Now You See Him (10 page)

D
R
. P
UREFOY SAT PERFECTLY POISED AND
erect in front of us. He swept his coolly compassionate gaze around the air over our heads. Sporting a deep winter tan, he was wearing a brown cashmere suit and low-slung bifocal glasses.

“Go on,” he said.

“The thing is”—Lucy looked at him, blinking with intensity—“he
has
begun making efforts. But it doesn’t cure the larger problem, which is that in a fundamental way, he’s simply not there and hasn’t been for a while.”

The doctor gave a quick compassion-flex of the underside of his mouth, and nodded.

“Not there,” he repeated gravely.

In the half hour or so we’d already been there, Lucy had monopolized the conversation in a fluent diagnostic aria about the state of our marriage. Her color was high,
her posture was erect, and I’d soon realized that she was
enjoying
it; that it was
fun
for her.

“I thought that in a way we had both made our peace with our respective roles in the marriage. We’d buried a lot of our differences for the sake of the children. Maybe we even had an unspoken contract to let the spool run out until the kids left home and then take stock. Is that,” she asked, a bit plaintively, “really so unusual?”

But Dr. Purefoy was not about to be drawn into a direct response.

“Go on,” he said.

“But then what happened is, a few months ago, right around the time of Rob Castor’s death, Nick seemed to enter a new phase of being distracted. I was used to it up to a point, but not
this
. It wasn’t even gradual, Doctor. It was like the husband I’d known was body-snatched one night while I slept. In a very real way, things haven’t been the same since.”

I knew that Lucy had been seeing Purefoy alone for several weeks, and sitting there, I had the highly unpleasant sense that this conversation was something prearranged between the two of them in a subtle way, and that I had, in so many words, walked into a trap. Holding the doctor’s measuring gaze, I said, “Excuse me, but how common is it for a therapist such as yourself to begin with a single person and then, after having worked with that person awhile, begin seeing that person’s spouse in couples therapy?”

“You’re questioning my methods,” said Purefoy amiably, looking at me.

“No, I’m just asking.”

“There is no ‘just’ about it, Nick,” the doctor replied, his cheerful expression falling with a rapidity that was, it occurred to me, a therapeutic technique of some sort. “You are posing a challenge to my authority to be here. Is there something in this situation you find uncomfortable? Are you perhaps threatened by the candor of this discussion?”

Quietly, unobtrusively over the previous half hour, I’d been studying Dr. Purefoy. The fake gravities of the face; the stylized sympathetic shrugs of the shoulders; the way he shook his head heavily from side to side to indicate the depths, the chambered profundities of his heart—I thought Purefoy was a hack. I thought he was a bad actor playing a role. In his mind, no doubt, my hostility toward him was the simple side effect of how much I had to hide. But for the most part, sitting there for a half hour had reinforced the opinion I’d formed from my experience with him ten years earlier: I didn’t like the man.

“I’m not threatened,” I said calmly, and noticed out of the side of my eye that Lucy was staring down at her shoes, “and furthermore, if you’ll pardon me, I think that my question was a reasonable one.”

Purefoy gave a rare full smile and steepled his hands together in an attitude of superior indulgence.

“Nick,” he said, “the process we’re embarked upon together today is composed of many layers. To get to those deeper layers requires a certain transparency between us to function effectively. Certainly, as you know, I’ve had several sessions already with your wife, and during those sessions we’ve endeavored, among many other things, to
reconstruct what it is you’re attempting to signal through your actions of late. But my relationship with you falls under the exact same therapeutic purview as mine with hers, no more, no less. I’d be happy to see you separately if you prefer, but it is my sincere belief that there is much to be gained from cutting through those layers together, cutting, as it were,” said the doctor suavely, “while collectively holding the knife.”

His smile deepened. It was impossible not to notice how attractive the doctor believed himself to be; impossible not to notice how
installed
he felt in this room.

“Okay,” I said.

“Very good.”

There was a long silence during which, to my dismay, I felt a growing need to propitiate the man, break the silence. I said finally, “I do agree with Lucy that I’m trying more, to show up in the relationship and in life generally, and be more ‘present,’ to use that word”—I smiled at Lucy, who looked away—“my wife seems to love.”

Head nod, lip flex, and a new moue consisting of the entire skull rotated into a forty-five-degree slant. I had to give him this: the doctor was expressive with minimal means. On top of that, he made me persistently uncomfortable, which was probably a kind of achievement.

“At the same time,” I went on, “I’m aware that I have a way of absenting myself, and in my relationship with Lucy, I suppose that there was a way in which I simply locked myself away in my head, and didn’t come out, for years.”

“I see.”

“But then again, I had a lot to deal with. You saw us
back then, so you know how green we were when it came to raising kids, running a home, et cetera.”

“Yes,” the doctor allowed.

“My feeling is that we got better at it, and that things threw us less, as time went on. But then Rob Castor died and I got all shook up by that, and Lucy claims that I’ve been different ever since. I don’t know.”

“Ah,” the doctor said delicately. Again the long hands were steepled together. “And why would the death of Rob Castor have affected you so?”

“We were best friends when I was a kid, and I lost my brother when I was still pretty young, and Rob kind of stepped into that role. I suppose in an unconscious way I’ve always defined myself against him.”

It felt good, in a general way, to be talking out loud, airing my concerns and off-loading some of the weight of built-up feeling in my chest. I was in the midst of the first self-congratulatory moment of the session when I heard Lucy’s voice, low, saying, “And the sister.”

“The sister?” the doctor asked as I felt my hands involuntarily tighten on the armrests of the chair.

“Belinda,” she said. “A kind of failed rock-and-roll singer who has been sniffing around Nick ever since Rob died.”

“Is this true?” Purefoy again turned his gaze on me.

“Is what true?”

“That there has been contact between you and this person?”

A hot flare of hatred passed through my chest. I said mildly, “I did go have a cup of tea with Belinda Castor a few weeks ago, yes. She’s an old girlfriend, and I’d missed
her at Rob’s memorial ser vice, because she was too messed up to come. We have a special kind of understanding because we’re maybe the two people in the world who knew Rob best, and that means something.”

There was a long silence.

“I think Nick has been talking to her at work,” Lucy said, blindsiding me.

The doctor nodded his head as if expecting this, and pointed his chin like a bayonet at my chest. I crossed my arms.

“That’s ridiculous!” I laughed.

“Is it?” he asked.

“Of course it is!” I was trying for an indignant tone but my voice came out thin and unconvincing.

The silence that followed went on for so long that the inadvertent noises of the sitting room came forward: a hissing of the heating unit, the smothered honk of a car horn in the street. When the doctor spoke, it was softly.

“I think we’re ready to conclude for now,” he said, “and I’d like to thank both of you for the brave, important work you’ve done today.”

I couldn’t understand how the “work” we’d just done was either brave or important, but now Purefoy was standing up, as were we, and he was shaking my hand with a straight-from-the-shoulder masculine grip of crushing force. The eyes, teeth and skull of the doctor were gleaming like a single enormous many-faceted headlight. Dazed, I let my arm drop and was mumbling thanks when Lucy stepped in front of him and turned upward to glance at him. Perhaps she also rose toward him from
within her shoes. It was just a quick and passing glance, but it shook me for the deep understanding it bespoke. I’d be talking to her in the future about that glance, I thought.

Quietly, heads down, we left his office.

U
NBEKNOWNST TO ME, MY PARENTS NEVER
quite stopped thinking about my brother. His presence, for them, continued to inhere in all sorts of anguishing little ways around the house. I didn’t realize that their lives were forever tied to the remembered weights and measures of his body as it sat in chairs, thumped up and down stairs, or crossed hallways, running. I didn’t understand that their hearts were stabbed on a daily basis by the clear recollections of his face and voice coming toward them through the air above the kitchen table and backyard. It was all, finally, too much for them to bear. Which is why, in my senior year in college, my dully predictable parents did something that shocked me to the core: they moved away.

Taking advantage of a surprise buyout of my father’s small chemical company by American Pharmaceutical, they committed the entirely untypical act of retiring at
the age of fifty-five and leaving Monarch for a seniors’ community in Arizona with the radiantly dull name of Sunnyside Acres. A huge hecatomb of tin-roofed bungalows called “villas,” Sunnyside Acres is a little pretend spa of sorts, with its own gym, its own theater, and its own artificial lake, containing a variety of torpid trout and at least nine disoriented swans. Days there are heavily scripted, as jammed with activities as that brother community in retirement, the cruise ship, and for similar reasons: the better to allow residents to ignore the grim, statistical ticking of the clock.

My parents have been there about a dozen years, and in the process this anxious shut-down couple have somehow reinvented themselves as precociously jazzy seniors. My father has taken up golf, a pastel wardrobe and the habit of midday cocktails. He’s begun experimenting with a newly extroverted personality that is full of peppy bad jokes and pretend elder-statesman observations. My mother meanwhile has become a bird-watcher, as well as an avid member of the book club and the Mozart group. As for me, my relationship with them has never quite recovered from the shock of their sudden removal. On our once-a-month phone calls my mother still clucks affectionately and worries about me as one would a son seemingly adrift in his phase of “finding himself.” And my father, from the vantage of his new personality, treats me like a slightly slow, humorless person with whom he once, many years ago, shared a particularly long vacation.

I called them the day after our session with Purefoy. I was certain that the actorly therapist with his canned responses had had no impact at all on me. But evidently
being trapped in the cross fire of my wife and Purefoy together had affected me more than I knew. That night I’d been quite agitated, finding it difficult to sleep, erotic hankerings mixed with the sudden desire to weep, anger at Lucy alternating with scenarios in which, on bended knee, I begged for forgiveness. Out of this mess of feelings, a long-buried container of memory surfaced. And once prised open, the volatile contents of that container continued to spill without stopping.

When I reached my father, he was returning from a round of golf. He had his happy voice on, and I was certain he’d drunk a “Tanqueray with a twist” in the clubhouse before returning home. I could see him sitting down on the couch in his sky-blue shorts and his sport cap, his face drawn back into its genial old-guy lines, the phone at his ear.

“Hello, sonny boy, how’s life?” he asked. When he’s happy he calls me sonny boy.

“Fine, Dad. How’re you doing these days?”

“Fit as a fiddle and pretty as a peach,” he said, then he sighed in a way I’d never heard him sigh before and smacked his lips. The combination of sounds seemed to indicate a world of sizzling appetite, and I suddenly wondered about the precise nature of my father’s friendship with any of the handsome, heavily rouged widows I’d seen greeting him effusively on the flagstone walking paths.

“Dad, I’ve been thinking.”

“Stop the presses, my son has been thinking!”

“Right. Well anyway, I don’t know why, but I’ve been in this phase of kind of being reflective about things, and I had this memory surface during the night.”

“Did you now.”

“I did, and it kinda ate at me.”

“Don’t you hate when that happens?”

“What, Dad?”

I thought I heard ice cubes clinking. It became clear to me that he was moving around the room.

“When you remember the bad stuff? I mean, what’s the point? Live for today, the Good Book says. Am I right?”

“Right. Well, anyway, Dad, I was thinking about this time at the beach.”

“Un-huh, yes.”

“It must have been, oh, twenty-five or so years ago, maybe even thirty.”

“Did I know you then? Had we been introduced?”

“Funny, Dad.”

“I do my best.”

“We were at Sandy Hook, with Mom and Patrick.”

Definitely, I was certain, he was making a gin and tonic. I heard the plop of cubes and the gurgle of liquid being poured.

“You drinking?” I asked.

“Some, but not enough.”

“I thought the doctor told you you had to stop.”

“He did say I had to stop, he just didn’t say when.”

A self-delighted chuckle, followed by another sigh, this one, clearly, an accompaniment to sitting down in a chair or on the couch, chilled drink in hand, prepared for a trip down memory lane.

“I’m all yours,” he said.

And so I told him. I told him about that moment in time when he’d been stretched out on a lounge chair one
sunny afternoon many years ago during a rare family vacation at the beach, the surf crumpling a distance off, and my mom lying next to him, asleep in a one-piece suit with a frilly bit of skirt covering her thighs. I brought him back to remembering that skirt, and remembering the pushing heat of the day, and the open sound of the water. And I recalled him as well to how much effort he’d put into setting up our little camp, the trudging to and from the car through hot, floury sand to lug our basket of thermoses and sandwiches, and at the end of his effort, the prize of lying on the beach for a while, cooled by the stiff salt breeze and reading one of his beloved John D. MacDonald novels.

“God, I loved those trips,” my father interrupted me, taking a long, swilling drink. The real pleasure in his voice surprised me. I’d always thought of him as living life in a kind of ongoing drab sufferance, but listening to him now, it suddenly occurred to me that it was perhaps only toward me he’d banked his fire, and that by this logic, incredibly, he might all along have been having a great time.

“And do you remember, Dad, that moment when I tried to show you my prize starfish in a bucket, and tripped and poured a torrent of cold water and sand into your lap?”

A beat of silence. And then in a slightly lower, more cautious voice: “I’m not sure I do, sonny boy.”

“Really?” I pressed my case. “You were asleep at the time, I think. Don’t you remember jumping to your feet in shock?”

The cubes clinked.

“Nope.”

“Or how you leaned down to me, and this I’ll never forget because I was such a little kid that it was like a tower, Dad, a tower darkening the sun. And you cursed at me? Do you remember what you said?”

“On the advice of my attorney Mr. Tanqueray”—he laughed at his own joke—“I can’t remember a thing.”

“You called me a bastard.”

Silence. Even the sportive tinkle of the cubes had gone dead.

“Yeah, Dad, and the reason I remember it so well,” I went on, “is because Mom jumped to her feet and she started screaming something at you, and she kind of drove you along the beach, like a smaller animal tormenting a bigger one, yeah, sort of like a mother bear attacking a male. The females are smaller, you know, but in defense of their own cubs they become kind of crazy and will do anything, even risk their own hide. Isn’t that right? Dad?”

Again a long, deep, many-roomed sigh.

“Are we getting to the point on this one?” my father asked.

“Of course we are, Dad. I’ve just been thinking so much lately, about my own life and stuff, and the past especially. Maybe it’s my”—I made quotation marks in the air with my voice—“‘midlife crisis,’ or who knows what, but I’ve been kind of looking at the way we all were as a family, Dad, and the life you had, all of you, with Patrick before I came along, and how much you loved him, you in particular. The funny thing is that, of course, I always thought it was just me, what I deserved from you, that incredible coldness you showed me, like there was something wrong I’d done to you just by being alive, you know.”

“Dear God,” my father said, his mouth partly away from the receiver, to the air.

“Don’t get upset, Dad. I’m just explaining that as a kid, you take the way people treat you to be a kind of judgment on your own self, you’ve got no defenses, and so how you were to me, the indifference and so forth, it was like a condemnation of sorts, maybe it wasn’t a death sentence, but boy was it close! And so I guess what I’m asking, and thanks again for your patience, Dad, is: did you mean ‘bastard’ as in a little piece of shit, or what, exactly? Dad?”

There was no sound at all. And for a moment, waiting, I held my breath. But then I realized that in some way I hadn’t detected, very quietly and stealthily he had replaced the receiver. By the time the transistorized voice came on, asking me to hang up please, I was gently setting the phone back in the cradle—and then staring at it for several long seconds while resisting the sudden, furious temptation to smash it to bits.