“Where,” I tried, “is the puppy?”
“Bedroom,” she said. “You were sleeping.” And she got up from the table not aglow with happiness, not placated at all, in fact perhaps rather irritated. “And she’s not a puppy. She’s a dog. She’s an adult. In a new and stressful situation and so especially in need of love and attention,” she concluded, beginning to walk away from me.
“Why did you bring her home?” I called out with a desperation I didn’t expect.
“Why did you not bring her home?” she said. “Why do you not do anything at all?” she continued, not looking at me, and almost out of the room.
She was wearing Rema’s green nightie boxers. Her legs were pretty, a faintest blue. And also they were long, with one hip ever so slightly rotated inward. Like Rema. I was proud of myself for having had the strength of character to leave behind such an attractive woman. I wish Rema could have witnessed that. I just would have liked her to enjoy the spectacle of how obviously and entirely and singularly I loved her.
5. An initial search
How did I search the city for Rema? I found myself standing in front of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, in front of its fogged windows into which no child had yet traced patterns. Below the windows: the pastel mural of slightly deformed angels. To the left: stacked white plastic chairs. To the right: a man descending into the sidewalk cellar holding a tray of uncooked dumplings, the wrappings pinched and pointing to the sky. And, still standing outside, reflected in the glass, was—and for a moment I didn’t recognize him—me: hairy handed and slope shouldered and not as tall as I like to think I am. With a rising sense of ridiculousness, the thought surfaced: this is how I search for my wife? This was probably the one place she almost certainly would not turn up. Like the most gumshoe of all gumshoes, I’d gone where I wanted her to be, not where there was any reason or unreason for me to believe she actually would be.
I went inside anyway—it was warm and humid, like a room for leavening. Near the pastry display case, a young boy was patting at the pocket of his mother’s (I assume his mother’s) coat shouting biscotto! biscotto! A skinny vulture of a man—he had terrible eyebrows—watched from the table; he was a regular who typed pompously, and flirted with the waitstaff, and I’d once overheard him say he was into meditation, and I thought of him like a disease. A little farther back I saw the crowd I thought of as “the dirty kids”: two messy girls who seemed always to have just left a medieval fair—eternally in old velvet or silk or lace—and a young man, with unwashed hair and a small cartoon bear nose, who perpetually wore a shapeless too-short leather jacket. He looked sad that day; the girls were consoling him. Also I saw a pretty wavy-haired undergrad with her thin arms bare. A little boy was crawling under her table and he picked up and turned over a pale green scrap of paper.
Sometimes it terrifies me, when I sense the exponenting mass of human lives—of unlabeled evidence of mysteries undiscerned—about which I know nothing.
“What did you say?” someone said maybe to me.
“Nothing,” I said to almost no one.
Having pined for Rema in the past in this very place (her tea’s leaves would stack up in the sieve and look like topiary) I felt my new loneliness echo against the anxiety I used to have watching the door wondering if Rema would walk in, and that feeling was then echoing against the haunting vision I used to have of Rema’s cornsilk hair, which was echoing against the memory of that first day I saw Rema see me notice that she had looked at me after which she had then quickly looked away, all of which echoed against a sensation of her kissing my eyelid, which made me shiver.
It was very bad, the acoustics inside of me.
I wanted, suddenly, to leave.
I ordered a coffee to go—a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and for being hot. I walked over to Broadway, went underground, boarded the number 1 train heading downtown. Each time new passengers came on, I watched expectantly. Near the bottom of the island, I exited, ascended, crossed the street, redescended, waited, and reboarded the subway going uptown. At the third stop, a man entered the subway car and announced loudly: “I had already apologized, for those of you who did not know.” Then he said those same words again, and again, and again, so I realized he wasn’t speaking to me, at least not in particular. But I anyway couldn’t help but feel that what the man really meant was that I should be sorry, that I should apologize. Maybe everyone on the train felt as I did, that they were the point of all this, of everything. It was like when the music comes on at the Chinese restaurant and suddenly even the random movements of the fish in the aquarium seem choreographed, thick with meaning; then the music pauses and meaning abruptly disperses. The fish seem dumb, as do all the diners.
At the 110th Street stop I exited and began a repeat of the whole cycle. Later I did sit for a few hours at the coffee shop, made some drawings of sugar cubes, and of an upside-down cup, and of the pattern that a small coffee spill made when it was soaked up by a napkin, a pattern like an archipelago.
Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair.
6. An alleged orphan
Walking, finally, home, I comforted myself with the likelihood that I would very soon see Rema, that she—the selfsame girl I’d picked up at the coffee shop years before—would be right there at home, russet dog or no russet dog. Maybe she would be shelling pecans. Or reading the newspaper. Maybe she would be very happy to see me.
I put my key to the lock, I heard scratching at the door, I opened the door and I found myself being lavished with affection, from the russet dog. Then the dog undid my left shoelace. I heard a voice coming from the bedroom and I heard a hanging up of a telephone. Meanwhile this dog still had my shoelace between its teeth and was shaking its head back and forth madly, behavior that may appear playful but that is quite clearly a manifestation of the instinct to break the neck of caught prey, a manifestation that we refer to as cute. It’s just like how we have so successfully forgotten as a species that a smile was born as a masking afterthought to the sudden baring of teeth. At least that’s the most convincing smile theory I’ve heard.
Then the woman emerged from the bedroom. I smiled. She was the same. The same false vision of Rema from before.
“The dog makes you happy?” substitute Rema asked, and what could I answer except no. The dog then left me (left my shoelace) for her; she picked that dog up in her arms, snuggled the dog with oversized gestures, as if performing onstage. She told me she didn’t care what I thought about what to name the dog, that she was going to name her without me. I said I didn’t care what she named the dog, the dog that was licking her face with dedication.
“But I got this dog,” she said to me, “for you.”
The dog had dark, wet eyes; the woman’s eyes were similar. Then I noticed that she—the simulacrum—had fine lines of age on her face. Tiny crow’s-feet, and not just when she smiled, since I could see them and she was not smiling. This look-alike Rema, I began to realize, was not such a perfect look-alike; it would seem Rema was being played by someone older, or who at least looked older. Someone pretty, but not as pretty. Not that there’s anything wrong with an older woman—there is nothing wrong with a woman my age for example, I just don’t happen to be married to one.
“You said dogs are brilliant,” she said, her voice supersaturated with emotion. “You said Freud’s dogs could diagnose the patients.”
But Rema knew Freud was essentially demoted (in a few specific passages promoted) out of my notion of an ideal psychiatry. As the impostress talked on I wondered: was Rema kidnapped or did she willingly leave? Which would be worse? Determined not to let emotion crack my voice, I tried to avoid speaking altogether. The simulacrum, fortunately, seemed to have the same talent as Rema for filling up silent spaces, and she went on: “You said Freud’s dogs knew when therapy was over, and knew who was psychotic and w
ho was neurotic, and that when memories were recovered the dog would wag its tail. You said you would have liked to have such insight, such dog insight, that it would be better than your own, and so there I was at the hospital, and this poor dog was left orphan, and it seemed like a sign, like not just random, like this dog was sent to us, for us to save her and for her to save us, silly I know, but no, you just look at me strange.” The russet puppy—I mean, dog—was licking tears from the doppelganger’s face.
“But Freud’s dogs,” I said, “they were chow dogs.”
It was all I could think of to say. I turned away from this woman and went to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands, which is something I like to do in the colder months, it just makes me feel a little bit better. Then I touched my face with my warmed hands. It calms me down, it’s just this very normal thing that I do.
Over the sound of the running water I could hear that Rema-like voice calling through the door. She didn’t sound pleased. I was thinking, Does Rema know this twin of hers? Did Rema complain about me to her? There were difficult aspects of Rema, I can’t deny that—a lot of this arguing through a bathroom door had been going on of late.
The Rema-ish voice came though the door with something about being tired of it always being her getting stuck with the label of unreasonable, irrational, crazy. I thought to shout back that of course it was her getting stuck with that label, and that furthermore I’d only ever said irrational and unreasonable, never crazy, and that it was she alone who was assigning normative value to those labels and, listen, she couldn’t even let a man just wash his hands in peace, but I stopped myself, instead said nothing, thinking to myself: This fight is stupid. This fight is ridiculous. And to have it with a woman I don’t even know—that is even more ridiculous.
Older, wrong, and no more manageable, this replacement wife.
I heard the front door open and close.
7. I am contacted
After finishing my private peace of running hot water in the bathroom I came out to find that the simulacrum and the unnamed dog were not in the kitchen, not in the living room, not in the bedroom—they were gone. Which meant, I decided, that I could think and plan in quiet, which I proceeded to do in a prone position on the sofa, which meant that I was promptly asleep but without knowing that I was asleep, a fact that I did not discover until the phone roused me from my poor and hectic slumber during which I’d suffered a dream in which what was happening to me was exactly what was actually happening to me. Because I woke up with a sense of relief, I had the clawing hope that Rema’s replacement had been not also but only in my dream, a bad dream induced simply by indigestion, or a cold draft, or a foot cramp. That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.
Again the phone rang.
“Hello,” I said, bringing the cold plastic receiver to my face.
“Leo Liebenstein.”
“Yes,” I said, not even rising from my reclining position because I didn’t want to lose the warmth I’d invested in the cushions of the sofa.
“Leo Lieben—”
“Yes,” I interrupted sleepily but louder.
“To whom am I speaking?” the voice on the other end said politely, in a strange accent. Or what seemed like a poor imitation of a strange accent.
And I began to feel more awake. “Who is this?” I asked.
Muffled bickering came through the line; then it sounded like the phone dropped. Just as I was about to hang up, a new voice came on, this time thin, sandy, and ambitious.
“I’m calling from the Royal Academy of Meteorology; we’d like to invite you to become a fellow. Would you—”
“Harvey?”
“Sir, I’m calling from the Royal Aca—” Again I heard a tussle over the phone. Then I heard Rema’s voice, though I couldn’t make out the words. I thought the voice was coming to me through the phone.
“Rema?” I called into the phone loudly, startling myself.
“The teakettle!” answered Rema’s voice—now clearly traveling directly from the bedroom—and I could feel the hot atmosphere my own voice had made near the phone’s mouthpiece.
“We’d like to make you a fellow,” I heard. “Do you understand? It’s a tremendous—”
I hung up.
I looked around the room: rocking chair, scratched wood floor, Godzilla poster—my familiar life. And Rema? I crossed over to the closed bedroom door, leaned against its unsmooth grain, and listened. I heard just that sound of cupping a hand over an ear. Of a distant ocean marked with a yellow flag, of my own ear anatomy breaking up the trajectories of randomly moving molecules of air, hearing its own little self-made sound universe. And suddenly I sensed my ridiculousness—pressing a cupped ear against a door in my own apartment—sensed, with a rising sadness, my familiar space growing foreign to me.
I abandoned the sounds of my ear cupped to the bedroom door. I went to the kitchen, turned the click-clicker of the gas stovetop—blue-orange burst!—filled the kettle with tap water—a nice contact sound!—and rested it on the flame. I love the different sound stages of water on its way to boiling. I like listening to the teakettle’s tremble. Our teakettle’s handle is slightly loose, and its shaking adds another harmonic layer over the tremulousness of the metal.
“Who was that?” came the voice.
I turned and saw her, under the kitchen’s lintel, wearing my button-up and her little boy shorts, thigh slightly rotated inward, holding that russet puppy—dog—in one hand. She walked past me, leaned against the counter near the stove; Rema had always liked leaning there, in just that way, so she could feel the heat, and so she could turn off the flame before the teakettle’s whistling had ever really begun. Maybe on account of that lean, despite that dog-puppy, I began silently to argue to myself: this must be Rema. This must be her. Believe this Rema like you always do. Look at her. Is she really more strange today than any other day? The hair, the eyes, the long legs leading down to slightly pigeon-toed feet. Who else could it be? Believe this Rema like you always do.
But I knew that my reasoning was post hoc, and another voice came in, mocking me, reminding me that post hoc reasoning is the consolation of the psychotic—all evidence interpreted under the shadow of an axiomatic belief that one is Jesus Christ, or the king of Sweden, or made entirely of glass.
Why should I believe, just by fiat, that this woman was Rema, when that ran contrary to the phenomenology?
The simulacrum tilted her head at me, like puppies tilt their heads.
And a high-pitched pain, like a thousand tiny moths, began to collect behind the front of my skull, accelerating, advancing. Something was wrong. I reached out and put my hand on where I expected her abdomen to be, because I had a feeling my hand might pass right through her, as if she were a hologram, as if only the clothing were real. But I was all wrong about what was wrong. My hand did not go through her abdomen, which was real, or appeared to be so, as solid, anyway, as anything else I know, though I suppose they say it’s almost all empty space, the building blocks of matter —a moth in a cathedral?—but one shouldn’t take the extension of such metaphors too seriously.
She looked at my hand on her abdomen. Then she squinted at me, as if to put me in focus.
“Wait, who was that on the phone?” she asked again.
The pain in my head had grown dizzying so I sat down on the cool blue tile floor, sat by that woman’s foot, and looked at the blue vein there across her arch. For a time during my medical training, on account of so often drawing blood and placing IVs, my eyes would travel, of their own accord, to plump veins. I would search feet and hands and wrists and crooks of elbows, and it would be difficult for me not to reach out and place the pad of a f
inger on those veins and feel the blood coursing through. It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us—like our blood, like our livers, like our loves—that goes on about its business without consulting us. I touched that vein there on Rema’s foot. I feel like I can say that, that the foot at least, that foot was really Rema’s. Or probably not really. Or so only in that every foot becomes, in my mind, Rema’s foot slightly varied. And Rema’s foot is like Rema entire; her foot alone is enough to recall her to me whole. I don’t know, I was very confused then.
“Leo,” this woman said to me gently. “Leo, are you all right? I’m sorry I was angry earlier, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about Harvey’s leaving. I think that is what this must be about. I don’t think it is your fault. Only you think it is your fault. Maybe it is my fault. Is that what this is about?”
I was petting her pretty foot. The teakettle’s trembling had advanced somewhat. I could hear the puppy, the dog, in her arms, above me, panting.
“What,” I asked her—and I asked gently because even if she wasn’t Rema she still seemed like a very nice person—“would you say if I told you that the Royal Academy called me?” I pressed on the arch’s vein very lightly, and watched its world go white.
“The Royal Academy?”
“You know which I mean,” I said quietly, wondering if she knew what I meant. I leaned down and kissed her foot, which was cold and dusty, as was the tile floor that I then stretched myself out upon more fully. “Of Meteorology.”
“Leo?”
“Where Tzvi Gal-Chen is a fellow,” I said, gesturing with my head toward the refrigerator, though Tzvi’s family photo was no longer there, I don’t know where things like that disappear to, the kinds of things one has on one’s fridge. These things are not just under the fridge like you might think, because I could see under the fridge and I saw only a curled fruit label sticker and a child’s jack.
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel Page 4
