“You want?” he asked, extending the pack.
“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”
“Try,” he said. “One time. Is very relaxing.”
She had never had a cigarette. Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things—except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma mixed with his cologne and sweat, and the taste of it in his mouth and the rush she got when she kissed him just after he’d had one. But the memory of watching her mother smoke had permanently soured her on them. Her stomach turned whenever she saw a full ashtray; she imagined being made to eat it, butt by butt, and gagging on the ashes.
“Fine,” she said, and she took a cigarette from him. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve. She reached her hand out for the lighter, but he just took his own cigarette out of his mouth, lit hers from the flaming tip of his own, and handed it to her.
“You have to light it right,” he said.
She took a few breaths without disturbance. Sergei told her to take a deeper puff, and she did so, looking at him for confirmation. He was smiling an amused smile. Her lungs filled with heat and she fell into a loud cough.
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.
“This always happens,” he said.
“Usually to teenagers,” she said. “Not to fifty-four-year-old women.”
“It happened to me,” he said smoothly. “You are not fifty-four.”
“I am.”
“You may have fifty-four years”—he was gesturing in an inscrutable way that she assumed would have conveyed more to a Russian native—“but you are not fifty-four.”
She blushed. “I think I’m done with this,” she said, dropping it and stepping on it. It was nearly the whole cigarette, and her embarrassment made her kick it behind her toward the house.
“You work very hard,” Sergei said, continuing to smoke. “My wife has no job for thirty years.”
“Thank you,” she said, absurdly. Talking to Sergei made her uneasy. At first she thought it was the language barrier, but now she was beginning to think it was something else, a tension rooted in the strangeness of having a man living in her house.
“I didn’t want to have job past sixty,” he said, finishing his cigarette and stepping on the butt. They went back inside. Sergei sat at the table glancing at the newspaper while she put dishes away.
She didn’t hear him on the stairs, and her back was to him when he entered, but there was no mistaking that Ed had joined them, because her stomach seized in nervous anxiety. She heard the clicking sound he made when he was trying to get words out, like the distress call of a bird.
Sergei put down the paper and gave him a long-suffering look.
“Why don’t you sit and I’ll make you some tea,” she said.
“My,” Ed stammered, and the clicking became more desperate.
“Ed, honey. Please.”
Sergei held up a hand to silence her. He gestured for Ed to take his seat as he rose and passed out of the room. She heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs and unconsciously poured the water out of the kettle she’d been heating instead of filling the cup she’d set out. The steam rose from the sink. When she’d caught herself, there wasn’t enough left for a full cup.
“Look what you made me do,” she said.
Ed calmed down once Sergei had left the room. He sat where Sergei had been and shook his head, continuing to click, but in a softer way, like a cooing bird. “No,” he stammered, quietly.
“It’s okay,” Eileen stood behind him and rubbed his back. “It’s okay.”
“Mine,” he said.
81
The summer uniform had short sleeves and no jacket, but the pants were a thick wool-poly blend, and he wasn’t allowed to take off his hat. There was no air-conditioning in the atrium, so they opened all the doors to the enclosed quadrangle and hoped for a breeze.
The one benefit to the heat was that it kept many of the residents away from the city. He ushered their mounds of bags and cartloads of hanging clothes into Range Rovers and Jeeps, and they handed him ten bucks and headed for the Hamptons or Long Beach Island. Even Mr. Marku went out of town for the weekend. He came into the lobby with his golf clubs and polo shirts on Friday afternoons and said to get his car, his sweat fresh with aftershave. Connell loved when Mr. Marku was away, because it was safe to read in the open.
The shareholders who remained in town weren’t much trouble. There was the shipping magnate of Olympian means who spread the last scant lengths of hair across his glossy pate. He hustled through the lobby with his head down, polite and preoccupied, as though he were sorry for trespassing. Then there were the younger sharks who hadn’t yet acquired a house in the Hamptons. They talked sports with Connell, checked out women with him, and as long as he didn’t act as though they were equals, they didn’t pull rank. They hailed their own cabs, told him to stay in his chair when he rose at the sound of their approach, but if he took for granted that they would, they cracked him into action with a chilly look, all camaraderie forgotten.
Mr. Shanahan in 12C was probably the most successful shareholder in the building. He wasn’t the richest—that was the shipping magnate—but he was the one who held the most power. He was in charge of an investment bank. He had the sort of reassuringly large cranium common to movie stars, and perfect teeth, and very little body fat, and he treated the doormen more like regular people than probably anyone else in the building. It wasn’t a shock to learn that he’d been a doorman once himself, in college.
Mr. Shanahan spent a lot of time with his son Chase, who was home from boarding school for the summer. Mr. Shanahan got dropped off in a town car and met Chase for lunch. Sometimes he came home early and reappeared in the lobby a little while later with the boy, both of them in jogging outfits. They stretched in the courtyard before they went out for a run in Central Park, and they did push-ups there afterward. They weren’t technically supposed to be in the courtyard doing that, but everyone looked the other way because Mr. Shanahan was such a good guy and never got to see his kid during the year.
Sometimes Mr. Shanahan and Chase sat on the bench in the lobby while one or the other tied his shoes on the way out or caught his breath on the way back in. They teased each other in a good-natured, prep school sort of way, and Mr. Shanahan took evident pride in the boy, who, at a couple of inches over six feet, was almost as tall as Mr. Shanahan himself, even though he was only fifteen. Whenever they left the lobby in the beginnings of a jog, Connell felt a jolt of yearning.
All in all, Connell liked being upstairs. In the early afternoons, though, when the sun washed the lobby in clarifying light, and the thick, humid air muffled the car horns, he was set upon by remorse. Not only had he abandoned his father to a stranger, he had cost his mother unnecessarily by doing so. She was paying Sergei twice what he was earning at the building, and to do a job that Connell should have done free of charge. There had to be a way of looking at it that wasn’t so dark. There had to be an explanation for his selfishness. Maybe something was going on that was too big for him to see. Mr. Grossman, his junior year English teacher, had lectured one day about how the Oedipal complex worked in Hamlet. Hamlet didn’t understand all the forces that conspired in his own mind, the conflicting desires and obligations. Losing a father early, being given all that responsibility, Mr. Grossman said, had made it hard for Hamlet to act. Maybe something like that was working in Connell’s mind too, something big, something hidden. He was afraid he would never see it clearly.
82
She scheduled a solo session. Bethany picked her up and brought her to that too.
To assert ownership
of the transaction, Eileen tried to present Rachelle the check when she walked in, but Rachelle cannily brushed it away and told her they could handle that later. Rachelle had her sit in the middle of the living room. It struck Eileen that no sign of Rachelle appeared in the pictures on the walls, that it could have been a house lent for the meetings by one of her acolytes.
They got quickly to work. Bethany sat close to her and held her hand as they listened to Vywamus speak. Eileen could almost physically feel the web of rhetoric being spun around her, but she relaxed in Bethany’s grip regardless.
“The true story of your husband is more complex than it appears,” Vywamus said effortfully, trailing into a long cough, as if Rachelle hadn’t gotten into character yet. Eileen liked to think she was above superstition, but she could feel herself hoping that Vywamus wouldn’t pronounce anything bad. “You only know him in this life, but your son and he have been struggling for many lives. This time around, your son has the intellect and the emotions. Your husband has only the intellect. He is fighting for his soul.”
“Really?” Eileen said doubtfully. The assessment of Ed was off base, and Eileen wanted to challenge it on principle. Anyone who knew Ed knew he felt things deeply, but how was she supposed to go about reasoning with Vywamus?
“But he is doing good things for himself,” Vywamus said. “He is putting others before himself.”
She thought of how Ed prayed for Connell and herself and not his own salvation. Maybe there was something to what Vywamus was saying. Or maybe Rachelle knew that letting Eileen leave with bad feelings might hurt her business.
“Your son left because he was angry at his father.”
“Funny,” she said. “I thought he left to go to college.”
She tried a smile, but Vywamus would have none of it. “He has been battling your husband for thousands of years.”
The whole act was so absurd, so transparent, but Eileen decided to shut off the critical voice in her head. She chose to let her mind be soaked in Rachelle’s narcotic wash of words. Eileen knew that she was the one actually spinning the web. For a couple of hundred dollars a week, she was being given the gift she needed more than any other: to be taken out of her life.
“It seems like that sometimes,” she said.
“You are guarded,” Vywamus said. “This is because of certain childhood experiences. We both know what these are, and I need not utter them now. You must open a window in your heart. There is a need for fresh air in your soul. You need to reach out to those you care about and give them a loving embrace. Remember that touch plays a crucial role in how we communicate love.”
“Okay.” She had the feeling of listening to a deathbed monologue. She felt strangely poised to carry out whatever Vywamus called for.
“You have a good child. And a good husband. This battle of his has nothing to do with how he feels about you. In this life, you have helped his soul.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
83
On a slow afternoon in early August, Mr. Marku snapped his fingers as he passed and motioned for Connell to follow him downstairs. They entered the office, and Connell sat on the worn leather couch as Mr. Marku yelled at a contractor on the phone. He watched clown fish and angelfish chase each other through the coral in the saltwater aquarium and had one of those crystallizing insights into the order of things that always seemed less profound a few hours later. The guy wanted weekend access so his workers could finish sooner, and Mr. Marku wouldn’t give it up. The doormen and porters took it for granted that Mr. Marku let his palm get greased for things like this, but as Connell listened to Mr. Marku standing this man down, he considered the radical idea that sometimes there wasn’t a cynical story to uncover, that Mr. Marku was probably just a man of principle.
He thought of his mother and the phone conversations he’d been eavesdropping on. He felt guilty listening in, but he couldn’t help it, because when he was around, his mother was so squirrelly about not talking to whoever this lady was, this friend of Bethany’s. His guilt turned to anger that his mother was getting taken for a ride.
Because Mr. Marku knew everybody, he probably knew the kind of people who could strike some fear in the heart of this lady, make her leave his mother alone. A couple of men would show up at her door, and they wouldn’t have to say much.
Mr. Marku hung up and leaned back in his chair. He lit a cigarette and gave Connell a long look that betrayed no malice, which made it more intimidating. He never prefaced anything with pleasantries; it was always speeches.
“You don’t shave, I give you a razor and tell you to shave,” he said. “You take long lunches, I say he’s a growing boy. You talk too much to the shareholders, I say I’m glad he speaks such good English. But when you don’t wear the hat; when you don’t wear the hat, and you’re standing in front of me . . .”
“Are you letting me go?”
“Not yet, I’m not,” Mr. Marku said. “I told your teacher I’d keep an eye on you, whip you into shape. You’re coming back down here to work.”
84
She added a weekly phone call to the Tuesday night groups and the Thursday night solo session. The rate was cheaper for the telephone session, one twenty-five an hour.
One day Connell sat at the table giving her dirty looks while she was talking to Rachelle. She tried to shoo him away, because she felt too self-conscious with him there, but he wouldn’t leave, and she told Rachelle she’d call back.
“What’s going on?” he asked when she hung up.
“What?”
“What’s up with Bethany?”
“Nothing, why?”
“I saw a show about this the other day. They’ll take you for everything you have. People end up homeless.”
“Look at this kitchen,” she said. “Look at that countertop. Does it look to you like I’m going to be homeless?”
The next time Bethany came to pick her up to go to Rachelle’s, a strange mood hung in the air. Connell came into the kitchen, followed by Sergei, and then the two of them went down to the basement. When she called down to say she was leaving, she got no reply. As Bethany backed out of the driveway, Eileen saw the garage door rising and Connell pulling out with Sergei in the passenger seat. It was something she hadn’t seen before, the two of them in the car together, and she spent the whole trip wondering where they could have been going. She usually enjoyed these rides to Rachelle’s, singing along with Bethany to pop radio, but she was distracted by the thought of Ed in that house alone, even if he was already asleep when she left.
The bell rang as she was settling into the floor. When Bethany opened the door, Eileen saw Connell and Sergei there. Connell started to enter. “Excuse me, young man,” Bethany said as she tried to stop his advance, but Sergei moved her aside with an effortless sweep of the arm and followed him in.
“What are you doing here?” Eileen asked.
“I wanted to see where you went.”
“You followed me?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said, “but I don’t like it.”
She was oddly comforted to see him there. She felt, for a moment, as if she wasn’t on her own.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s home. In bed.”
“You need to get back there,” she said.
“You need to get back there,” he answered. There was an unexpected authority in his voice; he seemed to have matured by ten years in an instant. She found herself on the point of heading for the door.
Rachelle walked into the room with a natural, confident air and placed a hand on her shoulder. “This must be your son,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you.” Her voice was full of disarming warmth. “I’ve been hoping for this chance.”
She put her hand out. Connell took it automatically.
“You’re every bit as spirited as I understood you to be.”
“Thanks, I guess.” He turned from Rachelle. “Come on, Mom. We have to go.”
“And who is your friend?” Rachelle asked.
“This is my husband’s caretaker, Sergei,” Eileen said.
Sergei stood there with his arms crossed, impassive. Connell must have prepared him for his role; the thought of it touched her.
“Come on, Mom,” Connell said.
“Now, I understand you’re feeling a lot of different things,” Rachelle said to him. “Anger. Confusion. A loss of control. And I know your heart is in the right place. I probably know more about what you’re going through than you think. You might like to talk to me yourself sometime.”
“Nope,” he said. “You can keep your snake oil.”
“Watch your mouth,” Bethany said, stepping toward him. Sergei shifted in front of Connell, and he and Bethany looked like a big dog and a little one squaring off. The tension in the room was thick.
“Why don’t we all take a deep breath,” Rachelle said. “Please, sit down.”
“I’m not sitting,” Connell said. “I came to get my mother out of here.”
“Is that why you brought your friend?”
Connell nodded.
“The body is one thing,” Rachelle said. “The body can be held captive. The mind is something else entirely. The mind seeks its natural state, which is freedom. You can’t imprison a mind forever. If your mother seeks freedom, she’ll be back. There’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do to fetter that desire. You can try to put her in chains, but her mind can break them. What we do here is train minds to break chains.”
Connell looked as if he was waiting for her to come to his aid, but she was frozen, partly out of curiosity about how he’d handle this challenge with a year of college under his belt.
“I don’t know what to say about all that,” he said. “I’m sure you’re a nice person. I just came to get my mother.”
We Are Not Ourselves Page 50