Camilla waited a moment. Then, not exactly a statement, not exactly a question, more of a realization: “Your wife picked those.”
I nodded. “She had superb taste.”
“But very different than mine.”
I nodded and slowly allowed my body to relax. But I could feel hers stiffen now.
“Camilla,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s a reflex. I just have to learn how to…”
“How to what?”
“Nothing major. How to forget about my whole life so I can just love you the way you deserve.”
I could feel the tension ease out of her, as well. But not entirely. Her eyes didn’t soften. They stared at me. It felt as if they were staring through me.
“Do you want to know why I didn’t call you back, those days when you were with your mother after her stroke?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I?”
“No, you probably don’t. But I’m going to tell you.”
“Camilla…”
“I was with Alex. The boyfriend I told you about. He came to New York to see me, and we stayed together. Do you want to know more about it?”
“Christ,” I said, “I don’t know.”
“He’s a doctor, too. I met him through Médecins sans Frontières. In North Kivu. He’s amazing. I saw him operate on people while bombs were exploding around him. When there were blackouts. And he had to work in the dark with no electricity and no machines. I was terrified. Sick to my stomach. He never stopped.”
“Where is he now?”
“Back in Rutshuru. He came to the city to try to talk me into going back there with him.”
“Are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. Do you understand why I’m telling you all this?”
“To make me want to kill myself?”
She smiled. “No,” she said. “I swear. To make you understand that you can trust me.”
“You have a very strange way of doing that.”
“I’m not with him now, am I?”
“No,” I said. “You’re not.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” Camilla said.
“Nothing.”
“Uh-uh. There’s so much you’re not telling me.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and drew her closer to me. I could feel her heart beating in rhythm with my own.
“I am strange,” Camilla said. “I’m strange and I’m complicated and I’m not easy. And you know why? You know what else I am?”
“What?” I asked.
“I’m not dead.”
With animals, you feed them, house them, pet them, and, when needed, you take away their pain—and for that they trust and love you. It should be that simple with humans, but of course it isn’t. We try to make it that simple, but it never is.
That, I’ve come to understand, is what makes us human. We are not simple. We run from things we’re attracted to. We destroy the things we love. We want the things we can’t have. We take the things we don’t want. We’re hurt by truths and soothed by lies. We live for such a short time and all we yearn for is something that will last forever.
That morning, holding Camilla, feeling her beating heart, knowing all the things I was afraid to do or say, all the things I was afraid she would do or say, I began to think that, in spite of it all, the hurdles in front of us were surmountable.
Maybe that’s why Camilla chose that day to tell me all about herself and her past.
* * *
From the New York Daily Herald-Examiner:
ASK DR. BOB
Dr. Robert Heller is one of New York’s leading veterinarians. He is the author of two books about taking care of pets, They Have Nothing but Their Kindness and More Than Human, and is a regular on the Today show with his weekly segment, “The Vetting Zoo.” Dr. Bob takes care of cats, dogs, horses, birds, snakes, turtles, frogs, snails, fish, small pigs, and many varieties of rodents. You can e-mail him at [email protected] and ask him any question about the animal you love. His column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays in the tristate area’s most popular newspaper. His columns can also be read on the Herald-Examiner website: www.HeraldCo.com/AskDrBob.
Dear Dr. Bob:
I don’t know if you’ll remember me or my dilemma, but I wrote to you a couple of years ago about the death of my cat, Ralph. Your response to me was a bit evasive and vague—you didn’t really make a firm commitment in your answer—but despite your waffling you were extraordinarily helpful. Sometimes an answer that is based in reality is a lot more valuable than one that tries to be encouraging or supportive.
I’m writing to you again—and I swear that I am not a nut who writes letters to the editor or fan letters to celebrities; you are the first and only stranger to whom I’ve ever written—because I have had a resolution of sorts to my problem. In your response you wrote that you hoped I’d rediscover the pleasures of what you dubbed “pet weight.” I have, in fact, rediscovered that pleasure, but in a way I did not ever expect. I was a cat person my whole life. Well, about fifteen months after Ralph died, I heard a screech outside my apartment. It sounded as if something bad had happened, which it certainly had. A small cocker spaniel had been struck by a hit-and-run driver. The poor dog was in tremendous pain; I could see the bone in his leg sticking through the skin. I took off my sweater, wrapped him in it, hailed a taxi, and brought the poor thing to my vet (who, of course, I hadn’t seen since Ralph had died). I was nervous touching an animal in such pain, particularly a dog, since I was not at all familiar with dogs. But this little guy was so gentle and seemingly grateful that in the cab I found myself stroking his head and talking to him in as reassuring a manner as I could manage. I realize this letter is going on and on, so let me get to the point. The point is that the owner of the cocker spaniel could not be found. The vet fixed his leg—he didn’t lose it, but he does still limp noticeably—and put him up for adoption. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and I wound up doing the adopting. I have renamed him Derek, and he sleeps next to me. Not on me, the way Ralph used to, but by my side, usually down around my legs. So the real point of this letter is to say I have indeed rediscovered “pet weight.” It’s different in every conceivable way. But it’s lovely.
—No Longer Weightless in Seattle
Dear No Longer Weightless:
You don’t need my advice, you need my congratulations. Rediscovering “pet weight”—and let’s call a spade a spade: We are really talking around the idea of love, just using cute euphemisms so as not to appear too treacly—is a rare and, I believe, wonderful thing. You are someone who must have a great capacity for love, and you are therefore able to embrace it on a deep emotional level. Many mere mortals are not capable of such resilience and rediscovery, and I suppose there are many reasons for being so closed off. Those reasons run the gamut from fear to bitterness to a simple lack of opportunity. Speaking for all of us on that end of the human spectrum, I salute, embrace, and revere you.
—Dr. Bob
* * *
CHAPTER 11
CAMILLA HAYDEN
Here’s what I learned about Camilla that day:
She was eight years, nine months, two weeks, and four days younger than I. But her mother’s best friend, an Englishwoman who owned a seed catalog and was always giving exotic seeds to Camilla to plant in their small garden, once said to her, “My child, you were born old.” I think the friend was right. Or more to the point, “old” was forced upon Camilla.
She was born in London; her father, Lewis, was British and her mother, Constance, was American. She grew up thinking about her family, as I did about mine, that they were strong and stable and that any problems that might exist in the world would be solved simply because everybody loved each other so much.
Her mother made beautiful things—gloves and jangly bracelets and socks that glowed in the dark—designing them for her own pleasure as well as for her business and selling them to small, upscale boutiques in Chelsea. One women’s clothing store in P
aris, in the fourth arrondissement, also carried her distinctive line. The Paris store, which was owned by a woman named Maude, sold more of Connie’s socks than anyone else’s.
Lew was an actor (we were both startled to hear that our fathers shared a profession and that we’d run as far away, conceptually, from that profession as we could, opting for precision and caring for others rather than inventiveness and vanity). He acted in plays occasionally, usually taking small to medium parts in companies that toured the British countryside. He did some television, often playing the bewildered bureaucrat or the friendly neighbor. But his real living came from voice-overs. He was the voice behind ubiquitous dancing tea bags and the narrator of BBC nature documentaries; he also extolled the virtue of the BMW’s ability to take curves and hold the road on the iciest of nights.
Camilla’s mother doted on her, dressing her up in frilly dresses and decorating her with her own inventions and designs as if Camilla were a living, breathing doll. Her father loved to watch his daughter prance around in elegant ribbons and jangly costume jewelry and iridescent socks. But he also warned her to be careful. When she was eight years old, he told her, “Men love all the shiny things—it’s what attracts them. But you have to have more than shine. You have to have substance underneath.” She understood what he was trying to tell her, especially when he pointed to her perfect mother and said, “She understands. Look how she shines. Look how she glitters. But underneath your mother there’s a lot more than glitter.”
Camilla was Lew and Connie’s only child. She got lonely sometimes and used to ask her parents why she couldn’t have a sister or a brother. They would tell her that they had gotten so lucky with a perfect child the first time around that they didn’t want to tempt fate.
Young Cammy went to a top school as a child, an essential step up the ladder in class-conscious England. She rode horses in Hyde Park and in the Sussex countryside, where Lew and Connie had a small nineteenth-century cottage. The cottage had a lovely little garden, and it was here that Camilla planted all the seeds her mother’s best friend gave her. On weekends she couldn’t wait to see if her own special flowers had come to life or sprung up several more inches or wilted away while she was separated from them. Until the age of twelve, that was the worst thing that had ever happened to her: flowers in the garden wilting and dying while Camilla was in London in her flat on Gloucester Road.
Then her mother made a major career change. Connie had long been satisfied with a business that was small and exclusive, but now she decided to go big-time, or at least bigger. She took a job with an up-and-coming British designer who wanted to branch out into accessories. Suddenly Camilla’s mom was a vice president and so busy that she often had to work late and, more often than not, spend weekends in the city. Lew, who was several years older than his wife, was not thrilled with the new arrangement. He loved it when his wife sparkled and shone at home, when she showed her inner substance only to him. He was not so crazy about Connie shimmering elsewhere and getting a big salary in exchange for showing the world how smart and talented she was. Lew loved routine even above substance, and his routine was now very much in disarray.
Things only got worse when Connie had a sudden realization: It wasn’t routine her husband craved, it was control. It also hit her that he’d been subtly controlling her all these years, and the awareness staggered her. One Friday, Cammy overheard an argument between her parents. It stunned her because she’d never before heard a cross word pass between them. Since Lew was English, it was a quiet argument. He never raised his voice or allowed his tone to turn angry. He let Connie handle that end. Lew simply said that he couldn’t go on this way and that if Connie insisted on continuing along this path, he’d have to do something about it. She pleaded with him; she loved the new job, told him how happy it made her. He didn’t care. He said he was taping a voice-over for a new frozen pudding that afternoon for BBC Radio and that he expected her to be ready to leave for Sussex by five p.m. sharp. Connie began to swear and yell while Lewis sat quietly, his arms folded, until she was done. She didn’t finish until young Cammy broke into the room, ran to her mother, and pleaded with her to come to Sussex for the weekend. Connie stroked her daughter’s hair, stared at her husband, and said she would be ready to leave at five p.m.
The drive out to the cottage was subdued and tense. That night, Camilla overheard another argument before she fell asleep. Her mother couldn’t understand why Lew didn’t see how important her work was to her. Lew couldn’t understand how anything could be more important than the perfect life they’d had for fifteen years. Camilla remembered her mother saying, “Sweetheart, things change. People change. It doesn’t mean everything has to fall apart. Change can make things better. You just have to trust me.” And she remembered her father responding very quietly, in that actor’s stage whisper that up until that moment she’d found so alluring and romantic, “You’ve betrayed me.”
The next morning, Lew told Camilla that he’d arranged for her to go horseback riding.
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I’d rather stay with you and Mum.”
“You can be with me and Mum this afternoon,” he said. He seemed particularly jovial, so Cam thought that maybe they’d worked everything out last night after she’d fallen asleep. A neighbor came by to take her, with the neighbor’s daughter, to the nearby stable. Cam suddenly felt a powerful need to say good-bye to her mother, but Lew said she was still sleeping.
“We’ll have a lovely lunch when you come home, ducks.” Cam couldn’t remember where the nickname came from, but he sometimes called her “ducks,” and it always made her giggle. She giggled this time, too; she couldn’t help herself. Then she ran to the car and went horseback riding.
When she came home at lunchtime, there was a local police car parked outside the cottage. She knew immediately what had happened—she just knew—and ran toward the house. A policeman tried to grab her, but she eluded his grasp.
Camilla raced inside and saw her father dangling from a rope strung up to the bedroom rafter. He was wearing a suit; in his jacket pocket, in place of a dress handkerchief, was a pair of shiny, sparkly socks, Connie’s latest design. Before he’d hung himself, he had stabbed his wife to death, plunging a kitchen knife into her eleven times. The police later determined that he had killed her before Cam had gone riding that morning. Connie’s body was sprawled on the bedroom floor, and Lew’s was hanging above it. The image of his dead wife had to have been the last thing he’d seen before the rope snapped his neck.
Camilla’s father had not told her he loved her when he sent her off to the stable that morning. He did not express any form of regret or agitation. He just said good-bye and told her he’d see her when she got home.
But he did leave a note for her. The police found it and at some point handed it to the hysterical little girl. Lew Hayden wrote the following words as his suicide note: “Ducks, I’m sorry we betrayed you. It doesn’t mean we don’t love you. Love, Da.”
Camilla was taken in by her father’s sister and brother-in-law, who lived in a London suburb. They were very sympathetic and kind—for a while. But they were unable to understand the depths of the girl’s confusion about how and why her life had been shattered so abruptly and so insanely, and they couldn’t comprehend why, at some point, she didn’t just pull herself up by her British bootstraps and get over it. They treated Camilla as if she had some kind of disease. Camilla told me that she did: terminal sadness.
Sadness often shifts toward anger, but when Camilla was fifteen, her anger turned into full-blown rage. Her aunt and uncle knew even less about how to deal with that. She started drinking and doing drugs. And she discovered sex, which became an excellent way for her to express her fury at the living as well as the dead and, of course, at herself. At sixteen, she left home. She also left behind a fair amount of money, because her aunt and uncle had somehow used the British court system to assume control of Lewis and Connie’s estate. It wasn’t all that sizable but
it was bigger than nothing, which is what Camilla now had. For the next two years, the teenager lived with friends, mostly boys. She was rootless and restless, unable to feel comfortable anywhere. Everywhere she turned she saw betrayal.
The one thing that didn’t suffer during this period, miraculously enough, was her schoolwork. School became a valued escape from all her frustrations and self-destructive behavior; when she turned eighteen, she was able to get a scholarship to Columbia University, in New York. But her rage continued unabated, as did the powerful desire to run as far away from home as possible. Not just the home that had been shattered or the home that had been forced upon her—she ran away from any home, all homes, anywhere. She lived with several men, but as soon as they got serious, she dumped them. She shared several apartments with roommates, but the moment a roommate started buying furniture or making the place comfortable and lived-in, Camilla either threw the roommate out or moved out herself. She left people and possessions behind without a second glance.
She loved medical school because it left her no time to think about her life. She loved her residency even more because it was her life. She lived at the hospital five nights a week, ate all her meals there. Her entire existence was devoted to eliminating other people’s pain, which gave her no time to experience her own.
When she finished with school, she felt lost for a bit. She hung out in bars, met men, sometimes went home with them, usually didn’t. She liked to make them listen to her tale, liked to watch their faces when she told them about her parents. She began to embellish the story, honing the details of what she’d seen when she’d raced past the policemen and into the cottage. She delighted in seeing how the tragedy scared many men away, excited others, and made some vulnerable to her manipulation. She liked the pity and the shock. Sometimes when she told the story she was casual and hard; sometimes she would go for the sentiment and the tears. It was all an act, because she never felt anything when she told her story except the deep sense of betrayal that her father had apologized for in his suicide note. He had taken away her belief that anything would be all right ever again. He had stolen her faith that the center could ever hold.
Ask Bob: A Novel Page 28