The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “It’s okay,” Rebecca said, accepting the extra drink. She thought she could either take it out to Mike at some point or put it to good use herself. She’d drunk one glass so far, and by that fizzy light the muddling of the kitchen already seemed more like gratuitous damage than wanton destruction. She wondered if Rory had removed any weight-bearing pillars. She wondered if he even knew what a weight-bearing pillar was. Structural integrity had never been his strong suit.

  “So how was Hawaii?” Bob asked.

  “Wonderful,” Rebecca replied, feeling the magic fading already, like the life from one of those colorful reef fish, caught and mounted on a board.

  “I’ll bet it was. We’ll have to have you guys over for dinner soon, and properly debrief you.”

  “That would be great,” Rebecca said, with what she hoped was an appropriate degree of polite vagueness.

  “When are you free? How about next Friday?”

  Rebecca glanced at Bonnie and found no help there. Bonnie thought Bob was great. It was very moving, in its way, after so many years of dating losers, of Bonnie saying that all she wanted was a decent man who cared about her and she would be content. It had turned out to be true. Bob was decent in the extreme, and Bonnie was content. Rebecca was happy for her friend, but unfortunately she thought Bob was an ass. It had hamstrung what had once been a deep and freewheeling friendship. It didn’t help that Rebecca had had first shot at Bob and had passed without a second thought. Fortunately, that never came up. Bonnie had caught Bob on the short hop of his rebound and never looked back.

  “I’ll make my famous garlic asparagus and pasta with lemon cream,” Bob persisted.

  “Well—”

  “Bob’s started making his own pasta,” Bonnie chimed in. “It’s amazing.”

  “I think it just adds incredible character to the meal,” Bob said modestly.

  “I’ve felt stymied for years by a lack of character in my noodles,” Rebecca said, and when neither of them even smiled, she cut her losses and said, “I’ll have to check with Mike, of course.”

  “And we know how crammed his schedule is,” Bonnie agreed, and she and Bob giggled in a way that made Rebecca realize that the poverty of Mike’s social life—and work life too, perhaps—had been a topic of some discussion.

  “We’ll pencil you in, at least,” Bob said. “Seven, say?”

  “Light pencil. Very light.”

  “Of course. Any preferences on the wine?”

  “High alcohol content.”

  “That white Bordeaux was perfect last time,” Bonnie said.

  “Or a Loire sauvignon blanc,” Bob agreed. “Depending on whether I go with the rotini or try a spinach mafalda.”

  “Surprise me,” Rebecca said.

  Phoebe had been rather conspicuously keeping her distance, but Rebecca finally caught up with her in the dining room, where her mother was sitting on one of the exiled kitchen chairs beside Rebecca’s drawing table. Everything in the room, which Rebecca had been using as the workshop for her graphics business, was covered with big sheets of plastic, which in turn were covered by a thick layer of drywall dust. It looked like something from the aftermath of Pompeii.

  “Welcome home, sweetheart,” her mother said.

  “You knew about this?”

  Phoebe shrugged. “Mary Martha made me promise not to tell.”

  “He’s using that kid like a crowbar.”

  Her mother didn’t disagree. “He said he’d be done by the time you got back.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Of course not.”

  It was heartening, somehow, to know that Phoebe had not lost her mind entirely. And Rebecca could more or less picture the scene. No doubt there had been no stopping Rory once he had the sledgehammer out.

  “What on earth got into him?” she said.

  “I think he really did want to do something nice for you. And I think there’s a touch of…damn, what’s the word—?”

  “Vandalism?” Rebecca prompted. Her mother’s meanderings through the vague depths of her rearranged brain still unnerved her. Since the stroke, she had realized how much she had always relied on Phoebe’s brisk articulateness. To see it falter shook her world much more than she could have anticipated. “Revenge? Insanity?”

  “No, no, it’s on the tip of my tongue…. Damn.” Phoebe was silent again, then said, “I really should have died on the sidewalk that day.”

  “And missed my wedding?” Rebecca said, trying to keep it light. “How rude.”

  “You weren’t even engaged at that point,” Phoebe said. “I should have gotten hit by a truck.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Mom. You’ve got a lot of life left in you.”

  “It’s best to leave ’em laughing,” Phoebe said. “Like my father. Like your father. Even Jesus.”

  “Jesus left them laughing?” Rebecca said dubiously.

  “It’s a very dry humor, sweetheart.”

  Rebecca laughed in spite of herself. If Phoebe could still talk like that, she felt, she had a good run left in her.

  Rory approached them just then. He still had Mary Martha by his side, like a very short bodyguard, both of them still aglow with their good deeds. There was nothing to do for the moment but be a decent mother.

  “Mary Martha, that banner is beautiful,” Rebecca said. “I still can’t get over how you made the letters look like a rainbow.”

  “Daddy made the letters and I colored them in.”

  “Well, you guys did a great job.”

  “I helped him with the wall, too.”

  “Every kid’s dream,” Rory smiled. “A hammer, and something to wreck.”

  Rebecca said, “Mary Martha, sweetie, would you run up to Mommy’s bedroom and get the presents I brought back for everyone? They’re in that bag beside the blue suitcase.”

  “Presents!” Mary Martha trotted off through the hole in the wall toward the stairs. The flow-through kitchen really did change the routing through the house.

  As soon as she was out of earshot, Rebecca turned to Rory. “So where’s the stove?”

  “In the living room.”

  “And the refrigerator?”

  “Don’t worry, I ran an extension cord to it, it’s still running.” And, at her look, “There was stuff flying all over the place, Rebecca. I really had to get them out of there.”

  “Any chance of getting them back soon?”

  “Well, there’s no sense moving the stove back until we get the gas thing worked out.”

  “The gas thing.”

  “I capped off the pipe as soon as I realized it was there, no biggie. There was never any danger.”

  “Redemption,” said Phoebe abruptly, with evident satisfaction. She had been sitting there quietly lost inside herself the whole time they were talking. Rebecca and Rory gave her startled glances.

  “Amen, sister,” Rory said fondly, lacking a context.

  Rebecca met her mother’s eyes. It was so strange, these days. Sometimes Phoebe was there, sometimes she wasn’t. But she was all there now. So much so that Rebecca half-suspected her mother had had the word the whole time and had been saving her best shot with it until the conversation with Rory threatened to spin out of control.

  She said, “Mother, you are a devious, devious woman.”

  “You have no idea,” Phoebe said.

  Rory, not sure what was going on but recognizing an opportunity to change the tone, said, “Becca, Chelsea wants to have you guys over for dinner soon.”

  “Oh?” Rebecca said, trying hard to picture it.

  “She’s been learning to cook. She wants to try out Phoebe’s lasagna recipe.”

  Phoebe’s lasagna recipe, Rebecca knew, was delicious and un-screw-up-able. She knew because it had been the first thing she learned to cook too, and the mainstay of their dinner menus during the early years of her relationship with Rory.

  “Well, sure, of course,” she said.

  Rory whipped a pocket calendar out o
f his back pocket. “How about next Friday?”

  Rebecca blinked. Rory with a pocket calendar. She had a sense of the world having gotten too weird for her, too quickly. “Uh, I think we’re already booked up with Bonnie and Bob that night.”

  “How about the next Friday? Or Saturday, maybe?”

  “The Saturday’s probably better. I’ll have to talk to Mike, and check his schedule.”

  “I’ll pencil you in for Saturday, the ninth.”

  “That’s a pen.”

  “It’s metaphorical, Bec.”

  She met his eyes, amused in spite of herself. Rory had Mary Martha’s sweet blue eyes. Or rather, of course, Mary Martha had his. That, his undeniable intelligence, and his indestructible sense of humor had always made it impossible to completely hate him.

  “Did you notice that it’s going to be arched?” Rory said.

  Rebecca looked at the hole in the wall. She hadn’t noticed before—her sense of the damage had been more or less undifferentiated—but in fact there was the first crude approach to an arch across the top of the breach. Eight years ago that had been her stylistic vision; for some reason an arched passage had seemed so elegant to her then.

  She had a sudden sense of the bittersweetness of her shared history with Rory, all those visions and hopes shared and broken, all the suffering experienced together, and the suffering caused. There really was no such thing as a fresh start; a second marriage was built on the ruins of the first, as the first was built on the ruins of previous boyfriends. The archeology of love only got more layered and mysterious with every new construction. And, apparently, her relationship with Rory was still a work in progress.

  “I know I haven’t really thanked you properly yet,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I understand you have to get past the initial shock. But I swear, Becca, I’ll get it finished up this weekend, and it’s going to be gorgeous.”

  “It’s already gorgeous, it’s a beautiful, thoughtful gift,” Rebecca said. “But it would be nice if you could get the stove working again soon.”

  Phoebe was trying to figure out a way to get out the back door without going through the construction materials, which would snag her walker. But every time she pictured walking out of the dining room in the other direction and going down the hall and around, she ended up in the old house in New Jersey where she had lived with her husband for almost forty years. She had two martinis, very dry; it was the end of the day, the cocktail hour, and she could smell the sweet, slightly fruity smoke of John’s pipe. They always did their best talking during the cocktail hour, chewing over the day together, digesting it into something that made sense—or even didn’t make sense, if it came to that. As long as they had chewed it over together and could smile about it and loved each other still.

  “You okay, Pheebs?”

  It was Rory, in very clear focus, which meant he had slipped off somewhere and had a hit or two. Phoebe said, “It depends on what year it is.”

  Rory laughed appreciatively, thank God. Definitely stoned. Phoebe understood. Such lucidity, however temporary, was priceless. But priceless things cost everything in the long run. She said, “If it’s not 1971, I would appreciate it if you would help me to the back door.”

  “Of course,” Rory said. He held out his hand for hers and helped her up, then eased her without fuss through the whirls and eddies of the party, across the hazards of the piles of tools, debris, and lumber. She’d known Rory for over fifteen years now and she’d always liked him, even after it became clear that it was time for Rebecca to move on. He had a gentle spirit and a giant heart. And he’d been good for Rebecca, for about fifteen minutes in the mid-eighties.

  Her husband, of course, had always wanted to kill him. But you couldn’t kill the father of your grandchild, however much you might like to.

  At the back door Rory held the door for her. “Are you done for the night or just taking a break?”

  “My whole life is a break now,” Phoebe said.

  Rory laughed again. She hadn’t particularly meant to be funny, but it was better than most of the alternatives, and she took advantage of the light moment to ease out onto the back porch by herself. Rory, bless his heart, let her go without a fight, and as soon as the door closed behind her the sky was the sky was the sky was the stars forever and amen. Her face felt like a cramped muscle, knotted into the proper benevolent at-a-party expression. Phoebe was not even sure what the right expression was most of the time anymore, but her face always knew. Her mother had been a stickler for the social graces, and the old disciplines still served; seventy-some years of training in maintaining appearances had not been wasted. And then one day you suddenly found yourself wandering around behind the appearances, like an actor backstage, grateful for the privacy while the play went on up front.

  A cigarette flared at the top of the steps and she knew it was John, who had smoked like a fiend and had it kill him early, just like they said it would. But John was dead and gone and she was dead and here like the last rumble of thunder from long-past lightning and it was Mike.

  “Hey, handsome,” Phoebe said.

  “Hey, gorgeous.”

  She crossed the porch and went through the procedure of getting herself seated on the top step beside him. Mike just let her do it by herself, for which she was grateful. It was use it or lose it; nobody seemed to get that, in their haste to help. You started letting them do it for you, and the next thing you knew you couldn’t do it at all.

  When she was finally settled, she took a good long while to get her breath back and the stars and the stars and the stars and the sky and Mike didn’t say a word. She could smell the jasmine by the fence. It was too cold for jasmine in New Jersey. The winters took it, every time. But that just made the smell of lilacs sweeter in the spring.

  “Lemme outta here,” Phoebe said.

  “Me too.”

  “No, I mean really. Out like a candle. Gone gone gone.”

  “I’d settle for a good bar,” Mike said, and then they were silent again and the stars and the stars and the sky.

  Having managed to not kill her ex-husband, Rebecca felt free to just circulate among her friends and have a good time. She was vague about several more dinner invitations; everybody wanted to have her and Mike over, the two of them were the flavor of the month suddenly, and she foresaw, uneasily, a series of initiation ordeals. She had no idea how Mike would handle it all. In all her imaginings, hopes, and worries in marrying an ambivalently resocialized ex-monk, she had not anticipated that particular twist of coupledom. She’d been too worried over whether he was going to renounce the corrupted flesh entirely and go back to the monastery, wear hair shirts, or be weird about God in some other, fatal, way. His ability to make and endure small talk had simply not come up.

  As things started to wind down, Bonnie, Bob, and Rory began gathering up glasses and plates and doing the dishes. The unprecedented sight of Rory helping to clean up went a long way toward reconciling Rebecca with the news that his heroic labors had screwed up the kitchen pipes somehow and they were having to do the party dishes in the small downstairs bathroom sink.

  Mary Martha and her mother had disappeared, but Rebecca found them both out on the back porch when she went out to tell Mike that the coast was clearing. Mary Martha was sitting on his lap, playing with his hair and chattering animatedly about something that involved red and green animals. Phoebe was sitting beside him on the top step, sipping a glass of champagne that she really shouldn’t have been drinking and looking relaxed and contented in a way that she did only around Mike, since the stroke.

  The three of them were so beautiful together that Rebecca paused in the doorway to savor the sight. Mike had been great with Mary Martha from the start; the only reason she had rented him the in-law apartment at all, when he had showed up the year before fresh out of the monastery with an escaped-convict’s stubble on his recently shaved head and an air of impenetrable gloom, was that Mary Martha had taken to him instantly, and
he to her. Rebecca had intended to rent the apartment to a temperate, solidly employed person of demonstrable stability, preferably a woman, and Mike had been homeless, jobless, and literally penniless, with nothing but a small black satchel that contained everything he owned and a comically inadequate severance check of some sort from the monastery, which he couldn’t get cashed because all of his forms of ID had been expired for fifteen years. Rebecca had actually heard his stomach growling at the initial interview for the apartment: he’d been sleeping in the park for three days by then and hadn’t eaten since God knew when. She had fed him a bowl of Cheerios, Mary Martha had showed up and had one of her own, and the two of them had bonded around some kind of unicorn offer on the back of the box. And that had been that. He’d been late on the second month’s rent, but he’d gotten a job at McDonald’s by then and was regular thereafter, and there had never been any doubt that he was the quietest tenant she would ever find. It was, of course, the quiet ones you had to watch out for.

  Mary Martha said something earnest, and Mike and Phoebe nodded simultaneously, in perfect sync. It was way past Mary Martha’s bedtime and there was going to be hell to pay in the morning, but Rebecca didn’t have the heart to break up that scene.

  “You knew what you were getting into, right?” she said to Mike that night when they were finally in bed together. Rory had stayed until it was time for Mary Martha to go to sleep, which had been potentially awkward, but Mary Martha had effortlessly solved the dilemma of the tuck-in by having both Rory and Mike read her bedtime story. They had begun by alternating pages, a little tentatively, but by the end they were alternating lines and using a variety of outrageous voices and accents, and the laughter of the three of them up there had been audible all through the house. But it was quiet at last, and it was beginning to feel like they were actually home.

  Rebecca and Mike had already assumed their best position, in each other’s arms with Rebecca’s head under Mike’s chin and his nose in her hair, and their legs entwined like braided bread. Mike chest’s still smelled, ever so faintly, of coconut. She figured that had one more shower cycle.