Rema looked away from me and stared into the tea mug she held. “You ate meat too late. Lamb after eleven. That is the bad feeling. That is all. You should respect my ideas. You should respect your wife.”
That is all it is. I remember wanting to correct her, to tell her to add it is. Wouldn’t that have been closer to what she meant? I watched her touch her finger to the surface of her tea and then put her finger to her mouth and then suck on it, as if she had a cut there. She did this again, this very slow way of drinking that she had. (The simulacrum, she drinks like she’s parched, like someone might take her drink away. Some mornings she’s through her first mug of tea in three minutes, though I’ll often find a second one left half drunk, grown cold.)
I did respect Rema, obviously I do. Though I know that she didn’t believe or understand that, which I thought had more to do with her own self-doubt about who she was, or what she was doing, or not doing. She didn’t have what one would call a “profession,” but I didn’t know why she particularly wanted one; it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid — that seemed silly to me. If I looked like Rema, if I had her ways, and if I weren’t a man, I’d consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before. I had told Rema once, when she complained of feeling aimless and amiss, that she was born in the wrong era and that she should consider just waking up every morning and being her profession enough. I told her she could be my duchess. She may have contemplated taking what I had said as sweet, but in the end chose instead — and I think “chose” is the right word — to be offended, because then she came out saying that maybe her problem was that she had been too happy to marry me, and that that had been good enough for too long, and maybe if she’d stayed lonely she might have made something of herself, even if something really dumb and superfluous, like a tax attorney, or a poet, and that would have been nice, to be able to say what one was. I said she was a Rema. I said, furthermore, that I didn’t really understand what obstacle I posed to either of her mentioned goals, but she just said yes, I didn’t understand, and I said that that was what I was saying precisely, that I didn’t understand. But she was saying that it was that I didn’t understand her.
So it was like that sometimes.
But about Rema’s lamb after eleven comment. Although I didn’t think she was right in that particular instance of my “bad feeling” before meeting with Harvey, I thought that her general idea — how we can misinterpret our own pain — I thought that was very right.
e. An initial (Pyrrhic) victory
You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey’s outfit from that day that I remember welclass="underline" navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight. I don’t know if Harvey actually had one arm notably longer than the other, but he gave off that impression.
Rema and I had planned on having her call near the end of Harvey’s session. I was to have already introduced the fact of myself as a secret agent of the Royal Academy. I had failed to do so. I felt too conspicuous, as if I was as exhaustively vivid for Harvey as he was for me that day (his eyes are so improbably blue) and this even though I knew that in truth it was highly doubtful that there was anything remarkable about my appearance at all; that day, like all the previous days, I must have seemed to Harvey simply an unremarkable gray haze of overly gentle inquiry.
My feeling of conspicuousness — I’m certain — stemmed from an awareness that a ridiculous lie lay in wait within me; I’m not a natural liar, so I had very little faith in my competence as one. I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying. Even as a child, in order to avoid saying thank you, upon prompting, for things I wasn’t truly thankful for, I would bury my face in my mother’s skirt. A smell of certain wools, the sound of a slip brushing up against hosiery, still recalls that emotion back to me. On the rare occasions when I have said I am busy when I am not, or that I like some item of clothing or person that I am indifferent to or hate, I am filled with unreasonable guilt over my “white” lie, and want to cry, confess, unburden. It’s all a bit overblown, really, as if I’ve actually wounded someone, as if my small insincerity might actually matter. I even kind of like it when other people lie, when Rema lies, for example; it’s a way of finding out, if the lie is uncovered, what she thinks is worth lying about.
So Harvey was saying something about El Niño, and dead fish.
Then the telephone rang, startling me far more than it startled Harvey.
“Hello?”
It was Rema, who, sounding inappropriately giddy, called me Dr. Liebenstein and asked me what I was wearing.
“Oh yes hello,” I said, staring at the lines at Harvey’s cuff, watching them blur.
Rema chatted comfortably about what she wanted me to pick up for dinner, urging me not to be cheap about the fish — everyone with the fish — asking me also could I pick up the thin almond cookies that she liked, the ones she liked to dip in her tea, did I know which ones she meant? Through all this I nodded sagely.
“And these El Niño winds?” I asked.
She talked on, saying I’m not sure what in her beautiful mint-pitched voice; eventually she suggested that she get off the phone. I said that of course I would pass everything on faithfully.
“Well,” I throat-cleared to Harvey, “I apologize for that interruption, but I can now say something rather important to you. Are you familiar with the work, the public work that is, of Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen?”
Preplanned words exited my mouth hastily, stumblingly, and I heard them as if they were not my own. Blushingly confessing myself a secret agent, I passed on to Harvey Dr. Gal-Chen’s assignment — a cold front approaching Manhattan. And as I spoke — my gaze fixed on the stain on Harvey’s shirt — I further estranged myself from myself, so that while one part of me talked to Harvey, another part thought about a certain shade of pale green that happened to be the exact shade of pale green that the newspaper once published as having been calculated by astronomers to be the color of the universe, after which a correction appeared in the following week’s paper stating that a math error had been made, and that the astronomers now realized the universe, if you could stand outside of it and see it, was actually a shade of beige. (Willed depersonalization is entirely normal, a valid, even laudable, coping technique. Only unwilled depersonalizations would be a cause for concern.)
After I stopped talking there was a brief or long — I’m not sure which — moment of silence.