Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I can’t! It’s too much.”

  “God often makes life difficult for His friends.”

  “Then it’s no wonder that He has so few friends!”

  The saint’s lip creased slightly, and her heavy eyebrows rose. “I said that.”

  “I know,” said Lucy, and then another voice said, “Miss? Miss, are you okay?”

  A conductor was leaning over her. The suburban matron was gone, or no—there she was, in the aisle, behind the conductor, looking nervous. The conductor, a pie-faced man with watery blue eyes magnified by wire-rimmed spectacles, looked nervous, too. Lucy recalled that talking to people who weren’t there on trains had before this been a prelude to a murderous fusillade. She said, “I’m fine.”

  “You were talking to . . . ah . . . yourself, miss.”

  “I was having a religious experience,” she replied with dignity. “I am not a danger to myself or others.”

  Everyone in the nearby rows was staring, craning their necks around to gape, the magazines and laptops abandoned. Lucy blushed. Now that the aura of the experience had passed, she was back in the world of social embarrassment. The conductor turned to the matron and, after a brief consultation, moved the woman and her many packages to a seat in the NO PRAYING section. People were still staring, and some of the ones sitting too close to the lunatic got up and moved to another car. The train was slowing down, gliding into a station. Without further thought, Lucy jumped out of the seat and fled the train. She looked around and discovered that she was in Bridgeport.

  She knew someone in Bridgeport. In fact, it was probably a sign. Not Boston, Bridgeport. No, definitely a sign, she thought, and trudged out of the station. She asked directions and walked some distance until she came to Main Street, a tatty zone of the old downtown: pawnshops, saloons, cheap clothing and furniture stores. And oriental restaurants and groceries. She found a blue sign that said PHO BAC, in white lettering, and she went into the door beneath it, past windows clouded with steam. Odors of anise and cilantro, and of the fermented fish sauce called nuoc mam, and boiling rice. She went through the dining room and past a door that bore a metallic sign: PRIVATE.

  Behind it, a small room containing a ratty couch, a round table in the center, some chairs. Four oriental men dressed in black clothes sat at the table playing cards. They looked up, bemused, when she entered. They were in their twenties, their thirties, all with thin, hard faces, three of them pockmarked, one, the oldest, smoothly handsome. His name was Freddy Phat, and he was a gangster. They were all gangsters there. He stared at her, his fine brows knotting.

  “Freddy, it’s Lucy. I’m here to see Uncle Tran.” She spoke Vietnamese, with a fancy Saigon accent.

  A smile. “Little Lucy! He didn’t say you were coming.”

  “He didn’t know. Where is he?”’

  “Out. Doing business. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better.” Suddenly she felt weak. She went to the couch and threw herself down on it. The cooking smells from the kitchen reminded her she had not eaten since early morning. She closed her eyes.

  “Hey, you’re sure you’re okay?” asked Freddy nervously. Freddy Phat had no particular liking for white girls, but this particular one was the most important white girl in the whole world.

  “I’m okay. I think I must be hungry.”

  He grinned. “You came to the right place then.” He laughed, and the other thugs laughed, too, hiding their bad teeth with their hands.

  She was spooning hot pho into her mouth when a thin, middle-aged Vietnamese man walked in from the street. He wore a short, black leather coat and a white broadcloth shirt buttoned to the collar and a white silk scarf. On his head was a plastic-covered rain hat with the brim turned up all around. An unprepossessing figure, oriental anonymous, like a waiter or a clerk, until you studied the eyes. Tran Do Vinh was his name. Tran had been a minor official in the South Vietnamese government’s finance ministry who had tried to escape by sea in 1978 and had perished of disease and exhaustion midway on the journey to the Philippines. The present owner of his name had been on the same leaky craft, although he had been a major official of the National Liberation Front, the so-called Vietcong. This was known only by Freddy Phat, Marlene Ciampi, and the girl who now jumped up and ran to him and threw her arms around him. He held her tightly. They had not seen each other in two years, and both of them were somewhat surprised to discover that she was now as tall as he. She pressed her face into the leather of his jacket and inhaled his scent—old-fashioned lilac hair oil, cigarettes, nuoc mam. He held her away from him and looked into her face. “My dear girl,” he said in French, “I am so happy to see you. But what is wrong?”

  She was crying like a baby. “Everything, Uncle! My life is a quite complete ruin.”

  “I am desolated to learn it. Finish your soup and let me hear the terrible details.” They sat, he ordered tea, he sipped, she slurped and told her story—the disaster at school, her mother’s collapse, the money and what it had wrought. He listened, smiling, asking hardly a question, and thought, as he often did in her presence, of his dead daughter, who would have been near Lucy’s age now. He was not a sentimental man, but this he allowed himself. He loved her. It always surprised him, like a radio message from a dead self.

  When she had finished, he asked, “So you had not intended originally to come to see me?”

  “No, I was going to Boston to be with Mary Ma. My new life.” Lucy rolled her eyes to mock herself.

  “Very interesting. You recall that the very first time we spoke you were also running away from school. I gave you some soup.”

  “Yes, soup and a Confucian lecture on studying hard.”

  “Which clearly had no effect whatever,” he said tartly. “And now that you are here . . . ?”

  Her face fell. Her fingers twiddled a packet of sugar. “I don’t know. I feel stupid and wrong. But I’m just paralyzed. When I think of school . . . the boredom . . . it makes me shrivel.”

  “Oh, boredom. Pah! Coping with boredom is an attainment. No one unwilling to be bored has ever achieved anything grand, and I am sorry to see you have not learned how. I attribute this to your narrow genius, and to the impatience with tedium that I believe is common among people with such gifts. However, this can be corrected by cultivating the proper attitude. And you must have tutoring, in order to catch up in your studies.”

  “Tutoring by whom?”

  “By me, it goes without saying. You will recall that I taught you how to calculate with fractions when you were eight—”

  “Which I’ve managed to forget.”

  “—and your current work will pose no greater problems. As you will recall, I am a licensed teacher, and also not unskilled in the techniques of extracting information from unwilling heads. I believe similar techniques can move information in the opposite direction.” He gave her one of his shark looks, and though she knew he was kidding, it still gave her a chill. She returned a hard look of her own.

  “Will I have to listen to cryptic Eastern sayings that will make me a changed and better person, as in those movies?”

  Tran sniffed as he had learned to in Paris in the fifties. “I assure you that my teaching methods are not cryptic at all. The opposite, in fact. I will be quite French. In any case, we will fix your school problem or kill you entirely, one or the other. Then we will see about repairing your dear mother. There is a telephone behind the cashier’s desk. Please call your home immediately and tell your father of these plans.”

  Lucy meekly went off and did so. Meek was a relief just now. She found it encouraging that both St. Teresa and a commie gangster agreed about what she should do.

  • • •

  Marlene awoke and did not know where she was. This ignorance upon arising had not been unusual in recent weeks, but formerly she had, after a few moments, recognized her location as some corner of her home. This was not the case now. Above her she saw not the familiar smooth, off-white dropped ceiling of the loft, but acou
stic tile, pale green. A TV hanging from the ceiling. A window, large and clean—the light said morning. A bag on a pole with a tube leading into a human wrist. A hospital? The wrist was attached to a chromed bed rail by a Velcro restraint. Her wrist, it seemed; the other was similarly tied, as were her ankles. That kind of hospital. They had somehow Velcroed the inside of her mouth, too, a technology she had not known existed. With effort she tore her tongue loose and croaked. Nothing happened. A call button was taped to the bed rail, within reach of her right hand. She pushed the button.

  In came a large, ocher-colored woman in a pink pants uniform and pink harlequin glasses attached to a chain. She smiled and said, “Good, you’re up. How are you feeling?”

  “Water.”

  The woman applied the tube of a plastic squirt bottle to Marlene’s lips. She sucked at it gratefully.

  “Thank you,” she said in a near normal voice. “Um . . . can I get loose now?”

  “I don’t see why not.” The pink woman undid the restraints. “You got to promise me you won’t tear up the place like you did coming in.”

  Marlene rubbed her wrists. “Where am I?”

  “Kinney-Briard. You’re in detox. I’m Dottie.”

  “Hello, Dottie. I’m Marlene.” She stuck out her hand, and Dottie shook it uncertainly. Marlene thought most of the clientele at Kinney-Briard did not shake hands with their keepers. Kinney-Briard was one of the city’s many private and expensive drunk tanks. “How did I tear the place up coming in?”

  “You fought like a devil when you figured out where you were and that we were taking off your clothes. They said you were boxing them . . . you knocked Pat Lucas down with a punch in the jaw, and she’s nearly two hundred pounds. And you gave Dr. Einkorn a split lip. I wasn’t on shift then, but I heard it took six people to get you sedated and restrained. Where’d you learn to hit like that?”

  “My dad taught me. He was a ranked welterweight in the forties.” Marlene then added inanely, “I was drunk.”

  “You could say that. You had a blood level of point four one. Point one-o is legally drunk. Point five is when people start going into terminal comas. You were lucky your husband brought you in when he did.”

  “Yeah, lucky me.” Marlene groaned and shifted in the bed. She could feel the initial pangs of what she knew would be one of the great headaches of the decade. Dottie was changing the IV bag. “What’re you dripping into me?”

  “Saline glucose with different electrolytes. You were seriously dehydrated, too. And malnourished. How long have you been drunk?”

  “Not long. Weeks, not years.”

  “I guess. Rate you were going, you wouldn’t have lasted a year.”

  On this cheerful note, Dottie departed, but not before dispensing an analgesic and directing Marlene’s attention to the helpful brochures on the nightstand. Apparently “Doctor” would be by this afternoon to tell her about the program.

  “The doctor I slugged?”

  “Afraid so, dear.”

  “Did I hit anyone else besides those two?”

  “No one but your husband.”

  “Oh, marvelous.” Marlene pulled a pillow over her face. To her surprise, she fell instantly asleep.

  And awoke to find Karp sitting there watching her, his expression neutral, tinged with apprehension. He had a purpling bruise under one eye.

  She whimpered and placed her hands over her face. “Tell me it didn’t happen. Tell me it was all a bad dream and I’m in here for an inoperable brain tumor.”

  He ignored this. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’ve been beaten with chains.” She peeked through her fingers. “Jesus, Butch! I’m so sorry. What can I say? I don’t remember any of it.”

  “The visit to the school?”

  A pause, a shriek. She pulled the pillow over her head. From beneath it, she wailed, “No, I thought that was the d.t.’s. I really . . . Oh, God, no! That poor kid! Where is she?”

  “Consorting with known criminals. She took off right after the events in question and ended up in Bridgeport. She called me last night. Apparently the plan is for her to stay up there with him until she’s caught up in school. I spoke to Sister Royal about it . . .”

  “Oh, God! Did she mention the . . . events?”

  “Only to convey wishes for your recovery. She’s a good egg. She says tutoring is a fine idea and that Lucy’s welcome back if she catches up on her work.”

  “Did she ask who’s doing the tutoring?”

  “Yes. I said it was a personal friend of yours. A graduate of the Sorbonne. Take the pillow off your face, Marlene.”

  She did so and looked him in the eye. She reached out to touch the bruise, but he shied at her fingers. “I did that.”

  “Yes. A right hook, just after you coldcocked the doctor. You were also vividly negative as to my Semitic ancestry and my sexual prowess. It was quite a performance. I wasn’t aware you harbored those feelings.”

  “It was the liquor talking,” she said shortly, not wanting to consider any of that. “Am I going to have to be guilty about this for the rest of my life?”

  “No, but it would be good if you fixed it so it wouldn’t happen again.”

  “What, getting blasted? Okay, I promise I won’t embarrass you in public again. I’ll exercise discretion.” She could feel the irritation rising. She looked at her husband’s face. She blocked out the pain and love she saw there and painted it over with a smug, judgmental mask. She wanted a drink. She was ashamed of it, but there it was, not to be denied. “When am I getting out of here?” she asked, looking away.

  “You need to talk to your doctor about that. When I spoke with him before, he suggested the full detox, four weeks.”

  The thought of Karp talking to some twerp shrink about her: a bolt of pain and revulsion, converted to rage. “You were talking to what’s-his-face, Einstern? You told him all about how bad I am?”

  “Einkorn. No, I told him I was terribly worried about you, that you’d never acted like this before, that I didn’t know what the fuck to do. He offered me a Xanax and gave me a brochure about Al-Anon.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  “No. Look, Marlene, I don’t know fuck-all about alcoholism. Maybe I’m in denial, maybe I’m one of those enablers you read about. And if you want to know, Einkorn was kind of leaning me in that direction, but looking at this last twenty years we spent together, I honestly don’t see that. I can’t recall another time in all those years when you were falling-down drunk like you’ve been half a dozen times in the last month.” He looked at her, but her face was closed to him. “I understand you’re hurting from what happened. You’ve been hurting before, but you snap back; you get on with life. But not now for some reason.” He tried a smile on. “Hell, Marlene, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where the Chinese guy says, ‘That not my wife.’” Marlene didn’t smile back. “I mean you got a problem, let’s talk about it. We always talked about stuff, even when we were fighting.”

  “My problem is there’s nothing to drink around here,” said Marlene in that strange voice she was using nowadays, a flat and bored voice, not her own, something she’d heard maybe. It was eerie for him, almost flesh-crawlingly. He wanted to shake her, hit her. He’d never wanted to do that before, even back when she was committing technical felonies every other night. He suppressed the comeback line, he sensed that’s what the new Marlene wanted, a little trading of one-liners, keep it light, brittle, and bitter.

  Instead he said, “Speaking of the movies, you remember what the girl says to Butch Cassidy? I’ll love you, I’ll do anything for you, but I won’t watch you die.”

  That got her attention. He sensed something trying to come out in her, some real thing. He ought to have been tender now, dropped his guard, opened up, broke down, but he was not good at this sort of thing, not good at dealing with the dark parts. So he said, “Whatever you want, Marlene. I’ll help you any way I can. But I’m not going to just watch you kill yourself. P
ull one of these again, and I’ll take the kids and split, I’ll walk away. That’s my bottom line, just so you know.”

  “That sounds like an ultimatum.”

  “Take it however you want.”

  They couldn’t look at each other then, both hearts breaking.

  The clinic was on Fifty-third off Second. When Karp left, he walked south, just to walk. The sky was low and threatening, cold for April; the green fuzz on the trees seemed out of its time, sprayed on, not real. Karp was a good city walker; his long legs ate the blocks without feeling the pounding, his size kept lesser beings from blocking his path. He walked blindly, his mind unable to get a bite into what was happening to him. It was not real, it was like a bad made-for-TV movie. He walked for a long time.

  In leaving, Karp had left a hole Marlene could not fill with the material in the brochures. Nor did Dr. Einkorn fill it with his bland line: you’re sick, we can fix it for you, give us a chance, put yourself in our hands, stop denying. Marlene was surly and wished that she had hit him a couple more times. No, she decided, when he had gone, too, the poor bastard is just doing his job. I am just not the job he does. Not yet, anyway.

  She got out of bed and found her clothes in a closet. The skirt and jacket and blouse she had worn to the interview of doom were unwearable, stained with vile substances, stretched and torn. It looked as if whoever had worn them had been in a fight and lost. The underwear was intact, though, one of the sets she had bought in Bloomie’s that day when she had got rich and drunk, and so were the boots and the long, fleecelined leather coat. She got into the undies and boots and coat and found her cell phone in her bag. She used it to call the limo service. They knew where Kinney-Briard was.

  Marlene put on her makeup, trying as she did so not to really look at her face. It was like making up someone else in high school. Dottie came in while she was doing this.

  “You going somewhere?”