Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (47 page)

He covered my thumb with his other hand and squeezed, a tear falling. He shut his eyes, sighed, and said, “I’m proud of you.” We sat there, holding hands, for a while. When he opened them again, his eyes were red. “Are you happy?”

I nodded. “Sometimes.”

“Because of your work?”

I nodded. He sighed again. “You did a good thing with those Grayson kids in Boston. Is that what you’ll do with my money? Help kids?”

“I’m going to try.”

Bernie nodded. He let go of my hand, shut his eyes, and put his fingers to them, pressing as if he wanted to push them into his skull. “Okay,” he sighed, straightened, and looked at me. His eyes were clearer, but still sad and guarded. “Okay,” he repeated and added in a doomed voice: “I’m ready to see them.”

Two days later, he was dead. As I feared, his last forty-eight hours were spent in an agonized delirium. From my internship, I was used to the wreck medicine can make of a human being and, with everyone’s permission, I made sure that once Uncle was too far gone, there were no more resuscitations. By the time they let him go in peace, his heart had been restarted twice. At the finish, the bold thirteen-year-old who once led a band of Jewish kids in triumphant battle against the toughest of the Irish gangs weighed less than eighty pounds. It was an ugly death, unworthy of him.

I finally reached Toni the day of my uncle’s funeral. She had two free hours a week and would be glad to see Gene. When I called Gene, he greeted my brief explanation of Toni with a doubtful, “Oh.”

“You sound unhappy.”

“I don’t mean to be sexist, but …”

“You’re uncomfortable with a woman therapist?”

“Well … You know, I’ve been sleeping pretty well since I called you. So maybe … Or is that—like when you’re on your way to the dentist—the tooth stops hurting?”

“Could be. If you see her and don’t like her, I’ll be happy to
get
you the name of a male therapist.”

“Okay,” he said in a forlorn tone that meant it wasn’t okay. I was too tired and sad to explore it further. I had a thought that deserved to be analyzed: this guy is bad luck for me. I was in distress, not only about Uncle’s death and funeral. Ahead of me that day was the uncomfortable prospect of seeing Julie for the first time since her father’s death. She was then unmarried and childless.

I didn’t have long to wait. I saw her standing alone outside the temple in Great Neck, on the fringe of the parking lot, smoking a cigarette. Although Julie was, besides being the mother of two, a movie producer living in L.A., she allowed her hair to show gray. She was right to. The streaks of white threading her flowing black hair added to her elegance. She tossed the cigarette down and opened her arms to greet me. From my car as I pulled in, she had looked worried and upset. That surprised me. She never liked Uncle and the incident at Columbia banned him permanently from her heart. I was pleased that, as I walked toward her, her unhappy expression relaxed and she smiled.

“Oh, Rafe,” she whispered in my ear while we hugged. “Is this what the future has in store for us? These fucking funerals?”

Embracing her called up sexual memories for me: resting my head on her belly; her behind bucking in my palms as she climaxed; toes stroking my pants under the table at a bizarre Seder at Aunt Sadie’s. I was naughty about this embrace in our mourning clothes. I pressed against her and didn’t let go until she pushed me off with enough emphasis so that her discomfort was clear.

“You look great,” I said, my husky voice concealing nothing.

“I do not. I’m an old mother of two.”

“Don’t fish. You know you look great.”

She smiled. “Okay. Thanks.” She patted her stomach. “I worked hard, believe me. It’s against the law to have a tummy in L.A.” Without a break, her face crumpled into the worry I had seen from the car. “Mom’s upset. She’s really bad. Worse than even for Daddy.” I nodded. Julie searched her black purse and came out with a cigarette.

“I thought you gave them up.”

“Just while pregos. I don’t smoke around the kids or Richard.” That was her husband. “He’d kill me.”

“You smoke secretly from your husband?”

“He knows. I just don’t smoke in front of him. Are they all crazy?” she asked without a transition. “Was it the money? They—” she nodded at the temple. The lot was full. The service was due to begin in five minutes. I had arrived late. Traffic was worse than I expected—every route I tried was under construction. “They act like God has died.”

“Maybe He has, for them. Remember, he pulled them out of poverty and he saved them again fifteen years ago.”

“He’s also fucked them up permanently.” Julie blew out some smoke and then covered her mouth with her free hand. “I’m horrible.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just stronger than they are.”

Julie came to a rest. Her nervous movements were frozen, cigarette dangling, eyes on me. “What do you mean?”

“You refused to be dependent on him. And you made it. You made it on your own.”

“How about you? You—”

“You know I never would have made it without Uncle’s help.”

“He also hurt you. Hurt you horribly.”

“Yes. But he meant to do the opposite. And when it came right down to it, he did help me.”

Julie let go of her cigarette, stamping it into the gravel. “Let’s go in before I piss you off too.”

It turned out she had had a fight with her mother. Ceil was angry that Julie had left her kids and husband behind in California. Julie was right. The surviving Rabinowitzes did seem to be a tribe who had lost not merely their chief, but their god. In particular, Aunts Ceil and Sadie were devastated. Uncle’s daughter, Helen, was also stricken, although grief seemed to improve her character. Back at the house, she didn’t drink at all, a remarkable difference, given that she was, in my judgment, an alcoholic. Helen tended to her aunts with grim concentration and told poignant stories about her father that surprised me; anecdotes of Bernie teaching her to ride a bike, dancing with her on her thirteenth birthday, all from before I lived with them, when, apparently, he spent more time with her and Aaron. Even Helen’s husband, Jerry, who must have felt some relief to be finally rid of his boss, was quiet, modest, a little frightened. Aaron did not come, although I had tried to coax him. My cousins, Daniel and the others I had raced against for the
Afikomen,
were there, with spouses and children, some content, some a mess. All were awed, convinced a great man had died. Julie did not fit in with them, either intellectually or emotionally.

When the visitors thinned out, leaving the immediate family, Julie’s quarrel with her mother started up again. Ceil complained that Julie coming alone to the funeral was disrespectful. I stepped between mother and daughter and took Julie outside, onto the sloping lawn. We walked toward the tennis court where I had had so many lessons, sweating to impress Bernie.

“Will you tell me what this is about?” Julie said. “My kids are three and seven months. I can’t bring them to a funeral. And how is it disrespectful? To Bernie? To this bimbo wife of his? Mom hates her.”

“Your mother wants her grandchildren here. She wants to feel life, that’s all. To know that it goes on.”

“That’s why I want her to come back to L.A. with me and stay for a couple of months. I know she’s lonely—”

“She wants you to honor the life she’s led. That life is here. Here in gracious, sensitive, cultured Great Neck.” Julie laughed at my mocking tone. “You don’t have to. It’s not your obligation to shore up her fantasy.”

“You do. You play along. They were mean to you, they were so fucking mean to you, and they
still
don’t appreciate you. They think you’re some sort of failure. Jerry talks to you like you’re a family retainer. But you take it all so patiently. You give and give and give to them and they don’t notice. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“I do?” I had learned long ago that a degree in psychology doesn’t confer perfect self-knowledge—or perfect anything for that matter. We had reached the court. I found the switch for the lights and flipped it, curious if they were working. A white glow, not harsh, but brilliant nevertheless, flooded the area. Swarms of bugs appeared, gathering at the large rectangular bulbs. I wondered if the painted asphalt of the tennis court had been maintained. From outside, it was hidden by green bunting to camouflage the fence’s interruption of the lawn. I opened the gate, to check on the condition of the surface. When Bernie bought the house from his first wife, Charlotte—she left the U.S. to marry a businessman who worked in South America—I assumed he intended to resume the old family gatherings, the huge Seders and birthdays. But there had been no family parties. Uncle used to resurface the court every five years. The—gate creaked loudly, a bad omen. But the surface was smooth, the lines bright, the net tape shiny. It was a ghost to me, an apparition from my childhood.

Was Julie right? Did these people think I was a failure after all? Had they taken the fantasies of my childhood to heart and continued to think of me as Bernie’s failed prodigy? And was I concealing something from them, accepting scorn while feeling superior? “I play along?” I asked Julie again. “I’m not aware of being phony. I feel sorry for most of them. For Aaron, certainly. And for Sadie. She’s always been very close to her family. I think she took my mother’s suicide harder than any of them and she loved Bernie, really loved him.”

“Jesus.” Julie slumped down onto the grass outside the gate. She reached for a cigarette. “You’re making me feel like a shit.”

I kept my eyes on the glowing, pristine court. “I’m in love with you,” I said, too cowardly and too ashamed of giving in to this feeling to look at her. “It’s been seven years. Supposed to go away. But I think of you every day and I realize today that I want you more than ever. I made a mistake. I should have taken you on any terms.”

I didn’t hear anything from her. I thought, in the distance, someone shouted joyfully from the house. That didn’t make sense, a whoop of happiness from people in mourning.

Finally, I heard her lips make a noise as she took another puff. But she didn’t speak.

“Maybe that’s why I keep bringing up family obligations,” I continued. “Just a sneaky way of complaining that you didn’t …” I couldn’t go on. I felt alone. I leaned against the fence and remembered a perfect shot I had once hit against someone, I wasn’t sure who, a down-the-line backhand on the full run, a typical stroke for a professional, but the only one I ever hit, a taste of greatness. Pointless in my life, yet I could still see the ball spinning over the net for a winner as if it were yesterday, as if it were full of meaning. “I’m sorry,” I said and turned to Julie.

She was huddled beside the open gate, head down. I knelt beside her. She looked up, face wet. She spoke passionately, but clearly. “That isn’t fair. You ended it. I said we should just go on—”

“In secret? For our whole lives?” I argued, passionately, as if no time had passed.

She straightened and pushed me with one hand, like an annoyed kid. “You have no right to keep it alive now. I love Richard and I love my children. Don’t make me feel guilty about that.”

I took hold of her shoulders and moved her toward me intending to kiss her. “I wanted to force you to—” I stopped.

“Force me to what? Tell them?” She nodded at the house. The tears had abated. She wasn’t in conflict. I was. These were settled matters for her. “How could we have made a family together in front of them? I have beautiful children. You don’t know. You’ve ignored them.”

“You know why.”

“You’ll do anything for them, for Aaron, for Helen, you’ll gush over their kids and you won’t even look at pictures of mine.”

“You can’t expect me to be glad that you’re happily married.”

“I
am
happily married.”

I let go. The impulse to kiss was certainly gone.

“I know you don’t want to believe that,” Julie said. “But I am. I love Richard. I’m furious at you that you won’t let go and see me for who I am. I’m a middle-aged woman with two kids and a husband. I was never as complicated as you wanted me to be. I loved you and I was willing to give up having a family to be with you. I couldn’t do better than that.” She sighed and covered her face. “I’m just as conventional as they are,” she mumbled. “That’s the truth.”

She was right, not about the last remark, but about me. Losing the fantasy of Julie was as painful as actually losing her, maybe more so. Her hands came away. I stared and tried to see the real woman. Was she there, the girl who had fought my mother and my uncle on my behalf? The woman who had once brought me the grace of mature love? The tennis court’s clarifying light left nothing for my imagination. She looked tired and her eyes were dead to the silent pleas in my own. She was a stranger and that meant in some way I was still a stranger to myself.

In the distance, a voice called, “Ray-feel!” A figure ran toward us from the house, a shape I didn’t recognize.

Julie squeezed my arm. “Be happy, Rafe. You deserve it.” She stood up. “Get away from us. We’re not good for you.”

“Ray-feel,” the figure called. He was carrying two racquets and a can of balls. The dumpy shape reached the border of the court’s lights. It was cousin Daniel, in his black trousers, his jacket and shirt off. He looked like a photograph of a turn-of-the-century boxer: bare-chested, big-bellied, in long dark pants. “Tennis, anyone?” he said and laughed.

“You drunk?” Julie said quietly.

I stood up.

“Come on,” Daniel offered a racquet. “I bet I can still beat you.”

“I’m sure you can,” I said and walked Julie back to my dead uncle’s house.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
The Rosenhan Warning

T
ONI REPORTED THAT
G
ENE TALKED A BLUE STREAK IN THE FIRST SESSION
, but said nothing. He was preoccupied by an offer from his boss, Theodore Copley, the leader of Flash II’s creative team. Copley had confided in Gene that he was seriously considering a job at Flashworks’s main rival, Minotaur. If he accepted, he wanted Gene to come with him. Gene believed the anxious contemplation of this decision—to leave the company where he had been successful and move his family against his wife’s wishes to another state—explained his insomnia. Toni was unconvinced. I hadn’t sent her any information on Gene or told her details of our work together. She asked for them now. I declined.