A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (9 page)

DR. NANCY
, the child psychiatrist, neatly laid out the sheets of foolscap. At first Mr. Peter, the court-appointed guardian, couldn’t make sense of the drawings. The human figures were recognizable, but what they were doing and where they were situated were not. The crayon work was sloppy and the red crayon had been used wildly, with tangles of scribble running across each sketch. The only other legible features were long rectangular blocks, set at skewed angles, some of them cross-hatched. Dr. Nancy placed a long, painted fingernail on each drawing as she explained: this is the mother and the father together, this is the father with the girl, the father alone with the boy, the mother with the boy, the boy alone, and look at this one, it’s all four of them. Mr. Peter studied the drawing for a while. The figures were holding hands, partly shrouded in red crayon.

These are, he thought, pretty hot fingernails, varnished burnt orange. Dr. Nancy wore a mid-calf skirt, stockings, and a satiny blouse; most child psychologists tended toward the drab, projecting motherly and grandmotherly personas meant to reassure the children. He preferred this persona. Looking at the youngish woman, svelte and energetic, Mr. Peter wondered how the case would unfold and whether they would work together afterward. He tried to peer into the future and learn whether it contained a
friendship, shared confidences and intimacies, romantic feints and parries and further complications—a conspiracy that would conclude either with love or without it. He was pleased that he was wearing his most lawyerly dark blue suit.

As he began to examine the drawings, Mr. Peter believed that the little girl, nominally his legal client, lagged in the development of her motor skills—this was common enough in children from troubled families and played well enough in court. But Dr. Nancy impatiently tapped her fingers on the drawings, urging him to look harder. He worked at separating and distinguishing the crayoned snarls. He became aware of the violent passion that had gone into these sketches; also, in the consistency of their subjects. The drawings came into focus. The psychologist had asked the girl to draw pictures of her family. In each one she had placed her family near or around the burning World Trade Center.

The World Trade Center was on fire; in one drawing the tail of a jet protruded from the left tower, about a third the size of the tower. The boy stood on the tail, on fire. In another picture the mother and father were poised on each of the towers’ roofs, their mouths framed as solid O’s of black crayon. Even though the figures were primitive, Mr. Peter received a strong impression. In the next few sketches the girl seemed to be leading the father away from the buildings, off the page; then the burning mother was carrying the burning father; then the girl’s limbs, scribbled over by deadly red, seemed separated from her body. In the last drawing the four of them had leaped from the towers and were falling hand in hand.

MARSHALL PURCHASED
an inexpensive telephone equipped with a simple earphone attachment. It rested on a hook next to the receiver. It allowed you to listen to a conversation that was taking place on another extension without lifting the receiver
and giving yourself away. The packaging warned, “Federal law prohibits use without the knowledge of all parties.” Marshall smiled, unable to contemplate an instance in which one would use the device
with
the knowledge of all parties.

He kept the phone hidden behind some books, though Joyce hadn’t entered his bedroom in more than a year. He enjoyed the clandestine cleverness of the device and his reliance on technology of which Joyce would never conceive. She was resolutely low-tech. In this battle Joyce’s advantages—single-mindedness, a keener hatred—would succumb to Marshall’s superior tactics. He thrilled with an appreciation of his power the first time he listened in on a conversation, a call opening playdate negotiations from the mother of Victor’s best friend. Marshall’s greatest hope was to intercept communication between Joyce and her lawyer, but it seemed she was too cautious for that and presumably took counsel only through her phone at work. This meant he had to be patient, sifting through a thin data stream: updates to work-related appointments, hair-cutter appointments, further playdate negotiations that went on longer than the playdates themselves, a few guarded conversations with her parents. There was nothing like a breakthrough until Flora called one evening, furious.

Removing the telephone from its hiding place, Marshall missed her first words, but he recognized Flora’s breathy, agitated voice at once.

“Christ, she’s driving me nuts.”

She
could only be her mother, Amanda. He wished he had paid another hundred dollars for a recording device.

Joyce called him Osama? He
loved
that—this was great, this was better than any intelligence, better than anything tangibly useful. He didn’t want to get back at her now, he just wanted to prolong this feeling of mastery, this sense of being
able
to get back at her. So he would have to get back at her; he would have to press his advantage. By the time this divorce was finalized, she was going to think he was Hitler and Stalin too.

The friend of my enemy…
Roger came into the Afghan restaurant with his eyes hooded, his demeanor solemn. He looked hot under his coat, which was much heavier than it needed to be on this summery November evening. He unzipped it violently. Joyce slid out from her table by the bar and presented herself to be kissed. He lightly brushed her cheek. She squeezed his arm as he looked away.

It was an Afghan restaurant, but this was Brooklyn Heights: Joyce noted the mojitos on the drinks menu. “C’mon,” she said. “They’re fun.”

They were meeting only for drinks, so that Joyce could return a photo album she had borrowed from Linda years before. She couldn’t return it herself: she and Linda were no longer speaking; they had ended, abruptly, a conversation they had begun in the third grade and had carried through the most fraught, significant, character-determining years of their lives. Each had now become the other’s unperson, whose name you couldn’t even think. Joyce had left the album in the apartment, however. Marshall and the kids were out of town for the weekend.

“Thank you for coming, Roger. I feel just terrible not seeing you guys. I miss Linda. I miss
you
.”

His hand sketched a vague outline in the air in front of his face. “Yeah, well, you know.”

“I know,” she said warmly.

In fact she didn’t know. Linda had been her best friend. Now Marshall had somehow seized the friendship and carried it off with him.

“So, how have you been holding up?” Roger asked, after they were served their drinks.

Joyce knew he would ask her this question, in precisely this way—eyes down at the table—but she took a while before replying.

“All right,” she said heavily, and then shrugged. “But talk to me about something else. Something pleasant.”

Roger was visibly relieved not to have to discuss Joyce and Marshall’s breakup. Instead he told her what had happened to him on September 11. He pronounced the date in a grim whisper. He had been in Florida on business. He had been washing his hair in the shower in the hotel room, with the TV on, if only to keep him company. He couldn’t hear what was being said, not with the water running, but through the bathroom’s
walls he had sensed a change in the broadcast’s pitch or temperature, the voice of Tom Brokaw at the wrong hour of the day. He had rushed out without a towel and was instantly mesmerized by the television images. He had watched for hours while his hair dried and the lather caked. Later, after days of confusion, he was bumped from his return flight. He detailed his maneuvers to get a new flight—dozens of phone calls, being put on hold for hours, urgent appeals to the corporate headquarters in Atlanta—concluding bitterly, “Delta wouldn’t tell me a thing.”

“Hmm,” Joyce said.

Roger was a burly man with bushy eyebrows and thick, cushiony lips; Linda’s endearing nicknames had always been drawn from the ursine: Smokes, Yogarama, etc. Of the four friends, he was the most intellectual and level-headed yet, Joyce realized, he considered himself a significant actor—a victim—in the September 11 tragedy. And didn’t she think she was a victim too? After all, she had
seen
the buildings fall, with her own helplessly naked eyes. She was supposed to have been on one of the planes. But so what.
Every
American felt that he had been personally attacked by the terrorists, and that was the patriotic thing of course, but patriotic metaphors aside, wasn’t the belief a bit delusional? There was a difference between being killed and not being killed. Was everyone walking around America thinking they had been intimately, self-importantly, involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center?

She studied him carefully, alongside the image he had brought to the table: himself rushing from the shower. The comment didn’t appear to be a come-on. He was much too somber and uncomfortable for that. Her phone call and simple request that he meet her for drinks had nearly seemed to break his heart. Their foursome had been inseparable once, each friendship within it tight and direct. She was touched, for she
felt the same grief he did. Still, he had just placed his dripping, untoweled self in play.

The restaurant filled with customers and the kitchen started disgorging clove-scented fumes. Lifting her iced glass, Joyce took a long pull on her straw. Dented copper and bronze tea-pots were lined on a shelf on one side of the room, wall tapestries on the other. Diners leaned on embroidered pillows. Their murmurs rose just to the point of audibility. The bearded waiters wore loose white shirts, belted around their waists and left to fall untucked over their cotton trousers, and stiff sleeveless black waistcoats. She wondered if they carried knives beneath their waistcoats, and not only for cutting meat.

“Too bad about those Yanks,” she said, trying to turn the conversation away from September 11, but that was impossible. In the seventh game of the delayed World Series earlier this month, the Yankees had lost to the expansion team from Arizona. The games, found in the back pages of newspapers dominated by terrorism and war, had been played in a spacious vacuum, despite the 9/11 ceremonies that preceded them. After the president, wearing an FDNY windbreaker, threw out the first ball—a perfect strike, the papers called it—the players were unable to fashion a story that either countered or honored the tragedy. The Yankees should have triumphed, demonstrating the vigor and resilience of the world’s greatest city—or the team should have been too demoralized to have made it into the Series at all. Not that many of the players ware actually from New York. Roger scowled at the table. He had downed his drink as if it were medicine.

Joyce blurted, “Does Linda miss me?”

Damn, that wasn’t what she wanted to say; she had hoped to avoid bringing Linda into the conversation. She felt blood rush to her face. Roger was taken aback. This meant talking about the breakup.

“Yes, of course,” he said, frowning. Roger usually preferred
precision and didn’t wish to make an automatic response. He thought about his answer. “It’s complex. Of course she misses you. She misses the friendship. She understands, though, that it can’t be what it was.”

Joyce wanted to ask,
Why not?
What did Marshall have to do with her and Linda? And how could Linda and Roger be so spineless? She wanted to smack him. They had always been weak. Now incidents from their lives came to mind. Linda had stayed with her loutish college boyfriend for years past college, unable to stand up to his abuse. Roger was perennially troubled by some complicated problems involving a rental property he owned with his sister and mother—problems whose solutions were obvious, requiring only some minimally tough determination. The way they shied from conflict could have been described as generosity and easygoingness—and it was these qualities that defined what looked like a relaxed, smoothly humming marriage—but Roger and Linda needed more than anything to be well liked. Roger hid his desperation behind an affability that pleasingly contrasted with his bulk and bearing. As for Linda, her defense was an affected ditziness that had gradually become an intrinsic part of her personality. She had been a dope to let Marshall come between them. But Joyce’s anger had gone cold a long time ago, she reminded herself. She was here to do what she was forced to do; she had begged Roger to meet her for a drink not because she wanted to repair her friendship with Linda.
The friend of my enemy…

“Do
you
miss me?” she said instead.

“Yes, sure, sure. Linda and I are heartbroken about this. We didn’t want to take sides, our friendship meant a lot…”

Joyce reached across the table and seized his hand. This was something she would never have done before, back when they were still friends and she had no enemies. She would never have touched him like this, even though their rapport had always included some physical warmth. Before they had kids the
four of them had moved around each other with a light, unembarrassed, meaningless physicality. Nothing was meaningless now: the waiters had witnessed her gesture, possibly; she thought she saw one of them flick a signal to the other, who had perhaps passed it on to the third. Everything was known. At the next table, a platter of sizzling kebabs had been brought to another couple, held high above the waiter’s head like the spoils of war.