The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  Mike disposed of his butt, and Dougherty shut the window and went back to his desk. Mike started back to his own chair, but the priest said, “Okay, then, room 215.”

  “What’s in room 215?”

  “I thought you said you wanted a job,” Dougherty said.

  When Rebecca got back to her car, she found that it had been ticketed. She had parked at a metered spot on Third Street near Howard, half a block from the Museum of Modern Art, and had loaded the meter with every coin she had before lunch, but apparently she had missed the deadline by a matter of minutes. She could still see the back of the traffic cop’s little golf cart, working its way up the block toward Mission. It was maddening, and beyond ironic: throw in the face-saving gesture at lunch, and this little jaunt had already cost her more money than she could possibly make this afternoon even if she hurried home right now and got right to work like the diligent neo-Puritan entrepreneur she was supposed to be.

  Instead, she left the ticket on the windshield and walked up the street to the MOMA. There was a Franz Marc show in town that she’d been meaning to get to for weeks. If the day was going to be a total disaster, at least she could do something for her real self. She already had her purse open at the admissions window when she realized that she’d left the last bills in her wallet on the table at the restaurant.

  It was, cumulatively, enough to make even a firm believer question God’s sense of humor, if not His actual existence. Rebecca stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, wishing that she was already home and could just cut her losses on the day and pour a glass of wine and curl up on the couch with Mike. He would laugh when she ran out her new theory of petty urban indignities as the real cause of the loss of faith circa the second millenium.

  “Excuse me, are you in line?” a woman behind her asked. A tourist, a kind-faced, matronly woman with an air of Midwestern sobriety, wearing an Alcatraz sweatshirt colored penal gray, like homelessness, but brand-new. Her husband had the exact same sweatshirt but seemed less happy about it.

  “Not unless you want to loan me $12.50,” Rebecca said.

  The woman looked briefly alarmed, then realized that Rebecca was kidding, probably. “I thought you didn’t need any money to get in today,” she said.

  “What?”

  The woman pointed to the sign. At the bottom of all the other, somewhat intricate fees for every age and category of person, a grace line read “First Tuesday of Every Month: Admission Free.”

  “I think I just had a religious experience,” Rebecca said to the woman.

  “So you are in line, then?”

  “I suppose I am,” Rebecca said, wondering why, in the light of such divine beneficence, she still felt slightly grudging. But she realized that some niggling part of her brain was still doing the math. A $40 parking ticket versus the $12.50 admission fee: if there really was a God at work here, she couldn’t help but think He still owed her $27.50.

  She was ashamed of her pettiness as soon as she was in the gallery. Franz Marc had changed her life when she was fourteen years old. She had been a horse girl, had been drawing and painting horses since she had first picked up a crayon, and had long since worked her way through Remington and Russell, Reginald Jones and George Stubbs, to the stylized Appaloosas of Carol Grigg, but she was feeling a vague cosmic discontent by then. Her ninth-grade boyfriend, Peter, had kissed her for the first time the week before, and it had torn a ragged place in her world. Peter was reading Schopenhauer, which Rebecca knew now was probably a very bad sign in a teenager, but at the time his gloominess had had an extraordinary appeal. She had tried to read Schopenhauer too, but by then Peter was in volume two of The World as Will and Representation and she had had the feeling she would never catch up even if she was able to read Kant, which he seemed to think was a prerequisite. But the relationship had destabilized her sense of beauty and made her regret her own simplicities. She was afraid Peter would not kiss her again if she did not have some insight. And so she had taken the train into Manhattan with her friend Margaret and gone to the Museum of Modern Art. It was Peter’s view that only music, and possibly only Mahler, truly qualified as art, but he was also reading Kandinsky on the spiritual and was prepared to concede some value to paintings as long as they did not slavishly depict actual things.

  The relationship had not lasted very long. Peter was not a good enough kisser, it turned out, for Rebecca to ever really warm up to pure abstraction, and her next boyfriend, Steve, had been a very good kisser and had not cared what she painted, as long as she let him get to second base, which was also her sense of where Mike stood. But she had loved Marc from the moment she saw her first blue horse, and it had set something inside her free.

  Two steps into the SFMOMA gallery now, standing in front of Die grossen blauen Pferde, three plump horses of softened cobalt curled into themselves in a brick red landscape that echoed the sumptuous lines of their backs, Rebecca felt the hush of pure seeing coming upon her. She had a weird but distinct sense that she had not moved a step since that day in New York. It was the same painting and she was the same person. She had learned nothing, had accomplished nothing; she had disappeared somehow; she might as well have fallen asleep and just awakened. She realized that she was afraid: seeing this way was something like truth for her, an aspect of her real self, forgotten for ages and suddenly present, and to feel this was to feel how long it had been since she felt this way, to face the reality of her prolonged distraction. If she was honest with herself, in this light, she could not help but feel she had wasted the past quarter century. This glimpse, this vision, was a promise to herself that she had utterly failed to keep.

  But the condition was strangely forgiving; the waste of the last twenty-five years actually seemed like small change given to a beggar in the immediacy of this seeing. And what could she have done differently, in any case? It wasn’t as if she should have stayed with Peter, who had in his way driven her to that first moment. Peter had just gotten gloomier and more eccentric, had gone on to Nietzsche and then Heidegger and then some sort of Eastern thing that involved shaving his head; there had been a couple halfhearted suicide attempts, and he had finally gone back to school and majored in history, and the last she had heard of him he had married someone blond and was thriving in all the obvious ways as a corporate lawyer.

  No, all she could imagine having done for the last decades to avoid the humiliating lapse of reality was standing in front of this painting, letting the crowds come and go around her day by day, sidestepping the mops of the janitors at night. The texture of the paint on the canvas, a bit pebbly here and there, or smoothed and fading at the end of a stroke, seemed like the only thing vivid enough to have held onto. She could feel that this painting was unfinished and her own brush was laden with that blue, and that she had simply paused to consider the next stroke. And what was twenty-five years, in that light? She still didn’t know the next stroke, there was only this seeing that was a kind of waiting, like a fire that had smoked through all those years over dirty fuel and flirted with dying, and was settling at last into clear bright burning. If it had taken twenty-five years to burn this cleanly, so be it; she was just happy that it had. The years between seeing like this didn’t matter, and all her failures and falseness did not matter. What mattered was only what had always mattered, what she had lost sight of in the fog of living and now saw clearly through the grace of a perverse God and parking tickets and free Tuesdays at SFMOMA; and all that mattered now was all that had ever mattered, to just find a way to keep on seeing it.

  The man in room 215 was dead. He lay on the elevated hospital bed, staring up at the ceiling, smoke damaged from some long-ago fire, with unseeing blue eyes like two cold marbles. One corner of his mouth had turned up into an unsoothable snarl, already frozen, unnervingly, into place. Mike wondered briefly whether this was some kind of perverse initiation ordeal concocted by Dougherty, then realized, no, the priest really hadn’t known. The man had just died, during lunch.

  Beyo
nd the room’s window, the same brick wall stoppered the view like a cork. So casual was this death, so banal, lonely, and unnoticed, that the man might almost have simply crawled behind the trash cans in the alley one floor below. Except then he wouldn’t have had morphine to steal. The snapped plastic line still ran uselessly from the man’s arm toward the empty IV rack by the bed. Mike hoped whoever had taken the drug had had the grace to wait until the guy was dead.

  He sat down in the chair beside the bed. The swing-away bedside table was littered with sheets of purple, pink, and red construction paper, some safety scissors, a few magic markers, and a small heap of brown paper scraps inscribed with things like drugs and poor mony managment.

  Mike swung the table out of the way for the moment, opened his battered monastery breviary, and began the office of the dead. Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna. There would be time later, he thought, there really was nothing but time, to finish the poor guy’s Dignity Flower.

  Chapter Nine

  My grace is sufficient for thee; your strength is made perfect in

  weakness.

  2 CORINTHIANS 12:9

  Saturday mornings were Mary Martha’s soccer games. Mary Martha had been playing since she was four, and in previous years Rebecca had just come to the games alone and done minimal bonding with the other mothers, shivering in the foggy meadows of Golden Gate Park and watching the adorable huddle of small children with the ball at the center move vaguely around the field like a drunken swarm of bees. But this year Rory in his new incarnation as gung-ho quasi-suburban dad was coaching the team, and the games had somehow become communal events requiring furniture, coolers, blankets, a staggering amount of equipment to carry from the distant parking spots. In addition to Mike and Phoebe, Rory’s girlfriend, Chelsea, attended. She and Rory had married the previous March, just in time for the birth of their child, but it was still hard for Rebecca to think of her as his wife. She was wearing a gorgeous Guatemalan serape that smelled distinctly of hemp, which she would lift occasionally to breast-feed the baby, whose name was Stuart John, after both Rory’s and Chelsea’s fathers, and who was called Stu-J. Rebecca, who knew Rory’s father, Stuart, a rigid alcoholic welder embittered by the demise of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, had been blindsided by poignancy at the name; she and Rory too had planned to name their first son after both grandfathers, and her father’s name too had been John. Stu-J was a magnificently serene child with Chelsea’s lopsided vulnerable mouth and strawberry-blond hair and Rory’s alert blue eyes, which meant that he had Mary Martha’s eyes, which was emotionally confusing.

  They set up their line of folding lawn chairs along the vaguely marked sideline of the field while the Sunset Sharks took warm-up shots at one end and some team from the Richmond district warmed up at the other. Phoebe sat to Rebecca’s right, wrapped in an enormous quilt and ostensibly doing needlepoint. But the pillow she had been working on for the last three months, a seascape, had shown no perceptible progress for weeks now; it was Rebecca’s impression, indeed, that Phoebe’s sessions now were tilted slightly toward a net unraveling effect. But her mother seemed perfectly content with that, and she settled in quickly to her semblance of industry. Chelsea sat to Rebecca’s left, with Stu-J sleeping for the moment in a portable bassinet beside her. Mike was over with the team; he had drifted into a de facto assistant coaching role on game days, and Rory had actually been trying for a while now to get him to come to the practices too.

  A soccer coach and a Sunday school teacher, Rebecca thought, looking at her once and present husbands now. She’d come a long way from sleeping in the back of a VW van in Santa Cruz, selling watercolors on the boardwalk to buy paint, Cheez Whiz, and dope while Rory surfed.

  “Mike is so nice,” Chelsea said, following Rebecca’s eyes.

  Rebecca nodded. Mike, she knew, was really not all that nice, in a socially virtuous sense, and could in fact be obstinate, disruptive, and even fierce when pressed too far. What he was, was almost unfailingly kind, which in practice usually amounted to the same thing.

  She said, “Rory’s mellowed quite a bit over the years too,” and wondered immediately whether that sounded condescending or even snarky, but Chelsea just nodded happily. She was a relative innocent with a very straightforward good heart and a half-full-glass view of human nature, which had clearly been what Rory needed; anyone who’d had his number from the start or been inclined to look too closely or really seen him in anything but the sweetest mild light of love would have been out of there long since. He had his strengths, but waiting for them to manifest had always required a near-saintly patience.

  Out on the field, Rory blew his whistle to call the team together for the final huddle before the start of the game. Rory, with a whistle. It was at least as strange as the pocket calendar. He was wearing a clean sweatshirt advertising the team’s sponsor, Starbucks, and a ball cap with a shark logo on it, the bill pointed toward the front. Rebecca had never before seen him wear a hat that was not turned backward.

  “I think he’s been more stressed out lately,” Chelsea said.

  Probably withdrawal symptoms, Rebecca thought, but she managed to hold her tongue. She was still feeling her way into how to converse with Chelsea without leaking bitterness, cynicism, or any of her own cumulative disillusionment. And not just with Rory: talking with Chelsea often made Rebecca feel ancient, world-weary, and mean in general. She said, “Well, he’s got a lot on his plate right now. He’s taken on a lot of responsibilities. It’s new territory for him, no offense, in a lot of ways.”

  “I think he needs to surf more,” Chelsea said, and Rebecca laughed in spite of herself. “No, seriously. It’s been weeks, I think, since he got to the beach at all.”

  “No, no, I know you’re serious,” Rebecca said. “You may even be right. It’s just—well, you know, forgive me, but getting to the beach has just never really been a problem for Rory in the past.”

  “I understand,” Chelsea said. “Rory has told me a lot about your relationship. He feels bad now about so many things.”

  It was a tiny shock to realize that, of course, Rory had discussed and even, almost unimaginably, analyzed his relationship history with Chelsea. Rebecca found herself stumped for a reply, and even for a tone for a reply, but fortunately, the game was beginning.

  Mary Martha ran by them on the way to her position and bypassed the grown-ups to drop down in front of Stu-J and coo at him fondly for a moment. Rebecca watched her, feeling a distinct tug at her heart; it was a moment to sharply feel something that had been emerging slowly but surely all along, that Mary Martha had a brother. Rebecca felt unnervingly out of that relationship loop; she had tried, in her few opportunities, to find an emotional approach to Stu-J, something warm if not actually auntlike, but so far she had failed to connect. Seeing the depth of Mary Martha’s love now was a bit of a jolt.

  A whistle blew on the field and Mary Martha scrambled to her feet, blew them a kiss, and ran out to her position. She looked strangely sturdy in her baggy shorts, with the shin guards beneath her kneesocks; and the teal jersey brought out an unexpected tinge of green in her eyes. Growing up, Rebecca realized. Becoming a kid among kids.

  “You go, girl!” she hollered, and her daughter smiled shyly and gave her a thumbs-up, then assumed a self-conscious position of readiness, her hands on her knees. The ball was kicked into play and the game began. It was a bit more coherent this year, with some of the kids occasionally dribbling for a few steps or even trying to pass, but for the most part it was still the same mad scramble.

  Stu-J, roused by the sudden flurry, began to stir and whimper, and Chelsea bent to attend to him. Phoebe had gone off to the bathroom, a walk of about a hundred yards, well within her range these days; and Rebecca took advantage of the brief interval of relative privacy to take out her cell phone and dial Mike’s number. He had his phone turned on all the time now, she knew, in case one of his dying people called with a crisis. Rebecca was still amazed at how happy Mike seemed to
be with his new job. He liked his boss, a cantankerous old renegade priest who smoked and swore and drank like a fish; and he even seemed to like the people he was working with, mostly down-and-out guys with their livers failing and their lungs shot, malnourished, demoralized, often strangely fatalistic about their last decline. He’d already had three people die on his watch, not counting the first guy, who had already been dead. How he came home after work like that and played with Mary Martha and drank a beer and watched the sunset with Rebecca was beyond her comprehension, but it was a tremendous relief to their budget at this point. Mike had actually forgotten to ask what his salary was in his initial interview, and they’d had to wait for his first paycheck to find out what he was making. It had turned out to be slightly more than he’d made cooking hamburgers and somewhat less than he could have made as a decent janitor. Not a lot, not even necessarily enough, but way better than nothing. Rebecca had made him ask about the health plan, and Dougherty had laughed and told Mike that the health plan at St. Luke’s was to get sick and die.

  From her seat, Rebecca could see Mike on the sideline among the Sharks’ substitute players, towering over them; when his phone rang, he reached for it with a jerk, as if he had been stung by a bee. She could hear the caution in his voice as he answered. “Hello?”

  “Hey, baby,” she said. “Have I got a job for you.”

  “Thank God,” Mike said. “I thought someone was going to make me do actual work.”

  “We’ll have to discuss remuneration, of course.”

  “Oh, I’ll remunerate you.”

  “No, I mean your salary, sweetie.”

  “Well, I’d certainly expect to make at least as much as I made in my last position.”

  “Would that be your time as a line production manager at McDonalds, Inc.?”

  “No, I was referring to my twenty years with the Bethanite corporation.”