Pharmakon (16 page)

He waited until it was dark before he climbed aboard his rusted bicycle and began to pedal. It was a hot and windless night. The telephone wires sizzled. As the katydids sang, moths orbited the street lamps on velvet wings.

The Egyptian gates to Grove Street cemetery were locked. Casper hid his bicycle in some bushes on High Street and jumped the wall. What better place to test his emotional state, his ability to resist the pull of the gravity within him, than the grave of his loss? If he could face what could not be fixed, perhaps he had a chance.

A back copy of the
New Haven Chronicle
told him a graveside service for the Bouchard family had been conducted two days earlier. The cemetery was larger than he had expected, long rows of headstones in gray-and-pink granite, chiseled dates of birth and death, sometimes followed by beloved wife, husband, daughter, son. There were old-fashioned names like Jebediah and Lieselotte, and thirteen Townsends planted tight as tulips, families closer in death than in life.

Casper had already begun to weep when he saw the marbled angel on a plinth that bore no name, just “Son,” and under it “Born January 21st 1823, died the same.”

He wandered the stately marble orchard for more than an hour before he found Nina Bouchard. Her headstone was carved in the shape of an open book. Her epitaph was from Byron: “Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most/must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,/The Tree of Knowledge is not that of life.”

Casper started to read it aloud but could not finish. Braced for the worst, he waited for the realization that he had missed his one chance for happiness to sweep him back into his depression. But instead of the tidal wave of recrimination and self-loathing he expected, Casper was flooded with a comforting melancholia that bordered on ennui:
It’s tragic she died, but everyone here has
died. What about the kid that only lived a day? Everybody dies;
it’s a fact of life; it’s out of your hands, my hands.

What now made Casper sad and worried as he brushed away his tears at Nina Bouchard’s graveside was how close he had come to dying for her, dying for a girl he’d never said a word to. In the darkness of that graveyard Casper could now see clearly that she wasn’t the only girl in the world who read Heidegger. There were other “crazy smart people” in this world besides her and himself, and Casper’s only responsibility at that moment was to worry about himself. He’d never thought of life as a job, like putting books on library shelves, but that’s what it was. He began to think what Dr. Friedrich referred to as “healthy thoughts”—to stay alive, to make the most of things, to take advantage of good fortune when it befalls you, to change what you can and forget what you can’t. Like Dr. Friedrich said, “The past doesn’t exist.”

When Casper found himself wondering whether they buried Nina with or without her braces on, he felt a hiccup of guilt, which he quickly soothed by deciding that the next time he came to visit, he would bring her a bouquet of flowers. Ready to return to the world, Casper was looking for the shortest way out when he heard a match being struck behind him.

Whitney Bouchard had a cigarette in one hand and a pint of Old Crow in the other. He had on the same suit he’d worn to her funeral two days ago.

“Nina was the best, wasn’t she?” Whitney staggered slightly but did not slur his words.

The truth, as Casper had so recently realized, was that Nina was a complete stranger. The correct response to Whitney’s statement would have been “I didn’t know her.” But Casper had come to realize that it’s the living who are important. Casper nodded yes.

“Sorry I didn’t invite you to her funeral.”

“I didn’t expect it.” Casper was no longer stuttering.

“Should have invited you.” He took a pull off the Old Crow before he confessed, “She read me the note you gave her the night before. . . .” He spilled some bourbon on his lapel as he wiped a tear from his eye. “It meant a lot to her. Hell of a lot.”

“It did?”

“Stuff like that means the world to a girl. Especially a girl like Nina.”

“I’m glad.” He was.

“You’re the first guy who ever tried to pick her up. Braces, polio . . . most guys, shits like me, couldn’t see past that.”

“She was beautiful.” Casper smiled at the thought of her looking over her shoulder as she got into her Buick.

“You’re lucky, you’re smart enough to see what really matters, what’s inside.” Whitney took another pull of Old Crow and offered it to Casper. Casper shook his head no. He already felt intoxicated by the strangeness of their intimacy.

Casper only then noticed tears were streaming down Whitney’s face.

“God, I’m ashamed.” The sight of Whitney Bouchard, football hero, faux Hemingway editor of the paper, undergraduate Batman, weeping as helplessly as Casper had, elicited a joyous empathy in Casper. Though it was dark, Casper could see he wasn’t so different after all.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Whitney dropped his head on Casper’s shoulder. His breath smelled of vomit and sour mash. “I was embarrassed of her being a cripple, didn’t want her near me; I always made up excuses to leave her behind. She was alone so much.”

“She had Heidegger.”

“That’s something.”

“That’s a lot.”

“You’re okay, Casper.” He didn’t call him “Getsick.”

They walked back through the graveyard in silence, then helped each other up over the wall. Whitney insisted on giving him a ride back to the dorm as he got behind the wheel of his Packard. The bottle of Old Crow shattered on the pavement just before he slurred, “Maybe you’d better take the wheel.” Whitney passed out before Casper could tell him he had never driven a car . . . Of course, he’d seen people do it.

Key in the ignition, clutch, gas, brake . . . like so many things in life, it wasn’t as complicated as Casper thought. As the clutch popped and the car lurched down High Street, Casper caught his reflection smiling back at him in the rearview mirror. Incredible, but true—he was okay, Whitney was his friend, and he was driving a Packard into a parallel universe.

Friedrich had a different kind of journey ahead of him that evening, but it, too, was a kind of test. Dr. Winton had listened to her shrink and decided to begin demystifying her attraction for her collaborator by inviting Friedrich and his wife to a party she was giving that night. The invitation was for seven. It was five ’til. The babysitter they had never used before was late, and Nora was not only not ready to go out the door, she hadn’t even come out of the bathroom.

Freshly ironed shirt, new tie, blue suit just back from the cleaners, Friedrich loitered at the foot of the stairs, glaring at his watch and bellowing, “Nora, for crissake, we’re gonna be late.”

No answer.

It had already occurred to him that she was paying him back for making her wait in the faculty parking lot in the White Whale with the kids and a fishing pole the Sunday before, and then sending her off to Sleeping Giant on her own.

It was a fifteen-minute drive to the Wintons’. Though he had never physically crossed the threshold of this or any of the other big houses (at Winton’s uncle’s, he had only been privy to the pool house), in his mind Friedrich had been inside. He had imagined what it would be like to have a spare four or five thousand square feet, a half dozen working fireplaces to sit by while you looked out leaded windows and watched your children play on two acres of lawn mowed by somebody else.

At that moment his own freshly bathed and pajama’d
kinder
were in the kitchen eating wieners and ignoring their broccoli. He didn’t need to go to a party at Bunny’s to know her house wouldn’t stink of boiled tube steaks and a bunch of dandelions rotting in the jelly jar Lucy had placed on the windowsill a week earlier. There’d be fresh-cut flowers in crystal (if not cloisonné) vases at Winton’s house; the jumble of life would be ordered in closets, cupboards, and drawers, not strewn across the living room rug.

In fairness to Nora’s admittedly lackluster housekeeping skills, the Friedrichs’ house at that moment was comparatively neat. It wasn’t the bouquet of weeds in the jelly jar that reeked; it was the two-day-old dirty diaper Jack had hidden under the couch that was ripe. And yes, the typewriter on the card table didn’t make for an elegant living room. But it was set up there so he could close the door on them and work into the night. Those were
his
papers and dirty coffee cups and unemptied ashtrays. And, in fact, he had been the one who’d forgotten to put away the
Little
Red Hen
and the bowl of popcorn and the chalk that he had just stepped on. But Dr. Friedrich didn’t see it that way. It was their mess, not his, that was drowning him.

Blindly dumping the coffee cups, the popcorn bowl, the jelly jar, and the
Little Red Hen
into the kitchen sink, then cursing as he pulled his children’s favorite book from the dishwater, he began opening cabinets looking for a dustbin. The garbage was not in the liquor cabinet, but once it was opened he was confronted by more mess. Why save an empty bourbon bottle? And the gin had fruit flies floating in it. He didn’t even drink gin. And yet he was infuriated. It was the waste that galled him.

The knock on the kitchen door was the babysitter. He shouted, “Come in.” She was fifteen years old, and wore a poodle skirt and a look of horror. Standing there with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a fifth of gin in the other, he could just imagine what she’d tell her parents.

In Hamden or anywhere else in 1952 America, babysitters were the suburban equivalent of the KGB. They were the secret police, reporting the slightest variations of the norm to the neighborhood, using their youth, tickle rubs, and the promise of candy to elicit innocent confessions from children about their parents. At least, that’s how Friedrich saw it.

One of the liquor bottles broke as he dropped it into the trash. The kitchen was hot. He was sweating through his shirt. Apologizing for the heat, he opened the window. “I don’t know how it got so warm in here.”

The babysitter pointed to the stove, the burners were on full blast. “God, I’m losing my mind.”

Lucy piped in, “When he’s hot, my dad takes his pants off.” The babysitter backed toward the door.

“She’s joking.”

“No, she’s not.” That was Fiona. “You like to get naked.” Fiona and Lucy squealed with delight. There was much talk of nakedness in the Friedrich household. Fiona added, her cheeks flushed, “Especially at night.” The babysitter looked out the window nervously. The sun was about to set.

Friedrich began to back out of the kitchen. “I’m just going to check and see what’s holding up my wife.”

“Do you have a television?”

“No . . . ah, shit!” Will had just gotten ketchup on his clean suit.

“Daddy said ‘shit.’ ”

“And he deeply regrets it.” Wiping the ketchup off the sleeve of his no longer clean suit, Friedrich turned to the babysitter in the hopes of sympathy. “You know how it is sometimes.”

She shook her head no.

Friedrich retreated to the stairs, shouting, “If we don’t leave now, there’s no point in going . . . honey?” He added the “honey” for the benefit of the babysitter.

No answer. “If you don’t want to go, you should have just said so and we could have made up an excuse.” He was running up the stairs now.

Nora called out from the bathroom, “Don’t project. I want to go to this party.” Friedrich tried to open the bathroom door; it was locked. He hated it when Nora used psych lingo on him.