E. Doctorow - Andrew's Brain

So there we were. I had taken her out of her organized life, removed her from her horizontal bar, and moved us to New York. In fact, she loved the city. We found a place after a while in the West Village. An apartment in a converted warehouse, with a loading-dock entrance and iron front windows, a creaky elevator, old unpolished wooden floors. Three rooms, lots of light, trees on the block, wonderful stores in the neighborhood, and of course the storekeepers all got to know Briony, the Italian bakery on the corner with the fresh breads in the window, the Korean food market, the coffee shop, newsstand. Because she was lovely, outgoing, cheerful, friendly, asking questions, warming up all these crotchety New Yorkers, who responded, to their own amazement, in kind. Andrew, she said, everything you need is right here, you don’t have to drive to a mall to shop, when was this invented! And we would walk everywhere, she wanted to explore, we walked to Chinatown, we walked over to Washington Square, where I had lived as a child, she got to know the city quite well.

How did you live?

I had a contract from a textbook publisher to do a kind of cog sci workbook. And then for the same company I became an outsource editor for their science lists. Reading books and proposals. And Briony tutored in math. She put something on the Internet and in no time at all she had more clients than she wanted — high school kids, middle school kids — testament to the state of education in America. So we made out OK. This was before the baby, you understand. When the baby came, a cake was delivered by the old Italian baker, the Koreans sent over a basket of fruit, all the old ladies of the neighborhood had tracked her pregnancy, she was everyone’s expectant young mother, and when on a spring day Briony brought Willa out for the first time, carrying her in a chest sling, somehow people appeared, it was as if they had been waiting, it was a kind of royal procession, Mother and Child, Briony couldn’t walk ten feet without someone stopping to ooh and aah.

What about you?

Well, I was there, of course, hanging in the background. I had never connected with the neighbors as Briony had. I just kept a smile frozen on my face, saying nothing and being more or less ignored. But I’ll tell you how lovely it was to watch Briony nurse our little girl, her cheeks flushed with happiness, her eyes on the baby and then on me with an expression of such fruition, as to enunciate in that moment the magnificence of life. And it was all in her eyes, my dear wife of twenty-two, who had the strength of being to totally transform me, turn me into something resembling a normal, functioning citizen of the world. [ thinking ] Ach, God.

Kleenex on the little table there.

So now you know why I’m here.

I do.

It’s a kind of jail, the brain’s mind. We’ve got these mysterious three-pound brains and they jail us.

Is that where you are?

I’ve known it for some time. I’m in solitary, one hour in the yard for the exercise of memory. You’re a government psychiatrist, aren’t you?

Well, I’m board-certified, if that’s what you mean.

And I thought we were travelers on the road together. The two of us, walking down the road. On the other hand I don’t think you travel well. I suppose you’ve never been to Zagreb.

Zagreb?

I was in a park there where every little bush and sprig of flowers was identified with a card on a metal stand. You had to bend down to read the Latin name. I was there with the woman who did the all-in-the-air somersault.

I see.

She was a prostitute, of course. And why I said to the pimp that her act was too brief to hold an audience for an entire evening, I don’t know. Perhaps I was drunk. Perhaps the somersault only seemed to be entirely in the air. She was a soft-spoken little woman habituated to submission. She smiled through her tears as she asked me to take her away from Zagreb, there in the park on a chilly autumn afternoon with the little bushes labeled carefully as if this was a truly civilized part of the world that had never seen war and whose native population didn’t hate the Serbs or the Bosnians, and who hadn’t made themselves into a puppet state of the Nazis in World War II. I saw this sedate, meticulously botanized park with the autumn leaves blowing across our path as a claim in the name of civilization to deny the brutal history of this place.

What were you doing there?

Just wandering. I had set off across Europe, hitchhiking with some other Yalies, but one by one we went our separate ways and there I was in Zagreb. In the hotel an old man in a tuxedo played the piano. American songs from years before as if they were the latest numbers. “My Blue Heaven.” “How High the Moon.” “Mr. Sandman.” And in a stiff clumsy unsyncopated way that revealed his obdurate classical training. Even Martha could do a proper swing tune if she was in the mood. I was the only American in the place, so I guess the performance was for me. A dark little room with red draperies and stuffed chairs and ottomans with the shape of buttocks worn into them. Just a few customers sitting in attitudes of waiting with their drinks untouched in shot glasses. The waiter nodding off in a corner. They all seemed in cahoots, the big bulky pimp, the pianist, and the customers — all of them there to demonstrate that this was the place to be, this third-rate hotel in this sadly unremarkable city of interest not even to the people who lived there. And she wasn’t the only one, the somersaultist …

The only one what?

Who asked me to take her away.

So this was not a dream.

There was a woman in St. Petersburg who asked the same thing. I don’t remember how I met her. Maybe at the Hermitage. She wore white stockings, a cherubic girl with her stockings held up by her generous thighs. Whose white-stockinged legs pointed skyward with almost military precision and then separated, widening like calipers.

Why are you telling me this?

Because I remember it. Because I don’t want to speak of what happened. It was clear wherever I went that I had no money. A student with a backpack, skinny and perpetually anxious. Yet this is what people do, when they are driven to it. With my American passport I was a commodity. Why are you looking at me like that? I’m trying to tell you that before I married Martha I had my share of adventures with the race of women.

I see.

With one marriage and several affairs behind me I was under no illusions. So that I did not impute to Briony her moral beauty, her natural unschooled virtue. It was really there. Nothing about her was practiced except perhaps her acrobatics. She came to me as Revelation. Not only because of the death of Martha’s and my baby girl, but because as a youth, as a student, I had been stupidly, cockily uncaring, not yet cunningly the resolved accidental killer-pretender but merely a heedless sort of lout like some of my collegiate pals.

I see.

There was one extended affair at Yale. I refused to marry her. So it ended as it had to at graduation and she went off to Spain, I think it was, with her degree in comparative lit, a tall pretty girl with dark eyes, and not long after there in the mail were her wedding pictures. The groom was not only a cognitive scientist, he even looked like me. So that when she wrote a few years later to tell me that she was leaving him I knew it was all over between us. You’re smiling.

I am.

But it wasn’t funny. We were very intense, it was something we’d gotten into and couldn’t get out of. She became pregnant in our junior year. We discussed that for a few furtive, dismaying months. But then she miscarried. This happened one evening when I was with her in her rooms. She called to me from the bathroom. The water in the bowl was plum-colored, and floating huddled with his knees drawn up was my tiny replica. Smaller than a mouse but unmistakably of family, with my same domey head and bunched brow in a frown, everything coming to a point in the chin. Not pleased at all, my heir, looking inward of course.