Pharmakon (17 page)

“You must have some ambivalence about it or you wouldn’t make us late.”

“We don’t want to be the first ones there.” She made no move to unlock the door. “And the sooner you quit rattling the doorknob, the sooner I’ll be ready to go.”

“If you know the party’s at seven and it takes fifteen minutes to drive there, why wait ’til seven to take your shower?”

“Because I had to iron
your
shirt and bathe
your
children.”

“Why not let the goddamn babysitter give them a bath?”

The bathroom door opened a crack: “Wanda Flowers.” Wanda was a pyromaniac Friedrich had tested at the Illinois Institute for the Criminally Insane who had been masturbated with a bar of Ivory Soap every time her babysitter gave her a bath. The Friedrichs took turns being paranoid.

“You don’t even have your dress on.” Nora had the last word by slamming the door.

When Nora finally emerged from the bathroom, clothed and ready to go, she was wearing a new shade of lipstick called Red Sands and, not owning any eyeliner, she’d used a charcoal pencil from Fiona’s drawing kit. She admired herself in the mirror.

Friedrich’s head swirled like a gun turret and his jaw dropped.

“That good?” Nora turned to give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Why aren’t you wearing a dress?” Professors’ wives didn’t wear pants to dinner parties, not if they wanted to be asked again.

“I wanted to do something different. I made them myself. Fabric, thread, cost me less than two dollars.” They were made of velvet and each pant leg was as full as a skirt.

“You can’t wear pants to Dr. Winton’s.”

“They’re fashionable, Will.”

“Says who?”

“
Vogue
magazine. Saw a picture of a pair just like it. In Dr. Mueller’s office.” Dr. Mueller was her gynecologist.

“You’re pregnant?”

“No . . . but if you could see the look on your face.” She had spent too much time on her makeup to cry.

“That look was about the pants, not about you being pregnant.” The look was panic, spiked with anger.

Friedrich herded his wife down the stairs, knowing that Nora would make him pay for the exchange that had just taken place between them. Tonight? Tomorrow? Next year? He guessed there was an emotional commerce between all couples. His wife, thrifty by nature, stoically banked her disappointments. He sometimes wondered what she was saving them up for.

As they headed for the front door collecting hugs and kisses from the children, the babysitter announced, “Everybody gets one bedtime story, then we say our prayers.”

“We don’t pray.” Fiona said it with an air of superiority. The babysitter fingered the cross around her neck and stepped away from the Friedrichs.

Nora wasn’t aware that her husband had greeted the girl armed with liquor bottles, or that he’d said “shit.” But realizing that she had forgotten to warn her husband that this new babysitter’s father was the Unitarian minister, she was correct in thinking the girl was about to quit. “Are you communists?”

Friedrich laughed nervously. “No, of course not.”

“What Fiona meant is, we don’t say our prayers out loud. Prayer is a private thing in our house.”

“Why?”

Nora looked over at her husband for help.

“We’re Druids.” He couldn’t help it.

“Is that like Church of England?”

“Sort of.”

As soon as the front door closed behind them, Nora exploded in laughter that wouldn’t stop. Tears streamed down her face, her makeup ran, and her stomach hurt. When they got into the car and the joke seemed to have passed, she had her compact out to repair the damage. But then she looked over at Friedrich seriously, said the word “Druids,” and convulsed all over again. She was hungry for laughter. And by the time they had pulled up in front of the Wintons’, the joke had erased the look her husband had assaulted her with when he thought of having another child.

The truth was, Nora liked being an outsider, or rather, she liked being on the outside looking in with Will. Their neighbors had nothing they wanted. They were immune to the fifties epidemic of keeping up with the Joneses. Will and Nora Friedrich were alike in that they believed that what they wanted could not be bought, but they were hopelessly mismatched in one regard. Though it didn’t always make her happy, Nora had what she wanted; Will believed it was waiting to be won. The prize in hand was never enough for him. What he had in hand was devalued by his own touch, and this, from time to time, broke his wife’s heart.

Winton lived in the biggest house on the best street in Hamden. The style was mock Tudor, but it was a serious house. It wasn’t a mansion like her uncle’s place on the Connecticut River where they had tested the rats. But it boasted a garage that was larger than Friedrich’s whole house, and its lawn was umbrellaed by elm trees that had sprouted during the War of 1812. There was a second-floor sleeping porch off what he guessed was the second-floor master bedroom, and a crescent moon cut in a wooden gate that offered a glimpse of the only backyard in Hamden that boasted a swimming pool.

Friedrich knew it was childish, but it cheered him up to note that the elm was blighted and the windows too small to offer much of a view; what Winton had inherited could be improved upon by him.

The front door opened before they had a chance to knock. It was Dr. Winton. The first words out of her mouth were, “You’re wearing trousers!” Friedrich had already given Nora an I-told-you-so look when he realized that Bunny was also wearing pants.

If a photographer had snapped a picture of Friedrich following Bunny and Nora into the living room, you would have sworn that this was a portrait of a man who was relaxed, at ease, comfortable. In fact, he felt like a blister getting ready to pop. Everything rubbed him the wrong way. He didn’t like being wrong about Nora’s trousers, or discovering they weren’t the last guests to arrive. It even bothered him that Winton introduced him as the “brilliant Dr. Friedrich I’ve told you all so much about.”

What was Winton buttering him up for, what was she after? And it doubly irked him that after giving him the big buildup, all Nora got was “and his extremely fashionable, lovely young wife.” He could already hear Nora on the way home: “You’re brilliant, and I’m the wee little wife. If I’d finished my own dissertation instead of typing yours, I’d have a goddamn doctorate, too.” Friedrich was so busy being annoyed at Winton for her condescension and Nora for the outrage she’d voice on the way home, that he completely failed to notice his wife was entirely enjoying herself.

Friedrich downed his drink in a gulp, musing that the only thing worse than getting no attention was getting all of it. A pregnant woman put down her gin and tonic and lit a cigarette and inquired, “Do you ever psychoanalyze small children?”

“Well, since there’s no such thing as a grownup . . .” Friedrich made everybody laugh and didn’t have to pretend he believed in psychoanalysis. Dr. Petersen, the Freudian, was lurking. And he had a new hearing aid, “But this afternoon, I was thinking, it might be interesting to do a study of the sexuality of preschoolers.” The delight his daughters had taken in telling the babysitter about his habit of taking his trousers off when he got hot had given Friedrich the idea. “Prepubescent girls are charged with sexuality. By ignoring it and pretending it doesn’t exist, we’re damaging their potential for a full and rewarding sex life.”

As he hoped, the pregnant woman was shocked. More surprisingly, Petersen seemed interested. If
gaikau dong
worked out, he’d be able to get money to research all sorts of things. Drugs were just a window into the mind.

“Very interesting. Could you repeat that?” Petersen was trying to get his new hearing aid to work.

Friedrich repeated himself, slowly and loudly. “I said, I’d like to do a study on . . .” He put his arm around Nora’s shoulder, thinking well of himself for including her in his glow.

Nora appeared to be gazing at a picture of a naked woman, all breasts and teeth on a field that looked like a melted rainbow. “That’s a beautiful De Kooning.”

Winton stopped listening to Friedrich. In 1952 there wasn’t another person within a mile who had heard of De Kooning, much less recognized one of his paintings. “You like modern art?”

“When it’s good.”

“You wear pants and you like De Kooning.” She pulled Nora out of Friedrich’s grasp and called out to her husband, who was at the other end of the room talking to an art dealer from New York who wore a turtleneck instead of a necktie and was spending the weekend, “Thayer, we’ve got a kindred spirit.”

Friedrich watched as Winton and his wife walked away from what he had to say about their daughters’ innate sexuality. The pregnant smoker followed them. Dr. Petersen put his hand on Friedrich’s shoulder. “Your idea reminds me of something Freud mentioned in passing one afternoon . . .” Most of all, Friedrich didn’t like worrying about his wife being included only to have her hijack the conversation. He escaped Petersen by asking directions for the bathroom, and beelined it to the bar.

The liquor was free, the people were friendly, and he had finally made it into one of the big houses on the hill. And yet, the blister under his skin was so raw it began to weep. He tried to shake the feeling by admiring the antiques that littered the room. He liked old things. But sitting in a Chippendale chair just made him think of all the people who had to die for him to now have the pleasure of sitting on it.

Nothing soothed it until he caught sight of a small, dark man in a black suit sitting alone on the patio outside, staring in at the party as if he were watching a game show on TV. His eyes were large and pale and watery. He was younger than Friedrich, twenty-eight at most. And though he was smiling to himself, smirking, actually, at the goings-on inside, there was something in his pale, blue eyes, a dampness to his stare, that made him look as if he was about to cry but wasn’t ever going to.

Bunny Winton was waving to him to come over and join her and her husband and Nora and the art dealer and a man who gave away money for the Rockefeller Foundation. If Friedrich had been himself, he would have been happy, eager to meet the grant giver. The success Friedrich longed for required deep pockets. The Rockefeller guy could give him money for research on GKD, or the sexuality of prepubescent children . . . Will Friedrich knew what he should do, but he wasn’t even tempted. He got up and turned his back on it all and joined the little man on the terrace, for Friedrich’s first loyalty was to unhappiness. Though he worked on a drug to ameliorate it, in his heart Friedrich felt it was a human being’s natural state.

The stranger introduced himself by offering a cigarette from his pack. “Exhausting, being polite.” His voice was hoarse and his accent Eastern European.

“It takes less energy than being rude.”

“That’s true.” The little man found that funny. “What do you do?” Perhaps because his English was limited, he did not waste words.

“I’m a psychologist.” There was something about him that was familiar to Friedrich, besides the sadness.

“Is that a good job?”

“It’s hard work.”

The stranger held up his hand like a guard at a crosswalk. “I’m sorry, but digging a ditch, this is hard work. Helping people . . .” he shrugged, “. . . is easy. Killing them is harder.” He said it with a smile on his face and introduced himself as Lazlo. “If your job is so hard, why do you do it?”

“For my kids.” It was what he told Nora.

“You want to give them what you didn’t have.”

“Basically.”

“Easy. When they are sixteen, give them the key to your house and don’t come back. Let them drink and fuck on the kitchen table.” People didn’t say “fuck” out loud in Hamden.

Friedrich didn’t like thinking about his daughters playing doctor under the table, much less imagining them fornicating on top of it. “Is that what you wish your parents had done?”

“No wish. It happened. Prague, summer of forty-one to summer of forty-two, happiest year of my life. Not so great for the rest of the world.”

“Your parents just gave you the keys to their house and left?”

“Not voluntarily. Nazis.”

“Why’d the Germans let you stay?”

“I worked for them. I helped the families pack up and get ready to go to the camp. It was clever having a teenage boy get them ready. Made it seem less frightening. That’s how I met my first girlfriend.” Lazlo reached up and clapped a mosquito to death. There was a spot of blood on his palm. “I was his last supper.” When Friedrich saw the numbers tattooed on Lazlo’s wrist, he knew where he’d seen him before.

“You were at my house.” Friedrich couldn’t fathom how the driver of a kosher butcher truck had ended up at Bunny Winton’s.

“If your parrots have heard from my sister Marjeta, let me know.”

“Where is your sister?”

“With my parents.”

Friedrich waited for Lazlo to say more. When he didn’t Friedrich felt obliged to change the subject. “What are you doing these days?”

Lazlo pointed at a girl in her mid twenties at the party. She was tall and sallow and looked like a Modigliani that had been to the optician. “Her father has an art gallery in New York City.” She was standing next to her father; behind her he could see Winton’s husband leaning over Nora. He was showing her something in a book. He would have suspected Thayer of looking down the front of Nora’s blouse if Bunny hadn’t been there turning the pages.