Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  “No,” Susan said. “No, I think it’s very natural that you would need to talk about all this. And it seems like you’ve had a very traumatic experience with your daughter. And I’m very sympathetic. I am.”

  “I knew you would be,” I said. “I was just feeling so completely lost and adrift in this city. You know, when you’re in a strange place you don’t have any cues as to who you are, and I thought: Susan is the only person I really know here.”

  She grimaced, then smiled, a confusing combination. “See, that’s where I feel like we aren’t quite understanding each other.”

  I stared, stupidly, my ears already burning hot. I had a hard time listening as she spoke. “See,” she said, “as you were talking, I realized, you know, I’ve done this a hundred times before. Not with you, I’m not saying you’ve done this to me a hundred times. But in my life, I’ve listened to a man cry and sob and bemoan what a failure he is or what a bad person or tell me how tragic his life is. And I have always let my heart go out to them, and I have always tried to mother and to fix and to help, but you know what? It never actually works. I’m just getting too old to keep doing it, Lucas. You can’t imagine how surreal it was, as you kept going on and on, it was like I was trapped in a scene I had played a thousand times. And the truth is, we don’t really know each other, do we? It’s not my job to leap in and help you get your life sorted. You need to grow up and do that on your own. We’re just strangers, really. We’re both only here on vacation.”

  I nodded. “Right,” I said, my mouth dry, my voice cracking. “You’re right.”

  “You’re going to be okay,” she said, and she reached out and squeezed my hand. “I’m going to go pay my bill and go to the afternoon tour. It’s the last one, and then there is the goodbye dinner after. Are you going?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I know I’m being harsh,” Susan said, withdrawing her hand.

  “Yes,” I said, “you are being harsh. But I understand.”

  “I’m very sorry about your daughter,” she said.

  But I couldn’t make my throat work to answer her, so I just nodded again and stared at her plate of half-finished carpaccio, the beautiful streaks of olive oil, yellow green against the white of the plate and the pink of the fish, gleaming in the sun.

  —

  It was only when I got back to my apartment and I felt the familiar buzz of my phone notifying me of an e-mail or some kind of status update that I realized I hadn’t ever turned it off after calling Katya that morning. The roaming charges would be insane. I was about to shut it off when I saw that I had four new voice mails, one of which was from Fang and was dated day before yesterday. I listened.

  “Hey there, Mr. Lucas,” Fang said, and then continued so solemnly and carefully that I wondered if he had written out what he wanted to say ahead of time. “I hope I am not out of line in calling you, but Vera has told me that you know about weaning down from her medication, and so it is my belief that there are no secrets between us anymore. I’m worried about her. She has been sending me long, occasionally incoherent e-mails. I worry that she is manic again and that it is my fault. At the same time, there is little that I can do from this distance. I hope that you will attend to this matter. Hopefully, I am wrong, but I do not think so. Thank you for allowing me to call you.”

  And then he hung up.

  What a simple and straightforward warning. One day too late.

  I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment, dazed. Then I called Katya.

  “Just get on a plane and come here.”

  Chapter 14

  Date: 7/14/2014 11:16 PM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: What’s done is done

  My Lovely V,

  As you can imagine, defending myself against your recriminations is wearying and agonizing and weirdly boring, all at the same time. It is not that I hold them against you. I understand that we are far away and you are insecure. But let me be clear: I do not care if you do not forgive me because there is nothing I need to be forgiven for. NOTHING HAPPENED.

  I am profoundly relieved that you have confessed all to your father. It is a weight off my shoulders, perhaps more than you imagine. I was also quite taken with your description of him as simple. I like your image of him as perfectly transparent, like some kind of crystal or very clean water. It is summer in California as you well know, and when you go off on such tangents it causes small cascades of thought, flights of fancy in my mind that keep me from sleeping and give me that sense of late-summer magic. Indeed, you above all other people convince me that magic is real. Not the cheap transubstantiation of handkerchiefs into doves but the abiding ontic mystery of june bugs dancing under yellow streetlights.

  Vera, we are lucky that we found each other. Before the spectacle of you, I become a toothless baby clapping in delight. Or maybe it is that you animate me, so that I become a friendly snowman instead of a pile of lumpy snow. Whatever it is, doll: You are my magic hat.

  Still, I am unhappy, lover. Your obsession with the photograph of me and Stephanie Garrison appears to be ongoing, and I do not know what to do or say to break you of the habit of that train of thought.

  Think instead of this: That we are all as simple as your father. That we are all, at heart, so breathlessly childishly clear. That is our true nature, Vera. Everything else is a mask.

  Yours truly,

  Fang

  Date: 7/17/2014 1:30 AM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: The Shoah and your pretty idiot

  My Lovely V,

  I wish you could know how helpless I feel when you present me with your wild emotions and I am able only to read them on this blinking blue eye of technology as all around me the household sleeps, except for the occasional somnambulistic pilgrimage to the kitchen by my mother. She keeps a key lime pie in the freezer and feeds off of it in the night, like a pie vampire. She prefers it frozen. She does not want it thawed. She passes by me here at the computer without saying a word. I believe she knows that I am writing to you and that I am like a love-sick puppy.

  It is time for me to confess what I have been withholding. If only it were as simple as having kissed Stephanie Garrison! You can’t know how badly I wish I had done something so straightforward. But we are not straightforward, you and I.

  I have been harboring in my heart, Vera, the secret and treasonous suspicion that all is not well with you. I try valiantly to keep from viewing you with a distance. I do not wish to become your doctor or your keeper. I dislike the idea of evaluating you, as though everything you utter to me, every idea, must be judged fit by me. I am not your judge, nor do I wish to be your jailor. And yet I am filled with the icky certainty that something is going wrong with your brain chemistry.

  Please reassure me and tell me that I am wrong.

  In either case, I am very sorry that you fought with Judith. But I would also remind you that she is your elder and that listening to her wisdom will serve you more deeply than getting to practice running your mouth. You can practice running your mouth on me.

  Yours truly,

  Fang

  Date: 7/17/2014 11:15 PM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Are you ignoring me?

  My Lovely V,

  There has begun to be a disconnect in our letters. I write to you with my concerns. I cite passages in your letters, explaining why I am worried, and you ignore these and persist in writing me as before. Now you say the ghost of your grandmother is contacting you.

  I am concerned.

  I am afraid for your safety.

  But I am also increasingly angry. We have always said that we were a team. We were a team before your episode, we were a team afterward. Together we waded through it all, the drugs, the disbelief of your parents, the unfortunate situation at school. Even at you
r most lost, I felt I could count on you to be honest with me. We were in this together.

  But I no longer feel that this is the case. Worse, I feel you have cast me in some villainous role that I cannot escape from. I cannot spend all day worrying about you. By the way, I was recently fired from Fat Burger. This does not seem like the proper venue for the story, but I assure you it was both humiliating and rather humorous. Suffice it to say, I am not a good multitasker. I was supposed to be working the grill station, most abhorrent and hellish of tasks. I do not understand how other people, people far more stupid than I am, are so good at these menial jobs. Truly, I am baffled by it. I am like a tortoise among them, trying to manipulate burger tongs with my digit-less hands.

  I am not having a good summer. Sometimes I feel the strain of trying to be myself in my current maladapted life, along with worrying about you, feeling somehow responsible for you, and yet helpless to actually do anything to assure myself of your well-being. Sometimes the strain of all this makes me feel I will snap.

  Did you know I considered lying and telling you I did kiss Stephanie Garrison, just to make it stop? Just so I could be cut free and no longer tied to the heavy anchor of my love for you? Are you really determined to tug me to the bottom of the sea after you?

  Wearily, I will follow, for I do not know how to stop.

  Yours truly,

  Fang

  PS: I am sorry I refused to ever acknowledge the note you left in my underwear drawer. I did receive it, but the effect was perhaps more claustrophobic than you intended. I have no desire to “turn into you” or to be your mental twin. That was never the plan. I wanted to love you, but as myself, and for you as yourself. Do you understand the difference?

  Date: 7/18/2014 5:21 PM

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Re: re: Are you ignoring me?

  V,

  I no longer believe there is anything I can do for you through e-mail. I have left a voice mail for your father, explaining my concerns. I cannot do this anymore.

  Please stop writing me. It is torturous for me. I cannot take any more of it.

  I hope some day you forgive me.

  As ever, just more distantly,

  Fang

  AFTER I GOT THE VOICE MAIL from Fang, it occurred to me that I had not really read his half of the e-mail exchange with Vera. Feeling much more like a snoop than I had the first time, I logged on to her computer and started to go through her mail folder. As I tried to piece together their whole correspondence, what she wrote to him, what he replied next, what she had said to that, I found that I couldn’t, and that was when I realized that a lot of his letters to her and her letters to him had been deleted. But they were right there in the trash folder of her mail program. So I read those too, and gradually a fuller picture began to emerge.

  In a way, I think Fang would have figured out what was going on even earlier if he hadn’t been so thrown off-balance by Vera’s jealousy over the Stephanie Garrison debacle. I hadn’t gone on Facebook to actually check, but it seemed that the picture in question was totally harmless: Fang smiling for a picture in a group, his arm thrown casually around the girl who happened to be standing next to him. But for Vera to be irrationally jealous was not something Fang would immediately connect to her bipolar, especially since he himself was convinced she had been misdiagnosed. Vera was quite capable of being volatile and irrational all on her own, and jealousy can cause anyone to seem insane.

  But the letters she sent to him during their fight were vile. And there were even more of them in her trash file, as though she had been aware that she should not have sent them and wished they could be stricken from the record. Fang must have been enraged by these letters, even as he sought to comfort and console her.

  Ultimately, Fang was an even stranger and more interesting person than I had guessed. It was easy to see why he and Vera had fallen for each other. I in no way blamed him for wanting to try to disentangle himself from what seemed to him the crushing moral weight of being Vera’s sole guardian, but at the same time, the idea of the two of them truly severing ties made me sad. And the timing of it. She must have gotten his last e-mail right before Daniel came over.

  I shut the laptop and rubbed my eyes. The cat jumped down through the window and came to lay beside me on Vera’s bed. The afternoon was wearing interminably on. Katya was coming, but she wouldn’t be here for almost two days. I thought of Vera in the quiet room, her padded cell, and suddenly hoped Fang stuck by his resolution to be done with loving her, to let go the heavy anchor. No matter how weirdly right they were for each other, I wouldn’t wish Romeo and Juliet on her and Fang. I wouldn’t wish for him to be the one waiting to see her at the mental hospital, or the one who has to realize she doesn’t actually want to be holding the knife, the one who has to find a way to take it from her hands. No matter how smart he was, he was still just a seventeen-year-old kid.

  I was also experiencing an almost physical sense of revulsion caused by some complicated aggregate of spiritual wrongs I had recently committed. I felt like a spy for reading such intimate exchanges between two people who would never have wanted me to read their correspondence. I felt embarrassed by Vera’s psychosis, and so added to my unease while snooping was the embarrassment of being let in on someone else’s shame.

  I remember my mother had a lover once, not Jerry, but someone just after him, who would let his house get horribly, disgracefully messy. He would keep buying new clothes so that he didn’t have to do laundry, so the dirty clothes in his back bedroom got to be waist high almost. The kitchen was unusable and putrid. My mother recruited me once to help her clean his apartment and it took us three days. I remember finding an open can of cat food among the clothes, a bag of gummy worms that had mysteriously begun to liquefy. It was appalling that a human being could live like this, and both my mother and I had an instinct to never voice to each other, nor to her boyfriend, how upsetting his house was. It was like that reading Vera’s trashed e-mails. I wanted to delete them even more permanently, to keep anyone else from ever reading these things and knowing how unreasonable she was capable of being.

  It was a horrible, queasy feeling. And dancing over this feeling were images of Susan, retinal burns almost. I could still see her plate of carpaccio in my mind, her knife fallen across the little rectangles of raw fish. She had told me she only wanted an adventure. She had told me I would ruin it with feelings. “You’re young,” she had said. And I had thought it was a compliment. I had misread her completely. Just as I had misread Vera.

  Had I misread Katya all those years ago? Was I really so bad at knowing what was real, at discerning what was true?

  I napped, disconcerted, the rest of the afternoon, the owner-less cat curled up beside me.

  —

  By evening, I did not know what to do but return to the mental hospital. Visiting hours were long over, but I went to the desk and asked if Vera was still in isolation and if she was not, could I please be allowed to see her. The nurse could not understand a word I said. I wrote my request on a piece of scrap paper, handed it to her to do with what she would, and then sat down in the waiting room and waited. I waited for three hours. Finally, at about nine o’clock, someone must have taken mercy on me or finally deciphered my note, because the nurse called me over and an orderly took me to Vera’s floor and let me see her in her room.

  She was lying on her bed, not like a sick person tucked under covers and propped up neatly, but like a mannequin that has simply been set down. She was fully dressed in some of the fresh clothes I had left for her, and her eyes were open. She gazed steadily at the ceiling. When I approached her bed and whispered her name, she did not sit up or turn to me, just lifted her eyebrows and said, “You decided to come after all.”

  “I’ve been trying to see you all day,” I said. “How are you?”

  She ignored this question, but continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “They tol
d me they put you in solitary,” I said. I wanted her to tell me about it. To tell me it had been awful, or to tell me it was not so bad, or to tell me what color the padded walls were. I pictured them blue. Were they blue? Probably they were tan.

  “You are afraid of me,” she said finally, with a queer little smile that made me shudder. Her body was nearly comatose, but her mind was still spitting up oracular little psychotic particles.

  “No,” I said, “I wanted to see you so badly. I was furious when they wouldn’t let me see you earlier.”

  “Do you know the book Hop on Pop?” she asked. “The children’s book?”

  I didn’t. Possibly I had read it when I was a child, but I had missed those years with Vera and so my memories of children’s books were dim and murky.

  “Two little bears jump on their father’s tummy. They hop on Pop. That was always how I thought of you. That was what I thought I was missing: having someone who would be magically immune to the pain I would cause them so that everything would just be hilarious all the time.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I never thought about not having a father that way.”

  “I always forget that,” she said, closing her eyes. “That you didn’t have a father, either.”

  “Yeah,” I said. And we remained there like that, Vera lying with her eyes closed on the bed, myself sitting hunched over in a chair at her side, until the orderly came to get me and tell me I had to leave.

  “Your mother is coming,” I told her, right as I was leaving. But she didn’t say anything, only shrugged, as though it didn’t matter to her at all.

  —

  The next morning was Monday, and Judith came to say goodbye before she left for the airport. I had seen her in the hallway the day before and awkwardly explained about Vera, and she hadn’t insisted on knowing more or talking. But an hour before she was supposed to leave, she showed up at my door offering me the rest of her coffee and tea. “Since you’re staying,” she said, “I thought you might need these.” I had, of course, canceled Vera’s and my flight and our future was so uncertain that I had yet to book a new one. An ongoing supply of coffee and tea was a blessing.