Wanting
Holiday bulbs flashed and twinkled in the gray winter light as they drove down the FDR in Bobby’s midnight blue Mercedes convertible. Destination: Brooklyn. Bobby maneuvered them swiftly around slower, clunkier cars. Rochelle watched him: his large, finely boned hands on the leather steering wheel, his brown skin melting into the red crew-necked cashmere sweater he had bought just for this meeting, his Italian leather loafer calmly pressing the gas petal, his brown eyes sliding across the road, watching, controlling, protecting them. He wore his hair short and tight; no outsized Afros for him. His license plates read LOVE-MD.
A diamond engagement ring glistened on Rochelle’s finger like a trophy or a dare. So far, on the phone, Mabel had been ecstatic. But she hadn’t heard all the details yet — or seen them — and Rochelle could hardly wait. She watched Manhattan blur by as they approached the Brooklyn Bridge with its swooping strands of white lights. She was going home to leave it, to sever herself from it for good.
“I admit I feel no small amount of trepidation,” Bobby said in his rich, deep voice. He swerved the car into the exit for the bridge. Rochelle let the momentum pull her into him. She grasped his thigh and squeezed.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “my parents are going to love you.”
The sun went down quickly, and by the time they reached the Heights it was dark. Bobby was lean and dignified next to buxom Rochelle. She rang the bell and the door swung open almost immediately.
Mabel’s welcome smile froze on her face. She stood there in her ruffly flowered dress and stared at Bobby.
Rochelle beamed her triumph. “This is Dr. Love.”
Alerted by his wife’s silence and the long pause by the door, Norman dashed over with a ready-for-anything greeting. Rochelle was just as aware of the wave of surprise that passed over her father’s face when he saw the color of Bobby’s skin as his openheartedness when he said, “Hello!” and vigorously shook Bobby’s hand. He was like a ship captain in a storm, guiding everyone into the living room, forging against the torrents of disappointment surging from his wife.
“Sit, sit,” Norman said.
Bobby sat on the couch and Rochelle snuggled up next to him. Mabel’s furious gaze rested momentarily on her husband, who threw back his own look, a be friendly or die look that sent her to the kitchen for the tray of hors d’oeuvres she had fussed over all afternoon. She brought it out in a state of disarray: caviar spilling off crackers, cream cheese smeared on the edge of the silver tray, a fin-ger-pocked bowl of dip. Looking mildly vindicated, she offered the tray to Bobby, who gamely chose a broken cracker with brie hanging off the side.
Norman poured the premixed martinis, seated himself in his armchair and leaned toward Bobby. “So, you’re a medical doctor?”
“Gynecologist,” Bobby said.
“I was his patient,” Rochelle said.
Mabel left the room.
“What hospital are you affiliated with?”
“New York Hospital. And I have a private practice.”
“Park Avenue, Daddy.”
Norman’s eyebrows arched deliberately.
Bobby’s expression was serious. Rochelle recognized the look: calm, ready, waiting. It was a paternal look and it really turned her on. She pressed against him and he moved away, forward, toward Norman.
Bobby said, “I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you and your wife, and I know I have, but the fact is I love your daughter and there’s no scientific reason not to. It troubles society, yes. But you know something? I have troubled society since the day I got a scholarship to Harvard, I have troubled society by hanging out my shingle on Park Avenue, I have troubled society by owning a good home on a good block in one of the best neighborhoods in the city. But I can tell you that I have not troubled society as much as society has troubled me. Frankly, sir, I am not grateful for Rochelle because she’s white, I’m grateful because she’s a fine woman and she loves me. I would sooner have fallen in love with a woman of color. But facts remain. I hope you can live with it. If you think it will be hard for you, rest assured that it will be doubly hard for us.”
Norman nodded. “I can only respect that.”
Bobby smiled, showing his beautiful bleached whites. Rochelle planted a kiss on the back of his hand.
Mabel served dinner with such extreme indifference that an outsider might have thought she was hired help. Rochelle could see her father’s frustration. She could hear them later, alone:
So he’s got everything but the right skin, so what? He’ll be a good provider.
Provider, blech! Any man can be a provider. He’s a Negro if you didn’t notice, not to mention he isn’t Jewish either.
Bobby Love was Rochelle’s dream man, because he satisfied all the basic status quos, except one, and that one was big enough to permanently enrage her mother.
The wedding took place at the end of January in the Love brownstone on 84th Street between Park and Madison Avenues, a huge old place with four floors of charm, original detail, and a landscaped garden. The decorator had filled it with bachelor colors of maroon, beige, burnt orange and gold. Rochelle planned to redecorate as soon as she got access to a joint account.
Over a hundred well wishers, and Mabel, packed into the house in true seventies fashion, wearing jeans or gowns, passing joints to friends, stealing kisses from strangers. The house was filled with flowers and Rochelle had sprayed every room with Shalimar. She felt beautiful today, a goddess in a white leather minidress, hair coiled and laced with baby’s breath, elevated to nearly Bobby’s height on platform shoes with four-inch heels. She carried a bouquet of yellow and white miniature orchids.
Leo was her bride’s maid, in a creamy felt suit and wide white tie. Mabel stood off to the side in a black dress streaked with vivid yellow lightning bolts and observed the ceremony with an expression of disdain that thrilled Rochelle. Norman ignored his sulking wife and focused instead on the ceremony, as his only daughter was married by a Justice of the Peace in a magenta Nehru shirt and jeans beneath a chuppa of iridescent silver cloth. Norman and Bobby wore matching yarmulkes, courtesy of Rochelle, which irritated her mother even more profoundly, which made Rochelle even happier. The marriage vows were lengthy and romantic. After, Rochelle laughed wildly and the newlyweds kissed to loud applause.
By evening a white limousine had parked itself outside the brownstone. Rochelle ran upstairs to change and Bobby followed calmly. Fifteen minutes later they descended in travel clothes: Bobby in crisp bluejeans and a yellow sweater, Roch elle in a baggy white pantsuit covered with tiny purple stars. They hugged and kissed friends and family on their way out the door.
Bobby got into the back of the limo and Rochelle stood on the curb for the last act of bridedom. She scanned the small group who had followed them outside and poised her wedding bouquet to toss, concentrating on her task as if doling out a divine directive; she was, after all, designating a future bride. Seeing her mother standing on the stoop with such grim determination in her bolts-of-lightning dress, Rochelle felt a stab of remorse. The thought to throw Mabel the bouquet flashed in her mind, then quickly faded. She had a better idea. Leo was standing on the sidewalk next to Chip — two clean looking men with big mustaches and matching brown suede shoes — and she couldn’t resist. Bobby was already in the limo and the door was gaping for her. With a wide grin and an obvious wink, she threw the bouquet right to Leo. The group cheered and laughed. Leo turned red and in his excitement he handed the bouquet to Chip. They kissed.
As Rochelle slid into the limo next to Bobby, she could hear the residue of her mother’s voice, “What did I do wrong?”
Bobby’s long brown body was stretched neatly down one side of the honeymoon bed. Next to him, Rochelle sprawled. They agreed that their inconsistencies were charming: his body’s smooth perfection, her body’s cavalier disorganization; his formality, her recklessness; his coolness, her heat.
He leaned on his elbows and sucked on her earlobe and whispered, “I want you pregnant.”
She said, “Yes, let’s think about that.”
“Let’s not think, let’s just do it.”
“I’ll have to finish out the cycle of my pills, then wait a while for my system to clear out.”
He was a doctor and knew she was right. “Then finish the cycle and stop.”
She kissed him hard and bit his lower lip and he got excited and they started to make love. Waves of panic rolled through her; she hadn’t even thought about having a baby so soon. She was a married woman now; she hadn’t really thought about that, either. She was a doctor’s wife; what would that mean? The panic swelled and so did he. She could tell he thought he was making her wildly excited. In fact, she was in the beginning throes of an anxiety that would become a kind of second career.
Bobby was so solid and reliable that, as time went on, she began to feel unhinged inside. She sat in her top floor study, her wiry hair pinned haphazardly on top of her head, a red silk caftan draped comfortably over her morning-naked body, feeling free of any real responsibility yet wanting more out of life. She was twenty-four years old and had reached the end of the road, having married a doctor and become a doctor’s wife. Once the bold statement of their interracial marriage faded, she realized she had bought the standard package. She didn’t want a baby now. She wanted to do something, be something, have an identity of her own. She was aware that she possessed an extraordinary confidence, as well as a tendency to abandon her focus for sensual pleasure. Eating, sleeping, sex. But her mind was strong; she knew she was responsible for her own destiny. The more she thought about having a baby, the more she knew she had to make a conscious decision, a choice, about the direction of her life. She wondered if she could find the answer with the help of an analyst. She would ask Bobby what he thought of the idea; after all, he would have to pay.
“Why?” Bobby asked over dinner at the huge oval table she had bought with his money and which he hated. The thick glass, tinted a smoky gray, shouted pretension, look at me I’m rich, I have this funny table. Bobby would have preferred something in wood, a long table suitable for a serious man with a family. But where was his family? He’d been waiting, hoping; and nothing. Now she wanted to go into analysis, a long process with dubious potential for results.
“I need it,” she said. “I don’t know why. I’ll know once I’ve gotten further into myself.”
Bobby shook his head. “Fine, if that’s what you want.”
Dr. Carr’s office was just across town on the west side. Rochelle crossed the sidewalk, her red dress ablaze in the summer heat, and a cab screeched to a halt by the curb. She swung open the door and got in. She loved this, loved the way the world responded to her. It was a different sensation than she had in college, when people read her column, admired her courage and said she had a good mind. This was more primal, a bodysensation, a basic physical force. Her it was gaining power, tuning her mind in to different frequencies. Sex and love and marriage had altered her. She still loved Nathan and now she was a wife and before babies she wanted something else, something else. She decided on this for her focus in analysis today: wanting.
She loved the drive through Central Park — she loved this city — brilliant sun flicking on tiny green leaves, a forest of sparkling coins. Manhattan was exciting and alive and she wanted to conquer it, own it. Wanted. But how?
Dr. Carr worked on the ground floor of a brownstone and lived on the floor above. Downstairs, two rooms were joined by a soundproofed double door: the first room was a waiting area, and the second room was the lounge-cum-office where he worked. He sat in his brown leathereen Lazy Boy armchair and nodded and listened to Rochelle, who reclined on an old green plaid couch. An industrial fan swept air across the room, rippling the red fabric of her dress against her skin. The doctor was wearing baggy old jeans and a denim shirt. His long gray hair stood out in frazzled wires.
He said, “You’re self-conscious with me. Are you feeling disturbed by something here?”
His voice was tight like the sound of a slap on a drum. A drumslap voice, she thought, and decided she must remember that. He had droopy blue eyes and his fingernails needed a cleaning and a trim. Something about him made her nervous, excited her; she loved sitting on his dirty couch watching him listen to her, being his only focus for an hour.
“There’s something I want,” she said, clenching a fist in the air. “Want.”
“Yes?”
Rochelle had a great big smile and used it to coax and charm. She tried one on now. The doctor’s face was sober. She said, “I don’t know exactly what, but I want something more in my life.”
When he smiled, lines fanned across his cheeks. “That seems normal to me.”
Normal? That sounded like a challenge. Who wanted to be normal? “I’m materially comfortable. I’m married. But there’s something else I need. Want. I’m aching inside,” she said, “here.” She pressed a manicured hand between her breasts. “There’s something I want right here.”
Dr. Carr smiled. “Yes, I see.”
Her adrenaline pumped at his smile, his I see, his yes.
“I want you to try something,” he said. “I want you to detach yourself from words. We learn to use words to classify, identify, analyze, judge. Here, we want to get to the level below the words. For this, I want you to try images. Visual images.”
“But I can’t draw.”
“But you can see. If you can see images, you can draw them. When we dream, our minds use visual images to symbolize our deep feelings and anxieties and conflicts. Stop thinking in words. Let these dream images surface. See them. Follow the lines. See where they take you. Maybe we can find out what it is you’re looking for.”
The hour was up. “Next week, same time?”
He nodded.
She sat at her desk in the mornings and fantasized about sex with Dr. Carr on the plaid couch, no talk, just bodies crashing, then at the end of the hour getting up and walking out. It was a familiar feeling, a strong attraction unrequitable for the forbidding boundaries that separated doctor and patient. But she had married her gynecologist, and she had made love with her brother. Boundaries did not deter her. She thought about Nathan, and their adolescent yearning for one another, the deafening crescendo of consummation. She could never speak of this to anyone; it was one of the last remaining taboos. Yet its memory haunted her. She was a woman who knew what she wanted when she saw it, and reached for it, and took it.
What did she want, really want, now?
She put her pencil to her pad and drew a large shadowy question mark, a tall dark bent figure hovering above an even darker planet, a lone hunchback unicyclist, a narrow man searching his naval for balance. The image absorbed her and her eyes followed her hand as it moved the charcoal to illuminate an eye in the figure, and the suggestion of an arm. And the question mark became a man’s body twisting. Then the line ruptured into a mouth, an open mouth, a scream. And then she knew what she was drawing, who: Nathan. He was who she wanted, who she loved.
Having found her shadow man, she couldn’t abandon him until she had explored him fully. He was erratic and unpredictable, and she followed him, first on the page and then out onto the streets. The visual image, which began as a spark in her imagination, extended first into the charcoal line on paper and then into a path, an imperative, which she obeyed.
Bobby was worried the first day she told him that she had spent the afternoon wandering the streets guided by an inner vision. She did not mention the can of spray paint she had bought at a hardware store, on whim, and tucked into her purse. He was worried but he accepted it, because it was 1971 and people did things like that, primal screams and fetal regressions and psychodrama and psychedelic explorations of the inner self and got lost even there. Rochelle returned home every evening, and as long as she knew where home was, he was happy for now to let her wander unquestioned. He knew that to attempt to separate this woman from her inner forces would be to lose his wife.
And so she wandered. It was early spring, and chilly. One evening, in the ashy twilight, she withdrew the can of red spray paint from her purse and without knowing the direction of her line began to draw it. It was long and shaky, a path to nowhere — or somewhere — and she followed. It snaked along blocks, bending down at curbs and rising jagged on steps. She was down below Houston Street where no one thought twice about an artist following impulse in public, where common ground was a found surface, a communal canvas.
As she moved loosely and slowly, dragging the bright paint-line behind her, she came upon a purple footstep. And then another. And another and another and another, right left right left right. They were the large purple prints of a man walking, striding purposefully southeast. She made a red loop around the first step, then followed, zigzagging her line unevenly alongside the purple feet.
She followed for seven blocks and came, finally, to a rectangular garden wedged between two dilapidated buildings. The purple feet entered the garden on a stone path, then ended. The garden was long and grassy, bordered with buttery daffodils. Vines of would-be roses climbed a trellis that leaned against the brick wall in the back. A square patch of earth had been tilled and was ready to be planted.
Rochelle wondered what would be planted there. She wondered where the person who had made the purple footprints was. She wanted to meet him, and realized that if he noticed her red line as she had noticed his purple feet, he would want to meet her too. So she went to the last stone in the path, which ended in the middle of the garden, and sprayed a loose red circle around the final footprint.
She returned the next day, and for three days following. On the fifth day, in the early afternoon, he was there: a lanky man with long graying hair, shirtless, in denim overalls, with traces of purple paint on his workboots. He was bending by the square patch of soil, digging with a hand trowel. A string of dark squarish numbers was tattooed on his left forearm — so, he was a Holocaust survivor. He looked like he was in his forties. A young pregnant woman in a soiled white dress and a green sweater squatted beside him. She slipped her hand under the strap of his overalls and he leaned to kiss her cheek.
Rochelle stood on the sidewalk, looking into the garden, holding her can of red spray paint. The couple didn’t notice her. She never went back.
The next day, she bought a pre-stretched jessoed canvas and some paints, and began to recreate the garden and the purple man and his young pregnant woman. She did not forget the numbers on his arm, and painted them in jet black so you couldn’t miss them among the blaze of daffodils. There were certain things everyone had to remember, to be reminded of; life and death; survival. In that garden there was no real right or wrong. In that garden, there was forgiveness. There had to be. Suddenly, guilt fountained up through her and she felt overwhelmed. She lay down her paint brush and stood back from the canvas. There was something inside her that wanted out, a monster feeling, something large and strong and ugly.
The red line that led to the purple footsteps that led to the garden that led to the survivor and his procreating lover had led to this: the knowledge that she was unable to be satisfied with her own good life. She was not a counter of blessings. With the shock of her marriage in the past, with its risk played out, with only the platitudes of motherhood before her — the honeymoon was over.