The hubbub gradually settled. Christopher, comfortable in the clear, cold stream, cupped a handful and poured it gently over the baby’s forehead. “I baptize thee, Hope, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
“And the Mother!” Sherilou exclaimed.
Christopher hesitated for a beat, then echoed, agreeably enough, “And the Mother.” He cupped another handful of water and let this wet the baby’s cheek, taking the opportunity to rub away the lipstick there. A final rinse and dab and the lipstick was gone and the baby was beaming in Phoebe’s arms. “Amen.”
“Blessed be!” Sherilou declared.
“Blessed be,” the crowd replied, and everyone broke into applause. Sherilou took the baby from Phoebe and led the boisterous exodus from the stream. Christopher and Phoebe clambered out last, grinning at each other like children who had gotten away with something. The band struck up a reggae version of “Forever Young,” and as everyone headed for the food and drink, their shoes all squishing, the redheaded priestess hastily thanked the spirits of the four directions and dismissed them.
Amid the general hilarity, Rebecca found herself watching Christopher. Whatever spirit had seized him for the ceremony had departed; he was laughing and joking now, dumping water from his shoes like everyone else and accepting a Budweiser from Phoebe. He was stooping again, ridiculously, a six-foot-three-inch man trying to pass for five-eleven. But it was hard to shake the impression the baptism had made on her. She had never known a man who would stand up in public and say that all flesh would see the salvation of God.
In the scramble for food and drink that followed the baptismal ceremony, Rebecca tried her best to establish an independent orbit, but Bob proved unshakable. He took it upon himself to balance two plates deftly in the line for burgers; he supplied beer after beer and scuttled across hot sand at the hint of a need for sunscreen. His small talk was impeccable and unfaltering. From fifteen feet away, there seemed no happier couple on the beach. Rebecca noted glumly that Michael Christopher seemed to be taking the burlesque at face value and was scrupulously giving her space. He had removed his jacket and shoes by now, rolled up his trouser legs, and was kneeling at the water’s edge with Mary Martha, absorbed in an ambitious sand castle project.
Bob had sallied forth in search of more refreshments. Rebecca realized that Phoebe had slipped up from behind and was squatting beside her chair. Following Rebecca’s gaze, her mother smiled.
“He’s good with her,” Phoebe noted, nodding toward Christopher and Mary Martha.
“Thank God.”
Phoebe laughed. “So fervent!” She sipped her wine and gave Rebecca a sly glance. “He’s good with you too.”
“Don’t even go there, Mom.”
“He’s a keeper, is all I’m saying.”
“Is that all you’re saying?”
“Unless he goes back into the monastery, of course.”
“Jesus, Mother.”
Phoebe sighed in exaggerated patience. “If he’d just come out of a twenty-year marriage, I’d be wondering about his wife, Rebecca. That’s all I’m saying. It’s a factor.”
“The man is my downstairs tenant, Mother. He’s here today because you invited him. He’s being polite. I’m being polite. We’re all being nauseatingly polite. And that’s all there is to it. I don’t care whether God grabs him back or not.”
Phoebe looked amused, and Rebecca realized that she had already protested too much. There was no hiding, really, from her mother. But Phoebe shrugged obligingly and made a merciful zipping motion across her lips.
The two women sat for a moment in silence. The surf’s dull surge made it impossible to hear, but Rebecca could see that Mary Martha was telling Christopher knock-knock jokes. Her daughter always messed up the punch lines, but it never seemed to affect the hilarity level.
“Knock-knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Banana.”
“Banana who?”
“Banana you glad I didn’t say ‘orange’?”
“I should probably go down there and offer our guest some lunch,” Phoebe said at last. “Get him off the old knock-knock hook, eh?”
“Give them a little while longer,” Rebecca said. “Okay?”
Phoebe met her eyes. “Ah! Well, of course.” She hesitated, then said, “He likes you, Becca.”
“We’ll see,” Rebecca said carefully.
“I suppose we will,” Phoebe said, seemingly content with that, and she rose and made her way toward the rest of the party.
Bonnie Carlisle showed up with her German shepherd half an hour later to find Rebecca glumly ensconced in the low beach chair Bob had provided, watching the volleyball game with two empty beer bottles and five dead cigarettes arrayed in an intricate pattern in the sand to her left, like a distress signal in Morse code. Bob had dashed off yet again in search of yet more sustenance. He appeared to believe that the afternoon was going well.
Bonnie, blithe in a floppy straw hat, huge pink plastic sunglasses, and a purple one-piece Victoria’s Secret suit cut to maximize her cleavage and minimize her hips, settled into Bob’s empty chair. She let Bruiser off his leash and watched with satisfaction as he bounded off in pursuit of the nearest shorebird, a savvy-looking gull that never let him get closer than fifty yards.
“You are so late,” Rebecca told her.
“Oh? What did I miss?”
“A legitimate miracle during the baptism: the Quieting of the Child. Two miracles, I suppose, if you count all these Marin County pagans getting their feet wet.”
Bonnie began smearing sunscreen onto her arms. “And Bob?”
“The Spirit seized him with the rest of us, but he stopped to take off his shoes.”
“I meant, is he behaving himself?”
“He’s behaving,” Rebecca said grimly.
“Oh, Becca, you’re always so hard on the poor guy.”
Bob reappeared just then, carrying two fresh beers. “Oh! Hello!”
“Hi there,” Bonnie purred, giving him her best Scarlett O’Hara smile and smearing some sunscreen between her breasts.
“Bob, you remember Bonnie Carlisle,” Rebecca said, noting that Bob was following the sunscreen action with interest. “You met her at my office; she’s my best friend from work.”
“Of course,” Bob said. “Good to see you again, Bonnie.”
“Did I take your chair?” Bonnie asked, stopping just short of fluttering her eyelashes.
“Not at all,” he said gallantly.
“Actually, Bob, you can have this seat,” Rebecca said, rising. “I was just going to check on Mary Martha.”
“Oh!” he said, but she was already past him, one step, two steps, every step easier. It felt cruel, but it always felt cruel, not being in love with Bob. Rebecca didn’t allow herself a glance back until she was almost at the water’s edge. By then, Bob had resigned himself to the coup and given the second beer to Bonnie. Bruiser had returned, and Bonnie was making introductions. Bob looked uneasy with the German shepherd, who had discovered Bob’s Frisbee and clearly wanted to play.
Christopher and Mary Martha were kneeling over the moat of their city, dredging wet sand and patting it into the wall, so absorbed in their work that they didn’t sense Rebecca’s approach. She stopped a few feet away, wishing she had a camera. Seeing the two of them together like this was almost too perfect; it was an inordinate pleasure, like chocolate in the morning. It was all the moments that should have been, and hadn’t been. And so it hurt a little too.
Mary Martha noticed her first. “Mommy! Look at our castle!”
“It’s beautiful, sweetheart.”
“It’s amazing,” Mary Martha asserted.
Rebecca laughed. The word was new for her daughter. She must have picked it up from Christopher. “It is amazing.”
“The tide’s coming in, but it hasn’t been able to get over our walls!”
“Yet,” Christopher added—gently enough, Rebecca noted appreciat
ively, tuning the six-year-old’s hubris down a bit—and Mary Martha promptly echoed, “Yet.”
“Well, when it does, maybe we should get you something to eat.”
As if on cue, a wave broke five feet away and reached the castle in a sizzling rush, slopping over the walls and soaking Mary Martha and Christopher to the waist. As it receded, leaving the moat silted and the eroded ramparts topped with foam, Mary Martha’s face puckered uncertainly; she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry.
“I think I have a fish in my pocket,” Christopher muttered, surveying his soggy trousers sorrowfully. Mary Martha decided to take the setback well and giggled.
“I told you to wear shorts,” she noted primly.
The three of them headed for the food tables, a little self-conscious of being a unit in motion together. Even Mary Martha seemed to feel the burden of appearances. She wasn’t sure whose hand to hold and clung briefly to Christopher, then to Rebecca, like someone trying on hats in front of a mirror. She even tried holding both adults’ hands at once, and for a few steps they moved as a clumsy six-legged creature, a mythical beast, an American family right out of a car commercial, before Mary Martha got antsy and ran ahead. Christopher and Rebecca exchanged a glance, acknowledging the awkwardness.
“She’s not used to having so many grown-ups around,” Rebecca suggested.
“Neither am I, to tell you the truth.”
She laughed, touched by his note of helpless candor. She felt that she had offered him a way out, a chance to deny the situation’s implied intimacy, and he had not taken it. But she didn’t want to make too much of that.
Mary Martha was already applying ketchup to her hamburger when they arrived at the food tables. Christopher fell in beside her, loading up a hot dog with every condiment available and heaping potato salad and beans onto his paper plate. It was all very American. Rebecca, who had already eaten with Bob, contented herself with yet another beer.
Phoebe, holding court on a big blanket nearby, waved them over. Sherilou lounged beneath an umbrella, her gown open to the baby, breast-feeding languidly. Rebecca had looked forward to sitting next to Christopher, but Phoebe offered him the spot on her right, and Mary Martha insinuated herself instantly on his free side. Rebecca settled across the blanket, beside someone named Bart, who nodded affably.
Everyone had a good laugh over Christopher’s soaked pants. The still-impressive ruins of the sand castle were pointed out by an insistent Mary Martha and duly marveled at by all the adults. Rebecca noted that her daughter had ketchup all over her face and a caffeinated cola in her hand; Mary Martha was so revved up by now from all the attention that there was no containing her, and it was just a matter of time before they had a scene. But there seemed to be no stopping the machine.
Phoebe and Christopher meanwhile chatted amiably about this and that, weaving a graceful thread of small talk: the pope’s position on birth control, liberation theology, the badness of most Catholic music. Rebecca began to feel oppressed, trapped somehow by the impenetrable surface of niceness. She realized also that she was a little drunk. She’d had a beer before the ceremony and a couple more, enduring Bob; and with the beer in her hand her blood alcohol had reached near-maudlin levels. Like Mary Martha, she was close to getting out of hand.
“So what do you do?” Bart asked her. He was a beefy, pleasant man, a former market analyst turned to yoga, draped in some ill-advised lavender cotton pants and a matching smock.
“I’m a graphic artist.”
“How fascinating.”
Across the blanket, Mary Martha was tugging at Christopher’s arm, disrupting his conversation with Phoebe, trying to get him to start a new sand castle with her.
“Mary Martha, let Mike hang out with the grown-ups for a while,” Rebecca said.
“It’s okay,” Christopher said uselessly.
“It’s not okay. It’s rude and it’s greedy, and she knows better…. Mary Martha, stop.”
“I just want to build another sand castle!”
“I’ll build a sand castle with you,” Bart offered, with surprising gallantry.
“No! I want Mike!”
“Mary Martha, I think you need a time-out,” Rebecca said.
“I don’t need a time-out!” Mary Martha shrieked. “All I want to do is—”
Rebecca stood up and took her firmly by the hand. Mary Martha promptly started wailing in protest. Half-leading, half-dragging her daughter away from the blanket toward an unpopulated area, like a bomb defuser with live explosives, Rebecca could only be grateful for the way the sand and sea took the edge off Mary Martha’s howls. She felt monstrous and public, everyone’s bad mother nightmare come to life. The look of ill-concealed dismay on Christopher’s face had pained her deeply. It was of course one of the main reasons she hadn’t had a decent relationship with a man since leaving Rory; why she had been so pathetically pleased, at first, with Bob’s unnatural forbearance. She was a package deal. She had fifty-three pounds of baggage, and sometimes her baggage screamed and threw a fit.
She steered her daughter toward a rocky prominence some hundred yards away. Mary Martha kept crying as long as she could, but without an audience her sobs began to lack conviction. By the time they had reached the rocks she had calmed down enough for Rebecca to pause and wipe the ketchup off her face. She lifted her daughter up onto a boulder and clambered up beside her. At their feet, the incoming tide hissed over surf-smoothed stones. Just beyond the breaking waves, Rebecca’s eye was caught by what looked like another rock, but then the rock blinked at her.
“Look, Mary Martha, it’s a seal.”
Mary Martha, unwilling to relent too easily, gave a grudging glance, then gasped with pleasure. The seal peered back at them, sleek and cheeky.
At the edge of earshot to their right, the party went on. The volleyball net had been rolled up and people were dancing now, casting long, exotic shadows on the sandstone bluffs. A bonfire roared into life as the golden light started softening toward rose. Phoebe, Christopher, and company were still chatting on the blanket. The discussion seemed to have turned serious; Sherilou was gesturing earnestly with her free hand, making some fierce point, while the baby slept in her arms. Farther down the beach, Bob Schofield had surrendered to the inevitable and was playing Frisbee with Bonnie and Bruiser. As Rebecca watched, Bob flung the disc as far as he could. The dog loped after it. The Frisbee hung in the air, hauntingly, spinning in its own timeless moment. At the last possible second Bruiser leaped and snagged it. As he trotted back toward them, Bob and Bonnie exchanged a gleeful high five. Rebecca marveled. She’d never seen Bob laugh like that; but then, she’d never wanted to. It was too much of a commitment, having that much fun with someone.
Mary Martha snuffled and wiped her nose on her forearm. She seemed to have recovered from her tantrum. She waved to the seal, who barked at them obligingly.
“He said hello!” Mary Martha exclaimed. “Isn’t that amazing?”
“It sure is,” Rebecca said, resigning herself to life’s small joys.
They started back to San Francisco as darkness fell, just as the party was starting to get its second wind. Phoebe, aglow with a successful production, did her best to persuade them to stay, but Rebecca would have none of it. The day’s complications had had a purging effect; she was feeling the scorched lightness of surrender to her fate, and all she wanted to do was get her daughter home to bed, pass out herself, and wake tomorrow to the drudgery of trying to get the lightbulb man to dance. She wanted her tiny life to resume without illusion.
“You’re welcome to stay,” she told Christopher, as Phoebe persisted and he seemed to waver. “I’m sure it would be easy enough for you to catch a ride home to the city later.”
“I’m as ready to go as you are,” he assured her, in a clear appeal to their previous camaraderie in social reluctance, but she couldn’t tell whether he meant it or whether he was just being polite. He had spent the day being indiscriminately kind to everyone, and now he wa
s being kind to her. It made Rebecca feel unreal. If they had been married, she thought, they would have been on the verge of one of those air-clearing fights couples were prone to after parties. As it was, she just felt unreasonably ornery.
Mary Martha fell asleep in the backseat right away. Rebecca concentrated on driving. She had sobered by now and was glad she had. The coast highway’s spectacular vistas shrank in the dark to the next fifty feet of yellow line and guardrail; the headlights splayed uselessly beyond the road’s twists and turns, now blunted by the cliff face, now petering out in the black void over the sea. Christopher was silent as the car wound up and down, and Rebecca wondered briefly whether he was worried about her driving. It was the moment she had waited for all day, of course, and she didn’t have a thing to say. But that was how it went. She felt silly by now to have built things up so much in her head.
“So did you enjoy the party?” she asked.
“To the point of exhaustion.”
She laughed, startled and pleased. It was not a polite response.
“And you?” Christopher asked.
“Oh, I always try to enjoy myself at these things, and I always fail miserably. Then I hate myself for a while, for being so incapable of enjoying myself. Then, if I’m lucky, I resign myself to being me. Then I go home.”
“Sounds like fun,” he said, without a trace of sarcasm, and they both laughed. “It sounds like the religious life, actually.”
“You really did seem like you were having fun. And you were very good at the ceremony.”
Christopher sobered instantly. “Ah, well, the ceremony…”
“I thought it was very moving,” Rebecca persisted.
He gave a cryptic grunt, his face turned to the black window. They reached a switchback, and the headlight beams groped through emptiness before swinging back to the comforting solidity of the road. She had a fleeting sense of his God out there somewhere, like the sea itself, invisible and dangerous, a vastness wrapped in darkness, just a long fall away.
At last he said, “I’m afraid it was a mistake for me to come at all.”
The Monk Downstairs Page 8