“You look very nice, Laura. I like that purple shirt. Is it one Mona found?”
“No, it’s new. I mean, from a real store. Thanks, but that’s not what I meant. Sick. You know, fading away?”
He studied me some more. No trace of irony. Mona had enough irony for both of them. “Not at all,” he said levelly. “You look tired, not sick.”
Nice, but not nice enough. I wanted enthusiastic conviction. Something a woman might give. I wanted one of the theatrical types to fall all over me with reassurances.
“Oh, Sonia’s just a bitch,” he said in his placid way.
“Is that your considered opinion?”
“Yes, she—”
I touched his arm in warning, for Sonia was closing in, pushing before her a youngish man. Her hand on his black shirt sleeve, fingers slightly bent to keep a grip, suggested property recently acquired. Chiseled face, blond, muscular. Vanity surging through his veins. Too much hard upper-body strength, the Tai Chi teacher would say; he’d snap like a stiff branch. The picture of health, though, which boded well. Sonia presented him as a fellow actor.
“Laura, you must talk to Gregory. He’ll tell you how to get better.”
Smiling, she moved off with Dave. Was I expected to congratulate her later, the way you tell new mothers how stunning their babies are?
He didn’t seem eager to impart his knowledge. “What are your symptoms?”
I had a flicker of anxiety, as when reciting symptoms to doctors, who always looked skeptical at my performance. Gregory might make a suitable doctor if the acting didn’t work out. When I finished he kept staring.
“Well, how did you recover?” I asked. “You look fine.”
“There is a way to cope with this disease if you’re willing to try it. I myself went to a homeopath, an Austrian down in Chelsea. You do know what a homeopath is?”
The mental Rolodex turned up homosexuals and psychopaths, the mind of a writer being nine-tenths ear. “Sure.” They were an alternative to doctors, at any rate. They fought fire with fire, in small doses.
“Have you ever been to one?” Gregory asked tauntingly.
“No.”
“Well, if you’ve never seen a homeopath, you have a surprise in store.” He waited, with a slight smirk, but I vowed to wait him out, enjoying the certainty that I could send him reeling across the room if I chose. Into the silence came Sonia’s throaty laugh a few feet off, and Dave’s answering grunt. At last Gregory yielded. “He’ll make all sorts of tests and ask you lots of odd questions, then depending on your answers, give you the appropriate herbs. You have to take these herbs at weird and very specific hours. . . . What do you do, anyway?”
“I’m a writer.”
“That’s good. If you worked a regular schedule you might have trouble following the instructions. For instance if you worked sixty hours a week in an investment brokerage firm. But with your lifestyle you can do it. Aside from the herbs, the other part of the cure is massive intravenous injections of Vitamin C. Not everyone can do this. It all depends on whether you want to go down to Chelsea twice a week and lie on this guy’s cot for an hour in a darkened room with a tube in your arm. Some people can deal with this and others can’t.”
Clearly, we both suspected which camp I fell into. I ate morsels of the dinner to provide ballast for the Scotch I was planning to drink as soon as Gregory finished describing his course of treatment.
“But it’s the way to recover, for sure,” he said.
“How long did it take you to get better?”
“Six months or so.”
“Six months, eh?” I didn’t puncture his smugness by saying the obvious. I was once smug, too. He wasn’t much older than I’d been then. Smug about Q.’s wife Susan, first off. He loved me more, ergo, he would have to leave her. Gregory would be unsmugged soon enough. I almost felt sorry for him: what a long way to fall until he reached the porous soil of humility. For most of us the drop was not that great, so we didn’t sink as deep.
“Well, I’m glad you’re better. Thanks for telling me about this.” Thank you for sharing, as they say in the support groups which had also been suggested to me, where you sit around and talk about your symptoms as my grandmother and her friends used to do over mah-jongg. At least they had the sense to play a game along with it.
“I can give you his name and number if you like.”
“Why don’t I think it over and then maybe call Sonia to get in touch with you, okay?”
“No problem. Good luck.” He was off.
I finished what was on my plate, poured a Scotch and sat down on the couch near the window. It was fine, sitting alone in Mona’s living room, slowly sipping Scotch. Very comfortable. Maybe Scotch was the cure, though not, to be sure, intravenously. I envisioned lying on a cot in a dim room while a tube pumped orange juice into my veins. What would Q. say?
ALWAYS AND EVER, what would Q. say? He does it, too, invokes me in his mind, he’s told me. In this case it gets me nowhere. He’d say what I say. Orange juice through a needle?
Forget Q. I’ll ask Tony, my stepson. Ex-stepson, I suppose. He may resent me but he’ll give a trustworthy opinion. And civilly, too, for Ev’s sake. He’s a thoroughgoing doctor now, as Jilly recently pointed out when I referred to him as a medical student. “He’s doing his residency. He goes around the hospital on his own and decides how to treat people. That’s a doctor,” she said with pride. How confidently she rested in his boyish arms as he carried her off the train those many years, coming to spend weekends with Ev and me. She was the brave one, on the lookout for adventure. Adventurers can afford to take risks because they’re rooted in safety: Tony was her root and stem, she the flower sprouting from the firm branches of his arms.
Yes, I’ll call him. The chill in his voice won’t hurt all that much. And I’m entitled to a question. I’ve earned it, like the disciples of Taoist monks: haul the firewood and buckets of water for twenty years and you can ask one question. Years of weekends. Picked glass out of his foot when he dropped the crystal decanter arthritic Aunt Bess gave us as a wedding present, then took him to the emergency room to get out the rest. Let myself be tackled time and again in football on the beach with far more force than was needed, but I never protested, it was only sand. Stripped the guest-room bed of sheets bearing his wet-dream stains. Corrected essays on Romeo and Juliet, Great Expectations, and A Farewell to Arms, even typed a few, when he complained his visits made him late with homework. I could go on and on. (Twenty more years and the monk’s disciple is entitled to a second question, an option often passed up. If the first twenty years of carrying buckets is ample time to formulate a proper question, the next twenty can cure you of the desire or need to ask another.)
There’s still time after the party. It’s early evening in San Francisco. Saintly Dave insists on walking me to my door, for this is not the sweet seaside hamlet of my imagination, where violent crimes never happen. . ..
“Don’t worry, you look fine, Laura,” he says as he turns to go. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
Right, but after I speak to Tony. Interrupt his sunset. Can it be as fine as the one that accompanied me along the river hours ago? Why on earth not? No limit to the splendor and democratic distribution of sunsets: custom-made, fashioned to locale.
I mustn’t forget he’s married now. Sara, Sandra, Phyllis? Sophie. Also a medical student. Doctor, sorry. I could get a second opinion for the same quarter. Not that I’ve had the pleasure of making her acquaintance. I wasn’t invited to their wedding, held about a year ago in Boston. A very small wedding, Jilly assured me, blushing with vicarious shame. Well, never mind all that.
The voice—its familiar pitch and diffidence—gives me a phantom shiver of pleasure. The next instant I see the gash in Ev’s neck running from just below the left ear across the throat to the collarbone. I got there so fast when the police called, they hadn’t yet fixed him up. Fixed his appearance, that is, since they couldn’t fix him. Not fast enough to spea
k to him, only fast enough to see the damage. I never told the kids how he looked. I accept it. I don’t ask to have it excised, only I would like, someday, that it not be the first image I see when I think of him.
“Tony.” I announce myself. “I hope I’m not interrupting. ...”
I’m touched, disarmed, when he says, “Not at all. Is everything okay?” until I realize it’s Jilly he must be thinking of.
Doctors hate being asked advice after hours, don’t they? I plod ahead with my mission.
“Are you sure it’s not just depression? I mean, even a long time after a trauma. . . . There’s a chance it might be psychosoma—”
“Tony, please. I know how you feel about me but don’t give me that shit, okay? At least not for openers. Do you think if it were ‘just’ depression I would call you of all people in the middle of the night, at least here it’s the middle of the night—”
“Laura, calm down, will you? I only meant it was a possibility. I know you’ve been through a lot and ...”
“Listen, Tony,” I say carefully, “all I really want is to ask you a very specific question. I heard—”
“Wait, Laura. Before you, uh. . . . What you said before, that you know how I feel about you. Maybe we should ...” He’s shaping phrases with the diligence of a toddler jaggedly piling up blocks, knowing they will very likely fall but not knowing why, unable to align them properly. “Maybe we should talk about this.”
Go ahead and talk, kiddo. I’m not your mother, I don’t have to help.
“You’re mistaken about how I feel about you, Laura.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. I—well...” Some throat-clearing, then a swallow. Coffee? Beer? “It’s true I used to resent you but . . . but not as much as you think. I mean ...”
“Oh.” Happily, one faculty my virus has not diminished is my sense of the ludicrous. That seems to have been enhanced. I also hear something dimly familiar, not just in the words but in the tone. In the earnest groping for a certain unobjectionable diction. Is it marriage? Has Sandra, I mean Sophie, had a feminine, tenderizing effect? They must talk over childhood wounds in bed. Well, that’s sweet. What’s her secret? Ev would listen but never contribute, and it doesn’t work as a one-sided game. No, beyond Sophie, it’s .. . ah, yes. Therapy. The unmistakable accents of working things through. He must have gone when Ev was killed, sure, that sort of blow could send even the most taciturn. He has been urged to examine his feelings and settle unfinished business, preferably out in the open.
“Do you want to define exactly how much you resented me, then? Is that the point?”
“That came out all wrong. You know what I mean. I mean, I know I gave you a hard time but I had my reasons.”
“People always do.”
“I blamed you for my parents’ breakup.”
“I know. You’ve told me that before. When you were twelve, the first time. How could I forget? I was trying to make a soufflé.”
“But I see now ...”
I have to admire his doggedness. Perhaps it’s good for him to encounter resistance. His feeling of closure will be all the more thorough. His therapist will be proud of him when he reports this conversation.
“I see now that you weren’t really all that responsible.”
“I told you that several times. When I met your father your parents had been separated for months.”
“I suppose I wasn’t ready to hear it. I always thought he would have come back if .. . if not for you. Because when he left he told me it was only temporary. Like a—a trial. I thought it was sort of like one of his trips, so then I was really blown away when—”
“Oh. Well, that’s something I didn’t know. That he told you it was temporary. I thought you understood.”
“He said he might be back. I’m almost positive he said that. But then you came along.”
“He wouldn’t have been back, regardless of me.”
“Are you sure?”
I hope he’s not going to cry. Poor Tony. A grown-up doctor but suddenly reduced to a boy of eleven. I really should help him out. I might reap some benefit. He might drop by next time he comes East, and truth to tell, I’d very much like to sit in a room with him—tall, lean, austere—hearing his voice at close range, feeling a wisp of Ev drifting my way.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure, Tony. Do you know it was your mother who asked him to leave?”
“I don’t know that. No. She never really explained. All she—Well, she did sit me down and explain that they couldn’t get along or live together but it wasn’t my fault or Jilly’s. Like, straight out of the book.”
“Oh. He was difficult to live with, it’s true.”
“Difficult how?”
How indeed? How to explain that absent presence, that silent wrestling with a shadow? “This is enough for one night. I’ll tell you some other time. Nothing outrageous or gory, don’t worry.”
“But you see . . . I’m married now—” an embarrassed pause for the wedding I didn’t attend—“and . . . and I don’t want to be difficult in the same way, whatever it was.”
“No, I don’t think you will be.” You’re too dull, for one thing. You’re like him in many ways, but he wasn’t dull. I would have had an easier time if he were. “How is Sophie, by the way?”
“She’s fine. She’s doing her residency in pediatrics.”
“And you?”
“Internal medicine.”
“Good. Well, that reminds me of why I called. I just met someone who suggested that I have massive doses of vitamin C pumped into me intravenously. It sounded strange but you never know. What do you think? Would there be any bad side effects? I mean, would my blood turn to acid or anything like that?”
“I’ve heard about good results in some cases.” He eases into the professional tone. “But I myself. . . well, I wouldn’t advise it. There’s not much data on the long-term effects. I don’t know enough to say definitely, but the point is, no one really does. This is a very conservative opinion, I should tell you. You could find doctors who’d say go right ahead. But I’d hang on unless you’ve exhausted everything else or you’re unable to function. How bad is it?”
“I get around a little. But mostly I lie down, or I want to be lying down. I’ve heard of worse cases.”
“You can try large doses of vitamins. Orally, I mean. Some people say magnesium. The few specialists each have some magic solution that works for a handful of people. The problem is, the immune system is off, and nobody understands enough about it to start it up again. There’re theories going around about hormone imbalance, brain inflammation, you name it.”
“What about modern life?”
“Listen, no kidding, that’s got to be part of it. The environment’s messed up, the air, the food . . . there are people who claim it’s a variant of the AIDS virus—not to scare you or anything—but just so you know it’s taken seriously.”
Thank you, thank you. I don’t really need Tony to make that clear. It’s quite clear. I can feel it in the general systemic refusal.
“Stress, too,” he goes on. “Frankly, the best thing is to get yourself a book by somebody who’s had a lot of experience with it. Diet is important. Stuff like that.”
“That’s exactly what your sister said. And she didn’t even go to medical school.”
“I’m sorry you’re sick, Laura. But it’ll probably pass in a few months. And I’m sorry. . . I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time, all those years.”
“Do you think you ever would have called me to say so?”
“Sooner or later, yes. Or knowing me, I might have written you a letter.” He gives a short laugh. The crisis is over. All those years of bad behavior wiped out by confession. Clean slate. “By the way, if you want to talk to someone . . . Sophie’s mother, Hortense is her name, had the same thing a few years ago. She was treated by an herbalist out here. In California, you know, that holistic stuff is taken much more seriously. You could call her and see if she has anything to s
uggest.”
“I’m not sure. Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
“Oh, but she came out of it just fine. She had some surgery recently but that was completely unrelated. Let me give you her number. You never know, it might be helpful.”
He sounds quite lighthearted now, relieved of his burden. The young are resilient—well, they need to be. I, on the other hand, feel too weighed down to budge, and may just go to sleep in my party clothes. Better yet, toss them in the direction of the nearest chair. I miss, but there’s no one to mind the clutter. Now, since the phone’s right here, why not try this Hortense in crepuscular San Francisco while the inquisitive mood is on me? How to introduce myself? Oh, words will come. They always do.
She has a weary, mildly aggrieved voice—What now?, her hello suggests—but at the same time sounds well-meaning and capable, a woman resigned to being asked questions, even proud of the role. I invent her from the one word: a mother of many children who keep in close touch, with their increasingly complex demands. The sort of mother who could always be relied on for lifts in the car, last-minute houseguests, hurry up and iron a dress for the interview, homemade birthday cakes, mediation with teachers or Dad, and God knows what all else. They are still relying, not having noticed her weariness. She’s a pretty woman, stout, a bit unkempt, always running late. Over the years she’s cultivated a few minor indulgences. She goes to the manicurist once a week and prizes her well-groomed nails. She buys lottery tickets often, at different places, when the urge comes over her. In bookstores, she leafs through soft-core porn but never buys any, just recalls key scenes when she needs them. The grievance in her voice is not aimed at her children or even at unknown supplicants like me, but at something far more general and diffuse. How long, O Lord, she whispers at night, into the dark.
“Well,” she sighs, “to tell the truth that’s far from my mind now because I just had a mastectomy six weeks ago.”
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