And Eileen was shivering in her sleep. It would be really stupid if she caught the flu just as I finally got rid of it, so I dragged one arm out from under the covers and spent a while shaking her shoulder, trying to wake her up. She groaned, she thrashed about, and she exhaled a lot of sweetish rum aroma, but she absolutely refused to become conscious, so I paused and looked around the room, trying to decide what to do next.
This was Eileen’s bedroom, and very dark. There was no sound from anywhere in the house, so McGadgett and Sheila were probably also asleep. They’d probably all been drinking together, and Eileen had forgotten about me being here until she’d come in to go to bed, and then she’d been either too sleepy or too drunk to make other arrangements. (I learned later that she’d spent Saturday night on a wicker sofa in the living room.) So she’d gone to sleep on top of the covers, wearing shorts and a halter, and now her skin was very cold.
Well, I couldn’t just leave her there. I managed to shove her limbs off me, and then I climbed wearily out of bed and stood leaning against the wall until the likelihood of fainting passed. Then I pushed the covers from my side over to the middle of the bed, exposing the bottom sheet, and yanked on Eileen until she rolled complaining over the bunched-up covers and onto the sheet, her head thumping onto my pillow. I stopped her before she could roll completely off the bed, and pulled the covers back again, bringing them over her and tucking them in along the side. Then I stumbled around the bed, got in on the other side, and fell almost immediately asleep again.
Our arms and legs and noses were tangled. Early morning daylight squinted through the slats of the bamboo shades, and Eileen’s open right eye was so huge and so close that I couldn’t clearly focus on it.
We were both moving a bit fretfully, trying to become comfortable. Then we were just moving, and discomfort didn’t seem to matter much anymore. “I think we’re going to do something,” I said.
“You’d better,” she said.
Thirteen
By Monday afternoon I was out of bed, though very weak what with one thing and another, and I spent the next few hours on the beach, soaking up sun through a thick smear of suntan lotion, applied by Eileen. That, plus a great quantity of food, made me feel almost my old self by evening, when the four of us got into the Pinto — Eileen and I crowding snugly together into the back, while Neal drove and Sheila gave expert criticism — and we traveled fifteen miles to another beach house currently occupied by well-off Long Island Irish: Dennis Paddock, Kathleen Cadaver, Xavier and Peg Latteral, plus some others who came later and whose names I didn’t catch.
These people had all gone to the same parochial schools together along Long Island’s south shore, the same Catholic high schools, even the same Catholic colleges: Fordham and Catholic University. Their parents had also grown up together in the same settings, and for some of them the linkages extended back to grandparents. The fathers were in construction or real estate or banking, and the sons were in advertising or law or the communications media. This was the generation which had severed the last of its ties with its heritage — they were only sentimentally Irish and only nominally religious — and I had been cautioned on the way over not to mention the fact that I was, or had been (the confusion on that score wasn’t as yet settled), a monk. I had promised to say nothing about it.
In fact I said very little at all. Like most groups of people whose relationships extend back nearly to the cradle, this bunch spent most of the evening talking about those of their friends who had been so incautious as not to be present. There must have been some ears burning in Patchogue and Islip that night. I sat quietly in the corner amid the talk, sipping rum-and-something-sweet while rebuilding my strength and meditating on the similarities and differences between a secular social grouping like this and the more cohesive and purposeful grouping at the monastery. We monks did our own backbiting, of course, but it seemed to me a less important part of our relationship there than it was of the social structure here. If this entire group was ever gathered together into one spot, for instance, with no absent friends to discuss, what on earth would they find to talk about?
(I asked Eileen that question eventually — not that night — and she answered, “Dead people.”)
I was not the first monk to leave in the Crispinite Order’s two-hundred-year history, but I was the only one in my experience and I had no idea how to think about it from the group’s point of view. I tried to visualize one of the others leaving — Flavian, say, or Silas — and guess what my reaction would be, but it was impossible. Even if I surmounted the difficulty that I couldn’t visualize either of those two, nor any of the others, leaving the monastery, I was still left with the problem that my reaction would be different depending which brother it was who had chosen to depart.
Well, I was the one who had departed, so what would the others think and say about me? Fifteen bewildered faces passed across my imagination, but no words issued from any of those open mouths, nor could I guess at any emotions deeper than or subsequent to the initial surprise.
Perhaps that was partly because my own reaction hadn’t yet moved beyond bewilderment. In fact, it seemed to me as though no moment of decision had ever actually been reached, and yet somehow here I was on the other side of it. When had I decided I no longer had a religious vocation? When had I come to the conclusion that I could make my peace with God outside the monastery walls? When had I chosen to fling myself back into the river of the world?
I didn’t know. But here I was, in over my head.
My only other reaction to myself, beyond bewilderment, was a great fluttery nervousness. Whenever I tried to see more than five minutes into the future — what I would do, where I would live, how I would earn my daily bread, what would eventually happen between me and Eileen — I began at once to twitch and itch, fidget and scratch, gulp a lot and feel very queasy in the stomach. My solution to that was to avoid thought of the future as much as possible, and I quickly learned that the ever-present rum drinks were a considerable help in that direction. And if a thought of the morrow did from time to time infiltrate through my rum defenses, the rum at least helped to lessen the resultant jitters.
It also helped me to think more calmly about Eileen. The ice had been broken between us, so to speak, and I had learned that swimming was not the only facility that remained undimmed in its details over a decade, but when I was utterly sober and in my right mind — or my usual mind — I still felt embarrassed at the lechery of my thoughts when I looked at her. A little rum helped me to relax and accept the fact that, for instance, in the back seat of the Pinto I really did want to stroke her leg. And other things of that sort.
What a nervous time the morning was! But it wasn’t considered acceptable to start drinking rum until lunchtime, so I distracted myself with as much activity as possible: swimming, talking, shopping, going for drives. And my tendency was to avoid Eileen until I’d had a little something to calm me down.
I was beginning to answer now when people said, “Charlie.” Mostly I said, “Huh?” And there were always, it seemed, plenty of people around. The group I’d met Monday night continued to be a part of our landscape, a fluctuating informal grouping that tended to get together after lunch and more or less stay together until late at night. Joining them on Eileen’s visa, I accompanied them swimming at Luquillo Beach, gambling in San Juan and drinking at one or another of their rented houses. The days were far more full — and yet emptier — than in my previous life in the monastery, and I was a neophyte, learning this vocation. I kept quiet, watched and listened, and allowed the group consensus to determine my course.