Envy (15 page)

but before they could change direction the prow struck one of those submarine rocks outlined in red on the lake chart in the kitchen. Scale, scale, Will thought. Had he never checked the scale? The lake must be larger than he'd known, much larger, the rocks farther from the shoreline.

As they capsized, there was a moment when Will and Luke touched. A part of his son glanced across Will's face, his thigh, perhaps, because his torso and arms were covered, and Will has the distinct memory of bare skin warm and smooth against his mouth, like a violent kiss, an indelible instant to which Will has returned again and again—how many times, he wonders, were he to add up all the waking and dreaming moments in a year? Say an average of ten per day, times 365 days, times three. 10, 950. And yet ten seems to him a fair, even conservative, estimate. The rate having decreased from fifty or maybe even a hundred times a day in the first weeks and months to now, when occasionally a day passes without his revisiting the accident. Progress, he thinks, when he notes such a day, the note being itself a reference, but secondary.

“Not direct,” he reports to Daniel. “And this is good. I know it's good, it's right, it's what Luke would want. But”—he stops until he's able to speak again. “It's . . . it's as though I've abandoned him.”

“Will,” Daniel says. “Will. Can you not counsel your own best self as you would a patient? Can you not be grateful for whatever resilience you possess?”

They surfaced on opposite sides of the Sunfish—at least Will thought they did. Even without his glasses—he'd lost them when they capsized; he wasn't wearing the Croakies Carole had bought him, the elastic strap that might have kept them on—he could see Luke's orange life jacket in the water just beyond the boat, and he swam for it, afraid Luke had been knocked out, because he couldn't see him kicking and he didn't answer when Will shouted his name.

As he swam he reviewed the basics of CPR for children. Check for breathing, check for pulse—it could take him as long as five minutes to get him to the shore, then, if—God forbid—if there wasn't a pulse, if he didn't breathe, please God don't let that happen. But if, oh God, if it did, then onto his back on a flat surface, lift his chin, tilt his head, open his mouth. Check for an obstruction in the airway— no more than a minute's grace by then; he would make it enough, there wasn't a choice. Pinch the nose closed and breathe into the mouth, lips sealed around lips, and look to see that the chest rises with each breath. Then find the right spot: two fingers' width above the xiphoid process, and with the heel of his hand on that part of the sternum—never press on the xiphoid process itself, a rib could tear away from the notch of cartilage, it could puncture a lung—he'd push down, gently and firmly, straight down, no more than an inch. Then release. Press and release. Press and release. Five compressions, five seconds apart, and another breath, a slow breath, just enough to see the chest rise.

But when he got to the life jacket, it was empty. Unbuckled. As was his habit, Luke must have undone it while his father was occupied with sailing the boat. Too clearly, Will could see his son, unconscious, sliding from the jacket's embrace, down below the surface, dragged by sweater and shoes.

“Luke!” He called the name over and over, and when he paused to breathe, he heard children, the antiphon of a distant game of Marco Polo. Marco? Marco? Then someone, far away, answering Polo.

It used to be, when Will thought about the accident, that he brought his hand to his mouth, not a gesture of shock or even grief but an attempt to conjure the sensation of flesh glancing off his lips. At times he did this over and over, not purposefully—he was never really conscious of the act and, on occasion, performed it in public— on the subway, sometimes, or while listening to someone on the other end of the phone. Once, at a dinner party, Carole pulled him aside to tell him to stop. It disturbed people, she said, and not without reason. “I know what you're doing, but they don't,” she whispered.

There was a dog on the shore, and the dog was barking. A man came out of a house and called to the dog, but the dog wouldn't come. The man yelled,
Nine-one-one, nine-one-one,
a message for him, Will assumed, a question.
Yes! yes!
he yelled back, and the man disappeared; presumably, he'd gone inside to dial.

It was more than an hour before anyone called Carole. Later, she told him she'd seen the rescue boat cross from one side of the lake to the other, and when the phone rang she was watching from the dock. She was wondering what had happened, and to whom.

15

Will buzzes in his three o'clock—that is, he buzzes in someone he thinks is his three o'clock but, as announced by her distinctive, staccato ascension of the uncarpeted stairs, it's the girl. It's been three weeks since he terminated treatment with her—since he told her what she has not accepted. Instead she's hounded him with messages and voice mails, some polite and beseeching, a few bordering on abusive. She's even called his home number, spoken with Carole.

“You have to leave,” he tells her now. “I'm expecting a patient.”

“I have to talk to you.”

Will inhales deeply, lets the breath out through his nose. “My— we don't have anything to talk about. We are no longer engaged in—”

“No,” she says. “You don't understand. I need to talk to you. Please.” The look on her face is one of what appears to be genuine desperation.

“Have you contacted either of the people to whom I referred you?” he asks her.

“No. No, I—”

The buzzer buzzes, and Will pushes a button by the light switch to release the lock downstairs. “My three o'clock,” he says. “You have to leave now.”

“I'll wait,” she says.

His patient starts up the stairs; the girl starts down; as they pass each other, the patient averts her face in the usual manner of an encounter at the analyst's office: deferential, blind. As Will closes the door behind her, he sees that the girl is sitting on the landing downstairs, rummaging in her backpack.

When he looks out his door at 3:50, she's reading.

“What can I say to help you understand that we cannot continue to work together?” he says as soon as his patient has left the building.

“Please,” she says, coming up the stairs. “Give me another chance. I don't know why I pulled that shit. I know I behaved badly, but I promise nothing like that will ever happen again.” Will watches her face as she speaks. Either she's sincere, or she's an actress with genuine talent.

“It's best—best for you—to begin over again, with someone else.”

“I don't want to! I can't. I swear I can't. Please!” Will doesn't answer. If only she'd stop saying “please” like that. Mitch could always get him to do anything if he just said “please” enough times. Will's impulse—his determination—was always to even things up between the two of them.

“Please forgive me,” the girl says, striking at this vulnerability with the accuracy of a mind reader. “We can start over.”

“Our professional relationship has been compromised. Compromised in a way that would lessen my effectiveness in treating you.”

“But why can't what happened be part of what we talk about? Wouldn't that be, like, useful? Useful in figuring out what makes me do these things?” Will doesn't answer her, and she throws herself onto the couch. She's wearing a pair of trousers that are, he guesses, a kind of commentary, or protest. Made of camouflage material in which the army greens and browns have been replaced with bright pinks and purples, their legs are absurdly wide, each one sewn from enough fabric to upholster a chair. “I don't get why you're making such a big deal about this,” she says. “You act like I stabbed you or something.”

Sitting cross-legged, the girl takes off her pullover the way a little boy might, by grabbing the scruff of its neck and dragging it over her head, making her hair crackle with static. Underneath is one of those sleeveless undershirts commonly known as wife-beaters. Her bra, visible through the sheer fabric, looks like the top of a bikini; it's striped blue and white. She reclines, arms behind her head.

“Please do not lie on my couch.”

“Because I'm not your patient?”

“Yes.” Will turns his back on her, and on the little surge of panic he feels, dismissing it as claustrophobia. Across from his office, someone turns on the light in the dance studio. A few students enter and begin stretching. Will twists the Lucite wand that adjusts the blind; he turns around to tell her once and for all to go, good-bye, good luck, but what he sees stuns him into silence.

“Put on your clothes,” he says as soon as he's recovered his voice. “Put them on now.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he says. “Or you'll have to leave without them.”

“What are you going to do? Drag me out into the street? That doesn't seem like such a great idea, actually. I mean, all I have to do is start kicking and screaming, right?”

Will opens his mouth, then closes it. If she screams, if she accuses him of assaulting her, then what? He has no witness to prove otherwise. She takes a compact from her backpack and consults the mirror within, considering her reflection. Paralyzed, he watches her. She's still young enough to be caught instantly by her own reflection, caught and consumed. She stares into her own face, licking her finger and rubbing at the makeup smudged under one eye, and Will—as is his tendency when threatened—responds by hyperanalyzing the situation, sure that in the moment she's forgotten him.

Wouldn't that be the appeal of an affair with a much younger woman? All those times she didn't understand or even notice you, and the attendant freedom from having to work constantly at interpreting pregnant silences and meaningful glances, all the weary, oft-traversed terrain of marital responsibility. And it's not just Will. It's the same with every patient, every marriage: an unlimited number of dialectics leading to the same disagreement. To each couple its own insoluble, often inarticulable conflict. If you discounted lust—which would, of course, be a mistake—the key motivation for infidelity might be the chance to bed a woman who didn't engage reflexively in the fight you'd fought so often before, the Rome of every conjugal union, the one to which all quarrels lead.

And what's his own? The psychic equivalent of an earthquake or tidal wave, Luke's death revised the landscape of his marriage, shoved aside the mountains he and Carole had made of molehills, filled in the old quicksands and quagmires and rabbit holes. And, yet, how long did it take, really, before he and Carole began to redraw their respective maps, excavating paths they used to travel? No matter how a fight begins, still it always arrives at a point that reminds Will of one of those Starship
Enterprise
doors that slide quickly and silently shut, separating one of the
Star Trek
crew from whoever is on the other side.

What is it with him? Why is he subject to these damningly juvenile references, consistently failing to produce the Proustian allusions such situations demand? Or forget Proust, he'd take Updike, Chandler, Norman Mailer. He would, except that his wife does happen to remind him of Dr. Spock: evolved, intelligent, a being of one mind, never two (let alone more), not quite, it would appear sometimes, human. And yet, those redemptive glimpses of emotion, of her poise breaking down every once in a while into irrationality. As for Will, prey as he is to lust, he's stuck being Captain Kirk, whose gold uniform always made him look that much more like a man losing a battle with his appetites. That insatiable, wolfish squint. With Carole it's only so far and no farther. Will is scripted as the one who knocks; she as the one who may not answer. He leans forward, she leans back.

“What is it with you?” Carole says if he tries to articulate this dynamic. “You invent problems that don't exist. You're a conflict junkie.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. You absolutely are. It must be recreational for you. Or you can't stop working—you come home but you're still at work. Your head's still at work. Righting wrongs. Except in our case there isn't one. There's only what you imagine as a problem.”

On and on they go. They might never stop but for exhaustion, and sometimes it strikes Will that this might be the glue of marriage, not just his but everyone's: both partners continue to show up for battle, helpless to resist it. Perhaps even eager for the comfort of it, the familiarity: this is our fight we're fighting; this is who we are; this conflict defines us; it makes us different from the rest.

If self-knowledge is the goal of psychotherapy, identity must be its most intractable enemy. When Will fails a patient, when he can't move a person toward a more livable life, it's often because that patient refuses to relinquish his or her neuroses, even costly and dangerous ones. How can she, if whatever it is—anorexia, OCD, agoraphobia, pyromania—is part of what that patient relies on to recognize herself; if the illness is what gives the individual a means of picking her small self out of the terrifying, endless mass of indiscriminate humanity?

Will looks at the girl looking at herself. She may not be drop-dead beautiful, but her body comes close, very close. She snaps her compact closed and tosses it onto the pile of her discarded clothes. “What's the matter, Dr. Moreland?” she says, taking a step toward him. “Pussy got your tongue?” She's close enough now to put her hand on his crotch. “See?” she says. “I told you you liked me.” Deftly, she unbuckles his belt, unbuttons and unzips his fly, and puts her hand against his cock, feeling how hard he is through his shorts before pushing and pulling his trousers down, underwear along with them.

Will stares at her breasts, at what strikes him as their almost impertinent defiance of gravity, the delicate color of her small, flattish nipples. Carole, by contrast, has big, ruddy nipples, sexy but in a very different way. She's nursed two children for a total of more than four years and in doing so reformed her breasts into flesh that is deferential, not pert but self-sacrificing, at once modest and unselfconscious. They're mammalian, he supposes; their attraction rests in the fulfillment of nature rather than in the conceit of beauty for a be-holder. Although, in the end, isn't it just that the girl is young, Carole not so young, a simple animal fact that he has convoluted into a thesis?

Her legs look even longer unclothed, and her pubic hair has been barbered into a narrow strip. “Brazilian,” she says, seeing him look there.

“Brazilian?” he repeats. He hears his own voice as if it's been brought to him long-distance, in the days before fiber-optic cable, delayed as if it were an echo.

“Yeah. A Brazilian wax. You know? As in J sisters?”

“Jay sisters?” Maybe he really can't talk anymore, only parrot one or two words.

“Yeah. J as in the letter
J.
I thought everyone in this city knew about the J sisters. Where the bikini wax was, like, invented? At least for Norteamericanas.” She lifts an eyebrow at him.

“Skip Brazil,” she says when he still hasn't replied or moved so much as an inch from where he's standing. “Think of it as your landing strip.” She sits and pats the couch next to her. “Why don't you take a step closer because . . . well, your cock's big, but no one's is that big.” She takes him in her hand, guiding him forward. “Cold hands, warm mouth,” she says, and then he's on his back on the narrow, black leather couch not even seeing the ceiling, not even seeing, eyes open and blind because of what she's doing. Between his legs, with her teeth, gently—gently enough—she's nibbling along the shaft of his cock, her tongue hot and slippery and all over the glans, the root of it in a tightening ring of thumb and forefinger and—“You just have to . . . you have to stop,” he forces himself to say, “just—stop. Please. Don't move your mouth. I . . .” But instead, she picks up speed, tightens her grip, and he comes fast, feeling it up to his neck, those last strokes or licks or sucks or whatever it is that she did, every atom of him concentrated into one accelerating charge. “Oh God, oh Jesus, oh—” and Christ, she doesn't break stride, doesn't even flinch. She's a swallower, heaven help him. Different, not better, just different from Carole. His wife's less predatory, but that's just a—

“Okay, now we fuck.” Will picks his head up to look at her, back at work lest he get soft. She's keeping the blood in his cock with some twenty-first-century tantric vacuum trick. Not a little-girl pout, after all, he—

“Check,” he pants. “Check—”

“Check what?” She sounds irritated by the interruption.

“Door.”

She stands to let him up from the couch. “I think we better get down on the rug, anyway,” she says after he's ascertained that the door is, in fact, locked. She points at the couch. “Too narrow,” she says.

As soon as he lowers himself to the floor she takes his cock in one hand and plants the other in the middle of his chest and pushes until he's flat on his back. Less than a minute in her feverish mouth and he's hard again, as hard as before. She straddles him and starts moving, back arched so that her pelvis is tilted into the shaft of his cock and going at it hard enough to make him ache. “Do I have the right tempo?” she asks, clearly uninterested in his response to a question that's just knee-jerk sexual etiquette, no more personal than saying bless you to a sneezing stranger. He watches her face, her eyes open and glassy, preoccupied by what she's doing to herself with her fingers.

She comes again and then once more, each time arching her back to pump him until it hurts. He searches her eyes, finds them empty. Not that he'd expected affection, or any other emotion, just some indication of pleasure. But she looks businesslike.

“Your turn on top,” she says, “but only if you promise not to come. Not yet. I might want to go back to this. And I don't want to skip all fours.” She lies on her back and slowly guides him into her. She's unbelievably wet and tight and impossibly, almost unnaturally, slippery.

“Astroglide,” she says, reading his expression.

He stops moving. “What?”

“I used some—a lot, actually—while your attention was, let's say, elsewhere.”

“A lot of what?”

“Astroglide?” She lifts the last syllable into a question: You're so last season / last year / last century that you've never heard of Astroglide?