Amor and Psycho: Stories (3 page)

I don’t know what they did not talk about—money, ambitions, disappointments. Late in the afternoon, Mrs. Brazir found Karim and me still reading. She said, “Let’s go swimming and get salt in our hair and then put on white shirts and go eat mussels at Billy Zee’s,” and we did that. Mr. Brazir took photographs, developed them in the basement and hung them to dry from wooden clothespins fixed to the Brazir Tree. I think Mrs. Brazir saw herself this way, visually, through his lens, or as if their life were a movie she directed every day.

I saw a book of hers on a table—a simple, personal book. It glowed; it vibrated. I picked it up and read it all, and when I left, I took the book with me.

THE SECOND AND LAST TIME
I visited Hell’s Point, Mr. Brazir was already sick with the illness that would kill him. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain; I think he felt that he had wasted his time. Mrs. Brazir seemed embarrassed by his short temper, by the way the beautiful, silent rooms held the sharp tone of him. They had gotten by all those years gliding on the surface, and the surface was perfect, like Zamboni ice, until it cracked.

After dinner, Karim and I walked to the beach with a flashlight. No one else appeared, so we lay down in the cold sand and did it quickly. I loved the way his white shirt hung and moved with the motion of his body. (The Brazirs were obsessed with white shirts in summer. Mrs. Brazir insisted that “white must be pristine.” The shirts were blindingly white and wrinkly. Sublime dishevelment was the virtue of these shirts; something about them transcended that other quality, of being ironed and businesslike.)

Karim and I did not talk much. He was—I realized this later—too cool to talk much. He had the confidence of a wild animal—he never questioned his instincts. He never asked me about the sex, whether I was satisfied by his intense, distracted hammering; we never discussed it at all. We went
back to the silent house, undressed around the Brazir Tree. We hung our clothes on the branches of the tree and went to sleep in our separate rooms.

I woke in the night and looked through the delicate skin of windows into the sky (where the moon hung, waxing gibbous and creamy) and thought, They have the moon.

IN SPITE OF
his illness, Mr. Brazir caught a fish for our last dinner, my last among them. He caught it himself somewhere, with a hook and line. It was perfectly illegal, he said with satisfaction; he had gotten away with murder. He invited us to look at the silver skin of the fish, which held rainbow colors in its shingles. Nobody had any idea what kind of fish it was. We called it “the fish” and sometimes “Him.”

“Do we want Him in lemon and butter?” Mrs. Brazir asked.

Mr. Brazir announced that we would clean the fish at three o’clock. Mrs. Brazir insisted that first she and I must put on dresses and ride bicycles barefoot to a particular shop to buy lemons. (I wanted to learn everything from her, to inhabit her tone. I still have the stolen book, with entries in her elegant, playful hand: “A beautiful Yale man drinking gin at Thanksgiving. I wanted that one.”)

When we returned, Mr. Brazir had found a bottle of champagne in the cellar—something very old, a Taittinger
with the label slightly eroded or chewed. He cooked the fish on a tiny hibachi in the garden, and served Him on a platter with His head still on.

He was very small, though. The four of us drank the champagne and shared Him, with slices of lemon. I realized how bourgeois it was to make an evening around quantities of food; better to drink water and eat air.

After dinner, Mr. Brazir rummaged in the pantry—I remember a tea towel tacked up in the door, representing the anniversary of the French Revolution, ten bodies, very well-dressed, severed heads. He returned with his fingers spread around four small lead-colored glasses and a bottle covered with interesting labels. Absinthe was illegal in America, he told us, which I knew from reading postwar novels—it was for information like this that I’d minored in literature. He poured some into each of the glasses and then added water. The absinthe turned milky, though the color of the glasses obscured the full effect.

The drink tasted of licorice and childhood, but quickly went deeper. I began to feel universal and human. The Brazirs understood the discipline of surface—the depth that was protected by surface. The surface functioned as the depth. We were all part of it. What could we do but transcend ordinary, sloppy suffering, rise above it, refuse? I tried to say these things to the Brazirs; it felt like a gift I could offer, to see them in their beauty.

Mr. Brazir began to laugh. His chin fell down on his
chest and he laughed into the soft open collar of his ancient and immaculate white shirt.

Our dirty dinner plates shimmered violently on the tablecloth and the room turned gray-green. Mrs. Brazir uncorked the vial of perfume she wore around her neck and held the opening against one finger. She looked at her finger and said, “Please don’t touch anything.” Mr. Brazir never stopped laughing.

Karim and I left them there and went for a walk to the beach in the dark. The sand where I lay felt muddy and damp. He pulled up my skirt and rode my body vigorously, his handsome face straining outward, toward the ocean. Just before he came, he slapped my face, and on the way back to the house he said, “I love you.”

The next morning, Mrs. Brazir did not rise, and Mr. Brazir scurried off with a glass of ginger ale for her. They hid out, I guess, until Karim took me away. At the ferry, which reeked of diesel and the exhaust of twenty growling cars lined up to board, he kissed me sloppily with his tongue. When I stood at the rail to wave good-bye, my face was still wet. Later I understood that I’d reached the end of my usefulness, like the charming fish called Him we’d murdered and eaten. Karim might have been licking his plate before handing it to a waiter.

Dr. Drema moved twenty-five times before she turned forty-eight. She felt like a different person whenever she lived somewhere new. In all, she’d had consulting rooms in thirteen different cities in the United States and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

It was always sad to shuck an old self. But Dr. Drema grew spiritually from shucking. She gained freshness and vitality, like a snake sliding out of its old skin.
Shpilkes
, her mother called it—ants in the pants. Moving so often had left Dr. Drema’s material life in disarray. She kept storage units in several cities on the East and West coasts of the United States (as well as a small house in San Miguel de Allende, which she owned outright), for indispensable articles that she could no longer visualize or name. Someday, when she became less busy, she would sort through these articles or let them go. In the meantime, she paid rents on her storage units, but paid them
only after receiving final notice that her possessions would be sold or thrown away. Paying rents late was Dr. Drema’s acknowledgment of how conflicted she was about holding on to her past identities. Wouldn’t it be better simply to graze across the unspoiled range of one life, like a Neolithic buffalo?

Dr. Drema had no trouble attracting new, necessary patients. For those who remained loyal—those really lost at sea—she held appointments by telephone. In any large or even medium-size city in the western hemisphere, hundreds, thousands of people—and their adolescent children—suffer from anxiety, depression, compulsions, addictions. Such people found Dr. Drema personable, brilliant and charismatic. She belonged to all the important professional organizations. Like buffalo on the range, she roamed free.

SHE
’
D SEIZED
the occasion of her forty-eighth birthday to reinvent herself. On a whim, at a bargain price and with an exceptional interest rate, she moved into the old Customs House in a small New England town at the confluence of a river and an ocean, took a young lover and shaved off eight years. An unpleasant period had just passed, which she wanted expunged from her record—the failed relationship, the car accident, the gallbladder, the chronic fatigue. What had happened to the part of life when every year marked an improving, a flowering out? She gazed through her new salt-speckled windows and said the number forty in her head over and over until it became
her
number—in the same way
that she associated candles with the number eight and Tuesdays with the color blue.
Forty, forty, forty
. She said the number until she became the thing. The lie lay near the very core of her identity and intensified ordinary transactions—filling out forms, listening to patients, talking to strangers.

DR. DREMA
’
S CUSTOMS HOUSE
overlooked the estuary of the Glass River. The town itself was formerly working-class and almost defiantly second-rate. Its converted industrial properties drew the sort of young professional people who raised children and confronted primal dramas—or shucked their primal dramas and sent Dr. Drema their bruised adolescent fruits.

The consulting room occupied the second story. Persian rugs covered the floors as well as a couch and a table. More rugs hung from the walls. A tang of history clung to the rugs: old dust, mothballs, something sour underneath the wool that Dr. Drema associated—pleasantly—with the dead. (She had bought the rugs all together at an estate sale when she moved.) Because of the rugs, the consulting room absorbed most of the sounds made there, and the air sparkled with dust. She quickly lost three patients who suffered from allergies. But because demand for her hours exceeded her supply, Dr. Drema could afford to let them go.

She’d come to the small town in pursuit of a dancer called Peter Dvorjak, whom she had met when he performed in a festival in San Miguel de Allende: He begged her to become
involved with him. She had been moved by his physicality, by his ability to communicate, through dance, complex psychological states. Peter Dvorjak was drawn, in turn, by Dr. Drema’s intensity, intuition, experience and apparent lack of interest in producing a child of her own.

Peter had a child from a previous marriage, a boy called Mikhail, who preferred to be called Mike. Mike was another reason why Dr. Drema became interested in Peter—and why she kept a corn snake in a terrarium in her consulting room, on a table covered with a Persian rug. The snake represented Dr. Drema’s commitment to Mike. It also caused the first frisson between herself and Peter, who proved squeamish around thawed mice. Dr. Drema responded generously—generosity was easy—and said the snake could live at her place. She kept the tank in her consulting room, the heart of her house; she didn’t mind. Dr. Drema’s chief interest in life lay in the study of symbols—and what animal is more symbolic than a snake?

She and Mike named the snake Herpatia. Sometimes, between appointments, Dr. Drema removed Herpatia from the tank and let the snake slither between her hands and around her shoulders. Herpatia’s skin felt like fine leather; she was also playful and strong, even
headstrong
, since this quality expressed itself most strongly in her head. One time, Herpatia slithered down the cleavage of Dr. Drema’s sweater and emerged above the metal button on her jeans. She made a light, dry sound, traveling, and produced an extraordinary sensation; Dr. Drema had never felt anything like it.

Always, after she had handled the snake, Dr. Drema
washed her hands. Someone at the pet store had said, “You must always wash your hands after handling the snake,” plus one other indelible word:
ectoparasite
. Convincing!

Herpatia, in her twenty-gallon tank, became a point of focus for Dr. Drema’s patients—a live animal, a mythic presence, but not active enough to distract from the analytic work. The snake also drew Mike naturally into this room of confidences in which anything could be said. Dr. Drema herself found the atmosphere—the live animal, the heavy silence, the glittering bands of dust from old rugs in the air—vicariously liberating. She liked all animals, but especially nonmammals. Before the corn snake—in San Miguel—she used to keep a little yellow bird, which sometimes sat upon her shoulder while she listened to her patients talk.

Sometimes she sat in the consulting room with Mike and kept him company while he handled Herpatia. In Dr. Drema’s professional opinion, Mike, at ten, was a too-busy child, always studying Greek or Latin, or tennis, or openings in chess, or practicing Wholfheart on the violin. Peter Dvorjak took his responsibilities as a parent seriously. A serious person himself, he rose every morning at 5:00 a.m. to stretch and do his movement exercises. He then spent hours every day rehearsing—living in his body.

The level of the Dvorjaks’ activity intrigued Dr. Drema. Most days, she sat in her consulting room drinking mugs of weak tea, which she replenished with water from her electric kettle, while patients came to her, or called, at their own expense, on the telephone.

Although anguished young professionals were her bread and butter, Dr. Drema found most satisfaction working with adolescents. Their relative openness did not draw her, because the open kind of child did not visit Dr. Drema. The children Dr. Drema saw had clouded over. Their eyes had a milky bluish cast, like Herpatia’s eyes before she shed her skin. Some had damaged their surfaces—cut them, or stuffed or shrunk them. Some had no surface at all, only depths, which Dr. Drema tried to plumb in a series of fifty-minute hours. She always had a beautiful career; she intended to write a book on adolescence, the cliff over which one had to persuade oneself to jump. In her dreams she heard the tone she needed; the whole scope of her work revealed itself. But when she woke, she could not hold on to it—sometimes in her dreams this tone was a scent, something wild and animal, and she, Dr. Drema, lay concealed, ready to strike and seize it.

Dr. Drema’s large house easily embraced Peter and Mike; she’d planned from the start to take them in. Her income, supplemented by the pittance Peter Dvorjak brought in from his grants, could support them all. Such generosity came easily to Dr. Drema, because Peter brought riches of his own: an energy that came from performing, from creating something original—dances, choreography, and the child.