The Good Neighbor

by William Kowalski

  This was Coltrane and Francie, in a nutshell, on the day they waited in the driveway of the house for the real estate agent, who was late; and their entire futures hung balanced, like a triangle standing on its apex, ready to topple one way or the other.

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  Francie and Colt had met almost ten years earlier, during Francie’s big post-graduate fling in New York. That trip was only supposed to last most of the summer, nine sultry weeks of big-city indepen dence before heading back home to earn a master ’s degree in Eng lish literature or poetry, or maybe even a doctorate; but somehow it had turned into almost a decade of being someone’s wife, in a city that still felt strange. She still wasn’t sure how it had hap pened, either. That is, she knew the facts of it, but not the mean ing behind it—if there was any meaning to be found.

  The facts were that through the influence of one of her profes sors, she had been “awarded” an unpaid internship at the Metro politan Museum of Art, which meant that she’d been granted the privilege of standing stock still every day amid the glassy-eyed fowl and plump nudes of the Renaissance painting exhibit, her feet screaming, her spirit slipping further each day into darkness and despair. And then Colt had come and rescued her. She’d no ticed him because he was tall, and she’d fallen in love with him be cause he knew how to take charge. What did she know? In many of the novels she’d read, people got married for far less than that. Yet she had not seen herself as an urban housewife, which was what she had become, and it was at moments like this, when the triangle was about to topple, that she looked back at the preceding years and shook her head.

  Francie had graduated from the University of Indianapolis in

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  June of 1991, putting an end to four years of blissful extended in fancy, a period she thought of now as her Golden Age. She had never left home before. Even while at school, she continued to live with her family, ostensibly because it was cheaper but really be cause she was afraid to leave. And also, there was Michael, her baby brother—not really a baby, but five years her junior, whom all the kids picked on and who needed her protection and comfort. When he was ten, Michael had developed a penchant for getting beaten up. He seemed to attract bullies like a light attracts moths, and Francie was the only one he could complain to; their father would just whap him on the back of the head and tell him to be a man, their mother would only worry ineffectually, the teachers didn’t care. What would Mikey do if he couldn’t crawl into Francie’s bed every night after the lights were out, whimpering the litany of wrongs committed against him that day?

  “When are you going to come to school and beat them all up for me?” Michael would ask, his wet face buried in her hair. “Why don’t you help me?”

  But the very idea of her beating anyone up was ridiculous. Poets did not behave in such a fashion. All she could do was comfort him with dreams.

  “When we grow up, we’ll live in a house together,” she promised him. “Just you and me. And no one will be allowed in, and we’ll never have to leave it.”

  “Can we have armed guards? And dogs?” “Yes.”

  “Where will it be?”

  “In the country somewhere,” Francie would say. “Somewhere no one can find us.”

  “That sounds really good,” said the young Michael, and then he was able to fall asleep, snoring, choking occasionally on his sister ’s hair.

  This conversation had been repeated a hundred times, maybe a thousand. But Michael’s need of her notwithstanding, Francie had

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  often lingered on campus in the evenings, in rapt adoration at the proverbial knee of some brilliant professor or enlightened graduate student, or in the dim watering holes that other literary hopefuls frequented, watching them imbibe to excess. She herself did not drink. Or—especially in her last two years—she spent her time in the library, where she scribbled in one of the dozens of spiral- bound notebooks she filled with musings, verses, and occasional paragraphs of unwieldy prose.

  But fiction in general she found too strenuous and unlovely. If po etry was like sculpting small statues in clay, then fiction was pour ing cement. She would leave such heavy work to coarser types. Besides, all the budding novelists she had met in school were wild, drunken narcissists who either tried (and failed) to lay her, or looked down their noses at her because she could take up to a week to write four whole lines, while they churned out pages in a single day.

  It was really the common, free-form stanza that enthralled Francie most. She was reminded of butterflies; she saw herself in a garden, surrounded by fluttering, diaphanous phrases that had emerged from her ears and mouth. These were her ideas, and they were perfect. The greatest triumph of her life came in her senior year, just before her twenty-first birthday, when a small press in Chicago agreed to publish a collection of her poems in the form of a chapbook—not quite a hardcover, but not really a paperback, ei ther. It was more like construction paper, actually, but at least it had her picture on the back. “Achingly beautiful,” the press’s pub lisher had called her work; and also “filled with the sweetness of surrender.” The chapbook was entitled Poems from My Sinister Hand, which was not a confession of secret crimes but merely a clever Latin reference to the fact that Francie was left-handed.

  This was the sort of thing that young poets dreamed of, and old ones too, and Francie suddenly had the feeling that her life was moving along according to some sort of plan that was better than anything she could have come up with herself. She became fa mous, within the tiny, rarefied sphere that was her world. Fresh

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  men sat at her knee in the same dim watering holes, hoping for some pearl of wisdom to fall from her lips. The drunken novelists renewed their maddened efforts to lay her, and failed again. One of her professors did succeed in seducing her, however, and thus her surrender was made even more sweet: one Tuesday evening in spring, Francie McDermott lost her virginity to a balding, forty- five-year-old classics professor who smelled of wool and pipe to bacco, and who called her “my dear ” as though it was the most passionate phrase he could think of. The pretext of their tryst was a romantic dinner at his place, but she was home in time to watch Leno with her father that night. It was all rather quick, really, maybe a little too quick, but then again, life had been moving faster of late. The Chicago press printed five hundred copies of her chapbook, giving her twenty-five in payment. And, to make the surrendering even sweeter, the school literary magazine published six poems from her book and offered her a small cash award— which she astonished everyone by declining. Publication she could accept, but it was better, she believed, to go unpaid, for fame and money were the two great enemies of the creative mind.

  Of course, Francie made this gesture with the expectation that she was actually about to embark on the greatest literary career of the twentieth century. As the divinely ordained love-child of Dickinson, Plath, and Leonard Cohen, it had simply never oc curred to her that she might never again be published anywhere, by anybody. She’d forgotten that the world was not a university campus, and had little use for types like her. The real world had Jerry Springer and drive-in wedding chapels and crack cocaine in it, and no one knew—or cared—that you were Francine McDer mott, poetess, and that the ichor of two American genius-women and a brilliant Canadian Jew filled the hollows of your bones. You were only a customer, and that was America. No one anywhere in the entire damned country was reading poetry, it seemed, except in university classrooms. To her knowledge, not one copy of Poems from My Sinister Hand had ever been sold.

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  A copy of it still sat in a bookstore in Manhattan, run by her friend Walter, who had graciously given her five inches of counter space and promised that he would never move it. Walter believed in poetry the way other people believed in religion. If ever she saw it was gone, he told her, she would know that it had been sold.

  But it had been a long time since she’d been able to bri
ng herself to go to Walter ’s bookstore and see if, in fact, Poems from My Sinis ter Hand was still there.

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  After graduation, Francie decided to have a carefully planned yet wild adventure in New York City, birthplace of a hundred famous poets and a million unknown ones. Her parents approved—re lieved, perhaps, that she was finally showing some inclination to leave home. The classics professor who stole her maidenhead wrote a letter to a friend at the Met, asking if he could make room for her somewhere. The friend wrote back and said that he could. Her friends in the literature and art departments back home all drooled with jealousy. They were sure she was going to get dis covered and become famous. How this was to happen, nobody knew; poets were not normally “discovered,” like Lana Turner sit ting at the soda fountain. But sometimes these things happened anyway. And everyone was sure it was going to happen to Fran cie, simply because she was leaving Indianapolis and going to New York. At the very least, they all believed, she could now be assured of dying in glorious obscurity. That in itself was more than any of them could hope for. It was beautiful to be obscure in New York, but to be obscure in Indianapolis was the normal state of affairs.

  Instead of getting discovered, she cried herself to sleep every night in the furnished apartment her father had sublet for her in Midtown. By the time she did manage to drift off, around four A.M., she’d usually cried so hard and for so long that she was dehy

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  drated, and her ribs were sore from sobbing. She hadn’t the faintest idea what she was upset about. She thought it was probably homesickness, but her mother, Penelope, told her over the phone that people didn’t get that homesick. She probably had something else wrong with her, Penelope said. Possibly something serious.

  Francie agreed. She’d begun work at the museum on a Monday, and by that Friday she’d already lost the urge to go on. She just lay in bed all day in a strange person’s apartment, lacking even the will to shower. She’d been in New York less than one hundred fifty hours, and already all she wanted was to die.

  Her parents flew in from Indianapolis and tried to figure her out. Her father was stymied, but Penelope thought she had a pretty good idea what was going on. It was a hereditary illness, one that had mercifully skipped over Penelope herself. Her own mother, Francie’s grandmother Minnie, had acted like this some times. They called it the Galloping Sobs, because it seemed to come up on you out of nowhere and run you into the ground. When a fit of the Sobs came over Minnie, everyone knew to be ex tra quiet and extra nice for as long as it took it to go away. Some times it took days. Later, it got to be weeks. When this kind of thing happened over and over, though, everyone stopped caring; Penelope remembered this cruel fact all too well. You went back to acting like yourself, being a normal kid and doing normal kid things, and that was when Minnie really broke down. The slight est noise was enough to make her crazy. When Minnie had the Sobs, even her own children were her mortal enemies.

  But that, Penelope knew, was before the great pharmaceutical corporations of America had begun to turn their attention toward what had been referred to in a general way as “hysteria,” that pe culiarly feminine disease that once seemed to doctors to originate in the womb and spread, like a virus, into the brain. Penelope did not suffer from the Sobs herself, thank God. But she knew the signs, and she would do anything in her power to spare her only daughter the hell that had been her mother ’s life. She would get

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  her some pills. Pills could fix just about anything these days, the Sobs included.

  “I just want to go home,” Francie had said.

  “You’re not going home,” said Penelope. “You’re going to lick this thing.”

  “I don’t want to lick it,” said Francie. She thought of how odd that phrase was, “to lick it.”She imagined herself holding It up to her mouth, whatever It was, and running her tongue over It. It would be a slimy black thing, like a leech. The image made her gag. At this point she hadn’t showered in a week. Her face shone and her hair was limp with grease. She lay on her side and let one arm trail over the edge of the bed.

  Her father, who up till now had been pacing ineffectually be tween the front door and back wall of this tiny apartment, which was smaller than his own dining room, said, “You’d goddam well better lick it. I didn’t spend three thousand of my hard-earned dol lars on this shoebox just so you could lay around in bed all day. Who cares if you’re depressed? Get up and get to work. There’s time enough to get emotional later. You can’t just give up on life every time you realize things in the world aren’t perfect.”

  “Stewart,” said Penelope, “for goodness’ sake, shut up.”

  “No, I won’t. I’ll have my say,” said Stewart. “This is the same kind of act your mother used to pull, Penny. Remember?”

  “Remember? How could I forget?” said Penelope. “It’s not an act!” Francie wailed. “I want to die!”

  “All right,” said Penelope. “If you want to die, there’s nothing anyone else can do about it. You’re the only one who can make that decision. But as long as I’m alive, I’m not going to sit idly by while you let yourself waste away into nothing. I’ve made an ap pointment this afternoon with a very good doctor, and you’re go ing to go see him. After that, if you still want to die, go right ahead. Just let me do this one last thing for you, so I can ease my conscience after you’re buried.”

  “What kind of doctor?” Stewart asked.

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  “A psychiatrist,” said Penelope.

  Stewart muttered darkly to himself, but said nothing. He was a successful real estate broker who felt out of place in New York. The sheer size of the buildings here had put him in a bad mood the minute he stepped off the plane, because they reminded him that there were so many men in the world whose success dwarfed his. Right now, he was absorbed by the notion that all the money he’d amassed over his lifetime would disappear in less than five years if, for some bizarre and unpredictable reason, he should be forced to move to this city and live on his savings. Stewart enjoyed tortur ing himself sometimes with thoughts of this nature. Five years, and then he’d be on the street. The thought was so horrifying that he felt he might be getting depressed himself. Think of it! All those years of work down the drain. His money was already being squandered in a shameless fashion by this daughter of his, who, all right, let’s admit it, really did have something wrong with her up stairs, had always been too sensitive, cried at everything, never showed much in the way of gumption or ambition, but then you couldn’t blame her for that—she was a female. Girls were impos sible. Lord above, you could go crazy trying to understand them.

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  The long and short of it was that Francie agreed to go to the psy chiatrist, whose diagnosis was prompt: she was manic-depressive, with bipolar aspects. The psychiatrist was a slight man, and in spite of her natural fear of doctors, Francie liked him. He was wise, kind and small, somewhat like Yoda, though instead of green he was a soft, pale pink. The doctor postulated gently that the mania part of her illness would normally take over during times of great excitement, such as the weeks leading up to the move to New York. Did this sound familiar to her? Indeed, Francie remembered that period as the best part of her Golden Age, when everything had seemed rosy and nothing could possibly go wrong. Then came

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  the depression, after all the excitement had died down, after the move was over, and she was on her own in a huge city where she knew absolutely no one, and where she sensed, with the instinct common to all mammals, that she was in great danger. She knew that if she were to slip and fall into the cogs of the great machine that was New York, she would be chewed up and spit out in an in stant. She had become obsessed with the fear of tripping. If she tripped just once, say on the stairs as she was coming out of the subway, the hordes marching along behind would flatten her un der their heels with no more mercy than Hitler ’s brownshirts. S
he didn’t think she was crazy for feeling this way. She thought it more likely that she was the only one who understood how bad things really were.

  That was when she first heard the magic word that was going to change her life: Benedor. Other magic words in the history of the world had never had any effect on her: “open sesame,” “abra cadabra,” “abraxas,” “please,” “I love you.” But times had changed. The old alchemical incantations had been replaced by the modern buzzwords of mental chemistry. And weren’t the pills a nice color? her mother asked. Francie agreed, because it was true. After only a few days on Benedor, everything was a nice color. The sky was a little bluer, the buildings not quite so stark and gray. Within a month, the kind, wise, small doctor told her her system would be thoroughly permeated by the drug, and everything would be just fine. Until then, she should be prepared for a few rocky mo ments; nothing was immediate. And she should keep coming to see him as long as she was in the city, so he could check up on her. “But it’s up to you,” the doctor told her, “whether you live or

  die. No one can tell you what to do. You have to tell yourself.” This was just what her mother had said, of course, and so Fran

  cie knew it was true; one or the other of them might be lying to her, but not both. She told herself once more to go to work, and this time it worked. Her mother went with her and had a private chat with the head of her department, behind closed doors, while

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