Darling? (7 page)

“How long have you been here?” he asked.

“Forty minutes,” she said, checking her watch—no, more like an hour.

He peered into her face as if he was ticking through his diagnoses, and she pulled a leaf out of her hair. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

“I did.”

“I’d have heard it,” he said decisively. He had given up on her, seen her finally for the madwoman she must certainly be. “I was just upstairs.” Why had she stood in the rain, let herself get so bedraggled, why—?

“Maybe it’s broken?” she began, though she knew better than to argue—you have to take the person’s hand, soothe her (or in this case him)—through these terrors.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I must not have pushed it right. But it doesn’t matter. Here we are after all.” She smiled and so did he—there, she’d found the key, they’d turned the corner.

But as they sat down his cell phone rang, and he rummaged for it in his briefcase, holding up a finger—it was his publicist; he had to take the call. She tried to dry her hair with a Kleenex, listening as Karp told him to develop a Web site: www.morriskarp.com. By the time he finished the explanation, his beeper was shrieking and he had to go back to the phone—

“No, I can’t film until three-thirty,” he said, although it was almost that already. “Yes, yes, I’ll be ready then.” And to her, aside, “You won’t mind if there’s a camera crew in the waiting room when you go?”

“No,” she said, “no, it’s okay.”

“So—” He smiled; he sank down in the chair. “How are you?”

“I—I—”

“Can you say what you’re feeling?”

She swallowed: “I, I guess…,” she began, despising the edge of tears in her voice. “I’m afraid, I … you seem different.…” and heard a murmur, perhaps of understanding—maybe everything was all right and she was hearing his affirmation through the haze.

“I mean, I do understand,” she said. “This is a test-tube love—meant as an inoculation against a more destructive strain … but…” But some people die of inoculations! He murmured again. And then again, though she’d said nothing. She looked up.

His eyes were closed, perhaps meditatively.

“Dr. Karp?” No answer. She cleared her throat. “Dr. Karp?” The response was an elephantine snore.

A wave of tenderness broke over her; the grand proscenium on which she had been giving voice to her passion shrank away, and she found herself in a badly lit room with a dear, nervous, allergic man who was doing his best to love her in accordance with the statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Now he gave out with something like a roar, and she laughed aloud. The spell was broken—there was no going about the usual business—they were alone together finally with not a ghost in the room. She loved him, she had wanted his wishes to come true, and now he’d got the book, the publicist, the interview—he’d worked all night, night after night—and he finally felt safe and warm enough to fall asleep
here
with
her.
She ought to be flattered! If she went to him now and stroked his hair, kissed him, he might awaken not just from the quick nap but from the terrible slumber that had kept him from loving her all this time.

“Darling?” This was distinctly a warning shot but it did not awaken him, and in one reckless instant she stood, crossed the rug that lay between them, and fell on her knees at his feet.

But she was not, it turned out, so much a rapist as to kiss a supine psychologist full on the lips in midsnore. She had a spider’s impulse to wrap him up and store him safely away—he would satisfy all her hungers for a time—but instead she touched his ankle, very quickly, expecting to receive a shock as from an electric fence.

“Wake up, angel.”

“What?” he started, looking up at her in alarm.

“You fell asleep,” she said.

“No, no.” He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, tried uncomfortably to pull back an inch or two.

“It’s okay, I understand.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he explained to his poor deluded patient, stretching.

“You were
snoring!
”

He smiled. “I wish I could say that only happens when I’m asleep,” he said.

“You
snore
when you’re
awake?
” She sat back. It may come as a blow, to find you’ve been playing Carmen in full dress opposite a wakeful snorer. She crept backwards surreptitiously, like a sheepish retriever.

“Not exactly awake, maybe” he explained, with his beautiful hands outstretched. “In a deeper state of consciousness than actual waking, but—”

“
Asleep!
You were asleep!”
Dr. Karp, let us call a spade a spade!
But to Karp there was no such thing as a spade—the conscious world was only a loose assortment of atoms in whose swirls he discerned now one constellation, now another.

“In something of a trance, a state
like
sleep … the state of deep listening…”

She skootched away another inch or two.

“And I was up most of the night!” he concluded. “A manic psychosis, these things can take hours.” Had he been the doctor, or the patient? Was he crazy? He’d insisted she wished he were crazy, so he would seem more like her mother.

“So you fell asleep,” she said. “There’s no shame in it.” But as they argued the stage loomed up again with all the actors in their masks—it was horrible, she started to bawl. “You wrote the book, you solved the emergency, you convinced the publicist, you rescheduled the camera crew, you exhorted me to open my heart, and then you
fell asleep!
I understand you can’t touch me, it’s against the law, and there’s this, this … wife … so, okay, it’s one thing not to
do
it, but not to
feel
it, not to let it take root in your heart, is mean, it’s stingy, it’s
cheap
somehow—it’s just wrong! You stand apart from me, you don’t enter into me, you treat me like—like an unexploded bomb!”

“I—” The buzzer rang, and he looked at his watch. “I can’t…” He closed his eyes, seeking divine strength? Praying she would disappear? How could she ever know?

“You torture me,” he said.

“
I
torture
you!
!” But … probably he was right. Here he was locked in a tiny room with a madwoman whose eyes were glued to the inch of pale skin between his sock and his pant leg, who thought of nothing except kissing his thighs, urging him to surrender himself to her, who was always calculating the width of his hips the better to imagine their thrust—just the thought probably put his back into spasms—how much longer until supper, until he could fall asleep beside his wife?

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry, I…”

She pulled open the door and tried to compose herself before passing the cameramen, who were sprawled over the waiting room chairs eating sandwiches like bears raiding a campsite. Turning down the walk, past the innocuous, nonallergenic shrubs, she heard Karp greet them with great warm energy—he was refreshed from his nap, grateful to have escaped her, narrowly, once again—far easier to meet the press, face the nation. And she would have to drive home shaking and sobbing, raging at gluttonous fat drivers, puritanical thin drivers, boorish Republicans and pious Democrats, thinking “I’ll tell you which parts of
no
I don’t understand!”—feeling less like a human woman than a hive of infuriated bees.

And arrive home to her serene family, Hugh eating a bowl of ice cream and reading a biography of Vlad the Impaler, Cyrilla already asleep. Daisy stood in the hallway outside her door, listening to her quiet breath with envy. Why couldn’t the mother possess a bit of the child’s composure? What had happened to the very decisive and well-organized woman who had gone to consult a psychologist with her little list of troubles folded carefully in her purse? Wasn’t he supposed to rid her of her failings? Instead he had turned her into a beast, ravenous, craving, ready to marry him or murder him or both, whatever would mash them most completely together. She went to the window—she was feeling oceanic—but the darkness was hard as enamel, and she saw only the reflection of the woman Morris Karp had introduced her to: wild-eyed, untended, hair flying off in corkscrews; heart breaking, blood racing … she spilled over in all directions; her every thought surprised her. There was more of her than there used to be.

And suddenly Cyrilla was screaming. Daisy went in to find her sitting up, still asleep, speaking in frantic gibberish as if she were arguing with a border guard in hell. “Wake up, Cyllie,” she said, but as she tried to embrace her, the child flailed as if Daisy herself were the monster. She started to sing “Lavender’s Blue,” hearing a strength, a sustaining note, in her voice, where once had been all grief and yearning. Cyrilla woke and pitched into her arms, and Daisy laid her back on the pillow, brushed the damp curls from her face, kissed her as if kisses would keep her safe from harm. “Mama, you’re better than a star,” Cyrilla said.

“Nearer, anyway,” said Hugh, who’d come to stand behind her. Had she dreamed she could abandon him? She was a wife, a mother, her bones ached with the past, but she was here.

*   *   *

How she loved that ache! She could trust it, could return to it over and over, a million times a day. She would always be longing; Karp would always be there. As he opened the door the next week she felt a wave of relief sweep all her suspicions away. He had not followed her parents into the void, he was here in the doorway, he smiled, coughed a little, weakly, from the damp. She blushed with happiness, looked down at her feet, and admitted she’d written the review—worked on his behalf in spite of everything.

“Laurel?” he inquired.

“It’s a complex flower, nothing like a Daisy. It thrives in the cold.” She snapped out her answers, though something troubled her—yes, the bushes along his walk—they were mountain laurel.

“And Tyringham?”

“Oh, I just pulled it out of a hat, I’ve only been there once—with a man I was dating years ago; it’s not much of a town, a few houses, an old cemetery.”

“It’s a place where you once walked in a graveyard—”

“—with a man I loved,” she said sharply, proudly. Let no one suggest that Daisy Kempton would abandon a passion simply because it was unrequited and absurd.

“Yes.” Their eyes met, maybe for the first time, and she looked away, feeling (could it be?) shy. It was a forlorn happiness, to be here together, two peculiar souls warming themselves at the same metaphor.

“Jung said a man has to live out his complexes,” she told him, lest he think they were striking a truce. She would not give up—she’d pursue him into his next life, and if she came back as a duck and he a june bug … well, the gods have their ways.

“Unlike Jung, I don’t sleep with my patients,” said the upstanding Karp.

“Freud couldn’t be bothered to sleep with his own wife.”

His sigh was very nearly a laugh.

“I’ve developed a—a certain tenderness—toward the UPS man,” she said, feeling, of all things, guilty, though surely he’d be relieved. “I had—you know—a dream.…” It was a pleasure just to recall it, to feel the familiar longing begin to shape itself around the next hope. “He brought me a package, and…”

But the lines in Karp’s forehead went so deep suddenly she thought of writing music on them: “So, you attempt to dilute your feelings toward me, and the efficacy of the therapy as well.”

A reprimand—could it be? How they irritated each other! Yes, they were growing old together, Karp and she.

A Girl Like You

“I’m here to pick up the prescription for Elspeth Forrest?”

Lane sounded adult and offhand—as if she were fully qualified for life, not at all furtive or peculiar. The pharmacist was young, his face and neck were all pocked, his Adam’s apple jumped ridiculously—who would be intimidated by such a person? She turned a mild gaze toward the cosmetics as if she were thinking of trying a new shade of nail polish if he’d just hand over the insulin and let her get on with her day. He tapped the name into his computer, running his finger along the screen to stall a minute, finally saying: “And you are—?”

“Lane Dancie, her daughter.” Worthy of a business card.

“Oh, okay,” he said, sounding relieved, turning to the refrigerator to take out the bag, double-checking the label. “Yup, Elspeth Forrest,” he said. “Insulin in suspension, one hundred units per … sterile hypodermic needles…” And finally, reluctantly, “How old are you?”

“Thirteen,” she said, defiant—she was almost eleven, but people often guessed older. Her face was wary and shrewd, her voice heavy with authority—she did not seem like a little girl. At school she let everyone cheat from her papers—she had all the right answers—but it won her no friends. That morning, the last day of school, Sylvie and Arlita had let her jump rope with them. She’d been so preoccupied with thinking how she’d say casually to Mama, “When I was skipping rope with my friends this morning…” (as if such happened every day) that she’d been clumsier even than usual and fallen, scraping knees
and
elbows, and Arlita had glared at Sylvie, who had invited her in, and Sylvie knelt beside her and examining her arm asked suddenly, “Is this a tan, or is it
dirt?
” then dropped the arm as if it was all pointless, there was no use being nice to Lane Dancie no matter how sorry you felt for her—she was a lost cause.

Of course it was dirt—a mottled stain along her arms, up her neck—why hadn’t she seen it? She licked her thumb and rubbed at her wrist until a patch came up, then crossed her arms tight over each other—if the pharmacist found her out, he would give up on her, too.

“I can’t give you these,” he said, but it wasn’t the automatic refusal she’d expected—he seemed hurt that she’d taken him for an easy mark. “Even if they were for you you’d have to have an adult.”

“She’s my mother,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What do you think, I want it to get high?”

“This much insulin could kill a person your size!”

“Doug lets me,” she said. He had, once, after Mama called and begged him—she hated the insulin, hated leaving their apartment, even using the telephone. She quavered, she didn’t have strength for these things—Lanie was the strong one. So Doug the regular pharmacist had let her carry the insulin back, just the one time, he was very clear. And handsome, and confident—hearing his name the boy drew back. Lanie had life on her side for once; it would be easier for him to believe her, give in to her, than ferret out the lie.