I think it’s about Dad. Max had loved working on the film, and Farber had kept him on the set to write changes if and when they were needed. Inga has a framed photograph of Max and Tony with their arms around each other’s shoulders, both beaming, with huge cigars clenched between their teeth. The spring air and light entered me as I walked home. The colors of red geraniums and purple pansies in pots on the Brooklyn stoops, the blooming deep pink crab apples and the white dogwoods I passed felt as strong as pains. Perhaps my thoughts of Into the Blue had sharpened my color sense. The elusive woman. Genie had been one, at least in the beginning. Miranda was another. I imagined Miranda leaning back and looking up at me, and I imagined kissing her. She had not called me after my stint of babysitting, and I had not seen her, but I knew she was there from the noise of the gate closing, her steps on the floor below me, and her voice rumbling at Eggy every once in a while.
That night, I watched the film again. In the gallery, the woman introduces herself as Lili Drake and explains that she is the artist. When he asks her how she could have painted him when they have only seen each other fleetingly, she says, “I never forget a face.” She ends up in Arkadi’s bed that same evening, but refuses to spend the night with him. Farber used the same scene three times, a cinematic déjà vu: Lili dresses quickly, tiptoes to the door while her lover sleeps, runs down the stairs and out into the city. And then one night, although she tells him she has to go, she falls asleep beside him. When she wakes up, he embraces her joyfully, but something terrible has happened: she no longer recognizes him. “Who are you?” she asks coldly. “Who are you?” Most of the film’s action is silent, and the voice-over never corresponds to what the viewer is seeing on screen. Max gave his erotic fable an ambiguous ending. After searching for Lili all over the city, returning to every place he has seen her, Arkadi finally gives up and boards a train. His destination is unknown, but when he sits down, he sees a young woman sitting across from him wearing sunglasses, her head bent over a book. There is something familiar about her. She lifts her head and smiles at Arkadi. Farber searched high and low for an actress who resembled Edie enough to make the last scene work. The girl they found bore an uncanny resemblance to the young actress, but she wasn’t an actress herself, and despite the fact that all she had to do was raise her chin and smile, the scene had required fifteen takes.
When the phone rang, I hoped it was Miranda, but to my surprise it was Burton, my old friend from medical school, someone I hadn’t spoken to in several years. Burton had always been an odd duck, but over time he had become increasingly isolated and peculiar, and we had fallen out of touch. Brilliant but morose, Bertie, as he was called then (his parents had blessed him with the awful name Bernard or Bernie Burton) had left medicine and turned to scholarship—the unremunerative but honorable field of medical history. He now worked in some capacity at the medical library on 103rd Street. When he asked me if we could have dinner together, I told him that would be “great” and then felt a little uncomfortable afterward because I understood it was true.
As I busied myself getting ready for bed that evening, the old mantra escaped my lips several times. It came unbidden, as always, and I felt embarrassed, as if there were some stranger in the room listening to my refrain: I’m so lonely.
WE WERE BADLY shelled for three nights, my father wrote. I and others were naïve enough to believe that the shells that screamed overhead the first night came from our own naval guns and that their targets were frighteningly close. We heard the patter of shrapnel as it fell in the sand. How wrong we were. The Japanese, who had captured our coastal guns in 1942, now used them against us. They were huge machines mounted on tracks and pulled out of caves at night. They pounded our beach in a systematic and repetitive manner. It did not take us long to learn the pattern. Like thunder each burst drew closer and closer. The terror you felt when you knew the next one might dig a cellar where you lay is war at its worst. The relief one felt for each escape hardly included proper concern for comrades farther up or down the line. The shelling went on all night, but stopped at dawn. The craters were enormous.
A number of bodies washed ashore during our first night on the beach. Things had, after all, gone wrong for some on their way in. We were told to leave them be. Graves Registration men, they said, would comb the shoreline and they knew what to do. Henry Parker and I did fish one body out of the surf. We couldn’t stand seeing it being tossed back and forth by incoming waves. Most of the other bodies were half imbedded in sand so in their case a burial of sorts had already taken place. Bodies continued to drift ashore the next two days but decreased in number. By the third day the beach was strewn with supplies: rations, ammunition, wooden crosses and stars of David, the basic needs of war. Incidentally, we all carried a mattress cover in our backpack. No one ever told us why we toted this extra pound, and when you figured it out for yourself, you yielded without protest to the army’s one taboo. In World War II, you carried your own body bag.
We all dug deeper holes the second night, not foxholes but slit trenches. During the second night, because of my deeper trench, several inches of water seeped in. Strolling sand crabs tumbled in and added to my misery. Later that night I moved in with Henry Parker whose trench was on higher ground and because of a cave-in had room for two. Henry’s fears were less than mine. Each time we survived an explosion intended for us, Henry laughed, saying repeatedly, “They missed us! They missed us!” Extreme fatigue had set in by the third night. With it came a kind of fatalistic indifference. Despite the pounding, I slept when the shelling was someone else’s worry. On the morning of the fourth day we watched American dive-bombers demolish the entrances to the caves that housed the artillery that had given us so much trouble. A bit later we received orders to move ahead.
After reading this, I remembered my father in his study, rolling his chair away from the oxygen line that would get tangled underneath it, a constant irritant that made him swear under his breath. His head was lowered over the page, and I knew that he was writing against time. The urgency of his task made his muscles tense through his back and neck. I walked toward him and placed my hand on his shoulder. He turned and smiled, then clapped his hand over mine, a sign of camaraderie, of some vague masculine understanding between us. When he bowed his head and returned to work, I lingered in the room for a moment and stared out the window at the field beyond Dunkel Road, brown stalks protruding from the snow. Inga and I were home in Minnesota for what would be my father’s last Christmas. I remember thinking I should say something. Words I might have uttered came to mind, and then I abandoned them. The memory holds the repetition of an old feeling. It’s as if I’m avoiding something I dread, but don’t know what it is. I’ve retained the moment because it troubled me and is swollen with emotion. I believed that in my own analysis with Magda Herschel, I had been able to articulate the distance I felt from my father and that my empathy for him had been the avenue to my acceptance of the gulf between us. As I looked through that window in December of 2001, I realized that I was deluded.
OVER DESSERT AND after a long talk about the book Burton was writing on theories of memory from the ancients to the most recent brain research on the subject, he abruptly asked me about Inga. There was a slight tremor in his voice, and I remembered the terrible crush he had had on my sister when we were all young. It was a sorry business, because even then Bernard Burton was a fat, waddling, red-faced person who had little luck with girls. His chief trouble, however, wasn’t his looks, but his moistness. Even in winter, Burton had a steamy appearance. Bubbles of perspiration protruded from his upper lip. His forehead gleamed, and his dark shirts were notable for the great damp circles under the arms. The poor fellow gave the impression that he was humid to the core, a peripatetic swamp of a man with a single vital accoutrement—his handkerchief. Once in medical school I had suggested that there were some treatments for hyperhidrosis. Burton had informed me that he had tried everything known to humankind that didn’t risk turning him int
o a vegetable, and his was a hopeless case. “My ur-reality is sweat,” he told me. The first year of residency had marked the end of his career as a practicing physician. His melancholy, dripping face, his sticky palms and sodden handkerchief had alienated nearly every conscious patient, but aside from that, he wasn’t cut out for that grueling initiation. To be frank, none of us was, but Burton flagged more than the others. The beeper madness, the emergency EKGs, the interminable bloodwork that meant poking into the veins, arteries, and spinal columns of screaming infants and demented octogenarians, combined with the chronic sleeplessness, felled him. When a patient howled, “You’re a torturer, you’re killing me,” his face would crumple up in distress and, ever serious, Burton never cracked a smile when Ahmed and Russel, our two resident comics, juggled bagels, mimicked a difficult patient, or made jokes about “cold meat” or “circling the drain.” Funereal humor. Burton didn’t have it. The year had assaulted me, too, had worn me to exhaustion, and at night I dreamed of protruding veins that slid out of arms and fell to the floor spurting blood. My overwhelming desire was just to get it over with and go on. I found a way to keep my distance from the agonized expressions, the noise of weeping, the smell of urine and feces, the dying and the dead. It wasn’t war, but I knew what my father meant when he wrote that if the shelling wasn’t his worry, he slept.
“Inga’s doing all right,” I said. “She had a couple of rough years after Max died, and it’s hard even now, but she’s working well.”
Burton took a long breath. “Last Tuesday, I left the library to have my lunch in the park. I pack it, you know, and well, as it happens, I saw her. Lovely woman still, beautiful, I would say. Exceptional.”
Listening to my old friend, I remembered that when it came to anything personal, his speech was suddenly burdened with even more qualifications than usual. He wiped his forehead and continued, “I considered speaking to her. She was very close, sitting right there on the next bench after all this time, after that last dinner we had together, November fifth, 1981, but she was with someone, a woman, and they were deep in conversation. Fortunately, I had something to read. Actually, it was Shimamura on memory and frontal lobe function in the Gassaniga collection. I’ll send it to you, if you like.” After a look from me, he returned to Inga. “I couldn’t help but notice the fervency of it, the conversation, I mean. Your sister was very upset.” Burton began to pat his wet forehead with his handkerchief, which during the course of our meal had turned from white to an unpleasant shade of gray. “She walked right by me,” he said. “Didn’t notice me, of course. She was distracted, overcome actually, quite beside herself.” He fell silent then and observed his plate. “I called you that night.”
“I see,” I said.
Burton looked distraught. “I found myself in an awkward position. As a former friend, despite the unfortunate finale to our relationship, during which I disgraced myself rather badly, I hold, have always held, your sister in high esteem, and seeing her in that state unnerved me. I was eavesdropping, I’m afraid, and didn’t know where to turn except to you.”
“Well?”
“Well,” he repeated. “I didn’t quite understand it. There was talk of letters. I heard that word several times, and money.” He uttered the word money in a low, hollow tone of voice. “I thought you might know what this was all about and relieve my mind.”
I shook my head. “What did the other woman look like?” My thoughts ran to the redhead.
“She was small, very attractive, long dark hair, a little hard looking, I thought.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Your sister screamed at her at the end: ‘How could you? How could you do this? It’s despicable!’ ”
I worked to hide my anxiety from Burton as I told him I would speak to Inga, that she was a woman of high feeling, and that her outburst might not have signified anything too awful, but I understood that I was speaking to pacify Burton, whose jowls were quivering with emotion.
THE SEVEN PHOTOGRAPHS I found the following evening had been left for me, not Miranda. They lay in a neat row outside my door, each one fastened to the step by a bit of masking tape. As I bent over to retrieve them, I instantly registered my own image in the pictures. The photos had been taken the day I walked home with Eggy and Miranda, the day we found the first Polaroids on the steps. They didn’t include the discovery of the pictures, only our walk on Seventh Avenue and up Garfield. In each one Eggy had been wiped out—all that remained of her was a small white silhouette on the sidewalk. As I stood on the stoop and studied the images, I thought I heard the rapid sound of a camera shutter, but when I turned to look behind me, there was nobody in sight, only a woman and man strolling up the sidewalk across the street. As I turned my key in the lock, awkwardly clutching photos and briefcase to my chest with my left arm, the soft repetitive clicking returned. I spun around, but again saw no one. I pushed the door open in a single motion and then kicked it shut behind me.
Sitting down at the table, I laid out the pictures in front of me and felt myself grow calmer. I reasoned that suspicion could transform almost any low noise from a host of sources into a paranoid fantasy that I was being photographed on the sly. Park Slope is not a loud neighborhood, but it’s never silent either. Living alone, I had become sensitive to the auditory mishmash that inundated my world—the stentorian racket of pipes, the sibilant whistling of radiators, the whirr of chainsaws, and the drumfire of drills. Distant traffic rumbled even when the local streets were still. Most nights in the spring, I listened to the muted drone of voices that floated from backyard gardens, the sporadic shouts, yelps, shrieks, and laughter that erupted in the street, the five or six lines of rap that burst from a passing car, the rock ballads, chamber music, and jazz that emanated from open windows down the block. In the mornings, various birds cheeped and called regularly, and sometimes a multitude came together in a loud, excited chorus. But there were countless unidentifiable sounds as well: clicks, soughs, crackles, wheezes, and various mechanical hums that throbbed in the background charivari of my life. I had been looking at photographs and therefore I had heard a camera. At the same time, if the stranger wasn’t lurking outside at that very moment, he had certainly been hanging about earlier in the day, and the idea of his vigilance was enough to create a feeling of diffuse threat. The empty figures in the photographs where a five-year-old child should have been made it worse. I picked up the telephone and called Miranda.
If I had called her the morning after I sat up with Eggy, as I had meant to, it would have seemed a small, ordinary gesture, but with each day that had passed since then the act of phoning her had swelled in my mind until the gesture of punching eleven simple numbers had become so bloated with meaning, I found myself paralyzed. When I heard her voice, I felt instant relief, understanding immediately that I had feared she would snub me or even hang up on me. After I had explained about the pictures, she said she would call me as soon as Eggy was asleep and that we could talk downstairs.
I washed my armpits, put on a clean shirt, and then examined myself in the mirror on the inside of the closet door. Genie had hung it for herself, and I rarely used it, sticking to the smaller one in the bathroom where I shaved. The man who met my gaze wasn’t ugly. He had strong, even features, large green eyes, and pale straight brows, but his body was thin and somewhat underdeveloped in the chest area. His skin was a whitish pink—on the transparent, veiny side. Not just a white man, a very white man. Was this body anything for Miranda? For good measure, I changed my socks.
THE PICTURES DIDN’T seem to surprise Miranda. When she saw them, she locked her jaw, narrowed her eyes, and, after taking a single breath, launched into her story. I noticed that when she spoke, her narration had a third-person quality, a matter-of-fact reporting style I had grown accustomed to in some of my patients. It kept emotion at bay. “I met him,” she said, “when we were both students. I was in the graphic design program at Cooper Union. He was at the School of Visual Arts. He was very smar
t, knew a lot, and was kind of edgy, a few piercings, you know, considered himself an artiste.” She dragged out the word slightly. “We were just friends then. I didn’t see him at all for a few years after we graduated, and then I ran into him at a restaurant in Williamsburg where I was eating with a friend. He asked me to have a drink with him the next night, and I did. That was when he told me his parents had died in a car crash in California three years earlier. He was still recovering from the shock.” Miranda looked across the room at the bookshelf and then lowered her eyes. “It all happened pretty quickly after that. I left my share, and we started living together in his apartment.” Miranda paused. We were sitting on her blue canvas sofa, and I looked at her arms, which she had folded across her chest. They seemed to shine in the lamplight. “He’d inherited money, and so he didn’t have to work at a job. He just pursued his art, which is photography—digital stuff, mostly.
The Sorrows of an American Page 8
