A Private Sorcery (2 page)

Of course, I'd sensed you were having trouble this past year; for the first time, we'd hardly seen you. But I'd assumed it had to do with your job, with what had happened to that boy in the subway. I count back the weeks to mid-December, when you asked to borrow my credit card. You said you wanted to buy holiday presents for Rena, didn't want her to see the bill. I didn't question you, didn't let myself entertain any concerns about why you'd been so insistent, taking the train out to New Jersey on a Tuesday evening to get the card. Even your mother was suspicious. “Maybe he's having an affair,” she said smugly, unable to disguise the touch of glee the idea gave her, revenge on Rena for not having provided any family of note for a
Times
wedding announcement, for keeping a distance from the dear-dear cluckers who listen to her complaints.

Your mother's bemusement disappeared when the bill (the only thing about the household to which she still attends being bills and bank statements) arrived and there were twenty-six hundred dollars of charges: a gold chain, a man's leather coat, a television set. “You call him, Leonard,” she commanded. “Right this minute.” When I'd not reached you, your brother, usually dutiful but brief in his phone calls with your mother, was, for once, happy to be her sounding board. He threw out his own theory,
gambling, does he go to Atlantic City, you know what a gullible person he is
, but it was easy to brush this aside as his old antagonism to you, the usurper whom he'd pronounced on your arrival home from the hospital to be an icky-wicky, his opinion of you having gone only downhill from there when he'd felt burdened with the job of protecting you from the very neighborhood bullies whose friendships he sought.

At Penn Station, I buy a bag of bagels and a tub of cream cheese, and
then feel idiotic for having done so, for having blindly followed my mother's rule never to arrive at anyone's door empty-handed. I consider handing the bag to one of the homeless women splayed near the Eighth Avenue exit but, superstitiously, I clutch it to me.

Outside, it's cold and drizzling. The rain hits the bald spot on the top of my head. I hail a cab. Coptic crosses jangle against the rearview mirror and I recognize the radio station as the listener-funded one you support, the shows put together with Scotch tape and chewing gum, the topic today the environmental racism behind a Harlem incinerator. It's a little after nine when I climb the brownstone steps and ring your bell.

She's wearing what must be your pajamas. Her tawny hair is wild and uncombed, and my first thought is how alike the two of you look: two long-limbed ectomorphs, she the pale-complected reflection of your darker hues. A thread of blood has formed in a crack in her lower lip. I resist drawing her toward me. I know that she could not stand it.

I follow her to your galley kitchen, a chopped-off corner of what had once been the parlor of an elegant house. She puts the bagels on a platter, turns on the kettle. “Tea or coffee?” she asks.

“Whatever you're having.”

She scoops green leaves into two mesh balls. Although her white couch and sleigh bed replaced your ratty corduroy couch and mattress on the floor when she'd moved in with you, it still feels like your apartment: the brick-and-board shelves overflowing with books and old records, the crates of unfiled papers, your cheaply framed political prints. Rather than overhauling the place, she has, it seems, carved out areas as her domain—your previously swampy bathroom now meticulously clean with sea-green hand towels and a glass shelf holding an aloe plant, the blue mugs into which she now pours hot water having ousted your drug company and radio station handouts.

She carries the mugs of tea. I follow her into the living room with the platter of bagels. She sits with her legs folded under her on the couch, cradling her cup, and I take the chair across. She rubs her shoulder as she talks. It takes quite a while for me to piece together even the most basic things. I can't tell if the ellipses are because she is editing what she
knows or because she, too, is bewildered, but I find myself thinking the way I did when patients would tell me their stories and I learned to let the first version have some breathing room before pushing at the contradictions, before insisting on details.

I
T STARTED, SHE TELLS ME
, when that boy jumped in front of the train. She calls him Mitch as though he is a frequent subject of discussion between the two of you, this boy dumped on your caseload New Year's Day, over a year ago, when the clinic's other psychiatrist quit and suddenly you were responsible for twice as many patients. From the perfunctory note left about him, you had no clue that he was rapidly decompensating and should not be grouped among the less urgent cases to be seen the following week. No one blamed you. The head of the service said it was fully his responsibility for giving you an unmanageable task. The lawyers skipped right over you to the doctor who'd left the inadequate sign-off note. You'd never even met the boy until his first night in intensive care, by then a double amputee.

“Saul couldn't sleep. His eyes wouldn't even shut. He'd pace in the hallway. I was the one who suggested he take a sleeping pill.” She tells me this with the steadiness of someone confessing. I refrain from reassuring her that it was an innocent thing to do, remembering all too well how the reassurances I tried to give you those first weeks after Mitch's jump made you feel worse, lonelier, as if you were the only one who could see your failure—how the nurses' reassurances on the ward that my patient Maria's actions were independent of me (when I knew they were entirely about me) left me unable to work as a psychiatrist anymore.

Every night, she tells me, you took your Nembutals: first one, then two, then four. Convinced that you could not sleep without them, you would wake groggy and then panic that the grogginess would cause another mistake. She doesn't know when you began prescribing for yourself, maybe March, maybe April, only that she discovered it Memorial Day weekend when the two of you went to visit your old supervisor, Sylvia Jacobs, at her house in Montauk.

“Yes, I know her,” I say.

Rena looks at me with confusion.

“She was chief resident when I was an intern. Twenty-six with orthopedic shoes. We used to joke that she'd make the
Guinness Book of World Records
for being the youngest little old lady in the Bronx.”

Your wife does not smile. She continues: You were napping on the beach. She'd gone into your camera bag because the sky had filled with flocks of gulls and she'd been overtaken with the desire to photograph Sylvia's wonderful house, set itself like a bird alit on the cliff, with the gulls overhead. She unzipped the inner pocket to get the lens cloth and found instead a candy store of pills: the Dexedrine, Methedrine and Ritalin bottles with her name on them; the phenobarbital, Tuinals and Dalmane with Santiago Domengo's name; the Valium and Librium with yours.

“When I saw those vials, the reality of what had been going on hit me. All those messages from his job on our machine. The nurses calling to say they needed certain orders written. His boss, Dr. Fishkin, asking if Dr. Dubinsky would grace them today with his presence.”

Rena removes the mesh ball from her mug. I copy her. “The real clue, I don't know how I hadn't seen it, was Santiago—his message that he hoped Saul and family were not ill. You know Saul never missed his Tuesday nights reading to Santiago. When we got back to the city, I went to stay with Ruth and Maggie. Maggie found a doctor who specializes in treating addicted medical professionals. After I was gone for six nights, Saul agreed to go.”

She stands, opens the window a crack. She stretches in front of the window, fingertips reaching toward the ceiling, and for a moment I remember Maria standing in my office before a barred window, stretching her arms up to the green ceiling, the fan whirring above, her thick black braid touching her round plump bottom, and I am disgusted to feel heat in my groin as I recall her bottom and the way her braid swung back and forth like a horse's tail.

“This doctor, Arlen, seemed to help for a while. He detoxed Saul from the sleeping pills. By the end of June, Saul was sleeping without
anything. He took up jogging—Arlen recommended it to reduce stress—and started listening at night to these relaxation tapes. Then, in August, I had to go out to Colorado for three weeks to work on the Braner campaign. I think that's when he started up again.”

She sits, hugging her knees, seemingly going over in her mind the events of last summer. It occurs to me that she probably has no idea how much I know about her work, how it was partly our discussion of the anonymous op-ed piece she'd written about the way people vote for their childhood images of the
übermutter
or
überfater
, the quality of the candidate as irrelevant as the nutritional value of a potato chip, that had initially prompted you to write her care of the
Times.
A second-year psychiatry resident, still enamored of the critical theorists introduced to you by Santiago Domengo, disappointed by the anti-intellectual atmosphere of your residency, you'd neither known nor cared if you were contacting a man or a woman.

I'd seen you, I recall now, last August while Rena was in Colorado. Of course, there'd been other times when I'd sensed lagoons of privacy, things you'd rather not discuss, but for the first time between us it had felt like an ocean. When I asked how you were doing, you said fine, better, you were jogging every day. You said nothing about Mitch and I didn't want to press you. Instead, you talked about Rena and how upset she was by the merger of Muskowitz & Kerrigan—the originally Democratic but, you told me, increasingly centrist political consulting firm where she'd risen from assistant pollster to something called physical presentation director—with Cassen & Silvano, a firm with long ties to the Republican party. Cassen, you said, had a thing for Rena, got a perverse kick out of forcing her to work with the candidates she found most repugnant. She was sickened, you told me, at having to work with Braner, a gubernatorial candidate propped up by gun lobbyists and anti abortion activists—repulsed at having to touch Braner's hands as she coached him to present himself as closer to what they called the man in the streets rather than the son of the real estate developer that he was.

“By the end of my first week in Denver,” she continues, “I knew Saul
had slipped. I could just sense it. He adamantly denied it. I was imagining things. I was ruining our marriage by acting like his social worker. Yes, he was having more trouble sleeping, but no, he wasn't going back to the pills. We'd see each other in ten days when he'd come out for a long weekend. Then he canceled the trip. He told me the other staff psychiatrist had a death in the family and he had to cover the unit. I was sure he was lying. I called Arlen, who lectured me about letting go.”

I take my first sip of the tea, lukewarm and bitter. September, October, November, December, January, February. Six months between then and now.

“I knew Saul was lying, but I let myself be lulled by Arlen into backing off. All fall I backed off. At work, they were running me ragged, sending me out to Colorado eight times, insisting that I accompany Braner on his town meeting tour.”

She stops as though afraid of sounding like she's defending herself. “The way we worked it, Saul paid the major bills—the rent, Con Ed, the phone—and I bought the food and what we needed for the apartment. I guess he must have kept up since nothing's been turned off.”

It occurs to me that you must have been determined to pay those bills. “I didn't call Arlen again until Christmas eve, when I came home to find this ominous-looking guy sitting on our steps, threatening that if the doctor didn't pay up there was going to be trouble.” She shudders. “Saul brushed the whole thing off. He said it was a psychotic patient he'd treated in the clinic. It was the holidays. I let myself buy it.”

Her hands move up her face, pushing the hair off her forehead. Without the fringe of hair, she looks young, like a girl emerging sleek-headed from a lake. She stands. Her shoulders sag. She must have been up all night. “I need to take a shower. Help yourself to more tea, whatever.”

I
T TAKES ME
a moment to realize that this is all she is going to tell me. I wait until I hear the water running before getting the phone. I dial your brother's number.

Susan answers in her chronically chipper voice. After three miscarriages, the last occurring in the fifth month, she had her tubes tied,
unable to bear seeing the sonograms, the little hands floating on the screen, but never having the baby. Since then, they've devoted themselves to what they refer to as their
lifestyle
, moving last year to a Spanish-style house on a golf course outside Atlanta, going every January to their time-share in Hawaii, hiking in the summers in one of the western state parks—a doggedly serious pursuit of pleasure.

“Good timing. Marc just came in from his morning run. It's glorious here today, in the sixties already. Sweetheart,” she calls out, “it's your father.”

“Hi,” Marc says. “What a day! A nine-holer at least.”

As always, I am taken aback that an offspring of mine could sound so much like a talk-show host, everything he says the buttery small talk that greases impersonal interactions, people you find yourself standing with in an elevator, the spouses of colleagues, talk whose purpose is not to communicate anything in particular but rather to signal that we're on the same side. But with Marc and the other partners in his law firm and the members of his country club, the backslapping and exchange of clichés go on and on. It took me a while to connect the depressed feeling I have after visiting him with the hostility that underlies all this forced pleasantness of speech and environment, its purpose being to shut out people who look or smell different. It took me even longer to see that I am, in fact, one of the people being shut out, that I carry the scent of the shtetl my mother left, of the poverty my father struggled against, and that although Marc and Susan belong to the conservative synagogue of Atlanta and, had there been children, would have had them bas mitzvahed or bar mitzvahed, the Jews they associate with have sanitized themselves of not only the Old World but also the landing spots—the Lower East Side and Brooklyn and Newark, with their pushcarts and tenements and rallies and the suspect ideas that constituted my father's politics and now both your work and mine.