A Private Sorcery (43 page)

“Don't cry for me, darlin'. I don't expect you to save me. I'm in jail. Imprisoned in these valleys. Only this is a jail with fresh air. I can eat what I want and fuck when I want. And there's wine—plenty of it here and cheap, too. Without the booze, I'd die. So I'm stuck. Beyond help. But I could use a pal or two in the world. Write to me. There's a lady in Roses, right over the border, who handles my mail. Jorge Balcazar is the name I go by for that. I'll give you the address. And get that husband of yours to do the same. That would be music for my rotted little soul. To hear from Saul.”

She lets him drive back. At the house, he throws the clothing strewn across the second bedroom into a trunk and hands her sheets. She sleeps with the shutters open, waking to the sounds of birds and a tractor beeping in the distance. Reed is snoring across the hall. It's turned cool. She pulls on jeans and a heavy sweater and walks the five kilometers into Prunet et Belpuig, eating wild blackberries along the way.

Approaching La Trinité, she hears the bells toll the nine o'clock hour. The iron gate is open. Inside, two candles are lit but there is no one. She drops some francs in the collection box and sits in the back pew. She lowers her head. She prays to be able to pray. She prays to be able to believe in a God watching over her. To believe that what happens to her is part of a plan rather than chance and pain.

Tears of self-pity fall in her lap. A mother flung like a shooting star from her home. A father dissolved in thin air. An abandoned career. These odd connections: an ex-father-in-law, an ex-husband, an ex-roommate. No partner, no real job, no child. More lost, really, than Reed, who at least knows what lies ahead for himself.

 

• • •

W
HEN SHE GETS BACK
, Reed is cleanly shaven, his wet hair combed back from his face. He's dressed in khaki shorts and hiking boots. He points to a backpack on the kitchen table. “I'm going to take you to Canigou. You can't come to this region without paying respects to the great lady. If I don't have a heart attack climbing up, we'll picnic at the monastery.”

They drive to the orchard town of Casteil, a hiker's outpost to Canigou, from which, Rena reads, visitors can either hire a jeep or begin the three-quarter-hour climb to reach the monastery of Saint-Martin.

“We can take the jeep,” Rena says.

“No. Goddamnit. I played football at Stanford. If I croak on the way up, I deserve it.”

It's a steep walk through patches of sweet-smelling garigue and thick green pines. Reed, panting, falls behind. Halfway up, Rena stops at an overlook to wait for him. When he reaches her, his face is red and dry. She pulls a bottle of water out of his backpack, and he drinks without speaking.

At the top, Reed rests on a bench while Rena takes the tour of the monastery, where the inhabitants live under a vow of silence. To start, a priest ushers the visitors into a small room where they are shown a film about the history of the eleventh-century structure built atop a huge rock outcropping by the Comte de Cerdagne, for whom the mountain range is named. Then, in silence, he leads the group up a path toward the monastery itself. Looking down, Rena can see wooded ravines and a stream. The cragged peaks of the Pyrenees hover above. An amazement, she marvels, that anything was constructed on this wild remote spot, that materials were hauled up the mountainside, that people have lived here for more than a millennium.

They picnic on a bed of brown pine needles: the Camembert and apples Reed packed, a
pain de campagne
bought along the way.

“I could do it,” Rena says. She sweeps an arm outward. “With all this to look at every day, I could do it—live here without talking.” What she does not say is that not only could she do it, she'd had to control herself from taking the priest's arm and pleading to be taken in.

“What are you going to do?”

She can see the light roots at his scalp and the blond hairs on his arms. He taps his cigarette pack and pulls out a cigarette, which he holds but does not light. “I don't know. All my life I've been scrambling to pick up the pieces. Never deliberately choosing.”

“I used to look at you, when you were working at that topless joint and it was just a job for you, a way to make money, and think how it would be a lot simpler to just have to make money. That was my downfall: this idea that I needed to find a calling. All these lies to myself about what I'd be able to do with a law degree. Then, like everyone else, getting greedy and going for the big money the first year out of my clerkship. That's what I admired in Saul. He never sold out.”

“In a lot of ways, he felt just like you—somewhere along the way what he'd wanted to do got swallowed up by a career. That's why he wrote me after I did that op-ed piece. He was trying to get back in touch with the ideas he'd put aside to get through his residency.”

It's late, nearly six, and the light is beginning to pearlize in the cooling air. Reed stuffs the cigarette back in its pack. He washes an apple under a stream of Badois. “You could write a book about Saul's and my botched attempt at crime. Hell, you can't have a crime in America without someone writing a book about it. I'd do it myself if it wouldn't lead the DEA to my door. Write a book, retire and have yourself a baby.”

“A baby? Where'd that come from?”

“Turning forty, this past year. The black stuff hides the gray.” Reed pats his hair. “You're not that far behind.”

“Four and a half years.”

Reed hands her the apple and she bites into it.

“It wouldn't take too much arm-twisting to get me to make the necessary contributions.”

Startled, Rena looks up to see him laughing. She chews and then wipes her mouth. “Thank you, sir. I'll keep that under consideration.”

S
HE SLIPS BACK
into her life in New York without a sign of anyone having traced her steps. Returning to work, she's restless, no longer comforted by the night hours, by the solitude.

She spends her first Sunday back walking. She traverses the city
ablaze in its autumnal glory: across the park at Ninety-Seventh Street, the trees all yellows and oranges; south on Fifth Avenue, the museums decked with the banners for their new exhibits; west on Central Park South, where the horse-drawn carriages begin their thirty-five-dollar jaunts. Not until the last lap north along the river promenade, past the boat basin, past the flower beds, past the hippo park, does she acknowledge what she is doing: fighting with her feet. Seven miles. One foot after the other. Fighting the hole she'd watched swallow up her mother. A state she's always privately viewed as in some essential way morally offensive. A debate she and Saul had when they first met—her belief that depression is philosophically incorrect. As though we are justified in the assumption that we will not suffer. As though our fate is to be content, and indignation is therefore due when disappointments heap at our feet. “You're an existentialist psychologist,” Saul had quipped. “Rollo May with a little Albert Ellis thrown in.” But once, when he looked at her with an eyebrow slightly raised and a strained smile on his lips, she'd had the thought that he saw right through her: her disapproval, the way she'd managed those months when her mother had sunk into the couch like a corpse settling into its coffin.

Her second week home, a headhunter for a Washington political consulting firm approaches her about a job. A small but dynamic group: two researchers from Rand, a Madison Avenue whiz kid, a statistician out of MIT. Rena would be the hands-on person for the candidate. Working with the staffers to translate the group's recommendations into action. A salary starting in the six figures. Excellent benefits. Partnership opportunity.

On the weekend, she can't sleep. Fully dressed, she lies on her bed with a blanket over her. She can feel Braner's sticky hair between her fingers. She flings back the blanket, thinks, I'd sooner go back to Alil's.

There is no sunrise, just a gradual shading of the black sky to gray and then an iced white. Joggers appear in the park below and an oil barge floats on the choppy river. Dots of rain mark her window. For a few days after her return from France, she'd imagined that Reed's plan for her had already been executed. When her period finally came, she was relieved—relieved
not so much to discover that she was not, in fact, pregnant, but to not be pregnant by Reed, golden boy, no longer golden, now only tarnished. She thinks about herself. No longer the waitress's kid banished to the kitchen during Nick's
little visits
, the school truant, the barmaid at a topless joint. Not even Saul's arrest could reverse that.

There's a truck backing up on the street. A dog barks. The pipes creak. Once, when she and Leonard were eating dinner in Guatemala City, working hard to find something to talk about aside from the embassy bureaucrats and how long before they could retrieve Bernardo's body, they'd taken to talking loosely about biology and reproduction. A baby girl, Leonard had told her, is born with all her eggs. From the perspective of the gene, life is no more than the spring on a windup clock, an egg released with each rotation of the hand on the dial.

Four more years until forty, Reed had admonished. On her palm, there are little paper cuts, a web of lines. How much easier if she could believe in destiny. If she did not believe that her life is her own creation. No, more than her life. She. Her very self.

S
HE TURNS DOWN
the job. “I'm thinking about having a baby,” she tells the headhunter, taken aback by her own words.

When she goes down to the lobby for her mail, Pedro hands her another box from Barcelona. “Your Spanish friend?”

Rena nods.

Pedro points to the return label. “She likes toys, yes?”

“Yes.”

Upstairs, Rena opens the box. It's a large doll made out of cloth. The puckered seam is underneath the pink pinafore. Inside is a wad of hundred-dollar bills and a typed note.
Para el bebé
.

She waits until five, when the cell blocks return from their work assignments, to call Saul.

“My father said you were back. I was wondering when I'd hear from you.”

In the background, men are yelling. “I'd like to come tomorrow.” “I'll have to check my social calendar. Let's see …”

“I'll come in the morning.”

“Whenever you'd like, Rena dear.”

She goes straight from work to the bus. She sits in the rear, behind the bathroom and away from the other passengers. She stares out at the highway, imagining a family tree of Eleanor, her father, Klara and Leonard spread out across the lanes: the Italian-Catholic daughter of a fishmonger, the second-generation son of prosperous German Jews, the daughter of an Episcopal surgeon from Baltimore and the only son of Ukrainian Jews come through Ellis Island. Lines dropping to Saul and her and then, from Saul and her, to a dot with a name in letters too small to see.

F
ROM A DISTANCE
, she would not have recognized him, his lanky physique now entirely hidden under an armor of muscle.

“It's an amazing sport, lifting weights. I always thought it was about vanity and a stupid kind of fanaticism. But there's a true zen to it. To lift correctly, without injury, you have to visualize your anatomy and the entire sequence of your movements. It's like a meditation. I've been learning from a guy here who used to be the number one bodybuilder in northern Jersey. I'm teaching him algebra and he's teaching me how to lift.”

Rena feels a wave of nervousness pass over her. The same nervousness she'd felt when she first took Saul to visit her mother and Eleanor greeted them in loose cotton pants, a look of serenity on her previously frenetic face. An anxiety about change, a suspiciousness that seems almost innate, an inborn xenophobia.

When Saul asks about her trip, she tells him about Tremolat and canoeing on the Vézère. She talks about visiting Domme and Sarlat and the castles in the Lot. Afraid that the room is wired, she says nothing about driving south into the Pyrenees, about climbing Canigou.

Saul watches her carefully: her fidgeting, the ways she sucks her pinkie nail. Her sentences grow awkward, jagged clause after clause, as she sees that he knows she's holding something back.

“I saw him.”

Saul folds his arms.

“He didn't know about you. He didn't learn until five months later.” She stops, worried about saying anything more.

“I take it you believe him.”

“He never expected what happened. He thought you were safe.” She watches Saul's face, the clenched jaw, the eyes held too still. “He wants you to write to him. He said it would be music to his rotted soul.”

“His rotted soul.”

“Actually, what he said was his rotted little soul.”

“Oh, I see. So that implies that it was never much of an organ to start with.”

Saul leans back in his chair. “The truth is, what happened afterwards is irrelevant. I've had too much time to think about it. Blaming him is just a way of not blaming myself. I'm the one who wrote that list, who told them Kim Sun's schedule. What he did, he can grapple with.”

“You'll be free in two and a half years. He's away forever.” She averts her eyes, but not before Saul has seen her pained expression.

“Survivor guilt. We'll go on. He won't.”

They sit in silence. Then Rena says, “Still, you must be mad at me. Since I introduced you.”

“Well, I never thought about that. That might be entertaining. To be mad at you. Only the argument doesn't hold water, since you didn't set about introducing us. Remember? We bumped into him at the Whitney.”

“The show with bottles of urine set up on a table. You went into a dissertation on the brilliance of the exhibit.”

“One thing's for damn sure. If I make it through four years here, I won't waste another two minutes on intellectual masturbation like that.”