Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  And I came largely to forgive women and myself for our own all too apparent shortcomings. Our emotional arrogance, our lack of perspective, our often unreasonable needs and projections and blames, our failure, like men, to manage or acknowledge the imbalance on our own side of the equation.

  Dating women was the hardest thing I had to do as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor.

  But then, I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.

  5

  Life

  “Ginger or Mary Ann?” asked Father Sebastian.

  “What?” I replied.

  “Ginger or Mary Ann?” he repeated, smiling. “You know, from Gilligan’s Island. Which one is your ideal woman, the glamour girl or the girl next door? Ginger or Mary Ann?”

  Ned was sitting with a group of black-robed monks in the rec room of their secluded abbey, enjoying a little relaxation after dinner before the bell rang for vespers. The rec room was the large common room located directly down the hall from the cloister gate, and aside from the monks’ private bedrooms it was the only place in the monastery that was off-limits to visitors. It was where the monks let their hair down.

  But only so far. This conversation was an exception. The monks didn’t usually talk so openly about women, or at least not in front of visitors. They were monks, after all. Actually, that was the only occasion during my three-week stay on which any of them evaluated the fairer sex so openly in front of me.

  “Well, wait a second,” I said. “What if you’re looking for something a little deeper and more nuanced?”

  This was a woman’s answer, or as close to one as I was going to come with these guys. The real woman’s answer is always the professor—even for dykes he was the only palatable choice—but Ned wasn’t exactly going to say that in this crowd.

  “Mrs. Howell doesn’t count,” said Father Sebastian.

  “Oh, come on, why not?”

  “She just doesn’t.”

  “Well, then, I don’t think I can choose on those terms. What about you? Which one would you choose?”

  “The girl next door.”

  What else did I expect him to say? He was the boy next door. A clean-cut, squared-off, very nice man.

  I turned to Father Diego, who was sitting next to Father Sebastian.

  “Okay, what about you? Glamour girl or girl next door?”

  “For me the glamour girl was the girl next door,” he said sighing theatrically, “and I still remember her name: Caroline Dalfur.”

  They may have been monks living under vows of chastity, but they were still pretty typical guys. And of course that is exactly why I chose them.

  Given the alternatives, a monastery was the least terrifying venue I could think of in which to observe men living together in close quarters without women, and the only one I was likely to in-filtrate successfully as Ned.

  The other obvious choices were prison or the military, both of which would have required physical examinations, extensive background checks, and in the former case, the commission of a crime. Besides, I didn’t fancy being anally raped and beaten senseless on a daily basis in a men’s prison, or running myself ragged under a drill sergeant.

  I needed to go someplace where I wouldn’t have to disrobe, where I could have mental and physical privacy when I needed it. My sanity and my cover would depend on it.

  That left religious orders. I considered infiltrating an orthodox Jewish community, but I knew that it would be virtually impossible for me to pass as a fellow Jew among observant Jews, since I knew very little about their religious practice or cultural traditions. I did, however, know enough about Catholic practice to pass there.

  I had been raised an observant Catholic and had once taken my religion very seriously. As a child and adolescent I had been devoted to the masculine intellectual tradition of the church and its emphasis on reason in the service of faith. In college I read selections from the works of Duns Scotus and Aquinas, Anselm, Boethius, Ockham and Augustine, and had taken to heart the writings of Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis on the subjects of Christian mysticism and theology. This tradition had deep roots in me, though in my conscious mind I had eschewed it all as nonsense long ago, or thought I had.

  But once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And, well, if you were my kind of Catholic, forget it. Boethius just doesn’t let go. So a Catholic monastery seemed like a natural fit. There I could live, work and pray among a small group of men who had chosen to spend their lives together, and thereby perhaps find out something about male socialization and interaction in an all-male environment.

  Best of all, I thought, I might find the answer to another pressing question that my earlier experiences had raised for me. I had been to the sex clubs. I had gotten as close as I could get to the grittiest, basest and arguably the most all-consuming drive of the male animal. I had seen and experienced some of what it could do to a man. Now I wanted to go to the other end of the known universe. I wanted to know what happens when you take sex away. I wanted to know what celibacy does to a man. And I thought the answer to that question might be found in a monastery.

  All of that is why I did something as crazy as hop a flight to somewhere I couldn’t even locate on a map, to live among people I didn’t know and who didn’t know me, and all I could think about was where the hell I was going to hide my tampon applicators when I got my period.

  But for all my fears, Ned slipped into the place with remarkably little effort. I had exchanged a few letters with the vocation director. We had had one long conversation on the phone. I had offered a character reference or two, and had expressed my desire to make an extended retreat. They were looking to expand their ranks among younger men who had talents to offer, they had plenty of space for guests and they were in pretty constant need of revenue (retreatants at this monastery were charged a daily fee for room and board), so they seemed happy enough to indulge my interest, whatever the outcome.

  For my purposes, the place was perfect. At any given time there were around thirty monks living in the abbey, give or take those who were away periodically on church business or ministering to the faithful in local parishes. It was a relatively small, manageable group in which to mingle and observe.

  Mingling and observing meant falling into step with the abbey’s strict prayer and work schedule, which took some getting used to. Each day was punctuated by ringing bells. Sadly, these weren’t serene pastoral bells tolling gently through the halls and hills. They were electric bells, those shrill, hammering alarmlike mechanisms they once used in public high schools to mark the beginning and end of each period. They were posted at regular intervals on the walls throughout the monastery. One of them was right outside my door. Its ring was so jarring that the first time it woke me up at the brutal hour of five-thirty a.m. I was in the hall before I knew where I was.

  The first morning prayer, vigils, was at six a.m. It usually lasted until six-thirty. Then there was breakfast, which was a silent meal, followed by the second morning prayer session, lauds, at seven-fifteen. By eight o’clock you were ready to begin the work of the day, which proceeded until the midday prayer at noon. Lunch followed. Lunch was the only informal meal of the day, so conversation was allowed. After lunch the work of the day resumed until nearly five p.m. Daily mass was at five, followed by dinner. Dinner was usually a formal, silent meal during which one of the monks read aloud. After dinner came a short recreation period and then the final group prayer of the day, vespers, at six-forty-five.

  All of this was set out in detail in a schedule on the desk in my room, along with a couple of devotional books, a brief history of the monastery and a set of rules and guidelines for visitors.

  My room was furnished sparsely like all the
other rooms, with a twin mattress on a metal spring frame, a sink with mirror, a wooden desk and chair, a bookshelf, a reading chair and a closet. It was on the fourth floor of the cloister, the floor usually reserved for novices. But there weren’t any novices these days, nor had there been for several years. There were a lot of empty rooms on the floor, with rolled mattresses on the cots and nothing but lonely crucifixes on the bare walls.

  Though he wasn’t a novice, a monk named Brother Vergil was one of the few other people living on that floor. His room was a couple of doors down from mine and we shared a bathroom. He was living up there because he had not yet taken his final or solemn vows. He was a special case. He had been a novice at the abbey in his early twenties, and had taken his preliminary (also called simple) vows after completing the novitiate. But at the end of the normal three-to four-year trial period between simple and solemn vows, he had decided to leave the community and make a go of it in the outside world. He had gone back to school and gotten a degree in biology, worked as a lab assistant for a while, and then when the research grants dried up, he’d ended up selling insurance and cars for a living. He’d had love affairs and, as he told it, gotten his heart soundly broken. He’d acquired things: stereos, cars, gadgets, a three-bedroom house, you name it. But then in 2001 he’d decided to come back to the monastery and had taken simple vows for the second time. He was the only monk I met who had left the monastery and come back, and he was one of the very few monks I met who had come to the life as a mature man, having experienced all that the outside world had to offer.

  His second three-year trial was almost over by the time I met him. He was on the verge of taking solemn vows. Thereafter, he’d be moving downstairs, having earned his place in the stable of the vetted brotherhood.

  I struck up my first true friendship at the abbey with Brother Vergil, a relationship that would in the end teach me more about the limits of male friendships, and the delicate balance of camaraderie and self-reliance that seems to prevail in all male quarters, than anything I’d experienced on a night out with my bowling buddies.

  Vergil was a delight, a lifeline to me in the beginning. He wasn’t one of the brooding introverts I’d expected to find in the cloister. Quite the opposite. He was a goyish Albert Brooks. He had the same antic face and impish eyes, a closely clipped, silver-stubbled head and an endearing doughy body with a tumescent paunch under his belt. There was a self-effacing sarcasm and sparkling intelligence in his remarks that made me want guys like him to land in purgatory just so that doubters like me would have someone to eat lunch with. Of course, there was a lot more to Vergil than his wit, as I would soon learn, but at first this bittersweet clown was a godsend.

  I was delightfully surprised, for example, when, during Mass on my second day, I banged my elbow hard on my armrest mid-hymn, and as I sat there, massaging my funny bone in obvious pain, Vergil leaned over and whispered: “Oak is awfully unforgiving, isn’t it?”

  A friendly monk with a sense of humor? Could this be?

  Vergil knew whereof he joked. Woodwork was one of his trades. He was the resident carpenter for the abbey, and his major task, when he wasn’t occupied with more pressing jobs, was to build coffins for the other monks. On my first few days at the monastery I went out to the shop to assist Vergil. Per his sense of humor, Vergil made the coffins in three sizes: tall, short and short and fat. The sizes were a smirking nod to some of the monks’ nicknames, one of which was Father Richard the Tall. The moniker was used to distinguish him from the other more portly Father Richard in the monastery who was known as Father Richard the Fat.

  I spent hours talking with Vergil those first few days in the shop, as he taught me how to use the electric level and sander to match and smooth the edges of the coffin. Our friendship took off as we discovered our common interests and shared them.

  We found that we had the same sense of humor and love of language. We expressed our political opinions and often agreed. We quoted Monty Python back and forth to each other. He read aloud from his collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan. I read aloud from my collected poems of W. H. Auden.

  We talked philosophy and theology. I asked him about his vows, looking for and finding thoughtful answers to my questions about monastic life. Vergil’s was a natural intellect. He didn’t appear to be particularly well read outside his prescribed fields (biology, Catholic theology and his avocation, musical comedy), but he had an innate gift for logical reasoning and an insatiable curiosity, both of which were contagious.

  I told him I sang opera arias to the cows in the pasture after supper and he beamed with amused excitement as he asked: “Oh, you sing?” He had a precise, clear voice and took his singing very seriously in church. Many of the other monks were hard of hearing and turned off their hearing aids during services in order to withstand the blast of the organ. Most of the rest pretty well recrucified the Lord each day in song.

  Vergil seemed glad to have another appreciable voice to keep him company. He often led us in the invitatory and other hymns, and sang the solo parts in the responsorial psalms, tuning himself quietly on a pitch pipe that he kept for that purpose in the cubby of his pew.

  As I was to discover, the obsessive pitch pipe tuning was one of his many anal-retentive tics, most of which I found vastly entertaining, especially because they were one of the few things about which he had no sense of humor whatsoever.

  He liked things just so. Details had to be correct. Mistakes displeased him. He wanted his pitch right and his part sung perfectly. He longed for a Gregorian precision in his brothers’ singing, and he winced at their sour notes. He ironed and starched his handkerchiefs and tailored his own habits, some of which he’d made by hand from scratch.

  This was classic Vergil. He was in control, or liked to think he was. That was an important part of his self-image, indispensable to his sanity and sense of place in the world. He thrived on the predictable rituals of monastic life. He enjoyed order, and he seemed to need it.

  I became part of that scheme.

  Vergil used to call me to him in church like a dog. Depending on the day and who did or didn’t show up for prayers, I’d sometimes sit a seat or two away from him in our row. Once the service had started and he’d seen that the seats between us were going to remain empty, without looking up from his hymnal, he’d motion me to his side with a curt hand gesture that meant “come.” And like a trained subservient, I did come. I’d flip my book open to the right page and he’d point his index finger, again without looking at me, at the right place in the prayer. This was pro forma. I was the pupil, he the master, and in this respect our relationship had a satisfying sharpness to it, clean and by the numbers.

  I lost myself a little in this ritual, or Ned did. I can’t be sure which or to what extent. I know that Norah flew into her friendship with Vergil—someone who seemed to present a full complement of emotional, intellectual and spiritual stimulation. And flight is not the wrong word. Women often do fly into new friendships with abandon, touching all the points of contact like bells on a tree. Men don’t. Especially with other men. And that is where Vergil and I clashed, though I say this with the benefit of hindsight.

  In the moment, I simply enjoyed the care that Vergil took with me in services, even if it was his command and my following, because as much as he did it with all his martial affect, he also did it with unfailing kindness and a genuine desire to include me. Standing beside him, close enough to smell his breath, which always smelled of Listerine or Altoids, mixing my voice with his, I smiled to myself out of sheer affection. But among men, especially among men who live together under vows of chastity, where the fear of sexual desire is ubiquitous and powerful, and the boundaries of intimacy strictly drawn at a barge pole’s distance, girlish crushes and even pseudo-Platonic exuberances are definitely not okay.

  “You’re falling in love with him,” said Father Jerome.

  “Oh, I am not,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

  “Yes, you are,” h
e said, “and it is.”

  Father Jerome spoke with the voice of experience. He claimed he’d seen this many times before. From the moment I’d met Father Jerome and heard his stereotypically lilting voice, I’d assumed he was gay—by orientation, not in practice—and out to himself, if not by dint of the obvious, out to everyone else as well. That was one of the reasons I’d befriended him.

  He was fifty, but looked ten years younger. He was a little on the plump side, with a rounded, acne-scarred face. He had a blindingly white smile with large perfect teeth, which he told me he’d had bleached by his dentist. He was a transfer from a parish somewhere up north, homeless at present, and shacking up at the abbey, perhaps hoping to stay for the duration if they voted him in after a trial period. He had been there for only a week when I arrived, so he didn’t know the place much better than I did. He certainly wasn’t an insider.

  I hopped a ride with him to town on my third day, hoping to be mostly honest about myself with at least one person in the abbey, someone who I thought might have some perspective on the place. I could let my guard down with him, I thought. He was loose and easy. He had the generic gay sense of humor, catty hilarity. We understood each other in that. So much so, that I’d felt comfortable enough to mention it.