I'm Glad About You (19 page)

“What happened to Paris?”

“It’s still there, last I checked. Hasn’t gone anywhere.”

“You were supposed to be on that plane.”

“I postponed.”

“Why?”

“You know what, Rob? You don’t get to ask. You’re here with Sheila on her
birthday
and you and I are
done
. And we’ve been done for long enough that I don’t have to tell you
anything
about
anything
ever again.” This was another new line; she was supposed to say something inane about questions and the past, which honestly made no sense at all. His cue was completely screwed up, but he loved it when she messed with the words; Bradley actually was so bored with acting that he loved being thrown off balance. She decided not to wait to see what he improvised in response and just started moving. As she took a step away from him he grabbed her wrist and yanked her back. She staggered with a sudden impetuous anger, tried to pull away. The physical contact was intoxicating.

“Get your hands off me,” she warned him.

He didn’t comply. “This
isn’t
done,” he informed her, simply and inexorably going back to the script.

“It is,” she said. But her resolve was weakening as quickly as it had built. Still gripping her arm, Bradley took a step inward, which surprised her and threatened to push her off balance, but she held her ground and they ended up in an intimate close-up instead. At moments like this her height was a real advantage; no other leading lady could go toe to toe with Bradley, who hovered, in stocking feet, above six foot two. But her five foot ten plus heels made a shaky clinch the easiest thing in the world to shoot. She wobbled but Bradley’s left arm caught and held her around the waist. The Steadicam operator crept in, danced around them, capturing the moment of indecision.

They were so close to kissing, and they had been waiting for that kiss for too much time, and so had the fans. Alison felt herself fading into an ancient longing to be held and valued and even worshiped. Bradley held her, uncertain—the scene was meant to go much longer, and the fight was meant to be more fierce, and the collision of lovers was meant to be more violent, more filled with disappointment and pain and a rash hunger for sexual connection. But in that stumbling half step, where her body instinctively refused to back away and her scene partner felt no more urge to push her, the two actors knew they were meant to represent the union of man and woman, and that further rage and conflict was not necessary. Bradley leaned in and kissed her for both of them, and their sojourn in the wilderness, and also for the fans of the tsunami, who wanted not so much a ruthless and relentless fuck on a pool table in some tawdry back room, but an answer to their yearning for relief from the exhaustion of what it meant to be human.

“Cut cut cut! Okay, that was great, guys, but we left a lot of the script on the floor,” the director moaned at them from the darkness behind the cameras, but they could not let go of each other.
Fiction, this is all fiction
, Alison reminded herself,
the whole of my life is fiction.
Bradley’s hands were inside that perfect sweater. Some of this take might be usable. In spite of the fact that they had gone completely off script.

Rage and wrangling ensued. They shot the scene the way it was written. Alison went home to her empty apartment, and Bradley went home to his wife.

ten

T
HE OLD PRIEST
made a terrible patient. Slumped forward on the edge of the examining table, his eyes gazed up at Kyle with watery disinterest.

“How is your digestion? Is there any reflux? Up in your throat, do you feel a burning sensation?”

More staring.

“Bowel movements regular?”

Kyle felt a vague tension creeping along his jawline. He knew that the monks took a vow of silence, but he had been told that it wasn’t anything they adhered to rigorously. How was he going to diagnose this old man’s digestive malfunction, whatever it was, if he wouldn’t even answer a simple question?

“I realize that you have taken a vow of silence but you will have to communicate with me, Father. If I ask you a question, can you write down the answer? That’s all right, isn’t it?” The priest continued to simply stare, but there was a whisper of movement behind him, and a hand was laid upon the doctor’s shoulder with such tender grace that for a moment Kyle thought that in fact he was the patient, not the old man.

“He has dementia. Some days are better than others.” The second monk, bespectacled, was nearly bald, but rigorous, clear, and sensible, decades younger. He took the old priest’s hand as he spoke. Lifted so lightly upon the younger man’s open palm, Kyle now could see the palsy there. “Father Timothy, this is the new doctor, he’s going to be with us for a whole week, while Dr. Murrough has his operation in Louisville. This is Dr. Wallace. He needs to ask you some questions about why you’ve not been eating. Can you answer his questions today?” Father Timothy stared at the young monk with the same indifference he had directed at Kyle mere moments before.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware,” Kyle began.

“I apologize for that, someone should have mentioned it. On his good days he’s fine. People want to believe that means he’s on the mend. He’s very beloved.” The younger monk continued to hold the old priest’s hand with such simple affection that Kyle felt his throat tighten with emotion. The unself-conscious use of the word “beloved” caught him by surprise. Father McManahan, the friendly parish administrator who had informed Kyle that the Abbey of Gesthemani monastery needed a doctor to oversee their infirmary for a week, had filled him in on barely anything and Kyle had arrived carrying the slenderest set of facts: The regular physician, one Dr. Murrough, was scheduled for hernia surgery. The doctor meant to replace him had come down with a bronchial infection. They needed someone right away. The monastery was a good two-hour drive from Cincinnati, so it would be best for him to be in residence there, where they could put him up in the retreat hall. They realized it was a lot to ask, but it would be only a week. Kyle’s internal monologue had a quick enough answer to all of it:
Only a week?
My daily life is a Gethsemani. This one might be an actual break.

Which of course was completely unfair, absurd even, or at least it would have seemed that way to anyone who knew him. The past three years had slipped by with an idyllic ease. He was successful and well liked at Pediatrics West and had even been encouraged to take on some of the practice’s shifts at the local hospital. He and Van lucked into a charming prewar house in an exclusive section of Hyde Park, which they would never have been able to afford under normal circumstances, but the market was wobbly and the sellers were desperate. He hadn’t wanted to take on the debt, but Van’s parents stepped up and released the money they had been holding in trust for her from her grandparents. It was her money and she was his wife; there was no way to refuse, and why would he? The property was beautiful, with old-growth trees and dazzling azalea bushes, and the kitchen had just been redone with a Sub-Zero freezer and a chef’s stovetop. The wood detailing was stunning, the neighborhood impeccable. Van was in love with the location and the eccentric charm of the architecture. And there was money left over to pay off almost half of his med school loans! He was in his late twenties, and already he had money, health, looks, a great job, a gorgeous house, and his wife was beautiful, sociable, and educated. No one would have called his life a Gethsemani.

Still. When he mentioned to Van that he had been asked to take on this one week of service for the monks at the monastery, she had feigned enthusiasm for the idea with the clear implication that she would be enthusiastic about anything that would get him out of her hair. At two and a half, Maggie was the charming center of Van’s attention; they lived in a world of gold ringlets and stuffed animals and sticker books and fairy princesses. Oh, and new babies. In her seventh month Van was blooming, as they say, with expectant hopes that her second child would be a little brother for her spectacularly adorable first. The three of them—the second child already had such a vivid reality it was hard to think of it as a fetus—traveled in a kind of bubble apart from him. People stopped them on the street to coo about how lovely Van looked, and how cute Maggie was, and how the second pregnancy was going. And could these total strangers put their hands on her belly to see if the baby within would obligingly twitch on their behalf? At times Kyle wanted to partake in all this delightful nonsense, but it was a world that held him at bay with an insistent feminine disdain. He had heard that some little girls preferred their fathers, and he had even seen it, at the pediatrics practice, girls clinging to men who haplessly admitted that it created real problems at home when she wouldn’t go to bed for her mother. This would never be Kyle’s fate, at least not with his first child, who was so patently averse to him no matter what he did that he was convinced that behind his back Van had been poisoning her mind with tales of Kyle’s dark and loveless heart.

Was his heart dark and loveless? It certainly never felt that way, although it would have been difficult for him to use the word “beloved” for the women in his life with the ease of this young monk, whose gaze upon the ancient priest spoke eloquently of that blessing. Now that Kyle had been forced to slow himself down and quiet his nerves, he could see that the old man—what had the younger monk called him? Father Timothy?—must be in his eighties. He glanced at the chart before him. Father Timothy was ninety-four.

Kyle felt a stirring of panic in the pit of his stomach. He shouldn’t have missed that. But the drive from Cincinnati had been stressful. There was more traffic than he expected and the directions he had pulled off the internet were just a shred too convoluted to figure out while simultaneously operating a car. Having crawled through the city traffic, he found himself wandering down circuitous country lanes which carried him past luscious horse farms before going nowhere, so he’d had to pull into gas stations twice to make sure he was on the right road. When he finally arrived he was already tired, even though it was only ten in the morning. The monk at the front desk of the retreat house had kindly suggested he say hello over at the infirmary before he took his things to his room, but when he got there the receptionist assumed he was already settled in, and she handed him a chart as soon as he walked through the door. Now here he was, in the middle of an examination before he had even landed. No wonder he’d missed a few clues.

“Ninety-four,” he commented. “That’s impressive.”

“Our community is aging,” the young monk explained. “Father Timothy is one of the oldest, but over half are in their seventies and eighties.” His statements were so simple. They bespoke a world of trouble, but there was no trouble in him. His calm goodwill toward both Kyle and the old priest was preternatural.

“I’m sorry, what is your name?”

“I am Brother Peter.”

“Ah.” Kyle had the urge to shake Brother Peter’s hand, but it wasn’t extended. A patient silence bloomed around them as the two men sat before Kyle and waited for him to explain what he knew, which wasn’t much.

“Do you see Father Timothy often enough to give me a sense of his symptoms?” Kyle glanced down at the useless chart and presented his inquiry with a confidence he didn’t feel. He should have asked a few questions before he took this on. But when McManahan had told him of the monastery’s predicament, all his Catholic boyhood training kicked in and flattered some deep sense of wounded pride. He had taken on the study of medicine because he wanted to work with the poor, to heal the sick, and it was humiliating, every day, to find himself once again trapped in that hyperprivileged country club version of a medical practice called Pediatrics West. Although he was popular with the nurses and most of the other doctors there, he had never felt comfortable with the suburban parents and their round pink children who wore him out with their blatant lack of need. This opportunity to come work with the monks, even for only a week, entered his private conundrum and moved through his spirit like a balm. It had never occurred to him that maybe he wouldn’t be qualified.

“We all eat, pray, and live together, and many of us work together too, although Father Timothy has become too frail of late for the real hard labor,” Brother Peter said with a smile at the old man. It was meant to be a light attempt at teasing, but Father Timothy was completely out of it. Kyle had a hard time believing that “some days were better than others”; from what he could now see, the dementia was advanced. “This past week several of us noticed that he really hasn’t been eating anything at all. Obviously it is a concern to everyone.”

“Are there any other symptoms of distress? Does he suffer from incontinence or diarrhea?”