Friends

Friends:

Many of you have asked why I have not been blogging. Depression is a loathsome disease, and unfortunately I am still battling this burden. I am doing very, very well, but each day is a struggle.

On the lighter side: Yes, of course I'm dating. I always date. His name is Ralph.


Ernesto

Anne is Sitting in Front of Her Mirror

Anne is sitting in front of her mirror. She is trying on her pearls, admiring the chain against her very pale skin. She has recently colored her hair red, and it is vibrant, exotic and even attractive one would say, given that she has always had splendidly green eyes. This she thinks as she pulls out the matching pearl earrings, and puts them on, always looking into the mirror. It is a lady’s mirror atop an 18th century chest. She loves furniture from that era, it so much more delicate than anything they can make these days. Celeste was with her when she bought the piece of furniture, out at Antique Row in Kensington Maryland.

“You really ought to buy something new,” said Celeste, “something modern, leathery and sexy if you will.”

Anne disagreed. It’s funny, she thought, how different she and her mother could be. Celeste was always of the moment, chasing the most current trends, the fashion of the day. Anne, her daughter, was the opposite. She admired classic lines and true and proven designs, like 18th century chests and simple pearl necklaces with matching pearl earrings.

“This will suit me fine,” she told Celeste. “Help me bargain with the shop owner, I want to get this on the cheap.”

She loves this mirror, she thinks this morning as she is rushing around, getting ready to go to work. She has a busy day ahead of her, but Anne is not worried. She’s accustomed to dealing with stress in her life, and keeping some semblance of order, her order, as it should be. Her order is not the same as anyone else’s, but she has never catered to the conventional rules. In life, you pick and choose your values, you construct the reality that fits your life best. This she believed adamantly. And so she had chosen a demanding career, she had chosen to be in your face in the world of male doctors, and at the same time she had chosen to be very feminine, delicate if you will, something old world.

She admires her pearls again, their beautiful shimmer against the looking glass. Looks great. She finishes putting on some powder on her cheeks, and steps away from her powder table. As she stands up, she trips on a pile of papers she has left next to her bed.

Someday I really have to clean up this clutter, she thinks to herself, but not really having any sense of urgency or conviction about it. She is comfortable with the clutter. There’s no need of overdoing cleanliness or neatness. As long as one’s appearance is well within decorum, there’s no need to spend time polishing the house, or straightening out the piles, or putting away the laundry. A little messiness never hurt anyone, except perhaps it deed seem to hurt her ex-husband. He hated messiness. He used to yell at her constantly about how messy she was.

“Good!” she thinks now, remembering his distaste for her clutter. “The bastard.” She was glad she had been able to bring some discomfort to his life.

Of course, she believed this only in small dosages. In spite of her hate him, in spite of her anger that he left her (leaving her when she was pregnant no less), she still liked him. One might even say she still loved him.

“Do I still love him?” she ponders.

“No,” she says to herself, again looking in the mirror. “Its only fondness, not love.” He is no different than the space left in your mouth when they pull out a molar, she thinks. You tongue caresses the crevice, missing the old molar, but eventually the tongue learns to live without the molar. That’s what her ex-husband represents to her by now, an old tooth that needed to be yanked.

“Mother, Joey is bothering me again!” Christina is screaming from the bottom of the stairs. Anne’s instinct is to start running downstairs, to attend to her children but Celeste takes matters in control.

“Don’t bother your mother now,” says Celeste to Christina and Joey. “Come into the kitchen and have some waffles. Let your mother get dressed in peace.”

The children listen to Celeste, and follow her into the kitchen. Their screaming ceases, for the time being. “Thank God,” thinks Anne. “Thank God for Celeste”.

Celeste lives up north, but she has come to stay with Anne for a long visit, “ a proper visit,” as Celeste put it. So far its been three months, and Celeste has made no mention yet of having to end her stay, of having to return back to her own house. Sometimes Anne supposes that Celeste has come to move in with her, but she does not want to seriously entertain the thought. Anne will not lose her independence, her solace, to Celeste or anyone else. Not this time, not evermore. Anne enjoys having guests now and then, the company of someone other than a child with whom one can talk at night, after dinner and coffee. Celeste offers such company these days. But Anne will not have her mother moving in with her. She has no intention of ever living with another person, of ever sharing a home. She has no intention of ever getting married again.

How life has changed. She had previously dedicated fifteen years to her ex-husband, and in those days she could not have imagined of ever wanting to live alone. Everything had been planned, and was supposed to take place according to the regimen she had prescribed for her life and the life of those around her. She was going to marry this terribly sexy man she had met in college, the one with the curly hair and the deep set green eyes. They would have fabulous careers, and then they would have lots of children. After the children were grown up, she and him would retire together to live by the sea, and write novels. It was a condensed version of a perfect life, the type that she had never seen anywhere other than in a movie, and she was determined to have it. Anne was certainly smart enough to accomplish all this. In fact, she was one of the brightest students at Barnard and later at NYU Medical School, and she could see no reason why she couldn’t get everything she wanted out of life, even if what she wanted was a cliché.

She remembers vaguely meeting her husband the first semester at college, in one of those classes that has too many students and that gets weeded out as the semester bears on and students drop out when the novelty of the course wears out. What attracted Anne to the curly haired college boy was his extreme shyness mixed in with a bit of intelligence. To her, this was an aphrodisiac; a sure sign of potential success. She remembers vaguely being attracted by his curls, but she could not remember how they started up a conversation, how they ended up as lovers and later as husband and wife.

Anne’s vagueness about how she met her ex-husband was dramatically stark compared to his version of the events. For years after they met and were married, he would entertain all their friends with the details of their supposedly romantic first three encounters. Anne hardly remembered or recognized any of the details he proposed.

The first time they met, he would claim, was in Greek Mythology 301. She was a student at Barnard, and all girls school, or all female as Anne preferred to refer to it. It was absurd to refer to those young college students as girls. Anne believed that a girl is distinguishable from a child by her sexual awareness, a woman’s self awareness her self sexual powers. In that respect, thought Anne, most of the Barnard girls she knew were true women in every sense of the word. Perhaps some, less kind than Anne, would refer to them as whores. Anne hated the stereotype image of the Barnard crowd, an image (she believed) made up, fabricated, rumored and spread about by the boys across the street, the Columbia College crowd. Those were boys, thought Anne, immature, pimply faced, still fixated with their cocks and still incapable of thinking with the larger brain. Most of them that is, not all, Anne would admit. There was much discussion among the Barnard girls about which Columbia boys were worth sleeping with, and the conclusion was almost always the same --- none of them. They are all fags.

Anne disliked talking about the College boys with her college girl chums. She preferred talking about the professors, the male handsome ones that is. She often initiated the gossip with her dorm friends about which professor had the deepest voice or the most flirtatious eyes. Some girls would take the conversation even further and discuss, intelligently and informatively, which professors were known to sleep with their female students in exchange for grades. Anne never pushed that form gossip, or at least if she heard it about she did not consider it valuable information. She didn’t need to sleep with anyone for her grades, she had more than enough brain power. But she relished the other gossip, the Peyton Place aspect of it, the silliness of it all. It was liberating to engage in such girl talk.

It was a result of just such a conversation, with a bunch of girls who had all gone to Hunter College High School together, that Anne learned about Mark Eigger’s Greek Mythology course. Eigger, said the girls from Hunter, had the body of a god, and was well known for wearing tight fitting clothes. It was 1979, and tight pants were fashionable. It was also trendy for men not to wear underwear, and to strategically arrange the fly of pants so that the bulge would protrude at a ninety degree angle. Eigger, said the girls from Hunter, had the most divine tight jeans that left nothing to the imagination. “You won’t be disappointed,” said one of the girls to Anne. “It’s worth taking the course just for his dick.”

Anne took the course as a lark, as did thirty other Barnard students, all straining to get a look at the bulge. They were not disappointed. Besides the obvious sexual treat, the course was fairly interesting. Eigger was in fact a good professor aside from being a good looker (in so many ways). The students at Columbia, across the street, were free to take courses at Barnard if they wished to. Few guys took the opportunity. It was therefore a surprise to Anne and to the other Barnard students that one single male from Columbia, one curly haired cutie, had decided to take Eigger’s course. “I’ve always loved Greek Mythology,” is how he later explained the matter away. “How was I supposed to know the only reason to take Eigger’s course was to take a gander at his cock?” He relished telling this story, laughing about it each time he told it, but now, now that things have turned out the way they have, Anne wonders. She wonders. Why did he really take Eigger’s course?

The second time they met, according to him, was on the subway. He painted this story in terms of attraction, romance, first impulses. He relished emphasizing to anyone that would listen to the story that Anne was the first to approach him, to befriend him, to flirt with him on the subway no less. She downplayed the incident. As far as she was concerned, the only reason she had approached him (on the subway, no less) was out of sheer practicality. Anne had grown up in an upper middle class house, with the stereotypical large front yard and a kidney shape swimming pool in the back. By most people’s standards, she might be considered to have grown up rich. But no matter how you characterized her upbringing (middle class, upper middle class or filthy rich), the fact was that during her college years Anne lived like a pauper. Her parents were in the middle of a divorce, squabbling over who would get the house (and its kidney swimming pool), squabbling over how much alimony Mr. Rex Emerson should pay to the soon to be former Mrs. Celeste Emerson. Celeste felt powerless against her husband. Although she was an intelligent and well read woman, Celeste had never gone to college, had not pursued a career (once she had given up her modeling career for marriage), had devoted herself to the kids and to the house. Rex held the purse strings, and he knew it. But Celeste did manage to accomplish two rather smart acts of self improvement during the divorce. First, first she got herself the best divorce attorney she could find. A real bull dog. Second, she managed to find refuge in Anne’s advise and support. Anne was only eighteen years old at the time, but already she had assumed the role of friend, confident and in some ways even parent to her mother.

Anne subsequently learned to detest her mother for putting her in that situation, for using her as a confident and to divulge to her bitterly negative assertions about her own father, Rex Foster. Anne thought she should have been allowed to enjoy a normal college lifestyle, allowed to get lost in books and parties and not worry about the real world. Instead, she was confronted with the difficulties of dealing with the divorce of her parents and the alimentation of her father, while simultaneously being asked to assume the role of moral anchor for her mother. Anne was not allowed to complaint during those college years. Mom, her dearest Celeste, wanted none of that from Anne, her dearest daughter. “Your role,” she had said jokingly to Anne, “it to give your dear old mom some really good advise.” Anne resented Celeste for many years afterwards, for having being used as . . . . Being used as what? She did not know as what, but she felt used.

Anne’s father extracted his revenge as well. He felt betrayed by Anne, felt that her allegiance should have been towards both parents, not towards Celeste alone. He knew that it was Anne who had found and chosen Celeste’s attorney; he knew that it was Anne who coached her mother not to settle for too little money; he knew it was Anne who gave Celeste the gumption to fight back. He extracted his revenge. He would pay for Anne’s college tuition, but nothing else. He would not pay for her clothing, her incidentals, her books, her living money. Even with respect to the tuition, he insisted in documenting this as a loan from Mr. Rex Foster to Miss Anne Foster. The terms required that she would repay to him with interest (when you graduate from that famous Jewish school, as he put it), or have the amount deducted from her inheritance. She hated the whole financial aspect of her relationship with her father, how she had been reduced to a negative asset, a liability, a financial obligation.

Celeste was only somewhat sensitive to Anne’s predicament. She managed to “scrape whatever I can from my alimony” (as Celeste put it), to pay Anne a monthly living allowance. It was not enough. Anne felt Celeste could have “scraped” a lot more from the generous sum that her father was required to pay her on a monthly basis for alimony. Anne took whatever Celeste gave her, and worked at the school library, or at a lab, or as a tutor to supplement her income. It was never enough.

Rather than allocate her monthly allowance evenly so that it would spread out over thirty days, Anne would spend heavily at the beginning of the month when she was still flush with Celeste’s monthly stipend. She referred to this time of the month as her salad days. By the fifteenth of the month Anne would feel poor again, as the money from Celeste would usually run out by then. She called this time of the month the “dammit days.” It was during the dammit days each month that Anne would have to come up with imaginative survival strategies. It was not beyond her to eat nothing all day except apples (she always bought apples), followed by soup made out of ketchup and hot water. Getting around town was a problem, but she would either bum a ride, hoof it, or jump the turnstile. Jumping the turnstile means hopping over the coin drop at the subway station to avoid paying the fare. It was Anne’s only illegal act in probably all of her life (other than the drugs, but she chose never to talk or think about that), and she hated being ratted out by her husband (now ex-husband) about this small indiscretion. It was necessity, is how she saw it, it was part of how she survived college.

The day Anne first met her husband (now ex-husband), on the subway at 116th Street (near Columbia), was a particularly difficult turnstile jumping day. The subway platform was crawling with cops. Either a gang shooting or a suicide jumper, is what Anne figured. Either way, Anne did not dare jump the turnstile with so many cops around. She was in a real predicament as she had to get downtown. Celeste was waiting for her at Tavern on the Green, to give her the next month’s monthly allowance. She needed the money, and knowing Celeste, if Anne did not pick up the check today it would be weeks before Celeste would get around to paying her. Anne lingered at the subway entrance, hoping furiously that the cops would leave soon so that she could jump the gate. She was literally down to her last pennies, and had not a coin to spare to buy a subway token. It was when she was about to give up, thinking perhaps that she would walk from 116th St. to 67th, that she saw him approaching the subway. He was wearing that ridiculous green scarf, crotched by someone’s mother (perhaps his own mother?) that was too green, too bright, and too long. Even after wrapping it two times around his neck it still reached his shoes. He was also sporting that crunchy short Afro that made him stand out in Greek mythology. He sat right in front of her and she remembered having stared at the back of that curly head, most particularly since it blocked the view of Eigger’s crotch. Perhaps he’s good for a dime, she thought. (God, she thinks as she looks at the mirror today. I’ll never ask anyone for a dime again.)

“I think we are in Mythology?” asked or said Anne. It came out as half question half statement, the way Valley Girls talk. Anne knew how stupid she sounded as soon as the words escaped her lips.

“Excuse me?” said curly head.

“I think we have Greek Mythology together. Eigger’s course.”

“Oh, yes. Good course.” He tightened his green scarf. She noticed that it matched the color of his eyes. That was unexpected, the smile, the smile of his eyes. She blushed. Now she felt surely stupid. She was not accustomed to blushing.

“I need a dime?” she asked, said again.

He smiled at her again, this time with more than just his eyes. He flashed his white, perfect teeth. The type that only the upper middle class can afford. She hated him for it.

“More than just a dime, actually,” she added. “In point of fact, I need subway fare. Can you help me out?” She stretched her hand out like a child, feeling foolish, embarrassed by the whole experience. Who was she, and why was she acting this way? She was never timid, never shy. “Buckle up!” she told herself. “What is it that this man is doing to me.” She needed to get composed, she thought to herself.

The curly haired man thought she was charming. As far as he could recollect, he had never met her before. Was she in Greek Mythology? What goddess is she, he thought. She seemed to have appeared of nowhere, and to know him instantly, fully, immediately. This he gathered from the few words she had shared, which was of course ludicrous. He was often fanciful with his thoughts, so poetic, he thought, but so incapable of sharing any of that. All he could do was smile, for it hid a world of bashfulness. This much he knew, this much his smile had brought him. He smiled at her, at . . . . He did not know her name.

“What is your name?” he asked, with that perfect smile.

“Anne.”

She never got around to asking him his name, but he did not notice. It would be months after that first encounter, after they had come to know each other though small talk and coffee, that she would ask him finally for his name. How odd, he thought then.

Back to the first day, to when they met in the subway, she pushed him for fare money. “So can you spare a dime?” she asked, this time without insecurity or hesitation in her voice. She was proud to feel strong and determined again, self composed once more. He smiled at her again, gave her a token, and she dropped it into the turnstile and disappeared.

And so years later, he would tell people, their neighbors, their kids (Joey and Christina), that this is how mommy and daddy had met, in the subway when Anne was jumping turnstiles. The punch line to his story was always the same, “She fell in love with my smile, right there and then when I gave her a token.’ Anne never bought his version of the story. It had nothing to do with his smile, as far as she was concerned. It was all about the token, shear practicality, the need to take the subway.

The third time they met for the first time, the version he told most often and of which she had absolutely no recollection, was on the George Washington Bridge, or across the bridge to be exact. This was his story, not hers. He told it all the time. Apparently he was crossing the George Washington Bridge by bus, reading (he was always reading) D.H. Laurence’s “Women in Love.” The main characters, or the one he remembered in any event, were Ursula and Gudrun, strong vibrant woman who wore brightly colored stockings. This struck his fancy, a woman in bright socks. This he pulled away from the novel.

They saw the two girls appear, small, brilliant figures in the near distance, in the strong light of the late afternoon. Both wore light, gay summer dresses, Ursula had an orange-coloured knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow, Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun bright rose, the figures of the two women seemed to glitter in progress over the wide bay of the railway crossing, white and orange and yellow and rose glittering in motion across a hot world silted with coal-dust.

He read the passage, several times on the bus, savoring its meaning and not knowing really what it meant. It felt right, is what he told people. It felt as if there was significance in it. As he was contemplating this passage, he happened to look out the window of the bus and saw a woman, a young woman in stop-sign red socks, crossing the George Washington Bridge. This is not a common walk. Few people cross this bridge span, for the wind is so fierce it can blow you against the railing. This day, this day he was crossing the bridge and reading “Women In Love” was in fact a particularly windy day, “a howling wind” as he recalled it. Anne was never able to remember that. She could remember however the wind blew often blew her hair in disarray. He remembered more than that; he remembered her skirt flaring into the air, like a parachute around her, and he remembered seeing her vibrant red socks, made of pure wool, clean and crisp like an accent mark against the chilled clean air. He retold this story, using these words which to Anne meant so little, many times to their friends, years later that is, once they had already finished the courtship and settled into a practical marriage. He believed it was romantic, that destiny had put him and his book on a bus, and her and the wind on a bridge, and that the two would somehow meet, that there was meaning to all of this, that there was significance. “I thought to myself,” he would say to their friends with romantic smugness, -- “I thought to myself .... hey!, that’s Anne, Anne from Mythology. I thought to myself -- She’s an interesting woman.”

Whenever he delivered this punch line, he would lean over and kiss her on the cheeks – always the cheeks, never the lips. She hated the story telling ritual.

She should have known then and there what a world of illusion he lived in. She was nothing like Ursula from Women in Love, not the sex starved intellectual maiden he imagined, brightly colored socks or no socks at all. She was a simple college student, perhaps smatter than the average person, simply struggling to get through college without any financial assistance from her divorcing parents. “I was crossing the G. W. Bridge by foot to save on the bus fare,” she would tell people. “What romantic claptrap would D.H. Laurence have to say about that?”

She was the pragmatist, the scientist as he referred to her. She was the one that had to make all the hard decisions for both of them. Like the decision to leave New York. Except, it was not exactly leaving New York, it was more like escaping. That’s the word she would choose, the time they escaped new York.

* * *

When they graduated College, he went straight into law school. She started working as a secretary at a law firm. She needed to save money if she was going to get through medical school. They reached an agreement, a compromise for their living arrangements, before they got married. They would live together while he finished law school and she continued to work as a secretary. They could both share her one room apartment on 69th Street. It was small, but it was rent stabilized, and neither would ever find anything cheaper in the City. She would use her secretarial salary to buy the groceries, put food on the table, maybe even go to the beach once in a while (Naples Florida, where Celeste had moved to after the divorce). The plan, the construction she had come up with and that he had agreed to, was that once he started working for a big wall street firm, for she knew he would, she would then go to medical school. It was all very practical, no sentiment or romanticism in it. Eventually they would both have their degrees and enjoy life in New York as only two income professional couples can afford to do. It all sounded so perfectly achievable, normal.

There was a hitch in Anne’s plan, however. There was one aspect, one ingredient, one component necessary for it all to come to fruition which she did not realize was not accounted for: Normalcy. He had none of it. He was not normal.

At first, his romanticism seemed charming, but soon after moving in together it became obsessively weird. He insisted they spend every waking moment together, even bathroom time. She was suffocated by him. Sometimes her only means of getting away from him was to tell him she had food shopping to get done. He hated food shopping, though God knows he loved to eat. She would spend hours in the supermarket, enjoying the coolness of the air conditioned isles, the freedom of being away from his constant companionship. When she got home, she would find him either in a foul mood (where the hell where you?) or naked finishing off two or three bottles of wine. Ironically he had never drank before he moved in with her (“Reminds me too much of my Mother,” he had said) and Anne had been the one that pushed him to “Have a glass when you get home. . . it will relive the tension.” It did not. It had the opposite effect. The drink would make his anger and his controlling nature more acute. “Bitch!” he would say (although he had claimed that he did not like to use foul language), “Bitch! You’ve ruined my life. Look at the dump we are living in. Look at this mess, look at this cluttered mess!” He knocked over two or three piles of paper she had left on top of a table; her notes, her clippings, her structured and organized clutter. “Why did I ever listen to you!” he shouted, in a tone that only an animal should use, if wounded and dying. “I should have known your ideas were quirky and that you would be a slob.”

He hurt her, emotionally, never physically, but he hurt her to the bone. The next morning he would apologize, and Anne in good nature would accept the apology. “I’m a dunce,” he would say in the morning. “You know how much I love you. Your my George Washington Bridge girl; I could never leave you.”

Any other woman would have left, but Anne would not admit defeat. She had already declared in her mind and to others that he would be her life partner. There was no turning back on these plans. She was not going to be the loser Celeste was, she was not going to be left alone.
Celeste urged her to seek counsel, or better yet, to leave him. Celeste could see it all. Anne told everything to Celeste, as they had become each other’s best friends, confidents, but Anne would take no advise from Celeste. “You should leave him,” insisted Celeste. “Get yourself a little apartment by the Village, decorate it in some of that sleek plastic furniture they are making these days. I can help you set it all up, I know the owner of a store on Madison that specializes in it. Leave him, Anne. Leave him.”

Out of pure stubbornness, Anne would have noting of it, none of her mother’s advise, none of the furniture or solutions she offered. “It will get better,” she answered her mother. “It always gets better.”

It didn't. It got worse. Once he started working for the law firm, in Wall Street, he became a monster at home. The law firm work was demanding, and it drained him physically and emotionally. He had to put on the best face at work, keep his anxiety and anger in check. He would often get home at 2 in the morning, to get a few hours sleep and then march straight back to the office. But he could not simply go to bed, he had to unwind first, and this unwinding consisted of yelling at her, of blaming Anne for everything he perceived wrong in his life. “You are being unreasonable,” she once dared say to him. It was the wrong thing to say. This time he did get physical, put his hands up against her throat, and (though he did not squeeze) she felt terror and feared the worst. He screamed, louder than usual, so much so that the neighbors came knocking around the door. “Everything OK in there?” they asked. Anne pulled his hand away from her, and answered the neighbors inquiry. “We are fine,” she said. “Just a nightmare.”

The next morning, he apologized as usual. She suffered it, silently, her own martyrdom, the martyrdom of an atheist. It was part of her destiny, although certainly not part of her original plan. “Just don’t scream at the office,” she begged him. “Just keep it home, if you would.”

A man that screams at his partner, will sooner or later scream at the world. These were Celeste’s predictions. Anne knew Celeste was right of course, but she hoped for the best, expected that maybe he would be smart enough to yell at some stranger in the corner, someone who perhaps pushed him inadvertently, someone who perhaps stepped on his toe by mistake, but he would not yell in the office -- he would know it was inappropriate to yell in the office. After all, he did have a Columbia education; surely they taught him that much, she told Celeste.

The day he had a screaming match at work, with a secretary, was the least predictable day Anne would have thought that anything would happen. He had been in a extraordinary cheerful mood that morning, and Anne had allowed herself the illusion to think that life was getting better.

“I love you,” he had said that morning as he left the apartment, and kissed her on the cheek (never on the lips).

In the subway, he felt anger for no apparent reason, other than the sheer crowd, the grimness of it, the dirt. He noticed rats on the tracks and graffiti on the subway cars. While other times he would have been amused by the platform musicians, today he thought they were no better than panderers, gypsies and beggars. It all seemed reflective of something inside him that he could not put his finger on. As he walked away from the subway exit and stepped into the street, a taxi cab honked at him, and he took insult but no revenge. He internalized this, took the taxi caber’s honking as a personal offense, and thought again that this unkindness he experienced, this rat maze of a life he was living in New York City was reflective of what he kept hidden in his heart – that which he would discuss with no one, the memories that he would not allow to be thought again -- the villa miseria, the high heels across wooden floors, the hand that struck his face and seduction. Push it away, he thought whenever these thoughts sought to reach the surface. Push it away. Finally that morning, a secretary had the misfortune of taking too long at the copier when he was in a rush; he had people waiting for him in a conference room, and had to make copies of a document to be reviewed. He exploded on the secretary. He started out by saying, “get out of my way,” but when she ignored him (or when he thought she ignored), he let loose on her as he was accustomed to letting loose on Anne. The street, the subway, the taxi, the villa miseria, the high heels, the hand across the face all culminating in a scream that only a wounded animal should utter, if sick or dying. “Get your fat ass out of my way!” he demanded.

The secretary moved, and he proceeded with his copies. He returned to the conference room, thinking nothing of what had just transpired. Everything was fine, as far as he was concerned.

Anne was the first to hear about the screaming, before even he heard about it. Even in an office where partners were known to loose their temper periodically, usually against some associate, his screaming was perceived to be abnormal, not just temper but an illness, a medical condition that needed to be addressed. It did not help matters either that the secretary he had chosen to freak out on was Judge Collins’ personal assistance. Collins was the law firms founding partner, the biggest rainmaker the firm had, and his personal assistance wielded if not as much power as Collins, then close to it. She was not to be trifled with. Collins’ secretary promptly retold the story to the head of personnel, and insisted that amends be amend. She was also the one that suggested that the man’s live-in companion be called first. “I believe she is a medical student” said Collins’s secretary. “I met her at one of the office parties. She seems like a reasonable person. Get her to come over and take him away.”

Associates are a dime a dozen, a good secretary (or even better yet, a loyal secretary) is hard to find. It was discreetly suggested to him that although he could continue to work as an associate (they did after all need the labor, and he did after all put in the long hours), it was highly unlikely that he would be offered a partnership, and his time would not be badly spent if he simultaneously sought employment elsewhere. Preferably by the end of the normal associate training period. In that they were generous; in essence, they gave him three years to pack his bags.

Anne came to pick him up at the office. By then he had been told by no less than Collins himself how unacceptable it all was. He was waiting for Anne, in his small office on the 14th floor, reading the New York Bar magazine. He was scouting the want ads, seeing how difficult or easy it would be to find another job. “I am sorry,” he told Anne, “But I think they are overacting, don’t you?”

Anne said nothing that night or the following day or even the days after that. Instead, she used her connections at NYU Medical School to get him a good psychiatrist, someone who would not be afraid to medicate him. No therapy, she thought, just medication; that’s what he needs. She got him on drugs, sedated, subdued. The drugs felt right to him. It was his destiny. They were his unknown chalice, he was their unknowing knight – a blob, a mental case, a mess in search of a drug. The street, the subway, the taxi, the villa miseria, the high heels, the hand across the face – the seduction -- suddenly none of it matter, though none of it had gone away. He was calm, in a way he had not been for many years, if ever. (“But I weaned him off them now,” thinks Anne these days. “I did not keep him on them, for too long, not too very long, really.”)

He soon learned how unforgiving New York could be. With the felt of drugs, he felt calm, normal and he still had his Columbia degrees, College and Law School. Headhunters however would have nothing to do with him. Word had been let out from Collins’ own office that the strikingly handsome curly haired attorney from Argentina was a lunatic. Without a head hunter’s assistance, no law firm in New York (no self respecting law firm) will have you.

After nearly three years of job hunting, one job offer did miraculously appear as the result of a friend’s inquiries with his uncle in a North Carolina law firm. The curly haired attorney from Argentina was aghast of the idea of moving down south, but went on the North Carolina interview on Anne’s insistence. “It may be the only job that is offered to you,” she had said. And she was right.

Anne was about to graduate medical school, and had to continue with her residence training at a reputable hospital. Her preference would have been to stay in Manhattan, which she adored, but she knew that he would never find a job in the City. she pulled every connection she had in medical school to ensure herself a residency at Duke, in North Carolina. It was hard. She humiliated in having to ingratiate herself with those who could actually assist her. She wished she did not have to do this, to seek professional favors from others, but she did it for him, knowing that if he did not take up the one job that was offered to him in North Carolina he would be unemployed forever. She even pretended that they were moving to North Carolina for her benefit, for her medical training, for her benefit. She never made him feel that it was out of desperation, to secure the only job that would come down his way. She convinced him it was all for her, and he convinced himself likewise, but complained about it. “It’s an imprudent move,” he told her, “Those southern heathens, what will they know about our Ivy League education. But I’ll do it for you; I’ll live with you in North Carolina, after we get married.”

She feverishly worked to revise the plot for their lives, the carefully constructed plans she had made. There were some very elementary revisions that had to be made, like getting married. They had lived together for four years now, and that was fine for Manhattan. It would not go over well in North Carolina. Anne let Celeste take charge of this, let her buy the wedding clothes, let her set up the appointment with Wyckoff City Hall. She even let Celeste plan a very small garden party for after the ceremony. They drank Cherry and ate watercress sandwiches. Celeste hired one of her gay designer friends to spruce up her back yard. “There’s not much I can do with this,” said the friend, “but at least it won’t feel like New Jersey; it will feel like Florence.” Celeste and her gay friend planted pink flowers everywhere, and decorated the garden railings with white crepe paper. It did not feel like Florence, thought Anne. But it got the job done. They got married in September, soon after she graduated from Medical School, and then promptly moved to North Carolina to start a new life. Anne still remembers the comment Celeste made to the overly gay man that fitted her now ex-husband for his wedding suit. “Take good care of him, he’s going to be my son in law now and for the rest of a lifetime.”

* * *

What a joke, thought Celeste, now sitting in front of her mirror, so many years later and circumstances changed. And now that lifetime is over. Thank God. She is glad to be done of it, to be no longer of his world, his wife, his companion. She is glad to be sitting here, back in the civilized Northeast, the suburbs of DC, where she belongs, in front of her mirror, her home, not his, putting on her pearls, admiring herself in her mirror, so very glad to be alone – alone with her mother and her children that is. How very much the plans she once made have now changed for the best.

* * *

The phone rings. Celeste is downstairs with the kids, giving them breakfast. She is such a darling to help her out. Anne loves her mother dearly, even though most times they fight as if they were rivals. “You really should start dating again, Anne dear,” says Celeste so often.

“Someone pick up the phone, please!” screams Anne from the top of the stairs. “Mommy is still getting dressed, and she needs a little help here.” She hears Joey and Christina now bickering as to whose turn it is to pick up the phone. Then she hears Celeste. Finally one of the children answers the damned device, and she hears him or her say “Anne Foster’s residence,” as Celeste has taught them to do. She can’t tell if its Joey or Christina that has answered the phone, at this young an age their voices are indistinguishable. Later on in life, no doubt, his voice will become deep, rich, voluptuous, like his father’s. After all, he has his father’s green eyes, his father’s contagious smile, of course he’ll have his father’s voice.

“Mom!” It is a loud scream. This time she knows it is Joey’s voice. She has never heard such fright in Christina’s voice; only Joey is able to express such fright. “Mommy!,” she hears again, but this time it is Christina screaming. Both kids are hysterical. Celeste urges Anne to pick up the phone. Anne takes over. It’s him. He is hallucinating. She is telling him, from the other side of the phone from where his voice comes, that he has taken 90 pills. He is telling her, from the other side of the phone, that he believes he is dead.

* * *


That same day, that day he committed suicide but survived like Lazarus, Anne took matters into her own hands. As usual, she would bring order to the disaster he created. After her meeting with Faucci (she kept the meeting, she can do everything), she gave an urgent call to that quack psychiatrist her ex-husband has been seeing. She found the number in his bedroom, next to the pills, on a little appointment card.

“This is Anne Foster.”

(Surprised mumble on the other side of the line)

“That’s right,” continues Anne after the mumble of the phone. “I’m his ex-wife, and I think we need to meet, and we need to do it rather quickly.”

(More mumbling on the other side of the line.)

“Today is fine,” says Anne to Dr. Take Notes, and hangs up her blackberry cell phone.

* * *

They agreed to meet at 2 pm, in Dr. Take Notes’ office, in Dupont. He’s a tiny little man, but he has a very demanding way about him. Anne is not intimidated. She has fried much bigger fish than this in her days at Duke and at the NIH. She may look diminutive, lady like, reminiscent of the gentler sex as it was a century ago, but she has the ferocity and cunningness of a lioness. The conversation is quick, right to the point, just the manner in which Anne likes to conduct business.

“You should know that he tried to commit suicide today” she informs him. “Tried to overdose on sleeping pills.”

Dr. Take Notes takes a drag of his cigarette. Some people just can’t give up the nicotine is what she thinks. She admires the yellow film the smoke has built up around his chubby fingernails.

Dr. Take Notes pretends to be calm. “We’ll need to make arrangements to have him institutionalized.” He says. “He’ll need to be watched.” He taps some of the ashes at the tip of his cigarette right unto his expensive oriental rug. “Is he a danger to himself do you think?”

“You’ll do nothing like that,” says Anne, calmly. “I’m not going to have you ruin his career. If you were to send him to a hospital, he would loose all his professional credibility. That won’t happen. I’ll watch over him, I’ll be his caretaker. We don’t need to get the hospital involved.”

“Madam, I can’t ignore this. I have a professional obligation.”

She laughs at this. It comes out harsh, louder than she intended, but she’s glad of it. It allows her to come out strong. Now she’ll let him have it, setting him straight. Rip him a new asshole, as they used to say at Duke.

“Professional obligation? Where did he get the sleeping pills may I ask?”

“Excuse me?”

“I know his internist personally; he’s a colleague of mine. He would never prescribe sleeping pills for my ex-husband, seeing how this is not the first time, seeing how he has a history of suicide attempts.”

“Well, yes, but . . .” Dr. Take Notes smashes out his cigarette, against his expensive oriental rug.

“I saw the pills on his desk. They weren’t prescribed to him. They were prescribed to you. I assume that you have been providing him with these?”

“It was a professional accommodation. A special act of kindness if you will.”

“What others drugs have you given him?”
Dr. Take Notes assesses the situation. She recognizes the lioness in her, but he has heard all about her from his favorite patient. He wrongly assumes he can take her on. He feels no need to mince words with her.
“Some hallucinogens,” says Dr. Take Notes. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Just helping him see beyond his own self. Helping him recognize who he is, as part of our special therapy sessions.”

Anne puts on her take no prisoner smiles, the one she has perfected after all these years. This little man, this Dr. Take Notes, is slim as far as she is concerned. “What rock did you crawl from down under?” she asks him. “What possessed you to give him drugs?”

“Why do you stay with him?,” he asks, impulsively, purposely disagreeable. ”

“Stay with him? We are divorced, do you not remember that? He left me, when I got pregnant. But I won’t leave him. Not yet. Not until he is fully cured. He’s a lunatic, but he is an exceptional man, and I love him. Can you understand that? Have you ever loved anyone so much that you would stick to him even if he has hurt you to the bone?”

Dr. Take Notes stands up, to pull the shades of his office window. He loves to play with his shades. He takes his time in sitting back down, clearly measuring his words. As he sits, Dr. Take Notes blurts out an explanation. “It was his idea, really – the drugs that is. He seemed to be quite knowledgeable about mood altering drugs. Apparently he has been given these before. Apparently he was subdued, for many years was. How many years was that Ms. Foster? Apparently he had a violent temper that needed to be kept under control, for which no self respecting psychiatrist would prescribe a prolonged treatment with drugs. But he found a source, Ms. Foster. Someone supplied him the means. Someone with access to drugs kept him sedated. I think we both know who we mean.”

Anne is not shocked. She maintains her composure even through this, even after having been outed. She would love to stand up and open the shades, as she hates sitting in the dark, but she won’t play Dr. Take Notes game. She sits back, apparently feeling relaxed, and smiles at her counterpart doctor. “So he told you all about it,” she says, pleasantly, as if engaged in one of her many tea chat conversations with her best friends from college. “Nothing to get excited about,” she adds. “I had my reasons, I had the means, and I had the results I needed. It benefited me, and it benefited me.”

“And me as well,” asks Dr. Take Notes. “As I said to you, he is a very passionate man, and I find that in addition to being able to explore those childhood issues with hallucinogens, he becomes very relaxed, very receptive if you will. Very seductive. He is a passionate man.:

“You quack. You dirty rotten quack.”

“He’s an interesting man. Very passionate about his feelings. Very passionate in general.”

Stop saying that, she thinks. Stop saying that.

Keep calm, she says to herself. Outwardly, exteriorly, let the pearls shine through”

“Look buster,” says Anne to Dr. Take Notes, determined to bring this to an end. “Let’s get this straight. I don’t want to drag your name through the mud, and you don’t want to drag mine. I also want to save his reputation, if we can, by keeping some of this to ourselves. All three of us have too much to lose here, and much to gain by our collective silence. I will make everything alright again. I will nurse him back to sanity, now that he has tried to commit suicide again. But you will never see him; you will call him and drop him as a patient. If you disobey me, if I get even a hint that you made contact with him again other than to dismiss him, I will have your license revoked and your ass put up for public humiliation. I have connections, you understand. Being the head of an NIH Department does have its benefits. Are we in agreement here?.

The shrink nods his head. He lights up another cigarette. Unusual that a man of pseudo medicine should smoke. Someday he must quit. “As he would say,” he replies to Anne Foster -- “de acuerdo.”


Anne pulls out her bag. She carries a small mirror in it, not a compact mirror, but a Marie Antoinette mirror, with a long brass handle. She holds it up against her face. Per Celeste’s insistence, Anne has started to use make up, and she likes what it does for her. It takes away so many years, it makes it so easy to forget how much time she has wasted chasing a dream that could not exist. She applies powder to her nose, examines her eyes, the necklace, the pearls. She puts away the mirror.

“Well,” she says to the psychiatrist, ,as she stands up to leave. “I guess we are all done here. I must dash. I still have another meeting to attend to with Faucci.”

* * *

Subway Musings

What it felt like -- sitting in the Indian restaurant next to you, in Baltimore (a city I don’t really know, but will get to know like Edgar Allen Poe), seeing you watching me, scrutinizing me with your accepting eyes, and feeling self conscious about such stares (yet also feeling glad to be so admired, by your accepting eyes), periodically putting my hand on your knees – periodically -- hoping to communicate to you that “I love being here with you, in this city I don’t know but I wish to get to know;” listening to your friends talk and understanding that (like you – for like kind attracts like kindness --) they are easy going, accepting; and its lovely, but not always lovely, because at the same time that we are having dinner with your friends, who are so welcoming (in this city of Baltimore, in this Indian restaurant I have never eaten in before, among your two best friends whom I’ve only just me), while feeling euphoria, I also feel remorse, having brief flashbacks (which are not welcoming) of our earlier fight that very same morning (at another restaurant, also in this city of Baltimore which I don’t know, eating Spanish tapas for lunch, which neither of us liked really, and where the conversation was not so lovely, although it should have been because it was only the two of us) and I reflect that we still need to work on how to communicate best, how to be able to talk without making the other feel unappreciated (and this remember Ralph, I did not mean to hurt you – my Ralphie, my dear Ralphie); but fortunately the flashbacks are brief, overpowered as they should be by my desire of wanting to kiss you in the middle of this dinner at an Indian restaurant in the city of Baltimore, but deciding against it -- because I did not want your friends to think that I’m the show off type (they don’t know me, the don’t know that I am a cautious man, that I do not render my heart easily, that my wanting to kiss you in public is against my every pattern, against the deepest core of my crusty old self); perhaps, I thought, they will think I’m the kind that kisses his new beau in public because he is the type who is in it only for the momentary giddiness of it and not in it for the inevitable ups and downs of an adult gay relationship (but they would be wrong, I tell myself – if they thought that, they would be wrong), and as I think about kissing you in public (and choose against it), as I have this dread of being conspicuous, not wanting to embrace you in the middle of dinner in the middle of a crowded restaurant – at the same time and during all these times – I feel the sweet conquest of having been kissed by you, moments ago, when we entered the restaurant, unabashedly, in this city of Baltimore, telling me with that kiss, as you did and intended, that “we fought, but I’m still proud to love you.”

What it felt like: It felt like a dream (but don’t pinch me – I know that I’m awake).