The Monk Downstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “So, are you ready for this extravaganza?” she asked brightly.

  “Hardly.”

  “That’s the spirit. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.”

  Christopher nodded unhappily.

  “Where’s your bathing suit?” Mary Martha demanded. “And your towel!”

  “I don’t think I’m going to be swimming,” Christopher told her.

  “You should at least bring some shorts! It’s the beach.”

  “Leave him alone, Mary Martha,” Rebecca said. And, to Christopher, apologetically, “Her father is a surfer, I’m afraid. She has very strict notions of proper beach culture.”

  “Ah, of course, her father,” he echoed inconsequentially, seemingly flustered. The moment just seemed to get more awkward. “Well, maybe I should go get some—”

  “No, no, don’t let her bully you.”

  Still, Christopher wavered. Their eyes met, and she saw him briefly for what he was, a man desperately out of his element. His sense of normality was stunted. He was scared to death. Twenty years of ritual and renunciation had left him helpless, at the mercy of six-year-olds, unprepared to decide whether to bring a bathing suit to a beach party or not.

  Rebecca touched his arm. “You’ll be fine. It’s not that big a deal.”

  He smiled gratefully. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have a bathing suit.”

  Mary Martha looked appropriately shocked. Rebecca laughed and turned to finish loading the car.

  They set out a few minutes later, north through the park and across the Golden Gate. The bay was crowded with white sails. Mary Martha chattered happily with Christopher, forestalling any question of keeping up a conversation. He sat half turned in the passenger seat, his long legs folded at a comical angle, replying gravely to her questions and observations, attentive without condescension. Every once in a while he would glance at Rebecca and give her a what-can-you-do? shrug and a smile, as if apologizing for the neglect of grown-up talk. He still seemed miserable, a man being gracious on his way to the gallows; but each time their eyes met, Rebecca felt a little thrill. There seemed to be a promise in those glances, a nod toward some future privacy.

  They turned west and then north along the coast, climbed above the sea on Mt. Tamalpais’s twisting roads, through stone and meadows of late-summer dun, and finally wound down the back side of the mountain, into the cluster of shops, shanties, and art galleries of Stinson Beach. Phoebe lived just north of town, a left turn onto a gravel road through some stunted pines and cypress, past a No Solicitors sign full of shotgun holes and several shacks in dubious repair. Phoebe’s place at the end of the road was the class of the cul-de-sac, a neat cottage of weather-grayed redwood with cedar shingles, on a rise with nothing but ocean beyond it. The driveway and sandy front yard were already crowded with cars. Rebecca noted Bob Schofield’s silver Lexus standing out amid the VW vans and third-owner Toyotas like an Armani suit in a cowboy bar. He had phoned her at work on Friday afternoon to ask her out, “on a purely platonic basis,” and she had been forced to concede that Phoebe was throwing a party, to which he had promptly invited himself. As soon as he had hung up, Rebecca had rushed off to beg Bonnie Carlisle to come to the party too, for moral support, but she didn’t see Bonnie’s sleek white Prizm anywhere now.

  Rebecca’s own battered Honda fit in nicely. She parked as far away from Bob’s car as she could.

  “Why are we doing this, again?” Christopher asked as she turned the engine off.

  Rebecca laughed. “As far as I can tell, because my mother reminds you of your abbot.”

  “That’s a pretty stupid reason, isn’t it?”

  “I’m pretty sure I told you that at the time.”

  Christopher sighed, conceding the point. They sat in the car for a long moment, with neither willing to make the first move, but at last Rebecca opened her door. It was strangely invigorating, she noted, to be arriving at a party with someone who wanted to be there even less than she did. She usually nailed down the grudging end of the social spectrum. She felt almost motherly toward Christopher in his dismay, as if she were shepherding a skittish adolescent.

  Christopher unfolded his legs reluctantly and picked the cooler out of the trunk. Mary Martha promptly insisted on carrying the picnic basket, and she approached the house at Christopher’s side, staggering self-consciously beneath her burden.

  The front door was open; Bob Marley was wailing on Phoebe’s expensive sound system. The living room was packed with people drinking wine out of Phoebe’s finest stemware and eating perfect canapés off silver trays. Beyond the similar crowd on the back patio, a jazz quartet was setting up on the beach. Even for a beach party baptism, Rebecca thought, her mother’s effortless sense of style prevailed.

  Christopher paused near the fireplace. Rebecca noted with alarm that he was gazing up at the painting over the mantel, a sprawling vista of Point Reyes as seen from Mt. Vision. She’d painted it not long after she had first come to California, and she’d made the mistake of giving it to Phoebe, who now insisted on telling everyone who admired it that it was her daughter’s work.

  “Are you ‘RM’?” Christopher asked, as she had known, somehow, he would.

  Rebecca nodded grudgingly. It wasn’t that she thought the painting was so bad. Her acrylic palette of those days seemed a little loud to her now, but she loved the green scimitar of the primeval peninsula, the incongruous softness of the land slicing into a yielding sea of silvery steel. She liked the sky’s mirroring silver-blue and the hint at an echo of the hills in whispers of lavender cloud.

  Christopher considered the painting quietly, then looked at her again. She felt his glance as a sudden heat in her belly, an almost palpable weight of new interest, visceral and shockingly intimate, as if he had slipped his hand inside her sweatshirt.

  “You didn’t tell me you painted,” he said reproachfully.

  Rebecca laughed, trying to minimize the disconcerting quality of the moment.

  “I don’t,” she said; and, as he moved to object, she added hurriedly, “It’s complicated. Now come on, let’s go find my mother.”

  Christopher hesitated, clearly inclined to pursue the matter, but at last he shrugged in surrender and allowed her to lead him toward the kitchen.

  Phoebe was at the wooden block table in the center of the room, with the sleeves of her sumptuous, pumpkin-colored silk blouse rolled up, skewering chunks of meat and vegetables for shish kebab and talking about Paris with a painter from Argentina.

  “Rebecca!” she called. “Darling! So glad you made it! And Mary Martha, look at you, you beautiful little beetle, lugging that tremendous load!”

  Mary Martha flushed with pleasure and allowed herself to be relieved of the basket and thoroughly kissed. Phoebe straightened and smiled at Christopher.

  “And this must be our wayward monk. Should we call you Father Christopher? Oh, dear, that sounds a little Christmassy, doesn’t it? Or is it ‘Brother’?”

  “Mother—” Rebecca began menacingly, but Christopher just smiled.

  “You can call me Mike.”

  “Mike, it is. You can just put the cooler by the back door there, Mike. The ceremony should be starting in half an hour or so. It’s a little complicated, but stay close and I’ll give you the high sign when you’re on. Think of it as a jam session of sorts, and you’re the bass riff. I hope you’ve got your mojo working.”

  “Mother!”

  “Don’t fret, sweetie, it’s just shoptalk.”

  “We used to do the same thing before mass,” Christopher agreed, with a perfectly straight face. He liked her mother, Rebecca noted; he had already relaxed perceptibly. For some reason, Rebecca found this annoying. Perversely, she had liked him better awkward.

  “Now come along, you must meet the guest of honor,” Phoebe said. “Where has she gotten to? Ah, there she is. Sherilou! Sherilooou!”

  Phoebe seized Christopher’s arm and frankly hauled him along. Rebecca trailed in their wake,
a little apprehensively. The star of the show was sitting on the stairs to the loft, receiving admirers with her baby on her knees. Sherilou wore a shapeless blue frock of unclear intent, part postnatal schmata and part Virgin Mary in Marin. She was a blowzy woman in her midthirties, with hair like a whisk broom, teeth in need of attention, and the air, somehow, of having just been wronged. The baby girl, her features a softened echo of Sherilou’s blunt face, was swaddled in a cherubically white gown with a white lace collar.

  “Sherilou, darling, our baptist has arrived!” Phoebe trilled, in that way only she could carry off.

  Sherilou eyed Christopher dubiously. “So you’re the priest?”

  “Such as I am,” he allowed, to Rebecca’s surprise. She had gotten used to him wasting no opportunity to disavow his former status. But apparently this was not about his former status. There was a firmness in him that she had not seen before, a subtle dignity.

  “I hope you’re not going to get into a bunch of gloom and guilt and hellfire,” Sherilou told Christopher. “I don’t want this to turn into some kind of patriarchal head trip.”

  Christopher shrugged. “I thought I’d just wait and see how the spirit moves.”

  Sherilou examined this suspiciously, like a squirrel with an unfamiliar nut.

  “I’m sure it will move just fine, Sherilou,” Phoebe said hurriedly. “I had to practically break the poor man’s arm to get him here, now don’t scare him off.”

  “I see the water as a feminine element,” Sherilou insisted.

  No one seemed inclined to dispute this. As the silence grew awkward, Christopher bent closer to the baby, who promptly seized his finger. The two of them smiled at each other.

  “She’s gorgeous,” Christopher said. “What’s her name?”

  “Hope,” Sherilou conceded.

  “Hope. How perfect.” He would have straightened, but the little girl continued to clutch his finger and he stayed hunched over to accommodate her.

  “The sweet sister of Faith and Charity,” Phoebe chimed in, in her helpful, ecumenical way.

  Sherilou smiled, pleased and proud and shy in spite of herself, and stroked the baby’s soft, drab hair.

  “The last thing out of Pandora’s box,” she said.

  Phoebe dragged Christopher away not long afterward to continue briefing him on the ceremony. Rebecca looked around for Mary Martha and finally spotted her in the backyard beside Phoebe’s exquisite little fish pond, feeding Cheetos to the carp. Her daughter seemed contented enough, as did the fish. Rebecca helped herself to a beer from an iced tubfull on the back porch and went to the railing. On the beach below, the jazz band had swung into action, and a number of barbecue grills had been fired up. People were milling around several picnic tables laden with hamburger buns and baked beans and fruit salads, pickles and condiments and three kinds of quiche, assembling meals on paper plates. Beyond all the activity, the ocean shone in the afternoon sun.

  As she stood there contemplating the Pacific, Rebecca could see Bob Schofield making his way up from the beach like the posse in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a puff of determined dust on the horizon, approaching relentlessly. She considered making a run for it, back into the house, then decided that now was as good a time as any to deal with him. Bob was inevitable, in his small way.

  “Rebecca!” he exclaimed when he arrived at her side, winded and sweating.

  “Hi, Bob.”

  “What a party, huh? Your mother is a wizard.”

  “She is that,” Rebecca agreed.

  “Can I get you a beer?”

  She held her bottle up.

  “Ah, of course.” He moved to the cooler for a beer of his own, shuffling self-consciously in his ultrabaggy khaki shorts and untied Nikes. With his Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, his swoosh cap turned backward, and his aviator shades, he was an advertiser’s dream, a forty-year-old man trying to look eighteen on the basis of television commercials. He was even carrying a Frisbee, which may have been how he had tried to look like a teenager when he was eighteen.

  “So—” Bob said broadly, giving her a smile as he opened his beer and raised the bottle in an informal toast.

  His tone had a bit too much of Alone at last, darling, but there was no way to leave that beer of his just hanging in the air. Rebecca tapped the Heineken with her own Bud Light, with what she hoped was brisk cordiality. Out of the corner of her eye, she had spotted Michael Christopher coming their way, and it was her sense that the timing could not have been worse.

  Sure enough, Christopher seemed flustered as he drew near. He hesitated a few steps away, obviously inclined to leave her to her intimacy with Bob.

  “Oh, Mike—” she said quickly. It was the first time she had called him by name, and it felt strange and false, even presumptuous. “I don’t think you’ve met my friend Bob Schofield. Bob, this is Michael Christopher.”

  Bob extended his hand in a hearty male manner, keeping his body aligned with Rebecca’s, casually insisting on the two of them as a unit. “Mike. Nice to meet you.”

  Christopher nodded formally and allowed his hand to be pumped. He had the air of a man who had walked into the women’s bathroom by mistake and wanted only to get out.

  “Mike has just moved into the in-law apartment downstairs,” Rebecca said, dismayed by how feeble the relationship sounded, when you put it like that. She was edging to her left, trying to get out of Bob’s territorial aura.

  “Ah, well!” Bob beamed. Shadowing her deftly, he had managed to corner her against the railing. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” Christopher said, for lack of anything else to say.

  It was all so wrong. Rebecca considered just pouring her beer on Bob’s head, but Christopher would probably take that as a lover’s spat and dash off to give them a chance to reconcile. It was a sitcom, and she was trapped.

  A conch sounded, sputteringly at first and then with more confidence. The tribe was gathering for the ceremony. As people began to stream down to the beach, Christopher said with obvious relief, “I’d better get to my station.”

  “Of course,” Rebecca said, but he was already hobbling away in his ludicrous shoes.

  “Nice guy,” Bob said, meaning that he had perceived no threat. “But where did he get that jacket?”

  “I think it’s sort of cute,” Rebecca said.

  The baptismal crowd had assembled beside a broad, shallow stream that slipped out of the mountains and ran across the beach just north of Phoebe’s cottage. As Rebecca and Bob arrived, everyone was joining hands at Phoebe’s direction to form a large circle. Rebecca found Mary Martha and took her hand. There was no way to avoid Bob taking his place on her right. Across the circle, on the shore of the stream, Christopher stood flanked by Sherilou and Phoebe, looking somber and absorbed. His habitual hunch looked odd out of doors, as if the sky itself might be a little low.

  When everyone had settled, a red-haired woman in a sleeveless black tunic invoked the spirits of the four directions and led them all in a chant. Then there was some kind of weaving dance that somehow wound everyone past everyone else, through the center of the circle and out again. At some point during the dance Sherilou’s baby began to cry, but there was no stopping the giant snake once it was in motion, and the dance went on and on, with everyone chanting something about the goddess of the summer and the baby wailing herself hoarse.

  Rebecca glanced down at the unhappy baby as she wound past Sherilou for the third time. Hope’s face was bright red from screaming, and her cheek was smeared with two colors of lipstick from misguided kisses delivered along the way. But there was no relief in sight.

  At last the circle straightened itself out again along the bank of the stream. Hope screamed on, to everyone’s dismay. The mistress of the ceremony said something uplifting about love and joy and community, then nodded to Sherilou, who said something about the water being a feminine element. Then Sherilou turned and handed the baby to Christopher. And the baby stopped crying.

&nbs
p; In the sudden, stunning silence, gooseflesh rose on Rebecca’s arms. It was a miracle, she realized. This was what miracles felt like when they happened. She had suspected all along that it would take a miracle to pull this baptism off.

  “As it is written in the book of Isaiah the prophet—” Christopher declared in a strong, simple tone. He had straightened, owning his full height for once with an actor’s instinct. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

  “Amen,” somebody said. A murmur of assent rippled through the crowd. Something had happened, and they all felt it. Some magic had kicked in.

  “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low. The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

  A mild breeze stirred the cypresses; Rebecca was conscious suddenly of the languid crush of the waves. A gull cruised overhead, brilliant white against the blue sky. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, in a deep, perfect hush.

  Christopher eyed them all for a moment, then turned to the stream with the child in his arms and waded briskly in, which seemed to take everyone off guard. Phoebe, as the godmother, hesitated for a moment, thinking perhaps of her slacks, then followed cheerfully enough; and Sherilou promptly splashed in after her, wetting her heavy blue gown to midcalf.

  As Christopher handed the baby to Phoebe, there was a general hesitation, a sense that this was not in the script; the circle wavered, then collapsed, and everyone moved to the bank of the stream and plunged in, laughing and exclaiming. Rebecca moved forward in the crush and hesitated on the bank, but Mary Martha jumped right in, squealing with delight. Beside her, Bob was vacillating, clearly concerned with his Nikes, which somehow made it easy. As he began to remove his shoes, Rebecca hopped into the water beside Mary Martha.