Page 48 of Saint
“Never mind,” I say quickly, and then I tack on a laugh for good measure. “I wouldn’t have very smart answers to those things anyway. Not the kind of answers aModereader would be interested in, anyway.”
“You don’t think aModereader would be interested in a queer millionaire turned Catholic monk?” Elijah asks, eyebrow even higher now.
“Well, I—”
Elijah shakes his head and settles back against the wide trunk of the tree, taking his beer and his notebook with him. “I’ve been meaning to properly interview you, but...” He sighs. “I guess it’s hard to separate the questions I want to ask as your ex-boyfriend from the questions I want to ask as a writer.”
Before I can figure out how to react to that, he straightens up a little. “Okay, actually, I do have a question.”
29
“What’sthe biggest difference between your job before and your job now?” he asks as he taps his pen on the paper. “Between managing investment portfolios and being a monk?”
“This feels like a pointless question,” I say, sliding my eyes over to him.
His lips twitch. “Why is that?”
“Becauseeverythingis different, and that difference is so laughably apparent. I mean, you could walk into an abbey and just start pointing at random things, and every single one of them would be different. Habits, incense, candles, statues, glass cruets.God.”
“As opposed to what?” he probes. “A windowed office overlooking the street and decanters of whiskey nearby?”
I picture my old office in my mind. I had been so proud of it once upon a time, this office I’d felt like I’dearned. It hadn’t been until the last two years there that the pride had started to slip away, that the feeling ofearninghad shifted into some other feeling. Awareness maybe, if awareness could be called a feeling.
“It’s more than that,” I say. “More than different windows and different liquors. We talked about it while we were dating, but I began to really see how few women worked there. How many white men. It was a boys’ club, and it was run like one.”
Elijah nods. A lot of the processing what I was seeing and naming it had been with him.
“But you stayed during all that,” Elijah says, looking up from his notebook. “It didn’t make you leave.”
“Maybe it should have,” I say. “I don’t know. I’ve chosen to stay in this church too, and it’s just as fucked up. More so, even.”
Elijah’s pen lifts from the page, his thoughts seeming to turn inward. “My family believes you have to stay inside something to make it better.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know.” He looks down. “I don’t know anymore. All the answers felt so clear to me when I was younger—leave, walk away, burn it down. There was a right answer and a wrong answer for everything. But something like staying or leaving...it feels more complicated to me now that I’m older, I guess. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I wasn’t judging you for staying at the firm. Especially because you did try to make it better while you were there.”
“I guess,” I say. Me and a few others pushed for a DEI consultant to be hired, and for the recruiting and hiring processes to change. I think it was fear of bad PR and potential litigation that got the top-floor people on board more than genuine conversion to the cause, but it had resulted in some small concrete changes. Not enough, though.
“It threw into stark relief how little meaning the rest of it held. The 3 a.m. phone calls to Tokyo or London. The market fluctuations, the allocations, the breakpoints. The suits and pens and planes and everything, all of it. It was someaningless.”
I look out onto hills that were lifted from the earth over three hundred million years ago. Even with the newer monastery buildings nestled between them, there is something so ancient about this place, so old and yet still so vital and alive.
“It was like a theater curtain had been pulled back,” I continue, looking down at the bottle cradled loosely in my hands. “And I could finally see all the props and sets and costumes for what they were: a giant game of pretend. And then I began to feel pretend too, like I was wearing a costume and showing up to speak pre-written lines, pretending I knew what real happiness and success looked like. Like I was a kid who’d put on my dad’s suit and thought it made me important. It was so hollow, and so empty, and—”
I pause. This is getting too close to the real reason I came to Mount Sergius. Too close to that night in the farmhouse, when there was nothing but the flash of a phone in the dark to give me enough light to make it until dawn.
I change direction, looking up from my beer to gesture at the monastery below us.
“The biggest difference between my old job and this one? Everything down there has meaning. Everything down there has a reason to be there and a history of being there.Even the smallest things—the smallest square of cloth, the tiniest vial, the dish for the priest to wash his hands—theymean something.It all means something. Yes, it all points to God, but it also points back to ourselves too. It creates the sacred for us.”
Elijah writes something down as I finish my beer. “So is it safe to say that what you want out of this job is different than what you wanted from your old one?”
I snort against my beer bottle. “You haven’t forgotten about the Timber Wolf, have you?”
He laughs, low and rich. “Oh my God, Ihad.”
In Kansas City, we have an iconic wooden roller coaster called the Timber Wolf. It’s not iconic because it’s a good roller coaster—it will rattle the balls right out of your ballsack—but it’s one of those things you love because of its enduring unpleasantness. It was also the first roller coaster I ever rode. My big sister Lizzy took me on it on my ninth birthday, and the photo from that ride ended up being the only picture I had after she died that was just of the two of us. I still have it in a small album in my cell in Mount Sergius.
