Wherever he was, Mike said, he had missed his mother’s funeral. He probably didn’t know she had died. He probably didn’t know how much she had hoped he would appear in the last weeks by her bedside.

  So, said Dr. H., you have had two losses, not just one.

  Ivan is not dead, said Mike Wilson.

  Dr. H. said nothing.

  But he might as well be, said Mike Wilson into the room. His voice bitter, strong, not that of a grieving man but that of an aggrieved man, betrayed by his son and abandoned by his wife (through no fault of her own).

  After the session, on his way home, he was not thinking of his own death. He was not the sort of man to kick a small animal but he considered it as a stray cat crossed in front of him and dashed under the wheels of a parked car. Filthy beast, he thought as he passed.

  He thought he might write a memoir. He had been around a good many floods, some hurricanes and political campaigns, funerals of presidents, and there was the war in Lebanon and the Kuwait desert. He knew what it felt like to wake up every day smelling like mold and fungus, the aftertaste of spices and alcohol, headache, lice in the hair, excited, ready, as if he were in a movie and celluloid-immortal. There, over there, he was always close to someone, a fellow journalist, a subject giving an interview, a child sitting on the curbside, and the sound of tanks moving and something in the sky, always lurking, ready to kill. He liked it. And then there was the Austrian photographer, Hannah, who now possessed his sweatshirt, a very small chip of his heart, and continued to exist in his mind for erotic purposes, now especially when he had the entire bed to himself all night long. Now that he was guilt-free or as guilt-free as a civilized man can be.

  Dr. H. had said, You don’t cheat on the dead by living.

  It was kind of him to say that, but of course it wasn’t true.

  Lourdes had complained, he hadn’t wanted to come back, to take a promotion, to stay in the city and be safe. He had little interest in safety. He did it for her and for Jeff, his oldest son, and for Ivan, Ivan-the-lost and Ivan-the-guilty, the bond money gone, Ivan.

  Dr. H. considered his patient, the father who had never had a conscious criminal thought in his head. He considered the mother who had once stood outside the school doors waiting for her child to run up the steps. From her office phone she arranged his membership in the West Side Soccer Club. She made his dentist appointments and arranged for the babysitter to take him and his older brother to a music class, or a baseball practice or a play date with another boy who would also wear a Spider-Man costume on Halloween. What was missing in this boy that he could not resist the lure of easy money? Or was it something dangerous in the world that had caused the shards of glitter to fall into his heart, causing him to do the illegal thing for the reward of a bauble, an apartment, a suit of armor made of champagne corks, a place in the sun in a gated community that his father or his older brother could never afford and had never wanted.

  Mike Wilson took Lourdes’ scarves out of her drawer. He had not touched them since her death. They were long and silk and some had flowers and some had geometric lines, black and white they appeared to be a mathematician’s dream.

  Lourdes, went back to work a year after Ivan was born. She had been in a consciousness-raising group and one after another the woman began to receive paychecks and she was not the first or the last. She had taught calculus in a girls’ school until March before her death. Her colleagues had come to the funeral and kissed him on the cheek or squeezed his hand and said they would miss her. Yes, yes, he had said, and was relieved when he knew their names.

  She wore the scarves in her hair, or she wore them with her black coat. She wore them the way a parrot wears its tail, they just came with her every day. He would give them all to his daughter-in-law. She wouldn’t wear them but she would keep them, in honor of Lourdes. He wanted to honor Lourdes. He would give this daughter-in-law the wedding ring, the simple band with a single diamond chip set into the gold. She had her own wedding band but it was time, it was important now to get that wedding band out of his chest of drawers, to move it on to another place. It weighed on him in the drawer.

  He would not look at the photograph albums (his married son did not have leather-bound albums, he had online photos on his desktop). He didn’t want to see his boys at the beach the summer they rented a mosquito-filled house in Fire Island. He didn’t want to see lost teeth and birthday cakes and team trophies. He didn’t want to see time slipping away. He especially didn’t want to see Ivan, his slightly bucktoothed smile waving to the camera at his brother’s engagement party. He especially didn’t want to see Ivan whom he would never see again. He didn’t want to see Ivan who belonged in jail, had been sentenced in absentia to ten years, who had disappeared and forfeited the bail money that had been posted by his girlfriend. He didn’t want to think about Ivan at all but a man can’t choose his thoughts and Ivan unbidden came again and again.

  I’m haunted, he told Dr. H.

  Too bad I’m not an exorcist, said Dr. H.

  You could try, said Mike Wilson.

  And what demon was it exactly that had run away with the boy that Ivan had been, citing the stats of every New York Yankee since 1921, unable to eat if his beloved Giants lost a game?

  Mike Wilson’s great-grandfather had danced at the Yom Kippur ball as the nineteenth century was ending. That night he had kissed the seamstress who would become his wife. On a tenement rooftop, under a scratchy wool blanket, the September air still warm, he had sent his genes into a welcoming place and those genes would be American, free of accent, free of shame. His story from that point onward would be the story of Pilgrims and Indians and of flags on the ramparts still standing. American history was itself just a few hundred years old, not thousands of years, like his old history, which had grown wretched and patched and useless as his own father’s tattered texts muttered into an indifferent sky over Vilna, Vilna, a stopover in the years of exile: a burden to carry in the age of reason. Mike Wilson’s great-grandfather hoped that his grandchildren would live in a town where no one could recall Job’s name or identify with his fate. Justice, equality, decent wages, indoor plumbing, it all seemed possible.

  That was the cartoon version. The real story had something to do with brothers quarreling and tuberculosis and a failed hardware business and two children buried in the city of the dead in outer Queens and a wife who was the kind of mother who hit her children whenever the mood came on her. Mike Wilson only knew that his own mother had been kind and dreamy and loved crossword puzzles and mystery stories and his own father had wanted to be a pilot but had become a schoolteacher and no one in the family had been in court for more than a traffic ticket and Ivan’s arrest had not simply been a matter of public shame, but of private despair.

  Dr. H. considered the question of Ivan. There was an explanation for the crime, another side of the story. The young man possessed a soul that had its reasons. Dr. H. preferred to understand rather than judge. Nevertheless he did not admire the behavior of this young man. Was he a capitalist pig or a hungry child who stumbled and broke apart? Why did he fall? Was this the old question of Adam in the garden? Or was it a gene missing a twist, or burdened with an extra curl. Dr. H. knew enough to avoid the problem of good and evil especially when it came to his patients and their children.

  In fact he was angry at Ivan, on behalf of his father and his dead mother and perhaps of all those who didn’t cheat. Ivan came in multiples, Ivan was many Ivans and they all had big bank accounts. Everywhere in the city, money was flowing and falling and changing hands and there was a race going on, a race for the best, most expensive view of the park or the river, there was a pounding on the doors of the stores on Madison Avenue where a hairbrush cost as much as a bus driver’s monthly salary. There were tuitions and clothes and china plates and labels that meant something to those who wore them and the city was rippling with anxiety over who had everything and who had nothing and who would gain more and how to show what one had and how to keep it safe and make it grow and how to be better, a better bigger house in the country, a better bigger home theater, a better bigger cash flow, in and in and in. This was a city in which little children compared the monetary value of their birthday presents. Dr. H. sighed. He himself sometimes regretted not becoming a heart surgeon. Sometimes he too wanted to be able to fly first class to China and satisfy all his wants, one after another. There was a particular range stove he would have liked that cost as much as a small airplane.

  Accumulation, competition, this was the addiction that humbled the city, that caused it to tremble in the predawn hours, the stench of avarice came off both rivers and wore down the citizens of the city, who scrambled like ants building their mountain of grains, fearing always the foot that would smash, the hand that would hammer, the end of the game.

  If one thought of it, money was not so much the root of all evil but the air one breathed, the source of life itself, the energy that turned the wheels that made the city run day after day. Cash was needed not for survival but for flash and bravado, for astonishment and amusement, for security, a goal that kept receding into the mists as you came closer. Security was not a Swiss bank account. It was a state of mind as illusive and fleeting as joy. Once upon a time it was enough if you could feed your family. Now you needed to have more than your neighbor, who must therefore have less.

  In his office with his bookshelves spilling over with old copies of the journals and the periodicals and the volumes of biography and the collected papers and the dusty whisper they seemed to make if you listened carefully, Dr. H. felt like a garage mechanic, a psychoanalytic garage mechanic, outside his little cell, shoes with spike heels cost as much as a racehorse, and money, the flow of it, the feel of it, the terror of losing it, fueled the motors of the real world, a world in which bundling did not mean cuddling and deals were cut with very sharp scissors. In that world his office, the little office of Dr. H. was of no importance at all.

  Far away from Mount Eden, the cemetery where Lourdes was buried, sat the golden statues in the Vatican storehouse as well as the Picassos, the Matisses, the Andy Warhols that were hung on the walls of the princes of Wall Street. Yes, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, but the unconscious, even under the analyst’s keen eye, was not an item you could buy or sell. Dr. H. regretted that he lived in relative poverty. He regretted that money and its rewards had passed him by. No, he didn’t regret that. What he minded was that all he held dear was less valued than it had been. Insight, thought, nature itself, affection, all seemed like fourth prizes in a contest he had not chosen to enter, but was in nevertheless. The devil stole away Mike Wilson’s child and stuck his finger in Dr. H.’s eye.

  Dr. H. did not accept his own dark thoughts as the complete truth. Perhaps they were a product of some shame of his own. He believed in personal responsibility.

  He believed in choice and he believed that Ivan might not be lost forever because you never know, not really, what might happen, unlikely as it seems, Ivan could return and redeem his days. Psychoanalysts are not seers or prophets, not judges, not makers or shakers. If all goes well they may be able to work like sheep dogs and round up a few strays and press them back into the herd.

  There was a day when Mike Wilson thought while eating a stale croissant at Starbucks, I lost my wife and my son but I have Dr. H. As long as I can pay for him, I have Dr. H. And by now he knew that Dr. H. was also a stand-in for his own father, brother, son, wife, mother, and something of a shape-shifter inhabiting his imagination while still knowing exactly how long forty-five minutes lasted, while knowing exactly the many ways Mike Wilson had to deceive himself and knowing how much regret a man could bear without breaking into fragments that could never be put back together again.

  At least Mike Wilson hoped that was so. Perhaps it wasn’t.

  Are you hoping that your son will contact you one day when he feels enough time has gone by? said Dr. H.

  It has been six years, said Mike Wilson. I call his old friends from high school. I call his college roommate every six months. I call his old girlfriend who hangs up on me. If this were a movie, I’d find a clue. A phone call would come at three in the morning with a stranger whispering a country name, an address into the air. I would open an unmarked envelope and find a blank page and then notice the stamp, the country of origin. But I am not hoping.

  Dr. H. said, Hope will not harm you.

  Mike Wilson sat in the leather chair opposite Dr. H. and wanted to tell him, wanted to tell someone, about the volcano that sat in his breast sending fire and ash up into his brain. The lava that flowed down from that volcano, the lava that was the dark hot stuff of his love for his child, his child who had done a criminal thing, his child whom he would never see again.

  You are angry at him, said Dr. H.

  Yes, said Mike Wilson, who actually was exhausted, bone-achingly exhausted from loss. How angry can an exhausted man get?

  I’m too old, said Mike Wilson, to have another child.

  Not too old, said Dr. H., to have another wife.

  I don’t want another wife, said Mike Wilson. The idea of another woman made him want to smash his head into the wall, the one with Dr. H.’s poster of the Sistine Chapel that he had picked up at an international psychoanalytic meeting in Florence. Did Dr. H. identify with God and that outstretched arm?

  Absolutely not.

  On rare occasions only.

  Dr. H. knew that his patient did not know his own mind, that is the way it was with patients.

  Lourdes had sat through every day of the trial. She stared at the jury, memorizing all their faces. She did not insist as the lawyer did that her son was innocent, but she hugged him in front of the reporters so they would know that this man was not an outlaw but someone’s beloved child. Of course he was also an outlaw, an anti-Robin Hood, who had robbed the poor to serve the rich.

  Do you ever think, asked Dr. H., that Ivan and his troubles gave Lourdes lung cancer?

  No, said Mike Wilson, of course not. But then he said into the waiting silence, It may have made her vulnerable, broken some resistance, made her not want to breathe.

  And one day he said to Dr. H., Maybe it was Lourdes’ fault. Maybe she loved him too much and spoiled him, so he thought he could get away with anything. She thought he was perfect. He probably believed her. There was a hint of a whine in Mike Wilson’s voice.

  Did you say that to her? asked Dr. H.

  No, said Mike Wilson.

  But there it was in the room, the son and the father, and the eternal Oedipus that must be endured for all to survive with 20/20 vision. Dr. H. heard it as if a gong had struck on a mountaintop and the echo slowly drifted down into the valley below. The father, a mere mortal, had sometimes been jealous of his son, in the way that fathers and sons have wrestled from the beginning of time. There was in Ivan’s flight some fragment of victory for the journalist who was himself away from his hearth for many months, leaving the mother and the son to themselves. It would take a long time and multiple gentle hints before Mike Wilson might see this himself, but Dr. H. would try in time, because he believed it was true and truth was the antibiotic of the mind.

  We were in Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital waiting for her name to be called. We were in a beautiful room with a view of the river outside. I went to get a Coke from the machine in the hall and when I came back Lourdes said, I’m done and I said all right. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Mike Wilson looked at Dr. H. He was ready to catch any expression on his face that might tell him if he had been negligent, ignorant, selfish. He had of course been all those things. Did Dr. H. think he was a dishonorable man?

  If he did it didn’t show on his face.

  Why should he care what Dr. H. thought of him? He shouldn’t. But he did. He was tied to Dr. H. who was insisting he live, who wanted him to live, and so he would live for a while, because Dr. H. was trying so hard to keep him above ground, where Mike Wilson had to admit the possibilities were not all bad, at least not yet.

  And then Dr. H. announced that he was taking a vacation in early April. There would be missed appointments. Money saved, thought Mike Wilson, although he would have preferred it if Dr. H. had remained in his office. Of course he knew that Dr. H. had a life of his own, maybe a family with children, but it still seemed wrong of him, to so easily take a vacation. He himself did not want to go anywhere. Where would he go, a man alone.

  The air became warmer, there were some buds on the trees in the park, there were lilacs in the buckets at the markets on Broadway. There were more skateboards on the streets. The restaurants were putting tables and chairs on the sidewalks.

  Dr. H., his wife and son and daughter went to Belize. The palm trees were everywhere. The houses were pink and blue and along the road from the airport to their hotel on the shore, noses pressed against flimsy fences, donkeys watched the cars go by.

  In the hotel lobby as they were checking in, Dr. H. saw the sign for a flat-bottom fishing trip, a photo of a huge tarpon decorated the poster, a four-hour trip, leaving at 6 a.m. His heart jumped. Yes, he wanted to do that. Yes, he loved fishing which his wife thought revolting and cruel. His son would come and he would, he would do it. His daughter refused. She was not yet eight. She felt sorry for the fish. Was it cruel? He preferred to eat what he caught. But the truth was that he liked the long wait for the hit on the end of the line. He liked the joy that jumped in his chest as he reeled in the shinning creature, scales, blank eyes, thrashing and struggling for its life. He liked the victory. He liked the murder. He liked the taste, he liked the sight of the fish in the bottom of the boat, his fish, his catch. I’m not a saint, he said to himself, and that was that.

 

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