The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  The last night, I walked down the stairs with four pieces of mail and laid them carefully on the pile in the hallway. I avoided the drawing but didn’t leave the apartment. Instead, I walked through the living room and the galley kitchen, then into the hall, and opened the door to what I guessed was Miranda’s room—the larger of the two bedrooms. For some time, I stood on the threshold and looked at the bed with its beige cover; the night table piled with books; the dresser, its surface ornamented with two bowls and a vase; the oval mirror that hung above it, and two large, framed black-and-white photographs of Eglantine, one as a sleeping infant, curled up among rumpled sheets like snowdrifts in light and shadow, and another, more recent one of the child I knew. She was wearing a tutu and a crown but was posing like a body builder, showing her biceps to the camera, a ferocious look on her face. I believe I told myself that I wanted to look more closely at the images, but this was an excuse to cross the threshold, which I did. My breath quickened as I examined Miranda’s books. She had a book of Diane Arbus photos, a volume called Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, three books on the Maroons, and five novels beside the bed. I picked up one called Delusion. It had a scarlet cover, bold lettering, and a white rectangle that contained a scribbled line drawing of a face. I guessed it was Miranda’s design, and when I opened the book to check, I discovered I was right. The other four covers were also hers, and like the first, their designs were simple but arresting, with strong colors. There were no curls or frills, no slanted letters or extra ornament. The aesthetic was tough, masculine, restrained. I returned each book carefully to its original place in the pile, touched the cover of her bed very carefully, and then stood over her dresser for several minutes, listening to the sound of my own breathing. The urge to open it was overpowering. I wanted to see her clothes, her stockings and her underwear. If I hadn’t looked up and seen my hungry expression in the mirror, I would have done it. The man I saw had a haunted, wild look. I backed away from him and fled upstairs.

  My solitude had gradually begun to alter me, to turn me into a man I had not expected, a person far more peculiar than I had ever imagined, a man who hovered in a woman’s room, breathing loudly, with his fingers near, but not touching the pulls on her drawer. I’ve often thought that none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions. I didn’t mean to lie to myself, but I understood that beneath the self I had believed in was another person who wandered in that parallel world Miranda had spoken about—down streets and past houses with another architecture altogether.

  MY ANXIETY CONTINUED. The worst bouts were at night, when I would often wake with a pounding heart after terrifying dreams, but during the day and with my patients I seemed able to keep it in check. I made a point of calling Laura, and during the sultry month of August we saw each other at least twice a week, always on days her son spent with her ex-husband. When she confessed to me in the middle of the month over a plate of gnocchi that she wasn’t ready for “a serious relationship,” I told her plainly that I liked her company but wasn’t advertising myself for the role of second husband. I was happy to be, I said, a transitional object of sorts, one that might ease the way toward future connubial bliss. Like a ragged blanket or bear, I would serve happily until outgrown. Laura laughed, shook her head, and said, “What you really mean is that you don’t mind having a fuck buddy.” I agreed somewhat sheepishly. Released from worries about the nature of our rapport, we were able to devour each other guilt-free, or so I imagined. By the end of the summer, Laura Capelli had crept under my skin. I found myself thinking about the dark hair that curled at the back of her neck, her skin with its hint of green, her booming laugh, her breasts, her mother’s involved recipes for tripe and veal, which she liked to dictate to me in bed, her spot-on imitations of Morton Solomon, an octogenarian analyst we both knew, a man whose slow, sing-song voice, with its unmistakable German accent, droned on and on at countless conferences and meetings as he patiently, painstakingly explicated some point in Freud (splitting of the ego, Ichspaltung, was one of his favorites), her tendency to raise her index finger and shake it at me when she was excited, and the little yelps she let out during her orgasms.

  My downstairs neighbors returned, but I hardly saw them. August was a slow month in publishing, Miranda told me when I met her outside one morning on my way to work. She and Eglantine would be spending time in Massachusetts with “friends”—long weekends mostly. Inga and Sonia left the city, too, for excursions to the Hamptons and Connecticut. I stayed in Brooklyn, rode the subway, inhaling its odors of urine, sweat, and unwashed flesh, and tilted internally toward self-pity.

  AFTER MOVING HER things into a dormitory room at Columbia, Sonia returned on the evening of September tenth and spent the night at her mother’s. According to Inga, the two of them had a pleasant evening, and Sonia seemed to sleep well. The next morning, she woke up, walked into the kitchen, and rather than go to the refrigerator for her habitual orange juice, she went to the window. Inga was reading the newspaper and drinking her coffee. After freezing in front of the pane, Sonia put her hands on either side of her face and shouted, “I don’t want this world! I don’t want it!” Then she sank to her knees and began to sob uncontrollably. Inga tried to hold Sonia. At first she flailed and fought, but after a while Inga took Sonia into her arms and began to rock her. Sonia wept, and her mother rocked through the morning and into the afternoon. Then the girl began to talk. She talked, broke down, talked more, and broke down again.

  The second anniversary opened an internal crack in Sonia, a fissure through which she released the explosive feeling that had horrified her for two years. The conflagration that had burned so many, that had pushed people into the open air, onto the ledges from which they jumped, some of them on fire, had left its unspeakable images inside my niece. Inga told me that during those hours she never let go of her daughter. Even when she had made them each a sandwich, she took Sonia to the kitchen with her and fastened her child’s arms around her waist while she cut and buttered the bread. Sonia didn’t want a world in which buildings fell down and wars were fought for no reason. She didn’t want a brother, either, she told her mother, or that stupid former actress Edie Bly in her life. She hated them, and she wanted her father back. She wanted to tell him she was sorry.

  After I had seen my last patient, I listened to Inga’s phone message and made my way to White Street. By the time I arrived, both mother and daughter were calm, the calm of exhaustion. I noticed that they both moved a little slowly and stiffly, as if their joints ached. Sonia raised her swollen face and looked at me as I put my hand on her shoulder, and then she lifted her arms and placed them around my waist. There wasn’t much to say by then. Sonia’s memories wouldn’t leave her; atrocities would continue to happen in the world every day; Max would not be resurrected; and the boy who might be her brother would not conveniently disappear. If anything had changed, it was that Sonia knew she could survive the power of her own emotion. And so could her mother.

  It wasn’t until I was leaving that I saw the doll. It sat alone among Inga’s books. “You actually did it,” I said. “You bought one of those toys from Lorelei.”

  Inga nodded. “I almost bought a widow, but it seemed too, well, masochistic, so I got this little guy.”

  I leaned forward to look more closely at the boy doll, dressed up in a dark suit and sitting on a wooden chair. His blond head drooped forward, and his small embroidered face seemed pensive.

  We stood for a moment looking at the figure, and then Inga said, “She said his father was struck by lightning. It’s before the funeral.”

  “Why on earth would you want something like that?” I asked.

  Inga patted my face three times very slowly. Her eyes looked hollow. “Don’t worry about it,” she said in a tired voice. “I’m no crazier than I’ve ever been.”

  THAT NIGHT I dreamed I was on the farm, standing near the gra
pe arbor to the left of the outhouse, looking toward the broad rolling fields ahead of me. The dream was colorless. I saw everything in shades of gray. My father was there beside me, but I had no clear image of him, except that he was erect and still young. Although his figure was obscure, I felt him, knew that he stood several feet away from me and was also looking west. Then, as we watched, an explosion burst on the distant horizon and sent a great ragged ball of smoke into the sky. Then there was another, and then another—three huge blasts that filled the sky. From behind us, a voice I recognized as my grandfather’s said, “Queak.” All at once, we were blown backward by some unaccountable force, and my father and I landed inside the house in a cramped enclosure that resembled a cellar or an attic, its beams just above our heads. The room began to rock back and forth violently, and my unseen grandfather spoke again. I knew he was there, but I didn’t turn my head. This time, I heard him pronounce the word “Quake,” followed by “Earthquake.” As I woke, the walls had begun to splinter and break apart.

  Dream economies are frugal. The smoking sky on September eleventh, the television images from Iraq, the bombs that burst on the beach where my father had dug himself a trench in February 1945 burned in unison on the familiar ground of rural Minnesota. Three detonations. Three men of three generations together in a house that was going to pieces, a house I had inherited, a house that shuddered and shook like my sobbing niece and my own besieged body, inner cataclysms I associated with two men who were no longer alive. My grandfather shouts in his sleep. My father shoves his fist through the ceiling. I quake.

  ON OCTOBER NINTH, Burton called me, and in an unsteady voice explained that he had not been in touch because a week and a half earlier his mother had died. If she had lived another month, he said, she would have been ninety years old. I knew only the bare outlines of his family story. Burton’s parents were German Jews who made their way to New York in the late thirties. His mother had been a teacher, I recalled, and his father had held a position in the New York Society for Ethical Culture. My friend had once called himself “a late surprise.” His mother had been over forty when her only child was born. After his father’s death in 1995, Burton had moved into his mother’s apartment in Riverdale, an arrangement that had spared the son from abject poverty and had allowed the increasingly frail Mrs. B. to stay at home.

  When we met a week later, I noticed immediately that my friend looked drier. He was still shiny, but not dripping. I didn’t remark on it, but Burton volunteered that his hyperhidrosis had taken a turn for the better.

  “I feel some trepidation,” he said, “no more than that. I feel acutely uncomfortable mentioning my altered somatic condition to a psychoanalyst, knowing full well that perspiration, or rather the precipitous decline of the same at this point in my life, that is, after my mother’s demise, could be construed as . . .” Burton paused and wiped his forehead, more out of habit, I suspected, than need. He settled on a word. “Symptomatic.”

  “Burton,” I said, “grief has many effects on people. I wouldn’t overinterpret what appears to be a good thing.”

  His cheeks flushed as he studied the tablecloth. “The last month,” he said, “she didn’t know me.”

  “That’s hard.”

  He nodded. “Stroke. Hemorrhagic. She changed personality.” He frowned. “Got sweeter. The laughter distressed me—inappropriate mirth, chuckling, giggling, smiling all the time, that sort of thing. Preferable to anger. That must be acknowledged. Read about a patient who started biting after a stroke. Very hard on the family. Broke the skin.” Burton looked up at me. “It hardly needs to be said, and yet I shall say it. As she declined, she disappeared. I missed the woman, despite her many, her many ambiguities. Yes,” he said, “I longed for the difficult, perplexed, tormented, acerbic woman of . . .” He hesitated, searching for the words. “Of, of yore,” he said finally.

  We were the last customers to leave the restaurant that night. I could feel the waiters grow restless as Burton told the story of his mother’s death and what he referred to as his “revised circumstances.” The apartment now belonged to him, and his inheritance, although not lavish, would “unpinch” him for a good many years to come. “It might even,” he told me with a thoughtful, cryptic smile, “do a little good in the world for a person of quality.”

  Before we parted on the sidewalk to hail cabs traveling in opposite directions, Burton gripped my hand, pumped it, and said, “To articulate the value, to me, of our renewed friendship, one that had been in hiatus, interrupted, as it were, for many years, is quite impossible. My gratitude is all the more replete now as I wrestle, metaphorically of course, with the Beast Melancholia.”

  As I sped down the FDR Drive, I looked out the window at the immense Pepsi-Cola sign suspended in blackness on the other side of the East River, and I found it beautiful. At that moment, the glowing emblem of a slightly older form of American capitalism was suffused with a feeling of loss, as if the sign reflected a collective wish that had now vanished. It was foolish to feel any emotion in response to an advertisement for soda pop, but when its image had dimmed, I thought to myself, They’re all dying now, our fathers and our mothers—the immigrants and the exiles, the soldiers and the refugees, the boys and the girls—of “yore.”

  ON OCTOBER SECOND, Ms. L. announced with a smile that she was “finished” with me. She had consulted a crystal healer and had joined a self-help group for “survivors of abuse,” people who “understood” her. Some of them had perfect memories from when they were one and two years old. It wasn’t the first time she had latched onto the clichés of popular culture, but that day I realized that the primitive distinctions trumpeted in the press and on the Internet fed her split world. As she spoke to me, I heard in her voice the remote quality of ready-made diction, the language of propaganda, demagogues, and newsmen on television. She wasn’t there with me. I told her this and asked whether she had thought through her decision. She screamed “Yes,” stood up from her chair, spat in my face, and rushed through the door, not forgetting to slam it.

  I wiped the saliva off my face with a Kleenex and sat motionless in my chair until the session ended. I knew she wouldn’t return. After all, I was only the last in a long line of doctors and therapists she had abandoned in a rage: Leave them before they leave you. What I mourned as I sat there were the moments of opening, her wrenching movements toward another way of being. However deluded she may have been, Ms. L. was a forgotten child from the beginning. Her scars may not have been physical, as she wished them to be, but they cut to her core. The ostensible crisis had hinged at least in part on memory, fragile and opaque as it is. Literal physical torture at the hands of her mother would have justified her pain, preserved her identity in that immutable category “the abused child.” The thought alone had brought her consolation. It conformed perfectly to her inner reality, a structure so rigid and frail that spontaneous combustion was always imminent. All this I knew, but there was another strain between us—fear, my fear. Acutely sensitive, Ms. L. had picked up the odor of something I myself didn’t understand.

  ON SATURDAY EVENING of the following week, I walked home from Laura’s around midnight. I paused at the bottom of the stairs to dig my keys from my pocket, heard urgent whispering, the sound of the door to the garden apartment closing, and before I could register what was happening, I found myself face to face with Jeffrey Lane. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Hey, how are you, man?”

  I nodded at him. “I’m all right. How are you?”

  “All right,” he said.

  I looked down at my keys.

  “Well,” he said. “See ya later.” He moved past me, and once he was on the sidewalk, he broke into a run. I watched him. Exactly why I can’t say, but I didn’t move until I had seen his figure disappear. If I hadn’t waited, I wouldn’t have heard Miranda crying. The shades were drawn, but the window was open a crack and, as I took the steps like a man with lead shoes, her low sobs accompanied me.

  After I had
let myself in, I sat in my green chair, where I usually did my reading, and for the first time in a long time I had no thoughts of any kind. For an hour or so, I listened to the noises of the night—traffic, muffled voices from someone’s television, distant music, and people laughing down the block. But I didn’t hear Miranda. Perhaps she had dried her tears and gone to bed.

  INGA’S CALL CAME after a long day. I had interviewed two patients who had been referred to me, and that afternoon Mr. R. had told me his wife was leaving him. Mrs. R. didn’t want the altered Mr. R., the man who had told me that the world had taken on a strange new brightness. He laughed more, hurt more, and saw more. He also wanted more sex, a development that the object of his revived libido resisted. “She liked me better as a stiff.” I was reading my notes from the session when the phone rang, and I heard Inga’s passionate, cracking voice.

  “Lorelei called. Lisa wants to see us. She’s going to tell us the story. I just know it. We can go this weekend. She’s sick. She may be dying, but she refuses to go to the hospital.”

  Her excitement annoyed me. “I have a conference,” I said.

  “You’re giving a paper?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t have to go.”

  “Inga,” I said. “You go, and tell me what happens.”

  “It’s you she wants to see. She won’t see me without you.”

  “What?”

  “You’re the son, the man, the heir. I’m sure that’s it. The daughter doesn’t count.”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Are you all right, Erik?” Inga asked. Her voice was softer.

  I could feel my lungs tighten and the tension inside me grow. “Yes,” I said.