Must Read Well, page 9
I had intended to take a walk in the Village before going uptown, to try to think through the revelations of the morning, but the cold was so bitter that I soon fled into a coffee shop on 14th Street. My head churning with questions about how the “episode” would continue, I ordered a cup of mint tea and let it steep till it got cold while I daydreamed about the future. If Weil’s affair went far enough, it would make a story sufficiently sensational to have Professor Probst and her colleagues on my review committee sitting up in their beds to read all night. Of course, there was the non-disclosure agreement, but as I finally remembered the tea, it occurred to me that even that document had a bright silver lining: If the liaison had been known to the public, there would have been no need for such a precaution. Whatever Weil and Morris’s story was, it was mine.
I paid my check, re-bundled up, and went down into the subway. Thankfully, my thoughts turned to the less complicated subject of the class I was about to teach. Today we would be discussing the start of second-wave feminism. I had assigned selections from The Second Sex and the whole of The Feminine Mystique. This was my favorite unit in the course and, naturally, a topic I enjoyed talking about. The whole course was one I enjoyed. But I was always glad to teach any class sent my way when I was a doctoral candidate. Not only did I love the job and need the money, teaching kept me inside the university. I knew too many doctoral students who had drifted out of orbit and eventually let their dissertations float away like children’s lost balloons.
Class was good that day, yeasty with the subject matter and full of sparks even though all but two of the male students said nothing, wary of putting a foot wrong. I handed back papers from the week before and reminded them to read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for Friday; I had put it on the syllabus to help frame their understanding of the anti-war movement.
Then I visited the music library. Two biographies of Gregory Morris had been published, one in 1961, the second in 1980. The library had both and, feeling lucky to get my hands on them with so little trouble, I checked them out and went to my office to start reading them.
Though I had already been to my office on several occasions since the breakup with Tim, this time, for some reason, a tidal wave of homesickness inundated me as soon as I opened the door. If I had still been living with him, I’d have spurned the office and gone to my desk in our nice, warmly lit bedroom. But I wasn’t. I was sleeping at Anne’s. This small, dreary, crowded, institutional room, with its stingy window and tiny desks, was now the closest thing I had to a home.
I stood just inside the door, let my backpack and coat slide together off my shoulders, and collapsed cross-legged on the floor. There I burst into sobs—racking, heaving sobs, like a child’s, the kind where you can’t catch your breath between outbursts. I had cried more than once since Tim ditched me, but nothing like this. This was a volcanic, cheek-drenching, nose-streaming, chin-wetting, shuddering explosion.
After a minute or so, I had the presence of mind to reach up and lock the door behind me. Seemingly unable to move, I used my scarf to soak up the muck and muffle the noise, then let myself go again. My thoughts were not mostly of Tim but of how little sense of “home” I had, how few safe havens I’d ever had in this world. My childhood home was a place of fear, anger, and sorrow—sorrow was the nicest part—and my various college digs were mostly temporary and peopled with unwanted roommates. The dark, cockroach-infested studio on Broadway I’d given up to move in with Tim was the nearest thing I’d ever had to a home of my own. I felt very sorry for myself. It was an exhausting cry, a long one, and obviously much needed.
Finally spent, I took a few deep breaths and slipped across the hall to the bathroom to blow my nose, wash my face, gulp down some cold water. Then back to the office and, by degrees, to normal, or what passed for normal with me in those days. I had taken the biographies to my office rather than to my room in the Windrush because (surprise!) I feared that Anne might somehow find them if I kept them there and throw me out.
Again, I understood that my anxiety about such things verged on paranoia—Anne could hardly walk, let alone putter around in my room out of curiosity—but at the time, I was dominated by the conviction that a single misstep could prevent my ever earning my Ph.D. I look back at those days and envision myself playing an imaginary, human-sized game of pick-up sticks, in which everything, and everyone, leaned on everything else—a game in which one false move, one careless word, one too-broad smile might keep me from achieving the life I’d worked so long to create.
All that said, I want to mention that, paradoxically perhaps, it’s also true that I wasn’t fully conscious of what I was doing at that time. From the moment I recognized that Anne was the one who’d placed the ad on Craigslist, I moved through my days on a kind of autopilot, methodically taking the next action, then the next, toward my goal, hardly allowing myself to think—hardly even thinking of thinking—about the nature of those actions.
When I did think about what I was doing, I told myself that the end (memorializing and celebrating the importance of Anne Weil’s work—and, incidentally, earning my doctorate) justified the means (deceiving an infirm, half-blind, very elderly woman, day after day, in her own home). I was honoring her, not preying upon her. But mostly I did not think. Mostly, I just moved forward, no more reflective than a fish.
All this was very far from my usual thinkety-thinkety-overthinkety state of mind. The only other period in my life I can compare it to is when I applied for college. Miss Hart, God bless her, encouraged me to aim high, go for the best education I could. But I told her that I had to go to school somewhere close to Fleissport, that I couldn’t leave my mother on her own, that she might start using again, or hook up with an abusive guy like my father, or OD, or even purposely kill herself.
“You’d be surprised what you can do when you have to,” said Miss Hart. She also reminded me of a central tenet of Alateen and its allied twelve-step programs—that we cannot control the actions of others, only our own. (Miss Hart had confided in me by now that she, too, grew up in an alcoholic household.) So, like a person sleepwalking, I filled out application after application to schools across the country, knowing that I could not leave my mother but knowing also that I would have to leave my mother so I myself could flourish. Even when I wrote back to Columbia to accept their offer, the cognitive dissonance continued. Not until late July did the numbness wear off—the numbness that had allowed me to approach half a dozen schools located hundreds, or thousands, of miles from home.
My mom was an intelligent woman, but not an educated one. She had dropped out of high school after her sophomore year, and her youthful drinking and drug use had no doubt undermined her intellect. Not to mention the years she spent being smacked around by her husband. When I finally told her my plans, her feelings were mixed, to say the least. We were sitting at our kitchen table on a Friday evening, a few slices of the pizza she’d brought home for dinner cooling in the box between us. At the words “admitted to Columbia,” she jumped up and ran around the table to kiss me, tears of joy in her eyes. Then she said, “We have to celebrate!” and pulled a bottle of vodka out of the freezer. I declined a glass; she insisted. She drank; I pretended to drink. By bedtime, she was hammered and wretched, alternating between crying jags and shrieks of what sounded like physical pain, as if I were ripping myself bodily from her (as indeed I was), asking the Lord Jesus (usually no particular friend of hers) how she could survive this, and me why I was doing it to her. Nothing I said had any effect. In the end, I left her, still shrieking, and went next door to sleep at Petra’s.
And then, four years later, a policewoman called to tell me she was dead.
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I opened the older of the two biographies first. It had been written while Morris was at the peak of his performance career. The author had chosen his subject out of admiration, and he painted a decidedly rosy portrait of the man. Still, it included details of Morris’s early life unmentioned in the articles I’d found online: the swiftness and ease with which he learned English and acclimated to America, the role he played in childhood as middleman between his parents and the family’s new world.
Like Anne—like me—he was an only child. His gift for music, obvious to his mother and father even before they emigrated, was encouraged when he was in second grade by a teacher who heard him playing a piano in the school auditorium during lunchtime. (His Miss Hart!) And so on: sacrifices the family made to pay for his music lessons, a growing recognition of his potential by his teachers, the scholarship Juilliard awarded him, and, soon enough, his emergence onto the stage. All the same, Anne painted a much more vivid and particular picture of the man.
After a while, I got hungry and took my book down to Tom’s Diner, on Broadway, where I sat at the counter and splurged on an omelet with rye toast, hash browns, and coffee. Around seven-thirty, the biography safely returned to my office, I took the train down to the Village, entering 10A just before eight o’clock.
Again, I had hoped Anne might be profiting by my absence to make use of her living room. But I found it dark and empty, the lights of New Jersey sparkling in the black night outside the windows. The dining room and kitchen were also dark. As I entered the corridor, though, I saw that Anne’s bedroom door was open. Was she in there? Where else could she be? She had to be somewhere in 10A. From what Marta had told me, she made only brief, infrequent forays out of doors, and never alone or at night.
A small, hopeful flame licked up inside me. Maybe we’d run into each other as we rattled around the apartment later. But the flame was snuffed when I noticed the closed study door. From the bills and other mail there, I knew she sometimes used that room, but I had managed to forget this. Now I went to my own room to read and grade the two dozen papers my pupils had handed in that day. By the time I finished, the study door was open and Anne’s bedroom door shut. Lost in the wonderland of student thought, it appeared, I hadn’t even heard her thump by.
I climbed into bed early again and picked up Beyond Black. It was the last book Mantel published before Wolf Hall, and her powerful mind was in full sail when she wrote it. I was only thirty pages from the end, and it was a gift to me to be so deeply absorbed for a while in someone else’s imagination, but my eyes tired before I finished it and I closed them, letting the book drop beside me on the bed.
Despite the heaviness of my eyelids, however, I did not drift off to sleep. Instead, I lay restlessly awake, my head buzzing with speculation about the possible course of Anne’s liaison with Gregory Morris. I thought longingly of the glass-fronted cabinet just a few yards away. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself tiptoeing into the study. There I would pick up the nice, heavy, brass-handled magnifying glass, wrap it in my turtleneck sweater, and ever so quietly use it to shatter the bookcase panes.
I would toss all the journals into a garbage bag, grab my purse and coat, and disappear with them into the night. I even had a quick, Looney Tunes-style fantasy of sneaking up behind the dear old lady and conking her on the head with a giant wooden mallet. She would sink to the floor in a daze, flashing stars and tiny singing angels flying in a circle around her head, while I took the key to the Biedermeier desk from her pocket, unlocked the bookcase, then restored the key before she came around. At last, I drifted into a doze, only to wake up at 1:00 a.m.
I turned on my bedside light, finished Beyond Black (a great book; I would miss it), then turned the light off again, closed my eyes, and made myself count slowly to a hundred. I went through the alphabet naming towns that started with each letter (Eddystone, Flyspeck, Gettysburg …), repeated the exercise with women’s names, then men’s. I forced myself to listen again to my breathing. None of these tricks succeeding, I got up, pulled a sweatshirt over my pajamas, and headed to the kitchen to warm up a cup of milk.
A light was on in the living room, casting a yellow path through the archway into the dining room. I walked along it and found Anne, wrapped in her quilted robe, silver hair tousled, seated on one of the two velvet love seats. Her face was to the dark foyer, the back of her head to me. I cleared my throat so as not to startle her and softly said her name. I called her Anne, the first time I had called her by any name at all.
She turned to look over her shoulder. I had feared she would be displeased, would feel I was trespassing, but she smiled.
She took off her reading glasses and put on the now familiar tortoise-shell pair. “Can’t sleep?” she asked in her low, rich voice. “Come sit down.”
As I obeyed, taking a seat on the opposite sofa (whose springs, I was sorry to find, had sprung), she went on, “I wake up in the night quite often now, no matter when I go to bed. It’s the pain in my hips and shoulders that does it. I’ve run out of comfortable sides to sleep on. I need a cushion of air, like a hovercraft. Anyway, I get out of bed and spend a few hours reading.”
She lifted the Kindle in her lap. “My little friend,” she said. “The motel of the book world, but a godsend to me all the same. Why are you up? Or haven’t you gone to bed yet?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t seem to get to sleep tonight. I’m going to try some warm milk. Would you like some?”
“Thank you, but milk is one of the many foods I can’t tolerate anymore.” She smiled again, this time reminiscently. “My father once came home from a visit to a doctor and told me, ‘Dear, don’t get old.’ At the time, I was a little scandalized—what kind of thing is that to tell your child?—but I’ve never forgotten it, and now I see his point. Go get your milk.”
I hesitated before saying, “I could sit with you a while if you like. If I’m not interrupting your reading.”
“Not at all. Do join me—if you like,” she said, emphasizing the word “you.” She raised the Kindle again. “I’m reading a very long novel set in Ohio in the early 1900s, narrated by a young doctor who thinks he’s losing his mind. It’s one of those irritating books where the writer feels he must include every fact he learned while doing his research. I don’t recommend it.”
I took a deep, steadying breath before asking, “What kind of novels did you write? I mean, were they domestic stories? Family sagas? Topical, at all?”
She looked at me, cocked her head. “Don’t you have a computer?”
I felt myself start to blush. “I just haven’t—haven’t—” I stammered.
“Looked me up? No? How very twentieth-century of you.”
I thought she would feel insulted. Instead, she started to laugh. Laugh at me, is what it felt like.
“Honestly, I don’t find it very interesting to talk about myself,” she said, lightly but firmly enough to make my heart sink. All I wanted her to do was talk about herself. “Tell me a bit about you,” she invited. “Not that you must, of course. Only for a little conversation.”
With no choice but to oblige her, I said, “I’d be glad to. What would you like to know?”
I resettled myself, deliberately uncrossing my arms and legs to erase the defensive posture I’d reflexively taken. Had she somehow become suspicious of me? I told myself that only my guilty conscience would make me imagine that—and yet, why was she so definite about keeping the focus on me? What would make a person find it uninteresting to talk about herself? I wasn’t sure I’d ever met such a person. Despite my awareness that these thoughts were unbalanced, paranoid, I nevertheless awaited her questions uneasily.
“Oh, where you grew up, what your parents did, do you have a boyfriend. Whatever occurs to you.”
Like anyone over the age of ten, I have been asked questions about childhood many times. But unlike most people, I have put a good deal of thought into my answers. Sometimes, I’ve had a good solid upbringing in semi-rural Pennsylvania, my dad the local vet, my mom his childhood sweetheart. Sometimes, Dad owned a hair salon in our little town, where he was a barber and Mom a hair-dresser. Or he was a grease monkey (reasonably accurate) and she a librarian (wildly inaccurate, though she did read popular “women’s fiction” by the fistful).
As to how my childhood went, in some versions my family was still intact, still living in the house where I’d grown up. In another version, my dad had died of a heart attack when I was a kid. (Technically true: Cardiac arrest was the medical cause of his death.) Branching off from this account were two scenarios, one in which my mother had remarried and one in which she hadn’t. No matter the story, I was always an only child, usually the kind who longs for a sibling, but occasionally one of the other sort—the kid who feels lucky to get all the attention. ( Just writing that down made me laugh. You really, really do not want all the attention of a couple of addicts.)
Only to a very few people did I tell the truth—that both my parents used, and that both were children of alcoholics themselves. My dad had an eighth-grade education and worked, as I said, at an auto repair shop, when he worked at all. My mother worked as a dogsbody in a beauty shop, and from her paltry salary, she managed (usually) to buy us food, to pay our rent, utilities, and so on, and (always) drink.
I told Anne that my dad was a barber and that the part of Brookline where I grew up wasn’t the fancy part. It was safe, it was okay, but it was the other part. I left my mother a homemaker, though it made my stomach hurt to say it, so comfortless a home was she able to make for us. I spoke of both my parents as if they were still alive and well. My intention was to portray a wholesome, stable, working-class background, and I felt I succeeded. By now I’d learned enough about possible causes of blindness to be able to explain why my mother couldn’t read for herself: In her early thirties, a pituitary tumor had permanently damaged her vision. But the subject never came up.
