Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “It isn’t uncommon,” Freddie Dunbar was saying. “You say you’ve been flying a lot recently? Here’s what I’m guessing: you picked up a viral infection from stale air circulating and recirculating in the plane, it settled in a neck muscle already strained from exertion and poor posture. Once the muscle goes into spasm, as yours has, it can take quite a while to heal.”

  “ ‘Poor posture’?” Temple said, hurt. He’d immediately straightened his shoulders, elevated his head. “How can you assume that, Freddie?”

  “Assume it?—I can see it.”

  Dunbar was a short, peppy-wiry man who may have been a few years younger than Temple. He had ghost-gray eyes, a congenial but guarded smile; Temple would have to reassess him, in the light of this multimillion-dollar medical investment. He sat on the edge of the examining table to demonstrate. “This is proper posture, see?—at the back of the neck, the cervical lordosis it’s called—” touching the nape of his neck, head uplifted and chin slightly retracted, “—a small inward curve. And, here, at the lower back, a similar hollow. When you slouch as you’ve been doing, everything sags, your head protrudes, and a considerable strain is placed on your neck muscles. And if these muscles have been infected or injured in any way, the injury can be exacerbated, and quite painful. Your muscle has gone into ‘spasm.’ The X ray shows a kind of knot.”

  Temple’s awkwardly corrected posture made his neck ache more. He kneaded the sore muscle at the back of his head. “A knot,” he said, puzzled. “How do you untie it?”

  Dunbar said, not ungraciously, “That’s what we’re here for.”

  The consultation was over. It had not seemed hurried, yet only eight minutes had passed. Temple had spent most of the hour shivering in the X-ray unit. Dunbar quickly wrote out a prescription for a muscle relaxant—“Be sure not to drink while taking these, Larry, and be careful driving, all right?” as if Temple had to be cautioned about such an elementary measure—and a prescription for Temple to take to the physical therapy clinic downstairs. Somehow, Temple was in for three therapy sessions weekly until his pain subsided.

  The men shook hands, as if after a tennis match Dunbar, the weaker player, had unaccountably won. It was only then that Dunbar asked, his expression subtly shifting, an actual light coming up in his eyes, “And, Larry—how is Isabel?”

  “Who?”

  “Isn’t that your wife’s—former wife’s—name? Isabel?”

  “Oh, you mean Isabelle.” Temple gave the name the French intonation Isabelle preferred. Coolly he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know, Freddie. Isabelle moved to Santa Monica after the divorce and remarried. It’s been three years since she’s spoken to me on the phone and more than five years since I’ve seen her—except in the company of lawyers. As for my son Robbie—we seem to be out of communication.” Temple was breathless, angry. He was still smarting over that crack about poor posture and he couldn’t have said whether he resented Dunbar’s asking about Isabelle, or only that he’d asked belatedly, about to walk away. And Temple knew, even before he presented his Visa card at the front desk, he’d be criminally overcharged: $338 for the visit!

  The glamorous young woman who processed his bill smiled at him anxiously. “Mr. Temple, are you all right?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine, I’m in agony,” Temple said, smiling in his affable, charming way, “—I’m in spasm, actually. It sounds sexual but it isn’t. I always walk with my head under my arm.”

  Thinking on his way downstairs he’d simply walk out, get into his car and drive away—what the hell. Quit while he was out only $338. Physical problems embarrassed him. He’d always been a healthy, unreflective person—intelligent enough, with a reputation in some quarters for being shrewd, and more than shrewd; but not neurotic. Never been comfortable discussing physical matters. Or “spiritual,” either. As when Isabelle tried to insist he make a will. “It’s something that has to be done,” she’d said provocatively, “—like dying itself.” The woman had known how to needle him, upset him. It was part of her style. But Temple had been so damned busy making money those years he’d postponed the meeting with their lawyer until at last it was too late and he and Isabelle required two lawyers, dueling lawyers, to negotiate the breakup and artful dismantling of their thirteen-year marriage and its considerable assets. Now that he was a bachelor again, and not even, in any practical sense, a father, Temple still didn’t have a will; but he intended to get around to it soon. He doubted he’d die before he was fifty.

  He was sweating, wincing with pain in his neck and head. It wasn’t that smug hustler Dunbar he was furious with, it was his former wife Isabelle. Damn you: what a way to treat a man who loved you. Crazy for you and what did I ever get out of it? Kick in the teeth, in the neck. In the balls.

  DESPITE THE CODEINE in the muscle relaxant, washed down with beer, Temple had a wretched night. Alone with his physical self.

  Defeatedly then next morning he checked into the Physical Therapy Clinic of the Saddle Hills Neck and Back Institute and, after a restless wait of forty minutes, was assigned a therapist. “Hello, Mr. Temple? I’m Gina. Will you come this way?” Dazed with pain Temple squinted at whoever it was with the somber equanimity of a condemned man greeting his executioner. He saw the petite young woman with the fine dark hair that fell to her shoulders, olive-dark skin and very dark, thickly lashed eyes. GINA in pink script above her left breast. His heartbeat quickened. Oh, ridiculous!

  Temple was a man besieged by women. A solitary well-to-do male in Saddle Hills, New Jersey. Not about to fall in love with a “physical therapist” with no last name.

  The young woman led Temple, more briskly than he could comfortably follow, a steel rod of pain driven through his neck. Through the large airy L-shaped space, past ingenious torture machines of pulleys, rings, bars, pedals, into which shaky men and women were being helped, victims of what physical mishaps, what unspeakable muscular or neurological deterioration one could only imagine. Temple did not want to stare. He feared seeing someone he knew, and being seen and known in turn. A muscular young man stood poised atop a curious disk, gripping a bar and trying desperately to balance himself; terror shone in his eyes as his legs failed, he began to fall, and two attendants deftly caught him beneath the arms. Another man, Temple’s age, with thick bushy receding hair very like Temple’s, lay stretched out groaning on a mat, having collapsed in the midst of an exercise. Back trouble, Temple guessed. Bad back trouble. Quickly, he looked away.

  “In here, Mr. Temple. Would you like me to help you lie down, or can you manage, yourself?” Gina shut the door: thank God, they were in a private room. Temple climbed up upon, and stretched out upon, unassisted, an eight-foot padded table; a warm rolled towel beneath his neck, exactly fitted to the aching hollow of his neck. He shut his eyes, terribly embarrassed. Flat like this, on his back, he felt—unmanned. An overturned beetle. What was this girl seeing, what was she thinking? Luckily the crises of the past several months had burned off most of Temple’s excess weight at the waist and gut: one hundred eighty pounds packed into a five-foot-ten frame, upper-body muscles still fairly solid, Temple didn’t look—did he?—like a loser. He was wearing a freshly laundered T-shirt and chino trousers, jogging shoes. He’d showered and hastily shaved within the hour and his jaws stung pleasantly. He knew that, upright, he was a reasonably attractive man; looked years younger than his age on good days. But this was not a good day. He hadn’t slept more than two or three hours the previous night. His eyes were ringed with fatigue and finely threaded with blood. It touched him to the quick that a young woman, a stranger, should see him in so weakened and debased a state.

  “Mr. Temple, please try to relax.”

  Gina’s voice was intense, throaty. Kindly. Temple did not open his eyes as she began to “stretch” his neck, as she explained—standing behind him, gripping the base of his skull and pulling gently at first, then with more strength. A woman’s touch like ivory against his burning skin. Christ! He thought of masseuses, prostitutes.
But no: this was therapy prescribed by Freddie Dunbar the neck specialist. This was legitimate, the real thing. Temple tensed expecting excruciating pain and could not quite believe it, that none came. He forced himself to breathe deeply and by degrees he began to relax. “Now retract your head, please. No, like this. Farther. Hold for a count of three. Release, relax, and repeat, ten times.” Unquestioning, Temple followed instructions. Gina then began to knead the “knotted” muscles at the base of his skull, slowly on both sides of his neck, down to his shoulders and back up again, again. At the injured muscle, the fingers probed pure white-hot pain and Temple cried out like a stricken animal. “Sorry, Mr. Temple!” Gina murmured. Fingers easing away quickly as if repentant.

  Crazy about you and what did I ever get out of it?

  An exhausting drill of exercises. Invariable sets of ten. Again, again. Retracting the head, side-bending the neck. On Temple’s stomach, sitting up, on his back again. When he gasped aloud Gina said gently, as if reprovingly, “Initial pain increase is common. Just go slowly.” Temple realized he was floating on an island of pain like sparkling white sand. One of the numerous tropical-resort white-sand beaches of his late marriage. And Isabelle close beside him. So long as he did not look at her, she would remain. Warm oiled supple woman’s body, the sunlit smell. When he opened his eyes, blinking, Isabelle was gone. But the dazzling sand remained. Blinding sand. An island of pain from which he kicked off, swam away in cool caressing turquoise waters, and returned; returned to the sparkling dazzling pain, and kicked off again, swam away again and again returned. Always, he returned. A woman’s deft fingers were fitting a snug thick collar around his neck through which (Temple gradually gathered) hot water coursed. Fifteen minutes. Temple sweated, panted; observed his pain draining away, the tension dissolving like melting ice. His eyes filled with moisture. He was not crying, but his vision swam. Panting with happiness, hope. The young woman therapist in white stood beside the table making notations on a clipboard. Only now did Temple cast a sidelong glance at her—she was probably in her mid-twenties, slender, small-boned, with dark, thick-lashed eyes and a narrow, thin-tipped nose. Her complexion wasn’t perfect yet you wouldn’t call it blemished—tiny pimples at her hairline, like a rash. She had sensitive skin, so what? Not the smooth poreless cosmetic mask of glamorous Isabelle and her glamorous female friends.

  “Are you feeling any better, Mr. Temple?”

  “I am.”

  “You were terribly tense when you first came in. But you did relax, finally.”

  “I did.”

  Temple spoke heartily. He wanted to cry, to burst into laughter. Wanted to seize Gina about the hips, her slender hips, and bury his heated face against her, life seemed suddenly so simple, so good.

  HE WENT AWAY, with a set of instructions for exercises to do at home, and an appointment with Gina for the morning after next. Secretly, he planned not to return—the sessions were $95, for fifty-five minutes! And he certainly wasn’t going to see Dunbar again in a week, as “Freddie” wanted. You don’t get to be a millionaire several times over by wasting good money.

  FAR FROM BEING a loser, Temple was a winner. One of the winners of the world as he’d become, to his surprise, one of the adults of the world. In another lifetime it’s true he’d been poor. No other way of describing it—poor. Poor rural county in northwestern Pennsylvania, poor family background. His prospects as a child must have been poor. Yet as a kid Temple hadn’t seemed to know this. He’d been so eager, so hopeful and—what was Isabelle’s word?—grasping. “A man who knows how to grasp,” she’d said. “Grasp and not let go.” Though he’d let go of Isabelle, finally.

  The story Temple told himself and others was of a dreamy young kid ascending from a farm in Erie, Pennsylvania, as if hitchhiking through the void to his destiny: Saddle Hills, New Jersey. How he’d come to learn his business, which was essentially the borrowing of money in order to make money, wasn’t clear; or wasn’t in any case part of the story. What he told of himself might have been illustrated by Norman Rockwell for the old Saturday Evening Post. A freckled face, a gap-toothed smile. Intense brown eyes, a frank handshake and manner. Once so good-looking, women would glance at him and smile quizzically, as if they knew him. Since approximately his fortieth birthday, when his hair began to recede and knife-creases began to appear between his eyes, that rarely happened. Unless the women knew his name, and, knowing his name, knew who he was. And hoped he’d smile at them in return.

  At about the time of the divorce, Temple began to experience odd heart “symptoms.” An erratic, jumpy heart. A speedy heart. A sensation as of hiccups in the heart. So he’d begun taking heart medicine, digitalis. His condition wasn’t serious, he’d been led to believe. But it could be embarrassing. In lovemaking, for instance, as he pushed to climax, if too much adrenaline was released in his blood, his heart might be triggered into fibrillation. Temple wouldn’t die—anyway, he hadn’t died, yet! But an attack could last as long as an hour and was not a comforting experience for either Temple or his lover, whoever the lover might be.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “WHY?—to help people, I guess. To play a role in a person’s recovery.” This second therapy session, Gina spoke more readily. As gently but forcibly she stretched Temple’s neck, massaged the “soft tissue” at the base of his skull, secured him into the remarkable hot-pack collar through which steaming water coursed nourishing as blood. (“Is it tight enough? Is it too tight?”—there was something disturbingly intimate, even erotic, about being trussed up in the thing. Just a little more pressure on his neck arteries and Temple’s entire head would be tumescent.) Partly Temple was quizzing Gina to distract himself from his misery and partly it was Temple’s habit to quiz strangers who intrigued him—How do you live? What is your life? Is there some secret to your life that might help me?—but mainly he was fascinated by the girl. Waking the previous night from restless dreams, a dream riddled with pain like pelting raindrops and someone was standing silently beside his bed and she reached out to touch him, calm him with her ivory-cool fingers. They were such strong fingers.

  Gina was saying earnestly, “I knew I wanted to be a physical therapist since—oh, sixth grade, maybe. Our teacher went around the room asking us what we wanted to do when we grew up and I said, ‘Help sick people get better.’ There was a cousin of mine, a boy who had cystic fibrosis. I always wished I could have helped him walk! For a while I wanted to be a nurse, then a doctor—but they don’t really play a role in a person’s recovery, over a period of time, like a physical therapist.” How proudly she spoke, in her shy way.

  Play a role. A curious expression. It evoked a world in which people played roles in one another’s lives and had no lives of their own except for these roles. Maybe it made sense, Temple thought. What is an actor, apart from a play? A role? You can’t just be—brute raw existence twenty-four hours a day.

  “I never knew that I wanted to be anything, I guess,” Temple said. Except a winner. “It’s like, well—falling in love. A life can just happen.” Cut the crap! Who was angling, negotiating, push-push-pushing to make it happen? “Uh—how many patients do you work with every day, Gina?” Temple tried, in the exigency of the hot-pack collar, to keep his voice level and casual.

  “Ten, sometimes twelve. It varies.”

  “Ten! Twelve!” Temple’s face burned. He didn’t want to think this was sexual jealousy. When he’d arrived that morning he peered in to see Gina’s 9 A.M. patient: a bearish young man of about thirty with sullen handsome features, wearing a neck brace, walking unsteadily with a cane. A cane! Football player’s physique but the look in the poor bastard’s eyes wasn’t one you associated with the sport of football. Temple had looked quickly away, shuddering. “And do you work at the clinic every day?”

  Gina hesitated as if these questions were becoming too personal.

  “Well—most weeks, yes. I don’t like holidays. I mean, to take them. People need their therapy.” She spoke almost primly.


  “And what are your hours?”

  Again she hesitated. Flat on his back, Temple could see the girl only obliquely; wavy dark hair that fell to her shoulders, the set of her jaw. Was she frowning? In distaste? Quickly she answered, “Monday-Wednesday-Friday, eight to one; Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, one to six.”

  Temple said, with forced exuberance, “That’s symmetry!”

  “What?”

  Gina had removed the hot-pack collar—too bad—and now Temple was sitting up, steeling himself against pain. Next came the dreaded neck side-bends, retract chin, lower head slowly to the right shoulder, hold for a count of three, raise head, now the left shoulder, repeat, repeat. Gina’s deft fingers were there to help, exerting pressure so that Temple could maintain the tremulous position. She hadn’t really heard Temple’s remark and he didn’t repeat it.

  Just like Isabelle. Like any woman. If you get abstract with them too quickly they turn vague, uneasy. Even the most harmless playful abstraction.

  Temple had tried to stay away. He’d tried. Endured two wretched nights before giving in and returning here. The unpredictability of the pain as well as its severity had frightened him. And he’d discovered from examining the Institute’s bill that where he’d been thinking neck, he ought to have been thinking spine. His official classification was cervical spine strain. That was sobering.