by Ann Packer
Hands for now, they decided. We went into the mud pantry, where three or four dozen bottles were stored, in racks jammed into cabinets and on a freestanding shelf unit that had been wedged behind the door. Lewis’s wife and daughters were out, and as we gathered bottles he began talking about the younger girl’s unhappiness with her new school, to which she’d been admitted a week after the year got under way, and what did I think of that, moving a child under those circumstances, was it okay?
I said, “It sounds like you’re worried about her.”
“Einstein,” James said. “That’s what we call her at home.”
Lewis glanced at James curiously. To me James seemed distracted, the comment delivered almost automatically, and I imagined myself explaining to Lewis that James didn’t mean anything by it, he was just discharging excess energy.
“Is there research on that?” Lewis asked me. “Changing schools? This is your field, right, aren’t you a child therapist? She’s eight, if that matters.”
“I don’t know of any research.”
“She also has trouble falling asleep at night—but I guess that’s not so unusual.” He hesitated. “Is it?”
I smiled noncommittally, and he let the subject drop as we took our first load of bottles to the garage. At first I was afraid James would drop one, but with his big hands and long arms he was able to carry eight at a time.
After depositing a load of bottles I asked if I could use the bathroom, and Lewis and James were gone when I returned. It was nearly six, dusk; I’d told a colleague I’d be free for a phone conversation at six-thirty.
I thought about carrying some more bottles to the garage, but once I begin to think about being late it’s as if it’s already happened. I didn’t want to delay our departure by the few extra minutes it would take me to make another trip, given that they’d likely be back in a moment or two. Then a few more minutes went by, and I regretted that I hadn’t gone because I’d spent at least as long standing there waiting for them as a trip to and from the garage would have taken me.
At last I set off, and it turned out they’d stopped working and were standing there talking.
“Rebecca,” James said, “you just missed it. Vince was telling me about the amazing ideas he has for the property. Tell her,” he said to Lewis. “Beck, you’ve got to hear this.”
“Actually, I’ve got to get going.”
“It won’t take a minute. Then we’ll go, I promise.”
Lewis was obviously uncomfortable; Robert had told him we had no interest in selling the house. But he began to talk, and as he went along his voice picked up speed and he grew animated. He described the multilevel house he envisioned, probably six or seven thousand square feet; and the series of terraces that could be created once the woods were cleared; and what could go on the top terrace (a swimming pool), and the next terrace (a tennis court), and the third (a guesthouse), which he was thinking could have a separate driveway. “I don’t know,” he said as he finished. “It’s just fun to think about.”
I glanced at my watch; it was six-fifteen. “I’ve got a call scheduled,” I said, and we exchanged thank-yous and shook hands, and James and I headed for my car, James whispering “Shh-shh-shh” as we hurried along.
“What?” I said in a low voice.
“Wait till we get going.”
He stayed silent until we’d closed the car doors. Then he gave me a mischievous smile and said, “One way to think about it? The more detailed his vision, the more he’ll pay to realize it.”
“James,” I said. “We’re not selling, remember?” Then suddenly I was afraid. “Wait—how did it come up?”
He smiled. “I brought it up. Told him things have changed.” He fastened his seat belt with a hard click. “I’m crossing over,” he added. “Hello, dark side.”
• • •
Ryan once had a dream in which the house hadn’t been built. He stood under the oak tree, surrounded by other trees and shrubs, and felt utterly bewildered. At last he realized he was in our father’s painting of the land before the ground was broken. He knew this because the colors he saw were muted: they were the painting’s colors, based on the true colors of nature but lightened and grayed.
He had this dream at a low point in his life, after his heart had been broken for the first time. We were both in college. He told me about it on a weekend afternoon, the two of us side by side on lawn chairs in the backyard. When he finished describing the dream, he closed his eyes and held out his hand, and I took it. We sat like that for several minutes. It was the first time I’d sat holding anyone’s hand in . . . well, perhaps in my life. Of course I’d walked while holding hands any number of times, when I was very little and one of my parents was escorting me or when I was older and escorting Ryan or James. But to sit holding hands: this was new for me. Finally, Ryan gave my hand a squeeze and dropped it. Then he said, almost as an afterthought, that in the dream the rest of us weren’t there with him, but he knew we were coming. He was alone but not lonely.
The night James said he wanted to sell the house, I dreamed Ryan’s dream. I was alone under the oak tree and also inside the painting, surrounded by a version of our land that had been bled of its true colors. In my dream, the family was there, too, standing among the shrubs, leaning against trees I’d never seen in real life because they’d been removed to make room for the house. I could see them—my father, my mother, all three of my brothers—but I couldn’t reach them. I was lonely but not alone.
I woke from this dream at 4:28 a.m. Emotions in dreams can build to a pitch they may not reach in waking time because of our defenses, and I was suffused with feeling. I wasn’t just lonely, I was bereft. I was desolate. Walt was asleep beside me, and I moved closer to him, put my arm around his waist, and waited for equilibrium.
My father’s painting had been the subject of much discussion after he died. Having decided unanimously that we didn’t want to sell the house, we may have needed a point of contention or even just deliberation; in any case, we debated endlessly over who should get the painting. Realistically, only Robert or I could take it—only we had room—but it seemed important that we go through some kind of process that allowed Ryan and James an equal and valid claim. Then one day all three boys came to me as a group—I didn’t think this had ever happened before, for any reason—and told me they’d decided I should have it. Maybe this story invalidates the idea that I was never the only girl in a family of boys, but I see it more as the exception that proves the rule.
The house, the painting, the dream: I feared I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Hello, dark side. James had been referring to the terms of our father’s estate plan. He’d been referring to Penny.
She first went to Taos in 1988, for a weeklong workshop on the found object in art, or The Found Object in Art, as my brothers and I somehow termed it, using emphasis and enunciation to capitalize the initial letters. A few years later she announced that she was going to spend the entire month of June there, and the following year it was the entire summer. Our father reported these plans with careful neutrality, and I let (or made) myself believe he was pleased with them, happy to have the house to himself for a while. I was busy with my residency and didn’t think about it very much.
At the end of the summer, she called and told him she’d found a room to rent in a tiny adobe house and wanted a year to figure out if she could support herself selling her art. She asked him for $2,000 a month and said that if by the end of twelve months she had not earned $24,000, she would give up and come home.
When he told me about this he tried to maintain his previous detachment, but I could tell he was flummoxed. “She needs to give it a whirl,” he said more than once, and it was his repetition of that exact phrase as much as anything else that clued me in to his anxiety. It was as if he’d memorized a line, the better not to say what he was really thinking. And “whirl”: the wo
rd seemed important. I suspected he was worried that the disturbed air might reach California and unbalance him.
Incredibly, she succeeded. By the end of the first year she had sold several dozen pieces, had rented space in a shared studio, and had broken even. And though he visited her a few times, and though she stayed at the Portola Valley house on the rare occasions when she came to California, they never lived together again.
When he turned seventy, he began to think about the house and what would happen if he died with his current will in effect. Despite California’s community property laws, he held the title to the house as his separate property, a state of affairs that had arisen from the fact that he’d owned the land before his marriage. From time to time he’d told Penny they could get a lawyer to do the legal work necessary to change this, but she never seemed to care and it never happened. In the original will, drafted when we were children, she was to receive half his estate while my brothers and I would split the other half. Thirty-odd years later he still wanted her to have half, but he knew she was itching to buy a place in Taos and was afraid she would force a sale of the house in order to cash out. He wanted us kids to be able to hold on to the place for as long as we all wanted. In the end, his lawyer set up a plan that left the house in trust to the five of us with the provision that it couldn’t be sold without the consent of Penny and at least one of the children.
And after his death she did want to sell; it was only because of the trust that we were able to hold on to the property. We were united in our desire to keep it, but we had our separate rationalizations. Robert said he might buy out the rest of us someday and live there, even though his current house was larger and more up-to-date, with a fabulous kitchen that his wife had designed. I was concerned about Ryan, who depended on the shed as a home for himself and his family. Ryan wanted to keep the house so Sammy, Luke, and Katya would know the place where we’d all grown up. And James wanted to thwart Penny. If I’d had to list us in order of how likely we were to break rank—to go to the “dark side”—James would have been last.
It took me a long time to get back to sleep, and I was tired and groggy all the next day, slow with my patients and spent by the time I got home. James was out somewhere, and Walt made dinner for the two of us. I was in bed by nine, and when he woke me at dawn the next morning and suggested we go for a hike, I nearly said no. But I knew I’d be glad if I went. I had wondered if being married would change my medical practice, and it had: thanks to Walt, I’d become the kind of psychiatrist who recommends outdoor exercise to her patients.
The county park was deserted and green, with a dirt road that quickly ascended to a network of trails winding through the trees. When our trail narrowed, Walt took the lead. He was fifty-nine, but his shoulders were bowed after several decades at the microscope and the computer, and he liked to use a walking stick because of an old knee injury, so he appeared older—though not yet an “older adult,” as the saying goes, the noun apparently added for dignity to make up for the potentially damning adjective. (In that way, “older adult” reminded me of “gay American,” and both seemed to be opposites of phrases like “vagina area,” in which the potentially offending noun is neutralized by conversion into an adjective.) Still, watching him up ahead of me, I felt acutely aware of the sixteen-year difference in our ages.
“Sorry about last night,” I said. “All that stuff with my brothers.” Over the course of half a dozen phone calls, Robert and Ryan and I had spent at least an hour talking about James wanting to sell the house. “Is James driving you crazy?”
“I enjoy him,” Walt said with a smile. “I don’t think he’s as much of a puzzle to me as he is to you.”
“He’s not as much of a puzzle? Or you’re less preoccupied with trying to figure it out?”
“Is a puzzle still a puzzle if no one wants to solve it?”
I loved Walt’s shy playfulness. It was among the first things I noticed about him. His serious, professorial demeanor belied a sweet, merry core. We met at a lecture on the neurobiology of depression; he was an immunologist, and when I asked what had brought him to the event, he said he thought depression could be viewed as an autoimmune disease, in which the mind produced antibodies against the self. “Oh, I like that,” I said, and he said, “I was hoping you would.” This was before my father’s death, but not enough before that I ever introduced them. It’s possible that, had my father lived, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get close to Walt. Regardless, the timing of our meeting denied all three of us whatever might have come of the two of them getting to know each other.
“The thing about selling,” I said, “is that it’s so final.”
Walt chuckled. “I suppose you could always buy it back someday.”
“No, we either keep it or we sell and it’s over.”
He didn’t respond. We were navigating a place where erupting tree roots had created a staircase effect, and I wondered if he was having trouble with the terrain. Then he said, “What if we bought it?”
“The house? We don’t want to buy it. I love our house.”
“We don’t want to buy it or we don’t want to live there?”
“Why buy it if we don’t want to live there?”
“Why own it if we don’t want to live there?”
“I own twelve and a half percent. We can’t live in twelve and a half percent of a house.”
“That’s very literal-minded of you.”
“Of course.”
“Rebecca?”
“Mmm?”
“I’d live there if you wanted.”
In response I reached up and touched his back, and he kissed me and pulled me close. My nose was inches from his neck, and I smelled his somewhat odd, idiosyncratic smell, which reminded me of baked squash. At first, when we started getting physically intimate, I had found the smell unpleasant and wondered if it might make the relationship impossible for me. I’d had several lovers though nothing serious, and already I knew this was different. But how could I be with someone whose native smell bothered me? And how could I let something so minor get in the way? Up until that point I’d treated a number of lonely, isolated people whose presenting complaint was that they were single but who then revealed themselves to be unable to get beyond small objections to the people they met. I’d had patients who couldn’t stand a new partner’s laugh or extremely heavy eyebrows. I never failed to interpret a conflict, often regarding how torn my patient felt about the prospect of actually getting what he or she wanted. Walt’s smell made me reconsider. I began to think more about chemistry—not “chemistry” but actual chemistry. I read about attraction and smell and came across a fascinating study in which it was found that women who were given samples of the body odor of a variety of men rated as most appealing the smells of the men who were genetically most different from them—those who would help them reproduce most successfully. Was my reaction to Walt’s smell an indication that we might not be a good match reproductively? We weren’t going to reproduce, so what did it matter? I worked hard to get over my revulsion, and over time, perhaps because of my work and perhaps because Walt in love smelled different from Walt alone, I felt less revulsion, and then no revulsion, more an awareness that I could, most of the time, keep neutral.
Walt released me and smiled mildly. “So you don’t want to be queen of the manse?”
I shook my head and we started hiking again. I could live in that house only as one of the selves I’d already been: the self-contained little girl, the preternaturally calm adolescent.
He said, “Tell me again what Ryan said?”
“ ‘Whether it happens now or not,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘the question will keep coming up until it does happen.’ ”
“He’s right, you know.”
“I know.”
James was still asleep when we got home. Walt and I showered and dressed and went our separate ways, but it was a
lovely start to the day, and when we met again in the kitchen at dusk I thanked him for having woken me. Now James was out. We made dinner together and settled in front of the TV to watch DVDs of some TED talks. We had two by colleagues of Walt’s and a third by a child advocacy expert whose work focused on immigrant children in border states. A couple days earlier, James had teased us about our taste. “And now I’m joining Rebecca Blair and Walt Newhall for a little light entertainment about the neuroplasticity of the brain.”
The phone rang and I saw from the caller ID that it was Lewis Vincent. I answered, thinking he must be calling about his conversation with James, but he said he and his wife wanted to talk to me about their daughter.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t treat acquaintances or their children. I’d be happy to give you a referral.”
“No, no, she doesn’t need therapy. Lisa and I just want to get your perspective.”
“I understand. But I’ve found that even a single consultation changes a social relationship.”
“We don’t have a social relationship, we have a business relationship.”
I kept silent.
“Really? You won’t meet with us once and give us your expertise? Sell us your expertise?”
“I have a lot of very experienced colleagues. I’d be happy to give you a name. It was nice seeing you the other day. How’s the wine migration going?”
“I’m getting a couple of guys in to do it. They’re selling me their expertise. Ha, I’m kidding. That was a joke.”
After we hung up I returned to the couch, and a moment later James came in, smiling as he saw us in front of the TV and saying, “Don’t tell me you’re watching this trash again. So how are you guys? I just spent a few hours with Rob. The two of us are talking about funding research on the mood disorders of middle-aged primary care physicians.”
