The Red Book (14 page)

Jane can no longer remember what impulse, other than shock and animal instinct, triggered her young, bare feet to pivot away from Nha Trang after she came back from a quick afternoon dip in the bay to cool off and witnessed, through the doorframe of her rapidly incinerating house, the six other members of her family immobile, limbs akimbo, eyes blank, on the bloodstained dirt floor, but pivot they did, away from the stench of burning flesh, away from those pierced torsos, her home, that first chapter of her life, falling in step with an enormous stampede of others for what she only years later, as an adult visiting the embers of her past in an air-conditioned Citroën with Hervé, realized was a journey of 275 miles.

She cannot remember what or how she ate or drank during that stretch, although she must have done both, and she has only vague memories of sleeping in the open air at night, under the stars, because of an argument she had one night with another child, a slightly older boy who’d also lost the other members of his family, over whether the Big Dipper was actually God’s ladle (his assertion) or just a random pattern in the sky (hers). Her one vivid memory from that in-between period takes the form of the baby white mouse she found and captured on the side of the road, naming him Bao, a common male surname, which, as her mother’s colleague, a Freudian analyst of Vietnamese descent, would years later point out, is also the word for “protection.” She would either hold the wriggling creature in her palm, stroking the downy softness of his pulsing back as she pushed southward through the plumes into the city, or, when Bao would fall asleep in her hand, she’d place him in the large apron pocket on the front of her dress for safekeeping until one morning, just before dawn, she reached down for a quick snuggle and discovered he was gone. “My mouse!” she cried. “Bao! He’s escaped!”

Her grief, locked up for the eighty-odd hours that had passed since she’d assimilated the grisly scene on the floor of her arsoned home, began to leak, in tiny rivulets, out of her face. “Someone! Please! Help me find Bao! He’s gone! He’s gone!” Both pleas and tears—their flow increasing in intensity with each passing second—were ignored by her fellow refugees with the exception of one, an older woman missing several teeth and two fingers on her right hand, who’d shown what Jane had assumed was an unusually compassionate interest in her pet. “It couldn’t be helped,” the woman admitted, with a burp and a pat-pat of her belly with the palm of her maimed hand.

A couple of years later, when Claire presented her with a gerbil as a Christmas present, thinking it would help ease her daughter’s distress over Harold’s untimely death, Jane made her mother take him back to the pet shop. “I don’t have time for pets,” she lied, unable to explain that she couldn’t fall in love with another creature who would one day die, since she didn’t understand it herself.

Jane removes the photo of her and Harold from the
JANE
folder and places it in a large manila envelope she labels
TO KEEP
with—ever her mother’s daughter—a Sharpie in all caps, picturing her daughter Sophie happening upon it years from now when it’s her turn to complete the same macabre task of mother erasure. No, she thinks, Sophie’s old enough, at seven, to see this now. To start hearing the basic outline of her mother’s story, to understand why traces of her beloved grandmother’s blue eyes are nowhere to be found on either Jane’s face or hers. She promises herself she’ll frame it, place it out on some surface of, well, wherever she’ll be living come the fall.

The rest of the contents of the folder she tosses into the moving box, which she labels
TO BE RECYCLED
, before turning to a frayed file labeled
HAROLD
containing her father’s death certificate, his army records, and the last passport he held before he died. She briefly considers keeping the passport before tossing it, along with the rest of the folder, into the box. No sentimentality, she rebukes herself. Be brutal and swift. If she’s lived perfectly well without her father’s old passport for the past twenty years of adulthood, she can live perfectly well without it for the next. And the next. And, if life’s kind to her, the next.

An entire hour passes. Then another as Jane digs through the archaeological strata of her mother’s life. She does not feel the movement of this time. It passes by so seamlessly that were someone to ask her to guess how many minutes have passed since she left her bed and opened the newest folder, a jackpot of unseen photos from that blissful summer vacation at the Waldmans’ house in Nantucket in 1975, the same year she arrived in the States, she would have said fifteen to twenty at the most, in the same way a child looks at a birthday party jar full of jelly beans and guesses 43 instead of the actual 796.

One of the photos from that August in Nantucket shows Lodge and Kiki Waldman and their two boys, Nate and Jack, sitting on the back deck of their house, overlooking the ocean; in another, eight-year-old Jane, still known back then as Ngoc, holds the toddler Nate in her lap while Jack, who must have been around six or seven at the time, makes a silly face in the background; there are several gorgeous photos of her mother and Lodge, sitting at an outdoor table, smoking cigarettes together and laughing, all sparkly in the dusk light, as Kiki, her back to the camera, fixes a cocktail in the background. Harold, before going to medical school, had considered becoming a photojournalist, and the images, Jane notes, are particularly well composed, the sole exception being a low-angle photo of Harold’s torso, his head cut off, which she must have taken herself.

Jane wonders whatever happened to the Waldmans, her parents’ best friends when she arrived in the States. She remembers them coming over for dinner one night after that trip to Nantucket—she’d spun Jack around on the tire swing so fast he wound up throwing up his macaroni and cheese all over the backyard, which caused Kiki to scold her, she now recalls as if it were yesterday, unnecessarily harshly, even though it was Jack himself who’d yelled, “Faster! Faster!”—but after that she has no memory of the Waldmans, either in her home, or at her father’s funeral, or during any family event thereafter.

How odd, too, she thinks, that these photos never made it into one of the dozens of carefully curated family photo albums, documenting every moment of her mother’s existence from her undergraduate years at Wellesley, circa 1959, until 2003, the year Claire Streeter acquired her first digital camera and never made another photo album again. (“But you can just make them on iPhoto,” Jane explained to her, “or do it on Snapfish or on any number of the online photo services,” to which her mother said, with the familiar sigh of the technologically challenged, “Oh, Janie, it’s all too complicated. Just send me some regular photos of Sophie every once in a while on photographic paper, please, when you get a chance, so I can stick them on the refrigerator.”)

A dozen or so files later, in a simple manila folder labeled
RANDOM
—Jane’s first clue that the contents would be anything but, as her mother was nothing if not thorough in her pursuit of order and organization—she stumbles upon the reason for the Waldmans’ omission from the Streeter family pictorial history in the form of a yellowing carbon copy of a typed letter, signed by her mother and addressed to Lodge Waldman:

September 15, 1975

Dear Lodge,

It is with the requisite, clichéd heavy heart that I write you this letter and hope to have the courage to actually slip it under your office door come Monday morning. It goes without saying that I don’t want Kiki or Harold to accidentally stumble upon it, and I’m assuming you’ll rip it up and toss it into the trash after reading it (or, at the very least, please hide it well, as I plan on hiding its carbon twin in the bowels of my file cabinet), but when I imagined calling you on the phone or talking to you in person to respond to your question, I realized that, simply by virtue of hearing your voice or seeing your face, I wouldn’t be able to be as brave and resolute as this situation requires.

Let me start off by stating the obvious. I love you. I love you so much that I feel it as a constant physical ache. I love you both with the heart of a teenager and with the mind of a woman who has finally lived long enough, after four decades of stumbling around in what feels like the dark, to understand not only what she needs in a mate but also what she desires. This past year of stolen moments with you has been one of the most blissful, intense, and transcendent years of my life. I literally don’t know how I would have survived Harold’s deployment without you, and I know, with near certainty, that when the light is fading from my eyes (hopefully) many years from now, images of us and all that we shared will sneak back in, breaking through the dikes of the subconscious, as they do now nearly every hour I endure without your physical presence. Oddly, I’m treating an elderly patient at the moment with a terminal illness who, week after week, laments not having left his wife for his lover decades earlier, and the ripples from the broken record of his thought processes, as you can imagine, have only served to jumble both my own thought processes and my resolve.

That being said, I want to make the right decision here based not on how I’ll feel at the end of my life but on how I want to live and conduct myself now.

So. The answer to your question, in my heart, is an unadulterated (ironic word, I know) yes. Oh my God, yes, nothing would make me happier than to marry you. But as we both know, in our capacity both as humans and therapists, we do not live in a vacuum. We live in a community. We have families. We work down the hallway from one another and refer patients to one another, for heaven’s sake. (“Do not shit where you eat,” a wise colleague once told me, back when she suspected—even before I did—that my feelings for you were heading beyond the platonic.) We have spouses who not only love us—yes, okay, each in their own highly imperfect ways, no need to go over that for the thousandth time—but who would be devastated by both the breach of trust and by imagining us, for the rest of their lives, in bed together. You have two young boys whose psyches, as you well know, you would damage, either slightly or irreparably, but you have no way of predicting the extent of that injury.

Yes, I know everyone and his cousin is getting divorced these days. That it’s lost its stigma, that it’s “no big deal.” But regardless of the current cultural trend, I don’t believe we have enough case studies of the lasting impact of divorce on children to treat it so cavalierly. I have to imagine that if we took the plunge and got married, and I became your sons’ stepmother, that over time, as they matured and began to understand the origins of our relationship—even if they somehow grew to love me—they would certainly grow to hate me as well. How could they not?

It’s not that I don’t believe in divorce when it’s called for. I frequently encourage my patients to walk down that road if there is emotional or physical abuse, or if they finally come to terms with their homosexuality. If my situation with Harold were untenable, if your relationship with Kiki was unsalvageable—which I don’t think either one is—then all of this would be much simpler. But we both know that sexual frigidity in a woman can be treated, and one doesn’t divorce one’s perfectly adequate if slightly emotionally aloof husband simply because a better, more passionate, more compatible version appears on the horizon. People aren’t cars to be traded in and up. They’re people. With complex emotional inner lives and filial ties and psyches that are far too easily bruised.

This brings me to what I’m assuming you understand is one of the more salient factors for refusing your hand, namely our beautiful new daughter Ngoc. I can’t help but feel that Harold must have sensed me pulling away after all those years of trying and failing to conceive, that Ngoc was his olive branch, his way of saying he was ready for a new chapter in our lives as a couple. Remember that letter of his I showed you, where he wrote about his delight at having been transformed overnight “into the father I always knew I was capable of becoming” after having met her? I remember your reaction to that letter. You looked positively stricken, because you probably realized, as I did, that her arrival spelled the end of us.

Lodge, I will always love you, of this I’m 100 percent certain, but I never knew what it felt like to have my own family, to be a mother, until Ngoc came into our lives. Yes, I know she’s only been here less than a year, but the three of us, our odd little family unit, deserve a chance to move forward in space and time intact, unencumbered. Meaning, the relative freedom I once felt vis-à-vis abandoning my own marriage to be with you has been usurped, and not in a bad way either. Just in a way I could have never expected or predicted, back when we first started making love and uttering the kind of sweetheart promises to one another that each of us probably knew, in the back of our love-addled minds, would be difficult if not impossible to keep.

In the spirit of our changed reality, knowing how torturous it would be for us to pass one another in the hallway every day, I have found a new lease on an office in Somerville, close enough to my old one that my patients won’t be inconvenienced but far enough from yours that I won’t be tempted to spend another lunch hour with you on your fold-out sofa. It’s for the best, Lodge, and I know, in time, you will grow to feel the same way. Even if you hate me for it right now.

I wish I had two lives. Hell, I wish I had three! I’d marry you in a heartbeat in both of those other lives, and I am certain that those other two lives would be filled with more joy and light than either of us could ever imagine. But we’re only given this one shot, my sweet, this one narrative thread to weave, and it’s time for the chapter on Claire and Lodge to come to a close. I will leave it up to you as to whether or not the idea of further communication between us feels helpful or harmful. On my end, I’m pretty sure I can handle it, so long as we’re never alone together. I’d like to talk to you on the phone every once in a while, to hear your voice and listen to your stories. I think we might even be able to meet for the occasional lunch, on neutral ground, in public, given enough time to get used to the absence of intimacy. But again, I can’t know how you’ll feel after reading this letter. Or how I’ll feel without your warm and steady hand at the small of my back. I don’t believe in God, as you well know, but that has not kept me from dropping to my knees these past few weeks to beg him/her/whomever to please give me the courage to do what I know must be done. I’m going to miss you: your touch, your smile, your brilliant, beautiful mind. Jesus, you should see the tears falling as I type this. It’s like Niagara Falls around here.