We Are Water (9 page)

Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces,
Angel Wings #17
, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”

“Not
her
,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”

“Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was. . . .

Well, maybe now I can finally explore
my
creative side for a change. Do I even still
have
a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it. . . . I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it . . . Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them.
What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?

God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was
not
, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I
did
want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that
not
having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.

I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel
with
. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those match-making Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.

“Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message:
call me
.
wanna talk 2 U dude.
I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”

“Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”

“I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”

“Hey, I thought
I
was the shrink. What am I scared of ?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”

I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.

“Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she
never
would have done before.”

“Like what?”

“Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”

“Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really
am
scared.”

She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”

“And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”

“Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”

“I said I was happy
enough
,” I reminded her. “Dude.”

But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00
P.M
., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? . . .

Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it
had
been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over:
Mog the Cat
,
Clifford the Big Red Dog
. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head. . . . Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”

And then this past March my malaise was replaced by panic when Jasmine Negron, one of my clinical practicum supervisees, walked into Muriel Clapp’s office and charged me with sexual harassment. It was one of those Rashomon-like situations. I said/she said.

But you were in her apartment, right?

I was. She was frightened. I gave her a ride home and she asked me in for a drink.

And you accepted.

Not at first. I tried to beg off, but she said would I
please
come in. The guy she’d broken up with still had the key to her place and wouldn’t give it back. A few nights earlier, she’d gotten home and he was there, sitting on her sofa. He wouldn’t leave.

How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?

Two. And granted, she’d poured them with a heavy hand, but . . . two.

I had to look away from her. Talk, instead, to my fidgeting hands in my lap.
I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, Muriel. Look, should I have gone into her apartment? Started drinking with her? No. I admit it was a stupid thing to do. Was I an idiot not to get the hell out of there when she started coming on to me? Hell, yeah.
Look her in the eye, I told myself. Say it right to her face.
But I’m telling you, Muriel
, she
came on to
me,
and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying.
It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.

And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.

Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.

Yeah.
Much
better, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working.
The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell. . . .

Don’t!
I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid
or
his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here. . . .

Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? . . .

Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “
stay
cations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo. . . . Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing
If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it.
At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”

“And what thing was that?”

“He . . . molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”

“And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”