Envy (4 page)

5

Will waits for his father at Molyvos, a Greek restaurant in midtown with a tiled floor and walls the color of terra-cotta. It's not the quietest place, but the lunchtime crowd has started to thin, and the layout makes for a lot of small corner tables, a sense of privacy if not calm. Will prefers to have his back to the wall, but he takes the chair and saves the banquette for his father, who gives his shoulder a hello squeeze before he slides in.

“So,” he says. “How's Carole? Sam?”

“They're good. Sam's loving this crazy tai kwon do class we put her in. Spends hours bowing to herself in the mirror. Carole's working too many hours—big surprise. There's some sort of grievance developing between the union and the district, but her position probably won't be affected by whatever changes are made. If any changes are made.”

“So she did sign the contract?”

Will nods. In addition to her private practice, Carole has recently taken a job with District 15, screening children for speech disorders. Four mornings a week, she administers diagnostic tests at either P.S. 321 or P.S. 282 in Park Slope, or at P.S. 8, a progressive elementary school in Brooklyn Heights. No retirement package, but benefits that include health insurance at a rate much more affordable than what he can get through NAAP.

Will waves the waiter away. “We need a few minutes,” he says. He points at a book in his father's upper-left-hand pocket. “What's that?”

His father pulls out a paperback copy of
Frankenstein
and asks Will if he's read it.

“A long time ago.”

His father frowns. “I wasn't expecting it to be so sad,” he says, thumbing through the pages. “I'd stop, but you know how I am. Can't walk out of a bad movie. Can't cancel a trip to the beach because rain's forecast.”

“Where are you?” Will asks him when he doesn't look up from the book. “What part?”

The two of them meet once a month, just to see each other, keep up. Sometimes they talk about books they've discovered, movies they've seen, and Will is often surprised by his father's choice of reading material. Last month it was
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“Just finished volume two,” his father says, and closes the book. “The monster has killed Frankenstein's son. And he's requested a female companion as hideous and deformed as himself, so that he can make love to a creature that won't turn away from him in revulsion.” Will's father closes his eyes for a moment. “Isn't it curious that such a tragic figure would have become, a hundred years later, a kind of joke? A hulking, green bungler with big boots and bolts in his neck. A figure of derision. Not capable of an act as focused as a hateful, vengeful murder.”

“Why are you reading it?”

He shrugs. “I don't know. I was in the bookstore, looking through the classics because, you know, I skipped so many. I picked it up, put it back on the shelf, ended up coming back to it when nothing else caught my eye. Something about the cover, must have been.” He holds it up, but the picture's too small for Will to see clearly from across the table, and his father hands it to him. It's a reproduction of a painting—six people gathered around a table and above them, on a pedestal, a white bird trapped inside a glass globe. Will turns the book over to read the fine print on the back cover. “A detail from ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, ' a painting in the National Gallery,” he tells his father. No date is given for the work, and Will has never heard of the artist, Joseph Wright. The bird is caught in an unnatural position, one wing extended, perhaps broken, and a tube attaches the sealed glass globe to a sinister-looking apparatus. The whole scene is lit dramatically so that a flood of yellow light picks out certain details and leaves others in darkness, as in a crucifixion by Caravaggio, for example.

“Doves usually represent the holy spirit, don't they?” Will asks his father.

“Guess so,” he says. “Distressing, seeing an animal trapped like that.” The waiter returns and Will's father points to a line on the menu. Will leans forward, trying to see what he's chosen.

“What are you getting?” he asks him.

“Dolmades?”—
dole
maids
—“Is that how you say it?”

Will shrugs. “Grape leaves,” he says. “With rice inside and something else, I'm not sure what.”

Across the table, his father is patting the many pockets of his sportsman's vest as if to remind himself of their contents, a gesture that has become habitual, even compulsive. Once he'd sold his veterinary practice and discarded his lab coats, he created what is in effect a new uniform: the khaki vest with numerous pockets, all of which he fills; wide-wale, navy blue corduroy trousers; and a fishing hat that looks like an upside-down flowerpot. The hat might be funny on another man—on anyone but his father—and Will has himself to blame for the vest. After he complained to his mother that he and Carole were receiving too many of what they'd begun to refer to as his father's “booty calls,” his mother bought the vest so his father wouldn't have to carry his cell phone in the back pocket of his trousers, into which he'd jam the thing and then sit on it while driving, inadvertently putting pressure on whatever button he'd programmed to speed-dial Will's home number. Whoever picked up would hear the thrum and whoosh of highway travel punctuated by random throat clearings and sometimes the strains of whatever song was playing on the local oldies station. “Dad!” Will would yell. “DAD!” But his father never heard the tiny voice coming out from underneath him, and once Will had answered the phone, he found it difficult to hang up and sever the connection. Though his father was oblivious to his phantom presence in the car—or perhaps because he was oblivious— there was an unexpected intimacy in having been summoned to ride along with him, invisible and undetected, returned to his ten-year-old self, happy to be with his father, no matter how workaday the errand.

“So,” Will says to him after the waiter has left, “I talked with Mom.”

“Oh,” his father says. “And?”

“She told me it's that woman you met at the gallery. The one who bought all those prints.”

“Yup.”

“You're living with her?” Will asks.

“I like the city.”

“I didn't ask you how you felt about New York. That's not—”

His father smiles. “I know.” Silver hair and laugh lines have made Will's father improbably handsome, more so than either of his much younger sons, more than when he himself was younger and women already found him irresistible, so that they'd linger in the exam room, schedule appointments for healthy animals, drop by the clinic with questions about dewclaws or ear mites or housebreaking, whatever they could think of. Will remembers his mother being good-humored about this, but then, his father hadn't given her reason to be jealous, not back then. Or at least he hadn't as far as Will knew.

His father plays with a rubber band on his wrist. “I spend a few nights in town, then go back home.”

“What about Mom?”

“She's busy enough that she doesn't seem to take much note of where I am.”

“Is that what this is about? You feel like she's not paying attention to you?”

“She's not. But that's not what this is about.” The waiter sets their plates before them, and his father picks up his fork. “Your mother and I have been married for nearly fifty years,” he says. “You don't think we've paid attention to each other the whole time, do you?”

“I guess I'm just trying to figure this out—what it means.”

“Does it have to mean something? I like spending a few nights a week in the city. I like spending time with Lottie.”

“Lottie?”

“Charlotte.”

“She's good company?” Will says. “What do you talk about?”

“Nothing much. We rent movies. DVDs. She has a good setup. Big screen. Like a little theater, almost.”

“She's rich, Dad,” Will says. His father nods, chews. “But that can't be—” Will is suddenly aware that he's pinching the skin over his Adam's apple, pulling at it absentmindedly as he does sometimes while concentrating, especially on something that bothers him. “There must be something else,” he says.

His father looks at him, raises his eyebrows. “There is.”

“Oh, God,” Will says. “Don't tell me this is about sex.”

“I didn't introduce the topic.”

“It is about sex?”

“Will,” his father says. He puts his knife and fork down and leans forward over his plate. “I take it your mother told you I was having an affair. Doesn't that imply that it's about sex?”

“But . . .”
You're seventy-four,
he was going to say, his mind already jumping to Viagra, and then to one of his patients, only two years older than Will, who uses a cocktail of Viagra and Cialis, each prescribed by a different physician, neither of whom knows about the other or that the man doesn't even have a problem with sexual performance. “My happiness,” the patient had said when Will challenged him, “is predicated on my getting this reward. The only time I feel really good, really alive, is when I'm getting laid. And everything I do, all the effort I put into my career, my wife, my kids—it's all about earning my right to have relations with as many ladies as possible.”

“As many as possible,” Will repeated. The man nodded.

“I feel okay about that,” the man said. “I work hard. I couldn't work any harder. I feel I'm entitled.” He looked at Will. “Who's getting hurt?” he demanded, and then he answered himself. “No one, that's who.”

Across the table, Will's father is smiling. “Will,” he says, “I'm not asking for your permission, or your advice, or congratulations. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about you. How's work?”

Will shakes his head. “I have a problem,” he says.

“Yeah? What sort?”

“I'm not sure. I'm trying to figure it out.” His father tilts his head to one side, frowns.
Come on,
the expression says,
get to the point.
Will draws a deep breath. “For the past month or so, every time I'm in session with a female patient, I end up, I don't know, having this, uh, physical response to her. It's weird. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.”

“Physical meaning sexual?” his father asks, and Will nods.

“As if she were the most desirable woman on earth, and I the most sexually starved man. Makes no difference what she looks like.”

“Huh,” his father says. “So what do you do?”

“What do I do? Nothing, of course.”

“Not with your patient. I mean, what do you do about dealing with the problem?”

“Check in with Daniel, I guess. I've made the appointment.”

“Daniel, your what's it called, trainer?”

“Training analyst,” Will says. “Basically, the mandate is that any time an analyst experiences feelings that are inappropriate or that might compromise the relationship between him and a patient, he goes back to his own analyst. Whoever it is he sees when a situation like that comes up.”

“Countertransference,” his father says, nodding.

“Right. But countertransference is a neutral term. It isn't necessarily wrong or even untherapeutic. Just sometimes.”

“You see Mitch?” Will asks to change the topic. His father wrinkles his forehead in an expression of something that looks like apprehension. “On TV,” Will clarifies, and his father shakes his head.

“When was this?”

“Sunday last. CNN, I think. Some filler show called
People in the
News.
”

“Oh?” his father says.

Will nods, watching his expression. “Same old, same old.” His father doesn't answer, and Will frowns at him. “It still bugs me, you know it does, his turning his back on all of us. I can't square it. Coming after . . . after he was . . . well, after that toast at the rehearsal dinner.”

His father waves a hand through the air. “Let it go,” he says, as he does whenever Will drags Mitch into their conversations.
Let it go.
Let him go. Give it a rest. Do yourself a favor: let it go.
But how?

Will doesn't say anything, remembering his brother the summer they were at camp together in the Adirondacks, both of them thirteen, an age he associates primarily with the onslaught of wet dreams. He sees Mitch's long body moving underwater, white, ghostly, aimed toward the dock where Will was standing, his face breaking through the surface. He came up out of the water and onto the dock in one motion, already more graceful and at ease in water than on land. It was an all-boys camp they attended that summer, and some of the campers teased Mitch about his birthmark, a port-wine stain that colored more than half of his face purple, but it had been Will whom this angered. Mitch was stung, he must have been, but whatever pain he felt in the moment seemed to fade. Or rather, Mitch faded, he became increasingly vague and distant—in Will's memory it's as if he is out of focus, an outline blurring into the background—while Will seethed with rage he couldn't control. Like two people long married, he and Mitch had developed a tacit, if not unconscious, symbiosis, one in which Will bore their humiliation, both the shame of his twin's disfigurement as well as the imperative to respond to insult. For his part, Mitch represented their capacity for patience and longsufferingness. Superficially, he did.

That summer, Will got into fights on his brother's behalf and, after bloodying a boy's nose, was given formal warning by the camp director. A report of his misconduct was sent home to their parents, and in reparation for the nose, he'd been denied an afternoon of tubing on the river, instructed to spend those hours composing a letter of apology to the owner of the nose and another letter to the nose's mother and father. As he remembers it, he had to write about a dozen drafts of each before he was able to purge the letters of recriminations against the boy he'd punched, and it required an extraordinary act of will to actually form the word
sorry.
Then, not an hour after he'd presented the letters to the director, he overheard a kid call Mitch an ugly douche bag and, before he knew what he was doing, had attacked him. The camp director called their parents to ask that they pick Will up; he was expelled.