Something in his tone finally made Bob stop. There was a long beat of silence, and then Bonnie said, “Are you sure you guys don’t want some coffee?”
“Thanks, no, I think we’ll call it a night,” Rebecca said.
“Would you really beat up Bob Schofield for me, honey?” she asked Mike that night, when they were safely in bed with the lamp out and the candle going.
“Sure,” Mike said. “Though I think Bonnie might beat me to it, in practice.”
Rebecca smiled. “She was great tonight, wasn’t she? I hope she felt like she had a good birthday.”
“Me too. I think she did.”
“She’s so happy about the baby. She’s been wanting that so much.”
“Maybe that’s why Bob was so hot and heavy on the importance of the genes,” Mike said. “He feels he’s a reproductive success.”
“I think Bob is basically just a victim of the last book he read. And he’d had a little too much wine. Bonnie said he was stressed out beforehand about the pasta.”
“No one wants to feel their rotini is inadequate,” Mike said.
They lay quietly for a moment in each other’s arms. Rebecca was just beginning to consider blowing out the candle when Mike said, “Are your genes screaming anything?”
“What?” Rebecca said.
“What Bob was saying about the agenda of the genes. The egg using the chicken to make more eggs. Do you feel that?”
Rebecca felt a surge of adrenaline, like sudden fire in her nerves. But she said, lightly enough, “Am I the chicken or the egg, here?”
“You know what I mean,” Mike said. “Do you want to have a kid?”
“I already have a kid,” Rebecca said; and, hearing the obfuscation in that, “Mike, I love our life. Exactly as it is. I love you, exactly as you are.”
“Me too. But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Is this because of Bonnie? You’re afraid I feel left out of the baby bonanza? Or did Bob just get to you, with all that chest thumping about breeding?”
“I’m just asking,” Mike said.
“Do I want to have a child? You mean, your child? Our child?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, do I want to have another baby, with you, despite the fact that my mother is turning into a full-time job, I already can’t keep up with my business, which is losing money, your job barely pays your bus fare, we already have Mary Martha, I’m almost forty years old, and you’re a man who—how can I put this—treasures his quiet? His hours and hours of quiet? Which are a lot tougher to come by, to say the least, with a baby in the house.”
“It’s a yes-no question, Rebecca.”
“Yes, then,” she said. “Yes, truly. I would love that.”
Mike was silent, for such a long time that Rebecca felt completely exposed; and when she could bear it no more, she said, “Why on earth did you ask now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I felt like I was ready to.”
“‘But’?” she prompted, hearing it in his tone.
“But maybe I was only ready for the question,” he said. “Not for the answer.”
Chapter Eleven
He was divine, but He did not cling to His divinity;
He took the form of a servant, and became like us,
and was humbler yet, even to accepting death on a cross.
PHILIPPIANS 2:6–8
This is my last sunrise, Phoebe thought.
It was the first time in weeks that the fog had not been too thick to see the hills to the east. She sat on the top step in front of the house, her morning spot, and the sky was nothing but clear thin blue, and the light of the approaching sun made a halo in advance of itself above the dark line of the distant ridge. As if for all that time the fog submerging her at dawn had been the smoke from a fire burning dirty wood, and now everything was burned off but the cleanest fuel, and there was nothing but light and heat and the tempered blade of the pain, hard enough and sharp enough at last to cut through the world’s cold grip without even a whisper of resistance.
What a gift, Phoebe thought, to have seen death coming from so far off. What a gift to have been wounded first and glimpsed it all, and given a reprieve, what a gift to have had time to learn to recognize the truth in the flame. She had been so sure the inscrutable smoke was meaning, and tried to read it, and that the inescapable pain was failure, and that its blade was something to fight with. But all the wrongness and phony hope had burned out of her, through the mercy of the fire, and all the need for it to be anything but what it was. There was nothing left but the blessing.
The edge of the sun cleared the ridge, and the light swelled and blossomed, showing the night for the passing thing it was. Phoebe blinked and lowered her gaze, her old eyes unable to stand it, head-on, even for a moment. But she could feel the newborn warmth.
No man shall see my face and live. But that wasn’t true at all, except in ways that vomited clouds of smoke like the burning of dirty wood. If you waited it out, you saw right through it in the end. I have seen Your face everywhere now, My God and my salvation, Phoebe thought. You can’t fool me anymore. And this is my last dawn.
The daily walk had been getting shorter and shorter, not even reaching the first corner sometimes. Today Phoebe and Rebecca were only about five steps down the sidewalk in front of the house before Phoebe stopped.
“Are you all right, Mom?” Rebecca asked. Phoebe had that look of inscrutable absorption she often got now, attending to some pain or distress or vagueness within.
“I’m fine, sweetheart. Just a little on the watery side today.”
“Shall we just go back and sit down for a bit?”
“That might be best,” Phoebe conceded.
Rebecca nodded happily, relieved to not have to argue about it. Phoebe often insisted on forging on, even after she had broken a sweat. Rebecca took her mother’s arm, and they made their slow way back up the sidewalk, and Phoebe for once didn’t throw an elbow at her or try to shrug her off but let Rebecca help ease her down onto the step. Rebecca didn’t know whether to be heartened by that or freaked out. But it was such a beautiful day, the first blue sky before noon in weeks, and she decided to just enjoy it.
When her mother was settled, Rebecca sat down beside her. They were quiet for a while. Sometimes now they still talked as they had always talked, girl talk and the daily flak, but more often they just floated along on a placid river of silence, broken by the occasional remark surfacing unpredictably from somewhere in Phoebe’s depths like a fish going after a fly. Rebecca was finding herself much more comfortable lately, both with the conversational anomalies and with her mother’s long periods of quiet.
“Is your husband all right?” Phoebe asked at last.
Rebecca considered. Mike was spending his Saturday morning off in the attic. This wasn’t completely unusual; he often vanished into prayer for hours at a time, the way some men went fishing or drank, and not always at the most convenient moments; and one of his guys had died yesterday, after all. But Rebecca knew that he was freaked out about having finally broached the question of children. She suspected that she should have lied when he asked, but she wasn’t sure she would know how to lie to Mike. When they had awakened that morning, slightly hungover, they had made gentle, mutually reassuring love; but at the crucial moment Mike had reached for a condom, an apology in his eyes. And afterward had fled into prayer.
Oh, well, Rebecca thought. The poor guy had to do something until the bars opened.
“Mike’s fine,” she said, deciding to just keep it simple.
“No, not Mike,” Phoebe said. “The one who surfs.”
“Rory?” Rebecca said, intrigued, and a little touched by the glimpse of her mother’s inner processes. Once a husband, always a husband, apparently, in the depths of Phoebe’s mind. “Rory’s all right too.”
“Good,” Phoebe said. “I was so sure he would die.”
“Only if he doesn’t get that kitchen finished soo
n,” Rebecca said.
They were silent again for a time, and then Phoebe offered, with an air of confiding and a certain rich satisfaction, “My husband’s name is John.”
“I know, Mom,” Rebecca said, and took her mother’s hand.
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me.
It was not the crisis that Mike had expected. He had been prepared for the challenges of relationship, the inevitable trickiness of a marriage’s emotional and practical dance, to be the hard thing. But it turned out that the monastery had been extraordinarily good training for simply being decent with someone on a daily basis. It wasn’t like taking the monastic vows made someone immune to being a pain in the ass. Mike had lived for years with prickly men hyperconscious of their elbow room in the choir stall, alive to violations of etiquette at doorways and in the halls, jealous of a hundred fine points of seniority and petty privilege. He’d fought with his abbot for decades, in a struggle to the death as savage and intimate as any marriage. And Mike knew he’d been no prize himself.
The thing was, spiritual practice did not erase the ego; most spiritual practice only refined it, made it subtler, cannier, and more noxious. And a monastery was not a dry county in the country of ego alcoholics; it was a brewery, a bar open twenty-four hours a day, a place not of escape from the ego but of immersion in it. You had to bottom out on the ego, had to come to know it for the poison that it was, whether you were in a monastery, a mansion, or a house in the Sunset. Rebecca was actually much easier to live with than most of the monks, and a dream compared to Abbot Hackley. She could be sharp as a razor, but at least she didn’t think her moods, desires, and prejudices were the will of God, that she knew what was best for Mike’s soul and had a divine mandate to impose it. She had a great, redeeming sense of humor, and she took him more or less as he came. He loved being married to Rebecca; it was a joy, down to the smallest details.
Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.
He’d thought that being a stepfather might be beyond him somehow, but there was nothing in his relationship with Mary Martha that he did not love, from the precious predawn hours in church together to playing with her after work to getting thrown up on once in a while. He loved that girl; and there was nothing in his life as sweet as the happiness of her loving him back. Mike often felt sheepish, indeed, that he’d ever been afraid.
He’d also suspected that the challenge of dealing with Phoebe’s debilitation and decline might overwhelm him, but there too he’d found only richness. The relationship with his mother-in-law felt like grace, like kinship even. He felt sometimes as if the two of them were a couple of ancient hermits, wandering in the vast desert of the mind, chuckling at the inscrutable ways of God. And Phoebe’s courage and natural dignity, her humor and her faith touched him every day. Changing her diapers once in a while, tracking her down when she bolted for the ocean, even holding Rebecca in his arms while she sobbed on the nights when the imminent loss of her mother left nothing else to do, seemed like nothing in light of that.
No, Mike thought, he really hadn’t seen it coming, quite like this: he loved his family. He had launched himself into the sky toward heaven all those years ago, a twenty-year flight like that of Icarus, higher and higher toward the pure life of the disembodied soul, until the sun melted the wax away from his greedy little mystical wings and he had all that time on the long fall from the heights of his imagined contemplative achievement to contemplate the actual idiocy of his targeted heaven and the realities of gravity. And now here he was, pinned like the tail on the donkey to the unmissable bull’s-eye of the one true earth, just happy for a seat at the table in the little house on Thirty-eighth Avenue. Happy with the refrigerator in the living room, the stove in the hallway, and the health insurance unpaid. Happy to turn out the light at night and sink into Rebecca’s arms, and happy to wake up in the morning and see her face and wonder what was next.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it.
He even loved his work. That felt like a secret, almost, almost a kind of shame. He was weirdly attuned to the needs of the dying. It even made a kind of sense: he’d really prepared himself for little else during those years in prayer. Everything in him had fought, and everything in him had lost, again and again, led by failure after failure to the ultimate failure, to the eternal moment of mortal helplessness, to defeat and surrender. He did nothing with the dying but show up, and nothing for them but stay there, and in those hours with those men every temptation to do something heroic and holy and healing arose anew and died again. He held their hands and met their eyes and felt the terror and the pain, the futility and despair, as naked as the blade of a knife. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, for him or for them; the world drained away like water from an emptying tub, and you saw what could only be seen when the world was gone.
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Where shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
No, Mike thought, he was at peace with dying, somehow. He had lived from death to death, had learned to find the vanishing point of peace, dragging a cross up a hill to the place of the skull. It even made a kind of deep sense to him, that the Word made flesh should find no place at last in the world but agony and failure and three days in the tomb. But what he apparently had yet to grasp, had yet to even begin to come to terms with, was the deeper mystery still, of the Word in a womb, of a night journey in winter to a place where animals slept, and an impossible birth, celebrated by shepherds and angels.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea—even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
The stairs to the attic creaked, and Mary Martha’s head appeared above the gap in the floor. “Mike?”
“Hi, sweet pea. Are you all right?”
“Yes. But Mommy said to tell you it’s time to take Gran-Gran to the hospital.”
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee, but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.
What a clueless ass I am, Mike thought.
“Okay, sweetie,” he said. “Let’s go, then.”
Rebecca had no idea how long it had taken her to notice. It might have been a minute or two, certainly not more than five minutes: a little spell of absorption in the painting, a meditation on how the sea met the sky, a play of green and gray and blue. It was long enough, she knew, that she would always feel the pain of not having noticed sooner. In any case, she had become aware at some point that it had been a while since Phoebe had spoken or moved, and she glanced over at her.
And had seen instantly that everything had changed. The slump was subtle, as was the slight sagging on the right side of her mother’s face, but the overall effect was as obvious as a tire going flat. It made Rebecca realize how much her basic sense of her mother’s appearance had altered, how quickly you grew accustomed to the most radical changes in someone. What seemed unbearable debilitation at first became the new norm in time, and you came to count on it in its turn and even, weirdly, to treasure it; and every further undoing was a new and painful loss. In the blink of an eye the speech-slurred, awkward, infinitely slow Phoebe of a moment before seemed like the shining image of a vanished heartiness. She had been dim and wan, and now was gray enough to make dim and wan seem bright; and her dreamy, drifting gaze, so unnerving for so long, had gone unnervingly vacant.
Rebecca sent Mary Martha upstairs to get Mike, trying for her daughter’s sake to make it sound like it was time for a more or less normal doctor’s appointment, and went to her mother’s side. Phoebe made no perceptible response to her presence. Her breathi
ng was shallow and quick but did not seemed threatened, and Rebecca decided not to call an ambulance. They would get to the hospital faster just taking her themselves, and Rebecca already knew that what the doctors did would depend on whether the stroke was hemorrhagic or ischemic, a bleeding from a weakened blood vessel or the clogging of a thinned one. The sooner they found out which, the sooner they could do something.
Rebecca was amazed by how composed she was. Phoebe’s first stroke had freaked her out to the point of raging helplessness—she had harassed the doctors and badgered the nurses and walked around in a sort of furious haze for weeks. Most of the little slips and lapses along the path of her mother’s decline, the lost words and unfinished sentences, the thoughts drifting into incoherence, the failures of bathroom skills and the getting lost in space and time on the way from one room to another, had pained her to despair. But now she just felt clear and calm and strangely tender. Apparently something in her had been preparing for this moment all along. The only time she cried, indeed, was when Mary Martha knelt at Phoebe’s feet to get her shoes on for her and tied them perfectly, explaining the Bunny technique to her grandmother as she did, as patiently the hundredth time as she had the first.
At the hospital, Rebecca’s sense of calm persisted. It was an unearthly quiet, a hush impervious to nightmare. They came in through the emergency room, and the dance of her mother’s care proceeded with the brisk solemnity of ritual—the heartbreaking change of clothes, stripping her mother down to her frail body and dressing her in the green sad gown with the open back, the taking of the blood samples, the wheelchair run to the room with the tomblike MRI machine. Through it all Phoebe was obliging in a fashion, offering neither resistance nor help. She was quite gone, showing none of the distress she had always displayed when it was clear to her that she was out of it.
The Monk Upstairs Page 17
