The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  While she waited for Bonnie to wind up a cute story about Bob and their dog, Rebecca reached for one of the tiny green peppers on the garnish plate and tried a bite. After the initial crunch, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, but then her mouth blazed, her sinuses seized, and her eyes swelled with tears. She reached for her water, which made it worse.

  “Are you okay?” Bonnie asked, briefly distracted from her own half-full glass.

  Rebecca nodded, trying to breathe without moving any more air through her inflamed passages.

  “Pepper,” she managed at last.

  Bonnie looked relieved. Rebecca’s emotional life was often a mystery to her. “They’re very hot.”

  Rebecca flagged their waiter and pointed desperately to her beer bottle, an SOS, and the guy nodded and hustled off. She drained the dregs of the first Singha, which also didn’t help, blew her nose into her napkin, and, steering with the skid, took the opportunity to say to Bonnie, “Mary Martha has started going to morning mass with Mike.”

  Her friend looked appropriately astounded. “How in the world does he get her out of bed?”

  “She sets her own alarm.”

  “Wow.” Bonnie hesitated, in obvious caution. Rebecca knew her friend was on the verge of telling some edifying story about Bob and their own Episcopalian church. Bob’s church, Rebecca knew. Bonnie just went for the pleasure of sitting beside her husband in the pew, because happy married people went to church together. It was a dress-up opportunity, essentially, and they went out for pancakes afterward. Bonnie had been raised in some relatively harmless Protestant sect and was undamaged by dogma and fanaticism. And Bob’s God was a genial midlevel managerial type. It was just one more thing that had become difficult for Rebecca to talk with her friend about.

  She said quickly, to head off any digressions, “The parish priest wants her to make her first communion, and Mary Martha is all for it. The guy even asked Mike to teach the class.”

  “I’ll bet Mike’s great with kids,” Bonnie said supportively, missing the point.

  “Mary Martha hasn’t even been baptized,” Rebecca said.

  “Ah.”

  “I never wanted her to have to deal with all that stuff.”

  “Rebecca, you married a monk. You shouldn’t be surprised to find out he’s Catholic. And besides, what can it hurt?”

  “Bonnie, these people are maniacs. It’s like the Chinese with little girls’ feet. My soul has a permanent limp.”

  “Mike’s not a maniac.”

  This was, Rebecca knew, a high compliment from Bonnie, who cherished innocuousness. “Well, not an orthodox one,” she said. “I mean, at least he’s not opposed to birth control.”

  Bonnie was silent at that, and Rebecca realized at once that she had blundered. Bonnie and Bob were intent on having a baby, so far without luck. She said, “Oops. Sorry, sweetie.”

  “It’s okay,” Bonnie said. “We’re going to go see someone, actually. A specialist.”

  “Really?”

  “Bob’s afraid it’s him.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’m afraid it’s me.”

  “Maybe it’s not anybody. Maybe it’s just, uh—” Destiny, Rebecca thought, and held her tongue. Or, worse, because more meaningless, luck. Or God, worst of all, because completely inscrutable. The big out-of-your-hands elements. She really had nothing of comfort to offer here.

  “Whatever it is, I’m not getting any younger,” Bonnie said. “But the technology has gotten very sophisticated.”

  She seemed satisfied enough with that. Bonnie had real faith in managed processes. Bob had three shelves of books on Relationship, and the Schofields steered by them religiously. No doubt they were already accumulating books on procreation.

  “You and Bob will be wonderful parents,” Rebecca said.

  “How about you guys?” Bonnie said. “Any luck there?”

  Rebecca shook her head vaguely. Bonnie, she knew, would be horrified by the truth: Rebecca and Mike hadn’t even discussed the question of children. It just, weirdly, hadn’t come up yet. She suspected that it might be a given that they would not have kids, Mike was such a different kind of animal in so many ways. It was as if she had married outside her species. Anything they produced would be a radical hybrid and probably as sterile as a mule.

  In any case, the whole issue was way too complicated to discuss with Bonnie anymore. Bonnie would just feel sorry for her. Rebecca had married a guy who might be a saint in the making and who certainly had saintlike qualities—absolutely incomprehensible reserves of patience, tenderness, and unselfishness—but who also, in the world’s usual terms and values, was more or less useless. If what Mike had could be bottled and sold, they would be rich, but in practice she and Mary Martha and Phoebe seemed to get it all. It didn’t translate well, it didn’t show up on a résumé, and it certainly didn’t pay. It was beautiful and delicate and absolutely unremunerative, and Rebecca sometimes wondered if she really had the guts for this, playing chicken with such fundamental insecurity, her deepest, truest self with the pedal to the metal of love and beauty, heading straight toward the most obvious and seemingly inevitable crash.

  Oh, well, she thought. There were certain benefits to going down the tubes for beauty and God, to being poor and in love. A year ago, after all, she had just been poor.

  Rebecca’s second beer arrived, and she took a tentative sip. It still felt like raw coals inside her mouth. She said, frankly striking out for fresh territory, “I may have to hire somebody for the business.”

  “That’s great!” Bonnie said. “I mean, isn’t it?”

  “It will be if I can afford it. I’m afraid I’ve got just enough work right now for one person to be overloaded. Thank God Phoebe is paying rent on the in-law apartment.”

  “How’s Mike’s job hunt going?”

  “He just sort of seems to be ambling along waiting for God to hook him up. Though he did finally take that hospice training course, so he’s got a piece of paper. But that was money going out, not money coming in.”

  “How much?” Bonnie asked, ever practical.

  “I don’t know. He put it on his credit card.” They smiled at that. Mike’s credit card, his first piece of plastic in twenty years rattling around in his naked wallet, was an ongoing amusement to them. The credit industry had no idea. Rebecca said, “I actually find myself sometimes wishing he’d go back to McDonald’s. Just to get some money coming in. Isn’t that horrible? The glory days when his career as a hamburger cook was on track.”

  “We ate there several times,” Bonnie said. “He was good.”

  “They were going to move him up to the counter, but he didn’t want to shave that often.”

  “We still have to have you guys over soon.”

  Rebecca nodded. They’d already let several weekends slip by without fulfilling their dinner date with the Schofields. Rebecca had pleaded reentry overload, child care issues, work stuff, and even actual illness once, but the fact was, it was almost impossible to imagine sitting in a room with just her, Mike, Bonnie, and Bob. Mike was vaguely willing to go through with the exercise, in principle, but in practice he seemed much happier every time Rebecca managed to put it off and they could just slip a video into the machine and get in bed early.

  Bonnie, who probably understood most of this herself, said, with a sly trace of blame-it-on-the-boys camaraderie, “Tell Mike he doesn’t have to shave.”

  Rebecca laughed. It was a glimpse of the Bonnie she loved best, the true friend utterly in tune with the realities and trickiness of human relationships and willing to work with her on it. She offered, in essential confirmation of Bonnie’s guess, “I think it will be easier, somehow, once he’s got a job and his male ego can calm down a little. I mean, he’s Mike, you know, he looks like he’s contemplating the Trinity most of the time and is surprised every time he has to put a quarter in a parking meter, but I know it pains him to not be bringing money in.”

  “Mike will get work,” Bo
nnie said stoutly. “And your business is taking off. You’ll hire somebody, and grow, and hire somebody else, and the next thing you know you’ll be a capitalist pig vacationing in the Bahamas.”

  “I suppose. I’m going to have to rent office space at some point. It’s sort of hard to picture an employee working with me in the dining room.” She gave Bonnie a glance. “I don’t suppose you want a job?”

  Bonnie’s face froze for an instant, and in her friend’s dismay Rebecca caught a glimpse of the thinness of the limb she was actually out on.

  “Just kidding,” she said quickly.

  “It’s just—well, you know, with wanting the baby and all, we really need my health plan right now. And Jeff has promised to spring for paid maternity leave, when the time comes.”

  “Of course, of course. I really was just yanking your chain.”

  Their waiter appeared just then, to their mutual relief. “You ladies like coffee?”

  Bonnie glanced at her watch. “Oh, man, I really should get back.”

  “Just the check,” Rebecca told the guy, and, to Bonnie, as he nodded and moved off, “on me, today.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Nonsense yourself. I’m an embryonic capitalist pig, I’m halfway to the damn Bahamas.”

  Bonnie visibly weighed it out. They usually just threw mutually approximate amounts of cash on the table and called it even, but they both knew that Bonnie had shown her cards already today by being appalled at Rebecca’s failures of practicality, and that to insist now would only make it worse, and Bonnie finally conceded, “My turn next time.”

  “Unless Mike’s with us,” Rebecca said. “Then we’ll just put it on his credit card.”

  Bonnie laughed, which was really the best they were going to be able to do at this point, dignity-wise. Rebecca laid down the last bills in her wallet, overtipping blatantly, and they hurried out before further damage could be done.

  Everything in the garden was dead again except the poppies and the squash. The poppies were spectacular and self-propagating, pure grace, and the squash was simply stolid and more or less indestructible in a squash kind of way, sprouted from old seeds in the compost. In neither case was there really much for Phoebe to do except maybe a bit of weeding. The garden was only about as big as a good throw quilt anyway. If she’d had a bigger bit of land to work with and been somewhere with enough sun to grow tomatoes, it might have been a different story. But this little bit of her daughter’s foggy backyard wasn’t enough to keep her on the planet. Still, it was good exercise as far as it went. Phoebe felt that on the whole she was getting stronger and that soon, quite soon, with the grace of God, she might be strong enough to die.

  It seemed to come down to whether to trust her sense of what was real or not. Because what seemed real now had diverged from what everyone else was paying attention to most of the time. Phoebe felt like she’d been in a play—not a bad play, either, a wonderful play—and that the good long run of the production was over and it was time to strike the set and see what was next, but the other actors didn’t seem to realize it. They just went on and on, playing the same roles in the empty theater. She would have liked to have helped them catch up, but there were more important things to be attended to.

  And so Phoebe walked west. In the early days after the stroke it had been all she could do to get herself upright and make it to the bathroom, and then for a long time, months, she had been confined to the house, and then the backyard, which had seemed enormous then. Eventually she had gotten to the point of being able to take short walks outside—to the corner and back at first, and then gradually farther along Judah Street, working her way block by block through the avenues toward the sea. It was ten blocks from the corner of Rebecca’s street to the end of the N-Judah train line at 48th, and downhill all the way; beyond that was a line of dunes, the Great Highway, and a final set of dunes before the Pacific itself. Phoebe could get as far as the 7-Eleven at 45th Avenue now before her body crapped out on her and dissolved into trembling and she had to take the train home, feeling her muscles like melted butter and her heart in her chest like a jackhammer.

  The way she saw it now, it didn’t matter much: If she died on the sidewalk, dying en route to death, as it were, great. If she died on the train home, awkward but not really so terrible. And if she made it to the sea, best of all. In any case, she was doing what she had to do, what God had given her now, and walking toward death. It wasn’t like there were style points awarded; it wasn’t figure skating, for God’s sake. All you really had to do, once you’d picked up the cross, was try to keep moving.

  Tom Dougherty’s office looked about like what you would expect from a guy who dealt with cockroaches with a hose, who also had paperwork. The room was tiny, and the single window looked out onto the brick wall of an alley. Mike had to move a large pile of folders containing grant applications from the room’s lone visitor’s chair while Dougherty settled behind the desk, which had three tall sprawling piles of paper. In, out, and miscellaneous, maybe. He was still wearing the floppy rubber boots. Mike had a sense of being a temporary inconvenience between bouts in the dish room.

  Dougherty glanced at Mike’s résumé and grunted. “Big gap here. Jail time?”

  “Monastery.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Out of the frying pan, into the fire,” Dougherty said. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of the desk. There was a well-maintained clear space there, the only one available, obviously for that purpose. “Why’d you quit?”

  “I was pissed off at my abbot.”

  “That’s a lousy reason.”

  Mike shrugged. He didn’t have a good reason. He still wasn’t sure there was one.

  Dougherty eyed him for a moment, then said, “Just so we’re clear: I have neither the time nor the patience to waste five minutes, much less twenty years, on you being pissed off at me.”

  “I’ll try to be efficient about it, then.”

  The corner of Dougherty’s mouth turned up slightly. He swung his feet down off the desk and tossed Mike’s résumé toward one of the piles of paper, where it settled into instant obscurity, like sand on a beach.

  “Well, here’s the deal,” he said. “Our usual work here is just serving as a hard place for people to hit bottom. We try to feed and shelter them until they stop bouncing and see what’s next. But we just got a big chunk of money specifically to fund a hospice program.” Dougherty shook his head. “A million bucks for dying homeless people. Can you believe that shit?”

  Mike shrugged. Hard to believe that shit, indeed.

  “If they’d give us a million bucks for food, addiction programs, and job training, we could keep a lot more of them from dying, of course, but some rich guy stubbed his toe on a corpse one night on Turk Street after the theater let out and so we’ve got money to burn for a while on morphine drips and beds that crank into different positions and RNs to tell us when the guys have stopped breathing.” Dougherty stood up abruptly. “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes,” Mike said, wondering if that was in the job description.

  Dougherty crossed to the door. “Felicity, if the mayor calls, I’m in conference,” he called to the woman behind the lobby counter, who was still hammering away at her keyboard.

  “Yeah, right,” Felicity said without looking up, obviously on to him.

  Dougherty closed the door and went to the window, lifted the sash, and sat down on the sill. There was an implicit invitation in it all, and Mike joined him, sitting on the other side of the wide sill. Dougherty produced a pack of Marlboro Reds and offered Mike one, then lit both their cigarettes on a single match. He took the long first drag of an addict toward the end of his comfort zone and leaned slightly out into the alley to blow the smoke away.

  “Try to keep it outside,” he told Mike. “Felicity gets really pissed off if she can smell it.”

  Mike blew his own smoke carefully toward the brick wall. The air
from the alley was fog-chilly and smelled of rotten bananas and urine.

  “So, where were we?” Dougherty said.

  “A million bucks for dying homeless people. The irony.”

  “The thing is, I haven’t got a minute for it. I’m trying to keep the bastards alive on pennies. So I need somebody who can handle the shit day-to-day, somebody I can blame for the cluster fucks at funding reviews, and somebody who can at least give the occasional appearance of these guys checking out with dignity and oh by the way make damn sure there aren’t any more bodies on Geary Street. You wouldn’t think it’s rocket science, but I’ve run through three people on it in the last month and a half.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Mike said.

  “It’s a mystery,” Dougherty agreed cheerfully. “Did you happen to notice our table decorations in the cafeteria?”

  “The vases and paper flowers?”

  “That was our last hospice gal’s arts-and-crafts program for the dying. She was a pretty little thing with a bachelor’s in social work and a master’s in Kübler-Ross or something. Cute as a button. She had all the guys making Dignity Flowers affirming their inherent value as human beings. But she couldn’t stop the bastards from selling their morphine and using the money to buy Night Train.”

  Dougherty’s cigarette ember was already at the filter; he smoked harder than anyone Mike had ever seen. The priest looked at the butt as if it had let him down, then flicked it out into the alley. Mike, his cigarette only halfway through, hesitated before following suit.

  “It’s an alley, for Christ’s sake,” Dougherty said. “Just don’t drop it on the body there.” And, as Mike involuntarily glanced down, “Hah, made you look.”