by Pamela Erens
“That’s my favorite Freud,” he says. “There’s nothing more interesting, is there, than everyday life. Mistakes, oversights, misunderstandings. Every day we testify against ourselves.”
I acknowledge that it’s an interesting book.
“You’ve read it, then? Do you believe, like Freud, that there are no accidents, that we intend everything we do?”
I say that I’m not sure. To change the subject, I ask him why he no longer practices psychoanalysis.
He hesitates, toys with the belt on his robe. “My patients always expected me to end their suffering,” he says. “You can’t end suffering. That’s what Buddhism knows.”
If I were to stretch out on the bed right now Joku would be seated behind me, just like the analyst he used to be. Perhaps I would begin to tell him things. But there is no time even to imagine that because we both hear a light knock on the open door and look up to see a woman holding a camera.
Joku greets her and explains that she has come today to take pictures for the summer brochure. Her name is Kim. Kim, a woman of about forty-five with loose long hair and no makeup, waves hello to me. In her long skirt and oversized sweater, she resembles many of the female residents here. I am trying to decide whether I’m supposed to make some pleasantry or whether I am just supposed to leave, when a flash goes off. I am stunned and lift my hand to ward off the explosion, which has already passed.
Kim backs up to get another angle with her camera.
“No more, please,” says Joku, waving her away. “Go and get some of the pretty faces out there. There’s a group at the teahouse right now. I’ll meet you there shortly.”
When Kim is gone Joku says that he’s glad we have a few minutes; the abbot has asked him to speak to me. He wants to know what my plans are.
So it has finally come; the abbot’s charity is running dry. I murmur the response I have prepared over the days and weeks. Perhaps, I suggest, the abbey could use a full-time gardener. I already care for the bonsai, and I work daily with both the vegetables and the ornamental plants. Everyone seems pleased with my work. The outside service the abbey employs to handle the landscaping must be expensive. It would save money to use me instead. I would stay on, as an employee, but I would not expect to be paid, just to be supplied with my room and board.
Joku looks puzzled. “Do you have nowhere at all to go?”
“No.”
His eyes grow anxious. He stands up, smoothing his robe, and says that he will speak to the abbot. Then he asks me if I want to borrow the book.
I have forgotten all about Freud, still clutched in my hand. I shake my head, give it over. It doesn’t contain any of the answers I need.
Ten
I awakened at dawn on Christmas Day after a broken sleep and looked out onto the empty street, anxious to go out. The snowplows had been through, but on the cars and balconies the snow still looked unexpectedly pretty and fresh. My eyes stung and I coughed blackened flecks into a tissue. Coffee seemed only to intensify the taste of ash. When I shut off the kitchen tap there was perfect silence in the room, in the entire building, and yet I had the uneasy sense that somewhere the walls were still secretly smoldering, still issuing smoky poisons. I brushed my teeth twice, then bathed.
Central Park West was bare of pedestrians, the air cold but less dry and bitter than the air inside my apartment. There was something hospitable in the atmosphere, an invitation. I could see thirty blocks north to Morningside Heights and twenty blocks south to Columbus Circle, where an electronic display atop a tall building blinked out the temperature and the time. Except for an occasional car jolting past, it was quiet. Holiday mornings—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—always had this feel about them for me, as if overnight the people who lived in the apartment buildings had been stolen away and only the caretakers were left: the doormen shoveling snow, the garbagemen claiming bags. I walked downtown enjoying this feeling of emptiness, lazily studying the salt-whitened surface of the road, the dirty stone facades, a banner advertising a show at the New-York Historical Society. I rolled a lemon drop over and over in my mouth. When I reached the southernmost entrance to the park, Merchants’ Gate, I finally turned toward the green. Merchants’ Gate, Scholars’ Gate, Farmers’ Gate, Engineers’ Gate: the names are carved into the stone wall circling the park, Olmsted’s tribute to the people whose labors built the city. Olmsted fought for the simplicity of these entrances, mere gaps in the wall, against the artists and politicians of his day who lobbied for grand, ornate portals. He’d had to battle such embroiderers, such meddlers, from the beginning. No one, it seems, wholeheartedly loves a simple thing. No one can resist trying to improve on it.
Two men approached on the path, laboriously pushing a baby stroller past a pair of ginkgo trees. The baby was immobilized in a snowsuit, its arms sticking out like a stuffed bear’s; a wrapped box had been balanced on its puffy lap. A heavily made-up woman walked a dog sporting a wilted red bow. “All alone?” she whispered. “Want to come home with me?” I moved past her quickly. In the Ramble the paths were largely unmarked by footprints, the understory shrouded, the larger trees outlined with thick brushstrokes of snow. Disoriented, I walked from place to place, trying to remember how everything had looked two days ago, suddenly afraid that I might never see it all disrobed again. But why should I think that? Gradually the map reassembled itself in my mind. I found a bench nearby and brushed it off with my hand, then sat and lifted my face to the weak sun. How good it felt to be out in the air, to see no human being, no smokestack, car, or bus. One could imagine that the air was actually clean. I began to dream about the coming of spring, about how safe and warm the branches now were in their sleeves of snow, the inner life protected until it was time to press forth again. First, in mid-March, would come the red maple, the herald, followed by the American elm and the cornelian cherry. In early April the colors would arrive: forsythia and magnolia, spicebush and periwinkle, yellowroot and trout lily. In the second week of April, there would be Virginia bluebell, blue violet, Norway maple, dandelion.
I’d known these names and others like them long before I could recognize the plants they referred to. They were in the appendix of a book on Central Park that I found in my school library the fall after my mother and I had returned from the Adirondacks. At the time I hardly knew the park, even though our townhouse was only footsteps away from it. My experience of it was limited to the playground one maid or another had taken me to when I was younger and the sunken transverses on which I was occasionally whisked by taxi to destinations on the West Side. Well-behaved fourteen-year-olds did not spend time in the park, not in the early 1970s. But back in the city that fall, Henryless, Central Park magnetized me. I studied the maps in the book with fascination: all that open land full of ponds and streams, woodland, rock formations, terraces, bridle paths, and bridges. My finger traced winding routes: I wanted to visit these places with enticing names such as Sheep Meadow, Bow Bridge, Turtle Pond, the Ramble, the Great Hill, and Duck Island. I read of the heroic efforts to earmark the land for public use, of the way the landscape was brought into being with hundreds of tons of dynamite that cleared millions of cubic yards of stone and dirt. When Frederick Olmsted came to check on his three thousand workers he stood knee-deep in stinking swampland that until recently had housed pigsties and slaughterhouses or been used as burial grounds for paupers. Goats left behind by squatters rambled over the rocks, nibbling bare the few trees that were able to grow.
I slipped away in the afternoons, telling the maid I was visiting a classmate. I walked in the park, ignoring the drunks and the dealers, learning the paths. I bought a field guide and began to identify trees and bushes. And I put my discoveries into the letters I wrote to Henry.
After the incident at the pond, Henry avoided me, but when his mother found out I was sick she sent him over with a tattered old botany book that she had found in the attic and some leaf samples. He laid the samples on my bedcovers and reminded me what each one was. I was s
till feverish, and everything I looked at was tinged with yellow. The leaves were drying out and left cracked bits on the covers. Henry seemed anxious, eager to please, and I knew that he had not wanted to stay away, had only thought that he was banished. I was so ill that I did not have the strength to tell him to go, and I found that I no longer wanted to.
Henry paged through the photographs. “The rhododendron,” he said, trying to get my attention. “You have rhododendron behind your kitchen.”
I looked at the picture he was pointing to. Did we have something in the yard that looked like that? I couldn’t remember. It wasn’t just that I was sick. I’d only begun to really look at bushes and flowers. Henry had taught me some of the names of trees, but I often mixed them up and had to be reminded. When lunchtime came and my mother did not appear Henry found a can of Campbell’s tomato soup in the cupboard. He brought it to me, steaming in the bowl. I took one look at the oily orangey-red liquid and turned away, revolted.
“Give it a chance,” said Henry. He picked up the spoon, filled it halfway, held it to my lips. I swallowed and the warmth spread through my chest, nosed down into my belly. I opened my mouth again, swallowed again. Once more. Then I had had enough. I turned my head away and fell asleep. When I awoke Henry was gone but the botany book was still there and my head felt clear. I opened at random to the chapter on taxonomy. “Man’s impulse to name and classify must be nearly as old as his impulse toward food and warmth and companionship.” I turned the pages with growing interest as the book explained that the angiosperms, or flowering plants, were separated into two groups, the dicots and the monocots, and that each of these was divided into half a dozen subgroups, or orders, which were in turn divided into families, and so on and so on until one arrived at the precise classification, the snug exact location, of a daisy or clover leaf or cattail. I have to tell Henry, I thought. Every plant—everything, I was suddenly sure—was related, everything was part of some larger group, some bigger whole. I had managed to get my socks and shirt on when the room began to spin and I fell to all fours on the floor.
I grew worse again, then better. One day I sat up in bed and drew primitive pictures and wrote out captions beneath them: DIVISION: Magnoliophyta. CLASS: Magnoliopsida. ORDER: Rosales. FAMILY: Rosaceae, the rose family. GENUS: Malus, the melons. SPECIES: Malus pumila. And there, red and plump, was my drawing of an apple.
By early August I had recovered but I invented lingering symptoms, complained of headaches, dizziness, strange pains. Henry, unsuspecting, still came to visit for a couple of hours every day. He came in smelling of the outdoors, of the pond and the ravine. We looked at the botany book, studied his beetles, and told jokes. Occasionally he glanced out of the window at the afternoon sun slanting over the yard and failed to suppress a sigh. I knew that he wanted to be out, knew that I was keeping him from pleasures. But I couldn’t help it. I was afraid now: of air and wind and water, of the woods, of running and swimming, of Henry. And although nobody forced him to do so, Henry continued to come. He wanted a friend, and I was all he had that summer.
As September approached I began to dread Henry’s return to the Westchester suburb where his family lived. “Can you visit me in the city?” I pleaded. “Can we be pen pals?” Sure, he told me. I wrote to him as soon as I arrived home, a long letter full of information about a science fair project I was planning. I felt freer on the page than in person; I wrote, “To my best friend” and signed off, “Love, Jack.” I felt happy as I mailed the letter. Within hours I had written another one. Every day I wrote to Henry, but a week went by and I did not receive a letter in return. I was puzzled, then impatient, then, after another week went by, hurt. I reminded him of walks we had taken, things we had talked about. I detailed the facts I was learning about Central Park, the places there I had explored. Still there was no answer. During math and English class I scripted conversations with Henry, demanded reasons. I imagined riding the train to his town, finding my way to his house. I wrote, “I thought we were friends.” I wrote, “You’ve broken my heart.” I ripped these letters up, sure that by the next day something would arrive from Henry, chipper and good-hearted and with an explanation of his silence. Finally I wrote a letter full of other kinds of words. Chiefly I remember this sentence: “You deserve to die.” And then, instead of destroying this letter too, I walked it out to the box on the corner and mailed it.
The first week of September the goldenrod would flower, and the white wood aster. After that the park would be dormant. Then, eventually, there would be spring again, the return of the red maples. I rose from my bench, threaded my way slowly back toward the city. The streets were filled now with traffic, although the day still had its comfortable holiday slackness. People greeted strangers, stopped to chat with doormen and dog walkers. The cars and buses passed almost apologetically.
The moment I opened the door to my apartment I knew that someone had been inside. There was a slight disturbance in the air, a sense of things subtly displaced. A copy of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding lay on the side table cover up instead of cover down, as I was sure I’d left it. The sofa cushions had been plumped up, as if to disguise the fact that they’d been used. I could almost feel the pressure of footsteps on the thin nap of the carpet. On the mantelpiece, in place of Patrick’s camera, was a sheet torn out of a pocket-sized notebook and held down by the shard of glass Patrick had taken the previous day from his shoe.
Please forgive. I’d hoped to find you in.
—Patrick
I’d hoped to find you in. I read this brief note, scrawled in hurried, uneven, rather childish handwriting, several times over, parsing the implications of “Please forgive.” Did those words, placed first, rob “I’d hoped to find you in” of any intimacy? Had Patrick only meant to say that if I’d been home he wouldn’t have needed to come in without my permission? But in that case he might as easily have written, “Please forgive the intrusion.”
I’d hoped to find you in. I thought of the master key in his pocket, the key to my rooms, the power he had to enter any time he wanted, and it gave me an uneasy thrill. I left the note by the shard of glass and the business card and hurried into the bedroom. I spread my palm on the bedcovers, touched the shade of the reading lamp. No vibration of him here. In the kitchen, though, he was back. I stared at a glass, conjured Patrick’s long fingers wrapped around it, holding it up to the bulb. I saw him opening cabinets and peering inside at the cereal boxes, Domino sugar, graham crackers, dented cans of food from my uncle’s time.
It was Christmas Day and Patrick was not out of town. He was not too busy with family visits or parties or a sweetheart to have come here, expecting to see me. He had been spending the day by himself. He’d been lonely. He’d thought . . .
He’d thought nothing. He’d needed his camera. His family had been sitting around the fireplace, waiting to be photographed, and he’d realized that he did not have his camera. I’ll run over there, he told them. It’s just around the corner.
Was Patrick just around the corner?
I spied the spiral notebook I had used on my research trips to the law library and picked it up, leafed through my notes. Adverse possession. Rationale of rent control. These words and phrases were soothing. I thought of turning on the oven, then considered the heating bill and instead pulled the quilt off my bed and wrapped it tightly around myself. I read for hours, the words on the page taking on a strange sheen, a pulsation that was somehow permeated with Patrick’s lean form, his stoop, the loopy script on the note he’d left me.
The days passed, and Patrick did not come. No one came. No one cleaned away the debris from the fire or scoured away the smell. A fine silty ash wafted down from the top floor and coated the stairwell, fingered under my door and into the fibers of my carpet. I took a sponge to the walls but that only spread a gray watery stain. The broken windows upstairs sent down whining swells of cold air.
One evening just before the New Year I paused at my front door with my
key in the lock, sensing a greater absence than usual above me. Upstairs I found Mrs. Fiore’s door gaping open upon bare walls, her rust-colored carpet littered with plastic tree branches. Gone were the wall mirror, the photographs, the pots and pans. That night I was more aware than before of the silence of the building after dark. Only now did I recall the sounds that used to be there when I’d believed there were no sounds at all: Mr. Flax’s phlegmy cough, the raised voices of the Porters arguing, the ringing of phones.
New Year’s Day arrived. I visited the park and at day’s end stood on the bridge looking out over Brooklyn. Tiny figures moved on the promenade, celebrants in the cold. When it was time to return home I slid my MetroCard, stripe facing left, into the turnstile at Broadway-Nassau, and a digital display flashed out that I had two rides remaining. I saw neither the man with the flat briefcase nor the woman with the purse. But the advertisement-lined platform and the whoosh of the arriving train and the jolt and tremble of the car were all familiar, and as I tucked the subway card back into my wallet I felt that I would get used to this new way of doing things.
Another evening, having found my way downtown a bit too early, I took a slight detour along Fourth Avenue, thinking to see if any of the secondhand bookstores from my student days still existed. After some circling about I was delighted to find one I remembered, the metal cart outside its door still filled with fifty-cent paperbacks. Long ago, before my time, dozens of secondhand bookstores had stretched north from the Village along Fourth Avenue, this one specializing in music, that one in art books or international fiction. They had constituted a city within a city, a subculture with its own hangers-on and celebrities. In histories of the neighborhood I read about the owner who could recite verbatim from any page of Paradise Lost, another rumored to be a former lover of W. H. Auden’s. When the noise of my classes or dormitory became too much I would spend an evening exploring the stores that remained, seeking out the smell or atmosphere I craved most. Leaning against the shelves or flopped in a chair, I’d read poetry and philosophy and history, cookbooks and old gun catalogues, Boy Scout pamphlets and economics textbooks, only dimly aware of the occasional cough or shuffle of feet.