Old

by Stan Charnofsky

When I arrived, I found her wearing a dark blue robe, tied around the middle and, on her feet, what seemed to be knitted woolen booties. She let me in and we sat in her living room sipping hot green tea. (She seemed to know, thirty years before it was widely touted, that green tea was a salubrious potion for the body.)

  “Megan,” she said, with a basso bite to her usual cello voice, “was picked up two hours ago by her father. He insisted on spending time with her.”

  “Was that part of the deal? I mean the court settlement? Does he get visitation rights?”

  “Since it was never proven that he was abusive to her, the judge did not see how he could forbid a father from seeing his own child. When he said that, I didn’t worry, because I was sure Tom would never exercise that option. He didn’t spend time with Megan, never seemed to care that much about her. Now he shows up—as he put it—to exercise his parental rights.”

  “So, you’re concerned, not that it will challenge her allegiance to you, but that she won’t be safe?” I put out, in question form.

  “Well, yes and no. I’m sure he won’t poison her mind about me, no matter how much he might try. And I don’t think he will physically harm her. It’s just that I don’t want his influence on her, value-wise or intellectually.” She stopped, thrashed wildly with her arms over her head for a moment, then said, “Oh, God, how could I have been so blind as to marry that dinosaur, that troglodyte?”

  When she did that I was aware of her breasts under the robe jiggling mightily, and I experienced, for the first time, a strong sexual pull toward Julie.

  “When you married him, you must not have known what you know now.”

  “Right on! I thought I was getting a hunk of a man, big and strong but gentle. And—the bane of every woman—I was sure I could mold him into a sensitive husband and father.”

  I flashed on Guys and Dolls, and the lyrics, “Marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow.”

  “My experience,” I said, trying not to sound too psychological, “is that some folks get so damaged early in life, that ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,’ can’t put them back together again.”

  “I didn’t know about his early life. He was closed off when it came to his history. Much later, I found out by chance that his father had been in some kind of institution. I saw a letter on the night stand from an uncle, that Tom’s dad passed away in a place called Atascadero. Pneumonia, I believe it said. I never even told Tom that I knew.”

  “Atascadero is for emotional disorders. Wonder what he was in for?”

  “I have no idea. It was never mentioned.”

  “Seems as if you and Tom had sparse communication between you.”

  “Better at first, then it totally deteriorated. At the end, we couldn’t be civil to each other.”

  I smiled and said, “It’s hard for me to see you not civil—to anybody. You’re such a…” I hesitated, not wanting to make her seem bland, “pleasant person.”

  She looked troubled, those dark eyes like nimbus clouds, stormy, occluded, as she gathered her frame into a formidable posture, moved toward me—if I didn’t know better, I’d say menacingly—and actually shoved me in the chest, not hard, but firmly.

  “I’m not always pleasant, Theodore,” she said, with what sounded like a growl. “Sometimes I’m aggressive. Sometimes I kick ass!”

  “What did I do?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  She kept pushing at me, backing me into a corner of the room, the last push more of a caress, and when I could go no further, she held me at arms length with her left hand while she untied her robe and let it fall to the floor.

  The full breasts, the flat stomach, the dark splotch of pubic hair—I took them all in at once, a banquet for my long-repressed male libido.

  So, that is when and how we made love, Julie and I, for the first time. It has to be obvious that even in that transcendent moment, she was the more aggressive person, simply not my style to be the initiator when it came to women. The experience was delightful, with a frenzy on her part that I could see was a release of deeply pent-up emotion. It was not only passionate but painful, and when we finished, she lay next to me and wept.

  We made love, Julie and I, and now as I think about it, I remember that it was her sister, Annie, who kept flashing in my mind, in some way which I did not at all understand, and I wondered if I were doing something morally corrupt.

  SIXTEEN

  A year and a half after Julie first visited my townhouse, we were married. Megan was almost twelve, and already the harmony between her and her mother was becoming discordant. It is amazing to me how two loving people can turn on each other when their individual ways of looking at the world are compromised. And, needless to say, I loved them both, but differently. With Julie, it was an adult friendship that blossomed into a pleasing passion. With Megan, it was a father-daughter affection, where I was deeply moved by her joie de vivre and almost savage way of confronting life.

  The two were civil enough to each other most of the time, so that living together was not a terrible strain. But now and then the volcanic eruption would come—when either felt crossed—and, for a few days, I would become the intermediary, their communication skills compromised by resentment.

  When I was thirty-eight and Julie nearly thirty-six, our son was born. We named him Aidan Emil Bronte, the Aidan part in honor of Annie and the Emil part after the writer, Emily Bronte––though, it must be said, we loved the names on their own, so that they were not solely tributes to memorable people in our lives.

  Megan was fourteen at the time, and already becoming a nubile young woman. Julie and I were not concerned that she would be promiscuous, since she had too much ego strength to allow some pup with raging hormones to talk her into anything. We were worried, however, that she would take unnecessary risks, since obedience to regulations was not her métier.

  Then, it happened. When Aidan was a year old, Megan disappeared.

  That’s it––she simply disappeared. We had no idea what happened to her. She went to school one day and never came home. No note, no trail, not a fellow student who could tell us anything. The police used dogs, which, at the time, was a fairly new way of trying to track someone down, sent out all-points bulletins, fired her picture off to every precinct in the county, and put out a wide net to try to discover her whereabouts.

  Nothing worked. Julie was desperate, and I no less so. I dearly loved Megan, and, in fact, had almost no history of friction to cause me feelings of guilt as Julie had. It was, for her, as one might guess, an indictment: something had to be so bad in the family that this young fifteen year old wanted to escape it. Or, and we did not want to accept this possibility, she was abducted and was held somewhere, or even—terrible thought—lying in a forest, raped and murdered.

  Days turned into weeks. Our home was a mausoleum. At the time, I recall feeling so thankful for baby Aidan, since he gave Julie a constant focus. Yet even he could not lift the heavy veil of melancholy that filled our lives every waking moment—and even invaded our dreams; Julie and I shared a range of nighttime images, from joyous reunions to crushing nightmares, telling about them seeming to expiate some of the ominous feelings they generated.

  One morning, Julie said, “I can’t do this. My life is a sham. Was I so terrible a mother? Was I evil? Did I treat her so badly?”

  “Sweetheart,” I said, “Megan had her own unique way of looking at the world. Her disappearance could have nothing to do with you or the climate in our home. For all we know, she decided to spread her wings and fly away, maybe to find adventure, maybe to explore some new land. She is an unusual fifteen year-old—more like twenty, like a grown woman. We aren’t going to get anywhere blaming ourselves.”

  “Kids protest all the time,” she answered, “and some wish they were in a different family, but rarely does one simply vanish.”

  I had a vagrant thought that maybe Julie’s ex was somehow involved in the disappearance, but she k
new him rather well, and didn’t bring it up.

  Trying hard to put a positive spin on what had to be one of the worst experiences a mother could have, I said, “Let’s hope she is relishing some novel situation now, maybe in a mountain village or a desert town, or maybe overseas somewhere learning about interesting people and a new language.”

  “But, Ted,” she said, with such desolation in her voice that it tore at my heart, “don’t you see, if she did something like that out of choice, then her life here, with us, must have been intolerable.”

  Her point was unassailable, yet there was an angle I wanted her to consider. “What if, just maybe, she fell in love with someone, and with her prolific imagination, decided she had no recourse but to leave with him? She surely would have known that we would not have given our hearty consent to such a scenario.”

  “Wouldn’t we have known if she were involved with a boy that intensely?”

  “With a lot of girls, yes. With Megan, I don’t think so. She has a very private side, and, in fact, relishes being mysterious. It was her way of being her own person.”

  I could see that my practical reasoning was falling flat with Julie. This was her daughter, her life-long companion, the child she rescued from her bullying father, a fellow survivor, so that nothing could explain her voluntary disappearance. It had to be foul play—which was unimaginable.

  Both of us retreated into our spheres of concentration, I into my psychology work, and Julie into caring for her precious and often demanding baby boy.

  Make no mistake. Our marriage and our lives together were never the same. It was as if the candle that gave our home its light had been extinguished, as if a landslide of despair had cascaded down and buried our little family. A persistent blizzard seemed to buffet us, day after day, and it seemed to be crammed with foul air that defiled our lungs. We held on to each other as if we were all we had yet there was a barrier between us that could not be torn down. Julie did not blame me for Megan’s eerie absence, but, at some level, there was a sense that her daughter rarely was at odds with me and often was with her, and that flared into resentment.

  At that juncture in my life, my friend, Zandor, tried to convince me to go to some kind of marriage counseling with Julie. He told me I was like a sick puppy who needed a vet’s skillful treatment.

  “You moon around all the time. She’s still the same woman you married only she’s wounded and doesn’t have as much to give. If you guys don’t deal with it, the friction is going to erode your good will. You both will start to find fault over every little thing. That’s how relationships go crazy.”

  “You’re the expert,” I answered sarcastically, not willing to have my amateur friend seem wiser than me, the psychologist.

  “It doesn’t take an expert to see what’s going on. You’re in trouble. You need to get a clear focus.”

  At a deeper level, I knew he was right. Though I had been single for much of my adult life, I relished being paired off, and this lovely woman, my Julie, was an exemplary partner—except for the grief that ate at her like corrosive acid.

  “Do you want to talk to her?” I asked, thinking that a friend might do better with Julie than a shrink-stranger.

  “Me? What do I know? I’m no therapist. I mean, I could listen, but I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “Maybe that would be better. Maybe she needs to get things out.”

  “I’m thinking you both need to get things out.”

  Of course, he was right again. I was well aware that, in my profession, when working with couples, one partner always wants you to fix the other. I was doing the same thing. If only Julie would straighten out her head, our marriage would be fine. Pride is a devastating taskmaster.

  I was around forty then, and though I can’t remember for sure, was probably vain as a peacock. I knew, I knew I was a valuable person, a rare man who was sensitive to feelings, and therefore, obviously Julie would want to keep me around. What I could not estimate was how anguished she was, the depth of the hurt that kept her emotions at a distance. We grew steadily less intimate—and it broke my heart.

  Then one day a strange event occurred that tipped us over into another dilemma.

  SEVENTEEN

  I don’t know if most people notice that nature always seems to operate in circles. Look at weather: hurricanes and tornadoes spin around a vortex, the one in a relatively small circle, the other in a huge one. Look at astronomy: galaxies are always spiraling, stars and nebulae are spheres, and in our solar system all planets travel in circles—even if elliptical—around the sun. Even our own planet is ever circling, round and round, for millions of years.

  Culturally and historically, we have countless references to circles: Indians are “circling” the wagons, tops spin in circles, old riverboats displaced water with circular waterwheels, long-distance track people run laps around a circular field, we “round” a corner, we come full circle.

  This is significant because when Julie and I were going through our Megan-loss recovery time, it seemed as if I were traveling in one vast, non-progressive, static, stalled circle. Little seemed to get done. There was always a conflict to address. Tension tracked me every waking moment. It was not an uplifting way to live. What do they say? He was going around in circles. He was treading water. He lost his focus.

  I began to wonder if Megan, our absent, itinerant Megan, had been as important to me as Julie. I loved Julie, of course, and yet Megan was a dynamo, whose presence filled any room, challenged all perceptions. From my perspective, she was simply exciting to be around.

  To compound the problem, one Monday morning, in my psychology office, a man appeared—without an appointment—and asked to spend a few minutes with me. He was clearly agitated, though he carried it well, with a soft voice that iterated a quiet urgency. He was of moderate height and his most obvious trait was the contrast between his youthful face and paper-white hair, which was echoed in a beard and moustache that hung straight down, as if electrified, from sideburn, along lip and chin, to opposite sideburn. An oddity was that his facial hair was so full and straight that when he spoke, the movement of his lips was obscured. The look reminded me of a cartoon in which a character sticks a finger in a wall outlet and is instantly sparked by an electric shock.

  “You don’t remember me,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “but we went to public school together. I’m Tillford De Main. When I was a kid they called me Tillie.”

  “Tillie,” I said, also softly—I had learned, as part of my therapy training, to try to stay on the same emotional level as the client––”of course. I remember you. You were active in the drama club.”

  “Became an actor. Yeah, never a big name, mostly theatre, lots of fun, not much money, no fame. Finally fell into a huge hole. That’s why I’m here.”

  My own hole was so oppressive that, at the moment, I had little compassion for Tillie’s hole, but in true “show must go on” therapist fashion I reflected his comment.

  “Fell into a hole.”

  “Yes. Not literally, you know, but symbolically. I am in a massive abyss, with smooth sides I cannot scale, and I am out of food and water and other basic life necessities. Since I still have energy to get some things done along my journey, I would like to find a way to climb out. I feel as if I am trapped and spinning in circles.”

  Ah, circles again. How to penetrate the arc, spear through to a new perspective, break the ring: these, the constant goals of people in trouble. As a psychologist, my task was to identify the elements of the spherical prison my clients claimed to be in, open them to the air, give them a chance to breathe free.

  Tillie began to lay out a tale that, of itself, was so bizarre it could not have been fiction, and put into the perspective of the man’s life, would have been devastating. His muted manner and tragic countenance made perfect sense given what he had been experiencing.

  “I married when I was thirty-six, a breathtakingly beautiful woman, also in the theatre business, name of Lanny, wh
ich was short for Leandra. Between the two of us, we got enough work to bring in good money, and managed to buy a piece of property in Malibu.”

  He paused, I believe to allow the impact of Malibu to sink in, though, in those days, it wasn’t the haven for the rich and glamorous that it is today.

  I wasn’t particularly impressed—fame had never awed me, never revved my blood up to envy or idolatry—but, as he held his silence, I held mine.

  He continued: “Lanny was a wildcat, in life, in bed, in all kinds of relationships. She could be crossed in an instant, and, believe me, one would not want to be her adversary, though, I must admit, she was gentler with me, since there was love between us.

  “We seemed to be rolling along just fine for three years, then she started to behave in a way that I would have to describe as odd and unpredictable. Like, staying out till four in the morning and explaining it away with ‘I was rehearsing’ or some other acting-related reason. I trusted her, so I did not challenge her stories, but it began to eat at me, and before long the trust began to waver.”

  He stopped again. I could see he was becoming more and more agitated, his brow creased, perspiration bubbled on his cheeks and neck, and most pronounced, his eyes darted back and forth, which we now know occurs during REM sleep, a time when dreams are supposed to be plentiful and deep.

  “Bottom line,” he muttered miserably, “is that about four months after that behavior began, she announced she was leaving. You might guess that it took me by surprise—no, it shattered me. I had no inkling of any real issues between us. Even in our lovemaking there seemed to be no massive change. With hindsight, I began to declare that she must have had an insatiable sexual appetite, to carry on with someone else the way she obviously was, and still be amenable to my advances. At the time, I pleaded with her for explanations, for reasons, but to no avail. Her response was simply, ‘I’ve had enough.’ When I asked her what that meant, she replied, ‘We are strangers.’”

  I managed to get a word in: “Must have been an ugly time for you.”