So it was like that sometimes.
But about Rema’s lamb after eleven comment. Although I didn’t think she was right in that particular instance of my “bad feeling” before meeting with Harvey, I thought that her general idea—how we can misinterpret our own pain—I thought that was very right.
e. An initial (Pyrrhic) victory
You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey’s outfit from that day that I remember well: navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight. I don’t know if Harvey actually had one arm notably longer than the other, but he gave off that impression.
Rema and I had planned on having her call near the end of Harvey’s session. I was to have already introduced the fact of myself as a secret agent of the Royal Academy. I had failed to do so. I felt too conspicuous, as if I was as exhaustively vivid for Harvey as he was for me that day (his eyes are so improbably blue) and this even though I knew that in truth it was highly doubtful that there was anything remarkable about my appearance at all; that day, like all the previous days, I must have seemed to Harvey simply an unremarkable gray haze of overly gentle inquiry.
My feeling of conspicuousness—I’m certain—stemmed from an awareness that a ridiculous lie lay in wait within me; I’m not a natural liar, so I had very little faith in my competence as one. I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying. Even as a child, in order to avoid saying thank you, upon prompting, for things I wasn’t truly thankful for, I would bury my face in my mother’s skirt. A smell of certain wools, the sound of a slip brushing up against hosiery, still recalls that emotion back to me. On the rare occasions when I have said I am busy when I am not, or that I like some item of clothing or person that I am indifferent to or hate, I am filled with unreasonable guilt over my “white” lie, and want to cry, confess, unburden. It’s all a bit overblown, really, as if I’ve actually wounded someone, as if my small insincerity might actually matter. I even kind of like it when other people lie, when Rema lies, for example; it’s a way of finding out, if the lie is uncovered, what she thinks is worth lying about.
So Harvey was saying something about El Niño, and dead fish.
Then the telephone rang, startling me far more than it startled Harvey.
“Hello?”
It was Rema, who, sounding inappropriately giddy, called me Dr. Liebenstein and asked me what I was wearing.
“Oh yes hello,” I said, staring at the lines at Harvey’s cuff, watching them blur.
Rema chatted comfortably about what she wanted me to pick up for dinner, urging me not to be cheap about the fish—everyone with the fish—asking me also could I pick up the thin almond cookies that she liked, the ones she liked to dip in her tea, did I know which ones she meant? Through all this I nodded sagely.
“And these El Niño winds?” I asked.
She talked on, saying I’m not sure what in her beautiful mint-pitched voice; eventually she suggested that she get off the phone. I said that of course I would pass everything on faithfully.
“Well,” I throat-cleared to Harvey, “I apologize for that interruption, but I can now say something rather important to you. Are you familiar with the work, the public work that is, of Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen?”
Preplanned words exited my mouth hastily, stumblingly, and I heard them as if they were not my own. Blushingly confessing myself a secret agent, I passed on to Harvey Dr. Gal-Chen’s assignment—a cold front approaching Manhattan. And as I spoke—my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey’s shirt—I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week’s paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalizations would be a cause for concern.)
After I stopped talking there was a brief or long—I’m not sure which—moment of silence.
“How long have you been working for the Academy?” Harvey asked.
I told him that there were very few details of my work that I was allowed to disclose.
He asked me if I could tell him if I’d received any awards, in particular the Symons Gold Medal or the Carl-Gustav Rossby Medal.
I said it was lonely having secrets and that Harvey probably understood that loneliness.
Then Harvey smiled shyly, and talked a few minutes, in a comradely way, of the difficulty and delicacy of meteorological work. It’s never ceased to amaze me how, if you’re calm and quiet, others fill in any gaps in your story. Harvey pulled out his compact mirror and smoothed down his eyebrows, and then began to explain something about this instrument of his, which he used, he said, to alter vectors of light and sound.
I noticed spidering burst capillaries across his cheeks. I remember well the dejected feeling of having, apparently, succeeded. I wanted to reach across to Harvey and just touch one of his sleeves. I don’t know why, not precisely. Even a well-intentioned deception leaves a metallic taste in the mouth.
Did I think I’d ever partner with Harvey in order to find Rema, rather than partner with Rema in order to control and deceive Harvey? I did not.
f. An unusual initiation of a kind of friendship with Tzvi Gal-Chen
Relaying Dr. Gal-Chen’s instructions to Harvey became easy, ordinary, domestic. The phone would ring, Rema would often recite a grocery list, and I would tell Harvey that Dr. Gal-Chen says high-pressure systems are coming in from the north and Harvey’s assistance is needed locally.
And following the initiation of the Gal-Chen therapy, for the next nineteen months, Harvey didn’t go missing even once. He followed strictly Tzvi Gal-Chen’s orders to stay for work in the city. He deregulated tidal winds off the Hudson River estuary; he finely negotiated the chaos of an incoming tropical storm system from the corner of his own street. As for me, Harvey’s mother regularly sent me grids of artisanal chocolates, each chocolate with its own transfer textile type pattern atop—and, well, this made me feel good about myself.
Rema also was very pleased—probably more pleased than me—with the success of the Tzvi Gal-Chen therapy. At least in the beginning, at least for a little while. She took to calling herself Dr. Rema, and she often held my hand and pressed the back of it against her cheek. Once, when the weather report interrupted the news, she squeezed my arm and leaned over and kissed me and laughed. She was the kind of happy that made me feel that she would love me, and me alone, forever. But maybe it was just that successful deceptions made her euphoric. “Why,” I asked her one evening, “did you say the corner store was out of clementines when in fact it wasn’t?” In response, she eyed me suspiciously. “I found the receipt for that blue sweater you bought me,” I said, “and you understated its price by eighty dollars.” She ignored me, remained unaffected in her bout of cheer. It was nice, though; contrary to my nature as it was, happiness grew in me.
Gal-Chen therapy language made its way into our apartment, first teasingly, but after a while who could say? When Rema and I disagreed, I’d invoke our meteorologist: “Dr. Gal-Chen prefers the green wool,” “Dr. Gal-Chen says no to imitation Nilla Wafers.” Or sometimes, more intimately: “Tzvi wouldn’t be pleased about your not wearing socks,” “Tzvi
thinks you should return the movie,” or “Tzvi thinks you should plump a little.” Rema may have tired of this, but, after all, the specter of Tzvi had entered into our lives on account of her therapeutic invention, not mine. I thought of Tzvi as a stranger, certainly, but one whom I felt in some way shared our life, as if he returned to the apartment late, after Rema and I were asleep, and snacked on leftovers from the refrigerator, watched the television with the volume down low, left tea mugs in the sink.
One free afternoon, I came across a photo on the Internet of Dr. Gal-Chen with his family; I e-mailed it to Rema. She printed it on a color printer at the hospital, brought it home carefully tucked inside an empty patient folder, and then magneted it onto our refrigerator.
“That was nice of you,” I said.
“Oh, I just did it for myself,” she responded, maybe a tiny bit irritated.
I recall, at the time, having had certain interpretations of this action, this posting of a family photo on the refrigerator. But in retrospect, with all that has since happened, those interpretations now seem too simple. I admit that I had rather unsophisticatedly read the photo in our home as symptomatic of a longing for children, though I wasn’t certain if the longing was Rema’s or my own. Or if really the longing was just for a return to Rema’s own unremarked-upon childhood, or to an alternate of her own childhood. Or maybe the longing was for something else, for someone else. But whatever that photo was, I don’t care, it doesn’t really matter, it was also, and above all, just an amusing photo to look at when one went, from hunger, to let the yellow light and cold out of the refrigerator.
The butterfly collar and tinted glasses on Tzvi, the eyeleted cap sleeve with trim on his wife, that stolid Izod polo on the son—it was pleasing to travel back in time like that, falling through those mode details. And that little Bavarian mock-up on that tidy little chub of a child, well, that was just precious. “Why do you only notice clothing?” Rema asked, as if pointing to a moral flaw. But when I pushed her as to what she noticed, she could only point out the creamy crooks of the elbows on the mother and son. Sometimes I wondered at the necklace on the wife, other times at the inscrutable pale blue square on the shirt of Tzvi Gal-Chen. And once Rema and I had a long argument about whether Dr. Gal-Chen’s shirt showed a button or a snap. I argued snap quite heatedly, on the basis of context. She argued button on the basis of visual details that I apparently couldn’t see. But look at the way the light catches on that snap—it’s pearline.
It was strange, now that I think about it, how I never tired of that photo.
Even though I know better than to trust appearances, especially posed, studio-airbrushed, heathered-backdrop appearances, still: the Gal-Chens had the look of a happy family. Maybe not particularly sophisticated, or good-looking, or fashionable, but still, happy. Even now I do not know if that was, or is, true or not. If they were, indeed, happy. But who can ever really know about anyone’s happiness, even one’s own? And if another woman can have the appearance of Rema, then perhaps I should by now be giving up on appearances entirely. But with that photo it was more than just an appearance, it was also a feeling, a family feeling. A feeling that at least seemed to be responding to something beyond mere appearance, though at times such “feelings”—such limbic system instinctual responses—are the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother.
4. A mysterious knuckle
So that was the state of affairs with Harvey—he was again missing—but I did not immediately connect his most recent disappearance (or Tzvi Gal-Chen) with Rema’s replacement, even though I had (as if a part of me knew something another part did not) immediately expected to find Harvey when I was paged shortly after the simulacrum had fallen asleep. When I returned from the hospital where Harvey wasn’t to the apartment where Rema wasn’t, I put Rema’s pale blue shoulder bag underneath the sink, for safekeeping. It was 5 a.m. and my new houseguest was not yet awake. She was hidden beneath Rema’s ugly old yellow quilt, with only one indefinite tan arm and a few tickles of blonde hair showing. I pulled the quilt back a bit; she didn’t stir.
It was a little uncanny, the feeling I had, looking at that look-alike. I was reminded of how I used to feel before I actually knew Rema, reminded of the winter when she was still a stranger and I would notice her, nightly, coming to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, wearing nubbly red mittens and her same wool coat with oversized buttons. She always ordered the loose-leaf teas, and when she would sit at a table near mine I liked to watch her try to pour from the little metal teapot without spilling, which wasn’t easy, since at almost any angle the water’s path of choice was to travel retrograde along the outside of the spout and spill on the table. Rema would then pat the table dry with her napkin and then get up and get more napkins, and this was every time, as if she couldn’t have anticipated and stocked up on extra napkins from the beginning. This—and her cornsilk hair, and her slightly clumsy gait, and I don’t know what—I loved her already then.
Leaving the sleeping simulacrum to herself I lay myself down on the sofa, experiencing the unhappy déjà vu of having lain myself down in just the same way not so many hours earlier, expecting Rema’s imminent arrival. I tried to rest. But although the phone did not ring—it was always ringing of late—intrusive thoughts, rising as if carbonated, disturbed me from sleep:
a movie dimly recalled from childhood, with a blind samurai who can’t see that the man pursuing him is his double
John Donne meeting his wife’s doppelganger in Paris, and this portending his baby’s death
Maupassant seeing his own doppelganger, and it portending his own death
Rema asleep on my shoulder at the movies
a guff of ugly laughter
This is just a problem I’m trying to depersonalize, I told myself. Probably just some very normal problem dressed up as a strange one. An ordinary problem masquerading as extraordinary. My mother used to say that almost any problem could be solved by one of the following three solutions: a warm bath, a hot drink, or what she called “going to the bathroom,” though she never specified what was to be done there. I was thinking now how I can’t really recall any episode from my childhood when her advice didn’t work. Our bathtub was in the middle of our kitchen, and the bathroom was a thin-walled room just on the other side of the kitchen sink; both rooms had the same houndstooth hand-layed tile floor, and one always heard water coursing through pipes, or braking, or boiling.
The sound of something like Rema walking by woke me from what couldn’t have been much more than an hour of sleep, but an awkward hour, from which I woke—starbursting pain—with a numb and tingly left hand. After again catching sight of the decidedly not Rema’s face, and during the achingly familiar sock-footing about in the kitchen that followed, I decided that I couldn’t just wait around feigning normality; I had to go and search for the real Rema. And though I didn’t know quite what that meant—would I don a cap, grab a magnifying glass, and go dusting for fingerprints?—I knew it was the proper next step to take.
Over red zinger tea with honey, I told the ersatz Rema of my plans. Or, at least, I mentioned to her that I thought I’d spend the day—which I could see out the window was another very gray, precipitous day—out walking.
“A walk sounds nice,” she responded expectantly, looking across the table at me with her dove dark eyes. “That sounds,” she continued, “like exactly what would please me. You and me and the gentle dog and we’ll—”
“I’d rather walk alone,” I braved.
“Oh.” The dog lover frowned. The red zinger had stained her lips a pretty pink. “I only offered to join you to be kind. But really the weather is ugly. What does the weatherman call this? Wintry mix? That makes it sound like dried cherries and coconut and pecans. But actually it is not so nice like that at all.”
As she spoke I was staring at her hands, both wrapped around her tea mug, staring at
the little elephant-knee patterns of lines at the finger joints. I could see the divot in the knucklebone, the grooves that reveal the finger as but a line-and-pulley system. The longer I stared at that knuckle the more it grew foreign rather than familiar. Pretty hands. Pretty knuckles. Pretty little way of holding a tea mug.
“Wintry mix,” I finally said, slowly, copying the woman’s copied language. My tea had meanwhile grown cold. When red zinger gets cold it tastes too full of tannins and makes me more rather than less thirsty. “That is kind of a euphemism, isn’t it?” I agreed, trying to sound chummy and casual. But I couldn’t make eye contact with the impostress. It was as if, by not admitting that I planned to go out in search of Rema, I was cheating on her, on this alternate Rema.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 3
