A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  Your mother is unusually cheerful. She slathers the eggs and salami with strawberry jam, makes a tiny belch when she’s done. “Excuse me,” she giggles, putting her hand over her mouth, her gestures more girlish now at fifty-nine than they were at twenty. After these rare warm moments, I tell myself that I was right to stay with her all these years, that love flourishes in the caring for others. It’s not a sentiment I am able to sustain—either that familiarity breeds affection breeds love or that anything so elevated as love has motivated me with your mother in any way.

  While she bathes, I change the sheets on her bed and bring her the tiny piece of cookie and the television guide she has requested. Dressed in her peach bed jacket, she sits in the armchair and flips through the pages. “Leonard,” she says, looking up at me with alarm, “you didn’t tell me today is Thanksgiving.”

  “Yes, dear,” I say, surprised because she usually tracks the calendar like a hawk.

  She slumps in the chair. “My sinuses. They’ve been awful.”

  We go on about her sinuses and the headaches they cause. The outing to the Ramada Inn, I cajole, will do her good. I help her back into bed.

  “Maybe if I rest awhile.”

  I adjust the shades, switch off the light, turn to leave. “My mink …”

  I CALL MARC FIRST. The conversation is defined by his not asking about you. He talks about his law practice, his golf game, Susan’s job teaching sign language. It was you who first pointed out the peculiar nature of these conversations. At the time, you were upset and railing a bit: “These phone calls, they’re not about trying to communicate anything. They’re rituals. Incantations employed to reassure himself that what seems empty makes sense: I know it’s ridiculous hours. Half the time, I think I should sell the house and we should move to Wyoming and I’ll work digging ditches. But, look, I guess you have to make these sacrifices at this time of life. No one who bills under twentyfive hundred hours in a year is going to make partner.” You sighed with exasperation. “It’s false consciousness,” you concluded, the harshest condemnation you can level.

  What I want to ask your brother but don’t is how he’s feeling now that he and Susan are no longer trying to have a baby. Six years of ovulation kits, hormone injections, egg extractions yielding three conceptions and three miscarriages. The last at eighteen weeks, after the sonogram, after seeing the baby curled knees to chest in the amniotic balloon. Susan, grief-struck, too afraid to try again. At the time, I’d wanted to call her, to comfort her by reminding her that one out of four conceptions miscarry, Nature’s way of weeding its garden; my grandmother, your great-grandmother, had six miscarriages and sixteen live births, only ten of which lived beyond childhood. But I hadn’t called. Marc said she didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, as always, it was you and I who discussed it: how these extraordinary efforts to boost fertility leave no room for the early losses, the medical interventions making each conception too precious, the loss of the fetus (for my grandmother, as expected as not) a devastation.

  With you, it takes over an hour to get through the busy signal. I keep hitting redial until I’m lucky and get a free line in the split second between someone hanging up and someone else dropping their quarters in the slot. “Shit,” I hear someone say. “Fifteen minutes, I’m standing here for this phone and that motherfuck Dubinsky gets a call. Dubinsky,” he yells. “It’s your boyfriend. Get your whiteboy ass over here.”

  I wait three, maybe four minutes. “Fuck ’em, fuck ’em,” someone mutters before the line goes dead.

  Rena is my last call. She answers slightly out of breath.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” I say.

  “Oh, Leonard, it’s good to hear your voice. I just walked in the door.”

  I hold while she takes off her coat, a jealous interlude during which I’m convinced that she’s coming in from the night.

  She’s good enough to puncture my fantasies. “I walked up to Riverside Church. I’ve never seen it so bright inside. It must be the angle of the sun.” This information is meant, I can see, as a hand reaching out to pat my arm. This place you and I have passed countless times on our walks to Grant’s Tomb.

  I do something impulsive. It’s because, I tell myself, I cannot reach you. “Are you free Saturday? For coffee, dinner?”

  She pauses. I am flooded with anxiety. Anxiety that she will say no. Anxiety that she will say yes.

  “That would be really nice. It’s sweet of you to ask me.”

  I am surprised that she seems touched. I always think of her as inaccessible, surrounded by the flurry of her glamorous job, well, her old glamorous job, her lesbian friends, her idiosyncratic beauty. She suggests the Alice in Wonderland statue in the park, near the model boat basin, half past four, sufficient light for a brisk stroll before an early dinner, and it is not until I am at the sink washing your mother’s breakfast dishes that it occurs to me I have not asked her what she is doing today, with whom she will spend her Thanksgiving.

  I ARRIVE TWENTY MINUTES early and sit at Alice’s feet, watching the pigeons skirt the steps that lead down to the basin. The sky is all whites and fading blues, a cold light that erases the yellow and red undertones that lift an ordinary spirit. There are no children, the promise of chill and dark too close, only two men, both mustached, both wearing brimmed caps. They stare at their toy boats, maneuvering them with remote controls, adult men frozen in eternal boyhood.

  She arrives exactly on time. Approaching from a distance, her hair covered by the hood of her parka, she could be you, twenty years ago, loping up the hill in front of the house. She kisses me on the cheek, her hood falling back over her shoulders, her hair ringleted from the damp, a haze around her pale, angled face. Ivory soap, lemon from her shampoo.

  “You look well, Leonard.” She smiles, a mouth of perfect gapless teeth.

  “It’s been a long time. Since the end of June when you moved.” Immediately, I regret saying this, afraid of sounding like one of the guilt vampires, those old people whom you’ve hardly greeted before they ask when they’ll see you again.

  She takes my arm, something I can’t recall her having ever done before, and we descend the steps to the terrace around the boat basin, the café closed for the winter. “This is one of my favorite places,” she says. “I come here in the summer to eat ice cream and watch the children with their boats.” She points at the boarded-up building. “Strawberry ice cream in a paper cup.”

  “I used to take Saul here.”

  “He told me. Your New York afternoons. The Forty-Second Street library, dim sum in Chinatown. He said you told him this was like a little piece of Paris in New York, how there’s a place like this in the Luxembourg Gardens.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No. I’ve been all over this country, including Hawaii and St. John, but never abroad. We were going to, we were just starting to plan a trip for the fall …” She sighs and then smiles, a weary ironic smile that suggests what choice but to make mincemeat tarts of our miseries and serve them up with sweetened tea. “I’ve promised myself a trip before my fortieth birthday. The classic tour that you read about in Henry James and Edith Wharton. Paris to Baden-Baden to Venice to Rome.”

  She stops ten feet north of one of the mustached boy-men. He keeps his eyes fixed on the sailboat, its leeward side tilted into the wind. “The truth is, if you don’t travel when you’re young, you feel intimidated. I’d be scared to go anyplace I don’t speak the language.”

  We walk north through the park and then out onto Fifth Avenue. I let her lead, uncertain where she is headed. When I ask about her Thanksgiving, she tells me how she’d been lured to Staten Island, to her mother’s sister’s house, with the promise of photos of her father.

  “There was my Aunt Betty, dressed in exactly the same clothes I’d seen her in eight years ago. Flowered leggings and a pink apron. Her husband picked me up at the ferry, but once we got to the house I don’t think he said a dozen more words to me. He and their two sons sat
glued to the television. They didn’t even leave the set to eat, just filled their plates and brought them into the family room. My aunt and I ate alone at the kitchen table. It was really sad.”

  I glance at Rena, refrain from placing my hand on her back. “My aunt spent the whole meal talking about how fat she is and all these diet centers she’s tried, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Living Lady, Gorgeous Gals, and all the while she’s heaping more and more food onto her plate. Eating and complaining about my mother and how she never calls and how my grandfather, who’s now in a VA home, is all her responsibility. I kept waiting for her to show me the photos, but we got all the dishes washed and the floor wiped down and still no mention of them. When I finally asked her, she looked at me with this tormented expression, like how could I even dream of asking for pictures after she’s been up since three in the morning cooking.”

  We are nearing the Metropolitan museum, announced by the convocation of Senegalese men, heads covered by brilliant tightly woven caps, selling knockoffs of Cartier watches and Ferragamo bags. The first time you went on your own to the city, you brought back one of those watches for your mother. This was before it became chic to sport the fake items, when the vendors still claimed they were genuine goods rather than trinkets manufactured in a Hong Kong sweatshop. Fifteen dollars for a Rolex, you proudly reported. You were devastated when Marc snickered, sucker. How I’d wished your mother would just put on the damn thing and say, what do I care, it’s a lovely watch and I’ll love wearing it, but instead she sank back onto her pillows and repeated the story about the time her mother had taken her pearls to be cleaned. The jeweler had replaced one of the pearls, mind you, your mother said, just one, with a fake pearl, but she knew, your mother’s mother, she knew her pearls, she knew to examine her jewelry anytime it went out of her sight and she had discovered it. When she threatened to call the police, the jeweler broke down and wept. Never before, he told your grandmother, had he done such a thing. Never had he so much as fudged on one one-hundredth of a carat when weighing a diamond. Only he had an ailing sister and your grandmother’s pearls were so fine that one, simply one, would pay for two months of doctor’s visits. Your grandmother had held firm, your mother enjoyed recounting, held firm that the pearl be replaced and had then, with the strand restored and securely clasped to her warbly neck (well, perhaps it was not warbly then) told the man (in, I’m sure, her haughtiest tone) to bring his sister the next day to your grandfather’s clinic.

  I tell Rena about the fifteen-dollar Rolex.

  “Not the tale of a budding criminal mind,” she says.

  “If you’d told me thirty years ago that Saul would end up in prison, I’d have said you were crazy. Saul was the kid whose ball was always grabbed at the playground, who would leave his Halloween candy out in the open for his brother to rifle through.”

  “Well, maybe it’s not inconsistent. I don’t mean to paint him as a victim, but I think he fell into drugs with that kind of innocence.” It’s touching to hear her defend you. “At first, he was just desperate to sleep. He was so afraid he’d make another mistake if he couldn’t clear his head.”

  We’ve passed the museum with the circus of tourists and children and students climbing or sitting or pausing on the steps. We walk on the park side, the crowd thinning north of Eighty-Sixth Street. Your wife’s face grows dimmer and dimmer as dusk falls, and then suddenly the streetlights turn on and gold darts off her hair like a halo in a Florentine oil.

  “It’s really my fault,” she says matter-of-factly, not in a browbeating manner or a way intended to invoke reassurances and the putrid psychobabble of not blaming oneself. “He was impaired. I should have insisted then, at the beginning, that he see someone. You know the old adage that a doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient. Saul certainly did. At the beginning, I thought it was just a few sleeping pills, but still, the fact that he was prescribing for himself at all should have told me his judgment was gone.” She hugs her arms. “If it had been something practical—getting the air conditioners installed, making airline reservations—I would have taken care of it. But I was so used to Saul being the expert on things emotional, I deferred.”

  “A professional hazard,” I say. “Everyone assumes shrinks can handle their own problems.”

  She stares at me. Something between disappointment and despair at my generic explanation passes over her face. Ahead of us, the Guggenheim looms like a crustacean deposited from the sea.

  “He found my blind spot.”

  She looks lost. I am reminded how little I know about her, afraid if I ask, what do you mean, your blind spot, it will sound accusatory and she will bolt on her long, slender legs, a gazelle slipping into the park. I point to the bench ahead. “Let’s sit.”

  If there is a center point to the Guggenheim, it seems that this bench is directly across from it. The problem with sleeping pills is they don’t work. Yes, they may deliver sleep for a while, but they are no balm for the mind. “There are three potions to soothe an ailing spirit,” I recall a teacher of mine once saying. A small beatific man whom the other psychiatry professors tolerated as representative of a fringe point of view. “Love, nature and art. We offer love, adult love purified of sexual intent, and in so doing we hope to unlock the natural appreciation for nature and art.” Love and nature have always seemed too daunting to me. But I exposed you and your brother from an early age to art, hoping it would be this balm for you.

  Right, I hear my old professors, the analysts, sneering. Right, I hear the new generation, your peers, the pill pushers, mocking. You would have prescribed an hour of Ravel and a walk through that unearthly building across the street.

  “Look,” Rena says. She touches my arm and points northward. There’s a tall woman with a scarf tied over her thick black hair. A long camel hair coat swings slightly as she walks. Loose pants skirt the tops of suede flats. She looks straight ahead, her gait a tincture of supreme confidence and nervousness. I know her. I know I know her.

  The woman passes right in front of us. A face that’s familiar in the way that even the strangers in your dreams always seem.

  “It’s Jackie Onassis,” Rena whispers. “She lives in one of these buildings. I heard that she walks in the park every day, but I’ve never seen her before.”

  I stare at the back of Jackie’s coat. At the way her trousers swoosh against her shoes. Your mother was obsessed with Jackie. You were born the same year as Caroline, and your mother felt that this gave her and Jackie a special connection.

  When Kennedy was shot, your mother wept not for the loss of our president but for the tragedy this meant for Jackie.

  WE EAT IN ONE of those restaurants that looks like it’s been put together from a hodgepodge of Hollywood sets: a bar from an Irish pub, the starched tablecloths of a Parisian bistro, the terra-cotta planters of a Tuscan trattoria. I order what’s on tap and the grilled tuna, and Rena orders a hot mulled cider and a pasta dish from the chalkboard specials. She keeps her hands over the top of the mug, letting the steam warm her palms. The beer has given me a warm, satisfied feeling. I push out of mind the thought of you eating sloppy joes served with canned peas and carrots, forty institution-size cans to fill three pots, each pot large enough, you’ve told me, for a man to sit inside.

  Rena bites into one of the puffy cheese straws the waiter has left in a basket. “What kind of dog do you think it was?” she asks.

  “What dog?”

  She giggles. Your wife is not a giggler. She flicks a fleck of pastry off her bottom lip. “The one Jackie was walking.”

  “I didn’t see a dog.”

  I glance to my right. Do people think she’s my daughter? My secretary? A May-to-December marriage? Could anyone mistake me for one of those men with their ramrod postures and gleaming white hair? Or does anyone, in these days of men walking hand in hand and high school girls with rings in their noses, even bother to speculate?

  Three-plus decades in the New Jersey suburbs and I’ve become a
greenhorn.

  “You didn’t see the dog?”

  “No.” I don’t know why this seems so funny, but we’re both laughing now. “Jackie wouldn’t walk the dog.”

  I’ve never seen Rena really laugh before. She laughs so hard, her eyes water. “That’s what she was doing. Walking the dog.”

  When the waiter comes with our food, he has a bemused expression. We both struggle to control our faces while he lays an oversize white plate before Rena, fat fettuccine noodles under glistening vegetables, and a stainless-steel platter before me, the fish still sizzling on the metal.

  Rena twists a noodle around her fork, then looks up at me, the laden fork still in her hand. “I’ve asked Saul for a divorce.”

  I finish chewing. I have an abhorrence of people talking with their mouths full, have never really understood how a person is supposed to converse over dinner. Even rushing the food down, it takes half a minute before my mouth is empty and wiped. “He told me.”

  We look directly at each other, as though everything that has taken place during the two hours up to now has been a kind of ceremony.

  “I feel like a louse, of course. But I can’t imagine ever being able to trust him again. Certain things don’t go backwards.” She lays down her fork. “Frogs can’t become tadpoles again.”

  I think of those conundrums you used to love about the identity of objects. At what point is a machine whose every part has been changed no longer the same machine? That’s what it must seem like to Rena. That nothing about you resembles the person she married.

  “You don’t have to apologize to me.”

  “I can’t help feeling I need to. Now all he has is you.”

  “Marriage isn’t the same as parenthood.” I wonder why I am condoning her actions, what is going on here.