by Barbara Hall
He nods. He hears me. And he leaves still wanting to kiss me but it’s not me. It’s something bigger. He knows that now. He knows it’s the music.
Chapter 32
“Well, it’s about time,” David’s mother says.
Jen’s hand is extended across the table and everyone leans in to get a view of the three-carat diamond. David feels himself blushing even though he’s glad of this moment, glad of the way his siblings are sitting up and paying attention, glad of his father’s satisfied smile, glad of his mother’s near foaming at the mouth, thinking of the wedding she’ll help to organize and how she’ll centralize herself in the affair. Glad of the way Jen seems so calm now, as if this were always the problem, and the solution has lifted the fog of anxiety and anger and nervous energy. She’s still now. She’s at peace. She knows who she is. She is a woman in the world with a diamond on her hand and a party to plan. She is the center of attention.
And he is the one who has made all this happen. He feels manly, even heroic, for bringing so many dreams to the point of realization with a simple question and a piece of jewelry. Only Sherry and Greta seem to fall just short of delight. They are happy because there’s now a common language, another girl brought into the fray to help conspire and gossip and complain about the men. But Sherry senses the threat that Jen might get to the grandchild threshold before she does—there seems to be some doubt that she can get there at all—and Greta seems ready to salivate over the ring and the commitment and the thing she now realizes she has always wanted but doesn’t have and can’t get from her married boyfriend. Every married woman to her must feel like the enemy. A glint in her eyes says, “And he’ll cheat on you, too, just wait.”
Or he’s imagining this. He’s creating all this in his head to avoid confronting a feeling that is welling up inside of him like a storm. He thrashes to understand it. It is centered in his stomach and a little bit behind the eyes and as he bows his head to think about it, he realizes it is shame. He’s ashamed of himself for jumping through this hoop. Ashamed for being glad. He feels he has lost. They have won. But what was the competition, he wonders? What was ever at stake? And how is committing to the woman he loves some kind of loss?
“Well, don’t look so jubilant, Dr. Doom,” his father says. It takes him a moment to realize he’s being addressed.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“You look like you need to be given last rites.”
The table laughs. Even Jen laughs. She gives his shoulder a quick massage.
“I don’t blame him,” she says. “I haven’t been easy to live with lately.”
“But you don’t live together,” Greta provides.
“Well, I was speaking figuratively.”
“Where will you live?” his mother asks.
“We haven’t decided.”
“Where’s the hitching post?” Rich asks.
“What do you mean?” David asks.
“The wedding. Where’s it going to be?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Back East, maybe,” Jen says. “My family are all in New York. It might be easier.”
“But the weather,” Verna says. “You can’t depend on it. I mean, if it’s an outdoor wedding.”
“I haven’t even thought that far,” she says. “This just happened last night.”
“Where did he do it?” Sherry asks in a nostalgic tone.
“At Vito’s, this old-school Italian restaurant we love on Ocean Park. They all know us there. So he gets down on one knee and everyone is watching and when I take the ring they all applaud.”
“What if you’d said no?” Greta asks.
“I guess that would have been embarrassing for David.”
She laughs but Greta doesn’t.
“Did you think about that, David, before you did it?” his sister asks. “That she might say no?”
“Of course.”
“It was a risk worth taking, right, Son?” his father chimes in. “Anything worthwhile is always a risk worth taking.”
“Yes, sir,” David agrees.
The cook begins to serve the roast beef and the Yorkshire pudding and green peas.
“This looks lovely, Flora,” his mother says. “I’ve been feeling English lately. I wanted a traditional Sunday dinner.”
Rich says, “Later there will be football hooligans and cross-dressing.”
Everyone laughs. Then there is the sound of utensils on plates and an awkward silence blooms.
“We’ve missed you,” Greta whispers to Jen, right before their father launches a new topic.
“Whatever happened with that Big Sur business?”
Jen stiffens a little. David does not look at her. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says.
“The girl you were treating who ran away with the psycho murderer.”
David clears his throat and puts down his utensils and takes a sip of water.
“First of all,” he says, “she is a woman. And the psycho murderer did not actually murder anyone and is being treated somewhere in Arizona. The charges against him were dropped.”
“Why?”
“Because my patient was not interested in pursuing it. And given that and his psychological state, it just wasn’t a case worth the D.A.’s time.”
“So they will load him up on pills,” his father says, “and eventually release him and he might attempt to murder someone else?”
“Possibly, Dad. Or they might actually cure his disease and he’ll go on to live a productive life. That does occasionally happen in my profession.”
“So you tell me.”
“He cures people all the time,” Jen says. “He cured the girl. Sarah.”
“She’s a woman,” David insists again. “Why does everyone call her a girl?”
“It’s just an expression, sweetie,” his mother says.
“But it’s so revealing. Someone with a mental condition is jettisoned back to childhood by general society. She’s had a whole life, she’s worked, she’s been engaged. She’s not a girl.”
It is not until he stops talking that he realizes how the passion in his voice has erupted and is still resonating around the room. Everyone is staring at him except Jen, who is cutting her meat with intense concentration.
“Beg your pardon,” his father says. “We will self-correct forthwith.”
“Don’t patronize me,” David says.
“I don’t mean to patronize,” his father says. “But it comes with the territory, being a pater and all.”
The silence occurs again and he feels Jen lean forward. He wants to stop her because he feels a moment of victory descending and he doesn’t want to let it pass.
“But he did cure her, the woman,” Jen says. “In a matter of months she was well enough to be released. And she’s living on her own and working and doing very well. He doesn’t even see her except on a checking-in kind of level. Isn’t that right?”
“Not even that,” he says. “She’s moved away.”
“As I understand it, she just had a brief psychotic break but she’s fine now.”
“Loaded up on drugs, I imagine,” his father says.
“She’s on a mild antidepressant,” David says. “And we shouldn’t be discussing it.”
Jen says, “David explained that psychotic breaks are not that unusual. It happens to people under an extreme amount of stress. They are imminently treatable. It’s not a life sentence. It’s more like an episode.”
“Please, Jen,” David says quietly.
“I’m not talking about her specifically now,” she continues. “Just your work in general. Psychiatry. He sees things that I don’t get to see. Because I’m not a real doctor. I’m just someone who read a book and took a test online.”
There’s no malice in her voice.
“Don’t sell yourself short, dear,” David’s mother says.
“I’m not. It’s the truth. I’m not going to continue in my profession. I never really liked it very much. I alwa
ys had a little bit of disdain for my clients,” Jen admits.
“What will you do?” Sherry asks.
“I’m going to be a wife,” she says, leaning into David. “And hopefully a mother.”
“That’s music to my ears,” Verna says.
Sherry sinks into herself and Greta reaches for her wine.
“Well, all’s well that ends well,” his father says. “To quote the Bard.”
“It’ll all be fine in the end and if it’s not fine, it’s not the end,” Jen says. “That’s what I used to tell my clients.”
“And they let you get away with it?” Rich asks.
Everyone laughs and some kind of equilibrium is restored.
David has a strange sensation of floating and looking down from the ceiling at this room full of anthropomorphic coincidences with their food and their clothes and their jewelry and their witty remarks and nervous laughter. This is where he lives. This is what he cannot escape.
“We forgot to toast,” his father says, raising his glass. “To David and Jen and conjugal bliss.”
“To bliss,” Jen says.
And the glasses ring out as they touch. David knows it is a vibration of sound waves but for a moment he imagines it is something otherworldly, a chime from Heaven, some kind of celestial endorsement. Or warning. He finds he cannot drink to bliss, having no earthly understanding of it. No one notices when he puts his glass quietly down, untouched.
Chapter 33
Montauk is at the end of the Long Island peninsula and so feels very much like the end of the earth. In fact, they call it The End. This is where I have landed. I am at The End.
In the winter it is enveloped in fog and wind and sometimes snow. It is extreme and dramatic by its nature and I enjoy it, letting the landscape demonstrate all the hysteria that once lived in my head. It’s not my job anymore to create the magic. I let it unfold around me.
People say it is haunted. The inhabitants love to propagate that idea and I like it, too. There are Indian burial grounds and as we all know, wherever there are dead Indians there are ghosts and poltergeists and demons. I don’t experience any of this, of course, because the volume has been turned down. I can barely imagine anymore and when I do, it is mostly memory, a conjuring of the past to make sense of it and see how it all happened and how it can now serve me. I am firmly rooted in this world. And I am not disappointed in it. The house is next to a wildlife reserve and we have six deer and a bunny who go in and out of the backyard as if they are our pets. They know us now and don’t run when we come outside. They stare and go back to what they were doing.
I am speaking in plural because I have a boyfriend now. It’s a relationship, like other people have. Most people have, I should say. We live together and we do what we do. He surfs in the morning and comes back home and paces on the balcony and talks business on his iPhone, hooked up to it by an earpiece. He is Greek and his skin is a beautiful latte color and he has strong muscles and intense features. His hair is long and dark and peppered with gray, even though he is five years younger than I am, and his eyes are also a latte color and close together, indicating his ability to focus. He is grounded and grounding. He doesn’t let me wander too much. When he stares at me, if I start to drift, his eyes bring me back to where we live. He knows about my past but we don’t discuss it much. And it doesn’t seem to worry him except when I begin to ramble about some idea or another, a business I want to open, another hobby I want to take up.
“Write,” he says when I do that.
And so I write. I write poems that rhyme and poems that don’t. Elegiac phrases that mostly make sense when I read them out loud, next to the fire.
“Draw,” he says, when the poems start to get rambling and nonsensical.
I draw in pen. I have a vast set of pens and I can use up an entire day choosing among them. Some have fat, stubby points that make delicious bleeding boundaries. Some have thin, austere points that make defined, imprisoning lines.
I cook a lot and I sew. These are the other activities, the ones that keep me corralled. They are not art, as far as he is concerned, and I don’t let on that the colors and the textures and the way it all comes together feels like art to me. I don’t let on that the smells and the tastes assault my senses and cause something like euphoria to well up in me. I just behave as if it is all a chore and I even complain sometimes about the work and the tedious nature of it. Tedium is good, he says. We all need a certain amount of it.
“Do you ever think about it?” he asked just last night. There was a thunderstorm and we built a fire even though it is mid-August and we sipped cocktails and stared at the flames and listened to the wood popping. It was inevitably romantic and in that atmosphere, the mind wants to know things it shouldn’t know.
“Think about what?” I asked.
“How it was. When you were in the hospital.”
“I try not to.”
“Do you remember how it felt?”
“To be crazy?”
He nodded.
“Not really,” I lied.
“Does it scare you when you look back?”
“Yes. So I try not to look back,” I lied again. I look back often.
“Does it feel like you could go there again?”
“No. Why? Do you worry about it?”
“Not really,” he said and I knew he was lying.
We have this beautiful, mutual lying routine.
“It’s not a subtle thing, Ryan. It will be noticeable if it comes back. But it won’t come back.”
“All right.”
“I won’t let it. I know how it happened. I won’t open the door to it again.”
“Okay.”
“Besides, I have that magic pill.”
“You think it’s really the pill keeping it all at bay?”
“I think it helps.”
I don’t really take a pill. I tell him I’m taking a pill to make him feel better.
He said, “Do you ever think about the doctor?”
“No.”
“I mean, he did help you. He saved you in a way.”
“He came and got me. I like to think I did the work myself.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s the case.”
Maybe it is because he is Greek that Ryan (his mother is Irish) doesn’t have much trouble with my past, with the idea of gods who speak and manipulate our world. Not in a literal sense, of course, but he can see things symbolically. He understands metaphor. This is how we met to begin with, in an art class in New York City. Metaphor and Meaning. Ryan was just dabbling in art but I had decided to turn to it. Turn back to it, I should say, since it is the thing I left behind long ago when I moved to Los Angeles and started trying to make a living. It was my calling and I left it out in the cold like a pet. It stood at the door and whimpered and I knew it was never going to stop until I let it in. So I let in.
Dr. Sutton always understood that. If only he had met me at the door with that information. If only he had said, “You are an artist. Just try being it instead of dying from it.” But you can’t skip steps. You have to take every bit of life from the beginning to the middle to, as we are promised, the end.
Chapter 34
When David runs into Heather Hensen it is not an accident. There is a coffee shop in the lobby of her building and he has been going there every day for lunch. When she finally walks in, he waits for her to catch his eye. He will take that as a sign. He has been thinking this way for a while now and it is disturbing.
When she sees him she does a double take and smiles and approaches.
“Dr. Sutton. What a surprise. Do you live in the area?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, they do make a nice tuna sandwich here.”
“Will you join me?” he asks.
“Sure.”
It is the kind of place where you order at the counter and pick it up and bring it to your table. So he has to wait while she does this.
He is sweating and his heart is pou
nding while he waits for her to return. He feels he is hanging onto a very thin reed on a very narrow ledge and it is slipping. He doesn’t know what happens when he falls. He doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t even want to know why he is feeling this way and wishes he could stop it and has tried.
His visit to Father Joe a while back was not much help. This was the first place he went when he felt himself losing his grip. It was nothing outstanding, just a strange preoccupation with intuition and where a life of following it might lead. It might lead, he realized, to Jung, whose work he had always pretended to admire but actually dismissed and ridiculed in his heart. It had been comforting, the notion that everything was either in the will or in the definable branches of the brain. Mystery had had no place.
But he couldn’t forget the dream. He couldn’t explain the dream. He didn’t want to think about the dream but he couldn’t stop. Eventually, this sent him back to Joe.
“It’s just the ineffable,” Father Joe said to him. “I think you can live with that.”
“What’s the ineffable?”
“Everything. God and the rest of it. We can glimpse it but we can’t fully reveal it. The problem with dismissing it is that you’re living by a false construct. To say that we know it all? Well, it’s just vanity.”
“It’s not that I think we know everything. It’s that I think everything is knowable.”
“Well, there’s an astonishing distinction.”
“I know it’s subtle. Don’t be an asshole.”
“Reductionism. That’s what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, my soul-searching can be reduced to that.”
“Your soul?” Joe laughed. “Now you have a soul? You guys don’t get to throw that word around. You’re going with neurotransmitters, bags of chemicals. You don’t get to play in the soul sandbox.”
“Why are you antagonizing me?”
“I’m trying to get you to hear yourself. You came from nothing and you’re going back to nothing but somehow everything you do in-between matters.”
David had no answer for that. And he didn’t know where else to go.