Dying Inside

THIRTEEN.

Judith’s dark, rambling apartment fills with pungent smells. I hear her in the kitchen, bustling, dumping spices into the pot: hot chili, oregano, tarragon, cloves, garlic, powdered mustard, sesame oil, curry powder, God knows what else. Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Her famous fiery spaghetti sauce is in the making, a compound product of mysterious antecedents, part Mexican in inspiration, part Szechuan, part Madras, part pure Judith. My unhappy sister is not really much of a domestic type, but the few dishes she can cook she does extraordinarily well, and her spaghetti is celebrated on three continents; I’m convinced there are men who go to bed with her just to have dining-in privileges here.

I have arrived unexpectedly early, half an hour before the appointed time, catching Judith unprepared, not even dressed; so I am on my own while she readies dinner. “Fix yourself a drink,” she calls to me. I go to the sideboard and pour a shot of dark rum, then into the kitchen for ice cubes. Judith, flustered, wearing housecoat and headband, flies madly about, breathlessly selecting spices. She does everything at top speed. “Be with you in another ten minutes,” she gasps, reaching for the pepper mill. “Is the kid making a lot of trouble for you?”

My nephew, she means. His name is Paul, in honor of our father which art in heaven, but she never calls him that, only “the baby,” “the kid.” Four years old. Child of divorce, destined to be as taut-strung as his mother. “He’s not bothering me at all,” I assure her, and go back to the livingroom.

The apartment is one of those old, immense West Side jobs, roomy and high-ceilinged, which carries with it some sort of aura of intellectual distinction simply because so many critics, poets, playwrights, and choreographers have lived in similar apartments in this very neighborhood. Giant livingroom with many windows looking out over West End Avenue; formal dining room; big kitchen; master bedroom; child’s room; maid’s room; two bathrooms. All for Judith and her cub. The rent is cosmic, but Judith can manage it. She gets well over a thousand a month from her ex, and earns a modest but decent living of her own as an editor and translator; aside from that she has a small income from a portfolio of stocks, shrewdly chosen for her a few years ago by a lover from Wall Street, which she purchased with her inherited share of our parents’ surprisingly robust savings. (My share went to clean up accumulated debts; the whole thing melted like June snow.) The place is furnished half in 1960 Greenwich Village and half in 1970 Urban Elegance—black pole-lamps, gray string chairs, red brick bookcases, cheap prints, and wax-encrusted Chianti bottles on the one hand; leather couches, Hopi pottery, psychedelic silkscreens, glass-topped coffee-tables, and giant potted cacti on the other. Bach harpsichord sonatas tinkle from the thousand-dollar speaker system. The floor, ebony-dark and mirror-bright, gleams between the lush, thick area rugs. A pile of broken-backed paperbacks clutters one wall. Opposite it stand two rough unopened wooden crates, wine newly arrived from her vintner. A good life my sister leads here. Good and miserable.

The kid eyes me untrustingly. He sits twenty feet away, by the window, fiddling with some intricate plastic toy but keeping close watch on me. A dark child, slender and tense like his mother, aloof, cool. No love is lost between us: I’ve been inside his head and I know what he thinks of me. To him I’m one of the many men in his mother’s life, a real uncle being not very different from the innumerable uncle-surrogates forever sleeping over; I suppose he thinks I’m just one of her lovers who shows up more often than most. An understandable error. But while he resents the others merely because they compete with him for her affection, he looks coldly upon me because he thinks I’ve caused his mother pain; he dislikes me for her sake. How shrewdly he’s discerned the decades-old network of hostilities and tensions that shapes and defines my relationship with Judith! So I’m an enemy. He’d gut me if he could.

I sip my drink, listen to Bach, smile insincerely at the kid, and inhale the aroma of spaghetti sauce. My power is practically quiescent; I try not to use it much here, and in any case its intake is feeble today. After some time Judith emerges from the kitchen and, flashing across the livingroom, says, “Come talk to me while I get dressed, Duv.” I follow her to her bedroom and sit down on the bed; she takes her clothes into the adjoining bathroom, leaving the door open only an inch or two. The last time I saw her naked she was seven years old. She says, “I’m glad you decided to come.”

“So am I.”

“You look awfully peaked though.”

“Just hungry, Jude.”

“I’ll fix that in five minutes.” Sounds of water running. She says something else; the sink drowns her out. I look idly around the bedroom. A man’s white shirt, much too big for Judith, hangs casually from the doorknob of the closet. On the night-table sit two fat textbooky-looking books, Analytical Neuroendocrinology and Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. Unlikely reading for Judith. Maybe she’s been hired to translate them into French. I observe that they’re brand new copies, though one book was published in 1964 and the other in 1969. Both by the same author: K. F. Silvestri, M.D., Ph.D.

“You going to medical school these days?” I ask.

“The books, you mean? They’re Karl’s.”

Karl? A new name. Dr. Karl F. Silvestri. I touch her mind lightly and extract his image: a tall hefty sober-faced man, broad shoulders, strong dimpled chin, flowing mane of graying hair. About fifty, I’d guess. Judith digs older men. While I raid her consciousness she tells me about him. Her current “friend,” the kid’s latest “uncle.” He’s someone very big at Columbia Medical Center, a real authority on the human body. Including her body, I assume. Newly divorced after a 25-year marriage. Uh-huh: she likes getting them on the rebound. He met her three weeks ago through a mutual friend, a psychoanalyst. They’ve only seen each other four or five times; he’s always busy, committee meetings at this hospital or that, seminars, consultations. It wasn’t very long ago that Judith told me she was between men, maybe off men altogether. Evidently not. It must be a serious affair if she’s trying to read his books. They look absolutely opaque to me, all charts and statistical tables and heavy Latinate terminology.

She comes out of the bathroom wearing a sleek purple pants-suit and the crystal earrings I gave her for her 29th birthday. “When I visit she always tries to register some little sentimental touch to tie us together; tonight it’s the earrings. There is a convalescent quality to our friendship nowadays, as we tiptoe gently through the garden where our old hatred lies buried. We embrace, a brother-sister hug. A pleasant perfume. “Hello,” she says. “I’m sorry I was such a mess when you walked in.”

“It’s my fault. I was too early. Anyway, you weren’t a mess at all.”

She leads me to the livingroom. She carries herself well. Judith is a handsome woman, tall and extremely slender, exotic-looking, with dark hair, dark complexion, sharp cheekbones. The slim sultry type. I suppose she’d be considered very sexy, except that there is something cruel about her thin lips and her quick glistening brown eyes, and that cruelty, which grows more intense in these years of divorce and discontent, turns people off. She’s had lovers by the dozen, by the gross, but not much love. You and me, sis, you and me. Chips off the old block.

She sets the table while I fix a drink for her, the usual, Pernod on the rocks. The kid, thank God, has already eaten; I hate having him at the table. He plays with his plastic thingy and favors me with occasional sour glares. Judith and I clink our cocktail glasses together, a stagy gesture. She produces a wintry smile. “Cheers,” we say. Cheers.

“Why don’t you move back downtown?” she asks. “We could see more of each other.”

“It’s cheap up there. Do we want to see more of each other?”

“Who else do we have?”

“You have Karl.”

“I don’t have him or anybody. Just my kid and my brother.”

I think of the time when I tried to murder her in her bassinet. She doesn’t know about that. “Are we really friends, Jude?”

“Now we are. At last.”

“We haven’t exactly been fond of each other all these years.”

“People change, Duv. They grow up. I was dumb, a real shithead, so wrapped up in myself that I couldn’t give anything but hate to anybody around me. That’s over now. If you don’t believe me, look into my head and see.”

“You don’t want me poking around in there.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “Take a good look and see if I haven’t changed toward you.”

“No. I’d rather not.” I deal myself another two ounces of rum. The hand shakes a little. “Shouldn’t you check the spaghetti sauce? Maybe it’s boiling over.”

“Let it boil. I haven’t finished my drink. Duv, are you still having trouble? With your power, I mean.”

“Yes. Still. Worse than ever.”

“What do you think is happening?”

I shrug. Insouciant old me. “I’m losing it, that’s all. It’s like hair, I suppose. A lot of it when you’re young, then less and less, and finally none. Fuck it. It never did me any good anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Show me any good it did me, Jude.”

“It made you someone special. It made you unique. When everything else went wrong for you, you could always fall back on that, the knowledge that you could go into minds, that you could see the unseeable, that you could get close to people’s souls. A gift from God.”

“A useless gift. Except if I’d gone into the sideshow business.”

“It made you a richer person. More complex, more interesting. Without it you might have been someone quite ordinary.”

“With it I turned out to be someone quite ordinary. A nobody, a zero. Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one.”

“You pity yourself a lot, Duv.”

“I’ve got a lot to pity myself for. More Pernod, Jude?”

“Thanks, no. I ought to look after dinner. Will you pour the wine?”

She goes into the kitchen. I do the wine thing; then I carry the salad bowl to the table. Behind me the kid begins to chant derisive nonsense syllables in his weirdly mature baritone. Even in my current state of dulled deceptivity I feel the pressure of the kid’s cold hatred against the back of my skull. Judith returns, toting a well-laden tray: spaghetti, garlic bread, cheese. She flashes a warm smile, evidently sincere, as we sit down. We clink wine-glasses. We eat in silence a few minutes. I praise the spaghetti. She says, finally. “Can I do some mindreading on you, Duv?”

“Be my guest.”

“You say you’re glad the power’s going. Is that snow-job directed at me or at yourself? Because you’re snowing somebody. You hate the idea of losing it, don’t you?”

“A little.”

“A lot, Duv.”

“All right, a lot. I’m of two minds. I’d like it to vanish completely. Christ, I wish I’d never had it. But on the other hand if I lose it, who am I? Where’s my identity? I’m Selig the Mindreader, right? The Amazing Mental Man. So if I stop being him—you see, Jude?”

“I see. The pain’s all over your face. I’m so sorry, Duv.”

“For what?”

“That you’re losing it.”

“You despised my guts for using it on you, didn’t you?”

“That’s different. That was a long time ago. I know what you must be going through, now. Do you have any idea why you’re losing it?”

“No. A function of aging, I guess.”

“Is there anything that might be done to stop it from going?”

“I doubt it, Jude. I don’t even know why I have the gift in the first place, let alone how to nurture it now. I don’t know how it works. It’s just something in my head, a genetic fluke, a thing I was born with, like freckles. If your freckles start to fade, can you figure out a way of making them stay, if you want them to stay?”

“You’ve never let yourself be studied, have you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like people poking in my head any more than you do,” I say softly. “I don’t want to be a case history. I’ve always kept a low profile. If the world ever found out about me, I’d become a pariah. I’d probably be lynched. Do you know how many people there are to whom I’ve openly admitted the truth about myself? In my whole life, how many?”

“A dozen?”

“Three,” I say. “And I wouldn’t willingly have told any of them.”

“Three?”

“You. I suppose you suspected it all along, but you didn’t find out for sure till you were sixteen, remember? Then there’s Tom Nyquist, who I don’t see any more. And a girl named Kitty, who I don’t see any more either.”

“What about the tall brunette?”

“Toni? I never explicitly told her. I tried to hide it from her. She found out indirectly. A lot of people may have found out indirectly. But I’ve only told three. I don’t want to be known as a freak. So let it fade. Let it die. Good riddance.”

“You want to keep it, though.”

“To keep it and lose it both.”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. What can I say, Jude? What can I tell you that’s true?”

“Are you in pain?”

“Who isn’t in pain?”

She says, “Losing it is almost like becoming impotent, isn’t it, Duv? To reach into a mind and find out that you can’t connect? You said there was ecstasy in it for you, once. That flood of information, that vicarious experience. And now you can’t get it as much, or at all. Your mind can’t get it up. Do you see it that way, as a sexual metaphor?”

“Sometimes.” I give her more wine. For a few minutes we sit silently, shoveling down the spaghetti, exchanging tentative grins. I almost feel warmth toward her. Forgiveness for all the years when she treated me like a circus attraction. You sneaky fucker, Duv, stay out of my head or I’ll kill you! You voyeur. You peeper. Keep away, man, keep away. She didn’t want me to meet her fiancé. Afraid I’d tell him about her other men, I guess. I’d like to find you dead in the gutter some day, Duv, with all my secrets rotting inside you. So long ago. Maybe we love each other a little now, Jude. Just a little, but you love me more than I love you.

“I don’t come any more,” she says abruptly. “You know, I used to come, practically every time. The original Hot Pants Kid, me. But around five years ago something happened, around the time my marriage was first breaking up. A short circuit down below. I started coming every fifth time, every tenth time. Feeling the ability to respond slip away, from me. Lying there waiting for it to happen, and of course that doused it every time. Finally I couldn’t come at all. I still can’t. Not in three years. I’ve laid maybe a hundred men since the divorce, give or take five or ten, and not one brought me off, and some of them were studs, real bulls. It’s one of the things Karl’s going to work on with me. So I know what it’s like, Duv. What you must be going through. To lose your best way of making contact with others. To lose contact gradually with yourself. To become a stranger in your own head.” She smiles. “Did you know that about me? About the troubles I’ve been having in bed?”

I hesitate briefly. The icy glare in her eyes gives her away. The aggressiveness. The resentment she feels. Even when she tries to be loving she can’t help hating. How fragile our relationship is! We’re locked in a kind of marriage, Judith and I, an old burned-out marriage held together with skewers. What the hell, though. “Yes,” I tell her. “I knew about it.”

“I thought so. You’ve never stopped probing me.” Her smile is all hateful glee now. She’s glad I’m losing it. She’s relieved. “I’m always wide open to you, Duv.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be much longer.” Oh, you sadistic bitch! Oh, you beautiful ball-buster! And you’re all I’ve got. “How about some more spaghetti, Jude?” Sister. Sister. Sister.