Darcey Steinke - Milk

“John?” Mac said. “You’re going?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” he said, smiling. “Let me accompany you up the hill.”

John had expected Mac to be angry or at least disappointed, but he wasn’t going to try and convince John to stay or mention the fantasy woman. Mac had said John’s fantasy girl was a robot, an idealized notion of romantic love, impossible to replicate. But now, Mac seemed to realize the woman had won. Mac walked beside him up the long asphalt drive. The trunks of the trees around them were black and creaked in the breeze. John wanted to say something, but the raw reality of what he was about to do rendered him speechless. He kept his hands deep in his empty pockets and his eyes on the white tips of his tennis shoes. At the end of the drive, the red taxi waited, “Brown Sugar” blasting out the windows. When the driver saw them he turned down the radio.

“I’ll write you.”

“No you won’t,” Mac said.

“I will,” John insisted, concentrating on the first line of gray light at the horizon. He had failed as a monk; he had not let himself become absorbed into the monastic life; out of insecurity, he had tried to protect his identity.

Mac opened the car door and John threw his bag inside.

“What should I tell the others?” he asked.

“That I’m sorry,” John said as he sank down into the backseat and pulled the door closed. His chest felt thick and achy. The driver turned the Stones back up and pulled out onto the highway. John looked back at Mac drenched in reflected red light.

The backseat of the cab reeked of smoke and the beige vinyl was sticky, details that seemed to foreshadow the chaos and shabbiness of his new life. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The car sped down the highway toward the band of yellow at the horizon, and John lay his cheek against the cold window flecked with tiny drops of water. God’s voice came back to him. So you can know yourself .

The first week outside the monastery, car alarms, garbage trucks, the subway, all grated on his tender nerves. Women on the city streets hurt him with their fragile preoccupied features. He missed the bells that had rung every few hours, and the offices haunted him, vespers in particular. The monks’ plainsong was loud inside his head. At first he felt his fifteen years in the monastery had been wasted, but then he realized that constant prayer had honed his perceptions. He saw that nothing was wholly static; color hummed with a kind of energy. He noted each individual leaf on each individual tree. Every person on the street sent out a delicate aura.

He rented a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began in the evening to go to a bar on Court Street, a generic place called Murphy’s. There the television blasted football games and the regulars were mostly red-faced men and a few slack-faced ladies who laughed too loud. He’d been drawn to a petite Hispanic woman who had, when he approached, explained curtly that she wanted to be left alone. At Bar Tabac, the woman with feather earrings said she was waiting for her boyfriend, and at Churchill’s, the attractive lady in the business suit told him she was gay. Similar scenarios resulted in all the watering holes around Brooklyn Heights.

He was frustrated and usually woke with a hard-on that was biblical in its intensity. Sometimes he masturbated, but afterward he always felt depressed. One day he picked up a Village Voice and flipped to the ads in the back. Cheap Sluts. Hot Local Girls. Live One-on-One Action . The thonged rear ends and cleavage stimulated him, but he’d be too shy for phone sex.

The listings under Adult Body Work confused him. The pictures were flagrant, women’s hands cupping their surgically enhanced breasts and pulling back the cheeks of their rear ends to show their anuses. There was only one ad that appealed to him. Kathy , a blonde in a white nightgown standing before a fireplace. Outcalls Only , the ad said, and John assumed this meant she’d come to his place.

The money was sealed in an envelope on the mantel and he poured brandy into two teacups. He’d showered, shaved and dressed carefully in his khakis and white button-down. When the buzzer rang the woman who walked down the stairs was not the Kathy from the picture. This Kathy had thick reddish hair, cut full at the top with long straight pieces coming down against her neck. Her eyes were huge and brown and her lips full but flat. She wore a leather miniskirt with metal studs and a tight black blouse. Her accent was Slavic with some New Jersey underneath. He felt his face get warm as she went over the economics of their endeavor.

John watched her walk to the futon, pull off her boots and spread her legs, exposing the crotch of her black panties. John assumed there’d be conversation, but he appeared to be mistaken, as he watched the woman arch her back and look at him with her mouth open. Her underwear was slick, the skin around the black material pink and hairless. He walked over to the futon and removed his shoes. His tennis shoes looked pathetic. Kathy pulled at his arm and he lay down beside her. He noticed that in the center of her right eyebrow was a patch of white hair.

“Do you want to fuck me?” Kathy said. She sounded like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon. He closed his eyes and nodded. Kathy undid his pants, loosened his cock and crawled backward; her mouth was warm and wet as she moved her head. He thrust his penis up toward her face and opened his eyes. Kathy’s head moved up and down like the needle in a sewing machine, and her eyes were open, the pupils dilated big as dimes. On the nape of her neck was a small scar. Pleasure had been rerouted over humanity and he wanted to try and change that.

“How did you get your scar?” He touched the raised pink flesh.

Kathy jerked her head to look at him. She was clearly annoyed. “It’s a scar.”

“I know,” John said. “How did you get it?”

“Oh somehow, I can’t remember now,” Kathy said, moving her wet mouth toward his crotch.

ALUMP OF CREAM cheese, crackers and a little bottle of capers; this was his last dinner at the Heights apartment. He ate on his futon; everything else was in boxes. He figured the car service could haul his possessions out to Sunset Park.

Opening his journal, John turned to the pages at the end, which were clean and white. He’d gotten a brief note from Holy Cross asking if he wanted to be exclaustrated, released from his vow, and he’d been thinking all day about what to write. “Dear Mac,” he began, but then thought of addressing the letter to the whole community. No. The only brother he felt any real affection for was Mac.

Dear Mac:

I would like to be exclaustrated. I may be called back some day to Holy Cross, but I was called out. I want to make this clear to you. I don’t know if you can accept it, but God did call me out, and those visions I had of a woman, a partner, both sexually and domestically, have been to some extent realized. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but I want you to know that I understand now what you used to say about God only being able to see Love, that it was philosophically impossible for God to even think about evil, that Love was all and we must make ourselves into vehicles of Love. I know you feel romantic love cannot accommodate the detachment that compassion demands. But I want to tell you that at this moment, as fraught as it is for me (for reasons I cannot yet discuss), a bigger portion of me, of my being, my soul, whatever you want to call it, has been changed into Love than was true at any time I was in the monastery.

Give my regards to the brothers and I want you to know that you are ever in my thoughts. When I left Holy Cross I thought I’d get away from your edicts, but it appears now that the real reason I left was so that I could embody them more fully.