He takes in Sally lying narcotized on the sofa, and then, after following me into the kitchen for a glass of water, the smashed cup on the tile floor.
“She’s been running a fever,” I explain through the epoxy of my lips. “It’s been rough sledding for her—especially in this heat.”
In response to Jean-Paul’s expression of concern, I add, with a haste that could be interpreted as callous: “She’ll be fine.”
We sit down face to face at the table and I am able to pick up that Jean-Paul is uncharacteristically nervous. He has read my novel about the reporter who covers his own crimes. I completely forgot that I had given it to him, three or four months ago it must have been, in its pre-edited version, with all the unseemly emotion that I have been erasing still intact on the page.
Jean-Paul talks excitedly about the wonderful movie it will make, “a story about identity, about how we see ourselves and how we try to get others to see us, a classic movie,” he says, “a noir but not stylized like a noir because that’s a trap that dozens of filmmakers have lost their shirts falling into.”
Trying to act attentive, I build my face into what I hope comes across as my most engaged crinkled expression, then feel the tremor of an oceanic yawn coming on, and devote all the feeble force of my concentration to keeping it from breaking the surface.
“With your permission, Michael, I would like to option the property and develop it into a film. Would you be willing, under a separate deal, to write the screenplay?”
The property. The screenplay.
“That would be…wonderful.”
“Excellent! I’ll be in touch with your agent to hash out the terms. As long as I know you’re on board.”
My agent. Am I still on her radar? My last communication with her was to convey my decision to take my novel off the market—a message left on her answering machine to which she never responded.
“I have to tell you, Michael, you’ve become so admirably calm. If I had any doubts about entrusting you with this project, they have been completely dispelled.”
He rises, flushed, pleased, enjoying his sweat now, it seems, like a successful hunter or athlete.
“Get well soon, Sally,” he says, and starts off on the descent to Bank Street.
After my experience on Sally’s meds, I press Dr. Lensing to wean her from them even more quickly than planned. I offer the example of my brother Steve, who has ingested, by my calculation, more than six million milligrams of Thorazine over the past thirty years.
“They gave him sledgehammer doses,” I say. “It went on for too long and I think it may have permanently changed him, quite apart from his emotional problems. It’s true that Sally’s concentration remains poor,” I add, “but how can it be otherwise when the medication makes concentration impossible?”
Lensing listens politely. I become uncomfortably aware of the fervor in my voice, and suddenly feel observed, like a patient. I decide not to run the risk of telling her of my experiment with Sally’s drugs. We are alone in her office and I am sitting on the couch where Sally usually sprawls, the two of us half blinded by the sunlight, Lensing with a new hairstyle, I notice, the blondness shot through with black streaks, and the tattoo of a small exotic bird on the back of her ankle which I note for the first time. Hints of her other life…
“I’m starting to gain momentum with Sally,” she tells me after a decorous pause. “She doesn’t want to be isolated, her impulse is outward, which I can tell you is extremely good news. Her desire is to be understood, and not only by us, she wants to understand herself as well. She’s still attached to her mania, of course. She’s remembering the intensity of her experience, and she’s doing her damnedest to keep that intensity alive. She thinks that if she gives it up, she’ll lose the great abilities she believes she’s acquired. It’s a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. There are things she’s not telling me, I suspect, because she doesn’t think I’ll believe her, and she doesn’t want to be disbelieved. Especially not by me.”
“What sort of things?” I ask.
“Oh…incidents that may or may not have actually occurred. Voices perhaps.”
“Voices?”
“It’s a possibility, yes. Don’t be shocked. It happens sometimes in cases of acute mania. The voices may be warning her not to repeat what they say. You’ll think it strange to hear me say this, but I actually feel encouraged by them. They provide an opportunity for Sally to comprehend that this tempest in which she’s been living was created by her.”
I tell her of the plan Pat and I have made to take Sally for an outing. A day at the beach.
“That will be splendid. For all of you,” says Lensing. She advises me to buy sunglasses for Sally. “You want to keep her in the shade, away from brightness. You want the sun to go down.”
Laughing, she brushes something invisible from her bare arm. Starkly pale, Lensing herself appears to have gone out of her way to avoid sunlight.
“And oh, yes, be sure she wears plenty of sunscreen. Antipsychotic medication makes the skin highly vulnerable to being burned.”
And so, in a rented car, we embark on our day trip, to the beach at Rockaway where I lived as a boy. Restless and volatile, Sally argues with me from the rear seat in a weaponized voice that makes my stomach turn over. “Are you monitoring my symptoms, Father? Are you inside my head?”
She leans toward me from the back of the car, her hands gripping the head rest, her mouth an inch or two from my ear. It is more than a noise, it is her noise, our noise, that impostor’s voice, with its pressurized bristle—how deeply I have grown to hate it!
Pat occupies the passenger seat beside me, concentrating on the book she is reading—another arcane volume to fuel her choreography, this one by the medieval alchemist Paracelsus—tuning us out.
As we are crossing the drawbridge that connects Rockaway Beach to Brooklyn, Pat says, “That’s enough, Sally.”
Sally fumes in silence for a few seconds, then revs up again.
I grip the wheel so tightly my hands begin to burn. I am driving slowly, plodding along, afraid to speed up, to let go. I would explode at Sally if it would shut her up, but I’ve learned to wait for these attacks to pass over, and not to push against them.
Pat, with an expression of infinite forbearance, returns to her book.
We make it to the beach, crammed with day-trippers like us, half-naked, dripping with salt and oil. It’s the same pageant that used to thrill me in August when I was growing up in this part of town and the entire city seemed to travel to my outpost of New York, laying claim to every inch of sand—the same sand I walked on when the beaches were deserted the rest of the year.
I want to tell Pat and Sally of those summers, when, waking at just after dawn, I would set out wooden umbrellas and chairs for the paying regulars, then gather them up again at dusk, chaining them under a tarp. Afternoons, I sold Eskimo pies from a steel box with dry ice in it that I strapped across my shoulder. I was too slight for this kind of work, and I would invariably end up dragging the box through the sand, but I wanted to be out there among the show-offs and fast girls, the screaming kids in the surf, and the transistor radios blaring a competing cacophony of doo-wop, jazz, soul, and rock and roll. I want to paint a picture of that world for Pat and Sally, but it’s as if I’m talking about someone who told me these stories, and I’m unable to capture their attention.
We trudge across the hot sticky sand until we find a space to lay out our towels thirty feet from the water. Pat continues reading. Sally takes a walk along the edge of the surf looking like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, with her sunglasses and high-wattage gaiety, slapping the water with her feet and flapping her arms like a bird at liftoff—an image I may once have found endearing, if overdramatic, but that I can no longer see as anything but ominous. I try to see her through the eyes of the strangers who are watching her—a girl who is unapproachable in her self-absorption, beyond sexual provo
cation or insult.
I collapse on the sand. Pat lies next to me, studying her book with an intensity that annoys me because I believe it’s feigned. Maybe she’s hoping, as I am, that order will miraculously restore itself, that what is skewed will somehow be set right. We exchange a strained glance from our respective towels. All that we used to look forward to at the end of a day—the shared anecdote, the random event analyzed and recounted, the narrative order, if not meaning, that our conversations seemed to give to our workaday lives, the jokes and arcane put-downs that were really expressions of tenderness because they bespoke the extent to which we took each other in—all the erotic, argumentative energies that supplied the frisson of our marriage have been submerged under the fallout of Sally’s psychosis.
I ask her with a trace of facetiousness whether the book she is reading is interesting. “You seem so absorbed in it,” I say.
“Why do I feel criticized by that observation?”
I close my eyes and listen to the hubbub of the beach, and the jetliners rumbling in and out of JFK Airport only a few miles away—familiar childhood sounds.
When we get back to Bank Street our landlord Eric is there waiting for me. A shiver of animosity passes between him and Pat as she disappears into the bedroom at the back of the apartment with Sally—to protect her from Eric’s scrutiny, I’m sure.
Eric seems wrought up and peevish, and I have an idea of why when I spot him holding a copy of a literary magazine with a story of mine.
“You must be pleased about this,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t give it much thought. To be honest, I’m not sure if I even like the story.”
This was the wrong answer: to dismiss its importance only magnifies the imagined insult. Why haven’t I done more to get him published is Eric’s perennial complaint, though I have taken pains to explain to him that since I am not an editor I have no power to do so.
“Have you looked at my novel?” he asks.
I completely forgot about it! Yet Eric’s novel is more central to our tenant–landlord relationship than the rent. He is counting on me to make a favorable pronouncement about his latest rewrite, though at a glance I could see that, like the last time he gave it to me, very little has been changed.
“I was planning to read it tonight.”
He looks resentful and hurt, and I find myself thinking of my own novel which I have been slashing with the illusion that I am improving it.
“Let’s go have a drink,” he says.
We walk over to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street and sit at a table under the crude, gray, unframed portrait of Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death here in 1953.
Eric drains his first bourbon in two gulps, and then regales me with his latest theory about his tenants: we love the address but hate our apartments, a paradox that makes us reluctant to move on even when it’s a matter of personal growth for us to do so.
“My building is meant to be a way station,” he says. “Eventually you have to leave. That’s your moment of truth—either you have the guts to take the next step for yourself and relocate or you hang on, defeated.”
I think I know what’s coming, yet can’t help but admire the acrobatic logic that has allowed Eric to blend his position as landlord with his higher vision of himself as the benevolent director of our lives. His tenants are the characters he really cares about, not the ones in his novel; on more than one occasion I’ve seen him act against his own financial interests in order to deepen his involvement with us, asserting himself as a central factor in our lives. After five years at Bank Street, my moment of truth has come: it’s time for me—and Pat and Sally—to move on.
He delivers the news with the demeanor of a kind person who has been forced against his will to be harsh—grinning uneasily, avoiding eye contact, apologetic and awkward. “I’m only pointing out what you already know. It’s for your own good. Anyone can see Pat’s not happy here. She wants to make her own home with you, and she’s right, you should. She only resents me for standing in the way.”
He reminds me that when I moved in we agreed this day would come. “I’m not double-crossing you. It was part of our deal.”
This is true. I’m indebted to Eric for offering me a place to live after my marriage with Robin broke up and money was scarce.
“I’ll need some time,” I say.
“How much time? Two months? Ninety days? Let’s set a date. It’s always better that way.”
“All I can promise is that I’ll move as soon as I can.”
Eric has to defer; the timetable, at least, will be mine. Even though I have no lease, New York City’s housing laws make eviction difficult. I could stir up legal hassles for Eric if I reneged on our deal, something I have no intention of doing.
We drift out onto Hudson Street and Eric immediately peels off. “I’ll be staying uptown tonight,” he says, mentioning the apartment of a mutual friend.
Impressive of him to have had the foresight to consider this detail.
Returning to the apartment, I feel a bitter tipsy pleasure at the extent to which my world has fallen apart.
“Freedom,” says Sally, tapping the side of her skull. “Freedome. Free mind. Think about it, Father.”
She plugs her ears with the Walkman which she has furnished with a fresh set of batteries, and slides to the floor under the window with her chin resting on her knees.
Pat is on the phone.
I take in the partially stripped molding, the water-stained ceiling, the bandaged windows—a collage of disrepair. Our only contribution to the decor are the bookshelves I built into the walls; our other attempts to spruce up the place have been invariably discouraged. The apartment is like Eric’s novel, I think, it exists as a token of the future, a perpetual possibility, incomplete and therefore unthreatened by a final verdict of its worth.
All we need to do is put our books in boxes, pack a few suitcases, and we’ll be gone without a trace.
But where are we going? There is little prospect of finding a place in New York we can afford.
Pat emerges from the bathroom where she has been talking on the phone, another quirk of the apartment. It had been a bedroom previously and is large enough for a clothes dryer, a wooden bureau, and a huge bathtub with a wide, tiled ledge on which rests various books, shampoos, soaps, and candles. During its conversion, the apartment’s sole phone jack was left there, next to the toilet.
“You reek of bourbon,” she says. “Which can only mean that your crony isn’t far behind.”
“He’s not staying with us tonight.”
“No complaints from me on that score.”
“He wants us out, Pat.
“I’m sure it was just one of your lovers’ squabbles.”
“It’s for real. He took me to the White Horse, bought me a couple of drinks, and evicted us.”
“Oh. I see.”
She actually sounds pleased. In a spasm of suspiciousness it comes to me that she has engineered this in some way, nurturing her little battles with Eric, and too contemptuous of the both of us to pay her share of the “rent” in the form of propitiating him with subtly subservient gestures of friendship.
“You practically forced this to happen!”
“How? By refusing to pander to Eric like some kind of courtier? Or by expecting him to treat us with basic courtesy even if we’re nothing more than squatters to him?”
“It’s our home,” I say miserably.
“It was never home. That’s what you fail to understand.” In a goading caustic voice she blurts out something about the “traumatizing” end of my “little bachelor paradise.”
I slap her face, a hard nasty snap.
With a quaking, startled screech she throws a boot at my head. It hits the mark, knocking off my glasses. My head is roaring. The tensions of the summer seem to mass in me, and it is as if I am walking beside myself, hollow and enraged.
I pound the top of the table until my hand th
robs, while Pat stands there watching me, smug or terrified or both, shaking her head in a tsk-tsk of incredulity, crossing her arms over her chest as if my loss of control proves her most uncharitable opinion of me and she is waiting for the brute hurricane either to kill her or to pass over.
The room is a blur. I grope along the floor for my glasses, then give up in a thick myopic mist.
“Look at yourself,” she says.
I lunge at her, pushing her against the wall.
“Don’t touch me!” she shouts, and runs into the bathroom, locking the door.
I kick and smash at it, calling for her to come out, until the panels splinter and I take each cracked piece and break it into smaller pieces and the better part of the door is lying in a pile of spearlike fragments.
Pat is sitting in the dry tub, with her hands around her legs, watching me with an odd mix of dread and anthropological detachment.
I sit down numbly on the floor for what seems like a long time. Then four policemen come panting into the apartment, in a racket of jiggling equipment, let in the door by Sally.
I’ve forgotten about Sally! She looks shrunken and stunned.
How could I have done this to her?
Sweating in their bulletproof vests, laden with guns and ammo and flashlights and billy clubs and handcuffs and ticket books and notepads on which to write the night’s crimes, the cops quickly clock the scene. Their right hands hover reflexively over the holsters of their Glock semiautomatics, while they make small talk, maintaining a casual air.
“You should tell the landlord to put an elevator in this place,” one of them says to me.
“Are you going to take him to jail?” asks Sally.
“Only if he’s committed a crime, young lady.” And at that moment, the speaker recognizes Sally. He’s the cop who removed her from the middle of the roadway on Hudson Street and brought her here with Cass. He’s the one who hid the knives.
Hurry Down Sunshine Page 16