The Monk Downstairs Read online

  Mary Martha popped out of the church now with her tiny legs pumping hard, squinting in the sunlight, containing tears. Spotting Rebecca, she started toward her at once, already beginning to cry. Bob, a step behind her, was struggling comically to hide his embarrassment and chagrin, to arrange his face in a way that facilitated Relationship.

  The communion wafer had turned to a lump of soggy bread in Rebecca’s clenched hand. But she didn’t know what to do with it. You couldn’t just toss the body of Christ aside in a parking lot for the pigeons to eat. As Mary Martha and Bob strode toward her, forcing the issue, she licked her palm surreptitiously and swallowed, and the bread stuck in her throat.

  In the car on the way home, listening to Mary Martha sniffle, Rebecca began to cry too, to her own dismay. Bob, disconcerted, stammered for a while and finally stopped, a little desperately, at Dairy Queen, where he bought all three of them vanilla ice cream cones with colored sprinkles. It was so sweet and touching that Rebecca was afraid for a while that she might have to marry him, that it was a message from God after all, the perfect humiliation. But she’d come back to her senses soon enough. Bob had kept the Dairy Queen receipt. She didn’t even ask him why. It didn’t really matter. She couldn’t live with a man who’d found an accounting niche for ice cream cone expenses.

  It wasn’t that Bob was unattractive. There were those who thought him quite good-looking, with every wiry black hair in place and trusting brown waif’s eyes. He was undeniably a nice guy. He was smart, and he could be witty. But his chin was weak, and he had a wispy softness of manner, a breathiness. He would have made a great gay friend, Rebecca had often thought. She treated him, indeed, as she might have treated a gay friend, with a frank, easy camaraderie, as one of the girls. But Bob was straight enough, in his programmatic way. He lingered at the end of their outings, which he insisted on calling dates, allowing the awkward pause at the doorstep to grow ponderous, waiting with painful obviousness for a goodnight kiss. Rebecca had taken to kissing him on the cheek just to deflate the moment’s significance, but recently Bob had begun to try to meet her lips. Their neck dynamics had gotten as intricate as those of fighting cocks. There had been lip contact. How he could possibly have found any of this grist for the mill of Relationship was beyond her. Bob had no pride. Combined with his fundamental obtuseness, this actually made him a little dangerous. Things should never have gone this far.

  He pulled out the ring at a lovely, ridiculously expensive Italian restaurant in North Beach. On cue, a violin player and a waitress laden with lilies approached the table. Bob got down on one knee. Everyone in the restaurant was watching indulgently, waiting to applaud. It was not possible to explain to them that the drama was entirely Bob’s. Rebecca knew that she had never done anything more encouraging than to shrug off his more flagrant hints: not a single yes had crossed her lips. It had seemed pointless to hurt his feelings.

  She was thinking of Rory now, inevitably. Rory with his gift for ad lib, who had proposed on the N-Judah train on a Tuesday afternoon. He hadn’t even had a ring—he’d rummaged through his pockets for a token of their enduring love and given her a guitar pick.

  “Say you will make me the happiest man alive,” Bob said from the floor at her feet, his wishful thinking writ large and public. Rebecca looked at him and all she could think was how tiresome it was, and how sad.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” she said. “Okay?”

  Emboldened by the sympathetic crowd, perhaps, he held his ground. “I need an answer now, darling.”

  He had begun to call her “darling” on their third outing, right after the fiasco at the church; she had fought the endearment off until their seventh date. Bob was the only one counting, of course. Rebecca leaned closer and lowered her voice so that only he could hear.

  “Get back in your goddamned chair, Bob, right this minute. I am not going to marry you.”

  His face fell, but he obeyed. He was good that way, of course; it was his strength. The other patrons applauded uncertainly. The clueless violinist began to play something screechy and romantic. The wine waiter arrived on cue with champagne.

  “May I be the first to offer my most sincere congratulations,” he said, laying on the fake Italian accent.

  In Bob’s Lexus on the way home, Rebecca lit a cigarette. She allowed herself five Marlboro Lights a day and thought of them as little suicides. There was also a certain amount of frank hostility in the act. Bob had a horror of his car smelling of smoke. She ran the electric window down and let the cold night air blast in.

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said.

  “So am I, Bob.”

  “I really thought—”

  “I know you did. It’s my fault as much as yours. I should have been ruder, sooner.”

  “Oh, I think you’ve been rude enough, often enough. I just haven’t wanted to believe it.”

  Rebecca glanced at him appreciatively. She had always wondered if he even noticed. The car radio was leaking something stupefying and symphonic at an anesthetizing volume. Bob had it set to a classical station, as always. He kept the ambiance as orthodox as a dentist’s waiting room. Sometimes he would make jaunty little conductor’s motions with his free hand as he drove. Rebecca took the last drag off her cigarette, the breath most laden with carcinogens, and flipped the butt out the window. Holding the smoke in her lungs, she felt a moment’s compassion for both of them.

  Let me just stay here, she thought. Let me not have to go back into the fray. Let me not have to be unkind.

  “I love you, is the thing,” Bob said. “Call me an incurable romantic, but I have to believe in that.”

  Rebecca let her breath out. The night tore the smoke away. She pressed the button and the window hummed up. She had one cigarette left in her daily allotment of small deaths, and she was determined not to spend it here.

  “It’s a movie, Bob. Don’t you see? It’s just a movie, and you’ve miscast the lead. I like you. I admire your…spunk. Your grit, your uncrushable goodwill. I’m not even looking for more than that at this point in my life.”

  “Of course you are. Everyone is.”

  “No. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’ve got a daughter learning to read and a job I don’t quite like. I’ve got a mortgage. I’m making my middle-aged peace with network television. Tomorrow is another day I’ve got to get through. If you could just behave yourself, we could have the occasional movie or meal together and I would feel that much less like a troll and a drudge. But I don’t need the violin music, Bob. I don’t want it. I find it sort of pathetic, really.”

  Bob took this in a silence that had a touch of sulk in it.

  “So we’re back to junior high school,” he said at last. “You ‘just want to be friends.’ I have a great personality. It’s nothing personal. It’s you, not me.”

  “I would love it if we could do this without regressing completely. But if junior high school works for you—”

  “What works for you? What can I do differently? I’m willing to change, Rebecca. I’m willing to grow. I’ll do anything.”

  He would, she knew. Rebecca sighed. “If you got any better, Bob, I would die from guilt. Just take me home.”

  They did not speak for the rest of the drive back to the Sunset. Bob pulled up in front of her house on 38th Avenue and put the car in neutral. Pointedly, he did not turn the engine off, and he made no move to get out. Rebecca found that she was grateful for his pique. It made things so much easier.

  “Well, goodnight,” she offered, playing on the inadequacy of it, hoping to share at least the camaraderie of fiasco. But Bob just hunched his shoulders.

  “Goodnight,” he replied curtly, as obvious as a child. He had both hands on the steering wheel and he would not meet her eyes. He wanted another round of drama; he wanted at least the dignity of a scene. Rebecca shrugged and opened the car door herself, feeling cruel. She got out, closing the door carefully, not wanting to fee
d his sense of melodrama by slamming it, and walked up the steps to her front door. At least there would be no neck dance tonight, no avoiding or succumbing to deluded kisses.

  Bob’s tires gave a petulant yelp as he pulled away. Rebecca shook her head, wondering if there would ever be anyone in her life again who slipped between the cartoon predictabilities and the emptiness. She knew she had been trying to fake a friendship as hard as Bob had been trying to fake a romance.

  Inside, she paid the baby-sitter and sent her home, then went to check on Mary Martha. Her daughter was sleeping soundly. Rebecca resisted the urge to go sit by her bed and gaze at her perfect face. It was enough just to hear her contented breathing. In the darkness, a throng of stuffed animals softened every surface of the bedroom. Mary Martha’s unicorn phase went on and on. Sometimes, watching her at play, seeing the look of absorption on her face as she put her magic animals through their paces, Rebecca would feel a tender ferocity rising in herself, a readiness to battle the world. All she really wanted was to protect her daughter’s joy in unicorns. It was like loving soap bubbles, she knew, treasuring that innocence. Yet nothing else in her life right now moved her in the least. She often thought that must be a little pathetic; surely she should have found a larger cause by this time. But the larger causes of her youth had bled away. Her sense of the Big Picture had fractured and decayed. She loved her daughter, the blessing of a good book, a glass of wine after the day’s wave of vanity had passed.

  And the occasional cigarette. Was that shallow? Then she was shallow, it seemed. Rebecca closed the bedroom door and slipped down the hallway, moving with the instinctive wariness she still caught herself in now. Five years after the divorce, the house remained dangerous in unforeseeable ways, like a children’s playground riddled with unexploded mines from a previous war. Little bits of Rory surfaced, devastatingly: a bookmark halfway through the collected short stories of Flannery O’Connor, a twenty-dollar bill tucked under the silverware tray for a rainy day, birthday cards he’d bought and never sent. Evidence of promises not kept and promises abandoned.

  She passed through the kitchen to the back porch. The abalone shell on the top step was filled with butts; she kept meaning to empty it. She sat down, tugged her coat around her, and lit the day’s last Marlboro. Above her, the stars themselves seemed weary in a sky bleached thin by the city’s lights. The dark backyard at the bottom of the stairs communicated neglect. She was really going to have to drag herself out of bed some Saturday and hack back some weeds, at least.

  The phone rang inside, and that deep, crazy part of her rose to the sound at once, like a trout to a dry fly. As if it still might be Rory, as if it all might have been a mistake. As if the death of a marriage through a thousand small cuts of violation and neglect could still be healed by the Band-Aid of a single communication.

  But it was Bob, of course. She listened to his voice on the message machine, apologizing already. Apparently he had had time to get home and research the problem in his library of Relationship. He had failed to give her her space, he said. He had not been sensitive to her needs. He had “pushed the river.”

  It went on for a while; he had worked out the lines of a solution too, in excruciating detail. Rebecca stopped listening and took a deep drag on the cigarette. In four good puffs, maybe five, she knew, she would stub the butt into the shell and her life would seem very small and sad to her again. It was the evil magic of nicotine that buoyed this little moment of peace. But it was lovely, nonetheless, to sit quietly, fingering the guitar pick that hung from a silver chain around her neck and listening to the untrimmed bushes rustle in the breeze that blew in from the sea.

  Chapter Two

  On Saturday morning Rebecca woke from a dream that she had swallowed a diamond. The stone was so large that the doctors were sure that it would kill her. Certainly it was indigestible. On the other hand, someone said, it was a very valuable gem. And it wasn’t like it was lost. They knew exactly where it was.

  “Fat lotta good that does me,” Rebecca had said, and woke. The dream had been so vivid that she could still feel a lump in her bowels, a sensation that only slowly dissipated. She wondered briefly whether her body was trying to tell her that she had cancer. That was all she needed now, a horrible, lingering death to fit into her schedule.

  The bedroom was bright; she’d slept even later than usual. Normally by this time Mary Martha would have trooped in two or three times with urgencies real and imagined. Her daughter suffered Rebecca’s weekend sloth, Rebecca knew. She felt bad about it herself. She was constantly making vows to pop up early and seize the day. But the week just seemed to blast every good intention into rubble. Come Saturday morning, she was the same old featureless heap in the bed.

  Rebecca roused herself, drew her threadbare terry cloth robe about her, and padded down the hall toward the bathroom, expecting her daughter to bound up at any moment. But there was no sign of Mary Martha. The TV in the living room was silent and her daughter’s bedroom was empty except for the usual unicorn tableau and a scatter of books. Rebecca hurried back up the hall to the kitchen, which was also deserted.

  “Mary Martha?” she called, hearing the panic-quaver in her voice.

  There was no answer. She was trying to decide whether to begin screaming right there in the kitchen or to run screaming out into the street when she noticed that the back door was ajar. Rebecca went to the window and looked down into the yard, and there was Mary Martha, sitting on the bottom step in the sunlight, talking with Michael Christopher, who was on his hands and knees pulling up weeds.

  With relief came anger for the scare, but the two of them made such a sweet scene that Rebecca didn’t have the heart to break it up. She could not make out their words from where she stood, but she could hear the clear, eager music of Mary Martha’s chatter and the respectful baritone of Christopher’s replies. The discussion appeared to be lively. Her new tenant had kept a low profile since moving in. If he went out during the day, he went out after she left for work. As far as Rebecca knew, he was down there praying, or drinking, whatever ex-monks did. But he seemed normal enough now in jeans and a T-shirt. His hair was growing in a little, and the escaped-convict stubble he’d sported upon his arrival had given way to a softer fuzz. She noted that he had shaved, revealing a sensual mouth and a determined jaw. His face seemed surprisingly vulnerable without the beard. With the downy blur of the new hair and his awkward neck, he looked like a freshly hatched gosling.

  While she was standing there, the phone rang. Probably Bob again, Rebecca thought, and let the machine get it. But it was her mother. Rebecca picked up.

  “Screening, are we?” Phoebe noted, amused. At seventy-two, she had one of those wonderful brisk old-lady voices like rung crystal, and something of the freedom to take the world lightly that Rebecca longed for.

  “Bob proposed last night. I’m expecting some aftershocks.”

  “Ah. Which one is Bob, now?”

  “The Thai food.” Bob had insisted on taking them—Phoebe, Rebecca, and Mary Martha—out for dinner on the previous Mother’s Day to some place in the Marina. “His girls,” he had called them, at least three times. He had almost broken his back opening doors and pulling out chairs, but the conversation had lagged. The main thing Rebecca could recall from the outing was Mary Martha’s delight in the peanut sauce and Bob’s insistence on a broad view of social evolution into the twenty-first century, which had filled the intellectual void like Styrofoam packing pellets. Phoebe, at the end of the evening, had merely remarked, devastatingly, “He seems nice enough.” From someone as capable of intricate analysis as her mother, Rebecca thought, it amounted to a dismissal.

  “Ah, of course,” Phoebe said now. “Mr. Megatrends 2000.”

  “It was a debacle, I’m afraid. He made quite a production of it.”

  Phoebe was briskly unsympathetic. “Well, you could see it coming. I hope you weren’t too hard on him.”

  “I was as nice as I could possibly be, under the
circumstances.”

  “Oh dear.”

  Rebecca laughed. “I suppose you think I should have taken him up on it.”

  “And become Mrs. Megatrends?” her mother asked dryly. “Yes, that’s an appealing prospect.”

  “He’s reading something else by now, I’m sure.”

  “Don’t give it another thought, Rebecca. There’s no need to settle for mediocrity.”

  “I wasn’t even tempted,” Rebecca declared. But she knew that she had been. Not by Bob as he was, but by Bob as he might have been with just a little tweaking here and there and some mysterious infusion of chemistry. A New and Improved Bob. From such wishful thinking it was one short step to trying to do the tweaking yourself and betting the ranch on the mysterious infusion. She had come soberingly close to a ruinous compromise over these past months. If Bob had not so characteristically blundered with his comic opera proposal; if he had made his offer in private, with a touch of humility and a dignified appeal to the longing for companionship, to the sharing of loads; if he had come on with a little humor and frankness about diminishing prospects and caught her on one of those days when the laundry and shopping hadn’t gotten done and there had been no one to pick up Mary Martha at day care and the car’s transmission was making a funny new noise…Well, who knew? It was easy for Phoebe, who had snagged the love of her life in classic fashion, to counsel holding out for excellence. Phoebe had married Rebecca’s father at nineteen and kept his house for forty-two years in perfectly contented devotion. When John Martin had died of a heart attack on the NJT 5:10 out of Penn Station one night on the way home from his office, some ten years ago, Phoebe had been shattered. She had languished for several years, keeping to herself—rattling around the old place, as she said, drinking too much and doing melancholy watercolors. Then, some five years previously, she had moved to California, ostensibly to be near her daughter. She had bought a small house near Stinson Beach and begun to show a surprising zest for widowhood. She was always bopping off to some Shakespeare Festival or orchid show; she worked part-time at a funky little art gallery in town, and she had a hip, even occasionally edgy, set of new friends, painters and writers and Bolinas secessionists.