Milk

by Darcey Steinke

  The ratty velvet couch, the bronze lamp with the linen shade, the worn oriental, everything was soaked through with incense and loneliness, and he couldn’t wait to get out. The carpet runner ended and his tennis shoes squelched against the wood. He went up on tiptoe as he passed the kitchen door. He knew Mac was inside preparing the monks’ breakfast.

  Mac looked more like a wizard than a monk with his long gray hair and beard. He’d worked most of his life in a leprosorium in Africa, and when John first came to Holy Cross, he’d sat next to him at meals listening to Mac’s stories: the legless girl who rolled around on a wheeled pedestal and the old man with a face so disfigured he wore a hood with eye slits. The central symbol of Mac’s life was the round communion wafer lying in the palm of a leper’s hand.

  As quiet as he tried to be, the door swung open and he was blinded with fluorescent light.

  “John?” Mac said. “You’re going?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” he said, smiling. “Let me accompany you up the hill.”

  John had expected Mac to be angry or at least disappointed, but he wasn’t going to try and convince John to stay or mention the fantasy woman. Mac had said John’s fantasy girl was a robot, an idealized notion of romantic love, impossible to replicate. But now, Mac seemed to realize the woman had won. Mac walked beside him up the long asphalt drive. The trunks of the trees around them were black and creaked in the breeze. John wanted to say something, but the raw reality of what he was about to do rendered him speechless. He kept his hands deep in his empty pockets and his eyes on the white tips of his tennis shoes. At the end of the drive, the red taxi waited, “Brown Sugar” blasting out the windows. When the driver saw them he turned down the radio.

  “I’ll write you.”

  “No you won’t,” Mac said.

  “I will,” John insisted, concentrating on the first line of gray light at the horizon. He had failed as a monk; he had not let himself become absorbed into the monastic life; out of insecurity, he had tried to protect his identity.

  Mac opened the car door and John threw his bag inside.

  “What should I tell the others?” he asked.

  “That I’m sorry,” John said as he sank down into the backseat and pulled the door closed. His chest felt thick and achy. The driver turned the Stones back up and pulled out onto the highway. John looked back at Mac drenched in reflected red light.

  The backseat of the cab reeked of smoke and the beige vinyl was sticky, details that seemed to foreshadow the chaos and shabbiness of his new life. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The car sped down the highway toward the band of yellow at the horizon, and John lay his cheek against the cold window flecked with tiny drops of water. God’s voice came back to him. So you can know yourself.

  The first week outside the monastery, car alarms, garbage trucks, the subway, all grated on his tender nerves. Women on the city streets hurt him with their fragile preoccupied features. He missed the bells that had rung every few hours, and the offices haunted him, vespers in particular. The monks’ plainsong was loud inside his head. At first he felt his fifteen years in the monastery had been wasted, but then he realized that constant prayer had honed his perceptions. He saw that nothing was wholly static; color hummed with a kind of energy. He noted each individual leaf on each individual tree. Every person on the street sent out a delicate aura.

  He rented a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began in the evening to go to a bar on Court Street, a generic place called Murphy’s. There the television blasted football games and the regulars were mostly red-faced men and a few slack-faced ladies who laughed too loud. He’d been drawn to a petite Hispanic woman who had, when he approached, explained curtly that she wanted to be left alone. At Bar Tabac, the woman with feather earrings said she was waiting for her boyfriend, and at Churchill’s, the attractive lady in the business suit told him she was gay. Similar scenarios resulted in all the watering holes around Brooklyn Heights.

  He was frustrated and usually woke with a hard-on that was biblical in its intensity. Sometimes he masturbated, but afterward he always felt depressed. One day he picked up a Village Voice and flipped to the ads in the back. Cheap Sluts. Hot Local Girls. Live One-on-One Action. The thonged rear ends and cleavage stimulated him, but he’d be too shy for phone sex.

  The listings under Adult Body Work confused him. The pictures were flagrant, women’s hands cupping their surgically enhanced breasts and pulling back the cheeks of their rear ends to show their anuses. There was only one ad that appealed to him. Kathy, a blonde in a white nightgown standing before a fireplace. Outcalls Only, the ad said, and John assumed this meant she’d come to his place.

  The money was sealed in an envelope on the mantel and he poured brandy into two teacups. He’d showered, shaved and dressed carefully in his khakis and white button-down. When the buzzer rang the woman who walked down the stairs was not the Kathy from the picture. This Kathy had thick reddish hair, cut full at the top with long straight pieces coming down against her neck. Her eyes were huge and brown and her lips full but flat. She wore a leather miniskirt with metal studs and a tight black blouse. Her accent was Slavic with some New Jersey underneath. He felt his face get warm as she went over the economics of their endeavor.

  John watched her walk to the futon, pull off her boots and spread her legs, exposing the crotch of her black panties. John assumed there’d be conversation, but he appeared to be mistaken, as he watched the woman arch her back and look at him with her mouth open. Her underwear was slick, the skin around the black material pink and hairless. He walked over to the futon and removed his shoes. His tennis shoes looked pathetic. Kathy pulled at his arm and he lay down beside her. He noticed that in the center of her right eyebrow was a patch of white hair.

  “Do you want to fuck me?” Kathy said. She sounded like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon. He closed his eyes and nodded. Kathy undid his pants, loosened his cock and crawled backward; her mouth was warm and wet as she moved her head. He thrust his penis up toward her face and opened his eyes. Kathy’s head moved up and down like the needle in a sewing machine, and her eyes were open, the pupils dilated big as dimes. On the nape of her neck was a small scar. Pleasure had been rerouted over humanity and he wanted to try and change that.

  “How did you get your scar?” He touched the raised pink flesh.

  Kathy jerked her head to look at him. She was clearly annoyed. “It’s a scar.”

  “I know,” John said. “How did you get it?”

  “Oh somehow, I can’t remember now,” Kathy said, moving her wet mouth toward his crotch.

  TWO

  ALUMP OF CREAM cheese, crackers and a little bottle of capers; this was his last dinner at the Heights apartment. He ate on his futon; everything else was in boxes. He figured the car service could haul his possessions out to Sunset Park.

  Opening his journal, John turned to the pages at the end, which were clean and white. He’d gotten a brief note from Holy Cross asking if he wanted to be exclaustrated, released from his vow, and he’d been thinking all day about what to write. “Dear Mac,” he began, but then thought of addressing the letter to the whole community. No. The only brother he felt any real affection for was Mac.

  Dear Mac:

  I would like to be exclaustrated. I may be called back some day to Holy Cross, but I was called out. I want to make this clear to you. I don’t know if you can accept it, but God did call me out, and those visions I had of a woman, a partner, both sexually and domestically, have been to some extent realized. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I want you to know that I understand now what you used to say about God only being able to see Love, that it was philosophically impossible for God to even think about evil, that Love was all and we must make ourselves into vehicles of Love. I know you feel romantic love cannot accommodate the detachment that compassion demands. But I want to tell you that at this moment, as fraught as it is for me (for reasons I cannot y
et discuss), a bigger portion of me, of my being, my soul, whatever you want to call it, has been changed into Love than was true at any time I was in the monastery.

  Give my regards to the brothers and I want you to know that you are ever in my thoughts. When I left Holy Cross I thought I’d get away from your edicts, but it appears now that the real reason I left was so that I could embody them more fully.

  Yours,

  John

  He read over the letter and put in a P.S. about Molly the monastery dog. He was pleased with what he’d written and ripped the page out of his journal, addressed an envelope and leaned the letter on the mantel. He lay down on the futon; the comforter was already packed, so he pulled his coat up to his shoulders. He watched snow fall at the curtainless window; the flakes were big, and it must have gotten colder, for they were sticking, gathering on the sidewalk and in the rents of the wrought-iron fence. He lay there with his eyes closed, occasionally looking up and out the window and thinking. Darkness overtook him and at some point he began to dream.

  The Dog Star hung like a radiant ice cube in the black sky. Bits of ice hit the back of his ankles as he passed a jewelry store; its windows were empty of merchandise. He saw the dog moving along the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The mutt’s fur was ratty and tiny headlights shone out from each of his eyes. John followed the dog down an alley, long and white and warm. The alley narrowed and John had to squeeze his body sideways, his nose grazing the bricks. At the end he saw the velvet chair from the monastery and he knew by a strain of hair, half-black, half-blond, that he’d just missed Mary.

  He heard a noise and opened his eyes to the glowing numbers on the clock. The veridescent numbers rolled on the seventies clock radio and he felt his heart like a water balloon in a metal vise. He craved her. Mac had warned against this. Mac argued for detachment, and that was reasonable when talking about middle-aged brothers but not Mary whom he wanted to imbibe; he wanted to taste her spit and put his tongue up inside her.

  He sat against the wall, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to find that dark shining passage of peace, but it was like an elusive dock, unanchored in night water. He tried the Jesus Prayer. Lord have mercy on me. And then the Lord’s Prayer. Neither helped. He thought again of walking over to the rectory, but this was impossible. She had said she wasn’t ready to see him. If he knocked on her door in the middle of the night, he’d seem both pathetic and insane.

  He turned on the lamp and picked up the baby book. He was learning about diaper rash and what foods were hard on a baby’s stomach, about how to deal with nighttime crying and pink eye. He read about how to make homemade baby food by mixing mother’s milk and sweet potatoes. He read about homeopathic cures for ear infections and how babies need fewer baths during cold months. He thought of his wife’s hips, how her pregnant belly had sloped up, the skin stretched so tight it was nearly translucent. The snow at the window glittered in the streetlight and he got up, in just his boxers, the skin on his spindly legs goose pimpled. He stood by the window and watched snow as it fell into the orb of streetlight and then out again into the dark.

  THREE

  DARK WET MUSH of snow under frozen rain. Everything curtained in purple grayness and ice. Mrs. Chin, a Chinese lady with a wide face and bright lipstick, rented him the new apartment. It was half the price of his studio in the Heights and twice as large, a railroad flat with a kitchen in back, a metal rack for pots, a spice shelf. He opened the cabinet: Zwieback wafers, rice cereal, baby bottles. He’d bought a secondhand high chair and two new terry-cloth bibs.

  Down the narrow hall was the living room, where he’d set up his table. The room was gray, but come spring, leaf light would fall over the walls. The adjacent bedroom had a large closet and a small alcove where he’d set up the crib. Decals of rabbits decorated each side. He’d bought organic cotton crib sheets and a bumper pad that would protect the baby’s head. He imagined Mary and he curled together on the futon. The scent of her skin like vanilla yogurt. The things she loved, his monk’s fringe, his barrel chest, the feminine way he moved his hands, were all things he found humiliating, but she loved them—he kept having to remind himself of that. Mac would argue that he was filled with manic passion. He was, as Mac loved to say, out of spiritual whack. Mac would try to convince him that heaviness was not real presence. But Mac was wrong. A weightless soul was worthless.

  John lay on the futon but could not get to sleep. Legs sore from carrying boxes. Back hurting. Heart empty and desolate. He lay there thinking. And thinking some more. Obsessed with the idea that Mary might find her way out to Sunset Park, though she’d never been and had no idea how to find the place. But if only there was a knock on the door and he opened it and she was standing there on the steps. He couldn’t take it anymore and got up. Minnows swam at the edge of his eyes, and he realized it was way past midnight and he still hadn’t eaten anything.

  * * *

  Outside the snowflakes were huge and the bodega at the corner was still open. Fluorescent panels lit up a bucket of porktails, plastic packages of cornmeal and ginger biscuits. A sleepy-looking Asian man in a hooded sweatshirt made him a cheese sandwich, and he got a carton of chocolate milk, paid with a ten, sank the change into his pocket and walked back out onto the cold sidewalk.

  Stepping off the curb, he looked up the street to his new apartment and imagined Mary, her shoulders, her hair, her body moving in a white nightgown across their living room, and the world was what it was, not a metaphor for something else. John saw its quivering supernatural quality, the electric clarity of its form, its matter, its sharp edges. He saw his palm moving up, disembodied and miraculous.

  FOUR

  JOHN PUT ON the mask and found his way to the back corner of the hospital room where Mary held the baby. The vaporizer sent out a ribbon of steam and John’s shirt stuck to his chest. The baby’s face was red and he began to cough, dry and metallic, the sound like the crude devices inside toy dogs. Mary held him high up on her shoulder and patted his back in a firm spiral motion. He shivered along the whole length of his body; his eyeballs stood out and he spit up a stringy line of blood. John grabbed a towel.

  The baby lay back on Mary’s shoulder, his head resting in the crook of her neck. His breathing was short, his stomach contracting as if choking for breath after a race. The vaporizer kicked on again, sending steam into the room, obscuring Mary’s feet and ankles. She pointed to the chairs by the bed. She seemed to want John to say something. Mac always insisted that a period of meditation was crucial before any emotional response. But with Mary premeditation was impossible. Her chest shook and drops of water fell from her eyes and he felt bewildered. The baby lay out on her shoulder like a piece of wet cloth.

  “Should we pray?”

  Mary tipped her head and closed her eyes; water continued to leak out the sides and made dark spots on the knees of her jeans.

  “Dear Father.” He sounded stiff and official and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Be with us here in this place. Let us feel—”

  “If anything happens to the baby, I’ll kill myself,” Mary broke in. “I’m not kidding either. I’m going to steal a surgical knife and slice my wrists.” She glanced up at John, her eyes wide and slightly insane.

  John felt his face heat up. She was threatening God, not a particularly good strategy, at least judging from the characters in the Old Testament. He tried to touch her hand, but she swung away.

  “Visiting hours are over.”

  “You want me to go?”

  Mary nodded and John got his coat. He couldn’t feel his head, only a cloudy spot of anxiety that floated between his shoulder blades. Mac would say to breathe deeply, Mac would say to withdraw into prayer, Mac would say he was a fool for getting himself into this situation.

  As he walked down the darkened hospital hallway, each room was like a little boat sending out an aura of light. In one room John saw a little boy in pajamas watching television, and in another a mother held a child in a pink
sleeper, a drainage tube sticking out the back of the baby’s bandaged head.

  The hospital’s waiting room contained fica plants and plaid couches and smelled of stale coffee and sweat. A Latino man slept on the couch across from John and an older lady in a Miami Beach T-shirt and floral skirt sat with her eyes glued to the television. He thought of the baby’s arms draped around Mary’s neck and walked to the information desk, the polished wood reflecting the fluorescent light, and he asked the guard if he could call up to the pediatric floor. A nurse answered and said Mary was talking to Dr. Lankwell, but she’d let her know he had decided to wait.

  The pressure of the receiver against his ear felt good and he kept it there even after the line went dead; then he walked back and lay down on the couch. He heard the steady stream of cars whooshing past on the BQE, and he was holding a girl’s hand. Not Mary but a girl who represented her. Her hand was small and they walked in an apple orchard. There was a teacup resting in tree branches and when she took the cup down, it was filled with blood. Then he was in the monastery basement in the room where the founding monks were buried. A tibia stuck out of the wall and he tried to force the bone back but the tibia broke and a car horn honked; somebody yelled something in Latin, and he was pouring a bottle of Evian over the baby’s forehead, darkening and splaying the fine hairs against his small pink scalp. Brother Peter’s toothpick crucifix hung on the wall, and he cleared cum off his chest with a Kleenex. Mac grasped his arm and said it’s absurd to search for God in terms of preconceived ideas. Mac shook his shoulder until John realized the guard was trying to wake him up.