A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  At first, I think it is exhaustion from the trip. Latent exhaustion released by the travel like a hidden virus set off by a cold. Then, rising above my somatizing analogies, I consider the jolt to my system of so much intimacy: the sounds of Rena turning in sleep, brushing her teeth, her screams the night after we saw the corpse. Finally, I consider the most damning of possibilities—that I am sickened by the remarkable change in your mother.

  Imagine, my self-approbation at not being thrilled by this turn of events. To feel only irritation at the disruption in my routine, the loss of the control I’ve had over the household. To wish that the old horse would climb back into bed.

  The blackness filters inward, a tarry smoke that makes it hard to breathe. My environs, which even in the best of times strike me as lacking in charm, lose even their bland pleasantness. At moments, the sensation of everything being covered with grime is so powerful that I am surprised when the objects in my life still function: the keys on my keyboard depress, the gears in my watch turn.

  WE MEET IN EARLY AUGUST. A Thursday evening in a heat wave, when most anyone with a decent bank account has fled the city for a square yard of beach or a wood cabin somewhere. Rena suggests a place on the uppermost level of the South Street Seaport. A tourist trap with mediocre food, she warns, but cool and breezy. I arrive early and am ushered to a table with knock-your-socks-off views of the mouth of the harbor. Party boats festooned with lights pass below, the reggae music blasting so loud I can make out the words, the lights of Brooklyn flickering—I can say it to you—like an ode to Walt Whitman.

  She arrives exactly on time, and seeing her I think immediately of two things. That she is never late. That she always finds her way to the edge of water. She’s wearing an ethnic kind of top and ankle-length skirt, her hair longer than I’ve seen it before, so that she looks less like a career girl and more relaxed and at ease. She kisses me warmly, once on each cheek.

  We order chilled things to share: oysters and shrimp cocktails and lobster tails. She tells me that she went to see you ten days ago. We agree that you seem to have passed through the worst of it. Eighteen months. Nearly halfway.

  She tells me that she’s returned to her word-processing job. “The money’s good and the hours suit me. In September, I’m going to France for two weeks. After that, they’ll switch me from a temp to a permanent position.”

  She sees that I am perplexed about the trip, that she’d be off again less than three months after our return. “I guess I’ve been bit with the travel bug,” she says. She doesn’t smile and I feel a tightness in my chest, the way I did with you when you came to borrow my credit card and I knew there’d been a rupture between us, things you didn’t want me to know.

  (You mean you knew I was lying.

  Yes.)

  “I’ve never been, you know. Ruth and Maggie convinced me that September’s perfect. The college kids will have left, but it’s still warm.”

  She pushes her hair back from her face, and I can see in that moment the way she will age: the tight muscles weakening and the skin growing loose and delicate but, like Katharine Hepburn, the great bone structure holding its own to the end. A despondency at the sense of a secret settles over me, and I don’t even ask for the details of her trip. The conversation turns to books, and I have the distinct impression that this is purposeful on her part. When she inquires about my book, I fall for it the way a vain woman will for a compliment.

  I order a brandy with coffee and indulge myself in your wife’s attention, in the sound of my own voice—knowing all the while that tomorrow I will feel sick with humiliation at my own pomposity. “There is always a personal story behind the public one,” I intone. “Only we’re usually too simplistic in the way we look for the parallels. The logic is more like that which operates between a dream and psychic reality: opposites and similarities are the same, contiguity is the signal of cause and effect, positives and negatives dissolve in a common pool.”

  In the dim light, she looks like an apparition. Across her face, I can see the traces of your eager visage when you still believed in ideas. Hour after hour around that duck pond and then later, as a medical student, stuffed with facts but starved for thought, your vacations spent reading Adorno and Habermas and those dense literary critics with their hodgepodge of deconstruction and Marx and Lacan. My own secrets swim up from their hiding places and for a moment I feel tempted to use them as a rope to reach out to Rena, but I stop myself, sheer will, as I see the betrayal in telling your wife about Maria before I tell you.

  THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, I go to see you. To my relief, your mother, still in her cleaning frenzy, every closet and shelf emptied and scrubbed, does not ask to come along. I leave at dawn, a day when light does not so much appear as darkness fades. I rifle through the night’s dream: quarreling with your mother, you two still children, about the reprehensibility of her buying every toy you so much as graze with a glance. You’ll ruin him, I say about you, turn him into God knows what.

  At eight, I stop for breakfast at a diner outside Fairfield, empty save for a group of golfers in pinks and greens and two tables of truckers chewing with their caps still on. The waitress passes her eyes over me with no more interest than I’ve been able to give to the landscape around me—a paunchy old geezer.

  I order a geriatric breakfast of grapefruit juice and Special K.

  “No Special K.” Her scalp shines under sprayed red hair. “Flakes, krispies or bran.”

  For a moment I miss your mother, who would have ordered more respectably. The Number Two with Canadian bacon. The Number Five with flapjacks. Or perhaps I feel badly about the dream, the transparency of the wish to point the finger about you at her. The wish for an excuse not to tell you about the ghost in the attic, the spectral Maria, safely hidden, I’d pretended—as though there were ever a child who’d not found the key.

  YOU REST AN ELBOW on the metal table, assume your chin-in-thesling-of-the-hand pose.

  “Did it occur to you that she might have worked it through with you if you’d stayed? That what happened between the two of you might have been understood in a way that would have helped her?”

  Either you’ve been dabbling in the same theoretical waters I still dip into from time to time (the new models about illness being a two-person construction, about the treatment having as strong an impact on the treater as the treated) or your intuition lands you where I’ve been since seeing your mother’s return to the living: at the way we sacrifice parts of the self to protect, or so we believe, the rest.

  “I couldn’t,” I say. “It was a vicious circle. She needed me to provide the words for her feelings. But I couldn’t step outside the force of my own responses. Had I admitted more than the skin of my feelings”—a shiver passes over me just thinking about it—“I would have been thrown out on my tail. Or at least thrown off the case.”

  “Did you consider that? Stopping working with her rather than stopping working completely?”

  “If I’d been able to consider, it wouldn’t have happened. Not that I stopped thinking. I couldn’t stop thinking. But my thoughts had lost their influence, like soldiers stripped of their weapons. All I had were my feelings and, thank God, enough conscience not to act more grossly than I did.”

  “Did you act?”

  “Not in a sense that a behaviorist would call action. More in a Catholic sense. I violated her in my thoughts. And my feelings—I’m absolutely certain—seeped through. Had she been better put together, she would have screened them out. But she was like a high-power radio receiver when it came to carnality. She could detect a fraction of a megahertz.”

  You grow silent. You look remarkably well for someone who’s just spent a year and a half in prison with two plus years to go. As though receiving the punishment for your misdeeds, real and imagined, has been a liberation.

  “So,” you say, “you had Maria and I had Mitch.”

  We stare at each other.

  “What do you mean?”

  Y
ou laugh. The guard peers through the window. He holds up the familiar two fingers. You hold up three in return. I notice that you’re no longer wearing your wedding band.

  “Tell Mom thanks for the clippings.”

  I raise an eyebrow.

  “She’s been sending me articles from the Times on topics related to health care. Controversies over vitamin B12. New theories about serotonin reuptake. Utilization of physician assistants in rural areas. It’s actually been very helpful. Motivated me to get Morton to start looking into what options I’ll have to practice after this.”

  You point to the green walls around us. The door opens and the guard cocks his head. I follow you out, the guard as always at the rear. At the turnoff for the lockup, a second guard is waiting. He shadowboxes with you, and I watch in amazement as you return the punches.

  I MAKE MY WAY to the car and drive off the prison grounds. Exhausted, I could be asleep by the count of ten. I find the throughway entrance and head south. At the first rest area, I pull in and park in a distant corner. I lean the seat back, check that the doors are locked and close my eyes.

  A tapping sound wakes me. A state trooper is knocking on the glass next to my ear. Groggily, I raise a hand to roll down the window. I smell the exhaust from the trooper’s car pulled perpendicular to mine, hear the hiss from his two-way radio. It’s neither light nor dark. I’m confused as to whether it’s night or day.

  “You were sleeping so long, we got worried something was wrong. Folks don’t usually do more than an hour shut-eye in these places.”

  I inhale deeply, close and then reopen my eyes to regain my focus. “No, no. I’m fine.” I look at the clock on the dashboard. It’s nearly seven. Seven at night.

  “Maybe you best go inside and get yourself a coffee and sandwich.” Inside, I call your mother and tell her when I’ll be home. In the background, I can hear a Frank Sinatra record. Records she dragged up from the basement and has been playing on an old turntable of yours.

  Obediently, I order a coffee and tuna sandwich. I set the sandwich on the passenger seat and prop the coffee between my legs. Other than the sixteen-wheelers speeding past on my left, there’s little traffic. I sink into the drone of the engine, let my eyes adjust to the dark.

  You had Maria and I had Mitch, you said, the idea so effortless it was as though I’d told you something you already knew.

  I want to argue it out with you. A useless exercise, I realize. As if the unconscious could be evaluated like a legal brief. Still, I cannot resist imagining the exchange:

  A faulty analogy, I insist. I knew Maria. I was by any reasonable construction of events the motive force behind her slitting her wrists. You never met Mitch until after his jump. It’s not a parallel.

  Oh, really, you counter. But Mitch knew of me. He knew I’d chosen not to see him my first day on the job. He knew I was no more going to be his Prince Charming than you would be Maria’s.

  That’s not what happened. She tried to kill herself because she’d trusted me and then I turned out to be no different from the encyclopedia salesman.

  That’s how you saw it. That you’d caused everything she experienced. Her desire for you. Her disappointment in you. Her fear of you. Her fear of her desire.

  I am nodding. Goddamn idiot that I am, I am nodding as I approach the Henry Hudson Parkway, the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey now in sight.

  I felt exactly the same. That I was the cause of Mitch losing his legs. And now you feel the same way about me. That you are the cause of everything I did. That it was all because of you.

  The megalomania of this washes over me. The madman’s trick of turning the wish to disavow all responsibility into assuming it all. The pleasure of self-flagellation. The comfort of mea culpa, of a world completely under one’s own control.

  Not until I’m in bed does what you’ve told me, that you are going to attempt to return to working as a doctor, sink in. That you, braver soul than I, are going to try again.

  16 Rena

  For a week after her return from Guatemala City, she’d not gone back to work. Bernardo’s ashes sat in their urn on her dresser. She considered sprinkling them in the orchard adjacent to Ruth and Maggie’s country house. She considered donating them to a library or some kind of archive. Then, one morning, she woke with an idea fully in mind. She opened the urn and removed the plastic bag. A body reduced to a few pounds of silt. With the bag in her backpack, she took the Broadway line to the last stop and boarded the Staten Island ferry.

  It was early morning, just a little past seven, and the ferry was empty save for a handful of night workers returning to their homes. She buttoned her sweater and pulled open the glass door that led out to the deck. The sun, still low in the sky, cast an amber sheen over the water. Gulls dipping for fish screeched in anticipation of their kill and a foghorn blasted from the east. The ferry traveled quickly into the channel, and within a matter of minutes they were in open waters.

  Moving toward the back of the boat so she would not be in view of the captain, she took the bag of ashes from her backpack and held them close to her body. As a child, when she was scared, her mother would whisper, Just close your eyes. Rena had done this with Nick. She’d done this with Joe. She’d done this with Saul for most of the year after Mitch. Not until Bernardo had she forced herself to look.

  They were passing between Ellis Island and Fort Jay. To her right, she could see the crowned head of the Statue of Liberty, the green hand hoisting the light. Her mother’s mother, Filomena, had made the passage from Italy to New York in 1912 at the age of four. Her mother’s father, the drooling old man she’d met at Betty’s house, had done the same eight years later. And her father’s parents? If Eleanor had even known, she’d not said.

  Rena opened the plastic sack. Inside was a gritty white substance with small pieces of bone. She leaned over the rail of the boat and let the ashes fall. They blew back, some catching on the wet side of the boat, some drifting down to the water. She thought of Santiago weeping as he told her that his wife had died of grief.

  To the east, the sky was fully lit. To the west, dark clouds, the remains of the night, moved toward the sea. A fleck of sandy ash stuck to her palm and for a moment she saw eye sockets, thought, are you there, but then the wind lifted the ash and as it disappeared in white air she whispered, “Bernardo, rest in peace.”

  At home, she drew the blinds and closed her bedroom door. She pulled open the top drawer of her file cabinet and lifted out the folder marked G. She counted the remaining giraffe money: six thousand two hundred dollars.

  In the afternoon, she called Sari. “Thank the goodness you’re back,” Sari sighed in her Urdu-inflected English. “The girl who filled in for you is too stupid to even use the spellcheck properly. Last week she made a typo on the word formulate and then selected fornicate as the replace option. The partner whose brief it was yelled so loudly that people ran in, thinking there was an emergency. And you won’t have Mr. Beersden breathing down your neck any longer. He’s been transferred to the Chicago office.”

  Rena returned to work the following night. She slipped into the old routine with the ease of a swimmer rediscovering her stroke: the evening walk, the stop at Grand Central, the wee hours chamber music, the walk home at six. On the weekend, she went to see Saul. When he asked about Guatemala, she could think of nothing simple to say. “They showed us a body. I hope it was his.”

  There was something new and hard in Saul’s face. Not hard in a wizened, scarred way, but hard like a diamond blade.

  “I threw his ashes over the water. Next to the Statue of Liberty.” Saul took her hand. Out in the open. His hand felt like a stranger’s, the delicate fingers now thickened and rough. She peered at the skin showing over the vee of his uniform shirt, wondered if the bird’s-nest hollow had disappeared under a shield of muscle, flushed at the thought that he would feel different now.

  THE SECOND GIRAFFE had arrived in late July. A box again from Barcelona. Again, she drew th
e blinds. Using sewing scissors to cut the puckered stitches at the base of the giraffe’s neck, she pulled out a piece of folded paper. Two words—LA TRINITé—with a cross drawn underneath.

  She crumpled the paper into a ball. This is lunacy, she tried to reassure herself. He cannot expect me to find him from two words on a scrap of paper.

  She took the wrinkled paper to the travel bookstore in Rockefeller Center, where she unsuccessfully searched the Spanish guidebooks. Reluctantly, she approached the information counter.

  “I’m looking for a place called La Trinité,” she told the woman behind the counter. “I think it’s near Barcelona.”

  “Are you certain it’s Spain? La Trinité, that sounds like France.” She thought about the Atlas Routier she’d taken from Bria’s apartment. The dashed lines for the pedestrian routes through the mountains. “It could be.”

  “La Trinité,” the woman murmured. “I wonder if that’s the name of a church.” She stood. Her silver pageboy swung beneath her headband. She led Rena to the back of the store. Climbing up on a stepladder, she reached for a book on the top shelf: Guide des églises et Chapelles de France.

  She flipped to the page. A paragraph entry and a dark photo of an engraved iron door. “The Pyrenees Orientales. That’s about as close to Barcelona as you’re going to get in France.”

  Rena bought the book. At home, she read the brief entry about La Trinité. A Roman church from the twelfth century that had been a stop on the hermitage journey for the Catalans. Renowned for its elaborate iron door and the wooden altarpiece carved by a Monsieur Autel. Perched in the foothills of the Aspres, near Mont Canigou. Near the village of Prunet et Belpuig.

  She found Prunet et Belpuig in the Atlas Routier, studied the map the way Reed had taught her to do. The towns thinned out as the white along the Mediterranean coast shifted to green. There were mountain peaks near La Trinité, the Spanish border close below.