Warm lemon-infused green tea, a douse right in the face, was enough to stun the man, make him stumble a few steps backward, so that small Twiz and I could push him down to the ground. He was unhurt but looked very confused. I heard roars of approval, more demonstrators clustered around him. I backed away and found myself eye to eye with my son. “Mom?” he said, but I could hardly hear him. The commotion roared on around us.
I threw my arms around him and whispered in his ear. “Death to complacency,” I said. “And don’t be late for dinner.”
I squeezed him tightly then left him there with his comrades, who flowed back toward the sidewalk, marching, up the slope toward the plaza and the park. I headed in the other direction, toward home. No need for shiatsu now. I felt unknotted and airy enough to float away.
ABBY, MAY 8, 2015
Benjamin found a six-toed cat prowling around the trash cans. It was as skinny as a cardboard cutout of a cat, almost, and approximately the same color, a flat dun brown. “He meows like, ‘Wowza,’” Ben said, and he declared that this scrap of fuzz would be named Wowza and would live in the backyard in a super cat palace Ben would build by hand using planks and bits of old carpet. “He can be our baby,” said Gianna.
Benjamin, my light heart, my high-arcing wavelength, the treble note in our family, his easy grace as he bounded down the stairs three at a time, rapping under his breath. And Gianna, his very first girlfriend, who sometimes stayed for dinner. When I arrived home this evening, the happy couple were chopping veggies for the salads that were more or less the only thing she would eat, dressed with a coconut oil she carried in a small bottle in her purse. She had certainly been spending more and more time at the house. Per Gianna, she would otherwise be home alone, eating pickings from a deli buffet. Her single parent was an asexual workaholic, she informed me matter-of-factly. “She works on Wall Street,” Gianna said, while turning a pile of baby carrots into fat circlets. “Big bucks, long hours, and she tells me she can be around or she can leave me a big pile of money for my trust fund, and I said, trust fund, please.”
Over at the stove, Dennis sautéed chicken in a pan. I wondered that he’d arrived home before me. He shot me a look I couldn’t really interpret—but it was unmistakably out of the ordinary. “Ben, would you mind turning this chicken. I’ve got to talk to Mom.” Dennis handed him the tongs, then guided me upstairs to our bedroom and shut the door.
I hadn’t seen the detective since our afternoon tryst. I hadn’t allowed myself. We had gone quiet again, for two weeks now. I had managed to evade guilt for a while, but now it followed me, a poisoned cloud, wafting around me. I could barely breathe. Surely Dennis could see it.
“It’s over,” he said.
My blood stopped in my veins. “Dennis.”
“I’m fired.” He sank onto the bed.
Half my brain understood instantly what he was talking about—it wasn’t what I’d feared—but the other half refused to process his words. I responded with a dumb shake of my head.
“Abby, they called security. These fucking linebackers in polyester suits showed up with empty boxes, and they watched everything I packed.”
He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face with his hands. I moved to comfort him, an automatic thing, my arm around his shoulders, murmuring that it would be okay. But in my head I heard breakers, waves of dread crashing.
“Hey, we’ll figure it out,” I said, stroking his back.
He looked up at me. “You know, I’m thinking of maybe going back to the studio for a while. Instead of looking for another job right away. We could scrape by on your check, and the job market stinks now anyway.”
“You said that sounded like death—scraping by. Didn’t you say that?” I walked over to the window. “But if that’s what you want to do. I can understand that. Totally.”
“I know we’ll figure it out.” He sidled up behind me, and now he rubbed my shoulders for a while. Then he kissed me with real warmth and then returned downstairs to finish up his chicken.
At dinner, the conversation bubbled around me. I thought about the money we paid out at that auction—three-fourths of our pitiable savings account. Our rainy-day money. Now our rainy day had arrived. That cash would be sorely missed.
That night, late, sleepless, I returned to the bedroom window. A film of shivery moonlight coated the rainwater-filled kiddie pool in the backyard below. A disc of light wavering like the threshold to another dimension. I could almost imagine diving out the window, plunging through this lustrous wormhole. I’d be back there with her. At the beginning of it all.
Once again, the thought arrived: What outcome would I change, if I could change any outcome at all?
Turning from the window, my glance drifted over Dennis, now just an abstract form, a creation of shadow and light. His face was turned away from me, his head fallen into the darkness behind the ridgeline of a pillow. He didn’t stir. He hardly seemed to breathe.
I pulled my robe from its hook behind the door and slipped it on. I peeked in on the boys. Benjamin slept with one arm resting over his heart, as if saying a pledge of allegiance to the god of his dreams. Pete’s room was flooded with the strange moonglow. The wind must be picking up again outside. The shadows cast by the tree in our neighbor’s yard washed back and forth over the bed and my sleeping child, like black sea grass. Above him, the window overlooked the street.
And there is A. Again in the shining shoes. A short black dress. Standing across the street, mostly in the shadow of a leafy ginkgo, her face a pale white smudge, a small twin of the moon. I can’t see her eyes, but I feel them on me.
I back away, tripping over something, a plastic bottle that falls and spills. A sharp strong odor—rubbing alcohol?—fills the room. Pete sits up.
“What the hell, Mom?” he stutters.
I gather some bathroom towels, and together we mop it up. He swears the bottle of isopropyl alcohol is for a chemistry project. He even shows me the handout from Mr. Littrell on chromatography—“The separation of a mixture by passing it in a solution or suspension or as a vapor.” I keep checking the window. I see only the swaying silhouettes of the trees.
When the mess is swabbed up, the house settles again. But I am still awake. Downstairs, I dig into my big work tote. There, in the nethermost regions where I’d buried it in an attempt to forget its incitements, a crumpled piece of coarse-tooth paper. A ragged torn edge, the fine sketch of his hands. And in my terribly familiar half-cursive scrawl: Dr. Merle, 212 692 7545.
ABBY, MAY 11, 2015
“I am being haunted by myself.” There, I’d said it out loud.
“Tell me more, Abigail.”
Classical music trilled from an old clock radio. Wasn’t that tune faintly familiar?
“I am seeing myself all over town,” I said.
Piano, flute, violin, each emoting in turn, diligently. Clearly the music was meant to screen out the comings and goings at Pam’s Kickin’ Kuts, which shared this second-floor space above a cell phone store on upper Broadway. Still, I could hear the distant roar of blow-dryers and the thump of dance beats. Dr. Merle Unzicker had come down in the world, a bit, it seemed. Hadn’t she, once upon a time, practiced in an airy prewar apartment high above the Hudson, with a row of arched windows and a big ficus tree?
Yes, she had. Now she was here above the cell phone store with a plastic fern and a dish of dusty peppermints.
“Do you remember me?” I asked her when I’d phoned for a first consultation. “I came to you, at twenty-one or -two. New in the city? A bit lost, a little wild?”
“Dear, I’m sorry. I will try to find the file. I will request a search for it at the Iron Mountain.” Her voice was raspy, with an accent of borough New York, the kind you don’t hear so often anymore.
“Where is that?”
“Oh, it’s in Jersey. A secure file storage outfit in Hohokus.” She was clearly happy to have an excuse to linger over the vowels of Hohokus. And who could blame her?
Dr. Merle Unzicker entered my life the first time via Eleanor Boyle. When Eli started visiting crack houses to photograph them, and I suspected he’d been trying the drug himself, I’d turned first to my longtime friend. “Of course, a guy like Eli is going to do awful shit, Abby,” she said. “One has to factor that in.” She sounded wiser than you’d expect for a person wearing emerald-green spandex shorts, glitter-striped knee socks, and high-heeled Mary Janes. We were waiting to enter a club in the dark industrial zone at the western end of Fourteenth. Just across the street sat a rolling bin of bones and fat, piled for rendering. A butcher, appearing from behind an aluminum door, tossed a slimy white mass on top. He stood there for a bit, smoking, studying us, then winked and gestured an offer of a cigarette. The meatpackers were excellent banterers, if you were willing to stop and chat. But Eleanor and I had reached the head of the line, the citizens of the night winding down the block behind us. We hadn’t gone out together in a while, due to my entanglement with Eli, and Eleanor had moved on too, racking up several interesting sexual conquests and discovering this new club, dungeon-like and vaguely Middle Eastern in theme, hookah pipes and tasseled tents.
Eleanor waved away the butcher’s attentions, then turned to me and said, “I have a shrink for you.” Her roommate, an exotic dancer-slash-performance artist, swore by one Dr. Merle. “A miracle worker, according to Zoe,” she said. “A specialist in existential ambivalence, and that is what I’m seeing here . . . you know that Eli is a fucked-up freak, but you are paralyzed, insecure, plagued by poor self-esteem, and this is just so typical of our age and gender,” Eleanor said knowledgeably. She had been a psych major when we were at Western New England U, until she switched to drama.
“Fuck you, I am not ambivalent,” I said. “I’m absolutely in the driver’s seat with Eli. He always asks me what I want to do, he lets me take the lead.”
“Oh, he lets you take the lead, does he?” She grinned.
The gatekeeper at the door was a tiny man in a top hat. He looked us over. “Nice socks,” he said to Eleanor.
“Thanks, baby,” she said. He lifted the rope and waved us through.
So here I was, returned to Dr. Merle the miracle worker. The classical music warbled on and I tried to fill her in. Since she didn’t seem to remember me anyhow, I talked about Dennis, how I loved him, Pete with his challenges, Benjamin and his omnipresent girlfriend. And then, finally, about the detective.
Dr. Merle listened, nodding, wheezing a bit with every breath. Her body, curled into a wheelchair, was so small and slumped, more rag doll than woman. A needlepoint footstool propped up her feet, clad in pumps so tiny they did indeed look like doll shoes. Her eyes were bright and alert, peering out of her splotched, creased face as if through a layer of desiccated fallen leaves. I couldn’t recall much about what she’d looked like a quarter century or so ago. No wheelchair, certainly. More hair, perhaps? Now her silver fluff was scant, just a gossamer suggestion of hair, really. Beneath it, lavender veins squiggled across her skull.
Divulging my transgression felt cleansing. Dr. Merle said, “You are endangering your marriage, of course. But it may be a sign of evolution. You must proceed with great caution and care,” she said. “Stay your present course, if you can. The silence.” She tapped her watch. “Time is up for today.” She frowned as I stood. “As for this haunting,” she said. “We must of course examine this.”
“Oh that.” I regretted telling her. It was too insane even for a shrink. “That’s just kind of a joke I play on myself.”
“I see,” she said. “Good day then.”
Walking past the whirring hair salon and down the stairs to the street, I wasn’t certain I’d be coming back. I’d named my troubles, confessed them out loud, and this unburdening was probably all that I had needed. I did not suffer from existential ambivalence. I didn’t want therapy. I didn’t want to turn back the clock either, not to Eli Hammond, not to the drowned pleasures of my youth. On my train ride home, my thoughts turned instead to Pete and his comrades, to their crude campaign to disrupt the future.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, MAY 12, 2016
Spring is always so skittish in Montreal. Some of the trees still wore dirty skirts of snow. In a fit of optimism, she put away her gloves and Maman’s wooly knits. She could feel the ground gradually softening beneath her feet as she crossed the lawns of campus.
Similarly, she thought, she could feel the Willard case yielding, slowly yielding under her scrutiny. After studying hundreds of images, from hundreds of different angles and depths, and finding them clean, she kept returning to this one. It showed a shadow. A void really, detectable only by scrutinizing the subtlest displacement in the tissue surrounding it. An anomaly. At last.
Though she’d sworn to utmost discretion, she risked showing the image to Buccardi. He frowned and nodded. Could be. You have shown it to Laurin?
No. She had not spoken to Laurin since just after his California junket. “Our doctoresse has run the lab startlingly well,” he announced, at the first departmental meeting upon his return. “We here at Le Neuro are very lucky to have this woman, so brilliant, so productive.” He smiled across the crowded conference room to where she stood, near the door. “And well formed. Forgive me, I am a mere mortal, and so I must say that this lovely dress truly makes the most of you, Mademoiselle Kazemy.”
So no, she would not share her findings with Laurin. The case that had come to mean more to her than anything in the lab, more than anything in her life. Certainly more than Samir. She told him about the shadow. “Does this mean you can finally move on from this, then? Mystery solved?”
No, she told him. Mystery deepened.
ABBY, MAY 14, 2015
At a faux-French café around the corner from school, Forest Versteeg sat on a wicker bar stool. He sipped an iced drink through a straw, his phone drawing him in, his pristine white slip-on sneakers angled on the footrest. Waiting to order, I mulled both the apricot tart and whether to approach him.
I didn’t remember him from the Broder and Wilcox gallery. But it had been the most overheated exhibition space in the city at the time, with legions of young interns and gallery assistants. This was pre-Chelsea, when SoHo was just tipping over into the East Village, and Broder and Wilcox occupied the perfect central position on Broome Street.
My color-saturated abstracts, soft at the edges, surely seemed too serious, too heartfelt, amid the showmanship and snark of that era’s art world. Painting had begun its fall out of favor. Installations, video, performance art attracted all the heat. But Jillian Broder decided to take a chance on me. “Three months out of RISD,” she cooed, looking at my slides. “Maybe you’ll bring emotion back.” Oh, her long silvery hair, so shimmery and almost white, like fishing line or polyethylene thread, spread over the back of her exquisitely cut suit jacket. Fanning over the sharp tailoring. I touched it one time, very gently, behind her back, just to see if it was real.
Versteeg didn’t look up from his phone until I said, “So is Jillian Broder still around, do you know?”
He looked up and yes, seemed happy to see me. He scooted over to free up enough space, I set down my bag on the counter and sat beside him. “In fact I see her often,” he said. “My husband and I spend a week every summer at her place in Western Mass. Northampton, do you know it? It’s lovely there, so green, so lush—and so gay.” He grinned, revealing incisors as sharp and white as his perfect white shoes. Then he noticed the spiral-bound watercolor pad sticking out of my bag. He pointed to it. “May I?”
I nodded, then watched, strangely numb, as he paged through it. Color studies à la Albers, overlapped blocks of azure and green and violet in increasing and decreasing intensity. A few pencil sketches. He paused on an image of Pete, slouched at the kitchen table over a textbook. I had surreptitiously drawn it after dinner the previous night, as I tried to talk to him about this Brigade group and the incident on Flatbush.
“Don’t worry about it, Mom. It’s just something I’m doing
.”
“I just hoped we could talk about it.”
“Does everyone have to talk about everything?”
“No. I suppose not. . . . But at some point let’s talk about it.”
“At some point.”
Forest pointed to Pete’s balled fist. “Brilliant,” he said. “So much dark energy there.” He closed the sketchbook and handed it back to me. “Why are you taking these classes anyhow? I’m like embarrassed to be teaching you.”
“Lifelong learning is a thing. I am desperately in need of a refresher course, at the very least. And you’re a good teacher.”
“Well, I love it. But I’d rather be painting, of course. This pays the bills.”
“Tell me about it,” I laughed. “That show at Broder and Wilcox? Exactly one painting sold.”
“I suppose I didn’t remember that,” he said, quietly. “I just remember your astounding work. I was so awed by you. Maybe that’s why I’ve always remembered that show as a sellout.”
I gave him a little smile. “Just one sale. A still life, Bremer’s grapefruits. The man ate a lot of grapefruits.”
“I still cannot believe you studied with H. D. Bremer. Incredible.” Forest swirled the ice in his glass and chewed it, contemplating me again. “I want to help you reinvent yourself, Abby. I like that you have these children and a husband, and you’re still out there trying.”
I wondered if I could skew this as a compliment.
“I could introduce you to my gallerist Matthew Legge-Lewis. He’s like the new Jillian. Just as genius, just as ruthless. Also, my husband.” He picked up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder, stood from his stool. “I’ve got to get the room ready. See you in class?”
ABBY, MAY 19, 2015
Breaking the afternoon silence like a plow turning soil, a blunt-nosed sports car rumbled down our block, passing me as I struggled home carrying a jumbo bag of cat food and a rotisserie chicken. It rolled to a stop in front of our house. Pete bounded from the front door and was climbing in as I approached. “And you’re going where?” I called out. The car was a late-model Mustang, the yellow of hot dog mustard and I could feel the engine’s growl in my gut.
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