The Monk Upstairs

by Tim Farrington

  “Ah, yes, I have your résumé here. So you’re saying you’d like to make at least—let me crunch the numbers for a moment—nothing?”

  “I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m worth it.”

  “You’re hired. When can you start?”

  “Well, did you bring a blanket? I’m thinking that eucalyptus grove over there.”

  “Mr. Christopher, I’m shocked—shocked!—that you would even consider neglecting your coaching duties. But right after the game would be good.”

  Mike barked. It took her off guard, as it always did. It was the most amazing little sexual yip, richly suggestive somehow, even slightly obscene. Rebecca giggled and glanced self-consciously over at the Sharks’ sideline, but no one there seemed unduly perturbed by their assistant coach’s barking.

  “You really should not be allowed out in public, sir,” she said, and clicked off before he could bark again. Beside her, Chelsea had picked up Stu-J and was bouncing him gently on her lap and attending to the game with such explicit absorption that Rebecca realized that the younger woman had probably gotten most of the flavor of the exchange. She considered trying to salvage some semblance of dignity, then decided it was too late for that and went for girl talk instead.

  “That man,” she said. “He barked at me.”

  Chelsea smiled appreciatively. “Rory growls.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Their eyes met, and they smiled; it was an unprecedented moment. God help us, Rebecca thought. We may end up being friends.

  Stu-J, perhaps feeling neglected, said, “Ga!” and both women took the opportunity to quit while they were ahead and attend to him. Rebecca held out her hand toward him, and the baby grabbed one of her fingers and examined it

  “He is so adorable,” Rebecca said. “Such a sweet-natured kid.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you mind if I hold him?”

  “That would be cool,” Chelsea said, and swung Stu-J over into Rebecca’s arms. “Say hi to your Auntie Beck, Stu-J.”

  All the old instincts were back in play instantly. Stu-J molded himself into the curve of her arm as if he’d been born for it and considered her with those blue, blue eyes, with all their echoes and immediacy. He smelled of talc and strawberries and that indefinable tang of sheer babyness. Rebecca felt her heart hurt, her womb ache, her eyes fill. It was a little unnerving.

  “Boogadoogascooga,” she said, and Stu-J grinned his off-kilter grin, pleased and amused, and said, “Ga.”

  It was possible to move from silence to silence, Phoebe had discovered. A new way of traveling, like crossing a desert, from oasis to oasis. There was the din and the blare and the pain, comfortless and grueling, like sand and sun glare on dry rock, and the hot wind of empty activity everywhere. And love dried up and hope dried up and there was only faith, sun-blinded, mute, and desiccate in a world that had dried up into its own noise. Your body became a stranger, something yoked to you, like a dying camel, and the sweetness of memory dribbled away like water into sand. Every effort only seemed to take you deeper into that waste, and every direction was that waste, forever. And yet there was nothing to do but go on. The old maps meant nothing. You simply went on into the mystery of that harsh, parched vastness, from agony to dry agony.

  But there were spots, as sudden as dreams, but realer than that, as water was realer than dryness. Like the world at dawn, remembering color, like a jackhammer stopping. And in that peace you knew that the desert was a nightmare only and it had been love all along. It had only taken this dying to know it. And even when you found, incomprehensibly, that there were somehow more steps to be taken, it was easier somehow, lighter, knowing that you only had to get this dying right.

  It wasn’t until halftime that they realized Phoebe was gone, and even then it took a while to sink in. It had been

  Rebecca’s impression that her mother could only walk a couple hundred yards anyway, but Mike, who had been paying closer attention, said that she was up to over a half mile lately.

  They checked the women’s bathroom, and then the men’s, and circled the entire meadow once, and by then it was time for the second half to start and therefore time to decide whether to truly panic and call an immediate and complete halt to normality or not. Rebecca was inclined to start screaming and have every one of the half dozen soccer games in progress on the meadow cease at once, to get everyone looking for her mother, but Mike said he thought Phoebe might have just gone over to the tulip garden or something, and in any case he thought he could find her by the end of the game, at which point, if Phoebe was still AWOL, Rebecca could sound as loud an alarm as she liked.

  It did make sense, Rebecca had to concede, to not freak Mary Martha out unless it was absolutely necessary, not to mention the rest of the team and the rest of the league. But the sobriety of being a mother was the only thing between her and a daughter’s visceral panic, and the line was feeling very thin. She hadn’t felt this helpless and terrified since Phoebe’s first stroke, when her mother had collapsed at Rebecca’s feet on a Mission Street sidewalk after lunch the previous October.

  “Call me as soon as you find her,” she told Mike.

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, the second you find her. If you see her in the distance, call me then. Call me if you find a footprint, call me if you have a strong intuition of finding her.”

  “I have a strong intuition of finding her,” Mike said. “Now go cheer for Mary Martha, before she starts thinking something’s up.”

  The roar before her was the sea at last; and behind her was the roar of the world. They blended at moments, like whirlwinds colliding, and her blood was roaring in her ears. Her bones hurt so, a useless skeleton sinking through her weakness, as her feet sank into the sand without progressing. Nothing firm left but her aching bones and the muscles would not carry. There was no sorting it out now, the time for worrying over thoughts was past, but the roar of her thoughts was pain now too, and there was no explaining, could be no explaining. That might have been the worst pain, that love could not explain to love love’s ways. The sea might wash even that away, but distance had become strange and it was possible the sea was the future and the roar behind her was the past and the roar within her was the dying that went on all the time. The cries of the damned were everywhere, and she listened for her own voice among them. But words were gone, and the sand should not have been so cold and it was possible she was dead, though if she was dead it seemed that the roar and the pain should have ceased should have ceased and the confusion so maybe but.

  And then Mike was there, which in its way was more confusing still.

  “How did you find me?” Phoebe said.

  “You only go west,” Mike said, tucking the blanket he had brought under her chin. “If you ever change that, we’re all screwed.”

  “I’m waiting for John.”

  “I hope he has a boat.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Good,” Mike said. “Can I help you up?”

  “I think I’d like to sit for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Mike said, and he sat down beside her on the sand.

  “Is there trouble?” Phoebe said. And, as Mike looked uncertain, “Among the living, I mean?”

  “Not if we get back by the end of the game.”

  “The game is over, dearie.”

  “Not for Mary Martha.”

  “Ahh,” Phoebe said, impressed. She used to be able to keep track of that stuff too. “Of course. A time to live, and a time to die, right?”

  “Right,” Mike said. “But I don’t think it’s your time to die today, Phoebe. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Phoebe said. “It appears that you are right.”

  They sat quietly for a while, watching the gulls whirl and screech. A line of pelicans went past, earnest and orderly. It wasn’t heaven, but it wasn’t bad.

  After a while Mike said, almost apologetically, “I should call Rebecca.�
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  “Rebecca’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “And John? Is he still alive?”

  “No,” Mike said.

  “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong,” Phoebe said. “John has a boat.”

  Back at the house, they ordered the traditional postgame pizzas and broke out the traditional postgame beer for the adults and juices for the kids, as if everything were normal. Mary Martha had brought a friend home, a teammate named Zoe, and Zoe’s parents were there, very nice people. The girls ran upstairs to play with Mary Martha’s American Girl dolls, and the adults sat down in the living room with the refrigerator and the stove, and everyone cooed over Stu-J and made soccer parent talk. It was a near-perfect performance of the usual Saturday scene, Rebecca thought, and thank God for that. When you had kids, basically, the show had to go on, pretty much no matter what.

  Mike, meanwhile, took Phoebe straight downstairs, put her to bed, and made her soup. Rebecca let him handle it by himself, feeling guilty about that. Her mother was gray with cold and fatigue, and shivering uncontrollably; she looked heartbreakingly frail, as bad as she had looked for months. Rebecca thought that she probably could have handled that, but Phoebe kept making cryptic little remarks that indicated she was completely whacked out as well, and the specter of her mother’s growing dementia was just too much. If it hadn’t been for Mike, Rebecca knew, she would have taken Phoebe straight to the hospital and let strangers deal with her.

  She hated herself for that; she felt it as a shameful emotional failure. In the hospital the previous fall, in the awful days after Phoebe’s initial stroke, her mother had been in a coma for almost a week, and Rebecca had come to terms with losing her, in long hours at Phoebe’s bedside that had felt like a losing fight in a stormy sea. Slipping beneath the tumult at last into the green dim quiet below had been, unforeseeably, a kind of peace. But then Phoebe had surfaced, gloriously, and though she was clearly not entirely herself, both physically and mentally, there had been at least the hope of eventual recovery, the program and discipline of working for that. Something to do that would make things better. A new routine, a viable condition.

  Lately, though, there seemed to be no way around the increasingly obvious fact that Phoebe’s recovery had peaked. Her nearest approach to her former self had been around the time of the wedding: there had been so much in the planning and arranging of the event that fed and strengthened the Phoebe of old, so much in the way of meaning and style and fine points that only Phoebe could do, and she had risen to the occasion joyfully and energetically. But in retrospect, that surge of approximate normality seemed like the high point of a tide; even when she came back from the honeymoon, after a mere week away, Rebecca had known that her mother had regressed. Physically, Phoebe was still making progress; she was walking better and farther, and her hand-eye coordination, while not sharp, had gotten good enough for the needlepoint phase to begin. But her mind was going. Her beautiful mind. Her mother, too often now, was gone, was simply and truly not there, was somewhere else; and Rebecca had come to be terrified of this stranger in her mother’s body, this empty echo of Phoebe that summoned up all the old instant and deep emotions and responses and yet was not quite Phoebe. If it had been her mother taking off like that today, scaring everyone to death, Rebecca could have been furious with her. But she had felt no anger when Mike finally brought Phoebe back from her escapade. She had felt only a shudder of dread and despair, meeting eyes that were her mother’s eyes, without her mother behind them.

  “Are you okay, Becca?”

  It was Rory, with a fresh beer. Rebecca looked down at the still-full, now-warm beer in her hand. Across the room, Chelsea and Zoe’s parents were in an animated conversation about Central America, exchanging funny travel stories. Rory, unprecedentedly, had been acting as the de facto host and had even brought out chips and salsa and a plate of cheese. Life, against all odds, went on just fine without her for the moment; and perhaps because it so demonstrably did, Rebecca began to cry.

  Rory immediately took her arm and led her out before anyone else noticed, through the kitchen and onto the back porch. The fog had rolled in, a cold pall on the afternoon. Below them, everything in Phoebe’s once-hopeful little garden was dead except for the indestructible poppies and a few sad-looking zucchini plants. Rebecca put her face into Rory’s chest and sobbed. He just patted her back and let her cry, without saying anything stupid, for which she was intensely grateful. He smelled like soccer, and like Stu-J, and like fifteen years of her life. It was all just too damn sad and strange.

  Inside the house, the doorbell rang—the pizza guy, Rebecca realized. Shit. She straightened, to try to get herself together to go deal with that.

  “It’s okay, Chelsea’s got it,” Rory said.

  “But the money—”

  “It’s covered, Becca,” Rory said gently, which for some reason just made her begin to cry again. He’d never before been the one who paid for the pizza.

  The first one to bed always lit the candle, and the last one to bed turned out the lamp. It was a ritual that had begun the second night Rebecca and Mike had slept together. On their first—candleless—night together, Rebecca had insisted on turning off the lamp; she was self-conscious about her body; there was no going back once you’d had a baby and breastfed. She felt that she would do, especially for a guy who hadn’t had sex for over twenty years, but she didn’t want to dwell on it. It had led to a brief comedy sequence: Mike had clicked the lamp back on, she’d clicked it off again, back and forth a couple of times, like two kids. Rebecca had finally gotten him to stop by saying the light was just too harsh. The next morning she’d succumbed unexpectedly to a sort of panic attack that had nothing to do with the lamp, a backlash in the cold light of day, and the relationship had gone into the crapper for weeks. But when they’d finally worked it through and come back together, the next time they got into bed together Mike had brought a candle, and he lit it, pointedly, when she turned the lamp off. A gentle light, as he noted with a smile. Rebecca had just been grateful to see his face; and anyway, she figured, he’d had plenty of time to bolt by then on an informed basis, if he had really required exceptionally perky breasts.

  The tradition had seen them through quite a bit by now, and Rebecca had come to love the candlelight, not only because it meant that Mike loved to see her just the way she was, which was incredibly liberating once you began to actually believe it, but also because the light just felt holy to her. It made the end of the day into a kind of prayer, whether they made love or just lay in each other’s arms and chewed over the day’s portion of craziness; and there was that beautiful little puff of “Amen” when they blew the candle out and settled in to sleep.

  Tonight, though, as Rebecca lay in bed while Mike brushed his teeth, the lighting of the candle just seemed…hokey. Empty, a forced cheer; a form of denial, even. She left it unlit, for the first time in their relationship, realizing as she did so that she was feeling alienated from Mike, was very close to being angry with him. It felt like they had somehow ended up on different sides of a crucial issue. Mike was almost eerily easy with Phoebe’s madness. He could go from the Eisenhower administration to whether there were seagulls in purgatory to what kind of tea Phoebe wanted without missing a beat. Rebecca couldn’t help envying his rapport with her mother, but she suspected that he was probably making Phoebe worse by humoring her like that. What Phoebe needed was better meds, clearly, closer supervision, unfortunately, and reality checks. It was painful, yes, but what was the alternative? Was it too much, to want your mother to be sane?

  Mike came out of the bathroom and crossed to the bed, pausing as usual beside it to click off the lamp. Rebecca could feel his surprise, half a heartbeat of hesitation, as the room fell into darkness. And she felt a surge of something like grief, because the world was winning, after all, it was finally starting to wear them down. Like a storm, like a tide, like the thousand relentless things that battered beauty until it succumbe
d. The terrible world was stronger than their love.

  Mike fumbled briefly in the dark and found the matches, lit one and got the candle going, then slipped into bed beside her, and their bodies found each other. His skin felt like home and the warm light felt holy. Just like that. Rebecca felt the truth of him, and of the two of them; and her lungs relaxed and took a breath. It seemed like she hadn’t breathed in days.

  “I didn’t forget,” she said. It felt like a confession, like something she had to get off her chest.

  “I think maybe you did,” Mike said.

  If there had been a trace of smugness or blame in it, they would have had real trouble, but Rebecca knew what he meant. He was talking not about the candle, but about what the candle meant, of the difficulty, of the near impossibility, of remembering your real, best self, in the midst of the world’s crush.

  She had a flash of memory, of the evening Mike had proposed. They had been sitting under a plum tree outside Grace Cathedral, right after Bonnie’s wedding there, and Mary Martha had been running through the labyrinth. The evening had been one of San Francisco’s rare balmy treasures, the sunset bathing the cathedral towers in sweet rose gold. Rebecca had felt, that night, a peace so deep, a love so real, that it seemed there was no going back, that the world and her self must be forever transformed in its light. It was something she had felt at Phoebe’s hospital bedside as well, something she had sworn to herself then that she would not lose sight of, would not forget, ever again. But she had, of course. Almost instantly, at the first honk of a horn out on the street, the first blown fuse, the first alarm clock going off after a short night’s sleep.

  They had talked that night about how easy it was to lose sight of that peace. Mike had told her about a print in the monastery library, a copy of Filippo Lippi’s painting of St. Augustine beholding the Trinity in a vision: sitting at his desk with an inkpot and a scroll on his knee, gazing raptly at a three-faced sun shining above him…with three arrows sticking out of his heart.