I was five pages into the search results when Charlie’s old articles surfaced. “The Native Speaker.” “Whiteout: Or, How a Black Man Stood on Top of the World.” “Five Reasons Why Firefly Is the Most Brilliant TV Show, Ever.” It was dark by that point, and my dream of exercise had turned into a pot of pumpkin ravioli and a third glass of wine. Under its maudlin influence, I read every story Charlie had ever published, in order to recover the man I loved. The strange thing is that I did. Reading Charlie’s eager sentences—so many exclamation points in those early pieces, so many dashes!—I heard him as he’d been when we met, a very young and not very reformed nerd, utterly in love with the strange textures of the world. Oh, Charlie, I thought. Come back. I called his phone but there was no answer. I poured myself another glass of wine and tried not to think about what he might be doing at that very moment. I composed an email to Lila asking her to please send my husband home but wisely didn’t send it. I lamented everything. The whole human condition, the fact that one thing leads to another, and the ten thousand years of progress that had enabled a horde of toxically regressed strangers to camp out on my laptop’s screen. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t read Charlie’s story about the Happy Rabbit. I searched for it: nothing. I googled Happy Rabbit, Memphis, William Lee. I remembered every detail. The Chinese immigrant prepared for a plausible future. A strange idea that could have saved the world. Nothing. Had Charlie researched the story but not written it? I googled golden rabbits and got a cascade of irrelevance. Happy Rabbit? Internet, please? Memphis rabbit restaurant? Finally, I realized that Charlie had made the whole story up. Right at the beginning, and how could I not have seen it? What kind of restaurant would serve only rabbit meat? I asked the obvious question: What else had he made up? Horrified, I packed a week of clothes and went to stay with my brother in Westport.
I had been lied to before, of course. Everyone’s been lied to. When I was eight, my father told me he was going on a business trip and he’d be back in a week. He was gone for six months. For most of them, he lived in Fairfield, practically next door to my quietly furious mother. He came back shortly after my ninth birthday: I tumbled off the school bus and there he was, rising from an armchair, reaching out to me in wonder. “Look at you!” he said, as though I were the one who had gone away. Then he said, “How about an iced tea?” We never talked about why he had left, but it didn’t take much sleuthing to figure out that he had run off with another woman. The greater mystery was why he had come back, and I never solved it. Nor did my mother ever really become less furious. The episode vanished from our family history to the point where my brothers claim they don’t remember it; the few times I’ve brought it up, they looked at me with total incuriosity, as if I were telling them about a dream. But those six months are still there; they can never stop being there. I see them in the way my brothers clown around on our family vacations, as though to keep my father in his seat. I see them in the adult-education classes my mother takes, on everything from Gemology to The Modern Middle East. Nothing, but nothing, will ever catch her off-guard again. And naturally I see the consequences in myself.
By the time Charlie called me, Eric had already talked to him. “I’m so sorry, Mar,” he said. “I ruined everything.” “Yes, you did,” I said. “I owe you an explanation,” Charlie said, “but I don’t completely understand it myself.” “See a therapist,” I said. “OK,” Charlie said. “OK. You’re angry.” “Charlie, I’m not angry, I’m done,” I said. “That’s not true!” Charlie said. “You can’t leave me just like that, over this one thing. Marina, you can’t leave me now.” “Watch me,” I said. But Charlie was right; we weren’t done. I saw him a week later: late September, everything blue as can be. I was renting a studio on the Upper East Side, and we met on the East River promenade, amid joggers and nannies with kids and forlorn people taking the Sunday Times for a walk. Charlie looked fifty years old. His hair was threaded with gray, and his expensive English glasses magnified the dark bags under his eyes. His army jacket smelled like a bar. He held out his arms to hug me and I stepped away. “I’m going to fix this,” Charlie said. “Grace gave me the name of a therapist.” He laughed. “The curious case of Charles Willett.” It was such a stupid thing to say that I didn’t answer. “I love you, Mar,” he said. “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. Charlie lit a cigarette and turned to look at the river. “I went back to Parry Sound,” he said. “You what?” I said. “I wanted to understand,” Charlie said. “Oh, my god,” I said, “don’t you ever learn?” “I did learn,” Charlie said. “You know what Spinks is?” “A monster,” I said. “He’s like the DMV guy, Mr. Rational Language,” Charlie said. “He’s someone who had to start again from zero. And the thing is, it kind of worked.” I was speechless. “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Totally serious,” Charlie said. “The truth is, in a sick way, I admire him. He helped me to figure something out . . .” “Will you fucking stop?” I shouted. I thought he had finally and truly lost his mind. People turned to look at us, and looked away. Just another young, or not-so-young, couple, having their weekend meltdown. “OK, chill!” Charlie said. “I’ll tell you about it another time.” “Tell me never,” I said. I had to get away from him, so I started walking. “Marina!” he shouted. “Hey, come back!”
• • •
I didn’t see Charlie again until the last day of December, when he emailed that he was sorry, he missed me, and he promised he wouldn’t talk about L. C. Spinks. I met him at a bakery in Cobble Hill. He was worn out, hunched around himself, around the place where he used to be. I felt the loss, too. “How are you?” I asked. “My life is a sad joke,” he said, “only there’s no one to laugh at it.” “What about Lila?” I asked. “That’s over,” Charlie said. “Too bad for you,” I said. “Please, Mar,” he said. “You have no idea what this is, not having anyone.” I wanted to touch his hand but I told myself it wasn’t time yet. Then he told me he’d tried to kill himself with his leftover Ambien, and I told him that he should check himself into a hospital, and he did. Six days later he was gone.
7.
Charlie died to me then, the same as he died to everyone else. I wept and mourned and participated in the rituals of grief, the most terrible of which was surely the memorial service Charlie’s mother held in her faculty apartment in Morningside Heights. It happened on a Sunday in February, one of life’s low points. Something that was almost snow drifted wetly out of the clouds. Indoors, two dozen people stood around a nearly bare living room, the only things in it a purple sofa, a white rug, a dozen bottles of cheapish Malbec on a sideboard, and a card table on which a thoughtful relative had arranged a basket of bagels, tubs of cream cheese and olives from Fairway. The last time I visited, on Charlie’s mother’s birthday the year before, the apartment had been imposingly full of books: volumes of German philosophy and art history and Greek and Latin Loebs. Their absence was almost as shocking as the occasion on which I was seeing it. Without the books, the apartment looked dingy: the plaster patched and painted too many times, the crown molding missing here and there, in accordance with some previous professor’s bygone scheme. Charlie’s mother—close-cropped gray hair, black turtleneck, round black glasses—circulated through this desolation like a zombie bride. Eventually, she approached me and asked if I was all right. I said I was as all right as I could be, under the circumstances. “What happened to your books?” I asked. “I got rid of them,” Charlie’s mother said. “Don’t you think the apartment looks bigger without them?” “Absolutely,” I said. “I rented a U-Haul and took them to the Strand,” Charlie’s mother said, “and when I got there, they said I had so many books, they would have sent a truck to pick them up! Let that be a lesson to you, Marina. Call ahead.” “I’m going to get a drink,” I said. Charlie’s mother looked at me vaguely. “Why don’t you come over for lunch, sometime?” she asked. “I’d like that,” I lied. “Wonderful,” Charlie’s mother said. “I’ll look at my calendar, and my secretary will giv
e you a call.” I slipped past an awkward knot of Charlie’s Princeton friends, and two cousins from Philadelphia who stood with their backs to the radiator, talking about basketball in an undertone. A man in a gray tweed jacket, a philosopher, I assumed, was searching for a cheese knife. There were plastic knives on the table, but he seemed unable to accept the absence of the correct tool, knowing that there were cheese knives in the world. I watched him for ten seconds, then I slipped out of the apartment, and in the elevator I thought of what a miracle it was that any living human being had emerged from such a place, let alone Charlie. Who was no longer a living being, I had to remind myself. Outside, I started crying, but with all the slush falling from the sky no one could tell.
But you have to keep living; so, in March, I moved back into our apartment in Brooklyn Heights. There were beer bottles in the sink, newspapers on the kitchen counter, piles of unopened mail, ashtrays full of cigarette butts, and black dust on the windowsills. I was furious at Charlie for leaving me with one more mess to clean up: even in death, he’d found a way to make me his maid. I threw out the trash but couldn’t bring myself to sort through Charlie’s things. Sometimes, in the evening, or on a weekend afternoon, I leafed through the composition books in which he had made notes for his projects. I wasn’t looking for anything; I just wanted to revive my memories of Charlie, to touch his handwriting, his smart-kid print. Inevitably, I found the notebook he’d used for his conversations with L. C. Spinks. My instinct was to set it in the sink and burn it: this book was dangerous. But I don’t believe in burning books, any books, and even if I did, I could never have brought myself to burn Charlie’s handwriting. Out of morbid curiosity, I leafed through the notebook one wet April night, but it didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already known. There was no record of Charlie’s last visit to Spinks, no suggestion of what my husband might have figured out. Which was strange, because Charlie took notes on everything. You never know what’s going to be useful, he said, when I teased him about it, and he’d often been right. I looked for the missing notes in the bag that had come back from the hospital, but they weren’t there. Nor were they in the sealed plastic bags the Stockbridge Police Department had finally sent me, containing Charlie’s shoes and pants and jacket. (No T-shirt, though. Had he worried about his chest getting cold?) It was possible that there were no notes, because Charlie had either thrown them away or never made them in the first place. It was possible, though dreadful to think, that he had taken the notes with him into the lake. More likely they would turn up in a closet or a bag that I hadn’t yet searched. Life is full of loose ends. My patients get tangled in them all the time; I’m supposed to help them see meaningful patterns in their lives, but I spend a great deal of time pointing out that some things are meaningless. Anyway, I told myself, it didn’t matter. Spinks was a liar. What could he possibly have told Charlie that would make any difference?
Then, on March 24, someone texted me a photograph of an indigo ocean. I didn’t recognize the number, and I was about to delete the message, when I had a wild thought about what it might mean. I remembered the note Charlie had left in the hospital: Do not disturb me, I wish to sleep for a long time. It was the note Barlow had pinned to his door before he killed himself, and I had moaned with pain when I heard about it, because it was so terrible to think that Charlie’s last words had been a quotation. But what if he had slipped away, like his Barlow? How insane that would be, I thought, and how infuriatingly stubborn. Which is to say, how Charlie-like. My heart beat hard as I called the number back. It rang four times, and just when I thought it would go through to voicemail, someone picked up; then the call dropped out. I called back and the phone rang and rang. It was a New Mexico number but possibly a cell phone, so the call could have come from anywhere. I saw a patient, and wasn’t much use to him; then I called again. This time I got a computerized voicemail. “It’s Marina,” I said. “Whoever this is, please, call me back.” I called ten more times that night and left ten messages that all said the same thing.
I told myself it was a wrong number, but here’s the thing: Being a psychoanalyst is in some ways like being a detective. You follow the trail of symptoms and dreams and memories back to the buried crimes of childhood. And like a detective, I’m very stubborn. I’m like Charlie in that regard. I kept my phone on all the next day, hoping the ocean person would call me back. That night, I forwarded the text message to Eric, who, I figured, owed me a favor. I asked him to use his big computers to figure out where the photo had been taken and whose number it was. He wrote back half an hour later. No information about the number. You probably need a subpoena for that. But according to the metadata, the photo was taken at Latitude 29.186460 North, Longitude 80.986413 West, 1.5 meters above sea level. Ask a programmer, I thought. I wrote back: Where in the world is that? Eric replied: Daytona Beach. Oh, I thought. Daytona was near Cassia, where Barlow had once lived. And I recalled Charlie’s dumb fantasy of working on a fishing boat. The next day, I called the Daytona marina—yes, Marina called the marina—and asked them to put up a picture of Charlie and my telephone number. I called tour-boat companies and fishing charters. I emailed Charlie’s face to dozens of strangers. I also thought about the photograph: the ocean, at night. Was whoever sent it pointing me to “The Night Ocean”? Barlow’s story was about an artist who rented a cottage by the sea to recover from a grueling project. Did that mean Charlie was resting? The story was also about fish-men who carry swimmers away. Should I be on the lookout for fish-men? For fishy men? Inevitably, I thought of L. C. Spinks. What had Charlie figured out when he went to Parry Sound in September? Where were his notes? Even as I was looking for them again in Charlie’s closet, I told myself, this is magic. You’re doing a ritual. When you’re done bothering random Floridians, maybe you can put Charlie’s photo on a shrine and light a candle to it every day until you get sick of magic and move on.
Then I emailed Lila. I doubt you want to hear from me, I wrote, but I think Charlie might still be alive, and I’m wondering if you know anything about that. You’d have to be a monster to know, and not to tell me. I deleted the last sentence and pressed send. Lila wrote back that evening: I used to think the same thing, she said. Now, I’m not so sure. Call me if you want. So I called her. I pictured her in some crappy room in an apartment in a part of the country where everyone has a house. Old linoleum, particle board, fluorescent loop on the kitchen ceiling. Lila’s voice was painfully young. “Thanks for making time,” I said, as if she were the busy one. “That’s OK,” she said. Either she thought she was the busy one, or she was good at irony. “The truth is,” she said, “I want to apologize. I feel really badly for what, um, happened. I was never in love with Charlie, and I don’t think he was in love with me, either. It was just, like, a thing that happened. I think, maybe he was lonely? And confused? And maybe he was going through some kind of midlife crisis?” For a Baronian, her psychology was dismally ordinary. “Lila,” I said, “why did you think Charlie might still be alive?” “Well,” she said, “someone updated his Facebook page on, like, January eighth.” “They did?” I couldn’t imagine how I’d missed it, except that I was too distraught, and I had stopped looking at Facebook. “Yeah,” Lila said, “it was just one word—Whoosh. But, I thought, who could have posted it, if not Charlie? And there was another thing. Charlie was reading this book, The Long Goodbye. It’s about this guy, Terry Lennox, who fakes his own death. And the lake where Charlie disappeared is right near Lenox, Massachusetts. Lennox and Lenox. I thought, maybe that was a sign?”
Oh, god, I thought. Lila was in love with my husband. Nothing but love could occasion such fantastic hermeneutics. Which made me wonder what I was doing, but never mind. “You don’t think that anymore,” I said. “No, Mrs. Willett, I don’t,” Lila said. “I think probably his Facebook page was hacked by somebody who was messing with him. Those Knights of the Outer Void people knew he was in the hospital.” Once again, I was angry at myself for not paying attention to wha
t had happened online. “They knew?” “Yeah,” Lila said, “they were tweeting about it. It was so ugly.” “Lila,” I said, “when was the last time you saw Charlie?” “In November,” Lila said. “That was when we broke up. But like I said, we weren’t ever really in love or anything.” Whatever, I thought. “Did he leave a notebook at your house?” “A notebook?” “Yes, a composition book with a black-and-white marbled cover. College ruled.” If she even knew what that was. If she even lived in a house. “No,” Lila said, “I don’t think so. I guess I could look?” “Please do,” I said. “If my husband left behind anything with writing on it, I want to know.” “I’m not sure I like you telling me what to do, Mrs. Willett,” Lila said. “I feel bad about what happened but it doesn’t make me, like, your servant.” “It’s Doctor Willett,” I said, “and I don’t give a fuck what you like.” I hung up. The satisfaction I felt was short-lived.
The Night Ocean Page 20