Crazy Sorrow

by Vince Passaro

  You do not have a better coat, Marina said.

  To her mother: He’s lying.

  I do too! You don’t know about it.

  Liar.

  He would not, however, come hell or gray-hard-frozen water, accept a coat from Marina’s mother. Marina slipped him money, which he promised to repay her, and he went out with her and bought his own coat. A U.S. Navy peacoat at a military surplus store which Marina said her mother might not approve of, but her father certainly would, except he wouldn’t notice.

  17

  Anna, having concluded she had no attractive future in a weekly newsmagazine research department, started law school in the fall of 1983, at Columbia, and the next spring when exams were over she left for Europe. The dollar was strong, everywhere was cheap. First Rome, then Paris for two weeks, then she left Paris and drove through the Alps with a girl named Molly and her somewhat-boyfriend named Jack down to the lake district in Italy where Anna and Molly left Jack, who was going to meet his family at a villa on Lake Como which he would not stop talking about but which he never breathed a word about inviting them into, not even for a glass of water. Then the two women drove up to Geneva. It was easier to find a stick shift to rent in Europe and she had to learn to drive one. Molly was better at it and did most of the mountain driving. The violence of the Alps. It took her only a little time being driven through them, along their breaks and chasms, through their small valleys, to understand the violence as an aspect of their beauty. She could see it in the jagged faces and deep shadows of the mountains themselves, that was obvious, as if they’d been hacked out of larger stones by crude and powerful forces. But it was part of everything, suggested everywhere: not just death but sudden, hard death. How many people in this part of the world fell to their deaths every year? And beyond death: the brutality of every transition. Wounds and blood and water and rocks, and sunlight lancing through the tree cover. It was June but still wet, there had been a late thaw and much rain in May, and everything was in drip, leaking, the wet rocks darkening and at quick angles catching the light. The place was large and close, both; and so erotic she was on edge; she felt as if she were going to be attacked. You could feel it in the earth, see it in the landscapes. You could, most certainly, smell it. The cycles, it all represented a contest for control between people, who gained at best a brief foothold on safety and life, and the earth itself, which was the overpowering victor. The earth fed on death. Perhaps this was why these people forever fought with one another: everything was a fight. All those little castles—sometimes two or three in a small valley, or more, you could stand on the hills in Bellinzona and count them, four, five, out on the low mountainsides, at the extremities of the bowl of valley, which had formed with massifs behind it—what were they all there for but to hide in, from violence, and to dash out of, to commit violence. Everything looked weathered from a beating. The high summer pastures filling with the dung of the cows; she saw in her mind all the animal offspring, she envisioned the blood of the pigs birthing, the calves yanked from the milk cows amid buckets of mucus and afterbirth; every farmer spent a portion of his year up to his armpits in gore.

  In Geneva she met a man, Joachim. He dressed very well. She complimented him on it, it was something she liked about him, something that turned her on, in fact, that he dressed very well.

  Just because you’re an assassin doesn’t mean you should dress poorly, he said. He was naked at the time, in her bed. She’d always remember that, the way he said it. She laughed, he put out his cigarette on a plate she’d given him for the purpose and reached for her. He had a cock slightly smaller than average but it was the hardest cock she had ever encountered; it didn’t feel, when he was aroused, quite human, more like a warm stone extrusion, unyielding to her fingertips, even its bulb stony to the touch. She was in Geneva to take a summer course in international law. Starting the last week in July she had a five-week summer job with a firm back in New York. He dropped by unannounced one afternoon in the days just before her exam, she was studying, and he began undressing her at the door and fucked her with his suit still on, pants draped open over his thighs, two buttons of the shirt open at the bottom, tie thrown back as some men do at meals. It had been a fantasy of hers and he kept it up for many minutes and she came hard twice, once near the beginning and again at the end, the second was sudden, surprising her. After, he just cleaned himself and left. The visit had lasted twenty-six minutes. She sat at her desk slightly stunned and warmed by the orgasms, and realized that she didn’t like this man, didn’t like him at all, but this would not stop her from fucking him, if he came around again (which he did once more). Indeed, somehow her distaste made fucking him all the more exciting. To her surprise she found she was no longer seeking love and affection from men, or not at first, not erotically: she wanted selfish desire on their faces, even a trace of contempt. She wanted a man to see her as an erotic entity, to want her for his use and to think he was using her. But then she questioned this thought: it was too simplistic and didn’t capture the depths of the desire at work. She wanted a kind of sex that was galvanizing but precluded the complexities and dangers of intimacy. Men she loved, meaning her brother, meaning to a lesser extent George, to an even lesser extent two others, or no, one other—well, it was borderline—meaning to a different extent her father too—in essence, they all had walked away from her. She found now that the ones who were interesting to fuck were frequently not interesting to talk to—not for very long and most definitely not after she was sexually satisfied. Their contempt became a buffer: their physical desire for her drew them close, their contempt, which frequently she came to see as fear, masked, kept them safely distant. And except for the temporary arousal their desire created in her, she didn’t have to feel anything at all.

  * * *

  SHE CAME BACK to New York and began work for the law firm. She had done well the first year and it was a big firm, very WASPy, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, like the pears, a cream-colored firm, cream stationery and creamy walls, with offices on Park Avenue and Wall Street; she was at the Park Avenue office just catty-corner from the Seagram Building, in the headquarters of Chemical Bank, which was their biggest client. Her international law course was helpful: they put her on the team working on loans to Argentina and Chile. Anywhere we find a nice dictator we send money, she wrote in a note to Molly. Molly was in Los Angeles and trying to get into the film business, which, she said, was filled with lechers, philanderers and outright rapists. She felt hunted like a carp by alligators.

  * * *

  LATE THAT SUMMER, walking home from work, she took Columbus from 67th after crossing the park. Near 81st Street who came down the steps out of Charivari but George.

  You? she said. You? He—she could hardly believe it—blushed. He was carrying a black jacket, a cotton-linen mix by the looks of it, with a shining white lining.

  Anna said, You’re blushing from embarrassment, it’s charming. Caught coming out of Charivari.

  I feel like one of my ninth-grade buddies caught me talking to a tenth-grade girl, he said.

  I can tell that happened to you. The way you said it. It happened didn’t it? she said. Then, while he was considering an answer: Never mind, don’t answer. Just try the jacket on. I want to see.

  It looked good on him. Sleeves a little long.

  Let’s show some of that spectacular lining, she said, and rolled the sleeves up twice, to above his wrists. She reached behind him to look at the label.

  Willi Smith, she said. Well, look at you. Very Danceteria.

  Never, he said. I’m too New England for that. I just liked it and it was on sale.

  They looked at each other. She felt—what? She couldn’t tell what she felt. Affectionate, amused at the jacket and his passage into the 1980s… and slightly stirred. She was cataloguing how she looked: skirt and silk blouse and dress flats. Office.

  Your hair’s shorter, he said.

  I just had it cut. For this job.

  Law firm?<
br />
  Just for the summer. Very white shoe.

  She posed and curtsied slightly. Thus the look, she said.

  It looks good.

  Not like Willi Smith, she said.

  Me in a shower of diamonds wouldn’t measure up to you in old pajamas, George said.

  Oh, please. So what are you up to?

  I’m currently unemployed, George said. I have a second interview coming up with the public radio station.

  WNYC?

  Yes, he said.

  I listen to them.

  Well, now I do too. Have to pretend it’s my métier.

  I like the guy in the morning, she said.

  Steve Post, George said.

  Yes.

  Speaking of pajamas. He’s a hippie from WBAI. The voice of COMINTERN. He’s like in slippers and twenty-year-old flannel shirts. I saw him last time I was there.

  What would you do for them?

  Write news, George said.

  Oh, you’ll get that. You’d be great.

  We’ll see, George said.

  You want to get a drink? she said. It surprised her, that her heart came up into her throat.

  I can’t, he said. He looked genuinely disappointed. I’m on my way back downtown for dinner.

  Some other time, Anna said. She pushed cheer into her face and voice.

  Yes, he said. Let’s. I’d like to catch up.

  Then she said: Are you seeing someone now?

  Yeah, he said.

  Ah, she said. She nodded, as if approving.

  What about you? he said. On that front.

  I’m currently unattached, she said. No interviews coming up either.

  Those are never scheduled ahead of time, he said. And you’re never dressed properly.

  Yeah, well… So tell me about your girl. Woman. Potential mate.

  Potential mate, he said. Ha.

  He told her about Marina. How they met, briefly. It was funny. Even she thought so, though he had seen the clouds of hostility brewing on her forehead a moment before.

  They exchanged their phone numbers and addresses. On the back of her summer intern business card. It stayed in her drawer of miscellany for a long time. Eventually she heard he was married, and knew he must have moved, but the card remained, then got moved with her and placed in a new drawer of miscellany. She could never bring herself to throw it away.

  * * *

  A WEEK BEFORE the term started, people were arriving back, she’d gotten busy socially and let the dishes build up in the sink. Mostly breakfast things. Just before classes began, the day after Labor Day, she addressed the pile and near the bottom of it she found a broken glass; she picked the pieces of glass out from amid remnant suds, silverware, a cup and saucer; she finished those and then, washing the sink itself, she wiped straight and hard across an invisible shard that was left, jutting up from the small drain. It cut into the pad of her middle finger deeply enough that it looked as if she could have peeled the chunk of finger right off with a quick jerk. That feeling—shock, and the expectation of, rather than the immediate suffering of, deep pain, the kind of woozy hope that it wasn’t true, that it wasn’t so bad, that it wouldn’t hurt; seconds of that. Then the pain began. The blood was biblical. Finally, with the thing wrapped in a cloth, throbbing, she took herself to the ER. St. Luke’s Hospital. Not too crowded but there was a drunk or fucked-up or perhaps quite ill young guy, almost a kid, toppling over in his seat… A cop—there were usually two or three cops around the ER—tried to get him to respond. He had apparently arrived without registering at the desk. The cop asked him, What is your name? No answer, a gurgling moan. What. Is. Your. Name?

  A few slurs and murmurs, in Spanish.

  Anyone here speak Spanish? the cop said, looking around the room. There were only six or so people waiting, it was 10:30 a.m. on a Tuesday.

  A black kid stood up, walked over. Yeah. I speak Spanish.

  The cop said, Ask him his name. Anna’s finger was wrapped too tight, the pounding was going to make her faint, but she didn’t want to unwrap it.

  The kid looked at the listing man, leaned a little toward him, and said, in a loud high tenor voice, El cop-o wants to know your name-o…

  She laughed. Dirty look from the cop, before he turned to the kid.

  Siddown, you clown.

  The boy just stared at him.

  The cop pointed.

  I said sit.

  The boy walked back and sat.

  The cop said, What are you here for anyway?

  The kid said, What?

  What’s wrong with you? Why are you here?

  They told me I might got strep throat. My throat hurts.

  Then I got some advice for you. Keep it shut.

  Her doctor was a resident, maybe thirty, she thought, a Caribbean man with that accent, light brown skin, freckles across the nose. Stirring gray-green eyes suggesting amusement and a mischievous intent.

  Anna Goff, he said, before he put aside the form they’d filled out for her at the desk.

  Yes, she said.

  What do we have here?

  I cut my finger. She unwrapped it.

  So you did, he said. She liked the way he held her hand. Then he flirted with her while he examined the cut, and while he sewed it. A funny curved needle. She watched and said ouch, but only once.

  You’re going to have quite the middle finger for a few days, he said when he’d put the last bit of tape around her bandage.

  I’ll flash it at my professors.

  What are you studying? he said. With his accent, mild, the studying ended on the upnote, emphasis on the last syllable.

  I’m in the law school.

  Impressive, he said.

  You went to medical school, so it’s not that impressive, she said.

  You’re right, you’re right, he said, it’s really nothing.

  The way he said it, cheerful tone and timing, made her laugh.

  He instructed her on how to keep the bandage dry, how to check for infection, how the stitches would come out.

  I can tell you to come back here for us to remove them but really there are only two stitches and it’s easy, once you feel them moving around and there’s no pain, in about four or five days, just clip them off and pull them out.

  She would hear that, clip them off, pull them out, in the way he said it, for days and days. It came back to her sometimes even years later when she would go to snip some thread or string. From their first date and into the years his voice had a way of coming to her, being present in her head: it was part of his beauty, a kind of resonance and rhythm made in the body.

  He asked, after all was finished, for her phone number. She was only a little surprised. His name was Bertrand. Full name, Bertrand Christopher Edward White. What Muhammad Ali had called a slave name, he said, a true one. Each of the three names after his first belonged to a British sugar plantation master along the way and was now carved into his family history. He took her to dinner on the Thursday night—he had called her that first night and asked her out for that week but she had claimed to have other plans, so they settled on the following Thursday. She was surprised at herself, suddenly coy, suddenly playing the game of making him wait. She made him wait for sex too, kissing and groping in doorways until their fourth date, when she invited him to her apartment on a Saturday afternoon before his midnight shift at the hospital. They’d spent the afternoon together at the Botanical Gardens. He had that British thing for gardens. She wanted to make him a British-style tea, strong black tea and cakes and clotted cream. She’d bought the cakes and looked up how to make the cream. They didn’t really get to them until well after the dinner hour. He was taut in sex: tense in a way that vibrated; she liked it. She loved his smell, his skin, and she loved his body, not tall, not big, but tight-muscled and almost perfectly proportioned. He had beautiful legs, which was something she had never given much thought to. His tension and his distance were exciting without being contemptuous, or so it seemed; he liked he
r, he treated her well, he was interesting when she got him talking about the hospital or about growing up outside Kingston, his life on the water as a boy, fishing for snapper and pompano from a raft on the flats. He was perhaps what she’d been looking for, a man she could bear being with, and still find intensity sleeping with.

  And after that, it appeared he was in love with her. She enjoyed him with a thrill—the same feeling, she realized later, as you’d have over an extraordinary car someone’s given you. You’d say: I love that car. She loved to look at him. He had very little hair on his body, just his tight-coiled pubic hair and a small patch in each armpit. This was luxurious, with that skin. And if he became aroused in a particular way, aggressive, harsh, as certain passing comments on the street, certain larger insults led him sometimes to be, she didn’t wish necessarily to like it, but she did.

  They were married the following May, 1985, a week after her second-year exams. She still had a year to go so they intended no major changes, he was doing his residency in internal medicine, she was going to school, they would live together, that was all. No furniture and china, no new curtains. And no families, she said. The simplest possible wedding. He complied, perhaps (viewed in retrospect) too easily; a few friends, City Hall, a nice dinner. She sent her parents a note. They sent back a weird card, a Hallmark wedding gift card, and a check for one hundred dollars.

  But well before that she had learned him, socially. She learned that he used his accent, turned it up and turned it down to meet the needs of the moment. It took her a little while to detect this, to hear it and see it in his affect. This should have been a warning sign. It’s the kind of habitual posing that can drive you mad in someone you’re close to, have to live with, once you know it. She didn’t think of it that way until she’d married him. With her friends he played it strong, with his own he played it down. When the company was mixed he was at his most volatile. The distinctions were subtle but her ear for it became beyond fine-tuned. Not long and it was pinpricks tuned, third-degree-burn tuned. At the hospital he used it as a bedside-manner technique to charm or amuse or seduce a patient. As he had, she came to see, with her.