Half believing that he would eventually get around to canceling with Malcolm Claret, Gurney kept deferring the call, until the time came—8:15 a.m.—when he was forced to make a decision: either set out on the long drive to his eleven o’clock appointment or pick up the phone and let the man know he wasn’t coming.
For reasons not entirely clear to him, he decided at the final moment to keep the appointment after all.
The day was starting to warm up, with a promise of typical August heat and humidity to come. He took off the long-sleeved work shirt he’d been wearing around the house in the coolness of the mountain morning, put on a light polo shirt and a pair of chinos, shaved, combed his hair, picked up his car keys and wallet, and, barely ten minutes after making his decision, he was on his way.
Claret’s office was in his home on City Island, a small appendage of the Bronx in Long Island Sound. The drive from Walnut Crossing to the Bronx, the northernmost borough of New York City, took about two and a half hours. Once there, getting to City Island meant traversing the width of the borough, west to east—a journey Gurney had never been able to complete without feeling the negative emotional residues of his childhood there.
The Bronx was fixed in his mind as a place where the essential grunginess had little redeeming charm or character. The faded urban topography was universally uninspiring. In his old neighborhood, the most constricted paycheck-to-paycheck lives and the most prosperous ones were not far apart. The spectrum of achievement was narrow.
The neighborhood of his childhood was by no means a slum, but that absence of a negative was as positive as it got. Whatever civic pride existed arose from successfully keeping undesirable minorities at bay. The shabby but safe status quo was tenaciously maintained.
In the mix of small apartment buildings, two-family houses, and modest private homes—crowded together with little sense of order or provision for open spaces—there were only two homes he remembered as standing out among the drab multitude, only two that seemed pleasant or inviting. The owner of one was a Catholic doctor. The owner of the other was a Catholic funeral director. Both were successful. It was a predominantly Catholic neighborhood, a place where religion still mattered—as an emblem of respectability, a structure of allegiance, and a criterion for choosing providers of professional services.
That constricted way of thinking, of feeling, of making decisions, seemed to grow out of the tense, cramped, colorless environment itself—and it had created in him a powerful urge to escape. It was an urge he’d felt as soon as he was old enough to realize that the Bronx and the world were not synonymous.
Escape. The word brought back an image, a sensation, an emotion from his early teens. The rare joy he would feel, pedaling as fast as he could on his ten-speed English racer, the wind in his face, the soft hiss of the tires on the asphalt—the subtle sense of freedom.
And now he was driving back across the Bronx to see Malcolm Claret.
He’d allowed himself to be talked into it. Curiously, his two previous experiences with Claret had been brought about in a similar way.
When he was twenty-four and his first marriage was dissolving, when Kyle was barely more than an infant, his wife had suggested they see a therapist. It wasn’t to save the marriage. She’d already given up on that, seeing that he was determined to stick with the lowly police career that she considered a terrible waste of his intelligence and—perhaps more to the point, Gurney suspected—a waste of his potential for making more money in another field. No, the purpose of therapy from Karen’s point of view was to smooth out the separation, to make the process more manageable. And, in a way, it had done just that. Claret had proved to be a rational, insightful, calming influence on the dissolution of a marriage that had been fatally flawed from the start.
Gurney’s second exposure to the man came six years later, after the death of Danny, his and Madeleine’s four-year-old son. Gurney’s reaction to that terrible event in the months following it—sometimes quietly agonized, sometimes numb, never verbal—prompted Madeleine, whose dreadful grief had been more openly expressed, to coax him into therapy.
With neither hope nor resistance, he’d agreed to see Claret, and he met with him three times. He didn’t feel that their meetings were resolving anything, and after those three he stopped going. But some of the observations Claret had made stayed with him over the years. One of the things about the man that Gurney appreciated was that he actually answered questions, spoke his mind openly, didn’t play therapy games. He didn’t belong to that maddening tribe of clinicians whose favorite response to a client’s problem is “How do you feel about that?”
Now, as he crossed the little bridge that led out to the separate world of City Island, with its marinas and dry docks and seafood restaurants, as he was thinking of Claret and imagining how the passing years might have changed his appearance, a long-buried memory came vividly to mind.
The memory was of walking across this same bridge with his father on a summer Saturday long ago—in fact, more than forty years ago. There were men standing at the bridge railing at intervals along the pedestrian walkway, casting lines out into the tidal current—shirtless men, tanned and sweating in the August sun. He could hear their reels whining as the lines flew out, big baited hooks and sinkers drawing them out in long arcs over the water. The sun was glinting here and there—on the water, on the stainless-steel reels, on the chrome bumpers of passing cars. The men were serious, intent on their activity, adjusting their rods, taking the slack out of their lines, watching the currents. They had seemed to Gurney like creatures from another world, utterly mysterious and out of reach. His father wasn’t ever shirtless or tanned, never stood in a row with other men, never engaged in any group activity. His father wasn’t an outdoorsman in that sense, certainly not a fisherman.
Although Gurney could not have articulated it at the age of six or seven when they took those three-mile Saturday walks from their Bronx apartment out over the City Island Bridge, the problem was that he didn’t feel that his father was anything. His father, even on those walks together, was an enigma—a quiet, secretive man with no overt interests—a man who never spoke of the past or revealed any interest in the future.
Parking in the narrow, shaded side street in front of Malcolm Claret’s weathered clapboard house, Gurney felt the way he always felt when he’d been thinking about his father—empty and alone. He tried to shake the feeling as he approached the front door.
He naturally expected Claret to look older, perhaps a bit grayer or balder, than the image, nearly two decades out of date, that he carried in his memory. But he wasn’t prepared for the shrunken physique of the man who greeted him in the unfurnished foyer. Only the eyes at first seemed the same—soft blue eyes with an even, unblinking gaze. And the gentle smile—that was the same too. In fact, if anything, those two defining elements of Claret’s wise and peaceful presence seemed to have become more pronounced, more concentrated, with the passing of time.
“Come in, David.” The frail man gestured toward the same office Gurney had visited years earlier—a space that gave the impression of having once been, along with the foyer, an enclosed sun porch.
Gurney went in and looked around, struck by the instant familiarity of the little room. Claret’s brown leather chair, showing fewer signs of aging than the man himself, was in the same position Gurney remembered, facing two other small armchairs, both of which appeared to have been reupholstered in the intervening years. A short-legged table sat at the center of the rough triangle formed by the chairs.
They took the same seats they’d occupied for their conversations following Danny’s death, Claret easing himself down with evident difficulty.
“Let’s get to the point,” he said in his direct but soft voice, bypassing any preamble or small talk. “I’ll tell you what Madeleine told me. Then you can tell me whether you think it’s true. Is that all right with you?”
“Sure.”
“She told me that on three occasions in the past two years you walked into situations where you could easily have been killed. You did this knowingly. In all three, you ended up with a gun pointed at you. In one, you were shot multiple times and put in a coma. She thinks you’ve probably taken these extraordinary risks many times before, without telling her. She knows that police work is dangerous, but she thinks that for reasons of your own you welcome that danger.” He paused, perhaps to observe Gurney’s reaction, perhaps to await some response.
Gurney stared down at the low table between them, noting numerous scuff marks, which suggested clients often used it as a hassock. “Anything else?”
“She didn’t say it, but she sounded confused and terrified.”
“Terrified?”
“She thinks you want to be killed.”
Gurney shook his head. “In each situation she’s talking about, I’ve done everything possible to stay alive. I am alive. Isn’t that prima facie evidence of a desire to survive?”
Claret’s blue eyes seemed to be looking through him.
Gurney went on. “In every dangerous situation, I make every effort—”
Claret interrupted, almost in a whisper, “Once you’re in it.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Once you’re in the situation, once you’re fully exposed to the danger, then you try to stay alive.”
“What are you saying?”
Claret said nothing for a long while. His tone when he finally spoke was mild and even. “Do you still feel responsible for Danny’s death?”
“What? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Guilt has tremendous power.”
“But I’m not … I’m not guilty of his death. Danny stepped into the street. He was following a goddamn pigeon, and he followed it off the curb into the street. He was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a drunk in a red sports car. A drunk who just came out of a bar. I’m not guilty of his death.”
“Not of his death. But of something. Can you say what it is?”
Gurney took a deep breath, staring at the scuff marks on the table. He closed his eyes, then opened them and forced himself to look at Claret. “I should have been paying more attention. With a four-year-old … I should have paid more attention. I didn’t notice where he was walking. When I looked …” His voice trailed off, and his gaze descended again to the tabletop.
After a while, he looked up. “Madeleine insisted I see you, so I’m here. But I don’t really understand why.”
“Do you know what guilt is?”
Something in Gurney’s psychological makeup welcomed the question, or at least welcomed the opportunity to escape into abstraction. “Guilt as a fact would be personal responsibility for wrongdoing. Guilt as a feeling would be the uncomfortable sense of having done something you shouldn’t have done.”
“That uncomfortable sense—what exactly do you think that is?”
“A troubled conscience.”
“That’s a term for it, but it doesn’t explain what it really is.”
“All right, Malcolm, you tell me.”
“Guilt is a painful hunger for harmony—a need to compensate for one’s violation, to restore balance, consistency.”
“What consistency?”
“Between beliefs and behavior. When my actions are inconsistent with my values, I create a gap, a source of tension. Consciously or unconsciously, we seek to close the gap. We seek the peace of mind that closing the gap—making up for the violation—will provide.”
Gurney shifted in his chair, feeling a surge of impatience. “Look, Malcolm, if your point is that I’m trying to get myself killed to make up for the death of my son, then why haven’t I let it happen? It’s pretty damn easy for a cop to get himself killed. But, like I said before, here I am. Very much alive. How could someone with a serious death wish manage to be in such good health? I mean, that’s just plain nonsense!”
“I agree.”
“You agree?”
“You didn’t kill Danny. So getting yourself killed wouldn’t be a rational goal.” A subtle, almost playful smile appeared. “And you’re a very rational man, aren’t you, David?”
“You’re losing me.”
“You told me that your offense was lack of attention, that you let him wander into the street, where he was hit by a passing car. Listen to what I am about to say, and tell me if it describes the situation accurately.” Claret paused before going on in a slow, deliberate way. “With no one protecting him, Danny was at the mercy of a blind, uncaring universe. Fate flipped the coin, a drunk driver appeared, and Danny lost.”
Gurney heard the words the man was speaking, sensed the truth in them, yet felt nothing. It was like a beam of light passing through shatterproof glass.
The rest of what Claret said flowed with a similar directness. “The way you see it, your distraction—your focus on your own thoughts—put your son at the mercy of the moment, at the mercy of fate. That, you believe, was your offense. And every once in a while, a situation arises in which you see an opportunity to place yourself in the same peril in which you placed him. You feel that it’s only fair that you should do so—only fair that you should expose yourself to the same flip of the coin—only fair that you should treat yourself as uncaringly as you treated him. This is your way of pursuing balance, justice, peace of mind. This is your search for harmony.”
They sat for a while in silence—Gurney’s mind blank, his feelings numb. Then Claret jarred him with a final twist: “Of course, your approach is a self-centered, tunnel-vision delusion.”
Gurney blinked. “What delusion?”
“You’re ignoring everything that matters.”
“Such as?”
Claret began to answer, then stopped, closed his eyes, and began taking long, slow breaths. When he placed his hands carefully on his knees, their shocking frailty became obvious.
“Malcolm?”
Claret’s right hand rose a few inches from his knee in a gesture that appeared designed to allay alarm. A minute or so later, his eyes opened. His voice was just above a whisper. “Sorry about that. My medication is less than perfect.”
“What is it? What …?”
“A nasty cancer.”
“Treatable?”
Claret laughed quietly. “In theory, yes. In reality, no.”
Gurney was silent.
“And reality is where we live. Until we die.”
“I would call it periodic discomfort.” He looked amused. “You’re wondering how long I have to live. The answer is a month, maybe two. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Gurney tried to say something appropriate. “God, Malcolm. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. Now, since our time is limited—yours as well as mine—let’s talk about where we live. Or should be living.”
“Meaning?”
“Reality. The place we need to live, in order to be alive. Tell me something. About Danny. Did you ever have a special name for him?”
Gurney was momentarily thrown by the question. “What do you mean, a special name?”
“Something other than his actual name. Maybe something you called him when you were putting him to bed, or holding him on your lap, or in your arms?”
He was about to say no when something came back to him, something he hadn’t thought of in years. The memory blindsided him with sadness. He cleared his throat. “My little bear.”
“Why did you call him that?”
“There was a look about him … especially if he was unhappy about something … that for some reason reminded me of a little bear. I’m not sure why.”
“And you would hug him?”
“Yes.”
“Because you loved him.”
“Yes.”
“And he loved you.”
“I suppose so. Yes.”
“Did you want him to die?”
“Of course not.”
“Would he want you to die?”
“No.”
“Does Madeleine want you to die?”
“No.”
“Does Kyle want you to die?”
“No.”
Claret looked into Gurney’s eyes, as if assessing his understanding, before going on. “Everyone who loves you wants you to live.”
“I suppose so.”
“So this obsessive need of yours to atone for Danny’s death, to deal with your guilt by exposing yourself to the risk of being killed … it’s terribly selfish, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Gurney’s own voice sounded lifeless to him, somehow disconnected, as though coming from someone else.
“You’re the only one for whom it seems to make any sense.”
“Danny’s death was my fault.”
“And the fault of the drunk driver who hit him. And his own fault for stepping off the sidewalk into the street, which you’d probably warned him a hundred times not to do. And the fault of the pigeon he was following. And the fault of whatever God made the pigeon and the street and the drunk and the car and every past event that brought them all together at that unfortunate moment. Who are you to imagine you made all that happen?”
Claret paused, as if to catch his breath, to gather his strength, then spoke in a rising voice. “Your arrogance is outrageous. Your disregard for the people who love you is outrageous. David, listen to me. You must not cause pain to those who love you. If your great sin was a failure to pay attention, then pay attention now. You have a wife. What right do you have to risk her husband’s life? You have a son. What right do you have to risk his father’s life?”
The emotional energy expended in this short speech seemed to exhaust him.
Gurney sat motionless, speechless, empty, waiting. The room seemed very small. He could hear a faint ringing in his ears.
Claret smiled, his voice softer now, the softness somehow conveying a greater conviction, the conviction of the dying. “Listen to me, David. There is nothing in life that matters but love. Nothing but love.”