by Laurel Brett
* * *
Back in New Paltz, my professional world began to fall apart. Dr. Dyer, our department chair, called me into his office for a little chat. He was a portly, excitable man around fifty.
“Dr. Adams,” he said with forced formality when his secretary ushered me into his office. He gestured for me to take the seat across from him. “We’re not too happy with your output lately,” he said.
I nodded. My mouth felt dry. Funny—I had put all of this out of my head.
“Working on anything? What happened to the work you were doing with those listless rats you bred?”
“It didn’t pan out,” I said. “Nothing interesting.”
“Any articles in the pipeline?”
“Not at the present.”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Garrett. We were pleased, very pleased, with data you were getting before you were granted tenure. You were going gangbusters. But your output seems to have slowed down, a post-tenure slump. I’ve seen it happen before. You’re going to have to have more to show the committee if you’re ever going to get a promotion or be happy here.”
“Should I consider this an official warning?” I asked. “Is there a report in my personnel file?”
“No. Nothing like that. Just a heads-up between friends.”
* * *
Without Caroline and with this new anxiety, neither Christmas nor New Year’s were very festive. Jerry and I caught a movie and had Chinese food—the Jewish Christmas. He asked me to go barhopping with him on New Year’s Eve, but I stayed home and watched those dumb movies they show to losers who have no parties to go to. I nursed one shot of Baileys for the entire night. I just wasn’t in the mood to party. I was screwing up everywhere—with Caroline, who was still in Indiana, and at work. I guessed I shouldn’t have thrown that briefcase in the dumpster when I left the bar with the Yankees losing. In the end they hadn’t come in last, but it was almost as bad, second-to-last. And to make matters worse, there was no sign of Daphne.
1968 promised to be a bad year, I thought, as I sat watching After the Thin Man in black and white, finishing the last drops of my Baileys. It had been either that or Guy Lombardo.
It turned out I was right. At the end of January, just after midnight on January 30, the Viet Cong hit American forces hard in the south. The attack was completely unexpected because the Vietnamese had always observed a cease-fire for the holiday of Tet. The element of surprise was on their side. The battle continued into the next day, when they attacked Saigon. This was catastrophic for American forces. I thought we should get out right then.
Then a call from Jerry came to interrupt my isolation and gloom. He proposed we meet at Hunter Mountain to ski. Back in our Cornell days, we had learned to ski on a dare from a group of guys who thought it would be fun to humiliate the city boys. Jerry took to it more easily than I did. He excelled at so many things. But I was persistent, and I learned. After that, we skied as often as we could.
It had been a long time since I’d done any diamond trails, but we’d skied together at least once a season since we graduated. We used to go back to Greek Peak near Cornell, but now we just met at Hunter. Jerry had to drive almost three hours to get there, whereas I could be there in an hour. They’d built a new base lodge about five years before, and I read that they’d installed a new lift and that the snowmaking apparatus was now one of the best in the world.
Jerry had to get up before daybreak, but I could linger over morning coffee. The day he chose was perfect—one of those days that recalls a child’s drawing, with a cloudless sapphire sky, a big yellow sun, and conical hunter-green trees covered with snow.
Our ritual—which had been Jerry’s idea—was to have coffee together before starting our day of skiing. Jerry had pointed out that we might have news to share, and an outing provided a chance to catch up.
I was surprised to see Jerry already at a table because I hadn’t noticed his car in the parking lot. He seemed a little worn, and his eyes had a wistfulness I wasn’t used to. A tall, rangy waiter with wheat-colored hair came to take our order. We always drank Irish coffees. Jerry had once convinced me that a little alcohol was a perfect way to warm us up before we hit the slopes, and this had become part of our skiing ritual. I started to order when Jerry said, “Just plain coffee for me, Garrett.”
I ordered two coffees for us and waited for him to speak. After all, my issues had dominated our last two meet-ups. This morning was his turn. I tried to be patient, yet I was itching to get out on the slopes; I hadn’t done anything completely physical or exhilarating since the day months ago when I’d swam in the ocean with Caroline.
The Adirondack-style lodge was built with exposed beams and wood paneling and decorated with forest-green upholstery. The vaulted ceiling was vaguely Alpine, and the roaring fire was homey. While we waited for our coffee, Jerry plunged in: “I know you weren’t comfortable the last two times we saw each other, Garrett, but that day in my office I was just trying to help.”
Trying to help. I was surprised by the constriction in my throat, and my own anger, and I said, “I felt like you were condescending to me. The great white healer and his messed-up friend.” I could plunge in too.
Jerry sighed. “Of course it would feel like that to you. But I wasn’t thinking that at all.”
We’d been waiting for this fight for years.
“Admit it,” I said. “You think being a psychoanalyst is way better than being a professor.”
“No, you think that, Garrett. Not me. You were always measuring yourself against me. Who says we have to compete at all?” His tired face was hangdog and sallow. The coffees came. We sipped them in a kind of silent truce.
He tried again: “I don’t want to compete with you. I want us to be friends, equals.”
“I suppose I am competitive. As students we were on a par with each other, but now you have this apartment and all this money. I am jealous.” I surprised myself by being so honest. I couldn’t see any reason to continue this covert war.
“I am no one to be jealous of.”
We finished our coffee, and he resumed: “And then at the bar, I know you had things to talk about—”
“Time to hit the slopes,” I cut him off. “Let’s save all this for another time.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that. I don’t think I feel quite up to skiing right now.”
“You don’t want to go skiing? You could have called me last night. You didn’t have to put both of us through this trip.”
“Bubbeleh. I guess I could have, but I wanted to see you. I needed to see you.”
“Why?”
“Because I need a friend.”
This was getting weird. Jerry always had this hardiness about him, a kind of blustery humor that muscled through everything and charmed everyone. It was the thing about him I envied the most. Next to him, I’d always been the tall, skinny, bespectacled sidekick. Seeing him deflated should have felt like a victory. Instead, I felt uneasy.
“What’s wrong?”
I put aside the anger, and suddenly we were two eighteen-year-old kids again, before life became a pissing contest, and before we measured ourselves in dollars and publications and renown. He shifted a little in his seat, his face showing just the faintest beginning of jowls.
“I’m in the beginning stages of cirrhosis of the liver. There’s been some scarring that can’t be reversed, but I can live with that.” He winked at me there to lighten the news.
“Cirrhosis? You’re only thirty-seven.”
“We’re almost thirty-eight, kid. Think about it,” he said. “Really consider the idea.”
Suddenly the ritual of having Irish coffee before skiing suggested something very different. It wasn’t the whiskey that was the addition; it was the coffee. Jerry couldn’t very well have suggested we go for beers at eight o’clock in the morning. I remembered the time in his office when I wondered why we weren’t in the living room. Maybe it was because of the decanter of Scotch. He co
uld walk over and take a nip without the fuss of bottles. I remembered now that he’d poured himself one first, and then offered me one with just a raising of his eyebrow and the tilt of his head. I remembered how much he resisted my request to go into the living room. Maybe he just wanted to stay where the booze was. I hadn’t really considered the fact that he left his liquor out in front of patients. I had rarely seen him out of control, but the last time in the bar he was really drunk, and not just the letting-off-steam kind of tipsy.
I said, “Liquor has been part of every one of our meet-ups for a long time. Ten years maybe.”
“It’s been longer than that.”
“You never seemed drunk, not until last time.”
“I’m a functional alcoholic, which only means that I hold my liquor very well, and that I can drink large quantities of it. Or at least, I could.”
“How long has it been since we were together without you having a drink?”
“I doubt that you’ve ever seen me without alcohol, until today. Not since the first few weeks at Cornell anyway, before we really knew each other.”
My clenched jaw relaxed and I felt sorry for my friend, and a little abashed at my own blindness. I had suspected nothing, even when he was so out of it. “So, you’re done with all drinking for good?” I asked.
“I have to be. It’s been four days.” He said this in an odd voice that showed both agony and pride. “It’s going to be really tough. Ski lodge without Irish coffee? Unthinkable. But here we are.”
“What happens now?”
“I’m in a program.”
“AA?”
“No. That’s not for me. That higher-power stuff.”
“But you’re Jewish.”
“Jews are atheists. You know that. Part of our covenant. When you get circumcised you become an atheist.”
“I thought you trotted God out for special occasions, like Rosh Hashanah.”
He laughed heartily at that. I was relieved to see it.
“But you’re in a different program now?” I asked.
“Yes. It was the only way to get off the sauce. I’m at a rehab center near here.”
“They let you out? I guess they don’t know about your love of Irish coffee.”
“Of course they do. Ski lodge equals Irish coffee for an alcoholic. They know that. I got dropped off here for a two-hour furlough. Someone will pick me up.”
I had imagined the morning all wrong. He hadn’t gotten up in Manhattan at the crack of dawn and driven up here. He was with aides and other residents.
“I’m terrified of running into one of my patients,” he confided.
“Then why don’t you go somewhere else?”
“Only the best for my patients. And I shouldn’t have the best?”
“What are you telling them?”
“Just that I needed to be away for a month. I arranged for other analysts to cover for me, especially for emergencies. It would be awful for both my sobriety and my clinical practice to lie to them. It would be awful for my clinical practice to tell them the whole truth.”
“Do you really believe in psychoanalysis, Jerry?”
“Not as a cure for alcoholism, I don’t.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Maybe that’s a conversation for another day.”
“You don’t even have skis with you, do you?”
He just sat there resignedly for a good thirty seconds. Then he said, “I thought you’d understand.”
His eyes glistened with new tears, and his mouth sagged with a vulnerability I wasn’t used to seeing in Jerry. I felt myself relenting. “Yeah, I get it,” I said, letting him off the hook.
Then the old Jerry surfaced, and he said, “It should be you. You’re the Mick. I’m the Yid. Jews aren’t alcoholics.” Then his humor faded. “Except when we are, I guess. I envy you, kid.”
“Envy me? Why?”
“First, you’re not an alcoholic. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. Second, you’re in a stable relationship with a fabulous woman.”
“I wouldn’t really say it was stable. Soon you may have nothing to envy.”
“What do you mean?”
“We haven’t seen much of each other lately. She’s been in Indiana. She can’t handle the Schrödinger mystery.”
“That girl?” he asked.
“Those girls,” I corrected. “I met another one, and I talked to two separate guidance counselors about two different girls.”
“That’s also a conversation for a different day, but don’t let Caroline get away. Soon we’ll be forty. You have to connect with someone, Garrett, and I have to stop running around and having all these dalliances. I can’t even take a girl out for cocktails now. But I do want to find someone and have a child.”
We had both married young, divorced, and spent years on our own. Jerry and Annie had stayed married for five years, at least four years longer than Helena and I had managed.
“Why did you and Annie get divorced anyway? You never said.”
“We drank together. One of us might be dead if we’d stayed together.” He stood up then. “I’m going to wait outside for my ride, but as long as you’re here, why don’t you take a few runs for both of us?”
I agreed that I would.
I followed our usual ritual. I drove my car close to the lift I liked. Although they’d added a new triple lift, I went back to the one we habitually used. I wore my ordinary boots because the parking lot was slippery. I carried my ski boots, gloves, scarf, hat, sunglasses, and sunscreen in a large camping backpack. I carried my skis too, of course. I bought a ticket for just a half day. I stashed my walking boots in a locker, and geared up. I chose an intermediate run. I hadn’t skied in a while so the first run required my total concentration. It was just the mountain, the snow, the sun, and me. The next run was pure exhilaration: speed, freedom, and joy. I stopped then. I hadn’t come with the mind-set for a day alone on the slopes.
* * *
When I was back home, although I rarely drank hard liquor on my own, I poured myself a Scotch. I had misunderstood so much for fifteen years. Jerry’s brio and confidence were fueled by alcohol. What would he be like now, without it? He seemed almost like another person, so vulnerable and raw. I had a newborn sympathy for him and all the hiding he had done. Because I had defined so much of my adult life through competition with him, I wondered what I’d be like from now on.
New information was forcing me to reinterpret all that I thought I’d known about Jerry. His illness had humbled him, but even with these changes, he remained one person, not splintered into three like Daphne. He couldn’t help me now. I was on my own, missing both Daphne and Caroline without Jerry for a sounding board, so I took stock.
Caroline and Jerry both thought I was crazy, and I got an uncomfortable chill down my back that maybe they were right. I had failed at getting any two Daphnes in the same place. Was I crazy or was it a quantum anomaly? I had so little to go on and no way to create an experiment in the way I’d been taught to do. I would have to decide. It was like Schrödinger’s two cats, but I had no mechanism to open the capsule and discover the truth, just my own intuition. I had to believe that the world I was seeing was real. If I couldn’t trust my own perceptions and conclusions, my entire life would unravel. By uncovering hidden connections, I fantasized, I could understand some deep code about the world—though maybe I would never really understand anything.
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
The absence of the Schrödinger girls put me in a state of chronic agita, but I had set rules for myself—that I would not call Ur-Daphne or SDS Daphne, the two high school girls.
So, I called Sarah Lawrence and got the art department secretary. “I’m looking for Professor Green,” I started to explain.
I was about to recite the lie I’d prepared, that I was writing a feature article on Galen Green’s Daphne paintings, when the obviously overworked staffer sighed in exasperation and cut me off. “He’s in t
he low countries for two large-scale international exhibitions.”
“Low countries?”
“In Brussels and Antwerp.”
“Thanks,” I managed to get out before she hung up. So, they were off in Europe again. I was jealous and annoyed. Why wasn’t Daphne around when I wanted to see her?
At least I could happily anticipate Caroline returning to New York. After months in Indiana, she had called and asked me to pick her up at JFK on Valentine’s Day. She didn’t want to talk at her apartment, she said, because we inevitably ended up in bed.
This was a make-or-break visit. Since I didn’t know her agenda, I couldn’t prepare any talking points, whereas she must have been mulling over what she wanted to say for weeks. To prepare, I took down the Daphne time line after I’d studied it again, still hunting for clues. I folded it in half and stowed it in my center desk drawer as I cast a random glance at the calendar. I had drawn a circle around Valentine’s Day. I planned on rehanging it after her visit.
I could acknowledge the day, or just ignore it. My instinct would have been to ignore it completely, but I was going to be on my best behavior with Caroline. I made the half-hour drive to Woodstock, where I found a gift, a little print in the Japanese style of a full amber moon, a shimmering disc rising over a slate-blue lake foregrounded by rushes and wild violet irises. The moon hovered close to the lake, full of expectation.
* * *
As I drove to the airport one of the FM stations was playing Magical Mystery Tour, the entire album. I would never have listened to the Beatles if I hadn’t met Daphne. Where were the girls? The day was almost ten degrees colder than average for the middle of February, in the low twenties when I left, but it was clear now. The snow shone pristine white on the fields I passed. The album finished as I approached the airport. The final cut, “All You Need Is Love,” made me even more anxious with its Valentine’s Day sentiment, and I worried about the day’s outcome.
I saw Caroline immediately, bending over the luggage carousel. She struck me as adorable in a very retro black-and-white houndstooth coat, the epitome of the swinging-sixties look that was now out of style in favor the San Francisco hippie look. I rushed over to her and tried to embrace her, but she sidestepped my hug and handed me the suitcase. Something was up, but at least the listlessness of Thanksgiving was gone. This woman had a subterranean purpose, though I had yet to discover it.