Kyra Read online

  “Crossing a border,” Greta added. “But this time a man is with you, and it’s a car, not a boat.”

  I could see where she was heading. She wanted to talk about Andreas. Had I learned something this summer in seeing him?

  I told her what had happened. He had said he was sorry, he wanted to know if he was the cause, he said he wanted to talk. Peter’s words came back: “He couldn’t believe he would hurt you so terribly by going.” How could he not have known?

  “Did you say anything to him?” Greta asked.

  “I said ‘I can’t go through this with you again.’”

  She looked at me, an island of calm.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked her.

  “I will tell you,” she said. “I’m thinking about your question, what is the opposite of losing? It is a good question for us.”

  I stared at her face. She had turned into a sphinx.

  “He sent me another letter, written right after Provincetown, but since he mailed it to Cambridge I only got it this week.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  I took it out of my purse and read: “Okay, Kyra. I think what you said is true. I think a lot of other things are true too, but that’s all one. What you said is true.” There was a space, then another line. “I apologize very sincerely. I will not be irresponsible again.” It was signed “a.” Which would have been enough, but there was this other paragraph at the bottom. “Oh darling, I wanted so to break this curse. You touched me in a place of me and showed me a vision that made me want more than I have ever wanted to break out of this hell with you and for you. I think you are the most beautiful person I will ever know.”

  Greta’s face was impassive. She wasn’t going to fill in for me.

  I looked at the clock. Time was running out.

  “A miasma of sorrow,” she said.

  I looked up the word in the dictionary. It meant bad smell.

  I was feeling better. Something had settled. The earth maybe, under my feet. On Nashawena, summer stretched its long fingers into September, reaching way past Labor Day, the midday sun hot, the water calm. The Gulf Stream rolled in from the west, diagonal waves sweeping the beach. Then a hurricane spewed its fury into the sea, somewhere off Georges Bank, and Anna and I went down to watch the walls of greenish-brown water crash on the shore. Rocks were moved, and a gull with a broken wing wandered dazed across the sand.

  “It looks like me,” I said. “Not now, but it was how I felt.”

  Anna had known. In that uncanny way women cycle together, bodies falling into rhythm with one another, like the moon and the tides. She had come over to the shack that day, sensing something was wrong. Later, it was she who found Greta, sent her to see me in the hospital.

  “About Greta,” I began. Greta had said that the order of the universe, what I had thought to be the necessary order of the universe, had been shaken by the work we were doing.

  “That’s what therapy does,” Anna said. “It dislodges you. Freud said that it deepens the darkness so you can start to see what has faint light to it.” She had been in therapy, all therapists had. I wondered about Greta—when she was the patient, had her world been shaken? People get anxious, Anna said, when something pulls them beyond the frame they’re used to seeing things through. You can’t be engaged with someone unless you’re willing to take that risk.

  I thought about Greta. What risks had she taken?

  “Your anxiety is rising,” Greta said to me one day when I was finding it hard to breathe, “and the question now is, do you have to restore the old order?” It sounded quaint, the king is dead, long live the king. She had become the therapist, taking on that order, enforcing its regulations, speaking its language, we have to stop. The therapist has to love the patient, Anna said, otherwise it can’t work. But if you love someone, I said, you don’t leave them.

  I watched the waves inch up the beach. The tide was coming in.

  “It’s confusing,” I said. Greta had taught me how to listen, to pick up the voice that speaks in dreams. But within her, I sensed a reserve. As if it would be dangerous to come too close. Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm. That was Auden. The poets knew. He also knew about war.

  At the first faculty meeting of the year, the dean introduced the new professors and visiting faculty. The room was filled, attendance mandatory, absence punished by death, David would say. He was in Rome; his replacement for the year caught my eye. A landscape architect from Tehran. Her hair was spiked, silver bracelets circled her arm. A mix of elegance and irreverence. I liked her at once. Her name was Roya. It meant dream, she explained over lunch after the meeting.

  She was a swimmer, she had grown up by the Caspian Sea. We decided to swim each morning in the Indoor Athletic Building. Dank corridors, ancient lockers, but the pool was okay. Afterward, we went out for coffee at the Italian place in the Square. “What’s wrong with the students here? They seem so docile,” she asked one morning, releasing her wet hair from the woolen scarf. “All they read is what’s on the reading list.” In Iran, the students had been Marxists, intellectuals, they read everything they could get hold of, they had been at the forefront of the revolution. “But then”—she shrugged her shoulders—“the government closed the universities.” I spooned the foam from my cappuccino and pictured Roya wrapped in black. “That’s when I cut my hair,” she said.

  I went to see Abe at the beginning of October. I felt strong enough to do it, and I had always liked him. He was staying with his sister, Edith. His tests were inconclusive. “Maybe it’s just a little hardening of the arteries,” he said. A winsome smile. The Europeans knew about aging. It happens. It takes courage, my grandmother had said. Abe was planning to go back to Budapest. He showed me a letter from Jesse. I am missing you too, Opapa, Jesse wrote over a picture he had drawn of the two of them holding hands. A P.S. was scrawled at the bottom, Papa says that maybe we could get a dog. I mentally noted my skepticism. Abe’s eyes sparkled. “It’s something Jesse and I have talked about.”

  We played gin, and Edith brought a plate of raspberry-filled cookies to the table. As far as I could see, there was no problem with Abe’s memory. He put down his cards. “Gin,” he said, discarding the five of spades that I had been waiting for.

  I didn’t want to bring it up, but he did. “Kyra,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about you. I want you to know that I’m sorry about what happened. You know that he lost his wife, Jesse’s mother. It was a terrible thing. So many terrible things. They leave a scar.” He pushed the cookies toward me. “Here, have one of these. They’re very good. Edith makes them. Maybe you would have some coffee, or tea?” He looked in the direction of the kitchen. There was more he wanted to say.

  “In Budapest, we thought we were safe. No one was prepared for what happened, but we should have known. Andreas was just a small boy, younger than Jesse, when the Nazis began rounding up the Jews. He thought we would protect him, and we did, thanks in large part to my wife. But I also had contacts, the people I delivered eggs to were well connected, and then one of the farmers took us in. I think Andreas thought he would always be protected. He has a mission in life. He wants to resolve something. You have to understand that. He feels it’s a debt he owes to his wife, to do his work in Budapest. She had fought for that, for him to be able to do that. And when that debt is repaid, which is what he’s doing now with his opera company, then he would be ready”—he cleared his throat—“to start a new life.” He placed his brown-speckled hand over mine and squeezed it. “Take it as you will. It’s an old man’s wish.”

  I told Anna I had seen Abe. Roya had come to Nashawena for the weekend to see the project, and we were in the kitchen. I could see that Anna liked her too. Tony was away for a few days, so it was just the three of us in the house. Anna was making pasta with clams. Roya had brought pomegranates and was slicing them for dessert. I finished chopping the parsley and carried the board to the stove. “Ready?” I asked, inhaling the garlic.
“Not quite,” Anna said, stirring the clams into the sauce. I watched the edges of the clams curl. Roya moved to set the table. “Should I use these plates?” Anna nodded. “So how was Abe?” Anna asked. She fished a strand of linguine out of the boiling water with a wooden spoon and handed it to me. “He seemed fine,” I said. “He wanted to talk.” She raised her eyebrows. I bit off an end of the pasta. “Almost.” “We have a bottle of Pinot Grigio in the fridge,” she said. Roya offered to make the salad dressing, “if you like it with lemon.” She picked a lemon from the blue bowl on the counter, tossed it to the ceiling, and caught it with a grin. A cloud of steam rose from the sink as Anna drained the pasta. I opened the wine and lit the candles.

  Anna lifted her glass to Roya. “Welcome.”

  Roya raised hers. “In Farsi, we say salamati. It means good health.”

  It was Friday night, the end of the week. We had not had much traffic on the way from Cambridge to Woods Hole. Roya and I had gossiped about colleagues. With her penchant for saying whatever was on her mind, she had extracted information from the most steel-faced, including the architecture chairman, who was apparently on the verge of leaving his wife for a neurobiologist. At Woods Hole, dusk had settled in. The low white building of the ferry terminal, a line of cars waiting for the ferry, dock workers in their red shirts, Venus bright against the gray of the sky. We took the small ferry, Roya ecstatic. She had been longing for the sea.

  I handed her the bowl of pasta and clams.

  Anna, stirred by the arrival of yet another refugee from the world’s political insanity, was waxing on the dangers of the current administration, Reagan in the White House, reading from a script as if he were still in the movies, the idiocy of Margaret Thatcher, the absurdity of Star Wars, not to mention the real wars in Nicaragua and Mozambique. “If there’s one thing I know as a therapist,” she concluded, heaping pasta on her plate and searching the bowl for hidden clams, “it’s what violence does to people.”

  “That’s what Abe was talking about,” I said, “how it leaves scars.”

  “It’s hard not to be pessimistic about the world,” Roya said, twirling the linguine around her fork. “In Iran, there was hope with Mossadegh. He was nationalizing the oil industry, instituting reforms. But then he was overthrown by your CIA.”

  “Not mine,” Anna said. She carried two passports, one Cyprus, one U.S., the hedge of the dispossessed. I had let my Cyprus passport run out.

  “With the revolution,” Roya continued, “we had hope again. We got rid of the Shah, but then the fundamentalists took over.” She shook her head, a dangle of silver, her earrings lit by the reflected light of the candles. “My family left, went to Rome. People were executed, there was no recourse, and now it’s almost impossible to get out of Iran.” Her face was flushed. “This is the conversation I’ve been missing,” she said. “In Iran nobody talked about anything but politics. Here people talk about anything but.”

  “No one seems to know what to do,” I said, distracted. The conversation with Abe had been unsettling. At the time, I had felt numb. It was just more of the same. I remembered the sentence from Andreas’s letter, the one he sent just after he left. I am past the point where I can accept your love on any terms other than permanently, and I am not at the point where I can accept it permanently.

  “I heard an interesting lecture yesterday,” Roya said, putting down her fork. She had changed out of her black slacks and silk blouse into soft gray pants and a long white sweater. “Each week when the Harvard Gazette comes out, I choose a lecture on a subject I know nothing about and just go. This week, I went to hear a psychoanalyst who was speaking at the Beth Israel Hospital. It was the something something memorial lecture and the title caught my eye: ‘When the Problem Comes into the Room: Turning Points in Psychotherapy with Women.’”

  Anna looked up, intrigued.

  “I took the shuttle bus across the river. I’d never been to the medical school. It’s odd, at these lectures I never see the same people, each time it’s a completely different crowd. The week before, I’d gone to a lecture on Indian burial grounds at the Peabody Museum. Everything was dusty and dim, a scattering of people in browns and khaki. They all looked like anthropologists. Here, everything was brightly lit and the auditorium was full. Doctors in white coats, nurses, men wearing suits, women in dresses. I was glad I had worn my Italian boots. The woman for whom the lecture was named had been a psychoanalyst, obviously revered, and the speaker had an impressive list of degrees and honors. At first I thought the lecture was going to be dull, but as she went on, her face became animated and it got more and more interesting. By the end she held that whole group in thrall.

  “As a medical student, she’d been intrigued by the process of healing, by the body’s ability to heal itself and also what got in the way. As a psychoanalyst, she saw the same thing. People came to therapy, she said, because there was something they wanted to heal, and therapy was set up to facilitate that process. But she had come to see that there was a problem in the very structure of therapy.”

  I caught Anna’s eye. This was our conversation.

  “She said that she noticed this especially with her women patients. She spoke of a woman she called Alice. At a point in her therapy when change was in the air, Alice began to complain about the therapy relationship. She said it was an oil-and-water relationship, like selling indulgences or a kind of prostitution, love or sympathy in exchange for money, the whole thing run by the clock.

  “The speaker, the analyst, said that at first she had seen this as a resistance on Alice’s part. She had been trained to expect resistance from people at the moment when they begin to envision the possibility of change. But Alice had dug in her heels. There was a problem, she said, and it wasn’t just her problem. And here’s the interesting point.”

  Roya picked up her wine and took a sip.

  “With Alice and also with other women patients, this analyst had come to realize that the impediments to healing were not just internal. Living in this world, women have learned to adapt to structures not of their own making, and this adaptation has to be confronted and challenged. That’s when the problem comes into the room.

  “She said that some change has to occur in the structure of the therapy itself, some action has to be taken in the relationship or in the arrangements to demonstrate to the woman that she has the power to change the situation in which she finds herself. If the patient does not initiate this change in the structure, then the analyst has to question why this woman is being compliant, or complicit. For the therapist, this also means questioning his or her own investment in the structure, her complicity in maintaining it.

  “She was a tiny woman who seemed very calm. Not the kind of person to gird herself for battle. I could see she was taking a risk. Some people in the audience were clearly uncomfortable with what she was saying. It meant challenging the existing structure of therapy, seeing it as a problem that must be addressed, especially in treating women. The woman next to me began sorting through her purse, but there was an electricity in the room.”

  Roya looked at us, waiting for a signal to go on. Anna nodded. I was rooted to my seat.

  “The speaker told a story about a British analyst named Winnicott. A minister had come to ask what he should do when people brought their personal problems to him. Should he talk with them or refer them to a psychotherapist? Winnicott told the minister that if he found it interesting, he should speak with them, otherwise he should refer them. The audience laughed, but she was serious. She said that however difficult or disturbing she found these moments of challenge from women patients, which often precipitated a crisis in the therapy, however on the spot she personally felt, she always found herself interested because the problem was a real problem. And in retrospect, it often marked a turning point in the therapy, opening the way to healing. In other words, in the patient, it was a good sign—that she challenged the structure of therapy.

  “She concluded by drawing out the
implications of what she had said. It is a mistake, she believed, to separate therapy or the problems that bring people to therapy from the society or culture in which it is taking place. Ultimately, the process of change has to extend beyond the individual and affect the family structures, the religious and political structures that are implicated in people’s suffering. I hadn’t known what to expect, but it struck me as a revolutionary talk.”

  “Who was the analyst?” Anna asked, passing the salad.

  “I don’t remember her name,” Roya said. “Dr. something, but apparently she was also a musician.”

  I looked at Anna.

  I had argued with Greta before the summer about this very issue. Structure had been my word, my “architect’s eye” as she called it. At the time, I thought she had dismissed it as my resistance to doing “the work” as she would put it, the therapeutic work I needed to do. Had she taken what I said to heart? Who was this Alice? It sounded like another name for me.

  Anna raised her eyebrows as if to ask, was I going to say anything? No.

  We ate our salad in silence.

  I hadn’t told Roya about Andreas. I hadn’t told Anna Abe’s wish.

  I got up to clear the table. The pomegranates were waiting. Would we go now, like Persephone, into the underworld of love? For each seed eaten, a month in Hades, according to the myth. I opened another bottle of wine.

  Night had settled into the room. Outside it was pitch dark, the island still. No moon, no wind.

  “Let’s talk about love, really,” I said, bringing the wine and the pomegranates to the table. I downed a glass. “What is love?”

  “It’s strange,” Anna mused, “psychoanalysts have written about so many things, and yet no one has really dared to write about love.” She finished the remaining wine in her glass and poured in more from the new bottle.