Trouble (28 page)

“Oh, our little baby,” said Suzie finally, crooning.

Rafael’s face was crumpled.

“What a little girl she was,” said Suzie into his shoulder. “Her temper, remember? Three feet tall and yelling at me like an overseer!”

He laughed through his weeping.

“She would give her toys away,” she told him. “Her new doll! She loved it, but she gave it to that horrible girl down the street. She said, ‘But Ma, she wants it more than I do.’ The doll she had begged to have for months.”

Suzie seemed to be holding Rafael up; he leaned on her while she chattered at him. I could see what had attracted them to each other all those years ago and also what had driven them apart not long after Raquel was born. I glanced over at Maryann to see whether she was jealous or pissed off, but her expression held nothing but sympathetic sadness.

“She was always singing from the time she could sit up,” Suzie was saying. “I thought she had a funny voice when she was little. She sounded like sandpaper. ‘Little Husky,’ I would call her; then she would bark at me.”

As if she had suddenly remembered where they were, Suzie released Rafael abruptly and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“And here I haven’t even offered your wife a drink,” she said, extending her hand to Maryann. “You must be Maryann. Hello, I’m Suzie Weinstein, and these are Raquel’s best friends. Indrani, Josie, and Josie’s daughter, Wendy.”

“I’m so sorry, Suzie,” said Maryann. “Hello, Josie, I spoke to you on the phone, didn’t I. Was that only yesterday?”

“The funeral is tomorrow?” Rafael asked Suzie.

“Yes,” said Suzie. “We’ll meet at the funeral home at eleven for the service and then go out to the cemetery for the burial, and then come back here tomorrow night for the second shiva. The place is called Cedar Park, it’s in Paramus. That’s where my whole family is—my grandparents, my parents, my aunts, and a few cousins. I hope it’s all right that she’s going there, Rafe. I didn’t even think to ask you.”

Rafael nodded at her. “It’s okay,” he said. “Thanks for making all the arrangements. I couldn’t do anything yesterday. Maryann got us onto the airplane this morning.”

“Raquel’s on an airplane now herself,” said Suzie. “She’s arriving tonight.”

All six of us were struck all at once with mass weeping. We just stood there silently for a moment.

Then Maryann lifted her glass of wine and said, “To Raquel.” We hit our glasses together vehemently, one after another, and then we all drank.

Much later that night, Wendy and I got into a cab in front of Suzie’s building and directed the driver back to Chelsea. Wendy leaned against me, her head on my shoulder.

“I’m so sad,” she said.

“Me, too,” I replied.

“Are you moving out right away?”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe I’ll delay it for a while.”

“I would love that. It’s too scary right now for me to think about you moving out right away.”

“Me, too.”

“But you have to leave, Mom. You can’t change your mind. I command you.”

We both laughed. A moment later, she fell asleep in the crook of my arm. I looked out the window as the cab jounced and bounced through the late-night streets. A Raquel-size hole burned black and empty in my mind. Someday, maybe, I would have the wherewithal to open the sluice that held back high violent floodwaters of guilt and anger: I had left Raquel for a night to go to Felipe’s to do what I wanted to do, but she had told me to go, she had insisted, and she had promised me that she would be all right. I wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t promised. But still, I had abandoned her when she needed saving. She had broken her promise that she wouldn’t kill herself while I was gone. We had let each other down in two of the worst-possible ways friends can.

But maybe that wasn’t the way it had happened. Maybe what had really happened, all moralizing and regrets aside, was that out of all the people who knew and loved her, Raquel had chosen me to be with her at the end. And despite having several very good reasons not to go, I had gone when she asked me and had been with her when she needed me most in exactly the way she required me to be. I had done all I could, and she was free.

Or maybe both things were true: Maybe she and I had failed each other by allowing each other the freedom to be ourselves, and maybe that was the inevitable consequence of true friendship.

Whatever. No matter how I looked at it, she was gone.

The cab pulled up in front of our building. I paid the driver, woke Wendy, and helped her up the stairs.

 
n a strangely warm day in late March, Corinne, the surgeon who had been having a torrid affair with her colleague, came into my office. “It’s time for me to end therapy,” she said. “I’ve decided that this is our last session.”

This was very like Corinne, to announce her termination of therapy as an instant fait accompli, but as far as I was concerned, she was well within her rights to do so.

“Congratulations,” I said. “We’ve done a lot of good work together over the past two years.”

“I ended the affair this week,” she said. She looked pale, resolute, and unhappy.

“What did you—”

But she was having no interruptions. “I can’t even be friends with him,” she said. “I have to go cold turkey. We’ll pass each other in the hallways, we’ll sit in the occasional meeting to gether, and we’ll probably have to consult on patients every now and then, but other than professionally, I’m through with him.” She started to cry, deep, heaving sobs that racked her.

I said, “Good for you.”

“I am going to miss him so much,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“But I have to do this.” She stopped crying as quickly as she had started. “I’m back in my marriage. I’ve been neglecting my life at home for months. My kids need me. My husband is an immature jerk, but he’s the guy I married. I’m staying put and making the best of things.”

“Are you sure you’re ready to finish therapy, Corinne? Seems to me you might need a few more sessions just to work through this.”

“No,” she said. “I have worked it through. There’s no more to say. I think I needed to go through this whole thing. That affair was like a malignant tumor growing in a healthy body. It diverted the blood supply. So I’ve cut it out. End of procedure.”

“I see,” I said. “What about post-op follow-up?”

“Nope,” she said. “Thank you for everything, Josie. I’m all right now.”

At the end of the session, she wrote me a check, shook my hand, and walked out of my life. I did not expect to see her again. I was sorry about this; I had learned a lot from her, had worked well with her, and now our paths had diverged, probably forever.

The next morning, I flew back down to Mexico City for a long weekend. I left my now-furnished, cozy, bright new apartment perfectly clean. Before I shut the door behind me, I glanced at the wolverine and wildcat masks on the wall above my new couch, and then I locked the door, pocketed my keys, and carried my wheeled bag down to the street.

In the cab to the airport, the biggest hit single from Raquel’s new album came on the radio, a hard-driving, gut-wrenching ballad called “The Fall.”

“Turn it up, please,” I said to the driver, leaning forward. Without a word, he twisted the volume knob, and her voice filled the cab. Her album had come out a month before; it had debuted at number two on the
Billboard
chart, and the following week, it had gone up to number one, where it still was. She was now, of course, far more famous after her death than she had ever been in her life; that was the way it went. That was the deal.

I rolled down my window and sang along while the warm wind streamed in: “There wasn’t any more time/There wasn’t any more space/There wasn’t any more breath/You came and got it all/You came and took it all/You came and stole it.” I was almost shouting the words through the lump in my throat, not caring whether it bugged the driver. Chuy’s work was all over this album; he sang backup harmonies and contributed guitar parts. He had brought in a Mexican mariachi virtuoso, an old friend of both his and Raquel’s, to play on a few songs, including “The Fall;” now the searing, clean, impassioned sound of his trumpet cut through the noise of traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway and made me lean back against the seat and close my eyes with painful happiness.

On the plane, I finally read the ending of
A Passage to India
. I had not been able to bring myself to open it since Raquel’s note had fallen out of it, but this seemed like a fitting time and place to finish rereading it. I found myself completely riveted by the story of the two Englishwomen in India, the friendship between the Englishman and the Indian, and the question of what had really happened in the dark and mysterious Marabar Caves, which was never answered. I finished the book just before the plane began its descent; it was even better than I had remembered from the first three times I had read it.

On the last page, at the bottom, Raquel had written, “Here I go, into the Marabar Caves.”

I felt a stab in my solar plexus. “Raquel,” I muttered to her, wherever she was.

The plane came down into the now-familiar yellow haze of soupy air. I walked through the airport, remembering Raquel’s instructions: “Unleash your inner Catholic. Change money at an ATM. Use the taxi stand on the left.”

But this time, I didn’t need a taxi. David and Felipe had said they would come to get me, and there they were, waiting for me as I emerged from customs. Felipe took my suitcase in one hand and my whole body in the other, and we followed David out to the parking area, piled into his little car, and went trundling off to Roma.

About the Author

Kate Christensen
is also the author of the novels
In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure’s Lament
, and
The Great Man
, winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

Doubleday

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Kate Christensen

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of
The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY
and the DD colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Christensen, Kate, 1962-
Trouble : a novel / By Kate Christensen. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction.
3. Mexico City (Mexico)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H716T76 2009
813′.54—dc22
2008031416

eISBN: 978-0-385-53038-5

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