The Mermaid Chair (23 page)

I didn’t ask him whether he was or not. I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t bear thinking he might go to vespers now and beg God to forgive him.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-four

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Whit

He did not go to vespers. He did not go to compline either. He crossed the cloister to his cottage, walking quickly. Inside, he sat at his desk without turning on the lamp and watched the darkness grow beyond the window, the quiet way it swallowed the trees.

He had not been touched for so long.
Years.
He’d had a kind of erotic jolt—at least that’s how he would describe it in his notebook. When he could no longer distinguish the shape of the trees, he flipped on the lamp and wrote it all down, everything that had happened, what he felt inside.

He shouldn’t have chanced putting it in writing, but he couldn’t help it. Feelings had always been strange, inscrutable markings in his heart, like the ones he’d seen on the Rosetta stone once. He’d stared at the stone for a very long time while at least a hundred, maybe a thousand other museum tourists had come and gone. He’d felt he was looking at something deeply personal, and from then on he’d been trying to decipher the emotional scribbles inside himself by writing them down. Oddly, they became accessible that way, transposed into something deeply felt.

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Like now. He could feel her hands on his back. See her body stretched across the ground, the goose flesh on her breasts. He could feel himself vanishing inside her again.

He put down his pen and stood up, needing to move. He paced from one side of his bed to the other, glancing at the crucifix nailed over the head. The bed was a simple mattress on a metal frame and took up most of the room. He wished he could lie down on the scratchy brown blanket and go instantly to sleep. He dreaded the long night to come.

He’d made love to a woman.

He didn’t know how to go about his life in the abbey after that.

He lowered the venetian blinds on the casement windows and sat again at his desk. He tried to be practical, to dissect the situation. He wrote down logical-sounding premises for what had happened. That being with Jessie was a way to fill the loss of Linda.

Or, now that he was on the brink of taking final vows, he was looking for a way out. Maybe his libido had been forced into such rigid denial that it had suddenly flipped to the other extreme. It even occurred to him that poets and monks had been using sexual imagery to write about their union with God for centuries. Could he have been looking for some consummation with God?

He read back over all the possible reasons he’d come up with, and they sounded ridiculous to him. They made him think of St.

Thomas Aquinas and his
Summa Theologica,
which his novice master thought was sublime, and yet on his deathbed Aquinas himself had said that all of it was nothing but straw compared with the things he’d experienced, the things in his heart.

That’s how Whit felt. As if his reasoning was a lot of straw. A lot of bullshit.

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He’d done this unbelievable thing because he loved her, he wanted her—that’s what he knew. He knew that life had erupted in him again, felt how much of a crater his heart had been before meeting her.

He closed the notebook and picked up his worn volume of Yeats, and it fell open to that passage he read and reread:

. . . Now that my ladder’s gone,

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

He got up and washed his face and hands in the sink. There were small cuts across his knuckles. He cleaned them with soap, then took off his shirt and held it to his nose and sniffed. He could smell her, could smell what they’d done. Instead of dropping it into the small laundry hamper, he hung it on the peg beside his extra shirts and robes.

Compline was over, and the Great Silence had begun. The monks would be sealed in their rooms now. He’d heard Dominic come in half an hour earlier, heard the typewriter start up.

Whit slid a T-shirt over his head and put on his coat. He opened the door and closed it quietly behind him. He did not take a flashlight, only his rosary. It rattled in his pocket as he walked. The gilt edge of a new moon hung in the sky, and he knew there would be a spring tide in a few hours. It would spill out of the needlegrass like a broth overflowing its bowl. Out on the hummock where he’d made love to Jessie, the water would flood within twenty feet of his hermitage.

On the nights Whit couldn’t sleep, he walked the stations of the cross. It took his mind off things; it calmed him. And he
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liked that the stations were not in the church, that they were simple cement plaques arranged like flagstones on the ground.

He loved the serpentine path they made through the oaks behind the cottages. And the animals he sometimes glimpsed when he was walking, the sudden red glow of their eyes. He had seen striped skunks, red foxes, owls, and once a bobcat.

At the first station, he took out his rosary, touched it to his forehead, and knelt beside the crude etching of Jesus standing before Pontius Pilate. JESUS IS CONDEMNED TO DIE. The abbot had said they must enter into the scenes when they walked the stations, become part of them, but he could barely keep his mind focused.

He closed his eyes and tried to remember the prayer he was supposed to say at the first station. He didn’t know how he could
not
see her again. Right now he wanted to run the distance to her mother’s house and knock on her window as if he were seventeen. He wanted to slide into her bed and wedge his knees behind her knees, twine his fingers with her fingers, mold his body against hers, and tell her what he felt.

He looked at the stone on the ground. He wanted to know if Jesus had struggled like this, had loved a woman this way. He wanted to think so.

At the second station—JESUS CARRIES HIS CROSS—Whit knelt again, more determined this time. He said the appointed prayer and contemplated the scene, shaking his head violently when the pictures of her came.

He was bent over the sixth station—VERONICA WIPES THE

FACE OF JESUS—when he caught the beam of a penlight darting through the darkness, and a figure moving toward him. He rose to his feet. The figure was robed, he could tell that much, but t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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with the deep shadows on the face, Whit didn’t know that it was Father Sebastian until the father was practically standing in front of him.

The light cut across Whit’s face. “So here you are,” Sebastian said. “I just came from your cottage. I’ve been looking for you.

You weren’t at vespers, you weren’t at dinner, and—mystery of mysteries—you weren’t at compline. Now. Solve this great di-lemma for me and explain where you were.”

The tone in his voice made Whit uneasy, wary; it was almost as if he were being baited. As if Sebastian already knew. But how could he?

Whit looked up at the sprinkling of stars over his head, then at Sebastian, who had folded his arms over his scapular and was staring at Whit through the bottom of his massive glasses.

Sebastian had come from his cottage.
Had he gone inside?

Looked in Whit’s notebook?

“So? I’m waiting,” the older monk said. “Were you ill? If you were, you appear to have made a nice recovery.”

“I wasn’t ill, Father.”

“What then?”

“I was in the rookery.”

“You were in the rookery. Well, isn’t that nice? Were you having fun out there while the rest of us were in choir doing our duty?”

“I’m sorry I missed choir.”

“Look, Brother Thomas, I’m the prior. Responsible for the discipline of this monastery. I’m the one who’s to make sure there’s no wrong behavior. I’ll not tolerate it, you understand?”

If he doesn’t know, he surely suspects something.

Whit didn’t respond. He stood still through a long silence,
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refusing to avoid Sebastian’s eyes. He would not feel tawdry about this. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel blameworthy; he did. The moment he’d returned from the rookery, from loving her, the guilt had crashed down on him, incisive and powerful, the need to be forgiven stunning him with its severity, and yet some part of him felt impenitent, belonging only to her—an impervious piece of him that the abbey, even God, did not own and could not touch.

He looked away from Sebastian at the final eight stations dis-persed through the oaks, glowing faintly on the ground, and beyond them the enclosing wilderness of marsh. He thought what a consolation this place had been; his confinement had been a freedom. A home. A dark and graceful poverty. What would he do if the place he most wanted to be was no longer the abbey but a woman’s heart?

“I don’t know if I belong here,” Whit said, and his voice cracked on the last word.
Here.

Sebastian watched Whit wipe at the thin film of tears that formed over his eyes, waiting as he cleared his throat and grasped for composure. When the older monk spoke again, his expression had changed, his face disarmed. The ugliness was drained from his voice. “I see.” He shifted his feet, reached beneath his glasses to rub his eyelids.

As his glasses settled again on his nose, he said, “I want you to walk the rest of the stations. If you like, you can do it on your knees as a penance. But do it mainly as a way of reflecting on your call. Ask yourself why you came here, what it means to you to be hidden here with God. Every one of us has wondered if we belong here, Brother Thomas. We’ve all had to give up somet h e m e r m a i d c h a i r

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thing or someone.” He looked at the ground. “You must carry your cross, you know. We all must.”

Whit nodded at him. He wanted to say,
But I don’t know
what my cross is. Is it doing without her now that I’ve loved her? Or
is it doing without the abbey? Or is it the peculiar agony of being
spiritual and human at the same time?

“When you’ve finished the stations, go to bed and get your rest,” said Sebastian. “You wouldn’t want to miss lauds in the morning. The word means ‘return of the light.’ May that be so for you.”

“Yes, Father,” he said.

He waited for Sebastian to leave, wondering if he would go to the abbot or keep all of this to himself. Sinking to his knees, he walked on them to the next station—JESUS FALLS THE SECOND

TIME.

Whit repeated fragments of the laudate Psalms: “ ‘The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in stead-fast love. . . . The Lord preserves all who love him. Praise the Lord, O my soul!’ ”

Then pieces of the Song of Zechariah: “ ‘The day shall dawn upon us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness. . . .’ ”

Whit wanted the light to come, the light Sebastian spoke of, but he wanted more to lie down in his own heart and hold the dark.

C H A P T E R

Twenty-five

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The morning after I made love to Whit O’Conner, I came into the kitchen and found Mother with the hibiscus scarf draped around the collar of her bathrobe, cooking Gullah rice perlo. Four giant aluminum stockpots of it. Enough for a monastery.

She lifted the lid on the largest pot, and tiers of white smoke wafted out, smelling like shrimp and andouille sausage.

“What are you
doing?
” I asked. “It’s seven o’clock in the morning.” I wanted coffee. I wanted to sit in the kitchen all by myself and sip it slowly.

“I’m cooking for the monks. We’ll need to get the perlo over there by eleven, before Brother Timothy starts fixing lunch. I’ll need to warm it up. Set out some bread and make sweet tea.”

Recipe books were spread across the kitchen table, mingled with onion skins, shrimp tails, and spatterings of Carolina Gold rice kernels. If she hadn’t looked so
herself
standing there with an Our Lady of the Miraculous medal pinned to the scarf, waving a wooden spoon in the air as she talked, I might have protested at how crazy it was to cook the dish here and then have to haul it over there.

“How are we getting all this over to the abbey?” I asked.

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“We’ll drive it through the main gate in the golf cart.” She seemed exasperated at having to point out the obvious to me.

I took my coffee mug to the front porch and sat in one of the wicker chairs with a quilt drawn around my shoulders. The clouds were light and spongy, floating high and soaked in a bronzy shade of gold. I slid my spine low in the chair so I could stare at them.

I’d slept without dreaming, waking once in an icy sweat, per-meated by the same terror-struck feeling that had seized me momentarily as I lay beside Whit in the aftermath of what we’d done.

These paroxysms were, I realized later, a kind of aftershock.

They would come and go for weeks, moments of violent disorientation in which I couldn’t recognize myself, completely breaking apart how I understood my life, all the joints and couplings that held it together. It was the peculiar vertigo, the peculiar humility, that comes from realizing what you are really capable of.

Those aftershocks would gradually taper off, but in the beginning they could almost paralyze me.

Last night the feeling had taken much longer to pass than it had on the island with Whit. Sitting on the side of the bed, trying to steady myself, I’d noticed the painting I’d done propped against the wall by the door, the underwater sheen on the woman’s face glowing slightly, making her look half alive. The sight unnerved me, and I got up and stood in front of the dresser. The pincushion was there, my wedding rings pinned to it like insects, like specimens of a valuable but discarded life.

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was—a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

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What if I lose Hugh and Whit both? What if I give up Hugh,
only to have Whit turn away? I’ll be alone, abandoned.