“Isn’t there anything else they can do?” Emily asked her mother. “A different type of therapy? Behavior modification?”
Again, her mother let out a heavy sigh. “Well, I guess that’s what the coping classes are. And they are trying some other things. We’ll see.”
To Emily, Clara actually sounded better. And yet Emily herself seemed, somehow, worse. Each day, her emotions snuck closer and closer to the surface of her skin, threatening to interfere with even the most minor components of her daily life. A week earlier, she’d completely lost her temper when the guy at the post office had refused to accept her credit card without ID, even though she’d been buying stamps from him for years. She’d run home to Curtis, taut with anxiety.
“You’re not mentally ill, okay,” Curtis said, with a shrug, when she told him what happened. “If that’s what you’re asking.”
“I know,” she said. “But, Curtis, I just went crazy. I started screaming at the guy. It was exactly the kind of thing Clara would do.”
Curtis twisted his puffy lips into a smile. “It’s the kind of thing everyone does. Postal workers are assholes.”
“I know,” she said again, looking down at her feet.
“Do you want to talk to my mom about it?” he asked.
“No, no,” Emily said quickly. His parents were both psychiatrists at New York Hospital, on Sixty-eighth Street. He met them for lunch every couple of weeks, and sometimes Emily accompanied him, trying to keep up with the Drs. Lang as they trotted through the building, dropping off papers, conferring with their residents, armies of clean-shaven, short-haired, vaguely pompous young white men in dark suits covered over with lab coats, who eyed Emily and Curtis suspiciously.
Mr. Lang specialized in sexual dysfunction. Mrs. Lang in eating disorders, which, Emily had recently discovered, through rampant Googling, were a type of borderline personality disorder. The Langs made Emily a little nervous, though she knew they didn’t mean to and she should just chill. If anything, Curtis’s parents were overly familiar: Peace Corps vets, like her own parents, who lived in a renovated Victorian—white, with black shutters—in a quaint, lushly landscaped town, with an overabundance of antique shops and bistros. They’d met at Harvard Med and still seemed appropriately fond of each other, both of them tall and thin and long faced, and clad in the sorts of garments worn by affluent suburbanites who wish to broadcast their interest in nature and the various activities one might partake in by way of communing with it.
Now that Curtis and his sister Cordelia were grown, the Langs spent part of each year in Africa, volunteering at an AIDS clinic. Their house was filled with tribal masks and fetishes, which frightened Emily, with their empty eyes. She knew it was politically incorrect of her to feel this way. She also knew that Sadie would have said that Emily’s fear of the masks was really a manifestation of—“a mask for, if you will,” she could hear Sadie saying, with a laugh—her fear of the Langs, Curtis included. For in a way, the problem with her visits to Montclair lay less with the Drs. Lang and more with the way a different Curtis emerged the minute he set foot on their plush lawn: the suburban overachiever, the yearbook photographer, political activist, track star. She didn’t mind this Curtis, but she knew, somehow, that if Curtis were to betray her, to renege the promises he’d made to her, to leave her, that this second Curtis—the Montclair Curtis—would be responsible. For this Curtis—who sweetly brought up the subjects on which he knew his father loved to expound, like T. S. Eliot and North Fork wines—was first and foremost a Lang, and secondarily everything else.
It had taken her some time to realize that Curtis was, despite appearances, still under the thrall of his parents’ expectations. When she’d met him, a year prior, she’d thought him the exact opposite, some sort of pure being, like a bodhisattva, shot down from a higher plane to bless mortals with his unusual wisdom. He didn’t want to talk about any of the things other people talked about at parties: new restaurants, rents, movies. He hadn’t read a magazine since 1984, when his subscription to Highlights expired, and he hadn’t read a book published since around that same date, other than Vineland (he was mad about Pynchon, the only person she knew who’d made it through Gravity’s Rainbow). He didn’t go to movies and didn’t own a television. He hadn’t asked her what she did or where she lived or how she found her apartment. What did they talk about? she wondered now, padding around her clean apartment. Family, she supposed. Art.
On her second visit to Montclair, in March, Mr. Lang served a cassoulet—“French peasant food!” he cried in such a way that Emily knew he shouted this whenever he served the dish—and a big salad, and talked at length about the wine, which came from a grape that had fallen out of vogue but was now being revived by artisanal vintners in Virginia (“Turns out the soil has the exact same pH level as the Loire”). After dinner, Mrs. Lang shooed Emily and Mr. Lang into the study—they’d eaten at the big plank table in the Langs’ sleek open kitchen—and summoned Curtis to help her with the dishes. “How about some port?” asked Mr. Lang, raising one bony finger, and slipped through the study’s second doorway, which led to a funny little passageway under the stairs. Emily was left alone in the Lang study, a dark, book-lined room straight out of Martha Stewart, though presumably the room’s design and decoration predated Martha Stewart’s invention of herself as the arbiter of things domestic. Emily ran her finger over the books in the cases: medical and psychological texts, British mysteries, short stories by Cheever and Carver and McCullers, paperback thrillers, a shelf of yellowing editions of poetry, presumably dating to the Langs’ undergraduate days. One section of a bookcase was covered with a massive door, behind which, Emily suspected, was a television. She imagined Curtis as a towheaded kid, lying on the flat kilim, watching cartoons.
From the kitchen came the low murmur of Curtis’s voice, punctuated by the higher, sharper inflections of Mrs. Lang. Emily tried not to listen, until she heard Mrs. Lang say, unmistakably, “What’s Amy up to these days?” Curtis’s response—or the parts of it she could make out, from where she sat frozen in an oversized leather club chair—had something to do with Amy’s continuing legal problems, following her arrest in Seattle at the WTO the previous year, and the fallout from a massive protest against Crown: a mock New Orleans funeral for the company, with an effigy of its CEO in a coffin, and a fifteen-piece brass band (“It was really cool”). Emily had read about the protest in the paper—and heard a bit about it from Lil, as Caitlin Green-Gold and her husband were, of course, involved—and wasn’t surprised to hear that Amy the Anarchist had been in attendance. But she was surprised that Curtis could outline Amy’s activities for his mother. She’d been under the impression they were barely in touch. Just calm down, she told herself. It’s not a big deal.
But a few days later, she flew into a rage—“You still love her!” etc.—and Curtis confessed that part of the time he didn’t spend with Emily—Sundays, his time, he’d said, for solitude—was spent at Amy’s place, visiting Dudley, the grayish, wiry-haired dog they’d adopted in college. Curtis kept a photo of Dudley in his wallet and looked longingly at every dog they passed on the street. “I miss him,” he told her. “He’s an old guy. He’s not going to be around much longer.” Emily’s fury—tamped down, briefly, by thoughts of Dudley—leapt into her throat again.