A Private Sorcery (16 page)

I remember the envy I felt at your semester abroad, eight weeks of study in Aix-en-Provence and then a long, rambling journey. I followed your trip in my atlas as deduced from your postcards. You clung to the Mediterranean, traveling from Málaga to Naples, and then across Italy and the Adriatic Sea to Athens and on to Crete. I located Aghios Nikolais, where you wrote that you'd found a room in a house above the port.

I wished for you a little Cretan friend, a girl with black hair that touched her waist and brows like friendly caterpillars. A girl with a black mole on the inside of her thigh who pulled the sheets over her breasts only when she felt cold. I castigated myself for having given you my bookish legacy, that amalgam of too much seriousness and a passive
reserve that made it likely your bed partners would remain the journal and paperbacks you carted around in your rucksack. So you can see why I was so surprised when you introduced us to Rena, not that she looks like the little Greek friend I wished for you, but rather that she has, despite her skittish veneer, an elusive but nonetheless undeniable beauty. Not the easy American cover-girl beauty that your brother saw in Susan but something more interesting that comes from the Old World, where things are not prized for being shiny and bright: long legs caught in the corner of an eye on a stone-laid street, thick hair pushed back from a face absorbed in thought, an aquiline nose suggesting an ancient hieroglyph.

I'm embarrassed, an old man, talking like this. It's been too many years living with your mother, the celibacy a disease. Twenty-six years of it, since I was forty-one, since the spring her father died. The suburban house, our few vacations spent in wall-to-wall carpeted resorts with life-size sculptures of tennis pros perched on a weedless lawn. The body—something to be sanitized and controlled.

So why did you go along with it?
I hear you asking.
Why did you let her dictate everything?

What makes you think it was her?

M
AGGIE, WHO TELLS ME
she worked for two years in a feminist painters' collective in Santa Fe, lays out the game plan: we'll spend today covering the floors with drop cloths, taping the trim and prepping the walls. Our goal will be to roll one coat of primer and the first coat of paint. Tomorrow, we'll do the second coat of paint and the trim.

Rena looks at me. “Don't feel that you have to do this all weekend.” “Count me in, soup to nuts.” The words are still stiff in my mouth when I remember that tomorrow is Sunday, the day I visit you.

Isn't that interesting
, I imagine you saying.
You forgot you were coming to see me.

Overdetermination doesn't negate coincidence
, I rejoin—but this is all fantasy because you have lost the energy for snappy remarks and it is apparent even to me that I forgot because I wanted to forget, because
I am scared to see you in your current state of mind.

“I'll take the boxes home tonight and come back tomorrow by noon.” Maggie divides us into work teams: Ruth and Rena, she and I. We begin the prep work on the bedroom. Maggie raises the blinds and it is stunning, the view of the river and park—the green treetops, the wide swatch of blue, the sailboats headed downstream, a tug and a barge moving north. I can see the spray from the prow of the barge and the gulls circling over the water, and for the first time I see that Rena is leaving you, that she is making a life on her own.

I
T'S ELEVEN AT NIGHT
by the time I haul your things up to the attic, your young man artifacts now stored in a space not much smaller than the five-by-eight cell you share with a twenty-four-year-old kid on his third mail fraud conviction.

I begin at six in the morning trying to call you at the pay phone on your floor. For the first hour there's no answer, and then, starting at seven, the phone is ceaselessly busy. I leave a message for you at the warden's office that I can't come today, that I'll be there Tuesday morning. The clerk answering the phone doesn't want to take the message—“We're not an answering service,” she says nastily, “we don't take messages”—but I pull doctor's rank (something I've always hated, the New Jersey cardiologists with their BMWs with the MD plates double-parked outside Le Cirque), saying this is Dr. Dubinsky, and she reluctantly agrees to have the message passed on to you. Afterwards, I feel miserable, and it's hard to know how much is guilt for postponing my visit to you and how much is guilt that I'm posing as a physician—I who have not seen a patient in nearly four decades, unless you count your mother as a practice unto herself.

I spend the rest of the morning doing penance for leaving your mother untended for two afternoons in a row. I put chicken pieces in the oven for her dinner, take a croissant out of the freezer, go to the store for milk, fresh orange juice and a pint of her favorite black cherry chocolate-chip ice cream. At ten, I soft-boil her eggs and fetch the strawberry jam.

She stirs as I come in with her breakfast tray. “You're early.”

“I need to leave in half an hour. I'm going to help Rena finish painting her apartment.”

She asks no questions about the new apartment. “I slept terribly. I feel so
weak
.” She stretches out
weak
over several seconds and then, as if forgetting the whole thing, swirls the strawberry jam into the yellows of her soft-boiled eggs. A fleck of croissant falls onto her neck and I reach over to wipe it off with the pink cloth napkin she likes on her tray.

She picks up the Sunday paper I've put by her side, reading as always the wedding announcements first.

“Deborah Gibbons. I wonder if that's Edward Gibbons' daughter.” I try to recall who Edward Gibbons is, but it is irrelevant since I am not expected to respond.

“She married the son of the president of one of the Sony divisions. He's an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.” She laughs, a bitter laugh intended to imply how much richer and better everyone else is than us and ours. I feel terrible for you, that your mother has never been able to be proud of you, to view you as doing something important and worthy of respect. Not that she'd ever had any respect for psychiatry, but when we were first married she'd still held medicine in awe and this had extended in some feeble way to me. With her father's death, the pedestal had cracked, as though if her father were no longer a doctor, there could be, at least in the way she'd always thought of them, no more doctors. She'd purse her lips when someone referred to doctors, once remarking to a neighbor, “Well, really, if you think about it, it's very much like being a manicurist or an appliance repair person—just another service job.”

“Let me help you move to the armchair to finish your coffee. Then I can change the sheets.”

Obediently, she inches her legs over the side of the bed. Her ankles are swollen, her feet puffy on top. For twenty-some years, Stone has told us she will keep retaining water until she changes her diet and starts getting daily exercise.

“I used to have such lovely feet. So smooth and slender.”

“Yes, you did, dear.” I take her hand and guide her to the armchair.

“Amy Loodis, she was my roommate my first year at Wellesley, she used to say she'd die three times over to have my feet. She had these awful size nine and a halfs.”

I put fresh sheets on the bed, plump up the pillows: everything done the way Mrs. Smiley used to do. With two college tuitions to pay, I'd had to let Mrs. Smiley go the year you began Swarthmore. Or rather, good soul that she is, she'd sensed the financial strain and found herself another position. “You can manage fine now, Dr. D, with a girl who comes in once a week to do your cleaning and laundry. That is, if you don't mind doing the shopping and taking Mrs. D her trays.”

It took me a few days after you and Marc left for college to understand that the irritation I felt at both of you was resentment that you still needed me to keep the household running. I fought the idea; after all, you were eighteen and twenty, gone most of the year. But the bottom line was if I didn't maintain a household, you had none. Different as my circumstances had been—there'd been no money for me to go away to college; I'd felt lucky that my mother had a steady job and could give me room and board and I could make enough to cover my City College tuition and incidentals by working summers for my uncle—my mother had always kept house with grace and good cheer. She'd never missed a beat, not after my father and Eunice died, not after Lil and Rose got married, not when it was just the two of us and me hardly ever home in the Pelham Parkway flat. Always, she stocked the icebox, cooked for the holidays, put the blankets in mothballs, vacuumed under the beds. (Merckin, my analyst until I quit my job and had no money to see him anymore, made a quizzical grunt when I described my mother this way, insinuating an unmetabolized oedipal complex. During the two years I lay five times a week on his couch, I argued with him about his spurious logic: if I hated my mother, it would be a defense against the incestual wishes; if I loved her, it was evidence thereof.) It frightened me that your well-being still depended so centrally on me.

For six months after Mrs. Smiley left, I felt nothing but distraction when I entered my study. Seated at my desk, my mind would race to review the day's chores. I'd jump up to look in the phone book for a store
that stocked the bulb for the freezer. I explained the anxiety that I wouldn't be able to work again (by work, I meant my books; the teaching, from which I was planning to retire once you finished college, was by then so automatic, my lectures all written a decade before, it didn't even enter into the equation) as a postpartum reaction to the completion of my second book, the last year of Mrs. Smiley's employ. Five hundred pages on the literary, scientific and philosophical precursors of the idea of the unconscious. It would be absurd, I told myself, to think that one could complete a project of that magnitude and not have a period of rebound. By the time summer rolled around, though, I had to acknowledge that the problem was deeper than needing breathing room at the end of a project, deeper than not knowing how to do two things at once. For the first time since I'd abandoned the practice of psychiatry for the contemplation of its concepts, I'd run aground onto a shore with no ideas. No seaweed, no shells, no jellyfish, no sand diggers, only the white white sand and hot hot sun.

M
AGGIE REORGANIZES THE TEAMS
, so I'm working with Ruth today. Ruth rolls the walls and I keep the paint tray filled, moving it and the stepladder for her.

“How's your book coming?” Ruth asks.

I pause long enough that she glances over her shoulder to check my face. There's a white splotch on her nose like the marking on a horse.

“It's not.”

Ruth dips the roller in the paint tray. “What's the problem?”

I don't know how to respond. It's been so long since anyone asked me this kind of question, I feel rusty. I'm not saying that we, you and I, didn't talk. We talked a lot before that thing with the boy and the subway train. But we talked about the ideas I was struggling with, not the work itself: an entirely different beast.

“I'm lost. I don't know how to tell the story of this girl, Carmelita. Whether to tell it as I've reconstructed it chronologically or to tell it as the pieces unfolded through my research or to tell it as it was told by all these people who used it to fight various battles. I keep circling
around. I can't get any momentum going.”

I feel self-conscious talking this way to your wife's friend, someone younger even than you. Like me, she has two published books under her belt. Unlike me, for whom everything about writing continues to feel chaotic, without principles or methodology, I feel certain that she has by now learned how to construct a book: a master builder, in control of her work, not wandering around like I do staring perplexed at the tools.

“Every book is like that,” she says. “You think you know what you're saying when you start out and then you find there's a softness, something not thought through, at its center. It's so painful to see that what you thought would carry itself has these thin, slushy patches. A lot of the time, the writer is facile enough to skate right over what's missing. That's the paradox of language: it's what we need to think, but it can also provide a beautiful subterfuge for not thinking.”

“I'm not poetic enough to do that. I wish I were.”

“You're lucky. My grandmother used to say to me, it's a great fortune, Ruthie, not to be beautiful. That means whoever falls in love with you has really fallen in love with
you
. Of course, she meant a man, but that's beside the point. I've reached that slushy place with both of my books. And I see it coming with my current work. Only now, I understand that the way to move through that space is to figure out why you've chosen this project. What it's about for you.”

I know I'm the psychiatrist and she's the historian, but this idea gives me the willies. Why I've chosen the Carmelita story? What the story of a murdered or suicided girl and her dead baby means to me?

“It's true with everything,” she says. “With all your projects. With the people in your life. Once you know what you're aiming for, you can get under the muddy swamp into the bedrock and really lay down a foundation.”

I look at this short, squat woman, a painter's cap covering her earlength black hair, her chin pointed skyward as she rolls the upper parts of your wife's bedroom wall. Either I'm hearing a distillation of some piece of wisdom dearly earned or a gussied-up version of an Ann Landers
column.

“Sorry to wax so philosophic,” she says. “Only I've been struggling with this myself these past few weeks.” She leans down and carefully places the roller in the pan I've brought over to her side. I look up at a perfectly painted white wall.

A
T FIVE
, I
HEAD
out with Rena to fetch sandwiches for everyone. In the hall, an old man fumbles to lock the door next to Rena's. Not until he turns his head toward us and I see his dark glasses and the white tip of his cane do I realize it's Santiago Domengo.