“Current events are certainly a contributing factor,” Dr. Friedlander said. “I can assure you, Mrs. McGavock, our staff is fully qualified to make that kind of assessment. Perhaps you can tell me first of all if there’s a history of chemical dependence or alcoholism in your family. Mrs. McGavock, you said just a moment ago that you were drinking too much?”
“I said everyone was drinking too much.”
The doctor raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Let’s just focus on you for the moment. Is there any history of alcohol abuse in your family?”
Luke was afraid Sasha would betray her indignation, treating the doctor like an impertinent member of the service sector, but he could see her mastering her defensive impulse, drawing herself up in her chair and preparing her story in her mind. He wondered how honest it would be.
“My father was a fairly heavy drinker.”
“Was he ever treated for alcoholism?”
This was a sensitive subject and Luke felt an unexpected wave of sympathy for his wife. Sasha seldom spoke of her father, who’d left home when she was three. She liked to portray him as a bon vivant—an aristocratic southern party boy, but the reality, according to her mother, was far less glamorous. He’d ended his days in a flophouse in Charleston.
“Treated? I don’t know. He went to Switzerland once. I used to get these postcards of Alpine scenes, edelweiss, gingerbread houses, and girls in Heidi braids. He said he was skiing, but Mom said he was at a clinic.”
“Would you characterize him as an alcoholic?”
“He was a good-time Charlie,” she said. “He loved saloons and racetracks. It was a different time.” She took a deep breath. “But yes, I suppose I would have to say he was an alcoholic.”
Luke had never heard her make this admission. He couldn’t help wondering if she wasn’t sacrificing her late father in order to protect herself. Still, it was a start.
“He’s deceased?”
Sasha nodded.
“And what was the cause of death?”
“We never really knew. It might have been alcohol-related.”
The doctor made a note on a legal pad. “And your family, Mr. McGavock?”
He shook his head. “My parents were weekend imbibers. We had an uncle who was a drunk, like every other southern family.”
“Let’s talk about your habits. How would you characterize your own drinking, Mr. McGavock?”
“I have a cocktail when I get home.” He remembered that he no longer went to an office, or even had a routine. “I mean, I used to. Wine with dinner. I think it’s under control.”
He was prepared to follow up, to defend the recreational drug use in his teens and twenties, but Dr. Friedlander turned to Sasha.
“What about you, Mrs. McGavock?” There was a note of disingenuity to this inquiry.
Sasha let go of Luke’s hand and crossed her legs. “I like my chardonnay. I suppose I sometimes drink a glass or two more than I should. We go out to a lot of benefits and charity events.”
“Are you currently taking any prescription medications?”
“Well, nothing scary. The Pill… Paxil—”
“You’re on the Pill?” Luke said. He thought she’d been infertile since having Ashley—in fact, she’d said as much.
“It’s just to keep my cycle regular,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“Have you ever been diagnosed with depression?”
“Well, I’ve been diagnosed with depressive tendencies.” She seemed happy to change the subject. “I mean, hasn’t everybody? The Paxil just makes life a little softer around the edges. And Prilosec, for acid reflux. All the P’s. And Ambien, for sleep.”
“Do you take ephedra?”
“Once in a while, but that’s not prescription. Everyone I know takes it. I mean, it’s not easy getting into a size four, and we can’t very well spend the whole day at the gym.”
“I gather Ashley was somewhat overweight until recently. Did you ever encourage her to take any drug for purposes of losing weight?”
“She might have asked me about ephedra, but it’s not like she needs my permission to take an over-the-counter medication.”
“And Dexedrine?”
She frowned. “I have an old prescription. I haven’t taken it in months. Only when I really need to lose a few pounds.”
The doctor made a note.
Seeing Luke’s expression, Sasha shrugged and tried to look girlishly helpless.
He turned to the doctor. “My wife’s a little obsessed with her weight, and it rubbed off on Ashley. The signal she was getting was that her mother loved her when she was skinny.”
Dr. Friedlander nodded.
Sasha sat up straight in her chair. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Did you ever provide her with Dexedrine?”
“I never!”
“And you never noticed that your own supply was disappearing.”
“Oh my God,” Sasha said.
“Goddamn it, Sasha. You were feeding her speed?”
“Please, let’s try to stay calm for Ashley’s sake. Now, I need to ask you about Ritalin. It seems that Ashley had two prescriptions, one from her psychiatrist, another one from her physician.”
“Two prescriptions?” Luke said. “Why would she have two prescriptions?”
“I gather, Mr. McGavock, that she approached you separately and suggested that it would improve her academic performance.”
“Well, yes. But it’s not like it’s a narcotic, is it?”
“It’s essentially an amphetamine, and at higher doses, it creates a euphoric high. Which is why it’s so often abused. Particularly in the Manhattan private school environment. I understand she asked you not to mention this to her mother.”
This was true. Ashley had told him how she sometimes had trouble concentrating; she had been sheepish about it, explaining how all the smartest girls in the school were taking it to improve their focus, asking him not to mention it to her mother, since her psychiatrist didn’t believe in Ritalin. It was their little secret, and at the time he’d been grateful for this little conspiracy between them. Her doctor had agreed to a trial prescription, and after checking in with her once or twice about the beneficial effects, Luke hadn’t thought about it since.
“How could you not discuss something like that with me?” Sasha demanded.
“Well, what about the other prescription?” Luke asked. “You must’ve known about that one. Why didn’t you tell me? I suppose you thought it would be a good way to lose weight.”
“Dr. Rosenblum prescribed it. And Ashley didn’t want me to tell you because she didn’t want her genius father to know she’d been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. It had nothing to do with weight loss.”
“I think it’s clear,” Dr. Friedlander said, “that we’re dealing with some serious communication issues here.”
Luke put his head in his hands. “You think?”
“I’m afraid I have to ask you about so-called recreational drugs. Mrs. McGavock?”
“Why are you asking me? What kind of question is that? Did Ashley say something?” She stood up.
“Please, Mrs. McGavock. It’s important that we have all the facts relating to the home and family environment in order to determine the best course of treatment.”
Sasha slowly lowered herself back into her chair, a remarkably graceful operation, one that Luke had often admired.
“Okay, fine, I admit I used to do a few lines in a party situation. It was part of the social landscape. It was like, you know, an amuse-bouche. So, once in a while, in the ladies’ room, I’d do a couple of bumps. I never really thought of it as a problem. I’m sorry, I realize that sounds terrible, but it’s true. I know it’s no excuse, but it was just part of the world we lived in. I certainly never exposed Ashley to that.”
“And now?”
She shook her head. “I realized it wasn’t very attractive.”
It was a little scary to see how well she lied.
Dr. Friedlander made another note. “Let’s talk a little about the family dynamic. Have there been any changes in domestic relations recently, any marital conflict?”
Sasha rolled her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake—why don’t you just come out and say it’s all my fault?”
“Why would you say that, Mrs. McGavock?”
“Because apparently Ashley mentioned this silly rumor about me, and I suppose that’s her excuse for swallowing a bottle of fucking Vicodin. It has nothing to do with the fact that her father spent thirteen years at the office or that our country is under attack and thousands of her neighbors are dead and now they’re sending anthrax in the mail.”
“Tell me a little more about this rumor.”
“There was some ridiculous item in the Post about me having lunch with a certain… with Bernie Melman,” she said with the weary air of a celebrity dismissing an ancient canard.
“Well, do you think it’s possible that Ashley might have been upset by this rumor?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. You seem to know all about it.”
“Did you ever talk to Ashley about this?”
“I really didn’t think it was worth dignifying with a discussion. And I really don’t think it explains anything.”
“At Ashley’s age, at this stage in life, the mother-daughter relationship is particularly fraught. Issues of sexual competition are bound to—”
“I’ve always—we’ve always been open and honest about sexuality. She knows she can talk to me about anything.”
“Did she tell you,” Luke said, “about the boy I caught her going down on last week?” He wasn’t certain what this proved, but he felt the need to pierce through the fog of evasions and prevarications.
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe if you weren’t so goddamned open and honest about sexuality, she wouldn’t be blowing strange boys in her bedroom.”
“I think we have a lot of work to do on our communication skills,” Dr. Friedlander said.
Twenty minutes later, Luke was in the parking lot, waiting for Sasha to come out of the ladies’ room, watching little knots of patients straggling up the meadow to a big two-story house, presumably answering a silent dinner bell, some of them moving with the ponderous sleepwalking gait of the heavily sedated. He couldn’t imagine his daughter as one of them. If he could just see her, tell her that everything was going to be all right.
Sasha appeared, her makeup repaired. “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink…. Don’t look at me like that. It was just a little joke, sort of.”
“I think we managed to provide the answers to the basic question, didn’t we? If not necessarily intentionally.”
“You mean I did.”
“I think there’s more than enough blame to go around.”
“I know you think I’m thick-skinned and cynical.”
“I’ll take the fact that you know that as a positive sign.”
She put her arms around him. “Let’s go out someplace quiet, some stupid old-fashioned New Englandy restaurant where they pour big martinis and sell maple-syrup candy at the cash register. Remember when we drove up to the Berkshires to see the leaves and we stayed at that funny old place in Stockbridge?”
“The Red Lion Inn.”
“And on the road to Williamstown how you practically swerved the car into the ditch when I gave you a blow job?”
He nodded, refusing to be drawn in.
“We passed a little inn on the way in.” She walked up and pulled him close. “Let’s just see if they have a room.”
Luke could almost see the appeal of this idea, feeling in her embrace a certain nostalgic warmth, a vestigial twinge of affection tinctured with desire. But he was meeting Corrine at a restaurant in the Village, and nothing short of another disaster could sway him from that course.
“I have to go downtown,” he said. He would have felt less guilty if she’d remonstrated with him, if she had reiterated her belief that his charitable work was trivial, instead of releasing him and silently retreating to the other side of the car, if she had at least slammed the car door in protest. If saving his marriage were his top priority, this would have counted as a missed opportunity.
23
What kind did you get, Marine Corps or Israeli?” “The Marine Corps. What, there’s a difference?” “The Israeli masks are definitely better. Plus, they have a child’s size. We bought them for the four of us, and the staff. Web went to Choate with the undersecretary of defense, and he bought the Israeli ones for his family. He set us up with his supplier. I could call him for you. I mean, for all intents and purposes, they’re impossible to get.”
Corrine wondered if the gas masks she’d purchased on the Internet were inferior, putting her family at risk.
“What about Cipro?” Casey said. “I hope you have a stash on hand.”
“I called our pediatrician and he wrote a scrip, but all the pharmacies downtown are sold out.”
“They still have some at Zitomer’s on Seventy-sixth. At least they did yesterday. I was at Minky Rijstaefal’s for dinner—you know Minky; her husband’s Tom Harwell, the plastic surgeon—and it was so sweet: Folded inside the name cards at the table, we all had prescriptions for Cipro.”
“Do you think Zitomer’s is still open?” Corrine asked.
“We can call. So, do you really like the new look?”
They were sitting in Casey’s living room on Park Avenue with a bottle of chardonnay from an Argentinean winery owned by Web’s firm. Casey lived at 740 Park, an address resonant with talismanic significance in her rarefied world. This simple address on an ecru Crane note card consecrated the embossee as an Olympian who had attained the heights of Manhattan social aspiration. Casey had recently had the place redecorated by the hottest new design team in a kind of deluxe Early American folk style, selling off all their eighteenth-century French furniture, seventeenth-century Flemish art, Chinese porcelain, silk damask, and Persian carpets—a look that Casey had recently decided was generic Park Avenue—replacing them with Pennsylvania highboys, braided rugs, antique quilts, tartan and calico patchwork upholstery, and paintings by the Wyeths, pre et fils.
“It reminds me a little of my parents’ house,” Corrine said. Indeed, the overall impression was almost farcically reminiscent of the eighteenth-century saltbox she’d grown up in on the North Shore of Massachusetts, furnished with inherited furniture, pewter and brass, and shabby bric-a-brac from her mother’s antique store in Salem.
“We wanted it to be homey. Little did we know how appropriate that would turn out to be. Given what’s happened, I think ostentation is over.” She looked around, admiring her new living room.
At moments like this, Corrine had to struggle to remember the overweight, insecure girl who’d been her prep school roommate, hoping she was still there somewhere beneath the glossy surface.
“How’s your mother doing?”
“About the same,” Corrine said. “Of course she wants us to leave New York and move to Massachusetts immediately.”
“My mother’s exactly the same. She thinks we should move back to Wilmington or to the place on Nantucket. As if we could just uproot our lives. Not to mention the kids. I was just talking to Sasha McGavock today—you know our daughters go to Sprague together—and she said that Hampton Country Day got like a couple hundred applications in the past few weeks.”
“What’s she like, really?” Corrine asked.
“Who? Sasha?”
“I was just, you know, curious.”
“Where do I even start?” Casey said, wetting her lips with her tongue.
Corrine didn’t want to tell Casey about Russell’s chippie until she figured out what she was going to do, since her friend would be only too eager to preside over the dismantling of her marriage; neither was she ready to tell Luke, although at the same time he was the person she most wanted to tell. For the moment, she wanted to segregate her anger at Russell from her feelings for Luke. Of
course, that anger made her freer to explore those feelings, but she wished to retain the illusion that the two were somehow unrelated, that beyond the barricades was a world apart.
Over the past few days, she’d minimized her contact with Russell to a couple hours in the evening, between his return from the office and the children’s bedtime, not wishing to punish them for his sins. They were already unsettled enough.
The night after the book party fiasco, a chilly formality and domestic routine had prevailed. They ate supper together with the kids, Russell having cravenly cooked one of her favorite meals, salmon with salsa verde, accompanied by an elaborate salad with hazelnuts and about twenty different kinds of lettuce he extolled as “microgreens.” As if making a chic meal would compensate for having screwed that girl… As if she really cared, the way he did, about what she ate; she supposed he actually might have been mollified, had he been the wronged party, by some extravagant multicourse spread incorporating truffles, caviar, and foie gras. Then, after dinner, he’d bathed the kids and done the dishes.
Corrine had left the apartment as Russell was putting the kids down, in order to avoid him after they were asleep, going uptown to visit Casey before heading down to Bowling Green for her shift, where Jerry gave her a note from Luke explaining that he was at his studio, catching up on sleep. Reading it, she found herself getting all teary—not because she had planned to confide in him that night, but because his presence would’ve distracted and comforted her and also because she worried about him, his tiredness seeming palpable and almost tragic. Contemplating the long night ahead of her, she realized just how much she looked forward to his company, and how mixed were her motives in turning up every night, how shallow her charitable impulse; she was no better, really, than the voyeurs who came down to glimpse the destruction, and get a war story to carry back uptown.
Corrine worked through the night with the lash of conscience at her back, making coffee and sandwiches, stacking supplies, dishing out chili, uncondensing cans of soup, sweeping out the tent, chatting with cops and Guardsmen and the silver-haired minister from Canada who’d driven down to provide counsel and solace to the rescue workers—all the while imagining how impressed Luke would be if he could see how industrious she was even in his absence. Proving her selflessness even as she wished that Luke could bear witness to it.