Amor and Psycho: Stories Part 1

Amor and psycho : stories.

by Carolyn Cooke.

For Randall Babtkis.

FRANCIS BACON.

In the early eighties, I often spent afternoons at Bob's House, which is what everyone called the twenty-thousand-square-foot Beaux-Arts mansion on East Sixty-seventh Street, said to be the largest private residence in Manhattan. There were always women there, always called "girls," and Laya looked like all of them to me-soft, fat, seventeen-year-old eager-to-please mouth breathers who signed their contracts with made-up first names and requested, for their take-out lunch, Cla.s.sic Americans from Burger Heaven. Having grown up poor in a small town myself just three or four years ahead of Laya and her ilk, I felt the pinch of proximity as we strove upstream together toward what I hoped would become a vast gulf between these girls and me. Meanwhile, I lived in terror of being mistaken for one of them. To guard against losing my edge (I hoped to become a writer), I'd refused to take a serious job, preferring the professional twilight zone of the men's magazine industry. The vulgarity of the writing a.s.signments didn't bother me; I imagined myself in the position of the Isaac Babel character in his story "Guy de Maupa.s.sant" and considered myself lucky that, with my English major and thirty WPM, I hadn't been forced to become a gofer at a fas.h.i.+on magazine. I also enjoyed Bob's blurred, autocratic presence, his white s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned to the belt of his sharkskin slacks, the chains around his neck, the long gray chest hair. His empire was worth $300 million that year; he was nearly at the height of his power to shock.

At that time, I needed little, apart from interesting experience, in order to live. While working for Bob, I subsisted on fancy lunches paid for in company scrip, and free c.o.c.ktails and hors d'oeuvres at openings for artists the company knew.

My responsibilities entailed exactly what we were doing on this day: traveling across town to Bob's House, listening to Bob's orgiastic creative direction, then putting words into the mouths of Babes. Later, from a gray-carpeted cubicle on Broadway near Lincoln Center, I would create implausible erotic monologues (based on implausible true-life experiences) that suggested unspeakably childish innocence, the slight resistance one might encounter parting a raw silk curtain in the dark, accompanied by some subtle but binding statement of adult acquiescence. What better training for a writer than inventing little stories, arousing a casual reader with ordinary language thrillingly unspooled? The story arc was simple, s.e.xual: foreplay, action, climax, denouement. Not that I supposed the men who read our magazine required much in the way of denouement; most of them probably closed the book once they'd s.p.u.n.ked. The magazine took great pains-wasted-to expose corporate and government crimes and cover-ups. (We hated cover-ups!) We published the steamier fictions of Roth and Oates.

Working for Bob made me feel like a real writer, commissioned, dared: Give me twenty-four hours and I could give you a story about a lonely coed and a was.h.i.+ng machine that could leave you breathless and satisfied.

Exposure to Bob's antiquities and follies had awakened my capacity for judgment. I felt contemptuous of every lapse in his taste-the carved marble toilets, the glazed fabrics, the white piano, the gallons of gilt. (My own shotgun flat, which I shared with my old college friend Mira, contained no furniture we hadn't plucked from the street. It was here in this studio, with its cold radiators and scuttling c.o.c.kroaches, where I did my "real" work at night, brutally scribbling over fresh drafts of my austere prose poems.) We traveled by taxi across the park to Sixty-seventh Street-an executive, a graphic designer, and a "writer." Inside the town house, we waited for Bob. We always waited; we waited for hours. It was Bob's dime; we were Bob's army, the p.o.r.nographer's p.o.r.nographers. Sometimes we waited all day while topless females cavorted with eunuchy-looking men in European bathing suits by the Roman-style swimming pool, which had been carved out of several venerable rooms. Or we sat in Regency chairs arranged around a fireplace whose panels contained decorative carvings of six-breasted women. Sometimes we waited until we saw Bob and his girlfriend, Kathy, dressed for the evening, descending the stairs and leaving by the front door. (Bob's face-before the cosmetic work-was sculpted into marble columns along the stairs, and the wall sconces that illuminated the way up to Bob's "office" were-or at least looked very like-molded t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of gla.s.s.) When we arrived, Laya-the girl-woman we were going to give away in a contest-was waiting, too, surrounded by the usual surplus of yellow-eyed men in their fifties and sixties, dyspeptics drinking seltzer water. One of these men immediately offered Laya a weekend in East Hampton. She slid off one strappy sandal, tucked a bare foot under her round bottom and leaned toward her interlocutor. "Is that on the beach?" she asked.

When she saw our trio, she lit up, as if she could have any idea who or what we were, and said, "Hi-I'm Laya!" The "creative team" introduced ourselves, then Ernie, the leering butler, appeared with a tray of vodka drinks. Laya asked for a can of Tab. From another room, or possibly some kind of intercom system, I heard someone say, "Put that nipple up again, or I'll have to come over and do it for you."

I resented waiting (dogged by the feeling that I had more important work to do), but Laya seemed to be enjoying herself the way a hunter enjoys oiling his gun, the way a whale enjoys breaching. We drank our drinks. Laya deployed her long hair as she turned the beam of her attention from one yellow-eyed man to the other. Stray bits of her monologue escaped, which I mentally filed for future use: "Capricorn," "unicorn," "nineteen," "calligraphy."

BOB EVENTUALLY SENT WORD via Ernie, and we ascended the stairway of faces and t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. He stood for Laya, and took her hand. Bob saw himself as an innovator, an idea man, a feminist. He liked to establish this right away. "I've arguably done more to advance the status of working-cla.s.s women than Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem," he told her.

"Absolutely," said Bob's girlfriend, Kathy. Bob had met Kathy-a brilliant dancer with a background in finance and science-at a men's club in London in 1969, the same year he launched his magazine. Entranced by her beauty and talent, he had bribed his way backstage to her dressing room, where they discussed nuclear fusion. Now Bob and Kathy were funding a team of eighty-five scientists to "work around the clock" in New Mexico; Bob was investing twenty million dollars in a casino and a nuclear power plant. His seemingly unlimited capital came from profits from his magazine, where his innovations to the print centerfold had made him rich, rich, rich!

Bob spoke generally to the room, continuing his feminist theme: "We were the first to show full frontal nudity, the first to show pubic hair, genital penetration. We remain the innovators, the leaders. We pushed the s.e.xual revolution forward." Bob looked the way he always looked-blurred, boyish, reddish and old, his white silk s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned to his belt. "You are all a part of it," Bob told us, spreading his arms to include Laya, Kathy, a few cretinous men, the "creative" department, even the paintings on the walls-the Pica.s.sos, the El Grecos. We were all a part of it.

One of the themes of his expensive art collection was, naturally, flesh-some of which I recognized from my survey course in art history. Bob owned a number of those fantastically macabre still lifes of Chaim Soutine, flayed rabbits and ducks hanging upside down, pools of blood spilling out among the crystal winegla.s.ses, decanters and blood oranges.

But today Bob had a new enthusiasm-the painter Francis Bacon. I'd never heard of him. A Bacon leaned against a wall. We stood around it, looking down. In the center of the painting, a lone figure howled to the point of implosion. "Bacon," Bob said, "didn't paint seriously until his late thirties. You know why? He was looking for a subject that would occupy his attention. This is it. The figure. The orifice.

"Our magazine is inspired by these ideas. It's vivid and bold, and it's all about opening up the figure. I want a woman who does not simply lie naked representing a woman. I want to make photographs that immediately connect the viewer with the sensation of being in the presence of this woman. I am not interested in the woman; the woman means whatever she wants herself to mean. What interests me is the sensation produced by the photograph."

Laya looked studiously at the painting, as if it might teach her how to be.

Even Kathy's Rhodesian ridgebacks sniffed around the Bacon. Laya tripped on her heels avoiding one of the dogs, and Bob reached out to grab her. The canvas sighed and fell to the rug. One dog, quivering, escaped from beneath it. Bob picked the painting up and leaned it back against the wall. "Don't worry," he said, looking the painting over. "Art canvas. It's strong."

We sat, finally, at an oval table, overlooking a platter of raw meat artfully arranged around a bowl filled with toothpicks. Bob got to the point: "With all this in mind, I want to run a contest. Two weeks in Rio or Paris-someplace like that. Laya's the grand prize."

Kathy slowly raised a cube of meat in the air. The Rhodesian ridgebacks trembled with antic.i.p.ation, then broke into compet.i.tion.

Bob turned his soft, blurred eyes on Laya and said, "The contest will be tastefully done." Laya nodded encouragingly at Bob. Of course, of course, tastefully done.

My job, Bob explained, would be to help to shape the story in such a way as to eliminate any tawdry elements. Laya and I would spend an hour together in the "red room" in conversation, from which I would extract her adorable essence, her hopes and dreams, which would appear in the promotional material. One of the cretins handed me a press kit, which contained Laya's resume, a high school report card, her height (52), her measurements (352235) and her ambitions: "too model and act."

Bob and Kathy left us to go have dinner at an Italian restaurant famous for its lewd murals and Neapolitan pasta puttanesca. After dinner, Bob and Kathy would stop by some wealthy industrialist's house for half an hour, as long as Bob ever stayed at a social gathering. He had a phobia about being kidnapped and held for ransom, and also he had little in the way of conversation. But this going out into the evening and coming home at nine or ten was one of the great things, I thought, about Bob. He did not hang out with the other p.o.r.n kings. He lived and socialized right on East Sixty-seventh Street, and was rather abstemious in his habits.

INTERVIEWING LAYA WAS like being tended to by a friendly, paid person. We sat together in the red room with the sound track to Last Tango in Paris piped in like a gas. Ernie brought us cheeseburgers from Burger Heaven, still in their Styrofoam containers, which I resented, although I ate mine. Laya plucked at hers; it was too rare. She told me about Texas and, later, Arkansas, about her one-eyed mother and her generous and encouraging stepfather, about her scarlet fever and teenage rebellion, about her early talent as an artist, about being selected for a local car dealers.h.i.+p commercial when she was only thirteen. She sat on her bare feet on the red silk couch and leaned toward me, flirty and confidential. "Tell me who, you know, who I should get close to. I almost know-I have ESP-but I can't trust myself because my spirit is so open."

LATER, after leaving Bob's House for the day, I met my roommate, Mira, and her new boyfriend, Amir, at the Russian Tea Room. We ate blini and caviar, and drank ponies of iced vodka and samovars of tea on Amir's expense account. Afterward, Mira went to the flamboyant penthouse with Amir (they called each other "Amira"); I refused a cab to maintain sobriety and economy, and walked home.

I stayed up all night writing Laya's "story"-about an ambitious and talented calligrapher with nonthreatening ESP who dreams of becoming an actress and discovers her s.e.xuality at fifteen on a 747 to Rome. In composing, I entered a fugue state. I realized that choice and freedom are not necessarily optimal conditions for work, and that the most confining, restricting and repulsive situations sometimes open themselves up to be investigated, like the terrifying "orifices" within the "figures" of Bacon. From this black hole of desire that yawns within us all, I heard Laya's small, hopeful voice bubble up and simply wrote down what it said.

When I returned the next day to Bob's House with my story, I found Laya outside the red room, sitting at the white piano and playing "Baby Elephant Walk" to a swarm of middle-aged men who hoped to screw her. She wore a halter dress short enough to reveal a fresh hematoma on her thigh, and expensive gold hoops in her ears. Her hair had a metallic sheen. I thought of the way crows are drawn to foil in their bleak winters, and that this flirtation, which might lead to anything, to s.e.x or marriage or death, was not a fantasy for Laya. It was the real life; it was what she did. She used her body the way I hoped to use my imagination-wantonly. She may have known already that the men she was flirting with could not really help her. They were sleazy, salaried men from Mamaroneck or Babylon, for whom the endless stream of young women like Laya-or like me, for that matter-was a job perk; many of them weren't even straight or single, just curious. Flirting with Laya, or having s.e.x with her, was part of a fantasy or charade, while real life marched on in shadows behind the scenes.

Within a few years, many of these men would be dead of AIDS, caught and frozen in the common imagination by the stigmata of livid sarcomas on their faces and the backs of their hands. It was as if Francis Bacon saw that future waiting, named it in bright colors and abstracted figures, nailed it. Before I saw the Bacon paintings, I'd thought of the barrier between charade and real life as an ironic principle that young, attractive aspirants might transcend without much difficulty, like the velvet rope at the door of a nightclub. Imagine Laya, for example, who got everything she had come for-a small temporary fame made possible by men and her own amenable s.e.xuality. (She became an actress, married a producer, lived for a period on a yacht off Skopelos, divorced, moved to London, and died at thirty-two, discreetly, of a disease she wouldn't name.) That night, I read the tale-the fictobiography she and I had made up together-to Laya and Kathy and Bob. The three of them softened around the mouth as they listened and afterward said how beautiful it was. Bob said, "This is what I do-take a young woman of charm and talent and give her a chance to reach her potential." Kathy fed a cube of beef to the dogs and said, more pragmatically to Laya, "See what you can get out of it." (We often boasted of how the first black Miss America had profited handsomely from the exposure our magazine had given her.) Bob showered Laya and me with scrip to the Copa, and I wantonly imagined the Veracruz snapper I'd command. Impossible to go to the Copa alone; I was more than ready to wait another hour for Laya, who continued to discuss details of the contest with Bob and Kathy and make new connections and arrangements with other men, working with more pa.s.sion and intensity and for longer hours than I ever did.

While waiting for Laya outside the Roman pool, I flipped through a catalogue from a retrospective of Bacon's work at the Metropolitan Museum and read about how the artist squandered his time until he knew he could be serious, until he found a subject that could hold his attention. I studied photos of his London studio-the liquor boxes, the knee-high trash, the paint cans and brushes, the broken mirrors, the acc.u.mulation of thousands of images Bacon would pluck from the ankle-deep soup that functioned for him like an unconscious mind. The mess had a willful quality I admired; it excluded everyone but the artist himself, who had to work in self-imposed conditions that nearly rendered work impossible. Bacon's detritus boasted of his promiscuity, his gambling, the chronic messes he made by seizing every sc.r.a.p of life that might serve his discipline.

I ripped a photo of Bacon's studio from the catalogue and laid it on the pile of company scrip. The scrip looked like play money-or like a child's certificate of achievement. We'd use it all, Laya and I-we'd eat and drink and make a little mess of the evening. With a fuzzy resolution born of several ounces of Russian vodka and a gnawing hunger, I promised the ladies of the multiple t.i.ts that one day I'd tell their stories, too. Sometime later, a dry finger touched my face with the slightest threat of a fingernail, as if I'd been chosen at random to play some brutal, compet.i.tive sport.

AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE.

Karim Brazir was an artist and a bohemian-alluring, s.e.xy, pa.s.sionate in an intense but impersonal way; almost perverse, maybe even borderline somehow. His name rhymed with Karen, and in fact his parents, who interestingly misunderstood the name on a trip to Cairo and Istanbul, during which they conceived him, spelled it that way. He used to call me at night in New York and ask me in a gravelly voice to take a taxi over right away to his loft in a then-disused part of town. Romantic, I presumed. I'd push the bra.s.s b.u.t.ton next to his name downstairs and he'd buzz me up. Always, I had to knock on the door, which he opened as if I'd come as a mostly pleasant surprise at 2:00 a.m., a minor interruption to his work. He offered me a beer, or a gla.s.s of water, or nothing. Then he pounced, direct and disarming, kissed me roughly, removed my clothes and f.u.c.ked me with the kind of attention and intensity that he brought to his work, an attention that felt inspiring, even infectious. Karim welcomed my enthusiasm but didn't consider it necessary. Afterward, to keep me from dozing off, I think, he would feed me cold pasta puttanesca from a Ball jar, or some take-out falafels wrapped in silver paper. He'd stand, leaning against the loft bed in his kitchen, and watch me eat. Then he'd walk me to the street and hail a cab. He'd try to press a five-dollar bill into my hand-not that this would cover the thirty or forty blocks to my apartment. "Don't be ridiculous," I told him, waving the bill away, climbing into the taxi. I was a feminist.

Once, when I arrived, he met me in the lobby, and we took the elevator together to the floor beneath his, where he showed me a terrible thing-his downstairs neighbor, a sculptor, crushed by a beam from which part of a large-scale wooden sculpture hung. He'd heard the crash, run downstairs, confronted the damage and called 911. He didn't know the sculptor well; she'd moved in only a few months before-but Jesus, but still. The paramedics arrived after Karim had been with her body for over an hour. They asked him a few questions, which he answered. Depressed person? Yes. She had no life, no money, no s.e.x, no enemies and no dealer, just this sculpture, which was so-so, maybe-or maybe it was good. He couldn't say. She drank when she worked, he said. She was drunk now-or had been, before she died. Here was a bottle, here was a gla.s.s; they could test her blood alcohol later. The paramedics tried to revive her, but then, without saying much of anything, they moved her body to a gurney and took it away. (A strip of yellow tape stretched across the locked front door, but Karim had a key.) When he showed me the death scene, I understood how he must feel. He held me tightly, breathed into my neck. I rocked him in my arms; we did it on a quilted mover's cloth on the floor, among broken pieces of sculpture. I had my period, but Karim didn't care, and afterward I found blood on the cloth. Then I noticed blood everywhere; it wasn't even all my blood.

Karim took me upstairs and let me shower and use his towel. When I came out, dressed in my s.l.u.tty evening clothes, he gave me a blue enamelware bowl of canned chili. Then he walked me up to Houston Street, hailed a taxi and tried to give me five dollars, which I resisted.

It may seem obvious that a relations.h.i.+p like this wasn't going anywhere. I didn't care; I wanted to go everywhere. Karim invited me, twice, to meet his parents, to spend a weekend with his family on h.e.l.l's Point, Long Island. It was my first direct experience of architecture-domestic life lived under aesthetic discipline.

THE BRAZIRS' HOUSE in the old summer colony on h.e.l.l's Point was defiantly architectural. Every room occupied a different level, and everybody's personal property commingled in a shared dressing room on a mezzanine, whose walls and floor were a blue gla.s.s that gave off shadows visible from the living room when you dressed. The house was rigorous and modernist, except for the specially designed item in the dressing room, an altar dedicated to the daily acc.u.mulation of clothing and personal effects. The Brazir Tree was (according to the architect, Igor Hermann, who commented on the house in two books, which sat prominently on the Noguchi coffee table in the living room) inspired by the family name, Brazir-actually p.r.o.nounced Brajir. Hermann installed a tree (fabricated, mahogany) at the center of the house, and used its branches as a series of impaling hooks for bra.s.sieres and neckties and ticket stubs from Philharmonic concerts. He saw the tree as a kind of metavalet, a sculptural, integrated sc.r.a.pbook, a changing focal point, a psychic courtyard. Like most architects, Hermann sought to control and direct the gaze. He acknowledged the necessary relations.h.i.+p between the house as a fixed object and the humans who used it-their constant s.h.i.+fting and changing. The house turned inward, rather than outward. It was, for Hermann, a womb-but bright and spare-a blue womb of gla.s.s. Natural light poured through clerestory windows into the dressing room, where the Brazir Tree stood silhouetted behind gla.s.s, representing nature, or human nature.

Everyone in the house used the Brazir Tree; Hermann's aesthetic discipline prohibited closets or bureaus in the bedrooms. One added a bathing suit or a gauzy dress to the wiry armature of the tree at the end of the day, and plucked one's nightgown off a limb. Mr. Brazir's masculine items dangled among the bras, dandy ties made into a bow, flung s.h.i.+rts from Brooks Brothers worn to a wonderful pulp.

Mrs. Brazir arranged our effects constantly. The picturesque disorder of the tree was a monument to wit, or a witty reference to a monument. You'd find the sleeves of one of his Brooks s.h.i.+rts tied neatly around the waist of Mrs. Brazir's peignoir, gestures like that. Mrs. Brazir's elegance seemed habitual, disciplined, expert. She wore a vial of perfume between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, which she uncorked during the second c.o.c.ktail of the evening, upended against a finger and daubed into her cleavage.

The perfectly black bathroom Karim and I shared had a red light recessed into the ceiling and a half bathtub sunk into the floor that shot jets of water at your body. To bathe there with the door closed was to go out of this world. (Karim and I soaked all afternoon once, while Mr. and Mrs. Brazir had their adjustments at the chiropractor's.) The Brazirs dressed up and had c.o.c.ktails every evening in the living room, where Karim and his mother prevailed upon Mr. Brazir to recite Shakespeare. Or they talked about whether to go see the balanced rock on Sunday or Tuesday. The smallest details mattered. Mornings, we walked down to the beach, a distance of a mile, or sometimes we took bicycles, big lugubrious cruisers that didn't belong to anyone in particular, and went swimming. We didn't just lie in the sand and go splash in the water every hour or so, as my people did. We went specifically to swim, and swam until our arms and legs turned blue. Then we dried off and went home. Intensity was everything to them; they insisted on living intensely in the moment. Sometimes we went to the beach specifically for a picnic, and on those occasions we did not swim. "Let's have champagne and lobster rolls and chocolate cake!" Mrs. Brazir would suggest, then pack and bring these items in minuscule portions. No matter how many of us went on the "picnic," she'd bring one half bottle of champagne, one lobster roll (and a plastic knife) and one piece of cake. In this way, the Brazirs shared the burden of a guest. This seemed like an essential lesson-to live eloquently, yet economically.

Mr. Brazir spoke about rebuilding a car, an Alfa Romeo they'd gotten for nothing. (Far from poor, they lacked only ready money.) One wall of the house opened up by means of hinges, and Mr. Brazir had at some point rolled the car inside. We always had c.o.c.ktails around the car, and the elder Brazirs sometimes had c.o.c.ktails in the car-a two-seater, of course-while Karim and I lay on the rug like strewn victims. Or if Mrs. Brazir had had too much to drink the night before, she might remain in bed all day and Mr. Brazir would bring her gla.s.ses of ginger ale, and explain, "Mummy's hung." The particular quality of their air held not the tense, angry caesura you feel in some houses, but a loving silence, like a glow coming out of their bedroom, where she lay, I a.s.sumed, in a white gown. (She almost always wore white, like a bride.) Only Mr. Brazir penetrated, bearing gla.s.ses of ginger ale. I never heard their voices during this exchange, as he pressed the gla.s.s into her hand, or set it down on the nightstand beside her; I never heard her say thank you, or him ask if she would like an aspirin. Nothing ba.n.a.l ever happened. The rooms swallowed you in silence, and as you sat in one room, you could not hear voices from the other rooms, or so I thought at first. One afternoon, Karim and I sat in the living room with the Alfa Romeo, which was never really worked on-never a hint of tools, grease or gasoline-only extraordinary, useless and admired. Mr. Brazir had disappeared into the bedroom with a gla.s.s of ginger ale. I lay on the rug reading 'Tis Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e in shameless hope that I could join the conversation over c.o.c.ktails (though it turned out that the incest conversation happened only one time; the subject moved from theme to theme, and preparation proved impossible). Suddenly I heard ice cubes knocking together as she drank. The sound broke the silence like an avalanche; I realized that the Brazirs communicated to each other without words.

I don't know what they did not talk about-money, ambitions, disappointments. Late in the afternoon, Mrs. Brazir found Karim and me still reading. She said, "Let's go swimming and get salt in our hair and then put on white s.h.i.+rts and go eat mussels at Billy Zee's," and we did that. Mr. Brazir took photographs, developed them in the bas.e.m.e.nt and hung them to dry from wooden clothespins fixed to the Brazir Tree. I think Mrs. Brazir saw herself this way, visually, through his lens, or as if their life were a movie she directed every day.

I saw a book of hers on a table-a simple, personal book. It glowed; it vibrated. I picked it up and read it all, and when I left, I took the book with me.

THE SECOND AND LAST TIME I visited h.e.l.l's Point, Mr. Brazir was already sick with the illness that would kill him. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain; I think he felt that he had wasted his time. Mrs. Brazir seemed embarra.s.sed by his short temper, by the way the beautiful, silent rooms held the sharp tone of him. They had gotten by all those years gliding on the surface, and the surface was perfect, like Zamboni ice, until it cracked.

After dinner, Karim and I walked to the beach with a flashlight. No one else appeared, so we lay down in the cold sand and did it quickly. I loved the way his white s.h.i.+rt hung and moved with the motion of his body. (The Brazirs were obsessed with white s.h.i.+rts in summer. Mrs. Brazir insisted that "white must be pristine." The s.h.i.+rts were blindingly white and wrinkly. Sublime dishevelment was the virtue of these s.h.i.+rts; something about them transcended that other quality, of being ironed and businesslike.) Karim and I did not talk much. He was-I realized this later-too cool to talk much. He had the confidence of a wild animal-he never questioned his instincts. He never asked me about the s.e.x, whether I was satisfied by his intense, distracted hammering; we never discussed it at all. We went back to the silent house, undressed around the Brazir Tree. We hung our clothes on the branches of the tree and went to sleep in our separate rooms.

I woke in the night and looked through the delicate skin of windows into the sky (where the moon hung, waxing gibbous and creamy) and thought, They have the moon.

IN SPITE OF his illness, Mr. Brazir caught a fish for our last dinner, my last among them. He caught it himself somewhere, with a hook and line. It was perfectly illegal, he said with satisfaction; he had gotten away with murder. He invited us to look at the silver skin of the fish, which held rainbow colors in its s.h.i.+ngles. n.o.body had any idea what kind of fish it was. We called it "the fish" and sometimes "Him."

"Do we want Him in lemon and b.u.t.ter?" Mrs. Brazir asked.

Mr. Brazir announced that we would clean the fish at three o'clock. Mrs. Brazir insisted that first she and I must put on dresses and ride bicycles barefoot to a particular shop to buy lemons. (I wanted to learn everything from her, to inhabit her tone. I still have the stolen book, with entries in her elegant, playful hand: "A beautiful Yale man drinking gin at Thanksgiving. I wanted that one.") When we returned, Mr. Brazir had found a bottle of champagne in the cellar-something very old, a Taittinger with the label slightly eroded or chewed. He cooked the fish on a tiny hibachi in the garden, and served Him on a platter with His head still on.

He was very small, though. The four of us drank the champagne and shared Him, with slices of lemon. I realized how bourgeois it was to make an evening around quant.i.ties of food; better to drink water and eat air.

After dinner, Mr. Brazir rummaged in the pantry-I remember a tea towel tacked up in the door, representing the anniversary of the French Revolution, ten bodies, very well-dressed, severed heads. He returned with his fingers spread around four small lead-colored gla.s.ses and a bottle covered with interesting labels. Absinthe was illegal in America, he told us, which I knew from reading postwar novels-it was for information like this that I'd minored in literature. He poured some into each of the gla.s.ses and then added water. The absinthe turned milky, though the color of the gla.s.ses obscured the full effect.

The drink tasted of licorice and childhood, but quickly went deeper. I began to feel universal and human. The Brazirs understood the discipline of surface-the depth that was protected by surface. The surface functioned as the depth. We were all part of it. What could we do but transcend ordinary, sloppy suffering, rise above it, refuse? I tried to say these things to the Brazirs; it felt like a gift I could offer, to see them in their beauty.

Mr. Brazir began to laugh. His chin fell down on his chest and he laughed into the soft open collar of his ancient and immaculate white s.h.i.+rt.

Our dirty dinner plates s.h.i.+mmered violently on the tablecloth and the room turned gray-green. Mrs. Brazir uncorked the vial of perfume she wore around her neck and held the opening against one finger. She looked at her finger and said, "Please don't touch anything." Mr. Brazir never stopped laughing.

Karim and I left them there and went for a walk to the beach in the dark. The sand where I lay felt muddy and damp. He pulled up my skirt and rode my body vigorously, his handsome face straining outward, toward the ocean. Just before he came, he slapped my face, and on the way back to the house he said, "I love you."

The next morning, Mrs. Brazir did not rise, and Mr. Brazir scurried off with a gla.s.s of ginger ale for her. They hid out, I guess, until Karim took me away. At the ferry, which reeked of diesel and the exhaust of twenty growling cars lined up to board, he kissed me sloppily with his tongue. When I stood at the rail to wave good-bye, my face was still wet. Later I understood that I'd reached the end of my usefulness, like the charming fish called Him we'd murdered and eaten. Karim might have been licking his plate before handing it to a waiter.

THE SNAKE.

Dr. Drema moved twenty-five times before she turned forty-eight. She felt like a different person whenever she lived somewhere new. In all, she'd had consulting rooms in thirteen different cities in the United States and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

It was always sad to shuck an old self. But Dr. Drema grew spiritually from shucking. She gained freshness and vitality, like a snake sliding out of its old skin. Shpilkes, her mother called it-ants in the pants. Moving so often had left Dr. Drema's material life in disarray. She kept storage units in several cities on the East and West coasts of the United States (as well as a small house in San Miguel de Allende, which she owned outright), for indispensable articles that she could no longer visualize or name. Someday, when she became less busy, she would sort through these articles or let them go. In the meantime, she paid rents on her storage units, but paid them only after receiving final notice that her possessions would be sold or thrown away. Paying rents late was Dr. Drema's acknowledgment of how conflicted she was about holding on to her past ident.i.ties. Wouldn't it be better simply to graze across the unspoiled range of one life, like a Neolithic buffalo?

Dr. Drema had no trouble attracting new, necessary patients. For those who remained loyal-those really lost at sea-she held appointments by telephone. In any large or even medium-size city in the western hemisphere, hundreds, thousands of people-and their adolescent children-suffer from anxiety, depression, compulsions, addictions. Such people found Dr. Drema personable, brilliant and charismatic. She belonged to all the important professional organizations. Like buffalo on the range, she roamed free.

SHE'D SEIZED the occasion of her forty-eighth birthday to reinvent herself. On a whim, at a bargain price and with an exceptional interest rate, she moved into the old Customs House in a small New England town at the confluence of a river and an ocean, took a young lover and shaved off eight years. An unpleasant period had just pa.s.sed, which she wanted expunged from her record-the failed relations.h.i.+p, the car accident, the gallbladder, the chronic fatigue. What had happened to the part of life when every year marked an improving, a flowering out? She gazed through her new salt-speckled windows and said the number forty in her head over and over until it became her number-in the same way that she a.s.sociated candles with the number eight and Tuesdays with the color blue. Forty, forty, forty. She said the number until she became the thing. The lie lay near the very core of her ident.i.ty and intensified ordinary transactions-filling out forms, listening to patients, talking to strangers.

DR. DREMA'S CUSTOMS HOUSE overlooked the estuary of the Gla.s.s River. The town itself was formerly working-cla.s.s and almost defiantly second-rate. Its converted industrial properties drew the sort of young professional people who raised children and confronted primal dramas-or shucked their primal dramas and sent Dr. Drema their bruised adolescent fruits.

The consulting room occupied the second story. Persian rugs covered the floors as well as a couch and a table. More rugs hung from the walls. A tang of history clung to the rugs: old dust, mothb.a.l.l.s, something sour underneath the wool that Dr. Drema a.s.sociated-pleasantly-with the dead. (She had bought the rugs all together at an estate sale when she moved.) Because of the rugs, the consulting room absorbed most of the sounds made there, and the air sparkled with dust. She quickly lost three patients who suffered from allergies. But because demand for her hours exceeded her supply, Dr. Drema could afford to let them go.

She'd come to the small town in pursuit of a dancer called Peter Dvorjak, whom she had met when he performed in a festival in San Miguel de Allende: He begged her to become involved with him. She had been moved by his physicality, by his ability to communicate, through dance, complex psychological states. Peter Dvorjak was drawn, in turn, by Dr. Drema's intensity, intuition, experience and apparent lack of interest in producing a child of her own.

Peter had a child from a previous marriage, a boy called Mikhail, who preferred to be called Mike. Mike was another reason why Dr. Drema became interested in Peter-and why she kept a corn snake in a terrarium in her consulting room, on a table covered with a Persian rug. The snake represented Dr. Drema's commitment to Mike. It also caused the first frisson between herself and Peter, who proved squeamish around thawed mice. Dr. Drema responded generously-generosity was easy-and said the snake could live at her place. She kept the tank in her consulting room, the heart of her house; she didn't mind. Dr. Drema's chief interest in life lay in the study of symbols-and what animal is more symbolic than a snake?

She and Mike named the snake Herpatia. Sometimes, between appointments, Dr. Drema removed Herpatia from the tank and let the snake slither between her hands and around her shoulders. Herpatia's skin felt like fine leather; she was also playful and strong, even headstrong, since this quality expressed itself most strongly in her head. One time, Herpatia slithered down the cleavage of Dr. Drema's sweater and emerged above the metal b.u.t.ton on her jeans. She made a light, dry sound, traveling, and produced an extraordinary sensation; Dr. Drema had never felt anything like it.

Always, after she had handled the snake, Dr. Drema washed her hands. Someone at the pet store had said, "You must always wash your hands after handling the snake," plus one other indelible word: ectoparasite. Convincing!

Herpatia, in her twenty-gallon tank, became a point of focus for Dr. Drema's patients-a live animal, a mythic presence, but not active enough to distract from the a.n.a.lytic work. The snake also drew Mike naturally into this room of confidences in which anything could be said. Dr. Drema herself found the atmosphere-the live animal, the heavy silence, the glittering bands of dust from old rugs in the air-vicariously liberating. She liked all animals, but especially nonmammals. Before the corn snake-in San Miguel-she used to keep a little yellow bird, which sometimes sat upon her shoulder while she listened to her patients talk.

Sometimes she sat in the consulting room with Mike and kept him company while he handled Herpatia. In Dr. Drema's professional opinion, Mike, at ten, was a too-busy child, always studying Greek or Latin, or tennis, or openings in chess, or practicing Wholfheart on the violin. Peter Dvorjak took his responsibilities as a parent seriously. A serious person himself, he rose every morning at 5:00 a.m. to stretch and do his movement exercises. He then spent hours every day rehearsing-living in his body.

The level of the Dvorjaks' activity intrigued Dr. Drema. Most days, she sat in her consulting room drinking mugs of weak tea, which she replenished with water from her electric kettle, while patients came to her, or called, at their own expense, on the telephone.

Although anguished young professionals were her bread and b.u.t.ter, Dr. Drema found most satisfaction working with adolescents. Their relative openness did not draw her, because the open kind of child did not visit Dr. Drema. The children Dr. Drema saw had clouded over. Their eyes had a milky bluish cast, like Herpatia's eyes before she shed her skin. Some had damaged their surfaces-cut them, or stuffed or shrunk them. Some had no surface at all, only depths, which Dr. Drema tried to plumb in a series of fifty-minute hours. She always had a beautiful career; she intended to write a book on adolescence, the cliff over which one had to persuade oneself to jump. In her dreams she heard the tone she needed; the whole scope of her work revealed itself. But when she woke, she could not hold on to it-sometimes in her dreams this tone was a scent, something wild and animal, and she, Dr. Drema, lay concealed, ready to strike and seize it.

Dr. Drema's large house easily embraced Peter and Mike; she'd planned from the start to take them in. Her income, supplemented by the pittance Peter Dvorjak brought in from his grants, could support them all. Such generosity came easily to Dr. Drema, because Peter brought riches of his own: an energy that came from performing, from creating something original-dances, ch.o.r.eography, and the child.

Dr. Drema and Peter did not understand money in the same way. Dr. Drema maintained a practical relation to the stuff. Money equaled time, energy, power. Peter, on the other hand, claimed not to care. He lived from grant to grant and by teaching. He lived dependently already, as Dr. Drema saw it. And yet he had a charming, stubborn pride, or perhaps just reluctance, when it came to moving permanently into the Customs House. Dr. Drema encouraged Peter to talk about his reluctance so that he might learn to understand and even overcome it.

One morning, Dr. Drema sat at her kitchen table, sipping tea and watching Mike spread honey on a slice of toast. It pleased her to see the child calmly using the things-the knife, the jar of honey, the toast, the plate-that she had bought for their work (she meant their life!) together. Mike dipped the knife into the honey, and a few crumbs migrated into the jar. For Dr. Drema, in some respects a fastidious person, this seemed like a defining moment, though what it defined, she couldn't say. Patients generally loved her for her good qualities: her loud, authentic, life-loving laugh, her irreverence, the depth of her understanding and her empathy with the psychic life of others. She was brilliant but not pretentious; she was down-to-earth; her credentials were impeccable and enviable and might have worked against her were it not for the muddle of her actual life, the charming gap between professional and personal practice. Perhaps because of her profession, people a.s.sumed that generosity dominated her character.

The image of crumbs in the honey jar filled Dr. Drema with warmth and longing, sensations followed, as time went by, by a more irritable hunger.

PETER DVORJAK'S RELATION to his dance company was parental. He ran them; he bullied them. He fretted over his dancers' welfare more than his own, or Mike's. He was also very like them. The company survived on grants, which Peter Dvorjak wrote the way coal miners go down into the mines. He descended into the writing and emerged hours later, the muscles in his arms s.h.i.+ny, his hair standing up on end, his eyes ringed with gray. All his work depended on these peanuts. Sometimes he used Dr. Drema's consulting room, spending hours on his laptop computer, writing a grant for a new piece to be performed in the spring. Dr. Drema encouraged him; a night like this was heaven, as far as she was concerned. She made corn fritters for Mike and herself and served them under a blanket of maple syrup. Sometimes they let Herpatia bask on a pizza stone in a slightly warmed oven while they drank tea at the kitchen table and played Battles.h.i.+p or chess. Upstairs, Peter Dvorjak tapped at his keyboard, used his lighter and wound open the cas.e.m.e.nt before he leaned out of the window to smoke. For Dr. Drema, a large source of happiness consisted of creating conditions that allowed others to work, to behave in a higher way. She did not, herself, have this kind of energy or drive. She hoped to write a book about primal dramas in adolescence; it seemed like work she could do in a slow, solitary way, even in bed, if she wanted to. When she realized that she might be able to wake at eight and lie in bed writing all morning in a notebook, Dr. Drema felt a fresh burst of confidence: She could do this.

She bought a notebook and spent time between her sessions in a state of inspiration. But her notes lost their pungency as they lay dormant. Later, her observations seemed ba.n.a.l, her handwriting indecipherable or unattractive. It was as if the writing had given over its crucial function-to communicate words to herself-and become simply an artifact, a repository of thought. The notebook itself (handsome, leather) seemed more valuable than the words it contained. Eventually, the notebook slipped behind the headboard of Dr. Drema's bed, swallowed as if into her unconscious mind, along with the Moncrieff translation of The Guermantes Way, an important pair of gla.s.ses, a slender digital camera with photographs of Peter Dvorjak in San Miguel de Allende embedded on a chip inside, a slice of whole grain toast, and a postcard from Dr. Drema's mother, showing the scenic overlook from which, according to Mrs. Drema's note on the back, a man from Idaho had recently pushed his second wife. The notebook slipped behind the headboard and became another artifact of Dr. Drema's psychic life. She stopped thinking about it; she forgot what she had written.

THE TINY THEATER FILLED UP for the first performance of Peter Dvorjak's new show; some in the audience sat on cracks between the seats. Dr. Drema felt surprised that anyone tolerated the shortage without complaining; she was used to getting what she paid for. She'd taken precautions, arrived early, and nabbed a single seat in the front row.

A couple of men climbed over her knees. One man asked the other, "Is this the ch.o.r.eographer you said is sublime, or does he work from a rigid computer-generated formula?"

"Remind me what sublime means. Spontaneous?"

"It means awesome."

Before the show began, stagehands emerged from the rear of the theater and laid staging across the corridor that led to the fire exit. It was as if Dr. Drema's body sprouted a hundred b.u.t.tons that someone simultaneously pushed. The sensation of anxiety approached ecstasy simply because it was so intense. Had she created a too-rigid formula for her psyche, wondered Dr. Drema, digging and probing all day so that her patients, as Freud suggested, could learn to be simply unhappy, in ordinary ways? Had she missed the noisy camaraderie, the heady dangers of real life?

The lights came up. Peter Dvorjak knelt over a suitcase. Dr. Drema relaxed immediately; she understood symbols, baggage. He'd covered his powerful, toned body in loose clothing-work pants and a work s.h.i.+rt in martial green. Peter Dvorjak spoke of a lover, clearly male, who had "gone in" when he was twenty-three. The story immediately drew her in, and Dr. Drema forgot about the discomfort of the too-few seats. Apart from the threat of fire, she felt happy; she loved to listen. Listening was her calling, attention without action, noticing what part of the story was being withheld. She had less sensitivity to movement, though she liked to watch.

Peter Dvorjak moved fluidly across the stage, communicating in supple or intentionally awkward gestures something human that transcended a.n.a.lysis. Dr. Drema watched, impressed, slightly outside the moment. She enjoyed being part of a full house, watching her young lover move across the stage, curl up into a plastic cube, roll ecstatically across the floor, rise and grind and tango with the imaginary prisoner and move as if he were making love to this other man, although it wasn't s.e.x: It was tango, hip-hop and ballet. Dr. Drema's skin p.r.i.c.ked up. She felt a chill, in spite of the body-heated air.

A woman appeared on the stage and began to sing a haunting melody. The company joined her, dancers of various colors, mostly androgynes, very slight. Peter Dvorjak looked like an Amazon, except that he was short, his tragedy-or maybe the source of his machismo-as a dancer. The dancers whirled across the stage into one another's arms. The smallest ones lifted and tossed the heaviest like Hacky Sacks. Dr. Drema experienced it all intensely. Possibly the gla.s.s of wine she'd had with dinner? She rarely drank, because of the health risks, and the loss of self-control. Now every jete and glissade, all the grands ronds de jambe, planted her more firmly in her chair. The planted feeling was not rootedness; it was a sensation of being nailed down in her role as observer, as audience. The situation became almost immediately unbearable, not because Dr. Drema could not bear it, but because she wanted to be part of the movement. She began, almost mischievously, to rub her hands over and over each other, producing a dry, sandpapery sound. Soon the audience picked up on her friction and began to rub their hands together, too. Dr. Drema had started it, and now everyone joined in, and Peter Dvorjak improvised, moving to the rhythm and sound of the hands.

"That was weird," someone said at intermission.

"She started it," said someone Dr. Drema couldn't see.