Prose
Silent Muse
Frank Diamond
Franco Bennett wants more.
He wants to have sex with Clare Harkin, but he’ll have to come right out and ask for it in the way that he might make his case for a bank loan: calmly, methodically, dispassionately. He’d been tempted to just let things happen naturally (and wordlessly) those times when they’d been making out and heading in that direction anyway. But all this #MeToo business forces Franco to reassess his approach to courtship. Franco gets it. “No” doesn’t mean “yes,” or even “maybe.” It means “no.”
But where does that leave the pursuit?
Most of Franco’s uncles had been turned down by the women who are now his aunts the first (or even the second or third) time they’d asked for a date. The men had been persistent, though, and eventually wore down the objects of their desire. “Object” is a loaded word these days, and persistence can get you jailed or fired or shamed online. Not that Franco’s ever been tempted to trifle with a woman; his three older sisters had beaten any such impulse out of him in childhood.
Still, he has needs.
So, on this particular day when Franco Bennett and Clare Harkin meet for lunch at Chauncey’s Bar and Grill in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia — after the drinks arrive and they’ve toasted new beginnings — Franco softly utters his prognosis.
“We’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” Clare asks with faux naïveté.
COVID-19 had years before evolved from a life-threatening mystery to a seasonal nuisance, so nobody wears masks these days. That resurrected humanity’s reflexive tendency to read facial expressions, but to Franco’s frustration, Clare’s beautiful face betrays nothing.
“Clare, please, I’m serious.”
Clare responds, “Hmmm.”
Hmmm? Just what the hell does ’Hmmm’ mean? Franco wonders. His lowered head and unblinking brown-eyed stare give him the air of a ram about to charge, ready to batter some, as yet, unknown rival for Clare’s affections.
Clare inspects the menu, seemingly deliberating, although she’ll end up ordering the Caesar salad with grilled chicken, as always. If not for the rain — which exploded out of the dark sky, causing them to scamper into Chauncey’s and which in minutes elicited flood warnings on weather apps — they’d be sitting out on the patio on this May Saturday afternoon. Chauncey’s had become one of their regular stops, even though they didn’t quite fit in.
Franco and Clare know that they follow different career paths compared to the other young people in the place who, they could safely guess or even ascertain just by overhearing, work in human resources, IT, sales, accounting, law, healthcare, banking, or publishing. The mix includes ones who still depend shamelessly on Mommy and Daddy, or who have decided to make the accumulation of graduate degrees or PhDs their life’s work, or at least half of their life’s work — the ones whose adolescence stretches to about age 40.
Clare’s a mechanic at a Ford dealership on Delaware Avenue right off the river. Franco manages a stone quarry just north of the city in Bucks County. Franco and Clare’s shared interests include the usual suspects found on dating apps: reading, exercising, going to movies, traveling, pets (dogs in their case), chilling with family and friends.
“Clare?” Franco asks.
“Franco, I am saying what we both said at the beginning,” Clare murmurs, sliding her index finger among the items on the menu. “No pressure. Remember?”
“But we are ready.”
Clare smiles, still not looking at him.
“You’re ready.”
They’d met on a dating app just in time because they’d both separately decided to take a long break from dating. Perhaps they’d quit altogether. At any rate, this would be it, they vowed. They’d try one last time to meet someone, and if that led to a date, good. If the date led to something more, even better. If not, okay then. They weren’t optimistic, each expecting another empty and awkward exchange leading nowhere.
“Are you Philadelphia born and raised?” Franco had messaged.
“Guilty.”
Franco paused. He looked around his apartment in the Fox Chase section of the city. Against the living room wall were stacked boxes that still needed to be unpacked. He’d moved in a few months ago. He’d been forced to. The big old drafty rented house that he’d shared with three friends came to be seen as obsolete — both literally and metaphorically — as the roof sagged and began leaking, and as Franco’s buddies had one-by-one gotten engaged and planned futures with their fiancés in which Franco may have a walk-on every now and then.
These visitations would become fewer and fewer until Franco and his posse not too far in the future might message each other on Facebook now and then. He’s accepted that that part of his life — hanging out with the guys and thinking that there’s no reason why things just shouldn’t always be like this — sailed into memory.
In the glow of the desktop, Franco had struggled to find words for this new girl. Franco wanted to say how awkward he felt, but he’d learned to not voice insecurity. Okay. That’s what he shouldn’t say. Now, what should he say?
Clare saved him by messaging, “You look like a gentleman. I am a lady.”
Now, that’s different. People didn’t talk about being a gentleman or lady these days. So old-fashioned.
Franco messaged, “Looks can be…” and left it at that.
Ha-ha.
In her apartment in the Fishtown section, Clare stared at the unfinished sentence.
Looks can be misleading.
Right. She gets it. She should probably roll with it and keep things light, maybe move this conversation into banter. Except that Clare bantered with old and trusted friends, not with internet strangers.
She insisted, “Are you a gentleman?”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-stinking-tock.
She’d always been tempted to get a quieter clock but this one above the mantel in her living room had hung on the wall of her childhood bedroom; the metronome that kept a steady beat behind the often shrill highs and guttural lows of growing up in a dysfunctional household. The sound usually comforted her. Now it puts her on edge.
In a few moments, Franco messaged, “Guilty.”
Two sighs rise up in Fishtown and Fox Chase. So far, so good, but a vast ocean of wariness separates “hello” from “let’s meet.”
Clare and Franco had managed to cross it.
Now, in Chauncey’s, Franco pleads his case. “But we’ve been seeing each other for,” the slightest pause as Franco calculates, “over two months now?”
Finally, Clare grants him eye contact even though she feels herself blush — as she knew she would — from his intensity.
“Is that a question?” Clare asks.
“Nine-and-a-half weeks, we’ve been dating.”
Clare sighs.
Oops, Franco thinks, but chance tricked him into the faux pas of saying the name of the classic erotic movie. He understands Clare well enough by now to know that she knows that he knows that she knows…
Franco thinks, Okay. Stop the loop. Time to get off.
Clare says: “Friends, remember? Take it slow, remember? Don’t force anything, remember?”
“Am I forcing anything?”
“You want sex.”
“Well,” he admits, “Eventually.”
“Eventually. When we both feel right about it.”
Franco thinks, Eventually? Can we maybe narrow it down a little?
He likes that she’s old-fashioned. He respects that. But still….
He can’t believe that Clare’s not interested in taking that step. He feels it when they kiss. Doesn’t he?
“We’ve been here before, Franco,” Clare says. “Remember the ruins.”
She refers to the battered landscape of their past entanglements.
By the time they’d met, the hookup scene had come to fill Clare and Franco with an antipathy bordering on aversion. They’d jumped onto the train in their younger years (they are now in their early 30s), excited by the idea of no-strings-attached sex. But many sad trials and angry exits later left them each dealing with a growing emptiness taking up more and more psychic space.
Rompings would be bracketed by long stretches of celibacy (of a sort — self-pleasuring not counting) or actual relationships that kept them interested and feeling wonderful until the inevitable crash. But why inevitable? Many of Clare and Franco’s happily coupled friends had met through online dating sites.
It works for some people — a lot of people. Why hasn’t it worked for them?
They’d always landed on the path that led back to hookups, with less and less excited expectations until finally, it felt as if they were clocking in. Well, no more. They needed a permanent break from swiping left or right. In, oh so many ways, their initial exchanges could have gone wrong, but they hadn’t.
“Let’s get to know each other first,” Franco had messaged. “Begin as friends.”
Clare responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
On one of their first dates, they made Chauncey’s their last stop on a busy evening, getting to the place just before last call and as the bartender roused a drunk from catatonia by jiggling the man’s shoulder. The inebriated gent wore a tailored suit and exuded the aura of someone who’d been locked out of his house. He raised his head, which lolled uncertainly.
“Out, Bob,” the bartender ordered. “Go home.”
“Can’t.”
“Then go to your sister’s.”
The man slid his cell phone over. The bartender dutifully arranged an Uber.
The man stumbled toward the exit, but when he passed Clare and Franco, he stopped.
“You two!” he accused.
“Yeah? What’s up, buddy?” Franco said, ostensibly patting him on the back, but actually shoving him along.
“Procreate!” The drunk demanded. “You two should definitely procreate!”
Thereafter, Franco and Clare would sometimes begin their text and email exchanges with: “Ya wanna procreate?” But something else happened that night. When Franco walks Clare home, light from the overheads dapples a spring mist that brushes their faces. Franco stops at one point, turns this beautiful girl toward him and they kiss. Yes, something changes. Franco realizes that he’s in love, and whispers that discovery into her ear.
“I feel the same,” Clare says.
There’s a future. And if ever they should in fact take that drunk’s advice and procreate, they would produce basketball players. Franco’s 6 feet, 5 inches. Clare’s an even 6, but that’s without heels.
They get noticed.
Franco learned back in high school that he possessed hair that girls love to touch. Coal black and wavy, with a pompadour that he could never comb out until one of his sisters said, “Why the hell would you want to do that?” He played basketball and wrestled, and after graduation, did a semester at community college but then decided to become a stone mason. He’d worked with an uncle one summer building a backyard gazebo, a walled garden, and several fire pits. Franco’s struggles with marble, slate, granite, and sandstone brought to the fore a quality he’d never suspected that he possessed: creativity. He was hooked.
Clare grew up helping her father at his gas station. It’s now her brother’s business and that’s fine with Clare because she didn’t like interacting with people, which isn’t the same as not liking people. She did like people. Loved them, in fact. Too much. She could easily be dragged into an altruistic black hole. Giving all her time, money, and emotion and leaving nothing left for Clare.
She’d told Franco that she’d grown tired of the noise of the world.
“I hear you,” he’d said, while thinking, Please, please, please don’t try to convert me. Thankfully, though she’d only revealed that aspect of her inner life on those few occasions. She may be religious, but she doesn’t talk about it much, thank God.
Franco thinks, Anyway, she’s too damn sexy for all that.
Despite Clare spending much of her workday in grimy overalls that she didn’t bother to change out of until she got home, men were not fooled. Clare was a 10. She could dress in a trash bag, it wouldn’t matter. Her blonde hair may be pulled back and capped, but the wisps that escaped highlighted turquoise eyes that didn’t let go. Her secret? A body kept in perfect shape by DNA, a natural aversion to the sorts of foods that fatten people up, and a job that keeps her moving. Do women desire toned and sexy arms these days? Well, as Clare could attest, using a wrench enough times during a shift will get you there.
She didn’t wear baggy clothes outside of work for the most part, but no matter what she wore, Clare’s demeanor warned: Do not disturb. One of her t-shirts sums it up, “I’m not antisocial. I’m selectively social. There’s a difference!”
Despite these defenses, or maybe because of them, Franco continues pitching fevered woo to Clare this day at Chauncey’s.
“Sex is good.”
“Yes.”
“Clare, I love you. You told me that you love me.”
“Yes. I was there, remember?”
“We’re adults. We stopped living with our parents years ago.”
“Yes,” Clare agrees. “And our parents taught us that sex is good. Look what that got them?”
Franco wishes he hadn’t brought up the parents. Franco and Clare grew up in broken households, maneuvering around the unchecked appetites of adults who’d adhered to a lifestyle that put no inhibitions on doing whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want to do it, so long as you can’t go to jail for it and can pay your bills (mostly).
Clare’s mother married three times and lived with two other men somewhere in her scattershot chronology; her father moved to Australia with wife number two and promptly started cheating on her as well. Dad recently emailed Clare that, “We are in counseling,” though Clare didn’t know which of the “we” women in his life had been referenced. Dad could multitask.
Franco’s parents also did the revolving door dance, and the resulting mixed family turned out to be a mixed bag when it came to instilling principles that would help navigate an ethical course through life. Each of Franco’s older sisters fled the unit years before Franco could, leaving him unprotected amongst older psycho step-siblings, two of whom were now in prison. The third, the “good one,” knifed Franco to end a dispute about who was the best third baseman of all time. Franco got stitched up without telling anybody about the incident because doing so would have been a violation of the family commandment, “Don’t snitch.” The other commandment, “Don’t be a dick” left a lot of room for interpretation.
Franco now points out, “We are not our parents.”
“We were for a while there,” Clare says.
“That’s the past. Those people don’t count. Do you miss any of yours? I don’t miss any of mine. Hell, I don’t even remember half their names. Do you ever think about them? I don’t. This — what we have — this is real, Clare.”
They’re leaning forward, talking softly and when the waitress approaches they draw back. This gives Franco a chance to assess the situation more. Partly because of his sexual urge. But also because he feels the tightening in his gut that occurs anytime anything ends. Almost anything could trigger this feeling, such as a coworker that he hardly knew moving to another job or even the cancelation of a television series. Minor stuff. Someone sent him a link to an article about separation anxiety.
Now when a romantic relationship ends, no matter who initiates the breakup, that’s when Franco feels as if somebody kicks him in the stomach. That’s when he vomits, something that the three friends he’d lived with pretended not to notice. (One of them had sent him the article.) He feels nausea building now.
For the past few dates, he’d tried to brush aside the affectless tone Clare had exhibited. She apologized for being a bit “out of it;” that she’d been busy “holding hands” with a new mechanic, showing him the ropes. Now, Franco wonders just how much hand-holding had been going on.
“Okay,” Franco says. “I’m sorry that I’m pushing.”
Clare smiles. “We agreed to slow,” Franco says.
“Slow is good.”
Franco thinks, If it were any slower, we’d be going backward.
Their food arrives with another round of drinks; a craft beer for Franco and a glass of Cabaret Sauvignon for Clare.
Now would be a good time to change the subject, but Franco can’t find another subject. It reminds him of back in school when a teacher would reprimand him for not concentrating, with the immediate result being that Franco could concentrate even less because of the unruly mob of emotions — resentment, anger, embarrassment — scaling the walls of his equilibrium.
Finally, Franco says, “I was thinking that maybe next Saturday we could...”
He stops because Clare’s shaking her head.
“No?”
“Can’t do next Saturday,” Clare says. “Sorry.”
Franco thinks, “Shit. Here we go again.”
He waits. She looks down, as she holds her fork above the plate.
“Clare?” He says, after a few beats. Wherever this may be going, he at least deserves an explanation.
“I’m busy that whole weekend, Franco,” she says.
“But….”
“A spiritual retreat,” Clare says, placing her fork down and folding her arms.
“Spiritual retreat?”
“I’m thinking about…”
“Yes?”
“It’s going to sound weird. It is weird.”
“Clare, just tell me!”
“I’m thinking about becoming a nun.”
That’s when it happens.
Franco falls out of his chair.
He never understood afterward — and he thought about the incident throughout his life — exactly how it occurred. He and Clare are talking, she reveals her calling, and he somehow loses his balance. He’s leaning to one side, his feet entangling, stepping on shoelaces playing a part, and his urgency to dispel this nun business factors in. Add gravity and you have the recipe that puts Franco on his ass.
And once on his ass, what does Franco do? He laughs. Loudly. He can’t help it. The girl he loves desires to become a nun. He started the day wanting to get laid and now he’s been laid out. Life is strange, Franco thinks looking up at the ceiling at Chauncey’s Bar and Grill.
Clare laughs as well, sounding like an exultant trumpet. He never heard her laugh like that. Franco’s aware that people at surrounding tables also laugh. In fact, everybody in Chauncey’s laughs. That’s what it sounds like, anyhow.
“Are you okay?” Clare shouts above the hilarity.
Franco jumps to his feet no-hands, in the manner of a circus acrobat, and then lifts his arms Rocky-like, which elicits more laughter from the onlookers — waves of laughter that after a few seconds crash on the shoals of applause.
And why not?
Here’s a young fellow who takes what could very well be one of the more embarrassing events in his life and transforms it into shared joy. Franco bows to his new fans. The manager runs over, smiling like a flashlight.
“Your lunch is on Chauncey’s,” he announces, as he gestures to Franco to take his seat again. More applause. The manager adds, “Now, folks, that only works once. Nobody else try that.”
And nobody does.
A moment of pure joy.
"Joy is what people don’t get about being a Poor Clare nun," Clare Harkin writes to Franco just before she enters the cloister. The retreat she’d spoken about before Franco’s fall was called a Monastic Experience Weekend; an introduction to a very strict and aesthetic order.
It’s a life of mostly prayer and work, with 30 minutes of recreation each day except Sundays and holy days, when that’s increased to an hour. That’s when the good sisters can gab and talk about their hobbies, such as art, knitting, music, gardening and, now, repairing cars. They never go out, and spend most of their time in silence.
“People have the idea that it’s a grim and joyless life,” Clare had written Franco in her last letter — yes a letter, not an email — to him. “But I’ve never experienced so much joy, Franco. These are happy people with minds and souls fed by God’s love. It’s not a life of sacrifice and misery. It’s a life of joy. The closest we can come to pure joy in this world.”
Franco responded, but he doesn’t know if Clare ever saw the letter because by that time she’d started her postulancy. Doesn’t matter because in the letter he writes what he had told her the last few times they met (you couldn’t call them dates by that point). He said he was happy for her. That had taken some doing because at first, he’d tried to talk her out of it.
He pleaded his case especially hard on one walk side-by-side along the Delaware River Trail on a day with a sky so blue it almost hurt Franco’s eyes.
“You’re just trying to escape from the world,” he had said.
“Maybe.”
“You won’t last.”
“Perhaps.”
“That nice glass of wine after a day’s work? Chilling with chicken wings and binging on TV shows? Sleeping in? Jogging in the park? Visiting your brother and his family? Visiting your friends?”
“I already know about all the things I won’t be doing anymore,” Clare says.
“But you like those things, Clare.”
“I did.”
“‘Did.’ Please.”
“That just shows you how wonderful the thing is that I’m now hooked on. And the people? My friends? My brother and his girls? You? That all becomes more important for I’ll be praying for all of you, all the time.”
“I don’t want your prayers. I want you. The way you were. The way you really are.”
Clare sighs.
Franco asks, “Why do that penance for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t consider it penance.”
“Clare...”
She pivots, squints up at him while shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare with her hand. “Can’t you be happy for me, Franco? Please stop.”
“What are you going to say next? ‘It’s not you, it’s me?’”
“It’s not me. It’s not you. It’s Him.”
Not much wiggle room there, so Franco eventually relents and wishes Clare nothing but happiness.
“And I, you,” she says.
Franco’s shattered, but he gets over it.
In the years to come, this heartbreak would become a punchline when any interviewer asks Franco how he’d happened to come to be an artist so relatively late. Franco would explain that true, it had been in his early 30s that he’d begun to devote hours and hours to his sculptures. But he’d been dabbling all along, ever since he’d helped his uncle. At the stone quarry, the owner let him come and go whenever he wanted. As manager, Franco already knew the code to open the gate and disarm the security system.
“The girl I loved became a nun, so I decided to become a monk for art,” Franco would divulge, but he never revealed the identity of this secret muse.
Although Franco and Clare had been together only a relatively short time and he quickly found joy in life again. Perhaps not the joy Clare spoke of but genuine enough; for instance, he became an uncle several times over; Franco never married. There had been some romantic interludes that featured a much distracted Franco obsessing over the sculpture that he should be working on. Everything else seemed a waste of time.
Here’s how Franco escaped the world.
A message on the wall at the corner of the cavernous warehouse at the stone quarry reads, “Franco’s Corner.” At first, when Franco started working on his stone sculptures, the sign had been made of large banner paper that would tear and fall apart at some point. Then, the owner painted it on the walls and penned in the area where Franco worked. He also installed some klieg lights.
In the years before he met Clare Harkin when Franco finished a work, he’d step back and assess. He always shook his head. Then he’d hop on a forklift and transport the piece back onto the quarry grounds to be broken down and shipped off to help create something useful.
That changed with “Clare,” the first sculpture that he’d felt good enough about to ask someone from one of the galleries to come and take a look. To an untrained eye, the work looks haphazard, just a pile of rock needing to be removed.
The trained eye saw what was truly there: the angst, the hope, the beauty.
The woman from the gallery had been a friend of a friend of a friend and somewhere along the line, someone owed someone a favor. It helped that the woman loved discovering what she referred to as “primitives,” people who’d never taken an art course and filled that “gap” in their development with work that inspired shock and awe.
Franco is discovered.
“We’ll need more than one,” said the woman, who’d eventually become his agent.
Franco worked that spring and summer often from closing time at the quarry through the night and into the dawn when his employees began drifting back in. To himself, though, he never called it work. He called it joy. The owner of the stone quarry called it crazy and tried to make him stop.
“You look like shit, Franco! Sleep! People need sleep!”
Maybe people do, but Franco didn’t.
His first showing happened that winter, and one of his pieces sold for $10,000. Franco was off. Within a year he resigned from his job at the stone quarry because he could afford it, but he still wanted to use that corner of the warehouse as his studio. The owner agreed but began charging rent. Franco could pay, so why not?
“What inspires you?” interviewers from art magazines ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it the mystery nun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some claim that story’s apocryphal,” one interviewer pressed. “Is it?”
“Well,” Franco Bennett says, ending the line of questioning, “if it is, I’ll never tell. Silence really is golden.”
And so he works on.
At night, when dust dances in the illumination thrown by the klieg lights, he sometimes hallucinates from tiredness and hunger. The same vision often appears. Nuns placate themselves before an altar. Chants, singing, and prayer echo as if from another far-off corner of the vast warehouse. Franco eventually understands that these visitations signal that he should rest for a few days, and he does.
Though a part of him realizes in quiet moments that these incidents could be a sign of encroaching madness (he wouldn’t be the first artist to endure that affliction), Franco fears not. In fact, he welcomes them with joy. He knows that the former Clare Harkin — now Sister Saint Francis Marie — prays for him, and will continue to do so forever after.
Franco thinks, Amen to that.
He wants to have sex with Clare Harkin, but he’ll have to come right out and ask for it in the way that he might make his case for a bank loan: calmly, methodically, dispassionately. He’d been tempted to just let things happen naturally (and wordlessly) those times when they’d been making out and heading in that direction anyway. But all this #MeToo business forces Franco to reassess his approach to courtship. Franco gets it. “No” doesn’t mean “yes,” or even “maybe.” It means “no.”
But where does that leave the pursuit?
Most of Franco’s uncles had been turned down by the women who are now his aunts the first (or even the second or third) time they’d asked for a date. The men had been persistent, though, and eventually wore down the objects of their desire. “Object” is a loaded word these days, and persistence can get you jailed or fired or shamed online. Not that Franco’s ever been tempted to trifle with a woman; his three older sisters had beaten any such impulse out of him in childhood.
Still, he has needs.
So, on this particular day when Franco Bennett and Clare Harkin meet for lunch at Chauncey’s Bar and Grill in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia — after the drinks arrive and they’ve toasted new beginnings — Franco softly utters his prognosis.
“We’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” Clare asks with faux naïveté.
COVID-19 had years before evolved from a life-threatening mystery to a seasonal nuisance, so nobody wears masks these days. That resurrected humanity’s reflexive tendency to read facial expressions, but to Franco’s frustration, Clare’s beautiful face betrays nothing.
“Clare, please, I’m serious.”
Clare responds, “Hmmm.”
Hmmm? Just what the hell does ’Hmmm’ mean? Franco wonders. His lowered head and unblinking brown-eyed stare give him the air of a ram about to charge, ready to batter some, as yet, unknown rival for Clare’s affections.
Clare inspects the menu, seemingly deliberating, although she’ll end up ordering the Caesar salad with grilled chicken, as always. If not for the rain — which exploded out of the dark sky, causing them to scamper into Chauncey’s and which in minutes elicited flood warnings on weather apps — they’d be sitting out on the patio on this May Saturday afternoon. Chauncey’s had become one of their regular stops, even though they didn’t quite fit in.
Franco and Clare know that they follow different career paths compared to the other young people in the place who, they could safely guess or even ascertain just by overhearing, work in human resources, IT, sales, accounting, law, healthcare, banking, or publishing. The mix includes ones who still depend shamelessly on Mommy and Daddy, or who have decided to make the accumulation of graduate degrees or PhDs their life’s work, or at least half of their life’s work — the ones whose adolescence stretches to about age 40.
Clare’s a mechanic at a Ford dealership on Delaware Avenue right off the river. Franco manages a stone quarry just north of the city in Bucks County. Franco and Clare’s shared interests include the usual suspects found on dating apps: reading, exercising, going to movies, traveling, pets (dogs in their case), chilling with family and friends.
“Clare?” Franco asks.
“Franco, I am saying what we both said at the beginning,” Clare murmurs, sliding her index finger among the items on the menu. “No pressure. Remember?”
“But we are ready.”
Clare smiles, still not looking at him.
“You’re ready.”
They’d met on a dating app just in time because they’d both separately decided to take a long break from dating. Perhaps they’d quit altogether. At any rate, this would be it, they vowed. They’d try one last time to meet someone, and if that led to a date, good. If the date led to something more, even better. If not, okay then. They weren’t optimistic, each expecting another empty and awkward exchange leading nowhere.
“Are you Philadelphia born and raised?” Franco had messaged.
“Guilty.”
Franco paused. He looked around his apartment in the Fox Chase section of the city. Against the living room wall were stacked boxes that still needed to be unpacked. He’d moved in a few months ago. He’d been forced to. The big old drafty rented house that he’d shared with three friends came to be seen as obsolete — both literally and metaphorically — as the roof sagged and began leaking, and as Franco’s buddies had one-by-one gotten engaged and planned futures with their fiancés in which Franco may have a walk-on every now and then.
These visitations would become fewer and fewer until Franco and his posse not too far in the future might message each other on Facebook now and then. He’s accepted that that part of his life — hanging out with the guys and thinking that there’s no reason why things just shouldn’t always be like this — sailed into memory.
In the glow of the desktop, Franco had struggled to find words for this new girl. Franco wanted to say how awkward he felt, but he’d learned to not voice insecurity. Okay. That’s what he shouldn’t say. Now, what should he say?
Clare saved him by messaging, “You look like a gentleman. I am a lady.”
Now, that’s different. People didn’t talk about being a gentleman or lady these days. So old-fashioned.
Franco messaged, “Looks can be…” and left it at that.
Ha-ha.
In her apartment in the Fishtown section, Clare stared at the unfinished sentence.
Looks can be misleading.
Right. She gets it. She should probably roll with it and keep things light, maybe move this conversation into banter. Except that Clare bantered with old and trusted friends, not with internet strangers.
She insisted, “Are you a gentleman?”
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-stinking-tock.
She’d always been tempted to get a quieter clock but this one above the mantel in her living room had hung on the wall of her childhood bedroom; the metronome that kept a steady beat behind the often shrill highs and guttural lows of growing up in a dysfunctional household. The sound usually comforted her. Now it puts her on edge.
In a few moments, Franco messaged, “Guilty.”
Two sighs rise up in Fishtown and Fox Chase. So far, so good, but a vast ocean of wariness separates “hello” from “let’s meet.”
Clare and Franco had managed to cross it.
Now, in Chauncey’s, Franco pleads his case. “But we’ve been seeing each other for,” the slightest pause as Franco calculates, “over two months now?”
Finally, Clare grants him eye contact even though she feels herself blush — as she knew she would — from his intensity.
“Is that a question?” Clare asks.
“Nine-and-a-half weeks, we’ve been dating.”
Clare sighs.
Oops, Franco thinks, but chance tricked him into the faux pas of saying the name of the classic erotic movie. He understands Clare well enough by now to know that she knows that he knows that she knows…
Franco thinks, Okay. Stop the loop. Time to get off.
Clare says: “Friends, remember? Take it slow, remember? Don’t force anything, remember?”
“Am I forcing anything?”
“You want sex.”
“Well,” he admits, “Eventually.”
“Eventually. When we both feel right about it.”
Franco thinks, Eventually? Can we maybe narrow it down a little?
He likes that she’s old-fashioned. He respects that. But still….
He can’t believe that Clare’s not interested in taking that step. He feels it when they kiss. Doesn’t he?
“We’ve been here before, Franco,” Clare says. “Remember the ruins.”
She refers to the battered landscape of their past entanglements.
By the time they’d met, the hookup scene had come to fill Clare and Franco with an antipathy bordering on aversion. They’d jumped onto the train in their younger years (they are now in their early 30s), excited by the idea of no-strings-attached sex. But many sad trials and angry exits later left them each dealing with a growing emptiness taking up more and more psychic space.
Rompings would be bracketed by long stretches of celibacy (of a sort — self-pleasuring not counting) or actual relationships that kept them interested and feeling wonderful until the inevitable crash. But why inevitable? Many of Clare and Franco’s happily coupled friends had met through online dating sites.
It works for some people — a lot of people. Why hasn’t it worked for them?
They’d always landed on the path that led back to hookups, with less and less excited expectations until finally, it felt as if they were clocking in. Well, no more. They needed a permanent break from swiping left or right. In, oh so many ways, their initial exchanges could have gone wrong, but they hadn’t.
“Let’s get to know each other first,” Franco had messaged. “Begin as friends.”
Clare responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
On one of their first dates, they made Chauncey’s their last stop on a busy evening, getting to the place just before last call and as the bartender roused a drunk from catatonia by jiggling the man’s shoulder. The inebriated gent wore a tailored suit and exuded the aura of someone who’d been locked out of his house. He raised his head, which lolled uncertainly.
“Out, Bob,” the bartender ordered. “Go home.”
“Can’t.”
“Then go to your sister’s.”
The man slid his cell phone over. The bartender dutifully arranged an Uber.
The man stumbled toward the exit, but when he passed Clare and Franco, he stopped.
“You two!” he accused.
“Yeah? What’s up, buddy?” Franco said, ostensibly patting him on the back, but actually shoving him along.
“Procreate!” The drunk demanded. “You two should definitely procreate!”
Thereafter, Franco and Clare would sometimes begin their text and email exchanges with: “Ya wanna procreate?” But something else happened that night. When Franco walks Clare home, light from the overheads dapples a spring mist that brushes their faces. Franco stops at one point, turns this beautiful girl toward him and they kiss. Yes, something changes. Franco realizes that he’s in love, and whispers that discovery into her ear.
“I feel the same,” Clare says.
There’s a future. And if ever they should in fact take that drunk’s advice and procreate, they would produce basketball players. Franco’s 6 feet, 5 inches. Clare’s an even 6, but that’s without heels.
They get noticed.
Franco learned back in high school that he possessed hair that girls love to touch. Coal black and wavy, with a pompadour that he could never comb out until one of his sisters said, “Why the hell would you want to do that?” He played basketball and wrestled, and after graduation, did a semester at community college but then decided to become a stone mason. He’d worked with an uncle one summer building a backyard gazebo, a walled garden, and several fire pits. Franco’s struggles with marble, slate, granite, and sandstone brought to the fore a quality he’d never suspected that he possessed: creativity. He was hooked.
Clare grew up helping her father at his gas station. It’s now her brother’s business and that’s fine with Clare because she didn’t like interacting with people, which isn’t the same as not liking people. She did like people. Loved them, in fact. Too much. She could easily be dragged into an altruistic black hole. Giving all her time, money, and emotion and leaving nothing left for Clare.
She’d told Franco that she’d grown tired of the noise of the world.
“I hear you,” he’d said, while thinking, Please, please, please don’t try to convert me. Thankfully, though she’d only revealed that aspect of her inner life on those few occasions. She may be religious, but she doesn’t talk about it much, thank God.
Franco thinks, Anyway, she’s too damn sexy for all that.
Despite Clare spending much of her workday in grimy overalls that she didn’t bother to change out of until she got home, men were not fooled. Clare was a 10. She could dress in a trash bag, it wouldn’t matter. Her blonde hair may be pulled back and capped, but the wisps that escaped highlighted turquoise eyes that didn’t let go. Her secret? A body kept in perfect shape by DNA, a natural aversion to the sorts of foods that fatten people up, and a job that keeps her moving. Do women desire toned and sexy arms these days? Well, as Clare could attest, using a wrench enough times during a shift will get you there.
She didn’t wear baggy clothes outside of work for the most part, but no matter what she wore, Clare’s demeanor warned: Do not disturb. One of her t-shirts sums it up, “I’m not antisocial. I’m selectively social. There’s a difference!”
Despite these defenses, or maybe because of them, Franco continues pitching fevered woo to Clare this day at Chauncey’s.
“Sex is good.”
“Yes.”
“Clare, I love you. You told me that you love me.”
“Yes. I was there, remember?”
“We’re adults. We stopped living with our parents years ago.”
“Yes,” Clare agrees. “And our parents taught us that sex is good. Look what that got them?”
Franco wishes he hadn’t brought up the parents. Franco and Clare grew up in broken households, maneuvering around the unchecked appetites of adults who’d adhered to a lifestyle that put no inhibitions on doing whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you want to do it, so long as you can’t go to jail for it and can pay your bills (mostly).
Clare’s mother married three times and lived with two other men somewhere in her scattershot chronology; her father moved to Australia with wife number two and promptly started cheating on her as well. Dad recently emailed Clare that, “We are in counseling,” though Clare didn’t know which of the “we” women in his life had been referenced. Dad could multitask.
Franco’s parents also did the revolving door dance, and the resulting mixed family turned out to be a mixed bag when it came to instilling principles that would help navigate an ethical course through life. Each of Franco’s older sisters fled the unit years before Franco could, leaving him unprotected amongst older psycho step-siblings, two of whom were now in prison. The third, the “good one,” knifed Franco to end a dispute about who was the best third baseman of all time. Franco got stitched up without telling anybody about the incident because doing so would have been a violation of the family commandment, “Don’t snitch.” The other commandment, “Don’t be a dick” left a lot of room for interpretation.
Franco now points out, “We are not our parents.”
“We were for a while there,” Clare says.
“That’s the past. Those people don’t count. Do you miss any of yours? I don’t miss any of mine. Hell, I don’t even remember half their names. Do you ever think about them? I don’t. This — what we have — this is real, Clare.”
They’re leaning forward, talking softly and when the waitress approaches they draw back. This gives Franco a chance to assess the situation more. Partly because of his sexual urge. But also because he feels the tightening in his gut that occurs anytime anything ends. Almost anything could trigger this feeling, such as a coworker that he hardly knew moving to another job or even the cancelation of a television series. Minor stuff. Someone sent him a link to an article about separation anxiety.
Now when a romantic relationship ends, no matter who initiates the breakup, that’s when Franco feels as if somebody kicks him in the stomach. That’s when he vomits, something that the three friends he’d lived with pretended not to notice. (One of them had sent him the article.) He feels nausea building now.
For the past few dates, he’d tried to brush aside the affectless tone Clare had exhibited. She apologized for being a bit “out of it;” that she’d been busy “holding hands” with a new mechanic, showing him the ropes. Now, Franco wonders just how much hand-holding had been going on.
“Okay,” Franco says. “I’m sorry that I’m pushing.”
Clare smiles. “We agreed to slow,” Franco says.
“Slow is good.”
Franco thinks, If it were any slower, we’d be going backward.
Their food arrives with another round of drinks; a craft beer for Franco and a glass of Cabaret Sauvignon for Clare.
Now would be a good time to change the subject, but Franco can’t find another subject. It reminds him of back in school when a teacher would reprimand him for not concentrating, with the immediate result being that Franco could concentrate even less because of the unruly mob of emotions — resentment, anger, embarrassment — scaling the walls of his equilibrium.
Finally, Franco says, “I was thinking that maybe next Saturday we could...”
He stops because Clare’s shaking her head.
“No?”
“Can’t do next Saturday,” Clare says. “Sorry.”
Franco thinks, “Shit. Here we go again.”
He waits. She looks down, as she holds her fork above the plate.
“Clare?” He says, after a few beats. Wherever this may be going, he at least deserves an explanation.
“I’m busy that whole weekend, Franco,” she says.
“But….”
“A spiritual retreat,” Clare says, placing her fork down and folding her arms.
“Spiritual retreat?”
“I’m thinking about…”
“Yes?”
“It’s going to sound weird. It is weird.”
“Clare, just tell me!”
“I’m thinking about becoming a nun.”
That’s when it happens.
Franco falls out of his chair.
He never understood afterward — and he thought about the incident throughout his life — exactly how it occurred. He and Clare are talking, she reveals her calling, and he somehow loses his balance. He’s leaning to one side, his feet entangling, stepping on shoelaces playing a part, and his urgency to dispel this nun business factors in. Add gravity and you have the recipe that puts Franco on his ass.
And once on his ass, what does Franco do? He laughs. Loudly. He can’t help it. The girl he loves desires to become a nun. He started the day wanting to get laid and now he’s been laid out. Life is strange, Franco thinks looking up at the ceiling at Chauncey’s Bar and Grill.
Clare laughs as well, sounding like an exultant trumpet. He never heard her laugh like that. Franco’s aware that people at surrounding tables also laugh. In fact, everybody in Chauncey’s laughs. That’s what it sounds like, anyhow.
“Are you okay?” Clare shouts above the hilarity.
Franco jumps to his feet no-hands, in the manner of a circus acrobat, and then lifts his arms Rocky-like, which elicits more laughter from the onlookers — waves of laughter that after a few seconds crash on the shoals of applause.
And why not?
Here’s a young fellow who takes what could very well be one of the more embarrassing events in his life and transforms it into shared joy. Franco bows to his new fans. The manager runs over, smiling like a flashlight.
“Your lunch is on Chauncey’s,” he announces, as he gestures to Franco to take his seat again. More applause. The manager adds, “Now, folks, that only works once. Nobody else try that.”
And nobody does.
A moment of pure joy.
"Joy is what people don’t get about being a Poor Clare nun," Clare Harkin writes to Franco just before she enters the cloister. The retreat she’d spoken about before Franco’s fall was called a Monastic Experience Weekend; an introduction to a very strict and aesthetic order.
It’s a life of mostly prayer and work, with 30 minutes of recreation each day except Sundays and holy days, when that’s increased to an hour. That’s when the good sisters can gab and talk about their hobbies, such as art, knitting, music, gardening and, now, repairing cars. They never go out, and spend most of their time in silence.
“People have the idea that it’s a grim and joyless life,” Clare had written Franco in her last letter — yes a letter, not an email — to him. “But I’ve never experienced so much joy, Franco. These are happy people with minds and souls fed by God’s love. It’s not a life of sacrifice and misery. It’s a life of joy. The closest we can come to pure joy in this world.”
Franco responded, but he doesn’t know if Clare ever saw the letter because by that time she’d started her postulancy. Doesn’t matter because in the letter he writes what he had told her the last few times they met (you couldn’t call them dates by that point). He said he was happy for her. That had taken some doing because at first, he’d tried to talk her out of it.
He pleaded his case especially hard on one walk side-by-side along the Delaware River Trail on a day with a sky so blue it almost hurt Franco’s eyes.
“You’re just trying to escape from the world,” he had said.
“Maybe.”
“You won’t last.”
“Perhaps.”
“That nice glass of wine after a day’s work? Chilling with chicken wings and binging on TV shows? Sleeping in? Jogging in the park? Visiting your brother and his family? Visiting your friends?”
“I already know about all the things I won’t be doing anymore,” Clare says.
“But you like those things, Clare.”
“I did.”
“‘Did.’ Please.”
“That just shows you how wonderful the thing is that I’m now hooked on. And the people? My friends? My brother and his girls? You? That all becomes more important for I’ll be praying for all of you, all the time.”
“I don’t want your prayers. I want you. The way you were. The way you really are.”
Clare sighs.
Franco asks, “Why do that penance for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t consider it penance.”
“Clare...”
She pivots, squints up at him while shielding her eyes from the sun’s glare with her hand. “Can’t you be happy for me, Franco? Please stop.”
“What are you going to say next? ‘It’s not you, it’s me?’”
“It’s not me. It’s not you. It’s Him.”
Not much wiggle room there, so Franco eventually relents and wishes Clare nothing but happiness.
“And I, you,” she says.
Franco’s shattered, but he gets over it.
In the years to come, this heartbreak would become a punchline when any interviewer asks Franco how he’d happened to come to be an artist so relatively late. Franco would explain that true, it had been in his early 30s that he’d begun to devote hours and hours to his sculptures. But he’d been dabbling all along, ever since he’d helped his uncle. At the stone quarry, the owner let him come and go whenever he wanted. As manager, Franco already knew the code to open the gate and disarm the security system.
“The girl I loved became a nun, so I decided to become a monk for art,” Franco would divulge, but he never revealed the identity of this secret muse.
Although Franco and Clare had been together only a relatively short time and he quickly found joy in life again. Perhaps not the joy Clare spoke of but genuine enough; for instance, he became an uncle several times over; Franco never married. There had been some romantic interludes that featured a much distracted Franco obsessing over the sculpture that he should be working on. Everything else seemed a waste of time.
Here’s how Franco escaped the world.
A message on the wall at the corner of the cavernous warehouse at the stone quarry reads, “Franco’s Corner.” At first, when Franco started working on his stone sculptures, the sign had been made of large banner paper that would tear and fall apart at some point. Then, the owner painted it on the walls and penned in the area where Franco worked. He also installed some klieg lights.
In the years before he met Clare Harkin when Franco finished a work, he’d step back and assess. He always shook his head. Then he’d hop on a forklift and transport the piece back onto the quarry grounds to be broken down and shipped off to help create something useful.
That changed with “Clare,” the first sculpture that he’d felt good enough about to ask someone from one of the galleries to come and take a look. To an untrained eye, the work looks haphazard, just a pile of rock needing to be removed.
The trained eye saw what was truly there: the angst, the hope, the beauty.
The woman from the gallery had been a friend of a friend of a friend and somewhere along the line, someone owed someone a favor. It helped that the woman loved discovering what she referred to as “primitives,” people who’d never taken an art course and filled that “gap” in their development with work that inspired shock and awe.
Franco is discovered.
“We’ll need more than one,” said the woman, who’d eventually become his agent.
Franco worked that spring and summer often from closing time at the quarry through the night and into the dawn when his employees began drifting back in. To himself, though, he never called it work. He called it joy. The owner of the stone quarry called it crazy and tried to make him stop.
“You look like shit, Franco! Sleep! People need sleep!”
Maybe people do, but Franco didn’t.
His first showing happened that winter, and one of his pieces sold for $10,000. Franco was off. Within a year he resigned from his job at the stone quarry because he could afford it, but he still wanted to use that corner of the warehouse as his studio. The owner agreed but began charging rent. Franco could pay, so why not?
“What inspires you?” interviewers from art magazines ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it the mystery nun?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some claim that story’s apocryphal,” one interviewer pressed. “Is it?”
“Well,” Franco Bennett says, ending the line of questioning, “if it is, I’ll never tell. Silence really is golden.”
And so he works on.
At night, when dust dances in the illumination thrown by the klieg lights, he sometimes hallucinates from tiredness and hunger. The same vision often appears. Nuns placate themselves before an altar. Chants, singing, and prayer echo as if from another far-off corner of the vast warehouse. Franco eventually understands that these visitations signal that he should rest for a few days, and he does.
Though a part of him realizes in quiet moments that these incidents could be a sign of encroaching madness (he wouldn’t be the first artist to endure that affliction), Franco fears not. In fact, he welcomes them with joy. He knows that the former Clare Harkin — now Sister Saint Francis Marie — prays for him, and will continue to do so forever after.
Franco thinks, Amen to that.
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Frank Diamond’s poem, “Labor Day,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize Award. His short stories have appeared in RavensPerch, the Examined Life Journal, Nzuri Journal of Coastline College, and The Fredericksburg Literary & Art Review, among many other publications. He has had poetry published in many publications. He lives in Langhorne, PA.
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