Envy (18 page)

“Do you want me to go with you to buy them?” Carole asked. She took his hand and walked him west along the block. “I'll stay here,” she said when they went into the drugstore, and she began to look through a display of greeting cards. She pulled one out to read the message inside. He still remembers the picture on the front. It was Linus, drawn by Charles Schulz, and he was in midair, upside down, Lucy having pulled his blanket out from under him.

As a child, Will used to follow
Peanuts
with attention rather than pleasure, as if it might tell him something he needed to know. He cut out the little black-and-white daily strips, which always seemed more serious and instructive than the colored Sunday ones, and saved them in a binder, organizing them by topic and (as if unconsciously anticipating the reference manual of his as yet unknown career, the DSM) cataloging emotion as if it were disease. He called one section “The Effect of Unrequited Love,” and there were also “Anger and Betrayal” and the thickest section of all, “Angst.” He was twelve, a seventh-grader whose reading comprehension tested at college level.

“I wish I still had that binder,” Will says to Daniel. “I'd like to look through it, assess its assessments. Even then I was trying to figure out what the fuck was going on. Figure out my brother.
Peanuts
isn't a very funny strip when you think about it.”

And they were never really children, those awkward, tormented characters, hunched over Bible verses or Beethoven scores, as alienated by talent as by failure, pining for unavailable valentines, losing their kites, losing their softball games, quoting the Book of Luke on the birth of Christ, suffering gender dysmorphia and slavish devotion (Peppermint Patty and her weird little sidekick who called her Sir), dragging along their tattered transitional objects, waiting with Beckett for the Great and Nonexistent Pumpkin-Godot, and, in the end, seeking dismissive counsel at Lucy's five-cent psychiatry booth.

“So,” Daniel says to Will, glancing at his watch—an abbreviated gesture, not to see the time but as a cue: ten minutes before the hour.

“So,” Will repeats.

“Now what?”

“I guess I contact Elizabeth. Check the story out. Be sure it's all true.” Will stands, hands in his pockets. “Then I'll talk to Carole. I'll call you. I'll keep you posted.”

“Please.” Daniel walks him to the door. “Next week?”

“Unless you think I've got my multifaceted crisis all wrapped up.”

Daniel puts his hand on Will's shoulder, a gesture Will notes for its infrequency. Rarity. In this room, they do not touch beyond the occasional handshake. “Take care,” Daniel says, squeezing the shoulder.

18

But she was. In New York City, in 1987, Carole was a twenty-four-year-old, post-sexual-revolution virgin.

“Really?” Will said, and then he said something ridiculous. “Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” Carole laughed. “Yes.”

Why?
he wanted to ask, but he couldn't think of a polite way to put the question. In any case, what he meant was,
Why me?
What about him invited or allowed this . . . this what? Awakening? Rite of passage? But he wasn't going to ask that question either, lest her answer was to change her mind.

“I mean, I'm not completely without experience. I've . . . well, I've . . . I just haven't done that.”

Will nodded. “The first time for me,” he said, “I was fifteen.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Carole looked away and then back. “I mean, I don't mind, if that's what you're asking. Does it matter?”

“No. No, it doesn't matter. And you, your . . . it's nice. For me, I mean. But . . .”

“But what?”

Will shook his head. “Nothing.” He'd been going to say that he felt a burden of responsibility, but that wasn't the right thing to say either. “I just want to know if you're sure, that's all. Sure you want to do this.”

“Yes, I am.” Carole unbuttoned her shirt and shrugged out of its sleeves, stepped out of her shoes and skirt. She reached around her back with both hands to unclasp her bra. It was black; he remembers this because he'd expected it to be white, because of stereotype: didn't virgins wear white underclothes? But her panties were black, too, sexy against her white skin. Not only does he remember being aroused, he can almost feel the barely contained, wet-dreamy quality of that erection, intensified by the slightest stimulus, physical or imagined. She pushed the black panties down and sat on the end of her bed, knees together, and watched as Will untied his shoelaces, leaning over in her rocking chair so that it tipped all the way forward.

“Maybe you don't want the overhead light?” he suggested when he looked up. “Maybe a candle or something?”

“Okay.” Carole stood. “I don't have candles. But I could turn off the overhead and leave the bathroom one on with the door ajar. That way, only a little would come in.”

“All right.” Will left his clothes on the chair and lay on her bed. Feeling self-conscious, he put the condom on her bedside table. Carole stood at the end of the bed for a moment, then she lay down next to him.

“Can we kiss for a while first?” she asked, breaking the silence. He nodded and pulled her on top of him, and then one smooth thigh was on either side of his cock.

“I'm going to be . . . I'm going to do the best I can,” he said, pulling back from her mouth, and again she laughed. “I don't mean to be funny. I . . . I know this is the second time I've made you laugh. But, well, I was being sincere.”

“It just sounded funny, that's all. Like taking the GRE or M-CAT's or something.”

“I'd like . . . If it's all right with you, I'd like to touch you first.”

“Touch me?”

“With my mouth.” He put his hand between her legs. “Touch you here.” She nodded and reached for the condom where he'd left it on the table by the bed. “What are you doing?” he asked her.

Carole sat up. “The books, um. I read a book that said I should . . . I mean that the girl, the woman, she should make putting the condom on part of foreplay. You know, so it's, uh, erotic.”

“The Joy of Sex
?
”
Will asked. “Was that the one?” Now it was she who flushed. “That's all right,” he said. “I don't . . . I'll do it after, when I'm ready.”

“I don't mind doing it.”

“No, I . . . It's just that they're not sexy. Condoms aren't. So I'd rather do it. But not until after I do this.” Carole lay back down, and he settled himself between her legs, nudging them farther apart with his shoulders. “Bend your knees,” he said, and when she didn't move he took her, one ankle at a time, and arranged her on the mattress.

“Sorry,” he said, after they'd made love and had rolled apart. “I didn't last as long as I wanted to.” Carole pulled the blanket up, covering both of them. “I was, uh, I guess I was excited.”

“More than usual?”

“Well, your being a virgin. I . . . I guess the idea of it, of your having never been with anyone before, it . . . I lost my, my restraint.”

“That's okay.”

“Was it—did it feel all right?”

“Yes.” She rolled up against him, her cheek on his chest. “The thing is,” she said, “what you did with your tongue felt so good that the rest was a little anticlimactic.”

“No pun intended?”

“Pun very much intended.”

“Why me?” Will asked after a silence, but the question came out wrong. He'd meant to sound grateful, not perplexed, and he worried that to her ears the question might have sounded worse than perplexed, even petulant.

“Why you what?” she asked.

“Why am I the first?”

“Oh,” Carole said. “Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because I'm going to marry you.”

Will didn't reply. He was still trying to figure out her meaning— irony? romantic fantasy?—when she kissed his cheek. “You'll see,” she said, and she turned over and went to sleep.

19

Elizabeth has agreed to meet him at Philadel-phia's Thirtieth Street Station, a point midway between his home in New York and Baltimore, where she lives. They are to meet at 11:30, but Will's train arrives at 11:12, so he waits for her in one of the station's big pewlike benches, watching as clots of passengers emerge from the platform stairways. A few people move briskly toward one or another exit; others set down luggage and packages to consult the readouts on their cell phones, make calls, locate connecting trains on the departure board. Or they just stand, passive and expectant as children, awaiting the arrival of friend or kin, someone to collect and bear them away.

He hasn't told Carole where he was going and doesn't expect to be caught in his subterfuge. It's Thursday, so Samantha stays after school for a swim class that isn't over until 4:45. He plans to return on the 1:40, arriving at Penn Station by 3:00, so even a major subway snafu, like a stalled train or a sick passenger or a police chase, any of the menu of expectable daily disasters (assuming terrorists are lying low, plotting rather than acting) that could slow him down won't stop him from getting back home to pick Samantha up in time.

So far, Will isn't enjoying the discovery of how easy it is to exit his life without explanation, like slipping unnoticed through a secret portal, leaving one world, waiting to arrive in another. The ridiculous transporter from
Star Trek
pops into his mind, that shimmering column of a crew member in the moment when he's neither aboard the
Enterprise
nor reassembled on an unexplored planet but in the limbo of molecular disarray, a trembling, staticky silhouette. He tries to shove aside the thought of himself back home that evening, glancing across the room at his wife, trying to decide what to say as he searches Carole's face unobtrusively. On top of feeling sick about what happened with the girl, Jennifer, although he hasn't quite gotten to the point at which he can think of her by that name—a guilty, nervous nausea that intensifies when he's near his wife—he'll be that much more disturbed having disappeared successfully for these few hours. Assuming he is successful in his deceit.

11:35. Maybe her train has been delayed—a mechanical failure, or a human one. The word
stickup
pops into Will's head animated by Daffy Duck sputtering in cartoon fear, flecks of spittle flying everywhere. Why is it that the more agitated he gets, the more childish are the images that assault him, all of them dating back to afternoons spent with his brother, the two of them on the living room floor under the television's blue gaze?

Maybe she isn't going to show. But how could she not? Will's e-mail described a young woman with a pair of stainless steel studs on either side of the bridge of her nose, fingernails bitten to the quick, and a citation from Cicero's “First Oration Against Catiline” tattooed on her chest. Not even New York City could contain two such young women.

Almost six months have elapsed since the college reunion, months during which Will has changed from the man he used to recognize as himself. After fifteen years of negligible marital sins, those of omission, mostly—instances of laziness or lack of consideration inspiring the familiar wifely complaints—he's become not only an adulterer but possibly an incestuous father, a man whom almost every culture throughout all time would recognize as a criminal breaker of taboo. His chronic fear of seducing a patient has been obliterated by a set of new terrors resulting from having been seduced by a patient. For the first time in memory, Will can't get it up. The previous evening, after lying next to him in the dark for a few minutes, Carole sat up in bed and switched the light back on.

“So, uh, Will?” she said.

“Yes?” He was lying on his back, one arm across his face to keep the light out of his eyes.

“What's up?”

“I don't know,” he lied. “I'm not feeling great, I guess.”

“You mean you're sick?”

“No, not sick exactly. Sort of.”

“Because—tell me if I'm wrong—but I think we've made out when you had the flu, I mean the real flu, that Coxsackie thing you caught from Sam, several sinus infections, strep throat, the back thing after the cab accident, innumerable colds, fevers, upset stomachs, et cetera. I can't remember your ever being sick enough to forgo sex.” Will didn't answer. “Is there anything going on?” she asked. “Anything we should maybe talk about?”

“No,” Will said, “not now. I'm just . . . I don't feel well. Can we turn off the light?” She did, and they lay there, awake but not talking for what seemed a long time. Both of them must have noted that it was Carole who pressed for dialogue while Will resisted—not a first, but very unusual.

And here's another distressing development: lately Will has caught himself immersed in sadistic fantasies of fratricide in which he goes after his brother with a blowtorch, or, in the more elaborately plotted scenario, drives a Humvee, one of those automotive paeans to testosterone, through the desert with Mitch chained to its massive bumper. Will forces his brother to walk barefoot as fast as Will chooses through a desert terrain, over blistering sand and rocks and cactus spines—the inverse of the environment of his expertise, cold water. Soon lamed, Mitch falters and begs, completely at his mercy.

Will slumps on the bench, rests his head on the wood back, exhausted by himself. Looking up, he sees that birds are flying inside the station. Its central hall is so large, the ceiling so high, that they appear content to swoop back and forth, gliding by the vast windows without succumbing to panic and diving against the glass panes. Directly over his head a shiny silver Mylar balloon is trapped in a ceiling coffer. Will dislikes these balloons and their forced, tinselly enthusiasm, the way they imply the inadequacy of regular balloons. And they never burst. Samantha got one on her last birthday, and the thing has remained in the house for months, floating at eye level, wrinkled and flaccid but still ascendant, somehow needling in its longevity, the way it persists in celebrating an occasion that even Sam has forgotten.

11:41, according to the oppressively large clock on the station wall, the slack middle of a weekday, without the bustle and press of commuters, and yet Will would have picked her out just as quickly from a crowd. She rises from platform 3 into the waiting area, her bright head gliding upward, carried along the unnaturally smooth trajectory of the escalator. When she steps off, she's standing in a long pale bar of sunlight that falls from one of the monumental windows. Without looking around, she turns herself in his direction, as if she knew by instinct which bench he would choose, and approaches with her characteristic walk, efficient and unhurried, her feet, in their low heels, striking the floor soundlessly. Her hands are shoved in the pockets of her belted black trench coat, which makes the color of her hair appear even more flamelike.

He stands, and she stops walking. Obviously she's decided against contact even as minimal as a handshake. Two yards—the length of a body—remain between them. “Elizabeth,” he says.

“William.”

“Why don't we sit over there?” He gestures toward the food court.

“Fine,” she says, and she sets off in that direction.

He follows her through the concessions. “Do you want anything?” she asks. “Because I never had breakfast,” she goes on, as if to justify the distasteful necessity of sharing a meal with him, “and by the time I get back to the unit I won't have had a chance to eat.” Without waiting for him to answer, she takes two croissant sandwiches squashed under Saran Wrap and slaps them on a tray.

“What was it you said you practiced?” he asks, straining for a neutral prelude to what will be a necessarily unpleasant dialogue. “What kind of dermatology?”

“Burns.”

“Burns. As in fires?”

“Or chemical. There's also the occasional idiot who pulls off the trick of a third-degree sunburn. I direct the acute-care facility at Johns Hopkins.” Her voice conveys either surprise that Will can have forgotten an appointment of this stature, or her more general—and justifiable—irritation with him for having created a crisis that has interrupted both their lives and demanded the inconvenience of this meeting.

“Sorry,” he says, “of course. I'm preoccupied. Lately, I mean.” How clearly he can picture Elizabeth presiding over a room filled with those state-of-the-art tank beds, each holding a body suspended in some advanced regeneration gel. Suddenly, he remembers that the previous night (in anticipation of this meeting, no doubt) he dreamed of austere white-coated Elizabeth as she ministered to a body on a bed of unguent, a body so burned that it had no skin. And yet there was no blood, either, no unsightly, blistered bits or charred wounds. It was flesh as decorative as that of a transparent man in an encyclopedia.

“Well?” Elizabeth says. She shoves a waxed paper cup under a nozzle that pours Diet Dr Pepper over a few lumps of ice. This is his, evidently, because she moves on to a selection of tea bags, picking through them until she finds one she deems acceptable. She unwraps it with care, leaving the fragile paper envelope intact, drops it into a Styrofoam cup, and pushes a red button to discharge a stream of hot water onto the bag. Then she marches, with him in tow, to the cashier. “Your treat.” She enunciates the word
treat
so sharply that it sounds as unpleasant and cold as, say, sleet.

The only unoccupied table is a large one with a big, striped umbrella planted in its center. “God, I hate that,” Elizabeth says. “It's just too stupid. As if to fool you into thinking you're dining on some patio on the Riviera.” She points at the chair opposite hers, an imperious gesture, employer to underling or professor to failing student. Three plastic saltshakers are lying on the table among a scattering of crystals, and she rights them in the center, brushes the spilled salt off with a paper napkin. Having spent only ten minutes in her caustic company, Will is already debilitated.

“So,” he says, “I'd just like . . . I know time is short, but I'd like to quickly sum up my encounters with your daughter.”

“Jennifer.”

“Jennifer.”

After saying the name they both look at each other in silence. “So,” he begins after a swallow of Diet Dr Pepper. “Last month a young woman who calls herself Andrea, and who claims she's been referred to me by another of my patients, begins treatment for a specific problem. She describes a compulsion to seduce older men and characterizes her pursuit of these objects as driven by a rigid set of criteria. They must be no younger than forty-five. They have to be professionals, gainfully employed. Glasses are a plus; baldness, obesity, and hearing aids unacceptable. There's more, but you get the picture.

“As she tells it, it's clear that her physical satisfaction is secondary to the brief reassurance, or abatement of anxiety, that sex with these partners affords her. She draws an analogy between her sexual trophies and a collection of paperweights to which she was attached as an adolescent.” Will pauses to underscore the paperweight allusion; Elizabeth regards him without affect, as if his face belongs not to a human being but to a clock or a speedometer, a tin plate under a veneer of paint. As they watch each other, Will feels a profound weariness, so leaden it's as if his substance, the stuff of which he's made, has changed without warning, his molecular weight doubled or squared so that gravity now presses him that much harder into his plastic chair. It's the moment when the twinkling silhouette disappears from the
Enterprise,
the transported body of whoever it was reassembled on a planet with an alien, possibly injurious atmosphere.

Elizabeth is still tilted forward in her seat. What's he doing here anyway? It's not too late, he can stand, apologize for inconveniencing this woman who has become, after all these years, a stranger. He can go home. He can, except that somehow he can't.

“Well,” she says, “we don't have all day, William. I don't, anyway.”

“So far there have been, the young woman estimates, thirty-eight of these seductions. A better word would be
transactions,
because the intercourse she describes is without emotional content. She has no interest in her partner's feelings; the sex is dispassionate; the partner fits a profile, no more, no less; this is the extent of his worth.” Will watches Elizabeth sip her tea.

“I'm listening,” she says, looking down at the unfinished sandwich on her plate. The part in her hair is very straight and pale, and Will thinks of the girl's bitten fingernails, the shiny pink flesh that rises around them, hot and swollen. “Angry,” his mother would say of the bitten nails, as in “an angry cut.”

In spite of his intent to banish them from his consciousness, the unfortunate tips of Jennifer's fingers have become an erotic snag, a penetrating detail that insinuates itself into his thoughts, pulling the girl's whole body along after them. Even so tangential a catalyst as the controlled part in her mother's hair is enough to summon them, the clean line of the part demanding the answer of their raw vehemence. Under the table, the red-tipped fingers find his fly; they close around his cock, even as his awareness of having potentially bedded a girl who might be his own child makes him feel literally sick. Will stops unwrapping his sandwich, unbuttons the collar of his shirt.

“So,” Will goes on, “the young woman tells me she's tried approaches other than psychoanalysis to cure this problem. She's seen counselors at school, dismisses them as incompetent; ditto for cognitive therapy, the Skinnerite behavior-mod specialist, the Menninger disciple, the yoga instructor, the acupuncturist, and the chiropractor, who tried to remove whatever obstruction had diverted the flow of her sexual energy, making her desire old men.

“Anyway, as I said in the e-mail, the young woman, ‘Andrea, ' knows details of your past that only you can have provided, and she has
‘Quo usque
tandem'
et cetera tattooed on her chest. Clearly she is, unbeknownst to me, your child, with whom you've shared my impulsive suggestion of DNA testing.” Will, whose mouth is dry, takes another swallow of the Diet Dr Pepper, which tastes more vile than he could have imagined, like watered-down, carbonated prune juice. Elizabeth continues to regard him without expression.