Pharmakon (20 page)

F: How’s your girl?

C: Eloise is not my girl.

F: What happened?

C: There was a beach party. I went up to Whitney’s to get more beer, and when I came back, Eloise and Whitney were gone. And when I went looking for them, she was bobbing for apples out by the jetty.

F: What?

C: Eloise had Whitney’s penis in her mouth.

F: What did you do then?

C: I watched until they were finished. I’d never had a blow job, so at least I learned how it’s done.

F: How did you feel about this?

C: I was upset. But I wasn’t going to kill myself or anything.

F: That’s good. Did you confront Whitney?

C: The next day.

F: What did he say?

C: He said he was drunk and he didn’t know what he was doing, and how sorry he was, and it didn’t mean a thing. Which was really the most insulting thing he could have said, if you think about it.

F: What did you say to him?

C: I told him that according to the American Medical Association, he was already an alcoholic. Whitney drinks in the morning.

F: Did that worry him?

C: Mostly he was worried about Alice finding out about him and Eloise.

F: Who’s Alice again?

C: At the time we had the conversation about his nascent alcoholism, Alice was still Whitney’s girlfriend.

F: And did Alice find out?

C: Yes.

F: How?

C: She asked me if it was true and I told her it was. Then we went for a walk and talked about what we should do about Whitney’s drinking problem. We decided to wait and see if he sobers up by the start of the school year. He and I are rooming together, so I’ll know.

F: You don’t sound very upset by all this.

C: Good things came out of it.

F: What sort of good things?

C: Well, Alice and I realized that we had other things in common besides our fondness for Whitney. We’re dating now.

F: You’re dating Whitney’s ex-girlfriend while you’re living in Whitney’s guest house? What does Whitney have to say about that?

C: He says he got what he deserved, and it’s his own fault, and Alice is a great girl. Which is all true. He’s drinking more than ever.

F: Do you feel in any way you betrayed your friendship?

C: I didn’t put his penis in Eloise’s mouth (laughter). I meant that as a joke. What can I say, Dr. Friedrich? I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. Whitney’s loss is my gain. Sex with Alice is great, much better than with Eloise, more satisfying . . . and I don’t have to pretend to be interested in ornithology.

F: That sounds awfully mercenary.

C: People screw their friends’ wives and girlfriends all the time.

F: Not in my experience.

C: That’s because you’ve never been to the Wainscot Yacht Club. There’s this guy at the club with a Concordia yawl. Each weekend he pulls in with somebody else’s . . .

The graduate student included the following note in the transcription of the session: “Dr. Friedrich, I think you must have accidentally pressed ‘erase.’ There’s two minutes and forty-one seconds of static on the tape.”

That part of their session had not been erased by accident. The man with the Concordia yawl who dropped anchor every weekend with someone else’s wife was Thayer Winton. Casper rowed out a bottle of champagne to him on one occasion; the yawl was fitted with a queen-sized bed. The most disconcerting detail of all was, as Casper put it, “A guy at the bar told me Winton uses the same trick with every one of the wives. His opening move is a first edition of T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land.
”

SEPTEMBER 1952

The parrots had been in Friedrich’s mulberry tree for almost six months now. They no longer drew crowds or inspired articles in student newspapers. Except for the occasional stranger who’d double take, pull over, knock on the door, and inquire, “Do you know what’s in your tree?” they had ceased to be a thing of wonder in the neighborhood. As it is with all things that don’t belong, familiarity had devalued their splendor.

Neighbors complained that the parrots nipped fingers, helped themselves to vegetable gardens, and in one case, strafed a house cat named Fluffy. At a town meeting someone even suggested they be shot (they did that with starlings one year), and if not that, trapped and rereleased in someone else’s neighborhood.

Lucy didn’t know that, but she was right to think no one loved the parrots anymore except Dad and her.

Fiona, after three weeks of second grade, had come to see the birds as one more hurdle to acceptance. Having a psychologist for a father (her new best friend’s dad called him “the headshrinker”) made her odd. Having a father who still drove around town in a broken-down ambulance instead of a car meant he was an embarrassment. And a mother who persisted in buying secondhand clothes and washed her daughter’s hair in dishwater detergent added humiliation to her stew. Parrots that shit on her friends whenever they came over was one more awkwardness than she could bear.

Willy, who could now not only say “urinate” but impress his dad by peeing standing up, only paid attention to the parrots when his father was around. Throwing things at them, better yet hitting them, was a sure way to get the professor’s attention. Willy, being a clever three-and-a-half-year-old, already knew that a psychologist’s idea of punishment was a cozy sit on the lap and a calm, nonthreatening talk about being kind to animals, followed by an insightful, “Willy, are you mad at the parrots or at Daddy?” The part of Friedrich’s disciplinary lap time Willy loved most was “You know that if Daddy didn’t have to work, he’d love nothing more than to stay home and play with you all day.”

Even Nora, who had proclaimed the parrots a miracle when they first arrived, had now grown impatient with the birds, particularly with the African gray who mimicked her husband’s voice so perfectly and sweetly when he called her name, “Nora . . .” she never failed to come running. Being at the beck and call of a husband was unsatisfying enough. But a parrot . . .

And though their pediatrician couldn’t say for certain an allergic reaction to the birds was the cause of the rash that blotched Jack’s neck and armpits, the possibility made her wish they would fly away and things would go back to the way they had been. Lucy had been at the pediatrician’s office with her mother when the doctor examined Jack for the second time. “Why not get rid of the parrots and see if the rash disappears?”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” Lucy noticed her mother blush the same color as Jack’s rash.

“They make my husband laugh.” Lucy didn’t know that the sound of her father’s laughter, the way he threw back his head, relaxed and easy, his arrogance transformed into contagious confidence, was what had seduced her mother. But the synapses of her now seven-year-old brain did connect the idea of sacrifice with love.

“I love you, Gray,” Lucy whispered through the screen of the kitchen window to the African gray that was perched on the front porch railing as the rain poured off the eaves. Initially she had been smitten with the red macaw, but after Fiona claimed it as her own, Gray had charmed her with his black tongue. While the other parrots hung out in the mulberry tree, Gray alone ventured up onto the porch. It had been raining hard all morning. She loved him so much, she kept the fact from her mother that the same rash Jack had had turned her own bottom red as a baboon’s.

“You can’t love a bird.” Fiona was playing doctor with her younger brothers. Jack was the patient, Willy was the nurse. The operating table was a large white chafing dish normally used to cut up turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas, now placed under the kitchen table for impromptu invasive surgery on Jack.

“I love Gray, too.” Jack loved everything.

“Jack, lie still, you’re dying.” Fiona pushed Jack down on his stomach lengthwise on the platter.

“Does dying hurt?”

“Not once you’re dead. Nurse, take his temperature.” Willy pulled down Jack’s shorts.

“I’m gonna marry Gray.” Lucy was blowing kisses through the screen.

“Marrying a parrot’s even dumber than loving one.” Fiona was washing her hands, preparing to operate.

“Gray’s not a parrot. He’s an African prince who’s been turned into a bird by an evil witch.”

“You can’t marry an African prince.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’d be a Negro. And then you’d have Negro babies, and people wouldn’t be nice to them.”

“I don’t like being a patient.” What Jack didn’t like was having his temperature taken rectally with a ruler.

“If we don’t take your temperature, you’ll die,” Willy announced in his most grown-up voice.

Jack scrambled to his feet, pulling the white tablecloth down over his head. “I’m a ghostie.” Jack held out his hands like a zombie.

Willy liked pretending he was scared. “He’s a ghost, run away!”

“Get back here, Nurse!” Jack and Willy ran, hoping Fiona would chase them.

“I’m going to count to ten . . . one, two . . .”

“What are they doing in the car?” Lucy looked beyond her feathered Prince Charming to the White Whale parked in the drive. Her parents had been in the backseat for almost forty-five minutes. It had stopped raining, but the car windows were too fogged up for Lucy to see what was going on.

“They’re making babies.”

Though Lucy was barely seven and Fiona was not yet nine, they knew all about how babies were made. In fact, they knew more about copulation than most Hamden High School girls did in 1952. Friedrich had answered any and all questions about reproduction gracefully and matter-of-factly. Determined not to shame, confuse, or titillate his daughters, he spoke about the facts of life with the same bored deliberateness he would have conveyed if he were reading the instructions to a Mixmaster:

“The man puts his penis in the woman’s vagina.”

Shame, confusion, and titillation? Friedrich’s mother had provided toxic doses of all three. Every Sunday morning before church his mother would make him and Homer hug her before she and his father returned to the bedroom to engage in that domestic tussle that passed for connubial bliss in the Friedrich household. “Come, children,” she would call out to her boys and demand a hug. “Come warm me up, Daddy’s going to hide his tail in me!”

Knowing the correct words for the body parts involved in reproduction wasn’t half as exciting to Lucy as knowing it was happening at that very moment in the backseat of the ambulance parked in their front yard. Since her mother had said making babies was a beautiful thing, Lucy reasoned,
Why shouldn’t I
watch?

Fiona was back to playing doctor. Using a butter knife for a scalpel and ketchup to simulate blood, she removed Jack’s imaginary tumor. Lucy slipped out the front door. Gray ruffled his feathers and tracked her with his yellow eye as she tiptoed across the soggy lawn to see how love was made.

“Just tell the truth.” Her father was talking loudly inside the car. He had not told Lucy people talked while they made babies.

“Will, I am running out of patience.” It was funny to hear her mother use the same tone of voice on her father that she heard when Lucy tried to give Gray a bath, or wore her best and only party shoes to walk in puddles. “I have told you the truth, and quite frankly, I find it sad and infuriating that when I tell you I am happy and in love with you and I am not sleeping with anyone else and I don’t want to sleep with anyone other than you . . . you refuse to believe me.” Since Lucy woke her parents up each morning and never found anyone besides her parents in the bed, she was nearly as perplexed as her mother was about her father’s suspicions.

“Nora, admit it and you’ll feel better.” Her dad used that trick to get Lucy to admit she was lying.

“Speak for yourself; I feel fine.”

“All right,
I’ll
feel better if you tell me his name. I swear to you I will not be angry if you just tell me who he is.”

“You really would feel better if I give you a name?”

“Absolutely.”

A circle appeared on the inside of the backseat window. Her mother was drawing a happy face with her forefinger, two dots for eyes, a line for a nose, and a half circle for a smile. Then Gray called out nervously as a plane flew low over the yard. Lucy didn’t hear the name her mother gave, just her father yelling, “How could you? Him, of all people.”