Brothers Keepers

Twelve

The house could not be seen until you were almost upon it, coming around the curving dirt road through the heavy jungle underbrush. And when first seen, it was far from impressive, a squat, one-story-high, flat-roofed structure with gray stucco walls and small louvered windows. It was neat enough, and so was the bit of lawn and garden hacked out of the jungle all about it, but I suppose I’d been expecting a fairy castle. This was simply a small blunt house tucked into a fold in the coastline, with the Atlantic Ocean just in front, nibbling modestly at a small white sand beach.

I was very hot and very tired, and I’m sure my face was sweaty and dusty, but now that I was here I very much wanted to get this interview over and done with. No, the truth is, I didn’t want to face Eileen at all. I shrank from it so completely that the only possible method was to leap forward, shove myself into the scene and hope for the best.

The dirt road, having approached the house from the side, now skirted around to the front. I followed it, glancing at the ocean with some longing — I would have enjoyed lolling in that cool-looking water for half an hour or so, clothing and all — and then I went up the cement steps to the tile-floored small front porch. Humming sounds from the air-conditioner rumps sticking out of two windows suggested that someone was at home. The front door consisted mainly of frosted glass louvers, tightly shut. There was no bell, so I knocked on the metal part of the door.

I had to knock twice more before I got any response, and then it was a sleepy male voice that called through the louvers, “Who is it?”

Raising my own voice to something just under a shout, I said, “I’m looking for Eileen Flattery.”

“And who are you?” The door remained firmly shut.

“Brother Benedict.”

“You’re what?”

“Tell her it’s Brother Benedict.”

The louvers cranked open, and a puffy face squinted out at me. “Good Christ,” it said. The louvers cranked shut again, and for quite some time nothing at all occurred. During that interval, I had much leisure to consider whether or not the puffy face was another “young man” of Eileen’s, and to decide it couldn’t possibly be. Couldn’t possibly.

I was gazing seaward, trying not to think how hot and uncomfortable (and apprehensive) I was, when the louvers abruptly cranked open again. I spun back, but too late. There was a quick after-image of startled eyes peering out, but the louvers were already folding shut once more, like something in a Busby Berkeley musical number.

Had that been Eileen? Possibly, but I couldn’t be sure, and when a minute later the entire door opened, revealing a dim wicker-bedecked interior and releasing a fall of tomblike air, the person who gestured gracelessly at me to enter, while saying, “Come on in,” was puffy-face again.

“Thank you.” Stepping from one tile pattern to another, I entered the house, with its cold dead air and its gauzy gray illumination, and my perspiration-soaked robe immediately froze solid.

Puffy-face closed the door and extended a puffy hand to me. Since he was wearing nothing but an open white terrycloth jacket, a skimpy red bathing suit and pink rubber shower clogs, I could see that he was puffy all over, a tall young man who had gone completely to seed twenty years ahead of schedule. “The name’s McGadgett,” he claimed. “Neal McGadgett.”

“Brother Benedict,” I repeated, and accepted the handshake. Within the puffiness, his hand was strong.

“Eileen’ll be out in a minute,” he said. He seemed neither hostile nor friendly, but merely cloaking impersonal curiosity. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Coke?”

I was beginning to shiver inside my cold robe. “Coffee would be fine,” I said. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”

“No trouble,” he said, with a shrug. “Sit down.” And he went away through an arched doorway in the far end of the room, calling out, “Sheila! One more coffee!” Then he leaned back into the room: “How do you take it?”

I told him regular, he bellowed the information to Sheila, and I was left alone. Settling myself into the nearest wicker chair, trying to keep the colder and wetter parts of my robe from touching my body, I looked around at a large bare-looking room which seemed to have been furnished more for low-maintenance functionalism than for either personal style or general appearance. Airline posters were tacked to the walls, there were no personal knickknacks on the small tables scattered among the wicker chairs, and the air-conditioner covering me with its icy breath had a blunt gray-metal facade. So this must be a rented house, rather than a place owned by Eileen or one of her friends. I don’t know why that should have made any difference, but for some reason it increased my discomfort to know I would be meeting with her in a Travelers’ way-station rather than a home; anyone’s home.

A door in the side wall suddenly opened and Eileen walked out, barefoot and wearing a pale blue knee-length robe. She gave me a brooding troubled look, then turned away to close the door behind her, and when she faced me again she’d shifted to the old amused expression. But I didn’t believe it.

Walking toward me, she said, “Well. Fancy meeting you here.”

I got to my feet, unable to decide whether my face wanted to smile or to be solemn. I left it to its own devices, so I suppose it looked seasick, which is the way I felt. “I’m as surprised as you are,” I said.

“Sit down, sit down. Are they getting us coffee?”

“I think so, yes.”

We sat in wicker chairs at right angles to one another, and she said, “I thought you people didn’t believe in travel.”

“Only when necessary,” I said.

“Is this trip necessary?” She grinned but it was still the mask.

“You told me you could help us save the monastery,” I reminded her.

“Did I?” With half a grin still clinging to her lips she faced me for a few seconds, then looked away.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

Her eyes snapped back to mine, and she leaned forward, suddenly intense, and suddenly very angry. “Butter wouldn’t melt in your goddam mouth, would it?”

I blinked. “What?”

“You’ve got the hots for me, you son of a bitch, and you know it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“What?”

“I said yes.”

“Yes? That’s all, just yes?”

“I haven’t been able to think straight since I met you,” I said. “But that isn’t—”

“You mean you love me?” She thrust that out as fiercely as if it were a javelin.

“Love you? I think I am you,” I said. “Some broken-off piece of you, trying to get home.”

“You’re crazy,” she said. “Look at you, dressed in that robe, talking to me like that. You’re a monk.”

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” I told her.

“Then why don’t you get out of my life?”

“Don’t you think I want to?” We were arguing all at once, we were glaring fiercely at one another, and yet I could feel an inane smile trembling about my lips, straining to reveal itself. Although I was hugely angry, enraged at this stupid girl for turning me into such a bewildered silly wreck, I knew somehow it wasn’t really anger I felt at all. My brain was full of dammed-up emotions, contradictory and embarrassing and even frightening, and anger was simply the only way to let them all out.

And it was the same with Eileen. I could see that and sense it, the same relieved smile struggling to show itself on her lips, and (God help me) I rejoiced in the knowledge. Rejoiced angrily, of course.

She was saying, “You’re lousing up my life, do you know that?”

“Well,” I said, “you’re doing the same thing to me. And I was happy in my life.”

She ducked her head, the better to glare at me. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning you were unhappy,” I told her. “Any fool could see that.”

“Is that what you came down here for, to tell me I’m unhappy?” The joy of anger had drained out of her now, and she seemed on the brink of angry tears.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t want—”

“What are you here for anyway? Who asked for you?”

“The monas—”

“Oh, shut up about that stupid monastery!”

“All right,” I said, and grabbed the lapel of her robe to yank her close, and when McGadgett came in to announce breakfast the girl in the blue bathrobe was being kissed by the runaway monk.

The tall and irritable blonde wielding the spatula in the kitchen was introduced as Sheila Foney, “Neal’s girl.” Neal’s girl; meaning that Neal was not Eileen’s young man. And while there were four places set for breakfast, one of them had a certain indefinable air of afterthought to it, and I wasn’t at all surprised when that one turned out to be my place. So there were no occupants of the house other than these three, Eileen and Neal and Neal’s girl, and I was a fourth wheel, not a fifth.

That had suddenly become very important to me. Instinctively and self-protectively I recoiled from contemplation of what that kissing scene in the living room had actually meant, and remained for as long as I could at the level of bewildered delight: happy that I had kissed her, happy that she had no boyfriend here. There was no possible way to think about my future, so I wallowed in the pleasures of the present.

Neal’s girl, Sheila Foney, was in a mood as foul as mine was fair, though it seemed mostly a personality trait and not directed at anyone present. She stamped around like somebody who’s just been insulted by a bus driver, and she was far too caught up in the grievances of her own life to take much notice of a robed and cowled monk abruptly at her table. McGadgett, on the other hand, ignored his girlfriend’s grouchiness and thought Eileen and me both very humorous. While he shoveled in great quantities of scrambled egg, fried sausage and toasted English muffin, he kept giving us sidelong smirks of confederacy, as though we were all conspirators together.

As for Eileen, she seemed mainly embarrassed. She avoided my gaze most of the time, acting calm and unruffled, as though determined to maintain her dignity in the face of some silly humiliation, but when perchance our eyes did meet she blushed and became suddenly flustered and awkward and at the same time soft, as though she were melting from within.

Myself, I was freezing from without. Breakfast was eaten in a large tile-and-plaster-and-Formica combination kitchen-dining room equipped with its own chill-breathing air-conditioner, and my wet robe was just getting clammier and clammier no matter how much hot food I put in my stomach. Halfway through the meal I started to sneeze.

It apparently gave Eileen an excuse to look at me. “What’s the matter? You’re shivering!”

“My robe’s a little wet,” I admitted. “From the walk.”

“Neal,” she said, “find something for him to wear, until we can get to the store.”

“Sure,” he said, and turned his friendly look toward me. “Now?”

“Finish breakfast first,” I told him. “It’s not that bad.” Though it was. I was feeling queasy and light-headed, and I wasn’t sure if that meant I was in love or had the flu. The symptoms seemed to be the same.

All of McGadgett’s clothing was too large and lumpish. I had become very self-conscious about my appearance all at once, so I spent a long time testing different items of clothing in front of the dresser mirror before finally settling on a pair of red boxer-style swimming trunks and a white pullover shirt that didn’t look too bad in its billowy fashion. Then I dawdled in the bedroom another two or three minutes, hesitant to show myself.

But there was no point stalling any longer. Reluctant, awkward, self-conscious, I took my nearly naked body out of the bedroom and into the living room, where Sheila Foney, wearing an astonishing pink string bikini, was irritably on the telephone, saying, “You don’t seem to realize you have certain responsibilities.” Seeing me, she told the phone, “Hold on a minute,” capped the mouthpiece with her palm, and said to me, “They’re at the beach.”

“Thank you,” I said, and hurried outside, not wanting to hear any more of her conversation.

McGadgett was out at the pocket beach in front of the house, supine beneath the sun, wearing a multicolored cousin of the swimming trunks he’d loaned me. Great dark glasses covered his eyes and much of the rest of his face, and his pinkish flesh gleamed with either suntan lotion or perspiration. Out in the water, Eileen floated on her back in the easy swell, her body trisected by narrow lavender bands of bathing suit.

The heat and humidity seemed much worse now that I’d grown used to air-conditioning. Plowing barefoot across the sand, I felt myself growing soggy again, and was already anticipating the chill the next time I would go inside. Why did people treat themselves in such a way?

McGadgett lifted his head slightly at my arrival, grinning his overly familiar grin. “Welcome to civilian life,” he said.

“Thank you. I guess I’ll...” And I gestured vaguely toward the ocean and Eileen.

“Be my guest.” And he lowered his smiling head to his beach towel again.

I removed the pullover shirt and ran into the water, which was cold but refreshing. I hadn’t swum in years, but the movements came effortlessly back to me, and I stroked steadily out to where Eileen was now treading water and watching my progress with a dubious expression on her face. “You look like everybody else,” she said, when I got there.

I couldn’t help laughing. “You mean you only love me in my uniform?”

“Maybe so,” she said, and swam away from me.

I didn’t know how to take that — I didn’t know how to take anything — so I didn’t follow her. Instead, I floated awhile as she had been doing, my closed eyes toward the sun and my mind just starting to pick experimentally at the scab of my recent experiences. Who was I now, and what was I going to do with myself?

“Listen, you.”

I opened my eyes, and she was back. Lowering my legs so I could tread water, I said, “Mm?”

She was squinting determinedly in the sunlight, as though she’d come to a firm decision to take charge. “Are you really going to hang around here with me?”

“If you want me,” I said.

“Don’t put it on me, you son of a bitch,” she said.

I said, “I mean I want to stay with you, but if you tell me to go away I’ll go away.”

That disgusted her, for some reason. “Oh, go away,” she said, and turned about as though to swim to some other part of the ocean.

“No,” I said.

She swam in a circle and came back to me, frowning. “I thought you said you’d go away if I told you to go away.”

“Only if you meant it,” I explained. “Only if you really don’t want me. Bad temper doesn’t count.”

She paddled about for a minute, thinking that one over, then came back and said, “I’m bad-tempered most of the time.”

“Why?”

She glared at me. “If you’re going to be my boyfriend,” she said, “you’d better stop talking to me like some wise old priest.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t feel like any wise old anything.”

“And that’s something else,” she said. “I’ll be darned if I’m going to call you Brother Benedict.”

“I agree.”

“So, what then? Ben? Benny?”

“My real name,” I said, the whole sentence being cumbersome in my mouth, “is Charles. Uh, Rowbottom.”

“Charles. What did they used to call you? Chuck? Charley?”

“Charlie,” I said.

“Which one? IE Charlie or EY Charley?”

I thought back, surprised at the question and trying to remember. Nicknames are mostly spoken, but from time to time there’d be notes... “IE,” I decided.

“Good,” she said.

“What’s the difference?”

“EY Charleys are irresponsible,” she stated, then said, “I’m getting tired out here. Let’s go in for a while.”

McGadgett had disappeared, taking his beach towel with him, leaving behind the pullover shirt and one other beach towel. “I’ll get you a towel,” Eileen said.

“I’ll get one,” I said, and started for the house, but she held up a hand like a traffic cop and said, “Wait there, I know where they are. Besides, they might be screwing in there and we don’t want to bring you along too fast.”

So she went for the towel, and I stood on the beach and thought about screwing. I had not entered the monastery at age twenty-four completely inexperienced, but ten years is a long time, and now I stood before the concept of screwing the way a small child stands before the star-filled night sky, feeling its vast mystery and its close fascination in tiny tremors behind the knees.

By the time she came back I was a flustered wreck, unable to look her in the eye and certainly unable to look at any other part of her. But she didn’t notice, or at least gave no sign that she’d noticed. “You better not stay out here too long,” she said, handing me a folded-up towel. “It’s your first day in the sun.”

“That it is,” I said. The towel, unfolded, showed a smiling couple with their arms around one another in a sailboat. I sat on them, and Eileen sat near me on her own towel, and for a while we remained like that in companionable silence.

Then Eileen said, “I think you’ve had enough sun. We’ll take the car and go get you some clothes.”

“I don’t see how,” I said.

“What? I don’t follow.”

“Well,” I said, “I spent the monastery’s money to get here. I can’t do that anymore, and I don’t have any money of my own.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“But I have to worry about it. You need money to live in this world.”

“Look, Buh—” She shook her head, in mock annoyance at herself, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get there. Charlie. Look, Charlie.”

I smiled at her; she delighted me. “I’ll answer to any name you want to use,” I said.

She gave me an ironic look. “You’ve been saving up those zingers for years, huh? Just waiting to hit some poor girl with the whole bunch of them at once.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“But the subject,” she said, “is money.”

“And that I don’t have any.”

“You don’t need any.”

“Of course I do.”

“Look, Charlie,” she said, and nodded in satisfaction. “Got it right that time.” Then she went on: “I live off my father, Neal lives off his mother, and Sheila lives off her ex-husband. You might as well live off us for a while, if only to even the score a bit.”

I said, “I can’t take money from a—”

She stopped me with a sternly pointing finger. “I’ll have you know I’m a Ms.,” she said (pronounced Mizz), “and you’d better be very careful how you finish that sentence.”

I closed my mouth.

“I thought so,” she said, got to her feet and gathered up her towel. “Come on, pig,” she said.

“Come on where?”

“First we get you out of the sun while I throw on my city clothes, then we drive to San Juan and get you decently dressed.”

I felt as though there were arguments I should be presenting, but I couldn’t think what they were. Besides, Eileen was already heading for the house, and the sun was in fact feeling very hot on my shoulders. So off I went.

After the shopping expedition, we went to one of the beach-front hotels for a drink. I was dressed now in white slacks, a pale blue shirt and sandals which were much lighter and flimsier than the ones I’d always worn in the monastery. But those of course had been handmade by Brother Flavian, who made all our shoes.

As to Eileen, she was also in white slacks and sandals now, plus an orange halter. The attention she got from other men confirmed my own feeling that she was something special, out of the ordinary.

We sat in a shaded air-conditioned lounge, in a corner with windows on two sides. In one direction we could see the crowded swimming pool and in the other direction the big empty beach. We were both drinking some sort of rum concoction, pink and sweet and full of fruit juice. I was already light-headed, from the sun and the events of the day, and I doubted this drink would have much effect on me.

We seemed to have no small talk, Eileen and I, though that didn’t mean our silences were comfortable. We were both twitchy and nervous, glancing quickly at one another and then away, and abruptly dropping into speech. For instance, after our second drink arrived I said, “What was Kenny Bone like?”

She looked at me. “Was? I’m not a widow, I’m divorced.”

“I meant, what was he like during the marriage?”

“Like you,” she said.

I stared. “What?”

“Don’t take it as a compliment,” she said. “He was an unexpected lunatic, a turn for the worse, a complicated crazy man.”

“Oh,” I said.

She made wet circles on the table with her drink, watching them with great concentration. “I thought I could take care of him,” she said. “Protect him from the world.” Her lips curled in what might have been a smile, and she said, “Be his monastery.”

“What was he?”

“A loony.”

“I mean, what did he do?”

“I know what you meant,” she said, and drank down half of her drink. “Sometimes,” she said, “he claimed he was a poet, sometimes a playwright, sometimes a songwriter. And he could do it all just as well as the real thing, so long as the fit was on him.”

“And in between?”

“Fifty percent mush and fifty percent paint remover.”

“And you think I’m like that?”

“No.” She shook her head, but not very enthusiastically. “I don’t know what kind of hell you are,” she said, “but I have my suspicions.”

“Where is he now?”

She shrugged. “Probably London. But it doesn’t matter, he wouldn’t give me a reference.”

“Did you divorce him or did he divorce you?”

“I divorced him,” she said, “partly because I didn’t want to talk about him anymore.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She reached over to place her non-drinking hand on my non-drinking hand. “I don’t mean to be bad-tempered,” she told me. “It just seems to come natural, under the circumstances.”

I said, “What are the circumstances? Would you mind telling me what we’re doing?”

“You ask too many questions, copper,” she snarled, and finished her drink. “Come on, let’s drive back to the house.”

It was strange to whiz back and forth in sunlight over the road I had walked in darkness. Strange, but not informative. The light showed me land and swamp and stunted trees and occasional sagging buildings, but it didn’t show me anything I needed to know.

The car we were in, a rental shared by everyone in the house, was called a Pinto, even though it was only one color; yellow. At one point in the drive back I said, “Shouldn’t a Pinto be two colors? This is more a Saffron, isn’t it?” But Eileen didn’t know what I was talking about, so I let it go. Also, I wasn’t feeling very good.

Shortly after we turned off the main road onto the road to Loiza Aldea I said, “Eileen.”

“Yes?” She half-turned her face toward me, but kept her eyes on the bumps ahead.

I said, “Can a grown-up be carsick?”

She gave me a startled look, then braked at once to a stop. “You look terrible!”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to feel this way and look wonderful.”

She touched my wet forehead and said, “You’re all clammy. You’re coming down with something.”

“I’m also coming up with something,” I said, and struggled out of the Saffron and did it.

Maybe there’s something to be said for this business of psychosomatics. If there is, Sheila Foney said it. She told me the whole story, in her brisk argumentative way, when I was once again healthy — that the body’s illnesses reflect the mind’s disturbances. “A runny nose is a way to deal with unexpressed weeping,” she said, with her self-confident face that seemed never to have known either snot or tears.

But maybe so. I’d almost never been sick during my ten years in the monastery, and here I was barely into secular clothing when I got the flu, complete with vomiting and diarrhea and sweating and incredible weakness. Maybe I was, as Sheila bluntly explained, punishing myself with all that, and getting out my grief and confusion as well.

On the other hand, there’d been the night without sleep on the plane, the sudden transfer from the cold of December in New York to the heat and mugginess of Puerto Rico, the twenty-mile walk in the humid night air, the alternations between heat and air-conditioning, my damp robe freezing on me during breakfast, the unfamiliar dip in the ocean...

Well. Whatever the cause, I spent the rest of Saturday, all day Sunday and part of Monday in bed, mostly asleep except for occasional staggering runs to the toilet, and generally feeling like something that had been eaten by a dog. (It neatly, by the way, solved the problem of what I would have done about Sunday Mass, which is another one up for the psychosomatic theory.)

Toward the end I had a dream, in which I was twins, one of me hot and one cold, and when I awoke I was very hot because Eileen was asleep next to me with one arm and one leg thrown over me, weighing me down, and she was shivering with cold because the air-conditioning was (inevitably) on and she was on top of the covers. “Hey,” I said, and she snarfled and moved somewhat, but didn’t wake up, and for a while I didn’t know what to do about it.

Then I took time out to realize I didn’t feel as rotten as usual. I was generally so weak my ears were hanging down, but the clammy perspiration no longer sheathed me, my stomach no longer felt like a sailor knot, and there was no urgent need for me to run to the bathroom. The flu had gone, leaving the local population with the task of reconstruction.

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.