Chapter
21
“I think there were several reasons
for what happened,” Dr. Orenstein said and paused. His face was rigid and eyes inward looking and
I knew that he didn’t want me to say anything.
I was irritated by his magisterial tone,
but at the same time, hopeful that he might provide insight into my predicament.
Finally he said, “Of course, she was making love to your father,
who was almost exactly your age when he disappeared.” He looked at me coldly. “And she was getting even with your mother.”
He paused again and I waited patiently while
he formulated his next thought. “And
I think, finally, she was trying to redeem herself by joining you all in your
folly.”
I was not pleased with his observations, especially the last one. I started to say, “How can I help it if I’m
the same age my father was when he disappeared. ” But I decided not to humor
him by referring to the synchronicity between my father’s age when he disappeared
and my present age. Instead, I said, “I have made a discovery.”
“Oh?”
“I love them all.”
He gave an amused smile that acknowledged the irony in my voice, but
remained silent.
“And I’ve been sexually obsessed. I’ve
been doing all the things I’ve read about in books and I’m exhausting all
of us.”
We sat in silence again in the shadows
of the late afternoon amid the great sea of books that he had collected from
all over the world: books in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
I watched his face as we both waited
to see if he would have anything to say about incest but he didn’t. He just sat there, abstracted, watching his
thoughts, I supposed, thoughts that wouldn’t congeal into anything which might
help clarify my predicament. I knew
the process well and I knew instinctively when it became my task to try to
further the process by saying something, saying anything.
I said, “I’ve done some research
in the library.”
He nodded for me to continue.
“Incest isn’t biologically harmful.
That’s just a myth. In fact,
it’s often done by breeders to strengthen
their stock.”
His eyebrows rose. “Incest is
the privilege of royalty and the gods. It’s
taboo in almost all societies.”
“She doesn’t know she’s my half-sister.”
“You couldn’t live with a lie like that.”
“Candy and I are rebels. Rebels
against the Gods of our parents. We
are capable of anything. Even incest.”
He had learned to indulge me in my excesses.
He knew that I had bouts of insecurity and that I often exaggerated
the truth.
He asked, “Do you know the story
of Siegmund and Sieglinda?”
I didn’t. I said, “Marlo would never
be able to follow me into my quixotic follies.”
“Marlo would be good for you. Jeannette was a good mother for her, when she
wasn’t drinking. Jeannette’s mother
and father come from very old and very solid French-Norman stock.”
“She isn’t smart enough for me.”
He looked puzzled.
“Candy has inherited my father’s mathematical talent.
She beats me at chess.”
He cleared his throat. “Does
Marlo play chess?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know if she has a talent for it or not.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Why do you insist that Marlo is beautiful?”
I sat there, perplexed wondering what he was driving at.
He said, “Define beauty.”
I said, remembering Stendhal’s definition,
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
“Stendhal said that love
is the promise of happiness didn’t he, not beauty?”
He liked to catch me in errors of memory.
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“It’s an interesting slip. But
I’m not sure what it means.” He didn’t
stop to analyze what he assumed was a slip of the tongue, as he usually did,
but said instead, “You love Jeannette
because she loves you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple.”
“Why does she love me?”
“Because you are your father
now, in her eyes, psychologically speaking.
And if your father had lived, if that absurd, unbelievable event had
not happened, if he had not almost literally disappeared into thin air, she
would be a happy woman with two magnificent daughters.
Instead, she is unhappy and has a daughter who was a prostitute, as
she herself was once, and another daughter who loves you and is being treated
badly by you. He is reincarnated in
you and she wants Marlo to have the happiness she
didn’t have, and so she’s offering herself as a kind of catalyst to make it
happen.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Why did Jeannette make love to you even though she desperately wants
you to marry her daughter?”
I answered with a question, “Why
do you think she desperately wants me to marry Marlo?”
He sat stony faced.
“Was I wrong to make love to her?”
He seemed surprised by my question but didn’t answer.
I said, “It was inevitable. She was irresistible.”
“Brad. She
made love to you.”
“What do you mean?”
He seemed uncomfortable. “What
is beautiful about Marlo?”
“I don’t know.”
He said, “Plato said that love
is the desire to reproduce ourselves with a beautiful woman.”
“All right. Then maybe I don’t
think I’m worthy of her beauty and so I protect her from me by blinding myself
to it. Maybe that’s why I want Candy,
because she’s like me, a prostitute.”
“That’s just the hysterical, imprecise voice of your mother talking
through you.”
“I meant to say that ... Candy
and I are fallen angels ... we...”
“Candy was just an adventure for you and you’ve confused yourself. Jeannette thinks she can make you see the light.
She knows that Candy is a casualty of life, like you are, and she fears
that if you marry Candy, you will both fall into chaos, together.
Jeannette made love to you because she.... ” His voice trailed off.
“Why this sudden talk of marriage anyway?”
I asked.
He was silent.
I said, “I think she made love
to my father, not me.”
“Brad.” There was hopelessness in his voice that told
me he had lost confidence in himself.
I said, “Marlo
is the most delicate, sensitive being I’ve ever encountered, and yet she is
strong like a race horse, like the horses she’s been painting in the apartment.
I make her suffer by leaving her alone and she thinks she is proving
herself worthy of me because she endures her suffering.”
“Is that beautiful?”
I didn’t answer.
He insisted, “But what is the
physical beauty? Where
is it? You’ve got to figure that out.”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
“Well. She doesn’t do anything to make herself beautiful;
she doesn’t wear makeup. She doesn’t
do anything with her hair. She wears
the same jeans and shirt and sandals almost every day. She washes her clothes in the sink every few
nights and hangs them in the shower stall to dry. She says she’s an artist and doesn’t accept
bourgeois values.”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“You asked about the physical beauty.”
He smiled.
“The only beauty left is a kind of nobility of gesture ... a refined
way of holding herself ... a ... I don’t know...
She has an innate sense of politeness for example, and she moves ...
she moves like a dancer.”
He was silent.
“I watch her out of the corner of my eye sometimes when we are out
together and catch her avoiding the eyes of everyone: men, women, children…
And when we are alone, she gives me her eyes, the quiet, curious, happy eyes
of a woman who is completely at ease with herself, who has reached a pinnacle
of some kind and yet...”
“Yes?”
“And yet, could come hurtling down from the pinnacle at any moment. Like she did that night.”
“What night?”
“When I slapped her.”
“After you left her alone for two weeks.”
“For two days!”
“Two days.”
“Can I tell you something I haven’t told you yet?”
His hands moved upwards slightly from the arms of the chair, as if
he were an old boxer whose instinct to cover his head had reasserted itself. “Certainly.”
“She was beautiful after I slapped her.
The beauty returned. The beauty
that I hadn’t seen since the day I first made love to her.”
We sat in silence and finally I said,
“So you see, Earl, why I’m not worthy of her.”
We sat there in silence.
Finally, he said, “Marlo
isn’t perfect either.”
I looked at the white shag rug at my feet.
“I slapped her hard and she fell to her knees.”
“And now you want her to bear the greatest burden of all.” He said
quietly.
I looked at him with incomprehension.
“You want her to share you with another woman.”
“No ... “
“Isn’t that one of the burdens we put on the women we love?”
“I, I don’t know. I...”
“We even bring them into our marriage beds and when they humiliate
themselves for us, we cease to love them.”
He stopped, suddenly self-conscious, and quickly regained his composure. “She’s born up to all your punishment hasn’t
she?”
“Yes.”
He was silent.
“If I marry her, how will I ever be able to resist making love to Candy
too? Or even her mother?”
“I thought you were against marriage.”
I colored. I said, aware that
I was evading his insight, “We’re getting married just to get the draft board
off my back. It’s too late to get into
graduate school this fall, but if I’m married they’ll give me a deferment.”
“I see.” He seemed surprised. After a moment’s thought he said, “Can I ask an impertinent question?”
I stared at him, “Go ahead.”
“How do you manage to satisfy two women and even dream of satisfying
three?”
I shifted my weight in the chair. I
asked, “Do you want the details?”
He smiled an impish smile. “Whatever’s
necessary.”
“Well, I don’t always have an orgasm, if that’s what you mean. And there’s no preferred position. Well...”
“Well, what?”
“Well, we experiment a lot.”
“And there’s nothing you won’t try.”
I felt myself coloring again, “Isn’t
that normal?”
“Not with three women.”
“I’ve been thinking I should marry Candy instead.”
He thought for a moment and then offered,
“You and Candy are centrifugal forces.”
He threw up his hands and stared at me intently. “Candy will accept your marriage to Marlo but Marlo would be devastated
if you married Candy. Don’t you know
that?”
I sat there in silence, thinking. Finally,
I said, not really convinced, “Neither
of them wants to get married anyway. Candy
is only 17 and Marlo is 19.”
“Marlo doesn’t want marriage because she thinks you are against
it, in principle. But that ‘principle’
is only your misguided urge to boundless freedom and rebellion.
She doesn’t understand it and it is tearing her apart.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
He continued, “Marlo
is in a very dangerous position. During
those years when Jeannette was an alcoholic ... I was going to tell you...”
His expression betrayed his hope that I already knew what he was about to
tell me.
I said, “She said a few things.”
“There’s no need to go into details.
You’ll find out soon enough. But
we helped her, your grandfather and I. Marlo
doesn’t remember me because she and her mother left for
Kelly was Dr. Orenstein's granddaughter.
“Neither girl remembers the other.
Kelly is 5 months younger than Marlo.”
I had known Kelly as long as I could remember.
“We were delighted with Marlo. She was extremely intelligent and lively and
always solicitous of Kelly, even apologetic for Kelly’s naughty behavior and
frequent refusals to mind. I can see
her yet, explaining to Kelly that she had to go to bed so that they could
play hopscotch the next morning and not be tired.”
He laughed silently and his eyes glistened.
“But Marlo would become anxious and withdrawn
after her mother had been gone a few weeks and when Jeannette finally returned,
their reunions were always tearful. When
Jeannette took her back into her world in
“The ... molestation?”
“Yes. We don’t know how often it happened but when
Jeannette found out, it changed her. It
became the motivating force of her life in fact, and she dried out all by
herself. She changed almost overnight. It was remarkable.”
“And she took Marlo and just left
“She kept in touch with us for awhile but, yes, we lost contact with
her.”
“When?”
“I remember well the last time I saw her.
It was the year that Elvis Presley made his first appearance on the
Ed Sullivan show. 1956. Marlo was nine years
old but Jeannette didn’t bring her along.”
“And you think Marlo needs me.”
“My God. They all need you.” He took off
his glasses and rubbed his eyes. His
head shook back and forth.
“What’s the matter?”
He put his glasses back on. “Well,
I’m acting like a marriage counselor and I have no business telling you who
to marry.”
I said. “I know one thing. My mother would never forgive me if I didn’t
get married in her church and Jeannette would never forgive me if I did.”
“Rhonda will get over it. She’ll
be happy that you’re married to the woman you love.
That makes everyone happy.”
I said, “I guess we’re going
to have to keep it secret from Candy that she’s my half-sister. I can’t see any way out.”
“Nonsense. But I advise you to tell Jeannette that you are going to
tell Candy.”
I sat back in my chair. “Maybe
marriage is just a way for me to get out of going to
He was silent.
“Well, I guess if that was the only
reason, I would marry Candy instead of Marlo, wouldn’t
I?” I looked at him questioningly and
then answered my own question, “Because
Candy and I are both rebels. She’s
my sister and...” I let my voice trail
off. I looked to him for direction.
He waited for me to continue.
“You know, I had a fantasy of marrying Jeannette and going off to
His eyebrows rose.
“It wasn’t going to be a real marriage.
I mean I was confused. Really
confused. I thought Marlo
would understand. So you see, I’m not
worthy of Marlo.”
He smiled apprehensively. He saw that I was leaning into an abyss of self-pity.
He started to say something.
I said, “At bottom, I’m just hopelessly blind and stupid
when it comes to human relationships and I’ve spent too much time doing mathematics
and sports and my mother has warped me and her Fundamentalism has made me
into an impossible human being.” I
paused and added, “Like Candy.”
He sighed. “If only Graham could
have arranged to stay alive for a few more years.”
“When I was in high school, all the prettiest women were interested
in me because I was a football player but it didn’t mean anything.”
“Your grandfather was very unhappy that you decided to play all three
sports.”
“True.”
“You dated a lot too, and it worried him.”
“Yes, but it taught me the vanity of all that.
When I finally devoted myself to mathematics, in college, those women
lost interest in me and I was relieved to be rid of them.”
“I
seem to recall that Graham was very happy when a certain cheerleader dumped
you in high school.”
“It was my mother’s fault.”
“Are you afraid there will be too many temptations for Candy and Marlo,
and they will make you jealous?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
He smiled and waited for me to see the irony.
I said, “It’s true that they
turn heads wherever they go and I feel like I’m driving my mother’s Rolls
Royce when I’m out with them.”
“And you’ve always hated that kind of cheap vanity.”