The Drowning Tree (30 page)

“Really?” I notice I’m leaning toward her, ready to fall into her reassuring dark eyes.

“But of course, whenever there’s a parent with the diagnosis there’s cause for concern, especially here because your mother was fairly young. I can understand why you would consider having the test. Let me explain a little about the factors you should keep in mind …”

I lean back while Irini Pearlman explains my statistical chances for getting breast cancer with or without one of the two genes that have been identified in “family clusters” with breast cancer, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Although I’m pretty bad at statistics and my mind starts to wander when too many numbers get bandied about, Dr. Pearlman’s very good at her job. If I’ve got one of the genes, I have an 85 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer compared to a 10 percent lifetime risk for women without either of the genes. More disturbing is the news that if I have the BRCA1 gene I have a 40 to 60 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer compared to a 1 to 2 percent chance in the general population.

“Wow, that’s pretty high,” I say, “especially since ovarian cancer’s so deadly.”

“Yes, there’s no reliable screening for it, which is why many women who test positive for the gene elect to have their ovaries removed. Of course, that isn’t a decision to be made lightly if you’d planned to have more children …”

Dr. Pearlman pauses, leaving a hole like one of the blank spaces in her questionnaire for me to fill in, but I’m already too dazed by the onslaught of information I’ve received to even pretend to know whether I’d planned to have more children or not. I remember Christine asking at the train station,
have you felt that much for anyone since Neil?
It’s hard for me to imagine ever caring enough for anyone again to even think about having another child.

“There’s no reason to get too far ahead of ourselves,” Dr. Pearlman says as if she can hear the questions roiling around in my brain. “We like to bring up the prophylactic measures available because without their existence there’d be very little reason to pursue this line of inquiry, but as I said, the chances are you don’t even have the gene. There’s also no reason to decide today whether or not you want to have the test. Perhaps there are family members you wish to consult …”

“No,” I say, “I want to have the test. I might as well get it over with while I’m here … or do I have to go to a lab?”

As answer, Dr. Pearlman gets up and retrieves a hypodermic kit from a filing cabinet behind her desk. I’m a little surprised that she’s the one to take my blood, but also a little relieved. Because I have narrow veins, giving blood is never easy for me. There’s something extremely soothing in her voice though, as she talks to me while swabbing the underside of my elbow and flicking my arm to raise my veins. She tells me the results will take three weeks and that I’ll have to come in for an appointment and I’m not to expect to receive any information on the phone. She also tells me that it’s probably safe to use my insurance—that they haven’t had any cases of people losing their insurance with a positive diagnosis—but that I’m welcome to pay out of pocket if I’d like. Although it’s expensive, I tell her I’ll pay for the test myself.

I look away when the needle goes in and Dr. Pearlman asks me inconsequential questions about what I do for a living and how old my daughter is and where we live—all to distract me from the needle in my arm.

“We get a lot of people from Penrose College,” she says.

“Oh yes, that’s how I was referred—”

“From that poor woman who died?”

I turn my head just as Dr. Pearlman pulls the needle out of my arm and presses a cotton swab hard into the crook of my elbow. “You mean Christine Webb? She came here?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything …” Dr. Pearlman gets up to dispose of the needle and comes back with a Band-Aid for my arm, avoiding my eyes while she replaces the blood-dabbed cotton with the adhesive bandage. “Everything that happens here is confidential.”

“But if Christine came here you should at least talk to the police. Here—” I take out one of the business cards that Detective Falco gave me, “—this is the number of the detective who’s handling the case. I’m sure it’s important, especially if it had anything to do with the baby …”

Dr. Pearlman looks up at me and quickly looks away, but not so quickly that I don’t catch a look of pity in those dark eyes so heartbreaking that I feel certain Christine came here because of her unborn child—and that the news she got wasn’t good.

D
ETECTIVE
F
ALCO HAD GIVEN ME TWO CARDS;
I
KEPT THE ONE HE’D WRITTEN HIS
cell phone number on. I dial the number from a pizzeria across from the medical center. He answers on the third ring.

“It’s Juno McKay,” I say, “do you have a minute?”

“Of course, Miss McKay, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I just had some tests done at a genetic counseling office in Poughkeepsie—”

“Anything wrong?” he asks, interrupting me.

“Oh no—well, at least let’s hope not.” I try laughing but it comes out more as a gasp. “Just checking something out. The reason I called, though, is that the genetic counselor mentioned that she knew a friend of mine from the college. I thought at first that she meant Fay Morgan—”

“Why did you think that?” he asks, interrupting me for the second time.

“Because Fay referred me to her.” I pause, expecting another interruption, but Detective Falco is silent. “Anyway, it wasn’t Fay—it was Christine. She came in for some testing about a month ago. Around the same time she would have been up here visiting Briarwood.”

“Did the counselor say what she was being tested for?”

“She wouldn’t tell me anything, but I gathered it had something to do with the pregnancy and that the news wasn’t good. I gave her your card and she said she’d call, but I thought I should give you her name and number as well.”

“Absolutely,” he says, “good work.”

I give him Irini Pearlman’s name and number and the address of the genetic counseling office and he thanks me. I can tell he’s ready to get off, but I detain him another moment. “I guess bad news about her pregnancy could have been a motive for killing herself—”

“And it could tell us who the father was,” he says, interrupting me for the third and last time. Then he thanks me again for my “good work” and hangs up. I’m not sure why, but the thought of Detective Falco homing in on the identity of Christine’s lover makes me feel a little queasy, almost as if I’m the prey that’s being circled. Or it could just be the loss of blood that’s making me feel light-headed. I buy a slice of Sicilian pizza and head across the river.

I
T’S BEEN YEARS SINCE
I
’VE BEEN TO
N
EW
P
ALTZ, NOT SINCE
N
EIL AND
C
HRISTINE AND
I used to drive through on our way to rock climbing in the Gunks. Sometimes we’d pick up bagels on our way in—
the only decent bagels north of the Bronx
, Neil used to say—and stop at one of the bars on our way back. New Paltz had a lot more going for it as a college town than poor rundown Rosedale.

It still feels like a seventies college town. If anything Main Street seems to have gone back in time since I last saw it. Tie-dyed shirts and bright Indian kurtas hang in the windows, long-haired men and sandaled young women—many with babies in Indian-patterned slings—walk along the main street.

When I check the directions on the opening notice again I realize that the gallery is just outside the town, over the bridge that crosses the Wall Kill, in an old stone building—in fact, it’s called Stone Gallery—by the side of the stream. The sight of the full parking lot brings me such a sensation of relief that I realize that my nervousness hasn’t all been over seeing Neil again. It’s the old anxiety I always felt when he did a show—the fear that if it were too sparsely attended or if too few paintings sold or sold to the wrong people or he overheard a callous comment or it was badly reviewed or not reviewed at all, Neil’s manic high that preceded the show would dissolve into crippling depression. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t really matter how the show went, that there was no amount of success that could staunch that downward flow from elation to despair—a process as inevitable as water flowing to the sea.

I park and walk up a flight of stone steps to an arched doorway flanked on either side by blue flags emblazoned with the show’s title—River Light—and Neil’s name and proceed down a narrow stone corridor. I wonder if the building is one of the original Huguenot buildings the town is famous for. It feels ancient, cool as a tomb, the wide planked floor worn and sloping ever so slightly downward so that I’m surprised that the room I emerge into is not some dark underground cavern. It is, rather, spacious and filled with color and wavering light.

I’d been expecting to see something like the river landscapes Dr. Horace showed me at Briarwood, but the canvas that fills the wall facing me could only be called a landscape in the most elemental sense. There is water—a great expanse of dark purplish water at eye level as if the viewer were swimming in it or skimming the surface in a low boat—and a towering rock face tinged with indigo and violet, and striped by wavering bands of pale mauve light that seem to be moving. In fact, the light is moving. The entire room is filled with reflected light coming, I soon figure out, from narrow rectangular copper basins lining the walls. I step over to one of the basins and look down through clear water to a tumble of smooth rocks at the bottom that nearly camouflage the underwater light fixtures. When I take another step forward the water vibrates, making the light bands on the paintings and walls jitter and shake.

“The basins are mounted on high-tension springs,” says a woman who’s come up behind me, “so that the pattern of light responds to the
presence of viewers in the room. The artist is commenting on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—the theory that there is no way to make an observation without affecting that which is observed.” I stare at the woman to see if she’s having me on, but she stares back with a straight face, as if explaining art via obscure physics theories was everyday stuff to her. Maybe it is. The woman is tall and slim, her silver hair cut boyishly. She’s wearing an ankle-length coat woven in a multicolored geometric pattern that looks vaguely Aztecan and chunky amber earrings the size of cherries. She looks like she could be a physics professor or an Aztec priestess. When I look down to see the springs under the water basins I notice that she’s wearing lavishly impractical sandals of blue satin, the strap between her toes encrusted with a rhinestone dragonfly that appears to have just alighted on her foot.

“Do you work for the gallery?” I ask.

She smiles down at me from the height of her dragonfly heels and I can’t help but feel that I’ve offended some Aztecan deity with my question. “My gallery is in Manhattan, but I’m also on the board of ArtHudson, which funds this gallery, and I’m volunteering as a docent for this show. I believe in supporting local artists whose work reflects the indigenous landscape. Buchwald’s pieces combine references to Hudson River school painting and more modern sources—for instance, Dan Flavin’s light installations. Flavin lived for a while across the river in Garrison and collected Hudson River school paintings …”

“Yes, I saw an exhibit of those recently at the Vassar College Art Gallery.” I’m lying. I saw the announcement of the exhibit and meant to go. Something about this woman’s elegant bearing and well-meaning tutelage makes me want to assert my own knowledge and credentials. I remember this about art shows—the temptation to say something pretentious and disingenuous. I’m wondering how to escape the talkative docent when she spots someone more interesting over my shoulder and hurries away without saying good-bye.

I stand for another moment in front of the canvas and read the little card affixed to the wall by its side, which explains that the painting’s title,
Water Lightning
, comes from a term used by Cambodian fishermen for the patterns of light reflected on the trees that stand in the drowned forests of
Tonle Sap Lake. The next two paintings, following the same theme, are called
Drowned Forest
and
Dancing Trees
.

The gallery has been partitioned with alternating panels so that foot traffic moves through the space like a meandering river. In fact, the paintings in the next space are titled
Bend in the River I, II
, and
III
. Not only are they tonally bluer than the first painting, but the reflected light waves that play over their surfaces are slightly bluish. The lights in the water basins must be tinted.

There’s only one painting in the next space and it’s called
World’s End
. Blue water tinged with green fills the entire canvas. Looking at it has the dizzying effect of staring into a whirlpool and I back away as if it might suck me into its maelstrom. I start to retrace my steps back to the front of the gallery, not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved that I’ve gone through the whole show without running into Neil, when I notice a small sign pointing down a short flight of stairs. N
OT THE END
, it reads. So
World’s End
isn’t the end. I recognize Neil’s love of wordplay and his fondness for
the last word:
he always loved codas and epilogues, afterwards and envoys.