“Congratulations,” I said. “But I’d like it to go away.”
“Well, sure. I’ll give you some oils to rub in. I’m feeling a lot of heat in your body. The body operates between extremes of hot and cold, damp and dry, and you’re hot and damp.”
“How sexy,” I said. “I wish I felt that way. It sounds like the old theory of the humors. Remember, sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric and melancholy? Of course that was medieval pseudoscience. I assumed it was discredited.”
“I know. But there was some truth to it,” she said blithely. “The parts of the body have temperaments just like the mind. And the temperaments interact. Western medicine isolates the organs and treats each separately, as if they had no effect on each other. But actually it’s surprising how close together they are, and extremely porous, with the blood and lymph flowing around them. It’s so clear, when you look inside a body, how every function is connected.” She sounded rapt at the vision.
“Why, have you looked inside bodies?”
“Of course. I went to medical school for several years. I bet you thought I was just an ignorant witch, right?”
“Yes,” I confessed. “Why did you stop?”
“I knew I wanted to be a healer, but I also knew I could never practice medicine the way we were being trained to do. I didn’t enjoy it, and I couldn’t get into that mode of thinking. Not only because it’s unrealistic to separate the various functions. Western medicine is based on aggression. The aim is to kill the invading organism, and it’s had most of its spectacular successes that way. Chinese medicine has a different approach to the body. It creates an environment that’s inhospitable to the intruder. If the organs are well-balanced and the center is strong, an invading organism can’t find a vulnerable place to lodge.”
“Like in Tai Chi.”
“Yes, just like that. You use your energy in such a way that the opponent can’t find a place to attack. So in medicine we focus not so much on the outside threat but on supporting the righteous.”
“The righteous?”
“The righteous is the natural, healthy state.”
“I don’t think I’d like looking at innards. Years ago, when I needed money desperately, I got a job proofreading something called the Herpes Handbook. It was right before AIDS. Everyone was worried about herpes. They sent the photos, too, because I had to proofread the captions. Those close-ups of body parts infected with herpes were so revolting I hated to look at them. But I also couldn’t take my eyes off them. I know it sounds paradoxical. I’d stare, and then I’d suddenly have to look away.”
“It’s always more difficult,” said the witch, “to study organs when they’re detached from the people they belong to, which is the way you’re taught in medical school, examining discrete parts. It becomes simpler and easier when you look at each part as belonging to an organism. A real person. You’d be amazed at how it stops being revolting.”
“It’s all very mysterious, isn’t it? The body, I mean.”
“The body,” she said, crossing her legs Indian fashion as she reached for a fresh package of needles, “is a black hole. Now, for this headache. I’ll work on it, but I have to warn you, if the headaches go away you might get other symptoms. The heat has to come out one way or another. Once it does, though, you’ll find you have more energy.”
“So what can you offer me? What are the specials today?”
“Well, we have a kind of smorgasbord—fever, nausea, diarrhea .. . I really can’t predict. Show me where the headache is. Okay, turn over, please.” She inserted three needles in the back of my neck, no doubt in a triangular pattern, then pressed her hands to my lower skull. “Do you feel anything?”
“The headache is moving around. Now it’s here.” I pointed.
“Better or worse?”
“Better”
“Okay, I’ll try a few more.” She put in three more needles and pressed again.
“Now it’s moving to here. Now it’s getting less. Shit, you’re giving me the creeps, you know? You’re moving my goddamned headache around. You could get burned at the stake for this.”
“I know,” she laughed. “So don’t tell anyone.”
When I got dressed to leave, she said, “See you next week, Laura. Keep walking.”
12
The next day when I boarded the bus to meet my cousin Joyce for lunch, there she was, halfway to the rear. No great coincidence—she lives eight blocks north and we were headed for the same place—yet unsettling. Joyce is the sort of person who’s hard to imagine alone. She responds so powerfully to others, it’s as if she wouldn’t exist without them. Her unprotected self was a stranger—bright red lips pursed somberly, dark eyes muted, gazing inward.
I approached and she leaped up, throwing her arms around me and exclaiming in her tremulous musical voice like liquid gold. Everyone turned to watch. Joyce was notable even when quiet—almost larger than life at close to six feet and outfitted to make heads turn, today in a longish white dress splashed with flowers. Masses of untamed curls trickled from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat and fell to her shoulders. How people had prized those curls when she was a child, as if curly hair were the ticket to life’s most splendid offerings. I was struck with stage fright at the exaggerated scene she was making, yet childishly pleased, too. After all, she acted in good faith. Life is small, I imagine she thinks. Let’s help it out a bit.
Just as we broke from our embrace the bus veered, and the contents of Joyce’s enormous tote bag poured out and scattered on the floor: books, papers, pens, wallet, tissues, makeup kit, comb, glasses, pillbox, cough drops, keys, address book. Joyce was notoriously sensitive to subtle vibrations. Could she have caught my symptom so fast?
“Look at this mess,” she groaned as we crept around gathering things up, the nearby passengers pointing out strayed objects. At noon the bus was never crowded. The travelers were mostly old people, some with canes, walkers, or caretakers. I bent to retrieve a ballpoint pen that had rolled behind a woman’s feet. “Excuse me,” I said, but she sat impassive, not moving aside to ease my groping. When we finally had the bag reassembled, Joyce hugged me again, less vigorously.
“You look fine, Laura. Not sick at all. I thought you’d look worse.”
“Thanks a lot.” I laughed. “It’s the suntan. And I’m getting plenty of sleep.”
Soon she was waving at the restaurant owner, sitting at the bar reading a copy of Variety, and then at the waiter. “Lorenzo! How are you, my dear!” I was afraid for the bag if she hugged him, too, but she merely engulfed him in her smile. The owner sent complimentary glasses of wine to our table.
As we picked up the menus, my shoulders tensed. Joyce has always had an odd habit in restaurants. She liked to order the same dish as me. What are you going to have? she’d ask casually, and I, just as casually, would say, I think the spinach salad. Oh, that sounds good, I’ll have that, too. Something would clutch at me, as if a choice to which I was exclusively entitled were being taken from me. I wouldn’t have minded had I thought Joyce really wanted the spinach salad. But no. She chose it, I was convinced, only because I was having it, thereby making it less my own. It was perplexing, especially as Joyce didn’t have an envious nature, and moreover what was so enviable about spinach salad? It wasn’t as though it were filet mignon or pheasant.
I used to mull it over. Maybe Joyce wanted to create, in a public place, the illusion of an intimate at-home lunch where everyone eats the same thing. No, I definitely sensed a boundary infringed upon. I began trying to outwit her, adopting the strategy of asking her first, forcing her to choose. So what are you going to have, Joyce? Well, she’d say, I’m not sure. Either the mussels or the shrimp salad, maybe. What about you? as if offering me a choice between those two. The linguine with clams, I think. Oh, I didn’t notice that, she’d promptly chime in. Maybe I’ll have the linguine, too.
It was a difficult game to win, a game of pursuit and evasion, and I wasn’t even sure Joyce was aware of being
a player.
“So, Laura, what have you decided on?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. It all looks good. What about you?”
“Well,” she said reluctantly, “I’m torn between the tabouli and chick peas with eggplant and the grilled salmon.”
“Hmm.” I perused the menu some more.
“What are you in the mood for?” she urged.
“Let’s see, I think I might have a mushroom omelette.”
“Actually that sounds very good. Light. I ought to have something light, too. Let’s have the mushroom omelettes, then.”
“You don’t have to have it just because I’m having it,” I said a bit testily.
“I know. Of course not. It just sounded good.”
The waiter, Lorenzo, appeared.
“We’ll have the mushroom omelettes, Lorenzo,” said Joyce.
“I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll have a cheeseburger. Medium rare.”
“That’s an idea,” she said, brushing her curls off her face. “You know what, Lorenzo? Forget the omelettes. Bring us two cheeseburgers, medium rare.”
Foiled again. I never thought she’d stoop to that, and in front of Lorenzo, too.
“Tell me,” I said when he’d gone, “why do you always like to order the same thing?”
“Why, do you mind? I didn’t realize you minded.”
“I’m curious.”
“It’s nice to order the same thing. Why not?”
“But why is it nice? I really don’t get it.”
“Because then we’re, well, we’ll be having the same experience.”
“But why is it nice to have the same experience?”
“It just is. Don’t you think so?”
“I knew a man like that once. I don’t mean he liked to eat what I was eating. Nothing like that. But he .. . we felt as if we were always having the same experiences because inside our heads, or our guts, it was the same. The same chemical components or something. Oh, he was different in many ways—he was older, he had a different background, he wasn’t even American, really. But we had this feeling you seem to crave, that there were no boundaries, that we felt everything in exactly the same way. It was, I think, sick.”
“Why sick? It’s a certain kind of romantic ideal. It’s not realized very often, but still...”
“Yes, and it’s obvious why. It’s madness. Was, I mean. We couldn’t be together and we couldn’t be apart. Or he couldn’t. I could have managed—to be together, that is. But he needed the Other. With a capital O. He knew too much about me, from the inside, because he was the same. He wanted mystery. But he also couldn’t. . . can’t. . . couldn’t let go either.”
“When was this?” Joyce asked cannily.
“Oh, long ago. Long, long ago. It was like a fairy tale, and they’re always long ago, aren’t they?” I hesitated as she stared. “I was young. I was like someone entranced, I don’t mean by sex, I mean by this crazy way of being with a person.”
“In the fairy tales,” said Joyce, “when the princess is carried off it’s always from being asleep or doing housework—sewing shirts out of nettles or minding the geese or being a drudge like Cinderella. Were you asleep?”
“No, I wasn’t asleep. And it was not exactly like being carried off. It made up a little world, like a trick with mirrors. We could see each other in the mirror. I also think it made me sick, frankly.”
“What, years later? Nonsense. You’ve got a virus. You told me so yourself. Didn’t you have lab tests?”
“Yes. I mean it left me open to this . . . thing. I don’t know. He was like a virus himself. He got into my bloodstream and has to work himself out.” I lit a cigarette even though I could see Lorenzo at the far end of the room gliding in our direction bearing the cheeseburgers, shoulder height. “No two people can have the same experience of anything, can they? Because even if the thing is the same, the people having the experience are different. Look, never mind all this, Joyce. I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m not used to drinking wine at lunch. Don’t pay any attention. I’m sorry about the omelettes. It’s not important. This virus has probably gotten to my brain.”
“I believe it has. Thank you, Lorenzo. That looks lovely.” He blew her a kiss as he left. “The Tsumati think that any man and woman who have been together, even if only once, leave a trace of themselves in the other person, so that you can carry around traces of any number of people, and they influence your thoughts and speech and actions. They shape you and change you.”
It was a pleasure to listen to Joyce when she got going, and to watch her mobile face mirroring the vivid workings of her mind. “That’s why you have to be careful whom you sleep with,” she continued. “Not for old-fashioned morality, but to choose what will become a permanent part of you, which is actually a higher form of morality. You know how old married couples get to talk and look like each other. Well, this is the same idea, only scaled down. But that’s just one kind of explanation for the general phenomenon of influence. Personally, I think you’ve just got a bug, Laura. Even more to the point is that the major diseases of our age involve the immune system defecting or turning on itself. It’s obvious from what you read in the papers that we’re into self-destruction on a global scale. Why wouldn’t it be happening on the individual level, too?”
“Maybe I should join this tribe of yours.”
“The Tsumati are an ethnic group. When you say tribe, it conjures up images of savages dancing around the campfire with tom-toms. Have you noticed that the fighting in what used to be the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia is always between ethnic groups, but in Africa it’s tribes? And yet these groups have exactly the same distinctions. So how long ago did you know this man you mentioned, again?”
“Long ago, I told you. How is Roger, by the way? It’s odd that since you two got married I forget to ask. I wonder what that could mean.”
“He’s fine. Same as ever.”
“So it’s working out?”
“So far.”
After eight years of indecision and moving—her apartment, his apartment, together, apart—Joyce and Roger married last year. More sensible and convenient, they decided, to continue their struggles under the official rubric. At their wedding, a colorful, mellow affair, the eyes of the bride and groom shone with relief: at least they’d no longer have to worry about whether to spend their lives together. Their gestures had the blissful serenity of people who have accepted the world and their fate in it, Buddhist monks, for instance. The only one who didn’t seem entirely content was Joyce’s cat, and with good reason. The cat was her confidante about intimate matters, especially this long back and forth romance with Roger. The creature sensed she was losing her raison d’être.
“Do you still talk to the cat as much?”
“No. It’s too bad, and she really feels it. She was heavily invested in that closeness. But with Roger around all the time we can’t really have the same long talks. And there’s not that much left to say.”
“Why don’t you get her a cat for company? It might be more appropriate.”
“I’ve thought of that. Except it means when I go to Africa there’d be two cats to take care of. I don’t know how Roger would like that.”
I left half my cheeseburger—I hadn’t really wanted it. I would have preferred the tabouli salad with chick peas and eggplant that Joyce was considering in the first place. The chair was stiff and unyielding. I imagined my soft bed awaiting me, calling, Lover, come back. It was hard to keep talking amid the buzz of voices and clink of silverware, and hard to attend to civilized table manners. To close down, not feel anymore, what heaven that would be.
“Joyce, I have to go home. I can’t sit up anymore. That cheeseburger did me in. It was overdone and greasy. How was yours?”
“Mine was fine.”
Of course. Joyce rarely admitted to disappointment. Willfully upbeat, she’d hardly uttered a bitter word through two divorces. That must be how she kept the good vibrations rolling in
her direction, as in a Taoist prayer. The Taoist prayer, as the Tai Chi teacher often says, is not a request for the future—Make me happy! Make me well!—but a declaration of what is in the present: I am well. I am happy. Such declarations attract the vibrations of wellness, as the great symphony of the universe unfurls. Fine, is Joyce’s prayer, her declaration of what is. No complaints whatsoever.
Outside, the sun was blinding, like coming out of an afternoon movie. Two fire engines screeched down the street with an ambulance in their wake. Against the sirens’ treble came the petulant continue of a car alarm—existential dread made audible, worthy of one of Dante’s deeper circles. The strollers on Broadway didn’t seem to mind, though. So inured, or so acquiescent, they accepted it as readily as birdsong.
“Just a second,” Joyce said. “My bag feels very light. I think I’m missing something.” She rummaged with one hand while looking skyward as if for assistance. “Oh, God. I think it’s my notebook with all my notes. I was going to the library. This is awful. I can’t lose that. It has everything about the lineage system for my article. Maybe I left it inside.”
Lorenzo searched. We all searched under the table and retraced the path to the door, but no notebook.
“It must have been when everything spilled out on the bus,” I said.
“Oh, right. I forgot all about that.”
“Someone might have picked it up and given it to the driver. Call the lost-and-found at the MTA. It’s a long shot, but still.”
This was not idle encouragement. Years ago I had lost a precious notebook, too, and gotten it back. But this didn’t seem the moment to tell Joyce. Besides, it was another Q. story, and I’d said more than enough about him.
“I’ll try that. This is why people keep everything on a computer. That’s what Roger’ll say, anyway.” She sighed. Her eyes looked teary; even her springy hair seemed to droop,
“If I hadn’t gotten on the bus just then it wouldn’t have happened.”
The Fatigue Artist Page 24