Remedies

by Kate Ledger

  Throwing away the wine casks was not as melancholy a task as he’d feared. They could buy more, he reasoned. If Jamie wanted to do the project, maybe they’d invest again. Then he began to consider the effects of the divorce and the future of the space. He did not want to stay in the house. There were too many memories. At the bottom of a kitchen drawer, he dug up the business card of a realtor, a woman named Irma Franken, and he called her. If he was getting divorced, he ought to know what they could get for the house. He’d just intended to get some figures, but she arrived, all business, with a three-ring notebook with a photograph of the house on the cover and, inside, sections that compared neighborhoods and instructed how to improve a property’s curb appeal.

  “Ixnay the offices,” she said as they walked through the clinic space and he explained what he’d been through in the last week. She had a heavy accent that sounded like it might be Russian, dragging through the v’s and the r’s, and for a second he wasn’t entirely sure if she’d spoken in pig Latin or some other language. “You’ll move your practice first. Can’t sell it with the commercial space. Unless we sell to another doctor. But given your circumstances, I’m not sure someone would want, you know what I mean?”

  “Okay,” he said, still stuck on the way she had pronounced shirkumshtances. He was imagining the timing. He’d have to get his license back first, so that he’d have income to open a practice at a new location. Quite possibly, he’d have to take out a large loan. Would he be able to get a loan, he wondered?

  “I mean, let’s be honest, and let’s not take offense,” she said. “Somebody’s going to think twice about picking up where you left off.” He nodded. What’s next, he kept repeating to himself, a new mantra. What’s next?

  Upstairs, she stopped in front of the piano and surveyed the ballroom. “Lovely. A perfect ten. Beautiful, large room. Lots of space.”

  “The piano’s staying,” he insisted, regarding the svelte curves of its body. As long as they’d lived there, he’d felt proud of having it, and having fought to keep together the pieces of a long-lost past. “I told you about the history of the house, right? It belonged to one of the early directors of the Peabody Conservatory. Caruso sang in front of that fireplace. Rachmaninoff played on that very piano at a birthday party that was held right here. The piano was here when we bought the house, and I negotiated long and hard to make sure the piano was part of the deal. It should stay.”

  She walked over to the piano and laid a finger on a key. A sole, melancholy note sounded, and even Simon, who did not have a single musical sensibility, could tell that it was out of tune. “It’s a lovely piano,” she pronounced, “but Rachmaninoff did not play on it.”

  “Oh yes,” he insisted. “It’s archived at the Conservatory.” He knew exactly where he would find documentation. He would dig up proof of that music that had once filled the house, auspicious concerts by musical luminaries who did not need words to speak the reverence they experienced in the world, who could say it all in chords and notes.

  “Not on this one, I hate to inform you. My father built and restored pianos,” she said. “He gave estimates. I grew up knowing all of them. This piano was built in the mid-1940s—you can tell because of the type of wood used during the war. Sergei Rachmaninoff was dead by then.”

  Some time ago, he would have felt indignant. He would have charged to the library—he would have driven her to the library—intending to prove her wrong. But after everything that had happened, he suddenly didn’t doubt that she was right. He would never have anticipated it, but the information imparted by Irma Franken made him laugh. He laughed out loud, his eyes watering as his body quaked. He held his belly as the laughter rattled through him and did not stop laughing, or even try to control the outburst, until he began to wheeze, holding the edge of the piano as he tried to catch his breath. Irma Franken stared at him, looking sorry, then amused, then concerned.

  He knew from his patients—especially those with chronic pain—that a person could only take so much. They’d talked with him frankly about considering suicide, what it felt like to hit the breaking point. After a while, the fight to endure became too much effort. It was not overwhelming at first. The torment became a kind of friend, not necessarily a welcome one, but a companion of sorts, a houseguest with staying power. At first you resisted, but then you adjusted yourself to a compromised existence. You hoped for the return of what you considered normal life. You blamed yourself. You blamed other people. If you were desperate, maybe you prayed. You carried on, but more and more you acknowledged the damage to yourself. And then after time, maybe after a long time, you entertained the treasonous notion of letting the enemy win. What was the point of an existence that was all suffering? You played with the idea of not suffering as if you were holding a coin in your pocket, turning it over and over, knowing, even when you took your finger away, it was still there. The possibility of release became a surprisingly tantalizing prospect. Eventually you might acknowledge that the fight to overcome was as wearying a burden as the pain itself.

  He was not suicidal, he decided. But he was not himself, either. He experienced spurts of optimism and ambition and cleaned out a closet or unloaded a box of old hiking gear. And then he would try to imagine himself in a new space, a new office, surrounded by new people, and across town in a new apartment, some other woman who was his new partner in life (cutting and pasting in his brain, he fit Bev’s face into the newly blank space, then tried out Betsy’s, then Rita’s), and he couldn’t picture any of it. He had to keep reminding himself who he’d been. It had been a week since the office had been closed, and he went down to the clinic. He fed the koi, who appeared unfazed by all the changes, and he stood in exam room A and read the clipping on the wall from Baltimore Magazine where his very own name and the address of his office was listed with the other Top Docs.

  He tried to imagine himself beginning sentences with, “My ex-wife . . .” and he found his eyes smarting. In a week, he had spoken to Emily once. After leaving the hospital, Jamie had gone home to Emily’s new apartment. With a criminal case hanging over Simon’s head, Emily argued that maybe Jamie should begin the school year in Bethesda. Reluctantly, he agreed. She’d bought Jamie a whole closet of clothes, and she hadn’t said a word, letting Jamie select the new outfits. They’d gone to see a shrink together, the two of them.

  “What’s that like?” Simon asked Jamie on the phone. He could barely imagine.

  “Not as bad as you’d think,” she replied. He could see her twisted-up little mouth, the bright eyes under the straight cut of the bangs. “You could come sometime.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “When do you think you’ll know about the charges?” she asked. Emily had obviously filled her in, and he felt a seeping of shame.

  But it was important to be honest. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Seeing patients?” he asked, and then realized the truth: “Not as much as you’d think.”

  He got off the phone quickly. What he remembered was Bev’s comments about the plasticity of relationships. The thought of Bev in her pink pajamas, her wide smiles of reassurance, brought no comfort and instilled a vague queasiness, but the unexpected wisdom she’d offered returned to him. He missed Jamie and he wanted desperately to see her, but he couldn’t bring himself to suggest plans. He couldn’t bring himself to make the drive to Bethesda, even though he thought it might make him feel better. In the week since the raid, he hadn’t eaten much. If he was hungry, he couldn’t feel it, and he only realized how little he had taken in when his pants began to sag, the material at the waistline pinching and gathering when he tightened his belt. The few dishes he’d used were piled in the sink. The mail remained on the floor. He’d left clothing strewn around the house, socks in the living room, his oxford shirt on the floor of the bathroom.

  Rita called the house and left messages. “I’m changing the outgoing message for the office,” she said into th
e machine. “I thought patients should know.” The Ebberlys called. He didn’t answer the phone. Betsy stopped by and left a container of homemade chicken soup in a bag on his doorstep. He would have left the bag sitting there, but he didn’t want her to drive by and think he was unappreciative of her friendship. He carried the bag inside and rested the whole thing in the kitchen sink and left it there. And this too shall pass, he told himself.

  He was partly right. He was not a long-suffering Job. At the end of a week, Tory called to say the U.S. Attorney’s office was dropping the investigation altogether. “No criminal charges,” he crowed into the phone. “They didn’t have a good case with that MacAllister guy. Too many question marks. They’ve got bigger fish to fry, is my guess. Anyway, it’s the best scenario we could’ve hoped for. Now we just have to work on the appeal for the Board, get your license reinstated and get you back in business.”

  He appreciated Tory’s energy, but he could not match it, and he told Tory he’d call later to schedule a meeting. He looked around the house where nothing seemed familiar, and it occurred to him for the first time that he was not ready for an appeal. The phone rang again. He could see that it was the Ebberlys again, and he listened as the machine picked up the call.

  “It’s us,” Betsy’s voice entered the room. “We wanted to remind you about breaking the fast tomorrow. Sundown. Our house. Don’t bring anything. Just yourself. Might be good for you to get out.”

  For a moment, he wondered if maybe they were scheming. They’d been unusually persistent. Maybe they had invited Emily, too, with the intent of bringing them together again. But Emily didn’t care for religious events, and the chances of her attending a post-Yom Kippur event with its sanctimonious overtones, the guests buzzing with the tremors of having gone holy with noneating and repetitive prayer, were next to zero. The Ebberlys were just looking out for him because he had not left the house in a week or returned calls and because they were hopelessly kind. There was no one he wanted to see, and it was clear from the way the Groves had disappeared that his welcome was not assured. What would they do if they saw him? Would they stop to talk? He walked to the front door and opened it, looking down the block in the direction of their house.

  The colors of the day had begun to shift and wane. Simon stood in the doorway, waiting for something, not quite sure what. He turned to go back inside and was suddenly overcome by the quiet of the house. It hummed. It suffocated. For the first time, he thought he could not be alone. He needed help getting through this. He looked at the phone and thought of Tory, eager to set a date and move ahead. He considered dialing Bev in Salt Lake City, just to hear her voice. He thought of the Ebberlys, and he wanted suddenly just to be near them. He wanted to be with people who cared about him. Grabbing his gray wool coat from the hall closet, he left the house. It was better to be outside, he realized as he gulped in lungfuls of fall air, invigorating to have a destination.

  Not until he was in the car, well on the way to the temple they attended, Beth Shalom, did he look down at the coat. It was the one with a deep ink stain, like a bullet hole, over the left breast pocket where he’d once forgotten a capless Bic. Emily had urged him to get rid of the coat, throw it away or donate it to one of the associations that were always calling, asking for bags to be set curbside for pickup, but he’d held on to it, arguing that he might be able to locate a solvent for the ink. He’d called several pen manufacturers, dry cleaning businesses, and even tried to reach a columnist at Good Housekeeping (that was Rita’s suggestion) who gave tips on stain removal. Then he’d gotten the idea that it might be possible to cut the stain out with scissors and darn the material, just like a sock, and he bought thread and set aside a surgical needle and was waiting for a day when he had enough time to focus on it. He’d managed to pursue none of the options, much to Emily’s continued annoyance. “Clothes are clothes,” he’d retorted when she’d badgered. Though he’d known she was right, he’d continued to defend the coat. As if it deserved to be salvaged. “Entropy dictates that eventually you’ll have stains.” Remembering that conversation embarrassed him. Poetic justice had been served: His wife had left and he remained with a bullet-sized stain over the heart.

  Shyly touring the packed lot at Beth Shalom, he realized he didn’t have tickets for services. Did God forgive you for sneaking in on Yom Kippur? he wondered. Maybe, if your need to be there was great. A benevolent God would know that Simon had nowhere else in the world to be. He was wanted by no one, needed by no one. He parked on the street and trotted through the cool evening air toward the temple.

  As he stepped inside, he could hear that the service had begun. The ushers were nowhere in sight, and no one was standing watch at the door. Inside, he helped himself to a yarmulke from a box in the hallway and entered the sanctuary, still trying to locate the one angle at which the black silk would cup his head without sliding. Only a few solo seats remained in the back of the auditorium. Several rows ahead, he could see the Ebberlys and two of their children turning pages in their prayer books. Their youngest had come home from college for the holiday, and he wondered, suddenly, what Jamie was doing. She’d roll her eyes if he were to tell her that, with nothing to do, he’d wound up at Kol Nidre services. Him! He was pathetic. He didn’t read Hebrew, he only knew a few of the prayers by humming along. Reaching for a prayer book, heavy and solid as a brick, he held it in his lap without opening it.

  The service of Kol Nidre was the evening service that led into the holy day of Yom Kippur. He’d attended years ago with Emily, but only because a friend of theirs was going. He remembered that they’d discussed it afterward as if it were a cultural event where the focus was the music, not the day of the year in which the Book of Life was opened before it was summarily sealed. Parts of Kol Nidre echoed the Yom Kippur service, but its purpose was different, the cantor was explaining as Simon leaned back in the seat. Kol Nidre offered the annulment of the year’s vows between people and God, or between the individual and one’s sense of the holy. “In other words, tonight the formula we recite is restricted to those vows which concern only the relation of the individual to his conscience or to his Heavenly Judge. For those vows we’ve made in the last year, all bets are off,” explained the cantor, who was young with Coke-bottle glasses. “Tonight we ask for forgiveness for forsaking God.”

  “We now stand,” said the cantor, so Simon rose along with the people seated around him. He gazed up at the stained glass towering above the Ark where the Torah scrolls were kept, joyous points of light catching the dipping sun. There were reasons that sanctuaries of mankind were great and lofty, and he felt eased by the sense of being small and insignificant. He’d never been good at praying, in any language. He was easily distracted by the sights around him. His mind strayed to his patients, his little concerns, return e-mails, the phone calls he needed to make, and he was never able to get into a holier state. He questioned the prayers as he read them, and he said “God,” because the prayer on the page said “God,” but in his mind supplied skeptically, Or whatever higher power that we imagine we need, because he didn’t believe rationally in God. Two of the congregants, one of whom he recognized from the crowd that attended the opera, opened the Ark and lifted out the Torah scroll in its velvet sheath. They raised it and began the procession around and down the aisles of the congregation.

  He raised a hand in a small wave at the Ebberlys. Betsy returned the greeting with a smile, nudging Ted, who turned around and nodded. The service of Kol Nidre asked forgiveness and annulled the vows between humans and the divine. What’s next? he thought as the procession edged around the synagogue. He would call Tory and schedule a meeting. He’d get back on track. He’d appeal to the Board. But did he want that? The congregants took their seats and a woman with a pillbox-shaped yarmulke stepped to the center of the stage. Her voice lifted and wound in a melancholy, ancient melody that throbbed like a pulse. He read along in English as she asked on behalf of all of them sitting there, as if they all were seated in co
urt, for a pardon.

  He looked around, the people seated in front of him and on his sides. What sins could these people possibly have wrought? They’d taken God’s name in vain when the garbage bag ripped on the haul down the driveway? Or they’d promised to be kinder human beings? The woman on his right had a protruding chin and slightly bulging eyes that looked like she had a thyroid disorder. The man on his left sat with a thumb-sucking kindergarten-aged child on his lap. Was he, Simon, so arrogant that he imagined his own transgressions were worse than any perpetrations of the people sitting around him? But they were. He was certain of it. He could chant along with them, but his circumstances were so singular, only he could know. And what could he make of all of it? He felt like he held pieces of a torn map that didn’t come together cleanly at the edges. The information he felt he needed was exactly at the tear.

  One detail he had never told Emily was that he had visited the cemetery after Caleb died. He’d gone alone. The weather had not been pleasant, the sky measureless and dull as the inside of a jar. The wind whipped at him, and he first realized he was underdressed for the cold and then thought he was deserving of the discomfort. As he walked to the gravesite from the car, the chill began to punish. The weather was forbidding, keeping other visitors from walking the paths or tending the grounds, and he was relieved not to encounter anyone. It took time to find the site, and he grew anxious as he stepped along the plots, looking for the little gray stone. But there it was. The rectangle in the ground bore only his son’s name, Caleb Joseph Bear, and the digits of the year, no month, no day, and Simon was relieved they’d decided to leave the information off, because reading the brevity of that short lifespan would have been too painful.