The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  The string to the overhead bulb had frayed away years before. Rebecca dragged a three-legged chair beneath the light, clambered onto it, and reached precariously to click the light on. Safely back on the ground, she slipped the sheet off the easel, exposing the work in progress there. In the watery sixty-watt light, a sea of dream-pure aquamarine threw a perfect wave against a forested shore. Beyond the breakers, a figure showed—not quite a surfer, not quite a merman—a figure lost in the glare at the edge of myth. On the shore, a woman dwarfed by the sea and trees and sky walked alone.

  More canvases were stacked nearby and still more strewn haphazardly through the garage’s disorder like the half-burned tinder of a fire kicked apart in breaking camp: paintings barely begun or nearly finished, paintings botched and abandoned or painted over, with the occasional near success thrown in to keep deluded hope alive. All cold and gray with time now, the dead ash of her once-bright art.

  Rebecca found the sunlight in the painting on the easel holding her eye, even in the bad light; she’d caught something there, a knifing fire, slicing the sky and sea. She was half tempted to dig her palette and oils out of the detritus and see what she could make of that brilliant hint. But that way lay only frustration, she knew. She didn’t have time to paint the bathroom these days, much less finesse some ephemeral effect she’d glimpsed on water years ago. She threw the sheet back over the canvas and turned toward the stairs.

  In the end, as she had known she would, she spent the afternoon on the computer, trying to make a lightbulb sing and dance. The graphics company she worked for had started landing corporate accounts in recent years, including this PR bit for PG&E. Relatively huge amounts of money were at stake, and suddenly deadlines mattered. There was even talk at work of “changing the dress code.” There had never been a dress code before. For years, the company’s founder, Jeff Burgess, had prided himself on running a hip little operation staffed by artists who did impeccable idealistic things like pro bono work for the women’s shelter and witty homages to the Grateful Dead. Utopian Images had been aiming for a world of beauty and a three-day workweek. But Jeff had two kids and a house on Potrero Hill now, and everybody was working weekends.

  The lightbulb was supposed to be some kind of animated hybrid of Woody Guthrie and Fred Astaire, “but hip,” according to the brief Rebecca had been given by Jeff. Some genius at PG&E was shooting for the moon. Utopian Images drew a particular sort of corporate type, people who no longer took LSD but wanted to remember that they had. Apparently a lightbulb singing “This Land Is Your Land” and gliding from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters in a tuxedo at the behest of a monopoly kept the flame of vision burning.

  The problem now was technical. The new animation program they were using was the latest thing, and Rebecca hadn’t figured it out yet. She struggled with it into the evening, adrift in that special, almost psychotic frustration that came with computers. She couldn’t figure out how to turn off the sound either, and the chipmunk-voiced version of “This Land Is Your Land” played every time she tried to run an image sequence. She tried calling Jeff, to beg for some kind of tech support, but he wasn’t home or wasn’t answering. No doubt he was out somewhere enjoying his life.

  At last she gave up, saved everything, including the spiteful little sequence of the lightbulb guy tumbling off a Humpty-Dumpty–like wall, and took a long bath to try to get back in her body. The sun was just going down when she got out of the tub. Rebecca put on some old sweatpants and a thermal underwear shirt, feeling the luxuriousness of sloppy comfort. She poured herself a glass of red wine, took her cigarettes out to the back porch, and sat down on the top step. She had taken only one smoke break all afternoon, smoking two cigarettes then, so she figured she had three to burn. She lit the first and breathed in, still trying to slow down, still trying to get that chipmunk song out of her head.

  The sun across the rooftops was half a hand above the Pacific, bright and brisk in a colorless sky. There wasn’t a scrap of fog or a cloud to be seen; it had been one of those rare August days when San Francisco seemed to have a summer.

  Below her and to her right, the door from the garage opened tentatively, and Michael Christopher stuck his head out. Even in the shadow, his stoop was distinctive, the shoulders rounded as if against rain, the curve of his skull still barely blurred with his new secular hair. He was wearing something that looked like prison garb or a clown suit. Rebecca realized that it was a McDonald’s uniform. So Mary Martha had gotten it right after all. She hardly knew whether to be amused or sympathetic.

  “I couldn’t help but smell the smoke,” Christopher said apologetically.

  “Oh, I’m sorry! Is it disturbing you?”

  He hesitated, apparently diffident, and Rebecca felt a stir of panic at the thought of losing her back porch reveries. But Christopher said, “Actually, I was hoping you had one to spare.”

  Rebecca laughed in relief. It was reassuring somehow to know that he had a vice compelling enough to overcome his moroseness. Christopher took her laughter for assent and started up the stairs. She picked up her whole operation, seashell, cigarettes, lighter, and wine, and met him halfway, instinctively protecting her haven at the top of the stairs. They settled on the fourth step from the bottom. She offered him the pack, banging one cigarette expertly into prominence, and Christopher slipped the Marlboro free and lit it. In the lighter’s flare she noticed again how young he looked without his beard. Or maybe it was just the McDonald’s uniform that made him seem like a teenager now.

  “I wouldn’t have thought a monk would smoke,” Rebecca ventured.

  “You’d be amazed. Some of the old-timers were like chimneys. The younger ones, not so much.”

  Her own cigarette was down to the filter. Rebecca stubbed it into the abalone shell and took another. Christopher reached for the lighter, gallantly enough, and she bent over the flame.

  “I wanted to thank you for taking a shot at the yard,” she said. “And for putting up with Mary Martha all morning.”

  “Hardly ‘putting up with.’ She’s wonderful.”

  “Don’t be afraid to draw your lines with her. She needs that.”

  “Don’t we all,” he murmured. She glanced at him dubiously, not quite sure what he meant. Christopher noticed and smiled. “Having just spent almost twenty years so very much inside the lines myself, is all I was getting at. I’ve been feeling my linelessness, a bit.”

  “God, twenty years. I’ve never done anything in my life for twenty years.”

  “I was no marvel of stability. Sometimes it seems to me that all I really did was keep my costume on and attend the events. But it does set up a certain tension.”

  “And now you’ve got a different costume.”

  He smiled ruefully. She had been speaking metaphorically; she hadn’t meant the McDonald’s uniform, but there was no way around it once the words were out of her mouth. Rebecca laughed. “Oops. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I was lucky to find work at all. There’s a big hole in my résumé.”

  She met his eyes briefly. In the twilight, he was, ever so slightly, amused by his own plight. She found herself liking him better for it: this forty-something man reduced to flipping hamburgers for minimum wage, keeping his sense of humor. There was a kind of nobility in it.

  “Why did you leave?” she asked.

  Christopher shrugged and attended to his cigarette. “It’s a long story.”

  “Yes, so you said.”

  A silence followed. Christopher smoked his cigarette down to the filter and lit another off the butt. Rebecca sat quietly, feeling helpless as the pause grew awkward, and then painful.

  “You said you had a fight with your abbot,” she offered at last, tossing it into the silence like a life ring.

  “My abbot was a jerk,” Christopher conceded. “But that had nothing to do with it, ultimately.”

  The blanket denial rang a little false, the first such note she’d heard from him. But who was she to judge?
She’d built her life on issues half resolved at best. Rebecca hesitated, then offered, “I suppose it’s a little like a marriage breaking up.”

  “I suppose it is,” he said glumly. “Apparently, I’ve got irreconcilable differences with God.”

  She thought that this might be a joke but didn’t dare smile. They sat in silence again for a moment.

  “After I broke up with Rory I couldn’t stop hating either him or myself, for years,” Rebecca said at last. “Like someone has to fail, for love to fail. Even now…” She shook her head. “Jesus, deep waters. Don’t get me started. I see your point. I promise, I won’t ask again.”

  “No, I—I like it, that you asked.”

  He meant it, perhaps too intensely. It seemed dangerously intimate. Certainly it was more than she had bargained for, making small talk with the new tenant. Rebecca realized that Christopher reminded her of a boy she had known in high school, Fulmar Donaldson. Fulmar had been a gloomy, taciturn presence at the back of her English class during her junior year. He was a skittish, prematurely philosophical kid suffering under the burden of the ordinary, who always ate lunch alone at the top of the bleachers on the far side of the football field, immersed in The Fountainhead or Franny and Zooey. One day after class, without any previous indication of interest, he had edged up to her in the hallway and asked her to a school dance. Rebecca, startled, had accepted, out of some mix of compassion and curiosity, letting herself in for a long, strained night. Fulmar danced like someone surprised by his own body. His conversation had been intermittent at best, veering from an overheated silence to Kafka, whom he apparently felt to be relevant to the scene in the gym. During the slow dance, to Cat Stevens’s “Wild World,” Rebecca had felt him trembling. It was like holding a wounded animal. The colored lights flashed on the gym walls, the music blared, the other couples danced around them in varying degrees of happiness and self-consciousness, and Fulmar simply floundered, beyond self-consciousness, nearly paralyzed. But he kept trying, nobly, to be her date, according to his vague understanding of the role. It had been a kind of heroism on his part, Rebecca had realized, to ask her to the dance at all: a sweet futility, a kamikaze charge into a realm in which he was not really fit to function, tilting at some windmill hope of relationship.

  Finally, to end his suffering, she had taken matters into her own hands. She bought them two Cokes from the machine in the gym lobby and led him outside, around the dark track and up the steps of the dark bleachers to the top row. Beneath the stars, away from the music and the crowd, on his home turf, as it were, Fulmar had calmed down. They talked about movies and books and integrity. Fulmar had been very big on integrity. Clearly, he felt his own to be embattled. He thought like he danced, flailing rather more than was necessary and not accomplishing much. But he was genuine, and passionate. He had also been big on truth.

  He had driven her home in his father’s Pontiac and walked her to the front door. Before the pall of expectations could stymie him again, Rebecca had taken his face in her two hands and kissed him. Fulmar had been startled, but not unhappily so. She could still remember the way he had become simple for a moment, the way his lips had softened. Any kiss was an adventure, at that point in her life, and Rebecca’s own heart had been pounding in her chest. She lay awake half the night, wondering what it meant. It was going to be hard to explain to her friends what she saw in Fulmar Donaldson. It would be a kind of martyrdom. But on Monday at school, Fulmar wouldn’t meet her eyes. She had known, even then, that he was just afraid. But knowing that changed nothing. He had gone back inside the cloud of himself. And she had found that she was relieved.

  Christopher seemed to sense her misgiving and instantly drew back. They sat for a moment in silence, their faces turned to the last glow of the vanished sun. At the base of the stairs, the ragged patch of dirt that Christopher had reclaimed that morning from the weeds was deep in shadow. It still looked oddly like damage, Rebecca thought. It looked, somehow, like a mistake.

  She started to reach for her wine, then stopped herself, feeling that it would be rude to drink in front of him without offering him a glass, but not wanting to offer him a glass, not wanting to go any deeper, not wanting the responsibility of that.

  Christopher, abruptly, stubbed his half-smoked cigarette out and stood up.

  “I should go,” he said, seeming genuinely pained, and fled before she could object. Rebecca watched him disappear through the garage door and thought that perhaps she had gotten spoiled, dating men like Bob, who couldn’t take a hint. There was something very appealing in Christopher’s hair-trigger sensitivity to thoughts she hadn’t even voiced. But she felt no urge to run after him and apologize for what was after all a relatively subliminal rudeness. All she’d done, really, was draw a little line.

  The fog came in overnight. Rebecca spent the morning in bed with the Sunday paper and a mug of coffee, warm and contented, savoring the contrast with the cool gloom outside. She let the answering machine handle two calls from Bob and three hang-ups, probably also Bob. He sounded peevish, perhaps justifiably so. But she had no desire to talk to him. The marriage proposal had hardened something in her, Rebecca realized. She had scared herself, letting it go that far with Bob. What she really needed, clearly, was a deeper self-sufficiency. Not picking up the phone for his plaintive ramblings seemed more cruel than self-sufficient, but it was a start.

  She had a late breakfast and got to work on the computer, feeling noble and committed to a calm professionalism when she turned it on but squandering the long morning’s measure of serenity almost instantly. The program was as balky, convoluted, and maddening as ever, and the job was idiotic. When the machine crashed for the second time, taking two hours’ futile labor with it, Rebecca simply turned it off and fled to the back steps, where she smoked three of the day’s five cigarettes one after the other, feeling herself careening irresponsibly toward lung cancer, toward leaving Mary Martha motherless.

  She lit a fourth cigarette off the butt of the third. At the bottom of the stairs, the hacked-out corner of dirt that Christopher had weeded the day before seemed naively optimistic beneath the low gray sky. He had left his trowel beside the back door, Rebecca noted, as if to have it handy to his return, but he had not been out today. Probably she had scared him off and forever discouraged whatever feeble energy for improvement he had had.

  On an impulse, she descended the stairs. Avoiding the blank stare of the in-law apartment’s window, she picked up the trowel and went out into the yard. She put her cigarette between her lips and knelt at the edge of the fresh dirt. Feeling a little ridiculous, she worked a weed loose and tossed it onto the pile that Christopher had left nearby. The effect on the sea of weeds was negligible. The small yard seemed vast from this perspective. Rebecca stubbed the cigarette out and attacked another weed.

  She worked for almost two hours without feeling that she had made much progress, breaking two nails in the process, but she went inside to shower feeling cheerful. Perhaps she was a peasant at heart, Rebecca thought. A simple soul, craving simple labor: see weed, pull weed. There had been no sign of Christopher, but it gave her some pleasure to know that he would discover the little beachhead of cleared ground mysteriously enlarged, as if by elves. She felt absurdly proud of that few square feet of churned new dirt.

  Mary Martha came home that night trailing sand from every pocket, ensconced in the combination of elation and smug reserve that she often had when Rory dropped her off. Rebecca suspected that Rory was allowing Mary Martha some slightly outrageous liberty and having her promise not to tell. It was infuriating, but there was nothing Rebecca could see to do about it.

  She gave Mary Martha her bath and made her dinner, which she just picked at. Rory, invariably, won the Sunday food battle. There was no competing with microwave burritos and nachos. Afterward, they curled up in front of the TV and watched Star Trek: Voyager. The show seemed much longer than an hour, but Rebecca had found that if she could just endure the space adventures it wa
s a great way to reestablish some rapport.

  “Daddy has seen flying saucers,” Martha Mary confided at the first commercial. “He sees them over the ocean all the time.”

  “How about that,” Rebecca said, which probably wasn’t the best way to deal with such a complex claim. But it seemed preferable to her gut response, which was that Mary Martha’s father was a drug-addled flake. And Rebecca knew she was vulnerable on this ground of belief. Rory, at least, had faith in UFOs. What sort of spiritual sustenance was she offering her daughter? What cosmic certainties? The tepid Catholicism of her own childhood was more like a lingering headache than a source of strength. She had picked for years at the smorgasbord of Californian spirituality and come away hungry. She felt her frustrated need for ardor as a burden and her longing for depth as a kind of dull pain. Sometimes, to be sure, smoking the last cigarette of the day, looking up at the stars, she would feel for a moment that life was bearable. But that wasn’t much to offer a child’s soul: Someday, sweetheart, with enough wine and nicotine, you too will be glad just to have survived another day. You may even, briefly, be content. It wasn’t enough for anyone, really. But it was what she had.

  The gallant crew of the starship Voyager lived to fight another day. The credits rolled and the teasers came on: next week’s battle would be tougher still. Rebecca put Mary Martha to bed and read to her for a while from The House at Pooh Corner. Her daughter settled in and listened raptly, as she always did, with no indication that further intergalactic intrigue was required, and something in Rebecca began to relax. Every other Sunday, Mary Martha came home half a stranger. Rebecca could feel the strain of having to compete with the glamorous sea and a sky full of aliens and the menu at the 7-Eleven for her daughter’s trust. But there always came that moment when the real world of her intimacy with Mary Martha reasserted itself, when the warmth and the familiar closeness overcame the jangle. She didn’t have to sing and dance, dazzle with special effects, or communicate with distant stars. All she had to do was keep the home fire burning and wait it out. All she had to do was love.