Happy Family Part 5

"My point, Professor Matzner, is that pragmatism, in situations like these, cannot be overrated."

Back home, Cheri pulls and yanks on the lawn mower she's dragged out of the garage, trying to get it started. She managed to still her hands while she was sitting, like a chastised child, across from Samuelson. Now they won't stop shaking from anger and adrenaline. The lawn mower yowls like a sick cat. As soon as she pulled into the driveway and noticed the weedy, overgrown lawn (yet another task Michael was too busy or too tired to bother with), she thought, Good, a living thing I can raze. If she can get the motor to run for more than ten seconds. She might have been brusque with Richards that day, but extracting You're a Catholic, get out of my cla.s.s from that is absurd. She's had students like Richards before, advocates of creationism who tried to hijack discussions with it's-the-word-of-G.o.d-so-it-has-to-be-true. She steered those students to a theology cla.s.s or they dropped out on their own, but this little f.u.c.ker spent the entire semester with her and then had the gall to put her career in jeopardy because he got a C minus. She'd looked up his grades and recalculated his 71.2 percent just to make sure. p.i.s.sant motherf.u.c.ker. Of course his father is a high-profile donor; if that weren't the case, would Samuelson even be trying to negotiate a peace treaty? Part of her thinks if it didn't reflect poorly on his department or him, he would have a glint in his eye that this was happening to her.

"Enough already!" Michael storms down the stairs from his editing bay, yelling. She motions that she can't hear him over the noise of the lawn mower. "Stop it, you're f.u.c.king up the machine. Stop!"

"Then call the guy, because this is ridiculous!" she shouts.

He shuts the lawn mower off. "You're being totally inconsiderate. If I said I'll do it, I'll G.o.dd.a.m.ned do it. Did it occur to you that I'm getting some work done up there?"

Did it occur to you that you will be placed on academic suspension?

Samuelson and Michael are the same age; is this a generational style of condescension? A gender issue? She wonders if Samuelson ever employs this sneering tone with Cheri's male colleagues. She hates dwelling on this line of thought. It taps into her prior experiences of persecution, the constant hara.s.sment she survived every day at the Ninth Precinct by pretending it didn't hurt and humiliate her. Michael stalks off, back up the stairs to the editing bay, and she feels twice stung. Hasn't she done enough to prove herself worthy? It's an echo of Sol's You're not good enough. Even when her father didn't say it, he said it. She's breathing hard and sweating; she puts her trembling hands on her knees. Her body hasn't felt like her own ever since she started trying to turn herself into a brood hen. Popping hormones instead of lifting weights has made her weak and soft in all the wrong places.

That's something she can change.

Body Shots.

For the past week, since her meeting with Samuelson, Cheri has favored the proletarian gym close to the house over the university facilities where she could run into someone from her department who might have heard of Richards's complaint. Insular environments breed buzzardlike reactions to the whiff of a comedown and while she hadn't heard back from Samuelson, she also doesn't want to be tempted to solicit information. Today, she's doing intervals of incline push-ups, kettle-bell swing lunges, and two-minute sprints on the rowing machine. Her body is responding, just not as quickly as it used to. Her cardio is lagging, but she's making progress. She pushes through her last round, panting from the effort.

Cheri showers quickly and is getting dressed when she glimpses her naked body in the mirror. She catches herself thinking like a cop, noting her distinguis.h.i.+ng marks, the things Michael would use to identify her body at the morgue: the mole above her right breast, her tattoos-cherry bomb on her left shoulder, handgun on her hip, tiger crouching his way up her back toward the ouroboros between her wings. For a long time she was "that girl with the tattoos." Back up and give her room, people. Now her stomach has a slight middle-aged pooch and recently she'd detected a few threads of gray at her temples. But her legs are still long and straight, her face is what a boyfriend in college described as jolie laide, to which she responded, "f.u.c.k you and f.u.c.k the French." But on any given Sunday, depending on the light, the angle, or her mood, her face does veer between ugly and striking. Her features are at odds with one another; near-black hair and white skin, mismatched eyes, small nose that leads to a full, heart-shaped mouth. One benefit of getting older, she thinks, is that she now takes "beautiful-ugly" as a compliment.

Cheri makes her way out of the locker room. As she's crossing the main floor of the gym to the front exit, she hears, "Matzner? Cheri Matzner?" A muscle-head guy standing beside a girl running on a treadmill is waving at her. He combs his hand through his hair and checks himself out in a mirror before trotting over. It's so out of context that it takes a minute for it to click. "It is you!" he says with a smile, then points to his chest. "Bobby G.o.dino, you remember?" G.o.dino, who begged to be in a mounted unit because chicks loved guys on horseback. "p.u.s.s.y" G.o.dino from the NYPD Sixth Precinct was now a personal trainer? "Yeah, can you believe," he says, reading her mind. Bobby flexes. "Bod's looking sweet, right? No s.h.i.+t, Cheri Matzner. I wondered what happened to you; you just disappeared. And bam, all these years later, here you are."

"Small world," Cheri says.

"So how you doing? I figured you went back to school and stuff."

"You called it, Bobby. I'm teaching at the university...and stuff."

"Cool. You married? You know, if it weren't for Eddie I'd have gone for you myself. You always seemed different, and I like a little flavor." Cheri holds up her left hand; her ring finger sports a gold band.

"And you?" she asks.

"Divorced. She got custody of the kid, moved out here-I followed so I could see my boy. You know, it's wild running into you like this. It's like people dying in threes, you know, because I heard from Eddie, out of the blue, what, it had to be before Christmas."

"Really," Cheri says, eyeing the girl on the treadmill eyeing her. "I think someone needs you."

"You're doing great, Sharon. Two more minutes," he says, checking his watch. "Sheila was friends with my ex, Angela, and when we busted up it was a kind of choose-your-side thing. Eddie checked in on me now and then, but, you know, we were never tight. Sheila's cooking on their fourth kid. And she's still on the Job. You knew he married Sheila?" Cheri didn't. "Eddie's Secret Service to some muckety-muck at the Pentagon-he's high up. No shocker there; we all knew Eddie Norris was going places."

"Well, I'm glad to hear he's doing well, and you too..."

"Yeah, I'm not usually here-it's only because my client is redoing her home gym-so let me give you my card. In case you want to work out or whatever."

Cheri sips a Jameson and c.o.ke at the neighborhood bar where she often grades papers. She hadn't felt ready to go home to Michael, especially after that random encounter with her past. Cheri hasn't heard anything about Eddie Norris in years. Of course he married Sheila the cop, a good Catholic bunny, and they have a litter of kids now. He was a cop of the Irish lead-with-your-fists breed, the type who believed real men don't cry. They retreat under the hoods of cars, speak softly, carry through on wicked practical jokes, drink only Coors, and kill any son of a b.i.t.c.h who tries to mess with their sisters or mothers. Eddie Norris standing in her apartment on East Ninth and Avenue A, naked, his head covered by a dish towel, leaning over a pot of boiling water and Vicks VapoRub. "Id it working yet?" Eddie Norris presenting her with his grandpa's cocobolo police baton, noting it had met plenty of flesh in its time. She carried it with her every day, out in the war zone and rubble of Alphabet City with its skinheads and squatters, crackheads and dealers with sawed-off shotguns underneath their coats. Venturing into the burned-out labyrinth of b.o.o.by-trapped tunnels, the shooting galleries with Clean up your blood spray-painted on the walls, knowing anything could come at you at any time, Eddie Norris was the eyes in the back of her head. What fueled them wasn't the danger of being shot at; it was the heightened sense of being alive that came with hyperawareness. Their world was ultravivid and the high was better than any drug.

She was deeply in love. That stupid-and-crazy love that songs are written about. She'd wear Eddie's wifebeater under her Kevlar because he was her good luck. Was it because she was young, the cliche that the first cut is the deepest? Was it a cop thing? It was true that cops dated other cops or nurses because n.o.body else could understand the daily trauma that comes from witnessing the depths of human depravity, suffering, and violence. But it was more than that. Eddie Norris had done something for her no man ever had. He'd stood up for her, and he did it when he had a lot to lose and nothing to gain.

Why, they all asked. Why was the resounding question when Cheri announced she was dumping Yale grad school for the police academy. She knew her choice to join the NYPD would alienate her family and friends. Even though Sol and Cici knew nothing about Near Eastern languages and religion, they had liked being able to say, "My daughter's going to Yale." While they'd never come to terms with her appearance-she'd been adding piercings and tattoos steadily since high school-and they hated that she lived in the East Village with all the weirdos, druggies, and Mohawked punks who Sol said made "hate-crime" music-their unconventional daughter was still on track to have a respectable white-collar career. "Why would you throw that all away?" they wailed. To become a cop, of all things.

Of course, Cici panicked that she'd get killed. Even more typical, she demanded to know why Cheri would agree to wear a uniform and look like a janitor. Sol was convinced it was all for shock value. He said if she followed through he'd never give her another dime. But Cheri had never felt at home in their bubble of privilege and she was certain that wherever her birth parents came from, it was more trailer park than Park Avenue. But there was more to it than that. Festering beneath her bravado was something too painful and complicated for Cheri to acknowledge, even to herself. Cheri's relations.h.i.+p with her father had always been distant, complicated, and, in the storm of her teenage rebellion, volatile. They'd stumbled along the frayed edges of their imposed family bond until, in her junior year of college, Cheri pulled on the one thread that would unravel it permanently. She'd cemented herself into complicity the day she confronted Sol about his secret, and after that, the thought of ever accepting his money made her feel dirty.

"What the f.u.c.k, CM? A cop?" brayed Taya when Cheri told her the news. "Are you going to start busting your friends, arrest me for smoking weed? There's a reason they're called pigs-not to mention they're all bridge-and-tunnel." Cheri didn't expect for it to make sense to anyone except Gusmanov. Her family's Russian handyman had been her secret-sharer growing up; she owed her expert marksmans.h.i.+p to his tutelage. Gusmanov always smelled of talc.u.m and tobacco. Cheri never cared that he was even older than her father. He showed her how to throw a pocketknife into the trunk of a tree and taught her Russian words. Best of all, Gusmanov had a gun. "Only for protection and sport," he'd told her when she saw it sticking out of his waistband as he crawled under her sink to fix a pipe. When she pinkie-swore that she wouldn't say anything to her parents, he let her examine it and explained the parts and how important it was to always keep it safe. Maybe one day he would let her hold it. When he eventually deemed her ready, he patiently taught her how to use it. She was a quick learner and a naturally great shot-at fourteen, she was an NRA double-distinguished marksman. But while Gusmanov acknowledged she'd be a good cop, even he had reservations. "Why you don't listen to me and go pro sharpshooter? It will make wallet much fatter."

But becoming a police officer made sense to her, and, for the first time in her life, she felt she could make a difference. Sol didn't buy it. "Now you're going to save the world? The people down there are degenerates and junkies who don't even try to help themselves. Doctors save lives! If you want to 'make a difference,'" he said, mimicking her earnest tone, "go volunteer in a hospital near Yale while you get your degree." There was no way Sol could comprehend that Cheri specifically wanted to help the "people down there." She'd lived on the Lower East Side during her four years at NYU. The neighborhood was like her-gritty, rebellious, dangerous, and teeming with diversity. She not only didn't stick out, she belonged. And was deeply affected by random acts of violence that destroyed the lives of people she cared about, like her friend Yure's grandson who was jumped by a street gang and had to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Yure was one of the Ukrainian immigrants who hustled playing speed chess in the park and he reminded her of Gusmanov. Her parents wouldn't understand that she missed Sweetie, the post-op tranny who worked the door at Eileen's Reno Bar and threw out acerbic comments about everyone who walked by. Sweetie had been killed on her way home from work by neo-n.a.z.i skins. It made sense to Cheri and that's all that mattered. She was making the leap into the thump of a life lived on the outside.

Of course she didn't disclose to anyone in the NYPD that she'd come from ritzy Montclair and had a college degree. It wouldn't have mattered to Eddie Norris. He wouldn't know a doctorate from a doughnut. He only cared that she was the best shot in her academy cla.s.s, that she was fast, reliable, and a quick study. Then there was the s.e.x.

It started as a smack-down of pa.s.sion in his Mazda hatchback, replete with adolescent pawing, fogged-up windows, bra-hook complications, and the discomfort of handguns pressing into sensitive places. They didn't break lips even when Cheri performed a near-contortionist move to straddle him. He fumbled to get inside her, one hand on his c.o.c.k, the other on her hip, pus.h.i.+ng a little too hard, a little too fast, but once he'd hit the mark, he cupped her face in his hands. "You okay?" he said, looking her right in the eyes. She nodded and started to move her hips, but he held her chin and said, "I want you to tell me if you're not." They f.u.c.ked again in the vestibule of her apartment building, ignoring the persistent stink of urine. Her back was up against the wall next to the mailboxes, her legs were around his waist, his jeans were snaking down around his ankles; a down-and-dirty f.u.c.k on all counts. And not. Because while they were f.u.c.king they were kissing and while they were kissing their eyes were open. Cheri had never had a man look at her while they made love. Or if he did, she didn't know about it, because her eyes had been tightly closed.

If they'd had s.e.x before she'd become his partner, it would have worked out very differently. Everyone would have thought he chose her only because he was f.u.c.king her. She might have thought so too. But she and Eddie hadn't gone "over the side" until well after they'd become partners, and by then they both knew it was going to be more than a onetime thing.

Just as Cheri starts to lose herself in another memory of Eddie coming up behind her in the precinct's file room late at night, whispering exactly what he was going to do to her as his hands clasped hers behind her back, the bartender asks if she wants a refill. "Not yet," she says. How long has it been since she's had an open-eyed kiss? She remembers the electricity that shot from her groin and lodged itself in her chest whenever she inhaled Eddie Norris's clean, masculine scent-a mixture of soap on a rope and sweat that lingered in her hair. Another filament of memory floats up and, with it, the phantom weight of a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson handgun against her left hip. Back then, and for a long time afterward, she couldn't imagine not carrying a gun. And now she's married to anti-gun Michael, sitting on a bar stool playing what-if. That's an insidious game, inevitably leading to that night with Red Hood, the look in Eddie Norris's eyes that sent her running from the NYPD, barricading herself in Cici's Eighty-first Street apartment in a drug-induced tailspin of heartbreak. You have the right to remain silent. She certainly did that. It's dark and deep down there, a chasm of shadows and regret.

Punch-Drunk Love.

You 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 a.n.a.logy, even for Cici. But hearing the lingering hope in her voice gives Cheri a pang of guilt as she a.s.sures 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 doc.u.mentary, 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 bulls.h.i.+t. We're making doc.u.mentary 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 a.s.sociated with the university, including partic.i.p.ation 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, s.h.i.+fty, 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 f.u.c.k? I texted you three times."

"Don't," she snaps. "Just f.u.c.king don't."

"Now there are only s.h.i.+tty 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 f.u.c.ked 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 p.i.s.sed off that he asked. She doesn't want plat.i.tudes. 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 jalapeno 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 ba.s.s. Somehow she makes it outside and sinks to the pavement. Michael appears beside her, asking questions. "Can't talk." She gasps. She's ma.s.saging 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 gla.s.s 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."

"h.e.l.lo-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, embarra.s.sed, 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-s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.sociated 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. f.u.c.k 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 h.e.l.l 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.

"You don't have to just stick to the facts," Dr. Vega says, "you've led an interesting life, and we have plenty of time left."

"I've never had anxiety issues. I'm used to functioning in high-stress situations and I haven't exactly s.h.i.+ed away from them."

"They produce a dopamine response, which is adrenalizing. You didn't say what led to your career change, which was quite a significant one. Did it have to do with the stress of the job? That's very common for law enforcement."

"No, it wasn't that," Cheri says, wanting to get off that topic. There is no way to enter that dangerous territory without betraying or being betrayed. "Listen, I just want to prevent this from ever happening again. I'm sure there's something I can take..."

"There's no magic pill for the ups and downs of life," Dr. Vega says. "I can give you some Ativan, but all benzodiazepine drugs are highly addictive." Fortunately, Cheri opted not to mention her history as a speed freak when she filled out the patient-intake form. Dr. Vega hands her a script. "Don't take it for more than three days in a row. We need to do talk therapy as well. You have a lot on your plate right now. You can set something up with my receptionist."

Cheri walks out of the pharmacy into the shank of the late-July day, pops open the bottle of Ativan, and swallows a pill. She slaps on her dark sungla.s.ses and merges with the Gold Coast denizens who walk in and out of buildings drinking their coffees, some leading dogs, others being led by various desires. Cheri catches a whiff of perfume-light, citrusy-and it reminds her of the Jean Nate bubble bath her mother used on her when she was a kid. It gave her a terrible rash. Cici became so distraught all she could do was cry. She had to give Cheri oatmeal baths for weeks afterward and swathe her in Saran Wrap. Cheri's throat aches at the trust of a child, any child, her as a child. How young her mother was then, how insecure; it fills her with a sadness that's close to love, but more akin to pity-the kind of pity that eventually provokes cruelty.

40bday 1.0.

Cici's silk blouse is wet under the armpits, and, porca miseria, she forgot to put in those pads. The stain will dry like a Rorschach test inkblot with a chalky outline from her deodorant because the air-conditioning in her closet is never cold enough. She retreats to her walk-in jewelry vault and plops down on the ottoman. It's soothing in here, with the white marble floor and the gleaming wood drawers from floor to ceiling; like a museum. She surveys that stronzo Cookie, who is slow and shrunken with arthritis nibbling at her bones; a little wind could snap her in two. Sol arranged for Cookie, who's spent forty years with them, to get her salary for life whether she worked or not. But Cici hasn't told Cookie that, although it's painful to watch her straining to do the simplest task, like going up the ladder to get the boxes down. And that wrinkled old black-and-white uniform.

"I pay you now the whole year of salary if you throw that away and wear real clothing."

"Last week you said two years, so I guess you like it more this week. Is this the d.a.m.n thing already?" She holds out a black felt jewelry box.

"No, no, no. That is for the tennis bracelet, not a ring. Put it down, put it down!"

"All look the d.a.m.n same to me, crazy woman," Cookie mumbles under her breath. Cici directs her to the other side of the vault and sips her Sancerre. Cookie comes down the ladder, moves it over a few rows, goes back up.

"Why is it your Choo-Choo, she never talks to you like Cheri, she talks to me? It has to be trouble with that husband, Michael. Why else is there no baby? And he is not giving her a party for her birth-day!"

"With Cheri, you always up in her business. Didn't work when she was little, and it doesn't work when she's big."

"It hurts when she is mean to me. I think we get older, it doesn't hurt so much, but it still does."

"Nothing stops hurting. Something else just hurts more and you forget. Now, what exactly are we looking for?"

"We have to make the list so it is up-to-date what is in here. Sol, he always said without lists, they cut off the insurance."