He turned around abruptly, almost as if he’d heard my thought. I stepped toward him, close enough to smell the saltiness coming from his chest, the damp circles under his arms. Light blazed up in the blue of his eyes. He reached out and pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me. “Jessie,” he whispered, pushing his face into my hair.
I closed my eyes and put my mouth at the opening of his shirt, let my lips open and close on his skin, tasting the flesh at the hollow of his throat, the taste of heat. I unfastened each small white button and kissed the skin beneath it. The wooden cross dangled over his breastbone, and I had to move it to one side in order to kiss the bone’s small arch.
“Wait,” he said, and pulled the leather cord over his head, letting the cross drop to the ground.
When I reached the button tucked inside his belt, I tugged his shirt out of his jeans and kept unbuttoning until he stood with his shirt wide open, a soft wind lifting the edges of it. He leaned over and kissed me. His mouth tasted like wine, left over from mass.
He led me into the flecked light of the hermitage, took off his shirt and spread it on the ground, then undressed me, lifting the T-shirt over my head, unsnapping my khakis, pulling them into a puddle around my ankles. I stepped out of them and stood in my light blue panties and matching bra and let him stare at me. He looked first at the indentation of my waist, that curve where it flares out to my hips, then glanced back at my face for a moment before letting his eyes wander to my breasts, then downward toward my thighs.
I stood unmoving, but there was an avalanche going on—an entire history sliding away.
He said, “I can’t believe how beautiful you are.”
I started to say, No, no, I’m not, but stopped myself. Instead I unhooked my bra and let it fall down next to his cross.
I watched him stoop and unlace his boots. The skin on his shoulders was glazed with sunburn. He stood up, barefoot, bare-chested, his jeans low on his hips. “Come here,” he said, and I went and leaned into the smoothness of his chest.
“I’ve wanted you from the beginning,” he told me, and the way he said it—his eyes fixed on my face, a frown of purpose across his forehead—sent a tremor through me. He lowered me to the ground on top of his denim shirt and kissed the soft places on my throat, my breasts, my thighs.
We made love with the tide sweeping in around the island and Max asleep in the sun. There was a mystifying scent in the air, like burned sweetness. I decided later it was the smell of wisteria floating out from the island. As he moved above me, I heard the high-pitched call of an osprey coming from the height of clouds. I heard crab claws scurrying in the brush.
The ground was lumpy, gristly with vines and sprouting fan palms. One of them was jabbing into my shoulder, and my body had goose-pimpled over in the cool air, from the deep, cobalt shadows at the back of the lean-to. I began to tremble. Whit slid his hand under my shoulder, cradling it away from the pointy shoots on the palm. He said, “You all right?”
I nodded. I didn’t mind any of it. I wanted to be here, lying on a tide-swept piece of earth, belonging to it, watched by the marsh, by the birds circling our heads.
He smiled at me, touching my face with his other hand, tracing the rim of my jaw, my lips and nose. He burrowed his face into my neck and breathed deeply, and I disappeared into the moment—Whit, the blood and bones in my body, the wildness of loving him.
I inhabited those moments in a way that was usually lost to me. They came through an amplifier that made the movement of our bodies and the pulsing world around us more vivid and radiant, more real. I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even, and the impassive way I’d treated them.
Later I would think that if sex was really a conversation, a way of communicating something, what was it we had said to each other? Where had those desperate, eloquent voices come from?
Afterward I lay beside him, still nude, warmed by his body, which gave off surprising waves of heat. There were smudges of mud on my hips, tiny green myrtle leaves pressed onto the backs of my legs. Max roused himself, wandered over, and curled up on the other side of me.
“I feel like that woman in the Gauguin painting,” I said.
He tightened his arm around me. “Which one?”
“That exotic island woman he was always painting. You know. Usually she wore a red sarong.”
He glanced at the turtle skull I’d placed on the crab trap, and smiled. Then he moved his finger along the gully between my breasts. I saw that his knuckle was bleeding from tiny punctures made by the sharp points of the fan palm.
I heard Max start to snore. Whit’s eyes drifted closed. I could not understand drowsiness after sex. The cells in my own body were simmering in adrenaline.
When he began to breathe in the heavy way of sleep, I lay there and listened. The afternoon floated on the tide, pulled along like flotsam. Whit slept. I watched him. I watched everything with a kind of wonder. Once, a blur of white wings plummeted toward the creek—a diving osprey falling like an angel toward the water.
I felt evicted from my old life—no, not evicted, sprung. Free. I lay there—the Gauguin woman—held in the lushness of what had happened, feeling content, alive.
Only once did I think of Hugh and a spasm of shock swept through me, the rebound of my other life, the terrible moral wrongness of what I’d done. I cupped myself tightly against Whit’s side until it passed.
When he woke, the sun was arching toward the west. From under the lean-to, I could see citron colors flooding along the horizon. He sat up. “It’s late. I have to get back for vespers.”
As I reached for my clothes, he said, “Are you sorry? About this?”
“I don’t have any regrets,” I told him. But it wasn’t true. I regretted that I was married. That I would end up hurting Hugh, had already hurt him. That Dee could be hurt. That all the glue that had held us together for so long was coming apart. But I didn’t regret what we’d done. I should have, I suppose, but I didn’t. I knew I would do it again. Unless. Unless he was sorry.
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.
CHAPTER Twenty-four
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.
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.
H
e 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.
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 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 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 dilemma 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, 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 dispersed 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 something 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 steadfast 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.
CHAPTER Twenty-five
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.
“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.