A Private Sorcery (22 page)

Pedro approaches. He touches Santiago's shoulder. “It's stopped raining. If we go now, you won't get wet.”

Santiago places his cane on the floor and leans forward to raise himself from the love seat. Pedro helps him up.

“Oh, old age,” Santiago says cheerfully. “What it does to the body.” His skin crumples as he smiles, and Rena thinks that if she were to touch his cheek with a finger or a kiss, it would break into tiny pieces. He balances on Pedro's arm and, as he did the first time they met, removes his beret and makes a little bow with the top of his liver-spotted head.

S
UNDAY MORNING
, B
EERSDEN
arrives as usual a little after three. He carries two bags out of which stick tinfoil caps, his motor cycle helmet hanging from an arm. He grins ear to ear.

“Our bass player took me to this place on Second Avenue. There must have been fifteen cabs double-parked in front. You should see it! It's like Damascus inside. All these Arab men bent over plates of grilled lamb and tabouli. Piles of pita, I'm not exaggerating, three feet high.”

She takes the bags and he follows her into the kitchen, where she puts the food on plates. He gets a beer from the refrigerator and picks up the plates to take them back to the bedroom.

“Let's eat here,” Rena says, pointing at the kitchen table. Beersden's mood, revved up from the night's performance and the motorcycle ride uptown and his excitement to see her, ratchets down a notch in response. She sets out forks and knives and glasses. He pours the beer he usually drinks from the bottle into a glass. The kitchen lights glare like operating room spots.

Beersden bites into his falafel. She watches his attempt to transport
the pita to his mouth without losing half to his chin. After three bites, he pushes back the plate. “Okay, Rena, why don't you tell me what's up.”

She has not rehearsed her words. She does not know what words to use. He refuses to break his gaze. “I need to stop. Us. This.”

“Why is that?”

“It feels wrong. It's not going to work. This is not going to go anywhere. You're not going to leave your wife.”

His eyes narrow and his cheeks droop.

“And I wouldn't want you to. That would be terrible. Your girls are so young.”

He picks up his glass as though to drink and then bangs it on the table. She freezes. “Bullshit, Rena. You're not leveling with me.”

There's a screech of wood on tile as he pushes back his chair. “Is it your husband? Are you going back to your shrink husband?”

“No.”

“Come on, Rena. You can't tell me you're going to live like this too much longer. A Yale grad typing nights. You've got to be thinking that whatever happened with your doctor hubby can be patched up.”

“No, I'm not.” She can feel the agitation rising inside her, and she fears that she will do something stupid and cheap like blurt out that Saul is in jail.

“I don't believe you.”

“It has nothing to do with Saul.”

He stands up suddenly. Her heart pounds violently against her ribs. He strides past her and then down the hall. She hears the hard stream of his urine hitting the water.

When he returns, his hair is damp from the water he's splashed on his face, now more composed. He reaches out a hand to pull her up from the chair. “Let's go talk in the back.”

His voice has softened and she follows him to her room, where he lies on the bed with his head and shoulders propped against the pillows. She sits cross-legged beside him.

“Just level with me, Rena.”

She closes her eyes and tries to think what is the truth and whether
he really wants to hear it. “The truth is I don't love you.”

He laughs. “What, you think because I'm in love with you, you're supposed to reciprocate? Very polite of you, sweetheart.”

He moves his hand to his mouth in mock horror. “Oh, I get it, you're not supposed to have sex if you don't love the guy.”

“Yes.”

He looks at her curiously.

“Yes, I am coming to believe that. It feels wrong to go on without love.” And then to her dismay she starts to cry. She buries her face in her hands and keeps it there until long after she hears him gathering his things from the heap in the hall and closing the front door behind him.

M
AGGIE INSISTS ON
making what she calls her love-affair consolation meal. “You have to come,” she urges Rena over the phone. “It's a guaranteed cure.”

“I'm not the forlorn one. I'm the guilty, confused one.”

“It works for both the rejected and the rejecter. You eat these foods and three hours later the bad feelings are at least half gone.”

When Rena arrives, the apartment smells of roast chicken and caramelized onions. Maggie hands her hot cider with a cinnamon stick. While they eat, she tells stories about the shelter. The woman who snuck out to call the husband who'd broken her arm and then gave him the wrong address so the police arrested him trying to climb in the basement window of the brownstone across the street. The shelter manager who lost it when she found her vacuum cleaner jammed with cotton balls and two of her pots scorched with burnt milk and started screaming that she was going to beat the shit out of whoever did this.

“Then Donna, our director—she's one of those people born without the irony appreciation cells—sends out a memo saying there will be no physical violence in the battered women's shelter.”

“You're being kind,” Ruth says. “Donna is missing more than that. All that healthy Kansas air stopped at her lungs.”

“She's from Lawrence, Kansas. Where, come to think of it, I just read
there's a huge concentration of DDT in the ecosystem.”

“See,” Ruth says. “It's probably that.”

Rena lets Maggie give her more chicken, more scalloped potatoes, lets Ruth refill her glass with wine. She takes a few more bites, then puts down her fork. “All I feel is warm and sleepy and filled with wonderful foods.”

“I told you,” Maggie says. “It always works. Medieval white magic.” “Chicken fat and heavy cream,” Ruth sings.

“Now you have to take a nap before dessert. That's part of the regime.”

“You cooked. I'm going to do the dishes.”

“Absolutely not. You've taken the medicine. You need to let it take effect.”

Rena lets Maggie take her hand and lead her into the living room. She lies down on the couch where she'd slept the week after discovering Saul's pills, and Maggie covers her with an afghan Ruth's mother crocheted for them one Hanukkah. Rena closes her eyes and thinks this must be what it's like to be a child with one of those mothers who makes soup when you're sick and brings you trays in bed, and then she thinks about trays and the wooden trays she'd brought to Rebecca and the napkin-covered trays Leonard fixes for Klara and the orange plastic trays in the prison cafeteria.

When she wakes, Maggie is in the armchair with her feet up on an ottoman, doing the crossword puzzle. Her long earrings catch the lamplight. Ruth is lying on her stomach, reading the Sunday book review with her unlaced work boots next to her on the floor.

“How do you feel?” Maggie asks.

Rena stretches her arms over her head. “Good. Rested. How long did I sleep?”

Maggie looks at the clock on the coffee table. “An hour and a half.” “I don't think I've ever taken a nap like that before.”

“It's the food.”

“And I had the weirdest dream.”

“That always happens. You dream about the one you're grieving over.”

Rena's first instinct is to say nothing, to not tell them that Beersden was only a bit player, the opening jester in the dream. But she feels the warm fullness in her stomach and smells the sweet residues of the meal, and she thinks,
these are my friends, my friends who love me
. She sits up and draws her knees to her chest. “Only it was Saul I dreamt about.”

She covers her face. Maggie and Ruth move beside her. Ruth puts an arm around her and Maggie smooths her hair, incanting, “Of course, of course, it's about time.”

T
HEY WALK HER HOME
, the three of them arm in arm on Riverside Drive. There's a lopped-off moon, like a sad tilted face surrounded by a pale halo. The trees have begun to turn, and in the moonlight the leaves glow the musky yellow of fall things: squash and hay and skin still holding its tan.

“I think I need to tell him,” Rena says. “I think I haven't been going to see him because I can't handle faking it.”

“Tell him?”

It takes Rena a moment to understand Maggie's question, to see that she hasn't been able, even here in the dark, with her friends, to say it out loud.

“That I want a divorce.”

They walk in silence the rest of the way to Rena's building. Maggie opens her arms wide and then wraps them around Rena. It's a hug with no holding back, not one of the skittish little hugs Eleanor or for that matter she herself tends to give.

In her dark kitchen, the answering machine blinks. Pushing
PLAY
, she hears a high voice with a little gurgle at the bottom. “Rena? Is this Rena? There's no name, just a phone number. This is Betty, your Aunt Betty. Can you come for Thanksgiving at my house? Don't ask me why this year. I guess because your mother sent that letter saying you want to see pictures of your father, and I went through all these boxes in the attic and it made me remember you as a baby. Very serious with these big eyes. I said to Donny, how come we never invite her to any of our family things and I said I would invite you for Thanksgiving. Donny
and the boys sit around all afternoon watching football, so after we eat we'll have lots of time to look through everything. Okay? You just call us when you get to the ferry terminal and Donny will come get you. Come early. You know, two or three.” A beep, and then Betty's voice again. “I forgot, my brains, they get fried in that beauty parlor. Bring …” She pauses and then rescues herself. “Bring your husband. I hung up and Donny says you didn't even invite her husband. Of course, bring him. Just tell him that we're simple people. Nothing fancy.”

Betty's laugh echoes in Rena's kitchen, the horrid ashamed laugh of people who think of themselves as unimportant, shut out from some larger, more elegant world.

O
N THE BUS
to the prison, Rena counts the months since Saul's arrest: nearly nine. We could have had a baby, she thinks. I could have grown a pumpkin belly. I could be decorating a nursery.

She hasn't seen him since June. He looks remarkably better. Heavier, the yellow cast to his skin now gone. She inhales. He smiles as he catches her doing this,
the smellomaniac
, he'd teased about her belief that she can detect people's states of health by their scent. With her mother, the way her scent had changed as she sank into melancholy: a sharp mildewed smell like a pillow gone damp inside. With Gene, the way she'd been able to track the waxing and waning of colds and viruses, constipation, toothache from the sour smell of his breath.

“Not depressed,” she announces.

“No, not depressed.”

They sit across from each other at the metal table, Rena facing the door. “So how are you?” she asks.

“Better. It was a long summer. I understand now why they take inmates' belts and don't allow bedsheets. There were days when the only thing that held me back was my father. Knowing that he believes suicide is revenge on the living. He would spend the rest of his days trying to ferret out his crimes.” Saul folds his arms. Beneath his khaki shirtsleeves, she can see the movement of the new ridge of muscles. “Actually,
it's a relief to be here. Awful as this is, the constant noise, the constant bickering, having to sleep with one eye open, living with the cesspool of human actions—don't think I don't include myself—it's a relief to be off the drugs. I've seen people watch themselves deteriorate physically and mentally. Watching myself deteriorate morally, the deceptions and oversights that became habitual lying and outright neglect and maltreatment of my patients that became, in the end, stealing … murder.” Saul shudders. “That was hell.”

“The pharmacist didn't die.”

“The fetus did.” He grips his elbows. “It's like having your soul chewed on by rats.”

The guard peers through the wired window. Seeing Rena glance up, Saul looks over his shoulder.

“That's Richardson. He's been working here eighteen years. Three years older than I am and he's got a twenty-two-year-old son. He just asked me to write his kid a letter of recommendation for medical school.”

“Did you do it?”

“Sure. Why not? It's not as though they check the credentials of the people who write these letters. The crazy thing is, I lost my license but not my job. Technically, I'm suspended. Once the suspension expires, the personnel people wrote me, they'll convert it to a personal leave. It's a moot point, since without a license I can't practice medicine.” He leans back in his chair, tipping it onto the rear legs. “So, pray tell, to what do I owe this visit?”

She falls silent. How can I do this, she thinks. Ruin the equanimity he's managed to acquire. And yet what are the alternatives? Wait for him to get depressed again? Forget the whole thing?

Saul rubs his eyes as though tiring of the visit, which suddenly seems like a charade, as if he already knows.

“I …” She hesitates, looks into his chocolate eyes. “I want a divorce.” Saul drops the chair back to an upright position. He puts his fingertips together like a church steeple.

She'd planned on saying so much more. About how she does not believe
that she could trust him again, cannot imagine being able to share a bed. Make a life. Have a child.

“That's it? You traveled all the way up here to tell me that?”

Her cheeks turn hot. Is he making fun of her? “What do you mean?” He looks at her levelly and then raises an eyebrow.