By Blood (17 page)

She squirmed and resisted, and finally replied: Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake.

At that moment she leaned forward into the light. She had been in shadow, only her body—did I mention, Dr. Gurevitch, what a very thin body she has, all sinew, so that one instinctively worries if she is well?—only her body had been illuminated, slashed by the beams through the venetian blinds. Now she leaned forward so that her eyes, too, entered the light, while the rest of her small, triangular face narrowed down into the shadows. In that moment, her eyes were nearly the hazel color she and her family persist in believing them to be. For they are actually brown, medium brown, with flecks of yellow, the flecks now catching the light so that her eyes blazed at me from the darkness. And her hair—also brown, not the fictional “dirty blond”—her hair suddenly haloed, a nimbus of frizzy light around her blazing eyes.

Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, she said to me so fiercely from the shadows. Every child thinks these cannot possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake, I do not belong to them. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really are not my parents.

What envy coursed through me! Yes, Dr. Gurevitch, I see now it was envy. She was right: She could shed her family and I could not. Her attachment to them was not “real,” they were not
blut
, she had inherited nothing from them but experience, which can be discussed, analyzed, understood, changed. But I carried in me—what? What have I inherited from the Obersturmbannführer? A stain—which cannot be removed? For I belong to him, to them, my family: the defenders of the murderers of the Jews.

I believe it is from that moment that my determination grew to detach the patient from her adoptive parents, said the doctor. Yes, it was envy, certainly. She would enact for me what I could not do for myself. She could leave her family, find another, a kinder one, perhaps, one more suited to her. How could I know I was throwing her back into … all that.

The doctor sat quietly for a full minute, as the tape whirred and the building hummed from somewhere in its depths. Then she switched off the machine and abruptly left the room—going to the ladies’ lounge, I assumed, since she had neither put on her coat nor taken her packages.

The urge to follow and accost her was overwhelming. I could station myself in the stairwell, I thought, and as she came by—what? What would I do? I had visions of strangling her—with what? My tie? Had I come to that? Could cudgel her … with a phone …?

The phone.

I picked up the handle and dialed the number she had left in her messages for Gurevitch: five, five, two, fifteen, nineteen. At last the nine circled back to its position, at last the connection was made, finally the ringer came alive on the other side of the door. How loud it seemed, shrilling in the empty room in the dead night: five rings, six rings, seven, eight. Finally Dora Schussler’s footsteps sounded in the corridor—nine rings, ten—she ran now to catch the phone, tore into her office, picked up the receiver:

Yes, I know the hour, Helmut, she said breathlessly. I am finishing and will be on my way home now.

(So she still called him Helmut!)

I told you not to worry, she went on.

She paused.

I told you I—

She said nothing for several seconds.

Helmut? she said finally. Then: Who is this?

I only breathed into the phone, loudly, to be sure she knew that someone was there, someone who was not Helmut.

She inhaled as if to speak, then let go the breath.
Attend
, she murmured in French.

She put down the handle and slowly moved toward our common door.

I put my finger on the hook. I stopped breathing. It had been too loud, my breathing—too loud!

She stood inches from me—I could almost taste the tobacco on her breath. My God, how long could I stand there without breathing?

Suddenly her phone began cawing: the quick, loud shout of a line off the hook.

Sheiss
, she whispered, turning away from the door and returning to her desk. Pervert, she spat, as she dropped the phone back into its cradle.

What delight it gave me to taunt her! Yet how I feared that my behavior would expose me. I had to endure Dr. Schussler, I told myself; she was my only conduit to the patient; whatever her errors, whatever her deficiencies, I needed her as badly as did the patient. For the doctor had said the patient would feel “cast out.” And I … I could not contemplate what should happen to me should I lose my dear patient and all her sorrowing goodness.

I went to the office daily during Christmas week and did not encounter Dr. Schussler, which was fortunate, for I was not certain of my
self-control
, of what I might do should I encounter her alone, without her patients, without
my
patient. I might … no! Her absence was a relief; although it was with many bitter thoughts that I imagined Dora and Helmut holidaying in some Teutonic cottage in the Austrian Alps, reverting to their Germanic type amidst the sort of people who could very well forget the Obersturmbannführer who oversaw the murder of the Jews of France. My own family—what was left of it after the suicides—would have enjoyed Dr. Schussler’s company, a cultured woman with whom they could share their greasy prejudices, their ugly words dripping from their tongues like saliva from rabid dogs.

Christmas Day itself was much like Thanksgiving: the city deserted but for the lolling alcoholics and desperate Vietnam War veterans. The sale-shopping frenzies followed; then the madness of New Year’s Eve. Office workers had opened their windows to toss the pages of their desk calendars into the street, a practice I had never seen anywhere else. I walked ankle-deep through a snowfall of past appointments, random phone numbers, part numbers, names, addresses, check numbers, dollar amounts, cryptic notations. I picked one up: Give Gary the name, it said. Another: Tell Suzy no. I wondered over this Suzy—for what was she being refused? And what madness made San Franciscans dump the details of their daily lives with such abandon, such delight?

Finally came the dead day of the New Year itself, the whole world shut and sleeping—a Wednesday, but without the patient. I dared not even turn on my torn radio with its drifting tuner for fear of the dark reports that might issue therefrom; and of the static, the curtain of electronic noise that resembled too closely the whir of the hated sound machine.

I went to the office early on the following Wednesday, January 8th, hoping beyond hope that Dr. Schussler’s Christmas hiatus was for but two weeks, not the three that my own nefarious practitioners had always taken, leaving me adrift at the worst time of year. (And why do they do that? What other profession absents itself exactly at the moment its services will be most needed, when patients are confronted with the absurdly neurotic idea that family holidays should make them happy? Would a medical doctor go on leave after a plane crash?) Only silence reigned in the adjoining office, and I passed the week scouring the halls, peering into offices where real people seemed to be going about the actual acts of living.

I cannot describe the feverish excitement with which I prepared to go to the office on Wednesday, January 15th. I bathed elaborately; shaved, even my chest, determined that my presence in Room 807 should be so slight as to leave not a scintilla of odor-inducing molecules upon the air. I sat still, so still as to be nearly incorporeal. I had survived her absence without deathly consequence. Any moment she would return and release me.

And finally it happened as always: elevator, ding, footfalls, slam of the door. (Oh, how I loved her slam now, the force of her very arms!)

And how was your vacation? asked Dr. Schussler.

Oh, my God, said the patient. I can barely describe it. It was … beyond belief. I can’t thank you enough.

Ah! said the therapist. You finally swam in the sea.

That’s not quite it, said the patient.

She paused. And lowered her voice. And said:

I had the best sex I’ve ever had in my life.

The story the patient went on to tell was so direct, so … specific in its descriptions, that my male member grew—I should say “sprang”—at a rate unlike any other time in my experience.

She began with the word “breasts.”

Breasts, she said. The whole evening started when I was at the bar on the hotel patio. Alone, except for a couple at the far end. And I thought, Breasts come out in hot weather.

Andie and Clarissa had long ago gone upstairs, she went on. They’d stayed with me as long as they could. But when they began tracing their fingertips up and down each other’s arms, and a flush bloomed on Clarissa’s chest, I told them: Go. I’ll be fine.

Now I was alone at the bar but for the couple, the patient said. The woman was wearing a lime-green strapless, her bosoms pouring out of the top, and she was bending over in just the right way to show them off to her man—the way you’d offer a sippy cup to a baby.

I felt my own nipples tighten, I confess, the patient said. It was all I’d hoped for: breezy nights, silk dress against my almost naked body.

She giggled after she said this to her therapist.

I hope this is all right, she said.

(Of course! I thought.)

Of course, said the therapist.

Then, just as I was enjoying it, she went on, I saw the expression on the man’s face—his jaw was just askew, his eyes slanting down, not listening as the woman talked—and Charlotte’s ugly voice jumped into my head.

Leering jerk!
Charlotte said.

I’m leering, too! I shot back at her in my mind. It was the old argument. The woman
wants
to show her breasts, I said. They’re sexual organs. And men are
supposed
to want to see them.

Leering jerks!

I had to shut her out of my head, the patient told the doctor. She somehow wanted to take all the weirdness out of sex. She couldn’t accept the part of it that was wild: where sex is animal.

The patient sighed.

Earlier in the evening, she continued, the bar had been filled to the edge of the pool. Men in expensive business suits, a few exquisitely dressed women. They were packed in so tightly that the circulating waiters were invisible, and the trays of champagne glasses seemed to float above the crowd on their own. Overnight markets, I heard. Inflation hedges.
Interest-rate
arbitrage. British accents, German, Spanish, French. Then I remembered the sign in the lobby: an international economics conference.

They were all around me, sweeping in all at once from some forum just ending. I was almost overcome by the scents of aftershave and powder in the tropical heat. Their hands were flying in the exchange of ideas. Their faces were flashing like lightning bugs. I can’t tell you how jealous I was. I thought: These are the sort of people I belong with.

Then there was Charlotte’s nasty voice again:
Pigs!

And I asked myself: Were they pigs?

And then this probably ugly thought came to me: the new Jews.

I tried to stamp it out, but you can’t take back a thought. And the idea finished itself in my mind despite my attempt to stop it: There was a time when only Jews did my sort of work—protected the treasures of kings and pashas and sheiks. When only Jews minded the fruits of taxes, allegiances, tributes, raids, robberies, wars, sieges, rapes, murders. And I suddenly saw myself in the long history of money: successor to the millennia of Hebrews who had handled filthy lucre to keep “clean” the consciences of pashas and popes.

The patient laughed.

So maybe it’s right that I’m a Jew. Maybe I’ve been training to be a Jew my whole life.

It got late, she went on. The couple at the end of the bar left. The wind picked up. Dead palm fronds scraped the paving stones. I intended to drink, lose myself in a few martinis, like Mother. Why not? There is some glamour, some easing of life, that can come from sitting at a good bar with a well-made drink. The martini, for instance. The bartender made it just as I’d been trained to do: a little ice slick, clear and light, resting on the surface in a dead man’s float.

But then the barman stretched and yawned.
Yawned
. And any hope of glamour vanished into the maw of that yawn. Now I could see there was only the empty patio, a man behind the bar wanting to go home, another man sweeping, a maid shining the leaves of a rubber plant. At the reception desk across the patio: a single person, a man, his head on his chin.

The patient settled her bill and walked down to the sea, first along a lighted path, then through a phony “jungle,” then past a phony “lagoon,” and finally came to the real sand.

The beach was empty; there was no moon. She removed her shift and stood still, wearing only her underpants. The breeze was colder than she’d expected. Goosebumps came up on her arms. Her nipples hardened. She took her breasts in her hands and softly kneaded them, for the warmth, she told herself. But then for the pleasure. Without moonlight, the sand was barely paler than the sea, which was at low tide, drained, unable to lift itself to lap at the shore. She walked out thirty paces before the water got to her knees. She wouldn’t get to a good swimming depth until she’d walked a hundred yards out to sea.

Then she remembered what Dr. Schussler had told her. Be careful with yourself, the doctor had said. And she turned back.

The pool was lit with soft green underwater lights, the patient noticed as she walked back to her room. She wasn’t ready to sleep, she realized as soon as she had closed the door behind her. She put on a bathing suit, then went back to the pool, where she found a low diving board. She performed a swan dive, then surfaced and tried to sprint in the
too-warm
water. But the pool’s curving walls made any serious swimming impossible, and she was aware, anyhow, that her aggressive splashes echoed too loudly against the hotel facade in the quiet night.

She stretched out on the surface, trying to be as light and clear as the wisp of ice on her last martini, to be nothing, a slick held up by water.

When suddenly something skimmed the underside of her body, like a large fish—

She jumped upright.

Laughter came from the dark side of the pool. Then a woman’s voice saying, I’m sorry. It is only that I cannot sleep.

The patient paddled toward the voice, which had spoken with a soft accent the patient couldn’t identify. In the shadows was a woman holding the edge of the pool, the ends of her hair floating on the surface.

The woman turned her head. She had large eyes. Bold-stroke brows. A wide, dramatic, high-bridged nose. Full lips, like the wax lips children put on their mouths.

Then she turned her body. And there were her breasts. Bare.

Easy, the patient told herself. Europeans go nude all the time.

The woman made no effort to cover her breasts, only crossed her left arm beneath them, which had the effect of raising the nipples so that they played hide-and-seek, hide-and-seek, with the lapping surface of the pool.

My name is Dorotea, said the woman, who seemed to be in her mid-thirties. They exchanged pleasantries, how long they’d been here, how they liked it, where they were from.

Argentina, Dorotea said. Nice to meet you, she went on, laughing and extending her hand under the water.

The woman was so striking that the patient could not stop gazing at her. She seemed to have been painted by Picasso during his cubist phase, with all the planes of her face broken into sharp angles, each eye so powerful that it needed a separate space, four planes for her nose, six for each high cheekbone. But the mouth, the mouth: blooming dark red amid the hard angles. The patient finally took the offered hand. She said a bit more about herself. She tried not to look at the breasts Dorotea was cradling, not at the dark-pink aureoles as they tightened in the cool night air, not at the nipples, pebbled, erect.

Dorotea held on to her hand.

I saw you earlier, Dorotea said. I was with the group—

The economics conference?

Yes. And I saw you …

I was at the bar, said the patient.

Earlier, said Dorotea. With your friends. There was a long pause. She was still holding the patient’s hand. Then she said: Your friends. They are …
together
?

Is this happening
? thought the patient.

Yes, she said. Together.

Dorotea released the patient’s hand, then slowly, and with some sense of demonstration, let go of her breasts. And you? she asked.

Now the patient allowed herself to look down at the full forms hiding like slick fish beneath the surface of the water, ready for the net.

I’m alone, the patient said.

Dorotea took a step closer.

They stood facing each other, saying nothing as water lapped at the rim of the pool.

Then a hand was tracing the patient’s hip.

Okay? asked the woman.

The patient gasped.

Under the water, Dorotea’s fingers were wandering to her waist, her belly. Slowly they circled the rim of the pelvic bone, down the thigh, across the gap between the legs, then back up again. The patient felt her clitoris grow, flourish, in the center of this circle, being the object of this circling, some kind of shrine the fingers had to walk around seven times, eight, nine, but could not enter. Finally one fingertip stopped on her pelvic bone, a spot just above the clitoris: the crown of the clitoris.

Oh! exclaimed the patient. She felt her clitoris must be inches high. If she got out of the water, everyone would see it, a finger poking out of her suit. She could barely focus on Dorotea’s face, which showed something triumphant. What was the patient supposed to do? She had never done anything like this before. Something in her said, Don’t do this. Be careful. Who is this woman? What are we doing here, outside, in public, in this pool? But then that fingertip slipped a little lower. And she had no more thoughts.

Meanwhile Dorotea’s free hand went to the patient’s breast, which was smashed under the spandex of the tank suit.

It comes off like this, the patient said to her new friend, undoing the clip at the back. When the water licked at her nipples, the patient’s legs went weak, and she could do nothing for a moment. Then she roused herself and reached for the breasts that had lured her here. Her companion rewarded her touch with a long, low moan.

Dorotea’s exquisite finger began massaging the skin below the crown bone, the skin that was connected to … everything. The patient fell against the wall of the pool.

Is this all right? she asked. I mean, what if someone sees?

What will they see? said Dorotea. As long as we don’t kiss.

They let their nipples touch, part and touch under the water; nothing else, only the nipples.

I can’t stand this anymore, said the patient. I’m going to faint.

Come to my room, Dorotea said.