I'm Glad About You(93)

He phoned the office—emergency family leave—and then he texted Van to tell her where he was. Not that she cared, but he wasn’t going to give her any excuse to sue him for abandonment or in any way damn him further. The spectacular permutations of her logic in laying the blame for this at his feet overwhelmed him daily; a terrible rage would unleash itself like some sort of mindless undersea creature determined to strangle the life out of him. Her declaration that he was to blame for her infidelity, that he was responsible for her utter betrayal, after everything he had suffered, lost, mourned, on her behalf. His dreams of accomplishment and joy, gone. His children, taught to see him as an enemy. His parents, yearning for grandchildren she willfully held away from them. The woman was a f*cking holy terror.

He did not know how long this bitterness might consume him, nor did he know how long the good brothers would allow him to live among them without finally asking a question or two about his plans. By the end of his second week in retirement from the world, the steady hum of prayer and spiritual good will actually began to do its work, and he could go for longer stretches between seizures. He texted Susan, asked her to let his parents know he was on retreat at Gethsemani. He knew that simple detail would ease their anxiety, and in this moment of bewildered compassion—they must be worried sick—he began to find his way back.

Brother Peter joined him in the cafeteria for a 5:30 breakfast one morning, and after they had prayed over their eggs and toast, he asked a gentle question.

“Have you found comfort, in your time here with us?”

“I have, yes,” Kyle responded, a little too quickly. It made him sound glib, which was the last thing he wanted. The few words you might use in a place like this should all matter.

“How long are you able to be here with us?”

“I would like to stay forever,” Kyle confessed.

The brother nodded. So much silence. It was different from his own silence, which too often placed a wall between himself and Van, or the girls, or the nurses. He remembered that Alison once accused him of using silence as a weapon.

“My wife,” Kyle began. He faltered. What was there to say about Van? Was she really his wife? She said she wasn’t, but if not, then what was it that they were to each other? “She wants to end our marriage.”

“That must be painful.”

Was it painful? Certainly the rages which overwhelmed him when he considered her vast betrayals were painful. Less so the distance, the time, the fact that he didn’t have to face her determined disappointment every single day. “The situation is painful, but I find my time here to be wonderful,” he said. “I don’t want to go back.”

Peter nodded at this and even smiled, rueful. “Everybody’s trying to escape,” he admitted. “Most days, I’d give anything to escape from here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t find it a little prison-like? Those tiny rooms? The marching to chapel every three hours to pray for half an hour? The work details? The monotony?”

“I think it’s great.”

“Try it for ten years.” It sounded like blasphemy but Peter was completely content to admit it, and seemed to have no fear of being overheard. “But life isn’t something we’re meant to escape. Or rather, we are meant to escape it, profoundly, in death. While we are here, we are meant to live it.”

“Then you don’t see the monastery as an escape.”

“For me it was a choice. Were I to abandon it, I would be abandoning myself. Which would be the same as abandoning God. So I wish to escape, but I choose to live through that wish, to discover what wisdom God might choose to bestow.”

“Might?”

“Yes, that’s the problem, isn’t it? He might just decide to bore me to death. But I suspect he has better plans, for both of us.”

This ruthlessness of choice was completely belied, of course, by the life of their saint Mr. Merton. Kyle was finally permitted to accompany one of the older monks to the site of Merton’s hermitage, down a simple path through a few charming thickets to a clearing where a humble cinder-block structure stood. He had long known the story of the famous writer, who actually couldn’t decide between a life of prayerful seclusion or a life in the world. But those fates were afforded to great men. The longer Kyle stayed and pondered God’s will, the more he felt the constrictions of his psychological trap. These good monks would not send him back to his life, but neither would they make him one of their number. Unlike Merton, who found a way to straddle two identities, Kyle would be left floating between them. And so he got in his car and drove back to Cincinnati.

Which frankly threw Van into a rage. When Kyle reappeared on the threshold of his own home, she practically spit in his face, and not over the fact that he had left in the first place. It had actually suited her just fine to have him disappear for a whole month; she was free, in that time, to do as she pleased. She and the girls had fallen into a routine that fit them, and her besotted suitor had even taken the opportunity to begin insinuating himself into the role of husband and father. Not that Van admitted as much; Kyle had put that one together when he found a half-eaten grilled rib-eye in the refrigerator and she had fumbled her explanation of what it was doing there. The whole thing was appalling, but he wasn’t going to get into some circular argument about it. His new goal was simply to make his choices functional. He called the parish office and asked for a recommendation for a couple’s counselor.