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.
Van had no intention of making this marriage work, but once he registered the problem with parish leadership, she had nowhere to run. Refusing to enter counseling would have made it impossible to get that annulment. And once they were stuck in that room with Roger, their kindly, white-haired Teutonic mediator, no amount of determined and circular logic passed muster. Old Roger had a truly excruciating idea of communication: He insisted on slowing everything down to a snail’s pace, and then once you were down there with the snails, you had to explain every thought three times before you were allowed to inch forward to another one.
“So what you’re saying, Kyle, is that you were upset when Van admitted to you that she had been unfaithful to your marriage.”
“Yes.”
“Could you tell that to Van?”
“Van, I was upset and hurt, actually, when you admitted you were unfaithful.”
“He wasn’t hurt, he was enraged. He was furious! And terribly threatening.”
“Okay, we’ll get to that in a minute, Van. What I’m hearing is that you felt frightened.”
“Of course I felt frightened, he frightened me.”
“But I really need you to take this one step at a time. When feelings run away with us, it’s hard to understand what is at the core of the misunderstanding.”
“It’s not a misunderstanding. He never loved me. He was in love with another woman when he married me and he never pretended otherwise.”
“I was not in love with Alison.”
“LIAR.”
“I hadn’t seen her in YEARS.”
“Whoa whoa whoa. You see how quickly this can run away from us! We’re going to slow this ship down. Slooooow dowwwwwn. Just repeat back to Kyle what he said to you.”
“What he said was a lie.”
“That’s a judgment, Van. We’re not going there, remember? What I heard, from Kyle, is that he was upset and hurt that you had been unfaithful to your marriage.”
“So?”
“Is that what you heard?”
“Yes, I heard him say that.”