A Private Sorcery (25 page)

“No. I've been all over this country, including Hawaii and St. John, but never abroad. We were going to, we were just starting to plan a trip
for the fall …” She sighs and then smiles, a weary ironic smile that suggests what choice but to make mincemeat tarts of our miseries and serve them up with sweetened tea. “I've promised myself a trip before my fortieth birthday. The classic tour that you read about in Henry James and Edith Wharton. Paris to Baden-Baden to Venice to Rome.”

She stops ten feet north of one of the mustached boy-men. He keeps his eyes fixed on the sailboat, its leeward side tilted into the wind. “The truth is, if you don't travel when you're young, you feel intimidated. I'd be scared to go anyplace I don't speak the language.”

We walk north through the park and then out onto Fifth Avenue. I let her lead, uncertain where she is headed. When I ask about her Thanksgiving, she tells me how she'd been lured to Staten Island, to her mother's sister's house, with the promise of photos of her father.

“There was my Aunt Betty, dressed in exactly the same clothes I'd seen her in eight years ago. Flowered leggings and a pink apron. Her husband picked me up at the ferry, but once we got to the house I don't think he said a dozen more words to me. He and their two sons sat glued to the television. They didn't even leave the set to eat, just filled their plates and brought them into the family room. My aunt and I ate alone at the kitchen table. It was really sad.”

I glance at Rena, refrain from placing my hand on her back. “My aunt spent the whole meal talking about how fat she is and all these diet centers she's tried, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Living Lady, Gorgeous Gals, and all the while she's heaping more and more food onto her plate. Eating and complaining about my mother and how she never calls and how my grandfather, who's now in a VA home, is all her responsibility. I kept waiting for her to show me the photos, but we got all the dishes washed and the floor wiped down and still no mention of them. When I finally asked her, she looked at me with this tormented expression, like how could I even dream of asking for pictures after she's been up since three in the morning cooking.”

We are nearing the Metropolitan museum, announced by the convocation of Senegalese men, heads covered by brilliant tightly woven caps,
selling knockoffs of Cartier watches and Ferragamo bags. The first time you went on your own to the city, you brought back one of those watches for your mother. This was before it became chic to sport the fake items, when the vendors still claimed they were genuine goods rather than trinkets manufactured in a Hong Kong sweatshop. Fifteen dollars for a Rolex, you proudly reported. You were devastated when Marc snickered,
sucker.
How I'd wished your mother would just put on the damn thing and say, what do I care, it's a lovely watch and I'll love wearing it, but instead she sank back onto her pillows and repeated the story about the time her mother had taken her pearls to be cleaned. The jeweler had replaced one of the pearls, mind you, your mother said, just one, with a fake pearl, but she knew, your mother's mother, she knew her pearls, she knew to examine her jewelry anytime it went out of her sight and she had discovered it. When she threatened to call the police, the jeweler broke down and wept. Never before, he told your grandmother, had he done such a thing. Never had he so much as fudged on one one-hundredth of a carat when weighing a diamond. Only he had an ailing sister and your grandmother's pearls were so fine that one, simply one, would pay for two months of doctor's visits. Your grandmother had held firm, your mother enjoyed recounting, held firm that the pearl be replaced and had then, with the strand restored and securely clasped to her warbly neck (well, perhaps it was not warbly then) told the man (in, I'm sure, her haughtiest tone) to bring his sister the next day to your grandfather's clinic.

I tell Rena about the fifteen-dollar Rolex.

“Not the tale of a budding criminal mind,” she says.

“If you'd told me thirty years ago that Saul would end up in prison, I'd have said you were crazy. Saul was the kid whose ball was always grabbed at the playground, who would leave his Halloween candy out in the open for his brother to rifle through.”

“Well, maybe it's not inconsistent. I don't mean to paint him as a victim, but I think he fell into drugs with that kind of innocence.” It's touching to hear her defend you. “At first, he was just desperate to
sleep. He was so afraid he'd make another mistake if he couldn't clear his head.”

We've passed the museum with the circus of tourists and children and students climbing or sitting or pausing on the steps. We walk on the park side, the crowd thinning north of Eighty-Sixth Street. Your wife's face grows dimmer and dimmer as dusk falls, and then suddenly the streetlights turn on and gold darts off her hair like a halo in a Florentine oil.

“It's really my fault,” she says matter-of-factly, not in a browbeating manner or a way intended to invoke reassurances and the putrid psychobabble of not blaming oneself. “He was impaired. I should have insisted then, at the beginning, that he see someone. You know the old adage that a doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient. Saul certainly did. At the beginning, I thought it was just a few sleeping pills, but still, the fact that he was prescribing for himself at all should have told me his judgment was gone.” She hugs her arms. “If it had been something practical—getting the air conditioners installed, making airline reservations—I would have taken care of it. But I was so used to Saul being the expert on things emotional, I deferred.”

“A professional hazard,” I say. “Everyone assumes shrinks can handle their own problems.”

She stares at me. Something between disappointment and despair at my generic explanation passes over her face. Ahead of us, the Guggenheim looms like a crustacean deposited from the sea.

“He found my blind spot.”

She looks lost. I am reminded how little I know about her, afraid if I ask,
what do you mean, your blind spot
, it will sound accusatory and she will bolt on her long, slender legs, a gazelle slipping into the park. I point to the bench ahead. “Let's sit.”

If there is a center point to the Guggenheim, it seems that this bench is directly across from it. The problem with sleeping pills is they don't work. Yes, they may deliver sleep for a while, but they are no balm for the mind. “There are three potions to soothe an ailing spirit,” I recall a teacher of mine once saying. A small beatific man whom the other
psychiatry professors tolerated as representative of a fringe point of view. “Love, nature and art. We offer love, adult love purified of sexual intent, and in so doing we hope to unlock the natural appreciation for nature and art.” Love and nature have always seemed too daunting to me. But I exposed you and your brother from an early age to art, hoping it would be this balm for you.

Right
, I hear my old professors, the analysts, sneering.
Right
, I hear the new generation, your peers, the pill pushers, mocking.
You would have prescribed an hour of Ravel and a walk through that unearthly building across the street
.

“Look,” Rena says. She touches my arm and points northward. There's a tall woman with a scarf tied over her thick black hair. A long camel hair coat swings slightly as she walks. Loose pants skirt the tops of suede flats. She looks straight ahead, her gait a tincture of supreme confidence and nervousness. I know her. I know I know her.

The woman passes right in front of us. A face that's familiar in the way that even the strangers in your dreams always seem.

“It's Jackie Onassis,” Rena whispers. “She lives in one of these buildings. I heard that she walks in the park every day, but I've never seen her before.”

I stare at the back of Jackie's coat. At the way her trousers swoosh against her shoes. Your mother was obsessed with Jackie. You were born the same year as Caroline, and your mother felt that this gave her and Jackie a special connection.

When Kennedy was shot, your mother wept not for the loss of our president but for the tragedy this meant for Jackie.

W
E EAT IN ONE
of those restaurants that looks like it's been put together from a hodgepodge of Hollywood sets: a bar from an Irish pub, the starched tablecloths of a Parisian bistro, the terra-cotta planters of a Tuscan trattoria. I order what's on tap and the grilled tuna, and Rena orders a hot mulled cider and a pasta dish from the chalkboard specials. She keeps her hands over the top of the mug, letting the
steam warm her palms. The beer has given me a warm, satisfied feeling. I push out of mind the thought of you eating sloppy joes served with canned peas and carrots, forty institution-size cans to fill three pots, each pot large enough, you've told me, for a man to sit inside.

Rena bites into one of the puffy cheese straws the waiter has left in a basket. “What kind of dog do you think it was?” she asks.

“What dog?”

She giggles. Your wife is not a giggler. She flicks a fleck of pastry off her bottom lip. “The one Jackie was walking.”

“I didn't see a dog.”

I glance to my right. Do people think she's my daughter? My secretary? A May-to-December marriage? Could anyone mistake me for one of those men with their ramrod postures and gleaming white hair? Or does anyone, in these days of men walking hand in hand and high school girls with rings in their noses, even bother to speculate?

Three-plus decades in the New Jersey suburbs and I've become a greenhorn.

“You didn't see the dog?”

“No.” I don't know why this seems so funny, but we're both laughing now. “Jackie wouldn't walk the dog.”

I've never seen Rena really laugh before. She laughs so hard, her eyes water. “That's what she was doing. Walking the dog.”

When the waiter comes with our food, he has a bemused expression. We both struggle to control our faces while he lays an oversize white plate before Rena, fat fettuccine noodles under glistening vegetables, and a stainless-steel platter before me, the fish still sizzling on the metal.

Rena twists a noodle around her fork, then looks up at me, the laden fork still in her hand. “I've asked Saul for a divorce.”

I finish chewing. I have an abhorrence of people talking with their mouths full, have never really understood how a person is supposed to converse over dinner. Even rushing the food down, it takes half a minute before my mouth is empty and wiped. “He told me.”

We look directly at each other, as though everything that has taken
place during the two hours up to now has been a kind of ceremony.

“I feel like a louse, of course. But I can't imagine ever being able to trust him again. Certain things don't go backwards.” She lays down her fork. “Frogs can't become tadpoles again.”

I think of those conundrums you used to love about the identity of objects. At what point is a machine whose every part has been changed no longer the same machine? That's what it must seem like to Rena. That nothing about you resembles the person she married.

“You don't have to apologize to me.”

“I can't help feeling I need to. Now all he has is you.”

“Marriage isn't the same as parenthood.” I wonder why I am condoning her actions, what is going on here.

“You never left Klara.”

“No, but not because of any great nobility on my part.”

The waiter approaches. He refills our water glasses. I ask for another lemon even though I don't really need any more. Afterwards, the conversation shifts—away from your mother tucked in her bed, away from you locked in your cell.

S
HE REFUSES MY OFFER
to escort her home.

“Don't be silly. It's completely out of your way. I'll walk up to Ninety-Sixth and take the crosstown bus.”

She kisses me on the cheek, leaves me waiting for a cab. After she turns her back, I lower my hand. I'm tempted to follow her, a careful ten paces behind. Instead, I remain rooted on the corner of Madison Avenue, watching her slim receding form.

What was it I said when she told me she'd overlooked your being impaired?

A professional hazard—
as though the two of you were case examples in a textbook.

She must have felt I was pushing her away. Only now do I see that I didn't ask what she meant by her blind spot, not because I feared she would bolt, but rather because I was afraid to hear what she might say.

The same way, she was trying to tell me, she'd felt with you.

10
Rena

Lying in bed the day after seeing Leonard, she watches the river, this afternoon a choppy slate, the high-rises and abandoned piers hugging the Jersey shoreline. A handful of birds swoop in frenzied arcs over the water, perhaps stragglers lost from their migratory flock.

The birds vanish from sight. Living with Gene a decade ago on the sixteenth floor, she'd learned how to translate this vertiginous landscape into an understanding of weather. How sun in cold air refracts differently on the surface of water than sun in warm air. How to detect the velocity of the wind from the wave patterns. She's been surprised at how quickly the discernments return, like a mother who can hear in her baby's cries the difference between hunger and anger. Her own mother had taught her this when Gene was a newborn and Eleanor was too depressed to rouse herself to tend to his nighttime needs. Instead, she would call out to Rena, then fifteen: he wants a bottle, pick him up, he needs to be changed.

Once Rena no longer needed Eleanor to interpret Gene's cries, she'd taken to rolling the bassinet into her room at night. Secretly, she'd been relieved to sleep with the baby so near. When they'd lived over Nick's restaurant, before Gene was born, she and her mother had shared the room's one bed. On the nights following Nick's visits, she could smell his cologne, the acrid dank scent (had she known at the time or is this a retrospective recognition?) of his semen on the sheets. After the scurry through the parking lot of Nick's restaurant to retrieve as many of their things as could be stuffed into the trunk of Joe's car, neither she nor Eleanor had dared to object when Joe led Rena into the storage room that would become her bedroom for the next eight years. The first night, she'd slept on two blankets on the floor with the overhead light glaring above. Waking from the cold, she'd seen the rifle hanging on the wall, the pistols gleaming behind the gun cabinet's glass doors.