The Sorrows of an American

by Siri Hustvedt

  When she entered the restaurant, I was already sitting at the table, and the first thing I noticed was that she was wearing a lowcut blouse that showed a lot of cleavage, which meant that during the dinner I would have to keep my eyes from wandering down to her breasts. It also occurred to me that, because she was a psychotherapist, she wouldn’t be oblivious to the meaning of clothes, and yet I’d often been surprised by the obtuseness of my colleagues when it came to their own actions, so I told myself to avoid jumping to conclusions.

  Laura Capelli talked, laughed, and ate with zeal. She had olive skin and nearly black hair that curled around her face. Her breasts were large, round, and distracting. She had a busy practice, an ex-husband, and a thirteen-year-old son, who had become obsessed with his hair. He spent an hour in the bathroom every morning with gels and brushes getting it just right, but when his mother remarked on his labored do, he had looked right through her. “My hair?” After Laura had polished off a crème brûlée and commented on what she thought was a skimpy appetite for a man of my size, we found ourselves on the street, and I said I would walk her home.

  When I leaned over to kiss her on the sidewalk, she grabbed me around the waist with both arms in a bear hug, and there was no stopping us after that. She led me quietly into the house, past her son’s bedroom with a finger to her lips, up a flight of stairs, and into her room, where we threw ourselves onto the bed and began tugging at buttons and zippers, which, after a short struggle, gave way. We found each other’s mouths and tongues and rolled over and under and into each other. Her skin smelled like powder and vanilla and tasted a little salty, and it had been so long that I had to hold back, did hold back until I knew she was coming. She was sitting on top of me, and by then our rhythm had become even and slow, and she threw her head back and closed her eyes and gasped as if she were stifling a scream. Within seconds, I had let myself go, and we were lying beside each other on the blue and white sheets. And then Laura sat up and burst out laughing. I sat beside her on the bed as she tried to muffle the escaping giggles, which had a distinctly hysterical tone. “Good God, Erik, good God,” she whispered, as she covered her mouth. We lay beside each other for about an hour after that, talking in low voices, but I sensed she was nervous that her son might wake up, and I made my exit, tiptoeing past Alex’s room, down the stairs, and out onto St. John’s Place.

  I found myself on Seventh Avenue around two in the morning. The night air was cooler than I had expected, and small groups of teenagers were still out, inebriated, jostling elbows and arms, hanging heavily on one another, laughing dramatically for the benefit of the others. The effects of the wine I had drunk earlier had long worn off. Agitated by my adventure, I felt sleep was impossible, and so, when I arrived at Garfield, I didn’t turn but moved on past the closed shops, keeping up a good pace as I walked by lone pedestrians with dogs, a few lovers holding each other as they journeyed back to a bed somewhere, and I didn’t stop until I reached Twentieth Street, where Green-Wood Cemetery lay stretched before me, its gravestones and monuments pale in the dim light of the street lamps. Laura’s breasts returned to me, white beneath her suntanned chest. I remembered her pale ass in the air and her muffled cries with an erotic shudder, but the memory of her body already felt a little alien, recent visions in retreat.

  When I turned around, I walked to Eighth Avenue and then along the park as images appeared one by one, some invented from the stories of others, some vague compilations of repeated moments, others temporarily intense and clear, but they arrived and fell away as my feet hit the sidewalk, a reverie with a rhythm. I watched my grandmother move heavily onto the stone step outside the kitchen, carrying two pails, the hem of her cotton dress lifted in a breeze. I saw my grandfather grip a bag of candy in his stub fingers and tear it open with the good ones, shaking out a hard ribbon of green and white into my waiting hand. I saw the stick-thin Max, saw his hand, incongruously large and brown, engulf my sister’s slender white fingers: “I want you to find someone else, to marry again. You’re still my young wife, and now you’re my young widow. Be a merry widow, a dancing widow. I don’t want you to be alone.” I imagined my mother leaning over to kiss the cheek of her dead father, and then Lorelei’s old-woman doll on her deathbed. I saw Edie Bly as Lili Drake walk with a heavy suitcase down an alley in the unnamed city, saw the innkeeper step out of a door and speak to her urgently in sign language. She answered in kind, her fingers moving rapidly. I remembered the piece by Shostakovich in the background, saw my father in his bed at the nursing home and heard the noise of his cough as he tried to hack up the thick phlegm from his ruined lungs, his expression closed and internal, muttering, “I used to be able to get it up.” I saw my mother button his pajamas and straighten the collar, watched her move past me to retrieve his toothbrush and a plastic basin and then help him brush his teeth. I said goodnight to my father and hugged him. Afterward, he smiled at me, his eyes rueful. “These days,” he said, “I must work hard to avoid sentimentality.” I stood in the hallway and listened to my mother’s voice. “Can you sleep now, Lars? Do you need anything else?”

  When I turned down Garfield and neared my house, I noticed that a single light was on in the downstairs apartment. The shades were drawn, but all three windows were open behind the iron grilles that protected them. I glanced at my watch. It was three-ten, and as I turned to go up the stoop, I saw a heap of papers on the top step. Even before I bent over to pick them up, I knew.

  There must have been a hundred pictures, most of them cheaply printed on ordinary typing paper—a glut of photographs of Eggy and Miranda and self-portraits of Lane with his camera. There were other people I didn’t recognize, and then several pictures of me, walking into my office, having lunch on East Forty-third Street with a book, striding toward the subway, picking up the Times on my doorstep in the morning, and one, shot through the front window of the house, in which I sat with my cup of coffee, looking out. I shuffled through them, quickly casting them aside until, near the bottom, I found an image of Miranda, naked and asleep in a bed, probably Lane’s. She was lying on her side, her face partly hidden by the pillow. The paper had been crumpled. As soon as I was inside the house I put it on the table and, not without a sense of guilt, carefully flattened it out. As I looked at the curve of Miranda’s narrow hip, her breast covered by one arm, I felt a sudden rush of anxiety, walked to my window, and closed the shutters.

  Thirty seconds later, the telephone rang. “You got the photos?” It was Lane’s voice, but he seemed to have made an attempt to disguise it. It sounded higher than I remembered.

  “What’s all this about?” I said. “I honestly don’t understand.”

  Lane was silent. I suspected that he had not been prepared for my honesty. Then he said the last thing I had anticipated. “I need a shrink.”

  I laughed.

  Then he hung up.

  Again and again, I heard that laugh in my ears. I held it up for inspection, turned it inside out, and reflected on that single spontaneous guffaw until it had been broken down into a thousand pieces of probably useless analysis. A summary of the tortuous route of my thinking would go something like this: It could have been that Lane was in bad shape and truly wanted help, in which case, my laughter was a gross violation of professional standards; or he may have expected the laugh, and had hung up on me to create exactly the tormented quandary that followed; or he may have occupied some position in between and had acted without a fully conscious motive. He could have felt that hanging up at that moment was more aggressive than talking and, hoping to disorient me, he responded to that urge—or my laugh had wounded his pride, and not knowing what else to do and feeling momentarily that I had the upper hand, he had cut off the conversation. Before I went to bed, I thought of a bit of Russian folk wisdom a history professor had once told me: If you ever run into the Devil, the only way to get rid of him is to laugh in his face.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT, BURTON gave his report over Chinese food, tapping his chopsticks from tim
e to time on the table to punctuate his commentary, which I took as a sign of increased excitement in his unofficial position as Inga’s gumshoe. Despite my grave doubts about my friend’s activities, I found my affection for Burton growing.

  “I didn’t actually enter the establishment, you understand, but remained poised without. My persona—the one I don for the job—would not allow it, as it were. The joint is too fashionable. Espresso goes for three dollars, out of my price range.”

  “Burton,” I nudged, “what happened?”

  “Yes, of course. Ms. Bly works in Tribeca now, not Queens. She’s changed her job, you see—Tribeca Realtors, higher wages, fancy properties. She throws down her cigarette, walks into Balthazar. I note that she is expectant, decided. My reading of bodies, if I do say so myself, has become expert. You know the Libet research, of course, that the somatic intention precedes the conscious thought? A third of a second!” After my nod, Burton made another dash toward the point. “Fehlburger is lying in wait.” Burton snapped his chopsticks, then wiped his forehead. “As they sit in the café, both of them are fortunately visible—well, not entirely. Their legs are obscured beneath the table, but the all-important facial areas, the sites of crucial interaction, entirely exposed. I noted tension between the parties, not hostility, no, that would be too strong, a strain in both necks and across the eyes. Words are exchanged.” Burton paused. “Only one of which I was able to ascertain.” The chopsticks hit the table. “Lip-reading has become essential, Erik. I consider myself in training, improving with each hour on the job.”

  “The word?”

  “Copies,” Burton said triumphantly.

  “Of letters, I assume.”

  “That I would also assume, but no packages of any kind were passed between them.” Burton began to dry himself vigorously with the familiar handkerchief, but his shoulders slumped. “It’s unlikely that you’re aware of the various materials to be found online about your sister. I confess to having kept abreast of the articles, interviews, and notices over the years. I had imagined that in this specific case, the target was Max Blaustein, muddying his reputation, but it has come to my attention that this Fehlburger personage, curious name, Fehl is fault or blemish in German, as you are no doubt aware. I seem to remember you studied German. In all events, this Fehlburger is intent on injuring, not the reputation of your deceased brother-in-law, but that of your sister, for whom she has particular venom, the cause of which I have not been able to uncover. There exist, however, online, several startlingly cruel and gratuitous attacks on your sister and her work written under several names, three of which I have been able to connect to this single woman.”

  “Good grief,” I said.

  Burton’s face was streaming, and his expression turned grave. “She’s freelance, you understand, not connected to any particular paper or magazine. It’s been some time since you and I spoke, hence the plethora of news on this front, much of it available at the touch of a few keys. There is an entry on the Web site of Nebraska University Press about Henry Morris’s forthcoming book, which is referred to as”—Burton dropped his voice to a whisper—“ ‘a critical biography.’ It seems, too, and I have tracked this, made the appropriate inquiries, that Ms. Bly is not alone. It seems that he has, that the man has, well, systematically, and one might say, voraciously, I would say it, yes, I would say it, visited the women in Blaustein’s life, procuring their confidences and, in some cases, favors. I use the word in its illicit sense, and add, with all delicacy and respect, that I feel for your sister in this regard. Indeed, my heart goes out to her.” Burton lowered his eyes onto the General Tso’s chicken that sat in front of him.

  “But can you be sure of this, Burton? I mean, you haven’t been peering into bedrooms, have you?”

  Burton’s face turned a deep red. “Nothing so unseemly. No, I confess I have inferred the behavior, not actually witnessed it. Comings and goings. Entrances and exits. And my own reading, interpretation, even divination of character. The man in question has predilections, appetites, if you will, that augur poorly. I see black storm clouds, turbulent weather in the future.”

  Although I shared some of Burton’s doubts, I couldn’t be sure he was right about Henry Morris, whom he regarded as a rival. What I did understand was that my sister, or at least the idea of my sister, had become enmeshed in the personal dramas of at least three people: the vengeful, narcissistic projections of Fehlburger, the literary fantasies of Morris, and the more benign, but equally passionate obsession of my friend Burton which had, I felt, begun to take on quixotic proportions.

  MS. L. BEGAN the session that Wednesday with a barrage of complaints about her stepmother and her pregnant stepsister. I knew the unborn child was important, but it was hard to find a way in with Ms. L. She called me a “smug asshole analyst who couldn’t help a fly,” an odd twist on the idiom “wouldn’t hurt a fly,” no doubt an expression of her frustration with what she referred to as my “impotence.” She called me a “confused, lying S.O.B. who didn’t know the truth when he heard it.” She had been abused, thrown against the wall. She remembered.

  I said she seemed to want rage from me. She pushed and tested me all the time. But there were rules that governed our exchange, her behavior and mine, and she was breaking them. “If you think I can’t help you, why do you come?” I knew there was a remote quality to my words, knew that I was backing away from her, and yet I hoped to introduce some ambiguity into her perceptions.

  Ms. L. looked up at me. “I don’t know.”

  “Is it possible that some part of you still believes we can make progress?”

  She was silent. Her eyes were blank and cold.

  I tried again. “Remember when we talked about your voids? You said you hate being so passive, so unproductive. When you attack me over and over, you encourage passivity in me because I don’t know where to turn or what to say. You create in me the very thing you hate in yourself.”

  Ms. L.’s head wobbled and she closed her eyes. “I don’t feel well,” she said. Then she stood up fast, looked around, and holding her stomach, she leaned over my wastebasket and threw up.

  I brought her some Kleenex for her mouth, told her I’d be right back, carried the container to the bathroom, emptied it into the toilet, and watched the drab-colored, lumpy vomit disappear with the flush. I poured some water and cleanser into the basket, left it behind me, and returned quickly to my office.

  “How are you?” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “What did you do with it?” she asked. Her face was pale.

  “I took care of it. It’s all right.”

  “You cleaned it?” she said in a low voice.

  “Rinsed it out.”

  “You cleaned up my puke? Why didn’t you get somebody else to do it?”

  “It wasn’t necessary.”

  “You’re disgusting,” she said sternly. “Look at you.” It wasn’t her voice; I knew I was hearing someone else, and I jumped in.

  “Are you saying that to me?” I asked her. I could hear the pity in my voice, almost a sob. “You sound like a grown-up reprimanding a child.”

  A look of confusion came over her face. She shook her head. “I’m lost,” she said. “I’m cold. I’m all alone.”

  THAT EVENING, THE anxiety hit. I found myself breathing rapidly, the pressure in my lungs was fierce, and I was overcome by a restlessness so intense that I began to pace around the house, from one floor to the other. I picked up the most recent issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and immediately knew I couldn’t read it. I thought of my mother and her unread books, tried breathing exercises in a chair, but the sirens inside me continued to scream. I had seen this in some of my depressed patients. I recognized it, for Christ’s sake. Mood disorder. How sanguine the diagnosis seems from afar. “It’s a fine line,” Magda had told me, “between empathy and distance. Too close, and you can be of no help. Without compassion, there’s no alliance between you and the patient.” I was racing. And then, Th
is is why he walked. The sentence made me shake more. My father tried to walk it away—the speeding internal engine that wouldn’t turn off.

  When the doorbell rang, I had poured myself a Scotch hoping it would quiet the roar within me. I could have used a milligram of lorazepam. I left my drink on the counter, walked down the hall, and through the glass saw Jeffrey Lane. His arrival created more chaos inside me. Could I turn around and let him stand there until he left? I opened the door. He said he just wanted a few minutes of my time; it wouldn’t take long. I let him into the hallway but didn’t shut the door behind him. The man looked disheveled, and he was hunched over with one hand on his stomach. I noticed the heavy black bag slung over his shoulder and guessed it was camera equipment.

  “I need help,” he said. “I can’t go on.”

  “Are you injured?” I asked, nodding at his stomach.

  “Not physically,” he said.

  “I can recommend someone you can talk to.” My tone was robotic, and my breath came in small puffs. I felt desperate to get rid of him.

  “It’s Miranda,” he said.

  “What’s happened to her? Is she all right?”

  “She’s all right.” He took a step toward me. “I’m the one who’s in trouble.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’m planning my funeral,” he said. Then he looked up at me and smiled.

  The smile was unintelligible, but my irritation with him seemed to direct my disquiet, which until then had been aimless, and this was oddly helpful. I breathed more easily. “What does that have to do with Miranda?” I asked.

  “She’ll be sorry.” He closed his eyes.

  “Listen,” I said, my voice rising, “I’m not your physician. I don’t like being harassed by you, and I don’t like being photographed without my permission, but if you need help, go to the emergency room at Methodist Hospital and tell them.”