A Private Sorcery Read online

  “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.”

  IT 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 an
d rallies and the suspect ideas that constituted my father’s politics and now both your work and mine.

  I deliver it straight. “Saul’s been arrested.”

  Marc exhales loudly. “What the fuck …”

  I imagine the dark circle of perspiration in the middle of his University of Pennsylvania T-shirt, his bulging legs, the muscles still engorged from his run, his thick neck, the black hair trellised from belly button to collarbone.

  “Hold on.” I hear water running, gulping sounds as he drinks. The glass bangs on the table. “What happened?”

  “It’s not clear. Rena says he’d been using drugs, prescription drugs he began taking after that boy lost his legs. He’d started seeing someone for help, but I guess it didn’t stick.”

  “Yeah, but why was he arrested?”

  “A burglary of the pharmacy at the hospital where he works. It sounds like he’s being linked with that.”

  “Great. Breaking and entering. Conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. Revocation of his license.”

  “He needs a lawyer. A criminal lawyer, obviously. Do you know anyone here in New York?”

  In the background, I can hear Susan’s little screeches. “Look, I have to talk to Susan. I’ll call you back. Where are you?”

  “With Rena. At their apartment.”

  “Give me the number.”

  Your brother doesn’t know your phone number—a place you’ve lived for eight years.

  I carry the mugs and platter into the kitchen, scattering dank tea leaves over the counter as I try to empty the mesh balls. I turn on the kettle, stand at the living room window waiting for the water to boil. The block association has put metal cages up around the trees. Bags of garbage lean against the sides.

  Two women in ski jackets climb the steps and the doorbell rings. The shower is still running in the back. I go to the intercom and ask who’s there.

  “Ruth, Maggie. Rena and Saul’s friends.”

  I buzz them in. You introduced me to them shortly after you and Rena started living together: Ruth, who you said had been a classmate of Rena’s at Yale and then later told me only became her friend after they’d bumped into one another in Riverside Park; Maggie, whom you called Ruth’s lover.

  I open the door and Ruth gives me a peck on the cheek. She’s wearing a wool cap that makes her face look small and cramped, and she stomps her work boots on the mat before coming in. Maggie towers a good half-foot over Ruth. She pats my arm and runs her fingers through her cropped blond hair. She unwraps a scarf from her neck and untangles her dangling earrings. Although they’re both in jeans and turtlenecks, on Ruth the effect is of a squat woman who has opted out whereas on Maggie the clothes suggest an urban chic.

  “How are you holding up?” Ruth asks.

  “Rena called us at eight,” Maggie says. “We wanted to give you some time alone with her before coming over.”

  The phone rings and Rena picks up on the extension in back. Maggie heads into the kitchen as the kettle starts to whistle. Ruth plops onto the couch.

  “Thanks for the letter,” I say. “It was very thought-provoking. I should have written you then to say so.”

  I think back to when I last saw Ruth. July. At your birthday party. Piecing things together with what Rena has told me, this must have been after you’d gone to see that doctor, during the interlude when you were doing okay. You donned a chef’s apron and positioned yourself in the garden next to the charcoal grill Rena had bought you for your birthday, flipping chicken pieces and these marinated slices of something Maggie, who’d made them, told me was ground soy. Although I’d known Ruth was a historian, we’d never discussed our work at any length. I’d felt too insecure about my historical skills, afraid that my first two books would strike her as amateurish, riding on an unused medical degree, my methods slipshod.

  Perhaps I was buoyed by your looking better, perhaps it was just the desperation I’ve felt this past year about the Carmelita project, but that night I threw caution to the wind. I settled into the folding chair next to Ruth, probed her about her work on nineteenth-century women living outside of marriage, the choices she’d made in focusing on the history of three prototypical women, her narrative strategies. Then, for the first time, I tried to explain what I’ve been struggling with in the Carmelita story, the multiple frames through which I’ve been examining Carmelita’s life.

  A week later, Ruth’s letter arrived—two single-spaced pages of additional thoughts she’d had about my project. She knew, she wrote, that I was interested in comparing the religious, psychiatric and economic interpretations of the Carmelita story, but had I considered the sexual politics of the situation? Assuming that Carmelita’s pregnancy resulted from intercourse, what were the conditions of this copulation? Was it rape or passionate mutual consent? Perhaps it was a monetary transaction. A paragraph followed on how she’d learned about the centrality of understanding the sex industry in the lives of disenfranchised women from her research on Lydia Johnston, a Presbyterian minister’s daughter who until the age of thirty-three had been her widowed father’s housekeeper only to find herself destitute on his death, after which she’d become a prostitute and alcoholic around the shipyards of Richmond. Reading her letter, my head spun. I felt keenly aware of how unaccustomed I was to this level of intellectual vigor.

  Ruth waves a hand as though to brush away my pesky apology. She reaches for the plate of quartered muffins Maggie has set on the coffee table. Rena comes in from the back. Her hair is wet, combed off her face, and she’s wearing a loose white shirt that makes her appear even more pale and sylphish. She squints, steadies herself on the doorjamb.

  Maggie moves toward Rena. Rena leans into her. Ruth opens out her arms to Rena, who sinks into the sofa beside her, head touching raised knees. She’s still barefoot. Awkwardly, I watch as Ruth massages Rena’s shoulder blades.

  After a minute, Rena sits up. “That was Marc.” Beneath the even words, I can hear the disdain, faint like the whispering of children who’ve been bid good night. “He discussed it with Susan, and they’ve agreed that it would be colluding with Saul to help find him an attorney. Marc said that Susan pointed out what a codependent family we are and how this would be a continuation of that.”

  Ruth snorts. “Can you believe the bullshit level of discourse?” Maggie glares at Ruth as if to remind her that you don’t comment on other people’s relations.

  I feel mortified, oddly more mortified by your brother’s behavior than by yours. It’s so mean-spirited, and Ruth’s comment has highlighted for me what I can only call the deep insult for Marc to use this commercial pop-psychological analysis given that he knows how seriously we’ve both struggled with understanding human behavior. I remember our debate years ago, back when you were in college, about the ethics of hostility: Is hostility unconsciously expressed better or worse than hostility consciously expressed? (You were insistent that we include expressed, not wanting to imply that it is the hostility itself that is ethically negative. “That would make us Catholics,” you said, “where thought and deed are judged as one.”) I took the position that hostility unconsciously expressed is less evil because the perpetrator is himself innocent of the act—suggesting that he, too, finds the act abhorrent. You took the position that hostility unconsciously expressed is, in fact, worse since the perpetrator is guilty both of the aggressive act and of not taking responsibility for what he has done. I was so proud of you, barely twenty, of the elegance of your argument, and for a moment I indulge in the reminiscence—until the image of fingers curled around iron bars presses against my escape.

  Ruth stands. It’s nearly eleven, still dim inside, the scant light blocked by the brownstones across the street. “I’m calling Ann.”

  Maggie shoots Ruth a quizzical look. “This is kind of far afield for Ann, isn’t it?” She turns to me to explain. “Ruth’s sister does—what the hell is it she does?”

  “Corporate litigation. But she’ll know someone. Their clients, those Fortu
ne 500 VPs, have kids who get in hot water and need bailing out.”

  2 Rena

  Rena and Leonard take the subway to meet Michael Morton. Rena doesn’t know or care what he owes Ruth’s sister, only that he’s agreed to meet them even though it’s a Sunday. They get off at Chambers Street and walk east into a biting wind. She bows her head, cutting the wind with her forehead, relieved that the effort excuses her silence. City Hall looms like a gigantic wedding cake set down on a construction site. They pick their way over ramps and head north through Foley Square, Rena navigating the way she’s always done with Saul, whom, absorbed in the pursuit of some line of thought, she’s often thought she could lead right off the edge of a bluff.

  Everything is closed, the row of kiosks that during the week sell hot dogs and souvlaki and falafel covered with rolled tin fronts. She reads the signs: Criminal Courts, Municipal Building, U.S. Courthouse, New York County Courthouse, Family Court, Customs Courthouse. Her hair blows up from her neck. She quickens her pace, too numb and cold to slow down when Leonard falls a step or two behind. They turn left on Worth Street and look for the number Morton gave her. It’s a twenties office building with bubble-letter graffiti sprayed on the red brick: FUCK YOU JUAN. She tries the door but it’s locked.

  “He said he’d be here by one-fifteen.” She looks at her watch, not yet one, takes shelter in the doorway. Saul, naked and handcuffed, sticks stubbornly in her mind.

  Leonard marches in place. Across the street, there’s a typewriter repair store and a sign, STENOGRAPHERS-CLERKS-TYPISTS: HOUR, DAY, WEEK. The setting, a stark contrast from the mahogany-and-marble offices of her clients, is making her nervous; it seems more like the location for a pawnshop, somewhere she and her mother might have gone, than a lawyer’s office.