Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

  “My son. Here you are.” Steiler held out the paper with the names but Leah ignored the gesture.

  “What does your son do?”

  “He doesn’t know. He can’t commit himself to anything.”

  Leah nodded sagely, detecting a weak spot in the impenetrable professor.

  “Committing isn’t everything,” Leah said. “Do you have any other children?”

  “No. Now, is there anything else you’d like to discuss?”

  “No.” Leah left without taking the sheet of paper.

  She went across the street to the college coffee shop and ordered sliced apples and milk. She had an hour to kill before therapy. Dr. May McNulty specialized in alternative methods of psychoanalysis—Gestalt, meditation—but more importantly, Leah liked her the first time they met. The college support center had given Leah the referral when she returned to school after Aaron’s funeral and the weeklong period of mourning, the previous spring.

  Dr. May, as Leah liked to call her, was direct but gentle and didn’t insist that Leah go through the four stages of grief like her mother did. She looked like a former gymnast: petite and energetic, exacting in her physical movements.

  A waiter on roller skates with green hair and a red silk tie took Leah’s order. He was one of the reasons she came to this restaurant. He didn’t appear to care what people thought of him. The waiter rolled back and placed the bowl of apples in front of her. They were arranged in the shape of a lotus flower. She was sure there was something hidden in Steiler, something soft and weak. Everyone had that. She would make Steiler listen to her. She inspected one of the apple slices, then bit it in half.

  “Get comfortable,” Dr. May said from across the heavily furnished, carpeted room. “We’re going to try some directed visualization today.” The therapist’s office was in a renovated attic of Brookline’s mini-estate area, not far from President Kennedy’s childhood home. Once a week, Leah passed the historic home but had yet to go inside it. She had enough death to think about.

  She stretched out on the couch and pushed her shoes off, fitting between the two couch arms. As she followed Dr. May’s instructions to close her eyes, Steiler’s face emerged in the darkness like a solid object in a dark pool. The woman had become an obsession. Dr. May encouraged her to let every image come through and in no time she saw Elaine Tyson’s greasy hair and her mother’s oversized, wasted eyes, then a sketch of her brother, Aaron, beneath a white cotton blanket. Aaron had an angular face and a bicyclist’s body, taut as rope. The cotton blanket changed to a rippling waterfall. Leah nestled deeper into the sofa as Dr. May asked her to talk about what she saw.

  “A waterfall.”

  She leaned over a boulder to feel the water gushing over a pile of smaller rocks. Soft car noises from the residential street in Brookline mingled with the water sound. A bicycle bell rang and a small truck shifted gears. Flowers grew out of the rocky mountainside. She went over and picked one; then she heard the bicycle bell again.

  “What do you see now?” Dr. May asked.

  The waterfall drifted away and Leah saw the green lawn of her childhood home, oak trees, the chain link fence that separated their yard from the neighboring woods, a blue sky. She saw Aaron and a middle-aged woman holding a kite.

  “This lady, Mrs. Devonshire, stayed with us once for a week. My parents were away, before their divorce. Mrs. Devonshire taught Aaron how to make a kite. I made a tree. We used papier-mâché.” She remembered the sticky white paste on her hands. “I planted my tree in the backyard. It lasted four days before the rain got it. But we still have Aaron’s kite.”

  She opened her eyes. “I don’t know,” Leah said, struggling to get up. She felt dizzy. Why hold on to things that are gone? She hated the overhead light and covered her face. Was she supposed to sit there and cry?

  “You’ll be all right,” Dr. May said, walking over and sitting next to Leah on the couch.

  Leah talked into her hands. “Please don’t touch me. And don’t tell me I’ll be okay. I hate that. It’s so typical.”

  When she got home, Tilly handed Leah the phone. “Your mother.”

  “I just walked in,” Leah said to the receiver.

  “Jewel, honey.”

  “Don’t call me Jewel, Mother.”

  “Don’t be mean. I’m your mother and I’m alone here.”

  Leah looked at an old wire running along the molding on the wall.

  “Don’t you forget that,” her mother continued.

  “How could I? You won’t let me.”

  The phone disconnected. Leah waited for a dial tone and called her mother back.

  ‘Mother, please. Maybe you should talk to a therapist. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Her mother remained silent. What now, Leah thought.

  “A therapist is not my family,” her mother said. The phone disconnected again.

  As Leah lay in bed that night the full moon whitened her room. Her body quivered and she saw the furniture vibrate in the light as if it were painted in air. The legs of the bureau mixed with the hairs in the rug. The red apples in the postcard she had pinned to the corner of her dresser mirror bobbed on the mercuric surface. She closed her eyes. A flash of white fur spun through her mind. A tree appeared and Leah saw herself standing beneath it, looking up at the stars. The ballerina, her pink legs floating behind like fish whiskers, hovered over Leah and the tree. Leah reached up to touch the dancer’s shoe but the shoe became formless and trickled away in Leah’s sleep.

  The next day in class, Michael nudged her a few times and twisted his head in a questioning posture but Leah disappointed him again. Poor Michael couldn’t adjust to the fact that she didn’t want to talk anymore: not to him, anyone or anything. Period. Words had not helped her communicate. What did he expect? Besides, Steiler’s zipper had been safety-pinned together. This was far more compelling to Leah.

  Steiler must have had a bad morning. Her blouse was sweat stained. The scarf around her neck looked like it had been hanging on a door knob in a dead person’s closet. While Steiler talked about colors and space, raising her arm to illustrate something, showing that stain again, Leah imagined the forty-ish old woman struggling to get dressed in the bedroom of an old brownstone apartment in front of a mirror that was also cracked and stained. Now Steiler was saying something about Cezanne and that whole impressionist crowd, quoting Pissaro, Cassatt, and the ballet man, Degas—the professor’s voice tracing halos around Leah’s head. She found it easy to condense Steiler’s words into abstract sensations so that they no longer had meaning, only sound. When class ended, Leah passed her second paper to the front, along with the others, and headed home. She took care with this paper, rechecking and editing her analysis of an early Manet painting to avoid making the mistakes of the first assignment.

  Steiler averted her eyes when she handed Leah the second graded paper. You’ve been reading, as far as I can judge, the professor scrawled, some critics on the Masters. I’ll have to see what you’ve used before I can judge how much of this is yours. Resubmit with Xeroxes of materials consulted. There was no grade.

  “You’ve accused me of plagiarism,” Leah said, standing inside the door frame of Steiler’s office.

  “My instincts are usually right,” Steiler said. She leaned back in her chair, her cheekbones protruding like knife handles. “Perhaps you would like to tell me what papers you’ve used?”

  “You specifically asked that we not use outside sources, isn’t that right? Which means you are calling me a liar.”

  Steiler’s head twitched.

  “Perhaps I’m mistaken. Nonetheless, I’d have to see some of your previous essays to determine that. Compared to your first paper, this one clearly surpasses what you seem capable of.”

  “I’ll get those papers to you.” Leah glanced over at the portraits on the wall. Steiler herself looked like an oversized
plaster bust. She’s out of her mind. Out of this world.

  Leah ran down two flights of stairs into the wind outside. Overhead the sky sucked up the last shadows on the street. She could smell rain but she headed down to the Copley Square, the opposite direction from home, and took an elevator forty-six stories into the clouds.

  From the John Hancock building, she looked out over the balcony to the rooftops, the highways twisting through fields surrounding the city. The sky had darkened, clumping like soiled cotton. She had a sudden impulse to jump free and grabbed hold of the railing to check herself. Aaron had slid a needle into his vein. That was the end of it. Who was he? She remembered how he had screamed at her once for misplacing his pen. She had thought all older brothers did that. Then he had nearly twisted her elbow off despite the fact that he’d had a whole drawer full of replacements. Her brother had been a heroin addict. She followed the railing around to the other side of the building and leaned against it.

  The moment between the balcony and the pavement would be the most difficult. All those tiny human beings moving senselessly below, what would they do if she flung herself, arms and legs splayed like Aaron’s kite, fluttered through the air for a few moments of grace before breaking into the impenetrable? It might take her to the purest sense of herself: no place—no up or down. She walked back inside and went home.

  She knelt on her bedroom rug and rifled through old term papers. That woman was not going to get away with this. A’s and B’s; words on the pages that said insightful, original, penetrating spread in a circle around her. Tilly wasn’t home yet. The rain had started and it was dark but Leah did not want to turn on the light.

  “So you’re home,” her mother said after Leah picked up the phone.

  “I’m home.”

  “What’s wrong? I can hear something in your voice.”

  “Nothing. I’m studying.”

  “I’m not going to fight with you dear. Aaron’s anniversary is in three weeks. I want you home for that. I want you home and I’m not going to worry about it. You make promises and you break them. Do you ever think of your mother?”

  “Never. Almost every day,” Leah said, looking down the end of her dark hall. Her mother lived in Portland, Maine, a two-hour bus ride she didn’t want to take. She left the papers on the floor and lay down on the bed. The woman in a fur-lined world held out her hand. Leah took hold of it in her sleep.

  At her subsequent therapy session, the thought of the waterfall, which Dr. May asserted was Leah’s inner place of solace and rest, embarrassed and annoyed her. Seeing the sofa reminded her of all that. She crossed the room and sat in a chair next to the door. Dr. May looked calm. That annoyed her too.

  “Leah?” Dr. May said.

  Leah picked up a magazine about dogs and flipped the pages until she found something that interested her: A Couple’s Nightmare.

  “What’s going on with you right now?”

  “Nothing.” Exactly that, Leah thought and began reading … An elderly couple from Maryland was attacked while staying at the Eagle Lake Motel. Inadequate safety measures—

  “Leah?

  … made it easy for intruders to enter the room where the Bancrofts were sleeping. They had not used the locks on their door and guests who heard the commotion did nothing for fear the intruders—

  “Leah, did something happen this week?”

  Mr. Bancroft was beaten with a metal rod sustaining multiple injuries—

  “Leah, I’m not going to judge you if you want to tell me.”

  Leah looked up. Dr. May’s hair was pinned in a tiny knot on top of her head, like a dancer’s.

  Over the weekend, Leah sat in front of the television and went to a German subtitled movie with Tilly at the Coolidge independent film theater. The last scene showed a woman in bed, a vial of pills scattered on the sheets: symbol of a ruined life.

  “Is that the only option?” Tilly wanted to know as they walked home.

  “I can’t talk about it,” Leah said. It was dusk and car lights popped out of the dim air like fireflies.

  Tilly nodded and hurried to keep up with Leah.

  “You know Steiler’s whole problem?” Leah began. “She’s divorced. The secretary told me.”

  “That’s not your problem,” Tilly said.

  “Yes, it is,” Leah said, halting on the sidewalk for emphasis. Sometimes Tilly’s penchant for cheap advice infuriated her. “If you don’t mind, I think I’d like to walk the rest of the way home alone.”

  She crossed the street and cut through a ballpark, following a white line that formed one side of the baseball field. Steiler’s bitter way was more than a problem. It was an oppression. Leah slowed down under the streetlights. A stray cat emerged from a hedge and she called to it but it was wary and slunk back under the shrub. When she got home Tilly was hidden away in the bedroom. They had gotten into spats like this many times.

  The following day, Leah sat in class with her stack of papers, hands folded in her lap. Michael pulled up a chair but said nothing. One by one the others took their places and waited.

  It surprised Leah how short Steiler was, petite really with bony shoulders and small hands. Petite except for those wide, inner tube hips she hid beneath the conference table once Steiler sat down.

  “I’d like each of you to choose one of the three topics written on this sheet,” Steiler said, passing the sheet around. “A five minute talk will suffice.”

  Reading the list—influences, topography, subject—Leah wondered if Steiler had been shafted by her husband as her mother had been.

  “Ms. Tyson, let’s begin,” Steiler said, returning to the seat at the head of the table.

  Leah was sure Steiler picked on Tyson for the pure joy of it.

  Elaine twirled a pen in her hand and pushed the bangs from her eyes. Three students opened their notebooks and started doodling.

  “There is always the problem of determining influences.”

  “True,” Steiler said.

  True, Leah mimicked.

  “Yes … so, um …”

  Moving along, Leah thought. Her temples itched from Elaine’s endless hesitations.

  “There’s the influence of the teacher over the artist, the way a parent influences a child.”

  The parent will do it to you every time, Leah agreed.

  “The critic to the work of art.”

  “Naturally,” Steiler nodded, going in for the kill. “But let’s start with one. We’re not asking you to address every option, Ms. Tyson.”

  We? Leah thought, digging her pen into a groove in the table until the plastic cap snapped under the pressure. Several people looked at her.

  She could not listen any longer and stared at the pile of papers to prove her teacher wrong. What had Aaron been thinking? The nurses had opened the curtains that last day so that the sunlight fell on his face but no light penetrated him. He was gone. Steiler called on another student until a half a dozen students had given impromptu speeches.

  “Leah!” Steiler said. “You may begin.”

  Leah focused on two aluminum eyes, the woman’s narrow face, the brown sweater and roundish body quivering, the tiny hands curling into themselves.

  “I would like to discuss the critic’s relationship to art,” Leah began.

  “What specifically?” Steiler asked.

  “If the critic focuses on abstract ideas as a way of responding emotionally to the work, she ends up confusing concepts with emotion. Intellectual constructs become a way of feeling. Theories, not emotions, form a grid through which the critic perceives or misperceives the art. This is a danger,” Leah continued, seeing her words reflecting across her brain. “For it is another way the critic convinces herself that she is being objective or right. The intellect,” she said, clicking the t’s, “just like everything else human, rearranges ideas in the way it
prefers and that, after all, is just another way of being subjective. Take color, for example—”

  “Whose idea might that be?” Steiler asked.

  Leah heard footsteps out in the hall. Chairs scraped against the floor. The period had ended. Several people stood up to leave.

  “Mine,” she said. “I have my own ideas.”

  Steiler nodded and gathered her things.

  “Excuse me,” Leah said. “But I’ve brought my papers.” She looked at Michael, who was slowly getting out of his seat, then back at Steiler who had embraced her books and was starting for the door.

  “I’d like you to look at these papers,” Leah said.

  Michael buttoned his coat and finally left. The room was empty now.

  “Impossible, I have an out of town lecture. I won’t be back until after the weekend.”

  “I’m not waiting a week. If you’d rather, I’ll file a complaint with the Dean.”

  Steiler shifted her stance. “I can’t stop you from doing that.”

  “Yes, you could. It won’t take long to look at these.” She held the papers and shook them.

  “Next week would be better for me.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Look at yourself,” Leah said, raising her voice. “Your clothes. Your loneliness—”

  “That’s enough.”

  “No. It isn’t. You called me a liar.”

  Steiler walked over to the door and pulled it shut.

  “I’m going to ask you to remove yourself from my seminar. This is impossible.”

  “I am simply asking you to read these papers. And no. You won’t do it! You insult me!” Leah cried out. “Your husband left you and I can see why. Didn’t he?” She stood in the room wavering in the clammy air. The windows lining the wall resembled cut-out pieces of cardboard. What would it take to make her pay attention? Leah wondered.

  Steiler looked at her and reached for the papers in her hand.

  “Sit down, Leah.”

  They sat. Steiler rummaged through her briefcase for reading glasses and began comparing essays. Leah stared at nothing, at the wall, at Aaron’s peaceful, breathless face until finally Steiler looked up at her.