Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind, page 10
Portia was born red all over with a crust of something in her eyes. She was perfect and both parents felt instant love and gratitude so vast it could never be repaid.
Which is why you might have thought that Portia’s mother would not have accepted that key. It was a dangerous act. She was risking all and that itself may have explained the way she tightly held the key in the palm of her hand and carefully put it in the inner pocket of her bag next to her passport home.
The Smullian mother was carried off to the nearest hospital hours away on a rough road in the back of the family truck. The Smullian father kept telling the Smullian boy not to worry, the doctors would save his mother. The Smullian boy could not imagine the death of his mother. He was brave and said nothing but he prayed nevertheless to the gods, to the stars, to the spirits of the earth and the sky. He promised he would never harm any creature on earth if his mother was saved. And in the hospital he waited in the emergency room and told no one he was hungry or thirsty and at last fell asleep on a couch. And he did not dream. His head was empty.
Portia noticed that the Smullian cabin had a water stain on the wall behind the parents’ bed. There must be a leak she thought, when wild storms pass the rainwater must pound against the wall and seep into the cracks. It rained in the forest every night for hours and Portia could hear the sound of water running down a drain. She could see the dirt darkening around the tree stump at the corner of the yard and she heard the beating of pine needles dashing against each other, against the branches swaying with currents. The Smullian father told the boy not to worry. They were safe in the cabin. Portia worried anyway. She saw jagged flashes of lightning as the crashing thunder came closer and closer and then receded over the mountains.
The Smullian mother returned from the hospital. Her rash was much better. It had left her face and there were only a few marks on her forearms. She threw her arms around the boy and she pressed her body into her husband’s and she said she would make chocolate cupcakes. Portia watched as the boy licked the bowl. But in the forest a jackal let out a scream, a hunger scream, and his prey tried to hide behind a rock, but the jackal was fast, his nails clicked on the stone as he jumped.
Portia’s mother had a good trip. It had been long but worthwhile. She brought Portia a doll from a market near the AIDS clinic she was visiting. The doll had glass beads around her neck and a red dress. On her feet she wore tiny stitched sandals. Portia was not very interested in dolls but she was glad her mother had come back. It was expected that she would return but Portia had not entirely expected it.
What a beautiful doll, said her nanny. I’ll give it to you, said Portia. Oh no, said the nanny, your mother brought her for you. Portia said nothing. Nobody can make you love something you don’t love. Even a child knows that.
August, Portia and her mother and father went for a vacation on Cape Cod. Portia and her parents rented a cottage furnished with wicker chairs and Hopper reproductions and little lighthouses rested on bookshelves. Portia’s mother spent many hours of the day on her cell phone talking with her office. Portia’s father took picnic baskets to the lake and Portia went into the water. She would not put her head under the water. She would not lift her feet from the stony bottom. Somewhere there was a snapping turtle in the lake and Portia watched for him, prepared for retreat to the shore if he approached.
One day the incoming fog slowly crossed the lake. There was no exact moment when the temperature dropped but in slow motion the gray seeped up the blue and the white clouds disappeared and deeper, wider dark ones spread over the nearby moored sailboats, over the weathered docks, over the children building a fortress, but then it was there, a drop in temperature, a quick folding of umbrellas, a packing away of the just unpacked sandwiches, the beach ball fetched quickly from the bushes.
Portia was there with her father and her father’s colleague whose family had rented a nearby cottage and the two men had been talking about a third who had broken a promise. And then Portia’s father said, I find vacations boring. His friend said, The weather’s changed, let’s go back to the cottage and watch the Yankees game. Portia said, I want to stay here. No, said her father. No one stays on the beach in the rain. I like rain, said Portia. I don’t, said her father.
There were rules of course that should be obeyed. There were promises that ought to be kept. Portia’s mother was aware of her obligations to her husband, to her daughter, to her own honor. She had never been a religious sort of person. But the Ten Commandments had long ago settled into her neurons and her blazing synapses and could not be easily erased. She was a decent person, considerate of those who worked for her, smiled at the doormen in her apartment building, caring about her friends, and above all proud of her family. Now there was this new man and this excitement in her body that would not go away, that made her nights sleepless, that filled her with dread just as it delivered shivers of joy, joy that she had almost forgotten was possible. However, as it was the world over, since Homo sapiens had straightened their shoulders and shortened their jaws and lived in groups that gathered and hunted and increased the tribe, some order had to be maintained.
Portia’s mother did not believe in sin but she did believe in respect, in nursing the flame of love for one’s mate even when that flame was flickering and threatening to leave her in the dark. But she simply couldn’t stop, stop the meetings in hotel rooms at the end of afternoons, at lunches in out-of-the-way Italian restaurants that were no longer fashionable if they had ever been.
Portia’s mother stayed later and later at the office. Portia’s father spent more time at the gym and Portia herself spent more time with the Smullians. The boy Smullian hid his father’s ax in the forest behind a large mossy rock. The father Smullian said that the forest was becoming home to thieves and he wanted to move them all into town. The mother Smullian went looking for the ax and she found it. After that the ax was kept on a high shelf in the closet.
Portia’s father taught her how to play chess. In the evenings sometimes he would sit with her and explain the moves, white and black. Portia would watch his hands, fingers drumming on the arm of his chair with his eyes focused on the board and at those times she wanted for nothing. Then he would turn on the evening news and sink into the couch. Portia saw that his eyes often closed as he watched. Sleep was suddenly elusive. He tried pills. They made him groggy. They stopped working after one or two nights. He tried hot milk and late night movies.
Portia’s mother had not meant for this to happen. There is no question that she was as shocked as anyone else that a stranger had slipped into the small space that she had allowed between her and her husband. It’s just a passing phase, her best friend told her. Ignore the signals your hormones are sending. They will go away in time. I don’t want them to go away, said Portia’s mother, who then was certain she would lose her lover if she didn’t admit, acknowledge to the entire world what was the new truth of her life. She was not cruel. There was no pleasure in this. She wept for her husband and the way he turned his head to the wall and refused to look at her when she explained it to him, an accident, a matter of fate, of true love. Like a surgeon who cuts to heal, she told him the truth.
And he moved out and took Portia and her nanny with him. The Smullians came too.
Two nights a week Portia returned to her mother’s apartment and her old bed and her old room. Her mother read to her at night. The man who was not her father told her how lovely she looked and he bought her a two-wheeled bicycle and promised to teach her how to ride it, and he played board games with her before bedtime. She called him Mark, but she never said his name out loud when she was at her father’s house.
The Smullian boy wanted to go to a regular school. He decided to run away to a nearby city. He wasn’t sure how to get there. Portia could direct him. Portia could lend him some money from her drawer. But she didn’t. So, he just waited for something to change.
Portia knew that it was very important to learn how to wait. A child is so small, the tunnel so dark and long and the way so treacherous that a child is best protected by waiting, patiently, without noise, for a change that must come with time.
What the Smullian boy needed was a friend. Portia knew it. It was not right for a boy to live in a forest so far from all others. She wanted to invite him into her bedroom, both of her bedrooms, and have him become her brother. But Portia was a cautious child and she could see that having a brother might be a calamity. She might be banished herself to a distant forest and a passing wolf might devour her or perhaps she would just disappear from lack of being seen. If no one sees you, it occurred to Portia, your body might forget how to be visible.
And so her mother explained the facts of life to her. And she said, You will grow up and have children of your own. I must? asked Portia. You’ll want to, said her mother. No, said Portia, I won’t.
That night she decided she was too old for the Smullians. She planned an avalanche, a giant block of snow from the mountain above, and she watched as it came roaring down the mountain and fell on the Smullians’ cabin where the three family members were sleeping. The dog was on the boy’s bed. The mother’s body was curled next to her husband’s. There was a terrible groaning sound, the roof cracked open and tumbled down. The cabin walls collapsed inward. Bones broke. It was swift and deadly, this avalanche, and there were no survivors.
Not quite true. Under the boy’s bed, there lived a city family, in two apartments, across town from each other. There was a girl who lived there too, sometimes in one apartment and sometimes in another.
That family, Portia’s family, survived the avalanche.
Portia’s mother told Dr. Berman that Portia was doing well. She had made a new friend at school. Who is Portia? Dr. Berman was not sure. Had her patient told her about Portia before? Portia was at school. She must be a child, not a pet. Children are resilient, said Dr. Berman. They have resources that would astonish you. Dr. Berman stood up and ended the session with her usual nod. When she rose, Portia’s mother saw a white napkin stained with food that Dr. Berman had been sitting on. She also saw a crushed banana in the corner of the chair. Portia’s mother didn’t want to say anything, but she was puzzled. Had she interrupted Dr. Berman’s lunch?
My early morning patient left his hat on the end of the couch. It was one of those gray fedora hats men used to wear before they didn’t. I could hear him in the outer hall but I didn’t rush after him. I was going to put the hat on my desk just as the bell rang and I went to open the door for my supervisee. I tossed the hat on my chair because I didn’t want to open the door with a hat in my hand. I walked back to my office and the supervisee sat down in the chair and I sat down on my chair and I could feel it under me: my patient’s crushed fedora. I just sat there, imagining the little feather in the band bending apart. The hat did not look so good after forty-five minutes under my bottom.
Dr. H. told this story to Dr. Z. as they were waiting for their wives to join them for a Chinese dinner before the theater.
Dr. Z. said, Were you coveting your patient’s hat?
Dr. H. said, Or other parts.
Dr. Z., What parts?
Dr. H., The part that is going on vacation to the fjords next month.
six
His mother had died just weeks before his bar mitzvah. All the pink ribbons in the world wouldn’t have been able to save her. The color pink made him want to throw up. His younger brother had been in the room the moment she stopped breathing. He said the dying was all right. He didn’t think it hurt her. Del had been waiting his turn to go to her. He had felt like punching something all morning. He had felt like punching his brother for days. When his father came to tell him he could go in and see her, he felt like punching his father, who in fact looked like someone had already punched him, his face was caved in, unshaved and there was spittle on his chin and his hair was uncombed and his eyes had this strange evasive look as if he were ashamed, as if he had been caught stealing.
Now it was two years later and Del had been expelled from the fine school he was attending in beautiful New England where in the fall the leaves turned golden and red, and blew to the ground in a rain of glory: a fact of nature pointed out in the school catalogue along with the college acceptance record of last year’s graduating class.
He had to see the doctor or the school his father had found in the city wouldn’t take him. He had no interest in seeing the doctor. He had an interest in going to the park and smoking pot with his friends. He had an interest in powders and pills that changed the way you saw the world, kept you awake, and made you think no harm could come your way. He also liked video games in which flares, bombs, assault weapons figured prominently. He did not like Ulysses or Hector or Ajax or Agamemnon, old and dead, they bored him. But it seemed useful for the moment to tell his doctor all about the war in Troy. His doctor listened.
When her colleague, Dr. H., mentioned that the patient she had referred to him seemed to be willing to talk about Troy for the next two thousand years, Dr. Berman said, Troy. Not worth the loss of life and treasure. An old story.
It is an old story, said Dr. H., whose own father had died in the Korean War just months before his birth.
If I were Penelope, she said, I would have married one of those suitors.
The wealthiest one, I assume, said her colleague.
Of course, said Dr. Berman. Was either of them joking?
First he stole Time from the table in the waiting room and tossed it in the trash can at the corner. Then when the doctor excused himself to answer a knock on the consulting room door in the middle of the session he stole a small Indian statue of Vishnu that was sitting on a shelf behind his chair. An arm or a leg bulged out of his backpack but Dr. H. was thinking he should have brought an umbrella to his office that morning and did not notice. Del sold the statue to an art dealer in the East Village and felt very American, an entrepreneur.
His doctor had suspicions, but no proof. His doctor missed his Vishnu. He had bought it in a dusty shop in London the summer he had gone to an international conference there. He was going to give it as a wedding present to his cousin’s son but then decided to keep it instead. It wasn’t particularly valuable. His attachment was simply sentimental. But sentiment has a value too.
What is it about the killing of Hector that you find so interesting? asked his doctor. His patient was silent. The doctor was silent.
His patient said, I’m going.
Why? asked the doctor. His patient got up and walked out and slammed the door behind him and did not return.
What do I do? asked his father.
Give him time, said the doctor.
Even Odysseus showed up eventually.
He had a shank of black hair that fell across his forehead. He was tall and thin, maybe scrawny would be the better word. He wore black leather bracelets on his wrists with protruding silver bullets warning the world to stay away. Girls in fact were attracted to him. The smell of danger, the indifferent way he noticed their breasts, their legs, and the cloud of nicotine that clung to his clothes. The heavy iron cross he wore around his neck. Was he Dracula or was he Dracula’s next victim. It was hard to tell. Girls knew that under the dark glasses, behind the tense smile, a boy was waiting for someone to hold him close and chase away the monsters from the depths of the closet. Girls thought they could find him when he couldn’t find himself.
It is in the nature of some boys to drive their cars into cement walls. It is the nature of some girls to ride ambulances to the scene of the accident.
No needles. He was afraid of needles. But other things were all right. At night in the park, with some guys from uptown, at a party on Park Avenue with a girl from his school, other things were all right, even comforting.
His father had a cousin who had gone to Israel and had founded a dot-com that provided information on insurance options. It sounded dull enough to be something you could do in New Jersey. Del packed a duffel and flew El Al. Why not? Why anything? As the plane lifted into the air leaving Kennedy Airport, he looked out the window and down to the harbor below and saw the Statue of Liberty, torch raised like a middle finger into the sky. Goodbye forever, he said to himself, and then wondered why he had said forever. His father had supplied him with only sufficient funds for a six-month stay and his return ticket was in his backpack stuffed behind his iPod and the pack of condoms his brother had given him as a going-away present.
The meeting was downtown in the Village where the head of the appointments committee lived in a brownstone with geranium pots in the windows and a collection of paintings that included a Larry Rivers and an early Magritte. Some analysts understood how to survive in a city of rabid dogs and others became like mendicant priests, resisting investment tips from patients because of an ethical code, using up inheritances, sending too many children to schools that paused in their pleas for donations only on the Fourth of July when most of their marks were out of town.
In the cab on the way, Dr. Berman said to Dr. Z., Who would you be, if you had to be one character in the Odyssey? He thought: Agamemnon. It took him a half second to realize why. His wife, ten years ago, had left him for six months to move in with a TV producer. She came back. His late night committee meetings, the paper he was writing and rewriting, “The Narcissistic Cathexis to the Missing Object,” had left her feeling abandoned. Or he just wasn’t as good as the other guy in bed. She hadn’t murdered him, but he was sure she wanted to. He said to Dr. Berman, I would be the horse.
You are not taking me seriously, she said. He was. An army of invisible fighters armed with steel blades sat within him, waiting for a signal that never came.
