Love Begins in Winter (7 page)

Then she lay down on the couch, and the sedative pulled her under so violently that she began to snore a few moments after closing her eyes.

I was surprised I understood why Jennifer couldn't go into the bedroom and lie down. I covered her up with another blanket. Body temperature drops at night.

Brian came over and put his arm around me. He turned off the lamp and kissed me. Then suddenly I felt strange.

I pulled away.

He sat there for a moment.

Then he kissed my forehead and went outside. I heard him drive away. He wasn't mad, because we understand one another—like two maps pressed together in a book.

It was either the semidarkness of the room or the smell of late summer pushing at the screens—or even the fabric of the couch on my bare legs. All these things in that moment seemed like props arranged by my memory to suddenly transport me to a moment which had long passed.

The exactitude of feeling two years old flickered inside me. I kept very still. I felt like primitive man having inadvertently made fire and wishing, more than anything, to keep it burning just a few moments longer.

It's as if my two-year-old self had been living inside me like the second smallest piece in a set of Russian dolls. It now rose to the surface of my consciousness, and I felt with absolute clarity how it felt to be two years old on one particular day in the 1970s.

My parents had taken me to the park across the street from our house because it was my birthday. There was a party; other children came. The other children weren't my friends; they were just other children. My parents were my best friends, which was why it was so hurtful when they reproached me.

My feet suddenly rose off the floor, pulled up into my shrinking body. I could feel the scabs on my knees like small islands. I pushed my tongue into the spaces where I had no teeth. Dry birthday cake. Juice with crumbs in it. Mild nausea. I pictured the candles, but the feeling was stronger than anything I could visually recall. It was as though I were there but without my eyes or my sense of touch. I remember running through tall grass. I can feel it brushing against my legs like long, thin arms. The other children's high-pitched cries. Presents lowered from large, foreign hands.

The end of the party. I didn't want to go home. I was frustrated that everyone was separating. I wanted the day to rewind itself. Then I remember chasing a boy. My parents calling me. His parents watching us, grinning, encouraging us. He falls, turns over laughing. I'm laughing too. I come upon him. I take his arm and bite into it. Blood appears from nowhere and spreads on his skin. He looks at his arm. He screams and parents scramble. He is scooped up like a bug. I want to say that I am a tiger and tigers bite. I want to remind them I can be a tiger. His face turns red as he is pulled up into the nest of his mother's arms. I sense the tone of crying change from shock to something else. He lifts his arm. His mother kisses it. She rocks him. His father stands erect, on guard, looking around, helpless, pathetic.

I am rooted to the spot by fear. Then suddenly my diaper is yanked down. I recoil but am held in place as my mother's hand clips my bottom. The crack of her hand against my flesh. My little body making forward jerks with each smack. My disgruntled face, my curling lip like a glistening crimson wave.

My eyes are open, but I am almost unconscious with shock and humiliation.

I can feel wind on the exposed flesh of my bottom. My mother walks away. I am burning with emotions too great for my small body. I am undressed in public. There are spots of blood on the grass. People gather around and peer down at me sadly.

I overhear a woman ask if I am a boy or a girl.

I am too scared to pull my diaper up.

My mother has walked away.

My father carries me across the field toward our house. As soon as he pulled my diaper up, I defecated into it. He rubbed my head. My mother stayed at the park with her arms crossed. She had taken off her fancy shoes.

My father said: “You cannot bite—biting is wrong.” But there was no passion in his voice. Then we reached the house.

He put me in their bedroom. He closed the blinds, but ribs of light fell through and settled upon the floor as though I were in the stomach of some celestial being. My father stripped me down to my diaper. It was full of feces. I was too afraid to cry. I wondered if I would be killed without knowing what death was. The fabric of the chair stuck to my tiny, fleshy legs. It was my birthday. I was two. Sweat had dried across my body like a veil.

Later, a plate of birthday cake was left outside the door.

“What if she's sleeping?” my father whispered. “She won't be,” my mother snapped.

I didn't want the cake. I wanted my mother to forget herself and remember me. Eventually they brought the cake into the room. I ate it and cried and sat between them and repeated over and over mechanically that biting was wrong. But deep down I still loved the boy and would have bitten him again and again, forever. And he knew I loved him. And it was pure and spontaneous.

And so I became a pediatrician. I wanted to be a hand that's lowered to souls dangling off the cliff in darkness.

About two years after Brian and I found Jennifer on the couch in Hampton Bays, I finished Dr. Felixson's
The Silence After Childhood
. I read it in one sitting. It was 3
AM
on Monday morning. I picked up the phone and called Brian.

“I have just read Dr. Felixson's book.”

There was silence and then Brian said:

“See what I told you?”

“Do you want to come over?” I said.

“Don't you have work in a few hours?”

“Jesus, Brian.”

“Okay, okay—I'll bring my clothes for tomorrow.”

I was trembling. Dr. Felixson's insights had set off small earthquakes in my body. They were spreading to my memory like soft, warm hands eager to unearth buried things.

When Brian arrived, I sat him down, kissed him, thanked him for coming over, and handed him a glass of whiskey. I opened the book randomly and read a passage.

“Listen to this,” I said.

 

 

I closed the book and opened it to another page. Brian leaned forward.

 

 

“Wow,” Brian said. “Dr. Felixson wrote that?”

“I thought you'd read this?”

He looked up. “It's been in our house for so long. I always meant to,” he said.

I turned several pages and let my eyes fall into a paragraph:

 

 

Jennifer is now living in Florida. She is writing her memoirs. She is seeing someone. He's
Italian
Italian, she says, and he's apparently related to Tony Bennett and has the family voice. Alan lives year-round in Hampton Bays. His relationship fell apart a few months after he left Jennifer. He tells Brian he's “playing the field.” He's started wearing cologne. I often wonder if Jennifer and Alan were as close as Brian and I are.

I know Brian has wondered if I've thought about whether he would leave me in the same way. But Brian is not like his father. Brian is a beautiful child, but he's not childish. Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them. I think it happens quietly to every one of us—like crossing a state line when you're asleep.

Brian and I may part one day, but it's not really parting—you can't undo what's done. The worst wouldn't be so bad—just the future unknown. Though I would carry a version of him inside me. But isn't every future unwritten? The idea of fate is really only a matter of genetics now. But what's interesting is how so many significant events in my life have come from seemingly random things. Freedom is the most exciting of life's terrors:

I'd decided on whim to walk into a bookstore. There was Brian.

I wonder if I had never met Brian, what I would have thought about all the times I've thought about him. Would my head have been empty of thoughts? Would it have been similar to sleep? Or would other thoughts have been there? Where are those thoughts now, and what would they have been about?

I've thought about these sorts of things since I began editing the unpublished writings of Dr. Felixson. A few days after finishing
The Silence After Childhood
, I tried to call him. A woman renting his old surgery space said he'd died.

I had more than forty pages of questions.

Unbeknownst to Brian, Jennifer had come into possession of some of Dr. Felixson's journals. I discovered this when I called her in Florida. I wanted to find out more about his life. There was singing in the background. Jennifer giggled and asked if I could hear it. I explained the effect Dr. Felixson's book was having on my life. She asked if Brian was there. He was. She asked to speak to him. She then explained to her son how she and the doctor had experienced a brief affair several years before Alan left her. The marriage had never been the same after. Brian was so shocked he hung up. Jennifer immediately called back and said she would have spared him, but she wanted to explain why she had only some of Dr. Felixson's journals. In his will, Dr. Felixson had left Jennifer the journals covering the period of their togetherness.

In a gesture of kindness and courage, Jennifer sent them all to me from Florida via UPS. She said that what little had been written about her was nothing compared with the notes he'd made on his patients and his general everyday thoughts.

“He writes about everyday things like clouds,” she said.

She was adamant that they be in the hands of another doctor. I felt truly honored.

When they arrived, I wrote back to Jennifer, asking if she had loved Dr. Felixson and why the affair had ended after only a few weeks. She wrote back almost immediately. She said Blix Felixson was the only man she had ever met who could love unconditionally without having to be loved back. She said it was unnerving because he was never disappointed by anything.

Or he was disappointed by everything. But I didn't suggest this. I had learned my lesson.

 

 

 

Dr. Felixson died alone and was not discovered for several days. The
Southampton Press
reported that a doctor of many disciplines who was of some note, had passed away from causes unknown at his Shinnecock Hills cottage, and was discovered by a landscaping crew who called local police when they saw an elderly man through an open window lying on the floor, apparently unconscious.