A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  “He’s specializing in athletics for the handicapped. Creating playgrounds with wheelchair ramps in barrios. Also, he isn’t Ion anymore. He’s Grivin,” Chloe informs him. “ He plays drums in a band. He says it’s a good drummer’s name.”

  “Grivin?” Bernie repeats.

  “An anagram of his wretched birth name. Irving. I should never have agreed to that.” Chloe shakes her head from side to side. “But you were having that affair with the nurse. And I was on the verge of suicide. Guess I just lost that one in the sun.”

  There is a pause during which Bernie considers the delicacy of the respiratory system and the necessity to gather filaments of air into his body, and keep his lungs oxygenated. “What about Gnat? What about Natalie?”

  “No pre-med there, either. Sorry. She’s in Women’s Studies.” Chloe examines her hands. Her fingernails are translucent with pearl white slivers at their tips. Or perhaps they are arcs of silver, permanently embossed by some new cosmetic process.

  “And? Come on. I feel it, Chloe. I’m down. Kick me hard.” The scotch is making him nauseous. He decides to make a pot of coffee and take a Dexedrine.

  “She’s calling herself Nat and living with a woman,” Chloe reveals.

  “She’s a lesbian?” Bernie tries to concentrate on Gnat, on Natalie. She was an excellent camper. When they rafted the Grand Canyon, it was Gnat who helped erect the tents, identify the correct poles and how to position them. Her natural ability to recognize constellations was exceptional. She rarely tangled a fishing line. Was this unusual? Was her spatial aptitude an indication of abnormality? Had he failed to diagnosis a monumental malfunction?

  “Fifty-six percent of her entering class listed their orientation as bisexual.” Chloe finishes examining her fingernails. “I suggest we adopt a neutral position.”

  Events are accelerating in a frantic progression, each revelation is increasingly surreal. Day is assuming hallucinatory proportions. He concludes that his present condition resembles severe jetlag combined with sixth round chemotherapy. And there is, of course, the matter of the luggage. The suitcases packed in the bedroom. She must have arranged for someone to carry them down the stairs and load them into her car.

  “Do you care about that?” Bernie manages. “Our daughter is gay.”

  “Why would I care?” Chloe seems surprised.

  “What will happen to the Christmas decorations?” Bernie asks. He considers their holiday ritual. Chloe and Gnat selected new ornaments for their permanent tree legacy, one for each family member, one each year. The two-hundred-year-old brocade angels with twelve- carat gold threads around their wings from Belgium. The gingham elves with pewter crowns. The silver maple leaves. The glass snowflakes, each with intricate individual facets and panels.

  “Nat will take them no matter what. If she goes butch. If she opts for artificial insemination. She’ll take the ornaments. And she knew you’d ask that.” Chloe is leaning against the wall, her eyes partially closed.

  Bernie pours coffee. He removes a bottle of amphetamines from his suit jacket pocket. He takes three tablets and offers the bottle to Chloe. She moves toward it with such unexpected rapidity, he can’t determine how many pills she extracts. Bernie watches her hands, following her fingers to where they terminate in glazed nails translucent like the undersides of certain tropical seashells.

  “Remember the glass snowflakes?” Bernie asks.

  “From Tibet? With triangular amber panels like medieval cathedral windows?” Chloe recalls. “I thought they’d look good as earrings. I imagined them on a young wife on a pyre. Of course, that wouldn’t work for me anymore.”

  “That’s what you were thinking? In front of the goddamned pedigreed twenty-two-foot Colorado blue spruce? Ritual incineration?” Bernie places his hands over his eyes. There are numerous anecdotally reported cases of sudden stress induced blindness. He puts on his sunglasses.

  Chloe pours herself a cup of black coffee. Her movements are slow, listless, stalled. The room is a series of sea swells. He realizes they are floating like the petals of the flowers that are not lotuses just above the koi.

  “And you’re putting the fucking suitcases in your car and driving away?” Bernie is incensed. “Sam Goldberg is your lawyer?”

  “He can represent both of us. Or I’ll take Leonard and you can have Sam.” Chloe offers.

  “Leonard is my golf partner,” Bernie says.

  “We know where all the bodies are buried. It’s a cemetery. When in doubt, just keep it, Bernie.” She studies the interior of her porcelain cup.

  Then Chloe goes upstairs. She returns, slowly and methodically, with suitcases. He’s surprised by her muscular arms. She knows instinctively how to balance her torso, shift her weight, and bend her knees. She is barely sweating. She has replaced the kimono with a short beige linen dress with spaghetti straps that accentuate her tanned shoulders. 20 years of yoga and tennis. Then the bags of groceries when the maids disappeared, were picked up by immigration, or beaten up by boyfriends. In between, they had babies and abortions. They visited relatives in their home villages and often didn’t return for months. Then the gardeners vanished. Chloe spent days in the garden with a shovel. Yes, she could easily load the baggage into her car. Even the inexplicable cardboard box of shoes. And that is the next step. Bernie considers the heavy carved oak front door that leads to the circular cobblestone driveway.

  “What about the jewelry?” Bernie inquires. He always gave her a necklace on her birthday. Rubies in Katmandu. Pearls in Shanghai. Silver and turquoise in Santa Fe. Gold in Greece. He can remember each separate composition of stones and the rooms above plazas and rivers and lagoons where he unwrapped his offerings and fastened the clasps around her throat. Sometimes there were cathedral bells and foghorns, drums from carnivals and parades, waves and sea birds

  “I took the diamonds. I left you the rest. They’re in my safe. The key is on my pillow.” Chloe pours another cup of black coffee.

  “Why leave me any?” Bernie wonders.

  “You may need them for bartering purposes later. Sometimes a strand of Colombian emeralds really hits the spot.” Chloe lights another cigarette. This is not the behavior of a novice. This is no small stray gesture of recidivism. Does her yoga instructor know? Her aromatherapist? Book Club and the hospital board? And what does she mean by barter? That’s a curious concept.

  “Wait a minute. Look. This is for your birthday. I got it early.” Bernie is excited. It’s the amphetamines, cutting through his fatigue, his heavy and unnatural disorientation. Airports are terminals of contagion. A maximum exposure situation. He might be incubating a malevolent viral mutation. Still, he is clarifying his thinking.

  “I can’t wait.” Chloe gazes at her watch.

  Bernie walks into his study, the only room Chloe permitted him to decorate, and returns with a small wooden box. “Here,” he says. He feels wildly triumphant.

  “I’m not interested,” Chloe informs him.

  Her voice has more energy now. The amphetamines. Perhaps they should take two more. Bernie produces the bottle. Chloe allows her fingers to reach into the pills. She stands near him while he opens the box. A single grayish stone.

  “I’m going to have it set,” Bernie explains. “It’s an agate from the beach in Chile. From Isla Negra where Neruda lived. I went there. I skipped Rio. Didn’t you wonder why I went to a river parasite conference in Brazil? I needed an excuse. I changed planes for Chile at the airport. Then I drove. I walked beaches for miles. I found it for you. I pulled it out of the water.” Bernie holds the pebble in his palm. His hands are shaking. “Now you can tell me what the stones know.”

  “Bernie, you’re a lovely man.” Chloe touches his cheek. “You’ve made it a wonderful job.”

  “I want to know what the stones know,” Bernie says. “That was your goddamned dissertation. Your personal grail. You were going to decode Neruda’s stones and explain them to me.”

  “That’s pre-history, Bernie. You’d
need an archeologist to dig back that far. A paleontologist.” Chloe turns away from the agate. It looks lonely and ashen. It knows it is an orphan.

  “What about the house? The furniture? The paintings? The sculpture? Each sofa a distillation of your personal evolution? That’s what you said,” Bernie remembers.

  “I tried to amuse myself. Forget it. The house is too big for you,” Chloe determines. “The kids are never coming back.”

  “They’re never coming back?” Bernie finds himself repeating. The afternoon is a kind of three-dimensional mantra. Phrases are recited, but they are like howls people make on roller coasters, ludicrous vows and confessions. Words came from their mouths, but they are sacraments in reverse, staining the air. They are curses.

  “Not for more than a day here and there. Now there won’t be the plague of holidays to entice them.” Chloe glances around the downstairs rooms, detached and calculating. “Unload it. The market is good now.”

  “Chloe.” Bernie takes a breath. “I love you.”

  “It’s been terrific, really. This is my terminal performance of prophecy on command. My final act of analysis and emergency emotional counsel. OK. I’m gazing into my crystal ball for the last time. It’s the goddess of real estate. She says sell.”

  “Chloe. Let’s talk this out. There’s more to say. I can say more.” Bernie tastes the amphetamines now, an unmistakable metallic sting between his lips. It’s spreading through his body; microscopic steel chips, hard-wiring his muscles, his reflexes and agility. She can load the suitcases into her car. But he outweighs her by seventy pounds, and he is wearing leather shoes. One must not discount the element of surprise. Chloe can do head and shoulder stands, she has mastered all the strength and flexibility postures, but she has never been in a street fight.

  “OK.” Chloe is unexpectedly agreeable. “One final note. That stricture I gave you about only wearing black and gray Armani?”

  “Yes?” Bernie closes his eyes.

  “I remove it. You should do jeans for a while, T-shirts. Downscale. Lose the Porsche.” Chloe takes a silver sandaled step toward the front door.

  “You don’t love me?” Bernie is confused and chaotic and finds the combination not entirely unpleasant. His trepidation has been replaced by an erratic turbulent energy.

  He is blocking the door, with its thick carved oak panels and intricate squares of stained glass implanted in the center and along the edges. Her decorator no doubt looted that from a church, too. And he is not going to let her walk out to the driveway.

  “Love you? I’m all dried up in that department. One marriage, 2 children, and the full liturgy of soccer. The 100 unique ornaments I was designated curator for. The secret acts of mediation. Messenger services. Currency exchange. Frankly, specific love isn’t even on my radar screen.” Chloe seems resigned.

  “What do you want? I can give it to you.” Bernie is desperate.

  “Solitude. Drift. I’ll travel. Maybe pen a mediocre verse here or there. It requires a climate you can’t provide. You can’t survive the altitude I’m looking for, believe me,” Chloe says. “And no more question and answer quizzes. No more multiple-choice tests. No more essays.”

  “Will you take this?” He extends the agate. “You said swallows and constellations of stars were inside. The mysteries of oceans. Metamorphosis and mythology. Take it.”

  “No more homework. School’s out, Bernie. School’s out forever.” Chloe sings the phrase, twice.

  He thinks it might be an Aerosmith song. Or, perhaps and worse, Alice Cooper. Once he settles the suitcase problem, he’s going to play Coltrane on the house speakers at full volume. Dizzy and Monk. Parker and Miles. It’s going to be jazz week. Jazz month.

  Bernie stands directly in front of his wife. Her suitcases are near the door. She is holding her car keys. Still, Bernie is beginning to get his bearings. There is a machinery in the periphery. He is starting to hear it hum and pump. There are mechanisms. Barter? Deduction is a gift. It becomes a skill experience polishes into a tool. The most fiercely reckless intuitions often prove accurate. And he can see the schematics now. There are blueprints and diagrams and there is nothing subtle about them.

  “You don’t visit the hospital anymore,” Bernie notes. “You used to come for lunch. We had our special noon appointment.”

  “I couldn’t stand all the doors opening to those discreet pastel alcoves. The rooms where women who still have eggs sit. Women with babies in their wombs. I could hear them devising names for infants. They do it alphabetically. Amy. Beatrice. Clarissa. Devra. Erica. Francine. Gabrielle.” Chloe glares at him.

  “That’s a lie,” Bernie says, shocked. He wants to slap her across the face.

  “Back away,” Chloe orders. Her voice is high and thin. It wavers, hangs in the air and loses its sense of direction and purpose. He considers fireworks, how they explode, tattooing the sky with a passionate conviction that quickly dissipates. Then she says, “Do you want the police here?”

  Bernie Roth envisions the La Jolla police; two or three freshly painted vehicles parked in the circular cobblestone driveway, each officer tanned and uncertain. He imagines them standing in the marble entranceway below the oasis of stately 60-foot palm trees. The fronds cast unusually vertical shadows like arrows and darts. From certain angles, the house looks like Malta. He once suggested mounting an antique cannon in the turret. And domestic complaints are a gray area. He is, after all, the senior doctor at the hospital. Alternatively, he imagines chasing her car, positioning himself at the end of the driveway, his back against the wrought iron gate, his arms spread wide. She might impale him.

  What are his options, precisely? He can shut off the master switch on his computer, of course, locking the garage and gates. Chloe refused to learn how to manipulate the systems. She said she wasn’t intelligent enough for such smart appliances. He often worried what she would do in an emergency power failure. Or he could call Ron Klein. Ron is running the psychiatric unit now. A wife with a menopausal psychotic break requiring hospitalization. It happens all the time. Ron owes him a few favors. But favors are a limited resource and he needs to ration them.

  “I’m delirious,” Bernie realizes. “ I need to take something.”

  The green in his wife’s eyes intensifies. It is like observing a river coming out of a mist. Or emeralds just professionally cleaned by sonic wave devices in a jewelry store.

  “You’re going to open the cookie jar?” Chloe asks. “But you’re under suspicion. You swore no more until Christmas.”

  “That’s nine months away. Isn’t that unnecessarily punitive and arbitrary?”

  Bernie wanders into his study.

  This is the only area of the house he has been allotted. He designed it himself in one weekend. He didn’t need a decorator. He ordered over the Internet. The walls are mahogany and the bookshelves contain his medical library, computer files and jazz discs. The lamps are solid brass. The sofa is brown leather like oak leaves in mid-October. The floor is red maple. Chloe disparaged his aesthetics and dismissed his study as aggressively masculine. But she is following him now.

  Bernie Roth has always possessed the capacity for strategic action. It might be time to retire now, after all. Empty nest syndrome demands attention. Menopause is problematic. They can build something new, on a beach in Costa Rica or Mexico, perhaps. Grivin can help with the construction. Maybe he can get extra credit course points. And Nat. She can bring her girlfriend. They’re probably both good with hammers.

  Bernie walks directly to the wall safe and unlocks it. The safe contains one blue canvas duffle all-purpose sports bag wedged against the metal. It fills the entire safe and Bernie has to yank it out. Chloe watches him unzip the bag. Bernie extracts a handful of glass vials. He removes a box of syringes.

  The agate from Isla Negra is in his pocket. Later, Chloe will tell him about Neruda, the poet she was enthralled with when they first met. When she recited stanzas about volcanoes and poppies, he didn’t hear the word
s precisely, but rather followed the narrative through her mouth and eyes. It was medical school and he was stupefied with exhaustion. He heard the phrases she offered as a music that was visual. It was a sequence of facial expressions, a tapestry of geometries composed from flesh. Trajectories formed on her lips, which were rivers and bays with bridges, and exited through her eyes, which were green wells and portals that could foretell the future.

  Tell me what the stones know, he will command later. I want to be initiated into the language of agates. Show me how they form bodies like infants and feed themselves from stars. And Chloe will comply. She will find the capacity for jazz. It’s simple. Saxophones mean spread your legs. Later, she’ll laugh at his WMD joke. Her throat will emit sounds that look like strings of rubies and sapphires. She will fall down on her knees and explain everything. She will invent and improvise. He’ll help her remember why she has a mouth.

  “The usual?” Bernie asks, glass vials in his hand. He prepares a mixture that is two parts morphine, one part cocaine. He prefers the reverse. He taps the air bubbles out of the syringes. “We’ll celebrate the birth of god early this year. Take a few weeks off. Reassess our position.”

  Chloe apparently agrees. She has removed her beige dress with the thin shoulder straps. She isn’t wearing underwear. She curls on her side on the leather sofa like a fawn at dusk. Bernie Roth reaches for his wife. She extends her right arm, the one with the good veins. He injects her first. Then he injects himself.

  WOMEN OF THE PORTS

  They meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone, the landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood where the carousel spins in its predictable orbit, and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. Some hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel doesn’t require calculus, rehab or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

  She phones Clarissa. “I’m here,” she announces.