Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

MY LAST DAY on Thoreau, a few days later, I was about to leave my turret for my tennis-and-dinner date with A. K. Lowell when the phone rang.

"Roy?"

"Yeah?"

"Lenny. How are you?"

"Bad."

"Yeah, me too. I been out of town, and just heard. Unbelievable."

"It's the worst," I said numbly. I had been in shock ever since Lily Putnam had told me that Cherokee was dead. In shock, feeling nothing.

"The absolute worst. We fucked up so bad!" He started to cry, and then had a fit of coughing. "Look," he said, "I need to talk. I'll come over."

"Can't. I'm on my way out."

"No, no, you don't understand. It's our fault. We're to blame. I shoulda picked up, more, how you wouldn't let me see Cherokee-and hell, you shoulda asked me to see him too. We both fucked up. We gotta talk."

"Sorry, but I can't." I felt frozen, below zero, too low to feel anything. I knew I should see him and that not to see him now would be sick, but to actually face him, to face into all the feelings, at that moment was incomprehensible.

"What's so important?" "You don't want to know." "C'mon, c'mon." "I'm going over to A.K.'s." "You shittin' me?" "No. How 'bout tomorrow?" "We gotta talk now."

I felt a tiny opening, like the unwilling opening of an eye to an eclipse. But to see would be to burn, and I closed down harder. "Sorry." "That's it?" "For today."

"Tomorrow's too late. I need to see you now. If we talk a little, you can help me with this, and I can help you too." He sounded desperate. "It's now or never." "Aw c'mon, Malik."

"Okay," he said, suddenly matter-of-fact. "Got a pencil and paper?"

"Wait a sec." I got a number 2 and a Misery envelope. "Yeah."

"Write down this number: 555-0100. Got it?" "What do you mean got it? — that's your home number, Malik."

"Right. Y'got it?"

"Yeah, but-"

"Now burn it."

"What the-" Click. The phone went dead.

TENNIS WITH A. K. LOWELL was infuriating; she was a topspin lobber. I would smash a forehand down the line and rush the net, and she, on her own baseline, would get to it and lob it back high over my head, with enough topspin to bounce even farther away from me than I had expected. She parked her tall, muscular body on her own baseline, and even when I tried to dink it softly just over the net, she would either anticipate me and be there and lob it high back, giving her enough time to settle back in on her baseline, or not even bother to try to get it, conceding the point rather than losing her baseline dignity. At first it was a challenge to try to adjust to her game, but

then, after hitting a few perfect shots that rifled low over the net and then watching the ball sail up off her racket with lazy ease and plop down near my own baseline, its topspin making it hard to return with any control, it was less a challenge than a cause. As I tried harder and harder to penetrate her maddening system, it became less a cause than an irritation, a perversion of the spirit of the game in the name of her winning. I lost the first set 5–7, the second 2–6, and in the middle of the third- after I hit a particularly vicious smash down the backhand line that I knew she could never get to, and just to make sure rushing the net to protect the angles, to see her with an almost lazy backhand flick lob it high high high over my head as if daring me to try to chase it, and I gauging to see is it going out or not and figuring yes but wanting to make sure to be there, racing back, back, seeing it come down just on my baseline and then, because of its height, carom off even farther back so that I had to chase it right to the edge of the bubble dome of the indoor court and with a wild flail backward over my head manage to hit it before I crashed face first into the mesh fabric, only to see it drop short on my side of the net, her point-in the middle of the third set I lost it completely and just tried to finish the set without going psychotic. "You can tell everything about a person by how they play a sport." Love-6.

Thank God for dinner. We sat at a massive oak table in a massive room paneled with dark wood which, in the candlelight, looked as impenetrable as ebony. The house was a castlelike Tudor. The neighborhood, the yard, the house, the furnishings-all were High Episcopal suburban. A.K.'s new husband, Robert, was much younger than she, and a hairdresser. He cooked, served, poured wines-white and red and dessert-cleared, and did the dishes.

Strange, all of it. Strange too the way that A.K. seemed no different at home than at work. She used the Three Techniques and complex silences on Robert. Strangest of all was how she treated her five-year-old son Mo Ali-short for Moishe Alis-tair. Mo Ali seemed a delightful boy, dressed in Oshkosh jeans and kid Nikes.

"I saw ducks flying in the sky today," Mo Ali would say.

"And what are your fantasies about ducks?" A.K. would ask.

"The ducks are going to Disney World."

"Yes, and what are your thoughts about Disney World?"

"I think I want to go there can we please Mommy Robert said we could."

"And what are your feelings about Robert?"

"I want to stand on his head in the pool till he drowns," Mo Ali said cheerfully, "and be with you all the time in bed. When someone's depressed, Mommy, how come some of 'em kill themselves and some of 'em don't?"

A.K. would nod at me knowingly. I would nod back, feeling appalled.

" 'We're three happy chappies,' " Mo Ali sang out, " 'with snappy scrapes'"

"Three," A.K. said, nodding, "is Oedipal." I nodded back.

Finally Robert took Mo Ali up to bed and A.K. invited me into her home office up under the skylight. The furniture was arranged to replicate as exactly as possible her office on Thoreau, with the same couch and chair and big desk with, on the left-hand side with its back to me, the same small framed photo and the four sharp number 2's. We sat in silence.

"I've always wondered," A.K. said finally, "how a man could walk to his own execution." Two seconds. "And why people cry at happy endings."

I stared down at the carpet for a while, an expensive antique Persian. I wanted to talk about all the disasters on the Family Unit, but I hesitated-to bring up something as "hot" as suicide and murder would be like my hitting a scorcher cross-court, then rushing the net only to be lobbed over, then scurrying back, breathless and sweaty and pissed off. Finally I said, "I'm rotating off the Family Unit. I won't be having supervision with you anymore."

"You could pay for it, privately."

"I don't know if it would be worth it."

She jumped in her chair as if shot. I, as surprised as she at this blast from my unconscious, went on, "I'm sorry about Oly Joe. We've both been having a helluva hard time. We both really screwed up."

" 'The relation between analyst and patient is based on a love of truth, that is, on the acknowledgment of reality, and it precludes any kind of sham or deception.' " She smiled. '' 'Analysis Terminable and Interminable.' "

"I… I don't get it." She said nothing. For some reason I thought about how I still had her Oly Joe ledger hidden away,

and how she must have missed it and wondered who had it, but had never asked me about it. Strange. "Cigar?"

I nodded. She rose and went to a table-high humidor, searching for a key in her pocket. I too stood up, and took a few steps to her desk.

For the first time I saw the small framed black-and-white photo: Schlomo Dove stood in front of the Farben, short, fat, and rumpled, flashing his snaggly-toothed smile, seeming about ten years younger. Next to him on one side stood a woman taller than he, a slender young woman with a Jewish nose, light brown hair cut short, and wearing a silky summer dress. This must have been A. K. Lowell when she was still Aliyah K. Whatever, before she'd had her nose job and bulked up and started wearing men's power suits. Analyst and patient. On the other side of Schlomo, with a gap between them, stood Dee White. Slender, smooth-cheeked, with a cute cowlick, he too seemed young. His face looked pained. I recalled Viv telling me that A.K. and Ike had been best friends, classmates at the institute, and that both of them had been analyzed, at the same time, by Schlomo Dove.