Bad Blood

by E. O. Chirovici

  “A month after I moved in, I met his dad, who turned up to visit unannounced. Abe wasn’t at home, so I was the one who opened the door to a gloomy, skinny middle-aged man, who smelled of sweat and alcohol. When he told me his name was John Hale I realized that Abe had been lying to me, so I was able to avoid making some terrible gaffe. Abe didn’t come home until two hours later, which meant that I had to make conversation with his father in the meantime.

  “He was coarse and poorly spoken, with airs of being the Good American Worker and an embarrassingly superior attitude, which I think came from a strong feeling of inferiority. In his eyes we were nothing but snot-nosed brats, idling away our time instead of working. He intended to leave his son one hundred dollars before he left, and he informed me of this with a lofty air. He was convinced that students did nothing but get high and have orgies. He’d been too young to enlist during World War Two and too old to get sent to Vietnam, but he gave me a long patriotic speech and described the freedom riders as crypto-Bolsheviks who made a mockery of their great country, and who had managed to eliminate the best American president of all times, Richard Nixon. With difficulty, I refrained from arguing with him until Abe came back.

  “Abe’s face turned white when he saw his father, and he invited him out for a coffee. The guy had arrived with a furniture van, which he wouldn’t be returning until the next day. I insisted that we go to a restaurant together, and in the end Hale senior agreed, as if he were doing me a great and undeserved favor. During dinner, he constantly chastised Abe for all kinds of things.

  “That evening, the guy left, but not before solemnly handing his son five twenty-dollar bills, along with a pathetic speech. Abe looked very embarrassed and apologized to me afterwards. I assured him that there was nothing to worry about, although I wondered how many other lies he’d told me. But ultimately it was none of my business.

  “He was very happy that evening. A girl from New York he’d known for a couple of years, and whom he was secretly in love with, had come to Princeton to visit some friends and she’d invited him to a party. He asked me to go with him, eager to introduce her to me. On the way to the party he talked a lot about how wonderful she was. Her name was Lucy Sandler, and she’d gone to high school in England, which in Abe’s eyes made her mysterious and somewhat aristocratic. Reading between the lines, I realized that he intended to confess his love to her that evening and was firmly convinced that she shared his feelings. Abe was a small-town boy and those were the seventies, so that was the way things worked for young people who still followed the same mating rituals as their parents.

  “I found myself in an apartment full of guys I didn’t know, parting dense clouds of tobacco and weed smoke and stumbling over people sprawled on the carpets. Abe was overdressed and looked lost, while Lucy barely gave him a second glance. I got myself a drink and took shelter in a corner. About five minutes later, she came up to me and asked me to dance. I looked around for Abe, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “To be honest, I can’t really remember how one thing led to another, because I’d been drinking a lot. At one point, Lucy told me that she knew where the spare room was, so I followed her into a dusty attic where the only piece of furniture was a ratty davenport. She jumped on me and kissed me. I mentioned Abe and she gave me an offended look.

  “‘Are you really going to spoil this?’ she asked. ‘Abe’s just a friend.’

  “‘I don’t think he’ll take this too well,’ I said as she began to undress.

  “‘The important thing is that we’re here now,’ she answered. ‘Come on, don’t make me wait.’

  “For the rest of the evening she acted like she was in love with me, kissing me on the sly and trying to hold my hand. She told me about her parents, about her life in Europe, about visiting the exotic destinations she dreamed of. People had begun to leave and I looked around for Abe, but I still couldn’t find him. Lucy had come with some friends, and she ended up leaving with them, after telling me a dozen times that she would call me.

  “When I got home, Abe was sitting at the living room table, stone drunk. He said that Lucy was a slut, a junkie, and a filthy manipulator. After a time, his insults became almost poetic, like the Song of Songs in reverse, with her breasts as suspenders, her butt as a baseball pitch, and her face as a scarecrow in a cornfield in Kentucky. For the first time since I met him, he seemed truly alive and full of verve. See, hatred can be as energizing as love. In those moments, I got the feeling that not only did he hate Lucy, but he was also capable of harming her.”

  *

  Josh put the empty cups back inside the picnic basket and asked me whether I wanted a sandwich. I declined.

  It grew warm, and tendrils of steam were rising from the carpet of dead leaves. The crowns of the trees and the closely spaced trunks had turned the clearing into a kind of greenhouse and I was sweating. Josh took his coat off and laid it beside him on the bench, carefully folded. Everything he did seemed pedantically precise, and I noted that the passing years had left little trace of the erstwhile bohemian.

  “In the end he fell asleep there, at the table, and I helped him to bed,” he went on. “I threw a blanket over him and made myself a coffee. I felt sorry, but not guilty. Things became more complicated the next morning, when Lucy turned up at the door. Casually, she announced that she’d decided to stay with me for a few days, tossed her bag in a corner, undressed, and climbed into the shower. When she emerged, stark naked, Abe was coming out of his room and for a few moments I thought he might have a heart attack. He said nothing, took his coat, and left. He didn’t come back for five days, by which time she was already gone. I tried to bring her up, but he always avoided the subject. I spoke to her on the phone a couple of times, but after that she stopped calling me and I didn’t seek her out.

  “I think it must have been about two months after the incident with Lucy that Abe told me he was going to Paris.

  “His situation was even more tangled than mine. He’d probably thought that once he got a scholarship and left his hometown his problems would resolve themselves in some natural way. That the professors would quickly pick up on his intelligence and cultivation, and so he would get good grades and meet influential people. He believed that he was gifted with a talent for research, and he thought it was as good as certain that he would be offered a job on the university staff. But things didn’t turn out that way at all.

  “He’d been more intelligent and cultured than the majority of the people in his hometown, and he’d been treated as such by his teachers. But at Princeton he found himself among some of the most intelligent new adults in America. In his freshman year he pushed himself hard to prove his worth, but without much success. Among the rich kids it was fashionable to slum it—there was a lot of hypocrisy out there, believe me—but that didn’t mean they accepted real paupers. Abe was the silent type, steeped in provincial habits and prejudices he wasn’t even aware of. More often than not you would see him dressed formally, and he was always eager to show off his genuine culture at the most inappropriate moments, probably in order to compensate for the sense of inferiority that came from his poverty. The worst thing was that he lived every day knowing he only had four years to change his life, which made him tense and surly.

  “So he was rejected by that environment, just like the immune system rejects an alien form of life that penetrates the organism. His reaction wasn’t to change the way he was, but to blame the others. So he retreated even further into himself and became bitter and critical of everything he saw. His grades were mediocre at best.

  “He was neither the interesting, brilliant rebel, secretly envied by the nerds, nor the outlaw fighting against the rules, swathed in the dark smoke of revolt. At the end of the day, he was nothing but a tormented, increasingly lonely small-town boy.

  “In other words, all his dreams had come to naught, and the clock was ticking. When I met him, he had less than a year to go before graduation. He didn’t know which way to go and h
e was becoming more and more depressed. He’d lost his scholarship and was forced to take up all kinds of odd jobs in order to make enough money to live on until he finished his degree.

  “The only person who took a liking to him was a lady by the name of Elisabeth Gregory. She was in her mid-thirties, if I remember correctly, and the owner of a small translations company that worked closely with the university. Abe had taken an internship there during a summer. She was considered one of the most beautiful women in the area and there were many students who dreamed of playing Mrs. Robinson with her, but she seemed as cold and distant as she was beautiful.

  “I can’t recall where I found out details about her private life, but the campus grapevine probably proved as infallible as always.

  “She was married to a depraved drunk named John Gregory, who had taught at Princeton a couple of years previously and been sacked from his chair following a couple of sordid affairs. Back then, cases of sexual harassment didn’t necessarily become public, as they were seen as damaging to the renown of the institution, so everything used to be dealt with behind the scenes and buried in the secret crypt of the board.

  “It seemed that at the time Abe met Elisabeth, John Gregory had moved to New York City, where he claimed to be writing scripts, but actually was just a barroom brawler.

  “Abe bumped into Mrs. Gregory one day and she questioned him about his plans after graduation. She noticed his embarrassment and asked him whether he’d be interested in working in Europe. You can imagine what that meant to Abe! She was the long-awaited ray of sunshine in an existence that had become darker and darker.

  “Although his conversation with her had been vague and she hadn’t made any definite promises, Abe was already in seventh heaven. In the end, I advised him to buy a bouquet of flowers and take them to her at home. He hesitated for a few days, but then he did as I suggested. I don’t know what happened that evening, because Abe refused to utter a single word.

  “What’s for sure is that a couple of weeks later he received a letter from a French foundation, called L’Etoile. They offered him a yearlong contract, with a three-month probation period and the opportunity to extend the contract for a further three more years. That evening we celebrated, and Abe was genuinely happy. After his finals he left for Paris immediately, asking me to promise to follow him a few weeks later.”

  We stood up and walked down a path almost hidden beneath the ferns and dead leaves. For a while he said nothing, lost in thought. We came to a stop near a spring that ran lazily between the rocks and we sat down on a fallen pine trunk. We’d come less than fifty yards, but it took him a good few seconds to catch his breath.

  “To be honest, it’s hard for me to say why I kept my promise and followed him to Paris,” he resumed his story. “Honestly, I didn’t regard him as a friend, but more as a chance acquaintance. I cared about him, but not enough to give up my own habits or plans. I think that I quite simply didn’t have anything better to do that fall.

  “So, at the middle of August, when I received a letter from Abe—in those days friends still used to send each other letters written down on paper—I packed my luggage and went to France. He described his life there in very enthusiastic terms and said that everything was more alive, more interesting than back home.

  “The myth of those brilliant Parisian expats—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Hughes, and the rest—it was still alive for my generation. Paris was a shiny Babel full of inspiration and mystery, while New York seemed to fall apart back in the mid-seventies. I imagined that all Parisians wore painter’s berets, ate four-foot-long sticks of bread, and drank absinthe, surrounded by tender-hearted loose ladies. The ideas of genius floated through the air like raindrops, so all you had to do was take off your painter’s beret for a few seconds and you could fill it to the brim. Here, in the States, the atmosphere was rather gloomy—the side effects of the Vietnam War, political scandals, social restlessness, and the racial issue.

  “I arrived in Paris in late August, when the city was still boiling because of the heat. Abe picked me up from the airport, and I barely recognized him, although it had been less than two months since I last saw him. He was bearded and had let his hair grow. He’d given up his sober brown and gray formal clothes and now was wearing a pair of bellbottom jeans, a linen shirt, and a black leather jacket. He looked happy and carefree. I felt like Paris was really capable of working miracles.

  “He lived in an old building on the Rue de Rome, not far from the Champs-Élysées. The rooms were like matchboxes and you had to be careful not to bang your head on the wall when you hit the sack. Here we worship the big: big houses, big beds, big Cokes, and big bags of popcorn. In Paris, size didn’t matter as much as location. The apartment was in downtown, and the foundation rented it to him for a modest sum of money.

  “I quickly got over the inconveniences—adaptability is one of the gifts of youth—and I let Abe show me around. I didn’t feel like making plans, and let myself be carried along by chance. But he’d written a lengthy list of places I had to visit, and for about a week I wore out my shoes traipsing around Montmartre, Montparnasse, Faubourg Saint-Germain, and Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I’ve always loved arts and the Louvre took my breath away. I found it strange when Abe declared that the place that impressed him the most was the Dôme des Invalides, that insipid monument in which Napoleon is interred.

  “He didn’t mention Simone to me at first.

  “Sometimes he would enter a phone booth and linger there for ten minutes or so, but I presumed he was talking to the people at the foundation. He would always emerge with that giddy, happy air that lovers have, but I’d assumed that the city itself was the object of his adoration. In the evening we would drink Pernod in backstreet cafés, or while away the time in small clubs, where they played jazz and performed sketches of which I couldn’t understand a word. I barely spoke a dozen words of French, but Abe was fluent. I mentioned that his mother was a Cajun from Louisiana, so French was almost his maternal tongue. Anyway, I remember that first week being like an enchanted dream. I was seriously thinking about trying to find a job there. What’s more, there were quite a lot of American expats working in Paris and it was easy to make friends.

  “One evening, Abe dressed up more than usual and, without giving me any details, took me to a restaurant near the Palais des Congrès. It was a nice place called Chez Clément, far too expensive for his pocket. Ten minutes after we sat down at our table and ordered our drinks, Simone arrived.

  “I think I fell in love with her at first sight. At that age, you could fall for a frog, but I could immediately tell that it was much more than just a late adolescent crush.

  “She had blonde hair and looked as if she’d been carved in ivory, delicate and gracile, completely different from the young women in America at the time. The fashion for many girls back then was to burn their bras and try to look masculine and self-assured, as femininity was thought to be an odious means of manipulation, concocted by men in order to turn women into mere sex objects.

  “Simone was glamorous and mysterious, exuding not only beauty but also angelic goodness. To me, it was almost as if she was from another planet. My conversation with her proved that she was very cultivated and had studied extensively. She loved literature and knew Sartre personally. We spent the whole evening talking about the existentialism, the political involvement of artists, and other such things.

  “I finally realized what the explanation was for Abe’s transformation. I’d ascribed it to the miraculous effect of Paris, but he was head over heels in love. In her presence he was shy and uneasy, but not lacking in a certain clumsy charm, the kind that usually bowls women over. He kept his eyes fixed on her the whole time, either trying to anticipate her wishes or merely contemplating her like a work of art.

  “Simone spoke fluent English, albeit with an accent. She’d been working at Abe’s foundation for two years and had been assigned to help him settle in. She’d been the one who picked out the a
partment on the Rue de Rome for him, the perfect location for a newcomer unfamiliar with the labyrinthine layout of Paris.

  “I couldn’t tell whether she was in love with him or whether she was just trying to be polite. In any case, Abe’s advances were platonic, and I was convinced that they hadn’t slept together. But knowing Abe, I was sure that he didn’t see this as being important. Shall we?”

  five

  WE WALKED BACK TO the mansion for lunch. A nurse wearing a white uniform, who introduced herself as Lisa Bedeck, handed Josh a glass of orange juice and a small plastic receptacle half full of pills.

  He was trying to keep a brave face, but the walk and our conversation had obviously tired him. He interrupted his story about Paris, and during the meal he asked me how I’d come to choose psychology as a profession.

  “I think it started with a conversation I had with a doctor, when I was like ten,” I told him. “My grandma from my dad’s side suffered from a nervous breakdown. I was in love with sci-fi novels and I’d read a book by Philip K. Dick, if I’m not mistaken, about a man who was able to heal everybody by entering a parallel world while he dreamed. Well, one day a psychiatrist visited us to speak to grandma and I asked him to explain to me what dreams are, why we dream, whether dreams have any meaning or not, and so on. He was very kind, so we chatted about the subject for over an hour, but my conclusion was that he didn’t know very much about it, and that seemed to me more fascinating than any potential précis answer. The next day I went to the public library and borrowed a book about sleep and dreams. From there, a couple of years later, I went on to study anthropology and from anthropology to psychology and psychiatry. In my last year at medical school, during my clinical experience, I met Professor George Atkins, who trained me for a few months in the hypnosis techniques he employed at Bellevue Hospital in New York. We’re still in touch. You may have noticed he wrote the foreword of my book.”