We Are Water

When we were out in the parking lot, standing at our cars, Siobhan announced that she had made a big decision about us. “About us?” I laughed. She didn’t. She had given it a lot of thought, she said. She was ready to be “deflowered” and wanted her “knight in shining armor” to be “the one.” I stood there, shaking my head and telling her that was not going to happen. And when she didn’t seem to want to take no for an answer—started getting a little belligerent, in fact—I climbed into my rusted-out ’68 Volkswagen with the bad muffler, started it, and rumbled the hell away from her. Too bad I hadn’t acted as professionally the night Jasmine Negron invited me in and fixed me that drink. I could have spared myself a whole lot of trouble and shame.

That was the last I ever saw of Siobhan, although for the remainder of my semesters as an undergraduate and well into grad school and my widening sexual experience, she occasionally starred in my masturbatory fantasies. But years later, after I had become a licensed clinical psychologist and landed the counselor’s job at the university, I thought I had run into her again—at the dry cleaner’s of all places.

Not long before that, I had extricated myself from my three-year relationship with Thea and was still licking my wounds from that debacle of codependency. She and I had been living together for two years at that point. She was midway through her doctoral studies in Feminist Theory. The beginning of the end had come the night when, postcoitally—after a go-around that I had assumed we were both enjoying—she’d informed me that, in a way, Andrea Dworkin was right. About what? I’d asked. That heterosexual sex was a form of rape, she’d said, and then had drifted off to sleep while I lay there listening to her snore. It had taken me three weeks and a couple of sessions with my shrink before I mustered up the resolve to tell her I wanted her to move out. “Good riddance and fuck you!” the note she had left me said. She had placed it on top of the pile of my LPs she’d taken out of the jackets and snapped in half: Tom Rush, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Highway 61 Revisited …

That late afternoon when I hurried into the dry cleaner’s with my armful of dirty shirts and thought it was Siobhan stepping up to the counter, I stopped cold. Same red hair and pale complexion, same petite frame. But up close, I could see that I’d been mistaken. “We’re closed,” she said—with attitude. So I copped an attitude, too. “Really? Because the door isn’t locked and your clock up there says three minutes of six.”

“Name?” she said, huffily.

“Orion Oh. Doctor Orion Oh.”

She was unimpressed. “Starch or no starch?”

And that was how I met Annie, my second red-haired damsel in distress. When I left the dry cleaner’s that day, our hostile little exchange might have been the sum total of our interaction had I not noticed that the only other car out front, a beat-up yellow El Camino, had a front tire that was pancake flat. I waited until the lights went out and she emerged, purposely not looking at me. I pointed. “Shit!” she said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” She burst into tears.

I offered to change it for her. “Spare in the trunk?” I asked. She said the flat tire was the spare. And so I had jacked up the car and driven her and her wheel with the punctured tire over to the Sears at the mall. They said they were behind—couldn’t get to it until an hour or so—and so I’d taken her to Bonanza Steakhouse while we waited. You’d have thought that rib eye and Texas toast she got when we went through the line was fine dining. Which, relatively speaking, I guess it was. In the weeks that followed, I found out that she was mostly subsisting on Oodles of Noodles and SpaghettiOs, heated on the hot plate in her tiny rented room. That was the first meal Annie ever “cooked” for me: SpaghettiOs with these tiny little monkey’s gonad meatballs. “No, no, it’s delicious,” I assured her when she apologized, even as I pictured my Nonna and Nonno Valerio rolling around in their graves.

Well, you sure can’t call Annie a damsel in distress these days, now that her work sells in the tens of thousands of dollars. That’s something I never could have imagined back after the twins were born when she started making her shadow box collages. The last time I talked to Marissa, she told me that one of her mother’s pieces, Angel Wings #17, had just sold for fifty-five thou to Fergie. “Wow,” I said. “Did she pay her in dollars or British pounds?”

“Not her,” Marissa said. “Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas.”

“Oh, right,” I said. When I got off the phone, I had to Google this other Fergie to find out who she was …

Well, maybe now I can finally explore my creative side for a change. Do I even still have a creative side after all these years of tamping it down? Providing a service for others? To be determined, I guess. And though there’s probably not much of a demand for a middle-aged ex-psychologist who can probably still reproduce the likenesses of Smokey the Bear and Alfred E. Neuman from muscle memory, there might be other artistic avenues for me to explore. Maybe I could buy myself a nice digital camera and get into photography. Or try my hand at sculpting. My Italian grandfather was a machinist, but he’d done a little sculpting on the side. Miniatures, mostly. I still have the little soapstone dolphin he made for me. To this day, I’ll sometimes pick up that smiling figurine and hold it in the palm of my hand. Smile back at it … I like to cook and I’m good at it. My immigrant Chinese grandfather was a hardworking, unsmiling restaurateur in Boston. And Nonna Valerio would sometimes let me help her make the sheet pizzas she used to peddle in the neighborhood. (Speaking of muscle memory, now that the traffic’s come to a complete stop, I’ve just caught myself, hands off the steering wheel, pushing pizza dough to the edges of Nonna’s scorched, warped baking sheets.) Maybe I could work up a concept, create a menu that combined Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. Open up a little bistro someplace. Call it … Marco Polo. But no, once the concept was figured out and the menu was fixed, running a restaurant would be full-immersion service work. Not unlike being a psychologist in that respect. People walk in the door because they need you to take care of them—to feed them or fix them. What are you going to be when you grow up, Orion? What are you going to be, Dr. Oh, now that they’ve booted your ass out the door?

God, it’s been a brutal year. In January, Annie’s and my three-year separation ended in divorce. That same month, I learned that I was not, after all, going to be named coordinator of Clinical Services. It was a position I’d been ambivalent about at first, but one I’d been assured would be mine if I went after it. That was what Allen Javitz, the dean of student affairs, had said as we stood in line at the bar at some university social function. And after he said that, I did want it. Felt not only that I’d earned the appointment after twenty-one years in Psych Services but also that I’d be damn good at it. I’m an empathetic listener, an out-of-the-box problem solver. But when my director, Muriel Clapp, bypassed me in favor of the far more flashy Marwan Chankar, an addictions counselor newly arrived from Syracuse University, Dean Javitz reneged and gave Chankar the nod. When the announcement was made, I felt as if I’d been sucker punched. Still, I shook Marwan’s hand and tried my best to be philosophical about it. I reminded myself that not having to supervise sixteen clinicians was going to save me a whole lot of meetings, evaluations, and headaches.

I began to look at my endgame. Made appointments with reps from Human Resources and my pension fund. Sat down with my calculator and crunched some numbers. If I stuck it out for another four years, I figured, I’d be able to retire at 80 percent of my salary. At which point, I could sell the house, move into a smaller place, do some traveling. Maybe by then I’d have met someone I wanted to travel with. Every time Marissa bugged me about trying one of those matchmaking Web sites, I’d assure her that she’d be the first to know when I was ready to start dating, which I wasn’t yet. And that, anyway, I was “old school.” I’d much rather meet someone in person than online. But truth be told, I was still holding out hope that Annie would come to her senses. Break it off with her flashy New York girlfriend and come back home. I’d even dreamt it once—had woken up laughing, relieved. Then I’d sat up in our empty bed. Even my dreams were sucker punching me.

“Daddy, do you think some nice woman’s going to just ring your doorbell someday and ask you out?” Marissa had said the last time she brought it up. She’d texted me ten minutes earlier with a seven-word message: call me. wanna talk 2 U dude. I can’t remember when she started calling me “dude” instead of “Daddy,” but I got a kick out of it. Started calling her “dude,” too. “It’s the twenty-first century. This is the way people meet people now, dude. You just need to, like, reboot yourself.”

“Really? Am I a Mac or a PC?”

“I’m serious. And if you ask me, it’s not that you’re not ready. It’s that you’re scared.”

“Hey, I thought I was the shrink. What am I scared of?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Being happy?”

I assured her that I was happy enough for the present time.

“Yeah, but the thing is, there are tons of women your age out there. My girlfriend Bree? Her mother was so repressed that, in all the years she was married to Bree’s father, she never even undressed in front of him. Then she met this guy on eHarmony, and now she’s into all this stuff she never would have done before.”

“Like what?”

“Kayaking, motorcycling. Last week they went to a nude beach.”

“Public skinny-dipping? Good god, Marissa, now I really am scared.”

She giggled. “And you know what else? Oral sex. Bree’s mom told her that letting her boyfriend go down on her was very liberating. And that giving him head made her feel empowered.”

“And I bet she’d be thrilled to know that Bree is broadcasting these breakthroughs to the world. Has she tweeted it yet? Put it on YouTube?”

“Enough with the jokes, Daddy. Mom’s moved on. You should, too. And don’t tell me you’re happy when I know you’re not.”

“I said I was happy enough,” I reminded her. “Dude.”

But I wasn’t. The finality of the divorce, the nonpromotion, both of them happening in the dead of winter when, by 5:00 P.M., it was already dark. I’d drive home, turn on the lights and the TV, open the fridge. The freezer pretty much told the story. I’d stare in at the frozen dinners and pizzas. The frozen top of the cake from Annie’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, the bottles of Grey Goose on the door, chilled and waiting. One microwaved meal and two or three vodkas later, I’d flop onto the recliner in the family room and fall asleep too early. Wake up having to pee a couple of hours later and then be unable to get back to sleep. So I’d read, walk around the house, watch a bunch of bad TV: televised poker games, infomercials for juicers and Time-Life music collections. The latter are always hosted by some unidentified woman and an icon from pop music’s yesteryear: Bobby Vinton or Bobby Vee or one of Herman’s Hermits. Of course, all of the coolest icons overdosed and died years ago, which is just as well. How depressing would it be to see a gray-haired Jimi Hendrix wearing a cardigan sweater and reminiscing about the soundtrack of the Summer of Love? …

Some nights I’d end up staring, in disbelief still, at the empty coat hangers on Annie’s side of our bedroom closet, her gardening sneakers on the floor below them. Those sneakers were the one pair of shoes she hadn’t taken with her. There’s not a whole lot of gardening to be done, I guess, when you’ve relocated to a Manhattan high-rise. On other nights, I’d wander into the kids’ rooms, looking at the things they’d left behind on their shelves and walls after they grew up and moved away: sports trophies and good citizenship plaques, posters of Rage Against the Machine and Green Day, Garciaparra in his Red Sox uniform. On the toughest nights—the sleepless vigils that lasted until daybreak—I’d sometimes take out the family photo albums. Leaf through the old pictures of the kids and Annie and me—the ones of us at Disney World or Rocky Neck, or gathered around the dining-room table for some holiday dinner, someone’s birthday party. In one of my favorite photos, the twins, puffy-cheeked, blow out their birthday candles. Their cake has a big number five on the top. Annie’s standing to their left, holding baby Marissa. Back then when I took that picture, it wasn’t as if I was wildly happy. Jumping out of bed every morning and thinking, oh man, this is the life! But it had been the life, I realize now. I was one of Counseling Services’ young go-getters. I’d jog or play basketball with some of the grad students at lunchtime, run late-afternoon groups for undergraduates who were wrestling with anger management, stress management. I’d started those groups, in fact. Had won a university award for it. And after work, there’d be my own kids to drive home to: roughhousing and piggyback rides, Chutes and Ladders at the kitchen table. On the nights I got home in time, I’d bathe them and get them ready for bed, read them those same stories they wanted to hear over and over: Mog the Cat, Clifford the Big Red Dog. I drank beer back then. A six-pack would last me a week or more. I’d sleep soundly every night and wake up every next morning, reach over and find Annie’s shoulder, her hip. Cup the top of her head … Then the kids grew up, Annie left for New York, and her side of the bed got occupied by books and journal articles I meant to read, clothes I’d ironed and laid out for work the night before. That girl Bree’s mother was straddling the back of a motorcycle, holding on to her eHarmony boyfriend and roaring through her newly liberated life. I was, on workday mornings, carrying my empty vodka bottles and microwaveable food containers out to the recycling box and then driving off to a job for which I’d lost my fire. All day long, I’d sit across from students, listening sympathetically for the most part, or feigning sympathetic listening when I wasn’t feeling it, all the while glancing discreetly at the circular wall clock behind them, floating above all of those troubled heads like a full moon. “Well, that’s forty-five minutes. We have to wrap up now.”

And then this past March my malaise was replaced by panic when Jasmine Negron, one of my clinical practicum supervisees, walked into Muriel Clapp’s office and charged me with sexual harassment. It was one of those Rashomon-like situations. I said/she said.

But you were in her apartment, right?

I was. She was frightened. I gave her a ride home and she asked me in for a drink.

And you accepted.

Not at first. I tried to beg off, but she said would I please come in. The guy she’d broken up with still had the key to her place and wouldn’t give it back. A few nights earlier, she’d gotten home and he was there, sitting on her sofa. He wouldn’t leave.

How many drinks did you have while you were there, Orion?

Two. And granted, she’d poured them with a heavy hand, but … two.

I had to look away from her. Talk, instead, to my fidgeting hands in my lap. I’m not going to sit here and lie to you, Muriel. Look, should I have gone into her apartment? Started drinking with her? No. I admit it was a stupid thing to do. Was I an idiot not to get the hell out of there when she started coming on to me? Hell, yeah. Look her in the eye, I told myself. Say it right to her face. But I’m telling you, Muriel, she came on to me, and if she’s claiming otherwise, she’s lying. It was painful sitting there and watching the skepticism on her face.

And then, a week or so later, while Muriel was convening her kangaroo court, there was the second, more painful body blow.

Sounds like you’re feeling better about things, Seamus.

Yeah. Much better, Dr. Oh. You said the new medication might take a couple of weeks to kick in, but I think it’s already working. The following morning, while the other kids in his dorm were still asleep, the custodian entered the building at the start of his day and found him hanging from a rope in the stairwell …

Don’t! I tell myself. Four or five months’ worth of self-flagellating postmortems and what good have they done that poor kid or his grieving parents? Think about something else. Think about where you go from here …

Maybe I could write a book. I’ve always had a facility with language and, over the years, I’ve probably read a hundred or more suspense novels. There’s a sameness to those page-turners that ride the best seller lists. I could study a bunch of them, take notes on what they have in common, and follow a formula. How hard could it be? …

Jesus, this stop-and-go traffic is driving me nuts. All summer long, the TV’s been talking about how everyone in the country is cutting back because of the economy—taking “staycations.” But I guess my fellow travelers along Route 6 never got the memo … Are the Sox playing today? Maybe there’s a game on. I poke the radio buttons and get, instead of baseball, classical music, Obama bashing, some woman singing If you liked it, then you should have put a ring on it, If you liked it, then you shoulda put a ring on it. At the far end of the dial, some distraught-sounding guy is talking to a radio shrink about his son. “I love him so much, but he’s done this terrible thing and—”

“And what thing was that?”

“He … molested my granddaughter. His niece. Went to prison for it. And he’s suffering in there. The other inmates, and some of the guards, have made him a target, okay? Made his life in there a living hell.”

“And what about his victim? He’s given her a life in hell, too. Hasn’t he? Your son had a choice about whether or not to rob her of her innocence. But she didn’t. Did this happen once? More than once?”

“It went on over a couple of years. Until he got caught.”

“And how old is his victim?”

“My granddaughter? She’s eleven. It started when she was eight. But anyway, I write to him, okay? Try to be supportive. But whenever I start one of those letters, I think about what he did and it fills me with rage.”

“Well, that’s an appropriate response. But why in the world would you write him sympathetic letters?”

“Because he’s my son. I love him in spite of—”

“And that’s an inappropriate response. Personally, I think convicted pedophiles should get the death penalty. If my son did what your son did, he’d be dead to me.”

Jesus, the poor guy’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Show him a little compassion, will you?

“Yeah, but the thing is—”

“The thing, sir, is that your son did something so vile, so despicable, that it’s unforgivable. You should be focusing your energies on helping your granddaughter, not your piece-of-crap son. Stop being a weenie. He’s earned what he’s getting in there.”

Well, there’s a counseling style for you: bludgeon the patient. I reach over and change the station. But what she’s just told that guy—that he should reject his son—ricochets inside my head and transports me back to that drab, joyless room on the third floor of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where my mother lay dying. Where, three or four days before she passed, she and I finally touched on the untouchable subject of Francis Oh, the father who had denied my existence. When I was a kid, from time to time I had asked Mom about him, but she’d told me almost nothing. Had gotten huffy whenever I inquired. How could she tell me what she didn’t know? she’d say. And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I had grown to hate the mysterious Francis Oh. Had decided he wasn’t the only one who could play the rejection game. “Fuck you,” I’d tell him, standing in front of the bathroom mirror—borrowing my own face because I had no idea what his looked like. It was around that time that my friend Brian and I went to the movies to see that movie The Manchurian Candidate. I had sat there squirming, I remember. Imagining that every one of those Chinese brainwashers in Frank Sinatra’s flashbacks was Francis Oh. It had freaked me out to the point that I got up, ran up the aisle and out to the men’s room, and puked up my popcorn and soda. By the time I went back in, I had missed a good fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie. “You okay?” Brian whispered. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” I had snapped back. A few days later, I hit upon the idea of being rid of my Chinese surname. I would take my mother’s and my grandparents’ name instead—become Orion Valerio instead of Orion Oh. Rather than telling my mother, I walked down to city hall one day after school and asked in some office about how to do it. But the process was complicated and costly, and I gave up on the idea. Instead, whenever anyone asked about him, I’d say my father died. Had gotten killed in a car accident when my mother was pregnant. I liked telling people that. Killing off the father who wanted no part of me. After a while, I almost came to believe my own lie.

But decades later, after I had become a father myself and was facing the fact that my mother’s life was slipping away, I broached the subject with her again. And this time, she was more forthcoming than she’d ever been …

She looks terrible. Her hair’s matted against the pillow and she’s not wearing her false teeth. But she’s having one of her better days. They extracted a liter of fluid from her cancerous lung this morning, and she’s breathing easier. “He was a regular at the movie house where I worked as an usherette my senior year in high school,” she says. “A college student studying mathematics—a lonely young man who always came to the show by himself. He liked gangster movies and started teasing me about the love stories I told him I preferred. Kidding me about how ‘sappy’ they were. And then one day, out of the blue, he brought me a bouquet of daisies.” He was something of a mystery, she says; it had been part of his appeal. “My parents were strict and the nuns at the girls’ school where I went were advocating chastity so stridently that I gave in to his advances as a form of rebellion.” Their affair had been brief, she says, and she’d known nothing about birth control. “Nowadays, the drugstores put condoms right out on the counter, but it was different back then. I thought it was something the man took care of, but I had no idea how.” She says it was only after she became pregnant with me that Francis told her he was married. “Unhappily, he said, but he wouldn’t leave his wife because it would bring dishonor to his family.”

She begins to cough. Points to the cup of ice chips on her tray table. I put some on the little plastic spoon and feed them to her. She sucks on them, smiles weakly, and continues. “He tried to convince me to end my pregnancy or put you up for adoption, but I refused. I knew I wanted you despite what was to come. I already loved you, Orion.” He saw her one more time after he learned she was pregnant, she says. “And then after that, he just disappeared. Stopped coming to the movies. Withdrew from his college. I tried to contact him there—borrowed my friend’s car and drove over there. But the woman in the registrar’s office wouldn’t give me an address. She was sympathetic after I began to cry. I had started showing a little by then, and I’m sure she put two and two together. But she stuck to her guns. And so I surrendered to the inevitable. Went home and confessed to Mama and Papa.” The following Saturday, her father drove her to the Saint Catherine of Siena Home for Unwed Mothers, she says, and she spent the remainder of her pregnancy there. Got her high school diploma but had to miss her graduation. “The sisters tried for months to convince me to do what most of the other girls agreed to: hand the baby over to Catholic Charities so that some nice childless couple who had prayed for a baby could adopt you. They accused me of being selfish, but I just kept shaking my head. I wanted to keep you and raise you and that was that.”