“When my mother starts giving me shit, I’m blaming you.”
“Which is only as it should be.”
That seemed to cover all the bases. Rebecca surrendered the bottle. As Mike tore away the foil, she plucked the cigarette from his lips and took a deep what-the-hell drag. Maybe the champagne would cover up the smell of smoke on her breath, she thought. With luck, her daughter might just think she was an alcoholic.
Mike worked at the cork with his thumbs until it blew out of the bottle’s mouth. It arced wonderfully through the air and landed on the roof of the shack. They looked at each other and laughed.
“Think of some gung-ho young monk finding that in fifty years,” Mike said. “Talk about your divine mysteries.” He waited for the champagne to stop foaming over, then handed her the bottle.
“We might as well still be in high school,” Rebecca said. “Jesus, thirty-eight years old, and I’m out here in the woods with my boyfriend, smoking cigarettes and drinking wine out of the bottle.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Mike said.
She raised the champagne. “Here’s to being late for our own wedding, sweetheart.”
“And to decency.”
“And to—uhhh—”
“The sacred reality of marriage.”
“If we can stand it.”
“Qui perfecte diligit, nupsit,” Mike said.
“Amen, I think,” Rebecca said, and drank.
She was glad for that wine, and for the time-out, twenty minutes later, watching Phoebe make her way up the aisle on the arm of Brother James. Her mother’s progress was glacially slow without her walker, and the journey seemed to take forever. Rebecca thought that she might not have been able to stand it, would almost certainly have squandered the moment on fretting and anxiety, had she and Mike not been so incredibly rude and made everyone wait while they got themselves together a bit. But as it was, Rebecca’s eyes stung with tears, because once you relaxed enough to see it, the dignity and splendor of Phoebe shuffling through the rose petals strewn a moment before by Mary Martha was one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen.
Beyond her mother, she could see Mike waiting at the altar, lovely in his unstrained patience; and Bonnie on the other side, with Mary Martha, and poor pale Abbot Hackley himself, seemingly propped upright by the stiff gold of his chasuble alone, all of them watching Phoebe with eyes full of exquisite and unhurried love.
And when Rebecca’s turn came at last, and she followed her mother up the aisle, moving at her own stately pace along that laboriously cleared path through the rose petals, she felt those same eyes of love on her, and she felt unexpectedly buoyed and moved, borne along by that unforeseeable grace. She was glad that they had gone for decency after all, in the end. And even gladder, perhaps, that she was just drunk enough to appreciate it.
Chapter Three
God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom,
and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
1 CORINTHIANS 1:25
Phoebe had come to see the slowness as a blessing of sorts. Not that she had any choice. The slowness was just how it was now, it was what she moved in, like a new kind of weather, a variant kind of air, as viscous as half-set Jell-O. You could try to go fast in it, from habit and history and wishful thinking, and suffer immensities of frustration, or you could cut your speed losses and just see what the world was like now, to these slowed eyes and this slowed self. She’d been a speed person all her life, and the fight had not been pretty, but by now she’d pretty much gotten it. Slow was where it was at. It certainly brought out a different aspect of things.
She was practicing shoelace knots on her number two pair of sneakers. Her number one pair had Velcro instead of laces, and that had been amusing and even enjoyable while Mary Martha had Velcro sneakers too, but Mary Martha had recently made the leap to laced shoes, and Phoebe was determined to keep pace. Mary Martha actually knew two different bow-tying techniques, which she called the Bunny and the Rabbit; she could keep them separate in her head somehow, and she knew all the steps to each. She had been trying to teach them to Phoebe, which was delightful and very sweet but often a little confusing; and the truth was that despite a significant lead in the abstract, Mary Martha didn’t really have either technique down yet herself. Phoebe kept hoping her own fingers would remember the skill somehow, but she’d had no luck so far. Her body remembered some things, her brain remembered others; but some things she was just having to relearn from scratch. And some things, she knew, were probably gone for good.
She made the bunny’s ear, or maybe it was the rabbit’s, she could never keep them straight, and chased the bunny around the garden and into the burrow and out the other side, but the bow fell apart for some reason, so maybe it had been the rabbit after all. She wished her granddaughter were there to help her. Mary Martha at least was clear about the mechanics of both techniques; it was her execution that was off.
She was starting again, a rabbit’s ear this time, when a startling crash sounded upstairs, and then a second. It sounded like someone breaking through a wall. Rebecca and Mike were in Hawaii on their honeymoon, and Mary Martha was spending the week with Rory, so there shouldn’t have been anyone up there, much less anyone who was apparently destroying the place with a sledgehammer.
Phoebe looked at her telephone, to which Rebecca had taped an index card with 911 written on it in big black numbers. She picked up the receiver and looked at the buttons. She had the concept of numbers down, she knew that the black things on the card matched things on the telephone buttons, and sometimes, maddeningly, capriciously, all the connections were abundantly clear, but this was not one of those times and it all looked somewhat Sumerian.
That was how things were now: she could remember the Sumerians, the rise of agricultural civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the origins of writing in hieroglyphs on clay tablets, but she couldn’t dial 911 on a phone sitting in front of her. The nine was in the bottom row and the one was in the top row, but Phoebe didn’t really want to start trying combinations at random. A long list of people’s phone numbers was taped to the table beside the phone, but those all had at least seven numbers. She probably should have been a little more honest with Rebecca about her actual reading capacities, but Phoebe knew Rebecca would never have gone on her honeymoon then. So she’d bluffed.
And now life was calling her bluff. Oh, well, Phoebe thought, and reached for her cane. Her walker wouldn’t get her up the stairs; if she was going to charge up there to confront the vandal, it would have to be at the snail’s pace of her cane.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she got to the top, but she’d found since the stroke that things usually worked out, you just had to jump in without really knowing all the hows, and go at it on faith. Often it was clear by the time you got there, and when it was not, as with shoelaces, well, then you just dealt with it.
She lay on black sand, the newest sand on the planet, letting the sun soak into her. The warmth here seemed to have an intelligence of its own, unhurried, gentle, and penetrative, like the hands of a good masseuse; Rebecca could feel it finding its way into her, layer by layer, sinking through her skin to her muscles and organs, to her heart, and deeper, to somewhere that had been screaming for warmth for years.
It was disorienting—not that this miracle happened but that it seemed so natural. It was more like remembering than like making, more like a return than a journey. How was it possible to forget something as fundamental as the way the sun felt baking a moment into eternity in your flesh? The way that time turned into simplicity in such warmth. They were only a few hours west of their usual location on the same turning planet. You could stand on this shore at dawn and watch this healing sun come up from where they lived what they thought of as their real lives. It was the same ocean, and the same sky; but it was a different world. And yet it felt like a kind of coming home.
A honeymoon, Rebecca thought languidly, stre
tching her oiled legs and digging her toes into the sand. The thought was unlike her. She didn’t actually believe in honeymoons. She was opposed to them on principle. Honeymoons were like the towel beneath her, a big new $5.99 tourist monstrosity of flaming orange-red, the color of molten lava, that was going to look silly as soon as they were back in cold, gray San Francisco. The cheap cotton was so thin it felt like rarified cardboard, and it was more or less useless as a towel, just moving the water around on your skin without actually absorbing any of it. This vivid symbol of their honeymoon happiness wouldn’t get her dry after the first Monday morning shower and certainly wouldn’t survive more than a run or two through the washing machine. The colors would bleed, the edges would fray, and she’d have to go to K-Mart and buy something fluffy and durable in good old Martha Stewart navy blue.
And yet…it was such a pretty thing, like a feather from a dream bird.
Mike came trotting up from the water just then, and Rebecca smiled just at the sight of him. It was still almost impossible to think of him as her husband without giggling. It felt more like they were kids, playing at marriage on the beach: here’s the sand castle that we live in, and here’s the sand castle where we go to work. This piece of wood is our car. Any minute now a wave could come in and change the entire landscape of the game; they might rebuild the domestic scene, they might start over on something Egyptian, or they might just jump in the water and play at being dolphins instead.
It didn’t help that they were only in Hawaii at all through the grace of Phoebe. Her mother had insisted, had simply bought the entire Paradise Tours package without consulting with them and handed them the tickets as a wedding gift. In Phoebe’s world, a honeymoon legitimized things. It was simply what one did, it announced to the world that you were serious. But for Rebecca, this mad jaunt just made everything seem surreal. They were lounging around in unsustainable luxury through the munificent whim of a woman with significant neural damage, spending money that wasn’t theirs on things they didn’t need, having unrealistically idyllic experiences in a place too fantastically beautiful to take completely seriously. Rebecca had moments when she hardly knew whether to feel grateful or dangerously overindulged. She would almost rather have just gone straight back to the foggy house in the Sunset and gotten on with good old chilly real life.
Mike stopped beside her and shook like a happy dog, the drops flying from his ever-longer hair. He’d been bodysurfing for the past hour; he turned out to have a passion for riding the waves in like a kid. The shore break here was abrupt, almost savage, big waves with thousands of miles of ocean behind them welling up for a gorgeous moment before collapsing onto the shallow beach, and Mike’s nose and chest were scraped raw from being pounded into the bottom at the end of failed rides. But he was undeterred, and even seemed to like the washing machine tumble at the end of most of his ventures. She loved watching him launch himself with a wave, catching the lift and swell, tapping in to the power of it, and then knifing down along the curling inner edge. Inevitably, she thought of Rory at times: her first husband’s best moments had all come offshore.
Mike flopped down beside her. Rebecca could smell the ocean on his skin. His towel was as blue as the Big Island sky and wouldn’t last any longer in the real world than hers would. He was wearing a pair of those huge baggy surfer shorts, also like Rory, and he looked completely silly in them, though not any sillier than anybody else did. He tanned easily, Rebecca had learned, to a lovely shade of cinnamon brown. It was amazing to her, in retrospect, that she had married a man without knowing what color he got in the sun. The leaps you took in life, never knowing.
She sat up and licked his shoulder, like a fond cat, tasting salt. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, you.”
“I feel completely decadent.”
Mike smiled. “Yeah. It’s great.”
“No, I mean, really. Seriously. Dissolute. It’s becoming an issue.”
“I’m sure we’ll be miserable soon,” Mike said, clearly trying to be helpful. He ran a fond finger along the line of her shoulder and, apparently finding her skin inadequately oiled, reached for the suntan lotion. He squeezed a generous puddle of the stuff into his hand and slipped behind her to begin applying it to her back and shoulders. His hands were cool at first, like a breath of the sea, but they warmed quickly on her sun-baked skin.
Rebecca closed her eyes and relaxed into the sensuous glide of his touch. Her cumulative SPF by now was probably in the thousands; Mike rubbed her body at every opportunity. She felt like a beloved car, a ridiculously pampered treasure with thirty-seven coats of paint: waxed, polished, and incessantly buffed. It was wonderful, actually. She’d never felt like an object of such devotion before.
“Isn’t there some kind of Bible story about some woman rubbing some expensive oil on Jesus?” she said, trying again.
“Uh-huh,” Mike answered absently, his attention at the base of her neck now, the balls of his thumbs sending little reverse shivers upward, like salmon swimming against the stream of her thoughts.
“And the disciples get their panties in a bunch over the waste? Like, they should have sold the oil and given the money to charity or something?”
“This stuff is $1.98 a bottle.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I suppose,” Mike said.
Rebecca knew he would let it go at that. She often tried to lure him into Christian discourse, but he was routinely elusive. She said, “My theological point, Brother Jerome, is: Didn’t Jesus come down firmly on the side of indulgence?” And, as Mike laughed, “Seriously. He backed the woman up, right? Told the disciples to chill out?”
“Well, there’s a context,” Mike said. He had found a pea-sized knot near the top of her scapula, and his thumb was holding it in tension. Rebecca wondered briefly whether the pressure was a Mike-ishly Zen comment on the parable, a visceral koan fretted on her high-strung musculature; and then she stopped thinking, as the point deepened into a sort of spaciousness under the continued pressure and her whole consciousness went into her body there and opened into somewhere else and then came back.
It felt like it might have been hours. Mike’s thumb had moved about a millimeter. The ocean looked like something that had just been invented, a project still in the developmental phase. What a great idea, Rebecca thought: an ocean.
“A ‘context’?” she said.
“What Jesus actually said, more or less, was, ‘Just think of this as anointing me for burial a little ahead of schedule.’ And a couple days later he was dead.”
Rebecca laughed. She really hadn’t seen that coming, though she probably should have.
She said, affectionately, “I wasn’t looking for the stations of the cross, honey, I was just trying to feel better about lying around in the sun like a happy seal.”
“You started it,” Mike said. “I’m just trying to keep my hands on your body, here.”
By the time Phoebe made it to the top of the stairs, she was exhausted. She slumped against the rail on the landing outside the kitchen door to rest. Whoever was destroying the place had settled in to a steady rhythm, and there appeared to be no hurry. Her entire body was bewildered by all this extraordinary effort; her breath came in ragged pants, and her heart was slamming around like a bee in a jar. She could hear crashing, and slightly more vivid, and it made her wonder for a moment whether the crashing was real either. No one told you that you would be able to hear other parts of your brain like that, like noise from a neighboring apartment, sometimes relatively coherent, like an excited conversation, sometimes like a stereo turned up too loud, and sometimes just as a species of pandemonium. Phoebe didn’t want to let anyone suspect how chaotic the environment was in her head. It would just upset them. There was such an emphasis, in stroke recovery, on getting back as close as possible to what had once passed for normal; everyone just wanted for you to hurry up and be okay. There was a certain look that came out on Rebecca’s face when she realized yet again that Phoebe simp
ly wasn’t up to speed anymore, and Phoebe would do pretty much anything she could to avoid provoking it. Unfortunately, there was so much, in the way of incapacity, that you couldn’t see coming; and even what capacities she had now were often hit-or-miss. She could sometimes recite entire passages of Shakespeare from memory, as clean and crisp as if a tape recorder were running; and at other times she couldn’t sort out Hamlet from an omelet and just wanted to be sure she could get to the bathroom by herself.
A fresh crash from inside the kitchen reassured her that something real was occurring in there. Phoebe reached for the handle and found that the door was locked. She had a key, but keys were one of those things now. She considered her options briefly, decided she would much rather be killed by whoever was trashing the house than try to go back down those stairs, as long as they just let her sit down for a moment first, and lifted her cane to rap firmly on the door.
Shave and a haircut, two bits. The rhythm came automatically and on a wave of resonance. It really was so interesting how your brain worked, once you lightened up about having it work right. Phoebe could remember her father telling her knock-knock jokes when she was five, and how he had laughed uproariously at all the knock-knock jokes she made up then, even though none of them were funny. He’d died of a heart attack, boom, bam, gone. Leave ’em laughing, he’d always said. None of this stroke stuff for him.
Knock-knock. Who’s there? Burglar. Burglar who? Burglar with a sledgehammer.
The door opened and Phoebe gripped her cane, prepared to go down fighting, but it was Mary Martha and, behind her, Rory, who was in fact wielding a sledgehammer and had already smashed a ragged hole in the far kitchen wall. No doubt there was a reasonable explanation for that.
“Hello, Gran-Gran,” Mary Martha said.
“Hello, sweetheart. Do you have a chair?”
“We moved the chairs into the living room. Daddy’s making a hole in the wall.”
The Monk Upstairs Page 3