Don't Say a Word

  “Be seeing you,” said Price.

  Conrad waved over his shoulder.

  It was nearly eight o’clock when Conrad entered his apartment. He was figuring on dinner. He figured he’d eat his dinner and his wife would sit with him and talk. He liked to listen to her. He liked the sound of her voice. Anyway, he was too tired to talk much himself.

  So they would have dinner and she would talk and then they would go to bed together. And then after about a fifteen-minute nap, he would get up and go back to work on his grief paper until about one A.M. That was how he had it figured.

  Then he opened the apartment door and stepped in.

  “Daddy!”

  The little girl came rocketing out of the kitchen hallway. She ran toward him with her arms open, her long braid flying back.

  “Daddy-Daddy-Daddy. Daddy-Daddy-Daddy. Daddy-Daddy-Daddy-Daddy-Daddy!”

  Uh-oh, Conrad thought. And then the kid hit his bum leg at full speed. She wrapped her arms around it, pressed her cheek to it, closed her eyes.

  “Daddy!” she sighed.

  “Hey, my little friend!” Conrad tried to smile, but it was more like a grimace. “Oh, gee. Oh, honey. Jessica, honey, sweetheart, please. My leg. Oh.”

  Gently, he peeled her off him. She grabbed hold of his hand and started jumping up and down.

  “Mommy let me stay up for you.”

  “Hey. Great,” Daddy said. I’ll kill her, he thought. First I’ll have dinner, then I’ll kill her, then we’ll go to bed together …

  “Because remember,” Jessica was saying, “you promised to play Chutes and Ladders with me before I went to bed?”

  “Uh … did I? Uh … Oh, boy, that’ll be great.”

  “So Mommy said it was fair because you promised.”

  “Ah. Well. That was fair,” said Conrad. “Good for Mommy.” First he would kill her, then he would have dinner …

  He set his briefcase down as Jessica dragged him across the apartment to the kitchen. They were almost to the door when his wife stepped out.

  Twenty-three years since they’d met, Agatha still had that happy smile, the one that made her round cheeks pink, her blue eyes bright. Her auburn hair was a little bit shorter now, but it still tumbled to her shoulders in breathless curls. And her round figure was a little bit rounder. He could see the curves of it even in her baggy black sweater and loose khaki slacks.

  “Hiya, Doc,” she said. And she came forward and kissed him lightly on the lips. The smell of roast chicken, hot butter and garlic, came out of the kitchen behind her.

  Maybe he would go to bed with her first, he thought.

  He couldn’t remember what he was going to do second.

  The Chutes and Ladders game seemed to go on forever. Jessica would painstakingly count her piece along the spaces—“Wa—un, two-oo, three-ee …” Then she would miss the count—“Oooh … wait a minute, wait a minute. Where was I?” And she would set the piece back at the original space and start again, “Wa-un, two-oo, three-ee,” while Conrad would be thinking: Four five! Four five, for the love of God, child! It went on and on.

  After a while, though, Aggie brought him a soda water and a few crackers. It took the edge off his hunger and his weariness. He began to relax.

  He and Jessie were lying on the swatch of maroon carpet in the center of the living room. Jessica was sitting Injun style, bent over the game board. Nathan was stretched out, his head propped on his hand. He sipped his seltzer and watched her as she spun the wheel and went through the long, slow count again. “Wa-un, two-oo …”

  Jessie had sandy hair like his—or like his used to be. Hers was thick and long—she wore it in a braid so her mother wouldn’t have to fight the snarls in it every night—but the color was his exactly. The rest of her was pure Agatha. The apple cheeks and the blue eyes and the big smile. Margaret, her teacher at Friends Seminary, said she was talented at art, as Agatha was too. She certainly seemed to enjoy it as much as her mother. Almost every day, she came back from the Quaker private school bearing another drawing of a rectangle house with a triangle roof, or a stick-figure woman in a triangle dress, or wavy water or lollipop trees or some other thing Conrad and Aggie could clap their hands and exclaim over. The best of these were hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Jess: the little stretch of hallway formed by the nursery and kitchen walls, Conrad had no idea whether the pictures were good or not. But he did sometimes stand in that little hall and congratulate himself on how colorful and solid they were. They showed none of the tendency toward disjointed abstraction he’d seen in pictures drawn by emotionally disturbed kids. Once or twice, he’d even stood there looking at them and caught himself thinking, “Well, she won’t ever need a psychiatrist.” (Not that there was anything wrong with seeing a psychiatrist, of course. But why should she? Her mother wasn’t an alcoholic. Her father wasn’t a craven codependent. There was absolutely no reason why she shouldn’t be the happiest, most well-adjusted human being who ever existed since time began. Right?)

  Well, anyway, the kid really did seem to have Agatha’s cheerful disposition. Her generosity. Her avocation to nurture others. Of her two “best friends,” one was a sweet but ugly and clumsy girl whom Jessie had seen rejected in the playground. Jessie had invited the child, Adrienne, to join the unicorn game she played with her other best friend, Lauren. Jessie had been taking care of Adrienne ever since. It was exactly what Agatha would have done.

  But if Jessie derived a lot from her mother, there were some traits, subtle traits, in which Conrad thought he saw himself. She was easily frightened, for instance, and the slightest criticism moved her to tears. Conrad had been like that as a little boy, and he hoped she would not be forced to harden herself as much, to bury her fears as deeply, to learn to take charge as completely, as he had. (But then why should she? Her mother wasn’t an alcoholic. Her father wasn’t a craven codependent. There was absolutely no reason she shouldn’t be the happiest, most well-adjusted …

  But be that as it may.)

  Also, no matter how tender and affectionate Jessie could be toward her outcast classmates, she was nonetheless grimly determined to be accepted by the more popular girls. They had rejected her—some of them—because of her friendships with girls like Adrienne. But Jessica had continued to invite them over for playdates and parties, hoping to bring them around. In this, Conrad saw a touch of his own brand of ambition: quiet, unspoken, and relentless.

  “Wa-un … two—oo, three—ee …” She was counting her piece carefully along the board again. Her head was bent toward it, her braid falling forward over her shoulder. Her blue eyes were intent on the task.

  Conrad smiled. He did not feel impatient anymore. She was working so hard at it. To count, just to count to five, took all her concentration. She was so small, he thought, and the world was so difficult to master.

  He reached out and touched her nose gently with his finger.

  “Honk,” he said.

  “Dad-dy! Now I lost count.”

  “Know what?”

  “Yes.” She cast her eyes heavenward. “You love me. Right?”

  Conrad laughed. “Right. How’d you get so smart?”

  “You always say that.”

  “Sorry. I’ll never say it again.”

  “Daddy. You have to say it. You’re my daddy.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

  The beleaguered child sighed wearily. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to count all over again. Where was I?”

  He showed her. She began the count again. Her piece was on the last row of the game but one.

  “Oh, nooo,” she cried.

  Conrad looked down. Jessica’s piece had landed on a chute. Not just any chute. The longest chute in the game. Her piece slid all the way down to the third row.

  Conrad’s smile faded. The game, he thought, would never end.

  In fact, it was done by eight-thirty. Conrad’s leg felt better by then and he’d swung his giggling daughter to the nursery by both hands. He tucked
her into her loft bed. He kissed her forehead and pronounced the Ritual Good-night—“Hit the sheet, feet; hit the bed, head; start to nod, bod; start to snooze, youse.” Then Agatha came in to sing the Good Night Song, and Conrad was relieved of duty.

  He returned to the living room. It was a long room, which Agatha had decorated in three useful sections. The first third, by the door, was a small work station, a desk for Aggie during the day and for Conrad at night. The middle of the room was a play area—the red carpet—with a folding dinner table pushed to the side. The far end, by the glass doors to the balcony, was the sitting area. Two huge brown armchairs and one long brown sofa around a circular, white marble coffee table on a Persian rug.

  Conrad collected his soda water and went to the sitting area now. He sat on one of the chairs, his body shifted so he could look out through the glass doors. He saw, in the night, the lighted windows of the building across the courtyard. A woman in her kitchen. A man in an undershirt, watching TV, drinking beer. An old silver-haired woman in a smock, working with clay at a table.

  There was a dark window, too, directly across from him. That was where the old lady had been murdered a few weeks ago. Conrad gazed at this one absently. Absently, he listened to Aggie sing:

  “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird …”

  Jessie was probably getting a little old for that one, he thought. But it was part of the Bedtime Ritual; hard to let go of. Conrad himself found it comforting: the sound of Aggie’s voice, sweet and shimmering like a little stream.

  He thought again about Jessica counting and he smiled to himself. He felt better now; his leg, his head. He just felt better. Nothing like a little game of Chutes and Ladders to burn off the tensions of the day.

  He did not hear Agatha stop singing. He was a little startled to see her reflected in the window, coming up behind him. She put her hands on his shoulders. He put his hand on her hand.

  “Is she out?” he said.

  “Like a light. I took her and Lauren over to the Waterside playground after school. She’s exhausted. I don’t know how she stayed awake till you got here.”

  He smiled again. Brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it.

  Aggie sat on the back of the chair. Kissed the top of his head. Her auburn hair tumbled forward and he felt it brush his bald flesh up there. He could smell her, her flowery toilet water. He closed his eyes and breathed it in.

  “So what’s up, Doc?” she asked him softly.

  “Hm?”

  “You’re a depressed kind of a guy. I can tell. What’s the matter?”

  “No, no, no.” He tilted his head back so he could look up into the round, cheerful face. “It’s just Thursdays. I schedule too many hard cases, on Thursdays. I’m starting to develop a case of the Thursday blues.”

  “Ah. I see. And how are they different from the Wednesday blues you had yesterday?”

  “Uh … Wednesday blues are a sort of lavender with patches of aquamarine. Thursday I go for robin’s-egg with great swaths of azure.”

  Agatha laughed above him, her eyes bright. “Oh, Doctor, Doctor? Oh, Mr. MD? You are bullshitting your faithful wife and Indian companion.”

  He looked away from her, out into the dimly lit room. “No, really,” he said. “It’s only Thursdays.”

  Agatha brushed at his last strands of hair. “Nathan. Every day has been Thursday around here lately.”

  “Isn’t that what I promised you when we got married? Every day would be Thursday?”

  “You promised me every day would be a holiday.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Nathan.” She took his earlobe between her thumb and forefinger. “I hate when you do this thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “This Psychiatrist-I-Am-a-Camera-with-No-Problems thing. This I-Take-Care-of Everyone-But-No-One-Has-to-Take-Care-of-Me thing. I hate it. And if you don’t tell me what’s bothering you right away, I am going to squeeze your ear until the top of your head blows off.”

  “Ah, these cruel little love games, how they make my heart flutter. Ow!”

  “Tell. What’s bothering you, Doc?”

  “Well, my ear hurts for one thing.”

  “It’s hard to be a shrink when you’re deaf. Tell.”

  “All right. All right.” Conrad pried her hand from his earlobe. With a small groan, he stood up and went to the glass doors. In reflection on the glass, he saw Agatha slide off the chair’s back into its seat. Her baggy black sweater rode up above her navel. She pulled it straight again and watched him. He fixed his eyes on a window across the court: the old woman working with clay.

  “I can’t help them.” He heard himself speak suddenly, more harshly than he’d meant to. “I can’t help them. All right? Can we eat now?”

  “Your patients? You can’t help your patients?”

  He turned to her. “You know, I hate this kind of conversation, Aggie, it really doesn’t—”

  “I know, I know,” said Agatha, holding up her hand. “Just shut up and talk.”

  He rolled his eyes. Turned away, faced the window again. He shrugged. “Yeah, my patients. I’m just … I can’t help them. No one can, not this kind of patient. Somehow I seem to have become an expert on trauma neurosis. I never seem to get the people who come in and say, ‘Oh, Doctor, my life is wonderful, why do I feel so bad?’ You know? They talk for five years and then shake your hand with tears in their eyes and say, ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Doctor, you changed my life.’ No one ever refers them to me. I get—like—Job. If Job were alive, I would be Job’s psychiatrist.”

  Agatha smiled, tilted her head. “Well, if I were a shrink, you know, I’d say that—if you have a trauma neurosis practice, that must be what you want somehow.”

  He nodded at the window. “Yeah. Yeah, it is what I want. It was what I wanted anyway. I mean, I’m good at it. People come to me and their kids are dead and their neck is broken and their cattle have boils or whatever. And they talk to me and they learn to live again.”

  “Sounds good to me, Doc.”

  “Ach.” He felt stupid even as he went on. “What’s the point of it? You know? Their kids are still dead. Their cattle still have boils.”

  He was grateful that Aggie didn’t laugh at him. He watched in the window as she pushed herself out of her chair and came to him. She put her arms around his waist, rested her head against his back.

  “Did I remember to tell you that you can’t save the world?” she said. “Your mother’s dead and you can’t save her and you can’t save the world.”

  “Please,” he said, but not unkindly. “I went through ten years of analysis. I understand everything.” He turned around in her arms. He held her, laid his cheek against her hair. “I just don’t understand anything,” he said.

  She raised her face to him, kissed him lightly. “It sounds like you miss the old days of staring into the sun.”

  He made a face at her. No, he did not miss those days, not at all. They had been in college then, both of them, Nathan at Berkeley, Aggie at San Francisco State. Living together in the seedy one-bedroom right over Telegraph Avenue. Nathan had grown his hair down past his shoulders and wore a long, sandy beard that made him look like a cross between Charles Manson and Jesus. Sometimes he even sported tie-dyed T-shirts, and his jeans were always faded nearly white. He was supposed to be premed, but he spent much of his time studying Eastern religions; he was pre-Zen, Aggie used to say. On the warmer afternoons, he liked to go up to Seminary Hill on the north side of campus. He would sit in the half-lotus position on the rocks overlooking San Francisco Bay. He would watch as the red ball of the sun turned the sparkling water orange and the drifting clouds pink. And he would meditate, counting his breaths, breathing slowly, forcing the air out with his abdomen, waiting for his mind to click into its low, dark state of receptivity. No opinions, no interpretations. Let the connections make themselves. The way of the Tao is easy. Simply give up all your opinions.

&nb
sp; He had thought he was raising himself to new levels of consciousness. He had not realized until the day his mother died, until the day he’d nearly made himself blind, that he was also, to put it in technical terms, losing his marbles.

  “At least I thought I knew something then,” he said. He put his hand on the side of Aggie’s face. He looked down into her blue eyes. “These people—my patients. Their dead children; their crippling injuries. I mean, it’s just … so bad, Aggie. It’s like … just this bad, bad thing with nothing good about it. And you can talk God or enlightenment or catharsis or even politics all you want, and the real truth of it is, it sucks and you can’t explain it, you can’t mitigate it or talk your way out of it. Children die and people get hurt and it just sucks. And when they look at me and say, ‘Oh, thank you, Doctor, now I can live with it!’ I feel guilty. I feel like I’ve put one over on them. I mean, how can they live with it? How can anything ever mean anything to them again? How can they face it, for Christ’s sake?”

  Looking up at him, Aggie smiled. “How can they?” she said softly.

  Conrad closed his eyes and let out a sigh. “How can anyone?” he said. And then he said, “How can I?”

  They were both silent a moment. Then Agatha lifted her face to his again, kissed him gently, moving her hand to the back of his neck.

  “That’s a very important question,” she told him. “Let’s fuck.”

  Conrad locked the front door for the night: the dead bolt, the intergrip, and the chain. Then he waited for Aggie in the bedroom, by the windows.

  The bedroom was not as long as the living room. Aggie had only been able to divide it in half. The first half, near the door, had her stool and drafting table in it. Drawings, paintings, and designs were spread over the face of the table or stacked on the floor or clipped to the wall nearby. The cover mock-up for Sam’s Kite; the watercolor illustrations for A Day with Santa; pencil sketches for Count the Bunnies; others only just begun.