Edward Lee: Succubi

She came into the slate foyer and closed the door with her butt. Then she groaned relief, setting down her litigation bag, which weighed more than a suitcase. The lit bag was any attorney’s bane; you carried your life around in it, and a lawyer’s life weighed a lot. A professional studio portrait of her with Melanie and Martin smiled at her when she hung up her Burberry raincoat. My family, she abstracted. But was it really? Or was it just her own weak compromise at normality? Often the portrait depressed her—it reminded her of what her indecision must be doing to Martin. She feared that, as each month passed, Martin grew more disgruntled with her reluctance to marry him. She knew that he blamed himself, that he lived each day in some inner dread wondering what it was about him that wasn’t good enough, and this only made her feel worse because it had nothing to do with his inadequacies at all. It was something in herself that she didn’t know how to express. What’s holding me back? her mind dimly asked the portrait. She knew it would never answer.

She wandered to the living room and switched on the TV out of habit. She expected the same dismal disclosures: deficits, bank failures, murder. Instead, a newscaster with too much makeup on was saying: “…the recently repaired Hubble telescope. Last week astronomers at NASA reported the approach of what is known as a full tangental lunar apogee, a full moon that will occur at the same moment as this year’s vernal equinox. ‘It doesn’t sound like much of a big deal to the average person,’ John Tuby of MIT told reporters this morning, ‘but to astronomers it’s significant news. The moon will appear pink at times, due to a straticulate refraction. It’s the first phenomenon of its kind in a thousand years.’ So get out your telescopes, stargazers, and get ready,” the silly newscaster went on. “Up next, poodles on skis!”

Poodles on skis. Ann turned off the set. At least it beat the usual news. She’d been hearing about the equinox thing for several days, like it was a paramount event. She didn’t care what color the moon was, nor why. All she cared about now was relaxing.

She turned to the hall. “I’m home,” she announced.

Home was a luxury three bedroom condo just off the Circle. It was perfect, but for $340,000 it should be; that’s what condos went for on the water. Ann liked it. Melanie had the second bedroom, and the third Ann used for an office. Martin had the little den for his writing. It was a corner unit. The balcony off the master faced the water, and the den faced State Circle, which was beautiful to look at at night. Ann would miss the place. When you made partner, you didn’t live in a condo.

Martin was out of the den in moments, with his worrywart eyes. Writers were weird, but Martin’s weirdnesses were different. At least once a week he threatened to quit writing in order to strengthen their relationship, and she grimly believed him. He felt guilty about his money situation, which was ridiculous. He taught literature part time at the college and wrote the rest of the time. Ann paid more in state taxes than Martin grossed per year. He was a poet, critically acclaimed. “Critically acclaimed means you get great reviews and don’t make any money,” he’d once told her. His poetry collections, four so far, and by a major publisher, had been written up very positively in the Post’s BookWorld, the New York Times, Newsweek, and every major literary magazine in the country. Last year his agent had sold three of his short stories to Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Esquire, and he’d made more money from those than the total royalties from his last book of poetry. “Write more short stories,” she’d suggested. “No, no,” he’d lamented. “Prose is defectible. Verse is the only truth in the written word as an art form.” Whatever, she’d thought.

“What did Dr. Harold say?” he asked now, and put his arms around her.

“The same. Sometimes I think I’m wasting my time.”

“Christ, Ann, you’ve only had three appointments so far. Give it a chance.”

A chance, she thought. The nightmare had started two months ago. She had it every night. Sometimes the details differed, but its bulk always remained the same. It bothered her now to the extent that she was fatigued at work; she felt off track. Martin had been the one to suggest seeing a psychiatrist. “It’s probably some subconscious worry about Melanie,” Martin had proposed. “A good shrink can isolate the cause and then find a way for you to deal with it.” She supposed that made sense. It wasn’t the $200 per hour that bothered her (Ann’s firm routinely billed that much per hour for an average client), it was that if she didn’t get to the bottom of it fast, her career might suffer, and if her career suffered, so would Melanie’s future, not to mention her relationship with Martin.

An abstract print on the wall showed the blotched back of a person’s head viewing a pointillistic twilight. Dream of the Dreamer, it was called, by a local expressionist. She and Martin had bought it at the Sarnath Gallery. Now, though, the warped shape of its subject reminded her of the pregnant belly of her dream.

She turned and kissed Martin. “Melanie here?”

“She’s with her friends.”

Oh, God. Melanie’s “friends” worried Ann more than any other aspect of her life. “The Main Street Punks,” the papers had dubbed them. Leather jackets, torn jeans held together with safety pins, and hairstyles that might compel Vidal Sassoon to hang himself. Ann realized it was a prejudice on her own part; these punks were to her what the hippies were to Ann’s parents’ generation. Martin had met some of them and assured her that they were okay. They looked wild was all—they looked different. The protective mother in Ann didn’t want Melanie to be different, even though the term was not relative. She knew she was being narrow minded but somehow that didn’t matter when it was your own daughter. Other people’s daughters, fine. But not mine. She loved Martin more truly than she’d ever loved in her life; however, all too often, his liberalism ate at her. They’d argued about it many times. “It’s a sensibility, Ann. When you were her age you were wearing peace signs and beads and listening to Hendrix. This is the same thing. It’s a trend that she relates to. Maybe if you tried to understand her more, she wouldn’t be so unsure of herself.” “Oh, I see,” Ann had countered. “Blame me. I must be a bad mother because I don’t want my only child hanging around with a bunch of people who look like Sex Pistols rejects! Jesus Christ, Martin, have you seen some of them? One of them has a metal spikes sticking out of his head!” “They look different, so they must be negative influences? Is that what you’re saying, Ann? Have you ever heard of self expression? Maybe if they all wore loafers with no socks and had names like Biff and Muffy, then they’d meet with your approval.” “Eat shit, Martin.” “They’re just innocent kids with a different view of the world, Ann. You can’t pick Melanie’s friends for her. That’s up to her, and you should respect that.”

Goddamn him sometimes. So what if he was right? Dr. Harold had proposed that her objection to Melanie’s friends was a defense mechanism. Ann felt so guilty about being away from Melanie so often that she sought out another, easier avenue of blame. “You work very hard,” the doctor had said. “You’ve made a tremendous success of yourself, but you use that fact to attack the ones you love. Subconsciously, you feel that you’ve been a neglectful mother, and you feel that that’s the cause of your daughter’s lack of confidence. But rather than admit that, and act upon it, you have chosen not to face it at all.”