Darling? Read online

  * * *

  Three days later she was sitting on the stoop with a bag of macaroons when the UPS man came up the walk with The Contemporary Parent—the next thing to having Karp’s heart and mind in a jar. She tore at the package with her teeth rather than let the man go. She needed someone, someone in a uniform, with her, lest Karp fly out of the book and castigate her for prying into him again.

  “Wanna see a picture of my psychologist?”

  The UPS man smiled most uncomfortably, but this was hardly the weirdest request he’d ever acceded to. She held the book open for him, squinting sideways at the photo herself in case the sight of it would blind her.

  “He looks very nice,” the man said, and seeing this fell short, added, “But … smug, maybe?”

  “Oh, no!” Daisy said, though she saw what he meant. It wasn’t Karp, the raw, honest face she loved, the angel as grocer, giving good quality at fair prices—it was Karp in a state of helpless ingratiation. “No, he’s mortified, that’s just his mortified look,” she said. She knew his mortified look pretty well. “I don’t think he likes having his picture taken.”

  He leaned in to look closer, taking the book out of her hands. He smelled of heaven: sweat and cinnamon chewing gum.

  “… nurturing the inner child?” He had turned to the dedication.

  “Oh, that’s just the way they talk … you know.” In her dreams he spoke Hebrew, the language written in flames.

  He had not dedicated the book to her, and this came as an insufferable blow. Of course, there was that wife and child. But common sense had played no role in her relations with Karp so far and was hardly about to assert itself now. She scanned the acknowledgments, dusting her fingers over the print in case there was a secret message for her in braille, but no, she was one of the few people on earth whose name did not appear. She’d loved him for years now, while he lived his life among others.…

  “I, I have some other deliveries—”

  “Of course, of course, thanks—”

  “I mean, he looks like a very nice man,” the UPS man continued, backing away.

  Daisy nodded, and opening the book thought of the chunk of plutonium discovered by a Brazilian family in an abandoned clinic: they lived in a world of mud and straw, but this stone glowed blue as twilight—obviously sacred. They built it an altar in their kitchen, carried it into the fields, touched it to the forehead of each newborn child … The tumors were immense, the youngest, blessed most often, were first to die. Beware of talismans, sacraments—she closed the book and touched her cheek to the jacket. Could this really be all she was to have of Morris Karp?

  * * *

  By Wednesday she’d handled it enough that it didn’t seem quite so dangerous and she dared carry it to his office for her act of contrition. She couldn’t actually read the book—the words, being his, were too full of meaning, jewels to be lifted to the eyepiece one by one, but she held the book up and waited with heart slamming—when he came in and saw The Contemporary Parent instead of her face, he would have to love her, for a minute at least.

  An hour passed with no Karp. Why had she ever touched him, tried to tear him out of the spirit world? He’d had no choice but to disappear.

  A little man came up the walk, wearing red suspenders and a pointed beard, carrying the Selected Paul Tillich. He pushed open the door and looked at her with suspicion.

  “He’s late,” she explained. “My appointment was at eleven.”

  “Mine’s at twelve,” he replied, and nodded at the clock—it was 12:10.

  “I’ve been here all this time,” she said. “He hasn’t come.”

  “I’ve never known that to happen,” the elf replied, opening his book with a snap. After all, she was in a psychologist’s office—she must be mad.

  But, of course: it wasn’t Karp who had vanished, it was herself! The gods know about torture: they had not sentenced her merely to lose him but to be erased from his sight. She heard his step on the stair and her heart beat frantically—he’d open the door, look through her, and take the elf into the sanctuary, and she’d have to return to the underworld alone.

  But he came down and motioned to her just as always, taking her into the office and going back to speak a moment with the elf. Daisy was abjectly grateful; she vowed never, ever to touch him, never to trouble him with herself again. Karp sat down pleasantly, silently, as if nothing was out of the ordinary … perhaps nothing was out of the ordinary? One must follow the local custom—if her watch read twelve and Karp said eleven, then eleven it must be. If he’d opened an umbrella she’d have put her head under the faucet rather than point out the sun—there has to be something certain on earth; let it be Karp’s way. He smiled politely, as if she’d never saved his life, never held him.…

  “You don’t love me,” she choked.

  “I don’t sexually abuse you.”

  “You pigheadedly refuse to sexually abuse me!” she wept. Yes, she burned like an immolated monk with longing and fury and shame—and still it was funny—was this fair? Could he really think that lying beside her, touching and being touched, eyes open so each could see his effect on each other, feel the absolute holiness of it—would count as sexual abuse?

  “Therapists don’t hug their patients!” he said, then added, “Though, I’ve been doing this a long time and there have been others—I suppose the most unsettling one was a psychotic man—so I’ve had a wide experience, with hugs, and—”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but a rebellion welled up. “No, I’m not—look at you! You don’t even guess what you’re missing, living your life without me!” She turned the surfaces of her hands lightly, eloquently, together; she was paying him to watch her every gesture, let him at least suffer what he missed. “Wouldn’t you like to have that feeling again, like when you were twenty?” she asked.

  “You’re inviting me to regress with you?”

  “When you’re dying, please remember you never kissed me.”

  “It’s against the law in Massachusetts,” he replied, and began to go over his itinerary again while she wondered if kisses were legal in any of the other major market cities, or if secondary markets were more lenient, in order to attract their share of authors. What about a place like Pittsburgh, for instance? Or maybe she should just fling him down and carve I Adore You into his chest with one of those sharp gold-nibbed fountain pens so popular with collectors. Never mind, she was going to stop on the way home for a vanilla milkshake and a BLT. She was infinitely greedy, for food, drink, beauty, love.… She would storm over the earth, a giantess, swimming the Atlantic in a few proud strokes, taking everything she wanted.… She frightened herself, she needed someone to suppress her.

  Harvard Doc Says You Can Have It All

  The Herald had a color picture: Karp at home with his daughter on his knee. This was shocking—a burst of reality in the midst of a dream, like the school principal taking her out of class the day her father died. She kissed her finger and touched it to Karp’s lips. She had to renounce him, she understood. He was in the public domain now, might as well be in the grave.

  As boxes go, she decided, the television is eerier than the coffin. Karp’s head talked on Frontline, on Dateline, on Nightline, while she watched like a cat peering into an aquarium. Blown dry, wearing … was that rouge?… saying “Well, Ted,” manfully as if he’d been saying “Well, Ted,” all his life, he strode through the interviews, looking like an eager schoolboy who was sure he had the answer, thinking Call on me, call on me! His hand shook, and Daisy pressed hers to the glass, matching her fingers to his. If only she could smash the set, reach in and pluck a wriggling Oprah out of his way. The camera closed in, a child lifted a toy out of his hand: he was a giant of empathy, the father every single viewer had been missing. Real tears glittered in his eyes. If a bee had flown into the studio he would have treated it with such generous respect it would have lost its need to sting.

  He was everywhere, on every channel—he had materialized out of the
world of dreams and to that world he had returned. There was no way to reach him but by telepathy. Daisy went to Amazon.com, and under the name of Laurel Shipman, of Tyringham, Massachusetts, gave The Contemporary Parent five stars: “A must for every man or woman trying to negotiate the complexities of parenting today!! Without this book I don’t know where I’d be!”

  In fact, the day The Contemporary Parent went on the bestseller list, Daisy went on Prozac. There would, of course, be side effects: anxiousness, diminished libido.… Karp had said this in his most neutral voice, in no way implying her libido was outsized. This is my body and my blood, she thought dully as she shook her pill out into her hand. It changed nothing, she lived at the empty black center of herself, getting Cyrilla to preschool, opening the shop, and spending the day in the corner behind the big armoire, hiding from the customers and ordering soft sweaters in the mail. The longing for Karp was always there, now distant, now right beside her—like a mosquito, faint but incessant, unwilling to light, so that she was doomed to flail at it until … until she had smashed every damned teacup, every vestige of the past. The UPS man always came at four, with her new sweaters and sometimes a confidence—they were becoming close, they had all that driving in common, and he was grateful to get advice from someone with such a famous shrink. Her fingers trembled, wishing to trace the lines of his tattoo.

  Then the tour was over, Karp was home. It was November, the garish fall colors were deepened into rich reds and golds that glowed against the gray sky—by the time she turned into his driveway it was pouring. His door was locked, so she sheltered under the eave, watching the rain sweep across the lawn. A cleaning lady lugged a vacuum into the manse across the street. After a long time Karp came out, unshaven, looking perplexed and angry and frightened all at once—as her mother had, when she was having a spell.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked.

  “Forty minutes,” she said, checking her watch—no, more like an hour.

  He peered into her face as if he was ticking through his diagnoses, and she pulled a leaf out of her hair. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?”

  “I did.”

  “I’d have heard it,” he said decisively. He had given up on her, seen her finally for the madwoman she must certainly be. “I was just upstairs.” Why had she stood in the rain, let herself get so bedraggled, why—?

  “Maybe it’s broken?” she began, though she knew better than to argue—you have to take the person’s hand, soothe her (or in this case him)—through these terrors.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must not have pushed it right. But it doesn’t matter. Here we are after all.” She smiled and so did he—there, she’d found the key, they’d turned the corner.

  But as they sat down his cell phone rang, and he rummaged for it in his briefcase, holding up a finger—it was his publicist; he had to take the call. She tried to dry her hair with a Kleenex, listening as Karp told him to develop a Web site: www.morriskarp.com. By the time he finished the explanation, his beeper was shrieking and he had to go back to the phone—

  “No, I can’t film until three-thirty,” he said, although it was almost that already. “Yes, yes, I’ll be ready then.” And to her, aside, “You won’t mind if there’s a camera crew in the waiting room when you go?”

  “No,” she said, “no, it’s okay.”

  “So—” He smiled; he sank down in the chair. “How are you?”

  “I—I—”

  “Can you say what you’re feeling?”

  She swallowed: “I, I guess…,” she began, despising the edge of tears in her voice. “I’m afraid, I … you seem different.…” and heard a murmur, perhaps of understanding—maybe everything was all right and she was hearing his affirmation through the haze.

  “I mean, I do understand,” she said. “This is a test-tube love—meant as an inoculation against a more destructive strain … but…” But some people die of inoculations! He murmured again. And then again, though she’d said nothing. She looked up.

  His eyes were closed, perhaps meditatively.

  “Dr. Karp?” No answer. She cleared her throat. “Dr. Karp?” The response was an elephantine snore.

  A wave of tenderness broke over her; the grand proscenium on which she had been giving voice to her passion shrank away, and she found herself in a badly lit room with a dear, nervous, allergic man who was doing his best to love her in accordance with the statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Now he gave out with something like a roar, and she laughed aloud. The spell was broken—there was no going about the usual business—they were alone together finally with not a ghost in the room. She loved him, she had wanted his wishes to come true, and now he’d got the book, the publicist, the interview—he’d worked all night, night after night—and he finally felt safe and warm enough to fall asleep here with her. She ought to be flattered! If she went to him now and stroked his hair, kissed him, he might awaken not just from the quick nap but from the terrible slumber that had kept him from loving her all this time.

  “Darling?” This was distinctly a warning shot but it did not awaken him, and in one reckless instant she stood, crossed the rug that lay between them, and fell on her knees at his feet.

  But she was not, it turned out, so much a rapist as to kiss a supine psychologist full on the lips in midsnore. She had a spider’s impulse to wrap him up and store him safely away—he would satisfy all her hungers for a time—but instead she touched his ankle, very quickly, expecting to receive a shock as from an electric fence.

  “Wake up, angel.”

  “What?” he started, looking up at her in alarm.

  “You fell asleep,” she said.

  “No, no.” He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, tried uncomfortably to pull back an inch or two.

  “It’s okay, I understand.”

  “I wasn’t asleep,” he explained to his poor deluded patient, stretching.

  “You were snoring!”

  He smiled. “I wish I could say that only happens when I’m asleep,” he said.

  “You snore when you’re awake?” She sat back. It may come as a blow, to find you’ve been playing Carmen in full dress opposite a wakeful snorer. She crept backwards surreptitiously, like a sheepish retriever.

  “Not exactly awake, maybe” he explained, with his beautiful hands outstretched. “In a deeper state of consciousness than actual waking, but—”

  “Asleep! You were asleep!” Dr. Karp, let us call a spade a spade! But to Karp there was no such thing as a spade—the conscious world was only a loose assortment of atoms in whose swirls he discerned now one constellation, now another.

  “In something of a trance, a state like sleep … the state of deep listening…”

  She skootched away another inch or two.

  “And I was up most of the night!” he concluded. “A manic psychosis, these things can take hours.” Had he been the doctor, or the patient? Was he crazy? He’d insisted she wished he were crazy, so he would seem more like her mother.

  “So you fell asleep,” she said. “There’s no shame in it.” But as they argued the stage loomed up again with all the actors in their masks—it was horrible, she started to bawl. “You wrote the book, you solved the emergency, you convinced the publicist, you rescheduled the camera crew, you exhorted me to open my heart, and then you fell asleep! I understand you can’t touch me, it’s against the law, and there’s this, this … wife … so, okay, it’s one thing not to do it, but not to feel it, not to let it take root in your heart, is mean, it’s stingy, it’s cheap somehow—it’s just wrong! You stand apart from me, you don’t enter into me, you treat me like—like an unexploded bomb!”

  “I—” The buzzer rang, and he looked at his watch. “I can’t…” He closed his eyes, seeking divine strength? Praying she would disappear? How could she ever know?

  “You torture me,” he said.

  “I torture you!!” But … probably he was right. Here he was locked in a tiny room with a madwoman wh
ose eyes were glued to the inch of pale skin between his sock and his pant leg, who thought of nothing except kissing his thighs, urging him to surrender himself to her, who was always calculating the width of his hips the better to imagine their thrust—just the thought probably put his back into spasms—how much longer until supper, until he could fall asleep beside his wife?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m so sorry, I…”

  She pulled open the door and tried to compose herself before passing the cameramen, who were sprawled over the waiting room chairs eating sandwiches like bears raiding a campsite. Turning down the walk, past the innocuous, nonallergenic shrubs, she heard Karp greet them with great warm energy—he was refreshed from his nap, grateful to have escaped her, narrowly, once again—far easier to meet the press, face the nation. And she would have to drive home shaking and sobbing, raging at gluttonous fat drivers, puritanical thin drivers, boorish Republicans and pious Democrats, thinking “I’ll tell you which parts of no I don’t understand!”—feeling less like a human woman than a hive of infuriated bees.

  And arrive home to her serene family, Hugh eating a bowl of ice cream and reading a biography of Vlad the Impaler, Cyrilla already asleep. Daisy stood in the hallway outside her door, listening to her quiet breath with envy. Why couldn’t the mother possess a bit of the child’s composure? What had happened to the very decisive and well-organized woman who had gone to consult a psychologist with her little list of troubles folded carefully in her purse? Wasn’t he supposed to rid her of her failings? Instead he had turned her into a beast, ravenous, craving, ready to marry him or murder him or both, whatever would mash them most completely together. She went to the window—she was feeling oceanic—but the darkness was hard as enamel, and she saw only the reflection of the woman Morris Karp had introduced her to: wild-eyed, untended, hair flying off in corkscrews; heart breaking, blood racing … she spilled over in all directions; her every thought surprised her. There was more of her than there used to be.