The Revisionist: A Novel - Rilegato

Helen Schulman teaches fiction at Columbia University and is the author of the short story collection Not a Free Show, the novel Out of Time, and co-editor of the anthology Wanting a Child. She lives with her husband and daughter in New York City.

David Hershleder lit up a cigarette and coughed up a chunk of lung. Larchmont. The station. A mile and a half from Casa Hershleder, a mile and a half from Itty and the kids, a mile and a half from his home and future heart failures. His eyes roved the Park and Ride. Had he driven his car this morning or had Itty dropped him off at the train? Had he called for a cab, hitched a ride with a neighbor? Where was that beat-up Mazda? His most recent history dissolved like a photograph in water, a dream upon awakening, a computer screen when the power suddenly shuts down. It receded from his inner vision. Must have been the weed...It really knocked him out.

Good shit, thought Hershleder.
        
He decided to walk. What was a mile and a half? He was in the prime of his life. Besides, Hershleder couldn't arrive home like this, stoned, in front of his innocent children, his loving wife. A long stroll would sober him; it would be a head-clearing, emotional cup of coffee.
        
Larchmont. Westchester, New York. One curvy road segueing into another. A dearth of streetlights. The Tudor houses loomed like haunted mansions. They sat so large on their tiny lots, they swelled over their property lines the way a stout man's waist swells above his belt. A yuppie dog, a Dalmatian, nosed his way across a lawn and accompanied Hershleder's shuffling gait. Hershleder would have reached down to pat the dog's spotty head if he could have, but his arms were too full of daisies. He made a mental note to give in to Itty; she'd been begging him to agree to get a pup for the kids. There had been dogs when Hershleder was a child. Three of them. At different times. He had had a mother who couldn't say no to anything. He had had a mother who was completely overwhelmed. The longest a dog had lasted in their home had been about a year; Mrs. Hershleder kept giving those dogs away. Three dogs, three children. Was there some wish fulfillment involved in her casting them aside? His favorite one had been called Snoopy. His sister Mindy, that original thinker, had been the one to name her.
        
Hershleder remembered coming home from camp one summer to find that Snoopy was missing. His mother had sworn up and down that she had given the dog to a farm, a farm in western Pennsylvania. Much better for the dog, said Mrs. Hershleder, than being cooped up in some tiny apartment. Better for the dog, thought Hershleder now, some twenty-eight years later, better for the dog! What about me, a dogless boy cooped up in some tiny apartment! But his mother was dead, she was dead; there was no use in raging at a dead mother. Hershleder the motherless, the dogless, walked the streets of Larchmont. His buzz was beginning to wear off.
        
Why neurology? Mrs. Hershleder had asked. How about a little pediatrics? Gynecology? Family practice. Dovidil, don't make the same mistakes I made, a life devoted to half-lives, a life frozen in motion. But Hershleder had been drawn to the chronic ward. Paralysis, coma. He could not stand to watch a patient suffer, the kick and sweat, the scream of life battling stupidly for continuation. If he had to deal with people--and wasn't that what a doctor does, a doctor deals with people--he preferred people in a vegetative state, he preferred them noncognizant. What had attracted him in the first place had been the literature, the questions: What was death? What was life, after all? Did the answers to these lie, as Hershleder believed, not in the heart but in the brain? He liked to deal in inquiries; he didnt like to deal in statements. It was natural, then, that he'd be turned on by research. Books and libraries, the heady smell of ink on paper. He'd been the kind of boy who had always volunteered in school to run off things for the teacher. He'd stand close to the Rexograph machine, getting giddy, greedily inhaling those toxic vapors. He'd walk back slowly to his classroom, his nose buried deep in a pile of freshly printed pages.

Hershleder was not taken with the delivering of babies, the spreading of legs, the searching speculum, the bloody afterbirth like a display of raw ground meat. But the brain, the brain, that fluted, folded mushroom, that lovely, intricate web of thought and tissue and talent and dysfunction, of arteries and order. The delicate weave of neurons, that thrilling spinal cord. All that communication, all those nerves sending and receiving orders. A regular switchboard. Music for his mind.
        
A jogger passed him on the right, his gait strong and steady. Hershleder's Dalmatian abandoned him for the runner.
        
Hershleder turned down Fairweather Drive. He stepped over a discarded red tricycle. He noticed that the Fishmans had a blue Jag in their carport. The Fishman boy was his own boy's nemesis. Charlie Fishman could run faster, hit harder. No matter that Hershleder's own boy could speak in numbers--a=1, b=2, for example; when Hershleder arrived home at night, the kid said, "8-9 4-1-4" (translation: Hi Dad!)--the kid was practically a savant, a genius! So what, the Fishman boy could kick harder, draw blood faster in a fight. Could Charlie Fishman bring tears to his own father's eyes by saying "9 12-15-22-5 25-15-21" when Fishman's father tucked him in at night? (Even though it had taken Hershleder five minutes and a pad and pencil to decode the obvious.) Charlie Fishman had just beaten out Hershleder's Jonathan for the lead in the second-grade play. The Fishman father was a famous nephrologist. He commuted to New Haven every morning on the highway, shooting like a star in that blue Jag out of the neighborhood, against the traffic, in the opposite direction. Hershleder admired the Jag from afar. It was a blue blue. It glowed royally against the darkness.
        
The jogger passed him again, on the right. The Dalmatian loped after the runner, his spotted tongue hanging from his mouth. The jogger must have circled around the long circuitous block in record time. A powerful motherfucker. Bearded. Young. Younger than Hershleder. The jogger had a ponytail. It sailed in the current of his own making. His legs were strong and bare. Ropy, tendoned. From where he stood, Hershleder admired them. Then he moved himself up the block toward his own stone Tudor.
        
Casa Hershleder. It was written in fake Spanish tile on the front walk, a gift from his sisters. Hershleder walked up the slate steps and hesitated on his own front porch. Sometimes it felt as if only an act of courage could get him to turn the knob and go inside. So much tumult awaited. Various children: on their marks, getting set, ready to run, to hurl themselves into his arms. Itty, in this weather all soft and steamed and plumpeddressed in an undulation of circling Indian shmatas--hungry for connection, attention, the conversation of a living, breathing adult. Itty, with tiny clumps of clay still lodged like bird eggs in the curly red nest of her hair. Itty, with the silt on her arms, the gray sliplike slippers on her bare feet. Itty, his wife, the potter.
        
By this point, the daisies were half-dead. Theyd wilted in the heat. Hershleder laid them in a pile on his front shrub, then lowered himself onto a slate-step seat. If he angled his vision past the O'Keefe's mock turret, he would surely see some stars.
        
The steam of summer nights, the sticky breath of the trees and their exhalation of oxygen, the buzz of the mosquitoes and the cicadas, the sweaty breeze, the rubbing of his suit legs against his thighs. The moon above the O'Keefe's turret was high, high, high.
        
The jogger came around again. Angled right and headed up the Hershleder walk. His face was flushed with all that good, clean high-octane blood that is the result of honest American exertion. He looked young--far younger than Hershleder, but hadn't Hershleder noted this before? Must be wanting to know the time, or in need of a glass of water, a bathroom, a phone, Hershleder thought. The jogger was jogging right toward him.
        
In a leap of blind and indiscriminate affection the Dalmatian bounded past the runner and collided with Hershleder's head, his body, his lap. Hershleder was stunned for a second, then revived by the wet slap of the dogs tongue. He was showered with love and saliva. "Hey," said Hershleder. "Hey there, Buster. Watch it." Hershleder fended off the beast by petting him, by bowing under to all that animal emotion. The Dalmatian wagged the bottom half of his spinal column like a dissected worm would; it had a life all its own. His tail beat the air like a wire whisk. His tongue was as soft and moist as an internal organ. "Hey, Buster, down." Hershleder's arms were full of dog.
        
The jogger jogged right past them. He wiped his feet on Hershleder's welcome mat. He opened Hershleder's door and entered Hershleder's house. He closed Hershleder's door behind him. There was the click of the lock Hershleder had installed himself. That old bolt sliding into that old socket.
        
What was going on? What was going on around here?

Buster was in love. He took to Hershleder like a bitch in heat, this same fancy mutt that had abandoned him earlier for the runner. A fickle fellow, thought Hershleder. A familiar fickle fellow.
        
"Hey," said Hershleder. "Hey," he called out. But it was too late. The runner had already disappeared inside his house.