Amor and Psycho: Stories

by Carolyn Cooke

  AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE

  Karim Brazir was an artist and a bohemian—alluring, sexy, passionate in an intense but impersonal way; almost perverse, maybe even borderline somehow. His name rhymed with Karen, and in fact his parents, who interestingly misunderstood the name on a trip to Cairo and Istanbul, during which they conceived him, spelled it that way. He used to call me at night in New York and ask me in a gravelly voice to take a taxi over right away to his loft in a then-disused part of town. Romantic, I presumed. I’d push the brass button next to his name downstairs and he’d buzz me up. Always, I had to knock on the door, which he opened as if I’d come as a mostly pleasant surprise at 2:00 a.m., a minor interruption to his work. He offered me a beer, or a glass of water, or nothing. Then he pounced, direct and disarming, kissed me roughly, removed my clothes and fucked me with the kind of attention and intensity that he brought to his work, an attention that felt inspiring, even infectious. Karim welcomed my enthusiasm but didn’t consider it necessary. Afterward, to keep me from dozing off, I think, he would feed me cold pasta puttanesca from a Ball jar, or some take-out falafels wrapped in silver paper. He’d stand, leaning against the loft bed in his kitchen, and watch me eat. Then he’d walk me to the street and hail a cab. He’d try to press a five-dollar bill into my hand—not that this would cover the thirty or forty blocks to my apartment. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him, waving the bill away, climbing into the taxi. I was a feminist.

  Once, when I arrived, he met me in the lobby, and we took the elevator together to the floor beneath his, where he showed me a terrible thing—his downstairs neighbor, a sculptor, crushed by a beam from which part of a large-scale wooden sculpture hung. He’d heard the crash, run downstairs, confronted the damage and called 911. He didn’t know the sculptor well; she’d moved in only a few months before—but Jesus, but still. The paramedics arrived after Karim had been with her body for over an hour. They asked him a few questions, which he answered. Depressed person? Yes. She had no life, no money, no sex, no enemies and no dealer, just this sculpture, which was so-so, maybe—or maybe it was good. He couldn’t say. She drank when she worked, he said. She was drunk now—or had been, before she died. Here was a bottle, here was a glass; they could test her blood alcohol later. The paramedics tried to revive her, but then, without saying much of anything, they moved her body to a gurney and took it away. (A strip of yellow tape stretched across the locked front door, but Karim had a key.)

  When he showed me the death scene, I understood how he must feel. He held me tightly, breathed into my neck. I rocked him in my arms; we did it on a quilted mover’s cloth on the floor, among broken pieces of sculpture. I had my period, but Karim didn’t care, and afterward I found blood on the cloth. Then I noticed blood everywhere; it wasn’t even all my blood.

  Karim took me upstairs and let me shower and use his towel. When I came out, dressed in my slutty evening clothes, he gave me a blue enamelware bowl of canned chili. Then he walked me up to Houston Street, hailed a taxi and tried to give me five dollars, which I resisted.

  It may seem obvious that a relationship like this wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t care; I wanted to go everywhere. Karim invited me, twice, to meet his parents, to spend a weekend with his family on Hell’s Point, Long Island. It was my first direct experience of architecture—domestic life lived under aesthetic discipline.

  THE BRAZIRS’ HOUSE in the old summer colony on Hell’s Point was defiantly architectural. Every room occupied a different level, and everybody’s personal property commingled in a shared dressing room on a mezzanine, whose walls and floor were a blue glass that gave off shadows visible from the living room when you dressed. The house was rigorous and modernist, except for the specially designed item in the dressing room, an altar dedicated to the daily accumulation of clothing and personal effects. The Brazir Tree was (according to the architect, Igor Hermann, who commented on the house in two books, which sat prominently on the Noguchi coffee table in the living room) inspired by the family name, Brazir—actually pronounced Brajir. Hermann installed a tree (fabricated, mahogany) at the center of the house, and used its branches as a series of impaling hooks for brassieres and neckties and ticket stubs from Philharmonic concerts. He saw the tree as a kind of metavalet, a sculptural, integrated scrapbook, a changing focal point, a psychic courtyard. Like most architects, Hermann sought to control and direct the gaze. He acknowledged the necessary relationship between the house as a fixed object and the humans who used it—their constant shifting and changing. The house turned inward, rather than outward. It was, for Hermann, a womb—but bright and spare—a blue womb of glass. Natural light poured through clerestory windows into the dressing room, where the Brazir Tree stood silhouetted behind glass, representing nature, or human nature.

  Everyone in the house used the Brazir Tree; Hermann’s aesthetic discipline prohibited closets or bureaus in the bedrooms. One added a bathing suit or a gauzy dress to the wiry armature of the tree at the end of the day, and plucked one’s nightgown off a limb. Mr. Brazir’s masculine items dangled among the bras, dandy ties made into a bow, flung shirts from Brooks Brothers worn to a wonderful pulp.

  Mrs. Brazir arranged our effects constantly. The picturesque disorder of the tree was a monument to wit, or a witty reference to a monument. You’d find the sleeves of one of his Brooks shirts tied neatly around the waist of Mrs. Brazir’s peignoir, gestures like that. Mrs. Brazir’s elegance seemed habitual, disciplined, expert. She wore a vial of perfume between her breasts, which she uncorked during the second cocktail of the evening, upended against a finger and daubed into her cleavage.

  The perfectly black bathroom Karim and I shared had a red light recessed into the ceiling and a half bathtub sunk into the floor that shot jets of water at your body. To bathe there with the door closed was to go out of this world. (Karim and I soaked all afternoon once, while Mr. and Mrs. Brazir had their adjustments at the chiropractor’s.)

  The Brazirs dressed up and had cocktails every evening in the living room, where Karim and his mother prevailed upon Mr. Brazir to recite Shakespeare. Or they talked about whether to go see the balanced rock on Sunday or Tuesday. The smallest details mattered. Mornings, we walked down to the beach, a distance of a mile, or sometimes we took bicycles, big lugubrious cruisers that didn’t belong to anyone in particular, and went swimming. We didn’t just lie in the sand and go splash in the water every hour or so, as my people did. We went specifically to swim, and swam until our arms and legs turned blue. Then we dried off and went home. Intensity was everything to them; they insisted on living intensely in the moment. Sometimes we went to the beach specifically for a picnic, and on those occasions we did not swim. “Let’s have champagne and lobster rolls and chocolate cake!” Mrs. Brazir would suggest, then pack and bring these items in minuscule portions. No matter how many of us went on the “picnic,” she’d bring one half bottle of champagne, one lobster roll (and a plastic knife) and one piece of cake. In this way, the Brazirs shared the burden of a guest. This seemed like an essential lesson—to live eloquently, yet economically.

  Mr. Brazir spoke about rebuilding a car, an Alfa Romeo they’d gotten for nothing. (Far from poor, they lacked only ready money.) One wall of the house opened up by means of hinges, and Mr. Brazir had at some point rolled the car inside. We always had cocktails around the car, and the elder Brazirs sometimes had cocktails in the car—a two-seater, of course—while Karim and I lay on the rug like strewn victims. Or if Mrs. Brazir had had too much to drink the night before, she might remain in bed all day and Mr. Brazir would bring her glasses of ginger ale, and explain, “Mummy’s hung.” The particular quality of their air held not the tense, angry caesura you feel in some houses, but a loving silence, like a glow coming out of their bedroom, where she lay, I assumed, in a white gown. (She almost always wore white, like a bride.) Only Mr. Brazir penetrated, bearing glasses of ginger ale. I never heard their voices during this exchange, as he pressed the glass into her hand, or set it
down on the nightstand beside her; I never heard her say thank you, or him ask if she would like an aspirin. Nothing banal ever happened. The rooms swallowed you in silence, and as you sat in one room, you could not hear voices from the other rooms, or so I thought at first. One afternoon, Karim and I sat in the living room with the Alfa Romeo, which was never really worked on—never a hint of tools, grease or gasoline—only extraordinary, useless and admired. Mr. Brazir had disappeared into the bedroom with a glass of ginger ale. I lay on the rug reading ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore in shameless hope that I could join the conversation over cocktails (though it turned out that the incest conversation happened only one time; the subject moved from theme to theme, and preparation proved impossible). Suddenly I heard ice cubes knocking together as she drank. The sound broke the silence like an avalanche; I realized that the Brazirs communicated to each other without words.

  I don’t know what they did not talk about—money, ambitions, disappointments. Late in the afternoon, Mrs. Brazir found Karim and me still reading. She said, “Let’s go swimming and get salt in our hair and then put on white shirts and go eat mussels at Billy Zee’s,” and we did that. Mr. Brazir took photographs, developed them in the basement and hung them to dry from wooden clothespins fixed to the Brazir Tree. I think Mrs. Brazir saw herself this way, visually, through his lens, or as if their life were a movie she directed every day.

  I saw a book of hers on a table—a simple, personal book. It glowed; it vibrated. I picked it up and read it all, and when I left, I took the book with me.

  THE SECOND AND LAST TIME I visited Hell’s Point, Mr. Brazir was already sick with the illness that would kill him. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain; I think he felt that he had wasted his time. Mrs. Brazir seemed embarrassed by his short temper, by the way the beautiful, silent rooms held the sharp tone of him. They had gotten by all those years gliding on the surface, and the surface was perfect, like Zamboni ice, until it cracked.

  After dinner, Karim and I walked to the beach with a flashlight. No one else appeared, so we lay down in the cold sand and did it quickly. I loved the way his white shirt hung and moved with the motion of his body. (The Brazirs were obsessed with white shirts in summer. Mrs. Brazir insisted that “white must be pristine.” The shirts were blindingly white and wrinkly. Sublime dishevelment was the virtue of these shirts; something about them transcended that other quality, of being ironed and businesslike.)

  Karim and I did not talk much. He was—I realized this later—too cool to talk much. He had the confidence of a wild animal—he never questioned his instincts. He never asked me about the sex, whether I was satisfied by his intense, distracted hammering; we never discussed it at all. We went back to the silent house, undressed around the Brazir Tree. We hung our clothes on the branches of the tree and went to sleep in our separate rooms.

  I woke in the night and looked through the delicate skin of windows into the sky (where the moon hung, waxing gibbous and creamy) and thought, They have the moon.

  IN SPITE OF his illness, Mr. Brazir caught a fish for our last dinner, my last among them. He caught it himself somewhere, with a hook and line. It was perfectly illegal, he said with satisfaction; he had gotten away with murder. He invited us to look at the silver skin of the fish, which held rainbow colors in its shingles. Nobody had any idea what kind of fish it was. We called it “the fish” and sometimes “Him.”

  “Do we want Him in lemon and butter?” Mrs. Brazir asked.

  Mr. Brazir announced that we would clean the fish at three o’clock. Mrs. Brazir insisted that first she and I must put on dresses and ride bicycles barefoot to a particular shop to buy lemons. (I wanted to learn everything from her, to inhabit her tone. I still have the stolen book, with entries in her elegant, playful hand: “A beautiful Yale man drinking gin at Thanksgiving. I wanted that one.”)

  When we returned, Mr. Brazir had found a bottle of champagne in the cellar—something very old, a Taittinger with the label slightly eroded or chewed. He cooked the fish on a tiny hibachi in the garden, and served Him on a platter with His head still on.

  He was very small, though. The four of us drank the champagne and shared Him, with slices of lemon. I realized how bourgeois it was to make an evening around quantities of food; better to drink water and eat air.

  After dinner, Mr. Brazir rummaged in the pantry—I remember a tea towel tacked up in the door, representing the anniversary of the French Revolution, ten bodies, very well-dressed, severed heads. He returned with his fingers spread around four small lead-colored glasses and a bottle covered with interesting labels. Absinthe was illegal in America, he told us, which I knew from reading postwar novels—it was for information like this that I’d minored in literature. He poured some into each of the glasses and then added water. The absinthe turned milky, though the color of the glasses obscured the full effect.

  The drink tasted of licorice and childhood, but quickly went deeper. I began to feel universal and human. The Brazirs understood the discipline of surface—the depth that was protected by surface. The surface functioned as the depth. We were all part of it. What could we do but transcend ordinary, sloppy suffering, rise above it, refuse? I tried to say these things to the Brazirs; it felt like a gift I could offer, to see them in their beauty.

  Mr. Brazir began to laugh. His chin fell down on his chest and he laughed into the soft open collar of his ancient and immaculate white shirt.

  Our dirty dinner plates shimmered violently on the tablecloth and the room turned gray-green. Mrs. Brazir uncorked the vial of perfume she wore around her neck and held the opening against one finger. She looked at her finger and said, “Please don’t touch anything.” Mr. Brazir never stopped laughing.

  Karim and I left them there and went for a walk to the beach in the dark. The sand where I lay felt muddy and damp. He pulled up my skirt and rode my body vigorously, his handsome face straining outward, toward the ocean. Just before he came, he slapped my face, and on the way back to the house he said, “I love you.”

  The next morning, Mrs. Brazir did not rise, and Mr. Brazir scurried off with a glass of ginger ale for her. They hid out, I guess, until Karim took me away. At the ferry, which reeked of diesel and the exhaust of twenty growling cars lined up to board, he kissed me sloppily with his tongue. When I stood at the rail to wave good-bye, my face was still wet. Later I understood that I’d reached the end of my usefulness, like the charming fish called Him we’d murdered and eaten. Karim might have been licking his plate before handing it to a waiter.

  THE SNAKE

  Dr. Drema moved twenty-five times before she turned forty-eight. She felt like a different person whenever she lived somewhere new. In all, she’d had consulting rooms in thirteen different cities in the United States and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

  It was always sad to shuck an old self. But Dr. Drema grew spiritually from shucking. She gained freshness and vitality, like a snake sliding out of its old skin. Shpilkes, her mother called it—ants in the pants. Moving so often had left Dr. Drema’s material life in disarray. She kept storage units in several cities on the East and West coasts of the United States (as well as a small house in San Miguel de Allende, which she owned outright), for indispensable articles that she could no longer visualize or name. Someday, when she became less busy, she would sort through these articles or let them go. In the meantime, she paid rents on her storage units, but paid them only after receiving final notice that her possessions would be sold or thrown away. Paying rents late was Dr. Drema’s acknowledgment of how conflicted she was about holding on to her past identities. Wouldn’t it be better simply to graze across the unspoiled range of one life, like a Neolithic buffalo?

  Dr. Drema had no trouble attracting new, necessary patients. For those who remained loyal—those really lost at sea—she held appointments by telephone. In any large or even medium-size city in the western hemisphere, hundreds, thousands of people—and their adolescent children—suffer from anxiety, depression, compul
sions, addictions. Such people found Dr. Drema personable, brilliant and charismatic. She belonged to all the important professional organizations. Like buffalo on the range, she roamed free.

  SHE’D SEIZED the occasion of her forty-eighth birthday to reinvent herself. On a whim, at a bargain price and with an exceptional interest rate, she moved into the old Customs House in a small New England town at the confluence of a river and an ocean, took a young lover and shaved off eight years. An unpleasant period had just passed, which she wanted expunged from her record—the failed relationship, the car accident, the gallbladder, the chronic fatigue. What had happened to the part of life when every year marked an improving, a flowering out? She gazed through her new salt-speckled windows and said the number forty in her head over and over until it became her number—in the same way that she associated candles with the number eight and Tuesdays with the color blue. Forty, forty, forty. She said the number until she became the thing. The lie lay near the very core of her identity and intensified ordinary transactions—filling out forms, listening to patients, talking to strangers.

  DR. DREMA’S CUSTOMS HOUSE overlooked the estuary of the Glass River. The town itself was formerly working-class and almost defiantly second-rate. Its converted industrial properties drew the sort of young professional people who raised children and confronted primal dramas—or shucked their primal dramas and sent Dr. Drema their bruised adolescent fruits.

  The consulting room occupied the second story. Persian rugs covered the floors as well as a couch and a table. More rugs hung from the walls. A tang of history clung to the rugs: old dust, mothballs, something sour underneath the wool that Dr. Drema associated—pleasantly—with the dead. (She had bought the rugs all together at an estate sale when she moved.) Because of the rugs, the consulting room absorbed most of the sounds made there, and the air sparkled with dust. She quickly lost three patients who suffered from allergies. But because demand for her hours exceeded her supply, Dr. Drema could afford to let them go.