Things as They Are (29 page)

The man hauled nothing down the passageway but himself.

Propped on crutches, he dragged legs encumbered by heavy braces, propelling them forward with violent spasms of effort, groaning as he swung on his crutches and his lifeless legs struck the floor rhythmically, again and again, with a dull, metallic clunk. Throwing himself at the swinging door, he drove it recklessly open with his braced legs, rattled through, and disappeared from sight. Behind the door lay chapel and monastery proper. Was he answering the call of the bells?

Greer hurried back to bed. Although it was June, what he had just seen left him feeling cold.

In the mornings following, Greer found himself waking earlier and earlier in anticipation of the unholy racket in the hallway.
It was deeply unsettling, but he could hardly complain about what the unfortunate man couldn’t help. Still, Greer was losing sleep and, worse, the whispered mutterings and groans got his working day off to a bad start, lent it a troubling, slightly surreal air.

I came to write a book and instead I find myself starring in a Bergman film, Greer told himself, trying to laugh it off.

But the Bergman film continued, even out of doors. Strolling in the monastery grounds Greer was astounded by the number of elderly, disabled monks he encountered: hunchbacks and clubfoots, the mildly retarded and profoundly disfigured. Meeting handicapped brothers on the gravelled paths, he hurried by them with nothing more than a curt nod of the head. He couldn’t help himself. The sight of them, infirmities cloaked in medieval-looking habits, increased his free-floating anxiety. For Greer, the whole place was taking on a gothic air.

He discreetly questioned Diane, one of the women who served in the dining hall reserved for the abbey’s guests, about the handicapped monks and she explained. Fifty years ago, Catholic parents concerned about what might happen to a disabled son after they died would encourage him to seek to become a brother in the monastery. If he were accepted, his parents were assured they need never worry about his future; he had a home for the rest of his life and would be taken care of. What Greer was seeing, she said, was the last generation, now old men, left in the care of the Church.

Then one evening when Greer was sitting in the empty visitors’ lounge playing a game of solitaire before supper, someone entered the room and dropped himself into a chair. When Greer looked up and saw the crutches and braces, he knew this was the disturber of his sleep, the cripple who groaned his way down the hallway every morning. The surprise was his face.

Greer bobbed his head politely, said hello, and immediately turned his attention back to the cards to avoid staring. The man in the armchair had at one time been horribly burned, so
hideously burned that his features had been reduced to an expressionless mask of livid scar tissue that resembled the scales of a reptile. His mouth was a lipless slit, his nose a snake-snout, his blue eyes puckered in flesh as lifeless as plasticine. He had neither eyebrows, eyelashes, nor whiskers, and the bald dome of his skull was stippled with slick, shiny scars that looked like drippings from a wax candle.

Greer’s distaste shamed him, but that didn’t make it any less real. He kept thinking how much the man looked like a lizard. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate on the game of solitaire, Greer could sense the stranger watching him, sense the man’s rigidity; his blank, fixed face, his legs thrust stiffly out from the chair as if they were planks nailed to his body and not really limbs at all. And Greer began to feel his own body going rigid too, brittle with tension, unease, anticipation.

When the man suddenly spoke to him, Greer started violently. “Pardon me?” he said, confused.

“You’re one pitiful solitaire player,” the man repeated. Greer looked hard and recognized an ironic, challenging intelligence gleaming in the eyes of the frozen face. The slash of mouth widened and Greer assumed it was a smile.

“Says who?”

“Five of hearts on six of spades! There!” the stranger said pecking at the cards with his fingers. They were hooked like the talons of a bird of prey, several of them lacking nails.

Jack moved the card. “Maybe I ought to surrender the deck to the expert,” he said, “and learn something.”

The young man held up his hands. “I’m a clumsy shuffler and dealer. It takes me a long time to play a game.”

“Well, my head obviously isn’t in it,” said Greer. “Let me lay a game out and you can shift the cards. How does that strike you?”

The fellow extended a claw. “Roland Madox.”

Jack reached for it. “Jack Greer,” he said.

That night the two men ate supper together in the separate guest dining room. Madox explained he was not a monk yet and was only at the abbey on trial, working in the library until the abbot arrived at a decision as to whether he truly had a vocation. For the present, said Madox, he was free to choose where and with whom he ate. Over the abbey’s famous fare – farmer’s sausage, sauerkraut, boiled beet tops, and new potatoes, followed by apple crisp and ice cream – Roland Madox told his story. When he was five, he and his grandfather had been involved in a car accident. The old man had been instantly killed when he pulled out into the path of an oncoming fuel truck. His grandson, however, had survived the wreck and conflagration with disabling spinal injuries and third-degree burns over eighty per cent of his body. With a kind of perverse defiance Madox mockingly referred to himself as a “fry.” According to his self-portrait, perversity seemed second nature to him. The night of the accident, the doctors said he wouldn’t see morning. When morning came they didn’t give him a week. When a week passed, not another month. On the burn ward everyone expected him to succumb to infection. Nothing doing. He had survived the burn ward, years of hospitalization and rehabilitation. Here he was, twenty-five years old, still defying the odds. He had battled his way through elementary school, endured the adolescent hell of high school, earned a university degree in history. Implausibly, it was in a university philosophy class that he had discovered the existence of God, a startling reversal of what Greer took to be the customary outcome of acquaintance with academic philosphers. Now he was determined to become a monk.

When Greer inquired as to why he had this particular ambition, the answer was simple. “I love God,” he said. Adding, “There’s not many things I can do as well as the next guy – but praying is one of them.”

At last the two men rose and went out into the calm sunshine, the blue shadows, the summer stillness which descends on the prairie only after the day’s wind has blown itself out in the grass, or the sky, or has lost itself beyond the brackets of
earth and horizon. Greer, at that moment, had no inkling of what he had embarked upon.

After ten days, Greer had still to write a word worth keeping. This place, this monastery, didn’t seem to be the solution either. All day he exhausted himself with the struggle and when evening came he lay on his bed watching the sky through his window, a sky as pale as a bowl of cream. At such times he often thought of Miriam, where she was, how she was, and especially of the night in that quiet street, the Herengracht, outside their hotel in Amsterdam. Miriam, who had stood by him for the four years he was writing the book that was supposed to change his life, and who had remained steadfastly loyal for the three more difficult ones which followed it.

Gazing over the canal, she had asked him exactly what it was he wanted. Because on how many occasions past had she heard him claim that all he wanted was a
book
, one book to prove to himself he was a writer. Well, he had got his book but it hadn’t made him happy. Now he claimed it was a disappointment to him. And the new book he was writing disappointed him even more. When was it going to stop? When was he going to get this bad taste out of his mouth?

Miriam told him these things in a calm, agreeable voice, without a trace of the anger she was so richly entitled to. While she did, Greer kept his eyes fixed on the oily, yellow blur of light on the canal, reflections of the windows of the tall, narrow houses that hedged it in, afraid to tell her how afraid he was of failure. A fine, misty rain hung quivering in the air between them like a veil.

He was always complaining that what he wrote didn’t measure up. She didn’t understand what he meant. Measure up to what? To whom?

He swung round on her, eyes burning. “To me, goddamn it! It doesn’t measure up to me!” he shouted. Embarrassed by this outburst, he turned back to his contemplation of the canal, forearms propped on the railing.

“If that’s really the case, Jack,” he heard her say, “it seems to me there are only two possibilities. Either you underestimate the quality of your writing, or overestimate your talent. If you want a life, you’d better make up your mind which it is.”

The next morning they divided up the currency and travellers’ cheques in a cafe near the Concertgebouw and separated.

It wasn’t long before Greer and Madox fell into a routine. By ones and twos more guests began to take up residence in the monastery, but Roland ignored their existence; he clung exclusively to Jack. The two men ate all their meals together, Greer helping Roland load his plate and manage his tray in the cafeteria-style line. In the evenings they played Trivial Pursuit, which Roland always won, earning him the nickname Mr. S.O. Teric from Jack. But it was the hour before supper that was sacrosanct, the hour devoted to solitaire – which Roland happened to be addicted to. As a boy it had been his substitute for Little League and Minor Hockey, later for the Teen Dance, rec-room parties, other excitements.

There were times, however, when Greer grew short-tempered with his new friend. Of course, Greer blamed his frustration with his own work for making him impatient and peevish. He regretted the way he sometimes behaved, comparing the stubborn stoicism with which Roland, in public, silently bore pain, to his own outbursts of irritability. Although each morning Jack lay awake listening to the gut-wrenching noises from the hallway, he couldn’t recall a single occasion when Roland had allowed so much as a murmur to escape his lips when they walked together. And the effort to suppress his pain was often evident in his face, the waxy scars taking on a sullen, leaden cast, a shine like the tip of a bullet.

Yet Jack couldn’t deny there were things about his new friend that drove him crazy, exasperated him beyond belief. With Chekhov’s example before him, Greer was attempting to cultivate the ability to see things lucidly, with nothing more than a pane of the clearest glass to put distance between
himself and what he looked at, without even so much as the breath of a lie to mist and cloud the glass for his or anyone else’s benefit. The famous objectivity, the pitiless refusal to delude oneself, to see clearly and not lose heart was, for Jack, the mystery of Chekhov’s conscience as a writer and a man. The acceptance of things as they are. It was the gift Jack wanted most.

So, naturally, Greer found Roland Madox annoying. It annoyed him the way he gushed about his life to come as a monk, sounding like some bride-to-be burbling about the prospect of a totally fabulously unique June wedding. He talked as if he were on the point of crossing the threshold of some never-never land of unfading, unfailing happiness. Was that likely? Because it was clear to Greer that Roland had not been accepted by the happy band of monks he was so determined to join. They obviously had as little to do with him as possible, grateful to leave him in Greer’s company and care. Wasn’t it Jack Greer who shuffled his cards, ate with him, listened to his stories, nodded over his plans for the future? Meanwhile his brothers in Christ didn’t pay the least attention to him.

Jack resented that. He had come to this place to write a book, not to get saddled with responsibility for another human being. Besides, anyone who had fucked up his own life as badly as he had, had no business letting anybody get in the habit of depending on him. He owed it to Madox to keep him at arm’s length.

When the situation became too much for him, Jack Greer took the coward’s way out and fled; struck out across country, knowing Roland couldn’t pursue him over rough, broken ground. Madox had tried once and taken some bad tumbles over ridges in a freshly cultivated field. Greer, returning to the monastery in the twilight, had found him collapsed in a furrow, panting, disshevelled, dirty, utterly done in. He had had to half carry him back to the abbey.

But if he turned his back on the disappointed man watching
reproachfully from the window and strode off in the direction of the shelterbelts and fields, he won a temporary freedom. Two things never altered on these expeditions. There was always brandy in his knapsack and he was always angry; angry about the guilt the figure at the window made him feel, angry at Roland for banking so much on becoming a monk. It wouldn’t heal his body, turn back the clock to the time he owned a face. Couldn’t he see that?

Past the hot stench of the pig sties, past the black and white cows sedately lowing their way to the dairy barns for milking, past the market gardens, past the rippling fields of wheat and oats, he marched, trying to tramp the fury and frustration out of himself, slashing weeds with a stick, sweating until his shirt clung to his back like a leech. A couple of miles bled the anger out of him. By the time he reached the railway embankment and stood in the cinders looking down at the slough and the ducks, it was spent. In early evening light the flat sheet of water was a mirror. And what does it reflect? Greer asked himself. Bullrushes, sky, cloud, streaks of sun, the wind brushing and wrinkling the surface. Things as they are. Nothing else. The last light of day is the truest light.