The Archivist (13 page)

I can’t reconstruct how it happened, how one day I knew that what we felt was not being told anymore through our touching.

We have become opaque to each other, have lost the lovely irreplaceable translucence of that first feeling …

May 9

It has been exactly three weeks since I came here. Today the doctors allowed Matt to visit me for the first time.

He was wearing the striped cotton shirt I’d bought him sometime in the second year of our marriage, when we had no money but occasionally made extravagant purchases for one another. I remember the day I found the shirt — at dePinna’s, on sale but still expensive — and brought it home in a flush of guilt and excitement. The stripes were a bluish purple, fairly wide, against a pure white.

When the attendants opened the door to my room, I saw the stripes on Matt’s shirt before anything else. I couldn’t take in all of him, even though I knew he was entirely there; I felt his presence charge the room. The stripes had paled over the years, but they held their essential color. My eyes dipped past Matt’s face and landed on the first attendant, the same surly one who got me into trouble with Dr. Clay.

Leave, I said.

The doctor says no unsupervised visits, he answered in an uninflected voice, just like a machine. So I went after him. I don’t recall the exact sequence of events, but in a brief time I had a clump of his hair in my hand, and Matt and the other attendant had me pinned by the arms, and the attendant I’d attacked was telling me (in that passionless voice) to stop spitting at him or he would call Clay. So I stopped.

Then was I able to look at my husband. His eyes were lit now with panic, their blue on fire, and I wanted to punish him by laughing but I knew there was no point. At Hayden everything is pointless but especially punishment.

You’re wearing my shirt, I said to him. The one I gave you.

My voice was low, calmer now. I felt his grip loosen, then he let go. The other attendant held on a few more seconds until he was satisfied that I wouldn’t move anywhere quickly. Then he took his hands off me, and I stood perfectly still.

Yes, Matt said.

I paused and turned to the attendant at my side. The bitter-chocolate one, Bud Powell. I knew I was safe with him.

How long is this visit supposed to be? I said very quietly.

Two hours, he said, also very quietly.

Listen, I said. You stay here for fifteen minutes so you can report that everything began under control. Then you leave us by ourselves for an hour and a half. Then you come back for fifteen minutes so you can report that everything ended under control. Is that a deal?

Yes, he said. If you keep the middle part under control.

I nodded.

He gave the other attendant a signal; the man left. The three of us moved to the corner of the room. Matt took my hand.

I am going to stand by this window, the attendant said, and he moved over to the room’s southern corner. And I am going to watch the outside world, and you two are going to talk softly if you don’t want me to hear what you’re saying. I’ll leave in fifteen minutes and I’ll come back at a quarter to two. I’ll knock once, then enter. Be ready for me.

He looked directly at me, though I knew he was speaking to us both. His eyes were a limpid brown-grey under thick brows. In that instant he was much more real to me than Matt, but when he turned his back on us it was as if he’d already left the room. Matt’s hand in mine was damp.

Excuse my outburst, I said to Matt, I didn’t mean to scare you.

It’s all right, he said, I’m all right.

We sat on the bed as we would’ve done at home: Matt at one end, me at the other, our legs angled across, only this time not intersecting, both of us careful not to touch although there wasn’t much room, the bed being narrow.

I don’t know what Matt was looking at because I wasn’t looking at him. We said nothing, and after what seemed like little more than a long pause (but it must’ve been fifteen minutes), the attendant left.

We talked in the middle part, as the attendant had called it. When he returned for the last fifteen minutes, we were again silent. As far as he knew, we hadn’t spoken during the entire visit.

I can’t remember what we talked about. There’d been so much talking and arguing, so much crying, so much anger and sorrow in the days before Matt brought me here that neither of us now had anything serious to say.

There was something about Matt’s work, something about Len and Carol — a leak in their radiator? — yes, but the water didn’t damage their record collection, I’ll get my record player eventually.

I have no idea how Matt looked as we spoke, or whether he even glanced at me. I was unable to bear looking or being looked at.

He thinks I’ll get better here, that I will be restored, as he puts it, and more in control, and less easily upset by everything.

You’re not functioning well, he said as we were driving here. I am not interested in functioning, I said, and he said you know what I mean. And I said you mean you can’t stand my being this way, as I am; and he said Judith don’t keep doing that, and we fell silent again, stuck in the same place.

He wasn’t afraid when we first met. But he’s become afraid of me.

May 11

Zohar:
“At times the Shekhinah tastes the other, bitter side, and then her face is dark.”

May 14

Now that the weather’s mild, they’ve let us wander the grounds, which are vast, studded with purple and pink azaleas, many dogwoods, magnolias. It has been a lush, rainy spring. The border gardens are full of pansies and marigolds and impatiens in all different shades; the pachysandra is thick under the shade trees. The gardener is evidently the only happy employee here. Everything thrives.

I spend much of each morning outdoors. In the afternoon I go inside and daydream about the city, Central Park’s flowers in spring, the Botanical Gardens behind the Brooklyn Museum, all the places I miss. It is hideously quiet here.

I don’t talk much to the other patients. They are dull, their pain doesn’t interest me, I have no desire for connection. It’s healthier to be silent.

Matt is my sole real connection. The others have been products of chance; Pam in Boston, Mary and Clara and a few of the couples we know in New York — these are all ties of chance, affectionate ties but weak, easily severed. I know I won’t hear from these people much, or for very long, now that I’m here; being here will make clear what divides us.

But Matt is afraid of me now. It wasn’t like that at the beginning, when we trusted each other in that animal way. I was the one who got scared first — but not of him. Never of him. He has made me angrier and sadder than anyone else ever could, but he’s never frightened me.

No. I was scared of the things I started reading about. Of the camps dotted across Germany and Poland. I was the one who made Matt begin to see the precise science of it, the inconceivably systematic deaths.

The
Zohar:
God is part mercy, part stern judgment; and when His judgment enlarges, it overwhelms.

The Holy One, be blessed, spoke: Man, life you have abandoned, and to death you cleave; truly, death awaits you … But if Adam transgressed, in what did the rest of the world sin? … When man stood upright, all creatures, beholding him, were seized with fear of him, and slavelike they followed after him.

May 15

I miss whiskey, neat shots of it in the dusk as I listen to Elmo Hope or Monk or Powell.

If Len and Carol don’t bring the fucking record player, I
will
go crazy.

Matt shouldn’t have worried so much about my drinking. He made it the wrong issue or the issue it wasn’t. The real issue was the space the whiskey made for me, a space Matt didn’t trust and anyway feared, especially in his own life.

The things he fears, he tries to take away from me. A certain kind of hunger I have.

Matt was right, I couldn’t have stayed in Manhattan, I was coming apart, everything terrified me. But I’m still in trouble here: this isn’t the safe place Matt wants to think it is. They take away the whisky but the trouble remains and is not (as the doctors would say) susceptible to treatment. I’m waiting for Matt to learn that, so he’ll take me back, as I am.

A certain kind of hunger. To know what happened and at least ask why. Because the
tikkun
can’t start until everyone asks what happened — not just the Jews but everybody.

The strange thing is that Christ evidently saw this.

Matt’s waiting for something, but he won’t budge. No one taught him how to take what he wants, so he just waits. I call it a sin not to satisfy your own hunger. Matt’s been duped.

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still

Matt has learned only to sit still, which isn’t sufficient.

I want my fucking record player. I want to hear Powell play “It Never Entered My Mind” like the prayer it wasn’t meant to be, a prayer of sex and loss. I want to hear how all of a sudden Powell reverses things. And what he lets out! — the hidden life —

May 16

Matt’s second visit. This time I put on fresh clothes, earrings. My hair was clean. I can’t afford to be fully female here, it hurts too much. I guess Matt can’t afford to be fully male either. He showed up in an old cardigan and loose grey pants that disguise what I like best about him. That supple firm leanness of his.

Matt doesn’t look like Sam in any of the pictures Len gave me. Sam was even taller, very lanky, boyish. Matt is self-possessed, he holds himself differently, with a certain elegance and guardedness I can’t find in the pictures of my father.

Father. When I write
father
or
mother
I split in two. One of me is incredulous and the other is enraged, and when I try to push the two selves together a sensation of panic inserts itself between them, and this I think is a defense against a sadness so profound I can’t even begin feeling it.

Matt wanted to know what I was writing. I told him that all I can do is keep this journal. I told him what I’ve been reading. He asked me some questions. I knew he wanted to know how I’m really doing. So I told him that the conditions of my life here preclude my talking about it, and he said what conditions, and I said internment — it’s a camp here, you know. He got agitated and reminded me of all our discussions about what Hayden could do for me. How I would be able to like my life again after spending some time apart from it, examining it with the help of professionals.

I could recite all his arguments in my sleep, but I haven’t accepted them. I told him I still feel betrayed, and he got agitated again. It wasn’t that I regretted saying it, afterward, but just that I knew it had done no good. We have this wall between us, unbreachable.

The thing is, he’s right, but I am too.

When he left, we were able to kiss one another but it was a passionless kiss, almost like siblings. He told me his work was going well. I believe that; he’s always been good at immersing himself in work. I could never get the distance that work requires. How did I do it all those years at the office — typing all day, answering phones, taking letters … The daily act of being with others but not really being with them, just as they weren’t really with me.

Len and Carol were the ones who taught me how to go through the motions. They’re masters at it. But the difference between them and me is that they’ve always had each other and I never had them, not in a deep trustworthy way.

Lottie and Sam —

May 20

Dr. Clay is trying to make me talk about my childhood. I meet with him once a week and with one of his young apprentices each day. There are three of them, a woman and two men. My little team of sorcerers.

Clay asks me a string of questions. I answer the ones that don’t bore me, which is to say about half. For the time being, Clay has accepted this — what he calls my “stalling maneuver” — but he doesn’t like it. It leaves gaps in the story he wishes to compose, the one about my life.

Does talking about Len and Carol bore you, he asked me today.

I’ve thought plenty about them, I answered, I know what they did and why. It no longer interests me.

What do you feel about the fact that they haven’t yet visited you here, he said. (Which surprised me. He is cannier than he appears to be.)

I feel just fine about that, I said. Only I do want my record player.

That’s how it tends to go. Sometimes I feel guilty for resisting Clay, I try to tell myself I’m here, so why not go along with it? And I can hear Matt’s anguished pleading — the only time in our marriage he ever pleaded with me was when he tried to get me to come here — but I just can’t believe in it yet, and I can’t imagine when I will.

Which is why I feel incarcerated. But none of these head-shrinkers understand this.

The attendant who looks like Powell understands, perhaps? Though I’m probably making that up, to feel better. Pretending I see something in his eyes.

I can’t do that with Matt anymore. But it was there, a long time ago, something I saw in his eyes.

Once he recognized what had happened in Europe, the thing I saw in his eyes began to dim. I can’t see it now.

Matthias was never connected to his Christ through love, only through awe. The
Zohar
says that through the second we come to the first, which is loftier.

Awe is safer, though: you don’t have to risk the terror of loving a God who turns His face.

May 29

Matt’s third visit was a blur; I can remember only the end, when the attendant, the one who’s like Powell, came back into the room and I was begging Matt to take me home, and Matt was crying but not letting me touch him. He was slumped against the wall next to the window, just where the attendant stands at the beginning and end of our visits.

His face in his hands. He never sobs but I can tell when he’s crying.

When I came back from Boston, after the first time I left him, he cried and then I saw in his eyes the fear I’d never noticed before, not from the crying but from what he’d suddenly felt: a need to keep separate from me, to protect himself. It must have terrified him.