Envy (17 page)

He sits up, elbows on knees, head in hands. Carole must be tucking Sam into bed about now. He called her and said he had a patient emergency and would be home late. He's given himself until midnight to pull himself together. Looking forward to that hour when one day turns into the next, when today will be yesterday. So unlike himself, the time miser—to want to hasten the clock.

What has he allowed to happen? It's—if it's true—it's the kind of scene familiar to audiences of Greek tragedies, a transgression both fated and unintended, proceeding from the hero's tragic flaw. But what is Will's? Aren't tragic flaws supposed to be a bit more grand than lust? After all, lust belongs to man's baser, more animal nature, it doesn't grasp for what can belong only to the gods. And was it lust that got him into this mess? Maybe it's whatever Elizabeth identified as his attempt to stanch grief with the fantasy of having fathered another child. What did she call that? Aside from a pathetic illusion? If only, please God, it could be. How he wants Elizabeth to be right.

He's just had sex with a girl who may be his daughter. She may not be, but if she is, according to the ancients, he's knocked the cosmos out of kilter. A blight on harvests. A blight on herds. A blight on women in childbirth. Plague and bloodshed. Athens wrecked. Jocasta in her blood-soaked bed. Right about now, in the wake of discovery, Will is supposed to be gouging his eyes out, or falling on his sword. What he's done—what he may have done—reduces adultery, only this morning a significant sin, almost to marital misdemeanor.

Unless Jennifer is lying, unless Elizabeth has lied to Jennifer, there's another betrayal: Mitch's betrayal of him, with Elizabeth. A hateful, perverse theft, to cuckold your own brother. Of course, if it's true, then Will has been cuckolded by Elizabeth, as well, but that seems a lesser insult. What Mitch has done is . . . It's just . . . it's . . . What is it? Will doesn't have a word for what he feels.

That it happened twenty-five years ago seems to make no difference. He's only just found out about it, so for him it's happening now, inspiring brutal fantasies of smashing in his brother's head, cutting off his perfidious balls. Anger so intense it summons the restless, coiled energy that demands violence, the feel of something— anything—yielding under his hands, even as it's short-circuited by something else: shame. Mitch, the brother he fought to protect, the person whose anguish he felt more keenly than his own—how can he think of hurting Mitch, killing him?

As if trapped in some awful carnival contraption, a Tilt-A-Whirl or whatever it is that jolts back and forth and up and down, Will lurches from horror to anger to shame and then back, whipped along a sickening emotional arc, unsustainable. In between scenes of violent dismemberment, his own and his brother's, his eyes for Mitch's balls, he keeps returning to the toast Mitch made at his wedding, the reference—suddenly less cryptic—to first girlfriends, and the bitterness in his brother's voice.

But that's nothing. Mitch's hostility that once seemed so intense, even threatening, it feels like nothing compared with Will's anger. Especially at the person who got him into this mess: himself. Why does he feel, though, that he doesn't know what's going on, exactly? Can it be paranoia that insists there's some worse something lurking beneath what's already a disaster?

16

Immediately, his own house is made strange to him. At the insertion of his key a new music tumbles from the front-door lock. Hinges keen, floorboards sigh under the weight of his feet. As he walks in, hours after midnight, Will is reminded of house hunting with Carole, afternoons long past, the two of them following real estate agents through one house after another, rooms that seemed as if they'd been evacuated by the arrival of catastrophe rather than for a prospective buyer. And, who knew, perhaps they had—not an earthquake, war, or epidemic, but the smaller, private cataclysm of financial ruin, divorce, a death in the family.

Lingering behind his wife and the agent, Will was so distracted by the evidence of other lives—titles of books on shelves, photographs hanging on walls, a series of framed paintings made by a child, Joshua, age eight, eleven, twelve—that he had trouble concentrating on the relevant features of whatever house they were considering. Kitchens, bathrooms, bay windows, walk-in closets, laundry rooms, skylights, coffin turns, pocket doors: he missed all of these as he hung behind to look at what had been pinned to the bulletin board by the door: memos, receipts, invitations, a snapshot of a child— Joshua?—wearing a fireman's hat, a list of names under the heading Thank You Notes, the first few crossed off.

Now, coming home—God, how did it get to be 3:47?—it's the same with his own house.
Who are the people who live here?
Will finds himself wondering as he walks through the living room.
Whose chair?
Whose collection of inkwells gathering dust? Whose subscription to
The Atlantic
?

A single plate rests in the drainer by the sink, and he picks it up, thinking of the long-ago couple who bought the set of blue and white china from Macy's Cellar, spending whole hours on a choice that made so little difference: What color? What pattern? The owners of the dish in his hands are people he no longer knows. In fact, it's hard to picture them.

I should eat something, he thinks, not at all hungry, but his head aches and he's dizzy; it's been fourteen hours since he had lunch. He gets out a loaf of bread and tries to find the jar of peanut butter, stands staring into the open pantry door, his hand on the knob, asking himself questions the real owner wouldn't ask.

Where would they keep the peanut butter?
he wonders. Not we. They.

17

“Ironic,” Will says to Daniel. “Don't you think? Carole grows up in a house where all these languages are spoken, inspiring her to devote most of her waking life to helping children learn to communicate effectively, and yet she herself turns out to be so cryptic and unforthcoming. I find her very resistant to revealing her inner life. There's a secretive aspect to her silences—whenever I ask her what she's thinking, she says, ‘Nothing.'

“And then there's yoga, her downed dogs and one-legged roosters or whatever she calls them—I just can't help feeling suspicious of yoga. There's something so smug and self-satisfied about it. All these punitive-looking postures maintained for unnaturally long periods of time. Doesn't that imply—or require—a dedication to restraint, to being self-contained to a fault? The whole point of yoga, for Carole anyway, is to practice a kind of refusal to let down her guard. At least that's what I think it is.”

Daniel, who is examining the end of his tie—a lustrous, pearly gray silk with small polka dots in different jewel-like colors—looks up at Will. “Have you always found her so opaque?”

Will takes off his glasses, replaces them on his nose, takes them off again. He's caught himself doing this lately, when he's with Daniel. Why? he wonders. Is he acting out some ambivalence about seeing clearly? “I don't know,” he says. “I've asked myself if Carole seems more intent on maintaining—what?—not silence, exactly. I've wondered if she's more reserved since Luke's death, but it's impossible to say, for the standard reason—projection. Any answer I give is my answer. Reflects my loneliness rather than her intent to evade me. I know that.”

Daniel nods, says nothing, folds his hands on his desk, looks at him expectantly. “What are we talking about, Will?”

“That patient?” Will says, surprised to hear the words. “The one who kissed me?”

“What about her?”

“I had sex with her.”

Daniel's expression remains as it was: attentive, calm. “Before or after you terminated treatment?” he asks.

“After.”

“Tell me what happened.” Daniel betrays no more interest in Will's revelation than he would if Will were telling him what he'd had for lunch the previous day. “Huh,” is all he says when Will has disclosed the whole mess, including Jennifer's announcement of his possible paternity. And then he says it again, “Huh.” After a silence, he asks, “Have you told Carole?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, for the obvious reasons. Cowardice. Avoidance of conflict. And I wanted to talk to you first. But also because, I don't know, I keep going over all the pieces, trying to figure out, I don't know what. It's all so weird. It feels . . . old.”

“Old?”

“Old like it happened before. Like déjà vu. Arriving in a city where I know I've never been, and yet I could swear I had. Also, I don't know how to predict how Carole will react. If I knew what to expect, it might seem less impossible to tell her. But the more I think about it, the less sure I am where Carole is these days. I mean, she could flip, of course, and how would I know what that would be like? We've never had any real knock-down-drag-outs. Maybe we should have. What if she's weirdly understanding? That could happen. I mean, it's not as if I knew this girl was . . . well. And I've waited years now for Carole to lose it over Luke, and she never has. Shouldn't she scream at me or, or keen or . . . shouldn't she do something? It seems like it can't be over, Luke's death won't ever be over, until Carole reacts, really reacts. But she hasn't. So maybe she wouldn't react to something like this, either.”

“What has your response been to her grieving so quietly about Luke?”

“My reaction to her nonreaction?”

“To her apparent nonreaction. You told me she cried a lot in the early months.”

“Yes. Silently.”

“Does that make the tears invalid?”

“It stresses me out! As if my head were this emotional seismograph—an affect-o-graph. Turned up way too high, sensitive to every minuscule mood vibration, pens scribbling all the time, reams and reams of fluctuations to interpret and parse and, and—I don't know what. All in the service of predicting when it's going to happen. When the fault lines split open and swallow up everything— marriage, child, careers, house, car. Annihilate us.”

“Annihilate.”

“Yes. Because I have to assume it's coming, the big one. It's delayed, that's all. It's only a matter of time before she blows. Because the longer it takes to arrive, the more forcefully she's repressed it, the more she's felt she had to repress. Thus the more intense and destructive it's going to be.”

“Maybe you're wrong. Maybe she isn't going to ‘blow.' ”

“Maybe.”

Daniel sticks his index finger into the bowl of his pipe, twists it around with a thoughtful look on his face. “Is it possible you let this happen to provoke Carole to anger? To get the dramatic response you crave? Like lancing an abscess?”

“But I didn't
do
anything. I mean, I told you. She took her clothes off, said she'd scream rape if I . . . maybe I should have . . .”

“Should have what?”

“I don't know. If I'd called the police or even just charged past her, out the door, she'd have framed me.”

“All right. Say you were passive and compliant to avoid further persecution. Then why use words like
hidden
and
sinister
?”

“I wasn't . . . it wasn't a reference to myself so much as to . . . to this sense I have that I'm missing what's going on. Really going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know what I mean.” Will puts his face in his hands. “Lately I feel like I'm thinking so hard I'm doing damage to my brain. The actual gray matter. Like redlining a car engine. And to no purpose. Getting nowhere. Spinning wheels.”

“All right, Will. As far as I understand it, what's happened is that you didn't effectively prevent a young woman, recently your patient, from manipulating you into sexual intercourse. You were not the aggressor, but you didn't stop it, either. And while you're anxious in the wake of betraying Carole—anxious about the possibility of incest and about sexual contact with a woman so recently in your professional care, angry with your brother, angry with your wife, you're also troubled by your own behavior. Worried that there are motives you don't perceive.” He stops, looks at Will, who says nothing. “Is that a fair statement?” he asks. Will nods. “And yet today you began by talking about what you find is Carole's tendency to be withholding. But, in fact, it's you who are keeping a secret from her.”

“I know. I know.” Will shakes his head. “Embarrassing to be so obvious a case.”

“Will?” Daniel interrupts a lengthening silence. “Where are you?”

“I was thinking about our different—I won't say conflicting— orientations. My insistence on parsing and interpreting and assigning meaning to everything, and Carole's tendency to just, I don't know. Live instead of think, maybe. Like she's discovered the trick of being rather than becoming.”

“Becoming?” Daniel says.

“Yes. My whole life, my work life and my personal life, is devoted to this . . . this conceit of becoming. To helping people become better adjusted, free of neuroses and compulsions on which they squander their time and energy. Conscious, if they can't be happy.

“And consciousness—becoming more and more fully conscious— is what I want for myself. I accuse Carole of campaigning to evolve, but that's unfair. I'm just seeing myself. Just because she corrects impaired children's development doesn't mean she's bent on her own evolution. In fact, she never seems to struggle to attain her calm collectedness. She's not really any different from the young woman she was when we met.”

“Why do you call it a conceit?”

“Call what a conceit?”

“Becoming. The idea of becoming.”

“I don't know. I mean, obviously, I believe in becoming. But maybe the god I serve is false. Maybe I'm deluded.”

“Maybe we all make our own gods, each as valid as the next person's.”

“Uh-uh,” Will says, “I'm not going there with you.”

Daniel smiles at him. “Just because I'm an atheist?” he says.

He nods. “Did I ever tell you about our first date?”

“So that's why you're a speech pathologist,” Will said to Carole. She'd just finished telling him about her father's death. She stared at him.

“Why?” she said, gray eyes wide in anticipation.

“Because.” Will frowned. “Well, here you were in college, studying communications, and you had this, this articulate and gifted father, who has a stroke, a series of strokes and, having been a polyglot, a man who commanded ten, eleven languages, he loses his ability to speak. Loses it one language at a time, and dies unable to say a thing. Unable to say two words to his daughter—Happy birthday. Happy birthday, Carole. This accomplished and generous man, a translator and a scholar who helped so many other people understand one another, this father you adored, he died. And immediately you change your major, you go from communications—media—to speech therapy, so you can become someone, ultimately, who helps children who can't speak, who guides them at the very important beginning of their lives. These people, very young people, who can't make themselves understood, who come to you and falter in the same way your father did at the end of his life. They open their mouths and nothing comes out. Or the wrong thing comes out, a sound they didn't mean to make. And you've made it your purpose to change that, to help them—and thus yourself—toward a different outcome.” Will stopped here, feeling quite satisfied with this interpretation, reductive though it might have been. The pretty woman across the table would understand him to be a sensitive and aware sort of male, the very kind, he hoped, who would appeal to her. Convince her, just possibly, to sleep with him. Maybe even that night, after dinner, dessert, another glass of wine.

Carole tilted her head to one side. “I never thought of it that way,” she said.

“You didn't?”

She shook her head.

“But what other way is there to think of it?” Will regarded her with puzzlement. Here was a woman who worked side by side with social workers and school psychologists and family therapists and all the other energetic zealots who populated the landscape of secular optimism—and she made no connection between her father's being silenced and her own missionary pursuit of fluency? How was that possible?

“I don't know.” Carole made a face, eyebrows drawn together, as if straining to understand what Will thought was so obvious. “I took this phonetics class, and I learned this system of . . . well, what phonetics is, is the discipline that breaks language down into phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound. Each has its own symbol, so a phonetic spelling of a word doesn't look like English. Anyway, I found it very clean and straightforward. It's transcribed in what's called IPA, for international phonetic alphabet, and I learned it easily, almost without effort. It was fun, that's all.” She shrugged self-consciously at this admission. Worrying, perhaps, that he might judge her as shallow.

“So,” she continued, “I began transcribing everything, all the notes for my other classes, in IPA. No one could borrow them—they didn't understand them. It was a foreign language, after all, a code, a set of signifiers. But it was easy, nothing like learning German, which I'd found so impossible. IPA was, I don't know, irresistible I guess. And I didn't resist it. I'd almost completed the requirements for a communications major when I switched to speech pathology, so I had to stay another year. Well, a year plus one semester.” Carole put down her fork and picked up her napkin. She held it in front of her mouth, not dabbing but covering her lips, as if she were hiding them from him.

“Dessert?” he asked. “Another glass of wine?” Or maybe he offered her—he hopes he didn't, but maybe he asked did she want Armagnac or Remy or something he thought might imply sophistication.

She shook her head, still holding the napkin. He picked up the check and they walked together to her apartment, where he stood with her on the street for what seemed a long time, waiting for her to ask him upstairs. He doesn't know why, but it wasn't uncomfortable. He remembers that when he looked down, so as to take a break from looking at her face, he saw that her feet were aligned, precisely together, and her knees were, too. She held the strap of her handbag with both hands, one fist next to the other, both right in front of her crotch. And she looked right at him, smiling slightly, a friendly look that didn't seem expectant. Self-contained, Will guesses it was.

“Are you thinking about what I said at dinner?” he asked her.

“Said about what?”

“I don't know. Your father. The speech thing.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“What then?”

“Nothing.”

He took a deep breath and held it, puffed out his cheeks, let it go in a gust. “So, uh—”

“Do you want to come up?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She nodded, still staring at him in that disconcerting, almost detached way she had. “Are you prepared?”

“Prepared?” he said, confused.

She looked away and then back, conveying exasperation, but not in a hostile way. “Did you bring a condom with you?” Will flushed, not something he did often, but he felt as he had when he was chosen to act out an exemplary scenario for his junior-high health class. He'd never slept with a girl who wasn't on the pill or didn't have an IUD or a diaphragm. This was before safe sex, after all. What could it mean, her not routinely using contraceptives? Impossible that she was still a virgin.