Real Life (3 page)

At its outskirts she turned down a gravel road that skirted the town. Far ahead of her a small forest stood, orange and gold against the sea of dusky summerfallow surrounding it. The tall white spire of a church she’d been told to look for rose above the trees on the far side. Her car’s small tires crunched and slid, and she slowed, not used to driving on gravel.

The monastery itself was much larger than she’d imagined, built of faded red brick, crumbling and patched-looking, with obvious newer additions on one end. The park surrounding it was bigger, too, than she’d thought when she’d seen it from a
mile or so away, and through the trees to one side she could make out a neat row of smaller frame buildings. Her nervousness rising, she parked, pulled her briefcase out of the back seat, and crossed the parking lot to the wooden double doors.

A monk stood just inside them, evidently waiting for her. He held back the heavy door for her and introduced himself as the abbot.

“It’s good you arrived a little early,” he said. “I always show the new faculty around the first evening, answer questions, that sort of thing.” He was perhaps sixty, a little stout in his worn black cassock, going bald, and so close-shaven that his face shone with a pink light.

“Thank you …” She couldn’t think how to address him and bowed her head to hide her confusion.

“Call me Dominique,” he told her, “or Father Dominique.”

He led her down long corridors with either polished and echoing wooden floors or worn vinyl tiles, opening doors as he went to show her classrooms, the cavernous, gleaming-clean kitchen, and the stark guest rooms.

“Sometimes faculty uses them when a winter storm blows in unexpectedly,” he told her. They turned this way and that, climbed stairs and descended others, until she was lost. At one point he’d gestured toward a narrower hall to their left, it seemed to her less brightly lit than the others, and said that it led to the monks’ residence and that it was, of course, offlimits to everyone else. Then he hurried her on.

“This is our library,” he said, and stood back to allow her to cross the threshold into a long, high-ceilinged room full of rows of book-laden shelves. A half-dozen stern-looking old men in plain, dark-wood frames frowned down on the few students, all young and male, lost in study at the oak tables which ran in a long column down the room’s centre. She smiled at the abbot, nodding politely, although the pictures
offended her and the smell in the room of old floor wax or of oiled wood was distasteful.

“I’ll show you our chapel and then you’ll have had the inside tour. We run a full-scale farm here too, and we have an orchard and a very large vegetable garden, plus cows and laying hens.” He turned to her now, and smiled down at her in a friendly, easy way that suddenly, frighteningly, made her want to nestle her head against his plump chest. “We’re pretty much self-sufficient here.”

“No women,” she pointed out before she could stop herself. She hoped she’d said it in a joking tone, but she could hear her voice hanging in the air, forlorn, like a minor note on a piano.

“No, no women,” he agreed amiably. “But many women come here for spiritual retreats or to attend programs. We aren’t like those monks on Athos who don’t even allow females on the premises.”

The chapel was even larger than the library, and in contrast, very modern, with sleek pews of polished blond wood, white walls, and a stylized, terra-cotta crucified Christ on the altar. It was empty, but in their moment’s halt so she could look around, Christine became aware of a sound invading the chapel’s intense quiet, a deep-voiced, rhythmic murmur. The abbot was glancing about as if to check if anything was out of place or needed fixing. Beside him, Christine stood motionless, listening.

Male voices were filtering through the unbroken wall behind the altar, and though the sound was muffled, rising and falling, sometimes fading out to return on a louder note, it gradually came to her that it was chanting.

“It is our monks at evening prayer,” the abbot murmured, oddly formal now.

She found herself advancing a few steps toward the sound, her head cocked. It’s like the beating of a human heart, she
thought, full of wonder, it’s as if it is my own heart beating, and heat rose into her cheeks, she felt a quivering start in her abdomen and solar plexus and wondered, Am I ill? What is this?

Father Dominique turned briskly to her.

“I’m sure you want to do a little preparation before your class arrives.” Obediently, Christine followed the purposeful swish of his skirts out of the chapel.

Night had fallen when she began her solitary drive back to the city. The road was deserted; no other headlights disturbed the darkness and no stars were visible; only the rare yardlight on a farm miles back from the road lit a small orange triangle in the sea of black. Christine was exhausted, leaning back in her seat as she drove, her head against the cushioned backrest. The class had gone well, she thought, although only one of her twelve students was a man—strangely, much older than the others, older even than her by at least fifteen years—and extra attentive, not in a studently way, she thought, but rather as if he found her an interesting phenomenon that would bear watching. She smiled nervously in the darkness as she thought of him and the way he held his mouth, sympathetically she found, and for no reason she could pinpoint, she was assailed by the penetrating sadness that nowadays seemed to be always present beneath whatever lightheartedness she might briefly find. Or had it always been this way? Surely in childhood she’d often been purely happy? But she wasn’t sure.

Her mind circled around and came back, as it always did, to seven-year-old Aaron. Was he happy? she wondered. He did something that might be called play: he walked in circles, he rocked until she stopped him, he banged his head sometimes, although that behaviour was almost eradicated. He would sometimes sit on her knee while she read a story to Meagan, but
then he would hum tunelessly, more a drone really, and usually it would escalate to that high, purposeless, meaningless scream of his, and nothing she said or did would stop it. She thought of his tense little body perched restlessly on her lap. Never an instant of relaxation until he fell asleep, never anything that might be called cuddling. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she refused them relentlessly. Crying had not so far cured him; she doubted it would do so now and sat forward in the seat, grasped the steering wheel more firmly, and accelerated the sooner to escape this darkness through which she drove.

When she pulled up in front of her house she’d already seen that all the lights downstairs were on, although it was nearly eleven. She stopped with a jerk, grabbed her briefcase, and rushed up the sidewalk and into the house. Her mother was waiting in the hall, her face white, her arms in their unravelling green wool sweater hugging herself tightly.

“It’s okay, Christine, it’s okay now,” her mother said before she could ask. “He’s back in bed. He’s asleep.”

For a long second Christine could only stare, her heart was in her throat, choking off her voice. She slumped against the wall, her briefcase falling to the floor.

“What happened?”

Her mother was smaller even than Christine and thinner, too, a tiny woman, really, gazing up at her out of large, steady brown eyes, whose colour tonight had darkened to black.

“I left his door unlocked when I put him to bed. Meagan called me and I went to her—I forgot the door wasn’t locked—and …”

“I forgot to lock the front door when I went out?” Christine asked and, without waiting for an answer, moaned, “How could I be so stupid?” Her mother shrugged, “Or I did. I think it
was me.” Christine straightened, began to shrug out of her coat.

“Was he gone long? Where was he? Who found him?”

“About forty minutes. The police.” Her mother was helping her take off her coat, moving aside the briefcase. “He was running down the centre of Fourteenth, shrieking and flapping his arms, the way he does. Perfectly happy to go with the policeman.”

“God,” Christine said.

“Indeed.” This was tart. “I’m thinking it’s time you—”

“Mother”—a warning. Her mother turned, walked toward the kitchen. “I need a drink, Mom.”

“Go check Meagan, and I’ll mix you one.”

The key to Aaron’s room was, as always, hanging on the doorknob. She turned it softly in the lock and pushed open the door. He lay on his stomach, his face turned toward her, the wedge of light from the hall showing her his long dark eyelashes, his sweetly curved mouth, the mass of curly dark hair. He’d pushed aside his quilt and his pyjamas were twisted on his defenceless little calves.

She came forward, deciding against trying to straighten his pyjamas for fear of waking him, pulled the quilt gently up over him, and touched his curls softly, the familiar anguish welling up in her chest. She pushed it down, blinking, then went softly out, turning the key in the lock, letting it drop to hang on its cord from the handle. She never did this without a mix of satisfaction, that he was safe and would remain so until morning, and of guilt, that she, a mother, was her child’s jailer.

Meagan lay primly in her bed, her five-year-old body hardly disturbing her blankets, one smooth, plump hand with its chipped green nail polish on three fingers resting neatly on the quilt, her barrette still holding back her straight fine brown hair
that was exactly like Christine’s. Christine bent and kissed her cheek, then carefully unclipped the barrette and slipped it out.

The street lamp beside the house cast a bar of light across the foot of Meagan’s bed, turning the pink-flowered quilt a ghastly blue-mauve. Staring down at it, Christine was reminded of the long drive back through the moonless night, the purr of the motor, and then the pulsing of the monks’ voices came back to her: the richness of the sound, and its rhythms, as if the monks were calling to lure some unseen, unknown, but precious thing.

In the living room her mother had already set out two of Christine’s wedding-present, cut-glass tumblers on the coffee table and was pouring a little Scotch into each one. Christine fell into the armchair across from the sofa. Her mother began, “He’s already in daycare, what difference …” Christine moved angrily, crossing her legs and then uncrossing them.

“We need to talk,” her mother said after a moment, adding ice, not looking at Christine.

“Does it have to be now?” She reached to take the drink.

“Yes, now,” her mother said, sitting down on the sofa.

“I’m not ready for the institutional route yet,” Christine said stubbornly. “You know I’m not. Besides, there’s still that clinic in Montreal—”

“Nobody’s going to pay for that and you know it,” her mother said. “I just want to tell you to call that special service for a sitter next Wednesday. I have a doctor’s appointment.” Christine nodded, leaned back, and closed her eyes briefly. “You can forget Graeme. If he wanted to help, he’d never have left in the first place. He’d send the money on time, he’d—” Christine raised both hands to her face, forgetting she was holding a glass, spilling her drink. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. Christine put her hands down, blinking, setting her drink on the table beside
her chair, brushing with the other hand at the beads of liquid quivering on the smooth navy fabric of her skirt.

“I can’t let you go on this way, Chris. It’s too hard to watch you struggling to keep up with everything. Aaron taking every drop of energy you have. Meagan not getting the attention she needs—”

“Mom …” Christine began.

“As if it’s your fault the way Aaron is,” her mother said. “You always were hard on yourself.” Tenderness had crept into her voice. She sighed, and when she spoke again, her voice was wry, Christine could hear her struggling against her anger. “One day soon you’re going to have to give it up.”

She meant Christine would have to give up the fight to keep Aaron with her, which surely, at bottom, was based on the stubborn belief, no matter what her common sense and all the experts said, that one day he’d wake up and say, “Good morning, Mother, I’d like toast for breakfast,” and everything would be fine at last.

“If I don’t love him,” she said, “no one will. You know that’s true, Mom.” Her mother opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. This, too, was familiar to Christine. She could read her mother’s mind:
But he doesn’t know the difference.

The next week the air had a crisp bite to it, the brilliantly coloured leaves had fallen and been blown away, leaving behind the forked black branches of trees stretching harshly against a sky resonant with light. Still, the very clarity of the light, the pale fields she caught glimpses of stretched out between the ranges of hills, and the flocks of crows and blackbirds that swept away in unison at the approach of her car pleased and soothed her. How Meagan would love the birds, she told herself, imagining her delight in them as they lifted and swirled away.

More relaxed this week, at break she followed her students to the gloomy, dark-wood-panelled dining room with its long rows of tables and chairs where the monks provided coffee and cookies. As she stood in the coffee lineup, the only male in her class, Richard, came toward her from the urns, carrying two full mugs.

“You shouldn’t spend half your break waiting in line,” he said to her as he handed her one of them. Touched, she accepted it, feeling her face flush, then turned and sat down at the nearest unoccupied table. He followed, sitting across from her, reaching for a paper napkin from the dispenser and stirring two sugar cubes noisily into his mug. He was short and heavily muscled and wore his grey-blond hair in a long ponytail down his back.

“Are you married?” This startled her, but glancing at him she saw that this was not a pass, although what it was, she couldn’t tell.

“Separated. You?”

“Long divorced, no children, considering whether I should become a Bride of Christ or not.” He grinned at her. She was confused, and asked him, “Why did you ask me that? What do you mean—a Bride of Christ?” He didn’t take his eyes from her face and she felt his gaze as too intimate, although not in the sexual way she found herself craving. She lowered her eyes to her coffee.