‘My vulture?’
‘The one that appeared at ground zero.’
‘Are you saying it was a hallucination?’
‘Do you think it was a hallucination?’
‘I don’t know.’ George was not forming a very positive first impression of psychotherapy. ‘My vulture did not massage my lips,’ he reported.
‘Leonardo, it seems, was illegitimate. He and his mother had an intense relationship – much kissing and pampering.’ She hugged a phantom baby. ‘You must understand that, in ancient times, maternity cults commonly centered on vultures. The Egyptians believed it was a species without males, inseminated by the winds. Through the vulture fantasy, Leonardo was confessing to a sexually charged relationship with his mother – or so Freud theorized. The tail prying open the lips. The insertion.’
‘I thought we were going to talk about my problems,’ said George.
She slammed the book shut with the suddenness of a steel trap being sprung. ‘On Monday your immersion in death begins,’ she announced evenly.
George took out his wallet and removed a rectangle from its blurry plastic envelope. ‘Do me a favor? Hide this where I can’t find it.’ He set the rectangle on the desk. ‘I keep looking at it.’
The therapist picked up Holly’s picture – her official class photograph from the Sunflower Nursery School – and placed it in her top desk drawer.
While Holly’s nursery school picture had been a wellspring of grief – ‘unendurable’ was his therapist’s word, the perfect word, for his loss – the portrait of himself, Aubrey, and Morning was another matter entirely. He looked at it whenever he could, testing it under different kinds of light, memorizing each brush stroke. On Saturday afternoon he looked at it for so long that he lost track of time, consequently arriving several minutes late for the screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s lengthy film adaptation of War and Peace.
Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were walking through the woods. ‘If evil men can work together to get what they want,’ said the narrator, ‘then so can good men, to get what they want.’
George enjoyed the battles of Schoengraben and Austerlitz. The lines of infantrymen stretched on and on, far beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.
When the lights came up for the first intermission, he saw that the only people in the little theater were himself, an enlisted man, Randstable, and – shifting now in the row ahead, turning to face George – an older gentleman who, with his bushy beard and substantial abdomen, might have found employment as Santa Claus’s stunt double.
‘Hello, friend.’ When Santa Claus smiled, his beard expanded like a peacock’s tail.
‘Are you an Erebus evacuee?’ George asked.
‘Brian Overwhite,’ said Santa, nodding. ‘US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.’
‘I’d heard you were aboard.’
‘My ticket for Geneva had just arrived – we were about to begin the STABLE III talks – when this war… incredible, isn’t it? The mind isn’t built for such things. Nuclear exchanges. Failed deterrence. STABLE III would have put tough limits on missile throw-weight and anti-satellite weapons – that was my hope, anyway.’
‘I’m George Paxton.’ He went to shake Overwhite’s hand. A sling cradled the negotiator’s right arm. ‘Were you in one of the battles?’
‘No – two unreasonable ensigns came after me. Cousins.’
‘I know who you mean.’
‘They said, “You’ve spent your life controlling other people’s arms, and now we’re going to control yours!” So they broke it. Snapped the damn ulna. I reported the incident to Lieutenant Grass. Now get this – the man laughed at me. That’s right. He laughed.’
‘There seems to be some kind of resentment against us,’ said George. ‘Take me, for example. I was placed in a torpedo tube.’
‘Resentment? Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.’ Overwhite scratched his cast, as if trying to relieve an itch. ‘Tell me, George, which do you fear more, the gamma rays or the betas?’
‘What?’
‘The gammas go shooting right through you, zip, zip, but the betas ride in on the food you eat and the air you breathe.’ Overwhite reached under his beard and caressed his throat. ‘The buildup in the thyroid is what you’ve got to watch for. The betas go for the thyroid, especially with the children. It’s a terrible thing when they won’t even let you negotiate a simple goddamn arms control agreement.’
George wished that War and Peace would start again. ‘Good movie, huh?’
‘I can see your viewpoint. Eight hours of mongrel film technique in the service of murky Soviet propaganda, and yet there’s much to admire – the energetic grandeur, the meticulous Tolstoyan ambience.’ Overwhite massaged his elbow. ‘Cancer almost never forms in the elbows.’
‘Not much of a turnout,’ said George.
‘These enlisted men, all they want is Clint Eastwood and tits.’ Overwhite interlaced his fingers. ‘Cancer doesn’t bother with the fingers, either, not as a rule.’ He rubbed his chest. ‘In general, we needn’t worry about breast cancer.’
Later that afternoon, the Russians fled from the Battle of Borodino, Andrei died of his wounds, the Grand Army occupied Moscow, Napoleon suffered his calamitous retreat, and Pierre ended up with the vital and appealing Natasha Rostov.
Morning Valcourt is probably quite vital and appealing, George decided, once you get to know her.
From the perspective of the average consumer, psychotherapists in the second half of the twentieth century were an overpaid population. A hundred dollars an hour seemed a high price for the privilege of being listened to. What people don’t realize, Morning thought, is that I never stop working, night or day. When I’m having lunch, I’m working. I dream about my patients.
She sat down in the middle of the periscope room and arranged her lunch. A thermos of skim milk, a cucumber sandwich. She wanted to lose five pounds by the end of the voyage. Her Defense Department patient came to mind. Wengernook. All those feelings – he actually saw his wife die of radiation sickness – and no vocabulary for them. He talks about ballistic missile defenses. And Randstable, rambling on about inertial guidance and his old ‘think tank.’ He confuses systems analysis with thought. And the arms controller. Poor Overwhite, riddled with nonexistent tumors. Repression…
She finished her lunch, stuffed the refuse into the garbage scoop.
And Paxton. Why does he look at me that way? It’s not sex, not entirely. He wants something else from me.
The door hissed open.
George knew that, as a Unitarian, he was not competent to deal with metaphysical commodities, including prophetic glass paintings. He had decided to approach the situation on the theory that his Leonardo did not spell out an inevitable fate but, rather, a possible future, something that he could make happen through diligence and creativity. I shall not let Leonardo and Nostradamus and Holly’s stepsister down, he had resolved. I shall woo Morning Valcourt, make myself fascinating to her, fall in love with her, convince her to become my wife.
‘You and I have a lot in common,’ he said, entering the periscope room. ‘Did you know that selling tombstones is quite similar to psychotherapy? I would talk to people about their troubles.’
‘We’re the talking cure,’ she said tonelessly.
‘For example, we had guilt stones. Also self-hatred stones.’
‘Oh.’
He saw that he had been misinterpreting her face. The odd tilt of her mouth came not from snarling but from speaking so much truth, while the sharp flare of her nostrils traced to sensitivity rather than snobbery. He twisted his wedding ring. Forgive me, Justine.