A Private Sorcery (17 page)

Rena touches his arm. “It's me, Rena.” She kisses his cheek. A wave of jealousy passes over me.

“But I did not think you were moving in until next week! I would have greeted you.”

“I'm not. They let me come in early to paint. Saul's father is here helping me.”

I extend a hand to Santiago, but instead of shaking it, he strokes my palm, the way my mother would do when I was too old to crawl into her lap but too young to bear an injury without her comforting me.

“Padre Dubinsky,” he says. “Padre Dubinsky.”

D
RIVING TO SEE
you two days later, I realize that I've put myself in a situation where I don't know what I can or should tell you. I know that you know Rena is moving into Santiago's building. But do you know that your things now reside in my attic?

I'd like to think that this has never happened before, that our relationship has up until now always been marked by candor, but here on this empty road, in the dull light of the interstate, in the beige interior of this mediocre car, too new to engender the carefree feeling of an old jalopy, too cheap to emanate even a hint of glamour, the whole thing feels uncomfortably familiar: what to say or not say about your mother, about psychiatry, about why I practiced for only a year. After your mother fell ill (see, even then, when you were eight, it was unclear to
me if you understood this, that
fell ill
was a shortcut, an abbreviation for something else), you became my companion. At the time, I thought I was doing it for you, but now, I see, you were also doing it for me. Our afternoon walks. Our language games. Our philosophical explorations. And although your marriage attenuated this, things didn't really change, did they, until that boy jumped in front of the subway train and the you who had always left room to keep up this patter with me was crushed.

Yesterday, I was remembering taking you into Manhattan to see the building where I lived those three years with my Uncle Jack and Aunt Mindyl. You were young enough to still hold my hand in a dimly lit place. A Saturday morning, your mother in bed, your brother at one of his team practices. A flush in your cheeks, crisp air, fallen leaves in the tree pits. Pointing up to the eighth floor, I told you about the Depression and what that had meant and how my three sisters and I had slept in the dining room, our parents in the maid's room, all of us sharing the tiny maid's bath, this while Jack and Mindyl each kept their own bedroom and bath in the rest of the sprawling apartment, their attitude toward us a mixture of self-congratulation at their generosity in taking in poor relations and superiority that they could live in the equivalent of staterooms while my parents had to make do with steerage. We stood in front of the building, the Orthodox Jews from the neighborhood exiting the synagogue on the corner, the women in their Saturday finery, the men in their black hats, and I was proud that you knew not to point at the boys with the tefillin sticking out of their pants. Afterwards, I took you to the store where my Uncle Jack used to go Sunday mornings, the old man slicing the nova familiar enough for me to imagine he'd been the young man who had always taken my uncle's orders for creamed herring, knishes and whitefish. I could see you struggling to put it all together, this world in which your father once lived, and how it fit with your bedroom in a New Jersey colonial acquired with a down payment given to us by your mother's parents or with their enormous Roland Park home where you'd gone for Christmas every year until
your grandfather's death.

Walking with me to get sandwiches, Rena asked if I'd ever considered divorce. My surprise must have shown, because she reached out and lightly touched my arm, this in the middle of Broadway, on the island where we'd been caught when the light turned red mid-crossing. “I'm sorry,” she said, “that was an intrusive question.”

“No. It's a reasonable question for anyone who sees how Klara and I live.”

My first thought was that the question had something to do with the encounter with Santiago Domengo, who you once told me still carries on about his wife like a newlywed. My second thought was your wife is a shiksa, that's why she doesn't understand. The men of my father's generation didn't divorce their wives. My Uncle Jack lived the last thirty years of his life on a different coast from Mindyl, unable to stand any longer her endless harping. But divorce her? Never. He was her husband. He'd made a vow to be her husband. She needed a husband. It was oddly liberating, this view of marriage: you didn't have to love each other or “work on the relationship.” All you had to do was fulfill your responsibilities. Impossible as Jack found Mindyl to talk to, to live with, he never questioned giving her money. He arranged doctors for her. He made sure that food was delivered to the apartment where she lived and that, at the end, a nurse was at her side.

I live in a world in between. As a youth, we all talked about love marriages, as though this were something quite revolutionary. Of my set, I was the only one who married out of obligation. I am sure that there are men my age who still talk in hushed voices with their wives under the covers at night. Legs looped together like noodles in a pot. Sagging bellies pressed against one another.

For a moment, eyes on the pavement, I feel a need to cry, but I am so out of practice—other than the night after your arrest, I cannot recall the last time I cried, perhaps at my mother's funeral—my tear ducts seem not to know what to do. This happens, I know, throughout the body: the brain needs stimulation, the muscles have to move or they atrophy.
The less a person has sex, I once read, the less they want it. Believe me, no one had to tell me that.

“ARE YOU SURE?”
I ask the guard sent from the lockup. “That's what he say.”

“I just drove two and a half hours to see him.” And then, in a lower voice, “I'm his father.”

“Sorry. Prisoner's right to decline a visitation.”

“Could you ask him to come for just five minutes?”

The guard hooks his thumbs under the waistband of his pants. A gun dangles on a leather holster. “Can't do that.” He sniffs, twists his face as though adjusting his sinuses. “Next visitation's Thursday night. Five to eight. You can come back then. Lots of times they change their minds.”

I drive to a diner just outside the prison gates and order coffee and a cherry Danish. I don't need coffee. I don't eat pastries. Thinking maybe there's something Morton can do, I call his office but all I get is his answering machine. I leave the number of the pay phone and move to a booth where I can hear it ring.

I drink coffee and stare at the black hairs on my fingers. When we first got married, your mother was horrified to see that I had hair on my back. Her brother's pale torso had been smooth as a chicken's. Apparently, the night we'd conceived Marc, she hadn't been looking at my back. Your brother inherited my hairiness. Like the men on your mother's side, you have tame sprays of hair on your chest, forearms and legs.

Again, I see you curled like a shrimp on your mattress.

In my residency, it was in vogue to talk about something called projective identification—a way that one person could be made to feel what was experienced but disowned by the other. Particularly, it was thought, this occurred between patients and therapists, with patients depositing pods of their own feelings into their therapist's consciousness. My fellow residents would smugly bandy the term about, either
in their discussions of their own cases, where they would glibly admit to having been aware of a harshly critical attitude toward a patient, or in their Monday morning quarterbacking about other therapists' cases. I'd been the skeptic in the class. It seemed too magical to me, this notion of feelings floating between people. And how exactly are these feelings transmitted, I would demand. What is the mechanism?

With Maria, though, I'd become a believer. Not only had I become a believer, but I'd grown convinced that it worked both ways: the therapist could feel things that originated in the patient, but just as easily the patient could feel things that originated in the therapist. Or, even worse, what if it was impossible to know what originated where?

By then, I was a year out of residency and there were no case seminars where I had to present. My classmates, those of us who'd stayed in New York, that being mostly the Jews who worried about getting a job anywhere else, continued to convene, but our gatherings grew increasingly social in character. None of us talked about our cases except in cursory ways. Not wanting to eat my hat, I was content to stick with the Chinese food and the banter about hospital politics. At my job, they'd assigned me a supervisor, Dr. Herbert Nettles, an analyst who worked two days a week at the hospital so he could get health insurance and a retirement plan to augment his Fifth Avenue practice. Tentatively, I broached my ideas to him.

“Yes, Dr. Dubinsky, this is logically possible. But you are overlooking the major force, the raison d'être, behind projective identification—the ego weaknesses that necessitate the use of this maladaptive, primitive defense mechanism. Remember, except in cases of psychic arrest, we give up the primitive defenses for those that are more advanced.”

I hadn't dared to push it further. Hadn't dared to tell Dr. Herbert Nettles of Fifth Avenue that I'd had a dream of holding Maria's buttocks like two ripe pears in my hands, her skirt hiked high on the plump thighs which I could see in the tighter and tighter skirts she'd taken to wearing to our sessions. That I'd been so aroused when I woke, I'd
had to lie on top of my hands, unable to bear the thought of relieving myself with the image of those thighs. If Maria's increasingly hysterical behavior with me (in one session, a button had popped off her blouse; when I passed on the ward, she would begin to cough uncontrollably) was the consequence of my own disowned erotic feelings toward her, then I was the one who'd failed to give up the primitive for the advanced.

It was on the occasion of reporting this dream to my own analyst, Merckin, along with my conclusion that I was the one with Nettles' psychic arrest, that Merckin interpreted my immaculate conception fantasy: “You hold on to the idea that like Mary, you should be pure as the driven snow, free of your sexual desires which you think will poison others. You cling to your belief in an age of innocence, before Eve bit into the apple, because it allows you to deny the sexual feelings you harbored as a little boy for your mother, the murder in your heart for your father.”

“Aren't you mixing up the Old and New Testaments?”

“More of your intellectual shenanigans. You refuse to hear me.” The waitress brings more coffee. I watch her filling salt shakers and sugar dispensers, a blank expression on her face as if she doesn't quite take anything in, as if, were she asked to describe who'd been sitting this morning at my table, all she'd be able to say is a man, older, I don't know, a man, kind of older.

Maria. Why today has she inserted herself back in my thoughts?

Is it that I'd let my eyes linger on your wife's hips, slim as a boy's, as she bent over the paint cans, a hammer in hand to pound the lids back on? That I'd imagined handling her breasts from behind and pressing myself against her hard coccyx bone?

I listen for the phone. For a split second, I get confused and think I am waiting for you, not Morton, to call.

Is it that I'd not wanted to see you, afraid to meet your eyes, and you'd caught it, this affliction of mine, and then not wanted to see me?

Part Two

POTIONS

8
Rena

By the end of her first month on the job, she's met all the first-year associates except Beersden—heard them talk about him with a mix of resentment and admiration that he not only earns their same salary working from nine-thirty in the morning after he drops his twin daughters off at their preschool to six at night when he invariably leaves, but seems to get more done than anyone else in two-thirds the time.

In late July, Hornby, a short balding man the first-years call
le petit Napoléon
, is promoted to junior partner in the litigation department, where Beersden works. His first night in his new position, Hornby schedules an eleven o'clock meeting for the lawyers he supervises. When Rena arrives, the women have their shoes on and the men's ties are tightened. Hornby storms out of the conference room, slamming the door.

“Telephone that asshole Beersden,” he barks at Rena.

“Excuse me?”

“I said telephone Beersden. Donald Beersden.”

“I am the temporary word processor, not the secretary, but if you delete the expletives and give me a clue as to how to reach him, I will try to help you.”

Hornby blushes. “Look in my Rolodex. Please.”

Rena goes into Hornby's office. Behind his desk is a row of shoes; his dry cleaning hangs on the back of the door. She finds the number and dials. A woman groggily answers.

“I'm sorry to wake you,” Rena says. “I need to speak with Mr. Beersden.”

“He's not here at the moment.”

“I'm calling for Mr. Hornby.”

The woman hesitates. “I can probably reach him. I'll try and have him call you.”

Rena leaves the number at her desk. Ten minutes later, the phone rings. “Hornby. He called me.”

Behind the low, gravelly voice, she can hear a rumble of conversation and music playing. “He asked me to let you know that he's having a meeting with the associates.”

“When?”

“Now.”

Beersden snorts. “Are we supposed to lick his shoes, too?” “I'm just relaying the message, Mr. Beersden.”

“Tell him I have a previous engagement.”

T
WO NIGHTS LATER
, a guy with thick bristly hair, prematurely gray, follows her onto the elevator. She's listening on her Walkman to a tape of Billie Holiday songs Saul once made her. He leans against the wall, a motorcycle helmet under his arm. At the end of “God Bless the Child,” she stops the tape. He gets off with her at the twenty-sixth floor and waits for her to unlock the door.