So I had to open the packages. I started with the smallest, and it unwrapped to display an alarm clock, a travel alarm clock that folded shut into a tan leatherette square clam. Open, it was a wind-up alarm clock with a neat squarish face and, when I tested it, a discreet but no doubt effective buzz. “That’s very nice,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You really like it?”
“Yes, I do, honestly.” I tried to put as much enthusiasm into my voice and face as possible.
“You were a real problem,” she told me. “It’s hard to know what to get someone who doesn’t have anything.”
I went on to open the second package, and this present was a razor, an electric razor with an infinity of settings. “Ah,” I said, constructing fervor again. “I’ll cut myself no more.”
“And you can use it without plugging it in,” she explained, her fingers intermixing with mine as she pointed out the razor’s features. “You can either plug it in like any razor, or you can take it with you when you travel, and it will run for days and days without recharging.”
“That’s great,” I said, and opened the largest package of all, and it was luggage, a tan vinyl overnight bag. “Ah hah,” I said. “Something to put everything else in.”
“Do you really like everything?” she asked me.
“I like everything,” I told her, and then I told her a truth: “And I’m madly in love with you.”
Now I lived from moment to moment, like a blind man coming down a mountain. I awoke each morning full of tension and uncertainty and the wisps of bad dreams, I soothed myself with rum drinks each afternoon, and I devoted myself to the truth of my love for Eileen each evening and night. My problems were critical but not urgent, severe but insoluble. There seemed nothing I could do to help either myself or the monastery, so I settled into fretful inactivity instead, trying not to think.
On Sunday we went to Mass, all four of us from the house. There was a small ancient vine-covered church in the nearby town of Loiza Aldea, but this Mass attendance was as much a tourist expedition as a religious requirement, so we drove past that church and on the twenty miles to San Juan and the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista, which features primarily the marble tomb of Ponce de Léon inside, and a statue of the same fellow out front, pointing rather languidly into the middle distance. (Aside from his famous search for the fountain of youth, instead of which he discovered Florida, Ponce de Léon was the first Spanish governor of Puerto Rico.)
The Mass we attended there seemed an older and richer rite than what I was used to in New York, somehow more properly Roman Catholic and yet much more remote. I had thought I might be embarrassed there, or alternatively that I might take the opportunity to seek guidance, but this version of God seemed unlikely to cast either an Eye or an Ear in the direction of some insignificant sex-struck erring monk; it would take fire and blood to attract the attention of this southern God.
Coming back from Mass, we stopped along the way for lunch and drinks, then continued on with Neal driving while Eileen and I were stowed together in the back seat. I touched her leg, which was my frequent habit, and she pushed my hand away. I said, “What’s the matter?”
“Not right after Mass,” she said. She wouldn’t look at me, but frowned out her window instead. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Do you mean, never on Sunday?” The rum I’d taken on at lunch made me think things were funny.
“Not this Sunday,” she said, and the way she frowned made her look like a stranger.
We did, actually, late that evening, but there was a difference in it. My week of sex had awakened a hunger in me that had been dormant for a long long time, so that my hands seemed always now to be reaching out in Eileen’s direction and I wasn’t of a mind to be critical or analytical about individual encounters, but even I could tell this particular exercise lacked something. Eileen was more clinging and yet more removed, and I felt simultaneously sated and starved. We were like actors who had toured in a play together years ago and who now, on returning to the stage after a long absence, discovered that they remember all the lines and all the bits of stage business but have forgotten why they chose to do this play in the first place.
In the morning I called American Airlines. Eileen was not yet awake, and I spoke softly when I asked for a seat on the next plane leaving for New York. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the Spanish-accented voice, “we’re all booked for today.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Booked solid, sir,” she said. She managed to sound both cheerful and regretful at the same time. “I could put you on standby, if you like, but I don’t think there’s much hope, to be honest with you.”
This was absurd. Finally I wanted to Travel, and the gods of Travel wouldn’t permit it. I said, “Well, when can you book me?”
“Let me see, sir. Mm-hm, mm-hum. We could give you a seat on Wednesday morning’s flight.”
“Wednesday.” And this was barely into Monday: what would I do for the next two days?
“That’s right, sir. Do you wish to make a reservation?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That would be Wednesday, the three one of December,” she said.
The three one of December. New Year’s Eve, the last day of the deadline for the monastery. “That’s right,” I said.
So I was going; but where? Back to the monastery?
They’d take me back, I knew that, no matter what I had done during my time on the outside, but could I accept my presence there ever again? If the monastery, if its existence and its destruction (and my failure to stop that destruction), was a perpetual barrier between Eileen and me — and it was — wouldn’t it be just as much a barrier between the Order and me? When my brothers, some time this coming spring, were driven from their home to new quarters in some phased-out Job Corps campus or bankrupt soft-drink plant, how could I possibly include myself? How could I live among them there? I had been their last hope, and I had failed.
At first I’d thought my choice was between Eileen and the monastery, but in truth my range of options wasn’t even so broad as all that. I couldn’t possibly stay with Eileen if the loss of the monastery was a permanent fact between us, but neither could I save the monastery by giving up Eileen. I was giving her up, I was doing it now, but that was only because the very silly idea of our being together had run its course. I had to leave, but my reasons were private ones and I couldn’t use our separation to save the monastery. I couldn’t bring myself to fulfill Dan Flattery’s other demand. I just couldn’t tell her I had lied.
Of course, I should have done so. As Roger Dwarfmann had said, citing Scripture for his purpose, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” But I couldn’t do it, and that was my failure. I couldn’t go away leaving her to believe I was a liar and a con man, who had cheated her, who had not loved her.
She got up late that day, while I sat on the beach in front of the house — I’d carry quite a startling tan with me back to the cold dark northeast — rehearsing different ways to tell her that I couldn’t stay, that I was wrong for this world and any of her worlds. I was a monk again, whether I went back to the Crispinite Order or not. I would have to find some such place for myself; it was what I was fit for. Perhaps that Dismal Order of ex-thugs Brother Silas had told me about would take me in — I could join those felonious monks in whatever substitute San Quentin now housed them.