(Kotkin thinks I’m wrong, she thinks I’m really angry at my mother. “Maybe I hate my father.”
(“Why? If he didn’t have the affair?”
(“For not keeping her. For not making her happy?”
(“You mean, your father didn’t have a big enough cock to keep your mother happy?”
(No. Don’t say this. No. Let me be. I don’t want to know this. Maybe if I lie quietly and don’t speak, Kotkin will leave me alone.
(“Did you think you didn’t have a big enough cock to keep Larry happy?”
(“No, no,” he begged Kotkin.)
“What am I having?” Gail wondered aloud.
Me. You’re having me. I’m born again, without Jesus, without lies.
(“I didn’t know!” he shouted at Kotkin. “How could I project my fears of my father losing my mother when I thought my father had left her, had cheated on her? ‘Your father wasn’t satisfied with me,’ that’s what Gail told me.”
(“She said that?” Kotkin alert, happy, on the scent of some trail in her notebooks.
(“I don’t know what she said,” Peter despaired. “Give me a break. Gail never tells the truth. How can I know what she said?”
(“What do you think she said? Do you remember the night she told you?”
(Mom and Dad sat on the big chairs. Gail smoked.)
Gail smoked?
“Did you used to smoke?” Peter asked.
“Yes,” Gail said with a fond smile of remembrance. She raised her hand for the waiter’s attention. “I have exciting news, Peter. We’ll order and I’ll tell you.”
“What is it?” Peter blurted with a harsh, nervous laugh. “You’re pregnant?”
Gail looked at him as if he were vomit, her lips in a curl of disgust.
(“No,” he told Kotkin, thinking again. “That was when she told me she was going to have my half sister. They sat me on the couch and told me. She smoked throughout.”)
“We’d better order. You must be hungry,” Gail said, dismissing Peter’s joke. When they were done, Gail leaned forward, eager and happy. “I’m going to be appointed cultural commissioner.”
I could sell my story to the New York Post. Cultural czar son abused by neighbor. He laughed.
“You find that funny?” Gail blinked at him. “What’s wrong, Peter? You’re behaving horribly.”
(“Do you remember when they told you about the divorce?”
(“I guess not.”
(Silence. Disapproval. Kotkin thinks I’m lying, I’m blocking, I’m repressing, I’m ruining the session. Her notebooks are full. Empty them, Peter. Make her feel she’s a good therapist.)
“Do you remember Larry?”
“What?” Gail seemed distracted. She pushed her plate, scanned the table.
“Larry. Gary’s cousin. He was a child abuser. He felt us up.”
Gail sat, the screened sunlight trailing across half her face and body. The water glasses shimmered. Her lips parted. The perfect edges of her teeth glowed beneath the red. Her tongue appeared and touched them. “What do — he did that to you?”
“And Gary. Nothing horrible. Just safe sex.” Peter laughed again. People use wit to blunt their evil, he thought.
Gail covered her face, lean hands over her eyes and nose and mouth like a mask. She bowed her head.
(“What do you think your mother would say if you told her?”
(“I don’t know.”
(“Do you want to tell her?”
(“Yes. More than anything else. I want her to know what she did. I’d like someone to know, just for once, what stupid little shits they are. For once, I’d like someone to admit they did wrong and that nothing — nothing — explains it, or makes it right.”
(“Is this just your mother we’re talking about? Or everyone?”
(“Everyone.”
(“Including you?”
(“Not me.” Peter shifted his head and saw Kotkin’s shoes. “Not me,” he told Kotkin’s Reebok sneakers. “I’m perfect.”
(“And me?” Kotkin asked. “Am I also a little shit?”
(“You’re not real. You don’t exist.”)
Gail moved her hands away, twisting them together above her empty plate, wringing something out of them. “I didn’t know,” she said.
“I wasn’t a bad son, Mother. You were a lousy mother. My father wasn’t a lousy husband. You were a selfish, adulterous bitch.”
My God, I’m free.
Gail’s face trembled. She got small and wrinkled and old.
My God, I’m home. I’m out. I’m out of the sea of lies.
“Peter,” his old mother pleaded.
Beg me, Mother. Beg me for my love.
“Peter, that’s not true,” her voice watered, words sagging out of her throat, drowning in the air.
“You tell lies to protect yourself. I thought it was to hurt me. But the lies are to cover your nakedness. I’m not your son anymore. And Byron will have nothing to do with you. I don’t want to be reminded of your existence. It’s crazy—”
(“What do you think will happen if you say this to your mother?” Kotkin asked.
(“I think you’ll be out one customer.”
(Silence. Kotkin thinks I’m acting out, crazy, escaping from one jail cell into another.)
“It’s crazy, I know,” Peter groaned to the old woman who was his mother. “But I’ve never really been your son anyway. So let’s make it real. Let’s take away the fiction. Why should you have your illusions? I don’t have reality! Let’s take away your dreams, then maybe I can have some.”
He was crying. Happy five-year-old Peter was back in his cheeks, in his mouth, in his eyes, in every part of himself, crying at what they did to him, crying at their stupid, selfish love.
He pushed away from the table, fought to stand on the teetering world.
“I’m going home.”
Her face was strange, something old and different. I didn’t even know her.
“Home,” he sang to her. Maybe the word would tell her. Tell her his regret. “I wanted to love you.”
Peter covered his face on his way out. He didn’t want to see himself in the stranger’s eyes.
Go to the love you’ve got, Peter. Get there fast.
MOM DIED alone.
The doctor said it had happened fast, mostly during her sleep. Lily woke up with the episode already well under way; she suffered little, he claimed.
What bullshit. He was also in bed when it happened.
Diane tried to be rational. She went to the doctor, listened to his explanations, spoke to Lily’s friends, asked them where to arrange a funeral, found the director, made all these plans, all to happen quickly, to bury Lily as Lily would have wished: a respectable Jewish woman, with a solemn rabbi and a full house of her peers. Diane spent the day of her mother’s death being a good girl. She made all the right arrangements.
But orphans wander. In Philadelphia she was an orphan.
At first, she tried to stay. She sat in her mother’s kitchen, after the long, incredible day, and the event came to the door, entered, and sat at the table: Hello. Your mother died today. How do you feel?
She jumped up. Turned on the television. Cried.
Peter called to check on her and asked, Should we come down right now?
No, wait till the morning. Brave Diane. I’ll be all right.
We’ll come over, Lily’s friends said when they phoned.
No, no, brave Diane said, tomorrow. I want to be alone tonight.
Everyone said, We understand.
But Diane didn’t understand why she turned them away. Because I wasn’t there. I didn’t save her. And she cried, moaned in agony on her mother’s furniture. Peter said, “I’m very sorry. She loved you very much.”
For a second, she thought he was kidding her. He liked to be ironic, so ironic that the slow-witted took him literally and never knew they had been insulted.