“Yeah.” I’ve got Albright Circles and ukuleles and promises of scars and fresh wounds.
“Okay,” said Fran. “How about a hypothetical right now?”
“Well, the point of
talking
, Finklestein,” said Larissa, “isn’t a question and answer session. We’re not engaging in the Socratic method.”
“The what?”
“The point is to converse freely about topics of great interest.”
“Check! I’m greatly interested. Oh, yes, Sherry, please, this
Ballerina Pink for the nails.” Fran winked at Larissa. “They’ll go with my black boots and gray striped leggings.”
Fran looked great. She always looked good. She put herself together just for the manicure. She seemed so accessible. Larissa chewed her lip. “Okay,” she began. “A hypothetical.”
Jessica and Sherry leaned forward. Larissa found this fascinating, considering their English was usually impaired by near-total lack of comprehension. Yet here they were: Larissa said
hypothetical
, and the foreign non-English speaking girls leaned forward!
Their curiosity duly noted, her own hands still outstretched, Larissa clammed up, and the girls started talking in Korean, and then she unclammed, but still, was having difficulty getting even the hypothetical words out.
“Finklestein,” she said, “do you know the story of Scylla and Charybdis?”
“What did you just say?”
The Korean girls continued talking, while buffing the bare nails before applying the polish. Larissa had five minutes tops, and then some time under the drier.
“Scylla,” said Larissa, “was a six-headed dog with twelve feet who lived in a rock and ate men who sailed by her through the Strait of Messina. Charybdis guarded the other narrow opening of the passage, a sea monster with a gaping mouth into which it sucked huge amounts of water and created whirlpools that sank men’s ships.”
“This is your hypothetical? A dog and a sea monster?”
“Yes.”
Fran laughed.
“Finklestein…”
Jessica applied the last coat of red on Larissa’s nails. Sherry was quicker. Fran was already done.
“Is that your choice, Larissa? Between a six-headed mutt and a sea monster?”
“I’m saying, you’re passing through the strait. You can go one way or the other. You’re impaled on the stake of your own indecision. Your choice either way is unacceptable.” Intolerable.
“I would turn around and go back,” Fran flatly stated, her wet pink nails moving sideways under the fan of the drier. “Can you go back?”
“No,” Larissa said. “There is no going back. It’s either Scylla or Charybdis, Finklestein. Which one shall it be?”
Fran got up, all long skinny legs in high-heeled patent-leather boots, her lips shining, her eyes blazing, her hip flirtatiously bowed out, dancing hip-hop, fashion-plate, young, careless, and said, “I would go back if I could. But if I can’t, you know what they say.” She blew and burst a large pink bubble.
“No, Fran. What do they say?” Larissa was so tired of her wet nails, of other things, gray horses galloping, chariot races into the watery abyss.
“If you ride the tiger, you gotta reap the whirlwind, baby,” Fran said, blowing her a kiss and twirling out. “Reap that whirlwind.”
Larissa received yet another letter from Che barely three days after the last, the frequency of the letters underscoring Larissa’s own increasing despair. She opened it.
Dear Larissa,
I’m out of options. I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I’m asking you for this. Please. Please, I beg you. Could you
Larissa stopped reading and slowly put the letter back in the envelope. She was sorry, she really was, but she just could not read another syllable of Che’s frantic missives. She simply couldn’t read about someone else’s troubles, her dirty plate so
overstuffed with her sordid own. Odysseus chose Scylla, because he said he would rather lose a few of his men to a beast than the entire ship to a whirlwind. I’m sorry, Che, she thought, pushing the letter away into the depths of her dresser along with the others. But the love of Larissa has waxed cold.
4
Fever Swamps
S
he came to Kavanagh Tuesday evening, sat down on the leather sofa, her hands in her lap. Watchfully she sat. Silently. It had been getting darker later and later, and tonight at seven, the last light of the sun streaked auburn through the windows, almost as if it were autumn, not the end of spring. There were no lamps on in the office. The paneled walls, the books, the wood desk behind the doctor, the notepad in the hands in which Kavanagh never seemed to write down anything, yet always remembered things Larissa had told her, Kavanagh and Larissa all steeped in lengthening shadows like curling smoke through a burning house. Tonight Larissa didn’t fidget, didn’t fret or fuss with her purse. Her jeans, her spring-green blazer, her cream tank top were pristine. Her light makeup hadn’t run from morning. She made figures out of clay with Michelangelo after school, fed her family burritos and fajitas, and home-made flan for dessert that took all day to make, and cups of fresh fruit. She had driven steadily with both hands on the wheel and now sat with both hands on her lap. She didn’t speak. And the doctor didn’t speak, waiting for Larissa to begin.
Larissa said nothing.
“Do you have plans for Memorial Day weekend?”
“Not really.”
In this manner they sat for forty-five of their fifty minutes together.
“I really should be getting back,” Larissa finally said, getting up. “My daughter has a concert on Thursday night and I promised I would listen to her practice before she went to bed.”
“Of course,” said Kavanagh, getting up. “Are you…all right?”
“I’m fine.” Larissa smiled and then, on impulse, extended her hand. “Thank you.”
Dr. Kavanagh shook it in confusion. “I’ll see you next Tuesday.”
Larissa rolled her eyes. “Actually, my son managed to get into the Junior League baseball playoffs and they have a five o’clock game next Tuesday. I don’t know when it will end. Can we reschedule?”
“Of course. Do you want to come next Thursday?”
“Let me call you, okay? Because it’s sudden death at the Junior League, and if they go through, I don’t know when the next game might be.”
“So we’ll reschedule?”
“I think that would be best,” said Larissa.
She knew the person she needed to talk to was Ezra.
“Lunch?” He glanced at the clock above her head. It read 10:45. “Um…?”
“I know but…I’ve got things later.”
She began casually, talking about the pesky epilogue problem for
Saint Joan
. The play was opening next weekend, at the beginning of June, and they still couldn’t decide whether to have the epilogue or to scrap it. There seemed to be as many opinions as there were people. They rehearsed it both ways,
and were still agonizing. Poor Megan remained terrible and miscast. Larissa had made a reckless choice and was now paying for it every day.
“Larissa, has anyone told you you’ve lost weight?”
She shook her head. “No, not really.”
“Oh, yes, really. What, you think I can’t tell?”
“It’s an illusion. You know what Sugimoto says. The fake subject in front of you looks real when transposed onto a photograph.”
“Oh, so you
were
paying attention to Bo and Maggie on your birthday? I should’ve known you have unplumbed depths.”
Oh, they’ve been plumbed, Ezra. Plumbed down to the bottomless maw.
“But which is it?” he asked. “Are you fake, or is your weight loss? Or is the weight loss the very thing that’s making you a fake subject against a real backdrop?”
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing. I’m five pounds up or down.” Larissa was thirty pounds lighter. Everything hung off her like she was a cancer patient. She despised herself for her lying internal metaphors.
“Do you think I’m self-actualized?” she asked him.
“Not if you don’t think you’ve lost at least half a Larissa.”
“Okay, but I’m talking in a metaphysical sense. Look beyond the physical, Ez.”
“The physical is but a manifestation of our inner sanctum. That’s why the soul is so hard to hide.”
Is it? Anyone who ever loved could look at her…and yet…they all loved, and they looked at her, and saw nothing. “Okay, can we…?”
“What’s your question?” Ezra smiled. “No, I don’t think you are self-actualized. Who is?” He leaned forward. “But you know what you are?”
She leaned away from him. “No, what?”
“Half a Larissa.”
“All righty. Now listen.” She leaned forward again, danger of seriousness from him avoided. “Ezra, what do you do when you have to advise your kids on big problems, like when you found our sad runaway Tenestra trying to give herself an abortion in the school bathroom?”
“Well, fortunately, in her crack withdrawal distress, she had gone into the men’s bathroom,” said Ezra. “I never would’ve found her otherwise.”
“My question is,” Larissa continued slowly, “what do you draw on to help her? Your education? Your intelligence? What?”
He shook his head. “Nothing in my education or intelligence can help me deal with a kid who’s scared shitless. It’s a Gordian knot for her, not for me.”
“So how does
she
decide to go into the men’s bathroom?”
“She puts away everything else and follows her fear. What is she afraid of the most? Clearly in her case, it was giving birth to a baby.”
“Is that how we make all our decisions? Out of fear?”
“Tenny did. I don’t know how
we
do.” He studied her. “What are
you
afraid of?”
“Oh, no, not me.” She smiled so lightly, so brightly, all her teeth sparkled at him. She took a sip of her coffee and the hands didn’t shake and she stifled the gag reflex from tasting close to anything that resembled nourishment.
“I see my kids, fifteen, sixteen years old,” Ezra continued, “and they’re confused, not ready to face life, and yet they have to choose a college, a boyfriend, whether or not to lie to their parents, have unprotected sex, drive when drunk. It doesn’t end.”
Larissa nodded. “Sometimes when the kids come to me to ask for advice, I don’t know what to tell them.”
“Sometimes I don’t either.”
“Really? What
do
you tell them?”
“What do you tell
your
kids?”
“You mean my real kids?”
“Yes, as opposed to the fake ones in the photographs. No, not your
children
. I mean the kids you teach.”
“Well, this is where my trouble starts,” said Larissa. “My heart is conflicted. I see two different paths for them. I can imagine an urban college or a rural one. I can imagine playing baseball, as in the case of your Dylan, but also guitar. I don’t know how you can even advise your own son.”
Ezra looked amused. “Those things are easy, Larissa. That’s not a do I have a baby or not. Do I have unprotected sex or not. Do I sleep with my best friend’s boyfriend, do I take my parents’ car when they’ve expressly told me I can’t.”
“But what if you don’t know how to make the…
right
decision?” asked Larissa.
“What I do then,” said Ezra, “is ask, what is the overriding passion of your life. What is the
one
thing you can’t imagine living without? If God came to you in a dream and told you He would take away from you everything but the one thing you couldn’t part with, what would that
one
thing you were left with be?”
Crowded bazaars, caravans, freak shows, high wire dancing monkeys, and fire hoops. I dream to be dreamless. I want it to be like before, not after. I want it to be not now when hollow heaven is awash in charcoal. “What if there are
two
?” she asked almost in a whisper.
“Rare. You’d be surprised how self-actualized the students become when the choice is presented to them this starkly. What if everything else was taken away? What do you want to be left with? They all know. If it’s piano, or baseball, or their singing voice. For some it’s their long legs, or their best friend, or their blonde hair. Some say their little brother. Some say their dog.”
“Does anybody say their parents?”
Ezra laughed. “Not a single one,
ever
. What does that tell you?”
Larissa tried to will herself not to look like she was going blind, torn, drained, as if in a death struggle. “But what about the other stuff? Right and wrong stuff? Like taking the car when you’re not supposed to?”
“That’s harder,” Ezra admitted. “Then I say to them, you know how you know what you
should
do? The thing that you actively don’t want to do. That’s how you know.”
“Oh, I bet they love that.”
“Oh, they do.” He grinned. “They fling Epicurus to defy me, like monkeys throwing poop. They all suddenly become Lucretians, start quoting from
On the Nature of Things
.” He tutted mildly. “I can’t get them to remember one quote from Kant or Kierkegaard, but Lucretius they have memorized. The atoms, ho, ho, ho, Professor DeSwann, they move in an infinite void, you see, and all we are is atoms, no more, no less. The reality of atoms is unflinching, they inform me. Suddenly all the young ones are Epicureans.” Ezra laughed. “I tell them it’s not a philosophy that has stood the test of time. They vociferously disagree. When I mention that Epicurean philosophy condemned lusts of all kinds, condemned passions, immoderation, they don’t want to hear it. They hear only ‘reality of atoms.’”
Larissa was thoughtful. “Well, aren’t your students correct, Professor DeSwann? We
are
made up wholly of atoms.”
“We are, but you can’t have it both ways to Sunday! I tell them that even atoms are not random. They move about in orderly, predictable ways, in ways that are designed and flawless. Even atoms are charged positively and negatively just enough and no more, the electrons do not fly away on whim and adhere to another matter just because they feel like it. The atoms behave along the lines of the natural order of the universe. Which is to say, not like human beings at all, who behave in all manner of appalling and unpredictable ways.”