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“M-m-maybe the doorman sent them away.”
“Cecelia,” Dr. Q. says, returning to his chair. “Where were you in August 1969?”
“You know where I was.”
“Where were you?”
“Yazgur’s Farm,” I say defiantly.
“And what were you doing there? Gonna join in a rock ‘n’ roll band?”
“Dr. Q. I was three years old. My mother dragged me there. No one paid attention to me. I had shit in my pants for hours. My mother was on an acid trip.”
“And everywhere was a song and a celebration”
“It wasn’t a celebration . . .the hippies made me dance . . . I was lost . . . my mother was on an acid trip. . . .”
Dr. Q. turns into Mrs. Spickel, the guidance counselor. “Hello, Cecelia. Your mother is dead. Aren’t you lucky it happen
ed now, when you’re seventeen, and not when you were a little girl. I hear your mother was very wild. . . .”
I’m crying. I’m crying hysterically like I’m going to break in two. I wake up.
Of course, it’s Hubert’s mother who is dead, not mine.
She died in a freak skiing accident when Hubert was seventeen.
Poor little lost prince, standing on the deck of his twenty-two-foot racing sloop, one hand on the rudder, staring out at the sea, wistful and a little bit fierce (like someone training himself to hold back tears), a forelock of dark hair falling over his forehead. He is a teenage girl’s dream: hurt, in need of rescue, a prince, a teen idol.
“I can save him,” I think, staring at the black-and-white photograph on the cover of Time magazine, sitting on the cheap, Scandinavian-wood coffee table in the living room with the nubbly green polyester couch in the house in Lawrenceville, Massachusetts, where my mother has decided to settle with the man who works in the fish business.
“I can save you, little prince,” I think, although he is not little (six-two) and just on the edge of manhood, and forever away, staying at the home of rich society people in the Caribbean and planning to attend Harvard in the fall. I stare at the photograph and fantasize that he is in the hospital, felled by an accident, with bandages on his head, and he says, “I want Cecelia. I must have Cecelia,” and I rush into the hospital room and he kisses my face.
I am ten years old.
What has happened to me?
I used to be so strong. And determined. And aggressive, people said. They were scared of me. It was obvious that I wanted something, but no one knew what.
I knew.
I wanted the prince.
Ever since I was ten, I worked at putting myself in the path of the oncoming train of destiny. How did I know that I should major in art history in college? (I just knew.) And that I should finagle a job at a famous SoHo art gallery where I would meet rich and glamorous men and women (mostly men), who would embrace a beautiful young girl with attitude and a sense of humor and take her up and show her off on the town, so that, even without the approbation of family money or name, her picture would appear in the newspapers and magazines as having attended this or that event? And how did I know, when Tanner walked into the gallery that day, that I must do everything in my power to become his girlfriend, so that when my real object of desire walked in, which I knew he would eventually, given the laws of consequence, those being that he lived in SoHo and bought art, I would already be taken by a worthy opponent and this would make me more valuable in his eyes?
You just know these things. They’re instinctual. I was all instinct then. Raw, aggressive instinct, and I lived my life like an alien thing was driving me.
But now that thing is gone. It has failed me.
(Where did it go? Can I get it back?)
And I am FRIGHTENED nearly all the time now. By EVERYONE—doctors, lawyers, politicians, photographers, gossip columnists, anyone who might use words I don’t know or talk about events that I should know about but don’t, all actors and journalists, women who go through natural childbirth, women who speak three languages (especially Italian or French), and anyone that other people say is talented or merely cool or simply English. As you can imagine, this encompasses pretty much everyone in Hubert’s life, and that is why, if we have to go out, I tend to become deathly ill beforehand (in which case I can usually get out of going); or, if I cannot muster a life-threatening illness, I sit in a corner with my hands folded in my lap, my head tilted and a blank expression on my face, which seems to prevent people from attempting to converse with me.
But on this particular evening, no amount of vapors can prevent the inevitable: attending the fiftieth anniversary of the ballet.
Without my husband.
Who is actually having a CARD GAME instead.
