Envy (2 page)

“No,” he says. “We're not.”

“Okay, good. Look, I'm sorry. But . . .” She's shaking her head. “I don't want to talk about our breaking up when we were, what, however old we were twenty-five years ago.”

“You were twenty-one.”

“Not quite,” she says.

“And I was twenty-two.”

“Twenty-two,” she agrees.

“And then you married.”

“I did.”

“You had a child.”

“Yes.”

Will nods. “I read your bio,” he says. “No pictures, though. Did you bring any? Any pictures of her?”

“No. Well, I have one, but it's back in my room.”

“She's how old?”

“Jennifer?”

“Jennifer.”

Elizabeth produces her hands from under the table and places them together below her chin, palms and fingers aligned as if in prayer. A pretty gesture, it makes him wonder if she prays, goes to church, believes in God. Did she used to? He can't remember. “Oh,” she says, nodding. “I get it. I get it now.”

“Get what?” he says.

Mouth closed, she looks as if she might be holding her breath, counting to ten so as not to lose her temper. Her face is every bit as arresting as it was when they were students together. More so, because the passage of years has scrubbed at her features, worn away whatever flesh once softened the angles of her jaw and of her cheekbones, revealing a face that is fierce as well as fragile. The fierceness was always there, of course, but now it announces itself. Her good looks are the opposite of the girl-next-door's, the opposite of Carole's.

“William,” she says. “You can't . . . you think Jenny is—” She stops. She separates her hands and leaves them open, with their palms up. “I'm not going to say it,” she says.

“Is she?”

“Is she what?”

“Were you pregnant when you left me?”

Elizabeth smiles, not warmly, and drops her hands. “I left you the summer we graduated, in August. Forgive me if I don't recall the exact date.” Her voice is sharp with sarcasm, enough so that it seems to twang. “I married Paul on September eleventh. Jennifer's birthday is February sixth.”

“So you were pregnant when you married Paul.”

“Yes.”

“And you were pregnant when you left me.”

“Possibly.”

“So is she mine or Paul's?”

“Well, really, William, who knows? Maybe she's Tom's or Dick's or Harry's. Maybe I was sleeping with any number of people.” Elizabeth tosses one arm out as if to include all the men in the tent.

“I'm not judging you,” he lies. “I just want to know if you know who her father is.”

Elizabeth tips her head up, eyes on the tent canvas overhead. Veins show green through the white skin of her throat. Oddly sexy, Will thinks, feeling desire awaken. She looks back at him. “Paul is Jennifer's father,” she says.

“Because it would be easy enough,” he continues as if she hasn't spoken, “to find out if she's Paul's or, well, whoever's.”

“I suppose that's true.” She gives him a stare of transparently manufactured patience, an expression intended to convey its opposite. Having lost whatever goodwill she once bore him, she's eager to terminate this unfortunate meeting.

“So, have you?” Will presses.

“Have I what?”

“Have you ever had the tests done to see—”

“Look,” Elizabeth says. “I'm sorry for what's happened in your life, Will. Truly. I'm sorry for you, sorry for your wife, sorry for your daughter. I admit that I have no idea the pain your family must have suffered. But what you and I had, a college romance, a relationship that's been over and done with for twenty-five years, it can't . . . there's nothing left of that, nothing that could—”

“This isn't about Luke.”

“Of course it is.”

“No. I just . . . when I saw your page in the reunion book, the bio, the year your daughter was born, I mean, how could the thought not have crossed my mind? How could—”

“You lost a child. Now you want to find one.”

“That's a little reductive, wouldn't you say?”

“Absolutely. But can you give me an alternate explana—”

“Elizabeth. You walked out on me. Possibly, you were pregnant with my child. Jennifer was born on—”

“Jenny is twenty-four years old. What's the point of talking about biological paternity now, after another man—Paul—has been her father for all her life?”

“Because. I want to know. I'd think she would, too. And you.”

“Seriously?” Elizabeth says. “Surely not seriously.”

“Seriously.” As he repeats the word, Will realizes that this is in fact what he wants. What he seriously wants. Suddenly, nothing seems more important than learning this one fact. He watches Elizabeth shake her head briskly, as if to dislodge what she's heard.

“But you're . . . you're interested. Is that what you're saying? You're not, you can't be asking me to have this, this thing done.”

“Yes, I am.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Why!”

“I told you. I want to know.”

“
You
do.”

“Yes.
I
do.”

“But so what? In terms of my life and her life, so what if you want to know? Information like that—it's pointless now. It would only confuse Jenny. Who knows? It could disrupt her education, compromise her understanding of herself. And to what end? To provide you solace? Illusory solace, because it's not going to fix anything, not really.”

“But paternity does matter. And I'm not asking for anything to be ‘fixed, ' whatever that might mean.”

“What then?” Elizabeth lays both hands on the table, palms down. She leans forward. “What could possibly be the point?”

“I want to know, that's all. Jennifer doesn't have to. You don't have to. I was thinking . . . well, here's an idea.” Will feels his cheeks tingle with surprise at what he's about to say. As if it weren't wine he'd been drinking but a far more potent disinhibitor, a solvent not just for common sense and restraint but whatever keeps a person from voicing everything that pops into his head. “Give me a strand of her hair. You could take it from her brush, tape it to an index card, and mail it to me. Then I could find out. I would know, and that would be it. I wouldn't tell you. I wouldn't tell her. Not unless you specifically asked me to share the results.”

Elizabeth stares at him, looking genuinely incredulous, her mouth ajar. “That is very, very perverse,” she says.

“What is?”

“Asking me, her mother, to take—steal—her hair.”

“It's not stealing.”

“It is. It is stealing.”

“How can it be stealing if the thing stolen has no value?”

Instead of answering, Elizabeth closes her eyes, long enough that he finds himself studying her face, the mauve skin of her eyelids, her pale mouth and cheeks. She could do with some color, a little lipstick or something, but she's always been too proud to wear makeup. Too assured of herself, one of a minority of those who suffer from high self-esteem.

“It does have value,” she says at last, in the measured tone she might use on a retarded adult, someone with the critical capacity of, say, a six-year-old. “Identity has value. Who your parents are is information with value. Obviously it has value to you, enough that you're attempting to convince me to perform an act of, of . . . we won't call it stealing if that offends you. We'll call it, what? How about voyeurism? Like taking a picture of someone who doesn't know you're there, hiding with your camera. You want to peer inside my child, find out what, exactly, she's made of,
who
she's made of, and you have the nerve to ask me—her mother—to be an accessory to this act of voyeurism.” Elizabeth is still leaning forward over the table as she speaks, articulating each word with angry precision. “Besides,” she says, “why should I believe you when you say you won't do anything with the information? You say you won't tell her, or me, but why should I believe you?”

“I'm trustworthy, Elizabeth. You remember that.”

Elizabeth snorts. “Says who?”

“Well, I'm not deceitful. Not like you.”

“What!”

“You left me knowing you were pregnant with my child.”

“That's . . . that's your fantasy, William Moreland. Your presumption. Not my deceit.”

“Prove it.”

“Why? Why should I?”

“Because you owe it to me.”

Elizabeth gives him a narrow-eyed smile, a look of unambiguous hostility. “I don't owe you anything,” she says in a voice that matches the expression.

“Yes. Yes, you do. You do owe me something.”

“What?”

“The truth.”

“No, I don't.” She shakes her head.

The last thing Will wants is to create a scene, and yet he can't stop himself from raising his voice. “You do!” He slaps his hand on the tabletop, not only summoning the attention of those seated nearby but startling himself. What's wrong with him? It's a clinical something, but what? This isn't the only instance, of late, that Will had caught himself struggling to come up with a self-diagnosis. “You do,” he says again, less loudly but just as emphatic.

Elizabeth looks at her wristwatch. “I'm going to leave,” she says, and she stands.

“Wait,” he says. “Just finish this conversation.”

“It is finished.”

“The honorable thing is to help me find out what I need to know.”

“Why? Why do you need to know? What difference will it make? No. Forget that. I know what difference it makes. It's what I said it was. You lost one, you want to find another. But it's too late to find Jennifer, even if she were yours. She's grown up. And”—she points at Will's chest—“can you tell me why is it that men always start talking about honor when they're losing a . . .” She doesn't finish.

“A what?”

“Whatever,” she says.

“As a human being, not a friend or an ally but just another human being, don't you think it's fair—I won't say honorable—for me to know if she's my child?”

“She's not. She is not yours. She's hers. She is her own person.”

“Fine. Agreed. But she may be a person who is closely, physically, related to me. And one day she may want to know that. For her own well-being she may want genetic information about her father.”

Elizabeth shrugs.

“In any case, she doesn't have to know. I want to know, but she wouldn't have to.”

“Fuck you,” Elizabeth says in a low voice. “Fuck you.”

“She wouldn't. Why would she?”

“Because,” Elizabeth says. “Because.”

“Because why?”

“Do you really not understand that you are being astonishingly stupid?”

“Why would she have to know?”

“Because she's a person, her own person. Not your person or even my person. She belongs to herself.”

“Yes, but she, she didn't invent herself, she—”

Twice Elizabeth goes up on the balls of her feet and then slowly lowers her heels, the habit of a woman who's had to come up with strategies to offset the fatigue of standing for much of a workday. Hands on her hips, oblivious to the people, quite a number of them by now, staring and listening, Elizabeth glares at him for what feels like a long time. “I have one thing to say,” she says.

“What?”

“You are an excellent example of why it is that people think shrinks are nuts.” She snatches her purse, a little black one, from where she's hung it on the chair. She drops it over her head, the long strap crossing her chest like a bandolier, and walks swiftly away, slipping back into the crowd like a new penny dropping into a dark well. He sees a flash of her red hair and then nothing—she's gone.

Will stands, eager to quit the company of people before whom he's behaved so, so . . . how has he behaved?

Badly, that's how. He's behaved badly, stupidly, possibly hurtfully, certainly unadvisedly. He feels the arrival of one of those red-wine headaches, the kind that make it imperative to walk carefully lest he jar it up a notch on the pain scale. And there's no minibar in his room at the hotel, no ten-dollar first-aid kit with Band-Aids, antacids, and two headache pills in a single-serving envelope. If there is a God, the front desk will dispense Advil. If there isn't, he's going to have to walk to a convenience store.

It's just guilt—please make it be a simple case of guilt—but along with the headache, Will feels an increasing sense of dread, or something like it. Foreboding. Not that Elizabeth didn't make it clear that there wasn't a chance she'd respond to his insane (Nuts! Nuts! What the fuck was he thinking!) request. Still, he can't shake the idea that what he's done belongs to the potentially costly rather than simply embarrassing brand of foolishness.

He will write her. An e-mail. He'll say he's sorry, that he's dropped the whole thing.

3

It must be the conversation with Elizabeth, Will thinks when he wakes, the room dark, a silver seam of light dividing the curtains. It must be that, because he can't remember the last time he dreamt about Luke.

In the dream, his son had been taken up to heaven.

The boy was white and luminous. He looked as solid as if he were sculpted from marble. Yet light leaked from his body. Every breath streamed and flickered from his lips; every hair on his head was incandescent, a halo of sparks like those thrown off a welder's torch. He was sitting in profile at the top of a fantastically beautiful and treacherous staircase, a staircase chiseled into the face of a cliff formed of glass or of ice, each glistening tread steeper than the one below.

Even from a distance, Will knew that his son was alive, and he began to climb toward him. Having no tools that might on earth prove useful—no pick, crampons, or rope—he willed himself upward, ascending slowly and with an effort that made him gasp and choke. Perhaps he sobbed in his sleep?

The stairs were slippery; they got taller and taller; the uppermost flight almost defeated him.

When he at last reached the top, the light was so intense, he couldn't lift his eyes. It was only by cupping his hands around his face that he could see at all. Even so, the light penetrated, filled his head, informed him that he had reached Luke not because he was strong enough or good enough but because it was inconceivable to him that he would not. Separation from his son was an outcome he was unable to imagine. He had to tell Luke he loved him and not to miss him too badly, not to grieve. He didn't want anything to worry him.

But when at the sound of his voice his son began to incline his face toward him, showing Will its familiar and cherished contours, a face polished and burnished and shining with love—not only his father's but his mother's and his sister's, his grandparents', his uncles', aunts', and cousins', his teachers' and his friends', the love and longing of so many people for this one child—when Luke began to look his way, another boy stopped him, a boy taller and older than his son, a boy Will didn't recognize. The boy put his hand out and touched Luke's cheek to prevent him from turning in the direction of Will's voice.

You must not look at him,
the older boy said.

And Luke answered,
But it's my father.

Luke struggled against the older boy, who Will understood had been assigned to show his son the ropes and prevent such mishaps as the one that had occurred. Because Luke did see Will, just for a moment. Still, it was long enough that his face registered horror.

The older boy said accusingly,
See!

And Luke asked,
What's happened to him! What's happened to him!

Nothing,
the older boy said.
It's just that that's the way he looks to you
now, because he is only mortal.

Luke sobbed, his face in his hands, and the older boy bent to comfort him.

And Will fell from heaven back to his bed, not down the stairs he ascended, but falling as a man falls from a plane, without a parachute, dropping through space at fatal speed, yet with time to see, and the vision of a god.

At first the city appeared as it would through the window of a jet approaching La Guardia, a tidy arrangement of lives, block after block, with an occasional landmark by which it was possible to orient himself. But then he was closer; he could find his own neighborhood and then his roof among the others on his block, the particular house toward which he was plummeting. What a mess it was in! Cracked façade and derelict rain gutter, two missing storm windows and an inadequately patched leak, broken satellite dish, snarls of TV cable and a useless antenna, its arms askew, like the ribs of a broken, stripped umbrella. Could this really be his house? How was it that Will had allowed it to crumble into such a state of disrepair?

Fast though he fell, Will could see into the rooms of his home as if peering into lidless boxes. There was his wife, and with Carole was Samantha. His mother, his father, and his brother. Neighbors and patients, current acquaintances and people he hadn't seen for decades, even children with whom he'd gone to elementary school—faces he couldn't summon when awake. How small everyone appeared and, like slides from a holiday long past, how nearly transparent. Worse than their smallness was the tiny warmth and throb of them, the insectlike brevity of human life. Unbearable—unspeakable and obscene to be spirit trapped in matter, the bodies we worship and fear, exalt and punish, the flesh that grants every pleasure and ushers in our grief. How awful to be given these sublime and flimsy houses for our souls and then to witness their decay. How monstrous.

The idea of it—flesh—gathered into a fist, or a blow, something that struck him hard on the chest, hard enough that he woke facedown and mouth open, unable even to gasp. As if, in truth, he had fallen from a great height back to earth and hit with a wallop, the dream knocked the breath out of him.

All you,
he would have said, were he speaking with a patient about that patient's dream: fragments of you, aspects of you, possible yous, impossible yous, incarnations of you, the you you were, the you you may become, your wishes, your fears, your . . .

But the people he saw as he fell didn't feel like him. And he didn't want the dream Luke to be taken away. He didn't want to have to make his son into, say, a part of himself that looked aghast at another part of him.

What had Luke seen? What did his son see in his face that so frightened and repelled him?

The blue numbers of the digital clock shift from 11:08 to 11:09. He's slept much later than usual, and his body feels stiff and achy, as if in the aftermath of a fever. Will considers the coffeemaker on the dresser, a little basket beside it filled with packets of sugar, artificial sweetener, and nondairy creamer. Eight O' Clock coffee in Christmasy-looking envelopes of tinselly red and green. He tears one open. The ground coffee is packed in a round, white filter, like a doll-sized cushion. He puts this, along with water, into the coffeemaker, and it begins brewing with a congested noise. The contents of the orientation package he picked up the previous day are spread over the table by the window—venue maps and drink vouchers and announcements of added or changed weekend seminars, a seven-page schedule of events that conjures visions of exhausted alumni, some with canes and walkers, lurching from breakfast meetings to round-tables to picnic lunches to step singing (
What
is step singing? Could it
be singing on steps? Which steps? Surely not those big stone library steps
); memorial services; guided tours of advances in veterinary science; panels; lectures; and God knows what else. The only important thing in the package is the
Class of 1979 25th Reunion Book.
Big black letters on a glossy red cover. Cumbersome and unwieldy as a phone book, it has torn its way out of its shrink-wrap, crumpled and mashed its self-congratulatory cover letter.

Here is the story of your class—your struggles and your triumphs, your
journeys from promise into fulfillment . . .
Who writes this drivel? Will balls up the letter and drops it in the trash can. Along with all the other members of Cornell's graduating class of 1979, Will had been invited to contribute his dispatch from midlife—
Dear
William Moreland, We want to hear from you!
And Will had drafted and redrafted and drafted once more his condensed (No more than 500 words, please!) autobiography, dividing himself into professional and personal; into husband and father; into brain, body, heart; into year twenty-three, year twenty-four, year twenty-five; into grad student, intern, resident, private practitioner; into citizen and consumer; into into into. There were any number of ways to dismantle himself, but how was he to reassemble his parts into a narrative, a string of words from here to there?

By default, Will became one of the 687 members of his class who didn't contribute to the reunion book, 89 of those having died, 161 “missing,” and the rest like himself, he guesses, unable or even unwilling to account for themselves in the form of an essay or a timeline or a résumé illustrated with photographs of children, pets, vacation homes, and fancy cars. Unlike his brother's résumé, rendered in ten-point type to accommodate all his accomplishments, Will's is two lines long: his name followed by what few facts the university has acquired about him since graduation. Ph.D., Psych., Columbia University, 1986; Married to Carole Laski, June 28, 1989; Children, Luke Michael, March 30, 1990; Samantha Jane, October 10, 1996. Member NAAP, APA, NYPA.

So there he is: educated, employed, married, the father of two children. And, like most men within his experience, either as a friend or psychoanalyst, a man transformed by fatherhood as he could not have been by any school or career or woman. Take the arrival of his daughter: wet and naked, arms thrown wide with the shock of her first breath, still tethered to her mother by a glistening rope of blood. Even now, this moment, how clearly he can see it, the blue and purple vessels bound together in an almost iridescent membrane, slippery and hot—the heat of it against his palm. He cut as directed and then found he didn't want to let it go. Wasn't it a thing too splendid, too holy, even, to burn in a hospital incinerator?

Eight years, almost, since that day, and yet even a familiar glimpse of his daughter can still catch him off guard, grab him with the force of a hand at his throat. The intensity of her concentration when she skips rope, for example, and the way her skinny arms cross at the elbows when she does some of her fancier moves. Through the turning circle she jumps, over and over, the scuff of shoes against pavement alternating with the light slap of the rope. The elastic comes off the end of her moving braid, and her hair, after a few turns of the rope, comes undone and flies up with every jump. She smiles and shows him the completely unexpected beauty of the gap between her teeth. Coming home from work, he finds a smudgy greeting underfoot, chalk hieroglyphs on the sidewalk in front of their house. How many times in a single day can he bear to be shown what is at once too valuable to surrender and guaranteed to be taken? She is flesh of his flesh, a small and perfect creature who is all promise, no regrets or disappointed hopes. He is her father. That her life will have its portion of unhappiness and ill fortune seems impossible, a species of crime, a wrong that must be righted.

Is Carole prey to thoughts like these when she watches their daughter in a school play, when she counts her years in cake candles? Will doesn't think so. The woman he married isn't inclined to melancholy; she neither speculates about what might go wrong nor dwells on what already has. She loves him, even as much as he loves her, Will believes, but she isn't romantic or even sentimental; her boundaries are definite; she has thoughts she will not share and assumes the same is true of him. A blessing, in that certain of his preoccupations are those that might alarm a wife. His sexual fixation, for example, which is beginning to feel too big to keep inside his head. Was there even one woman he encountered the previous evening, one upon whose body he allowed his gaze to linger, without seeing himself— seeing her—well, without seeing what he saw? Even were he to remember one, the act of calling her back before his mind's eye would disqualify her: she wouldn't get away a second time.

He wants to believe that love can't make mistakes, but what he knows is that it's like water, assuming the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it. He's not a blameless father or a perfect husband, and though he's made a career of listening to other people's problems, he can't always respond with patience and insight. He does bear witness: this is a role as old as childhood, as old as his consciousness of his brother's suffering. He opens old wounds and binds up new ones, strips away defenses, shores up egos. To be paid for the work he craves seems marvelous to Will, a reason to give thanks—but to what, to whom? Because he's also a tortured agnostic, suffering spasms of private, even desolate, self-examination. Alert to coincidence and unanticipated symmetry, to aspects aligning in patterns, almost readable, he sifts, sorts, and turns the pieces, lays them down and picks them up in what amounts to an endless game of mental solitaire, occasionally drawing close to something that comes out neatly and looks like a grand and universal plan, a sequence of details in which, as the saying goes, God resides. Summoned to his door by a pair of canvassing Jehovah's Witnesses, Will not only accepts the literature they press into his hands, he reads it. Accosted on his own corner by a canvassing flock of young Lubavitchers who demand to know if he's a Jew, he stammers in confusion, receiving the question as a challenge to him, him in particular, rather than the proselytizer's customary preface. He's not so much godless as God-bereft.

Armed, of course, with distractions from existential anxiety. Apart from sex, there's real estate: he's landed. He's even a landlord, if only incidentally and only as a means of managing the debt they carry on their home. A personal trainer who works at a local health club rents the top floor of the brownstone they were lucky enough to buy before the market recovered, a now mostly fixed fixer-upper, with bay windows, an ornate cornice, and a stained-glass skylight: 138 Lincoln Place, in the historic district of Park Slope, named for streets that descend gently from the long, lush meadow and ball fields of Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Both his own and Carole's school loans long behind them, Will is paying down the mortgage, each month chipping away at the principal, reduced now from the $475, 000 they borrowed to $280, 000. They've lived on Lincoln Place for thirteen years, long enough that the rent for the upstairs apartment at last covers the monthly mortgage, a fact that thrills him, allowing him to tear open statements purely for the pleasure of seeing that his last assault on the principal has been recorded, even if it's no more than a few hundred dollars. It's nothing he could have anticipated, but their mortgage bill has become the single piece of mail to which he always looks forward. Each time he checks the principal, he translates his most recent subtraction from what they owe into its material equivalent: a pocket door, one of the original chandeliers, the parlor's crown molding. Checks made out to him by his patients are welcome, but oddly, they don't inspire the same feeling of accomplishment. Brick by brick, he is making himself and his wife the owners of these four soaring and dignified stories faced with a milk-and-coffee-colored stone that no longer exists in nature, brownstone having been quarried into extinction many years before he was born.