The Infinite Plan (46 page)

At that moment his trance was shattered by a persistent ringing. It took an eternity to recognize the sound, to realize where he was and see himself on the floor, naked, wet with urine, vomit, and tears, drunk and terrified. The telephone was ringing like an urgent summons from another dimension, and finally he was able to drag himself to it and pick up the receiver.

“Greg? This is Tamar. You didn't call me today . . . it's Monday.”

“Come, Carmen, please come,” he stammered.

A half hour later Carmen was by his side, after breaking the speed limit from Berkeley. He opened the door to her, still in his towel, disoriented, and embraced her, trying to explain in a flood of words where it hurt: here, his chest, his head, his back, everywhere. Carmen draped a bathrobe around him, collected David, half asleep, got the two into her car, and raced to the nearest hospital, where within a few minutes Gregory Reeves was on a stretcher, connected to a monitor and an oxygen mask.

“Is my daddy going to die?” David asked.

“Yes, if you don't go to sleep,” Carmen replied fiercely.

She sat in the waiting room beside the sleeping child until morning, when the cardiologist informed her that there was no danger; there was nothing wrong with Reeves's heart: he had suffered an anxiety attack. The patient could be released, but he should see his doctor and undergo a series of tests, and, he said, he highly recommended consulting a psychiatrist, because this man was close to a breakdown. Once home, Carmen helped Gregory shower and get into bed, brewed coffee, dressed David, gave him breakfast, and took him to school. She called Tina Faibich to tell her that her boss was in no condition to work, returned to her friend, and sat beside him on the bed. Gregory was drained, and dazed with tranquilizers, but he could breathe without pain and was even slightly hungry.

“What happened?” Carmen wanted to know.

“My mother died.”

“But you didn't tell me!”

“It happened very quickly, and I didn't want to bother anyone; besides, there was nothing you could do.” And he began telling her everything that happened, without rhyme or reason, a river of unfinished sentences, memories, images, and terrors, a lifetime of hurdles and loneliness—all the time holding the hand of this woman who was more than his sister, who was his oldest and most lasting love, his friend, his comrade, a vital part of himself, so close and so different from him: dark-skinned, essential Carmen, brave, wise Carmen, with five hundred years of Indian and Spanish tradition in her blood and a solid Anglo-Saxon common sense that had helped her move through the world without stumbling.

“Do you remember when we were kids and I ran in front of the train? That cured me of my obsession with death, and I went years and years without thinking of it, but now that same fixation has come back, and I'm afraid. I'm boxed in: I can never repay my loans, my daughter is a hopeless addict, and for the next fifteen years I'll be battling with David. My life is a disaster. I'm a failure.”

“There are no such things as failure and success, Greg; those are gringo inventions. You just live, that's all, the best you can, a little every day; it's like a journey without a destination: it's the getting there that counts. It's time for you to slow down. What's the rush? My grandmother always said, We don't have to be slaves to the clock.”

“Your grandmother was balmy, Carmen.”

“Not always; sometimes she was the sanest person in the house.”

“I'm sunk, and all alone.”

“You have to hit bottom, then you'll push off and rise to the surface again. Crises are good for us; they're the only way we grow and change.”

“Just look at me—that's who I am. I haven't done anything right, beginning with my children. I'm like the Tower of Pisa, Carmen: my axis is off true, and that's why everything comes out twisted.”

“Who told you life was easy? No one is free of pain and struggle. You'll have to right your axis yourself, if that's what it takes. Look at you, Greg: you're a dishrag. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and put your shoulders back. You've been living on the run, but you can't run forever; at some moment you have to stop and face yourself. However far you run, you're always inside the same skin.”

Gregory's nomadic father passed through his mind: moving on, crossing frontiers, trying to reach the horizon, to find the end of the rainbow and, in the beyond, something denied him on earth. This country offers great open spaces in which to escape, to bury the past, to leave everything behind and begin anew as many times as you need, with no burden of guilt or nostalgia. You can always dig up your roots and start over; tomorrow is a blank page. This was Gregory's story too: never still, ever a transient, but the result of all his activity had been loneliness.

“I told you before, Carmen, I'm getting old.”

“That happens to us all. I like my wrinkles.”

He looked at Carmen, for the first time with true objectivity, and saw she was not a girl anymore; he was happy she did not try to disguise the lines in her face—the signs of life's voyage—or the gray hairs that lighted her dark hair. The weight of her breasts bowed her shoulders, and true to her style, she was wearing a full skirt, sandals, earrings, and bracelets—everything that made her Carmen/Tamar. He imagined that naked she might look like a wet cat and still seem pretty, much more attractive than when she was a plump and mischievous young girl with braces on her teeth, or the most desirable girl in high school, or even the fully developed woman strolling with a Japanese lover through the Gothic section of Barcelona. He smiled at her, and she returned his smile; their eyes were filled with mutual sympathy, with the complicity they had shared since childhood. Gregory took Carmen's shoulders and kissed her softly on the lips.

“I love you,” he murmured, aware that the words sounded banal but could not be more true. “Do you think we'll end up together?”

“No.”

“Do you want to make love with me?”

“I don't think so. I must have a personality problem.” She laughed. “Rest now, and try to sleep. Mike Tong will pick up David at school and come stay with you for a few days. I'll be back tonight, I have a surprise for you.”

The surprise was Daisy, two hundred pounds of beautiful, cheerful black womanhood, pure gleaming chocolate, a native of the Dominican Republic who had walked through half of Mexico and then crossed the border with eighteen other refugees in the false bottom of a truckload of melons, prepared to earn a living in the north. Daisy would change Gregory and David's lives. She took charge of the boy without complaint or distaste, with the same stoicism that had allowed her to survive the adversity of her past. She did not speak a word of English, and her employer had to act as interpreter. Daisy's method for raising children bore fruit with David, although the credit may not have been exclusively hers, since David was also in the hands of an expensive team of teachers, physicians, and psychologists. Daisy had no faith in modern science and never even learned to say the word “hyperactive” in Spanish. She was convinced that the reason for all the confusion was simpler than that: the child was possessed of the devil, a common enough occurrence, she said. She personally knew many people who had suffered the same ill, and it was easier to cure than the common cold; any good Christian could do it. From the first day, she set about expelling the demons from David's body, using a combination of voodoo, prayers to her personal saints, delicious Caribbean dishes, a great deal of affection, and a few stout smacks administered behind the father's back and not reported by the victim because the prospect of life without Daisy was intolerable. With praiseworthy patience the woman took on the task of domesticating her charge. If he seemed prickly as a porcupine and ready to climb the wall, she wrapped him in her great dark arms, cuddled him against her motherly breast, and scratched his head, crooning to him in her sun-filled language until he grew calm. The tranquilizing presence of Daisy, with her aroma of pineapple and sugar, her ever-ready laughter, her musical Spanish, and her endless store of tales about saints and witches, which David could not understand but whose rhythm lulled him to sleep, finally brought the long-awaited security. Because of this improvement in his basic routine, Gregory Reeves was able to begin the slow and painful voyage into himself.

Every night for a year Gregory Reeves believed he was dying. As his son lay sleeping and calm fell over the house and he was alone, he could feel the presence of death. Because he did not want to frighten David if he waked, Gregory locked the door to his bedroom so the child could not walk in on him, and then he abandoned himself to his suffering without offering up any resistance. It was very different from his earlier vague anguish, to which he was more or less accustomed. During the day, he functioned normally, he felt strong and active, he made decisions, managed his office and his household, looked after his son, and for brief moments had the illusion that things were going well; as soon as he was alone at night, however, he was overcome by irrational fear. He felt as if he were a prisoner in a padded room, a cell for lunatics, where it was useless to scream or beat the walls: there was no echo, no knocking in return, nothing but an enveloping void. He did not know the name for that nightmare composed of uncertainty, restlessness, guilt, a sense of abandonment, and profound loneliness, so he simply named it the Beast. He had been trying for more than forty years to elude his Beast, but finally he understood that it would never leave him in peace unless he met it head-on. To grit his teeth and bear it, as he had that night on the mountain, seemed the only effective strategy against the implacable enemy that tormented him with a crushing grip on his chest, a hammering in his temples, the fire of live coals in his stomach, and a craving to race toward the horizon and disappear forever where no one and nothing could ever reach him—least of all his own memories. Sometimes dawn came and he was still sitting huddled like a cornered animal; other nights he fell asleep exhausted after several hours of mute battle and woke dripping with sweat from a flurry of dreams he could not recall. Once or twice the grenade exploded in his chest again, taking his breath away, but now he knew the symptoms and merely waited for them to recede, trying to contain his terror lest he die from fright alone. He had lived his life deceiving himself with sleight of hand; now the moment had come to pay the piper, with the hope that he would cross the threshold and one morning wake up whole. That hope gave him strength to go on; the tunnel did have an ending; it was merely a question of enduring the forced march that would bring him out the other end.

He gave up the crutch of alcohol because his intuition told him that any consolation would delay the hardheaded remedy he had imposed upon himself. When he reached the limits of his strength, he invoked the vision of his mother as she had appeared to him after her death, holding out her arms to him with a welcoming smile; it soothed him even though he knew he was clinging to an illusion: that affectionate mother was the creation of his own imagination. He stopped chasing women, although he was not totally celibate; once in a while he met someone willing to take the initiative, and for at least an hour or two he could relax. He did not fall back into the trap of romantic fantasies; he had learned that no one else could save him, he had to save himself. Rosemary, the former lover who wrote cookbooks, used to invite him over to try her new recipes and sometimes caressed him, more from goodness than desire, and they ended up making love without passion but with sincere goodwill. Mike Tong, still addicted to his unlikely abacus despite a brand-new system of computers in the office, had not fully succeeded in explaining to his boss all the mysteries of the red scribbles in his large books, but at least he had sown the first seeds of financial prudence. You must balance these accounts or we'll all be up to our asses in shit, his Chinese bookkeeper would plead, with his immutable smile and courteous bow, nervously wringing his hands. Because of his affection for his boss and his limited English, Tong had adopted Reeves's vocabulary. Tong was right; Reeves needed to get his finances in order, along with the rest of his life, which seemed on the brink of foundering. His ship was taking on water in so many places that he did not have enough fingers to plug all the holes. Reeves learned the value of the friendship of Timothy Duane and Carmen Morales, who put up with his stubborn silences for hours and never let a week go by without calling him or trying to see him, even though he was not very entertaining company. You're unbearable, I can't get you to go anywhere, what is it with you? you're a real bore, Timothy Duane complained, but even he began to tire of his chaotic life. He had abused his robust Irish constitution for so long that his body could not stand the bacchanals that once had filled his weekends with sin and remorse. In view of the fact that Reeves did not talk about his problems, partly because not even he knew what the hell was wrong with him, Duane was struck by an inspired idea: to take him, even if it required force, to consult with Dr. Ming O'Brien—but only after Gregory swore not to try to seduce her. Duane had met the psychiatrist at a lecture on mummies; he had attended to see whether there was any relationship between ancient Egyptian embalming and modern pathology, and she in order to see what kind of nuts might be interested in such a subject. They met in the coffee line during a break. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the battered Parthenon statue lighting a pipe three paces away from a sign that said
NO SMOKING
; Duane, in turn, was thinking that the tiny woman with black hair and intelligent eyes must have Chinese blood in her veins. In fact, her parents were from Taiwan. When she was fourteen they had shipped her off to America to stay with compatriots they barely knew, with a tourist visa and precise instructions to study, get ahead, and never complain, because anything that might happen to her there was far preferable to the fate of a woman in her native land. A year after she arrived, Ming had adapted so well to American ways that she conceived the idea of writing a letter to a congressman, enumerating the advantages of living in America and, in passing, asking him for a resident visa. By one of life's absurd coincidences, the politician collected Ming porcelain, and because the girl's name immediately caught his attention, in a moment of sympathy he arranged for her to receive resident status. She acquired the surname O'Brien from a husband in her youth with whom she lived ten months before moving out and swearing never to marry again. At a closer look, Duane was struck by the doctor's quiet beauty, and when they stopped talking about mummies and began to explore other subjects, he discovered that for the first time in many years he had found a woman who truly fascinated him. They did not stay to the end of the lecture but left to go to a restaurant on the wharf, where, after the first bottle of wine, Timothy Duane found himself reciting a monologue from Brecht. The psychiatrist spoke very little and observed a great deal. When Timothy wanted to take her to his apartment, Ming amiably refused, and she continued to refuse during the months that followed, a situation that kept the tormented suitor's curiosity vividly alive. By the time they finally decided to live together, Timothy Duane would be totally smitten.