The day wears on with its out-of-time feeling, and we wait it out, Robin and I, pressed together in the cramped room, listening to Sally’s shaken breath and her occasional oracular utterances.
“The curse of being beautiful is that we love ourselves too much,” she says in her prophet’s voice, waking for an instant and then falling asleep again.
We try to laugh; if only we could do so and mean it. An unexpected intimacy settles over us, the feeling that something has been restored: not our marriage, which we are relieved to be free of, or even our former affection for each other, but a flesh-and-blood rapport through Sally.
“It’s hard to imagine New York isn’t partly responsible for what has happened to her,” she says. “The psychic strain here is enormous. Sally takes on the entire assault, the speed of the city, the toxins, she takes them in without filters.”
“You always detested New York,” I say. Although I wouldn’t have guessed as much when I met her. Robin lived on Bleecker Street with her artistic-minded parents, and hung out at the Village coffeehouses, in perfect tune with the city, I thought, and, at fifteen, physically precocious enough to inspire the attention of older men who were a constant threat to me. She was majestically talented, as an oboist, a singer, and as a visual artist as well; she was a prodigy at the Art Students League. That her gifts were a source of distress to her perplexed me; she treated them as a burden she’d just as soon get off her back and discard.
The most meaningful events of her childhood, she claimed, were holidays at the Vermont cabin her parents bought as a getaway shortly after she was born. The cabin was upgraded year by year, so that its acquisition of electricity, plumbing, additional rooms, and new wood-burning stoves ran in step with Robin’s own transformation from child to young woman. Vermont, she said, was where she came alive.
My attachment to the city was as powerful as her aversion to the place. She had pressed me to leave when Aaron was born, and then later, after we had Sally. But I couldn’t conceive of living elsewhere. For ten years beginning in 1976, we resided on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Our nineteenth-floor apartment was level with the roadway of the Manhattan Bridge. Traffic ripped by our window on the bridge’s steel grid. Below, on the East River, a prison barge was permanently moored; we used to watch the inmates play basketball, like miniature action figures, on its fenced roof each morning. Prostitutes serviced motorists in broad daylight under the elevated road. At night, gunshots between rival gangs interrupted our sleep. Trash smoldered in the empty lot across the way, and hovering above was a constant swarm of helicopters, monitoring traffic, going nowhere it seemed. The roar never ceased. For Robin our divorce was a repudiation of that roar, of the “Boschian underworld,” as she called it, where I insisted on bringing up our children. It was a repudiation of her unhappiness, of New York, of me. She said that settling in Vermont—in a farmhouse located a few miles from her parents’ place—was like breaking free of an extraneous predatory force. Sally too is a victim of that force, proving that Robin had it right all along.
Robin sits on the edge of the bed clutching her denim bag, from which she removes a half-ounce glass vial. “Skullcap,” says the label, a flower extract and homeopathic remedy that, she shyly informs me, “promotes relaxation.” The label is hand-painted in an Olde-Tyme apothecary style: a discreet corrective to the avalanche of medicalized concoctions from modern pharmaceutical labs. The herbalist in her forest hut, she measures a drop, gently opens Sally’s mouth, and places it on her tongue as if feeding a rescued bird.
“I smuggled it in,” she explains, pleased to have put one over on the staff. “They have a rule here against anything made of glass. You know, Michael, in the end, we’re the only ones who can really take care of her.”
She massages Sally’s head, cupping it in her hands, finding the pressure points. Robin clamps her eyes shut to augment the intuitive quality of her touch. After a few minutes she moves to Sally’s feet, pressing and palpating. She explains to me that it’s a new therapy she has learned. “Polarity.” It brings into balance the polar opposites of the body: the feet, which pound the grit of the earth; and the skull, the cranium, which points upward to that to which so many of us aspire—potentially sublime, but when cut loose from the earth, free-falling and lost.
“This is a particular area of concern for you, Michael, if you don’t mind my saying so. You live so much in your head.”
“I’m not as sold on my head as you may think.”
“Well, you certainly used to be. I wasn’t enough of an intellectual for you. I had the feeling I bored you.”
“You never bored me. Not for a second.”
“Only because you had no idea who I was.”
Robin’s New Age infatuations had been a bone of contention between us, and I can sense her bracing herself for some derisive comment such as I might have delivered during the disintegrating days of our marriage. She is going to make Sally well again. And why not? Her diagnosis seems as accurate as any: a psyche torn between its most extreme poles. What I marvel at is her physical ease with Sally. I have only one way to reach her: through language, the very faculty that has broken down.
“Mother dearest, are you trying to heal my heel?” says Sally, startling us from her far shore. “Or is your aim to defeet me?”
This time we laugh together at Sally’s punning, her haywire brilliance.
We remember Sally’s birth, her head cocked improbably high as if she was assessing the levels of energy in the room, her little nimbus of golden hair.
“I still haven’t forgiven you for going out to eat while I was in labor,” says Robin. “You were like that horrible Hemingway character who sits in a cafe with his ham and eggs while his wife is dying.”
“The only reason I ate was so that I would have the stamina to stay with you when it counted.”
“That wasn’t the way it felt, Michael.”
Watching them on the bed together now, I feel as if we are back in that birthing room, in a new version of her infancy.
“I felt a kind of electric shock when she was born,” says Robin. “She was without stillness. She had no peace. She used to tremble and push me away with this enormous despair. There was nothing I could do to ease it.” Robin’s long emotive silences seemed to infuriate Sally. A voltage of discord ran between them. A month or two after she was born, she rejected Robin’s breast, insisting on a violent autonomy. She seemed always to be waiting for some invisible storm to blow over. I sometimes worried that she felt at home nowhere, that what lay in store for her was a life in which she would be chasing one solution after another in a ceaselessly impulsive quest for some kind of haven from herself or just a place of pause. As a baby, lying on Robin’s chest, Aaron had projected a bold and sturdy serenity. Sally had no such serenity. She was a thrasher, a gripper, a grasper, a yanker of fingers and ears. She thrust herself forward; she was relentlessly propelled. And unlike Aaron—with whom Robin’s labor lasted twenty-six hours, Aaron resisting expulsion every inch of the way—she was born with supernatural ease. On first laying eyes on her, I pictured a meteoric future. People instinctively gave way to her. She disobeyed. She bolted from Robin and me every chance that she had. Then, having contrived to make herself alone, she looked panicked and lost. She craved reassurance, but when we gave it to her she rejected it as tainted or insincere.
Now this second infancy, with Sally on the bed with her wayward black eyes, and Robin beside her administering her remedies and waging her healing campaign. As a baby, Sally wouldn’t put up with this kind of communion with Robin. But now she offers no resistance. It is as if Robin is enacting with her the infancy she wishes they’d had.
I doze for a few minutes, and I am thrown back to when Robin and I were fifteen ourselves, hiding out in Robin’s bedroom. It was almost as narrow as this one, and what comes back to me is Robin’s luxurious silence, and the expression that accompanied that silence: at once tolerant and far away, an offering that al
so signaled her unconquerable detachment. I prattled on about my plans—our plans. And that expression of hers, that open-lipped half smile that encompassed to my teenage eyes the entire feminine world, was the only response I desired. We would lie together for hours, lost in each other, yet unaware of the other, with no danger of disagreement in our clutch, no room for potentially complicating intrusions.
I remind Robin of those Bleecker Street afternoons. “I still remember them as a kind of paradise,” I say.
“Maybe for you it was. You’ve probably forgotten this, but you used to tell me how ‘liberated’ you thought I was. I wasn’t ‘bogged down,’ you said, by which you meant, I guess, that I was your idea of a free soul. You had no way of knowing this, but I was fed up with myself. I thought I was hopeless, everything I did felt stalled. My polarity teacher says I was stuck in shallow soil. Maybe that’s why I understand what Sally’s going through. She has nothing to hold on to, nothing to hold her down.”
As if she is as startled by Robin’s words as I am, Sally pops open her eyes, blinking us into focus, her face opening into a jubilant expression that immediately puts me on guard.
“Look at you two! I’ve brought you together again!”
Her smile is as broad as that of an opening night performer taking her curtain call, basking in applause. Another torn part of Sally’s life has been repaired. The sheer power of her luminescence has brought Robin and me together again. All has turned out as she foresaw.
She orders Robin to sit next to me on the arm of the chair.
“Put your hand on his shoulder,” she says. “Father, take Mother’s other hand. Hold it tight.”
When I hesitate, she glares at me. “Do as I say!”
Having arranged us to her satisfaction, she plants herself on the edge of the bed, hands clasped in her lap, enjoying the picture.
“You look beautiful together. Don’t you realize this is the way you were born to be?”
7:55. Visiting hours are almost over. It is pouring rain, thick pellets slamming against the window.
I say good night to Sally, who is still aglow with the new harmony she believes she has imposed on our lives.
“Artichokes tomorrow,” I promise.
“I’ll stay a few minutes longer,” says Robin.
We are off balance with each other after our mock re-marriage, and out in the hall we quickly arrange to visit Sally separately from now on, so as not to reinforce her false picture.
“The very idea that she believes there is some living ideal to go back to,” whispers Robin.
As I am leaving, my attention is caught by a disturbance in the hall. Rufus is shooing the Hasidic family off the ward, rushing them into the elevator like evacuees.
The shoteh’s brother gives me a stricken, possibly beseeching look as he is ushered away.
In the lobby he is wrapping his black hat in plastic, to protect it from the rain. His hands are trembling. He looks surprisingly fragile with his head uncovered, his hair above his side curls tousled and thin.
“They told us we stimulated him too much. It was an accusation. They marched him into his room like he was condemned.”
“He’ll feel better in the morning,” I say.
It is still light outside, a yellowish twilight, enchanted in its way, with the thunderstorm pouring down, the raindrops as large as hailstones striking the ground like they’ve been hurled.
He seems to regret having confided in me, and turns abruptly away, leading his family, who are gathered around him, out into the storm.
Emerging from the subway at Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue, I have the sense of having traveled from an alien place only to return to somewhere equally strange. The West Village has a stage-set feel. The thunderstorm has passed over but water continues to rush along the curb. The rain has darkened the pavement. The air is simmering. A drenched couple passes. The woman looks at her ruined shoes as if to say, Why fight it?
The 200-dollar hairdresser stands in front of his shop on the corner of Bank Street and West Fourth smoking a joint. He wears a red bow tie, leather suspenders, and, despite the heat, a striped Edwardian jacket. His powder-blue Vespa is parked on the sidewalk, glistening from the rain. “A heavenly weekend,” he says to me. “Tout le monde has headed for the shore. We’re socially disgraced, you and me. Positively marooned.” Inside the shop, his implacable shih tzu lifts his leg over a mound of cut hair that has been swept into a corner.
Across the street is “my” building, like a derelict passenger on a first-class train. The bricks need repainting, the cornice is sagging, the lids have fallen off the beat-up trash cans. I climb the five flights to the campground of my apartment and collapse on the living room sofa. Sally’s cracked Walkman sits on the steamer trunk that doubles as a coffee table, with Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations still in the cassette slot. I try to turn it on. The batteries are dead.
Pat isn’t home, and for the first time since he died two years ago I am overcome by a palpable desire to speak to my father. If only he were alive, with his horse sense and keen assessing eye. He was a hardnosed man, dealing scrap metal and pig iron from his warehouse in Brooklyn. Having had to contend with his own shoteh in my brother Steve, he would have understood the impact of Sally’s crack-up. Of his own children, he used to say: “Whatever they are, I’ve no reason to act surprised.” The fact that we were so often at odds only makes me miss him more sharply. When I was in my early twenties, with a baby to support, he offered me the chance to join him in the scrap metal trade. He was furious when I turned him down. “Those notebooks you scribble in won’t get you on the goddamn subway,” he said. Self-conscious about his lack of formal education, he took my literary pretensions as a personal affront. As a career, writing was unfathomable to him, unless you were as famous as Arthur Miller or cooking up gags for one of his revered television stars. Yet there is nobody with whom I could have spoken with less inhibition about Sally.
I nod off and then wake up with a start.
“You look like you just fell off a ladder,” says the voice of my landlord Eric. He’s standing over the couch, wearing work boots and a gray T-shirt torn around the collar. He’s already helped himself to a bourbon. “I’ve been laying a new gas line. Honest work for a change. Is the fold-out bed still in working order? I’ll be using it tonight, if you can put up with my snoring.”
“I barely hear it.”
He raises his glass as if to say Salud! Nothing is out of the ordinary; Eric crashes on the fold-out when he pleases, at least four or five nights a month.
Reaching into his shoulder bag, he removes a manuscript copy of the novel he has been working on for years. “I’ve completely revised it,” he says. “Would you mind having a look? Some of the changes are subtle, but taken as a whole I think they make a real difference.”
One hundred and fifty-eight pages, I notice, the same length as when he first showed it to me shortly after I moved in. Perhaps my encouraging words at the time were influenced by my dependence on him. But there were things to admire in his writing—a certain wryness, a curious feeling for people with power. About a year later, after a much talked-about “rewrite,” he gave me the manuscript again. As far as I could tell, not a word had been changed. I pointed this out to him as gently as I could. “You’re right,” he said. “I need to get on with it, take the bull by the horns!”
Since then, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid the subject, but Eric constantly brings it up, counting on me to endorse his illusion by discussing the novel in such a way as to make it seem viable and alive. I’ve come to realize he has no more intention of finishing the novel than of abandoning it. He speaks of it the way one speaks of moving to Tahiti or sailing around the world. Yet I can see that on some level it causes him pain.
I gather up the manuscript and place it neatly on my lap. A tacit promise. I feel as if I’m impersonating the person I was before Sally’s crack-up. If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical dise
ase, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. When Eric refers to someone as “crazy,” he means uninhibited, rebellious, creative. It’s a form of praise.
“Does Pat have a problem with me?” he suddenly asks.
“Of course not.”
“She called earlier. She seemed…put out. Impatient. And not for the first time. It’s a general feeling with her. How shall I put this? I don’t feel welcome anymore when I come around.”
In my own place, he might have added. Our leap, Pat’s and mine, from obscurely hostile roommates to married couple has radically altered the chemistry of my friendship with Eric. Pat is unwilling to play along with the crash pad atmosphere Eric and I maintained before she came on the scene. Eric misses our bachelor days.
“I’m going to visit some friends uptown,” he says frostily. And he abruptly leaves.
10:25. I replace the burnt-out fuses and switch on the air conditioner, which then labors away like an old truck in the corner. Eric forgot his newspaper, the front page of which informs me that Vicente Gigante, the most powerful mafia boss in the United States, is wandering around Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers, hollow-eyed, unshaven, pretending to be insane so as to avoid having to stand trial for murder. “He’s a scary person,” says a neighbor. “He stares right through you like you’re not there.”
A parody of madness. What other disease is verifiable solely from the social affect of its victim?
On another page of the paper more news of Margaux Hemingway, dead at forty-one from an overdose of barbiturates. Her grandfather had also killed himself in the month of July, thirty-five years ago, with a shotgun. He had been trying to perform the opposite trick from Gigante’s: that of convincing people that he was sane so he would be left alone long enough to put an end to himself. He was taken to the psychiatric section of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, after a gun aimed at his face was wrested from his hands. At the Mayo Clinic he “charmed and deceived [the doctor] to the conclusion that he was sane,” wrote his widow Mary.
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