A Private Sorcery (33 page)

“I'm forty-four years old. I've published some two hundred poems. I have a secure teaching position. We tried for two years to conceive—I'll spare you the boring details—until finally an endocrinologist told me she was going to talk straight with me: we could spend fifty thousand dollars we don't have and another two years hyperstimulating my ovaries and our chances would still be only fifteen percent. She said she wouldn't talk to me like this except that she'd read my poems, had her residents read my poem about watching your eggs drop, month after month, an inheritance dwindling. Afterwards, I cried. I cried for most of two days. People read my work and they think I'm a different person than who I am, that I'm some sort of Amazonian. But I knew she was right. Hank knew she was right. She was talking his lingua franca: probability. We can't wager all our money, he said, and one-twentieth of our remaining years on a fifteen-percent shot. We stayed up drinking Dewars straight from the bottle until the newspaper boy came and the dogs started barking. In the morning we called the agency that brought us here. That was last fall.”

Rena touches Sonia's elbow. They're at the intersection for the small street that houses the
posada.
Like Saul, Sonia follows her without even looking at the sign.

“What never occurred to me was that we lose our fertility for a reason. That it's not just an artifact of evolution. That we're born with all our eggs and that the time when the good ones run out is not simply random—that it wasn't simply my body that was too old to have a
baby.” Sonia hugs her arms. In the dusk, she looks younger, her skin airbrushed by the waning light. “No, it's my psyche too. For twenty-five years, I've woken every day to absolute quiet. It's been the foundation of my day. I've lain in bed and thought about my dreams and then padded to the kitchen to turn on the coffee and then to the bathroom to pee and wash my face and brush my teeth and then I've sat down with a pencil and paper. Sometimes, if we've been away or it's a day I have to teach, I may have only twenty minutes, but for me those twenty minutes are the difference between feeling alive or like an automaton.”

They're in front of the
posada.
Sonia stops as if what she has to say cannot be said inside. “I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I thought I'd still be able to do that. Get up before the baby. Let Hank get up with him. But I can't. First, I'm so exhausted, I sleep to the very last minute. Then, when Carlos gets up, I can't just leave him to Hank. I feel like I have to check in with him. See how he is. Only that goes on all day. I keep saying, it's just for now, when we get back to Boston I'll be able to have my morning time. But it's been four weeks and I'm going crazy.”

The bass has disappeared from Sonia's voice. Tears balance on the rims of her eyes. “I feel like I've lost my mind. I've stopped dreaming. Or when I do, the dreams are wiped out immediately since I wake up all night to Carlos' cries. Only once have I woken on my own, not to his crying. It's the only dream I can recall since we've had him. The only line I've written. Seven syllables.”

Sonia reaches out her hands and grasps Rena's arms. She's laughing through her tears, a kind of hysterical hilarity. “Guess what I was dreaming? That Carlos was crying. I was dreaming that he was crying, and when I woke up there was absolute quiet and I took a pen and wrote on my palm: ‘Silence, sugar of the soul.'”

A
T THREE
, R
ENA
bolts awake. At first, she thinks it's the sound of a baby crying, or parents half asleep, stumbling and muttering as they make bottles, change diapers, but all she hears is the call of an animal,
high-pitched and distant.

Afraid of disturbing Leonard, she refrains from turning on the light to read and instead lies listening to his breathing, insufficiently staccato to qualify as a snore but too loud to permit an easy return to sleep. She can detect his scent, heavier and more pungent than Saul's.

Over dinner, she could feel a tension rising between them—the excess politeness, the absence of any joking. She'd been relieved when Hank volunteered to go with Leonard to the Guatel office—relieved to have the time apart.

She turns onto her side and pulls the thin blanket over her shoulders. It doesn't make any sense. Leonard has been nothing but considerate and helpful. So why does she no longer want him here?

“T
HEY'RE RIGHT
,” R
ENA
says over breakfast. “It's absurd to come this far and see only this city. You should go to the Highlands.”

Leonard is cutting a tortilla covered with a fried egg. He finishes the incision and places his knife and fork parallel on the plate. “If we persist with the embassy, we might be able to get them to apply pressure and get us earlier access.”

“It's not worth it. It's Wednesday already. We could spend two days badgering them and maybe we'd get the body by Friday. And that's only maybe.” She feels oddly like Sonia, talking about facing probability and letting it guide your decisions.

“So why don't we both go? We could leave tomorrow morning. Come back on Sunday. That would give us time to visit Lake Atitlán and one or two of the mountain villages.”

From the way Leonard has an itinerary mapped out, it's clear that he's already thought this through, perhaps even consulted with Hank.

“I still need to arrange for the cremation, make sure everything is set for us to bring back the ashes.”

“Don't you think we could get that all wrapped up today?”

Rena stares at a black hair afloat in her coffee. She fears she will gag. Fears what will happen if she has to putter around with Leonard until Señor Perez's return. That the strain of the togetherness will overtake
her and some undigested piece of nastiness will pop out of her mouth. Nor does she want to tell Leonard that she has promised Sonia she will take Carlos for a night, will keep the baby in her room to allow Sonia a morning to wake in silence, or that Sonia wept at the offer, her words—“You'd really do that, oh my God, if I could have one morning, maybe I could feel okay for a couple more weeks”—all a jumble.

Leonard's eyes narrow. He has registered her wish to be alone.

Touching his wrist, she whispers, “I can't.”

13
Leonard

I would never have agreed to go had she not made it clear that she wanted me to leave. I want to leave her phone numbers, ways of reaching me, but she waves her hand: “Leonard, I'm a big girl. I'll never forgive myself if your trip to Guatemala is confined to this city.”

Oddly enough, other than an initial flinching, I don't feel insulted that she would prefer to remain here where the air is so thick with grime I have to scrub my neck and wrists to remove the accumulated soot. It is so clear (I hope I am not being overly confident here) that it has nothing to do with me that what I feel is sympathy at how hard it is for her to be in someone else's company. Were I not, after thirty-some years of solitude myself, utterly drained of that wish, it strikes me as something I might do myself. What I do feel, though, is indignation on your behalf. She must have done this a thousand times with you. Yes, she insisted you see that detox doctor. Yes, she called him a couple of times after she sensed more trouble. But it didn't go much further than that, did it?

And how was it different for you with Mom? Did you do more than go through the motions?

Of course. It takes one to know one.

Unable to make any definitive travel plans since the guidebooks warn that bus schedules for the Highlands change without notice depending on weather and the military, who have a habit of closing roads, I tell her I will be back, hell or high water, on Sunday.

Hell or high water
: who do I think I am?

S
HE INSISTS ON COMING
with me to the bus depot, making a respectable effort at small talk on the ride there. Once we arrive, it's hard to figure out what needs to be done. Do I buy the ticket at the window or on the bus? What time does the bus depart? All anyone will tell
me is the gate number. “
La cuatro. La cuatro
.”

We go to the newspaper kiosk so I can get a
Herald-Tribune.

“We should have asked Hank,” Rena says. She's wearing a dress with buttons that go up the front. In the heat of the station, she's taken off her sweater, leaving her thin arms exposed. Ahead of us is another American, purchasing copies of every available newspaper. “Excuse me,” I say as he turns to leave. “Do you know how this works? I'm trying to find the bus to Panajachel.”

He's tall with brittle brown hair pulled back with a rubber band. I'm certain that he's as flabby as I am, but his head is big and he carries himself in such a way that his girth under the spirit fabric shirt gives the illusion of muscle rather than fat. His eyes settle on the oval of skin between the top of Rena's dress and the hollow of her neck.

“Works? Nothing works here.”

“We're trying to find out the schedule. But all anyone will tell me is the gate number.”

“That's because each bus has its own contract and each driver keeps his own schedule. But if you go to the gate, there'll be someone who knows when the next one leaves. Which gate did they say?”

“Four.”

“That's on the side facing the market. I'll show you.”

I can see Rena studying him, trying to figure out who he is.

“Where are you folks from?”

Rena glances at me. She is deferring to me. Whether I'll say New York for the two of us, or let him know about the river between. Don't be ridiculous, I say to myself. He's just trying to help. A Good Samaritan. Maybe a little crazed from being alone in this unbeguiling city. I remember my old supervisor, Nettles, long dead, I presume, and how he used to say that I didn't distinguish between what was on my mind and what was on the patient's:
Dr. Dubinsky, one must always keep an eye on the impact of the countertransference
. The countertransference. As though it were a thing with a color and smell.

“Rena's from New York City. I'm from New Jersey.”

“And you?” Rena asks. Her voice is cool, almost chilly. It's breathtaking,
the contrast between those slender arms and the large breasts. A shark, I think. Hidden under the flab is a shark. And sharks like cold water.

You have your directionality confused, Dr. Dubinsky
, Nettles would admonish.
What originates within the doctor and what derives from the patient
. That tone. I could hear it being delivered to the Park Avenue matrons lying year after year on his black leather couch.
Mrs. Randall, certainly even you can see how your associations point toward an envy of the male anatomy? Mrs. Randall, you speak constantly of your husband's lack of sexual interest in you, but you grew very embarrassed when you talked about seeing your friend's abundant pubis when you accompanied her to the changing room at Bergdorf's.

“Here. I've been living here the past year and a half. The Bay Area before that. Tony Prankle with a ‘k,' ” he says, extending a hand to me.

“Leonard Dubinsky. And this is my daughter-in-law, Rena Peretti.” I have to remind myself that this Tony Prankle with a “k”—a stringer for the wire services, he tells us—does not know that Rena is staying.

“I hate to tell you guys, but this is the dog's way to get to Panajachel. These second-class buses are old Canadian school buses. Unless you got calluses on your derriere, they're pretty rough going. And slow. Most people take one of the private coaches that leave from the hotels. Me, I like these babies because you get to see the rural life, not the tourist life, but you definitely have to be up for it. I've seen every animal smaller than a horse be boarded and Indians so dank you'd think they'd self-combust.”

There's a yellow bus waiting at the gate. It's jammed with people, mostly Indians but a few straggly-haired backpackers, too. I approach the Ladino man standing guard at the door and ask if there's room for one.
“Lleno,”
he says. Full.

“You have dollars on you?” Prankle asks.

“Five or six in ones.”

“Offer him three dollars American for the two of you.”

“It's just me going.”

Prankle with a “k,” I swear to God, moves an inch closer to Rena.
“Offer two American.”

I pull out two dollars from the inside zipped pouch of my vest.
“Momentico,”
the guy at the door says. He leans inside and points at a man and a woman and two children all crammed into the seat behind the driver. I can't hear what he's saying, but the next thing I know they're trooping off the bus, the kids carrying satchels tied from cloth and the man gesturing toward the roof filled with baskets. The woman herds the children to the wall where the sign for the gate is posted, and they sit silently, the three of them on the ground, while the man climbs up to retrieve their baskets.

Rena kisses me on the cheek. “I'll see you Sunday,” she says. I take my seat behind the driver. His dark eyes fill the rearview mirror. I wave to Rena and she waves back. Prankle points to something on the bus and she smiles.

Nettles. All those weeks in his office with him lecturing me about my countertransference. He didn't understand a thing. Not a goddamn thing.

A
N ISOSCELES TRIANGLE
. You in prison in Connecticut. Rena in Guatemala City. Me headed slowly, two hours out, already three repetitions of the driver's one cassette, songs of lost love crooned by a Spanish Elvis, to Panajachel, a hippie outpost—my blood pressure still elevated from thinking about the way this Tony Prankle will try to put the moves on Rena.

My intestines are burning, the beginning, I fear, of a case of
turista
. I suspect the Chinese food from the night before last. In one of the Carmelita documents, a sister described how the family had journeyed all the way to Oaxaca on the occasion of Carmelita's sixteenth birthday to go to the first Chinese restaurant to open in their region. I compute years and dates: 1953, two years before her death. Ten months before she got pregnant. The year I finished my residency. Back then, there'd been a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant on Lower Broadway that a group of us had frequented Friday nights, all of us pledging to keep up our gatherings as we dispersed to our hospital jobs. Five Jew
boys congratulating ourselves on our boldness in eating shellfish, and on a Friday night to boot. (I was sure I wasn't the only one who added a silent prayer for leniency in case our agnosticism turned out to be wrong.) Decades before people fussed about Hunan and Szechuan, we'd eaten tureens of wonton soup and plates of chow mein. There'd been bowls filled with crispy fried noodles and afterwards litchi nuts speared with toothpicks. Nothing like the places in your (can I still say your, or should I say Rena's) neighborhood with their diet selection banners—
NO FAT NO SUGAR NO MSG
—emblazoned across the top of the menus.