I felt thick as a tree.
“Look, she wanted Jerry home. So what does she do? She knows Kendra liked you, she’s no dummy, so she sends you to Kendra’s fucked-up Irish twin, who thinks you’re quite the groover—”
“Oh I don’t know that he likes me like that,” I said, smiling into my tuna in spite of myself.
“No, really. She used you to reel in the prodigal son. Who’s now helpfully down for the count with his, what the hell, mold-and-flea disease. Defenseless. And so perfect for her to coddle, fatten up—reprogram—and crush the radical right out of him. Dude’ll end up like Winston Smith, under the spreading chestnut tree—the ‘indispensable, healing change.’ ”
“Like she’s got some huge agenda,” I said.
“She sounds so manipulative she must have one. They’re all so manipulative—I can’t believe you don’t see it.”
“Jerry’s been through some bad shit,” I said.
“Oh, boo-hoo, the Sorrows of Young Jerry! Name me one person in New York who hasn’t been through what they think is some kind of bad shit. Whether or not they really have been.” She paused to waggle my arm gently, which is what she did when she thought she might be harshing too much and she didn’t want me to feel bad.
“You’re a soft touch, Chess,” she said, not unkindly.
“I need to get out of there,” I said. But I didn’t really feel that way. Somehow I felt as if life had directed me to the Marr-Löwenstein family. They contained something for me. I just had to figure out what it was.
But this was nothing I could explain to anyone, not even Trina.
After we finished eating, Trina and I would ball up our paper bags and take turns soccer-bumping them into the wastepaper basket on the other side of the gallery. I’m sure the grumpy owner hated the stinky tuna bags gathering up there day after day, but he was so mean, what did he expect? The gallery often had Edward Gorey drawings on display, and it was also the meeting place for the James Joyce Society—and since I, for one, never did see any of the Joyce Society convening there, they somehow melded in my mind with the Gorey characters so that I pictured them as all having shaggy raccoon coats, Edwardian bowlers, and, hidden behind their backs, big, dripping axes.
Before Trina went back to work, we’d smoke a cig in front of Gotham and say our good-byes, sentimental or insistently oh-I-forgot-to-tell-you even though we’d be seeing each other the next day. Then I’d roll down Forty-Seventh Street, where you’d see all kinds of intriguing characters in those days. There were unsmiling men in cheap suits and puckered loafers with, legend had it, bags full of diamonds in their pockets. There were rosy-cheeked Hasidim wearing the full Orthodox Cleveland in the summer heat, and hotshot Israelis with velour jogging suits and thick gold chains around their necks who reminded me of the hip-swiveling Guido relatives of my ’70s childhood. From Forty-Seventh Street I’d go down to the library or up to a museum, anything to prolong the time before I’d have to go back to Eleventh Street and feel unneeded.
I never saw Jerry. He was kept quarantined on the top floor, and I was given to understand that I had no reason to go up there.
It went like this for a while, until Clarice called me into her study early one morning.
She was writing when I went in and didn’t look up. I stood before her, waiting for her to acknowledge me. She didn’t, but instead began talking to her paper as I stood there.
“Do you like it here?” she asked the paper.
I leaned forward and tried to look at the paper.
“You, silly girl,” she said, looking at me. Her eyes were hard and gleaming.
“Of course,” I said.
“I’m afraid Jerry’s going to leave again when he’s well,” she said.
“Well, he’s an adult,” I said.
She looked through me, abstracted.
“He really is no such thing,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“He has a learning disability,” she said. “He can barely read.”
“Oh please—you’re kidding.”
“It’s true, or he would stay and be my secretary,” she said.
I stared hard at her and then had to look away.
Don’t you understand how much he hates you? I thought.
And then: So I am nothing?
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s asking for you,” she said.
I somehow felt a bright jolt at these words.
“Oh?” I said, swallowing.
“He’s grateful to you for helping him.”
“It was the only thing to do,” I said.
She went back to looking at her paper.
“False modesty is so unbecoming,” she said.
I stood blinking, looking at the top of her head.
“I wasn’t being false,” I said at last. Or was I?
She was writing again now, and began humming to herself.
“No matter,” she said in a singsong voice. As I stood there I felt all kinds of sureties washing away. What did she want from me?
“Clarice,” I said, “what would you like me to do?”
She slowly put her pen down and flooded her big face at me.
“Just be your own sweet self,” she said, an insipid edge to her voice. “But not too sweet. We’ll start work again when the time is right. Meantime, go see Jerry.”
“I don’t understand,” I said miserably.
“Oh, you’ll figure it out,” she said, raising her hand to wave me out of the room.
It has occurred to me over the years that if I’d had a mother I could talk to, a mother I could have gone to for guidance, I probably would have saved myself a lot of grief. I was blessed with no such mother. My mother was a confused woman. She understood my sisters and brothers and me when we were babies, but when we reached the age of reason we could only baffle her. For all her learning, she had been raised not to question any man in her life, and she was incapable of protecting her own children while her husband knocked the shit out of them in the name of “discipline.” She just stood there screaming and crying and wringing her hands. And then when we grew up and got the fuck out of that house, she felt deeply hurt, as if it were some cruel trick we were perpetrating against her—a conspiracy passed down from oldest to youngest child. How heartbreaking that we become adults and inhabit our own grown-up bodies and make our own choices.
Anyway.
Was Clarice suggesting I seduce her son? Make him cocoa? I didn’t know. I knew if I told Trina about it, she’d tell me, Run—don’t walk—the hell out of there. Fang was in an increasingly miserable way, always complaining about the many narcissisms of Decon Head, and whenever I saw her seemed barely to come out of her brooding.
When I knocked on Jerry’s bedroom door that morning, he called for me to come in. He lay flat in his bed, staring at the ceiling, arms straight down at his sides atop the bedclothes.
“How are you?” I asked him.
“Okay, I guess.”
He didn’t look at me but continued staring up at the ceiling. I pulled over a chair that had been brought into the room, a stiff ladder-back chair, and sat by him. His face was calmer and clearer than I’d ever seen it, but he looked completely exhausted, almost lifeless.
“I’m not being rude, it’s just that everything spins when I move my head,” he said. “Something to do with the fluid in my inner ear.”
“Vertigo,” I said.
“Yes, it actually is called vertigo.”
I smoothed my skirt.
“Are you out of your mind with boredom?” I asked him.
“I am,” he said.
I looked up at the ceiling where he was looking, then turned my head to the window.
“The light’s beautiful in here. There’s like a snatch of sky you can see, framed in the window at this angle. Such a clean, flat light. It reminds me of a painting by Købke, just a corner of sky and Lutheran sort of steeples. An impossible view in a way. There’s a l
oneliness about it.”
“Cupcake?” he said.
I swallowed a sigh.
“Købke,” I said, “like with a Søren slash through the o. I’m sure I’m saying it wrong.”
“I wish I had a cupcake,” he said.
“I could get you a cupcake,” I said.
“No,” he said, “I couldn’t taste it anyway. I guess I’m just thinking of the sweetness. I want the sweetness.”
I leaned forward and looked at him, because liquid was leaking out from his eyes. He was so still and emotionally flat that it took me a moment to register this as tears.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why this is happening,” he said. “I never cry.”
“Maybe you need to cry,” I said softly.
Why are you so shattered? Why are you all so shattered?
“We’re not supposed to cry,” he said.
“Screw that nonsense,” I said. Impulsively, I took his hand.
He turned his head, just a fraction, to look at me. The tears stopped as suddenly as they’d started.
“Are you doing that because you’re paid, or because you’re kind?” he said.
“I feel sad for you,” I said. I went to take my hand away, but he held it fast. He was suddenly full of all the strength in the world and pulled me to him. The medal around my neck swung out and he caught it in his free hand.
“Do you wear this because you’re religious?”
“My mother gave it to me.” I pulled it out of his hand and dropped it beneath my shirt.
“But are you religious?”
“I’m lapsed. I’m very, very lapsed.”
“They didn’t raise us with anything. They didn’t give us any of that. Clarice always says the sight of a cross makes her want to vomit.”
I pulled free from his grasp.
“A lot of bad has been done in the name of religion,” I said, “but faith is something else. Faith comforts people. Whatever kind it is. When I was little we’d go to this old church up in Philly sometimes and I’d see these Puerto Rican women holding on to the feet of statues and just crying and crying. It was so heartfelt, it was so naked, it fascinated me. My father would see them and say how they made themselves ridiculous. But I always thought if it comforts people, why is this so bad?”
“Because it is bad. It controls people.”
“Yeah, well, I went to Catholic school for twelve years and hated every minute of it, so you don’t have to tell me. What I’m saying is why not take the good you find in it? Leave the rest. So, what, you’re supposed to tell those women crying on Jesus’s feet to go home and stop being so foolishly controlled? Isn’t that just as bad? Isn’t that worse? I think your family has the worst fascist streak I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Oddly, this made him smile.
“I see why Kendra liked you so much.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re feisty,” he said. “But you’re also sweet.”
“Oh, please—don’t make fun of me.”
I got up to leave.
“No, no, no,” he called out. I turned. He had raised himself on his elbow. He smiled at me, and his smile was like a wolf’s.
“You can’t leave, Francesca,” he said. “You’re paid to be with me.”
I stared at him.
“Get the fuck back here right now,” he said.
“What?”
I squeezed my hands into fists.
“You are not doing this to me,” I said. “Tell me you are not doing this to me.”
He beckoned me back to him, his eyes shining.
“Look, look, I’ll be nice to you,” he said, patting his bed. “I promise.”
Slowly I went back and sat in the chair, the two of us staring at each other. The smirk on his face changed into something else. It changed and changed again like the light in September.
He collapsed back in his bed.
“I’m sorry. Oh, God. I am so sorry. You can go.”
I cleared my throat.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“It is?” he said flatly.
“You’re not well.”
“Am I ever?” he said.
At this we both somehow gave a laugh.
“I could read to you,” I said.
“You want to read your William James to me?”
“I could read you One Fish Two Fish.”
He blinked at me, seeming not to know what this was.
“Do you know any poems by heart?” he said.
“I do. I know lots of poems. Mostly old ones.” I smoothed my skirt. “ ‘Loveliest of Trees.’ ‘Dover Beach.’ ‘Dust of Snow.’ ‘Break, Break, Break.’ I know lots of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland,’ don’t ask me how. ‘Whoso List to Hunt.’ ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’ Huge passages from ‘Goblin Market.’ Countée Cullen, ‘And Yet Do I Marvel.’ Some Fleurs du Mal, which I will only butcher. Delmore Schwartz, somehow. John Donne. Anne Bradstreet, the one about sending her book out into the world. All kinds of things, come to think of it, most of it way old. ‘Lullaby,’ I think it’s called, but the meter’s so jerky it always trips me up…” I trailed off.
“What’s ‘Lullaby’?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s, uh, W. H. Auden.” I realized the first lines would be hard to say to him.
He settled back into his bed, stared straight up at the ceiling.
“I think I’d like to hear that one.”
“I don’t know that I remember it all,” I said.
“Please proceed,” he said, and closed his eyes.
I sat looking at him, saying nothing at all. I looked off, cleared my throat, and began.
“ ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm.’ ”
I paused and looked at him. He lay there with his eyes closed like a child. I let my eyes close then as well, and as he lay there on his bed and I sat in my stiff chair, both pairs of eyes closed to the sun, I recited the entire poem to him, my voice growing sonorous and saddened as I spoke.
When it was over, we both opened our eyes, but neither of us said a word.
“It’s a beautiful thing,” I said at last, surprised by the emotion welling in my throat.
He rose on his arm once again.
“It is,” he said, running his fingers forcibly over his lips and looking deeply into my eyes. “It is.”
I realized he was the hungriest boy in the world, then.
I leapt up from the chair and clapped my hands together.
“Let’s play Botticelli!” I said.
*
And so in this way we worked out a routine together. I’d go to him in the morning and I’d recite a poem to him—sometimes I would read one, but he seemed to like it better the other way, as if he wanted to know just what was in my head—and then we’d talk for a while, talk about things that were sufficiently distanced from us, never emotions or faith or family or pain. He was never cruel to me the way he had been. I think he realized that he risked playing king of the hill over me, his captive audience. His captive.
He’d grown up without a TV, so any sort of stupid pop-culture touchstones that my college friends could riff on for hours were lost to him. He made me embarrassed that so much of this crap was in my head: I’m the sole survivor. Golden flaky tender cakey outside. When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty…Instead we played endless rounds of Botticelli. We loved to stump each other: I stumped him over Frances Farmer, Nella Larsen, and Eleonora Duse. He stumped me over Rabindranath Tagore, Osip Mandelstam, and David Ben-Gurion.
Always I watched him like the weather. Like a gathering storm.
“What is that nonsense about you having a learning disability?” I asked him one day.
“Clarice told you that?”
“Yes, as if to say you’re dyslexic.”
He looked away.
I’ve embarrassed him, I thought.
“Not so much that. I have a…it’s a visual processing thing.”
“I don’t know what
that is.”
He moved himself around in his bed, unfolded and folded the pillow behind his neck, rolled his shoulders around, trying to make himself comfortable.
“It means that when I read things I take it in differently. I can read perfectly, I can see perfectly, that’s not the issue, it’s just that things take a different path in my head so they come in strangely. Like a randomized bunch of stuff, a kitchen drawer with all the stuff that won’t go somewhere else. It can be exhausting, just reading one page. Even now. It was awful when I was little and we’d have to read aloud and I just couldn’t do it. I would sit there and shut my eyes and go silent. I would think, Everyone else can do this. Everyone else can see the pattern but it’s not a pattern at all.”
“I think that probably just means you’re creative.”
“No, it’s a thing, it really is a thing that they’ve told me I have. I went to a million doctors when I was little, it took them forever to find out. I would hear Clarice talking, saying that I was retarded. It was a relief when they put a name to it. Because I realized it wasn’t my fault.”
“Jesus, of course not.”
“She always needs things to be someone’s fault.”
“I think she should lighten the fuck up,” I said.
“Yes, exactly—lighten the fuck up, Clarice,” he said. This struck him as incredibly funny and he began to laugh. “Lighten the fuck up, Clarice!” he said again, choking up with laughter. He laughed until he blew himself out into a coughing fit. I pressed tissues into his hands and he expelled all kinds of goo, swabbing his mouth and drawing a line of mucus away to his hands, unembarrassed. He wiped his mouth more neatly, looked at me. “It’s just that no one besides Kendra ever said anything like that. I’ve just never heard it in someone else’s voice. It sounds so, I don’t know, funny and cute.” He let his head fall back onto his pillow.
“I’m exhausted,” he said, smiling.
*
As he started to feel better and could sit up for more than a few minutes, I’d sit at the foot of his bed and we’d play games. It started with checkers, then Chinese checkers. I found a deck of cards and taught him Crazy Eights and Go Fish and War. We could play for hours, but there was a degree of labor in this, a thing with the letters and numbers; I wondered how such forms looked to him. Neither of us cared who won. It was like we signed that over somewhere, and it was about the moment of play only. I memorized his hands, so long and articulate, knobby and raw, cut and healed over in a hundred little ways as if he’d been a short-order cook and not a musician at all.
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