“I think I had the basic idea,” Mike said. “I must have missed the fine print on the ex-husband with the sledgehammer.”
“Rory does this kind of thing once in a while. He once took our car engine apart to save us some money on a valve job and never did get it back together. We took the bus everywhere for about three months and eventually had to sell the car for parts and buy a VW van. Which of course is what he wanted all along.” Rebecca shook her head. “What really surprised me was Phoebe. Two years ago—one year ago—she would never have let that happen.”
“Apparently Mary Martha made her promise—”
“I know, I know. Her hands were tied. It’s just not the mother I know.” She leaned back slightly to meet his eyes. “You two looked pretty cozy there on the back porch for a while. I don’t know whether to be grateful or jealous.”
“I adore Phoebe, you know that,” Mike said. “She’s easy for me, somehow.”
“She keeps saying she wishes she were dead. But she says it so cheerfully. Sometimes I think she may just be trying to get a rise out of me.”
Mike seemed inclined to dispute that, then smiled and conceded, “That would be Phoebe-like. Though I think there’s more to it than sheer orneriness.”
“Well, I hate it when she talks like that. It seems to me that it’s practically my job right now to hate it.” She hesitated, then said, “What do you two talk about?”
“Not much. It’s more like music, what we do now.”
“Well maybe I’m just tone-deaf. Because this new hit-or-miss coherence of hers is freaking me out.”
“She’s okay. Just coming at things from a different angle.”
“I hope so,” Rebecca said. “It’s just so hard, this different woman. It scares me. Half the time when I look at her I just want to cry. It took her five minutes tonight to find the word redemption.”
“That’s not bad,” Mike said. “It takes most of us years.”
Rebecca laughed and put her head back under his chin. She could feel him breathing her in, as if she were a flower. Their familiar and comforting entwinement felt slightly self-conscious tonight, and it took Rebecca a moment to place her emotion: it was a marriage night, tonight. Not a wedding night, not a honeymoon night. A marriage night. They had come back from a trip together to stacked-up mail and newspapers, survived a mutual social event, dealt with her mother and with friends. They had no running water in the kitchen and were without a working stove. Their refrigerator was in the living room. Their kid had to get up for school in the morning, and Rebecca was already feeling the dread of peeling back the dust-covered sheets of plastic in her studio the next day and getting to the piles of neglected work beneath them. She had never felt more married. This was it. And it felt good. How strange, she thought, to find that such a surprise.
“Welcome home, Mr. Christopher,” she murmured into her husband’s chest, and she could feel his smile against her forehead.
“Mrs. Christopher,” Mike said, “welcome home.”
Chapter Six
Truly I say unto you, If you have done these kindnesses
to any of the lowest of my brethren,
you have done them unto me.
MATTHEW 25:40
Dear Brother James,
Hello, my friend. It seems like forever since I have written to you. I think I have even been afraid to write to you, in some ways. To articulate what I always seem to have to say to you, to speak truly about my soul and the workings of God in me, seems to lead me to an abyss of sorts. I peer over the edge, and see the ruinous fall—from grace, from the life I have hoped for, from everything I consciously hold dear. There is never a question that it is anything but God that has led me to that edge, but still I look for a way around. And look, and look, and finally panic and try to run away. But in the end every path leads to that abyss. And so I am finally defeated, as always, into my heedless leap.
I thought I might be done with that stuff. How ridiculous is that? As if, after a lifetime spent in the desert with the demons and the dryness and the emptiness of the self, I could suddenly become a civilian in the oasis of normality, a cheerful well-integrated man, a bit sweaty perhaps in the usual humidity, but still a productive member of society. It is much more likely I will run this body into the ground, wreck my life and the lives of those I love, fail in every direction, wreak havoc wherever my fear drives me—until at last I am brought home through sufficient wreckage and the final grace of complete failure to the desert that is everywhere, to the abyss that is my home.
At which point, apparently, I will write to you. You are like a therapist I talk to only after the suicidal urges have passed.
You said in your letter that you hoped I was adjusting well to my new domestic life and thriving in my new world, and while I appreciate the sentiment, I have to say that adjusting too well and thriving too much is one of my greatest fears here. Though there is apparently no danger of that: my job interviews so far have been a series of humiliations. Aside from the paucity—even the bizarreness—of my résumé, I’m afraid I don’t come across well when they ask me seven-habits-of-highly-successful-people things like “Where do you see yourself, careerwise, in ten years?” and “What do you feel you bring to the table here?” The truth is, a career just looks like a jail cell to me, and I don’t bring shit to the table.
As for my home life…I feel, as I have felt from the beginning here, utterly blessed and completely terrified. My love for Rebecca is such pure joy; I could live forever in that woman’s eyes and never miss a thing. And yet, I feel far from entirely domesticated, and even suspect that the feral element in me is crucial. Jesus wasn’t kidding when he said he came bringing not peace, but a sword; nor when he said that anyone who didn’t hate his father, mother, wife, and children—yea, and his own life also—could not be his disciple. I took him literally for twenty years, scorning peace and kin and self like a child learning his ABCs with a hammer, and thought in my sterile smugness that my cross was solitude and emptiness; but I can tell you now that to “hate” yourself and family while actually living with them, and loving them, to be free of the world’s blind loyalties and compulsive demands while still responding to human particulars with tenderness and compassion, is the real, staggering, almost unbearable cross, and that the steepness of Calvary in actual life often makes the monastery gig look like a downhill stroll with a valet.
I don’t mean to denigrate your own vocation, or monastic life in general. God knows, if I had managed to learn to love my enemy in Abbot Hackley, they’d be doing the research for my beatification by now. In many ways this is a second marriage for me, after a decades-long failure of monumental proportions. In the end, we have to do both our hating and our loving right where we are, carrying the cross we’re given up the hill in front of us; and Jesus himself fell three times on the way up. So I guess we’ll both just keep on trucking. And God help us both.
Love,
Mike
Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.
It was strange to climb, to go up to pray. Prayer had felt like a place he sank into, a depth, for such a long time that he could only marvel at the old days when it had felt like a path upward, when he had read Merton’s Ascent to Truth and longed to climb the holy mountain, to labor upward toward the heights of contemplation by the steepest possible route. It had all seemed so straightforward then. But that kind of zeal and programmatic patness just felt embarrassing after a while; the real ascent to truth eventually destroyed all the ways you’d hope to rise, and you were well rid of them. But here he was nonetheless, climbing a ladder every morning in the dark.
The wooden steps creaked, but all the oil in the world didn’t seem to help that. Rebecca and Mary Martha had both assured him that they never heard the noise, that they slept right through it, but it still sounded painfully loud in the house’s predawn silence. It would have been so much easier—quieter, simpler, and certainly less arduous—to just sit in the living room, on the far
side of the couch, as he had for several months, or even in the corner of the bedroom, where he had prayed when he and Rebecca first got together. He knew that Rebecca was uneasy with the whole attic thing. She took it personally, as a bad commentary on their life somehow, and felt that he was moving away, despite his best efforts to reassure her.
Mike would have liked to accommodate her in that. It shouldn’t matter, ideally speaking, where, or even when, he prayed. All the world was the temple of the Lord, and every moment was as holy as every other. But the attic in the predawn just felt better. It felt like getting out of the traffic somehow. No doubt a sufficiently centered person could commune with God in any old spot, but he just wasn’t that guy. And, he reminded himself often, even Jesus had taken himself off into the hills sometimes to escape the crowds and pray alone.
Maybe he was a little defensive about it all.
I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
At the top of the ladder, the attic’s darkness was absolute. Mike picked up the flashlight he always left at the entry and made his way, along the plywood walkway he had laid across the beams, to the back wall. In the early days up here he had sat near the ladder, but he’d gradually worked his way west, as if moved by some sort of gravity. He eventually wanted to put a window in the wall he’d ended up in front of, which made almost no sense at all. He was sitting here with his eyes closed, after all. In the dark.
His prayer mat was spread before the small altar he’d set up. Mike lit the single votive candle there, sat down, and got to it.
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
In the kitchen, Mike turned on the first light of the day and started a pot of coffee. While it percolated, he washed the last of the previous evening’s dishes in the tiny bathroom sink—Rory, despite his best efforts, had not been able to restore normal plumbing to the kitchen yet—went over Mary Martha’s math and spelling homework, which she always left on the kitchen table, and went out to the living room to check the refrigerator for breakfast milk and lunch fixings. The coffee was ready by then, and he poured himself a cup. It was just after 6:00 AM; in the monastery, the private masses said by the monks during lauds would be giving way now to lectio divina, a period of sacred reading, before prime rang and they gathered to sing the conventual mass. Here, Mike took down the copy of the Bible and a volume of poems by Rumi that he kept on top of the refrigerator. He still felt the small thrill of reading the Islamic mystic without compunction; it had always driven Abbot Hackley a little nuts when he read Rumi during the lectio. One more of the unforeseen joys of spiritual catastrophe. Rebecca, he knew, had no problem with Rumi but was actually a little uneasy with a Bible on top of the fridge. You never quite got used to ironies like that.
He read quietly for a time, before a movement in the doorway caught his eye. Mike looked up and found Mary Martha standing there.
“Oh!” he said. “Good morning, sweet pea.”
“Good morning.”
“Are you all right?” he asked, hoping she hadn’t had a bad dream or something. Mary Martha, who had not even been aware that the attic existed until Mike had started going up there, had gone through a period of concern about the attic monsters coming down the ladder during the night. One more of the ironies of the life of prayer: you opened your inner doors to the Mystery, and your kid had to deal with the demons too. That wasn’t something you found in The Cloud of Unknowing. No amount of reassurance or guided tours of the attic during the day to demonstrate its unpopulated harmlessness had helped; Mary Martha had not relaxed until Mike had convinced her that he knew all the good monsters up there, and that the good monsters ate the bad monsters. Even now, a huge purple Puff the Magic Dragon stood guard at Mary Martha’s bedroom door every night, just in case a bad monster made it down to the domestic level. Puff, thank God, was always hungry; bad monsters were like chocolate to him.
“I’m fine,” Mary Martha said. She lingered in the doorway—shyly, Mike thought, which was unusual between them, as Mary Martha had felt free and easy with him pretty much from the beginning.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“So are you,” she noted, a little defensively, as if to say she had every right to be up now too. Mike realized that she was already dressed, everything buttoned down, zipped up, and otherwise in place except her flopping shoelaces.
“So we’re up together,” he conceded. “Do you want some cereal?”
“I would like some tea,” Mary Martha said, quite formally. “Please.”
This too was unprecedented, but Mike thought he understood: matching his coffee. Cups of hot liquid, one each. He said, throwing in a touch of an English accent, “Certainly, miss, coming right up. Won’t you have a seat?”
Mary Martha gave him the first hint of a smile and crossed to the table. He got the kettle going, and while it heated he came back and knelt before her chair to tie her shoes. Mary Martha’s shirt buttons were skewed, he noted, one hole too high per button. He wrestled briefly with the dilemma of whether to fix them or not and decided to let it go. He already understood that as a parent he tended to err on the side of letting the kid make as many of her own mistakes as possible. The usual morning dressing routine involved Rebecca; she and Mary Martha allotted fifteen minutes, post-Cheerios, for a protracted closet meditation, the discussion of fashion choices, and all manner of subtlety and fastidiousness. But clearly this was not a usual morning.
“I can do that,” Mary Martha said, of the shoelaces. “I just forgot.”
“Of course,” Mike said, not believing her for a second. But he leaned back obligingly while Mary Martha leaned forward, and watched as she took hold of the laces. To his surprise, she looped the ear deftly, then chased the bunny around the garden, into the burrow, and out the other side. Zip, boom, bam, done.
“Was that the Bunny?” Mike said. He felt like he’d missed a turn somewhere. He was pretty sure he’d seen Mary Martha make a total mess of the whole laces thing with Phoebe the day before, during one of their marathon grandmother-granddaughter shoe-tying seminars.
“The Rabbit.” Mary Martha tied the other shoe with similar ease.
“You’ve been holding out on me,” Mike said, a little accusingly.
Mary Martha shrugged. “I go slow for Gran-Gran sometimes,” she said. “I don’t want her to feel bad.”
Mike felt his eyes sting. “That’s very gracious of you,” he said, instead of crying, and straightened to take his seat beside her.
“Do we need to go over your homework?” he asked.
“No.”
“Really? How do you spell train?”
“Train,” Mary Martha said. “T-r-a-i-n. Train.”
“What is seven plus four?”
“Eleven.”
Mike pretended to count on his own fingers, and looked baffled when he ran out of them at ten. “How did you do that?”
Mary Martha rewarded him with the second smile of the day. “It’s easy, silly.”
“Easy for some people.”
“Seven minus four is three,” she said.
The kettle gave a first tentative tweet, and Mike hurried to catch it before it whistled and woke up Rebecca.
“What kind of tea do you like?” he asked, opening the cupboard. New territory here, for sure. “We’ve got chamomile, peppermint—”
“Lipton’s, please,” Mary Martha said.
Mike hesitated. There was in fact a box of orange pekoe there among all the herbal teas, but he wasn’t sure of the house policy. He really didn’t like undermining the sometimes arcane disciplines and regulations Rebecca tried to enforce, but he also hated to seem gun-shy or letter of the law.
“You know that has caffeine in it,” he said, by way of compromise.
“Not as much as coffee,” Mary Martha pointed out.
“Well—”
“Coke has caffeine,” Mary Martha persisted. “Mount
ain Dew has caffeine.”
This was true. The kid knew more about caffeine than he did. Mike pulled out a Lipton’s bag and dropped it into her Pikachu mug.
“Cream and sugar, Miss?”
“Cream?”
“A lot of people like cream in their coffee or tea. Your mom does.”
“Do you?”
“Just a dollop.”
“A ‘dollop’?”
“Dollop,” Mike said. “D-o-l-l-o-p. Dollop. A dollop is a doll-sized plollop.”
“Okay,” Mary Martha said dubiously, clearly resigning herself to the mysteries of adult sophistication; and then, after he had gone out to the living room and come back with the carton from the refrigerator, “That’s just milk.”
“We call it cream when we’re being prim and proper about hot drinks.”
“Oh.”
He brought her the steaming mug and sat down at the table with her. Mary Martha stirred in a tremendous spoonful of sugar, then sat back.
“You have to let it steep,” she said.
“Absolutely. It’s crucial.”
They sat quietly for a moment. Mike snuck a glance at the clock, then let it go. He was already figuring he would miss the morning mass today. This was way more fun. But Mary Martha caught his look and said, “Is it time to go yet?”
“To church?” She nodded. “There’s still a few minutes. But I’d much rather stay here with you, if you—”
“Actually,” Mary Martha said, “I want to go with you.”
Shit, Mike thought. Her tone had the same formal—rehearsed, he understood now—inflection with which she had asked for tea. He realized that he was delighted, in a deep way, but the situation seemed overwhelmingly complex. Aside from the fact that he was already letting Mary Martha have caffeine and walk around with her shirt buttoned wrong, he had long understood that Rebecca was wary of him “laying a Catholicism thing” on her daughter. One of the trickiest phases of their relationship had come while Phoebe was in the hospital the previous autumn, after her stroke, and Mike had taken Mary Martha several times to light prayer candles for her grandmother. Rebecca had relented on that, eventually, or at least had cut her losses; but Mike had pretty much bent over backward since to avoid similar conflicts.
The Monk Upstairs Page 8
