Envy (14 page)

Across the table, his father is buttering a slice of bread. “I'm standing there, my hands in my pockets, thinking I don't know what, probably that the mayor's not even five feet tall, and the guy says to me, ‘Did you intend for them to be religious images?' He stands there, looking at me with his arms crossed, waiting for me to expound.”

“What'd you say?” Will asks.

“Nothing. Smiled like an idiot.” He shakes his head, opens the wine list.

“Did you?”

His father looks up. “Did I what?”

“Did you make them out of some religious impulse?”

He shakes his head. “That's not the way I think of them.”

“Then how? How do you think of them?”

“I don't.” His father shrugs. “I see them, that's all.”

Will nods. “He still there?” he asks after a minute.

“Off and on. Went back to his place but seems to have left things behind, has to keep coming around to look for them.”

“Does he work?”

“Dermatologist.”

“Geez,” Will says. “Everyone's a dermatologist.”

“No, they aren't. What's that mean?”

“Nothing. I guess I was thinking of someone I ran into last summer, a woman who's become a prominent dermatologist.”

“Who's that?”

“No one. A girl I was boffing twenty-five years ago.”

“You know what you want?” his father asks him.

Will looks over the menu. “Free-range chicken.”

“Glass of wine?”

He shakes his head. “Takes the edge off.”

“Isn't that the point?” his father says.

“Yes, but I have a session at three, and even one glass makes me that much less, what, present, I guess.” Will takes his glasses off and lays them on the table, rubs his eyes. “Even were I inclined to dull my edge, this wouldn't be the day to do it. I've got a couple of patients right now for whom I really have to be at the top of my game. Consistently at the top.” He puts his glasses back on. “Well, one of them I just have to get rid of.”

“What do you mean, ‘get rid of '?”

“Refer to another therapist.”

“Personality conflict?”

“No. She's out of control. I'm going to send her to a woman.”

“How come?”

“Long story. Well, not that long. Begins treatment because she has a history of compulsive promiscuity. That's what she says, anyway.
Promiscuity
is my word, not hers. ‘Collecting' is what she calls her pattern of staking out older men and enticing them into sex. It's about power more than sex, her ability to seduce.”

Will's father frowns in concentration. “Hookups,” he says. “Sex for sex's sake. No emotional entanglement.”

“Right,” Will says, “exactly.” Every once in a while his father makes an observation meant to prove he's not out of touch, leaving Will feeling less impressed than protective of whatever inspires this earnestness, because this is the quality that's most palpable when his father produces what he believes to be evidence of his being hip, or, as he'd say, “in the know,” and it's the same quality that insures he'll never be hip.

“She's very flirtatious,” Will says of the girl. “Which, ordinarily, isn't an issue. A lot of patients flirt. Some can't convey affection or even respect without using a vocabulary of implicitly sexual words and gestures. But this is different. Deliberate. Conscious rather than unconscious. She spent an entire session giving me an unnecessarily and provocatively detailed account of how she came on to a professor she picked up at the place she waitresses. I'm talking explicit. There's nothing this girl doesn't say. No physical transaction she won't fully describe. Then, at the end of the session she, uh—well, she kissed me.”

“Kissed?”

“Kissed.”

“How'd she do that?”

“Smoothly. Very, very smoothly. When I thought about it later, it reminded me of the time I got mugged by that kid on the bike. Remember my telling you about that? Came up from behind on the sidewalk? Just glided in front of me, cut me off, and caught me in the angle he made with his bike and the wall. Expert, almost choreographed. Same thing with this girl. As she's leaving, she pretends to have trouble with the doorknob. Says she needs my help. I come over to where she's waiting, and before I even get to the allegedly problematic knob, she's doing it.”

“Wow.” His father whistles. “Doing it how?”

“Not chastely.”

Will's father raises his eyebrows. “Sexual?” he asks.

“Definitely sexual.”

“Mouth open?”

“And a lot of tongue.”

His father smiles. “So what'd the doctor do?”

“Nothing. I didn't do a thing. She slipped out the door and left me standing there like some hormone-addled teenager.” Will leans forward over the table, lowers his voice. “She put her hand on my fly, too, Dad, and I was clearly not, uh, unaffected.”

To this, Will's father says nothing, and he doesn't smile. His expression, if he has one, is of judgment withheld.

“I see her Thursday,” Will says. “I've called her already, left a message. Told her I was referring her to a couple of other therapists. Both women.”

His father puts his knife and newly straightened fork to one side of his plate. Having been a veterinary surgeon, his handling of any small implement is dexterous, unusually graceful. “I guess you had better,” his father says, and he says it again. “I guess you had.”

13

“You know what's weird?”

“What?” Daniel asks.

“I'm dogged by the sense that I'm lying even when I'm telling the truth. Or especially when I'm telling the truth.” Will shakes his head. “Not that I'm ever dishonest with you—I'm not. What I mean is, it's when I'm especially conscious of trying to tell the absolute truth that I feel most strongly that I'm lying.”

Daniel frowns and shakes his head slowly, communicating Will's failure to make him understand.

“In here, I mean,” Will says, “with you.”

“Are you talking about omissions?”

“Omissions? Omissions of what?”

“I thought you were telling me—for a moment I thought you might be saying that there was more to the story of what happened between you and that patient. More than you'd reported.”

“God no! Don't you think a French kiss and her goosing me is enough?”

“I'm sorry, Will. Please, go on.”

Will stands. He paces in front of Daniel's desk, his hands in his pockets, agitating the coins and keys within. He stops in front of his chair and faces Daniel, but he doesn't sit. “In this room, talking to you, I am scrupulously honest. I know that. I'm as honest as I know how to be. But as soon as I've said something, or even sooner, while I'm still speaking, I'm flooded with the sense that I'm lying. I feel guilty. I reexamine what I've said. Succumb to doubts. It's as if everything I say breaks down under the pressure of my scrutiny. The whole idea of anything being completely true seems ridiculous.”

“It is,” Daniel says.

“I know. I know. Truth's a direction, not a destination. No capital
T.
” Will makes a chopping gesture with one hand, lets it fall to his side. “That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not speaking philosophically or even analytically. I mean that I, literally, in the most pedestrian sense, feel as if I'm telling lies. Whoppers. And I'm not.” He drops back into his chair. “Why?”

Daniel silently turns his unlit pipe in his hand. It's at least a minute before he speaks, and it feels to Will like ten. “I had a patient,” he says, “who told me that each time as she prepared to come here, as she rode the train and walked from the subway stop to my office, she invented falsehoods she intended to tell me. Right up until the moment she was on the couch, silently she'd be embellishing intricate tales of abuse and perversion, of adulterous relationships with colleagues, of eating disorders she didn't have. Shoplifting. Setting fires. Pedophilia. You name it.”

“And?” Will says when he doesn't continue.

“I wondered what you made of it.”

“A defense. She overcame her reluctance to make herself vulnerable by imagining that she wouldn't reveal herself to you. Instead, she'd disguise her true neuroses with decoys, those she made up.”

Daniel nods slowly, still frowning at the pipe in his hands. “That was my conclusion.”

“But what does it have to do with me? With what I've told you?”

“Maybe nothing. But it seemed to me that her case offered us a hint.”

“What is it?”

“There's no direct parallel. She rehearsed lies and told the truth. You intend to be truthful, and in fact you are truthful, but you feel that you're lying.”

“So she fears being revealed, and I fear that no matter how hard I try, I'm not revealing myself ?”

Daniel shrugs. He smiles at Will and lifts his hands over his desk, palms up, empty, holding no answers.

14

On Little Squam Lake, in New Hampshire: a shingled summer cottage at the bottom of a track through the woods, a steep incline that made it impossible to walk toward the front door, especially if you were carrying something heavy, a suitcase or a bag of groceries. Gravity pulled you into a run, flung you at the house, which was long and low and filled with liquid, green light, sun reflected off water and filtered through trees in lush, midsummer leaf. They'd rented it for a month, sight unseen, through one of those minuscule ads in the back pages of
The New
Yorker.

A lake chart was tacked to the kitchen wall, where renters would be sure to see it. Originally, the chart had been black-and-white, but someone had amplified it with a red marker, highlighting certain rocks and shallows. With time, one wet season following on another, the ink had spread into pink aureoles, as if those places were charged with magic rather than danger. During the day, you didn't hear the lake tonguing the foundation. You heard outboard motors and the cries of swimmers; you heard neighbors laughing or arguing, the sounds of a distant tennis game, the percussive return of the ball broken by an occasional long pause when one of the players went off into the woods to retrieve it.

Will can picture the four of them eating dinner in that house, laughing, talking, helping themselves to more food, their faces flushed and shining, and he aches with sympathy for the family he sees, innocent of what's to come. The people at the table are like the cast of an expertly made movie—Will doesn't know them, not personally, not anymore; and it seems impossible to him that they are so carefree, that they don't feel something—anything—for how can destruction not announce itself, the way earthquakes and tornadoes are said to do with a peculiar, heavy stillness, a greening of the light?

But in that house the light was green already, and the family around the table saw nothing, not so much as a ripple on the surface of the lake. Did they miss it, a warning that only a more evolved species might perceive? A single high note, perhaps, out of the range of the human ear?

Outside, tied to the dock they shared with the neighboring cottage, was the Sunfish Will had rented in town. When the wind rose, the lake nudged it into one of the pilings. “Can't you stop that?” Carole said when he came to bed that night, the last night. Luke's last.

“Stop what?”

“The boat. Every time I fall asleep, it wakes me up.” She spoke from under the pillow, where she'd hidden her head to muffle the keening of loons, the trickle and slap of the lake, the knocking of the boat. “Can't you tie it so it doesn't do that? I keep dreaming someone's come to the door. That I have to get up and answer the door.”

“Maybe. I'll go out and see.”

He stumbled on the steps leading down to the dock, mesmerized by moonlight on the lake, like countless sequins on the water's heaving black bosom. He retied the boat, pulled it snug so it wouldn't knock, and sat dangling his feet from the dock, listening for another of the loons' weird calls.

He was never a careless person. Particularly, he was never careless with the children, who always wore seat belts in the car, helmets when riding bikes, and life preservers on a boat. When he played baseball, Luke wore the chest guard he hated, but, as had been established by the misfortune of other families, a perfectly placed blow to the sternum could stop a child's heart. Luke was two when Will enrolled himself and Carole in a course called “Baby Life.” Taught at a local hospital, it focused on infants and young children: what to do in case of a head injury, when to call Poison Control, how to recognize the onset of anaphylactic shock, and how to perform the Heimlich maneuver and CPR on small bodies. Health insurance; home insurance; trip insurance: maximum coverage never struck Will as too expensive. He paid to have his children's teeth sealed against cavities, checked their bodies for deer ticks every night after a day spent in the woods. Flu shots. Multivitamins. Antimicrobial soap. A water filter installed on the kitchen tap; fire alarms hardwired throughout the house; window guards on every window above the first floor. Regular maintenance on the car and the furnace.

A friend of Carole's had given her a joint as a little going-away present, and Will wasn't as enthusiastic about the gift as she'd expected. “Maybe we should just leave it at home,” he said while they were packing.

“No,” Carole said. “Come on.”

“I don't know. Lake sports and dope—it seems like a bad combination.”

“Will, it's not as if we're going to get stoned and go water-skiing.” To counteract any perception of himself as an uptight killjoy, Will was the one who suggested they smoke the joint. They'd been at the lake for a couple of weeks. The kids were in bed, and he and Carole were sitting outside on the dock. It was true what they said: marijuana was a lot stronger than it had been when he was in college. Before they'd smoked even half the joint, they were lying on their backs reduced to monosyllables, holding hands and watching a sky spattered with stars they never saw in the city.

“It's . . .” one of them would say. Or, “I wonder . . .” But neither of them finished a thought, and the two of them laughed at each other, and themselves.

“Let's swim,” Carole said after a silence so long that Will was lost in some genius theory that interpreted constellations as if they were messages rendered in a Braille-like language of luminous dots, sentences that shifted with the reader's vantage so that inhabitants of one galaxy received one message while other beings on other planets read something entirely different, allowing God an infinite combination of signifiers to manipulate, tailoring revelation to the particular needs of—

“Will? Let's go swimming.”

“No.”

“Please. Why not?”

He laughed. “Way, way too fucked up.” A long pause.

“We could stand,” she said.

“Stand?”

“Stand in the water. Instead of swim. We're not too fucked up to stand.”

“Okay. But first can I tell you what I was thinking?”

“What?”

Will tried to articulate his theory of celestial communication but got no farther than drawing an analogy between stars and Braille dots before understanding that the revelation he'd experienced was itself a pattern of dots and therefore untranslatable into English. He stopped speaking.

“We could get naked,” Carole said, enough time having passed that she'd forgotten whatever weird point Will had started to make.

“Yes. Let's.”

So they stripped and dropped their clothes where they'd forget to collect them, and stood together in the shallows, bodies pressed tight, feet sinking into the cool, velvety ooze of the lake's bottom.

“We don't kiss enough,” Will said when they pulled apart.

“Because we're in a hurry,” Carole said. “We're always in a hurry.”

“I'm not always in a hurry.”

Carole laughed. “I am,” she said.

“How come?”

“Greedy. I'm a glutton. An orgasm pig.”

Will slipped a finger between her legs. “Because you can be. If men could have multiple orgasms . . .” He didn't finish the sentence.

“Then?”

“Death of civilization.”

“Beginning, more like.”

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Because men would fornicate without stopping, and women would run things. We'd use you for stud, that's all.”

“In that case,” Will said, “let's go inside. I have to practice for the regime shift.”

In the morning, Luke and Samantha brought their parents' clothes to the breakfast table. “Did you guys take your pants off outside?” Luke asked, frowning.

“Mom washed them in the lake,” Will answered. “Like an Indian.”

“Native American,” Luke corrected.

“Right. Native American. Although I believe Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians.”

“But so do black people sometimes call each other niggers.”

“Excellent point.” Will shook the arts section out of the paper and handed it to Carole.

“Anyway,” Luke went on, “it's not true what you said about Mom washing clothes in the lake, because they're not wet, they're only damp from lying out in the dew.” Will looked at him.

“Can't you stop being so smart for a minute? Eat some toast or something?”

It was later that day, about four o'clock, that Will woke from one of those disorienting daytime naps he never knows whether to consider a luxury or a mistake. “How about a sail?” he asked Luke when he came outside, figuring it might dispel the dull, hungover feeling that always overcame him after sleeping during daylight hours. Off the dock was a shed, and inside it old fishing rods, a tangle of mildewed tarps, a rusted shovel and rake, and a few life jackets, also mildewed. He chose the smallest for Luke; once he'd tightened the webbing belts it didn't seem overly large. His own was missing its plastic clasps, and so he tied the belts, using not one but two knots and making a show of the procedure as an example to Luke, a claustrophobic child who tended, surreptitiously, to squirm out of whatever he found confining. Luke rode miserably in a car, holding the seat belt's diagonal strap off his chest and away from his neck because if it touched him, it made him “sweaty,” it made him “carsick,” it made him “suffocate.”

“Isn't it a little late for sailing?” Carole asked as they walked past her chaise on the way to the dock, and Will saw himself reflected in the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses. He didn't answer what was more comment than question, and she unscrewed the lid from the Coppertone bottle, reapplied it to her shins, and went back to what she was reading. When Will thinks of that scene, Carole in the chaise on the dock, he sees her with one of her lust murders. But this is wrong, anachronistic. They are a habit she acquired after Luke's death.

The Sunfish was not even fourteen feet long, white fiberglass with a wood daggerboard, a mainsail—no stay—striped red and yellow and blue. On the weekends the lake was crowded with others like it, a popularity granted by the boat's size and lightness, the simplicity of only one sail, and a kick-up rudder that made for easy landings on a beach. It seemed more toy than real boat, an invitation to the inexperienced, and the people who sailed Sunfish often had mishaps. They collided and capsized and lay their bright sails down on the dark water surrounded by woods, water that looked black no matter what the hour. From the dock Will had watched a number of accidents, all greeted with hilarity. Often the sailors were laughing so hard, hanging on to the hull, that it took them some time to right their boats.

It was one of those perfectly clear midsummer afternoons, the kind that require people without sunglasses to duck their heads— squinting wasn't enough. Even late in the afternoon the silver face of his watch was invisible under the crystal's hot stare. What—who— could stand up to the sun's relentless scrutiny? Only the water; the rocks and the hammock-sized spiderwebs; the trees on the shore, each leaf shining dark and impenetrable, mysterious; mushrooms glowing orange in the shadows; the heads of mallard ducks that glinted from the lake like giant cabochons. As for himself: soft, smudged, and apologetic, excluded from the light's benediction.

Why does he describe it like that? Was that how it was? He's been reading a book that attempts to explain the process of memory. Written by an expert on the nature of consciousness and the neurochemical impact of torment versus pleasure, the text summarizes the results of clinical trials suggesting that each time the mind revisits an experience, retrieving a scene from where it's stored, that scene is contaminated by the new context. For example, if, having attended a party that Carole missed, Will subsequently told her all that had transpired, who had said what and to whom, the next time he remembered the party it might seem to him that his wife had been there. He might be so sure that Carole had joined in conversations he'd shared with her only after the fact that he'd argue the point, willing to bet on his word over hers.

This adhesive property, the tendency of memory to incorporate what it encounters—like a stream of water carrying along silt, pebbles, lost lures, a message in a bottle, all that it passes over and through—applies to emotion, as well. A happy, sunny moment can darken if exposed to grief. A smell, like that of Coppertone, generally evoking languid contentment, can become its own opposite, summoning anxiety and dread with notes as clear and loud as Pavlov's bell.

They got in the boat, and once more Will checked Luke's jacket. They waved and called good-bye to Carole, who was still trying to read, and to Samantha, standing by her mother's chair with a mud patty in her hands. “No, honey,” he heard Carole say, “not on the chair. Put it in your bucket.” Trying to come up with something, anything, that might occupy a five-year-old while she skimmed another paragraph, she asked Sam to fetch a plastic cup of water and pour it on her feet. “Mom's toes are so hot and thirsty. She needs you to water them.”

They crossed the lake, laughing because it was so much fun and so effortless. Will had the tiller and Luke sat, leaning when his father told him to lean, closing his eyes to give himself more completely to the acceleration. It felt as if they were riding a few inches above the water, on air, and trusting his ability to recall the lake chart, the position of those pink-ringed rocks, Will continued on around the little island in the middle of Squam, beyond the part of the lake he'd sailed before. Despite the sun, it was cold on the water, and Will was glad he'd nagged Luke until he put on a sweater. Even so, the boy's lips were blue. It was time to go back. Will said, “Come about,” and reminded him to get out of the way of the boom. Luke had had three sailing lessons—Carole enrolled both children in a beginner's class when they arrived in town, and he knew the basics—