Darling? Read online

  Of course she loved him; he turned the pieces until they fit, remaking her life as a story—as whole. She grew toward him like a root to water, combing the personal ads though she knew he was married—surely he’d find a way to send her a message, tell her she was loved. After he mentioned Yeats in passing she read Yeats every night, though she’d used to think poems were dull—now she’d have taken them intravenously. When she turned over a plate at a flea market she’d rather it read Karp than Limoges, and the shop now had a Judaica corner next to the nautical tchochkes. Karp being Jewish, she found herself studying the instructions for koshering, on the back of the box of salt: Place a turkey on an inclined drainboard, sprinkle salt outside and in like a light blanket of snow. Might such a process work on herself? She had absorbed Karp’s attitudes without realizing she knew them, heard herself using his pronunciations, felt his expressions on her face. When she was thinking Karp, Karp, if only you would drive your body into mine (yes, it was all most embarrassing), she might have considered that she’d already sopped up a good portion of his soul.

  “Where’d you grow up?” she asked him.

  “You’d like to know something about me.”

  “Yes, I’d like to know where you grew up.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I was wondering where you grew up!” How to seduce a man if you can’t know him? What did his father do? Why psychology? How did he fall in love with his wife? With details like this she could have fashioned a romance of and for him, an image of himself so seductive he’d have had to step into it, and fall in love with its creator.

  “The therapist isn’t supposed to talk about himself,” he explained, sounding plaintive, even exhausted. She was wearing away at him, she would have her victory soon. His consulting room with its burlap wallpaper and diagnostic manuals took on the aspect of a seraglio. Daisy spent hours calculating which outfit would seem most artlessly charming. More angora! Many the bunny must be combed, that her sweaters might call out to be touched while the woman inside them went on innocently murmuring her free associations.

  “I dreamed there was a door at the back of the office, another room where we could go, with sunlight, and curtains blowing in the breeze.…”

  “And?…”

  “Well, you know, we’d be free of the restrictions…”

  “Restrictions?”

  “You know.…”

  “You feel some restriction here, something rigid or unpleasant, but inescapable.…”

  She paused a long time, touching her cold fingers to a burning cheek.

  “Can you say what you’re thinking?”

  Was he deaf, dumb and blind? “I’m thinking of … of … seducing you, making love to you, for God’s sake!”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “We can analyze that.”

  Karp, Karp, he was driving her crazy! She awoke in outrage every morning. Would the sun be rising in the west then? Because he ought to have loved her—But, no wonder her husband couldn’t bear her—she was nothing to look at, her head was too big for her body … or rather the shoulders too narrow; the legs short.… No, looking again she saw the shoulders were too wide. Whatever, it was a question of proportion—she didn’t have any. The things she’d been vain of—she was thin as a girl, she never put an extra morsel into her mouth, her features were sharp and clear—faded when he didn’t seem to see them. How could he love a woman with such a witchy chin? It was no coincidence her mother had named her for a flower without whorls or fragrance; she had no softness, no mystery about her. Her mother’s own name had been Rose.

  She was only Daisy, not kosher for Karp. Slicing the roots of the leggy mock-orange in front of the shop she was overcome—Was this all, then, when a thing didn’t grow as expected it must necessarily die? She’d dreamed she was pruning her own hands. But, what a dream—Karp would love it—surely he could come to love the dreamer, too. And she popped the bush out of its bed and heaved it into the compost without another thought, looking up to follow the trajectory of a plane overhead: was it flying in his direction?

  * * *

  Then one morning there he was in the Boston Globe. It was a brilliant early summer day; Hugh read How We Die while Cyrilla (their daughter—Daisy had long since forgotten there’d been some problem about getting her) played bird-baby-in-a-nest, and Daisy was eating a peach, deciding whether she ought to buy a big lot of Fiestaware though she hated the colors—it would sell quickly, which was supposed to be the point—squinting out to see if the tide was high enough for a quick swim, and, of course, looking for Karp, when she found him, in the gossip column. It being the Globe, the gossip column did not, of course, stoop to any actual gossip—usually it was a grinding recitation of who was chairing or being chaired at Harvard, but today:

  Double day is promising a major publicity push for The Contemporary Parent, psychologist Morris Karp’s manual for two-career families, due out next month.

  It was as if a butterfly pin had flown in through the window and fastened her, fluttering, to the wall. A book, with his picture on the jacket and his voice in every sentence, all his beliefs in evidence. A book to hold close to her schoolgirl’s heart—she was going to know him, to understand him, and after that it was only a step.…

  “Karp wrote a book,” she said quietly, reminding herself of an explosion she once heard some miles away—just a soft puff, though it killed two people. Hugh didn’t look up—he didn’t really believe in Karp. He remembered Daisy had been unhappy for some reason a while back, and she went to the city every Wednesday, she spoke of this Karp occasionally, but he loved his wife, depended on her—why on earth would she see a psychiatrist? He cast the notion aside.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t have guessed that in her heart of hearts she had taken a little gossip item for an engagement notice—had laid out, in preparation for her appointment, something like a trousseau, right down to the silk panties—four years of Karp and still she had not convinced herself that panties were not germane. Over them the bride wore a linen shift with a tiny blue check, and a spray of forget-me-nots pinned on. She carried The Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire:

  I am sick with hearing the words of bliss

  the love I endure is like a syphilis

  and the image that possesses you and never leaves your side

  in anguish and insomnia keeps you alive

  and a bouquet of her week’s essential moments, to be tossed to Karp’s present wife from the landing as the bride ascended the celestial stairway from his couch to his bed. The bride’s dream, of ivory peau-de-soie, hand-stitched with over ten thousand seed pearls and cascading in gentle, fingertip-length waves, was this: Karp had embraced her and gone away, leaving his body like a forgotten overcoat in her arms.

  He would love her now, he would have to. She drove up Route 3 on the wings of limerance—she who had dreaded the highway was happiest now behind the wheel. To drive was to be nearing Karp! It seemed only hours until she’d be kissing his collarbone, the crook of his arm, until they stumbled together out of the thicket of language into a warm sea. Punching the radio buttons in search of a song exorbitant as feeling, she found herself listening instead to a discussion of children’s night terrors on some godforsaken talk station. Not that Cyrilla, little sovereign, had ever had a night terror—she kept her own counsel, busied herself all day making a “pilgrim stew” of acorns and inkberries, slept soundly, ate well. It was a disappointment; she didn’t much seem to need a mother. Still Daisy couldn’t help listening to the talk show, she didn’t know why—only as she turned off the highway and saw a handful of sparrows fly overhead like rice did she realize the voice in the radio was that of her betrothed—of course, he would be always beside her now he was on the air!

  He left her at the altar. She sat half an hour in the waiting room and finally decided she must have gotten the time wrong, or the day—her stories had wilted: how ordinary they were after all, the little jealousies and disappointments she’d saved up to
tell him, ludicrous fears balanced by ludicrous satisfactions—things he’d heard a thousand times before. She heard his step on the stairway and wanted to run away: he’d find her here with her expectations fallen in around her, a child got up in her mother’s clothing … and she hadn’t been reading French poems either but Self magazine, which he probably kept in the waiting room just to see who was idiot enough to open it.… She pushed it in between two scholarly journals just in time.

  “Sorry,” he said perfunctorily, as if he wasn’t holding the little fishbowl of her life out in front of him, threatening to let it smash. He was carrying a case of Kleenex and opened some for her before settling himself, waiting … for what? Her dream was forgotten, and as Karp didn’t bring up the book or the interview, she felt she oughtn’t to mention them either—maybe they were the kind of things one was supposed to pretend not to know?

  “Nothing going on, I guess,” she said, sounding disingenuous even to herself.

  “No thoughts?” His smile was dubious and kind; who on earth does not spend his life weaving little nests of thought from the odd bits at hand? She had to speak or give herself away—by now she felt she must have trespassed unforgivably, spying, eavesdropping on him.

  “Congratulations,” she mumbled, fixing on the Arabic letters in the rug as if she might bring herself to such a boil she’d find herself able to read them. “On the book. I saw in the paper.” But he’d known for months without telling her; what could he care for her congratulation? What did she know of him at all? Was he immensely strong as it sometimes seemed, or thin and fragile? Handsome? Ugly? Before she’d looked up his birthday she couldn’t have guessed his age—now she wondered whether he was kind, really, or cruel.… Ah well, she’d figure it out after they were married.

  He was beaming. “Thank you, yes—that does bring up something.” And he unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket—an itinerary. “There will be some scheduling problems.… Let’s see, next week, New York and the Northeast. Well! There, I can see you next week, ten A.M.?”

  She scribbled it down. “You’re going away?”

  “Fifteen cities,” he said happily. “Not just the major market cities, but the secondary cities, too.”

  She nodded. “Very nice.”

  “Portland, Seattle, Dallas—I think Dallas, wait—” He checked through his appointment book and then some papers on the desk. “Yes, Dallas and Houston, too, actually … I guess they just sort of threw Houston in; it’s not that big a market, though the major chains are fairly well represented.…”

  Well, hadn’t she prayed he’d want to confide in her?

  “Not that I know that much about marketing and distribution,” he continued, though he seemed to be the very encyclopedia of marketing and distribution. She watched the time tick away, thinking that, after all, it was exciting, and this was the way men got excited, so she ought to try to be patient.… And following this line of thought she lost his thread and a silence fell which she remembered it was her duty to break.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “Well, you know, whatever you were saying…”

  “Can you say what you’re feeling?”

  “Are you crazy?” she asked him. “All right, all right then if you don’t care about me. All right, you’re going away. But surely you don’t imagine that I’m going to sit here and describe for your delectation all the sorrow and humiliation of being rejected by you!” She was sobbing, a very minor matter, of course, to a man who buys Kleenex by the case. She plucked up several tissues in a fury and blew her nose with ostentation, remembering for no particular reason that her father had worked in a Kleenex factory when she was small.

  “So, you’re angry, you feel—”

  “Don’t you dare talk to me like a psychiatrist!” Horrid little man, this leech who made such nice soft sucking noises, she hadn’t noticed until her life was nearly drained—

  “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’m being defensive, I agree.” This only opened a floodgate.… She wept so she could hardly hear him. “I made a failure of technique,” he was helpfully explaining.

  “Technique?” Just a technical problem, and here she’d thought he was being mean. She looked away toward the window, where a bumblebee was blundering up the screen.

  “Technique,” Karp said with a pedagogical gleam, “the way I approach a problem, or…” He saw the bee, too, and his voice strangled in his throat for a second before he said, extremely calmly, “There’s a bee. I’m going to have to kill it,” and stood up, very carefully lest he throw his back out, taking several ginger steps toward the window and removing one of his shoes. Daisy came awake, and the room, usually so stuffy, full of half-expressed thoughts and feelings, cleared suddenly—she’d never seen him actually do anything before. A keen suspense was developing, something like a bullfight, maybe—she’d always dreamed of visiting Spain.

  The first skirmish ended with a premature cry of triumph from Karp, while el toro buzzed away, settling disdainfully again within easy reach. Karp lunged at it, but it flew a few feet, heavily, as if it didn’t have quite the wing power to sustain its girth, and set about circling a spot on the wallpaper like a sleepy cat. Karp looked baffled, if martial, and wondered aloud whether he ought to call an exterminator.

  Would it be intrusive to intervene? Callous just to sit by? Then the bee tried an offensive maneuver, flying straight at Karp, who flinched away, moaning horribly, his hand jumping to the small of his back, and Daisy leapt to her feet; her moment had come.

  “I think I could trap him under a cup,” she said.

  Karp looked up, smiling frankly for once, without that gynecologist’s look he got, of a man feeling around in the dark. “Be my guest!”

  And for a moment she was able to act as herself, Daisy the able, the swift. She plunked Karp’s coffee mug over the bee, slid an envelope under its mouth, and, since the office window was painted shut against pollens and molds, carried it into the waiting room and shook it free out the door while Karp made helpful and appreciative noises from the corner. No telling whether he was keeping back from the bee or from her—by the time she returned to his office he was back in his chair, his face arranged again into a blank screen.

  “Let’s see,” he said, in his most neutral tone, “you were saying—” But the time; he stood up. “Actually we’ll have to pick up there next week.”

  “It’s time?” Had she used up her hour by saving his life?

  “I’m afraid…” He smiled wretchedly, and then, searching for some gesture of farewell—some way to get rid of her—extended his hand.

  Which, having taken, she found herself unable to let go. Some eternal seconds passed, she gazing meaningfully at him, he pleadingly at her, until, with her natural officiousness (but he understood so kindly that her parents had needed her to tell them what to do) pulled him to her, held him tight.

  It took an age—thirty seconds at least—to realize he was just standing there, unmoved except maybe by embarrassment and irritation. She had captured rather than embraced him.

  “I have someone waiting,” he said icily, and pulled the inner door open, before he recovered himself, and, in his most careful, hypnotic, lion tamer’s tone, stuck his head right between her jaws. “I mean, if this brings something up, by all means feel free to call … but…”

  The bride fled home to her husband with something like a steak knife lodged in her breast. What could she have been thinking of, trying to seduce a god down from Olympus, imagining that Morris Karp would embrace the likes of her? And on the truck in the next lane cappuccino was written with two ns. Why can’t anyone spell? Nobody bothers, nobody cares.… What if she just smashed into it until the word stove in on itself, folded the offending n out of sight? Consult the dictionary! she wanted to scream—and she pressed the accelerator. If she could only go fast enough, maybe a cop would come save her, put her in prison, get this weapon out of her hands.

  As Daisy turned i
n the driveway at home Cyrilla burst out onto the steps, naked and golden with Hugh behind her holding a martini and proffering, beseechingly, a little pink dress. The Dow Jones, he said, with deepest, most satisfactory dread, was sharply up: this could only portend a crash. She hadn’t been noticing—when had he become a happy man? And another murder in Boston, he said, pointing to the television—why would anyone go into that city, what could be worth risking your life that way? It occurred to Daisy that she loved him more than she’d used to. His gloom felt cozy and familiar; he was only pointing out how big and frightening the world was, why she ought to stay by his hearth. She glanced at the reprehensible television—and there was Karp; his face filled the entire frame.

  Talking about toddlers, she guessed, though she couldn’t hear or understand him while she was drinking him in this way. To look into his face so closely, see the thoughts pass across it, this was as much as she’d ever asked for—all she’d wanted from the awful embrace. There was a space between his front teeth—how had she missed this? What else didn’t she know? When his forty-five seconds were over and the bright generic face of the anchorwoman replaced his, the loss hurt her eyes. “Dr. Karp says it’s not the amount of time you spend with a child, but whether something meaningful takes place during that time,” the woman chimed. “Dr. Karp says…”

  Daisy felt exactly how his arms should have fit around her … how he would have lifted her out of her dull, petty self into the light … to keep apart from him felt completely unnatural, wrong. And decided that for dinner she would make fettuccine Alfredo—she was ravenous suddenly; the foods she used to disdain rose up and demanded she acknowledge their deliciousness—what madness could have kept her from eating them all these years?