“There are wobbles and lurches,” he said to me. “But it’s better, no glooming, dooming death thoughts, hardly any voices, and they’re not loud, kinda fuzzy in the background, receding not impeding. Dr. Odin doesn’t talk much, though. A nodder, a scribbler, a grunter. I thought maybe I could see you.”
“Will your insurance cover it?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know.”
“We could make an arrangement—ability to pay.”
Mr. T. rubbed his hands hard. His fingernails were thickly lined with dirt, and his expression was soft. “Herz und Herz,” he said. “Zu schwer befunden. Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.”
“What’s that?
“Paul Celan. ‘Heart and heart. Deemed too heavy. Heavier become. Lighter be.’ My translation. He drowned himself in the Seine.”
“He was a poet. Like you.”
Mr. T. smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Like me.”
Late that afternoon, as I walked to the subway, I thought about Uncle Richard again. I sometimes think that it made me—the murder, I mean. I thought about Mr. T., about his father and grandfather and my father and grandfather and about the earlier generations who occupy the mental terrain within us and the silences on that old ground, where shifting wraiths pass or speak in voices so low we can’t hear what they are saying.
ALTHOUGH EGLANTINE AND I dismantled the string sculpture the following evening, Miranda didn’t come upstairs to fetch her daughter. Instead, she called for Eggy, and the child, after a few minutes of dawdling, took to the stairs. My evening with Miranda had reconfigured that vague country we refer to as the future, a place inhabited exclusively by fears and wishes. Jeffrey Lane had penetrated one of my wishes with uncanny speed, had seen it before he even spoke to me. I had hoped to “win” Miranda and lead her and Eggy up the stairs into the domain of family happiness. But I had begun to understand that the woman couldn’t be won by me or by anybody else. She had come to me with her confession and her desire to be taken care of “a little bit,” but there was resistance in her character, too, and a will to independence that meant no one would be allowed to tell her story for her.
“IT’S TRUE,” SONIA said in a firm, low voice. “Dad screwed that woman and gave me a brother. I don’t understand why Mom’s so calm about it, almost like a robot. ‘The truth is what it is,’ she keeps saying. Like I don’t get it. I get it. I just don’t like it. She thinks I should go to that meeting with Henry and Edie and the Hamburger.”
As she spoke, the gray light from outside the Greek restaurant on Church Street illuminated her defiant face. Her eyes and her expression at that moment are cut into my mind with unusual precision. Although I had been prepared for the possibility that Max had another child, the fact jolted me, and that shock is surely behind the power of the memory. “whatever you decide,” I said. “I’m glad you’re talking.”
I thought about Joel, whom I’d never seen, a boy who would have to struggle with a father who had become a tall stack of books and four movies. I wondered if he had seen his young mother as Lili, with her bright eyes and beautiful grin, the elusive sylph of an aging man’s fantasy. Would Joel get lost among these fictions? Would he find a place for himself as the son of Max Blaustein and move on?
“Why couldn’t Dad just have stayed loyal to Mom?” Sonia’s voice broke on the word loyal and ended my reverie.
I shook my head. “All I know is that he loved you.”
Then she leaned forward again and said, “It’s strange, you know, my father is dead, and still, I don’t want to share him. I want to be the only child.”
“Joel never met him,” I said.
Sonia looked at her hands. “You know that I haven’t read any of Dad’s books.”
“You have time,” I said.
“I’ve been afraid of them, Uncle Erik.”
“Why?”
“I think because I wanted to keep him safe as my dad. Maybe I really didn’t want to be in his head, to know what was in there. I was scared of being burned, that the world would fall apart, that the world I wished for would fall apart. It’s all gone now anyway. It’s been gone for a long time.”
“Since September eleventh?”
“No, since I saw Dad with her. Nobody died, just an illusion of the perfect father.” Sonia leaned forward and put her hands on the table. “At night it was always the same—the falling people. Waking up to howling in my ears, and I couldn’t breathe or speak.”
“Is it better now?”
“It’s gone. I have nightmares sometimes, but I don’t have that dream anymore. I hope it never comes back.”
“And now you’re in love.”
Sonia looked up at me and blushed. “I never was before. It’s all new.”
“New is good.”
“Yes,” she said. “Dad’s books are new, too. I’ve finally started to read him.”
AFTER SEVERAL LONG and tortuous dialogues on the telephone that took us in and out of our various hopes, weaknesses, and illusions, Laura and I mutually agreed not to stop whatever it was. In honor of our unnamed but significant relations, she cooked me a meal, which, by the looks of her kitchen, must have taken all day to prepare, if not longer. She was still wearing an apron over her tight black dress when I poured the wine and we sat down to eat. I was about to taste her first course, spaghettini with scallops, parsley, and red pepper, when I looked across the table at Laura and saw that she was watching me with great seriousness, waiting for a verdict from my face. For some reason, I found her expectation unbearably poignant, and I paused, my fork suspended between plate and mouth.
“What is it?” she said. “You can’t eat scallops?”
“No,” I said. “It’s the way you look.”
“What about it?”
“You look generous.”
Laura raised her eyebrows and laughed. “What kind of a compliment is that? You’re supposed to tell a woman she looks beautiful or sexy, not generous. Generous sounds fat.”
I didn’t let her laughter derail me. “Generosity is something I admire very much,” I said.
Laura leaned toward me, her brown eyes tender. “Thank you, Erik,” she said in her warm voice. “Now eat your pasta before it gets cold.”
We ate the pasta and we ate the veal and we ate the arugula salad and we drank the wine and we laughed, and I paid close attention to her animated, generous face throughout the eating and the drinking and the laughing, and I felt as if I were seeing it for the first time.
INGA HAD TAKEN a suite at the Tribeca Grand for what she called “a gathering of the letter mongers.” She had wanted a neutral but private place. Both Henry and the Burger woman had signed legally binding statements that they would not make public anything that was said in the room. No doubt their curiosity had been piqued enough for them to come despite the ban. Sonia had reluctantly accepted the invitation, and I had confirmed my job as bodyguard and well-intentioned observer. In the hours before the peculiar round-table event, I became aware of a mounting sense of anxiety, accompanied by the now familiar feeling of breathlessness.
I hadn’t seen Edie Bly since her actress days, and although she remained pretty, Burton was right: her face had been touched by hardness. A new severity had sharpened her once soft features, especially her chin and nose. The recovering alcoholic, the still-smoking, coffee-drinking real estate agent wore a version of the hip New Yorker’s all-black uniform, a sweater and a pair of pants that showed off her breasts and narrow hips. She also emanated an invisible cloud of spiced perfume that summoned the doctor from Bombay I had slept with twice, years ago, during my residency, an erotic association which, although irrational, somehow affected my opinion of her. Inga had moved all the available chairs and arranged them in a circle around a small coffee table. Edie sat down next to me and immediately began to jiggle her right leg. I knew she wasn’t aware of the restless tic and this augmented my sympathy.
“It’s cold out there,” she said to no one in particular and received no
answer.
An inscrutable Henry arrived, greeted everyone politely, and sat down next to Inga, who, to my relief, appeared equally sanguine. The Burger woman came next, tightly wrapped in a coat and scarves, which she proceeded to undo over a period of several minutes, and, after being introduced to me, she took the only remaining empty chair. I had seen her once on the stairway, when her smile had chilled me, and perhaps a second time when only her back was visible. Except for her red hair and something in the deliberate quality of her gait, however, she wasn’t recognizable. After all I had heard about her, I must have been anticipating a larger woman in all respects—more hair, more body, more nastiness. The person who sat across from me looked ordinary. Her round face with its small eyes and rather flat nose seemed as innocuous as her middle-sized body draped in a loose sweater and long skirt.
Inga folded her hands in her lap and began to speak in a professorial manner that reminded me for a moment of our father. “I thought we should air our differences and find a way forward. There is now no doubt that Max is, or rather was, Joel’s father, and as I’ve already told Edie and Sonia, I know that Max would not have wanted me to ignore his son. That would be unconscionable. He will be cared for and will share in his father’s literary estate, but that’s not why we’re here.”
Sonia sat frozen, looking down at the floor.
“We’re here to discuss the letters,” Inga said steadily. “I have questions for all three of you. First, Edie, what compelled you to sell those letters without consulting me when I had already offered to buy them? You know that I have the sole right to make them public.” Then she turned to the Hamburger. “As for you, Linda, your motives for harassing me are completely incomprehensible.”
After she had uttered the woman’s first name, I realized that I couldn’t recall her last name, despite the fact that Inga must have said it during the introduction. It was buried under countless facetious references to the great American beef patty.
“Why do you care about my husband’s love letters or his past?” Inga continued. “Does the press give a damn about literary lives? Does it give a damn about literature at all? This isn’t London. Even I know there’s no big story here. It’s frankly bewildering to me. Why do you bother?”
Under Inga’s direct gaze, the redhead smiled, and then I recognized her; it was the same sheepish, uncomfortable smile I had seen on the stairs.
Inga turned to Henry and said quietly. “I wanted you to be here because you care so much about Max. I mean, what happens to his work, and those letters, well, whatever they are, they’re part of him. Sonia knows why she’s here. We’ve kept too many secrets from each other.”
Inga turned toward Edie and waited. The silence that followed was thick with emotion, as if every person in the room were emanating some viscous airborne material. I wondered if I should say something but decided to keep quiet.
Edie finally spoke. “I had the right to sell those letters to anyone I wanted. You all know that. You think it’s easy bringing up a kid now that I’m by myself? Joel’s got reading problems. I’m doing homework with him every night for hours. I’m so tired when I go to bed, I can’t believe I have to get up the next morning. I don’t give a shit about Henry’s literature.” She gave the word a posh British enunciation, as if to underline that she, unlike the rest of us, was consumed by the problems of real life, not snooty literary business.
“But I was willing to buy them,” Inga said. “And to help you both. You knew that.”
“You think I don’t have any pride?” Edie said, her jaw set.
Inga leaned back and opened her mouth in disbelief. “You think this hasn’t hurt my pride?” She looked baffled for another second and then said, “Maybe that’s the problem. He threw himself at you, and you rejected him, but I wanted him so much. I always wanted him.” Inga’s voice cracked.
“I was in bad shape back then. I’m clean now. I . . . I found myself.”
“whatever that means,” Sonia said abruptly. “I hear that all the time. You’d think there were selves lying all over the place just waiting to be picked up.”
Edie ignored her.
As I listened, I realized that Edie Bly was at a disadvantage with her clichés. She didn’t really know what she was saying. “Pride” was code for her need to be seen and understood, and the hackneyed expression “I found myself” had helped her leave behind her addicted self and embrace her sober self. Despite my concern for Inga, I felt compassion for the former actress with the strong perfume. Inga became more, rather than less articulate with anger, and I had heard her bark perfectly formed paragraphs of vituperation in defense of a dearly held idea or person. I was relieved to see that she had fallen silent.
“Who bought the letters, Edie?” Henry asked in a deliberate voice, his face apparently imperturbable.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know!” the Burger woman nearly shouted. “Are you crazy?”
“That was the deal, no name. The man paid cash.”
For the first time, Henry looked ruffled. He stared at Edie. “Why, you little idiot,” he said. “Those letters are part of a literary legacy. They belong to posterity, to all of us . . .”
“A stranger has them,” Inga said in an awed voice. “Edie, is there anything in those letters that I should know about?”
An image of Max in a light-filled hotel room came to me then, a mental picture I had seen when Inga told me the story of that day in Paris after they went to the movies. I saw his fingers moving: I can’t tell you.
Edie’s face looked strained. “I’m going to smoke,” she announced, and with an unsteady hand removed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, shook out a cigarette, and lit up. “He sent those letters to me, to me,” she repeated, her voice rising.
“I know,” Inga said quietly. “I know, and if you’d wanted to, you could have burned them or cut them up or blackened out what you never wanted a soul to read—all that was in your power. Don’t you see, Edie, we have to try to come to an understanding, because my daughter and your son are sister and brother. You’ve sold the letters to an anonymous person who could do many things with them, and I think it would be fair to tell me, to tell us, if there’s something in them that might hurt Joel or Sonia someday.”
Edie’s bottom lip began to shake, her mouth contorted, the tears fell, and I heard a deep noise break from her throat.
I reached over to her, placed my hand over hers, and patted it for a moment.
Out of nowhere, Linda erupted, “You think you’re perfect, don’t you?” she said, leaning toward Inga, her face suddenly animated. “Look at you, playing the noble mother in order to wheedle the dope out of Edie. It’s revolting. Glamour-puss Ph.D., writing those pretentious books showing off how smart you think you are, how truly special and superior: Ms. Perfect with the perfect daughter and the perfect Tribeca apartment, widow to the Late Great Cult Hero Max Blaustein. I knew I’d find some dirt on you. You needed taking down a peg or two. You want to know why I bothered? That’s why I bothered.” This speech was delivered through clenched teeth with an unmistakable snarl accenting her final word.
My sister’s mouth opened, then she put her hand to her chest, as if the verbal assault had hit her body.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” Linda continued.
Inga continued to gape. In a small voice, she said, “Remember you?”
“From Columbia. I knew your friend Peter.”
“Peter?” Inga said. “You knew Peter?”
“I was in journalism school. You were in philosophy.” She spat out the word. “We had coffee together three times with Peter. Three times. I might as well not have been there. You two were rattling on about Husserl. I said something about it and you laughed.” The woman’s eyes didn’t leave Inga.
“I’m sorry,” Inga said. She leaned forward. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Mom doesn’t laugh at people,” Sonia said. “She laughs a lot, but not at people. She ca
n’t remember everybody she meets. And I can say one thing for her, she doesn’t go through other people’s garbage.”
Inga could barely get the word out of her mouth. “Garbage?”
“Why don’t you tell my mother what I never told her, that I found you going through our garbage. There she was”—Sonia pointed her index finger in Linda’s direction—“with the bag open, rummaging through our eggshells and coffee grounds, fishing out papers and letters.”
Linda didn’t answer this. She sat tight-lipped in her chair.
Inga hugged herself. “It’s awful to be forgotten and ignored. It’s happened to me, too.” She looked confused, reached both her hands toward Linda, and said, “You’ve taken it awfully far, haven’t you?”
Henry interrupted. “I should say so.” He turned to Edie, who was still sniffling.
“They belonged to me!” Edie said before Henry could speak. “I told you! He sent them to me! And then all of a sudden, everybody wants them.” The tears were running hard down her cheeks. She gasped. “Seven stupid letters. So important. A whole lot more important than I am, for Christ’s sake. Or Joel, or any person. Just some crapola on a few pages. I mean, the whole thing is disgusting.”
The Sorrows of an American Page 29
