Page 75 of Saint
From the notebook of Elijah Iverson
Honesty,no matter how late it comes, is always best.
I’m reminding myself of this since I’ve just gotten off the phone with Jamie, and the consequences of my honesty feel very, very hard to bear right now, even though the call was about mundane matters like arranging for my things to be moved out of his little Westside house.
I loved Jamie. I love him still, maybe. But I couldn’t marry him, and I shouldn’t have said yes when he proposed. Even then I think I knew it, but I wouldn’t admit it to myself, because admitting it to myself would also mean admitting why.
Admitting that nearly five years hadn’t undone my feelings for a man who left me without saying goodbye.
I keep asking myself what I want. What I want from this, knowing that it will end, and it will hurt more than the first time it ended—but somehow the question has stopped mattering here. The air smells like lavender and rosemary, and there’s an unlimited supply of the rarest beer in the world, and as I write this under the shade of an old oak tree, I can watch a shirtless Aiden move through the rows of lavender as he harvests the lavender flowers with the other monks.
I think I could watch him forever, simply watch him be a monk. The work, the prayer, the singing, the silence.
Maybe I don’t understand, maybe I’ll never understand, but when I watch him, it feels like I don’t have to. It feels like simply being with him is enough.For however short a time.
40
I discoverin lavender-scented Provence the reason the Church tries so hard to keep monastics away from sex, and it’s not because sex pollutes prayer and it’s not because sex is the opposite of prayer either.
It’s because sex and prayer fit each other so well that splitting them apart feels like the real sin. Like bread and wine, like gold and incense, they are made for one another, both liturgies of body and soul.
Every morning, I wake and dress and go to vigils. There I sing and chant my way into wakefulness. Sometimes Elijah is there, a couple mornings he isn’t, having stayed up the night before to write. And then I go back to my room and do lectio, savoring overSong of Songsand letting the words linger in my mind like wine. And then lauds, and then the lavender fields, where I sweat and laugh with the other brothers, where I stop to pray the little hours, feeling God’s words on my tongue as his winds whisper around me.
And then under the pretense of tourist-y exploration, Elijah and I disappear into the hills and worship each other until we are deliciously wasted like heathen cities in the face of God’s wrath. And then there is touring the brewhouse and more prayer and scripture until night comes, and with it, a deep, peaceful sleep that I’ve never known before now.
There is no hitch in my thoughts as they wander from the memory of Elijah’s mouth to the word of the Lord. There is no veil between the memory of him surging into me and the surge of gratitude I feel as Dom Francis places the host on my tongue. I feel fully and deeply and completely alive. Human. Incarnated entirely.
With him and God together.
And yet.
And yet.
I have to hide my joy; I have to pretend my smiles and serenity are from fervent dedication to prayer and nothing more. We have to keep wary, keep careful, as we go into the hills and as we creep into each other’s rooms.
And the same sun which breaks over me to find me more replete and alive than ever also signals the passing of time with each dawning day. Soon we will leave here for St. Columba’s, and then after a week there, it’s back home.
Soon this trip will be over.
Soon this will end.
* * *
We haveone day left here at Our Lady when Elijah’s phone rings from his satchel.
He’s fast asleep on a blanket near the shady grotto, napping the nap of the well-fucked, and I go to silence the phone so it doesn’t wake him up, which is when I see that it’s my brother Sean calling.
I haven’t handled an iPhone in almost five years, but I manage to answer and then realize it’s a FaceTime call from a computer, which is amazing because then I get to see—
“Ababy!” I exclaim, wishing I could scrunch myself through the screen and eat the baby’s giant cheeks and tickle his big pot belly. The baby blinks at me with long baby eyelashes and then shoves a chubby fist into his mouth and starts gnawing industriously on it.
The man holding the baby on his lap narrows his eyes at me. “You’re not Elijah,” my brother says.
“So what? This is my nephew,” I say as I make a funny face at the baby. The baby regards me impassively, still chewing on his fist.
“He’s Elijah’s nephew too,” Sean says impatiently. “Can I talk to my best friend and the best uncle of my children please?”
“I’m the best uncle, and anyway, Elijah’s sleeping,” I say, making another face at the baby. Joseph Anthony Bell—or Josie for short—pauses chewing a moment . . . and then decides I’m still not worthy of a smile.
