Helen liked waiting, wanting, and being wanted more. It’s all so typical, she told Dr. Kaye, and he wanted her to go on. She felt him hanging on her words. Tell me more, he said. The bar was dark, of course, crowded, Rex’s eyes were smoky, and everything in him was concentrated in them, they were like headlights, he’d been in a car accident once and showed me his scar, at his neck, and then I kissed him there, and I told him about my brother’s suicide, and about you, and he was jealous, he doesn’t want me to talk about him, us, he thinks it’ll destroy the magic, probably… stupid… it is magic… and he wanted me then, and there… But she thought: Never with Rex, never give myself, just give this to you, my doctor. She announced, suddenly: I won’t squander anything anymore.
The urge to give herself was weirdly compelling, written into her like the ridiculous, implausible vows in a marriage contract. Dr. Kaye might feel differently about marriage, or other things, but he wouldn’t tell her. He contained himself astutely and grew fuller, fatter. He looked larger every week. The mystery was that he was always available for their time-bound encounters, in which thwarted love was still love. It was what you did with your limits that mattered. She imagined she interested him.
Listening to her stories, Dr. Kaye encouraged her, and she felt alive. She could do with her body what she wanted, everyone knew that; the body was just a fleshy vehicle of consequences. Her mind was virtual — free, even, to make false separations. She could lie to herself, to him; she believed in what she said, whatever it was. So did he. To Dr. Kaye, there was truth in fantasy. Her half-lies and contradictions were really inconsequential to anyone but herself. He might admit that.
But the next day, on the train, Rex pressed her silently. His thin face was as sharp as a steak knife. He wouldn’t give her what she wanted: he didn’t look at her with greedy passion. There was a little death around the corner, waiting for her. She had to give him something, feed his fire or lose it and him.
So she would visit his studio, see his work, she might succumb, Helen informed her analyst. She described how she’d enter his place and be overwhelmed by sensations that had nothing to do with the present. In another time, with another man, with other men, this had happened before, so her senses would awaken to colors, smells, and sounds that were familiar. Soon she would be naked with him on a rough wool blanket thrown hastily over a cot. Her skin would be irritated by the wool, and she would discover his body and find it wonderful or not. He would devour her. He would say, I’ve never felt this way before. Or, you make me feel insane. She wouldn’t like his work and would feel herself moving away from him. Already seen, it was in a way obscene, and ordinary. She calmly explained what shouldn’t be seen, and why, and, as she did, found an old cave to enter.
Dr. Kaye didn’t seem to appreciate her reluctance. Or if he did, in his subtle way he appeared to want her to have the experience, anyway. She knew she would go, then, to Rex’s studio, and announced on the train that she’d be there Saturday night — date night, Rex said. He looked at her again, that way. But she knew it would hasten the end, like a death sentence for promise. Recently, Helen had awaited Timothy McVeigh’s execution with terror, but it had come and gone. No one mentioned him anymore. Others were being killed — just a few injections, put them to sleep, stop their breathing, and it’s done, they’re gone. Things die so easily, she said. Then she listened to Dr. Kaye breathe.
Saturday night Helen rang the bell on Rex’s Williamsburg studio. All around her, singles and couples wandered on a mission to have fun. Soon they’d go home, and the streets would be empty. Rex greeted her with a drink — a Mojito — which he knew she loved. His studio was bare, except for his work and books, even austere, and it was clean. The sweet, thick rum numbed her, and she prepared for the worst and the best. There was no in-between.
His paintings were, in a way, pictures of pictures. Unexpectedly, she responded to them, because they appreciated the distance between things. Then, without much talk, they had sex. She wasn’t sure why, but resisting was harder. Rex adored her, her body, he was nimble and smelled like wet sand. He came, finally, but she didn’t want to or couldn’t. She held something back. Rex was bothered, and her head felt as if it had split apart. But it didn’t matter in some way she couldn’t explain to Dr. Kaye. She heard him move in his chair. She worried that he wasn’t interested. Maybe her stories exhausted him. Rex called her every day. She wondered if she should find another man, one she couldn’t have.
Chartreuse
How abrupt she was. She’d handed him the glass of Chartreuse, and her wrist flicked upward. Her hand’s rebelling, he thought. Then she flinched. But she caught herself, she hadn’t told him what actually happened, and she hadn’t lied. She’d left room in their conversation for ambiguity. So this was the conversation he was in, but what about the others he hadn’t been asked to join. His life was cycling into territory where gaps counted more. Mind the gap, but his mind was wandering.
“In La Grande-Chartreuse,” she said, also abruptly but with a laugh, as if to distract him, “the head and celebrated monastery of the Carthusians, near Grenoble, the monks brewed Chartreuse. It’s a liqueur or aperitif — you can have it before or after — made from aromatic herbs and brandy. The recipe is an ancient secret.”
She visited the monastery years ago, crossing the Channel as a teenager, and pronounced the word “herb” the English way, its “h” heavy and funny as the man’s name.
“Pope Victor III, Bruno of Cologne, founded the order in 1086. Twenty years after the Norman invasion…”
He interrupted her then, he remembered he interrupted her, and she hated that. “When the English language suffered a loss of prestige, but you still keep that hard ‘h,’ don’t you?”
She drank some more, while he told her the color of Chartreuse looked sick, even feverish, but maybe the weird yellow and green high-voltage potion held an alluring illness, laced with the charge of deception. Her cheeks flared scarlet, the garish liqueur having its way with her. It burned his throat, too. But she kept her tongue, and her ruse, if it was one, wasn’t even bruised. He wasn’t going to force the issue, it would be like rape, and who wants truth or sex that way. He swallowed the yellow/green liqueur, distasteful and medicinal. Then he poured them both another Chartreuse.
A kind of golden amnesia stilled other monologues inside him. Her shirt, chartreuse for the occasion — their fifth anniversary — winked ambivalently. She liked designing their nights, he thought, color combinations were her thing. He wondered how he fit in sometimes. Yellow elided with the green, never landing on the integrity of one color, and, he reflected sullenly, her blouse managed to be a fabric of lies, too. The silk looked sinister, too shiny, and, under the light, his wife’s facade iridesced. Glimmering vile and then beautiful. Inconstant chartreuse numbed his tongue and his eyes.
“This tastes disgusting,” he said, finally. “I could get used to it.”
“Absinthe,” she explained, or he remembered she did, “was called the green fairy, because it made everyone crazy — everyone became addicted, and there was legislation against it, still is, like against heroin, because they thought it would destroy French civilization.”
“Maybe it did.”
“But now you can find it, if you want. At a party I went to we all drank from the fairy cup.”
She didn’t find his eyes. Maybe it was then, he thought, that it happened.
“The Carthusians were expelled from France in 1903, and they went to Tarragona. Spain.”
“Home of tarragon?”