16.
Further back in time, to 1961. “We’re off to see the wizard!” Simon said on the drive to my first appointment with Dr. Madera, who was fresh out of Harvard at thirty years old. I would be his first patient in Savannah.
But the story doesn’t begin there. Where does it begin? Sadness is a wave. It had been coming for me a great many years. And then suddenly I was beneath it.
Let’s say the wave found me at the same time as Genevieve, whose husband was the geologist hired and loved by Simon to prospect on our ship, on the Blue Rose. Thomas and Genevieve, transplants from Louisiana. She was originally from Paris, it was said, a bit of je ne sais quoi Thomas had picked up after the war. Lyra’s streets were perfumed as she passed through, by both her cologne and the steady stream of cigarettes attached to her pretty, painted mouth. The two had no children, which made a couple strange in my day. From the instant I saw her, I wanted to know her. And then one day there she was, lingering on the street outside the bank, offering me a drag from her cigarette, her voice husky and only slightly accented, though her syntax gave her French origins away. “We both look like we could profit from more fun,” she said. “This is what is wrong with us.”
She was a handsome woman, not quite of our time, not quite of the past or future, either. Her eyes were so dark blue they were almost black, her cheekbones severe, and with the exception of her lavish bosom and long, wavy chestnut hair, she might almost be mistaken for a very beautiful man. She looked at you like a man might. Devouring.
In the blurry moments that ensued, I found myself accompanying her to Grey’s Tavern, where I had never once been a patron in nearly twenty years living on the island. Once inside, alone with Genevieve and the bartender in that room that stank of sweat and booze, I didn’t protest as she ordered me a Scotch and herself another, and another, and then another.
After half an hour of nervous introductory banter, Genevieve interrupted to say that she’d never enjoyed this sort of conversation. This was revolutionary for the time; petty conversation was what women did together. Instead, she asked bluntly: “Do you love truly your husband?”
“Why, yes,” I replied automatically.
Genevieve chuckled, but her eyes settled on me as if she’d seen something tragic.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Rien,” she said. “Only our husbands spend much, much time together, you know?”
“Well, they work together,” I insisted. “On the ship. Close quarters make fast friendships.”
“Tell me, did you ever love another?” she asked, following a reverie of her own. “I had a lover when I was a girl and I think of that lover every day. We always had music together. Do you know that feeling? Like there is an orchestre symphonique when you embrace?” She was slurring almost romantically now, as if she were singing lyrics to me. “But then my lover was married off to a man. It was like she died. And so I married, too.”
I looked away anxiously and noticed we were suddenly alone. “The garçon has left us here,” Genevieve said. “You see,” she then pronounced very soberly, “I know all about your husband, because I know the truth about mine.” Genevieve did not wait for me to respond. She took her hand and placed it on the thin skin of my pantyhose.
“What do you want?” I asked, my insides shivering.
“I want to try with you what they do every night to each other,” Genevieve said, her mouth already upon me. “Have you ever kissed a woman before?”
She had taken nearly all of me when three men, one of whom was Clarke Junior, stumbled into the bar. They were already descending upon us when the Clarke boy slurred: Well, whaddya know? The fairy princes have got dykes for wives. I ran from the bar, face covered in my hands, into the empty nighttime streets.
For months I waited for the gossip to crash down all over my marriage, but it never happened. Perhaps those boys were too blind drunk for the events of that night to survive in their memory. Still, I could not get my hands clean enough. I wanted Genevieve, wished her to do what she had done and more, but when the desire snaked through me, I found something sharp to quiet it. A razor to my thigh, a knife to my fingertip. In the mirror, I looked at myself and found my body everywhere bruised and bloody. But Genevieve haunted me still, the smell of smoke in her hair. It was as if she had brought Gabriel back. I became convinced it was his ghost in her body, calling for me. Finally coming back for me. That she was his wave.
Out on the beach one night, a perfect piece of driftwood had washed ashore. I took it in my hands and beat myself with it, there at the very center of myself, until I could feel nothing but a deep, blissful, burning pain. At last I was only light, disappearing through stars. I would see Gabriel soon. But in the morning, a young boy found me on the shore, bleeding, shivering, whispering to myself. My body had not left me; it smothered me still. I asked the boy to abandon me there, but his hands dug deeper around my chest, clutching my hair. His young eyes were swollen with tears. Raymond, my Raymond.
After I was released from the hospital, Simon drove me to that first appointment with Madera.
Dr. Madera was so young then, with a complexion that would make him seem young forever. A blond wife. Educated at Harvard. For someone I saw so often, whom I’ve met more times than I ever met Gabriel, that is all I have ever known about him.
At that first appointment, Madera weighed me, took my blood pressure, checked my temperature. I thought he might invite me to recline on a couch and reveal the content of my dreams, my secret obsession with my father and hatred of my mother. But none of that, Madera announced, was relevant any longer. At five feet nine, I was down to 110 pounds. “How’s her appetite?” Madera asked.
“She hardly eats,” Simon replied. “But it’s just a little illness, like you said, right, Doc? Almost like a cold?”
“That is my belief, despite what others contend,” Madera replied. “That diseases of the mind cannot be distinguished from diseases of the body.”
Simon trusted wholeheartedly in the medical sciences—it is where all the dust of his phantom gems went, after all. If only we’d been born one hundred years later, Simon would have found a way not to die. Then again, if we’d been born a hundred years later, I would never have had to marry Simon. I would be living on one of Jupiter’s moons with Gabriel.
“Nevertheless, I’ll have to ask her some questions directly, to see how serious the illness has implanted,” Madera replied to Simon, as if I were my husband’s dog. “Mrs. Ranier, how often do you have thoughts of death? Did you mean to hurt yourself on the beach? Do you fantasize about harming others? Do you have suicidal ideations? How often do you feel happy? How often sad?”
I had wanted to lie on the couch and talk about my dreams. I had wanted to tell this nice young man how often I still dreamed of Gabriel returning, as if from a foreign land. To tell him how, though I was so happy to see Gabriel, there was always something off about his appearance: He would seem suddenly old or too young, or thin, so thin I thought he might die all over again of hunger. He was poor as a beggar and as dirty. Or he would appear as someone else entirely, talk from beneath someone else’s face. Occasionally and only very briefly he would appear as he was; his dream hands would reach for me, try to draw me close, but before we could embrace, he would slip away, disappear in a dream wind. I wanted to ask the doctor why the living dream so vividly of the dead—but just as I opened my mouth Madera shouted my name, less like a doctor and more like a drill sergeant. “Return to this room, Mrs. Ranier!”
I stared out the window, seeking the deep azure of the Atlantic, longing for its waves to return me to their womb instead. “I just want to go back . . .” I began to say aloud.
“Mr. Ranier, I would not recommend psychotherapy or hypnosis. These are outdated, unscientific methods that are not going to work on your wife,” Madera announced without further inquiry. “But I can offer her electroshock treatment, which has been utterly groundbreaking.”
I floated home to Lyra after that first appointment. There was no car, no road, no journey; no time seemed to pass between sitting for the sentence enacted upon me by those electrodes in Madera’s office and reclining with Simon in the garden hours or days later over Ethel’s egg sandwiches, my hair caressed by the wind.
“Simon,” I said, “Lyra looks like it’s been painted with blue all through it.”
Ethel peered around nervously. “Where you seeing blue?”
“Lightning bugs,” I replied. “But blue.”
Simon had already picked up his newspapers. That day, the first human being, a cosmonaut, was sent into space. “It will get better, darling. Look, you’re even eating your lunch.”
What could I do but wander away from him? I set out on the road north, the branches low overhead. It was wilder there, the soil smelled better. Fairies flitted around me, flickers of light gallivanting between the trees. This land was unmarred by human want, immune to Simon, to Madera. I could almost hear that man up there, all alone, so many miles from Earth, crying for home in my mother’s native Russian. I crawled into the cradle of an oak limb and became a part of the tree, my skin changing to bark, my hair to moss. My veins were shining, incandescent. Lightning danced on the edge of all things. Opposite me I saw Genevieve, lying naked in the tree.
“Do you feel happier?” Simon shook my arm, interrupting my daydream. The sky was closing in on me again. Where had my private wilderness gone?
“I feel so happy. You can’t imagine how happy I feel,” I replied steadily. “I think I’m all better now.”
“Good, then we’ll go see Madera again next week. He says consistency is important.”