The Doctor's Daughter
Page 11
His seedy street was becoming gentrified, with interesting little restaurants every few doors, it seemed. Scott tried to use my glancing interest as a delaying tactic. “The neighborhood’s really picking up,” he said, conversationally, “isn’t it?”
I stopped dead and he almost went past me. Then he did a goofy little double take and shuffled to my side, but I didn’t smile. “Scott,” I said. “Listen to me. I’m very upset and I think you know why.”
He looked miserable, I was glad to see, pale and slack-jawed. “Ma,” he said, “it was stupid.”
“Yes, it was. Are you doing drugs, Scott? Tell me the truth.”
“No. No, not really. I mean me and Jeff and Amy do a little pot now and then, but that’s all.”
“So why did you take the paperweight?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I told you, it was stupid.”
“But what were you thinking? Were you planning on selling it?”
He appeared shocked. “No!” he protested.
“Well, was it because you were angry with Dad? I’m really trying to understand this.”
“Listen, Ma,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything. I just saw it there on the table, and it was like there was a light inside it, sort of blinking at me? And . . . and I put it in my pocket.”
“Scotty, you’re nineteen now, not twelve. You don’t just act on every crazy impulse. And that wasn’t some candy bar or key chain you took; it was your father’s precious possession. It was in our home.” I thought of Ev’s innocent joy in finding his missing paperweight, and how the home I’d mentioned with such solemnity had changed. The lies I’d told the night before had disqualified me from confiding my secrets to Ev, of receiving his understanding in return. Some of that, anyway, was Scott’s fault.
And he looked guilty. “I know, I know,” he said, pacing around me. “I feel like shit. I’m really sorry.”
I felt like shit, too. Scott’s eyelashes were spiky and damp, and his pallor had turned to an agitated pink. But I didn’t have the familiar urge to patch things up, to make him feel better at any cost. “I’m not covering for you anymore,” I said, grabbing his arm roughly to make him stand still. “Do you hear me?” Both of us were close to tears.
“Yeah,” he said in a muffled voice. “I hear you.”
“Okay, then. I’m going home now.” And I hailed a cab and ran to it, without kissing him first, without even saying goodbye.
The following afternoon I went downtown again, to Dr. Joie’s office at NYU. I would never have recognized her out of a medical context; she was Ingrid Bergman playing Golda Meir. Her nurse was gone for the day, she told me, and she sent me right to a dressing cubicle to put on a gown.
When I came out, she was waiting for me. “Let’s take a look at you,” she said. “We can talk later.”
Then she led me into the sonogram room and told me to lie on the table. She examined my breasts quickly and lightly with long, cool fingers. I was reminded of touch typing. I sat up, I lay down again, I raised my arms and lowered them, and she made a few little X’s on both of my breasts with a black marker. “Do you drink much coffee?” she asked. “Do you like chocolate?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Do you feel something?” A dumb question with all those tattooed X’s circling my nipples.
“Lots of things, nothing in particular. Now show me what you felt.” And I took her hand and guided it to the thickening on my left breast. She closed her eyes as she explored the area, as if to visualize what she was feeling. “Let’s skip the mammogram and go right to the sonogram,” she said.
“Do not pass Go,” I said, inanely. “Do not collect two hundred dollars.” Why hadn’t I told Ev about this, at least? He would have been here with me.
“This will be cold,” Dr. Joie said as she squeezed jelly onto my breast. She pushed the probe around the right breast and then the left, and I watched on the bedside screen as the shadowy images changed, and something that sounded like a paparazzo’s camera clicked and clicked.
“Look at this,” she said, holding the probe still and painfully deep on the outer rim of my left breast, and I saw a cluster of darkness that made my breath catch. “These are only cysts. All that caffeine, I’ll bet. You don’t have cancer.”
“Really?” I said, as she wiped my breasts briskly with a paper cloth. The cold jelly felt oddly like the cooling fluids of sex, and that moment held something like the bitter sweetness of postcoital tristesse.
“Get dressed,” Dr. Joie said, patting my shoulder, “and we’ll talk.”
This wasn’t the room in which she’d talked to my mother, but that other one couldn’t have been very different: the family photographs, the medical books, diplomas and licenses from Montreal and Chicago and New York. My mother’s news had been bad, and mine was good. The relief of it filled me like helium, and I expected my voice to be high and silly. “Thank you,” I said, sounding surprisingly normal and inadequately grateful.
I was waiting to be dismissed with some standard reminders about the caffeine and a follow-up visit, but Dr. Joie leaned back in her chair and said, “You were in school when your mother became ill, weren’t you?”
For the first time I could see vestiges of the doctor’s younger self in her eyes, in their open, frank expression. “Yes,” I said. “I was at Swarthmore. When she died I was in graduate school.”
“What did you study?” she asked.
“Writing. I was going to be a writer.”
“And?”
“And I wasn’t good enough.”
“That must have been hard,” she said. “What did you end up doing?”
I hesitated. Book doctor, that sly title I’d taken, seemed especially frivolous and fraudulent in that setting. “I became an editor,” I said at last. “As close to the kingdom as I could get. And I have a family.”
She smiled, and I remembered a phone call from my mother when she was recuperating from her mastectomy. “I have a wonderful new doctor,” she’d said.
“What’s so wonderful about him?” I asked, disdaining my mother’s thrall to the princes of medicine.
“Her,” my mother said. “Do you know the first thing she asked me, Alice? ‘What do you want to do with the rest of your life?’ ”
I didn’t see anything so remarkable about that, but sitting in Dr. Joie’s office, I realized how atypically friendly and nonclinical her question was, and that by asking it she had given my mother hope of having more life.
“My mother really liked you,” I said.
“I was fond of her, too.”
“Then, how do you do what you do?” I asked. “I mean, when people die.”
“Helping people to die is in the job description.” She paused, and then she said, “You know, your father and I disagreed at the end about your mother’s care.” I sat forward a little. “He let her go on too long.”
“Yes,” I said. “Why do you think he did that?”
She shrugged. “His training, maybe, you know, life über alles. But lots of things motivate people to hang on beyond reason—the complications of love, of guilt, or just an inability to let go.”
“Did you ever read my mother’s work?”
“Yes, I did. She gave me a couple of journals with her poems in them. I liked them.” My eyes grazed the bookshelves behind her, and she said, “They’re in my library, at home.”
“Dr. Joie, did you happen to read a poem of hers about feeding the ducks and geese in Central Park? I think it was also meant to be about losing hope.”
She was thoughtful, and then she shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
“I know. Of course.”
“She never spoke directly about giving up, you know. I think she was afraid of disappointing your father. But maybe she did put it into a poem.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And you never raised the subject with her?”
“That’s a dance where I always let the patient lead.”
“That sounds like me. Why?”
I took a shaky breath. “I’ve had this peculiar feeling, since April.” I put my hand to my chest. “In here. It’s a sort of hollow aching, as if something is really wrong. I thought it might be breast cancer—an atypical symptom—because of my mother, my family history—and now I know it isn’t. But it wasn’t just the fear of having cancer, either, because the feeling’s still there.” And it was, adamantly there, even as I spoke.
“What do you think it might be?” she asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“Ah, but it’s your feeling,” she said.
My mother did have someone like Violet in her life.
11
In mid-July Michael lost his job at GM and acquired an apparent writer’s block. He had extra time on his hands now, he said, and enough unemployment insurance and some savings to subsist for a while. I kept receiving genial and entertaining e-mails from him, but no new manuscript pages and no explanation for their absence. It was as if the final pages of a published book I was avidly reading had fallen out, and I might never get to know what happened next.
Of course I wanted to find out where Caitlin was; Michael had made that part of the narrative terrifically suspenseful, and Caitlin herself, Joe’s beloved Cake, an intriguing figure. Why did she always choose such selfish and unstable men? And what did the three small tattoos on her body— the blue circle on her ankle, the white bracelet around her wrist, and the yellow half-moon on her back—represent? But more than anything else, I wanted to know why Joe felt so responsible for Caitlin’s disappearance.
When other writers I’d edited developed blocks, I would carefully feel my way around the problem. It never seemed like a good idea to just ask if they were stuck; someone superstitious might take that as the laying-on of a curse. Until most writers are forced to admit they’re blocked, it simply isn’t true. It’s merely a lull in the creative process, a time for dreaming and gestation. And who’s to say that isn’t so? To paraphrase Dr. Joie, it’s one dance where I always let the writer lead.
So I wrote chatty, cheerful notes back to Michael, without even mentioning his manuscript, the elephant in the room. And I resisted a startling temptation to bring up that other pressing, but much too personal matter, the steadfast worried feeling in my chest. So instead I spoke of the humid weather in Manhattan; the arrest of another prominent athlete on assault charges; and a couple of interesting pieces I’d read in The New Yorker, one on the patenting of ideas, and the other on St. Petersburg.
Perhaps because I had more time to myself now, too, I was writing more often in my notebook—nothing shapely enough to be considered a story yet, but the cast of characters had grown. A fictional version of Dr. Joie, and an amalgam of Michael, Joe Packer, and Tom Roman had been added to that someone who now was and wasn’t my mother. And all of their lives were loosely connected by certain details. I’d forgotten how pleasurable it was to unroll the ribbon of language onto the page, especially when there was no pressure to do so, and no one to cast a negative opinion about what was written. My notebook had become a place to retreat, which I badly needed since the big blowup with Ev a couple of weeks before.
He’d come home from work one night, slamming the door hard behind him. His footsteps were heavy, and he didn’t call out to me as he usually did. I was sitting up in bed, writing, and I quickly closed my notebook and shoved it into the night table drawer. I didn’t call to him, either. When I came out of the bedroom, he was standing in the hallway, yanking off his tie. “Oh, so you’re home,” he said flatly, and I could hear the scarcely controlled anger in his voice.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, knowing the answer already, and wanting and dreading to have it said and over with.
“Your son paid me a visit at the office today. To apologize. I guess he figured you’d busted him.”
Your son. “He’s your son, too,” I said, sullenly. I wasn’t even going to attempt to deny the charges.
“Yeah,” Ev said. “A little detail you seem to have forgotten.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about the way you shut me out, Alice, and the way you’ve lied to me.”
“Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry that I lied to you about the Clichy. It was really stupid.” Wasn’t that what Scott had said about taking it?
“What else have you lied about?” he asked.
I thought immediately of Violet asking that day in the diner if I was having an affair. “What? Nothing!” I told Ev in an outraged squeal, although I felt strangely guilty, and probably looked as if I needed to be hosed down. “And I didn’t even know for sure where the Clichy was until it turned up on the windowsill that day.”
“But you didn’t bother sharing it with me, then, either, did you? And you make me out to be some kind of monster to my own children.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do! You feel as if you have to protect Scott from me. What have I ever done to him?”
“You’re exaggerating, as usual,” I said. “But you are harder on Scott than on the other two.”
“That’s because Suzy and Jer don’t break my balls the way Scotty does.”
“There,” I said. “It’s just that kind of hostility and crude language I’m trying to spare him.”
“Is that because of his royal blood?”
“What?”
“Like yours. They may have sheltered you from ‘bad’ words back at the palace, but the rest of us have to live in the real world.”
As he spoke I envisioned the house in Riverdale, the gated gardens where men were bent over hoeing weeds, the windows of my room with the white curtains billowing. He was right, he was wrong! “Fuck you,” I said, shocking both of us. I had never said anything like that to Ev before, and it seemed to turn every loving act between us right onto its head.
“Ha!” he countered. “And I’m the one who’s crude.”
“Crude and cruel,” I said. “You pick on Scott. He’s your little scapegoat, isn’t he?”
“Get off it, Al. That’s bullshit and you know it. I’m just reacting to his con-man behavior. You’re always covering for that kid, and believe me, you aren’t doing him any favors.”
“And you’re always so critical of him.”
“Because he screws up all the time, that’s why! We gave him an expensive education and what has he done with it? He’s not even going to college.”
“Not everybody is college material.”
“So is he going to work in the stockroom at Tower the rest of his life?”
“There are worse things,” I said, although I couldn’t think of any at that moment.
“Jesus, you’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t understand why you hate your own child.” That was untrue and unfair. The moment I said it, I saw Ev holding Scotty’s forehead over the toilet when he was little and throwing up. I couldn’t do it because I’d always begin to retch myself. But I was still reeling from what he’d said about me, as if Scott and I were a couple of helpless siblings against a brutal parent, and I wouldn’t take it back.
“How can you say that?” Ev shouted. “I love him! That’s why I want him to grow up and take some responsibility for his own actions.”
“You’re just jealous of his freedom,” I said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He’s young and he can still do anything he wants to with his life, that’s what you can’t stand. And what have you done with your expensive education?” I added, because I couldn’t stop myself. “Where is your brilliant career?” Even before I saw the stricken expression on Ev’s face, I knew that I’d just had the final, fatal word in our arg
ument.
We hardly spoke to each other after that. And then Ev, too, began to appear in my notebook, but only as a minor character, a cynical dentist named Earl whom the other characters visit. He causes them pain, and stuffs their mouths with cotton and clamps, so that they can’t speak or even cry out. His office becomes a masochist’s mecca for his patients, who think deeply about their own troubled lives as he works torturously on their teeth. Across the top of the first page of my notebook, I scrawled “The Dentist’s Chair.” Now I had a villain of sorts, and a title, even if I didn’t have an actual plot.
But venting myself on the page didn’t make me feel much better about Ev and me. Our life together didn’t seem authentic anymore, and I couldn’t help comparing our marriage to my parents’. When you grow up in Eden, everything elsewhere can seem pretty flawed. And Ev and I had both become really miserable. He was still furious with me, he’d implied I wasn’t trustworthy, and he’d taken to sleeping in our sons’ old bedroom, which served as a guest room now. I noted that he’d chosen Scott’s bed, and sometimes I wandered around the apartment at night with my pillow and a book, looking for another place to lie down that wasn’t the lonely, mine-strewn field of our own king-sized bed.
One night I could hear Ev moaning in his sleep as I passed the boys’ room, and I almost went inside to wake him and try to talk about everything. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My own anger was still alive under all that despair, and I guess I was afraid of intensifying his. Besides, it was our style to wait things out, to let them blow over by themselves, and then just go on.
When I told Violet what was happening at home, leaving out the final awful thing I’d said to Ev, she still took his side. “Well, you did lie to him,” she said. “That wasn’t exactly a vote of confidence.”