She came back to herself as she painted. The green of the trees across the lagoon, which had seemed almost derisive to her, nature’s empty ironic loveliness in a relationship world red in tooth and claw, turned first into a technical problem, because this green was different, was qualitatively unlike any other she had painted. Considering her initial botches, Rebecca realized that her eye had gotten lazy, that her painted trees, especially the watercolors, had been merely iconic for years now, mysteries shrunk to gestures, like a child’s green circles atop a single line of crayon brown for a trunk: just something she got onto the paper as a marker for her brain. This green was so fresh that it made its own demand; it lived, resisting the easy banality, and made her live newly to meet it.
It seemed at first that the problem was dilution, that the watercolors bled too thin. Rebecca tried laying the paint on thick, barely dampened, almost scooped from the palette; but she gradually realized that the green’s uniqueness was also contextual, a function of the myriad touches of subtle color that emerged from the original mass of foliage under a slower gaze. Just a bit of orange, not ochre-heavy but apricot-light; a streak of lemony yellow, somehow, not flowers, almost atmospheric; and red, sharp and soft, and more red—fuchsia and ruby, scarlet and pink; and the sky, its unprecedented azure drawing the green toward emerald; and the lagoon’s aquamarine, a weightless lucidity softening the gem tone toward verdure; and the italicization of the beach’s sun-bleached bone white, sharpening everything.
By the time she had the primary masses of the painting sketched and structured, and her palette swimming with third drafts of the hues, Rebecca realized that she was happy. Not happy, actually, but…something good. Something quiet and strong and even peaceful. The landscape was innocent again, a mystery, escaped from the burden of her projections. Her eye was innocent again, seeing the mystery new; and with her eye, her heart.
It was one of the gifts of these last months with Mike, she knew, the return of her painting life, long relegated to a pile of old canvases in the garage. His presence in her life had somehow led her to find that space again, and that old part of her had reawakened. It sounded so corny, but it was true. He had given her back a crucial part of herself.
She would always be grateful for that, Rebecca thought now, with something almost like nostalgia, even if the marriage failed. She could paint. She could raise Mary Martha, God knew she knew how to be a single mother by now. She had good friends. Maybe she and Mike could even be friends, after the dust settled and they could both acknowledge what a crazy thing it had been that they’d believed they could make a go of it.
Mike was back at the blanket now, drying himself off, or at least moving the water around, with his big blue version of her big red-orange towel. Rebecca had worked herself into such a state of artistic detachment and postdivorce serenity that it was a small shock when he started walking toward her and she realized there were some minor details of the breakup process still to be attended to, like explaining to him how their marriage had failed somewhere between the last cinnamon scone and this idyllic lagoon.
“Hey there,” she said as he drew near.
“Hey.”
He plopped down beside her with a touch of emphasis, as if asserting his right to do so, as if she might dispute it. She still had her brush in her hand, laden with an early attempt to catch the brown-black of the old lava rocks, and Mike gave her painting an appreciative glance. She thought he was going to say something complimentary, blah blah blah, but instead he leaned back and wrapped his hands around his knees and said, “So, what the hell is going on?”
His tone was so precisely the same pleasant and amiable tone he’d been using all along to slide past their tension that it took Rebecca a moment to register what he’d actually said. She felt a surge of adrenaline, the thrill of This is it, thank God, at last; and was horrified to hear herself say, “Nothing.”
“‘Nothing,’” Mike echoed, meaning, clearly, Bullshit.
“I told you, I didn’t sleep that well last night.” He continued to look at her, not buying it. Rebecca couldn’t believe herself what she was saying. It was almost like being possessed: some demon had seized control of her; she was channeling lies.
She looked at her painting, trying to recapture that sense of serene acceptance of the worst truths of her life, that free embrace of reality for better and for worse. It was going to be hard to blame the marriage’s demise on Mike’s failure to engage her over the issues if she lied to his face when he tried to begin talking about them.
What in the world was she afraid of? They had fought before. Not much, maybe three or four times when the temperature truly climbed into the uncomfortable range, but it wasn’t like any of it had been that traumatic, at least not after their first fight, which had blown them apart for weeks. But that had been a blind-shots-in-the-dark getting-to-know-you fight. This was marriage, for God’s sake. Mike actually fought fair most of the time; he was patient beyond anything she had ever experienced, right up until he lost his temper and said something so over-the-top that you either had to laugh or walk away for a while. He cooled off fast and could laugh at himself about it all within an hour or two at most. He had a way of limning her shticks that made them seem almost endearing, and a disarming way of copping to most of his own crap without too much fuss and denial. She had never felt safer or realer trying to muddle through things with anyone than she did with him; she had actually considered it one of the unforeseen strengths of their relationship.
There was his disconcerting habit of praying at crucial junctures, of course, of just stopping, somehow, at the Gordian knot of the moment, shutting up and letting the dust settle; but even that gave a kind of ritual spaciousness to the fights, once you realized it was happening. It was like counting to ten, or a hundred, or a thousand; it slowed things down and it usually even helped. It was certainly more effective than Rory’s old preferred technique of hauling out a giant doobie and lighting up or slamming the door and driving off with a screech of the tires.
Mike was probably praying now, Rebecca realized. His silence had turned stolid, frankly downshifted for the long haul. He was going to wait out the bullshit. And she realized that maybe that, precisely, was it: she didn’t want this to be just about her bullshit. She felt incredibly petty; when she boiled it all down and tried to articulate it, it started to sound a lot like they might have avoided all this wretchedness if he had just brought her medium coffees after his morning walk instead of extra large. And that just wasn’t it. She wasn’t sure quite what it was.
She said, with a touch of rueful self-deprecation, “I think I may be about to get my period too.”
Mike held on for another moment without relenting, then he shook his head and stood up.
“What?” she said.
“If you don’t want to talk about it right now, we don’t have to talk about it now,” he said. “But don’t treat both of us like fucking idiots.”
They drove back to the hotel in silence. It was Mike who was madder now, Rebecca realized, and in a way it took the pressure off. At least she wasn’t the only one stewing. It was unnerving, though; her new husband had a previously unsuspected capacity to go completely into some zone of his own, an opaque place with a cold hard shell. She actually felt alone in the car, as if he were a cab driver or something, he was that far away.
Back at the hotel Mike pulled into the numbered space in the parking garage too fast and hit the wall with a sickening crunch of yielding metal, hard enough that Rebecca’s head snapped back. She held her breath, thinking that at least now they’d have an exchange of some sort, either to laugh or to explode, but Mike didn’t say anything, not even Shit, nor did he give her a glance of camaraderie, chagrin, or blame. He didn’t back the car away from the impact point either; he just put the parking brake on, turned off the ignition, and got out, as if a whiplash-inducing stop with the bumper crumpled against the concrete was standard parking procedure.
He was already halfway
across the parking garage toward the elevator, moving like a man with a mission, by the time Rebecca realized he wasn’t going to come around to her side of the car and open the door for her. It had been one of the small delights of their relationship, Mike’s unexpected little southernisms, endearing archaic touches of antebellum chivalry, like opening doors and always positioning himself to walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk, as if she might get splashed by a passing carriage.
It took Rebecca several tries to get out of the car herself; the rental had some complex new locking system that required pressing buttons. Mike was out of sight by now. She moved to look at the front of the car and found that the bumper was in fact a total loss. It was one of those clever semiplastic things that disappeared at the merest touch of contact and clearly hadn’t been designed for a furious monk in a bad honeymoon moment. She wondered how much she should care, paperworkwise, and decided: not much. It really was a side of Mike she’d never seen before.
When she got back to the room, there was no sign of
Mike. Rebecca sat down on the bed and tried to think of what to do next. If she was Mike, of course, she would probably pray, just give it all up to God and rely on His mercy. As things stood, all Rebecca could think to do was either start drinking or call Bonnie Schofield. What an appalling lack of inner resources she had to show for almost four decades on the planet.
She checked the menu, and the room service alcohol cost a fortune, money probably better saved to cover the repairs to the rental car, so she reached for the telephone and dialed her best friend’s number. Bonnie wasn’t home, and Rebecca couldn’t imagine leaving a message that wouldn’t sound like someone had died, so she just hung up and tried Bonnie’s cell instead. To her relief, her friend answered on the second ring.
“Hey there,” Rebecca said.
“Becca! Sweetheart! I was just thinking about you. How are you, you little lovebird?”
“Circling the drain, frankly.”
“Great!” Bonnie said, so brightly that Rebecca understood that someone else was there. Probably Bob, Bonnie’s husband, an earnest, sweet, relatively clueless man; in general, Bonnie swore by his relationship savvy, but in practice she tended to spare him the details.
“Who’s there?”
“The whole gang,” Bonnie said; and, aside, “In a minute, sweetheart, let me have a turn with her first.”
“Mary Martha’s there?” Rebecca said. “Where are you?”
“Rory’s backyard.”
“What?!”
“I’m just going to go over here and talk to your mom a minute,” Bonnie told Mary Martha on the other end. “No, sweetie, in a minute. You go get another hot dog.”
“A hot dog,” Rebecca said.
“We’re having a barbecue,” Bonnie said, dryly now, having apparently established some privacy.
“This is the same Rory we’re talking about, right? The one on parole?”
“What can I say? Mary Martha wanted to have a barbecue. She saw it in a movie or something, or on Mr. Rogers, I don’t know. And I hate to say it, Rebecca, but Rory’s looking awfully suburban at the moment. He’s got an apron and a chef’s hat and everything. He’s got a spatula. And Mary Martha is eating it up.”
Rebecca was silent for a moment. When she had left their daughter for this week with her ex-husband and his relatively new wife Chelsea, she had had any number of concerns, but they had mostly centered around drug abuse and criminal neglect, the possibility of Social Services stepping in and prosecuting them all for blatant failures of parenthood. She certainly hadn’t foreseen worrying about losing Mary Martha’s domestic affections to some kind of stoner’s version of Ozzie and Harriet.
“But seriously—” she said.
“If it makes you feel any better, he’s overcooking everything.”
Rebecca decided to worry about it later. “Bonnie, we’re having a big fat stupid fight.”
“That bastard,” Bonnie said, instantly supportive.
“No, no, I think it’s mostly my fault.”
“Hmm—” Bonnie began contemplatively, but then, aside again, “No, no, take a number, honey.”
“Who—?”
“Yo’ mama,” Bonnie said. “Damn, she’s insisting.”
“Phoebe’s there? Shit, Bonnie, no—”
“Hello, sweetheart,” her mother said.
Rebecca could picture the transaction. Phoebe had no doubt simply taken the phone out of Bonnie’s hand. She said, resignedly, “Hi, Mom.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Of course everything’s all right. We’re having a blast. We bless you every day and light candles of gratitude for this perfect gift.”
“No need to get sarcastic. Bonnie had a look on her face.”
“That’s just Bonnie’s normal look. She had a tricky childhood.”
Phoebe hesitated briefly, possibly trying to decide whether that had been a shot. Rebecca hastened to say, “Everything’s great, Mom. Really.”
“Silly me,” Phoebe said. “To suspect that someone with your naturally serene and sunny disposition could possibly have a moment’s trouble in the stressful early days of a new marriage.”
Rebecca considered bursting into tears and telling her everything. Phoebe could handle it, even poststroke. But she could picture the scene in Rory’s backyard, which was about seventeen square feet of dead grass, normally inhabited by Bruno, Rory’s enormous and overly affectionate chocolate Lab, and dangerously rife with Bruno’s defecations. There was no way Phoebe could be in anything approaching a truly private space, and this was no time to set off alarms among the general populace.
“It’s all good, Mom,” she said, ruefully enough that she knew Phoebe would take it both as an acknowledgment and as reassurance that Rebecca felt she could work it out. “How are you?”
“Well, I’m fine, I suppose. Bonnie has been wonderful. Too wonderful, even. She calls every day and stops by after work. And Rory and Mary Martha have been by quite a bit too.”
“Rory and Mary Martha have been by the house?”
There was a silence, slightly unnerving. Rebecca could never tell anymore whether Phoebe’s pauses were diplomatic, tactical, or stroke related. In the past, a silence like this would have spoken volumes, and Rebecca couldn’t help but suspect that it still did.
She said, “You can’t talk about it right now, can you?”
“Nope,” Phoebe said.
“Should I get on the next plane?”
“No, dear, you just enjoy yourself. It can wait until you get home.”
“I’m serious.”
“Me too…. Mary Martha’s standing here jumping up and down like a Mexican bean.”
“I guess you’d better put her on, then. These are Bonnie’s minutes we’re using up here.”
“Your father threw a clock against the wall on our honeymoon, you know,” Phoebe said.
“Really? You never told me that.”
“I’m sure it was just symbolic,” Phoebe said. “Tempus fugit or something. Of course it freaked me out. But what did I know? I was only nineteen.”
Rebecca laughed. “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Here’s our angel.”
“Mommy?” came Mary Martha’s eager voice.
Rebecca gathered herself to be a decent mother herself. “Hi there, honeybaby. How are you?”
“We’re having a barbecue!”
“How wonderful. Is it sunny there?”
“No, it’s foggy. But it’s warm if you stand by the fire.”
“And you’re eating hot dogs?”
“And a bite of hamburger. Bruno ate the rest of it but I didn’t mind. And chips. And Pepsi.”
“Potato salad?” Rebecca asked, just to yank her chain.
“Mo-om!”
“Just kidding.”
“I hate potato salad.”
“I know, honey. What’s for dessert?”
“Gran-Gran brought cookies, and Chelsea ma
de a chocolate cake.”
Rebecca rode past the pang. It was hard to picture Chelsea, a sweet twenty-something posthippie Deadhead, cooking anything more complicated than a microwave burrito. But apparently you couldn’t turn your back for a second. “A chocolate cake. Wow. Perfect. Your favorite.”
“I’ve got to go,” Mary Martha said matter-of-factly, a child’s mind attending to the moment in front of her. “I’m Daddy’s assistant.”
“Okay, honey. Have fun. I love you love you love you.”
“I love love you you,” her daughter said, and the phone clicked off.
So much for the support and perspective of friends and family. Rebecca didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that Mary Martha hadn’t given the phone back to Bonnie. But at least her daughter hadn’t handed it to Rory.
Rebecca set the receiver down and reached for the room service menu again. The liquor hadn’t gotten any cheaper. But she’d already used up plan B. She decided to save the service fee, delivery charges, and double tip, and headed downstairs to the bar.
The Aloha Wai‘Ona was all bamboo and floppy fronds, with waitresses in grass skirts and a view of the bay out the broad open doors onto the patio. Rebecca sat down at the tiki hut bar with her back to the sunset and said in a let’s get-down-to-business tone to the bartender, “What’s good?”
The guy, a fresh-faced young local in a spectacular pink and purple aloha shirt that somehow looked natural on him, considered briefly, then said, “Speaking as a tourist, a connoisseur of fine liquors, or a woman looking for adventure?”
Rebecca laughed. “Speaking as a newlywed on her honeymoon in Paradise, in the middle of the first idiotic fight of her marriage.”
“Ah, that’s easy, then.”
“Is it?”
“Apple martini.” He got to work immediately and made a bit of a theatrical production out of it, right down to cutting a fresh slice of apple and dumping the ice from the chilled glass with a flourish the instant before he poured the drink. The glass was hand painted to look like a little palm tree. Rebecca picked it up by the curved trunk and sipped.
The Monk Upstairs Page 5