HeartQuake

By R. H. Lawrence

The ability to trust and bond with another being nestles in the heart of our human experience, and when that ability is ruptured by repeated trauma in childhood, the wound (if untreated) can be long-lasting and life-limiting, particularly with regard to forming stable and loving adult relationships.

Dissociative Identity Disord

• Language: English
• Publisher: Go To Publish
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781647495176

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HeartQuake

Copyright © 2021 by R. H. Lawrence

Memoir; Drama

ISBN-ePub:978-1-64749-517-6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Prologue—

A Disease of the Heart

Part 1—The Call (August 2001)

My Nina?

The Be-In (April 1967)

Pool Shark

Child’s Play (March 1968)

Ten Thirty-Seven

The Sun King (May 1968)

One Hopped Out of Toad Hall

The Words

Part 2—In for a Dime

Two Bits

Four Bits

Six Bits

A Dollar

Part 3—The Big Dig

Thanksgiving Saturday

A Day of Unrest

Flat Monday

Two for the Road

Wednesday’s Ashes

Betrayal (December 1968)

Cracks (February 1969)

Monster Thursday

Home Fried

Weeping Man

Part 4—First Intermission

Part 5—Playing House

A Belated Honeymoon

Patchwork Teddybears Rampant

Two in the Morning

Angela

You Have Cake

Pounds of Flesh

Part 6—Second Intermission

Part 7—Broken Angel

Lily Six

Shell Game

Rosebud

The Piano

Sarah

Strike Four

Heartquake

Part 8—

The Sound of One Hand Clinging

Raw and Awful Truths

A Question of Obsession

Something In the Way

Part 9—Reality Bites

Talking to a Ghost

Desiree

Inside Out

Outside In

The Swan

The Last Encore

Curtain Call

Epilogue—Healing the Heart

for the Lilies,

all of you

Prologue—

A Disease of the Heart

What is Love? Let’s be clear—I’m not talking about philanthropy, maternal nurturance, or warm-and-fuzzy flower power here—I mean that soul-scorching, lemming-over-the-cliff passion for merger that grabs you by the hair and screams This is the one! inside your head. That’s the question that’s been singeing my synapses for the last 50 years. And, time and again, over the course of infatuations that flared up and sputtered out, a passionate friendship that lasted a decade, and a functional marriage durable enough to raise a child to provisional independence, all the evidence of my experience has pointed to a single conclusion: it’s nuts. Bonkers. To put it more clinically, I’ve come to the conclusion that inloveness is a certifiable form of mental illness, a mild neurosis in those who give it less than full attention, but rising to the level of full-blown psychosis in idealists and the self-indulgent.

My thumbnail analysis of the dynamic is this: you’re a single piece in a 7-billion-piece jigsaw puzzle, and like everybody else you want to fit in. At first you see that you’ve got knobs here and pockets there, like everybody else, but on closer inspection it turns out that your knobs and pockets are just a little different, like nobody else’s. Still, once in a blue moon Monday you bump into a certain someone, and something seems to click. If you could just leave it at that, you’d be all right, you’d have a lover, maybe even a friend, but you’ve still got these other knobs and pockets, they’re just as important, and they’re crying out for equal satisfaction. Let’s try this other one. That’s when the illness sets in. It’s like Cinderella’s stepsisters and the glass slipper. If a little carping and pouting is enough for you, that’s dollar-a-dozen neurotic inloveness, but if you try to force it, that’s the long-stemmed wacko variety, and it can get bloody.

I’d also propose a practical corollary to this hypothesis that says if the inloveness is a one-way thing (and you’re not actually crazy on some other account), the whole disease will blow over in a week or a month without permanent injury, because the object of your inloveness, still being able to see what’s what, which is that you don’t really fit, and seeing that lemming look in your eyes, will head for the exit before either of you busts a knob. It’s when the inloveness is mutual, and the two of you keep mashing on each other for months and years, that permanent damage can result.

Now, as I sit here writing this, I’m well over 70 years old, and accumulating the data for my inloveness as mental illness hypothesis has put some dings in my knobs and pockets, but the perspective gained has kept me out of the psych ward. Fifty-some years ago, though, I did have one close call.

To tell the truth, I can’t realistically remember what it felt like then, acute psychotic inloveness, but a single memory, branded on my brain, offers a clue. It’s from a couple years after the divorce, when my ex- and I were cordial enough to get together for old time’s sake on the eve of my relocation from Boston, where I went to college, to Appalachian Ohio, where I was about to undertake a back-to-the-land enterprise with some long-haired colleagues.

Cordial doesn’t quite capture the mood—we must each have been feeling some kind of in-your-face bravado to think we could get high together, like I can if you can. Maybe she was nervous. Hell, we were both nervous. Anyway, the kid was with her parents, and she had a joint already rolled. I was barely in the front door, when she pulled it out. Or maybe I pulled it out; I can’t be sure. All I can remember is that after a couple tokes, I saw her face change. It changed from the face of my ex-wife, the face I’d gotten used to looking at from oblique angles, into the face … well, like a cameo, maybe. I see that I’m still reluctant to use the word in earnest, but it was the face I had loved. Adored, even. I swear her skin seemed to glow with an inner radiance; her face was framed with a border of something like ethereal psychic lace, and she might as well have had a fucking halo like the Madonna in some 15th century Italian fresco. A person would walk through fire for that face. Or pick up a cross. It scared the shit out of me. To think that I had ever felt that way, for anyone. I stubbed out the joint. And got out of there as soon as I was steady enough to drive.

Part 1—The Call (August 2001)

My Nina?

Ellen flagged me down as I was pulling out the driveway. There’s a message for you on the phone, she said. It’s from Nina. My right foot went slack, and the pickup stalled.

"Nina? My Nina?"

I assume so. She sounds pretty shaky. I think you should call her back.

I went inside and listened to the brief message, the hesitant voice from the past. A Massachusetts number, of course. I didn’t really think twice about returning the call but took some deep breaths as I carried the phone out on to the porch. I dropped into the porch swing and began slowly rocking. Nina had been my first love, my child-bride, my first and greatest heartbreak. It had been 30 years since she’d tried to contact me.

Not 30 years since I’d seen her, though—it wasn’t that stark. Eight years ago the idea had finally wormed itself into my skull to introduce myself to her son, Matthew, whose probability of being biologically mine had once been rated at 50/50. I guess it was a case of the half-empty glass that finally, after 24 years, looked half-full. I’d had to work through his grandmother, since Nina was still indulging her fondness for unlisted numbers, and then through the Harvard alumni office, but I found him. He’d never even heard my name, never knew he was adopted by Nina’s second husband, Jimmy Killian, the retired hit-man. Who was now, blessedly, dead. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Matthew and I began corresponding, and I visited him seven years ago, and five years ago, and three. The last two of those visits out east, Nina also agreed to see me.

The first time, in the fall of 1996, she’d suggested meeting me at the bench—the bench in the Boston Common where we’d first met in the spring of 1967. I was about ten minutes late as I half-ran up the steps of the subway at Park Street and was suddenly unsure which way to go to find our bench among all other benches, when I saw her walking toward me with that girlish skip in her step, wearing a navy pea coat, just like so long ago. She’d put on some weight—had a round little potbelly, actually—and her hair was long, wavy and loose, unlike the stylish pageboy she used to wear. I noted the differences with a mixture of regret and relief. Her face was rounder, too, gravity at work, and her expression an embarrassed smile. Then she laughed, that laugh splashing like raindrops out of a blue sky. And something, some rough beast that had been slumbering for 27 years, rolled over in its sleep.

After nine in the evening the Common was no place to hang out, so we took the subway to Cambridge and found a Dunkin Donuts. Nina was visibly nervous and required coffee. Once upon a time, we’d had what you might call our wedding reception at a Dunkin Donuts on the drive back from Salem, New Hampshire in December of ’67, but she didn’t remember that. In retrospect, it was odd that she remembered the bench, because one of the first things she told me as we sat, nursing a large coffee and a hot chocolate, was that she had basically no memory at all of the entire period of our marriage. All 14 months of it, if you counted the time we lived together—it took another year and a half before I legally gave up the ghost and filed for divorce. What she could tell me about was her experience with the mental health system over the previous decade, and the conclusions reached by her team of therapists: that their psychological testing indicated a high probability that she’d been molested from early childhood onward, right up until she left home to marry me, and that her mental balance was so precarious that she should avoid digging around for any of those missing memories, as the recovery of too much traumatic material at once could trigger a psychotic break, from which she might possibly never return. Nina had been hospitalized three or four times since that first episode—right after my graduation, five months after she’d moved out, the time she overdosed on Midol and chianti, and then discovered on her release that she was pregnant with Matthew. Now, sitting in front of me with her head turning turtle-like on top of her pea coat, she was assuring me that the prospect of being permanently warehoused was no joke, and that I needed to respect that limit. All this case history was narrated into her coffee cup in a flat, emotionless voice, like CliffNotes for Journal of the Plague Year.

I reminded her that when we were married I’d known about one incident because of some nightmares she’d had, more like trance-states than nightmares, maybe, because her eyes had been open. Gentle shaking or sprinkled water wouldn’t wake her out of them. Though she apparently couldn’t see me, she could hear my voice, and it became clear through our conversation that she thought she was talking with her mother. Afterward she’d confessed that was the one secret about her life that she’d kept from me, that her father said no one should know. And I’d never pressed her about it…. Now it appeared to be the tip of an iceberg, and I felt embarrassed at how naïve I’d been, thinking that even one time was awful, beyond belief. Never considering there might have been many.

You needed help then, I said. Professional help. We never got any help. We never thought to ask.

She nodded slowly, then looked at me with a steady eye. I think now that God must have had a plan for me. Otherwise, I’d be dead by now. More than once. I’m sure He’s always been there, but it’s only been since five years ago that I’ve known it, and I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior. She tilted her head and smiled. Don’t worry—I’m not going to evangelize you.

Praise the Lord for small mercies, I thought. Fundamental Christianity was a long way from the New Age spiritual casserole that was more to my taste, but I didn’t want to devalue something that was obviously important to her, so I invited her to tell me how she’d arrived at her faith. She swirled the last of her coffee and went for a refill.

"I got into a negative spiral after Jim died and Matthew left for college … alcohol … promiscuity … more alcohol. I guess the old trauma triggered it. One day I hit bottom. I wanted to die, and made the decision to end it. I remember vividly, after one sexual encounter, cleaning myself up in the ladies’ room, and crying out to a god I didn’t believe in, ‘Okay, if you’re there, God, prove it to me. Because I don’t want to live past today.’

"So, with Johnny Walker beside me, a bottle of antidepressants, and the will to end my life, I got into my Chevy and hit the highway. I was holding the wheel with my left hand, pouring all the pills in my lap, and reaching for Johnny. I thought it would be only fitting, a good laugh really, to pick some music for my last ride, so I started pushing the buttons on the radio. Commercials, country, heavy metal, pop, jazz, classical. Nothing … nothing was … satisfying. I switched to AM. More commercials and talk shows. I was furious—after all, I was going to die, damn it! I deserved something with a little style! I began pounding on the buttons until they were stuck, all but one. Then I heard the gentle voice of an old preacher, talking about the woman they’d dragged to Jesus … because of her adultery. They were going to stone her to death until He stepped in. When the preacher spoke, it felt like he was talking straight to me, and when I heard him say what the Lord said to that woman, ‘Go, and sin no more,’ I had to pull over. I was sobbing on the steering wheel and repented in my heart.

I drove home with the pills still in my lap, and Johnny in the passenger seat. I rushed into the house and rummaged through my bookcase for the Bible. I dusted it off, and searched through the book of John for that passage the preacher read. I spent the rest of the day with the Lord reading through the gospels. Nina went on about listening to the radio, studying the scriptures, and finally being led to a simple white church with a simple white preacher and a plain wooden cross.

He looked directly at me so often … I thought the sermon was meant for me. And then he asked everyone to close their eyes and bow their heads, and he prayed without dramatics, speaking from his heart, quietly. He asked us to keep our eyes closed, and he said, ‘If there is anyone who wants the Lord to come into your heart, please raise your hand.’ You know, it was just like the Holy Spirit had a string around my wrist, because I felt this pull, like from a master puppeteer, and my hand shot up straight and strong. I felt this warmth surround me, and I started to cry.

There were a few more verses to her testimony, but they slid past me as I stared at a face now painfully unfamiliar. This was the girl I had loved from the first day we met, that I, who now did nothing major without six degrees of deliberation, had married without hesitation less than a month after the first time we made love—the first time for each of us. This was the woman who had survived a lifetime of trauma and abuse both before and after the small, bright window of our love affair. She’d found religion, or religion had found her, and now we spoke different languages. Still, that was what had kept her alive. I was grateful for that.

The amnesia revelation really bummed me out, though, to discover that the formative melodrama of my youth, which I had suffered in exquisite laceration down to the bone, had lost its only other intimate witness. That tragic romance, which as self-therapy I had committed to paper, was entombed in a satchel of unpublished writings, an 80-page epitaph to two young soldiers lost in action on the battlefield of the heart. Every decade or so I would find myself reading it again, but the nerve endings were still so raw that the main feeling was embarrassment—to have ever been so young, so utterly naked.

Still, it had come out of the closet recently, to be shared with Matthew, in a probably pathetic attempt to show him that I had indeed loved his mother, and how we’d blown apart, and that none of it was in any way his fault. And what kind of girl she’d been at 18. I suppose I was trying to nudge a little sympathy out of him, maybe get him to cut each of us a little slack. My appearance in Matthew’s life had driven a wedge between him and his mother. From his point of view, trading in being the son of an executioner for the last gasp of a hippy and a stripper was no great improvement. He was like a hen sitting on a clutch of hand grenades.

Nina reached into her purse and pulled out a stick of gum. I sure could use a cigarette now, but my doctor says I’ve got to quit.

She sat in front of me like a Red Cross tent beside a smoking crater that had once been a house. A house I once lived in. I tiptoed around the edges, probing for signs of life. We had a cat, I said. There was nothing traumatic about our cat. Did she remember the gray cat, Dusheshka? No. The basement apartment in the Back Bay, where the heat wouldn’t come on, on our December wedding night? No. Cooking with a can opener—B&M baked beans, Dinty Moore beef stew, tuna-fish salad sandwiches? Playing parcheesi and cribbage while she sat under the hair dryer? No. Did she remember sending me to the corner store when she was out of Tampax and cigarettes? Tareytons, I think. Did she remember that she called condoms machines? No. Did she remember calling herself Li’l bugger when she’d blow in my ear and tickle me as I was trying to do my homework. How we’d bring our faces so close together that two eyes would merge into one, and we’d chant in unison One big eye! One big eye!

Nina looked at me as if concerned I might soil myself in public. The styrofoam cup stopped before reaching her lips. There was a statue, she said. You made it. Yes, I remember. Carved out of wax. I called it ‘Happy, pregnant Lily’. There’d been a number of months when she’d announced that her period was late. Which was like asking, Do you smell smoke? I’d get this adrenaline rush. How late? We’d do the math and gaze at each other. We were kids ourselves and not even remotely prepared, but we figured, who ever was? Abortion wouldn’t have entered the picture. Love had strapped us into the divine roller coaster together, and we weren’t getting out until the car stopped. Or so I thought. But anyway, they all turned out to be false alarms. Which was why it was beyond ironic when she turned up pregnant five months after we separated, pregnant the month after the last time we made love, if you could call it making love, for it was qualitatively different than every other time of the hundreds we’d had sex in a way that I couldn’t clearly recall, except that it had something to do with anger. My anger. And shame about that anger. Which was at least half the reason I needed to see that glass as half empty all those years. That, and just being a guy, a guy who was totally chickenshit and ignorant about whatever it might mean to be a father, especially a father with no wife. Going over this series of thoughts was like bouncing down a rutted dirt road in fourth gear instead of second, and I found myself consciously unclenching my teeth. It was, however, a road I’d finally chosen to travel and it was, indirectly at least, the reason Nina and I were sitting at this little table in Dunkin Donuts, both lost in our own thoughts. I looked up.

Do you remember that you wanted to be called Lily then? You even sent Jim Carroll a telegram in Florida saying ‘Nina is dead’—

A shadow seemed to pass over her face, and I bit my tongue.

Lily … that’s the name I was born with, she said dreamily.

Yes, I know. Feeling dangerously close to the unseen edge, I still couldn’t resist one more step. Do you remember Jim Carroll? She shook her head. He was your special friend from before we met. He was supposed to be gay. But he was also the reason you told me we’d never know if I was Matthew’s father or not.

Nina was still drawing blanks. I was stunned by the perfection of her forgetting. It was all lost, run away like sand into a sinkhole. That first magical Sunday, and how I’d realized, watching her subway car slide into the darkness, that in my stupid joy I’d never thought to ask her phone number or even her last name, and how I found her again on Monday by faith and luck, searching the cars on the Ashmont train one-by-one. Our falling in love over the summer in multicolored Pentel-pen letters, two would-be writers, each with a captive audience of one. Then all the struggles, the battles against invisible dragons, simply to touch—how many times she’d wanted to, before she was able to slip her hand inside my shirt—my twentieth birthday when she surprised me, using the excuse of overnighting with a girlfriend so we could share our first night falling asleep in each others’ arms, our first morning waking together. And two weeks after that, when she asked me to break her, in blind innocence feeling the tension and obstruction inside her, watching the pain blossom on her face and yet seeing how much she wanted that pain, that for us to come closer required that passage of pain.

Again, after so many years, I felt abandoned—talking to a ghost, to a being no longer troubled by strivings on this mortal coil—and a tear slid down my cheek. Hesitantly she reached across the table and clasped my hand.

You really don’t remember anything—

All I remember, she said, is what I told Matthew … about the night I brought him to see you at that place … you were living there with that nurse—

So this was the story that she’d told Matthew, when I first contacted him, that yes, indeed, this stranger was his biological father, but that I’d abandoned them both when the boy was a baby. When Matthew repeated it to me, I thought it delusional. After all, she was the one who’d started hanging out with that guy David, the short-order cook at the restaurant she waitressed at, David who happened to be the son of one of my professors; she was the one staying out all night and then finally getting her own apartment, walling me out of her life…. I strained to recall what she’d just said.

You must mean the house on Kenwood Street, I said. Susan Pirelli did live there for a while—and we were both called ‘attendant nurses’ at the hospital. But I have no memory of ever seeing Matthew as a baby, anywhere, let alone at Kenwood Street.

I remember, she continued, wearing that blue and white halter dress—it was your favorite—and Matthew woke up when you turned on the porch light and cried just a little, one little moan, and then he looked at you but … you never looked at him. You just stroked your beard and looked annoyed, like you wished we’d evaporate ….

Watching the movements of her lips, I lost track of the sounds, but some little latch was lifting in my mind. It was dawning on me that what she was describing, or something like it, must have truly happened—which meant that she wasn’t the only one with selective memory….

"… I must have dozed a little with Matthew asleep in my arms, leaning against the cabinets in that kitchen, because she startled me when she came down in the middle of the night for a drink of water. She was so pretty, so poised—so Radcliffe—"

Nina, Susan dropped out of Bridgewater State—

When we left in the morning, I knew there was no looking back. It was a long walk back to Cambridge. I felt like lying down on the train tracks and never getting up, but I couldn’t do that, because of Matthew. ‘Your papa doesn’t want us,’ I said, ‘but we’ll be all right, you’ll see. I’m going to finish high school, and you’re going to go to Harvard.’ Nina looked at me with the faintest smile curling the corner of her mouth. I did. That’s what I told him. Maybe that’s what kept me going.

I was still groping for a memory of her face through the screen door at Kenwood Street. What was she doing there, showing up on my doorstep after 18 months of running away, and with a baby, for god’s sake? There was a shadowy feeling of embarrassment, almost revulsion, as of something regurgitated that should have long since been digested. And yet now I pictured or felt her clearly, walking by the tracks, with the tiny boy on her back, papoose-style, unable to see her tears. She said it was morning, morning when she walked away from me for that last time, and yet what I saw her walking into was darkness. A black hole, the place light goes to die.

After that there were no more occasional invitations to visit. Jim Carroll came back into the picture briefly; I remember meeting them together, on their way to pick up a puppy for Matthew, who was always with his grandmother. Our contacts slipped to the occasional phone call or brief written note. She wrote about a lover named Crecco, another Jim. Then there was Jimmy Killian—they were all Jims. Like her father. By the time Jimmy Killian entered the picture, she was dancing at the 2 O’Clock Lounge. In the Combat Zone. And more than dancing—I remember her using the term call girl to describe her way of making a living. A couple years earlier the words would have burned a hole in my mind, but by that time my ears were as numb as the voice that spoke them. If she could do it, she could say it. We’d never turned our backs on the truth.

What happened after that was never clear. At first she spoke of Killian as if the guy were stalking her, had imprisoned her, captured her somehow. She was clearly afraid of him. A month or two later she called again, asking if I had any connections to get Jimmy some pot; they were living together. Not really, I said. I’d seen the guy once and heard his pedigree, just out of Leavenworth after 15 years for commercial murder. I didn’t want to encourage any commerce. The next thing was they were getting married. It never made sense. The last act was Matthew. Once they were married, they wanted him to be a Killian, too, legally adopted. I didn’t have to think about that very long; I said sure. Any father was better than no father, I figured, and I was none. Plus, who was going to argue with Jimmy Killian?

Now Matthew was 26, himself recently married, and angry. Angry at me for leaving him to be fathered by a psychopath, and angry at Nina for never telling him that he wasn’t the natural son of one.

A few weeks ago I had a dream about you and Matthew, I said. You brought him to see me, but in the dream he was about four or five years old. He looked up at me and said, ‘What did I do wrong, that made you go away?’ I told him he hadn’t done anything at all wrong, and I bent down and scooped him up. He pressed his face against my neck, and we were both weeping. Then the dream-tears were all over my face at the little table in Dunkin Donuts, and Nina rose from her chair and put an arm around my shoulders.

We talked for another hour, like old friends now, catching up on the details: kids, work, spouses. Unlike Matthew, who was a driven, type-A go-getter, her younger son James was struggling. He’d been in and out of community college, volunteered with a local theater group, and was still living with his mom. She hinted at some kind of mental disability, but didn’t get specific. A couple years after her conversion experience she’d married for a third time, a man named Steven she’d met at her church. He’d courted her like a gentleman, and they were chaste until it was all square with God, but on their wedding night he’d gone psycho, and it eventually required some fisticuffs by her sons and a lifetime restraining order from the court to restore some peace in her life. That was it for her, she said, with respect to men; her choices had always gone wrong. She was dedicating her life to the Lord in service. After winning a start-up grant for small businesses, she’d opened a Christian bookstore and was hosting a call-in radio program. She gave me a business card with the name of the store, The Mustard Seed. The phone number, she said, would reach an answering machine.

That was five years ago, when Ellen and I were still contentedly married. We were prosperous enough, anyway; Ellen’s pay stubs were finally looking like a real doctor’s, and the carpenter’s dream house was finished from top to bottom. Brandon (her son, my step-) was just entering high school, and we were renting a house on the Outer Banks for two weeks every summer. Life had an orderly feel to it. I assumed it would go on that way, for the duration.

The Be-In (April 1967)

Sunday, April 9, 1967. The Boston Common. The very first Human Be-In.

Flyers announcing the time and place in the swirling calligraphy of psychedelic album covers had been turning up all over—in cafes and headshops, on lampposts along the Charles, and finally even on the door of the M.I.T. Coop. No one knew exactly what a be-in was. There were sit-ins for civil rights, teach-ins about the war, and Laugh-In on TV. There were rumors of love-ins on the other coast, spontaneous celebrations of drugs and sex which were impossible to imagine but equally impossible to ignore.

It was a promising day, a spring-damp early afternoon with sun-patches playing tag between white clouds. Bob was looking for someone but hadn’t found her. It will be a ‘happening’, she’d said, and I will be there." The willowy pothead with the blond Mary Travers mop should have stood out like a cue ball on a pool table; she clearly wasn’t there yet. The human contingent was still just a few hundred, though growing, with no clear concentration other than along one edge of the little pond, where a few squealing waders had put the ducks to flight.

Happenings apparently happened bit by bit. Sounds of water splashing, dogs barking, guitars tuning and tambourines. Frisbees began flying and a few kites were testing the breeze. From the periphery Bob continued scanning heads. She must have changed her mind again, like a cabby switching lanes, predictably unpredictable.

Near the pond a guy in a hat like a corduroy orchid was juggling duckpins to scattered applause, though that might have been for the cheerleader swirling a hula hoop. Nearer, a blue-jeaned couple, she in a tie-dyed T-shirt, he shirtless under a leather vest, were tossing puffs of popcorn at each other, catching them open-mouthed like trained seals. When their box was empty, they moved on, and pigeons moved in to glean the misses. Bob gave up surveying for a while and leaned back against a maple tree to watch the birds.

He was unaware of the man’s approach until a pair of dirty sneakers with straggling laces entered his field of vision. He looked up. Above the stained, brown pants was a threadbare, greenish sport coat over a turquoise bowling shirt. Good afternoon, the face declared. I’m schizophrenic. The face was unshaven, middle-aged, with skin the pebbly texture of rising bread-dough and a pendulum of mucus swinging precariously from the left nostril.

As it was Sunday in the Common, the first Human Be-In, it was no time to rush to judgment. Glad to meet you, Bob said.

The man extended his hand for Bob to shake, then looked down the sidewalk to the right, then left. Actually, I’m schizophrenic-paranoiac—my psychiatrist says I’m part paranoid, too. Sixty-forty. Schiz with a paranoid chaser.

On her days off Nina sometimes came into the city just to have somewhere to go. She’d ride the subways to the end of the line or just sit in the Common, observing people as they passed, alone or in pairs, and focusing on certain words or gestures she’d imagine their lives in detail, their public personas and private anguish. On this particular Sunday she’d brought a book called Man Against Himself and was trying to read, but her thoughts kept returning to Jim, and the letter that hadn’t come. She could picture the envelope with simply James as the return address, opening it carefully, the white page, probably notebook paper, now unfolded, alive with symbols … which she couldn’t read. She was afraid to imagine the words. It had been two weeks. Finally she took a spiral notebook out of her shoulder bag and began composing their story.

Jim was the first man to whom Nina had revealed herself, and she had thought she could love him. This feeling was new to her, for she had always believed that she could only love a man who was everything, all men in one, and she had been waiting for him, this man of perfection, when she met Jim. She found Jim ugly at times; objectively, she supposed he was—homely, small—genetically inferior, in his own words. Yet she trusted him more than any man before because of his kindness and perceptiveness. And because he was homosexual….

The story reached its end. Not a very satisfying ending for her, personally, but she was still too close to it. She closed the notebook. A frisbee came rolling drunkenly on edge through the grass and wobbled flat on the sidewalk a few yards from her bench. It was fetched and slung away by a young man with long red hair and, more interestingly, a red valentine heart painted on his left cheek.

There were two men talking, a few benches up the walk. She’d been vaguely aware of them while she was writing but now studied them more closely. They were an incongruous pair, the talker tall, middle-aged, looking rather down-and-out, the listener shorter, younger, with a trimmed beard. Strange. She imagined that they might be father and son, that the man’s wife might have deserted him twenty years ago, taking the baby, the father becoming an alcoholic in despair, and perhaps only recently the grown-up boy learning about his past, leaving home, and finding his father here for the first time. That was how earnestly the young man seemed to be listening….

She opened her book, but after the first sentence couldn’t focus on the print. Looking up again, she found the younger of the pair walking toward her, then seeming to freeze and slowly turn back toward the elder, who was staring at him (and at her, since all three were in a line) with a look of dull bewilderment. The young man tapped his temple with two fingers in a parting salute. As he turned back toward her, Nina lowered her eyes to her book.

When the brown boots stopped in front of her, she looked up into a boy’s face hiding behind a beard. He asked, Is it all right if I sit down here?

Yes. She studied him with a clinical air. It’s all right.

He sat down, thinking he probably appeared like the casual man-on-the-make, a role he had not yet learned.

I don’t usually impose myself on people like this, he said, but—see the guy behind me, by the trash barrel, across the sidewalk? He came up to me about half an hour ago, introduced himself as a schizophrenic—excuse me, a schizophrenic-paranoiac—and all this time he’s been telling me his life story, case history—the collected works— He paused, shaking his head at the lameness of what he was about to say. Anyway, I probably know more about his life now than I do about my own. So finally I needed an exit, you know, but I didn’t want to put him down by just walking away, so I … well, I told him you were my girlfriend, and you were waiting for me, so he’d understand why I had to leave … like now.

She was still inspecting him. Boys up to their ears in embarrassment were nothing new to Nina, but there was something about this one that made the ridiculous seem … at least plausible. He seemed to have run out of explanations and was now peering at the book on her lap. When no more words were forthcoming, she answered the implied question: It’s about suicide.

Are you studying it?

Let’s say, the subject interests me.

He was intrigued. She might be a psych major. Might even go to Radcliffe, though one of the women’s colleges this side of the river was more likely.

On the other hand, there’d been that debacle with the girl he’d met on the bus last fall, coming back from New York. Germaine. Long dark hair, white denim jeans—he’d thought a Cliffie might look like that. When a Thanksgiving blizzard turned a four-hour ride into eight, there’d been time to get personal, but his brain had cramped up. Actually, the last two hours all he could feel was his bladder about to explode. And then, after the bus finally crept into a service plaza and he’d waddled in through the snow—pay toilets! Nothing but pay toilets, and he didn’t have change. Seeing his anguish, she’d come over and handed him a dime…. It had seemed promising, but she turned out to be a hard-drinking high school dropout who worked on motorcycles…. A freshman mistake. Cliffies don’t ride the bus.

Finally he asked, Do you go to school around here?

No. He looked at her directly for the first time, with an expression of undisguised puzzlement. I’m a dropout, she explained. Why are you smiling?

Hey—some of my best friends are dropouts. Where did you drop out from?

Hingham.

He hadn’t heard of it. Is there a girls’ school in Hingham?

No. Hingham High School. With other people she’d made up convincing covers; she didn’t know why she was telling him the truth.

He, on the other hand, was thinking that no one else could have such luck. He adjusted his attitude a notch toward condescension. Why did you drop out?

Because I want to be a writer, she said. I’ve been writing since I was ten…. To be a writer you have to understand people, and high school didn’t have anything more to teach me about that. There are so few types in high school—in the suburbs anyway—so when I turned sixteen I just stopped going. I meet a lot more interesting people at my job. She was waitressing at a place on Boylston Street now. And as she described to him some of the characters she’d met at work, hustlers and businessmen and artists, Bob’s patronizing air gradually dissipated. She seemed to have experienced so much more in her life than he in his. Strangely, he admired her for having the guts to drop out of school, or at least finding something so important to her that it trumped the ordinary rules. When he asked her why she’d come to the be-in, she replied, What’s that?

He opened his mouth, but now she was looking directly at him, and the openness of her question stopped him. I don’t know, he admitted, then, extending a hand toward the human circus, he added, but it’s here, whatever it is, for the first time. He met her eyes. We could go find out.

Pool Shark

My history with Nina divides into the old regime and the new, rather like that of the Bourbon kings of France. The old days peaked with the Sun King and ended with the guillotine. Actually, they bled on for a few years after the axe fell, though our occasional contacts diminished in frequency and emotional resonance.

Nina’s phone number was always unlisted, but at random intervals I’d send her a letter. When the letters went unanswered, I’d call her mother to keep up a minimal contact. She’d give me a little generic news, mostly about Matthew, about whom it felt legitimate to ask—that he was very bright, did well in school, and that Jim Killian (when I asked directly) seemed to be a very devoted father, an active father since he was a stay-at-home dad because of his disability, a heart condition. With a nervous edge to her voice she’d impart the barest scraps about Nina, that she’d earned her GED, that she’d given birth to a daughter who’d died at four months from a heart defect, that she was working with doctors somehow and part-timing at a community college, that she’d had a second son, James.

My last visit of the old regime came in 1984, a few weeks before Matthew turned 14, right about the time I hooked up with Ellen. Looking back, I marvel at my chutzpah, marching into the mobster’s den. Curiosity can be a powerful motivation. Not having seen Matthew for ten years or so, I was curious what kind of young man my un-son had grown into. Okay, I was curious if he looked at all like me. In my little traveling pack I was carrying something I wanted to give him, something I’d made, a 6" round wooden box constructed of walnut divided into two paisley-shaped compartments with interlocking lids of dark walnut and blond maple, in the shape of a yin-yang. Perhaps he was old enough to be developing a curiosity about—what shall I say?—the other. Other cultures, alternative points of view. Or it might take a decade before it occurred to him to wonder about the meaning of the symbol and the source of the box. I wanted to plant a seed.

It was late February in a city tired of winter. The maze of unfamiliar streets intersecting at strange angles was even trickier to navigate because of the snow. Piles of the sooty stuff spread out from the curb like the droppings of a herd of dark, lumpy clouds that had been milling around for weeks. By the time I found their row-house in Dorchester, it was already dusk outside. Five steep steps led up to the concrete stoop; the porch light was on.

Jim Killian opened the door, a tallish, sinewy man with angular features and wavy hair, gunmetal gray. Motioning me inside, his eyes momentarily narrowed, as if taking my measure. He led me through the living room, past a Lazy-Boy recliner facing a TV, which was turned on but with the volume very low. We entered another room, which might have originally been a dining room but was now nearly filled by a pool table. A pungent marijuana haze hung in the air. He called up the stairs, announcing my arrival, but there was no response. Nina was occupied upstairs with the younger one, he explained. Her unavailability was disappointing, and the prospect of socializing with Jim one-on-one a bit unnerving. Through a half-open doorway I caught a glimpse of a slight, serious boy leaning on one elbow on a bed, reading. Jim noticed my glance and spoke to the boy:

Matt, say hello to Bob here. He’s an old friend of your mom’s.

Matthew seemed preoccupied and moody, a normal adolescent. Barely looking up, he mumbled Hi.

What’s your book? I asked through the doorway.

Looking up more attentively this time, the boy flicked a lock of brown hair off his forehead. Silas Marner.

Ah … recreational reading. Matthew responded to the irony in my remark with an exaggerated facial expression midway between boredom and nausea. Inadvertently, I’d turned my back on Jim; I was reminded of this as his words sliced over my shoulder:

Take a break, Matt. Come on out of your cave and entertain the guest.

Matthew swung his legs off the bed, and Jim led us both back into the living room, where he settled into the TV chair, Matthew and I taking opposite ends of the couch. Jim left the TV on and seemed to pay little attention to us as I asked Matthew the usual dull questions adults ask teenagers, what subjects he liked best in school and so forth. Matthew’s responses were courteous enough, even friendly; if entertaining the guest was a chore for him, he didn’t appear oppressed by it. His academic interests inclined more toward social studies than the arts or sciences. Beyond high school, he’d begun thinking about the fields of psychology, or sociology, or possibly law.

At the mention of the word law Jim Killian let out a loud snort, demonstrating that he had indeed been listening, and Matthew jerked to attention.

What’s the matter, Dad? Lawyers make plenty of money.

"Ha! You got that right! Lawyers can do it all—cheat, steal, kill—and they never get caught. Ha! And they hang around with all the official criminals like it’s nobody’s business—’cause it’s their job. What a racket!… And all from a few more years of school." Then he laughed, an ominously hearty laugh that ended abruptly with his thumping his fist on the arm of his chair. Matthew and I held our breath, anticipating further eruptions, but Jim seemed to return to a state of dormancy.

Matthew then asked me what I did for a living.

To me, this was hardly the straightforward question it is to most folks, so it took me a while before I decided to say I was basically a carpenter.

Does that pay well? he asked.

The way I do it, it usually doesn’t pay at all. Matthew looked confused, and even Jim turned his head. But it puts a roof over my head … and my friends’ heads … and we take it from there.

But how do you pay for anything, food and stuff?

Well, mostly we just keep our expenses really low. We own our own land, so there’s no rent, and people grow some of what we eat—

But wait a minute— Matthew was pointing a finger at me. Somebody still has to pay the electric bill.

I had to smile. I can see the lawyer right now, Jim.

Jim gave another little snort, but Matthew refused to be distracted.

Let me rephrase my question. How are you going to pay the electric bill?

Yeah, Jim added, and how are you going to pay for some pot?

I left a little pause. Like I said … people grow things.

Ha! Jim thumped the chair arm again. No money, but all the pot you can smoke…. He shook his head, then, after some internal calculations, started nodding. "So that’s how you pay the electric bill." Matthew frowned, and I sensed the conversation might be getting a little too interesting.

No, that’s not the way we do it, I said. Since a bunch of us share the same piece of land, it would be too risky to grow anything illegal there. But I do know a few people who pay their bills that way … so it’s not hard to find the stuff.

Jim sat up in the recliner and gave me a wolfish grin. Did you bring me any?

I took a breath. I’ve never been in that business, Jim. And I’m not now. After an awkward silence, the recliner squeaked as he leaned back, and I turned to Matthew. And you’re still wondering about that electric bill, I said. I do some carpentry on the outside for pay. Everybody pulls in a little income one way or another— I reached down into my traveling pack, pulled out the round walnut box, and put it in his hands. I do a little woodworking on the side, too. While he quietly inspected the box, sliding the light and dark lids open and closed, I took the opportunity to study his face. His high forehead, already suggesting a widow’s peak, reminded me of my father, but my scant visual memory of Jim Carroll shared the same feature. The overbite and the receding chin were pure Nina. His nose was wide, substantial, quite possibly like mine. Not having a mirror, I tried to gauge the shape of my own by feel. The evidence seemed inconclusive. When I found him looking at me, I asked, Do you recognize the symbol?

I recognize the symbol, but I don’t remember its name. It’s Chinese or something…. Doesn’t it have something to do with good and evil … the struggle between good and evil?

It’s a Taoist symbol. I’m not sure they’d go for the good-and-evil bit, but the yang and the yin represent the light and the dark, the creative and receptive, male and female—all these different pairs of energies. And the image is more about balance than struggle. Together they form a circle; they complete each other. Then, look at this—each half has a little seed of the other at its heart. That’s about change. Not only do they complete each other, they continually give birth to each other.

That’s cool. Matthew rotated the box between his two hands, first one way and then the other. It’s kind of hypnotic.

As he offered it back to me, I said, I’d like you to keep it.

Jeez. It’s awfully nice.

The recliner squeaked again, and momentarily Jim Killian was standing beside us and over us and taking the box from Matthew’s hand. After a brief inspection he said, Yeah. It’s too nice. Matthew can’t accept a gift this nice … from a stranger.

Why not, Dad?

Because you don’t get something for nothing, Matt. When you think you’re getting something for nothing … that just means you’ll pay for it later. With that, Jim handed me the box. Retreating, I slid it back into my pack. "That’s enough of a break, Matt. You still got homework…. If you’re gonna be a lawyer, you gotta hit