From the Novel

For three years now, I have been working none-too-quietly on a novel called Vanity: A Paperweight or Mea Culpa. Below, I am posting something I wrote today.


"I was in love once," The Monk chuckled. "With a yoga instructor in New York City. She taught at the YMCA."

"How'd that work out with your oath of celibacy?" I asked.

The Monk smiled. "I wasn't entirely celibate then."

"You dog! How was she? Limber, I'll bet."

"It never went that far." The smile dwindled from his face. "I took her out for coffee once. I spent all day begging for spare change on the street corner in order to afford
it. She talked about how badly she wanted to know God."

"Did you show her?" I asked.

"I tried. I wasn't able to talk with God like I can now; She had too much going on back then." The Monk rested his head against the lead-lined concrete wall.

"What did you do then?" I stopped pacing and sat on a crate full of rations.

"Strange how I can remember it so clearly. I asked her if she had a compact and if she did, could I see it? She dug around in her bag--it was a big gym bag, we had just come from the Y--and
handed it to me. I opened it up, held the mirror in front of her face, and said, 'You see that? That is God.' She laughed at me. She said she thought God should have a smaller nose." The Monk sighed. "So my love was an unrequited one."

"The easiest kind," I said.

The Monk laughed. It was the first bitter laugh I had heard come out of him. "I hadn't thought of it that way. It felt like hard work at the time."