“Why don’t you just leave the note and the dates at her office?” Whitney had asked. “She has a little wicker basket on her door.”
“Because I want her to get them here,” I’d answered, and Whitney had nodded knowingly. I get it, that nod had said.
I did utilize that little wicker basket, however: One day I left Carissa a colorful nylon loop for her eyeglasses, and on another I left her a pair of red wool socks with green reindeer and white snowflakes. For a moment the socks had seemed a little personal, but then I told myself I was the only person on the planet who grouped pretty wool socks with lingerie—it wasn’t, after all, like I was giving her a pair of silk tap pants and a camisole, for God’s sake—and so I offered her that gift as well.
And I knew Carissa had a cat, and her cat’s happiness mattered to her greatly. Consequently, I left off a care package for both, a calico bag filled with catnip for the kitty and home-baked chocolate Christmas cookies for her that I had bought when I was taking Abby to meet Santa in Middlebury.
When she finally called, the Monday after I had begun my courtship in earnest, she begged me to stop and said she couldn’t possibly accept the gifts I had given her. She said she would have to give them all back.
“Even the catnip?” I asked.
“Well, not the catnip. Sepia’s spent the last couple days in kitty heaven.”
“And the cookies?”
“Okay, not the cookies, either. But that eyeglass thing, and that Christmas ornament, and—”
“You can’t give back the dates, Carissa. For all you know, I’m a Berber warrior with one very macho temper.”
“The fact is, I know you’re not.”
“And the loop for your eyeglasses cost ninety-nine cents. Even if you give it back to me, I promise you I won’t bother returning it to the store. Christmas is only a week away. Keep it.”
“You really want me to?”
“Desperately.”
She sighed, and the moment I heard the whisper of her breath, I knew she was, at least for the moment, wooed. I closed my eyes and pulled the mouthpiece away from my lips so she wouldn’t hear my own little snuffle of rapture.
“You know if I agree to go out with you,” she said, “you’ll have to see a new homeopath.”
“I’ll be strong.”
“I’ll give you the name of a fellow in Burlington. He’s excellent.”
“Thank you.”
“And I hope you know I don’t feel good about this.”
“I won’t think less of you in the morning. I promise,” I told her as I glanced at the calendar I kept on my desk. I saw Wednesday night was the yearly meditation on boredom that posed as a party at the mayor’s office in City Hall, and Thursday and Friday nights I had important dates with my daughter: Thursday was the preschool’s annual holiday play, and Friday we were shopping for Christmas presents for her cousins in New Hampshire. No matter. I would see Carissa tomorrow night. Tuesday. Tomorrow night I’d be on a date with my homey. Ex-homey. Erst-homey. Homey from heaven.
From Psora
(OR PSORIASIS)
The good physician will be pleased when he can enliven and keep from ennui the mind of a patient.
Dr. Samuel Hahnemann,
The Chronic Diseases, 1839
“Spend Christmas Eve with us, too,” my sister, Diana, was saying. “Drive down here the day before. Abby can bunk with Lydia.”
Even before Elizabeth had died, we’d always seemed to spend Christmas Day with my sister’s family in Hanover. Thanksgiving was usually earmarked for Elizabeth’s family, but Christmas seemed to be devoted to mine. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought this had something to do with the teddy bears, and the huge numbers of them that had wound up with Diana—including the eight-foot display teddy our father’s company had used for years in its trade show booth. Initially, Diana had been reduced to shrieking and sobs when she first saw it when she was nine: The poor child had wandered downstairs in our house in the middle of the night Christmas Eve and discovered what we would come to call Giganto Bear sitting upright in the doorway. Our father had thought it would make a fun Christmas surprise, and indeed it had. Sort of.
In any case, the teddies were now a symbol of Christmas for Diana, and that meant spending the holiday in New Hampshire.
“I can’t imagine not being here Christmas Eve,” I said, resting the cordless phone on my shoulder and spooning the last bite of breakfast melon into my mouth. I pressed the rind into the garbage and wandered into the living room to admire the tree Abby and I had decorated. About ninety-nine percent of the ornaments were on the branches Abby could reach, and so the spruce looked a bit like a mountain with a tree line: About three feet off the ground, the glass balls and cloth reindeer and silver tinsel started to diminish. By four feet the decorations went from sparse to nonexistent. My contributions, essentially, were the blue angel and the star that sat perched at the top of the tree.
“Abby expects Santa to find her here,” I continued. “She expects to wake up in her very own house and find her presents under her very own tree.”
“Santa somehow gets to those kids who are away from home all the time. Just tell her about the Christmas bookings at hotels in Hawaii.”
“And one of Abby’s friends is having a little party that night. They’re all going to bake cookies for Santa. And you know how I love the Christmas Eve service here. You know how I love all the candles.”
“We do have churches in Hanover, you know.”
“Yeah, but you people are smarter than we are. You don’t give the little kids candles.”
“You really want to be there when the church goes up in flames. Is that it?”
“Have you ever watched their faces when they’re raising and lowering their candles? They’re so earnest about it. So serious. It’s wonderful. They get the meaning of the ritual much better than we adults do.”
“They’re just little pyros. It’s the only time they’re given an adult-sanctioned chance to play with fire. Will Abby get her own candle this year?”
“Maybe. I think we’re going to go to the eight-thirty service. It’ll depend on how awake she is.”
“So you’ll drive down here Christmas morning?”
“You bet. Will you be done opening the loot Santa left by early afternoon?”
“God, yes. Will and Lydia will have ripped apart the mountain by seven A.M. By early afternoon, they’ll have the list ready with everything Santa forgot—and the stores where Mom and Dad can find it.”
“Then we’ll leave here about eleven. We should be in Hanover by one.”
“What will you do Christmas Eve?”
“You mean besides the candlelight service?”
“Besides that, yes.”
“I’m having dinner with someone.”
“Like a date?”
“Romantic dinner for two.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Here, like your house?”
“Like that. Yes.”
“Is this a woman you’ve been seeing a long time? Is this some secret you’ve had all fall?”
“Oh, no. I would have told you. Tonight’s our first date.”
“But you’re spending Christmas Eve together?”
“Well, it’s not official. I haven’t asked her,” I said. I reached down for one of the silver and blue bells on the tree and turned it so that the swirls faced the center of the room.
“But you think she’ll say yes.”
“I do,” I said, and I noticed the ornament sparkle as it reflected a fragment of light from the sun. “I’m absolutely sure of it.”
Do I know Richard Emmons because I know his cure? Sometimes I believe that I do. Biographers, after all, often begin their books knowing that little about their subjects. Besides, I know what Carissa was thinking when she administered Richard’s remedy, and what Jennifer told me about the weeks before and after the tiny pellets of medicine rolled in the pink-and-white froth of his mouth
.
And so it is not merely the blistering nodules on his hands I can see: I can see also the way he would self-consciously kiss his daughter or his son on the cheek before leaving for work, touching them by design with only his lips. An embrace is out of the question, because that would mean nearing their skin with his.
I can see him unwilling to run his fingers along his wife’s thighs.
And, like many adults who are no longer young, I, too, have felt aches and pains in my joints. Richard’s arrived in the fall of the year he would die, twinges and pricks that came on with cold weather. When he would stretch, the needles would ebb, but it would take time.
Besides, when we’re asleep we don’t stretch, and so he had yet one more reason that autumn to be awake in the night.
And, of course, there was the asthma. But it usually wasn’t the asthma itself that frightened him, it was the chemicals he used to control it. It was the idea that his regimen already included a combination of drugs with incomprehensible names, and now his doctor was offering more. There was, I imagine, the fear that he would grow into an old man with a wallet card listing his meds, a cardboard materia medica of the capsules and pills dissolving every day in his stomach.
Often those cards are twenty names long. I fear them, too.
And so in his bed in the night, his world would be reduced to his infirmities. Arguably, they were neither debilitating nor incapacitating. Not in reality. But that changes nothing. In the night he’d still fret.
Yet Richard was, like all of us, more than the sum of his symptoms. There he is with his hands in his pockets, putting up a good front before the young art directors and copywriters who work for him at his ad agency. There he is in the spring, a patient Little League coach, managing somehow to teach eight-year-olds how to bunt. There he is driving home from Boston in a blizzard so bad the airports are closed, so he can see his daughter as Dorothy in a junior-high-school production of The Wizard of Oz.
And there he is surprising himself with a desire—a wish in some ways more pronounced than the hunger to look at his hands and not find them repellent, to breathe without medication, to grow old with something that resembles serenity—he’d shared with only his wife.
Richard Emmons really did wish that his kids could have a pet.
“I don’t want to know everything there is to know about homeopathy,” I said to Carissa over dinner. “It’s enough for me to know it works.”
I’d chosen one of the restaurants in Burlington on the shore of Lake Champlain, and while it was too dark to see a bloody thing but an occasional light from the ferries crossing the water between New York and Vermont, I liked being close to the lake. I heard in my mind the word aura when I suggested the spot, wondering if I’d ever before thought of the word in my life, or whether that, too, was a bonus from arsenic: access to the vocabulary I had stored somewhere in my head that I never bothered to use.
We’d met at the restaurant so I wouldn’t have to drive all the way back to Bartlett to get her—although I had indeed offered—and so for the first few minutes of dinner I found myself ruing the fact there was absolutely no chance we’d sleep together that night. After all, we wouldn’t wind up back at her house together since I wouldn’t be driving her home, nor would we wind up at mine because one of us had suggested in the warm little cocoon of an auto in winter that we give each other a tongue-bath.
At some point soon after our menus arrived, however, I stopped wondering where the dinner would go. It might have been the quiet Christmas music in the background, or the red candles on the table. It might have been the wine.
It might even have been the arsenic.
And so I shared with Carissa my enthusiasm for the remedy as we sipped herbal tea over dessert.
“I’m glad you feel so good,” she said. “I’m surprised—not by the fact that your remedy seems to be working, but by your confidence in the protocol.”
“Well, it did what it was supposed to do.”
“Apparently.”
“How did you become a homeopath?” I asked.
“I met one on an airplane when I was going to England. It was eight years ago now. He sat next to me.”
“Were you already a psychologist?”
“I was still getting my hours for certification, but I’d finished school.”
“Was he British?”
“The homeopath? No. He lived in London, but he was originally from New Delhi. He’s Indian.”
“And while you were chatting about medicine, you grew interested in homeopathy?”
“There was more to it than that. I was flying to London to see my best friend, my college roommate. She’d been spiraling downhill for months, and she’d just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I wanted to see what was going on firsthand. And the fellow I met on the plane, the homeopath, actually ended up treating her. He took the time to visit her and see what he could do. We’re still good friends.”
“Did she see a traditional doctor, too?”
“He is a doctor. He’s a psychiatrist.”
I nodded. I was surprised, and I realized I shouldn’t have been. Carissa had already told me that many homeopaths were medical doctors. “Did he treat her with purely homeopathic remedies?”
“No, it was a combination therapy. He and her doctors gave her some of the more usual medications for schizophrenia, too.”
“But it was the homeopathy part that impressed you.”
“It was.”
“So you’ve only been doing this six or seven years, then?”
She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Suddenly afraid you put your health in the hands of a novice?”
“No, not at all.”
“I’ve been a full-time homeopath for just about six years.”
“I gather you’ve treated Whitney.”
“You and Whitney talk way too much.”
“She’s a big fan of yours.”
“She’s young.”
“How’s your friend now? The one with schizophrenia?”
“She’s doing fine. Maybe you’ll meet her someday.”
The waiter returned to our table with the check, and while I was dropping my credit card onto the plastic after-dinner mints tray, I heard a sentence form in my head and was unable to stop it from escaping my lips: “Spend Christmas Eve with me.”
Instantly the waiter retreated.
“Spend Christmas Eve with me,” I said a second time, hoping when I said the words again I’d understand exactly what I meant. Was I asking her to visit me in the early evening for a chaste dinner while my daughter was off baking sugar cookies, was I merely asking her up to see the tree? Certainly that’s what I’d had in mind when I told my sister my plans that morning.
Was I now, however, asking her to, literally, spend the night with me? Did I really just ask this woman to sleep with me? I wondered.
I realized I wasn’t sure what I’d meant. Immediately, of course, I began hoping she’d come to the worst—no, not the worst, simply the most erotic—interpretation and answer yes. I hoped she’d assume I had just asked her into my bed. Or onto the couch by the tree. Or onto the thick rug on the floor by the woodstove.
She ran her fingertips along her collarbone and stared at the black window facing the lake, and then at me. There was a tiny hint of candle flame in her eyeglasses.
“Sure,” she said, “that would be nice,” her answer not offering me the slightest clue as to what she’d heard in my invitation. As with our dinner together that night, I’d just have to wait and see where Christmas Eve would go.
I had not honestly expected we would make love Christmas Eve. I’d hoped we would, but I certainly hadn’t expected it. Carissa had been unable to get her car started, however, and so after dropping my daughter off at her friend’s house, I’d driven into Bartlett to get her. And when she’d climbed into the truck a little past five and shown me the wicker basket of food she’d assembled as a present, I’d decided there was a pretty good chance we’d wi
nd up in my bedroom before Abby returned.
“One-stop shopping,” she’d said when I told her she shouldn’t have brought me a gift (though I had gotten her a book about dreams that had just been published, an absolute natural since it had the word butterfly in its title). “It’s all from the health-food store. It seemed appropriate to shop there, given the way we met.”
When we arrived at my house, she began pulling the items from the basket one by one, laying them side by side on the counter in the breakfast nook: There were truffles made with carob and honey, and cookies sweetened with fruit juice. There were dates rolled in coconut and dates that were plain, neither of which, Carissa told me, she expected me to eat. “I just didn’t want to offend a Berber in his own home,” she explained. And there were bags and bags of nuts, which she said she wouldn’t have thought of bringing if she hadn’t run into another patient of hers in the store, an asthmatic who was allergic to cashews.
But it was the whole-wheat English muffins, delivered daily to Bartlett from the natural-foods bakery in Burlington, and the box of breakfast tea that I found most arousing. English muffins weren’t usually an aphrodisiac, but I remembered she’d said Tuesday night that she always had an English muffin for breakfast. And while I couldn’t imagine that she thought we’d actually be having breakfast together Christmas Day—would there be a worse way to introduce Carissa into Abby’s life?—the muffins and the tea were a signal, a gesture that was tender and amorous at once.
And so as she was showing me the remainder of the contents of the basket and explaining the significance of each—the echinacea was obvious, it was sort of like our song, but I wouldn’t have understood that a garlic clove smelled a bit like arsenic if she hadn’t told me—I kissed her, a brush across her lips barely more passionate than the chaste peck on the cheek I’d offered in the parking lot of the restaurant earlier that week.