The German Money, page 17
“You saw her a lot. Do you think she was depressed?”
Holding her fork over her plate, Val hesitated, as if weighing the meaning of that word. “Your Mom was never Betty Crocker.”
“I know that, and I also know she wasn’t taking anti-depressants, but her doctor said he recommended them to her. So he must have seen some kind of change. Was she worse than she used to be?” Asking her, I could almost feel the weight of my mother’s occasional brooding silences, the way she could sit at the kitchen table ostensibly reading the newspaper but radiating a kind of dark helplessness, as if she were being swept into a maelstrom.
Val thought it over. “Your mother liked reading my reviews. I clipped them for her. But she couldn’t read my memoir, and something changed after it was published. She was proud of me, she said so, but I felt, oh, more distance between us after the book came out.” Val shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and her eyes clouded. “When I explained to her about the new book, and that I was going to interview Mrs. Gordon, who I met down in the lobby talking to your Mom—” she didn’t go on.
“Tell me,” I said.
Val leaned back from her dinner. She sighed, clasping and unclasping her hands. “I got the feeling she thought I was betraying her. That I was getting too close, almost forcing her to think about the War, to remember.”
Then she swept a hand across her face with the quick gesture you’d use to brush off cobwebs you’d stumbled into. “Your mother went through a lot, more than we’ll ever know. When your Dad got sick, it must have brought back the same sense of terror. I’m just guessing here, but it makes sense to me. She was losing everything again. I can’t imagine watching someone you’ve been married to drift out to sea like that, day after day, and you can’t stop it, can’t call them back, and can’t dive in after them. There’s no rescue.”
Val seemed tearful now and I wanted to get up, sit at her side and hold her. But I was afraid she’d think I was taking advantage of the moment, so I didn’t move. I just poured both of us another glass of wine as I saw our waitress headed over to do just that and see how we were. I waved her off.
Without looking at me, and in a very low voice, Valerie went on, “I know this is crazy, but when your mother died, I felt kind of guilty. What if my talking about the War—even though it wasn’t a lot, not a lot, really—what if that was bad for her heart? Maybe it was just one more thing that wore her down.”
“You think what you were doing helped kill her?” I wanted to laugh because it was so outrageous. My mother couldn’t have been that sensitive, that open to anyone’s influence, not even Valerie’s, though she seemed to have cared for Val more in life than for any of her own children. I hadn’t been able to keep the surprise from my voice, and Valerie bristled at it.
She shot back: “When you’ve suffered the way she did, how can anyone predict what has an impact and what doesn’t?”
“But your parents are fine, aren’t they? Your writing hasn’t hurt them, has it?”
She leaned forward, enunciating as clearly as if I needed to read her lips. “They—can—talk—about—it. Your mother kept everything inside. Even your Dad said that once. He had no idea what your Mom went through. She refused to tell him anything.”
Even to Dad. This amazed me. What she’d suffered had been so terrible it could never be expressed even to the man she’d been married to for over fifty years. To shape the obscenity in words was impossible. What could be so unimaginably terrible? Hundreds of people, thousands, had talked about the camps, written about them, been interviewed on film.
But then Val surprised me. “You know, your Mom was also getting forgetful. She used to tell me that she was afraid she’d end up like your father. I didn’t see it, but maybe she was really alert to the smallest change because the signs would have been familiar.”
We faced each other across the dreadful scenario of my mother not having died of a heart attack, but declining into incoherence like Dad, lurching from one loss of connection to another, until the woman she had been flickered and then went out, leaving a vacancy in the shape of a human being.
“The way she went was better,” I said reluctantly. But then I thought of how people talked about sudden death, calling it merciful or lucky or easy. All of those labels were crude.
“If I ever start to lose it like Dad, I’d kill myself. I won’t wait.”
Val didn’t flinch. “How would you do it?”
I picked an answer out of the air, but as soon as I said it, I sensed its perfect fit. “I’d drive out onto the highway, floor it, and smash into the back of a truck.”
“That’s a waste of a good car, isn’t it?”
I started laughing, despite myself. After fifteen years, I was having dinner with Valerie, who was even more lustrously beautiful than before, and I was flinging around images of death, flames, dismemberment. And she could still make me laugh.
“You’re right! I just got a new Grand Prix—it’s terrific!” As I raved about the car, I imagined the two of us in it, speeding up north from Ann Arbor, the sun roof open, Val’s hair fluttering around her head. Would Libby be there? I couldn’t picture anything other than a midget version of Val.
Val saw that she had me on a roll, and she didn’t let up. “Remember that joke in Playboy we loved about the woman who told a girlfriend she was all excited about going to the Grand Prix and the friend said, ‘Honey, first thing you should know is you’re pronouncing it wrong.’”
In the old days, I could be dark and despairing, riffing an emotional version of Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida and she’d undercut it with something, a remark, or a goofy face, hitting my gloom with the sunniness of Dr. Buzzard’s Savannah Band.
“You always could figure out how to lighten me up,” I marveled, wanting her to know I appreciated it.
“Monsieur,” she said in a passable French accent, “Some things, they do not change.” Her punctuating Gallic shrug was lovely, but I was suddenly hypersensitive again, wondering if she meant to be critical in saying “some things.”
And a comment she’d made before we were laughing suggested a question I had to ask. “Did my mother ever talk about suicide?”
Valerie nodded reluctantly. “She followed that doctor in your state. The one who used to do mercy killings. Jack Kevorkian?”
“Dr. Death.”
“Is that what they called him?”
I nodded and we told our waitress yes to coffee but no to dessert. She took away our dinners which I doubted either one of us had tasted.
“We used to talk about him a lot,” Val said.
I was envious. The few times a year at most when I spoke with my mother on the phone, we had exchanged platitudes.
“She thought he was a hero, and hated that he was being prosecuted.” Val looked so distracted, so open, I reached across the table and grabbed both her hands. She didn’t pull away. They were very warm, and I was flooded with the memories of sleeping next to her, how warm and fragrant her body had been, how wonderful it was to fit against her full round ass and wake up in the middle of the night, one hand having slid down to her crotch, and my cock pressing apart her legs.
Her eyes widened, as if she were picturing exactly what I was. I didn’t have to say it, but I did.
“I need you.”
She shook her head and slid her hands out from mine.
“Valerie, don’t you remember how good it was?” I hadn’t been her first lover, but soon into sleeping together, she had told me that our sex was the way James Baldwin described it in Another Country, one of those long slow train rides.
“I never forgot.”
“So? Last night you said I was desperate. I’m not. Not now. I love you.”
She seemed not to hear that, and seemed deeply disturbed about something. “The timing’s wrong. Talking about your Mom and dying and your Dad is really upsetting.”
“Then why not—”
“Because I don’t want to make love to forget.” She withdrew her hands, put them in her lap a little primly.
“How does that add up?” I asked. It was obvious we weren’t going to bed if we were starting to squabble about it, but I couldn’t stop myself from plunging off this particular cliff.
The coffee came but neither one of us reached for our cups.
“Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked.
“There is nothing else, not right now.”
“You’re unbelievable. You’re just as arrogant as Dina is.”
“Bullshit.”
“Absolutely. Maybe even worse than Dina. No wonder you two never got along.”
“Now you’re my therapist?”
“Therapy wouldn’t hurt you. Maybe you’d stop running so much.”
“Running from what?” I asked perversely, almost wanting her to dump on me, wanting her anger. It was some kind of connection at least, not as hot as sex, but electric just the same.
“Is there anything you haven’t run from? Me, your family, your past, your home, a real life. You should have seen your face when I mentioned Libby.You looked petrified. Hell, you’re even running from an inheritance. How crazy is that?”
She pulled some bills from her wallet, struggled into her jacket, and said, “You’re not a kid any more, but you still don’t know what the hell you want.”
“I want you!” I hissed, vainly trying to defuse the scene, aware that we were drawing prying looks from other diners. “Don’t go.”
But she did, and I thought I’d surely lost her for good.
In the cab up to Mom’s apartment, I mused how mysterious Val’s life had suddenly become. She had a daughter in—what?—first grade, second grade? Who was Libby named after? What kind of kid was she? How did she and Val interact? I couldn’t see any of it. And Val would have a world of connections with other parents or single mothers that was totally alien to me.
But then I wondered if Valerie could be more drawn to me than I hoped, maybe still in love with me. Maybe she was protecting herself as much as Libby by keeping her daughter away, keeping her from making a connection between us.
Then I forgot about Libby. I asked the driver to turn the radio off because odd moments and comments at dinner had started to crystallize for me. Val wanted me to go back to Michigan, to stop asking questions. Val and my mother had talked about assisted suicide. My mother’s doctor said she was depressed and he, too, had brushed me off. And Val had looked very troubled talking about Jack Kevorkian.
Everyone was telling me to go home, to stop asking questions. Hadn’t I sensed there was something wrong, without being able to pinpoint it? What if my mother had felt sure she was in the first stages of dementia and had committed suicide? With Val’s help, or Mrs. Gordon’s, the doctor’s, or all of them? They all wanted me to drop the questions, to move on or even go home—why?
The cab stunk of pine-scented air freshener, making me wonder if someone had puked in it recently, and something vibrated in the door like a drill, so that by the time we hit the West Side Highway I had a headache. Every now and then something loomed up at me with bleak significance: the heliport making me wish for escape; the aircraft carrier docked at the Intrepid Sea and Flight M9useum, which left me feeling dwarfed and weak; the garbage barges at the Department of Sanitation, perfectly symbolizing where I was.
Back at the apartment, I called Simon right away and poured out all my suspicions.
“Are you high?” he asked carefully.
“No!”
“None of it adds up, Paul. So Dr. Stein was rude to you. He’s busy, and you’re not a patient of his anymore. Assisted suicide is illegal.”
“It happens all the time anyway, and not just in Michigan.”
Simon spoke more firmly than usual, as if to snap me out of a dizzy spell. “If Mom killed herself, it’s none of our business.” He went on to say that it was her choice to leave us and leave a husband who didn’t recognize her anymore. “Could you blame her?”
I couldn’t sleep that night. I combed through her medicine cabinet to see if I could find anything she might have taken, but I had only the vaguest ideas about what kind of pills could kill you, and gave up anyway when I realized that my mother was intelligent enough to have covered her tracks. The bequest felt even more painful, when I considered the ugly possibility of my mother’s suicide, of her having brought on her death and my inheritance sooner.
I lay there in bed furiously jerking off in the hope it would tranquilize me, imagining Camilla riding me, but I kept thinking of Val. I’d ruined my chances with her by pushing her too hard to have sex, and then pushing her away when she said no. Dina was right, I was an asshole, I thought, as I burst like a geyser and fell asleep with my hands around my cock.
The phone woke me up and I staggered to it out in the kitchen. My mother’s lawyer was calling me back, and he was either on a commuter train or somewhere in traffic. I asked him if she had ever explained anything about the German money and why she was leaving it to me.
“Nope. Never. I just drew up the new Will after your father got sick, according to her instructions.”
His tone was dismissive and brusque. Once again, I was chilled by the New York rudeness I’d forgotten after my years in Michigan.
“What’s the problem?” he asked after I didn’t comment.
“It bothers me not to know why she left me all this money.”
“Are you saying you don’t want a million dollars—you got a problem with a million dollars?” He laughed scornfully and I thanked him for his time. Another dead end. Nothing was going to put my mind at rest.
I showered and made myself scrambled eggs in one of my mother’s old cast iron fry pans, gulping orange juice from the container as if I’d been crawling across a desert. Our mother hated when we didn’t use a glass and it felt good to defy even the memory of her disapproval. Standing there at the stove and eating the eggs out of the pan, I imagined calling Mom’s doctor back and asking if she had committed suicide. He’d tell me I was nuts and probably threaten to sue me. There was no point in calling him.
But I could ask Mrs. Gordon. I was suddenly convinced that she knew more about my mother than she’d been telling me.
“Another surprise!” she said a few minutes later when she let me in. “Wonderful!” I declined her offer of chocolate babka, but I accepted some coffee and we were soon in that overdone living room that was like a museum exhibit, in the same seats as yesterday.
“Your sister called me last night,” she said from her chair. “Not too late.”
“Dina called you? Why?”
“She wanted me to convince you to share your mother’s money that came from Germany.”
“What?”
Mrs. Gordon hushed me. “Shah, shah. Don’t make such a tsimmes from it.”
I was outraged and embarrassed, but Mrs. Gordon seemed amused.
“What did you tell her?”
“I got rid of her easy as pie.” She wiped her hands on each other with satisfaction. “I agreed with every little thing she said. With a girl like this, you don’t get nowhere by arguing. You say, Yes, darling, you’re right, and she feels better and stops hocking you a tchynick.”
I translated the Yiddish for myself: making a fuss. “That was smart,” I said.
“Listen, Dina told me a little once about this husband of hers and his family, so I feel sorry for her.”
Of course she could be sympathetic to Dina, she was an outsider and neutral. I doubted whether Dina had been even that open with our mother about Serge. She would have been afraid of a leaden “I told you so” or some other indictment. Dina hated to be wrong.
“How was your dinner with Valerie?” Mrs. Gordon asked brightly. “Such a lovely girl. She told me she was going out with you. She was very excited.”
Val had been excited, and I’d completely pissed her off.
“Not well,” I said, rising to go. Mrs. Gordon struggled up with her cane, but I told her I’d let myself out.
“I’ll bring you up some babka later,” I heard her call thinly from her chair as I let myself out into the hall and dragged my sorry butt up the stairs. What a loser. I had been right to speculate about Val’s renewed interest in me, but what had I done? I obsessed about the German money and my mother’s death. Cheerful conversation, guaranteed to make any woman fall into your arms, especially after a long absence.
How could I have been so misguided? Why didn’t I buy her flowers? Or surprise her by arriving at her apartment with a bottle of champagne? No, that would have been showy and excessive, just like pushing her to come home with me. I’d hoped that being together would spark something in her. If it had, I’d doused it with my stupidity.
And now I was even suspecting her of helping my mother commit suicide. From lover to killer—it had the earmarks of a movie on the Lifetime channel.
Wasn’t it time to give up and go back to what I called my life in Michigan?
Simon had left me a message while I was at Mrs. Gordon’s: “Dina flew down from Quebec. I’m picking her up at the airport and we’re coming over around noon. She didn’t tell me what’s up.”
More melodrama, probably.
I went out to Broadway to buy a New York Times, which was thicker than the national edition I sometimes read. But on the way back, I remembered my mother’s keys and stopped at Mrs. Gordon’s.
“Keys?” she asked vaguely, holding the door open and peering up at me as if I were a stranger. “What keys?”
“The set of keys my mother gave you for emergencies.”
She squinted hard, as if trying to make them appear in the air between us. “You know, doll, I’m not so sure where I put them, but I’ll look.” She smiled as if she’d actually found them, and I thanked her.
By the time I was done with the paper upstairs, Simon and Dina showed up. She was in a royal blue power suit and pumps, and her face was so tight she looked like she had a gun in the Chanel bag she was itching to use on me. I was angry, too, at both of them for never telling me that Valerie had a daughter. It was their fault, wasn’t it, that I’d been surprised at dinner, waylaid.
I wanted to say something mean to Dina like, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” but I settled for hello and just followed her into the living room. Simon met my eyes and shrugged.
