Envy

Elizabeth has agreed to meet him at Philadel-phia’s Thirtieth Street Station, a point midway between his home in New York and Baltimore, where she lives. They are to meet at 11:30, but Will’s train arrives at 11:12, so he waits for her in one of the station’s big pewlike benches, watching as clots of passengers emerge from the platform stairways. A few people move briskly toward one or another exit; others set down luggage and packages to consult the readouts on their cell phones, make calls, locate connecting trains on the departure board. Or they just stand, passive and expectant as children, awaiting the arrival of friend or kin, someone to collect and bear them away.

He hasn’t told Carole where he was going and doesn’t expect to be caught in his subterfuge. It’s Thursday, so Samantha stays after school for a swim class that isn’t over until 4:45. He plans to return on the 1:40, arriving at Penn Station by 3:00, so even a major subway snafu, like a stalled train or a sick passenger or a police chase, any of the menu of expectable daily disasters (assuming terrorists are lying low, plotting rather than acting) that could slow him down won’t stop him from getting back home to pick Samantha up in time.

So far, Will isn’t enjoying the discovery of how easy it is to exit his life without explanation, like slipping unnoticed through a secret portal, leaving one world, waiting to arrive in another. The ridiculous transporter from Star Trek pops into his mind, that shimmering column of a crew member in the moment when he’s neither aboard the Enterprise nor reassembled on an unexplored planet but in the limbo of molecular disarray, a trembling, staticky silhouette. He tries to shove aside the thought of himself back home that evening, glancing across the room at his wife, trying to decide what to say as he searches Carole’s face unobtrusively. On top of feeling sick about what happened with the girl, Jennifer, although he hasn’t quite gotten to the point at which he can think of her by that name—a guilty, nervous nausea that intensifies when he’s near his wife—he’ll be that much more disturbed having disappeared successfully for these few hours. Assuming he is successful in his deceit.

11:35. Maybe her train has been delayed—a mechanical failure, or a human one. The word stickup pops into Will’s head animated by Daffy Duck sputtering in cartoon fear, flecks of spittle flying everywhere. Why is it that the more agitated he gets, the more childish are the images that assault him, all of them dating back to afternoons spent with his brother, the two of them on the living room floor under the television’s blue gaze?

Maybe she isn’t going to show. But how could she not? Will’s e-mail described a young woman with a pair of stainless steel studs on either side of the bridge of her nose, fingernails bitten to the quick, and a citation from Cicero’s “First Oration Against Catiline” tattooed on her chest. Not even New York City could contain two such young women.

Almost six months have elapsed since the college reunion, months during which Will has changed from the man he used to recognize as himself. After fifteen years of negligible marital sins, those of omission, mostly—instances of laziness or lack of consideration inspiring the familiar wifely complaints—he’s become not only an adulterer but possibly an incestuous father, a man whom almost every culture throughout all time would recognize as a criminal breaker of taboo. His chronic fear of seducing a patient has been obliterated by a set of new terrors resulting from having been seduced by a patient. For the first time in memory, Will can’t get it up. The previous evening, after lying next to him in the dark for a few minutes, Carole sat up in bed and switched the light back on.

“So, uh, Will?” she said.

“Yes?” He was lying on his back, one arm across his face to keep the light out of his eyes.

“What’s up?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. “I’m not feeling great, I guess.”

“You mean you’re sick?”

“No, not sick exactly. Sort of.”

“Because—tell me if I’m wrong—but I think we’ve made out when you had the flu, I mean the real flu, that Coxsackie thing you caught from Sam, several sinus infections, strep throat, the back thing after the cab accident, innumerable colds, fevers, upset stomachs, et cetera. I can’t remember your ever being sick enough to forgo sex.” Will didn’t answer. “Is there anything going on?” she asked. “Anything we should maybe talk about?”

“No,” Will said, “not now. I’m just . . . I don’t feel well. Can we turn off the light?” She did, and they lay there, awake but not talking for what seemed a long time. Both of them must have noted that it was Carole who pressed for dialogue while Will resisted—not a first, but very unusual.

And here’s another distressing development: lately Will has caught himself immersed in sadistic fantasies of fratricide in which he goes after his brother with a blowtorch, or, in the more elaborately plotted scenario, drives a Humvee, one of those automotive paeans to testosterone, through the desert with Mitch chained to its massive bumper. Will forces his brother to walk barefoot as fast as Will chooses through a desert terrain, over blistering sand and rocks and cactus spines—the inverse of the environment of his expertise, cold water. Soon lamed, Mitch falters and begs, completely at his mercy.

Will slumps on the bench, rests his head on the wood back, exhausted by himself. Looking up, he sees that birds are flying inside the station. Its central hall is so large, the ceiling so high, that they appear content to swoop back and forth, gliding by the vast windows without succumbing to panic and diving against the glass panes. Directly over his head a shiny silver Mylar balloon is trapped in a ceiling coffer. Will dislikes these balloons and their forced, tinselly enthusiasm, the way they imply the inadequacy of regular balloons. And they never burst. Samantha got one on her last birthday, and the thing has remained in the house for months, floating at eye level, wrinkled and flaccid but still ascendant, somehow needling in its longevity, the way it persists in celebrating an occasion that even Sam has forgotten.

11:41, according to the oppressively large clock on the station wall, the slack middle of a weekday, without the bustle and press of commuters, and yet Will would have picked her out just as quickly from a crowd. She rises from platform 3 into the waiting area, her bright head gliding upward, carried along the unnaturally smooth trajectory of the escalator. When she steps off, she’s standing in a long pale bar of sunlight that falls from one of the monumental windows. Without looking around, she turns herself in his direction, as if she knew by instinct which bench he would choose, and approaches with her characteristic walk, efficient and unhurried, her feet, in their low heels, striking the floor soundlessly. Her hands are shoved in the pockets of her belted black trench coat, which makes the color of her hair appear even more flamelike.

He stands, and she stops walking. Obviously she’s decided against contact even as minimal as a handshake. Two yards—the length of a body—remain between them. “Elizabeth,” he says.

“William.”

“Why don’t we sit over there?” He gestures toward the food court.

“Fine,” she says, and she sets off in that direction.

He follows her through the concessions. “Do you want anything?” she asks. “Because I never had breakfast,” she goes on, as if to justify the distasteful necessity of sharing a meal with him, “and by the time I get back to the unit I won’t have had a chance to eat.” Without waiting for him to answer, she takes two croissant sandwiches squashed under Saran Wrap and slaps them on a tray.

“What was it you said you practiced?” he asks, straining for a neutral prelude to what will be a necessarily unpleasant dialogue. “What kind of dermatology?”

“Burns.”

“Burns. As in fires?”

“Or chemical. There’s also the occasional idiot who pulls off the trick of a third-degree sunburn. I direct the acute-care facility at Johns Hopkins.” Her voice conveys either surprise that Will can have forgotten an appointment of this stature, or her more general—and justifiable—irritation with him for having created a crisis that has interrupted both their lives and demanded the inconvenience of this meeting.

“Sorry,” he says, “of course. I’m preoccupied. Lately, I mean.” How clearly he can picture Elizabeth presiding over a room filled with those state-of-the-art tank beds, each holding a body suspended in some advanced regeneration gel. Suddenly, he remembers that the previous night (in anticipation of this meeting, no doubt) he dreamed of austere white-coated Elizabeth as she ministered to a body on a bed of unguent, a body so burned that it had no skin. And yet there was no blood, either, no unsightly, blistered bits or charred wounds. It was flesh as decorative as that of a transparent man in an encyclopedia.

“Well?” Elizabeth says. She shoves a waxed paper cup under a nozzle that pours Diet Dr Pepper over a few lumps of ice. This is his, evidently, because she moves on to a selection of tea bags, picking through them until she finds one she deems acceptable. She unwraps it with care, leaving the fragile paper envelope intact, drops it into a Styrofoam cup, and pushes a red button to discharge a stream of hot water onto the bag. Then she marches, with him in tow, to the cashier. “Your treat.” She enunciates the word treat so sharply that it sounds as unpleasant and cold as, say, sleet.

The only unoccupied table is a large one with a big, striped umbrella planted in its center. “God, I hate that,” Elizabeth says. “It’s just too stupid. As if to fool you into thinking you’re dining on some patio on the Riviera.” She points at the chair opposite hers, an imperious gesture, employer to underling or professor to failing student. Three plastic saltshakers are lying on the table among a scattering of crystals, and she rights them in the center, brushes the spilled salt off with a paper napkin. Having spent only ten minutes in her caustic company, Will is already debilitated.

“So,” he says, “I’d just like . . . I know time is short, but I’d like to quickly sum up my encounters with your daughter.”

“Jennifer.”

After saying the name they both look at each other in silence. “So,” he begins after a swallow of Diet Dr Pepper. “Last month a young woman who calls herself Andrea, and who claims she’s been referred to me by another of my patients, begins treatment for a specific problem. She describes a compulsion to seduce older men and characterizes her pursuit of these objects as driven by a rigid set of criteria. They must be no younger than forty-five. They have to be professionals, gainfully employed. Glasses are a plus; baldness, obesity, and hearing aids unacceptable. There’s more, but you get the picture.

“As she tells it, it’s clear that her physical satisfaction is secondary to the brief reassurance, or abatement of anxiety, that sex with these partners affords her. She draws an analogy between her sexual trophies and a collection of paperweights to which she was attached as an adolescent.” Will pauses to underscore the paperweight allusion; Elizabeth regards him without affect, as if his face belongs not to a human being but to a clock or a speedometer, a tin plate under a veneer of paint. As they watch each other, Will feels a profound weariness, so leaden it’s as if his substance, the stuff of which he’s made, has changed without warning, his molecular weight doubled or squared so that gravity now presses him that much harder into his plastic chair. It’s the moment when the twinkling silhouette disappears from the Enterprise, the transported body of whoever it was reassembled on a planet with an alien, possibly injurious atmosphere.

Elizabeth is still tilted forward in her seat. What’s he doing here anyway? It’s not too late, he can stand, apologize for inconveniencing this woman who has become, after all these years, a stranger. He can go home. He can, except that somehow he can’t.

“Well,” she says, “we don’t have all day, William. I don’t, anyway.”

“So far there have been, the young woman estimates, thirty-eight of these seductions. A better word would be transactions, because the intercourse she describes is without emotional content. She has no interest in her partner’s feelings; the sex is dispassionate; the partner fits a profile, no more, no less; this is the extent of his worth.” Will watches Elizabeth sip her tea.

“I’m listening,” she says, looking down at the unfinished sandwich on her plate. The part in her hair is very straight and pale, and Will thinks of the girl’s bitten fingernails, the shiny pink flesh that rises around them, hot and swollen. “Angry,” his mother would say of the bitten nails, as in “an angry cut.”

In spite of his intent to banish them from his consciousness, the unfortunate tips of Jennifer’s fingers have become an erotic snag, a penetrating detail that insinuates itself into his thoughts, pulling the girl’s whole body along after them. Even so tangential a catalyst as the controlled part in her mother’s hair is enough to summon them, the clean line of the part demanding the answer of their raw vehemence. Under the table, the red-tipped fingers find his fly; they close around his cock, even as his awareness of having potentially bedded a girl who might be his own child makes him feel literally sick. Will stops unwrapping his sandwich, unbuttons the collar of his shirt.

“So,” Will goes on, “the young woman tells me she’s tried approaches other than psychoanalysis to cure this problem. She’s seen counselors at school, dismisses them as incompetent; ditto for cognitive therapy, the Skinnerite behavior-mod specialist, the Menninger disciple, the yoga instructor, the acupuncturist, and the chiropractor, who tried to remove whatever obstruction had diverted the flow of her sexual energy, making her desire old men.

“Anyway, as I said in the e-mail, the young woman, ‘Andrea, ’ knows details of your past that only you can have provided, and she has ‘Quo usque tandem’ et cetera tattooed on her chest. Clearly she is, unbeknownst to me, your child, with whom you’ve shared my impulsive suggestion of DNA testing.” Will, whose mouth is dry, takes another swallow of the Diet Dr Pepper, which tastes more vile than he could have imagined, like watered-down, carbonated prune juice. Elizabeth continues to regard him without expression.

“Well?” she says, when he doesn’t say anything. “Will you please get to the point? We do know all this. We have established this much.”

“Here’s the point. While I assume that she bears no relationship to me—why would I think otherwise?—she’s checking me out. She has a definite agenda. She arrives on time for her second session, and we address the problem she described the previous week. This entails a detailed account of her most recent ‘date’ with an older man, a narrative that strikes every possible erotic note and one that’s obviously an attempt to put the moves on me.”

“On you!” Elizabeth slaps the table with her open hand. “My God, William, have you completely lost it?”

“Let me finish. So after a ‘blow-by-blow’—her words, not mine—description of how she seduced a professor at the place where she waits tables, she gets up to leave and hesitates at the door to my office. Asks me for help with the knob because, she claims, she has carpal tunnel syndrome and can’t turn it. This being the very same knob she turned the previous week, but what she really wants has nothing to do with the knob; she—”

Elizabeth surges up from her green metal chair, her thigh hitting the tabletop so that the umbrella sways, tea and Dr Pepper slosh over the lips of their respective cups. “She does! Jennifer does have CTS, and as you’d know if you were a real doctor, it is not a constant thing, it goes into remission for a time and then it’s—”

“Fine,” Will says. “Fine. Jennifer has carpal tunnel. But it didn’t prevent her from accompanying her open-mouth, big-tongued kiss with some very dexterous, very nimble manipulation of my genitals. Despite her crippled hands.”

“She did not!” Elizabeth cries. “That did not happen!”

“Yes,” Will says. “It did. But that’s not all, Elizabeth.”

“You’re telling me that my daughter put her hand down your pants?”

“Not exactly. She fondled me through the fabric of my trousers while she French-kissed me. And that’s still not the end.”

Elizabeth sets her lips in a tight line.

“I discontinue treatment and refer her to a colleague. I assure her that I will not share any of our conversations or her unusual behavior with that colleague. She’ll have a fresh start, a clean slate, whatever she wants to call it. But that’s not what she wants. She has no interest in starting over, no interest in analysis or any other kind of psychotherapy. Her agenda is decidedly outside of the therapeutic envelope. She calls me; she leaves messages with my service. When I don’t return her calls, she tracks me down at my home number. I hang up, or, when Carole answers, I refuse to take the call, explaining— honestly, or so I think—that I’m under siege from a patient with whom I’ve discontinued treatment. I even tell Carole why it was I discontinued treatment, and we talk about the occupational hazards of working with unbalanced individuals.

“Anyway, when she can’t reach me by phone, she comes to my office one afternoon and, thinking she’s my three o’clock, who happens to be late, I buzz her in. I manage to get her out of my office when the patient does arrive, but she doesn’t leave the building. Instead, she sits on the stairs, she comes back up when the session is over. She has to see me, she’s sorry, needs my help, doesn’t want to start over with a different therapist. Please, please. And why am I making such a big deal out of a kiss if, as I’ve told her, she’s no longer my patient? After all, outside the context of any professional involvement, a kiss is no big deal. By now, I’ve turned my back on her for a minute so I can collect my thoughts, figure out how to get rid of this person without physically throwing her out of the building. But whatever I’ve planned to say goes right out of my head. That’s how shocked I am to find that while I wasn’t watching her she’s taken her clothes off. All of them. She refuses to dress or to leave. She threatens to cause a scene—‘kick and scream’ is how she put it—if I don’t play the game her way.”

Elizabeth’s mouth, which has been open for some time, begins to speak in an unnaturally calm and measured tone, the voice of someone who works a 911 line, who gives the same directions countless times each day, who is prepared to listen and respond to heart attacks and drug overdoses, babies who can’t be woken, criminals with guns, fires in the attic, and more. “There’s a phenomenon,” she says, “I’d think you’d be familiar with it, William. It’s called erotomania. Erotomaniacs suffer the delusion that other people are sexually fixated on them. Maybe after the accident, after your son drowned, maybe you got a little unglued and—”

“Of course I came unglued! Not a little, a lot! And, yes, Elizabeth, I do know what erotomania is. How is it that all these years later, as other people our age arrive at a more nuanced and humane maturity, you remain so condescending? Do you actually believe you’ve got it all figured out? That the rest of us are just struggling to catch up? I’m not talking about erotomania, and I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about a young woman who is endangering herself and others with her amoral and pathologically narciss—”

“Oh, spare me! I’m not one of the suckers you can fool with your psychojargon. As you’ve said, Jennifer is not your patient. You have no idea who she is.”

“Do you? Do you have any idea who she is? Maybe the rest of this story will be illuminating. Maybe not. Maybe it will come as no surprise.” He folds his arms, waiting for her to ask him to continue.

“Well,” Elizabeth says. “Don’t stop at the cliff-hanger. What happened?”

“She steps up, unbuckles my belt, unzips my fly, and we have sex.”

“Oh fuck,” Elizabeth says, and she closes her eyes. Her face, no longer animated by her eyes, looks exhausted. He sees lines he hadn’t noticed before, around her mouth and on her forehead. “Why! Why didn’t you stop her?”

“Well, first of all, don’t forget, I think she’s Andrea whoever, a young woman who is no longer my patient. Second, I’m . . . she . . . I was worried about protecting my career, my family. I didn’t have any faith that I could resist her effectively. Without her framing me. I was—”

“You were a schmuck!”

“And you know what’s the worst part of this mess? I don’t know what I should be worrying about most. Potential incest? Adultery? An STD? Or the idea of you and my brother?”

“Your brother?” Elizabeth looks at him sharply. “What does your brother have to do with this?”

“Jennifer said you were sexually involved with both me and Mitch at the same time. And two other men. Four potential fathers.” Elizabeth stares at Will, not saying anything. “After Jennifer offered me a strand of her hair,” he goes on, “she explained that it might not be so bad. I hadn’t necessarily done it with my daughter; she could just as easily be my niece. And that’s because”—Will’s voice gets louder—“you were fucking my brother!”

“Don’t yell,” Elizabeth says.

“Were you or were you not fucking Mitch?”

“Don’t yell.”

“Were you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes!”

“I told you, yes.”

“I cannot, I can not—well, I can—but no, I cannot believe that my brother, that, that you . . . why?”

“You know, William, I can’t help but suspect that you’re making a big deal out of this in order to draw attention away from the fact that you had sex with my daughter.”

“She assaulted me.”

“According to you.”

“She was the aggressor, and I didn’t know her real identity because she lied.”

“Okay, so you were screwing a patient twenty-five years younger than you. Ex-patient. Let’s not claim moral high ground. Anyway, we’re talking twenty-five years ago. When we were kids. Is it such a big fucking deal if when we were kids I slept with your brother?”

“Why?” Will asks. “Tell me why. Why were you screwing Mitch and me at the same time?”

“Oh, Christ. Can we get back to the real topic? And it’s not like it started out that way. For a long while it was just you.”

“And then?”

“And then it wasn’t. But we’re not talking about the past. We’re talking about—”

“It was and then it wasn’t? What is that supposed to mean?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess he came on to me.”

“Mitch came on to you? When did he?”

“Actually, it was more complicated than that.” Elizabeth frowns, pinches her lower lip. “He sort of led me to believe it was you, that he was you, and by the time I knew he wasn’t, it was too late.”

“How the hell did he do that?”

Elizabeth raises her hands, wiggles her fingers theatrically. “Under cover of darkness,” she says. “You’re twins, remember? Identical. Built the same, sound the same. You guys were so square you even had the same haircuts.” She takes a sip of her tea, now cold, and makes a face.

“Go on,” Will says.

“He came over, this was sometime senior year—I was living off-campus in that house on Maplewood—and he slipped in that back door—you know which one, you used it yourself. So he made his way to my room and got into bed with me. I thought that was pretty ballsy. I liked it—it was sexy. You seemed suddenly sexier, or you seemed sexy in a way you’d never been before. Of course at first that’s who I thought it was—you. After, when he revealed himself, I was irked.”

“Irked? You were irked?”

“Yes, pissed off. I guess because I was a little freaked out. But then, after a minute or two, it didn’t seem so bad.”

“A minute or two! That’s how long it took you to adjust?”

Elizabeth leans forward. “About as long as it took for Jennifer to go from being a person to whom you owed professional respect to just another piece of ass.”

Will ignores this. Sexy in a way you’d never been before. Mitch, who he thought was celibate. “So was that . . . was it . . . was that the only time?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“You lost count?”

“I never tried to count. Jesus, why are men so petty and small-minded? Do you think I made hatch marks on my bedpost? I’m a woman, I don’t have to do that. I’m not living in constant fear of sexual inadequacy. I don’t worry that my penis isn’t big enough or that I won’t be able to get it up or—”

“Okay, okay. For how long?”

“I don’t know. He came back. I didn’t stop him. I don’t remember for how long.”

“Yes, you do.”

“You’re right, I do.”

“Why?” Will says. “Why did you let it go on?”

“It was, I don’t know, interesting.”

“It was interesting?”

“Yes, interesting. Sophisticated. Cool. It seemed hip and liberated. Counterculture. All those things we wanted to be. It seemed free.”

“Who? Who wanted to be cool and counterculture?”

“All of us.” She raises her eyebrows at him. “I did. Didn’t you?”

“What’s free about deceiving someone? A person who loved you?”

“I don’t know, William. You were always . . . you made everything so claustrophobic. You were always all over me, and I don’t mean physically. I felt like I couldn’t get any air when I was with you.” She stops, frowning in concentration, and he sees the same frown as her daughter’s. Why, why hadn’t he put things together? “In retrospect,” she says, “I think it must have seemed like a way to escape you without doing anything terribly wrong. You and Mitch being twins made it seem like it wasn’t cheating, exactly, or it wasn’t such serious cheat—”

“Are you kidding! It’s worse that he’s my brother!”

“Now, maybe. To you, maybe. But to me, back then, the fact that he was so nearly you mitigated that aspect of it. I know that sounds like a rationalization, but it is how it felt. And it’s not as if you and I were engaged or something. I never said I wasn’t sleeping with anyone else. Besides, I didn’t think you’d get hurt. I didn’t think anyone would find out. And no one did, William. This all started because you were so weird and fixated at the reunion. I mean, it’s been twenty-five years. Have you forgotten that we were young? We were, you know, kids. Careless.”

“I wasn’t. I was never careless with you.”

“Well, I guess I just must have been less evolved.”

“Less evolved! The person you’re describing is someone with the moral intelligence of a bait worm!”

“Jesus, William. Will you just lighten up?”

“Who was better?” he asks.

“Better?”

“Who was better in bed?”

“You must be joking.”

“Not at all. Who was the better lover?”

“Both of you were what, twenty? No one is a lover at twenty.” Elizabeth uses the index and middle finger of each hand to make quotation marks in the air when she says the word lover.

“Fine. Who lasted longer? Who was more considerate, more deft, more creative? Who made you feel good? Who went down on you? Who made you come?”

“I’m not going to answer any of this.”

Will reaches across the table and grabs Elizabeth’s wrist, aware that he’s out of control, but it’s like noticing your car’s brakes have failed when you’re already going down a hill: he can’t stop. “Yes, you are,” he says. “You are.”

She twists out of his grasp, stands up. “I’m leaving. I’ve had enough.”

“So have I. But it’s not over yet.”

“Yes it is.” She ties the belt of her trench coat and shoves her hands in her pockets. “If you contact me—if you e-mail me again, or call me, or Jennifer—I’ll report you to the police. I’ll tell them you sexually assaulted my daughter. If Jennifer is half as calculating as the person you’ve described, then maybe she didn’t use a condom because she wanted her underpants to collect some, what shall we call it? Proof of your trespass?” Elizabeth looks at Will and, when he doesn’t answer, continues. “Any number of strategies might present themselves to an amoral, ambitious, sexually experienced girl like Jennifer. I hope she didn’t perform fellatio on you. Only too easy to have hidden a Ziploc bag somewhere. A quick spit and, zip, she’d—”

“There was nothing like that,” Will says.

“Oh, I don’t know, William. And neither do you. Under such circumstances you must have been distracted. ‘Thinking with the little head’ would, I believe, be the appropriate expression. Consider this. You’re a forty-seven-year-old man. She’s a girl of twenty-four. Who do you think anyone would believe?” Without waiting for an answer, Elizabeth turns and starts walking away, toward the platforms.