Four Beds

THIS BED IS COMFORTABLE. It’s a narrow twin in St. Dominic’s Priory near Hampstead Heath in northern London. When I come to this bed I’m always jet-lagged, having arrived from Heathrow not long before and been met in the terminal by Vivian, who is my oldest friend and also a Catholic priest. I dream of this bed on the red-eye over the Atlantic from New York, during the truncated traveler’s night I spend crammed half sideways into a British Airways window seat, trying to stay warm as ice crystals form on the inky window next to my head. So I am stiff-necked, bleary, and longing only for a nap when I am spat off the plane into the high tide of 9 a.m. London life, and there to greet me is Vivian, a silver-haired, handsome Irishman, bright eyed and ready to do something touristy that he’s too cool to do on his own. We stroll through the shrubbery maze at Hampton Court Gardens or ride the London Eye Ferris wheel in the balmy June weather, and as we lift and lower slowly over the Thames, I think of how much I would like to be lying in the bed I caught a glimpse of as I dropped off my green rucksack at the priory. Sometimes Vivian lets me take a brief nap before heading off into the summer fray, and I, vibrating like a struck bell from tiredness, wish only to burrow deeper into its white sheets — so tautly made up by the housekeepers who care for the men of the priory — and lie swaddled, and sleep on.

The priory thrums with the absence of sex. Its three guest rooms are on the upper floors, intermingled with the rooms of the priests who live here. The most common guests are priests from other houses, in London on church business from Toronto or Lagos or Prague. Women ascend these stairs all the time to vacuum or lay out fresh linen, but this is not a house where people menstruate or hang panties to dry on the shower rod. Women don’t breathe the night air here — except for me. I am subtly conscious, even walking fully clothed down the hushed side stairs to the dining room, of my aberrancy, my softer tread, my different undergarments. So I keep it buttoned. (I was well brought up.) When I join the priests in the common room after dinner, I domesticate myself by knitting socks, seated among these men, who chat kindly with me over their cocktails or simply peer at me and then return their eyes to their London Times or the television screen. It is an odd photonegative of the way Vivian must have felt at the time we first met, when he was chaplain for a term at my all-female high school in Trinidad: surrounded every Tuesday by identically dressed adolescent girls, shy and sly in the way girls are and just beginning to taste the might and peril of womanhood; lining up with our eyes closed and tongues slightly extended for his placement of the Host at Mass; sitting in a circle at his feet, gray box-pleated skirts pulled carefully over knees, listening to him discourse on Jesus’s love. He was twenty-eight, seven years younger than I am now.

Vivian and I maintained a friendship by mail for years after he’d left Trinidad. I’ve visited him in London three times, and on this trip, as on previous ones, I stay at his home, the priory, a tawny-bricked Gothic building that abuts the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. The first floor is public space, with black and rust-colored marble tiles in the front cloister, wide oak doors with iron handles, and labeled hooks outside the vestry where the residents hang their identical black capes after Mass. The priory library is upstairs, but most of the other upstairs rooms are bedrooms, and the quiet hallways and stairwells between them display small paintings of the Madonna and Child and of Saint Dominic himself, founder of the order. I am housed on the third floor. Here I take showers at night in the bathroom down the hall after all the priests have gone to bed, and once clean creep to my room wrapped in my damp towel, hugging the walls and feeling the spiky fibers of the maroon carpet against my bare feet. My room has a casement window overlooking the front garden with its statue of Mary; a little porcelain sink where I brush my teeth; and flowered curtains probably sewn by one of the housekeepers, women who chastely wive the men of St. Dominic’s. There is an entire caste of such women, good Catholic girls grown up or old who, married or no, never entirely untangle themselves from the passion-freighted allure of celibate men. They iron for the priests, wash their vestments and their boxer shorts, put a roast in the oven on Sunday, make sure there’s milk in the fridge. They wear pinafore aprons with yellow rickrack around the edges, shapeless tweed skirts or baggy jeans, and flat rubber-soled shoes. They can be a whole world of women to these men, because sex doesn’t intrude. It may slither greenly around the edges of quotidian life (how could it not?), it may shimmer at the corner of the eye, but it is never looked at directly. In its place there is dailiness and peace.

Priests have always been the men in my life. I was raised with their hands laid on my head in benediction. I could easily become one of these women. But I am not. When I am here at the priory, I have no apron to shield me and anchor me in place. I am a vagabond, a refugee from the floating world outside, where sex lies coiled. The housekeepers are sturdily unsexy — but then, they don’t have to be sexy. They have standing. I am a guest, glossy and flimsy and as liable to tear as a paper doll. I am a passing breeze in the cloister, stirring the hair at the nape and then gone. So I smile at these women when I come down to breakfast. I cross my ankles decorously at the table, as I was taught as a girl. I eat my toast and marmalade, drink my instant coffee with milk and sugar. I go back upstairs and try to make my bed as tautly as I found it.

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