has always felt like a phone booth.”

  He was stoned, Phoebe realized. She could tell, since the stroke. Rory had been conspicuously clean for most of the last year, since getting busted for possession the previous autumn. He’d settled in to a steady job as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at a local pool, married his girlfriend well before their new baby was born, and in general was knocking himself out to be a good citizen, a good father, and a good husband—even a good ex-husband, obviously. But he was definitely stoned at the moment. He was very slowed down.

  She said, “You didn’t tell Rebecca you were going to do this?”

  “That would ruin the surprise,” Mary Martha said. “You have to promise not to tell too, Gran-Gran.”

  “I promise,” Phoebe said. “Mary Martha, sweetheart, would you run downstairs for me, please, and get my sweater? It’s a little drafty up here.”

  “That’s the hole,” Rory said. “It’s already improving the air circulation.”

  “Where is it?” Mary Martha asked.

  “On the back of my big chair, I think.”

  Mary Martha hopped off her lap and trotted away on her mission. Once she was out the door, Phoebe looked at Rory and said, “Maybe you should have waited until you were sober to start knocking down the walls.”

  Rory instinctively considered denying it, then just met her eyes and gave her a slightly rueful smile, not an attitude, just an acknowledgment. Almost no one met her eyes like that anymore, as if she were a fully sentient being.

  “It’s just a couple hits,” he said.

  “A couple hits to knock the wall down. How much to finish the job?”

  “No, no, it’s not like that. It’s just been a little more stressful this week, keeping Mary Martha and all.”

  Phoebe considered her options, which seemed to be limited to making certain hand-wringing noises that he would ignore completely. It wasn’t like she could take the sledgehammer out of his hand. What she really wanted to do was tell him how clearly she saw this leading to catastrophe somehow. He was trying too hard to do too much, and he was already starting to fray. To cheat, to cut corners.

  She said carefully, “I’m not sure this is such a good idea, Rory.”

  “Rebecca is going to be thrilled,” he said. “Really. “

  “It’s going to be a…” Phoebe trailed off, groping for the way to say it, knowing that she just sounded like a feebleminded old woman. She had the meaning, it was right there, she could feel it in her brain like grit in an oyster, but her mind couldn’t make the pearl for the word fast enough. It was something she’d often felt since the stroke, the agony of impotent lucidity. Cassandra didn’t have some special psychic gift. All she had was helplessness. Once you couldn’t do anything about it, everything became painfully clear.

  “It’s going to be fine, Pheebs,” Rory said with such warm and genuine affection that she felt like crying.

  Mary Martha came trotting back into the kitchen just then with Phoebe’s sweater.

  “Thank you, sweetie pie,” Phoebe said.

  “Your shoes are untied, Gran-Gran.”

  Phoebe looked down. “My goodness, so they are.”

  “Do you want me to tie them for you?”

  “Would you, please?”

  Mary Martha knelt and got to work, making her scrupulous loops, the tip of her tongue sticking out, as Rory’s did when he concentrated.

  “Is that the Bunny or the Rabbit?” Phoebe asked, trying to follow the procedure.

  “The Bunny,” Mary Martha said. She did something entirely different than Phoebe remembered, and then went through the hole into the burrow, but somehow the knot came out with only one loop.

  Rory had come over by now, and he said, “Do you guys know how to do the Teepee?”

  “We know the Bunny and the Rabbit,” Mary Martha said.

  “She knows them better than me,” Phoebe said.

  “Well the Teepee might be easier for you.” Rory took Phoebe’s laces. “There’s even an easy little rhyme that goes with it. Watch: Make a teepee. Come inside. Pull down tight so we can hide. Around the mountain…here we go! Here’s my arrow…and here’s my bow!” He looked up at them. “Bingo! You got it?”

  Phoebe and Mary Martha exchanged a glance. Even stoned, Rory had gone way too fast for either of them, and the technique actually seemed much more complicated than any of the Bunny/Rabbit variations; but Mary Martha’s look said, fondly, Indulge him, he’s doing the best he can. Phoebe felt a burst of love for her granddaughter, and a sort of pain at how much she loved her father. It was heartbreaking, how hard they all were trying.

  “Got it,” she said to Rory.

  Rory, satisfied that he had improved the world by one shoelace, turned back to the wall and picked up the sledgehammer. Mary Martha climbed back onto Phoebe’s lap. Phoebe had remembered the word she was groping for earlier by now, it was tragedy, but that was just how things went, too little, too late. It was just so lovely, for the moment, to hold her granddaughter close, to smell her hair and feel her happiness. And the wall’s demolition really was quite a show, once you realized there was no stopping it.

  Chapter Four

  His mother said unto Jesus, “Son, why have you done this to us?

  Your father and I have been sorrowing.”

  And Jesus said unto her,

  “Knew ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”

  LUKE 2:48–49

  Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall…

  It was warm enough even at 4:00 AM to sit for prayer on the balcony of their eighth-floor hotel room. This high above the water, the waves were the merest whisper on the rocks, and the stars seemed closer than the hotels across the bay. It was like sitting in the sky. You could smell the ocean, not as the sharp salty tang of northern California, but as a softer balm. You could feel the air around you as a bird might feel it, as an embrace.

  It made Mike realize how much of his prayer life he had spent feeling like a mole, a blind thing burrowing relentlessly, often hopelessly, through the recalcitrant densities of self and world: down, and deeper down, and deeper still, into heatless earth, into a blackness ever more alien and profound. And the peace he’d found in prayer, more often than not, had been a miner’s austere peace, a surrender, lamp-lit at best, to the incomprehensible call to the cold depths of such darkness. As if to live in God were to become a species of stone.

  My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.

  Slipping back into the hotel room after his meditation, he would ease the sliding door to the balcony shut and stop to listen to Rebecca breathing. There seemed such a miracle in that: to rise from prayer and step into love. The warm room smelled of gardenias and their lovemaking, of the last wine in the glasses by the bed, of the sandalwood candle that had burned all night and still flickered within its heart of wax. Not stone, but flowers an
d flame, fruit, and flesh: the true eternity, not of what merely didn’t change in time, but of what lived and died in the holy moment. Rebecca’s face in that candlelight seemed all the eternity he needed now.

  He took the stairs down rather than the elevator, nursing the glow within him, nodding to the night clerk at the front desk, who had been startled to see him at this hour on the first day here, less so the second, and who by now just gave him a smile of graveyard-shift camaraderie and lifted his coffee cup.

  Outside, Mike moved along the sidewalk through the deep shadows of ancient banyan trees and across the pedestrian bridge to the island park that protruded into Hilo Bay just across from the hotel. The place was a little miracle, a sort of rocky prayer garden. At the far side of the bridge, two old Japanese men stood twenty feet apart on the seawall with their fishing lines in the water, motionless as twin herons. They nodded impassively, once each, in the etiquette of solitaries, as Mike went by.

  Beyond the bridge the island was, deliciously, deserted at this hour. He moved across the dark sand toward the rocks on the far side. The sky over the ocean to the east was just beginning to soften toward gray. Across the bay to the west, the mass of Mauna Kea loomed from the mist above the lights of Hilo, the volcano nothing but a massive mystery in this light, a place where the stars were not.

  Mike settled on a flat boulder, smelling the seaweed and the salt, listening to the low wash of the waves and the first cries of waking birds beginning to hunt. Soon the day would make itself real through slow degrees; the mountain behind him would sharpen into form against the purpling sky and then, thrillingly, catch the first rays of the sun, a rose touch at the peak. The red sunlight would flow down the mountain like lava, a relentless wave of descending light, searing the world into color and shape.

  It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.

  He would even be able to see their hotel room by then, picking it out easily by the twin honeymoon towels, orange and blue, hanging from the railing, and to see the reflection of the lit volcano in the sliding glass door, like a promise, like an echo. And that would be his cue to walk back, against the rising tide of fishermen and dog walkers, joggers and women with strollers and people doing tai chi, hoping, if only for a moment before his buzzing daily mind made the usual crap of it, to be a bit like that sunlight, easing down from the peak of his rosy little mystical moment toward the holy making of the day.

  Was it really so impossible that Love could walk the planet? Not at all, it seemed, not in balmy seventy-five-degree weather, not on a honeymoon in Eden. Not I, but Christ in me, could do just fine for a little while, playing at being in the world but not of it, in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel room that someone else was paying for.

  Mike smiled at himself. The Word made flesh, eating cheese-burgers in paradise. Still, it was nice to catch a glimpse. Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

  In the afternoons they rented masks and flippers and snorkeled in secret coves, working from a list of secret places they’d found in the tourist magazine in their hotel room. Some of the places were in fact quite isolated and relatively unpopulated; and the hilarity that the word secret inevitably took on became one of the thousand small delights of their honeymoon, part of their private lovers’ language. They drank secret mai tais, ate secret meals, and lounged on secret beaches; they drove down secret roads to secret destinations. Along with the surreal beauty of the island itself, the ongoing play lent an air of sweet mystery to almost everything. It felt like they were moving around in a country of their own most of the time, a vivid place voluptuous with unsuspected meanings, hidden in plain sight.

  Given the general sense of idyll, it was almost a relief to Rebecca to find a problem. It made her feel that she hadn’t lost touch with reality completely, that she was not ruined for daily life. The week of pure leisure, like a receding tide, had exposed some rocks at which their life in San Francisco had only hinted, the most prominent being that Mike was a morning person and Rebecca was not. At home this showed mostly in the fact that Mike’s early routine was still essentially monastic: he woke without fuss or groaning, and without an alarm, at around four, slipped out of bed to engage in the mysterious inwardness of his meditation, then walked over to the 6:30 mass at the local Catholic church. He would get home again just after seven, smelling faintly of frankincense and fog, to slip back into bed with Rebecca for the remaining fifteen minutes before her own alarm went off. Some days she didn’t even know he was gone until he got back. The routine worked perfectly on weekdays and so was more or less invisible; on Saturdays Mike skipped the slightly later morning mass, and they savored the extra time together in bed until Mary Martha came trotting in and the day got started.

  Here in Hawaii, in the lovely northwest-facing room with the view of Hilo Bay, their mornings were trickier somehow. Instead of going to mass after his morning meditation, Mike would wander around the shore of the bay in the rising dawn light, and he tended to come back from these jaunts a bit later, well after the sun was up, and far more energized than he did at home. He would bustle happily back into the hotel room bearing two giant cups of Kona coffee from a little stand down by the bay, and a cinnamon-raisin scone for her. A lover’s gift, continental breakfast in bed: sweet thoughtfulness. But by their fourth day on the island, Rebecca had begun to see an oblique chastisement in the size of that coffee cup; she felt, ever so mildly and fondly, plied with caffeine and sugar, as if she were supposed to be peppier.

  Who knew? Rebecca thought. Mike had a Rory streak in him. It was almost like he was coming back stoned. Apparently the damping effect of Catholicism and the gloom of San Francisco served as a natural check on some wild strain of exuberant nature mysticism in Mike. It didn’t help that Hawaii made her feel infinitely more languid. She just wanted to lounge there in the enormous bed, getting the slowest and most gentle start possible on the day, dozing amid the sex-tangled sheets like a walrus on a sunny beach, letting her mind wander through the delicious, obligation-free hours of sunlight ahead.

  The irony of having married a contemplative and finding herself aggravated by his excessive energy did not escape her, but the loss of her sense of humor was a key part of the whole problem. Rebecca told herself it was just a girl thing, a function of her heightened expectations, but she found herself increasingly preoccupied, reading signs of tension everywhere and projecting the trend into a future of cumulative catastrophe, the two of them drifting relentlessly toward divorce, cinnamon scone by cinnamon scone. It really shouldn’t have been that big a deal. But it hurt to have anything not work on a honeymoon.

  That afternoon, as they drove to another secret beach, Rebecca realized that her brooding had reached critical mass and tipped over into paranoia. Didn’t Mike understand that their relationship was doomed? That they had fallen fatally out of sync? But he seemed oblivious, chattering on about an old friend who’d recently gotten back in touch. Mike had gone to seminary with the guy, who had eventually ended up as a parish priest in Los Angeles for a while before having the usual monumental crisis of faith blah blah blah. All of Mike’s best friends, it seemed, lived from crisis of faith to crisis of faith. Anyway, the guy had eventually married an ex-nun, and they lived somewhere north of Willits in some exquisite blah blah blah.

  “They want us to come up for a visit when we get home,” Mike said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He glanced at her. “Are you okay?”

  “Just peachy,” Rebecca said.

  “You seem a little…uh—”

  “I’m fine. Maybe a bit dozy, I think I might have slept bad somehow last night.”

  “When we slept,” Mike said, arching an eyebrow, referring to their glorious sex life, that irony.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shall we stop somewhere along here and grab a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t want any damn coffee,” Rebecca snapped, surprising even herself.

  Mike looked startled f
or an instant, then hurt, before he controlled his face and concentrated on the road.

  “Sorry,” Rebecca said. “It’s just…I just don’t want any coffee, thanks.”

  “Sure,” Mike said, and drove quietly for a while. She suspected that he was praying. He had told her once he often prayed when he was baffled by their dynamics: just gave it all up to God and waited for grace. At the time Rebecca had been pleased by that. Now it just felt condescending.

  The beach was exquisite, a waning crescent of white sand lined with coconut palms, ringing a tiny green cove as intimate as a swimming pool. There was a local family at the far end of the beach’s curve, with a bunch of coolers and a big picnic lunch spread, umbrellas, and beach chairs; otherwise they had the place all to themselves. A truly secret spot. A keyhole of heaven. A goddamn postcard.

  “Nice,” Mike noted, so carefully casual that Rebecca wanted to bite his head off. Which was nuts, of course. She recognized that. She wanted out of this condition; she truly did. She just couldn’t see any way out that didn’t involve acknowledging the bankruptcy of their relationship, the fatal flaws they’d ignored coming in, too obvious now even for commentary.

  Mike took out the sunscreen, holding it like it was a loaded gun and he was afraid it might go off. But he said, still with that same note of perfectly pitched amenability, “Would you like me to—”

  “No, thanks, I’m a little sunned out,” Rebecca said, striving to match his tone. Maybe they really could just ride through this. Or maybe they were setting patterns of denial now that would haunt their marriage until it fell apart. “I’m just going to go up in the shade and paint for a while, I think.”

  “Oh,” Mike said. “Well. Sure.”

  Rebecca bent to gather up her sketchbook and watercolors and headed off toward a spot beneath one of the palm trees, where she spread her towel and settled in. Just another blissed-out honeymooner, luxuriating in the natural beauty of the Big Island. Oh, the aquas and the teals. She felt Mike watching her for a moment, in frustration and bafflement, something Rory had never done; but then, like Rory, he turned and took his shirt off, picked up one of their rented snorkeling rigs and a set of flippers, and headed for the water.