The Summer Without Men

addled as the powers that be in the hospital assumed. He continued his oratory by explaining that this was all related to the deeper levels of Buddhism, and as I walked toward Daisy, who had come through the door to take me home, he drifted on to Goethe’s Faust and his descent into the realm of the Mothers and his union with the nothing, and that was the last I heard.
    Lonely man. He couldn’t be Mr. Nobody, could he? After I had left the hospital, I regretted that I hadn’t made it clear to him that I was following at least some of his leaps, but all I could think about then was my daughter’s face. That something was all that mattered.
     
To recall me as she,
rocking in rooms
as white as eggs.
An underground of string—
these violent lines
of what used to be called
the heart, lost to
my now-bitter mouth.
“A tangle,” he said.
     
No, knots.
Not this or these.
She was distinct,
I believe. Shelved.
Put her away.
    Inanimate thing.
Put her away,
And let her rock.
    *   *   *
     
    “Dear Mia,” Boris wrote. “Whatever happens between us, it is very important to me to know how you are. For Daisy’s sake, too, we have to be in communication. Please send a message back when you receive this.” So reasonable, I thought, such stiff prose: in communication. I felt like biting something. He was obviously worried. He had seen me on the day after I landed in the hospital, when I was acute, delusional and hallucinating, bouffée délirante, and I was convinced he was going to steal the apartment, push me into the street, a conspiracy cooked up with the Pause and the other scientists at the lab, and when he sat across from me in the room with Dr. P., a voice said, “Of course he hates you. Everyone hates you. You’re impossible to live with.” And then, “You’ll end up like Stefan.” I screamed, “No!” and an orderly pulled me away and they injected more Haldol, and I knew they were in on it.
    His brother and his wife. Poor Boris, I could hear them say. Poor Boris, surrounded by crazy people. I remember babbling to Felicia, who had come to clean. I remember tearing down the shower curtain, explaining about the plot, yelling. I remember it perfectly, but now it’s as if I were someone else, as if I’m looking at myself from afar. It all fell away after Bea arrived. But I had frightened Boris, and because he had “agitated” me on the ward, they didn’t want him to visit again. I stared at the message for a long time before I wrote back: “I am not crazy anymore. I am hurt.” The words seemed true, but when I tried to elaborate, all further commentary seemed merely decorative. What was there to communicate ? And the irony that Boris wanted communication was almost too much to bear.
    I don’t want to talk about it. I’m waking up. Let me have my tea. We’ll talk later. I can’t talk about it. We’ve been over this a thousand times. How many times had he uttered those sentences? Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words. I am walking back and forth over the same floor. I am singing the same song. I am married to the same man. No, not really. How many times had he answered Stefan’s calls in the middle of night? Years and years of calls and rescues and doctors and the treatise that would change philosophy forever. And then the silence. Ten years of no Stefan. He was forty-seven when he died. Boris was five years older, and once, only once, the older brother had whispered to me after two scotches that the most terrible thing was that it was a relief, too, that his own beloved brother’s suicide had also been a relief. And then when his mother died—the flamboyant, complicated, self-pitying Dora—Boris was the lone survivor. His father had dropped dead of heart failure when the boys were still young. Boris did not grieve in any demonstrative way. Instead, he receded. What had my father said? “I can’t. I can’t.” I had longed to find both men, hadn’t I? My father and my husband, both prone to long disquisitions about torts or genes and so mute about their own suffering. “Your father and your husband shared a number of traits,” Dr. S. had said. The past tense: shared. I looked at the message. I am hurt . Boris had been hurt, too. I added, “I love you. Mia.”
    *   *   *
     
    The sex