by Diane Wald
I was so busy all day that, fortunately or unfortunately, I hardly had time to give Mussel a thought. It was difficult trying to tie up the loose ends of my practice and hand my patients on to other therapists; each case required special care and lengthy consideration. With only about six weeks left before we moved to New Jersey, I had to take care of all the house-selling and house-buying problems as well, and my days were filled to the brim and beyond. So that night I raced home, showered quickly, changed, fixed a quick drink for myself and Frances (who was fluttering over her wardrobe like a debutante and simultaneously trying to organize things in the kitchen), and paid a speedy visit to the boys who, already fed, were cleaning up the garage in preparation for our move. Then all of a sudden, the doorbell rang. Frances commanded me to answer.
I don’t know what I expected, exactly. Don Rath had told me Mussel was fat, but that was all I really knew about his physical appearance. Because of what I knew about his infamous personality, I was prepared for a certain amount of repulsion, but almost never before had I reacted so viscerally to any mere human. Suffice it to say the man was a mountain of flesh topped off by a highly unpleasant little head and face and two of the beadiest, deadest little eyes one could ever imagine. I definitely suspected a toupee. Also, he was wearing some kind of shiny, ill-cut suit, and a shirt that looked a great deal less than fresh. I took a deep breath and was relieved to note that I could not smell him. That made me think of Sarah, and of kicking Mussel instantly in the groin.
I extended my hand to him. “Dr. Mussel,” I said, smiling. “How remarkable that our first meeting should be in my home.” I was trying to establish my territory before the monster set foot in the place.
He pumped a smushy little handshake my way and said, in his uber-creepy whine, “Dr. MacLeod, how kind of you to invite me.”
I wanted to say, “I didn’t invite you, you gigantic spill of filth, my foolish wife did. And you’d better be careful tonight if you want to get out of here alive.” But, of course, I simply stepped back and allowed him to enter.
Frances appeared out of nowhere and glued herself to his arm. She had settled on a floaty chiffon number that would have been more appropriate at an outdoor summer wedding reception. I suddenly wished for the kind of wife who wears plaid shirtwaists and ruffled white aprons—someone like Margaret on Father Knows Best. Mussel patted Frances’s hand, and, as she led him toward cocktails on the patio, the two of them began a running conversation that lasted for the better part of three hours. I could barely get a word in anywhere. Occasionally it would occur to one of them that I ought to be included, and then they would draw me in for a moment or two in some minor way, cast me off again quickly, and resume their exclusive dialogue. I don’t even know what they were talking about, it was that boring: an endless string of meaningless, unconnected observations on the state of the world.
What irritated me most of all was that I was unable to find out anything more about Mussel than what I already knew: that he was a disgusting sort of chap indeed. He seemed to find me disgusting as well, for though he managed to remain polite and even unctuous at times, he eyed me with unmistakable contempt. I could not tell if it was simply the fact of my being married to Frances that annoyed him, or if he were picking up on my hostile vibrations. Whatever it was, by the end of the evening, just thinking about it had exhausted me. After Mussel left, drooling his gratitude for a “fine, fine dinner” all over my wife, I went directly to bed in the spare room. I did not want to listen to Frances talk about what an interesting man he was, and I knew she wouldn’t miss me.
12. A Priest, a Barber, and a Psychologist …
I mentioned, way back, that now and then I would “catch sight of” my sons. This phenomenon, which I enjoy with ever-increasing frequency and precision is, like my limitlessly back-filled memory, a happy perquisite of death that never ceases to amaze me. Maybe it has something to do with the common expression “My life flashed before me” that people frequently say when they’ve had a close call; maybe what seems to me like infinity is really just a moment of reality. It happens this way: suddenly I will simply “see,” like the proverbial fly on the wall, some scene, past or present, in which someone close to me figures prominently. These scenes, more often than not, seem to point out some previously mysterious aspect of my own existence, although I am not always immediately aware of their significance.
In this way I have followed the lives of my sons. Harry and Mark, I am pleased to report, did not seem to suffer unduly from the rather bumpy family life they experienced during their teenage years, and have grown, both of them, into remarkably likable, capable, and seemingly satisfied individuals. Mark, oddly enough, became a Catholic priest. At first, when I dropped in on his ordination ceremonies and saw the archbishop bestowing what I considered rather ridiculous religious powers upon my boy, I was appalled. Neither Frances nor I had ever succumbed to the temptations of any organized religion, and while we had, I hope, allowed both boys to satisfy their natural curiosities about such things and also instilled a sense of tolerance into their malleable young psyches, I think we must also have conveyed to them that Mom and Dad had little use for religion in the ordinary sense. Thinking back, however, I suppose Mark always was the more spiritually inclined of my sons, and while I do not exactly know what road he had traveled to arrive at his vocation, since his ordination I have seen evidence of his genuine happiness and usefulness to others on numerous occasions. Had I continued to live, I do not doubt that I would have had a great deal of trouble with his choice of career and faith—but then, had I lived, he might have pursued a different career entirely.
And Harry. Harry, my darling. All parents, in their truest hearts, have a favorite, and Harry was mine. As a tiny child, he was like a little man: funny, eccentric, peculiar looking in an engaging way, and full of a natural wisdom the origins of which defied all scrutiny. I doted on Harry until Mark came along, at which time I attempted to divide my attentions equally between them, I hope with some success. So, Mark became a priest … and my Harry became a barber.
Harry was fifteen when I died, Mark thirteen. Both boys were quite intelligent, but we never did them the disservice of having their IQs tested. Harry always shone a little brighter somehow—perhaps it was his wit, perhaps just that all-comprehending light in his eyes. He was physically superior to his brother as well, with Frances’s reddish golden coloring and a slender though muscular build. He excelled in math and science, pitched a mean season of baseball for his high school team, swam competitively, and showed all the signs of becoming a junior league ladies’ man, much to the delight of his mother. I suspect, though I cannot even now be sure of this, that Harry was Frances’s favorite as well; I think she saw in him the well-rounded, handsome devil her husband had never been. I’m sure we both expected Harry to excel in some profession, if not one of ours, and I admit I used to fantasize about taking him along on trips to psychology conferences when he was older, thereby gently steering him in the direction I had taken myself,
But, of course, that is not what happened. Harry did go to college, he did wow the ladies (how many of them were wowed amazes me), and he eventually did marry and start a family with a lovely young woman who looked a lot like his mother. But somewhere along the line our golden boy dropped out of school, and somehow, he drifted into hair-cutting—and not the fancy salon-type either. One could by no stretch of the word call him a hairdresser or stylist: a simple barber is what he had become. The first time I saw Harry in his white tunic rubbing tonic into the scalp of a half-bald elderly man I figured my sight had gone wrong in this afterworld as well, but it had not. Harry seems, like his brother, very happy, and that makes me glad. I truly wonder what his mother thinks, although I can well imagine.
Weather is something I don’t experience anymore, of course, and, except in rare instances, when the weather had some enormous effect on events, I seldom even remember anything about it. In my favorite sighting of Eliza, however, the weather played a
very important part: I saw her shoveling snow.
I cannot say precisely how old she was when this scene took place, but she might have been about thirty, judging more by the clothes she was wearing than anything else. Her hair, which had been very long when I knew her, and all of one length (those were the flower-child days), stopped short of her shoulders, and there were a few strands of grey showing through the dark at the front, where long bangs escaped from the funny old beret. She still had that hat—it was the first thing in the scene to bring me a kind of possessive joy, though not the last.
Instead of her old formerly ubiquitous jeans, she was clad in plaid woolen pants, and instead of the Navy surplus pea coat I had grown accustomed to seeing her wear, she had on what appeared to be several layers of sweaters, giving her frame an oddly unbalanced silhouette.
She was shoveling the end of long, curving driveway, and it was obvious from her high coloring and from the long breaths she was taking that she had shoveled the entire length of the thing herself. I wondered whether she lived alone, and why there was no one to help her. It was early morning. A fluffy, large-flaked snow was still falling, and there were about six inches on the ground. I had never seen the location before—indeed I do not even know what part of the country it was—but there was a certain familiarity about the scene just because Eliza was there. I focused in on her face and hair, eyeing the old hat lovingly and wishing greedily for the impossible physical happiness of reaching out and touching her cold, burnt-red cheeks. Aside from the fact that there were bags of fatigue under her eyes, she looked wonderful. She looked dreamy and exalted and very, very womanly. I felt suffused with her, and at the very moment this feeling reached an almost unbearable peak of intensity, Eliza pushed her shovel into a snowbank and gazed up at the sky.
She was not, I suppose, looking for me in those snow-laden clouds, but something did stop her and make her look up. Her face took on, for just a moment, the look of a woman’s face after love. She let the snowflakes gather on her upturned face until she had to close her eyes, then she shook her head and reached out her tongue to them like a child might. After that, although she had some ground yet to cover, she did not continue her labors, but picked up the shovel and headed slowly up the drive. It was then that I noticed the object that exploded my reverie into gratitude and felt that sense of possessive wonder I’d tasted when I saw Eliza’s hat. Halfway up the little path she had cleared on one side of the lawn stood a small signpost suspending a nicely lettered placard from two little chains. The sign was covered by flakes of the wet, sticky snow. Eliza reached out a mittened hand and wiped it quite clean in one motion. DR. ELIZA HARDER, it read, and, under that, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY. She looked at it with great pride—as if she’d lettered it herself.
I “froze” that frame of the scene until my composure returned. To say that I had never expected Eliza to take up psychology as a profession would be an egregious understatement. I had suggested to her, time and again, for my own selfish reasons, that she should apply to graduate school in that field, that I would help her with her studies, and that, under my tutelage, and with her literary gifts, she would be able to plan out and execute a thesis that would make her success a certainty even before she left the university. But although Eliza never came right out and said no to this idea, it was always quite clear to me that it didn’t quite suit her. I think she was too independent to want to take on something so reliant on my accompaniment, and also, I’m sure, she instinctively wanted to avoid a daddy/daughter or Higgins/Eliza association with me. She was, I knew from our many discussions of her past, acutely aware that because her father had passed away when she was in high school, she was more vulnerable than most to a relationship of that sort. I did not want that either, of course, but so needful was I of her presence at the time that it seemed any plan that assured her continued attendance in my life was worthy of serious attention.
So imagine my delight at seeing that little wooden sign. Eliza, like me; Eliza, like me … the phrase repeated and repeated itself in my mind like the lines of some chorus, sung by angels. I don’t believe in angels, and yet, I really did hear strange and glorious voices; they were all around me. Their music obliterated all else for a space of time that seemed endless.
And when I remembered at last to look for Eliza again, in her snowy, glistening landscape, she was gone.
I was born in the winter: I have always loved the snow; and if ever there was a bit of weather that changed me, dead or alive, it was that little winter scene in Eliza’s world that brought her that much nearer to mine.
13. Hansel and Gretel
Another time I saw Eliza with her lover. Of course, she had told me about Miles DiGrazia, and she had also intimated that Miles was not the boy with whom she’d lost her virginity, though I gathered from her oblique references to that event that Eliza’s “first time,” while not unpleasant or meaningless, was less than completely fulfilling. When I say fulfilling, however, I do not mean physically: Eliza was, judging by my experience of women (and by a not insignificant amount of reading I have done), very responsive on the physical plane. I only mean that her first lover seemed to have been a man from whom she broke away rather quickly, and about whom she seemed somewhat confused—which no doubt furthered her desire not to talk about him, especially with me. I never even learned his name.
Anyway, I happened in upon Eliza and Miles in Thompson Park. They were sitting in an old beat-up brown sedan, which I assumed to be Miles’s, since Eliza, to my knowledge, had owned only her old green Dodge station wagon all through her college years. They were sitting on opposite sides of the wide front seat, Miles behind the wheel. The car was running, and the heater had steamed up the inside of the window. This was my first real glimpse of the DiGrazia boy, and I was very curious. I didn’t know much about him. He was popular on campus, a talented classical guitarist in the music department, and a leader of one of the “peacenik” groups to which Eliza and many of her friends belonged. Now, at my leisure, I examined him closely. I must say he looked kind and serious that day, and he gazed at Eliza with real love—and real pain. He was muscular, quite tall, and had long, straight black hair pulled back into a ponytail.
His complexion was ruddy, but his eyes were remarkably large, blue, clear, and honest. Best of all his features, I think, were his hands: strong, long-fingered hands, smooth skinned, and steady. I could easily see why Eliza would be attracted to them.
“Miles,” Eliza said, reaching out a hand and laying it along his thigh, “What’s the matter?”
He looked at her for a long time, then bunched his thin plaid coat around him tightly and looked away from her at the steamy side window. He cleared off a space on its surface.
“Grazzie?” she said, pleadingly. It must have been a pet name.
He spoke very quietly. “Billy told me something,” he said. “I was wondering if it’s true.”
“Something about me?”
“About you. About me. God damn it, Eliza!” he suddenly erupted, switching his position and drawing one leg up underneath him so that he was facing her, wedged between door and steering wheel. I was suddenly afraid for Eliza—the kind of fear one would have for a character while watching a film—but her calmness did not waver.
“What?” she said simply.
There was a long pause, then he spoke down into his coat. “Billy said you’ve been seeing MacLeod,” he said.
This shocked me. I didn’t know who Billy was, or how he’d come into this knowledge, but I’d always been comfortable in my belief that my relationship with Eliza was a complete secret. I really did not believe she’d told anyone about me; in fact, she’d assured me she hadn’t. Neither of us really had any reason to keep such a silence—Eliza was no longer even a student of mine by the time things became serious between us—but I think we both felt self-protective about it all.
Eliza shifted a little in her seat too, until she was facing Miles. She let out a slight guttural sound. “Oh,” she said.
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“What do you mean, ‘Oh,’” said Miles. “Is it true?” He still spoke down into the collar of his coat. He looked so young and afraid.
“Well,” Eliza finally said, pulling one mitten on and off slowly, over and over again, “Yes. It’s true, Grazzie. I’m sorry. There’s a lot more to it than you think, Miles, really, but I don’t think I want to go into it all. Don’t be so hurt, Miles, please. Let me tell you what I can, if it will help you understand.”
Miles slumped against the car door. “Thanks a heap,” he said.
“You see,” she said, her voice grainy and soft, “It’s not about sex, Miles; I mean, I’m not just certain what it is, but it’s not just that. And you and I weren’t really tight, you know. I mean we didn’t really have an agreement not to see other people.”
Miles stopped her with an explosion of words. Out of the very center of her bittersweet monologue he had chosen the one word that disturbed him the most: sex.
“Not just sex!” he said loudly, lifting up his head and piercing Eliza with his clear eyes. Then, more quietly, “Shit. Oh, God. My God, Eliza, Billy just said you were ‘seeing’ him, that’s all. I didn’t think—”
Eliza took his gaze and turned it back on him. She sounded a little angry, but it was the kind of anger one would feel towards a child. “Didn’t think what?” she said. “I don’t believe you. Of course you thought I might sleep with him, didn’t you? How could you not think it? We’re not talking about going to a prom or something. If we’re going to talk about this at all, Miles, I think we’ll have to be honest.”