Louisa Meets Bear

by Lisa Gornick

  “And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson,” Julie and Angie sing, “Jesus loves you more you than you can know, wo, wo, wo.”

  “Remember squirmy little Dustin Hoffman in that scene?” I say to Julie, my scalp alert to each of Conchita’s twists and twirls.

  “Yeah.” Julie smiles. “And that leopard-print bra Anne Bancroft wore!”

  When Conchita takes out her brush and begins to untangle my hair, I lean back so that my head rests against the top of the seat. My sandy hair drops over the back and a sigh escapes. Conchita brushes gently from my forehead to my nape, the way Louisa must have tried to do the morning of Lily’s funeral, and for the first time I see that it is not only her father Conchita is missing but also her sister, who she never met but has always been with us.

  On the chorus, Conchita joins Julie and Angie in the “wo, wo, wo.” Angie raises her Coke can with the “Here’s to you” and I sit up. Soon we are four toasting Mrs. Robinson, the sun sinking low to our right, the windows open, the dusky air blowing on our faces, the golden daughters leaning over the seat, the wounded mothers sailing first into the night.

  2003

  Barberini Princess

  For fourteen years, César Punto had cleaned Ilana Green’s office on Saturday. The first weekend of each month she left him a check written in her precise handwriting, handwriting that matched her small frame and bob cut. On occasion, she left a note, a gentle reminder to vacuum under the chair cushions or dust her books. Two or three times a year, she called him to announce her absence from the office and request that he water her plants. During the first few years she’d had the office, she’d seen César often. Then, she’d still been settling in—installing shades, hanging pictures—and he’d helped her with various things. Over the past few years, she hadn’t laid eyes on him at all.

  Ilana Green was a psychologist and a mother. She thought of herself in that order, perhaps because she’d been a psychologist before she became a mother, perhaps because seeing patients felt entirely natural, whereas she had moments with her daughters, nine and eleven, sturdy redheaded beauties, when she felt awkward, as though she were playing the part of a mother in a stiff unbelievable manner. Her husband, Bill, was one of the alpha New York men who when they first met had still been called by his Wall Street buddies by the nickname, Bear, they’d given him when they were at Princeton together. For a while, Bill had campaigned to have her join the majority ranks of the mothers of the children who attended her daughters’ private school, women who had exchanged going back to work after their second was born for the position of full-time domestic CEO and part-time school volunteer. There were former anesthesiologists and corporate tax attorneys stuffing envelopes for the spring benefit. Women who’d once managed trading offices in Singapore gave tours to kindergarten applicants.

  She knew that her children would have liked to have her, rather than Nona, their housekeeper, home on the numerous days they had off from school, but it frightened Ilana to give up her professional life. It was hard enough with a doctor before her name to muster a sufficiently firm voice to address plumbers and taxicab drivers, much less her husband, who seemed to grow more remote and irritable with each passing year: the relentless strain of getting up at 3:00 a.m. for the Far East markets, the exile from an essential part of himself left long ago on a beach somewhere. Without her work, she imagined that she would be more vulnerable to Bill, he would sleep with one of the bank trainees, a girl with luminous highlights and sultry lowlights, her daughters would fight more than they already did. Most important, Ilana liked her work, which remained a never-completed puzzle. Each psychotherapy session was a one-act play that she variously directed, performed in, and observed. Each patient who got better, and most of Ilana’s did, was a missive of good sent into the world. It was sacred work—an amazement to her that she, raised by a father who believed human nature could be reduced to self-interest, altruism a sentimental myth, had ended up able to give at all.

  *

  It was a Monday morning, the first balmy day of the year. Ilana walked across the park to work, the paths and lawns littered with the fallen petals of cherry blossoms, the air pungent with the perfume of blooms balanced between perfection and decay. As a child, she’d been terrified of anything in a state of decomposition, going blocks out of her way to avoid a dead bird or a gardener’s compost or even a pile of raked leaves, each withering object bringing to mind a vision of what had happened to the remains of her mother, whose lung cancer had been mistaken for recalcitrant bronchitis so that by the time she’d been diagnosed, her demise was too far along to halt. Ilana had ridden to the cemetery with her three aunts, her face pressed against her plumpest aunt’s upper arm to block glimpsing the horrid shiny casket or the horrid shiny hearse inside which her father had insisted on riding and from which he had mysteriously disappeared by the time they reached the grave site.

  Arriving at her office, she listened to her messages. The last one was from César. He’d lost his set of her keys. They’d fallen out of a hole in his jacket pocket on the subway, somewhere between Columbus Circle and his stop in Queens.

  He was so despondent, there was no room for her to be annoyed. “I feel terrible,” he said in the message. “All night, I cannot sleep, I feel so upset about this.”

  With her first patient already waiting for her, she called César with the intention of—quickly—reassuring him that he should not worry.

  “I cannot believe this could happen. I try so hard to please you, and now this.”

  “I’ll make you a new set and leave it with the doorman.”

  “I feel so bad. I only want you to be happy with me.”

  “I am happy with your work, César. I would let you know if I wasn’t.”

  César didn’t say anything. Had he been one of her patients, Ilana would have encouraged him to unpack the silence. But he wasn’t, and no benefit would come of it. She crossed her fingers, a wish that, as is the way with everything—beauty, love, hatred, even, she’d come to think, wisdom—his remorse would disintegrate.

  *

  The following morning, she woke thinking about César. It was strange that she had forgotten that she’d actually had quite a bit to do with him when they’d first met. Then, he’d been the boyfriend of Evelyne, the nanny who worked for the family across the hall. Ilana and her neighbor, Jen, had plunged into one of those quick, intense friendships born of the intimacy of shared circumstances and filled with the pleasure of padding in socks and pajamas in and out of each other’s apartments. It was before Ilana had her own children, at the end of her fellowship and the beginning of her private practice, when she’d begun to yearn for a baby, but Bill, with his thoughts returning always, during movies, during sex, to a trading scheme he was working out, couldn’t even talk about it. During the brief period of her friendship with Jen, they’d fit like lock and key. Holding Jen’s baby, Ilana could taste the sensuality, the profundity of raising a child, while Jen, still carrying fifteen pounds from the pregnancy, her clothes yellowed from baby spit-up, could feel for a moment that her life was enviable, not a stupid mistake.

  Every night, as Evelyne finished work, César would be in the lobby waiting for her. It was clear to anyone seeing them together that César was in love with Evelyne in a sticky, suspicious way and that it was only a matter of time before she would dump him. When she did, he became so depressed it scared Evelyne, who confided in Jen, who asked Ilana’s advice. Ilana gave Jen the number for a low-fee clinic and the name of an intake worker César could contact there.

  A year later, after Jen and family decamped to Westchester, the friendship unraveling as quickly as it had been knitted, Ilana bumped into Evelyne in the park with her new babysitting ward. Ilana inquired about César. They were still broken up, Evelyne said, but they remained friends. He’d gone to the clinic Ilana had recommended and he was a lot better, but the store where he’d cleaned at night had gone out of business. He’d found a few small cleaning jobs, Evelyne reported,
but was looking for more work. Did Ilana know anyone?

  Ilana took his number. She’d keep her ears open, she promised. A few weeks later, she signed a lease on a small suite in a building on West End Avenue. She hired a painter, picked a butter cream for the room where she would see her patients, okra for the windowless waiting room, and a silvery gray for the small patient bath and tiny kitchen. The painter did an excellent job but left a big mess. Remembering César, she called him.

  “My God, I cannot believe you called me. Evelyne told me she saw you, but I never think you would really call me.”

  He’d seen a social worker at the clinic for a few months and one of the doctors had given him some medicine, which he’d taken for a while. “So many times I think to write you a letter to tell you how much you help me. So many times.”

  “You’re most welcome. I’m glad to have been able to help.”

  “You help me more than anyone ever help me.”

  An uncomfortable feeling descended over Ilana. Too much was never good. When her patients went on too long about the travails of their journey to her office, she knew they were late because there was something they did not want to discuss. When, right before they got married, Bill had bought her a too-expensive watch, she’d known it was expiation. At first she’d thought he’d slept with one of the high-low-lighted trainees, but a week later he’d confessed that he’d bumped into his ex-girlfriend Louisa.

  “For chrissake, it was only a drink. She was in New York to visit some guy.”

  “A drink? A single drink?”

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it. We never left the bar. Just old friends talking over a couple of drinks.”

  Once, Ilana had screwed up her courage to ask one of Bill’s college buddies about Louisa. “Louisa, Louisa.” He’d laughed. “None of us knew her. Couldn’t tell if she was shy or stuck-up. But man, she was good-looking. Had that sylph smoke-in-your-eyes thing going with Bear.” Ilana had left the watch on Bill’s dresser with a note that if it happened again, if he saw Louisa again without telling her, she would have to leave, and although he’d pained her many times since in other ways, she’d never again had cause to suspect he’d been in touch with Louisa or that there had been a breach of fidelity of any sort.

  César arrived within the hour. He cleaned the new office while she went back to the old one to finish packing. The next day, after the movers delivered her things, he helped her unpack her books and files, during which time he told her how much he still loved Evelyne but that his sister had told him to forget her, that Evelyne would never marry a guy who cleaned toilets. He thanked Ilana excessively when she paid him for the two days’ work, nodded solemnly when she then offered him the Saturday cleaning job.

  Unfazed by blizzards or transit disruptions, César had never missed a week, the only exception when his grandmother died. Now Ilana could not remember exactly when that was, perhaps seven, eight years ago, only that he’d called her to say he had to go back to Colombia for three weeks.

  “If you need to hire someone else, I understand.”

  “Of course not. Don’t worry at all about that.”

  It had sounded as though César was crying. Ilana had been uncertain if he was crying because of his grandmother or because she’d said she would not give away his job.

  *

  Thursday afternoon, Ilana stopped at a locksmith to copy her keys for César.

  The locksmith pointed at the larger key. “Where’s the card for this one?”

  Ilana stared at the locksmith. A card, a card … When she and Bill had bought their apartment, Bill had insisted on changing all of the locks to the expensive sort that require a computerized card to copy the keys. He’d made a fuss about finding a location to store the card. With her office, she could no longer remember who had given her the keys, much less whether there had ever been a card.

  “Is there any other option?”

  “Change the lock.”

  “How much would that cost?”

  “Two-fifty for labor. Plus the cost of the cylinder.”

  It was a lot of money, but she had no confidence that she’d ever find the card and didn’t want to make more complicated arrangements with César, arrangements that would mean more contact with him. “When could you do it?”

  The man looked in a smudged notebook. He put on his glasses and turned the page. “I could do it tomorrow nine to eleven, three to five…”

  Ilana studied her pocket calendar. Her schedule was so tight between her patient hours and picking up the girls two afternoons a week, any deviation plunged her into what felt like a crisis. She knew it was an absurd arrangement, since nearly every week brought disruptions: the girls’ illnesses with the need for doctor’s visits and then pharmacy trips, leaks, broken appliances, events at her daughters’ school or business dinners she was expected to attend with Bill. Had she been her own patient, she would have said that there was something sadistic about her expectation that life adhere to the schedule she’d made.

  “I can’t. I see patients Friday morning, and I need to pick up my kids at school at three.”

  “Well, lady, it’s your door. I can only come when I can come.”

  “There’s no other possibility?”

  The man turned the page of his notebook. “Saturday, nine to eleven. Time and a half.”

  *

  At her mother’s grave site, there’d been a discussion with the rabbi as to whether they should proceed without her father. The gravediggers had a strong union, it was said. Their lunch hour, a full sixty minutes, began at twelve. If the grave-site service did not start soon, they would have to wait until the gravediggers returned from lunch.

  It was February. The earth was frozen and the air was damp. The women, their legs covered with only nylon stockings, were shivering. Her mother’s eldest sister told the rabbi to proceed.

  The casket, bound with green straps, was lowered by a machine into the already dug grave. The dirt that had been removed before they arrived was covered by a tarp, as though it would make the huge mound next to the hole seem less grotesque.

  When the coffin reached the bottom of the pit, the gravediggers took off the straps. Ilana wiggled her hands free of her aunts’ hold so as to edge nearer to the grave. The casket, viewed from above, appeared monstrously large, way too big for her tiny cancer-consumed mother. It was inconceivable that they were going to leave her mother in this freezing pit.

  The rabbi threw the first shovelful of dirt. It made a thud as it landed, spattering across the top of the coffin. In her head, Ilana screamed. Outside, in the frigid air, it was silent.

  *

  On Saturdays, Ilana usually took Sarah to softball while Bill read the paper and Janey watched cartoons, a habit Janey should have outgrown but had not. Now Bill would have to take both girls with him and stand on the edge of the ratty field making small talk with the other parents. Had he been a character on Janey’s show, there would have been a sizzling hiss as she touched his arm.

  “I have to meet a repairman at my office,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the game. You can leave as soon as I get there.” Ilana hated her apologetic tone, the implication that she should feel badly that Bill would be spending more time than usual with their children.

  Not until the cab was halfway across the park did Ilana wonder if César would be at her office. She’d always left it up to him when he came on Saturdays. She closed her eyes. “Please, no,” she said to herself. She wanted to sink into her chair and drink her takeout coffee and read from the volume of Chekhov stories she was carrying in her bag, stories she found more illuminating than most of her professional journals or the conventions she’d long ago stopped attending. She wanted to leave behind her thoughts about her patients and Bill and her children, let her mind rest on the desolate landscapes and exquisite manners of another time. Afterward, she’d be happy to see her family again. By then, Bill’s foul mood would have dissolved into three cups of sweetened black coffee and t
he weekend pleasure of wearing jeans and sneakers and anticipating his afternoon run. The girls, buoyed by the Krispy Kreme donuts he would have bought them and the fresh air, would be giggly, touching her shoulders and hands and hips like they were toddlers again.

  Yesterday afternoon, as she’d left, she’d given her own keys to the door staff for César. When the Saturday doorman told her the cleaning person had taken them upstairs, her hopes for the morning evaporated.

  The outer door to the suite was unlocked. Ilana could hear the vacuum cleaner. She carried her coffee into the waiting room. César was working bare-chested. A spray of black hair fanned out from his navel, surrounding his surprisingly pink nipples.

  “Jesus. Dr. Ilana. I am so sorry.” César reached for his sweatshirt, pulling it over his head, then leaning down to shut off the vacuum.

  Standing up, César was beet red. “I take off the sweatshirt because I get so hot. I didn’t know you were coming. I am so embarrassed.”

  “I came to meet the locksmith. I need to change one of the cylinders.”

  César sat down in one of the waiting room chairs. He doubled over his knees. “Jesus Christ. Look at all the trouble I cause you. You have to come in on Saturday. All because I did such a stupid thing.”

  Ilana perched on the chair across from César.

  “You’ve done an excellent job all these years. Everyone makes a mistake on occasion.”

  The truth was, he’d done a good-enough but not excellent job—not, she thought, because he was lazy but because he didn’t have the sensibility to think on his own to do the things Nona did automatically: wiping out the inside of the refrigerator, dusting the tops of the picture frames, polishing the spots from the bathroom faucets. The notes Ilana left suggesting extra attention to certain tasks never seemed to have an impact beyond the week they were received.