A Private Sorcery (14 page)

In August she slept with Russell, the guy across the street who'd carted out Joe's deer head. Like mother (Eleanor had gone on a crash diet and taken to wearing tighter blouses and shorter skirts and screwing everyone in sight), like daughter, she thought. Russell was perfect—physically gorgeous and spiritually bankrupt. Answering the door barechested and barefoot, the snap of his blue jeans would still be open. He lied about everything. It got his goat that she didn't care who else he slept with. He fucked more and more vigorously, banging into her, throwing her around, until one morning, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she saw her tailbone black and blue. Horrified, she left him a note: “This is getting out of hand. Count me out.”

A few days later, sitting on the front steps waiting for Eleanor to come in from the night so she could leave for work, Rena watched Russell, a towel wrapped around his middle, open his front door and her mother walk out onto the porch. Her mother's head tipped backwards, inviting a kiss. Russell waved at Rena before bending over Eleanor. Rena felt sick. She was twenty-five. Eleanor was forty-four. Russell was right in the middle. The peanut butter and jelly.

In the evening, Rena banged on Russell's door. He laughed as she
pushed past him.

“Lay off my mother. You don't give a damn about anyone, do you?” He moved toward her, his hands reaching for her breasts. “She's not bad, your mother. But she ain't got these.”

Everything went static, the electrical circuits that usually keep thought and action in separate channels suddenly blown, and the next thing she knew she was punching him. She'd never hit another human being, but she pummeled him: on the nose, at his ears, on his chest. A trickle of blood ran over his top lip onto his chin. Then he pushed her. Hard. Her knee slammed against the floor. Everything rocked and she saw black. He stood over her, his stunned expression turned stone. His mouth moved as if he were chewing. “You want to get rough with me, we can get rough.”

For a week, she hobbled around the diner with a knee brace. Nights, she lay with her leg propped on pillows, her mother out at the bars or perhaps across the street with Russell, Gene asleep down the hall. It was then that she really hit bottom about Ascher. The first time they'd separated, he'd given her Rebecca. This time, it was as though all the losses of her life had been piled together and she found herself sinking to a place she'd never visited before, beyond sadness, beyond grief, where the body gives out and there is no more sleep or appetite.

She saw Ascher only one more time, in May, when Rebecca died. He stood two people away from her at the gravesite and she'd not let him catch her eye, afraid he would see that her tears were as much for him as for Rebecca.

B
ACK IN
N
EW
Y
ORK
, she calls Monk and Leonard. Monk curses. “Assholes. I told them two weeks ago to have the shrink there look Saul over. Half the time you can't tell if they're not doing something deliberately or they're just so inept and disorganized they don't even know they haven't done it.”

Leonard is not surprised. “It's been coming,” he says. Rather, he seems more surprised to hear from her. Nearly a month has passed since
they last spoke, the drift apart, it seems to her now, coinciding with Saul's letter that he was not going to “harangue” her to visit. Had Saul and Leonard planned together to leave her alone?

Cautiously, Leonard asks how she's been.

“Well,” she says, “I quit my job. Finally.”

Leonard pauses, his consternation a live thing between them. “I knew you were upset with the changes there, but I hadn't realized you were thinking of leaving.”

For the rest of the night, she can't stop going over the conversation with Leonard. She can't say what it is, but something strikes her as wrong. She takes a silver cloth to her earrings, pays the basket of bills. It's after two before she pinpoints what it was: talking about Saul, she'd sounded so distant, her efforts on his behalf a set of willed actions—do this, do this, do this—like the movements of a limb that's fallen asleep. None of the agitated intensity she'd felt so often with Gene, that reserve of energy that allows some mothers to stay up night after night with a newborn, some fathers—here, she imagines Ascher and Leonard—to lift a car off a trapped child.

M
ONDAY MORNING, SHE
wakes with the realization that this is the first time since before Gene was born that she does not have a job or a fixed set of obligations. She unplugs the phone, closes the shades, spends the morning in bed. In her waking moments, she remembers the weeks Eleanor lay unbathed on the couch, rising only to use the toilet. Candy wrappers littering the floor. Joe:
You fat pig. You lazy fat pig
. Eleanor unable even to cry. Unable to do anything other than stare at the ceiling and eat.

By noon, she's scared out of her lassitude. She showers, dresses, sits down at the kitchen table with the want ads, mostly temporary agencies looking for word processors. Why not, she thinks. She's an excellent typist. At Muskowitz & Kerrigan, they'd hired temps to do the overnight typing. There'd been a guy who'd worked on her projects for nearly a year. Once, working late, she'd met him, surprised to see that he was not a kid but a gentle, portly man with a gray goatee. They'd
spoken for only two, three minutes—long enough for her to see that people were painful for him. Working nights, he had only to nod at the guard in the lobby.

She calls one of the numbers from the paper. Someone tells her to come in at three.

She deletes the four years at Yale and the seven years at Muskowitz & Kerrigan from the application she fills out before taking the typing and spelling tests. Afterwards, she's interviewed by a woman dressed in a suit closer to what a soap opera star in the role of a businesswoman would wear than the attire of any professional she's known. The interviewer looks up questioningly from the spare application.

“My husband and I recently separated. I need a job.”

A sympathetic look, a glance at the test scores. “My goodness. I've never seen anyone get a hundred on the spelling test. Aren't we smart? And your typing is very good. Let me see here …” She flips through a directory of their current openings. “You said you prefer nights?”

Rena nods.

“This might be perfect. A large law firm, one of our regular clients. The lawyers mark up the last drafts of the day and want a clean copy for the morning. They need someone who's very careful, very meticulous. You might work out well there. The only thing is, they don't like to change girls, so you'd need to make a commitment to stay for at least two months. Can you do that?”

July, August. Suddenly, Rena feels completely exhausted and entirely alone, as though only now, in this air-conditioned midtown office with this paper doll woman, has the magnitude of Saul's arrest taken hold. Had the woman said six months, she probably would have said yes to that, too, the months stretching forward without demarcation.

Forty-eight moons lined up in a row.

F
OR A WEEK
, she tells herself that she can call Santiago Domengo and let him know over the phone about Saul's arrest, and that will be that, obligation fulfilled, no more required, but all the while she knows that she cannot do it, that no one she has ever respected, Rebecca, Ruth,
Saul, would drop a bomb and run.

In the end, she does not call at all but instead goes to the address she finds in Saul's book, a building on Riverside Drive a few blocks north of where she'd lived with Gene—not far, from what her mother has told her, from where they'd lived with her father after she was born. Assuming that Santiago wouldn't recognize her last name, she has the doorman announce her as Saul's wife. She takes the elevator to the eleventh floor and rings the bell.

An old man with dark glasses and a black beret opens the door. His skin is dotted with liver spots and his fine lips are almost white. He's frailer than she'd expected, the vast store of knowledge Saul had described hard to place in this slight, stooped form. With one veined hand, he balances on a cane, seemingly unsurprised at her presence at his door, so that it passes fleetingly, absurdly she decides, through her mind that he already knows about Saul. He extends the other hand.

“Mrs. Dubinsky, what an honor to meet you. So many times I have said to Saul you must bring your bride to meet me. Come in, come in.”

The foyer is filled floor to ceiling with dark bookshelves, now empty of books. On a few of the lower shelves are piles of clothing: sweaters, socks, pants. She follows Santiago into the living room, frozen in fifties modern, the furniture worn beyond repair. Through the scrim of grime on the windows, closed despite the warm weather, she can see the Hudson, this afternoon a sailor's blue. Santiago motions for her to sit in a low armchair. A puff of dust rises when she touches the seat. He lowers himself onto a couch covered with a flowered sheet.

“How is Saul? I have been worried, it's so unlike him to not come.” Santiago cups his knees with his hands. “He must be very busy with his job.”

Disappointment washes over her, the fantasy that the blind can see what's invisible to the rest of us, that he would explain what happened, punctured.

“We were in the middle of reading
Moby-Dick
. Have you read it? Your American genius, Mr. Melville.”

“It's been a long time. Fifteen years ago. More.”

“Saul is a marvelous reader.” Santiago points to the bookshelves,
where Rena now sees a tape recorder and a pile of audiotapes. “The social worker from the Guild for the Blind sent me a copy on Books on Tape so I could hear the rest.”

The apartment has a funny smell: mothballs, wet wool, chili peppers. Other than the one visit she'd made with her mother and Gene to see her grandfather, she's never really had occasion to spend time with anyone old.

She'd promised nothing to Saul. He'd bolted from the room before she could respond. She could make small talk and leave.

Santiago tilts an ear in her direction.

She could.

She could not.

“Mr. Domengo, I came because of Saul.”

“Please call me Santiago. All these years, everyone calling me Professor Domengo, I'm too old for it now.”

“Santiago. I'm afraid it's not good news.”

“He is sick?”

“No. He's well. Physically, that is. He's been arrested.” “Arrested?” Santiago puts a hand on his chest. “For what? Some kind of political protest?”

“He was implicated in a pharmacy burglary. He'd become addicted to prescription drugs. Perhaps Saul told you about his patient who'd lost his legs? It was after that, when he couldn't sleep.”

Santiago lets out a faint whistle of air. He leans against the flowered sheet. She cannot see his eyes, hidden behind the dark glasses.

“I'm sorry to have to tell you.”

“Saul has been like a son to me.” His voice shakes.

She waits for him to regain his composure. Behind him, an oil tanker creeps south toward the harbor.

“How long will he be in the prison?”

“Four years. More or less. He asked me to tell you. I think he was feeling badly that he'd let you down.”

“It is true that I was worried about him. But I never thought drugs. All these years that I've known him, since he was a university student,
Saul was such a responsible boy. More realistic than my son, Bernardo, who was so naïve.”

“Did you suspect anything?”

“His mother, she begged him not to go. She knew. She was a very intelligent woman. Here I was the professor of political science, but it was she who really kept up with what went on in the world.”

Rena raises an eyebrow, but of course Santiago cannot see her confusion.

“She knew it was very dangerous then. A guerrilla war. Later, when we went down to try and find him, we heard about whole families who'd been murdered for having an uncle who was part of the resistance movement. Terrible, terrible things, we heard. Whole villages where every man and male child had been shot.”

“Saul told me about your son.”

“He organized a fund at Swarthmore to help us with the search. He was a very kind boy. Too kind, I used to tell him. Too much compassion, I used to tell him, can lead you astray. The good comes from the balance of the hard and the soft.”

Santiago takes off his glasses. His lids are puffy, almost purple, and he keeps them shut as he wipes his sightless eyes.

After he puts his dark glasses back on, she tells him she has to go. He insists on escorting her to the lobby. In the elevator, he flattens the palm of his hand against the paneling, remarks that he still remembers the grain of the teak, a tree found in the forests near where he was born.

“You lost your sight since you've been here?”

“In 1979. First I lost my son. Then, two years later, my sight. My wife got rid of my books the next year. Four thousand three hundred and sixty-three volumes donated to the City University library. She said the dust bothered her, but I knew it was really that she could not bear to see them because she thought they, my work, were why we'd lost our son.”

He falters, the grief so close to the surface that she fears he will break down again, but like music moving from sadness to sweetness, he recovers. “She was a wonderful woman. She read to me every day, wrote
all my correspondence. You would be amazed at how much mail still comes from people who want to discuss articles I wrote forty years ago.”

The door opens onto the lobby and Rena holds a hand against the sensor while Santiago enters, his cane tap-tapping ahead. “But I cannot complain. I am ninety-three and I still manage on my own. And the people here are very good to me. Since my wife died, Pedro, the day doorman, takes me every morning to the corner to buy whatever I need for the day. A very generous man.”