Don't Worry About the Kids Read online

  She reached to the night table, lifted her glass of white wine, drank. She chose not to answer the telephone. Tom’s glass was empty. He had left two hours before, at 6 A.M. She listened to her own voice, recorded, asking callers to leave messages at the sound of the tone. She listened to Simon’s father telling her that if she didn’t agree to meet with him, he would instruct his lawyer to take action against her.

  She walked to the bathroom, downed two aspirins, squatted on the toilet, removed her diaphragm, listened to Mr. Pearlstein’s voice—like bright morning sun, she thought, like an ocean of holy light!—pour into her apartment. How pleased Simon would be, she thought, could he hear the sound of his father’s helplessness and rage.

  “We ll give you one more chance. Please call us by noon so we can try to settle this like reasonable human beings. My wife and I have decided that we’re prepared to compromise—to give you something. At a time like this we certainly don’t intend to drag our son’s memory through unpleasantness.”

  But you will, Jane said. If you get angry and greedy enough, you will. For a half million dollars, there are lots of things we’ll do we never suspected we were capable of.

  Simon was dead and she was a wealthy woman. Amazing. Simon Pearlstein, twenty-six years old, her patient of nineteen months—thirteen months at the state hospital, six months as an outpatient—had perished along with 221 other passengers when their Boeing 737 charter crashed three days before as it passed over Gander, Newfoundland. Simon Pearlstein—dear, sweet Simon, who brought her a gift each time he came to her office—had outdone himself this time. Before boarding his plane, Simon had taken out a $525,000 accidental death and dismemberment policy, and on it he had named Jane Fogarty, M.D., his psychiatrist, as sole beneficiary.

  While his plane sent a small explosion of light into the sky above Newfoundland—a supernova to a passing dove, she thought—she had been in bed with Tom, on top, banging away at him, waves of orgasm passing from her thighs to her brain and back again, blinding her, making her wish she would never have to look at anything in this world again. Still, even in memory, even while that warm ocean had come roaring through her body, the thought of having to talk with Tom afterward—of having to act as if she cared for him more than she did—wearied her.

  So now that you can do anything you want, what is it you want to do?

  She laughed. I’m not sure, Simon. Let’s wait and see.

  Sure, he said. I’m good at waiting. Where I am now, I can be patient in a way I wasn’t able to be before. It’s the best kind of patient to be.

  Simon had asked her often about her childhood. It wasn’t fair, he would protest, that she knew all about him and he knew nothing about her! Why was she hiding from him? If you tell me all about yourself, he said, I promise I won’t criticize you or make fun of you the way you do to me.

  I grew up poor, Simon. I was an only child. My father was a handsome man who loved to drink and who would, in my presence, sometimes beat my mother. Mostly, though, he’d fall down drunk and beg her forgiveness. My mother worked as a cleaning woman at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Newark. My father died of a heart attack when I was eleven and he was thirty-seven. It happened on a trolley car, though for years I told friends—boyfriends especially—that he’d died in the saddle. I made up stories about him. In high school, he was in love with a beautiful girl who later became a movie star. Stopping over in Newark on her way to New York—the weekend of their twentieth high school reunion—she called him. In her luggage, in addition to her lavish wardrobe, she carried with her, always, her own powder-blue satin sheets.

  So now that you know that, what do you know?

  Simon looked away, as if ashamed to have drawn such information from her—as if frightened, Jane sensed, that she would abandon him because she had told him about herself.

  The difference, she thought, answering her own question. The difference between what I was and what I am. Between outside and inside. Between then and now. Well. If Simon could not know her—know her life—he could do the next best thing: he could, from the grave, alter it.

  The aspirins were taking effect. Jane watched her headache lift, the fumes curling from her hair, rising to the ceiling. She remembered, as a child, buying tubes of magic smoke, rubbing the sticky substance between her fingertips, watching the feathered plumes lift off. In the mist below the ceiling, Simon coalesced, drifted down. He sat next to her.

  Money was the one thing my mother talked to me about freely, Simon. Money was the matter of her lullabies. My mother taught me how to budget, explained on a daily basis how she managed the bills, the shopping, the rent. When she wrote a check, I sealed the envelope. When she held up two cans of beans in the grocery, I chose the less expensive one. If I had not existed, she would surely have moved to the shore—to Asbury Park, where her sister Regina had found a husband, an accountant, who bought her a house of her own and who treated her like a lady. But her sister would not let her move in while my mother had a child with her.

  The phone rang and Tom’s voice came through the answering machine. He had been in touch with his lawyer, Emlyn Schiff, who was expecting her call. Tom had two questions for her: If Simon wanted her to have all the money, why did he send a copy of the policy to his parents? And if she was so rich, why wasn’t she smart enough to fall madly in love with him?

  Jane smiled. She had known Tom for nearly a year, had seen him or spoken with him almost every day for the previous four months. He was handsome, intelligent, generous. He was marketing director for a large New York publishing house, had been a senior editor before that. He had a wonderful sense of humor. He loved her. She doubted neither his constancy nor his wit. So what kept her from returning his love, from feeling free to say, All right—you’re it. She was splendid, as with Simon, at taking care of others—at helping them learn to take care of themselves, to know themselves. But when somebody else—Tom—wanted to care for her…

  She closed her eyes and, with Simon, silently recited the opening lines of Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats:

  He disappeared in the dead of winter

  The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted…

  Simon had brought copies of his own poems to her office, had sometimes inserted into their conversations snatches from the poems of others and then, afterward, asked if she noticed the difference: which words were his, which belonged to Yeats or Auden, to Thomas, Jeffers, cummings, Dickinson, Hopkins, Donne, or Blake. Most of the time-though she did not let on—she could have answered, could have passed Simon’s tests.

  Yet, as with his parents, Simon had his small victory with her too. For she could neither return his last gift nor talk with him about it. She knew all about accepting and not accepting gifts from patients. Well. If she was entitled to the money, he’d been entitled to the pleasure—had it been his—of giving it to her, of letting his parents know he had.

  She wondered, though: now that she could have virtually anything she wanted whenever she wanted it, would she be less horny? She felt almost giddy, finding the question there. Would being free financially enable her to be more patient with herself sexually? What Tom didn’t know about her adventures during the past year—brief, delightful flings, usually at out-of-town professional meetings—surely didn’t hurt him, and surely, too, she had been clear about her own sense of their relationship, about the freedom she desired for herself and allowed for him. She understood her own needs and patterns well enough. When the sex came first—and early—what need was there for trust? The sex represented intimacy. Genuine trust was something that, by definition, came only with time—something that, as she knew better than most, was built and sustained slowly.

  Trust was not infatuation and infatuation was not love and love was not sex and sex was not love and love was not infatuation and infatuation was not trust.

  Yes? Tell me more.

  To know something in the mind is not to feel it in the heart, and to feel it in the heart is not necessarily to know it
in the life.

  You’re confused, aren’t you?

  Yes, Simon. I’m confused, if mildly.

  I can tell from how general you’re being about yourself—the words you’re using—about trust and money and love. Simon paused, leaned forward. When he spoke again, his voice was hers: would you like to talk about it?

  She laughed. You’re wonderful, Simon. You really are.

  I always thought it was so.

  That you were wonderful?

  No. That money was at least as wonderful and confusing as sex. So what do you think?

  Jane sighed. What I think is that I want to be loved—most of all, endlessly—by a handsome, strong, attractive man, and yet…

  Yes?

  I feel ashamed of my desire at the same time that I fear it will never be fulfilled. Such an ordinary sentiment, alas.

  I disagree.

  She dressed for work. She thought of her day: an hour’s drive to the hospital on Long Island for a staff meeting, then back to the city for four hours of individual therapy at her Manhattan office. Jane wanted to get to the poems before Simon’s parents did. She worried that if his parents found the poems he had written expressly for her, they might, in their rage, destroy them. Some of the poems, she thought, were publishable—Simon had been too terrified of rejection to send them out—and so she would ask Tom to look at them, to give her his opinion. If the poems were neither publishable nor good, she wanted, still, to be able to use them in her own work, for a paper she was preparing on dissociative mechanisms in posttraumatic stress disorders.

  Through the static of her answering machine, Simon’s father returned. He had checked at the hospital, at her office. If she insisted on avoiding him, he would be forced to take actions they might both regret.

  Simon had once talked of composing a poem made up solely of messages from people’s answering machines. His own “Hie and Ille,” he said, about a convention at the World Trade Center, where answering machines gathered in the darkness of an auditorium to exchange greetings and messages.

  Simon’s father, unable to provoke a reaction from Jane, was now railing against her—about how she had taken advantage of Simon’s good nature, of his vulnerability. “He may have been out of his mind—which is why your case won’t hold up in court for a minute—but he’s still our son,” Mr. Pearlstein declared. “There’s a difference.”

  Jane raised her glass to Mr. Pearlstein’s voice. Together, she and Simon watched the bile travel upward to Mr. Pearlstein’s mouth, out and into the receiver, through the wires, down into the walls of his apartment building. It rolled below the city’s streets, gathering speed, tumbling toward her apartment. The underground cable was slick and sticky. Like what? Jane smiled, made an incision in the sidewalk, lifted the cable—a gleaming, slippery large intestine—unfurled it, stretched it to its full length so that the liquid rage within could flow more easily, so that she could see where, at each end, to slice the tube.

  Simon passed the scalpel to her, complimented her on how deft she was. He said he would trust her to remove his brain, to cut out the sections of it that made him ill. He bent over the white sheet, sniffed it so he could determine which sections were rotting. He had read about Phineas Gage, he said. Phineas Gage was a railroad crew chief through whose brain, in 1845, a three-foot-seven-inch-long, 1.25-inch-diameter iron rod, weighing 13.5 pounds—dynamited into his skull—had passed. Phineas and others who suffered penetrating bifrontal brain injuries often regained full physical independence. Their characters and personalities, however, suffered major disorders.

  Their brains survived, Simon said, but their minds didn’t. How come?

  Jane cupped Simon’s brain in her hands, set it on top of the water, watched it bob, dip, drop downward. She imagined it becoming part of the coral reef, the reef turning to flesh, throbbing, Simon waking from sleep, rising from the bottom of the sea, grinning.

  The question remained: what would she do with all the money?

  She could pay back her medical school debts, look for a larger apartment in a safer neighborhood, redecorate her office, get her mother into a better nursing home, buy books, clothing, records, antique jewelry, eat elegantly in expensive restaurants, take long, luxurious vacations…

  But where would she go, and with whom?

  With me.

  Why you?

  Because I’m paying for the trip.

  You’re dead, Simon.

  Says who?

  She spoke with the building’s superintendent on West 74th Street, told him she wanted to see Simon’s apartment, to gather some items for a memorial service. The superintendent—a young Puerto Rican with the jaundiced, creased face of a man twice his age—stared at her ankles, her breasts. He lifted his T-shirt, scratched a scar that ran in a jagged diagonal across his stomach, said that he couldn’t do it. He had orders.

  I’m Simon’s sister, she said.

  He shrugged.

  She handed him a fifty dollar bill. This is for all you did to make Simon comfortable. He liked living here.

  It’s your choice, lady. Only I never gave you nothing. If you want a key, I might arrange it.

  She gave him a second fifty dollar bill. He gave her the key. Money is a wonderful thing, she said to him.

  Better than sex, he said, articulating, to her surprise, the very words that were in her mind.

  She unlocked the door, closed her eyes, imagined that she was entering a commercial for California wine. A handsome executive, in midnight-blue tuxedo, stood at the window, gazing out at the city. The slow movement of Bach’s Second Violin Concerto floated toward her in crystalline waves. The carpeting was linen-white, the furniture and draperies shades of ivory, mauve, lavender, ruby. Jane blinked. A plush leather couch, armrests of gleaming chrome, curved under billowing drapes at the far end of the long room.

  She moved forward, across a handsome oriental rug. Simon had left his small apartment in order. There was an oak buffet, a glass coffee table with three geodes on it, a couch upholstered in navy blue corduroy. On the walls were prints: Chagall, Klee, O’Keeffe. A framed poem, inscribed to Simon from Seamus Heaney, hung on the wall beside the couch. Jane looked into the narrow kitchen, saw the chef’s wrought-iron pot rack above the butcher block island, noted the microwave oven, the blender, the espresso machine. The white countertops glistened.

  Beyond the sink and refrigerator, next to a window that led to the fire escape, there was an old mahogany telephone bench, where, as in a love seat, you sat to make and receive calls. She imagined Simon’s parents telephoning the New York Times Sunday Magazine to come and photograph the apartment, the Times running a sidebar featuring one of Simon’s poems. In death, as never in life, he might, with enough luck and hype, join some of those poets whose reputations, he argued, had been inflated by suicide: Plath, Berryman, Sexton, Jarrell.

  She moved to the bedroom, imagined that she was walking across the sleeping bodies of hundreds of Angora cats. Simon’s desk, a wide rectangle of golden oak, was at the far end of the room. The bed itself, between her and the desk, was, to her surprise, queen-sized, covered with a quilt, the quilt stained in deep parallel bands of purple, vermillion, cobalt blue. She moved to the desk.

  A velvet-encased box-IN MEMORY OF JANE FOGARTY inscribed upon its cover—waited dead center, an electronic typewriter to its left, two volumes to its right: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. H. Auden. She sat in Simon’s chair, untied the lacing of the case, looked at the title page. Once, during her junior year abroad, she recalled, she had pretended to be wealthy, had sat for two luxurious hours in a fancy London art gallery, opening such boxes, going through Flemish engravings.

  She looked beyond the desk, to the fire escapes on the backs of facing buildings. She closed her eyes, thought of Dutch landscapes, of low horizons and wide vistas, saw the land slip downward so that there was nothing in the frame but sky. She could enter that sky with Simon, were he to trust her enough. If he could have clos
ed his eyes and let himself fall into the white space, believing that she would never let him fall all the way—if he could have learned fully to depend on her until he could depend upon himself…

  “We knew you’d be here.”

  She turned.

  “That’s her, officer. Jane Fogarty—the lady we told you about.”

  “She told me she was his sister and that he gave her the key. I don’t know nothing else.”

  Simon’s father held up a camera, took her photograph.

  The police officer moved forward, spoke to her about her rights, about trespassing, about pressing charges. Jane saw other people standing in the doorway, to either side of Mr. and Mrs. Pearlstein, assumed they were Simon’s older brothers and sisters. She saw children. Simon’s nieces and nephews?

  “And I’m Samuel Axelrod, Dr. Fogarty—Mr. and Mrs. Pearlstein’s attorney.”

  “I’m sorry, darling,” Mrs. Pearlstein said. Mrs. Pearlstein touched the hem of her skirt, turned in a half circle, like a young girl. She touched the quilt. There were tears in her eyes. “Where did he get the money?”

  “You’ve never been here before, have you?” Jane said.

  “Don’t answer her,” Simon’s father said.

  “It’s like magic, being here,” Mrs. Pearlstein said. “That I should live to see the day my son had an apartment like this. When he was a boy he always helped me clean. He scrubbed the kitchen floor. One time he scrubbed the oriental rug and I yelled at him because it was so hard to get the Ajax out. He asked for the rug when he moved out of the hospital.”

  The police officer had his pad in hand. Jane stared at the black leather holster that held his revolver, at the handcuffs that dangled from his belt. The children were laughing at her. She counted: there were nine of them. She wanted to tell them about the note Simon sent, with the policy—how he had mistyped a word, writing that he had attacked the policy to the note when he meant attached.