Don't Worry About the Kids (23 page)

Then to know you is to know nothing, I said.

Precisely.

In the hotel I moved from the sitting room to the bedroom. Aldy was there, under the covers, a small bullet hole in her forehead. Her expression was calm, as if she had not been surprised.

Her father covered her, said that they would never kill him, because he knew too much. If he died, his knowledge, which others coveted, went to the grave with him. Aldy had known nothing and was, therefore, expendable.

Then you lied to me, I said.

Of course. You knew that, didn't you? Didn't Carl the philosopher say that all philosophers are liars?

I thought of lifting him and throwing him against a wall, or through a window, but the thought—the picture—of what would happen if I did—of what would ensue—was there before the feeling: he would be prepared for my anger. He was expecting it, I knew, and would be armed, and though he might not kill me, he could wound me in severe ways, so that I might never play again.

He had lost somebody he had known for her entire life, I thought, whereas I had lost somebody I had hoped to know for my entire life. Neither of us seemed surprised at Aldy's death. Neither of us showed any outward signs of grief, and I did not sense this was because our feelings lay too deep for tears.

Will you mourn? I heard Aldy ask.

Probably, I said.

Probably?

Aldy's father talked to me about the arrangements—how her death would be reported, how her body would be taken away and cared for, what he and I would do next. Our best hope lay in trusting each other. He touched my arm, said that he had tried to get to the restaurant before Aldy left—to intercept her, to propose a plan that would save us all—but that she had lied to him on the phone, saying that she would wait for him with me, that the three of us could have dessert and coffee together. He said that if she had not deceived him and returned to the hotel by herself, without me, she would now be alive and I—so she had believed—would be dead. They only wanted one body and they preferred, given a choice, to use the less newsworthy one of those available.

He left the room, and I heard him speaking on the phone, attending to details. I did not look at Aldy again. I wanted to think of the small hole in her forehead, the smudge of powder, as a blemish that, bringing imperfection, would have pleased her. She could at last be valued for qualities other than the physical beauty that had been hers and that she had not chosen. She would not be able to interview me in order to tell the story of my life, and I thought of saying to her that with nobody to tell my story, my life would remain unexamined and unverified. It would not, however, she replied, remain unlived. I could now have, she said, what I had desired before I knew her. It was why, she suspected, I was feeling so little after she, to her surprise, had been feeling so much. I could now be more alone than I had ever, in my philosophy, dreamt possible.

In Memory of Jane Fogarty

I
N
THE
GLOOM
and fog of Dublin, who'll ever notice my difference?

Your difference, she replied.

My difference, damn it! You know what I mean—my
craziness!
She showed nothing. Simon looked down at his hands. In the gloom and fog of Dublin, for that matter, who'll notice me?

In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start
.

Surely Simon had had that verse in mind when he spoke to her of Dublin—and surely, too, he'd had it in mind when he attached to his flight insurance policy a sheet of paper on which, in block letters, he printed five words: IN MEMORY OF JANE FOGARTY.

She reached to the night table, lifted her glass of white wine, drank. She chose not to answer the telephone. Tom's glass was empty. He had left two hours before, at 6
A
.
M
. She listened to her own voice, recorded, asking callers to leave messages at the sound of the tone. She listened to Simon's father telling her that if she didn't agree to meet with him, he would instruct his lawyer to take action against her.

She walked to the bathroom, downed two aspirins, squatted on the toilet, removed her diaphragm, listened to Mr. Pearlstein's voice—like bright morning sun, she thought, like an ocean of holy light!—pour into her apartment. How pleased Simon would be, she thought, could he hear the sound of his father's helplessness and rage.

“We ll give you one more chance. Please call us by noon so we can try to settle this like reasonable human beings. My wife and I have decided that we're prepared to compromise—to give you something. At a time like this we certainly don't intend to drag our son's memory through unpleasantness.”

But you will, Jane said. If you get angry and greedy enough, you will. For a half million dollars, there are lots of things we'll do we never suspected we were capable of.

Simon was dead and she was a wealthy woman. Amazing. Simon Pearlstein, twenty-six years old, her patient of nineteen months—thirteen months at the state hospital, six months as an outpatient—had perished along with 221 other passengers when their Boeing 737 charter crashed three days before as it passed over Gander, Newfoundland. Simon Pearlstein—dear, sweet Simon, who brought her a gift each time he came to her office—had outdone himself this time. Before boarding his plane, Simon had taken out a $525,000 accidental death and dismemberment policy, and on it he had named Jane Fogarty, M.D., his psychiatrist, as sole beneficiary.

While his plane sent a small explosion of light into the sky above Newfoundland—a supernova to a passing dove, she thought—she had been in bed with Tom, on top, banging away at him, waves of orgasm passing from her thighs to her brain and back again, blinding her, making her wish she would never have to look at anything in this world again. Still, even in memory, even while that warm ocean had come roaring through her body, the thought of having to talk with Tom afterward—of having to act as if she cared for him more than she did—wearied her.

So now that you can do anything you want, what is it you want to do?

She laughed. I'm not sure, Simon. Let's wait and see.

Sure, he said. I'm good at waiting. Where I am now, I can be patient in a way I wasn't able to be before. It's the best kind of patient to be.

Simon had asked her often about her childhood. It wasn't fair, he would protest, that she knew all about him and he knew nothing about her! Why was she hiding from him? If you tell me all about yourself, he said, I promise I won't criticize you or make fun of you the way you do to me.

I grew up poor, Simon. I was an only child. My father was a handsome man who loved to drink and who would, in my presence, sometimes beat my mother. Mostly, though, he'd fall down drunk and beg her forgiveness. My mother worked as a cleaning woman at St. Anthony's Hospital in Newark. My father died of a heart attack when I was eleven and he was thirty-seven. It happened on a trolley car, though for years I told friends—boyfriends especially—that he'd died in the saddle. I made up stories about him. In high school, he was in love with a beautiful girl who later became a movie star. Stopping over in Newark on her way to New York—the weekend of their twentieth high school reunion—she called him. In her luggage, in addition to her lavish wardrobe, she carried with her, always, her own powder-blue satin sheets.

So now that you know that, what do you know?

Simon looked away, as if ashamed to have drawn such information from her—as if frightened, Jane sensed, that she would abandon him because she had told him about herself.

The difference, she thought, answering her own question. The difference between what I was and what I am. Between outside and inside. Between then and now. Well. If Simon could not know her—know her life—he could do the next best thing: he could, from the grave, alter it.

The aspirins were taking effect. Jane watched her headache lift, the fumes curling from her hair, rising to the ceiling. She remembered, as a child, buying tubes of magic smoke, rubbing the sticky substance between her fingertips, watching the feathered plumes lift off. In the mist below the ceiling, Simon coalesced, drifted down. He sat next to her.

Money was the one thing my mother talked to me about freely, Simon. Money was the matter of her lullabies. My mother taught me how to budget, explained on a daily basis how she managed the bills, the shopping, the rent. When she wrote a check, I sealed the envelope. When she held up two cans of beans in the grocery, I chose the less expensive one. If I had not existed, she would surely have moved to the shore—to Asbury Park, where her sister Regina had found a husband, an accountant, who bought her a house of her own and who treated her like a lady. But her sister would not let her move in while my mother had a child with her.

The phone rang and Tom's voice came through the answering machine. He had been in touch with his lawyer, Emlyn Schiff, who was expecting her call. Tom had two questions for her: If Simon wanted her to have all the money, why did he send a copy of the policy to his parents? And if she was so rich, why wasn't she smart enough to fall madly in love with him?

Jane smiled. She had known Tom for nearly a year, had seen him or spoken with him almost every day for the previous four months. He was handsome, intelligent, generous. He was marketing director for a large New York publishing house, had been a senior editor before that. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He loved her. She doubted neither his constancy nor his wit. So what kept her from returning his love, from feeling free to say, All right—you're it. She was splendid, as with Simon, at taking care of others—at helping them learn to take care of themselves, to know themselves. But when somebody else—Tom—wanted to care for her…

She closed her eyes and, with Simon, silently recited the opening lines of Auden's poem in memory of Yeats:

Simon had brought copies of his own poems to her office, had sometimes inserted into their conversations snatches from the poems of others and then, afterward, asked if she noticed the difference: which words were his, which belonged to Yeats or Auden, to Thomas, Jeffers, cummings, Dickinson, Hopkins, Donne, or Blake. Most of the time-though she did not let on—she could have answered, could have passed Simon's tests.

Yet, as with his parents, Simon had his small victory with her too. For she could neither return his last gift nor talk with him about it. She knew all about accepting and not accepting gifts from patients. Well. If she was entitled to the money, he'd been entitled to the pleasure—had it been his—of giving it to her, of letting his parents know he had.

She wondered, though: now that she could have virtually anything she wanted whenever she wanted it, would she be less horny? She felt almost giddy, finding the question there. Would being free financially enable her to be more patient with herself sexually? What Tom didn't know about her adventures during the past year—brief, delightful flings, usually at out-of-town professional meetings—surely didn't hurt him, and surely, too, she had been clear about her own sense of their relationship, about the freedom she desired for herself and allowed for him. She understood her own needs and patterns well enough. When the sex came first—and early—what need was there for trust? The sex
represented
intimacy. Genuine trust was something that, by definition, came only with time—something that, as she knew better than most, was built and sustained slowly.

Trust was not infatuation and infatuation was not love and love was not sex and sex was not love and love was not infatuation and infatuation was not trust.

Yes? Tell me more.

To know something in the mind is not to feel it in the heart, and to feel it in the heart is not necessarily to know it in the life.

You're confused, aren't you?

Yes, Simon. I'm confused, if mildly.

I can tell from how general you're being about yourself—the words you're using—about trust and money and love. Simon paused, leaned forward. When he spoke again, his voice was hers: would you like to talk about it?

She laughed. You're wonderful, Simon. You really are.

I always thought it was so.

That you were wonderful?

No. That money was at least as wonderful and confusing as sex. So what do
you
think?

Jane sighed. What I think is that I want to be loved—most of all, endlessly—by a handsome, strong, attractive man, and yet…

Yes?

I feel ashamed of my desire at the same time that I fear it will never be fulfilled. Such an ordinary sentiment, alas.

I disagree.

She dressed for work. She thought of her day: an hour's drive to the hospital on Long Island for a staff meeting, then back to the city for four hours of individual therapy at her Manhattan office. Jane wanted to get to the poems before Simon's parents did. She worried that if his parents found the poems he had written expressly for her, they might, in their rage, destroy them. Some of the poems, she thought, were publishable—Simon had been too terrified of rejection to send them out—and so she would ask Tom to look at them, to give her his opinion. If the poems were neither publishable nor good, she wanted, still, to be able to use them in her own work, for a paper she was preparing on dissociative mechanisms in posttraumatic stress disorders.

Through the static of her answering machine, Simon's father returned. He had checked at the hospital, at her office. If she insisted on avoiding him, he would be forced to take actions they might both regret.

Simon had once talked of composing a poem made up solely of messages from people's answering machines. His own “Hie and Ille,” he said, about a convention at the World Trade Center, where answering machines gathered in the darkness of an auditorium to exchange greetings and messages.

Simon's father, unable to provoke a reaction from Jane, was now railing against her—about how she had taken advantage of Simon's good nature, of his vulnerability. “He may have been out of his mind—which is why your case won't hold up in court for a minute—but he's still our son,” Mr. Pearlstein declared. “There's a difference.”