Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  “You know the consequences of what happened.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Alex. What are you saying now?”

  “Dennis, you told me earlier that Brabet said that for each ‘climber’ there were supposed to be nine people waiting on the left, nine on the right, and one to catch the head.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Have a look at the photo.”

  “No.”

  “Have a look. There are nine on the left, nine on the right, and there’s the one to catch your head. Is that Joe Geraghty on the left?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “That’s him, isn’t it? His hands aren’t in his pockets. He’s not playing with a phone. His hands are waiting to catch. He was doing what he was told, wasn’t he?”

  “What sort of bullshit is this?”

  “What I’m saying is that everyone did as they were told, including you. Joe was there to catch you. He let you down only to the same extent you yourself did. You’re a physicist, Dennis. You should have known better than anyone that the whole exercise was flawed in its design, that it was inherently dangerous. Even with everyone doing as they were told, it was incredibly likely someone was going to get hurt.

  “Look at the outstretched arms, Dennis. Look at them waiting to catch you, all at different heights, different degrees of rigidity. You are a man five feet ten inches tall weighing about one hundred and sixty pounds, and you voluntarily fell backwards from an average height of thirteen feet just because a man whom you had already deemed to be a charlatan had told you to and because everybody else had done it. Just one or two arms giving way would have been enough. No wonder it felt like you’d been punched in the back. You don’t need a Ph.D. in physics to know how dangerous that was, but you had one and you did it anyway. Go ahead and cry—”

  “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

  “Swear at me, Dennis. Blame Joe Geraghty—”

  “I rattle when I move. It feels like there’s a fucking Erector set in my back.”

  “I can imagine how you feel.”

  “If it weren’t for three sessions of physical therapy a week I wouldn’t be able to walk at all. Do you know how many attempts it takes to get my legs into pants? I have a method for putting my socks on. I throw the sock on the ground and with my right toe pinning the sock to the floor, I basically grab hold of my left leg and push it into the sock. I had a rehabilitation specialist come to my house to teach me how to put my socks on, but she’s not there when I fall over. They’re the worst times, especially when I’m alone. That’s when I scream. That’s when I throw things. I have a lot of falls. I’m lucky to get through a day without a fall, and once I’m on the ground it’s very difficult to get up unless there’s something to hold on to. I fall over more now than I did when I was a toddler—”

  “Go on, Dennis, see if you can make me cry.”

  “You see, I’ll be walking and my dropped foot catches on the ground. If I don’t lift my left foot high enough then my toes drag along the ground. I have fallen down in public. That’s when it’s really embarrassing. Once my arm got rammed into my shoulder at the joint and ended up frozen that way.”

  “It’s terrible, and it’s all everyone else’s fault, isn’t it, Dennis?”

  “You’re sick, Alex. You’re a very sick man to do this.”

  “It’s Terry Brabet’s fault, Joe Geraghty’s fault. Listen to yourself, Dennis. You’re not responsible for anything. You’re lucky all this happened to you before managed care came in and limited your rehabilitation—”

  “So that’s what this is about, you miserable sick fuck. You should be struck off.”

  “But I know my physics, don’t I? Keep going, Dennis. I’m still not crying.”

  “Is this how you shrinks get your kicks?”

  “Come on, Dennis, you can do better than that. What about your wife, Patricia? You haven’t mentioned her for a while.”

  “She got tired of taking me to the physical therapist. Said it was inconvenient. She refused. She was bitter about the whole thing. She said she felt cheated, robbed. It was getting worse, all this anger growing inside her, until one day . . . she just . . .”

  “What?”

  “Our son was ill. She’d had to pick him up from school early and just as they’d pulled up in the driveway, he’d vomited in the car. I was slumped over the coffee table in the living room. I heard her scream as she opened the car door. She stormed in the front door calling for the cleaning woman, who had been to clean that day but had already left. I suppose Patricia had wanted her to clean the upholstery in the car. I don’t know. But after calling her name a few times she must have realized that the woman had gone. She saw that the vacuum cleaner had been left in the living room, that it hadn’t been put away, and then she saw me lying there, as usual, looking up at her. She started telling me how James, ‘my son,’ was sitting in the car in his own vomit. She was beside herself with fury. It was as though she didn’t know whether to shout or cry. Then she started on me.

  “ ‘If you think I’m going to be the wife of an invalid for the rest of my life, you’ve got another think coming. I had a real man once but, like an idiot, I came back to you. You’re not a man. You’re just . . . a useless cripple.’

  “She was shouting and she was . . . she was flailing at my face, hitting me, with the end of the vacuum cleaner. I was on the floor, covering my face with my arms, trying to get to the wall so I could pull myself up. And then I turned and looked back at her, back toward the door. I saw that James was standing there. He was standing behind her in his vomit-stained shirt. He had seen her hitting me. He had seen the whole thing. I called out to him. I just . . . called his name, and . . . he vomited again, just where he stood. That’s more or less how my marriage ended.

  “That wasn’t the only time James had heard her call me a cripple. It wasn’t even the first time he’d seen her hit me. I shudder to think what he’s going to remember. Is he . . . Alex, do you think he’ll remember this?”

  “Dennis, what do you remember of your childhood? He’ll remember. Where is he now?”

  “He’s with Patricia. She said unless I let her take him with her to Germany, she’s going to hang me out to dry. She said she’d keep me in court till all the money had gone.”

  “The money?”

  “She means the house and whatever I get from the firm.”

  “Are you suing them?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s the only reason they haven’t gotten rid of me. They got rid of Joe Geraghty within a week but they don’t want me to add a ‘wrongful dismissal’ or some accusation of discrimination to my case against them so they’ve kept me on. They’re hoping I’ll just quit. They’re doing everything in their power to make me quit.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Everything. They’ve demoted me. I’m not working as an analyst. The head of Human Resources has an assistant. I assist that person.”

  “The assistant?”

  “I assist the assistant. When I was ready to try to come back to work Gorman told me that I could take off all the time I needed during the day for rehabilitation, physical therapy, occupational therapy, whatever. Of course, he said, with me missing all that time I clearly could no longer work as an analyst. But I wasn’t to worry, they would find something ‘appropriate’ for me. ‘Appropriate’ meant sixty percent of my previous salary. They moved me into a cubicle in an open-plan office where not only did I not have any privacy, I didn’t have any room. You see, I’m supposed to divide every hour into twenty minutes of sitting, twenty minutes of standing, and twenty minutes of lying down. When I complained about this to the head of HR, he told me to stop feeling sorry for myself.

  “People walk past me. They try not to look, but I catch them looking at me sometimes. They’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by the whole thing. Some of them have been interviewed about me by the firm’s lawyers. But then, I’m suing the firm. You know, they’re still doing it.”

  “W
hat are they still doing, Dennis?”

  “They’re still sending people on retreats. Since I was injured they’ve had two people hospitalized—one with a heart attack and one who collapsed from exhaustion. I don’t really have any work to do there but they won’t get rid of me until the case is over.”

  “It must be unpleasant for you, the reduced circumstances, the lack of work. Why do you go in there?”

  “Why do you think! I need the money. Did you think I needed the humiliation?”

  “What part of what has happened to you humiliates you?”

  “Only a psychiatrist could listen to everything I’ve been saying and ask a question like that. It’s a vocation; there’s no question about it. You sit there, session after session, writing notes in your book. Jesus Christ!”

  13. “A day or so after James had vomited in the doorway of the living room, Patricia outdid herself. I told you she had found it inconvenient driving me to and from medical appointments.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I had to find a way of getting to them. There was no way I could drive myself at the time. Even now, though I can and do drive, I still prefer not to. I’m still fighting the pain. Sometimes it’s worse than other times, and I don’t always feel confident behind the wheel. At first I caught cabs to and from but, given the number of appointments—medical, legal, physical therapy, hydrotherapy, pain control—”

  “And now here.”

  “Sure, but I’m going back a bit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well, I was eating up my money in cab fares and needed some help.”

  “With money?”

  “No, not money. Alex, will you shut up? Will you just listen! I needed some help with transportation. There was a couple who lived a few doors down from us with a son about the same age as ours. They’d seen my situation and had been very sympathetic. The wife offered to drive me to my appointments. It started as an offer to fill in for Patricia, but gradually she took over from her. The woman worked in sales, said she was on the road anyway and could schedule her appointments to fit around me. It was incredibly good of her.

  “Anyway, a couple of days after . . . that fight . . . Patricia came home and told me that for the last five or six months she’d been having an affair with that woman’s husband. But she said that the relationship was over. They’d had a fight, and she didn’t want us to see them anymore. And, Alex—get this—to consummate its ending she told the neighbor’s wife about it and about other relationships he had apparently told Patricia about. That was the day she ended their marriage. That was also the day she told me about all the other men she’d played around with.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “I was hurt when she left me years ago but after that . . . quite frankly, I knew what she was. It was just a question of how many times and in what particular way she was going to confirm it. In any case, what she did or said couldn’t begin to compete with the physical pain that had taken over my life. As I sit here and hear myself tell you about her, I have the luxury of being horrified by the Patricia I’m describing, but the only way she can really get to me now is through my son. And also, I suppose, by tying me up in court. Look, we hadn’t slept even side by side for months. We hadn’t actually had sex since . . . I don’t know when we last slept together. Until I went into the pain-management clinic I wouldn’t have cared if I’d never touched another woman again.”

  “What happened in the pain-management clinic?”

  “They did more tests, and twenty-five thousand dollars later I was fitted with a dorsal column stimulator. They inserted a wire to run down my spine with electrodes attached at regular intervals. The other end runs down to a device implanted near the hip. It’s battery operated. When I switch it on, it sends electrical impulses into the spinal cord and masks the pain. They don’t want me to use it too much but, I swear, I couldn’t have made it this far without it. I wouldn’t have made it here quite literally, because I wouldn’t have met Angelique.”

  “You mean you wouldn’t have been thinking about sex?”

  “That’s right. But since it was installed . . . Patricia had left, and I thought there’s got to be some advantage to all this.”

  “So you phoned for a prostitute?”

  “You know I did. You don’t have to put it that way. It wasn’t ever like phoning for a pizza. My wife had abandoned me. Suddenly I was pain-free, at least at times. So yes, after everything that had happened, I called up the place Joe Geraghty had once taken me to and Angelique was the one they sent me. I was overwhelmed by what I saw when I answered the door. She didn’t seem to be too repelled either because within minutes she was naked on top of me upstairs in the very bed my wife had had all her affairs in. Picture it, Alex. There she was, so young and sexy and alone with me in the quiet of my house, naked and all mine. Can you picture it, Alex? She smiled in that way of hers where there’s nothing but sex in her eyes. You know how she can look, Alex.”

  “I thought you said you hadn’t slept with her.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t care?”

  “You don’t need to tell me anything you don’t want to, but you shouldn’t lie to me. You’re only hurting yourself if you do. Whatever you tell me ought to be the truth. You’re only interfering with the treatment otherwise.”

  “Just give me the pills and I’ll go. You can stick the rest of what you call ‘treatment’ up your ass!”

  “You didn’t sleep with her, did you, Dennis?”

  “Look how interested you are!”

  “You brought it up, initially telling me you didn’t, now you say you did.”

  “You can believe what you want to believe.”

  “Dennis, I don’t have an interest in choosing a version of your life. I’m more interested in why you want to lie to me about this.”

  “What makes you think I’m lying? Well? Now, you don’t want to answer, do you, Alex? You just don’t like the idea of me sleeping with her, do you? Admit it, you’ll feel better.”

  “That’s not really . . . Dennis . . . Dennis?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you think you’re crying? . . . Why do you think you’re crying now?”

  “Did she say something? What did she say? You’ve spoken to her? Is she all right? She won’t return my calls. I leave messages. Alex . . . Everything I touch turns to shit.”

  14. “I was nervous even looking up the number in the telephone book. I got in the shower as soon as I put the phone down. I was pretty nervous. It felt like a kid getting ready for a date.”

  “But you’d done this before, hadn’t you?”

  “Why is that so important to you?”

  “It’s not, but I want to get everything straight so that—”

  “Once. I’d done it once, and that was years before. Joe Geraghty had taken me to that brothel, the one she worked out of. I didn’t even pay, and it wasn’t like . . . having someone come out to your home. Maybe that’s why I was nervous. For a time after I was dry I just sat on my bed in my underwear. I didn’t know what to wear. I didn’t know what to say when she got there, whether to have some music playing, whether to offer her a drink. I didn’t have anything in the house. Patricia had always bought the booze. It occurred to me how much better at this she would have been than me, although, as far as I know, she’d never had to pay anyone for it.

  “I wondered what would be waiting for me when the doorbell rang. What would she look like? What would she think of me, that is, before I spoiled it completely by undressing? Alex, I didn’t feel I was any kind of man anymore. Each day when I get out of the shower now I try not to catch sight of myself in the mirror, of my buttocks and all the scars and the angles I make when I try to negotiate space. I squint at the mirror. I’ve caught myself squinting so many times that I don’t try to hide the squint anymore, only myself from myself.

  “I put on a loose-fitting shirt and a pair of casual pants thinking she, whoever she was going to be, would have to hav
e seen worse than me, even me after the accident. Then I went downstairs and waited. My palms were moist. I would have paced but . . . well, you know. It’s not practical, is it? The doorbell rang. I made my way to the door and opened it. She was delightful. She was . . . well, of course, you know.

  “I introduced myself and when she told me her name was Angelique, I made some facile starstruck remark about angels or something completely wet, befitting a shy teenage boy trying to differentiate himself from the pack. As much as I recognized that she had a beauty quite beyond that of even the prettiest tawdry working girl I could have hoped for, you have to believe me, lust was not my primary urge, not then. It was just good to be with, to be in such close proximity with, someone so lovely. That’s when she said she had to ask me for the money.

  “I offered her a drink and had started to pour it when she changed her mind. On second thought, she wouldn’t have one. I must have turned around to face her a little more quickly than she had expected because I caught her face before she’d had a chance to change her expression . . .”

  “It’s all right, Dennis. Take your time . . . What did you see?”

  “For a moment, a brief moment, I was on my way. I was getting a drink for a lovely young woman. I was on my way to fixing her a drink, Alex, and I had forgotten what that felt like, the anticipation, not sexual, or hardly, but that sense of being alive that comes with being in the glow or aura of a woman’s beauty. You can almost touch the possibilities even if you can’t name them. You can’t articulate them because they’re subliminal, almost primal. It is risible even to try. If your mind lets loose the words, even unsaid, to enumerate what you might have within your ken: sex, yes, of course, but also someone charming to talk to, to look at, to touch, to care for, to breathe in, to fill the emptiness, to give you back a sense of yourself; if your mind is given the chance to form the words for any of this then the words will no sooner take shape than they will mock you. You had better just feel it, keep it at the emotional end of your continuum.