A Private Sorcery Page 7

  She takes the bus from Port Authority. It’s early Sunday morning, the only other passengers a mother with a sad little boy and two elderly women hovering over hard-boiled eggs wrapped in foil and squares of crumbly cake.

  For Saul, she carries his mail, a Walkman with a selection of his jazz tapes, the requested books. In her pocket, Saul’s letter stamped with the number of his cell block. Everything important that has happened between Saul and her, it occurs to her now, has been heralded by a letter from him, starting with the one to her five years ago care of the New York Times. She’d submitted the piece anonymously, so Saul hadn’t known he was writing to a woman. That, more than anything, was what drew her to him in the first place. Years later, reading Ruth’s work on women living outside of marriage and their use of the idea of celibacy as the equivalent of purity, it came as a slow, needling awareness that this had been part of her attraction to Saul. On the one hand, there was purity: a man who wrote you to discuss your ideas. On the other hand, there was what Sammy and the others at Alil’s Adult Showcase & Lounge had called “doing cage”: dancing topless in the glass enclosures in the back room.

  Saul’s second letter had been written a year later on her mother’s fiftieth birthday, written in what had once been Rena’s room. It was the first time he’d met either her mother or her brother, and so much had changed by then for the better that Rena had feared he would think she’d fabricated or at best exaggerated her stories about Eleanor: her mother kowtowing to fat Nick of Nick’s Ristorante, letting him shoo Rena downstairs to wait in the kitchen while he had his little visits, how Eleanor had fallen apart after the birth of the twins, the girl stillborn, Eleanor bingeing and crying and sleeping, unable to care for Gene so that the job had fallen to Rena, then fifteen. The crazed state Eleanor sank into when Joe, Gene’s father, died of a heart attack in the cab of his truck while having sex with an underage girl he’d picked up hitchhiking south of Santa Cruz. Eleanor sleeping with any man who would participate, letting Rena bring Gene, then nine, back east.

  It had taken her mother two years and Rena would not hazard to guess how many men before she’d come to her senses, the rage either siphoned off or tucked into some other place. Arriving with Saul on her first visit since Gene’s return to live with their mother, she’d found the house unrecognizable: her room, Joe’s storage room before she and Eleanor moved in, with the gun cabinet by the door and the rifle mounted on the wall, now freshly painted with a tatami mat on the floor and a meditation altar beneath the window; the living room, where once there’d been a deer’s head over the couch and Joe’s enormous television always blaring, now quiet and light with a breeze from the garden and a vase holding daffodils.

  “She seems so peaceful,” Saul commented that first night. Sensing Rena’s fear, he wrote at dawn, placing the letter in her hands as she opened her eyes: “I know things are rarely as they seem—that your mother’s serene demeanor does not mean she has always been this way or even is so now.”

  Rena’s eyes dampened. “It’s not that I want you to vilify my mother. I just can’t bear it if you think I’m crazy.”

  He nodded, and later, when she decided without regrets to marry him, she would pinpoint the start of loving him to reading that letter in which she’d seen so clearly the intrepidness of his orderly mind, his refusal to turn a blind eye—unlike her, she thinks now in the hum of the bus—to other people’s distress.

  Saul’s third letter came last year after the disastrous trip to visit Sylvia in Montauk when she’d found the camera bag filled with vials of sleeping pills, stimulants, painkillers and tranquilizers. Then, she’d been too shocked and angry to turn away. He’d acted as though she was making a big deal out of nothing. “You know I can’t stand that,” she screamed when Sylvia left to buy groceries. She’d never yelled at anyone before. “Being told something real is all in my head.” They drove the four hours back to Manhattan in silence. She dumped her sandy clothes in a pile on the apartment floor and, while he was in the shower, re packed her suitcase. On the bedroom mirror, she wrote with lipstick: “Not coming back until you agree to get help.”

  At the end of the week, Saul’s letter arrived at her job: Okay.

  One typed word.

  Now, with his latest letter, he is prodding her to smile. It’s like being on Novocain. She can sense the pressure without feeling the touch. Unless she’s been smiling in her sleep, she does not believe she has smiled since his arrest.

  THE VISITORS’ REGISTRATION area is thick with waiting. The purposeless waiting she remembers as a child, sitting with her mother in rooms filled with people holding numbers that won’t be called for hours. Her first month at Yale, she’d been amazed to see how efficiently everything ran, how her classmates complained if they had to wait half an hour to get registration forms signed. How a person’s time was assumed to have value.

  There are a dozen or so others. Mostly women, the younger ones in jeans and ankle boots and oversize sweatshirts with glittery logos across the chests, the older ones in cotton skirts and layers of sweaters and snow boots over feet swollen, she imagines, from working in hospital laundries or cleaning offices at night. She feels unnerved. Not for herself. To her, it all seems unwelcomingly familiar. For Saul.

  An hour passes before the clerk calls Rena’s name. “Sign here, here and here.”

  Rena signs at the three X’s.

  “Packages.”

  A female guard empties the shopping bag. She flips through the books, opens the Walkman. “Gotta check you, too. Arms up.”

  Rena lifts her hands over her head. The guard pats her sides, under her breasts, between her legs. It’s nothing, it’s nothing, she repeats to herself, the silent mantra lurching to a stop with the disposable gloves the guard puts on before inspecting her hair.

  There’s a long green hall and then a double gate where Rena is handed over to a second guard. A group of prisoners, their heads individualized with berets and bandannas and Tshirts tied into kaffiyehs, files past flanked by corrections officers front and back. Someone whistles. A sound like a cat’s hiss passes up and down the row. The corrections officer in front does an about-face. He looks at her, his eyes narrowing, before turning to someone at the front of the line. “Cut the shit. Morris, I know that’s you. It’s absolute silence, I mean so I can hear a pin drop, or your ass is going back in lockup so fast you ain’t going to have time to wipe.”

  The guard leads her into a small room. There’s a table with two chairs and a buzzer on top. The glass in the door is reinforced by wire. “Remember, no physical contact, nothing goes to the prisoner except what’s in the bag I checked. You need assistance, hit the buzzer.”

  She’d expected to talk to Saul through a window. She’d never thought they’d be alone together in a room. Her mouth turns to cotton. Her head throbs.

  The door opens: Saul followed by a different guard. For a moment, there’s the distraction of the new guard. He points to the clock on the wall. “You got forty-five minutes. That’s till five past two.” He checks the buzzer, looks at Rena. “That chair you’re in, it’s got to stay center and the bag’s got to be on the table.”

  Rena moves her chair in closer and places the shopping bag on the table. The door bangs closed.

  To her surprise, he looks better, the wells under his eyes less prominent, his hair, cut shorter than before, less unruly. He slides a hand under the bag and touches her arm. She freezes, expecting the guard to rush in. He runs a finger up and down the skin between her wrist and the cuff of her sweater.

  “I’m sorry.” His voice seems too loud. She has to force herself to keep looking at him. He pulls his hand out from under the bag and touches his lips with the finger that had been on her wrist and then slides it back. A speck of saliva from his mouth moistens her skin.

  “I love you.” She can feel his desperation to sink an anchor in her. His gaze is unbearable. She lowers her eyes. Thankfully, he knows to withdraw his finger.

  “Rena.” His e
yes are wet. He is a beautiful man. Beautiful in the way a woman is with high cheekbones and a peaked upper lip. “I just wanted to tell you that. That’s all.”

  She leans forward on the table so her head rests on one arm. “You look awful,” he says.

  “You look terrific.”

  “It had been a while since I’d had three squares and gone to the gym regularly.”

  A stab of guilt. Rarely home before nine, she’d hardly cooked so they’d lived on takeout and omelettes and tuna salad. Every night, she’d prettily set the table as though the napkins folded in triangles would make up for the inadequate fare.

  “That’s the best of it. Sharing an eight-by-ten cell with another man is no picnic. The worst part is the noise. There’s always noise. Men yelling to each other, the loudspeaker day and night. I’d kill for an hour of complete silence.”

  He leans back in his chair. “Still, the truth is, it’s better than being strung out. Those last weeks, scrambling to get money, worrying at every corner I turned that a hired thug was going to knock out my teeth, that was the real hell.”

  “The truth?” She immediately regrets the jab.

  “I’ve got some work to do on that score.”

  The lies had been the hardest thing, the endless lies, all the more unnerving because she’d always thought of Saul as an earnest, guileless man who never knew when a woman was looking at him, who would leave his wallet in restaurants and his credit card on department store counters, so that even now she can’t help but feel that this, too, is some sort of scam.

  “I’ll have a long time to work on it here.”

  She glances at the clock. Unbelievably, only seven minutes have passed. She does not think she will be able to manage another thirty-eight. She prays, her version of praying, that he will not say, I’m going to make it up to you, because then she’ll have to say I’m sorry, I’m going to have to leave now.

  He senses it. She can see him trying to shift gears.

  “How’s work? What’s happening with the Braner campaign?”

  Her eyes narrow.

  “I didn’t have a lobotomy.”

  She refrains from saying that it would be easier if he had, if she could reclaim what he knows about her. It’s not that he knows firsthand (not like Reed, who’d known her while she worked at Alil’s, while she was the then congressional candidate Ascher Malone’s hidden white girl), but he’d probed, gently, really, she thinks now, in his own way, relentlessly, for the details. How the first time she and Ascher had stopped seeing each other, he had turned her over to Rebecca, his teacher at the San Francisco Socialist School, who’d taken Rena under her wing, encouraging Rena to take the SATs (something Rena had never thought to do) and, after seeing Rena’s scores, pressing her to apply to Yale where Rebecca’s graduate school roommate, then an assistant dean, helped Rena get a little-known grant designated for women of Italian-American descent. How, about to graduate with Gene to support, she’d asked

  Ascher to help her get a job, the only time she let him help her: a simple calculation—no job, no Gene.

  “The one thing there’s plenty of here is newspapers. I’ve been reading about what’s going on with Braner in Colorado. Cassen and Silvano are right-wing functionaries, but you can say this for them: at least they work only for people they believe in. If you think about it, it’s got more integrity than what Kerrigan and Muskowitz were into these last couple years, making candidates the Democratic party could sell.”

  She sees it: he’s trying to seduce her with his thoughts. She feels thrown by how chipper he sounds. From what Monk had said, she’d expected to find him listless and demoralized. Has something happened since he’s been here? Or is he feigning a false optimism for her benefit?

  The guard presses his forehead to the glass. She waits for him to leave. “You decided to plead guilty.”

  “I am guilty.”

  Saul watches her eyes land on his trembling wrist. He steadies his wrist by lacing his fingers together. “I’ve got three more days on the barb detox. It’s a lot better than it was.”

  “You pled guilty because you feel guilty?”

  “I pled guilty because my lawyer told me it was the smartest thing to do—given that Reed seems to have left me holding the bag. But I’m relieved to do so.”

  For a moment, she feels tempted to challenge Saul’s belief that Reed abandoned him, but with relieved a bubble of distress rises in her, bursting against her anesthetized demeanor so that she imagines crying out, How did this all happen? By then, though, Saul has launched a description of the prison routine. He will not be assigned a job until after his sentencing. For the interim, they’ve put him on pots detail.

  “You should see the pots they use for the soups and stews. It takes two of us to lift one from the stove.”

  Three times a week, his cell block goes to the gym. Someone has shown him how to use the barbells. He flexes an arm, stroking a small ball of muscle in mock vanity. “Biceps, triceps, deltoids, pectorals. These guys know more anatomy than I did my first year of medical school.”

  Visions of a horde of men, thighs thick as tree trunks, and she has to ask, “Is it safe—is it safe here?”

  His jaw twitches. “The double whiteys—the white guys here on white-collar crimes—live in constant fear. Pharmacy robbery has cachet. One of the lifers, they call him one of the big ten because he still runs a street gang out of Brooklyn, adopted me as his secretary. I write his letters for him. He likes having me sign them Dr. Dubinsky, Secretary for Marsden Stem, Grand Marshal of the Blackjacks. As long as I do his letters, word’s out that anyone who harasses me is dead meat.”

  For the first time during the visit, she detects fear in him. She can smell it, his breath acrid like the scent of iron tools left overnight on wet grass. His face collapses and his entire visage shifts so she can see the bruised skin under his eyes, the despair leaching out like rust seeping into the aquifer.

  SHE TAKES THE BUS back to Port Authority. She knows that she should call Leonard, that he won’t call to inquire, at least not today, but that he’ll be waiting. When she gets back to Ninety-Fifth Street, though, it’s all she can do to pull the blinds and stand in the galley kitchen and eat some cereal out of the box, then bring a glass of milk, the Sunday paper and her briefcase with her calendar for work into bed.

  She sleeps with the light on, the milk souring on the bedside stand, her calendar on her chest, the papers spread out where Saul used to be. At four, she is awakened by a sharp sound somewhere between a clang and a screech. A cat vaulting between the trash cans. Her feet are very cold. She clears the bed and wraps the blankets around her ankles as though these lower extremities are a baby she is swaddling. She can see Saul smiling as he talked about scrubbing crusted macaroni and cheese from the bottom of a thirty-six-inch pot. Again she wonders, is his good cheer a pretense? He must know that there are mandatory sentences for federal drug convictions, that he is going to be locked up, Monk said, somewhere on the order of forty-eight months. At the very least, he must know that he is going to lose his license.

  Her feet will not warm. She tucks them under her. The despair shifts, one of those figure-ground illusions where the vase becomes a face, and her eyes well with tears that flow in the darkness as she sees that it is not only he who has lost her, but she who has lost him.

  SHE WAKES THINKING of Reed. In the shower, it occurs to her that Saul must have had a phone number and address for Reed. Never a snoop (her stepfather, Joe, whose suspicions of Eleanor had extended to Rena as if they were collaborators in a scheme against him, had so routinely searched her drawers and backpack she’d told her mother they should leave him notes tucked between her underwear), she’d not thought to pick the lock on Saul’s rolltop desk.

  She snaps the lock with a metal nail file. It appalls her how easily it comes to her. Behind the rolltop, she finds scraps of paper with scrawled telephone numbers. The abbreviated pocket version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Saul’s addre
ss book. Under M, Reed’s address, no longer on John Street where she’d left the messages last year for him but on East Eighty-Eighth.

  She calls her job to say she’ll be late, takes the Ninety-Sixth Street crosstown bus to Second Avenue and walks the eight blocks south. The building has a frayed green awning and no doorman. Next to 6E, she sees Bria’s name. Bria Estefan. She rings the bell and waits.

  A man in a maintenance shirt enters the lobby with a bucket on wheels and a spaghetti string mop. Rena taps on the glass. He opens the door.

  “I’m looking for Bria Estefan.”

  “She’s gone. Been gone a month, maybe more.”

  “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

  “You go talk to the super, Rafael. He’s in the office downstairs.” Rena takes the stairs to the basement. In the office, Rafael is drinking coffee and reading the Post. He peers at her over the top of his paper.

  “I’m looking for Bria Estefan. Actually, I’m looking for her boyfriend, Reed Michaelson.”

  “You, darlin’, and everyone else in this city. She went back to Brazil, someone said.”

  “For good?”

  “One of the cops who was around here said she’d been deported, but then she paid rent for April. You figure.”

  “I’m Reed’s sister. There are some papers I need for the family.” Rafael takes a loose cigarette from his pocket and lights up. Clumsily, remembering Ascher when he’d needed things done, she pulls out two twenties from her wallet and lays them on the desk. Rafael exhales a plume of smoke. The twenties disappear under the Post.

  “The cops took a couple garbage bags of stuff, but you can pick through the rest. Tell the guy cleaning the floor I said to open 6E for you.”

  Six E stinks of cigarettes and cat piss. A partially eaten jelly doughnut sits on the kitchen counter, a roach expired on the red center. Long black hairs festoon the bathroom sink. Women’s clothes are strewn over the unmade bed. Rena picks up a snakeskin print dress. Victoria’s Secret, size 2.