Дональд Уэстлейк - Brothers Keepers

At first I’d thought my choice was between Eileen and the monastery, but in truth my range of options wasn’t even so broad as all that. I couldn’t possibly stay with Eileen if the loss of the monastery was a permanent fact between us, but neither could I save the monastery by giving up Eileen. I was giving her up, I was doing it now, but that was only because the very silly idea of our being together had run its course. I had to leave, but my reasons were private ones and I couldn’t use our separation to save the monastery. I couldn’t bring myself to fulfill Dan Flattery’s other demand. I just couldn’t tell her I had lied.

Of course, I should have done so. As Roger Dwarfmann had said, citing Scripture for his purpose, “Let us do evil, that good may come.” But I couldn’t do it, and that was my failure. I couldn’t go away leaving her to believe I was a liar and a con man, who had cheated her, who had not loved her.

She got up late that day, while I sat on the beach in front of the house — I’d carry quite a startling tan with me back to the cold dark northeast — rehearsing different ways to tell her that I couldn’t stay, that I was wrong for this world and any of her worlds. I was a monk again, whether I went back to the Crispinite Order or not. I would have to find some such place for myself; it was what I was fit for. Perhaps that Dismal Order of ex-thugs Brother Silas had told me about would take me in — I could join those felonious monks in whatever substitute San Quentin now housed them.

What on earth was I going to say to Eileen?

“I love you, but I can’t stay.”

“I was content and happy before all this started, and now I’m confused and miserable. Maybe I’m merely a coward, but I have to try to get back to where I was before.”

“The monastery, that simple stupid building, stands between us and always will, particularly once it’s been torn down.”

“You won’t want me forever. I’m merely a rest period between your struggles to find some way to live your own life.”

“You knew yesterday, you knew last night, that we’re finished, it’s only a matter of time.”

She came out at last from the house, wearing her lavender bathing suit under her blue terrycloth robe, and looking at her I knew the transition back to celibacy was going to be a difficult one. But it had been difficult the first time, ten years ago, until gradually the itch had faded, as it would do again; abstinence makes the heart grow colder.

She was carrying a glass in her hand, obviously one of our rum drinks, which was unusual this early in the day. She was also very pinched-looking around the mouth and eyes, as though she’d lost the ability to withstand the sun and now it was beginning to shrivel her. And the look in her eyes was both tender and hard. When she reached me, she knelt beside me in the sand and said, “I want to talk to you.”

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“Me first. You have to go back.”

Suddenly it seemed too abrupt. My stomach fluttered, I needed things to slow down. “I do love you,” I said, and reached out for her hand.

She wouldn’t let me touch her. “I know that,” she said, “but you can’t stay. It isn’t any good for either of us.” Then she said, “All I’ve done is louse you up, make you confused and unhappy. You have to get back to where you were before I came along.”

Then she said, “That monastery building, that hateful place, it won’t let us get together.”

Then she said, “I’m not a forever person, and you are. I’m always either running to something or away from something. I’ll be that way all my life. If you stay with me, someday I’ll walk out on you and that’s a guilt I wouldn’t be able to stand.”

Then she said, “You know I’m right. You knew it yesterday, that we can’t go on.”

She had taken all my lines. I said, “I have a reservation on the morning plane Wednesday.”

Eileen drove me to the airport. I had slept the last two nights on that wicker sofa in the living room, I had avoided all rum since making my decision, and I was dressed again in my robe and sandals. I was also a physical wreck from lack of sleep, an emotional wreck on general principles, and a moral wreck in that I craved Eileen’s body just as much as ever. More. We had had a week together, and turning off that faucet was easier said than done. Her nearness in the Pinto made me quiver.

But I was strong — or weak, depending on your point of view — and I didn’t alter my decision. We arrived at the airport, Eileen walked me as far as the security checkpoint, and we said goodbye without touching. A handshake would have been ridiculous, and anything more would have been far too dangerous.

At the end, as I was about to leave her, she said, “I’m sorry. Char — I’m sorry, Brother Benedict. For everything the Flattery family has done to you.”

“The Flattery family gave me love and adventure,” I said. “What’s that to be sorry for? I’ll remember you the rest of my life, Eileen, and not just in my prayers.”

Then she kissed me, on the mouth, and ran. It’s a good thing she ran.

My seatmate on the flight back was a skinny cranky-looking man of about fifty, who gave me one short curt glance when I took my aisle seat and then returned to his dour survey of the world outside his window.

The plane was less than half full, and most of the passengers — like the one next to me — were men Traveling alone. All holiday Travelers had presumably arrived at their destinations by now, leaving only these few solitary wanderers who were no doubt involved in Business Trips.

The plane took off, the stewardess provided my seatmate with Jack Daniel’s on the rocks and me with a cup of very weak tea, and for some time we Traveled in silence. The Jack Daniel’s was methodically dealt with and replaced by another just like it; I rather liked the little bottles, but could think of no way to ask if I might have the empties. I read the airline’s house magazine, I did the puzzles in it, and wondered how the Razas family was getting along. This was certainly a very different trip.

My seatmate pulled stolidly at his Jack Daniel’s, emptying one little bottle after another, behaving not as though he were enjoying the drinks but as though they were a duty he was required to perform. Something midway between medicine and ritual. He drank and drank, in small and steady sips that were never ostentatious, never great thirsty gulps, but which in their inexorability suggested he could rid the world entirely of its store of Jack Daniel’s if he put his mind to it.

I finished the magazine, returned it to its pocket in the seat-back in front of me, and my neighbor said, in tones of the deepest disgust, “Travel. Gah.”

I looked at him in some surprise, and found him giving a brooding glare at the seat in front of him, seeming to consider whether or not to bite it. He probably hadn’t been speaking to me, but I was a bit curious about him and a bit bored (and trying very hard not to think about how much I wanted to leap from this plane and swim madly back to her and attach myself to her like a shirt full of static electricity), and so I said, “Don’t you care for Travel?”

“I hate it,” he said, in such a flat hoarse way that I instinctively drew a bit back from him. He went on glaring straight ahead, but now his near eye glittered as though his only pleasure in life was the contemplation of his hatred of Travel.

I said, “I suppose, though, people do get used to it.”

Now he turned to stare at me, and I saw that his eyes were somewhat bloodshot. Also, his cheeks were drawn, his hair was thin atop his narrow skull, and the flesh around his temples seemed gray. He reminded me of the Marley knocker. He said, “ Used to it? I’m used to it, oh, yes, I’m used to it.”