There was a tiny part of me that wanted to say, You have me, Genet. But for once, I stopped to consider myself, to save myself
I felt compassion for her of a sort that I hadn't felt before: it was a feeling better than love, because it released me, it set me free of her. Marion, I said to myself, she found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?
51. The Devil's Choice
IN RETROSPECT, my illness began that Sunday morning in the crystalline moment of waking to a silent house in which I knew I was alone and she was gone. Forty-three days later, the first shudder of nausea arrived, an ocean surge as if a distant Vesuvius had collapsed into the sea. Next an ancient fog, an Entoto mist full of shifting shapes and animal sounds descended on me, and by the forty-ninth day I had lost consciousness.
How remarkable that a life should turn on such a small thing as a decision to open a door or not. I ushered Genet in on a Friday. She let herself out two days later without a good-bye, and nothing would be the same again. She placed a pinwheel cross at the center of the dining table, a gift for me, I presumed. That St. Bridget's medallion she wore on a necklace had been her father's, and it had belonged to a Canadian soldier named Darwin before that.
The tale of her ex-husband lingered like a nasty flu. I'd insisted on hearing the story. I discovered that Genet was capable of selfless love— just not with me. Still, in my home I'd found a momentary equilibrium with her, or the illusion of it, as if we were again like children playing house, playing doctor.
I HURRIED HOME each night after work, hoping to find her waiting on my stoop. My heart would sink when I glimpsed the yellow sticky I had left for her inside the screen door, telling her the key was with my good neighbor, Holmes, and to feel at home. Once inside, I felt compelled to retrieve my note, checking to be sure I had, in fact, written on it. I confess, I even left a stub of a pencil by the door in case she felt inclined to compose a reply.
By Friday, a week after I first dragged her into my home, the sight of that yellow square of paper screamed, FOOL! The stubby pencil said, FOOL OF THE HIGHEST ORDER. I tore up the paper and flung the pencil stub into the street.
I wasn't angry with Genet. She was consistent, if nothing else. I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.
Sitting in my library that night, having done more damage to a bottle of Pinch in four hours than I had in the year since I bought it, I replayed our last exchange. She'd been curled up in the chair I now sat in, wearing my dressing gown, the gown that I now wore. I came to her with tea— that signature move of fools, one of the stigmata by which you shall know us.
“Marion,” she said, for she had been gazing at my library, my eclectic little collection. “Your father's apartment in Boston, the way you described it … it sounds so much like this.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” I said. “I built these bookcases myself. Half the books here have nothing to do with surgery. Surgery isn't my life.”
She didn't argue. We sat quietly. At one point I saw her gaze flit to the rug on the floor between us—there was an intruder sitting naked on those synthetic fibers, a dark silent man with razor cuts to his body. His presence put a damper on our conversation.
When I announced I was going to go to bed, she said she'd be right along. She smiled. I didn't believe her. I thought I'd never see her again. But I was wrong. She joined me under the covers. We made love. It was tender and slow. It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.
TWO WEEKS AFTER SHE LEFT, I felt at odds with my house. I found my library oppressive. In the kitchen, I took out my dinner, which was a foil packet labeled FRIDAY in my handwriting; it was the last of what I had cooked, frozen, and packed in aliquots many weekends ago. Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos inside my head.
Thank God for my good neighbor, Sonny Holmes. He heard me raging, he heard me bang my head against the fridge. Sonny Holmes had an inherent curiosity an honest, all-American nosiness that came with crossing one's seventieth year and that did not try to conceal itself. Hed been aware of the coming of my guest—such a rare event—and he'd heard the headboard music and then the long silence.
“You need to hire a security firm,” he said, coming to a quick diagnosis before I had even finished my story. Sonny believed in the ennea-gram, that Jesuit-invented classification of people into personality types. He was a One, willful and confident and certain. He had me pegged as a Three or a Four, or was it a Two? Whatever it was, it was a number that did not argue with Ones.
“I need a what?” I said.
“A private detective.”
“Sonny, for what? I don't want to see her again.”
“Perhaps so. But you need closure. What if she's in jail or in a hospital? What if she's trying desperately to get back to you, but can't?”
A noble motive, that was all a Two needed to continue an obsession. I latched on to that.
East Coast Investigations of Flushing turned out to be an earnest, blond youth by the name of Appleby, son of Holmes's late sister-in-law. Appleby quickly established that Genet had not returned to her halfway house. She hadn't gone to Nathan's restaurant, where she washed dishes. She had not checked in with her probation officer and she had not called Tsige. He learned these facts in no time. He even knew that Genet had been diagnosed with tuberculosis while in prison. She began medications, but then failed to report for her DOT—Directly Observed Therapy—after she was released. The cough, the fever, in all likelihood were her tuberculosis coming back. The disconcerting news was that if she ever materialized, I'd be third in line after the state health department and her probation officer. She would be headed back to jail. Apple by s source in jail could get his hand on her complete medical records if we wished, and Appleby said he'd taken the liberty of telling the man to proceed. I was concerned about violating her confidentiality. “Knowledge is power in these kinds of situations,” Appleby added, and with that he won me over; any man who would use a quote that Ghosh loved was a man to trust. “You are paying to know,” he added, “and I think we're obliged to know more.”
“So what now?” I asked Appleby. I wasn't asking him about exposure to tuberculosis. I could handle that.
Appleby avoided my eyes. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were covered with twitchy blood vessels, ready to flush at the least provocation. His condition was acne rosacea, not to be confused with the pedestrian acne vulgaris, the bane of many teenagers. Appleby's nose would one day be burgundy and bulbous, the cheeks a meaty red. Already shy, his problems would get worse because strangers would assume incorrectly that his appearance was a result of drink. Here I knew about his future while paying him to tell me mine.
“Well, Dr. Stone,” Appleby said, clearing his throat, his nose starting to redden, a sure indication that I would not like what he had to say, “Respectfully, I would say to check your silverware. Inventory your belongings. Make sure nothing is missing.”
I looked at him for a long while. “But, Mr. Appleby, the only thing that matters to me is precisely the one thing that is missing.”