By Blood (6 page)

Here the patient stopped and sat there breathing haltingly, as if she would cry—but no. At once she regained control of herself, and said:

So I knew I was looking at the unlucky one.

She paused.

Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin. In her bones and blood and skin. And nothing would ever change that verdict: She was going to have a hard time in this world. I looked at that little baby—she was still screaming; why didn’t somebody soothe her now, for God’s sake?—and I wondered: What would I have done? How deep and dark and terrible that cylinder must have seemed. Would I have been able to do it: reach in and find the shiny little happiness at the bottom?

The elevator bell
dinge
d out in the hallway.

It’s time, isn’t it? the patient said.

The doctor hummed softly. I am afraid so, she said.

What bad timing, said the patient.

You can call me, said Dr. Schussler. You know you can always call.

The doctor stood, then her client.

I have that—

I remember, said the therapist.

Bad timing!

Yes, the doctor said. Certainly not the best.

You can call, said the analyst. Please. Do not hesitate to call.

The moment the door closed behind the patient, Dr. Schussler lit a cigarette and dragged on it deeply, three times. Before the curl of her smoke could reach under our communicating door, she picked up her phone and dialed. The rotary phone ticked off the numbers: two? eight? five? The rest of the pulses went by too quickly to count, and I soon heard the therapist say:

Dr. Gurevitch? Dr. Schussler. Yes. Thank you. I am so happy to have caught you in. You received my— Of course. Yes. In particular I am hoping we can … three. The patient coded as three. You see— Aha! Yes. Eight o’clock? Until then. Yes!

She hung up the phone, then threw open the window—airing out the office, I thought. Moments later she closed the window, opened her door, and said “come in” to her twelve o’clock. Their voices disappeared behind the rush of the sound machine.

I sat stunned.
Born unhappy. Built in. Original, like sin
. These words kept reciting themselves in my mind until I thought I must have said them myself. The sound machine was on; I might move about, but I did not, could not. The patient and I were kin, I suddenly knew, spawn of the same cursed line: the tribe of the inherently unhappy. How early one knows this! Too early, too young; she at thirteen, I at twelve. All unexpectedly the realization comes; that damned day; that indelible sight; that unreachable, shiny little happiness.

The nearby church bell tolled the slow strokes of noon. At the twelfth, my heart began to race. Sweat sprang out upon my neck and back. The weather had turned unaccountably hot; one day the late summer’s fog chilled the city as usual; the next came a dry, hot wind from the east, sending temperatures above ninety degrees under merciless skies. Even the cold breath of the old building’s soul had been vanquished by the heat. Yet the sweat that clung to me was chillingly cold. There was nothing I could do. I could only watch as my black mood descended upon me the crows, so delighted, flapping down for their meal of carrion. They pecked at my wishes, as they did always; sucked the world empty of hope. I thought of the weight of inheritance that had fallen upon the patient—so heavy, so like my own—and my dreams for her self-creation seemed doomed, a small, flapping bird chained to a stake at the foot.

The clock sounded one, then two. And only then, after Dr. Schussler left for her luncheon break, did I stand and try to calm myself. I took a turn about the office, visited the men’s room, then walked the length of the corridors: two long, perpendicular hallways—the building was shaped like a carpenter’s rule—where at the far end of each hall there gathered a dim, perpetual twilight. I could not return to my cottage by the ocean—the hot weather had beckoned hordes to the beach; their loud radios plagued me; motorcycles raced up and down the Great Highway without cease. I could only stay at the office, which I did, lying down as best I could upon the small settee, settling in before the therapist returned for her three o’clock patient.

The afternoon wore away. The sound machine kept up its empty breathing; Dr. Schussler spat out her
T
s, hard-hushed her Ss. A faint current of hot air stirred the venetian blind, setting it to knock softly against the casement. Spears of light hit the walls, then vanished, then speared again in the uneven rhythm of the bare breeze. It seemed to me that I had seen and heard all this before: the stabs of light, the knock of the blind, the rush of Ss. A voice sounded in my head. When you’re adopted, said the voice, you don’t look like anyone. The sound machine took up the rhythm of the breeze, playing a deceptive melody. And all at once I knew how this moment had come to be, where it had happened, long ago.

I did not want to go there in my mind. I looked out the window—a statue on the roofline of the Palace, a naked man, loins draped—then looked away.

The weather turned on us again. The heat subsided; there was one clear and temperate day; and then it began to rain. I had no idea that rain could fall with such steady determination, hour by hour, day after day. What kind of devilish place had I come to, I wondered, where humid fog could turn to sere heat and then to monsoon rains all within the space of a few weeks? A wet gloom now seemed to have settled over the city, and while San Franciscans went about their business as usual (the N Judah rumbled by; passengers ascended and descended; cars dashed by on the Great Highway), the fifth deluged day found me still in bed, in dirty pajamas, watching rainwater seep under my door. Out on the beach, no one appeared but a single haunted soul in a black hooded jacket: a suicide, I thought, surveying the sea for riptides.

Only the thought of the patient’s return enabled me to rise from my bed, dress, make my way under the drenched gargoyles, through the white lobby, past the black, circling eyes of the cherubs, to my office, there to await the rich cream of the patient’s voice.

In my absence, the radiators evidently had come aboil, for now they chuffed and clanged as steam surged through the building’s aged pipes. The dry heat was almost unbearable. I envied the man in the Hotel Palace across the way, who, as I watched, threw open his window and, heedless of the rain, stood naked to the street.

I doubted that the man could see me—I kept my light off, lest Dr. Schussler look up and see the glow at her neighbor’s window—yet I could see him clearly. His body protruded past the plane of the window directly opposite mine, and the gray light of the sky cast an even, silvery tone upon his skin, so that he appeared to be made of marble, one of the statues that lined the hotel’s venerable roof. He was tall and well made, muscular yet not overly so: the sort of body that would neither repulse nor intimidate if encountered in the locker room. A look of pleasure passed over the man’s face, which he lifted up to the sky and rain. Then, his face still uplifted, he took his genitals in both hands.

Not since boyhood—since Paul, my best friend—had I seen another male touch himself. I gaped as the man fondled his testicles and stroked his penis softly, almost absently. After some moments, he encircled the base of his penis with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and began to pull upon it with the other. He gave himself long, full, strong pulls, and his member responded by steadily growing in length and girth. He continued in that full, slow rhythm until his penis achieved an impressive size, protruding some inches into the narrow width of New Montgomery Street, so that he seemed very near to me, almost at a touching distance, the eye of his penis looking directly at me, as it were. All the while, he kept his face uplifted to the sky, blinking with delight as drops played upon his eyelids, his mouth opening and closing as if to taste the rain. My own member begin to stir—it was normal, I told myself; I was responding to the memory of my boyhood games; also sex begets sex; the sight of the man’s penis, of his pleasure, his delight, merely made me think of my own.

But then, suddenly, without ever quickening his rhythm as I would have done near the end, the man closed his eyes, arched his back, gave one great thrust, and ejaculated forcefully into the air.

His seed dripped from the ledge.

I shut my eyes in disgust.

When you’re adopted, you don’t look like anyone.

It was Paul, Paul Beleiter. We were in his bedroom. The light that pressed against his venetian blinds was the hot sun of an August day. From down the hall came the static of a drifting radio station, a melody now surfacing, now fading, then a stern voice: talk of war in Europe. Paul and I did not listen. We were boys, twelve years old, indolent in the last days of summer.

When you’re adopted, Paul was saying, you don’t look like anyone.

We were sprawled across his wide bed. I looked at Paul: sculpted lips, curls of near-black hair, smooth skin—swarthy, a shade too dark for the liking of his adoptive parents. His nose was pointed, his eyes too close together, fortunate imperfections that gave him a ferocious gaze. No, he didn’t look like anyone, not even the other boys. He towered over us; his beard was beginning to show; his voice was already lowering—he was years beyond us, it seemed. His father was pale and slight; his mother pallid, tight. Why would he want to look like them?

He was angry. Something about some art classes in New York; a scholarship he’d won; his parents forbidding him to go. We were stranded in Ovid, our town named for the poet. But the artists who had settled and named the place were long gone. Now only fields and dairy cows stretched out in the heat beyond the window; farmers and the people who sold them things. Paul’s father sold tractors, mine insurance. At least we didn’t have cow shit on our shoes, we said.

They don’t know anything about art, I said to Paul.

I’m never going to be like my parents, said Paul. Never.

He leaned down, reached under the bed, and came up holding a box, the sort that once might have held a pair of boots.

Look at this, he said.

He held a stack of clippings. Then one by one he laid them on the bedspread. They were photographs, no story attached, no caption. Here and there, the newspaper name was printed on a clipping’s border: the
Ithaca Journal
, the
Cortland Standard
, the
Elmira Star-Gazette
, the
Finger
Lakes Times
, the
Olean Times-Herald
. Some clippings were white, some faded, some yellowed—Paul had clearly been collecting these for years. We were very best friends; why hadn’t he shown these to me before?

Horrible, isn’t it? Paul said.

I don’t—

What happens to people when they grow up.

Now I saw it: an adult and child in each picture, the child remarkably like the adult who was clearly the parent. Uncanny resemblances. Faces captured at two distant moments in time.

Amazing, I said.

Keep looking, said Paul.

For what?

Here. Look what happens to a dimple.

It was a picture of a cute little boy of about five. His happy, dimpled face relaxed on his father’s shoulder. The father, too, had dimples, but the formerly endearing little dots had deepened, were now surrounded by desiccated skin, hanging sacs of flesh.

And look what happens to that adorable pudgy cheek, said Paul.

A sagging jowl, I saw.

And look at that little girl’s pretty fair hair.

Her mother’s was thinned, dyed, dry.

And this one, he said.

A holiday picnic. A mother holding a little girl on her lap. Beside her, the grandmother, holding a little boy. Three generations, one face. The curve of a tender cheek, softened, then sunken. Wrinkles slowly etching themselves into the skin above the mouth. The girl’s round little eye, hopeful; the mother’s eye, drooping at the edges; the grandmother’s, disappearing into a sea of folds.

And on it went: A little roly-poly boy sat upon his father’s fat gut of a lap. A girl with twinkling eyes looked into the crow-marked eyes of her mother. A beanpole of a boy in the embrace of a father whose wrinkled skin hung from bony arms. A tiny puff in a cheek become a sorry fold. Small lips now a mean line. Cute buck teeth grown into embarrassments. Tiny flaws, invisible in the freshness of youth, now magnified, exaggerated, dominant in the parent: the terrible work of time that awaited the child.

Paul picked up this first set of clippings and replaced it with another—another catalogue of the decay, desiccation, bloating, wrinkling, graying, fading, and shrinking that awaited the poor innocent spawn of his parents’ blood.

How can anyone stand it? said Paul. I mean, how can you look into the face of your parent and know you’re going to turn into
that
?

I leapt away from the bed and went to the window, where I drew back the blind and stood squinting into the brilliance of the yard. I watched birds peck at the grass, leaves ruffle in the breeze, a cat dive into a patch of underbush, as I tried not to think about my mother, who just two months before had tried to “do some harm to herself,” as my aunt had put it. While at the hospital, sitting among my relatives and listening to their talk, I had learned things about my grandmother—that she had locked herself in a running car in a closed garage. And about my
great-uncle
on my father’s side, who had jumped off a roof; about my mother’s grandfather, who had given away all his money one day in a manic fit; about another great-aunt, who had thrown herself in front of a car. While waiting to hear about my mother’s condition, my aunts and uncles and adult cousins had gone on describing manias, depressions, obsessions, compulsions—it seemed our family had long bloodlines of mad people stretching back in time, suicides running in our veins the way blue eyes were passed down in saner clans. Throughout, my father sat there without speaking, closed, withdrawn, as he had been for the past year. I looked around this circle of my relatives. I saw my eyes here, my chin there, my cowlick rising from the crown of Uncle John’s head. My aunt Selma once said I had the temperament of Uncle Harry: Did this include whatever bad thing he had done with his gun?

I said to Paul: Everyone says I look exactly like my mother.

He started, sat back on the bed, put down his clippings. He knew—he had to have known—how I longed to be like him, how dearly I wished not to know that what had happened to my family—to my mother, to my unspeaking father—could also happen to me. I longed for him to walk over to me, embrace me, at least pat me on the shoulder, and say, Don’t worry, you’re your own man, you never know.

But of course we were just boys, twelve years old, and so what, really, could he do or say? Paul quietly retrieved the clippings, put them in the box, and slid it back under the bed.

Let’s play our game, said Paul.

I don’t feel like it.

He reached for me. Sure you do, he said.