Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"You were right," he said. "Not talking was hell. The only way we communicated was in bed."

"Bed?"

"Yeah, do you believe it? The sex was… animal." He stared at me, and in his eyes was a terrific abjection. "It wasn't making love. It was fucking. Made me think of… of him." He sighed. "And here's the worst part." He gulped for breath. I waited. Nothing. "Ah, the hell with it. I'll just go."

"What? You can tell me."

His eyes shifted-he wasn't about to tell me. "Christmas is a bitch," he said. "Ever since I can remember." He went on to talk about the Putnam Christmas ritual, where every December in Europe his father would move the clan to the Alps and conduct a series of drunken visits to drunken friends, all the terrified blond kids sent off with German nannies to run the gauntlet of the ski slopes until sundown when they'd run the gauntlet of the family dinner. Sensing that we were off track, I asked him how he'd first met Lily. He was startled, suspicious. But then I saw the startle reverse, back past his anger and suspicion, and as it moved all the way back past the birth of the first child, Hope, back to the real hope of Lily and him in love, it softened, and he smiled.

"It was an arranged meeting," he said. "I had finished Yale and was living in Boston, doing Harvard Law, bored and floating. Her mother's sister-in-law, Happy Borgmann-two n's-knew my father's Final Club roommate. I hated those arranged things, they never worked out, but…" He sighed. "When I saw her, I was awed. She was so… innocent. Innocently lovely. Lily. Like a moist orchid." There were tears in his eyes. "Someone had given me tickets to Symphony. That night, I knew she was having the same intense attraction to me, and all the way downtown we talked and talked and we went into Symphony Hall and the lights went down and these four men in referee shirts and twirled moustachios came out and started singing four-part harmony. It was 'Barbershop Quartet Night' at Symphony. With anyone else I'd've been mortified, but with Lily it was exactly right-we laughed and laughed, talked about what a hoot it was, how unacceptable it would be in both our families. Magic. Like a dream."

We sat, still, the "click" between us a third element in the room. What he couldn't know was that I'd met Berry in much

the same way. Our parents, golfing acquaintances, had fixed us up, each pair bringing their child with them to Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. I had reluctantly agreed to this, as had she. Then, that first moment, well, it was love. That sheen of innocence, yes. Cherokee looked at me, and in his eyes I saw the cloud of all the years since-the kids, Los Angeles, the Disney Studio in godforsaken Burbank with a corner office in a grand sandstone-colored building with a facade modeled after the Acropolis, each of seven columns being one of the Seven Dwarfs, crowned by a gargantuan Snow White, and now this-all this loss, of all this innocence. I felt my own looming loss, of Berry, asking myself-

A knock at the door. We both jumped. Another knock, and then we heard the outer door open, and then the inner, and standing there was a slender woman with light brown hair cut short as a boy's, with one eye bruised and swollen shut and the other glittering with fear and rage. Despite the black eye she was radiantly beautiful, delicately featured, a girlish face, lined. She wore jeans and boots and a fashionably worried leather jacket. A string of opalescent pearls was around her swan's neck, a riding crop in her hand.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Cherokee cried.

"He hit me," she said to me. "Did he tell you?"

"You have no right to just barge in on my therapy."

"You did it to me."

"I waited until after."

"And then spent an hour with him, with my therapist?"

"Yeah well I'm not fucking mine!"

"Oh God!" she said, holding on to the doorknob for support.

"Hold it.'" I said, like a referee, standing between them. "I'm Dr. Basch."

"Lily," she said, holding out a hand with a diamond mine on it. Her hand was slight, tentative, lost. Brave but lost.

"Why don't you sit down with us," I said, "and talk?"

She struggled with this. Then she shook her head. "No. I can't."

"Come on, Lily," Cherokee said. "It's a chance. Go for it with me."

"Dr. Dove said it would pollute the transference. No. I can't."

21 ^

"That smelly little Jew is brainwashing you!" He looked at me. "Sorry, Basch, I didn't mean-

"Before this gets still more out of hand," Lily said, "I need to say to you, Dr. Basch, that I don't mind that he hit me-his father hit him, with a belt, quite a lot actually-but I do mind what he's doing with the children."

"What? I'm doing nothing with the children!"

"That's the point. You're withdrawn from them. And that's the way you were with me-more and more withdrawn- before you hit me."

"I would never-never ever ever-do them the slightest harm." He had tears in his eyes. "How could you possibly think that of me, Lil?"

She looked at him, feeling, clearly, his moving toward her. I knew, as did they, that her slightest movement toward him, even the slightest sign of her intent to move toward him, might tilt their lives toward each other, maybe for a long time. Such moments can, and do. I was rooting for her, hard.

She turned and left.

Cherokee slumped down, hands over his eyes, as if to not see what he did see. I waited. He said nothing. I said, "Okay. Tell me."

"I was drunk, she was drunk, we argued about-God knows what now-and I hit her. I hardly remember it. I'm totally ashamed. Father never really beat me, just whacked me once or twice with his belt."

My father too, more than twice. Talk about terror. To be at the mercy of an enraged dentist? "Did he hit your mother?"

"When they were drunk, sure, some."

"And your children? Hope and Kissy?"

"I swear to you, never. Never in this world. Lily's the one who loses it with them, lately. She gave Kissy quite a shake, in Italy-that's one reason she left to come back here for therapy. You do believe me, don't you?"

"You didn't tell me about hitting her."

"I was afraid of what you'd think of me. I would have told you, before I left. That's why I called. I want you to know these things, Roy. But you've got to believe me, about the girls? Never. Do you?"

I considered this and realized I did. "Yes."

"Thank God. Didn't I tell you Christmas was a bitch?"

"I don't think you should go to Aspen."

"Got to. There's a party at Eisner's house, all my old Disney friends. Remember Eisner? Three hundred fifty million, in one year? His house is incredible-perfect-looking up a valley into the mountains, all hand-hewn wood, a mix of Adirondack Lodge and Rocky Mountain. The best house ever. The man has taste."

"This isn't about houses, it's about your life. And your family."

"Yeah, but Aspen is Aspen. It's only another ten days. I'll be back."

We parted with a sense of the tenuousness of our link, as if all this talk were well and good, even a serious dalliance, but Aspen is Aspen, Gstaad Gstaad. He may be getting easier to read, I thought, but-and maybe even for his sense that he's being read more easily-he's getting harder to change. Like us all. I was scared to let him go, to let him out there, but what else could I do, lock him up? Against his will? Fat chance.

CHRISTMAS ADS FOR Misery were running daily hi the Crier and on TV-late at night or early in the morning to catch those with the buzz of high anxiety preventing sleep, or those with the fuzzy early-morning awakenings of the depressed. Each ad ended with "Our operators are standing by." The weather was a gold mine for the hospital. As if to mock the TV image of Christmas-those soft pillows of snow, that squeaking of new boots on the packed roadbeds, the crisp chill wishes for Peace on Earth Goodwill to Men-it was unseasonably warm. Primed for temperatures in the twenties and thirties, we got forties and fifties. It was screwy. The big banks of November snow went all runny. There were floods. Things pretty much turned to mud.