True Enough

by Stephen McCauley

  She stood up, dismayed to discover that her foot had fallen asleep. Somehow, she made it to the door. As she was about to walk out, David said, “Mara, by the way, is fine.”

  “Wonderful.” She lifted her dead foot a few inches off the floor and tried to shake it discreetly. “Give her my best.”

  3.

  She wanted pills. She wanted to wait in line at Walgreen’s with all the other prescription junkies and hand in her slip and be given a cheap, amber vial of small, expensive pills that would, within a matter of hours, minutes, make her feel better about everything. She didn’t want a solution, she didn’t want to sort through her feelings, she wanted to simply not care. She’d been so infuriatingly shortsighted when she went into her I-hate-drugs monologue with Dr. Berman all those months ago.

  Everything she hadn’t told Dr. Berman or had told him in some abbreviated or altered form was piling up on top of her, and the weight of it was starting to crush her. As she sat in Berman’s office, looking at him as he looked at her, each waiting for the other to speak, she thought about how, in the last month, their relationship had changed. His signals weren’t as easy to read, his silences were more ominous, his eyes were more stern. He’d lost respect for her, she could tell. It shouldn’t matter, since her own respect for him was a little soft, but somehow it did. She knew she ought to either break down and tell him everything, or drop out of treatment altogether, maybe find another shrink with whom she could make a fresh start.

  I’d be happier if you were my wife. Tell him that. Start there.

  “Something I forgot to tell you,” she said.

  He raised his chin, nothing more encouraging than that.

  “The dog left a few days ago. Remember I told you about Helen, my husbands colleague’s dog?”

  Yes, he remembered. He remembered everything. For all she knew, he remembered things she hadn’t even told him.

  “I got up at six A.M. and I took her out for a long walk, all around the neighborhood. It was still dark, dark and colder than I’d expected. She was walking more slowly than usual, as if she knew she was leaving that day and was taking it all in for the last time. I took her down to a park near the house, and I let her off her leash and she just stood there, looking at me, with a let’s-get-it-over look on her face. Do you say ‘face’ for dogs? Anyway, we went home and she watched as I packed up her leftover cans of dog food, the bag of treats. She watched me the whole time, didn’t even go to the dish of food I’d put down for her or get her usual drink of water. And then, when Thomas left for work, she followed him out to the car and got in the back seat, all without prompting. She just went along with him, didn’t fuss. But as she was getting into the car, she turned and looked at the house, almost as if she knew I was up in the window. She seemed to be saying, ‘How can you do this to me?’ I could barely watch.”

  “You told me the dog missed her owner.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Her owner was released from the hospital and she was going back to her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think it’s possible you’re the one feeling the loss? Aren’t you talking about your sadness, Jane, not hers?”

  Her sadness, her loss. Her sadness about Helen, which wasn’t even about Helen but about everything else she’d lost in the past several months, a list that seemed to be growing by the hour. Her face began to feel uncomfortably hot and, before she knew what was happening and had a chance to apply the brakes, she began to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do this.” She pulled a handful of tissues out of the box sitting on the table by her chair and mopped at her face. In addition to whatever else she was feeling, she was panicked that Berman might get out of his chair and try to comfort her. What would she do if he came over and put his hand on her shoulder? All the time she’d been seeing him, off and on all these years, she’d maintained a perfectly poised demeanor, had never once shed a tear, and now she knew why. It was this awful fear that he’d console her. Except she’d been sobbing for a good few minutes and he didn’t seem to be doing anything.

  “I’m going to Florida in four days,” she said through her tears. “I’m afraid to fly. I hate all the little noises and the way the coffee smells and the way all the seats and the bins feel so cheap and everything rattles when you take off. I want you to write me a prescription for something to make it easier.”

  Without blinking, Berman reached one of his hands into a pocket of his chair and pulled out a prescription pad. “I’m qualified to do that,” he said, and began to write.

  She needed help and he was going to give it to her, and all she had to do was ask for it. She was so relieved and grateful, and so embarrassed by her own ignorance of this simple arrangement, she wept even harder.

  Twenty

  Welcome to Florida

  1.

  The gray smoke of clouds floated past the window at a leisurely pace. There was nothing quite as soothing as flying, nothing that provided such a sharp, comforting contrast between illusion and reality. On the inside, the calm hum of air filtration systems and the predictable routine of flight attendants and the bland monotone of the pilots; on the outside, the violence of metal and jet fuel ripping the sky apart, cutting up the delicate chemicals of the atmosphere in an effort to hurry people to places they usually didn’t want to go. Desmond loved being lifted out of his life, plucked up into the chilly ether where everything was clean and carefully controlled and simultaneously safe and dangerous, where you could travel at extraordinary speeds through subzero temperatures without effort or discomfort, without even having to press your foot on a pedal. And if ever there was a moment when he longed to be rescued from the foundering boat of his life and strapped into a comfortable chair, it was now. How many mistakes could he make thirty thousand feet above his whole world?

  Two female flight attendants were standing in the aisle one row in front of them, loudly discussing the injustice of the airline’s scheduling policies. It was true that all the glamour had been drained from air travel, but that only made it as dull, in a reassuring way, as a trip to the Grand Union.

  “I’m sick of it,” one of them said. “I’m sick of being pushed around.”

  “No kidding,” the scrawnier of the two drawled. “And yesterday they drug-tested me again. That’s twice this month.”

  “Oh shit.” The untested woman reached a pale, braceleted arm into the overhead bin and tossed a pillow, doll-sized and stiff, to the passenger seated below.

  “The whole thing was so humiliating I went out and had a complete blowout last night.”

  Jane shoved a magazine into the seat back in front of her. “Aren’t they supposed to be discussing something important right now?”

  “Your lunch?”

  “I was thinking about emergency landing procedures and flotation devices, but lunch would be nice. What have you got to read over there?”

  He handed her a copy of the same airline magazine she’d just been looking at, and she flipped through the pages as if she’d never seen them before. She was nervous. At the airport, she’d stepped out of the taxi and dropped her purse onto the sidewalk and dropped her keys as she was stooping to pick up the purse and dropped her purse again as she was stooping to pick up the keys. If he had to put money on it, he’d guess that she, like the emaciated flight attendant, wouldn’t pass any drug tests with flying colors today. “Take care of Jane,” Thomas had told him yesterday morning. “She likes to boss people around, but underneath, she needs someone to watch out for her.” And then, with great tenderness, as if he were revealing to Desmond one of his wife’s most lovable traits, he said, “She wouldn’t admit it, but she hates to fly.”

  A smile had lingered on Thomas’s face for a moment, and Desmond had felt as if a curtain had been pulled aside and he was being offered a glimpse into a hidden corner of their marriage. He’d assumed that Thomas was the one who needed to be coddled and babied—Thomas with his
shiny, baby head and his overbearing wife and his mother in the carriage house and his monstrous child whom he adored—but now he saw that was Jane’s perception of things. In reality, it was Thomas, solid and steadfast and dull, who ended up protecting Jane from her own worst impulses. In preparation for this trip, she’d had her hair cut shorter and permed, and it made her look defenseless, the way people always look when their efforts at dressing up produce unflattering results and their desire for beauty is revealed while the beauty itself remains elusive. The way he looked, no doubt, in the overpriced gray Armani jersey he’d bought yesterday in a moment of shopping selfindulgence that instantly soured into self-loathing. The back of Jane’s neck was exposed and the perm was so recent, her hair appeared to fit her head badly, like a hat she’d bought for the color, despite the fact that it was the wrong size. She kept pulling at the curls in back, perhaps trying to loosen them up. She had on a gray flannel suit, just right for November in Boston, even this warm November, but a big mistake for Gulf City, Florida.

  The plane bumped, as if its bottom had just scraped over a boulder, then rose up. The cabin was shot through with milky sunlight, and when Desmond looked out again, there was a field of dark blue beneath them. They were over the ocean now, making their way south along the coast. Within minutes, they’d be flying over Manhattan. For one reckless moment, he imagined that if he gazed out the window, he’d spot Russell down there, walking along Broadway, maybe reading the letter Desmond had written after visiting Rosemary and had finally put into the mailbox.

  He’d gone through eight drafts of the thing. He started out with a raw, emotional plea he’d typed in a wine-fueled frenzy of sentimentality. “I don’t care what you’ve done or with whom, I don’t want you to move out, if that’s what you’re contemplating. I’ll be back in a little more than a month. We’ll work it out then. Let me finish this semester and finish this book. I feel certain I’m very close to finding what I’m missing, and all I’m asking for is the quiet space to do it.” The next morning he’d woken up, reread the page-and-a-half letter and found it a bit too conciliatory. It wasn’t strictly true that he didn’t care what Russell had been up to. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing, or with whom . . .” he revised. That afternoon, as he was reading over the second draft in his office at Deerforth, he’d been struck by the pleading tone in the part about finishing his book. He scratched out the “quiet space” and penciled in “I need a little fresh air, too.” At midnight, sitting at his desk, he’d retyped the fourth draft. “I know what you’ve been up to.” And the next morning: “If you want to move out so badly that you’d consider returning to that cell on C . . .” Over lunch, red pencil in hand: “I haven’t exactly been crying into my pillow every night, you know.” The many drafts were so jumbled in his mind, he wasn’t entirely sure what was in the version he’d mailed, but he was fairly certain there was some veiled reference to a handsome, bisexual architect, and to the wonderful emotional freedom he was experiencing now that he could lay claim to a larger portion of his own identity.

  Jane grabbed the armrests of her seat. “Where did Tim end up?” she asked.

  “Somewhere in the back,” Desmond said. “I can’t figure him out. I don’t know if he’s a dolt or a genius, although I have the feeling it’s either one or the other, no middle ground.”

  “He’s twenty,” Jane said, “meaning he was raised in a completely different culture from the one we know, so you and I have no basis for judging his intelligence. He might as well be a different species. Within ten years, he’ll be ruling the world with his computer and media talents and we’ll be extinct. We think in terms of pages, he thinks in terms of screens—computer, TV, movie. And therein lies the future.”

  Desmond supposed there was some truth to this, and yet what fascinated him about Tim, and about so many of the students in their late teens and early twenties he’d taught over the years, was that for all their computer savvy and sophistication, for all the cultural advantages and freedoms they’d been handed growing up in a time of peace and prosperity and sexual liberation, they seemed, in most emotional ways, to be right back in the 1950s, obsessing about a Saturday night date or an unreturned phone call, a crush or a crisis of insignificant proportions. If anything could save the human race for another couple of generations—unlikely, but not impossible—it wouldn’t be advances in technology and scientific intelligence, but this lack of emotional development that pulled people back to their simplest needs and desires and left them stumbling over their deepest insecurities. In the end, there was nothing more compellingly human than that.

  “I’ll bet Chloe is up front eating lobster,” Jane said. She sighed and handed the magazine back to Desmond. “I’ve never liked lobster. And lately, I can’t even look at the poor things, trapped in their holding tanks at the supermarket.”

  In the airport lounge, Chloe had started chatting with a gray-haired businessman from Atlanta who, ten minutes later, had her ticket upgraded to first class so they could continue what must have been a riveting conversation. Chloe had seemed genuinely surprised by the attention: “Wasn’t that nice of him?” she’d asked as she was gathering up her things for early boarding.

  “Just for the record,” Jane said, “no rich older man ever found me so interesting or attractive he offered me a first-class ticket. You have to be exactly the right blend of pushy, pretty, and emotionally needy, and I’ve never been good at keeping the pieces of my personality well balanced.”

  “Just for the record,” Desmond said, “you seem very well balanced to me.”

  In the end, being a good friend usually came down to talking people out of their perceptions of themselves, especially the accurate ones.

  “You wouldn’t think I was a hopeless alcoholic if I ordered a Bloody Mary, would you?” Jane asked.

  She was beginning to sound maudlin. People often get maudlin when they board airplanes and leave everything of importance behind them and can’t decide whether they’re afraid of crashing or hoping for it. When the drink finally came, Jane mixed together the tomato juice and the miniature bottle of vodka with the precision of a chemist, took a sip, and began rummaging through her enormous leather purse. “You know,” she said, “I truly cannot remember the last time I had a whole day in which I wasn’t responsible for doing a single thing.” She took out a small vial of prescription pills and popped one into her mouth. “Vitamins,” she explained. As she was about to put the bag under the seat, she reached into it and hauled out an appointment book, overstuffed with sheets of stationery, newspaper clippings, ragged slips of paper. She opened it up randomly and a few unevenly folded pieces of paper fell onto her lap. “This is what my week usually looks like,” she said. “Gerald’s doctor appointments, my shrink appointments, my shameful secrets. Not that I have any.” She handed the book to Desmond. “It’s perfect airplane reading.”

  It wasn’t possible that the drink and the pill had taken effect already, but Jane seemed to be sinking more deeply into her seat. As long as he didn’t end up having to carry her off the plane, he didn’t mind. Once, many years earlier, he’d been involved with a pothead boyfriend who’d been so easily amused by lighting up a joint, he required blissfully little in the way of gifts, expensive entertainment, or conversation. If Jane had offered, he wouldn’t have turned down one of her little yellow pills. She fumbled with the seat until she was partly reclining, then let her head drop back and her eyes close. The book was a hodgepodge of notes, most of them typed or scribbled on loose paper; the pages of the memo book itself were practically untouched. There were reminders about bills and facials and dinner guests, notes about Dinner Conversation, shopping lists, and menus. It wasn’t possible that something this disorganized could help clarify anything for anyone; it wasn’t an appointment book but an admission of defeat; handing it to him was a cry for help.

  “You have an awful lot going on,” he said.

  “I do, don’t I? And that’s one book of many.” She turned her he
ad toward Desmond, her face resting in a nest of her too-curly hair. “The lure of the fresh, naked page gets to me at least once a month, the hope that starting a new appointment book will be the same thing as starting a new life.”

  One thin strip of paper was entitled “Things For Gerald.” A list of toys and books she intended to buy for Christmas or birthday presents, he assumed; on closer inspection, it proved to be something else. “Spontaneity, joie de vivre, physical confidence.” Good luck finding any of those things in the aisles of Toys “R” Us. That was about as likely as him finding the character traits he’d been searching for in bottles of organic sugar pills and herbal extracts suspended in alcohol. The list covered half the page. At the bottom she’d written, in tiny print, the word “smiles.” This was exactly the kind of scrap he would have celebrated finding if he’d been writing a biography of Jane, but with her sitting next to him, about to fall into a drug-induced sleep, it was embarrassingly intimate.

  He reached over to put the book on her tray table, but she touched his hand lightly. “Keep it for me?” The tone of her voice, soft and girlish, made it sound like a plea. “It would be such a vacation for me to not have to think about any of that for the next few days.”

  “It’s only fair to warn you,” he said, “that when I’m alone in my room, I’ll probably pore over every word, snooping into your life. It’s part of my job.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s all written in code, and lately I’ve been having trouble keeping the code straight. You’re welcome to all of it, Desmond. I trust you.” A few minutes later, she added, in a voice heavy with sleep, “If you discover anything interesting in there, be sure to let me know, especially if it turns out I’m a halfway decent person.”