by Laurel Brett
Chapter Eighteen
* * *
When we arrived at the rehab center, just before Daphne got out of the car she gave me a Russian painted box. It was only two inches round, black with colorful Russian birds and flowers painted on it. I tried to open it, but the top was screwed on tightly.
“Thank you. I’ll keep this,” I told her. It would be part of my collection that included the snapshot, the postcards, the books, and the albums—all the objects that Daphne had brought into my life.
The girl stood in front of the large glass doors, small and forlorn. She had known me for almost a year, but I had known this fourth Daphne for only two days. This Schrödinger mystery gave life an odd quality. Each new girl knew me better than I knew her. She had met me in April 1967, her memory of that day was intact, but when a new avatar entered my life I would be meeting her for the first time. I had to be careful to hide the discrepancy from her and act as if we were old friends, which in a weird way we were.
She disappeared into the building, and I drove a little way to see Jerry. Despite the twenty-degree weather, he was waiting outside, jumping up and down to warm up. “Finally an adventure,” he said.
I chose Rhinebeck because I’d taken Caroline there, and Jerry was fine with anyplace. The colonial setting of the old inn had a charm that I thought would be a welcome change from the sterile environment of rehab. Without beer, wine, cocktails, shots, and Irish coffees, we would have to find new rituals.
“The thing is,” he began, “I don’t know how to be without the hooch. It was like the yellow-brick road, giving me direction.”
“Can’t you just be the person you were, but sober?”
“The person who designed my life was a drunk.”
“Do you still believe in psychoanalysis?”
“Maybe I don’t believe in penis envy or the castration complex. Maybe I don’t think people need to lie on a couch five days a week free-associating. But I do believe in having a trained and responsible friend to hold your hand when you’re exploring the most painful aspects of your life.”
“I don’t revere behaviorism the way I used to either. I don’t know what I believe, but I can’t agree with the denial of the idea of a self.”
“Man, professionally we’re a mess, aren’t we?” But his voice was playful, and the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. “I like being in therapy. It helps you see what makes you tick. It’s been years.”
“Maybe I could use that,” I said.
“It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Do you believe me? About the four girls?”
“Um, no. It’s too far-fetched, but I did talk to a very unhappy girl.”
This was a blow. Simultaneous realities represented by the different avatars were evident to me, but not to anyone else. If only I could uncover irrefutable proof. Yet I still hadn’t seen two of them together.
“But Jerry? What else is there to think? What is your explanation?” He ignored my question, and then my mind wandered. Eventually I clued back into to what he was saying about himself.
“. . . family came from the Old Country they were seeking a savior. A big, gaudy, American-style success. My father worked his heart out as a catering waiter, but we were always really poor. The Lower East Side was no picnic. Gangs. Getting beaten up all the time for being Jewish, often by you Irish boys. So who was to be the savior? Who was the darling tateleh? Me, of course. My mother told anyone who would listen that I was going to become a doctor. It was an act of rebellion to become a psychologist and not a doctor. But to make her happy I had to bring in big bucks.”
“We weren’t exactly rolling in it either, Jerry.”
“But being from his wealthy family, your dad had already been to Oz and seen behind the curtain. Your parents didn’t expect you to rescue everyone. My family did. Grandparents, even aunts and uncles.”
“And the drinking?”
“Ambivalence. Fear. Even at eighteen I knew I would never be able to save them all. And then there was the Holocaust and the survivor guilt. We all had it.”
“Ah.” I understood everything he was saying. I had reacted to my past in the opposite way: I’d built a snail shell of research psychology around me and crawled into it, behind my glasses.
“Even sports. I needed to be the big man. Always competing.”
“Do you miss drinking?”
“Only every minute.”
As we drove back I put on one of the new FM stations. I saw Jerry stiffen and become restless. Dylan sang, “There are no truths outside the gates of Eden . . .”
“You really listen to this music? I can’t get into it. And Bob Dylan’s voice is so grating.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Hmm. Dr. Freud, what do we make of this hostility?”
Jerry laughed. Then we heard “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” also from Bringing It All Back Home. “You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last, but whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.” The lyrics, the tune, and Dylan’s voice found their way straight to my core.
“Give Bob Dylan a chance. He’ll turn you inside out.”
I silently thanked Daphne, who had led me out of the straight jacket of the fifties and into the openness of the sixties. I had traded a black-and-white still for a Technicolor movie, and I wanted to share this transformation with Jerry, who had helped me rescue Daphne. I wanted him to hear how the Beatles and Bob Dylan and so many other bands talked about their inner worlds the way I did.
I got out of the car at Jerry’s rehab center and practiced my newfound openness by giving him a big bear hug. His startled expression was comical, but then he returned the embrace. I waved as he glanced back before entering the one-story, tidy, modernist construction that was made more open by walls of safety glass, decorated with a neat lawn and well-kept topiaries. A tidy garden is a tidy mind? I reflected on the odd coincidence of both Jerry and Daphne being in rehab at the same time, and felt gratitude that whatever my problems were, I wasn’t there with them.
Chapter Nineteen
* * *
Although Caroline’s ultimatum defined the space between us, now that I had met this fourth, vulnerable Daphne, I was even more committed to my Schrödinger girls. I fiercely hoped that Caroline’s demand would prove negotiable.
We had a date set for St. Patrick’s Day. I didn’t usually
celebrate this holiday out at bars. I had a kind of self-
righteous I’m a real Irishman chip on my shoulder, but I made an exception. We arranged to meet in Kips Bay at Molly’s, a great old Irish pub owned by a real Irishman. A version of the tavern had been at that location since the 1890s. The bar sported sawdust on the floor and was as close to being in Dublin as you could get in New York. I’d spent a lot of my life in an Irish pub doing my homework at a table while my mother tended bar. It would be a big night for her pub too. Even in Florida people wanted to be Irish on March 17.
When I got to the bar it was so crowded I could barely squeeze in. It wasn’t going to be the same without Jerry. St. Patrick’s Day had always been a day he performed. He affected a great Irish brogue and recited speeches from Ulysses. He was a much more literary guy than I, who had never made it through Joyce’s novel. I couldn’t recite any Yeats either.
Gazing out into the dense crowd I saw a sea of green shirts, green ties, green dresses, green hat ornaments, and green carnations. Even hippies were in green tie-dye and green bandannas. The place wasn’t that big and so many people shoehorned in that I had no idea if Caroline was there yet. As I tried to get through, a few single women, longing for an Irishman for the night, decided I’d do and accosted me in exaggerated Irish accents. “Hi, darlin’,” one blonde enthusiastically crooned, and another carrot-topped redhead called out, “Paddy, free for the night?”
My mom had always told me I looked Irish, but I didn’t really see it. I didn’t have the family’s bright blue eyes or black Irish raven hair. I had the middling coloring of my Boston father
. “It’s the face,” Mom said, and maybe so. The holiday didn’t have much to do with the working lives of my family of cops, teachers, and nurses. My mom had begun tending bar to put herself through nursing school, though she decided she liked the conviviality of a bar more than the atmosphere of sickness at a hospital. Even so, it had been a hard life for us both.
The corned beef and cabbage and penny whistles also had little to do with the life of the old sod where we still had relatives. Ireland was all poverty, verdure, and stories. Still, it was fun to hear all the Irish songs and see so many Irish movies on television for the day. But after St. Paddy’s Day I had no desire to see Darby O’Gill and the Little People or The Quiet Man until the next year.
After elbowing my way through the crowd for a while, I gave up and stood in place like a rock in the middle of a current of swarming people. I wasn’t having any fun, and I was nervous about seeing Caroline. She hadn’t given me a deadline for my decision about Daphne except to point out that she was only getting older.
Finally, after what felt like eons of waiting, I heard Caroline’s contralto voice: “I’m here, Garrett.” She was tall enough that when she lifted her arms over her head I could just see her waving hands. I made my way over to her, though to my surprise and chagrin, she wasn’t alone. Who the hell is this guy? She was arm in arm with an extremely attractive man. Men may claim we don’t notice things like that, but it’s a lie. He reminded me of an actor whose name I couldn’t remember, whom Caroline and I had seen in the movie Barefoot in the Park. I wanted to punch him in the nose just for being with my girl and for being so handsome. Neither he nor Caroline wore green. She introduced her friend as Tom, explaining that they had dated when she first came to New York and had run into each other, quite by chance, a few weeks ago.
Caroline had a Cheshire grin on her face, but we guys were awkward.
“I’m an actor,” Tom began. Of course he was. The loud buzz in the bar was beginning to make me feel dizzy, and his vibrant blue eyes made me even more self-conscious about my glasses. That settled it. I was getting contacts. “Nothing interesting. Just some commercials. Toothpaste.” He grinned in an exaggerated manner, comically showing his teeth.
Yup. He had perfect teeth. He also had a deep baritone voice. If Caroline had a child with this man, the kid would win the genetic lottery. I had a fleeting paranoid thought that she had hired him to show me that I couldn’t dither around for long, that she could do better than me. Tom was saying something about my being a professor, but the noise distracted me.
Tom went to the bar for three pints. “What’s he doing here?” I asked her.
If she heard me over the roar of the bar she gave no indication. I had no idea what she’d told Tom to get him to come along. He returned with the pints, but after downing them, we all got tired of the din, so we gave up on St. Patrick’s Day and found a quiet little coffee shop.
When we each had our coffee in front of us, I said, “So did you guys hear that Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency yesterday? It’s a perfect St. Patrick’s Day announcement. Members of my family have a shrine to the Kennedys in their homes. The Kennedys and the pope. I’m not kidding.”
“What do you think of McCarthy?” Tom asked.
“Too cerebral,” Caroline responded. “I would rather have Kennedy. I’m just so afraid it’s going to be that bastard Nixon. RFK is the only one who can beat him.”
Tom must have discovered that being a third wheel wasn’t all that much fun because he excused himself and walked over to the pay phone. When he returned he announced that he had to leave. Back to a bar, I imagined. I’ve never been the kind of guy to make a scene, but I wanted to make one then. I itched to tell him to stay away from my girl, yet he was such an affable guy that when we got up to leave we just shook hands like gentlemen. If Caroline wanted Tom instead of me, there was really nothing I could do about it.
When we were finally alone, Caroline and I almost glared at each other. “He’s a real looker,” I said.
“He’s great. Smart. Starting to have some success.”
“How far has it gotten?”
“I’m not sure our present contract allows you to ask questions like that,” she replied. “How far have you gotten in renouncing this crazy Schrödinger obsession?”
“Not very,” I admitted. “In fact, I met a fourth girl.”
Caroline’s face took on a wary, hardened expression. When she heard Stony Brook Daphne’s story she murmured appropriate words of concern, but her eyes were noncommittal. Then, surprisingly, she asked me to go back to her place. We had gotten to a very cynical space with each other, where some sex was better than none, but neither of us was happy about using each other.
“What about your edict about not having sex with condoms?” I asked.
“I’ll get a papal dispensation.”
“I don’t know, Caroline. Bringing Tom was quite a stunt.”
“Yeah, I guess it was,” she said, laughing. “But all’s fair in love, etcetera.”
“You’re playing hardball.”
“I’d like to play with your balls.” Then Caroline blushed. She must be really horny, I thought, which meant she wasn’t yet sleeping with Mr. Blue Eyes.
When we got to her apartment, we wanted each other, but each of us came with baggage that made things complicated. As I kissed Caroline’s delicate breasts, thoughts about the babies they might feed crept in. Nothing was as simple as the first times we’d made love, when the world sang with joy. Still, as usual, we were good together.
I loved having her body curled against mine, her head on my shoulder. “Have we seen the end of Tom?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Have we heard the last of Daphne?”
Her implication was unmistakable—forget them, or she’d pursue Tom. I understood that it must have been difficult for her to watch me think so much about these mystery girls when she longed to create a real child. Caroline was tireless in her attempts to rescue me from my quixotic allegiance and return me to a reality she recognized.
“You explained to me theories about different realities. What if this is true for all of us, and we are unaware of these realities, in the same way we can’t hear a dog whistle or see ultraviolet light, but we know those sounds and sights are real? What if there are as many Garretts as there are Daphnes? What if reality is so complex that there are worlds upon worlds of alternate realities and alternate Carolines, Garretts, Daphnes, and Toms? What if there’s a Garrett who is running a rat experiment right now, and one who’s a physicist and one who is serving his country in Vietnam, but we have no access to these realities?”
“Exactly,” I said. “What if? And what if for some reason a barrier dissolves and we can see four of these alternate realities?”
“Then the outstanding variable would not be Daphne, it would be you and your ability to see these realities. What if we are all part of realities we never know? What if you and I are already married with three children in an alternate universe?”
These were stunning thoughts—that Caroline and I were already parents, that Daphne was not the anomaly but the rule, and that the only weird circumstance would be the unexplained break in the membrane keeping these different realities separate.
“But how does that help us? I would still want to spend my time thinking about my ability to perceive these alternate universes. I do wonder what happened that day in April last year in the bookstore that brought this mystery into my life. And the day at the gallery, the third time I saw Daphne, when we first glimpsed a different reality when we viewed the portrait. You were there too, when I first discovered there were two Schrödinger girls. And I started to fall in love with you. That was magic too. You’re part of this, Caroline.”
“Maybe, but I don’t feel like it, though it is a kind of miracle whenever we meet anyone who truly moves us. We don’t meet many of these people in one lifetime—the people who lead us forward. Why should this idea, the idea of these simulacra
, be so engrossing to you instead of the miracle that we found each other at all?”
“They show some kind of rent in the fabric of many universes, a momentous exception. That has to mean something.”
“You are so stubborn. Is it crazy to be so obstinate? You know for a fact about these many universes? And anyway, you can only live in one reality.”
“But I could do that and still make visits to these other realities.”
“You’re not going to give up on this Daphne mystery, are you?” she asked, her voice sinking rhetorically.
“Not right now.” I could tell I was being a jerk to her, yet I couldn’t do anything else. I wondered why she put up with me at all. We were good in bed, but it couldn’t be just that.
“I have no idea why I feel so comfortable with you when you drive me bonkers. So much for my ultimatums.”
Chapter Twenty
* * *
Caroline’s campaign was getting to me. I had to consider the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to keep both her and the Daphnes in my life. The thought made me feel as if I were drowning—the premonition of grief. I experimented with imagining my life without Caroline, then without the Daphnes. The drowning feeling only got worse. Somewhere I had read the sentence, The first death is the worst. That was my father. His posthumous nocturnal visit allowed me to keep breathing, but as soon as he disappeared for good I began sinking into my grief. I had spent days at Yankees games learning baseball statistics to have something to hold onto. This preoccupation served me so well that I got really comfortable with numbers and was a statistics whiz in grad school.
But I’d shut down when Amy was stillborn and Helena just drifted away. The random girl in the rain slicker had been the first person in fifteen years to penetrate my shell, and once she had, I’d been able to allow Caroline to slip in too. I didn’t want to go back to the petrified state I’d been in, impervious to history, impervious to art, and impervious to love.