The Waters & the Wild Read online

  “Sometimes you lose one,” the police investigator had said when he interviewed me. Surely he was right. Who isn’t touched, from time to time, by accident and evil luck? So I thought at her funeral, as though the story had ended, while in reality it had yet to begin.

  * * *

  —

  After the funeral, for a few days’ grace, life appeared to resume its rhythms, though I scheduled no new sessions in the daily hour that had been Jessica Burke’s. I entertained vague plans of spending that freed time in observance of her disappearance, walking around the reservoir, maybe, or if my daughter, Clementine, had a free class period, meeting her for a coffee or cocoa and an elephant ear at Esmé’s, a café we liked, just across the street from her high school. The plans, however, remained unrealized, and I passed Jessica Burke’s empty hours staring at the tetrahedron of daylight the sun cast on the strip of wall at the foot of the couch. Over the hour it would change shape, though never so quickly that I could see the change as it happened.

  That shape of light had been what Jessica Burke had looked at in her sessions over the two years she had been in my care. What was I doing, staring at it now? Waiting for that flatness to vibrate, to release a whispered echo of Jessica Burke’s words? Those words had been in every way unremarkable, the runoff of everyday frets and worries, the white noise of the day-to-day muffling all cries, whether of ecstasy or terror. I had disliked her voice at first, noting my distaste as the first instance of negative countertransference, the analyst’s inevitable resistance to the patient’s inner turmoil. Despite her dishwater hair and thrift-store clothing, an unconcealable Brahmin croak bridled her voice’s upper register, and though a tattooed word bruised the back of her knuckles, her gesticulations dispensed a blasé, patrician nonchalance. It had taken months for me to appreciate the brittle frailty in these traits, to discern in her profile the beauty she labored to obscure, to acknowledge what I must have noticed when first she appeared in my office: that her eyes were a bright lapis blue.

  It seems to me now that after the funeral entire weeks must have passed like that, a score of Jessica’s widowed hours dissolved in my staring at the wall. In reality, however, the interval was brief, no more than the two or three days required for a letter to make its way across town, to appear among the other bills and statements on a hall table. It was an ordinary letter, in a plain envelope, addressed to me at home. Maybe I had overlooked it or had neglected the mail for a few days. In any event, it was Clementine—no doubt looking for something else—who brought it to my attention.

  “Who’s sending you a key?” she asked, holding the envelope up to the light.

  It was unmistakably that, a little lopsided weight in the corner of the letter, its shape shadowed on the outside of the envelope by the pressure and grime of the post office sorting belts. Inside, there was nothing else, no note, no letter, just a key affixed to a tag bearing my name, spelled out in neat capitals: ABEND, D. The key itself was stamped with the letters USPS and what looked like a serial number: a post office key. It was my own post office key, I concluded, sent to me in the mail. Like many analysts, I have always kept a post office box for patients who send checks in the mail, to preserve analytic anonymity. Clementine would tease me about this postal box, calling it my love nest, my trysting bower, but in fact I checked it only infrequently, no more than once a week. Surely I had lost the key somewhere without noticing that it was gone. Anyone could have turned it in to any post office, and the post office, identifying it from the numbers, must have sent it to me. Why not? Nor did I think to verify that my postal key had in fact gone missing. How couldn’t it have, if this was it?

  So that was when it began, the awareness, the first flush of it, like motion caught in the corner of the eye—an intimation prior to thought. It was there and gone even before it occurred to me to check my key chain. The awareness began as a kind of puzzled befuddlement (what is this thing? where is it from?) but turned suddenly into something else—not dread exactly, not yet, rather the solution from which dread would precipitate, a solution odorless and colorless yet permeated by an equally clear not-quite-rightness. When Clementine asked me about the key later that evening, and I reported that it was a post-box key I’d lost, that colorless, odorless wrongness was the reason I knew instantly I was lying—not just mistaken but lying. That wrongness was why I avoided checking my key chain, and why, when I finally did, I was not surprised to find my own mailbox key still there on the ring. That sense of wrongness must have been why I waited through the weekend until Monday, until after Clementine had left for school, to walk down to the post office to make my inquiry. That wrongness knew already that the key would not fit the lock on my box. A clerical error, I said to myself: someone has misread a column of names or numbers.

  “Doesn’t open your box,” said the clerk.

  “I’ve tried it in the lock—” I began to explain, but he had sighed off to retrieve a green ledger from somewhere behind the counter.

  “Daniel Abend, you say? You have ID?”

  “Yes, and when I tried the key—”

  “That’s your key. Box 5504, to be renewed—not until next year.”

  “But that’s not my number,” I began again, but he had vanished once more, only to emerge, at least a foot taller than I’d imagined, from a door giving onto the lobby.

  “Box 5500, 5502, here we go—” he said, turning the key in the box directly below my own, withdrawing a large envelope. “Daniel Abend, box 5504,” he said, reading the address. “You might want to write that down somewhere.” It did not seem important anymore, or even possible, to say that this was not my box, not the mailbox to which my patients sent their checks, and anyway, the clerk must have sighed his way back through the lobby door because his graveled voice called, “Next!” from behind his window.

  Suddenly I understood, standing there in the post office, holding the envelope the clerk had just handed me, that she had sent it, that Jessica Burke herself had addressed it to me, writing out the painstaking capitals that spelled out my name. Like the envelope in which the key had arrived, this larger envelope lacked a return address, and yet now I knew that both it and the key were from her. I stood there staring stupidly at the envelope, as one might stare at a car in a parking lot, a car similar to one’s own and in a similar place, but not the same. Likewise this envelope was mine and not mine, and if it was not mine, I should hand it back as I would any letter gone astray. I would hand back the key as well. I will drop the key into the local mail slot, as one would drop a key through the slot in a door one had no intention of opening ever again. Do it, I said to myself. Do it now.

  I did not do it. My hand had already opened the envelope and withdrawn from it a single sheet of graph paper torn from a notebook. On the sheet, written out in the same painstaking block characters, was—what was it?—a sort of list, an itemization? An itinerary? The steps in a sequence? No, it was none of these. It was a poem. Before I read it, I knew it, what it was, what it said. I knew how it ended.

  Jessica Burke had mentioned the poem in passing, in a session. Someone had shown her a copy, or she had been assigned it in a night school class she was taking. The course had been her favorite, and she was hoping to reenroll in school, full-time if the administration would permit it. She had seemed excited, happy: if it was spring, soon it would be fall. “New pencils! New erasers! New lunch box!” she said, half ironically. Maybe it was not too late to enroll for the fall semester. If she could “throw herself on the dean’s mercy,” maybe it was not too late after all, not too late!

  This was her plan. The very fact that she had formulated a plan at all seemed to me a sign of progress; perhaps the familiar fog had lifted from the terrain of her future. I could hear the change in her voice, in the sessions and even outside my office in the lobby if she arrived early enough to chat with Itzal, the doorman.

  “You watch, Itsy,” I heard her say.
“I’m going to do it. I’ll bet you a million dollars.”

  I couldn’t hear Itzal’s response, no doubt something about how betting tempts the devil, or perhaps he merely shrugged, his shoulders lifting somewhere in the ill-hung spaces of his doorman’s coat, gaunt cheeks creased in a dry, inverted smile, as though to say: “Everything is possible.”

  It was the happiness of possibility, an infectious happiness, how the spring sunlight struck its frank spring shape on my office wall. Though I continued to work with her as I always had, I think now that my interpretations must have felt warmer to her: Yes you are now able to feel a new excitement for a future, for your new course, yes you no longer want to be somewhere else, to be someone else. For surely I felt it too, that possibility of which spring itself seemed the guarantor, the sunlit patch on the wall like a tacked-up handbill announcing a new act in town.

  The poem I was holding in the post office, she had asked, in passing, Do you know it? It had been just so great, she’d said, just to talk about books in class again, just to talk about books. She’d just gotten her first essay assignment, to write about a poem, this poem by Yeets, no, not Yeets, Yeats….Did I know it? I was obviously a literate guy, with all the books I had in my office….Do you know it? she had asked, then without waiting for an answer, going on to say that it was a fairy poem, about how the fairies lure some child away from his familiar world, saying the world is more full of weeping that he can understand. That poem, she said, do you know it?

  I had answered with natural honesty: Yes, I know it, I said. I know it well. But to have said so, to have answered her question, however truthfully, however spontaneously, was an error for an analyst, a technical misstep. Immediately I was aware of this, and of the need to regain my footing. Such a concept of error is foreign to those who have never practiced or undergone psychoanalysis, as is the idea that the analyst should disclose nothing of himself. In a well-conducted session, however, everything depends upon that abstinence. I should have said instead: What would it mean to you if I knew it? Or: You want us both to know something together. You would like to have a new kind of conversation with me, about a thing we could share. I should have said something like that, because even in her passing remark she had turned the poem into a kind of gift, and it is axiomatic to my trade that every gift conceals a squadron of vigilant desires and dissembled meanings. Here, she had in effect said, here is something I like. I want you to have it too. I want to oblige you with something in common. I want you to be obliged.

  On the other hand, the lapse was minor, a hairline scratch in the reflective surface of the analysis, a surface inevitably chipped and scraped in the course of daily sessions, even while the gentle, repetitive friction of the sessions works in time to restore that surface’s mirroring sheen. In any event, she had paused only briefly, and having registered my misstep, I had to turn my attention back to the stream of her speech. I never thought about it again until that moment in the glare and hubbub of the post office. At that moment, however, a conviction surged through me, not as an idea but as a jolt of current: Jessica Burke had sent me this letter. It was she who had sent it, and it was she who had leased the box in my name and mailed me the key. I knew then what she had meant for me to know, holding there what she had meant for me to hold. And I knew that it was not, as I had originally thought, a gift. When she had posted this letter, she had not intended it as a present. It was instead a bequest—no less so than if it had been unsealed in an attorney’s office and read out to a gathering of legatees. When she had posted the letter, her death had been as inevitably fixed in her future as it was now for me irredeemably lodged in my past. In mailing it, she had as much as said: It is my will that you should have this document. Upon the event of my death, I do desire and direct that it shall be yours.

  And yet what was it, this single sheet, torn from a notebook, this poem by Yeats you could have found in any library, any anthology? What was I meant to do with it? She had not changed it, had only copied it out by hand in blocky capital letters. Standing there, thinking none of this but knowing it, I read it through. Or rather, it read itself to me. After all, I knew it by heart, from the first stanza:

  Where dips the rocky highland

  Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

  There lies a leafy island

  Where flapping herons wake

  The drowsy water rats;

  There we’ve hid our faery vats,

  Full of berries

  And of reddest stolen cherries.

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand…

  To the last:

  Away with us he’s going,

  The solemn-eyed:

  He’ll hear no more the lowing

  Of the calves on the warm hillside

  Or the kettle on the hob

  Sing peace into his breast,

  Or see the brown mice bob

  Round and round the oatmeal chest.

  For he comes, the human child,

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

  Jessica Burke would have sent me the poem no earlier than a day or at most two before her death. Her death, I knew now, was not an accidental overdose but a suicide. In sending it, she had said: Do you remember? You admitted that you knew it. You admitted you knew it well.

  THREE

  Three years ago that was, the inception of my secret. In sending the poem, Jessica Burke had entrusted me with the fact, suddenly obvious, that she had taken her own life. I was to keep this final fact as I had kept all her others, as its mute, hired guardian. That, at least, was how I understood the envelope she had sent me and the poem it contained. Or so it seems to me now, Father, now when I ask myself why I said nothing, told no one. Whatever secret Jessica Burke had confided in me, surely I was obliged to keep it. Whom, in any event, would I have told? Not her mother, who lived in Pensacola with her third husband and tormented her daughter with maudlin, alcoholic telephone calls. Should I have told the police? They had done their job and drawn their conclusions. My job was different. Was I not by trade the custodian of stories the world would not hear?

  In any event, the window for disclosure snapped promptly shut. Each hour of delay would be an hour I would have to explain, and I had no explanation to offer. Thus the secret declared me its home. As for the postal box itself, I had no reason to open it again, and the key itself took its place among the other odd objects washed up in my years of practice: a Zuni fetish sent by a patient who had moved to New Mexico, a headless action figure an autistic child had named (to my amazement) the Danger of Speculation. Surely box and key required nothing else of me, having discharged their emissary duty. Surely Jessica Burke had no more letters to send. I brought home the poem and placed it in an empty pigeonhole in my desk.

  Nevertheless, I must have peered into box 5504 from time to time on my weekly trips to the post office, as though my eye sought repose in its perfect emptiness. I know I must have because one day, three years later, that emptiness had been replaced by the bend sinister of an envelope’s diagonal shadow in the box.

  Father, I ask you this: Why did I not assume that the letter was for someone else, that the box itself now belonged to someone else? I had never, after all, received anything else in it, had not in three years even received notice to renew its lease.

  This envelope was roughly the same size as the first one, the one with the poem, though smoother than standard manila with a faint striation, a European envelope, I thought, like the ones I had used during my years in Paris. It seems to me now that when I removed it from the post box and read my address, spelled out patiently in careful block capi
tals, there followed a moment of stillness, a floating like the floating of a vase or glass that, having escaped the hand’s grasp, turns lazily, luxuriates in air, as though no haste could trouble it before it shatters on the floor.

  The letter had been sent four days earlier. It could not have been sent by Jessica Burke, dead now these three years. These were new instructions: from where, from whom? A wave of vertigo seized me and drove me out onto the sidewalk, cresting in a surge of nausea that broke in a splatter of vomit on the curb. Someone, I seem to remember, approached me to ask if I needed help, but I must have simply walked away, apparently in the direction of the park, because after a while I was sitting on a park bench, the new envelope resting beside me, still unopened. My attention had affixed itself to the ordinary, the circumstantial, the dusting of pollen that lay on the bench, the few bruised daffodils lolling at the border of the path. I needed to get home. Hadn’t Clementine said something about bringing a friend by for dinner? I ought to stop by the store. I should check what time it is. The mechanical chorus of everyday obligation was urging me up from the bench. The daffodils, the face of my watch, everything nodded and whirred in a clockwork pantomime of the ordinary. But the ordinary had vanished forever the instant I took the envelope beside me from the postal box.

  Yes, Father, all of that I knew even before I opened the envelope, knew so completely that opening the envelope seemed the merest formality. And in fact I was not surprised, not really, to see that the envelope contained the poem, the very poem, that Jessica Burke (I once believed) had sent me three years before. The same blocked-out, handwritten capitals, regular as architect’s script, marched through the same four nearly equal stanzas, each concluding in the familiar refrain: