The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (37 page)

Alphonse had been right: I
was
in the doghouse, which was why Dr. Patel had called the summit. Earlier that week, I’d cut my finger, gone looking for a Band-Aid, and found, at the back of Mo’s night-stand drawer, an unrecognizable white box. Inside the box was a flashlight-looking gizmo. Plastic, putty-colored, battery-operated. I turned it on, and that’s when it dawned on me: she’d gotten herself a vibrator.

I let it massage the palm of my hand, the stretch of skin between my thumb and index finger.
This
was going to do it for her, when I couldn’t? Out of nowhere, I heard Paul Hay’s wife’s friend that night she called to clue me in on Mo’s affair. Saw Paul Hay come flying at me that morning when I’d gone out to his house, busted his Andersen windows, and almost busted in his skull. Not that they were in the same ballpark or anything, but Mo’d had her trauma and I’d had mine. We both had our triggers.

I went downstairs and presented the evidence. Pointed it at her and flipped the switch. “So who do you fantasize about when you’re using this thing?” I said. “Brad Pitt? Batman? You want me to wear tights or something?”

It wasn’t like that, she said. “Beena suggested—”

“Beena? You fantasize about your
shrink?
”

She asked me to please stop being a jerk.

But at that moment, I
felt
like being one. Felt justified. “I mean, it can’t be me you’re fantasizing about, because, hey, you’ve got direct access there. Not that
that’s
doing much for you. So who is it? Tom Cruise? Paul Hay?”

DR. PATEL HANDED US CUPS
of licoricy-smelling tea. Her sari that day was purple—a shimmery, iridescent material draped
over a pale blue shirt. She was smiling as serenely as Buddha. “I’ll get right to the point, Mr. Caelum,” she said. “It is I who encouraged Maureen to experiment with a marital aid.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah?” Some of my tea spilled into the saucer.

“And it appears you are uncomfortable with that?”

I shifted from one butt cheek to the other. “Uncomfortable? No, I wouldn’t say that.”

Maureen, seated beside me, snorted quietly.

“What? I’m
not.
I just … I guess I just don’t understand why …”

“Go on,” Dr. Patel said.

“No. Never mind.”

“Very well, then. May I ask you a question?”

Shoot.”

“Do you masturbate?”

I felt my ears blush. “Do
I?
Not with something that requires double-A batteries.” She kept looking at me, not smiling. If you’d given me a choice at that moment—either stay seated there or go get a root canal—I’d have hightailed it to the dentist’s. “Occasionally,” I said. “I don’t think there are too many guys who don’t.”

“Nor too many women,” she said. “May I share some information with you about Maureen’s sexual history?”

I glanced over at Mo. She’d pulled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands and was staring straight ahead. “I don’t know. What about doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“Oh, Mr. Caelum, I assure you that my ethics are quite intact.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right. Well, if it’s the stuff about what her father did when she was little, I already know about all that.”

“Yes, I know you do. And wasn’t that both an act of courage and, more significantly, an act of
intimacy
when Maureen took you into her confidence about such a painful subject?”

I said I’d never thought of it as intimacy, but that, yes, I could see what she meant. I reached over and kneaded Mo’s shoulder a little. Figured I’d pick up a few points for that.

“Perhaps you are unaware, Mr. Caelum, that, until very recently, Maureen had never masturbated? That she had always put men in charge of her sexual release?” I could see that, beneath those sweater sleeves, Mo was making and unmaking fists.

“And that’s bad?” I said.

Dr. P gave me a smile. “Not bad, but, perhaps, limiting. In that it puts her in a recessive position. A position of powerlessness.”

I smiled back at her. “And all this time, I thought you two were working on what happened to her back in Colorado.”

“And so we have been. But in our work together, Maureen has discovered a connection between the two traumatic events, so many years apart. The terrible trauma she experienced that day at the school reawakened in her the earlier trauma her father visited upon her—another violation of her safety, albeit one that was far more private, and, of course, of a different magnitude. And one which, Maureen now realizes, she had never fully dealt with. And so, after the shootings, she became doubly vulnerable. She was both the woman hiding in the cupboard and the little girl being forced to witness her father’s puzzling and frightening behavior. She was, in both instances, powerless and afraid. Which is why, perhaps, following the shootings, her posttraumatic stress advanced from the acute to the chronic stage. And why Maureen sought to numb her terrible pain with more and more medicine until that became a problem, too. Do you see all of the ways in which these things became intertwined?”

“What I see is my hands around her father’s neck,” I said. From the corner of my eye, I saw Maureen flinch.

Dr. Patel put down her teacup. She said mine was an understandable reaction, but not a very useful one. “Mr. Caelum, Maureen’s father betrayed her in a deep and damaging way. As did the two troubled boys. But she does not need retribution. She needs tenderness. Gentleness. Intimacy. Which brings us back to the reason I’ve asked you to come here today. Given Maureen’s history—her unhealthy initiation to sex and her equally unhealthy promiscuity during her
teenage years—I have advised her that, if she embraced the practice of pleasuring herself, she might, first of all, enjoy the sensations in and of themselves, but also, that she might begin to feel she has some control over her life. Her sexual life, yes, but also her life in more general terms. And if she can bring herself to a position of greater empowerment, then, perhaps, she can feel more open to the idea of
shared
intimacy. And by this, I mean intimacy in the broader sense, of course, not just as it is expressed in the bedroom. But in terms of sexual intimacy, I have suggested to Maureen that masturbation might lessen some of the pressure she feels about climaxing when you and she are intimate. And so, you see, this practice, rather than distancing you from one another, would actually bring you closer together. Would you like that, Mr. Caelum? If some of that pressure was relieved, and you could both relax and share yourselves with each other? Feel that lovely closeness again?”

Unexpectedly, I teared up. Nodded. Maureen touched my arm.

“So you would not feel upset, then, or threatened, Mr. Caelum, if Maureen used a marital aid to achieve self-satisfaction?”

“No, I guess not. Not when you put it that way…. This isn’t something she’d pull out in the middle of …?”

“No, no. This is something Maureen would do in private. Unless, of course, you and she decided mutually that you would like to incorporate this in your lovemaking.”

“Oh. No, I don’t think … but, like you said, in private, she could—”

“Perhaps you would like to speak directly to Maureen?”

“Oh. Sure.” I turned to Mo. “Why not, right? To empower yourself or whatever. It’s fine with me—not that you need
my
permission. Whatever floats your boat.”

Dr. P threw her head back and laughed. “What floats your boat,” she said. “That’s marvelous! When I get home later today, I shall write that in my notebook of American colloquialisms. And I shall credit you, Mr. Caelum, as the source. ‘What floats her boat.’ Delightful! Now, please, my friends, when you return home, you should
perhaps take a lovely walk, or cook a nice soup together, or enjoy a warm cup of tea. And with as much tenderness as possible, relax and enjoy each other’s company. Remember, Mr. Caelum:
tenderness.”

As it played out, it wasn’t moonlight and roses but a couple of cans of diet Dr Pepper and the UConn-Villanova game. During a commercial, I asked her where she’d bought the vibrator. Ordered it on the Internet, she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I think it’ll be good for you. And, you know, for us, too.” She nodded. Smiled. “So you and she are figuring things out, it sounds like, huh? Untangling some of the shit from the past?”

She said they were definitely doing that. She had a ways to go, but she was definitely making progress.

“Good,” I said. “Great. And about the other thing? Your ‘marital aid’ or whatever? As far as I’m concerned, consider yourself cleared for takeoff.”

THE LAST ITEM ON MAUREEN’S
personal goals chart was:
Go back to work.
Sometimes when I looked at her list, I’d think, Jesus Christ, let her nail this one. Let her start signing her name on the back of a paycheck. Lolly’s washing machine had started seeping from the bottom, and I’d be damned if I could figure out how to fix it. That same month, Chet developed an abscess, so between him and Soph, our vet bill shot past four hundred. And our car and house insurance were due. “I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it,” the agent had said, when I asked her over the phone about downgrading our policy in the interest of lowering our bill. “But if it’s this or nothing, Mr. Quirk.” It was that or nothing, I told her. From the sale of our Colorado house, we had nineteen thousand left, and it seemed like every month we were subtracting more and more to meet our expenses.

Tricia, one of Mo’s NarcAnon pals, told her the caterer she worked for needed extra servers for some big hospital fundraiser. It would be
fun working together, she said. And so, Mo had bought the requisite black pants, white shirt, black vest, and red necktie. The bill for those duds came to a hundred sixty; her pay, with tip, was one fifty-five. But it’s an investment, Tricia had reminded her; you only had to buy the clothes once, but you’d get paid for every gig. But serving crab puffs and mini samosas to snooty rich people had made Mo such a nervous wreck, she asked Tricia to tell her boss she wasn’t available for upcoming jobs.

Home Healthcare Services, Inc. advertised for visiting nurses, offering flexible hours and a benefits package for full-timers. Maureen was reluctant to apply at first because of her drug problem, but I reminded her that (a) she had no record and (b) she was in counseling, went faithfully to meetings, and had been drug-free for almost a year. She prepared her résumé, mailed it, and got called for an interview. She must have impressed them, because they hired her on the spot. Over the next week, she read the manual, watched the instructional videos, and underwent the three days of mandatory on-site training. She was to start on a Monday morning, but had had the dry heaves most of the night before. At five a.m. on day one, she crept downstairs, called Home Healthcare’s answering service, and left the message that she was not available to work for them after all.

She was down for a while after that, but she wasn’t out. Then Jackie, her nursing friend from Rivercrest, called to tell her that Norma Dubicki had gotten in a huff about something and given notice. Jackie was Rivercrest’s third-shift north wing nurse. If Maureen replaced Norma as third-shift south wing nurse, they could spell each other and hit Curves together when their shift ended at seven a.m. Third shift was “cinchy” compared to first and second, Jackie assured Mo: bed checks, temps and meds, and paperwork, most nights. No family members or pain-in-the-neck state inspectors, no docs or administrators walking around with God complexes. And third shift had the coolest aides, too: hard-working young Latinas, for the most part, who changed their kids’ Pampers during the day and the residents’
Depends at night. Olga, Provi, Rosa, Esmerelda: they were great with the patients, and hilarious with one another when they got going. Rivercrest would hire Maureen back in a flash, Jackie told her. They’d
salivate
if they heard she was available.

Margaret Gillespie, the director of nursing, offered Maureen the job on a Friday and gave her the weekend to think it over. As third-shift R.N., Mo’s salary would be about two-thirds of what she’d made before as nurse supervisor, but double what she’d made as a parttime school nurse in Colorado. And, hallelujah, the benefits package would include health insurance. Still, I didn’t pressure her. Nor did I ask her about the one thing that was bothering me—until Sunday afternoon, when she wanted to know what I thought she should do.

“It’s your decision,” I said. “Which way you leaning?”

She kept going back and forth, she said.

“Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you. Paul Hay still work there?”

She shook her head. His wife had died, Jackie had told her. He and his son had moved to Minnesota, where Paul’s family was from. Jackie had heard he was in divinity school.

I nodded at the news, trying to keep my face free of reaction. “Well,” I said. “It’d be a relief to have health insurance. And you’d have Jackie for backup, right? Nothing says you have to stay if you don’t like it.”

She liked it well enough. There were trade-offs, of course. The shift passed more slowly than when she’d worked days. And she didn’t get to know the residents as well now; they were mostly asleep while she was on duty. But, as Jackie had promised, the aides were competent and fun and the work was pretty low-impact. On really slow nights, she and Jackie chatted with each other on the phone from their respective nurse’s stations.

It was nice, too, that our work schedules matched up. Afternoons, when I got back from Oceanside, she’d have cooked something for us. We’d eat, talk, watch a little TV. Then we’d unplug the phone, get into bed, spoon, and sleep. Sometimes, before I dozed off, I’d do
some future planning. If she hung in there at the nursing home for, say, a year, then maybe I could drop one of my Oceanside courses. Lighten my load a little—cut that pile of student papers in half. Or, if the state lifted the hiring freeze and Oceanside offered me a full-time position, I could quit the bakery. I’d been cutting, proofing, frying, and frosting doughnuts since college, and it was getting pretty old.

The alarm would wake us up at nine p.m. She and I would get up, shower ourselves awake, get the dogs taken care of, eat a little ten p.m. breakfast. Then we’d dress for work and leave the house. Us and the raccoons, we’d say. Out all night.