Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

In a way, I think Fang would have figured out what was going on even earlier if he hadn’t been so thrown off-balance by Vera’s jealousy over the Stephanie Garrison debacle. I hadn’t gone on Facebook to actually check, but it seemed that the picture in question was totally harmless: Fang smiling for a picture in a group, his arm thrown casually around the girl who happened to be standing next to him. But for Vera to be irrationally jealous was not something Fang would immediately connect to her bipolar, especially since he himself was convinced she had been misdiagnosed. Vera was quite capable of being volatile and irrational all on her own, and jealousy can cause anyone to seem insane.

But the letters she sent to him during their fight were vile. And there were even more of them in her trash file, as though she had been aware that she should not have sent them and wished they could be stricken from the record. Fang must have been enraged by these letters, even as he sought to comfort and console her.

Ultimately, Fang was an even stranger and more interesting person than I had guessed. It was easy to see why he and Vera had fallen for each other. I in no way blamed him for wanting to try to disentangle himself from what seemed to him the crushing moral weight of being Vera’s sole guardian, but at the same time, the idea of the two of them truly severing ties made me sad. And the timing of it. She must have gotten his last e-mail right before Daniel came over.

I shut the laptop and rubbed my eyes. The cat jumped down through the window and came to lay beside me on Vera’s bed. The afternoon was wearing interminably on. Katya was coming, but she wouldn’t be here for almost two days. I thought of Vera in the quiet room, her padded cell, and suddenly hoped Fang stuck by his resolution to be done with loving her, to let go the heavy anchor. No matter how weirdly right they were for each other, I wouldn’t wish Romeo and Juliet on her and Fang. I wouldn’t wish for him to be the one waiting to see her at the mental hospital, or the one who has to realize she doesn’t actually want to be holding the knife, the one who has to find a way to take it from her hands. No matter how smart he was, he was still just a seventeen-year-old kid.

I was also experiencing an almost physical sense of revulsion caused by some complicated aggregate of spiritual wrongs I had recently committed. I felt like a spy for reading such intimate exchanges between two people who would never have wanted me to read their correspondence. I felt embarrassed by Vera’s psychosis, and so added to my unease while snooping was the embarrassment of being let in on someone else’s shame.

I remember my mother had a lover once, not Jerry, but someone just after him, who would let his house get horribly, disgracefully messy. He would keep buying new clothes so that he didn’t have to do laundry, so the dirty clothes in his back bedroom got to be waist high almost. The kitchen was unusable and putrid. My mother recruited me once to help her clean his apartment and it took us three days. I remember finding an open can of cat food among the clothes, a bag of gummy worms that had mysteriously begun to liquefy. It was appalling that a human being could live like this, and both my mother and I had an instinct to never voice to each other, nor to her boyfriend, how upsetting his house was. It was like that reading Vera’s trashed e-mails. I wanted to delete them even more permanently, to keep anyone else from ever reading these things and knowing how unreasonable she was capable of being.

It was a horrible, queasy feeling. And dancing over this feeling were images of Susan, retinal burns almost. I could still see her plate of carpaccio in my mind, her knife fallen across the little rectangles of raw fish. She had told me she only wanted an adventure. She had told me I would ruin it with feelings. “You’re young,” she had said. And I had thought it was a compliment. I had misread her completely. Just as I had misread Vera.

Had I misread Katya all those years ago? Was I really so bad at knowing what was real, at discerning what was true?

I napped, disconcerted, the rest of the afternoon, the owner-less cat curled up beside me.

—

By evening, I did not know what to do but return to the mental hospital. Visiting hours were long over, but I went to the desk and asked if Vera was still in isolation and if she was not, could I please be allowed to see her. The nurse could not understand a word I said. I wrote my request on a piece of scrap paper, handed it to her to do with what she would, and then sat down in the waiting room and waited. I waited for three hours. Finally, at about nine o’clock, someone must have taken mercy on me or finally deciphered my note, because the nurse called me over and an orderly took me to Vera’s floor and let me see her in her room.

She was lying on her bed, not like a sick person tucked under covers and propped up neatly, but like a mannequin that has simply been set down. She was fully dressed in some of the fresh clothes I had left for her, and her eyes were open. She gazed steadily at the ceiling. When I approached her bed and whispered her name, she did not sit up or turn to me, just lifted her eyebrows and said, “You decided to come after all.”

“I’ve been trying to see you all day,” I said. “How are you?”

She ignored this question, but continued to stare at the ceiling.

“They told me they put you in solitary,” I said. I wanted her to tell me about it. To tell me it had been awful, or to tell me it was not so bad, or to tell me what color the padded walls were. I pictured them blue. Were they blue? Probably they were tan.

“You are afraid of me,” she said finally, with a queer little smile that made me shudder. Her body was nearly comatose, but her mind was still spitting up oracular little psychotic particles.

“No,” I said, “I wanted to see you so badly. I was furious when they wouldn’t let me see you earlier.”

“Do you know the book Hop on Pop ?” she asked. “The children’s book?”

I didn’t. Possibly I had read it when I was a child, but I had missed those years with Vera and so my memories of children’s books were dim and murky.

“Two little bears jump on their father’s tummy. They hop on Pop. That was always how I thought of you. That was what I thought I was missing: having someone who would be magically immune to the pain I would cause them so that everything would just be hilarious all the time.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I never thought about not having a father that way.”

“I always forget that,” she said, closing her eyes. “That you didn’t have a father, either.”

“Yeah,” I said. And we remained there like that, Vera lying with her eyes closed on the bed, myself sitting hunched over in a chair at her side, until the orderly came to get me and tell me I had to leave.

“Your mother is coming,” I told her, right as I was leaving. But she didn’t say anything, only shrugged, as though it didn’t matter to her at all.

—

The next morning was Monday, and Judith came to say goodbye before she left for the airport. I had seen her in the hallway the day before and awkwardly explained about Vera, and she hadn’t insisted on knowing more or talking. But an hour before she was supposed to leave, she showed up at my door offering me the rest of her coffee and tea. “Since you’re staying,” she said, “I thought you might need these.” I had, of course, canceled Vera’s and my flight and our future was so uncertain that I had yet to book a new one. An ongoing supply of coffee and tea was a blessing.

Judith had on her red lipstick and her red beret. She was, as my mother would say, “ready to be seen.” She had survived this trip, this foray out into the world as a widow, and she looked happy. I was genuinely glad for her. I invited her in. “You don’t still have any of that cheese?” she asked.