“Ryan, hey, it’s me, Alison,” she announced. “No no, I’m fine, I’m fine. There was just a kind of misunderstanding at the set and I didn’t know what was going on, it sounded like we were finished for the day, so I took off and— Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Ohhhh. Wow. No no, I am so sorry.” She actually was a good little actress. At least the phone call was a masterpiece. “Oh, God, no! I was ready to do the shot, and I was asking a few questions and then everything seemed to erupt, so—of course I’ll call Lars. I lost my cell phone, I didn’t—oh, it’s in my trailer! Of course it is. Well, I’ll call him right now. You call him too. It’s a total misunderstanding. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks.”
She clicked the phone off. “This whole movie business is retarded,” she announced. “It’s a fucking police state. No kidding, they went into my trailer and found my cell phone. I have to call Lars immediately and apologize. When he was the one being mean to me.” She sighed and started to dial again. “I warned you, once I made a phone call, all the fun would be over.”
Yes, she had warned him, and she had been right.
twenty-three
MARRIAGE COUNSELING was hideous. Van was eight months pregnant, and uncomfortable. And she didn’t want to be there. She had to be told point-blank that if she didn’t go to counseling with Kyle, he would refuse to even consider an annulment. The whole argument was circular and coercive: Unless you try to talk things through and save our marriage, I won’t admit that the marriage never in truth existed.
Poor Van. She had more or less entered this miserable marriage because Kyle felt duty bound, as a Catholic, to wed the woman he had deflowered. Not, actually, that he had deflowered her. But he had deflowered himself. Which at the time had somehow seemed to be the same thing. And now she wanted to escape. But apparently she had fallen in love with a man who was every bit as Catholic as Kyle. He wanted that annulment, and he was not going to marry her without it. She was stuck.
Kyle didn’t want to be there either. But the kindness of the monks to whom he’d fled for wisdom could not absolve him of the worldly responsibilities he had taken on with this marriage. No one ever said as much; in fact, those quiet, decent men said pretty much nothing at all. They accepted his sudden arrival as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They took him in; they gave him a bed; they let him sleep. For two days, no one asked him anything at all. They were simply content that they had something to offer him. They accepted that he understood the value of peace, and time, and prayer.
And pray is what he did. He got up at four in the morning and sat in the plain wood loft, listening to the brothers chant below him. He went back to his room and slept, then got up at seven and went back to the chapel for more of the same. Then he wandered the grounds until he could go back to the chapel and listen to them chant some more.
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 fucking 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.”