by Chase Novak
She must also enroll them in school. Sending them back to the Gothic structures of Berryman Prep, their old private school, is out of the question, psychologically and economically. Without a doubt, they will be attending public school. But even in their neighborhood, where real estate prices seem to have been calculated in post–World War I German currency (when it took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a pound of Black Forest ham); even here, where a medical doctor’s salary puts him in the middle class and a professor would be unable to live without the help of an inheritance; here, where the Yorkshire terriers wear diamond-studded collars, and nine-year-old girls get four-hundred-dollar haircuts; even here, the nearest public school building is a monument to government neglect: a dingy, one-story afterthought with wire mesh over its windows and brickwork from which graffiti has so often been removed that the stones themselves seem wan and unstable. Here, the student body consists of the children of live-in nannies; rich little boys with behavior problems who have been bounced out of their private schools and who have gladly traded in their blue blazers for basketball jerseys; and a surprising number of children from actual and bona fide nonwealthy parents, children who the strollers and shoppers along Lexington and Madison Avenues thought lived miles and miles away and whom they might have expected to see only in a heartrending documentary about Want in the Midst of Plenty but who reside a few blocks east in tenements that have not yet yielded to the wrecker’s ball.
The twins must also see their therapist—since Jenny Carlat, who had been assigned to Alice, moved to Cleveland, both children see Adam’s therapist, a lanky young man named Peter White, an MSW who after two years working for the City of New York is already a burned-out caseworker.
White’s office is on East Thirty-Second Street. Unfortunately, despite Cynthia’s efforts to move the appointments around, Adam is scheduled to see White on Mondays at ten, and Alice sees him on Wednesdays at two, and so Cynthia must accompany them twice a week. They go as a threesome. They do virtually everything as a threesome.
Peter White’s office is in what real estate agents call the garden level (but which is in fact the basement) of a shabby old brownstone, once a private home for a family of six and now divided into fourteen rental units, two of them windowless in violation of the law. To reach the entrance of White’s office, Cynthia and the twins must take the steps that lead below street level, squeeze around the trash bins, and ignore the sour juniper scent of alley-cat congress. The office itself is scarcely two hundred square feet, devoid of so much as a ray of natural light. The space is divided in two by a wall, with the waiting room on one side and the consulting room on the other. When a client opens the door to the waiting room, the first bars of “Some Enchanted Evening” play in the consulting room, informing White that someone has entered. The first time Cynthia took the children there, she was surprised she could simply let herself in—even in relatively slipshod and easygoing San Francisco, people locked their doors, and here in New York, even the antiques stores had a system by which customers were visually inspected before being buzzed in. She mentioned her uneasiness with White’s open-door policy, saying, “Anyone could just walk in here,” and Adam said, “I guess,” and Alice added, “But who’d want to.”
Adam seems indifferent to his appointments with Peter White, but Alice hates them, and today is her hour. She is not one to complain, but as they descend the concrete steps leading to White’s door, her eyes are cast down, her shoulders are slumped, and her lower lip is extended in a classic pout of dejection.
“I don’t see why we don’t have the right to just forget about bad stuff if we want to,” she murmurs, as much to the cosmos as to Cynthia and Adam.
“It’s the law,” Adam reminds her, which is his interpretation of Child Protective Services’ making their continuing therapy one of the requirements for their adoption to be finalized.
Cynthia opens the door and hears the recording of “Some Enchanted Evening” played by carillon bells coming through the closed door of White’s consulting space.
Alice glances at her watch. Today, she is wearing the American Girl, and Adam has the Swiss Army.
“Expecting someone?” Cynthia says, really as no more than a joke.
But Alice frowns. The girl has a talent for suddenly placing her foot in your path and forcing you to step on her toes.
“Kidding,” Cynthia says, hoping to reassure.
“I don’t like it here,” Alice says.
“You know where I’ve always wanted to go?” Cynthia says. “And maybe before school starts we can go there. Just the three of us.”
“Where?” asks Adam.
“Mount Washington,” says Cynthia.
“Where’s that?” asks Adam.
“New Hampshire. Right in the middle. It’s totally wild. And high. And windy. They say sometimes the wind gets up to three hundred miles an hour.”
“Wouldn’t that kill you?” asks Alice. “Why would you want to take us to someplace like that?”
“Because it’s beautiful and it’s wild. And it’s only windy like that sometimes, in the winter.”
A moment later, the door opens and White appears, rubbing his hand on his cheek and chin, perhaps wondering if he can go another day without shaving. He is six and a half feet tall, with long dry hair the color of a parched field of wheat. He holds his long pale hands in front of him and glances at them continually, as if they might do something awful. He treats his hands as if they were on parole. White looks at the three of them expressionlessly.
“Are we early?” Cynthia asks, annoyed by the shrink’s lack of affect. Today is the day she might tell him that if you break the word therapist into two pieces, you get the rapist.
Yet why does she resent him? Why does she not acknowledge the fact that she needs him? It could be as simple as this: She wants the twins all to herself. She is giving them intravenous infusions of pure unadulterated love, and she does not want that to be interrupted.
“You’re right on time,” White says.
“We’ll wait right here,” Cynthia says to Alice reassuringly.
“Actually, Ms. Kramer,” White says, “I wonder if you and I could spend a few minutes alone before Alice and I begin.”
Cynthia is surprised to hear this. A nervous flutter in the lower digestive region. Despite Peter White’s wracked, two-packs-a-day, ten-cups-of-bitter-coffee appearance and the fact that he is at least ten years her junior, she feels as if she is being called into the principal’s office. Has he some sort of heightened emotional radar, has he guessed she has had dark thoughts about him? That the rapist thing was meant to be funny…She reaches into her handbag and gives Adam the sudoku puzzle book she’d brought along to pass the time.
“Sit tight, kids,” she says, her voice unaccountably merry. It is a failing of hers, she knows, this desire to keep every moment upbeat, engaging, and interesting, as if she were a TV host afraid they would switch the channel. “Okay? Little Alley-Oop?”
“Okay,” Alice says.
“How come she gets a nickname?” Adam asks. He is embarrassed by his own question. He can barely look at Cynthia.
“You want one? I wasn’t sure. You’re such a serious kid.”
Adam shrugs. “I don’t care. Whatever.”
“Oh, so that’s how it’s going to be. All right…Braveheart, have it your own way.”
White switches on the white-noise machine on top of the table strewn with magazines and escorts Cynthia into his office, closing the door behind them. When they are seated, he wastes no time getting to the point.
“They are both very upset youngsters, Ms. Kramer. They are bright, engaging, and, when they choose to be, quite articulate. But Alice spends half her hour here crying.”
“Alice?”
“Yes, Alice. Adam doesn’t cry. At least not here. But he brought me this drawing.” White unlocks the top drawer of his wooden, well-scarred government-issue desk and pulls out the drawing, slides it toward Cynthia. It is a
n astonishing piece of work, a pen-and-ink drawing so filled with images that the paper feels drenched. Trees, planets, houses, and statues bearing swords and bayonets all swirl around in a kind of airborne madness that looks partly like ecstasy and partly like the end of the world. In the center of this vortex stands a half-man half-beast creature who is holding a dog that he is preparing to devour; sticking out of his mouth are a dog’s head, a rat’s tail, a child’s foot—the remains of what he has already consumed.
“This is an amazing piece of work,” Cynthia finally says, putting the drawing down. She places her hands in her lap, not wishing White to notice they are trembling. “I mean, a real artist did this. In fact, I doubt it was Adam.” She shrugs. “He’s too young, for one thing. This isn’t the work of a twelve-year-old.” She slides the drawing back to him.
“It is the work of a twelve-year-old, Cynthia. And Alice does cry in this office. We need to see what really is, not what we wish there to be.”
“Of course,” Cynthia says.
“I want to put them both on medication, Cynthia,” White says. In fact, he feels regretful about this, since his slice of the psychological pie is talk therapy, but he camouflages his regret with a certain aggressiveness in his tone. “They both need selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”
“Antidepressants? Why? I don’t see them as depressed.”
“Weeping in my office? This?” He taps the horrific drawing with his index finger.
“But you can’t even prescribe them anything, Mr. White. You’re not a medical doctor. You’re a…what? You have a master’s degree in social work? And now you want to pump those kids full of chemicals?”
“You sound rather angry, Cynthia.”
“The fact is, you can’t prescribe medications.”
“I work very closely with the best child psychiatrists and psychopharmacologists in New York. Those children need treatment. I do believe that with time they could find their way through the thicket and come out as fine and productive members of society. But talk therapy is slow—and they need help right away. They are gaunt.
“Alice appears to be starving herself, Cynthia.”
“I know, I know. We’re working on it. I’m giving her grass-fed organic meats with no hormones. I think she’s worried about…about getting her period. Puberty. All the additives and chemicals in the commercial food supply push kids into puberty way too early. It’s a crisis, worldwide. All those children’s choirs? Like in Europe? They can’t find kids who can sing the soprano parts. Even the ten-year-olds have these deep voices.”
“Why do you think they fear puberty, Cynthia?”
“What do you think? They’ve been told that for some of the kids whose parents went through those horrible fertility treatments—they’ve been told that things start getting crazy for those kids once they hit puberty. They’re afraid. We all know that. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s not inappropriate; it’s not crazy behavior. They feared their own parents were going to kill them—and fucking eat them. Of course they have fears. It would be psychotic if they didn’t have fears.”
“They’re going to end up back in the hospital if we don’t intervene quickly,” the therapist says.
Cynthia shakes her head. She wills herself to calm down.
“It’s a big step, Mr. White.”
“I appreciate that, Cynthia. And I commend you for your conservative approach. Too many of the parents I see are all too eager to give their kids whatever new pill comes down the chute. They’re desperate, I suppose.”
“I’d like some time to think it over. Which antidepressant do you have in mind?”
“Oh, there’s a host of them out there. And new ones coming out all the time. And maybe they’d benefit from something else on top of that. Something to stabilize them. Help them put on some weight. Help them get past some of their fears. It’s just astonishing the things that can be done biochemically. Amazing stuff is being done.”
“That’s what they told my sister and her husband about fertility drugs.”
White lowers his eyes, like some nineteenth-century gentleman showing his respect when a funeral carriage rolls by.
“No,” Cynthia says, suddenly adamant. “I don’t think we’re at that stage, not yet. I want to give them what they’ve never had.”
“Which is?”
“Love. Just pure unconditional love. A good stable home. The basic things that every child has a right to—things they have never had.”
“You can’t love away the damage that’s been done, Cynthia. It’s not possible.”
Just then, the recording of those carillon bells playing “Some Enchanted Evening” fills the little room.
“Could they have left?” White asks, frowning, rising from his seat.
“I seriously doubt that,” Cynthia says. She turns in her chair. “Kids?”
Looking as if he’s trying not to panic, White walks across his office and opens the door to the waiting room.
The sudoku puzzle book is on the floor, and other than that, there is no sign of either Alice or Adam.
“Kids?” cries Cynthia, with more urgency and less hope.
“They’re gone!” White exclaims.
“They wouldn’t do this,” Cynthia says. “I know them. They just wouldn’t.”
The door leading to the outside is open. Garbage-y summer air wafts in. The white-noise machine on the table continues to make its breathy sound, like a stadium crowd cheering a mile away.
Chapter 8
Boy-Boy leaves Ezra and Annabelle’s apartment and rides the elevator down to the lobby. Today was lucrative; the old man bought twice his usual amount and put an extra Benjamin in the envelope for a tip. No question about it: being dangled from a balcony brings out the best in some people. Ezra has been ultra-polite since that first time. Annabelle, however, hardly even glances in Boy-Boy’s direction. All the sexual satisfaction Boy-Boy’s product has made possible for her has had the opposite effect of dangling her from a balcony. It’s made her a bit rude. She act like me’s not there, Boy-Boy muses as the elevator makes its squeaky descent.
Speaking of not there, Boy-Boy wishes the elevator operator weren’t there. Everyone in the crew, from Rodolfo on down, is on high alert.
Us’s and thems like us’s, we’s going down one by one, Rodolfo reminds them all every time they go out to work.
Could the elevator operator be the one doing all this extermination? Boy-Boy wonders. Could this dark old man in a toy-soldier suit be working with whoever is picking off the crew? Or maybe the old man is the exterminator himself! No, no, makes no sense. The exterminator ain’t working no fucking elevator, Boy-Boy reminds himself, calming down. But what if the real elevator operator is tied to a chair someplace, conked on the head, handkerchief stuffed in his mouth?
Nervously, Boy-Boy chews on a cuticle. The skin around each and every one of his fingernails is red and raw. He finds his own skin comforting and sort of delicious. Forget sort of. It’s just plain delicious. He knows he has to be careful, though; it’s a dangerous appetite. A couple guys in the crew took it too far, and the result was something even Boy-Boy cannot bear to think about, even though he prides himself on being a street-savvy warrior with nerves of steel.
The elevator moves so slowly. Fuck me, the peeps in this place must be made out of time. But at last they reach the lobby and the operator opens the grate, turning all those triangles into exclamation marks, and after that the outer door.
“Thank you,” Boy-Boy says, exiting as far from the elevator operator as possible to guard against some poisonous last-minute lunge. Across the tiled lobby, with its columns and potted plants, freedom waits, just beyond the heavy doors with their polished brass handles and all that money sunshine shining through.
“Son?” the elevator operator says as Boy-Boy leaves. “Sometimes a shower is in order.”
Up many flights, in Ezra and Annabelle’s apartment, the shades are drawn, the ringers on the phones are off, and the music p
lays fairly loud, because although the walls in this stately old apartment building are thick, practically soundproof, Ezra and Annabelle plan to kick up a bit of a ruckus, and they want to make certain no busybody with time on his hands and an ear to the wall picks up on any of it.
They are undressed now, soaking delightedly in the enormous tub in the master bath with its bright blue border of Turkish tiles and solid gold faucets in the shape of swans. Out of some residual sense of modesty, as well as a lingering reluctance to put his aging, sagging, scarred body on prolonged display in front of his young wife, Ezra has poured several capfuls of Ethiopian bubble bath he recently purchased at Henri Bendel. His old exhausted penis lies curled beneath the scented froth of a trillion bubbles while Annabelle, perhaps mocking his modesty or perhaps having a bit of fun, has taken two scoops of bubbles and placed them over her nipples—it’s how people in Ezra’s business used to have to show girls in the bathtub, several decades ago, when a hint of pink could get you shitcanned.
The tub is fourteen feet long and eight feet wide, and so deep that it took a full hour to fill it. Clunky square tuberose-scented candles purchased from a store near the Piazza Navona burn along the edge of the tub. They also have two bottles of Icelandic springwater. The four vials of blood bought from Boy-Boy lie on their sides next to the water bottles, and, after drying his hands on Annabelle’s hair, Ezra uncaps two of the vials and they both drink quickly, after which they both take swigs of the Icelandic water to wash the taste of salted copper from their mouths.
“If pennies could drool, this is what it would taste like,” Ezra says.
“It’s like tomato soup that’s been in the can so long it’s gone weird on you,” says Annabelle. She dabs the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand; the little trace of blood pinks the soapy bubbles. She looks at it for a moment, aghast, but finds a way to laugh. She plunges her hand in the water to wash it clean. Baptism by Ethiopian bath gel!