Happy Family (12 page)

Y
ou have a house for guest, that is where the guest stay. Your husband does not want me as a guest anymore,” Cici wails into the phone. Three weeks since their last round of pin-the-tail-on-the-birthday, Cheri has been sucked into another. Cheri had been trying to convince herself that she could get some work done while jammed into the table in their bedroom, but so much for best-laid plans.

“The guesthouse is Michael's office, he works in there, at all hours. You complain that the pull-out couch in the den hurts your back and the air conditioner—”

“The thing in the window makes so much noise and does nothing. I tell you to get the build-in and you do not listen. Why you no spend the money?”

“I just think you'd be much more comfortable in a hotel,” Cheri says, thinking of her mother's tendency to mix white wine and Valium and wander around at night in the nude. Cici reacts to this suggestion like she's Napoleon being forced into exile on Elba. “Besides,” Cheri adds, “we're
not
having a party.”

“Whaaat?”
After more back-and-forth, Cici finally gives in. But not without adding, in a wounded voice: “You really want me to make you the birthday wish from a thousand miles away? Like not looking a person in the eye when you make a toast, it is not good luck.” That's a stretched analogy, even for Cici. But hearing the lingering hope in her voice gives Cheri a pang of guilt as she assures Cici that this is, indeed, what she wants.

They have this fight every year around Cheri's birthday. Usually Cheri would say fine, don't come here, I'll come to you. Cici lived in their Upper East Side apartment, and despite her penchant for constantly changing interior design, she kept it exactly as it was when Sol died. As if that would somehow cement the happiness of their last few years together and faux over everything that came before. The house in Montclair, Cici complained, was too big for a woman all alone, without company. She kept threatening to sell it, happily ignoring the fact that Sol's will provided that their holdings transfer to Cheri with Cici as the life beneficiary but with no signing power. It was an unexpected turn of events for Cheri, but it wasn't the only surprise in Sol's will.

After hanging up with her mother, Cheri attempts to get back to work—if she could really call it that. For hours, she's been fiddling around on Baghdad.com and obsessively checking her e-mail to see if Peter Martins has dispatched the promised photocopies of his fragments to her. Not that she could accomplish any meaningful work on them at this stage, but at least she'd feel close to the actual starting point. Everything she cares about is in plain sight but out of reach, like the toys in one of those claw vending machines. The Tell Muqayyar tablets remained hidden behind a cloud of increasingly hysterical WMD rhetoric, Samuelson has been incommunicado since putting her on suspension, and even Michael, perpetually in crisis mode over his never-to-be-completed documentary, was desperately seeking a shaman. When she walked into the kitchen this morning, he was venting on the phone to Bertrand, his producer, that the shaman he absolutely must shoot was coming to the U.S. but he'd been co-opted by an environmentalist in Sedona. “That guy caters to celebrities and woo-woos,” Michael exclaimed. “His workshops are bullshit. We're making documentary art.” For someone who had never left the Ecuadoran jungle, the shaman was certainly in demand. After twenty more minutes of aimless clicking, Cheri realizes she needs to leave, having promised Michael she'd meet him at the Biograph. The house feels like an Ecuadoran jungle and she cares more about the theater's air-conditioning than about the movie itself—all she knows is that it's by a director with three names, one of the rare Hollywood types Michael has blessed with his seal of approval.

As Cheri's walking out of the door, her phone buzzes. Samuelson's name flashes on the screen. Cheri takes a deep breath before answering. Shockingly, Samuelson's voice is buoyant. “Good news. After considerable effort, I've prevailed upon Mr. Richards to dismiss his complaint. All you need to do is write a letter of apology, and we can put this matter behind us.”

“Apologize?” Cheri says, veering from relief to indignation in a second. “For what?”

“We can craft it along the lines of an acknowledgment. You apologize for your lack of sensitivity regarding his personal and religious beliefs and admit that this may have led you to make an oversight regarding his final grade. You say you're willing to revisit his grade based on a third party's review and recommendation.”

“You want me to admit to something I didn't do. I don't take issue with my work being reviewed by a committee. But I do take issue with apologizing for being unprofessional or unethical when I was neither. If a committee finds that I did something wrong, that's one thing, but right now all we have is the student's word—and feelings.” Cheri wants to add
And I'm not changing his grade
but thinks better of it.

“Don't let this be your hamartia, Professor Matzner. This letter is informal and not subject to the committee's review. Yet.”

Cheri hesitates. He's backing her into a corner, one she's been in before. The familiarity is visceral; her fight-or-flight mechanism is in overdrive.

“I know the Richards family is important to the university. I appreciate this fact puts you in a difficult position. I will cooperate with anyone and everyone. If I made a mistake I'll admit to it, informally or formally. But I cannot—and will not—apologize for something I did. Not. Do.” She thinks she hears him tsk her.

“That's very disappointing. You understand, Professor Matzner, that it's now out of my hands? Without an apology, I cannot hurry things along. This will be a drawn-out, deliberative process, and I have no influence over the findings. You will hear from the committee chair as soon as one has been appointed.”

“I understand,” Cheri says with a confidence she no longer feels.

“As I told you before, academic suspension applies to everything associated with the university, including participation on my translation team.” Cheri feels punctured. All the air is leaking out of her. “If you want to reconsider, I'm telling you: now is the time.”

It takes a second for Cheri to respond. “I cannot do that, Professor Samuelson. You know where to find me.”

By the time Cheri walks to the Biograph she's pressed her nails into her palms so tightly they've left angry indentations. She's being blackmailed. Again. She pictures Eddie Norris's face, tight, shifty, unable to look her in the eye. Her heart is racing. Michael's pacing in front of the box office. He throws his hands up. “What the fuck? I texted you three times.”

“Don't,” she snaps. “Just fucking don't.”

“Now there are only shitty seats left,” Michael grumbles as the lights dim in the theater. They stumble past a dozen knees—“Sorry, excuse me”—to get to the only two seats together. “Evidence, not emotion,” Michael offers after she whispered a rushed recap of her phone call. “Don't get sidetracked by how fucked up it is or by asking yourself why your boss is listening to a kid over you—stick to the evidence. You didn't do anything wrong, right?” She is pissed off that he asked. She doesn't want platitudes. She just wants him to take her side.

It's only when
Punch-Drunk Love
starts that Cheri realizes she's in for two hours of tedium told through the claustrophobic lens of a typical Adam Sandler man-child. It doesn't help that the large man on her left is taking up both armrests and that the smell of melted jalapeño cheese mixes with his BO whenever he moves an arm to dip a chip. She starts to ask Michael to switch seats with her, but someone behind her shushes her. She hates being shushed. Suddenly, everything is closing in on her. She's sweaty and antsy; her mouth is bone-dry. She needs air. It feels like someone is squeezing her heart in a vise. Really bad heartburn? Does she have her Tums? No, this feels different. Get it together. Now. She needs air. Her chest is constricted and her breath is shallow. She leaps to her feet, flails past the dozen knees again, gulping for air, mouth opening and closing like a hooked bass. Somehow she makes it outside and sinks to the pavement. Michael appears beside her, asking questions. “Can't talk.” She gasps. She's massaging her chest and someone asks about her arm. Is she having a heart attack? She's in a Magritte, a forest of pant legs; they threaten to smother her, she's buried in pants.

Michael's holding her shoulders. “Breathe, in and out, close one nostril and then the other.” Her chest feels like a buffalo is standing on it. “It must have been the movie, it stunk so bad,” a teenage boy says, walking past her.

The paramedics arrive. “Who called them?” Cheri rasps when she sees the ambulance. “I don't need them.” Then, to prove her point, she gets up. “Whoa, not so fast,” says a trained medical professional. Two paramedics sit beside her and start checking her vitals, running through their list of questions. “I just couldn't breathe,” she repeats over and over, “but I'm better now.” Is she on drugs, under stress, any known medical conditions?

“It's likely a panic attack,” one paramedic says. “Nothing cardiac. I suggest you follow up with your physician, and if you haven't had one recently, get a physical to rule out anything else.” Michael starts to ask questions about panic attacks but Cheri interrupts. “I'm good, so let's go, okay?”

When they get home, Michael goes into his medicine cabinet and gives Cheri a pill. “Ativan—it's good for anxiety. Take one now and another one if it doesn't bring you down in an hour or two.”

“We don't know if this had anything to do with anxiety,” she says. Ignoring her, Michael pours her a glass of water from the kitchen sink and hands it to her. “At least you picked a historical place to collapse. Dillinger was gunned down coming out of the Biograph Theater with the Lady in Red on his arm.”

“Let's not say
collapse
. I was conscious.”

“I noticed you didn't tell them about the fertility drugs.”

Please don't make this about my ovaries,
Cheri thinks. “I'm not on them now—it can't be related. It's not about that.”

“Hello—infertility is a major cause of stress. Look what you've been going through for the past year, even longer.” He looks at her, concerned. “What's going on right now? How are you feeling?” She's speedy, flushed, tired, dizzy, embarrassed, muddled.

“I'll be fine.”

“If you push yourself too hard, you're going to collapse; that's how it goes. You laugh at me but meditation would be good for you. I know how you feel about my shrink too, but talking to someone couldn't hurt.” Cheri exhales angrily, and Michael takes a step back, hands raised. “Okay, I won't make any more suggestions. But that was scary for me, and I know it was scary for you. Don't do that to yourself again, okay? Please. Call a doctor.”

“Okay.”

Michael approaches again and mushes her into a hug. “Relax, let me hold you.” Standing there in the kitchen, Cheri feels trapped, pinned. Michael senses it, and she can tell by the way he pulls away he takes it personally.

“Listen, I'm still wired,” she explains, “I just need to hang out for a bit, try to unwind, wait for the pill to kick in. I'll be fine.”

She is not fine. At three in the morning, she decides she needs banana bread. She goes into the kitchen in her T-shirt and underwear, throws ingredients in a bowl, and starts mixing with aggressive strokes, thinking,
How do you get the banana lumps smooth?
They had only one egg; maybe it needs two. She takes the other pill with a shot of rum and splashes some into the batter to thin it before it goes in the oven, but her body keeps surging. Her mind, however, is glazed. It's a good combination for doing things like cleaning out the top drawer in the kitchen, the one where they throw rubber bands and parking tickets and business cards of plumbers. When she remembers to check on her banana bread, it's charred on the outside and raw in the middle. She eats it in hot fistfuls; it's leaden and tasteless.

Whatever it was that Cheri experienced that night, she knew this much: it was not fine.
Panic
and
anxiety
—not words she associated with herself. She'd survived far more stressful times at work without getting so much as a cold. While she was still hormonally out of whack, attributing it to hormones was akin to saying she had PMS.

“For someone so smart, you are totally dumb!” Taya tells her the next day when Cheri recounts the episode. “Of course this has to do with stress. And hormones. When I was pregnant I had a million nervous breakdowns! Fertility drugs are worse than going through menopause. Fuck meditation! Hold on, hold on. Shut up back there right now or I'm going to put you both on the sidewalk! You want to walk home? You don't need Michael's New Age shrink, you need an MD who does meds and will load you up with Xanax.”

Besides mandatory evaluations on the police force and a drug counselor she'd seen during her breakup with speed, Cheri had never been in therapy. But being that out of control, her heart clenching so unrelentingly, scared the hell out of her. She had a hard time filtering her thoughts; every time she got stuck in a loop of Samuelson's voice, telling her to apologize for a transgression she didn't commit, she'd get that buffalo feeling on her chest. She had to admit, the Ativan helped. She'd used up Michael's prescription and wanted more. “Fine,” she told Taya, who promised she'd get back to her with a referral via her vast network of friends who knew the best of everything in every city, “I'll see a meds doctor.”

Dr. Marlene Vega's office looks like the place where sixties art goes to die. The doctor herself is the kind of woman who calls pants
slacks,
wears pearls and blouses with bows at the neck. Cheri answers her questions with the minimum amount of detail necessary, quickly pointing to the factors leading up to the
Punch-Drunk Love
incident: bad eggs, marriage in the netherworld, the Richards complaint.