Treasure Island!!! (4 page)

 

I
don't have the training,” I said to Rena in the coffee house. “I love cake decorating, but to actually get a job, I'd have to go to pastry school and learn fondant and . . . tart doughs and . . . petit fours.”

“Well, maybe you'd like that,” Rena said.

“Right now I'm liking the freedom of being cut loose from the job, and the lease on my studio, and the old expectations! I can't describe it. When Henry James read
Treasure Island
, he wrote Stevenson a fan letter and said, ‘I feel like a boy again!' Exactly how I feel, but I never was a boy. I'm giddy, can you tell?”

“Too much sugar, maybe.” Rena looked down at the bill and flushed. “Speaking of which, I think she forgot to charge us for a coffee. No, there it is. Oh, well.” Gloomily, she slid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check. “How's Richard? Did you bring pictures?”

“Was it you who said a pet would be good for me? The responsibility? Maybe it was Adrianna's half-brained idea. He's a drag. Every time he fails, it's like I'm failing. I say, ‘Steer the boat, girlfriend' twenty times and he looks at me like I'm part of his seed tray.”

“Birds like seeds.”

“I've pretty much given up on him for decent conversation. But I don't like the way he follows me around the apartment with his eyes. It's creepy, how he always seems to be looking. He sits on his perch and stares—like this.” I goggled my eyes and willed my nose to appear like a sharp hard beak. “I used to read
Treasure Island
out loud, but he inhibits me.”

Rena took the sugar dispenser out of my hand.

“Pets have to be chosen with care. It's not like buying a pair of shoes or something. Which reminds me, where'd you get that bag?”

“Anniversary present from Lars.”

A flurry of activity as I showed her the contrast stitching and the side pockets that held my index cards on
Treasure Island
.

“Don't think
he
chose it, Rena. He was going to get flowers. I redirected him.”

“I'd get a bag like that if it was vegan,” Rena sighed.

 

“Poor Rena,” I said to Lars as we sat on the couch and pulled apart our chopsticks. “Yesterday she pretended not to like my bag because it wasn't vegan, when the truth is she can't afford anything like this because she works as a pet-sitter. Have you ever seen her put on that act? The holier-than-thou voluntary vow of poverty to save the animals thing?”

“She's always been anxious about money,” Lars observed. He tipped half the carton of egg foo yong onto my plate.

“Next time let's not bother with the plates,” I said.

“The boat!” said Richard.

Lars and I turned to each other in amazement. I gripped his shoulder.

“Did you hear that? I'm going to cry!”

“Pay-off time,” Lars said, serenely lifting to his mouth a greasy bundle of noodles.

I peered into the cage. “Again! You can do it!” Richard gazed into the distance and after a moment, raised his tail feathers and excreted something slimy.

I slunk back to the couch and picked up my chopsticks.

“Seeing Rena made me realize I don't want to rush back into a meaningless job just to pay the utility bill. It isn't worth it. I have bad dreams about the wrong kind of job.”

“What kind of dreams?”

In one I sat in the secretary pool at Leonard Milkins Middle School, where my father teaches Latin. In another I was making out with my mother when I had been hired to do yard work.

“They're too boring to describe. I go to work with my dad. When I first read the book I dreamed every night I was Jim Hawkins. Clearly I've strayed. I think my unconscious mind is trying to warn me to stay unemployed a while.”

“
Boat!
” Lars repeated and I thought, Why, he's as proud as I am.

“To Richard,” I toasted, “our baby bird who's finally learning!”

“Here's to ourselves!”

“Here's to ourselves,” I repeated, “and hold your luff, plenty of prizes and plenty of duff! And here's to me and my state of creative unrest!”

I expected Lars to say something else, but he only puckered his forehead and drank.

 

 

S
ometimes I consider
BOLDNESS
a quality one has or does not have; other times I think of
BOLDNESS
as a quality one chooses to cultivate or to let wither on the vine. To avoid thinking in that simplest of dichotomies—bold, not bold—I try to imagine a continuum on which persons of varying degrees of
BOLDNESS
may be arranged. Unfortunately, the longer I lived with Lars, the more clearly it came to my attention, like a hangnail one feels smarting and tries not to bite, that Lars didn't exemplify even the far far other end of
BOLDNESS
; in fact on the continuum of
BOLDNESS
, Lars was off the line.

 

Boldness Perceived as a Continuum

 

Boldness—Impudence—Self-Reliance—Timidity—Cowardice—

 

Every day he trailed off to the same low-paying techie support job he'd done since graduating college.

“Isn't it time you made your move?”

“What move?” he said.

“Onward! Upward!”

But he never responded well to such suggestions, insisting that he liked his job, liked talking to people and figuring out problems. One morning when I pressed him to seek out oppor­tunities for advancement, cheer-leading him into a state of energy and self-confidence, exhausting myself at the crumby breakfast table in the hope that he would walk out the door with fresh resolve and make us both proud, he revealed (nonchalantly) that he'd been offered a chance to do something at a software company six months before and passed it up.

And why?

He liked that his job left him “free” on the weekends!

Our weekends, of course, I enjoyed prodigiously; Lars did all the things that I arranged—brunches, shopping, movies. On weekdays, I kept myself in a whirl, partly to avoid missing Lars and partly to insure I didn't stumble back to The Pet Library and beg for my job back. I avoided my parents, knowing they would fail to understand my devotion to
Treasure Island
and worry instead about my outward appearance of inertia. Sometimes my mother would telephone and say, “What are you doing?” “What are
you
doing?” I'd answer, but she never registered the sharpness of my reply. Instead she gave me the record of her accomplishments since rising at six in the morning and outlined, with cheerful precision, her tasks for the rest of the day. “You know me, I like to keep my ducks in a row.” I knew what she thought
my
ducks looked like—scattered round the pond, wings drooping, heads listing; one call to Animal Patrol would confirm they had West Nile virus. “But what were you doing just now when I called?” I am sure she wanted to catch me out in something frivolous—waxing the hair off my kneecaps, let's say—but I always told her I was studying my book. “And what are you planning to do?” she persisted one day. “Now that you've left The Pet Library?” “Who knows,” I said bitterly, “But I will never be a Latin teacher!” She denied that she had ever harbored the expectation; oh yes, she pretended to be amazed. “We never expected you to follow in Daddy's footsteps. Whatever you want to do, that's what you should do, darling. We've never expected anything from you or Adrianna.” True, in that they certainly never
helped
me to do anything.

When this kind of conversation put me into a funk, I bounced around town, picking up niceties for our home and little masculine luxuries for Lars (shaving creams, foot massager, new lizard watch band), and I had time to attend to my own appearance, too, so between the haircuts and eyebrow waxes and cheap Asian manicures, I'd never looked better in my life.

“But listen,” Lars said one morning, “I've been looking over the credit card bill and I think we need to cool it a while. Maybe it's just too many take-outs, and we could cook more. The thing is, this is the first time I haven't been able to pay off my monthly balance.”

“Lars, you don't have to pay off the monthly balance!” I kissed his unsmiling mouth. “That's why they call it credit.”

Lars pulled back from my kiss; we were in the living room and he didn't like to start anything near Richard. Not that the bedroom was much better; one blood-curdling scream and Lars's erection would take French leave. As I kissed him again, he responded with demeaning ambivalence. One hand groped me; the other made placating gestures to Richard, who'd begun to scream.

“Lars,” I hissed. “Stop talking to him.”

“Wasn't talking. Was just, you know, indicating, that everything's okay. His back feathers ruffled.”

We glared at each other.

“He gets upset,” Lars added.

“Scrrraaaawww!” Richard said.

“Jesus,” I said. “I don't feel like kissing
now
.”

“That's okay. That's totally cool. No problem.”

“No problem?”

“No problem!” he repeated cheerfully.

Of course, there
were
problems, but the problems were seated beyond the reach of argument—way out in some rural zone where there isn't even Internet access. I tried to handle Lars with care, as if civility could make up for the deficits, but time stripped our verdant orchard of its leaves. Picture us on a stage with a skeletal Beckett-like tree. Clearly the underlying issue was that Lars didn't want me to change.

“I like your hair the way it is,” he said when he heard me on the phone, making a color appointment.

Lars didn't want me to grow.

“You look great,” he said, often without even looking.

One Saturday when actively weeding through my wardrobe to make the final decision on what to discard, I allowed Lars to come upon me in a butternut squash sweater and a pair of red corduroy pants.

“That's a nice sweater,” he said. “Is it new?”

“This is a filthy old sweater I've had since eleventh grade. It's made of rayon.”

“Oh.”

“Do you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like it with these pants?”

“Yes.”

“Even though the colors clash?”

“Yes.”

“Even though the pants are baggy in the butt?”

“It looks good on you,” he said.

Which was supposed to be a compliment, but in its refusal to engage reality was more accurately the verbal equivalent of a chuck on the chin. I knew very well what Lars meant when he praised me, and held me, and indicated through a caress that he liked me
just the way I was
; I knew, better than he knew himself, that he wanted to ensure he never be confronted with what, in his own personality, might need pruning or pushing or prodding, that behind every show of support he gave, for me here, for me now, there lurked a terrified refusal to acknowledge his own potential to grow. With each endearment, with each endorsement, he tried to make me slack. Did I buckle? Dear Reader, no. I saw his white-knuckled terror, his toes clenching the edge of a perceived abyss, even when he leaned over the garbage bag of clothes and planted a kiss on my head!!

 

 

A
nd now for the secret autobiography, the chamber within the chamber, the revolving bookcase that spins into a red velvet study, the roomy compartment behind the false back of a tiny drawer.

It is possible to think of my life, up to the age of twenty-five, as a series of therapists I successfully dodged.

“A series of therapists!” you will exclaim.

When I began this story, I had thought to keep my counseling history a secret, but the more I write, the more I think of my reader as a friend with whom I can lounge in even the sour-smelling rooms of the family manse. So here they are, all failures!

 

1) Dee Bissell-Ivy: Wore her hair in a bun, kept dolls on her shelves

2) Peter Johnson: hush-voiced, still in training, borrowed folding chairs

3) Deborah Grady: red-faced, aggressive, hobby-oriented

4) Jennifer Shaftal: Long-legged, deep tan; began each session by asking if I treated my body like a temple, then proceeded to confuse me with another patient whose parents had repeatedly locked her up in an RV

5) Brenda Pickens: fluffy-haired, fluffy-sweatered, said all “her girls” were hindered by terrible self-esteem

 

A haze descends when I try to recall the others' names. I ran through every therapist available in that long college hall of Harris Center known as PERSONAL COUNSELING. You could have six free sessions with anyone, and then if dissatisfied, pick a new person and start counting towards your six free sessions again. I never paid for a seventh session with any of them.

 

In my twenty-fifth year, I was happier and stronger than ever, done with therapists—
finis
!—and yet occasionally I craved a pill to calm my nerves. Where was I in this story proper? Oh yes, I was living with Lars. Notice how closely that sounds like living with lies. It sounds exactly like it, if you imagine yourself saying it with some kind of Eastern European accent. And I
was
living with lies when I was living with Lars. For reasons already apparent, I found myself happy to be rid of The Pet Library but unsteadied by the new arrangements. Now that Lars had gotten tight-fisted, we went to fewer restaurants, and rather than go shopping on weekdays, I spent long lugubrious hours at home, the vapors of which could be dispelled only by picking quarrels. Sometimes I fought lucidly, poignantly, my complaints so beautifully orchestrated I wished I could fight Lars for a living. Other times the quarrels left me confused rather than ennobled; that time I stood in my bathrobe with zit cream on my face and hollered, “Lars, I didn't marry you so you could work at the computer support desk your whole life,” especially comes to mind.

“What?” Lars said. “What? You didn't marry me at all!”

“I know. But what exactly are we doing here every night, cud­dling up on the couch with a box of General Tsao's chicken?”

The truth was I felt as though I had married him. I'd forgotten that I had strong-armed my way into his apartment because I needed a place to live while I pursued the insights of
Treasure Island
.

Did he want me to leave?

“Maybe I do. Maybe I want a divorce,” he said ironically.

Not long after that conversation, I dropped by my mother's internist to get a prescription for a calming pill. My mother's doctor, a half-retired guy named Dr. Rattner, refused to see me, but the secretary said she could squeeze me in to see his partner, Dr. Klug. I don't know why, but when the rap came on the examination door, I was expecting Dr. Rattner's wizened twin to walk in. Instead a chisel-cheeked, healthy, blonde woman, ten years my senior, stood at the foot of the table, ordering me to swing up my feet. I swung them (gladly).

Chest, lung, nose, ears, throat. She smelled like rubbing alcohol and verbena. Why was she examining me, I wondered.

“What do you want pills for?”

“Anxious. Can't sleep.”

“You look well-rested. Something bothering you?”

“Yes, no.”

“Lie back, please. I don't like to throw a person pills until they've tried other options. Lie back, please. Have you talked to anyone about why you're anxious?”

This was just the opening I needed—and although it was a pretty narrow gap, I shot through it like a winged termite. Rooting
Treasure Island
out of my bag, I told Dr. Klug my theory that there are basically two kinds of people in this world—“those who sail the ship—and that includes sailors, pirates, and cabin boys—and those who cling fearfully to the ship's base. That would be the barnacles.”

“Marine biology. It's been a while . . . ”

“Never mind, it's a metaphor.” Surprisingly, steering the conversation away from that metaphor led me to explain a night in college when I found myself in the student union, pretending to know what
veni, vidi, vici
meant, and to a longer explanation of why I felt hampered by my family, unable to imagine myself casting any shadow in this world at all, except by their lanterns. “The thing is if I am going to become a Latin teacher I would have to go back to school, in my late twenties, and get a lot of Latin down.” I explained one of my favorite parts of
Treasure Island
,
the bit where Jim Hawkins kisses his mother goodbye, and how, stumbling upon that sequin, I'd realized that, if you talk to your mother every other day, chances are you're not going to
have
an adventure; you have to get away from your cove and open yourself up to strangers. Then, without wanting to go into the whole rationale about why I went to college only fifteen miles from home and after graduation settled in the same town as my parents, I managed to impart a certain amount of personal history and bring the conversation back to the barnacle, by saying my primary goal right now was to peel myself off my ship's bottom—but here I broke off. Lars's mother, when she used to bathe the children, called his sister's butt her “bottom” and her vulva her “front bottom,” a euphemism that appalled me, as did the fact that, even though in
my
family we had struck strictly to clinical terms, my recent intimacy with Lars, who calls his penis his “Johnson,” had allowed his family language to insinuate itself into my consciousness. This is the best way I can explain why the blood rushed to my face as I heard myself saying “
my
ship's bottom
,” and I felt obscurely, but acutely, as though I had just asked Dr. Klug to think about what Lars would call my “nether lips.” (He thinks he's worldly because his vocabulary evolved away from “front bottom.” But the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.)

Dr. Klug nodded. “You do seem anxious. You shredded your gown.”

“Well, it takes an awful lot of energy to give birth to oneself. It's not as though you do one bold thing and then you
are
bold. The thing about adventure is that you have to keep on doing it, day in and day out. I don't know, can it ever be definitively accomplished? I hardly rest, I hardly can!”

Dr. Klug nodded slowly. I had a very good feeling about her; I liked her so much I thought I might come talk to her now and then, the way
J
im Hawkins strikes up a friendship with Dr. Livesey, whose bright black eyes and pleasant manners contrast with “the coltish folk” around him, though in my case, I might better say “doltish.” Dr. Klug replied that she was a doctor of internal medicine, that the best doctor for me to talk to would be a therapist, that there were many qualified therapists in town, that it was kind of me to be concerned but it wasn't a question of her not having the courage to be a therapist, she had always wanted to be an internist, and that I should ask her a different question because she had already told me she wasn't a therapist; and when I said I had no other questions, she left, abruptly, the room.

In the waiting room, the receptionist asked me, with a frankness I found off-putting, how I wanted to pay.

“You have my mom's address. Did the doctor leave me a prescription?”

She hadn't. Had there been a mistake? No. Then there would be no pills? No, the receptionist said, but Dr. Klug would be happy to refer me to a psychiatrist. I didn't want a psychiatrist, I explained, I wanted a sample.

“You guys are supposed to be giving it away like candy. Come on, I bet you have a closet full of starter packages. Please don't pretend Dr. Klug is the only doctor in America not in the drug companies' pocket!”

“I beg your
pardon
?” the receptionist said, as if my pardon were an ugly damp thing and the only possession I had.

“You heard what I said” (after I walked out).

For a few moments I stood quaking in the elevator, unsure of which button to press. Eventually a stoop-shouldered old lady stepped in and pressed “L.” Why were the simplest encounters complicated for me? I had trusted Dr. Klug with my personal history and she had repulsed me like she would have any other patient. It was enough to make a person feel . . . generic. I worked myself up to a high level of disgust as the elevator worked its way down to the low level of the lobby. When the doors chortled open, the sun-struck, airy atrium broke the elevator's gloomy ambience. My elderly companion hustled out before I could even make a show of letting her go first.

 

“I got a doctor's bill for you from Rattner's office,” my mother said. “I hadn't known you were sick.”

“No, I wasn't,” I said carelessly. “I just wanted to go for a check-up.”

“Well, next time, let's talk about it first. You're not on Daddy's insurance. When you get a job—”

“I'm fine now. Actually, I'm exploring alternative kinds of medicine.”

For my mother the phrase “alternative medicine” registered only as some kind of youth-culture slang. “Really? Well, good for you. It's so important to have a hobby.”

Lars hardly understood it either. “Why are you going for a healing?” he said. At this point we no longer spoke openly about our schedules, but I had left a portrait of my new friend, crisply drawn, on a doodle pad, under which I'd written, absent-mindedly, in a fine cursive sprawl,
Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer Beverly Flowers Personal Healer
. Also I had used the page to blot up some spilled coffee, and now, a few days later, Lars was finally getting around to cleaning up the mess.

“She's a remarkable woman, if you have to know.”

I had known this the first time I set foot in her office. Bev Flowers looked to be in her early fifties, and her rooms were elegantly furnished in a grey and green color scheme, as if to suggest the mossy underside of a stone. She greeted me honorably, as if I were a soldier just back from the war, and as we faced each other on matching Indonesian chairs, she was so attentive I thought I might weep. So this is what it was like to be around a spiritual person. I fished
Treasure Island
out of my bag and laid it on my knees.

“Every hour alone with this book helps fortify me. I'm cast away, like Ben Gunn on the island, only I'm in our apartment, and instead of powder and shot . . . ”

“Maybe”—Bev pressed her hand against the book and cocked her head—“Maybe this book has a higher vibration.”

“Exactly! Yes!” My relief was so intense, I wanted to stand up and punch a hole through the rice paper screen that divided the room. Instead I signed up for Beverly Flowers's package deal, six one-hour healing sessions and three long-distance attunements.

“But are you sick?”

“You don't have to be ‘sick' to undergo a healing,” I told Lars. “You just have to be open to a life-source of positive energy.”

“It's big, it's hot, it's back!” Richard shrieked.

Lars threaded his way through the apartment, collecting dirty plates and crumpled-up napkins.

“Shut up!” I hurled an empty tuna can at Richard. It missed widely, but the way he carried on, you would have thought I punctured his crop, and Lars, who never threw anything at Richard, looked ready to reprimand me. Instead he turned around, picked up the can and tossed it into the garbage.

“Stupid bird!” I said as the parrot pecked his dirty feathers.

Lars gave a sort of sigh.

“Idiotic non-stop-talking feather duster!”

“Did you notice he's not talking? You scared him.”

I found this information hard to digest—and weirdly exciting, too. I had spent so much time being afraid of Richard. All these weeks he had seemed stolid and indifferent—capable of antagonizing me, but not capable of being hurt. Was it possible the tables were beginning to turn and he, in fact, was cowed by me? If a bird can be cowed, I mean.

“Who knows?” Lars said. “Why don't you run it by the healer?”

I might have—despite his sarcasm, I truly might have—but the next time I saw Bev Flowers she didn't want to chat.

“Lie down on the table,” Bev said. “I want to check your energy fields right away.”

Fieldwork promised great things. I'd been told how another client smelled burnt tapioca all over the room when Bev checked her energy fields; another woman gasped as an umber aura shuddered down her torso; a third client swore she heard frogs. I hadn't sensed anything yet, but today might be different, I thought as I closed my eyes; given Bev's urgency, today might be the day I . . .

I fell asleep.

When I woke up, the rice paper screen had been moved and Bev was arranging a tea tray. She gestured for me to join her and folded her hands in her lap.

“How am I?” I asked after a moment.

“Your anchor has been dropped,” Bev said. “The boat is going nowhere. I realigned your energy fields but I'm concerned you're not progressing.” She poured the tea, which was deep yellow and smelled of grass. “The book,” she began.

Bev had a strong streak of renunciation. The last session she had pressed me to give up coffee, sugar, and wheat. I pushed back my chair.