What You Remember I Did (13 page)

"Now," murmured Tonya, and there was anticipatory stirring around the circle as if everyone but Nan knew what was coming, "I invite you to bring the warmth and light into the most intimate part of your body, between your legs, your private parts, your genitals. Notice what you feel, what images and memories come to the surface." One of the young women was wailing. "And when you are ready," Tonya went on, gently but not turning away, "when you are ready, I invite you to share what you are remembering, perhaps for the first time."

Nan stood up. Tonya was looking at her; if the others noticed, they gave no indication. Nan mouthed at the therapist, "I'm leaving." Tonya nodded and closed her eyes again, dismissing Nan or respecting her own process.

Nan stumbled out of the room and the building and to her car, and sat shaking until she could drive. Even then, she couldn't bear the thought of going straight home and having to deal with her mother.
Becca
wouldn't mind another few minutes. Nan drove to the far end of New City, beyond the golf course to a small grove of trees, which had miraculously survived around the banks of a stream. Sitting in the grass, she took comfort in the solidity of the earth under her and the broad trunk of an old tree at her back.

Frantically reviewing her research into Repressed and False Memory Syndromes, she decided that Tonya's body scan thing must have been what more than one article had referred to as "expressive bioenergetics," or maybe "narrative therapy." And all that crap about "the most intimate part of your body"–talk about leading the patient! Next thing, Tonya would be reciting childish names for various private body parts; one transcript of a therapy session, which had seemed so outrageous she hadn't known whether to believe it, had recorded the therapist hypnotically intoning at least a dozen such terms, and a footnote had explained that this was for the purpose of "accessing primal memories."

She brought her fist down on the ground at her side. It was not possible that her mother had ever done any of this. She couldn't allow herself to be hypnotized or seduced–a good word for it–into even entertaining the notion. What a tragedy it would be if the last few years she had with her mother were ruined by this filthy nonsense.

She was done. She was not going back to see Dr. Tonya Bishop ever again. She was going to go on with her life as if this ugly little interlude had never happened.

For a while, Nan's resolve translated itself into a feeling of well-being. It was autumn, and nothing rivaled autumn in upstate New York, no matter how much she traveled and despite the fact that it augured the end of the outdoor tennis season. Shopping for a pumpkin with Jordan and carving it on the porch. Filling the inside with leaves without having to duplicate a single color. Wearing chunky turtleneck sweaters and scarves and soft, lamb leather jackets. She loved all of it. Even at work, everything seemed heightened. The campus was brighter than usual, the yellows and oranges and russets almost iridescent. She ate chocolate bars with abandon, stealing from the bags of miniatures she was storing for Halloween, and she offered to make a costume for Jordan who said, "Oh, Grams, I'm too old for
that
."

There was excitement in the air, a feeling of celebration she'd never lost from childhood, but there was something else, too, something that made her feel as if she was balancing delicately, carefully, on the edge of a cliff. Every time she thought of Matt, a physical sensation shot into her groin, as if it had been hit by an orgasmic bolt of lightning. While the sensation was not unpleasant, it left her wanting the real thing.

Nothing satisfied her. Her less-than-convenient class schedule, which ordinarily might have been worth a bitch session or two over coffee with Dan, enraged her. Seeing Peter Sanchez here and there on campus made her giddy in a way that felt dangerous.

At home, she could hardly stand to be in the same room with her mother, yet could hardly stand to leave her alone at all. Catherine's mental and physical decline worsened noticeably from one day to the next, and Nan was terrified. Of losing her. Of never being able to find out what had really happened between them. Of finding out.

At school, she was holding the line, or thought she was until she bumped into Dan half-running toward the parking lot. His face was filled with concern.

"Everything okay?" she called out.

He stopped moving. "It's Professor Dawson. They moved him into a hospice yesterday and he's asking for me."

"So he's–"

"Close." He paused. "What about you, Nan? How are you doing? I don't mean to pry, but you've been looking kind of–stressed. "

"I'm fine. Really. Just have a lot on my plate right now, with my mother and..."

When she didn't continue, Dan asked carefully, not looking at her, "How are things with Matt?"

"Okay. Complicated. What does he say?"

Dan grinned sideways at her. "He says things are incredibly wonderful." They'd reached his car. He gave her a quick one-armed hug before he unlocked the door. "I hope I didn't screw up, introducing you to him." He waved and slid behind the wheel, saving them both from her reply.

"Complicated" was putting it mildly. Her relationship with Matt had turned almost entirely sexual, and almost all the initiative was hers. She couldn't keep her hands or her mouth off him. She wanted–needed–him inside her all the time. She didn't want to do anything but make love, and she wanted to do it everywhere–hotel rooms and his office and her office and the tennis court on a moonless night and the handicap stall of the ladies' room at Le Jazz Hot.

He was often amazed, sometimes put off, once in a while actually shocked. "Jesus, Nan, what's come over you? You're wearing me out." Or "Let's go out to dinner," or "Let's just talk."

But she couldn't stop. Her sexual ardor had a nasty manic quality to it, she knew, but the pleasure and release were necessary. She crossed boundary after boundary, discovering and inventing erotic activities she'd never have considered before, taking greater and greater risks of making a public display. She couldn't get enough.

And she didn't tell Tonya.

One hot late-August morning, over their usual coffee and biscotti before her first student, she declared, "Tonight we'll make love at my house." It was a demand, a statement of fact.

His eyes widened and he heaved a sigh. "I don't think that's such a good idea. Your mother–"

"Fuck my mother." Nan laughed harshly, ignoring the look akin to revulsion that crossed Matt's face. "Just come over at eight, okay? She'll be in bed."

Happily, Catherine was sound asleep well before eight. Nan had had to brush her hair for only a few minutes. Sometimes it took an hour before the old woman let herself be lulled. Sometimes Nan could hardly tolerate the feel of the white strands, which not so long ago had made her think fondly of words like "gossamer." Now they were coarser, something she'd been told happened to old people more often than not. When she was little, she and her mother had brushed each other's hair. That used to be one of her favorite memories. She vowed it would be again.

Matt was late. Maybe he'd chickened out. She couldn't handle that, not now when she was this horny. When she thought about it from a left-brain perspective, she thought it was because she was delving into primal sexual feelings.

The phone rang. She snatched it up in half a ring, desperate not to wake her mother. "I'm waiting," she cooed into the receiver.

There was a pause, and then her brother said, "Nan?"

"Patrick?"

"
Becca
said you wanted to talk to me." For a moment, Nan didn't know what he meant. "Something to do with Mom?" he prompted, and she caught the indignation in his voice. "Some stupid thing about something Mom is supposed to have done to you?"

"Wow. That really makes me want to talk to you. You always did have a way with words."

"What the hell do you think you're doing? This is our mother we're talking about."

There was a double-rap at the front door. Her heart pounded. "You know something, Pat? I don't have time for this now. I've got better things to do than–"

"Well,
Becca
said you wanted to know if I remembered the same kind of crap. The answer is no. She was a great mom. To all of us."

"Yeah, okay, fine. I'll call you tomorrow and we'll talk some more–"

"No, we won't." They'd always competed to see who could hang up on the other one first. As usual, it was impossible to tell.

Waiting for Nan or Catherine to answer his knock, Matt considered again the thrilling and unsettling turn this affair with the once-cautious and really quite conventional Nan
Jenssen
had taken. Self-editing, as was his habit, he mused that neither "considered" nor "again" was the right word; to speak of something being considered implied calm and rationality, neither of which was even remotely applicable, and "again" required a stopping and a re-start when in fact these days he hardly thought about anything but the turn this affair had taken.

"Thrilling" was right, though. He hadn't felt like this in a long time, probably since the passion in his marriage to Marcia had succumbed to the demands of an infant. The thought of Eliot, and the still-sharp regret that he and Marcia hadn't had a chance to rekindle and rebuild, caused a migraine to stir and make its presence known. "The gathered creature," he'd called it in a poem, "always alert for my unwilling summons."
Please, not tonight,
he prayed, pressing his temples.

But he was also thinking, as he often did these days:
What have I gotten myself into?
Nan's new sexual insatiability was thrilling, yes, but it was also a little crude and off-putting, and more than a little disconcerting.
Maybe she won't let me into the house and that'll be the end of it.

They really hadn't known each other very long. There was time to get out of this without much pain to either of them.

The trouble was, he really did like her. A lot.

Yet she thought it possible that he could have molested his own son. He fought down nausea and hoped he'd be able to wash soon without it seeming too odd.

When Nan opened the door, Matt took a step back.
Something's wrong here
, he told himself.
Be careful.
But she said come in, in a husky voice he'd come to recognize, and he decided he was more than welcome.

"You are so beautiful," he said by way of greeting, and reached for her. She danced away, and, thinking he recognized the game, he strode after her, playfully backing her into a corner, bracing a hand against the wall on either side of her head and pinning her down in mock force.

She leaned into him, moaned, and swung UP her knee. There was nothing playful about the way she connected with his groin.

Holding himself, he staggered back against the doorjamb and slid to the floor. "What the–?"

"I'm sorry, Matt, I'm sorry."

Lights pulsed behind Matt's eye and he thought he might pass out. "Sorry? That hardly does it. You hurt me. Imprisoning each other is a game, Nan. We've played it before. We don't really hurt each other, remember?"

"How could you think of that as a game?" she demanded. "How could you trap me?"

Fury cleared his mind, for the few moments before the migraine hit full-force. He was not going to deal with another accusation. "You said you liked to pretend we're playing rough and you always seem to want sex. You initiate it more often than I do. You want it all the time."

Nan was screaming. It was almost as if the target of her rage was someone other than him. "You're just the same as she is. You think you have the right to do anything you want to me." She was flailing her arms.

"You're crazy," he gasped. "You need help."

"I'm not the one who needs help." She was shouting now. "You're the one, you and my mommy–"

Something was really wrong. Something had happened to her. He loved her–that this should be the first time he'd realized that was demented in itself. He wanted to help. He wanted to protect himself. And what about Catherine?

He tried to rise, but the pain in his genitals had been overtaken by a roaring headache, and he couldn't move.

Catherine was startled from sleep by her daughter's call for Mommy and knew exactly what to do. Crying, "I'm here, Nanny, Mommy's here," she struggled out of bed and hurried to the doorway of the other room, trying to blink the sleep out of her eyes and pulling at her tangled nightgown. Where was she? In her house, in her bedroom, yes. Where was she going? What other room? Who was calling her? Her daughter, yes, her daughter Nan. It didn't matter where she was or where Nan was, she had to get to her.

Someone was on the floor. Someone else was leaning over the person on the floor. Catherine hastened to make some sense out of it, even if she was wrong. "A game," she chirped, laboriously folding her body into a seated position next to the person–a man–Matt on the floor. "What are we playing?" She looked up at Nan and patted the carpet. "Sit here, Nanny. Sit next to me."

"No." Nan stood up straight. "Stop it. Leave me alone."

"I know you're not five years old anymore, but let's pretend."

"I must have liked it," Nan said, looking at Matt. "That's the insidious nature of early childhood sexual abuse."