None of this Ever Really Happened

by Peter Ferry

  2

  . . .

  THE DOCTOR

  I REALIZED ONE summer day that I was spending entirely too much time sitting at my desk by the window in my room, and I got up early to cross the plaza with Art and eat a good breakfast in the sidewalk café beneath the arcades. I even bought the English-language paper, hoping to find out how the Cubs were doing. In it beneath a heading that read, "Whereabouts—Please contact the American Embassy," halfway down a long list of names, I found mine. It surprised me. Was I missing? I tried to remember the last time I had talked to or even written anyone at home except Carolyn; it seemed as if it had been days, but it had been weeks, many weeks. Actually, I hadn't called home since I'd left San Miguel and come here. Later I put some pesos in the beggar's tin.

  The beggar had a lot to do with why I didn't leave my room often: the beggar, the fruit cart, and my work. Despite the steepness of the hill, the stones in the street were so large and irregular that there was little danger of the fruit cart rolling away. The beggar sat behind the fruit cart in the shelter of a doorway with a rusted sardine tin beside him. He looked like a pile of refuse that the street sweeper was sure to come back for. The only part of his anatomy that you could pick out from his colorless heap was his face, featureless and organless now, looking like a swollen, misshapen fist. When you dropped a coin into the tin, the beggar scrambled to recover it and then waved it impatiently, almost frantically, above his head until the fruit-cart man came to replace it with a banana, an orange, a slice of melon, a few nuts, a mango, a piece of papaya, a tangerine or a slice of coconut with a streak of hot sauce across it. The beggar ate with the same impatience, clutching and gulping his each morsel like a chipmunk, and when it was gone, waited for more footsteps, another coin, more food. I didn't like the beggar much, but he fascinated me. I didn't even pity him because he was just too far removed from the whole of my experience, but I had come to realize lately I envied him a little. I'd been tempted several times to drop a few hundred pesos in that tin of his and watch the fruit-cart man dump his entire inventory on the beggar's head. Perhaps it was his table manners that offended me so.

  Late in the day after the rain, the high-plateau sun beyond my roof shined down into the street onto the fruit cart and reduced everything for a few minutes to color, a few colors, insistent primary colors like a child's finger painting. Early in the morning before the beggar came, even before the fruit cart came, a woman carrying a pan of water opened a door in the wall and washed yesterday's peels and rinds and shells into the gutter.

  We all need our monsters—that much is certain—and sometimes they need each other; neither Saddam Hussein nor George Bush was very interesting all alone. The same is true of Mr. Claggart and Billy Budd, or should that pairing be Mr. Claggart and Captain Vere? I think so. As for everyone's favorite monster, Adolf Hitler's greatest contribution to destruction in our time wasn't a worldwide war or the murder of twelve million, but providing the rest of us with a model of absolute evil just when we had wisely begun to doubt its existence. Since 1945, God only knows how many lives have been given and taken in the name of morality; certainly righteousness is the greatest destructive force on the planet today. I saw Albert Decarre six times as a patient in the months after I got home from Mexico, though I'd intended to see him only once. The first time I told him I was haunted by something that I had seen and something that I knew, but we didn't discuss either of those things until the last time I saw him. What we did talk about was my family, the love my parents shared for forty-one years, and the guilt I felt for hurting Lydia.

  "Can you tell me about that relationship?"

  I told him that it had everything a relationship is supposed to have except something neither of us was ever quite able to define, but both of us knew was missing.

  He took notes. "The thing that was missing. Did you see it in your parents' relationship?"

  "I suppose. I think it was like glue, something that bonded them, some absolute commitment, the 'in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse' part. That wasn't there. I always knew that something would happen, and we wouldn't be strong enough to survive it, and we'd come apart. And we did."

  I should tell you that despite myself, I liked Albert Decarre. He was intelligent, empathetic, thoughtful, helpful, troubled, and world-weary. His face was deeply lined and his eyes sunken, things that had not shown up in his photograph. He carried sadness with him. He was also quite elegant; that's the only word for it. He was slim, graceful, and soft-spoken. His clothes fit perfectly. His hair fell just so. At the same time, he always seemed to be on the very verge of something you didn't want to be the cause of. Within minutes of meeting him, I knew exactly why Jeanette Landrow had been afraid of hurting him.

  My sessions with Albert Decarre were really conversations; if he was thoughtful and soft-spoken, he was not reticent. He listened well but he also spoke well, and we often built on each other's ideas, and we sometimes came to important conclusions. This happened at least twice.

  But if I liked Albert Decarre in the beginning, I did not trust him. I knew as well as anyone that Lucifer can be beguiling. I never forgot that his ease, charm, and apparent confidentiality (he could be surprisingly forthcoming) were all tricks that had seduced others and could seduce me, too. I came to realize, however, that there was a difference between them and me: If he was tricking me, I was also tricking him. Sometimes I sat there watching him as he recrossed his legs and talked, or absentmindedly stroked his chin and talked, and I would have to repress a smile; I was the safe that was about to fall on his head, the car that was about to veer across the centerline into his lane. There were even times when the satisfaction I felt was tinged with some feeling for him; I was, after all, going to destroy him, and anyone—even a bad man—who is about to meet his fate can enlist our sympathy. I came to think of this as a twist on the Stockholm syndrome; I was the captor and I was beginning to identify with him, the captive; of course, he didn't know he was a captive at all. Later my identification would become different and stronger.

  Most of the conversations we had were about love, the nature of love. One of the important conclusions we reached— and I think it fair to say we reached it together—was that just because one doesn't love another anymore doesn't mean that he or she never did, that the death of love is as natural a phenomenon as the birth or existence of love, and that love doesn't have to commit suicide or be murdered; it can die naturally, accidentally or even incidentally. It can die even when we don't want it to, just like a person. I was naturally thinking of Lydia, Lisa, and Carolyn when we talked about this stuff. As I watched Decarre, I wondered who he was thinking of.

  Another thing Decarre said that I tried to apply to both of us was, "The hardest truth of all is that sometimes in this life you must hurt other people. Not that you do or can, but that you must." He compared these occasions on a personal level to earthquakes, forest fires, and natural selection on a global one. He said that they are necessary—if painful—adjustments for the greater good and to avoid them is to invite imbalance and worse. It may surprise you to know that as he said these things, I didn't sense that he was justifying or rationalizing, so much as realizing. Naturally I thought about myself and Lydia, and I thought about Albert and Lisa, and then I thought about him and me. And that is when my identification with him truly crystallized because I suddenly knew that I had to do what I was about to do, exactly because he had had to do what he had done. Any doubt I may have had was erased. He and I were alike; we were both beset by lamentable compulsion. I scheduled my final session with him and left.

  One week minus one hour later, I put my backpack with its precious cargo on the floor and settled into the now-familiar chair. Albert Decarre sat across the coffee table. I told him I thought it was time to talk about the thing I had seen and the thing I knew. He asked me what I had seen.

  "I saw someone die."

  "Um," he said, "I'm sorry. That can be very hard. Did you know t
he person who died?"

  "Not beforehand, but I got to know her afterward."

  "After her death?"

  "Yes. In fact I quite fell in love with her."

  "After she was dead?" he asked.

  "Yes," I said. "Actually the only time I ever saw her was on the occasion of her death."

  "May I ask you how she died?"

  "It was an accident. At least it seemed so at the time."

  "And you saw it happen?"

  "I saw the whole thing."

  "I want to ask you something else. Did you cause the accident?"

  "No."

  "Did you have anything to do with her death?"

  "No, except I think—or I thought for a long time—that I could have prevented it."

  "You no longer think that?"

  "No, I don't think so. Not very often."

  "So you have some doubt?"

  "A little."

  He took some notes and I watched him. He had an unusually expressive mouth. He had long white fingers. He crossed his legs in that way that thin people can so that the one fairly dangled from the other. "A while ago, you said that something happened that your relationship with Lydia wouldn't be able to survive. Is this what happened?"

  "Yes."

  "And you fell in love with the woman who died?"

  "Yes, I fell in love with her. The other shoe dropped."

  "Interesting phrase. Do you often feel that the other shoe's about to drop?"

  "No, I don't think so, but I did in that relationship."

  "Do you feel that now?"

  "Now? I guess I do, in a way, but in a very different way. More as in 'resolution,' and I guess that's why I've come to see you."

  He turned back a page. "Resolution of what's been haunting you?"

  "In a way."

  "Tell me this," he said. "Do you think you could ever have the kind of relationship with a woman that your parents had?"

  "Well, I hope so. I think that's what we're all looking for, don't you?"

  The doctor ignored my question. He said that he dealt with a lot of people who've had inadequate models in their lives, or bad models, but sometimes having a good model—a model that's too good—is the hardest thing of all. He called it the famous-parent syndrome. If a parent has been extremely successful, it's a hard thing for a child to live up to. He can never make as much money, build as big a house, write as good a book, hit as many home runs as his father, and even if he does then he knows people will say, "Well, it was just because of his dad. His father made it possible."

  "You think my parents' marriage was too ideal, and I can never live up to it?" I asked

  "It's possible. One thing that interests me is that you chose to fall in love with someone who was unattainable."

  "I didn't exactly choose her," I said.

  "You fell in love with someone unattainable. There is no one less attainable than a dead person, and you may be surprised to know that lots of people fall in love with dead people." He smiled. "It's another syndrome." He called it the widow's syndrome. A man dies after a difficult or troubled marriage, and his wife turns him into a saint, forgets the dirty socks on the floor, the drinking, or the womanizing, and romanticizes him, turns him into the husband she'd always wanted, and ends up loving him more in death than she ever did in life.

  "And you think that's what I'm doing?" I asked.

  "It's possible," said the doctor. "You see, loving someone who isn't there is safer than loving someone who is, which is why 'absence makes the heart grow fonder.' There's no more profound absence than death, and when someone's dead, you can make her anyone you want her to be."

  "I don't know. It seems a little pat."

  "Okay, tell me more. Why do you think you fell in love with this dead woman?"

  I told him that guilt was a factor, that she was beautiful and interesting and vulnerable.

  "Vulnerable after her death?" he asked.

  "In an odd way. I told you I saw something and I know something. That has to do with what I know."

  "And what is that?"

  "I know that her death wasn't really an accident, or at least it was an intentional accident."

  "An accident she intended? Did she commit suicide?"

  "No. She was killed."

  "Oh. Murdered?" he asked.

  "Yes, she was murdered, and I know who did it."

  "How do you know this?" he asked.

  "I saw the man who did it."

  "You saw him do it? You saw him kill her?"

  "No, but I saw him, and I know he did it. I put two and two together, and I know."

  "Pete, may I ask you what your purpose is with regard to this man?"

  "I would like to see him brought to justice, of course."

  "May I ask then why you don't just go to the police?"

  "I did. That's one of the first things I did." I waited and watched him.

  "And were they able to help you?"

  I told him that they helped me see that I knew nothing about police work, that my "case" against the man was intuitive, my evidence was either missing or circumstantial, that the man was a highly respected citizen with no criminal record, and that I appeared to be on either a wild-goose chase or a crusade. Here are the things I did not tell him: "They" was Steve Lotts, who now believed the man to be involved in the woman's death, Lieutenant Grassi may have suspected foul play early on, and I now had a lot more evidence that I hadn't taken to the police because I wanted to be able to act if they did not. "They said that no prosecutor would dare to touch the thing, and if one did, he'd get laughed out of the DA's office. They suggested I seek counseling."

  "Okay."

  "So here I am. Seeking counseling."

  "All right. How are you feeling about all of this now?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I presume since you came 'seeking resolution,' that you are not finished with it quite yet."

  "No, no. They did make me step back and take a closer, more realistic look at myself and my motives and the whole situation. I mean, why was I doing this? What did it really matter to me?" I told him that I no longer saw the woman as a purely innocent victim; she was too complex for that. For that matter, I no longer saw the man as completely evil. I didn't like what he did, but I began to understand it at least a little; I could at least imagine his desperation. I mentioned for the first time that the man was a doctor, that the woman was his patient, that they were having an affair, and that I was quite certain now that at least on some level—if only the emotional one—she was blackmailing him. She was getting to him somehow, that he was an essentially good man who made one mistake and was in danger of being destroyed by it. He was a modest, intelligent, circumspect man about to become a tabloid headline, a man who had devoted his life to helping others undone by the most human of desires, a man trapped perhaps (who knows?) in a loveless marriage, a cold, difficult wife, a lonely man empty, aging, and then this woman—this young woman—this beautiful, vital, exciting, sexy, daring, tempting, willing, able, very able, very willing, and very vulnerable girl came along, and of course it went sour, and she turned into a viper, and he was faced with utter ruin. I told him that I thought a lot about the despair, desperation, and panic the doctor must have felt, about the scandal, the shame and disgrace that he knew lay ahead of him, about that Noah Cross line in Chinatown: "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time, at the right place, they're capable of anything." I even told him that I thought of some of the things I'd been capable of and some of the things I'd done that I regret. I told him I'd done things I wished I hadn't. I looked at him.

  "Do you want to tell me about those things?" he asked.

  "No, not really. Not now, anyway. See, I needed to resolve this thing about the doctor. I came to realize my fallacy was my starting point; he's not an essentially good man; he just looks like one. Look closer and you see a physician who betrayed his most essential trust, who hurt a patient who came to him for help, who hurt her premedit
atedly, repeatedly, perhaps as an act of passion originally, but later dispassionately, and when he feared getting caught, he abandoned her. Abandoned her as a lover, as a human being, as a patient. And when she struck back, he killed her."

  "Hm."

  "There's more. There's the man in the camel coat and the woman who might have been his wife. See, we met at the wreck. They were driving north as I was driving south. Had the young woman swerved left rather than going straight into the tree, she might have hit them. Of course, the woman who might have been his wife might not have been his wife, and for all I know, he was about to hit her over the head or dump her in the lake or she him, all of which is to say that I'm really not much of a sentimentalist myself, but you'd have to consider who else you might be endangering, wouldn't you?" I looked at him carefully and closely.

  "So where does that leave you?" he finally asked.

  "You mean in the 'is the doctor good or is the doctor evil' thing?"

  "If you wish." And I thought for an instant that he was genuinely interested in my answer.

  "My guess used to be neither," I said. "My guess used to be that he was more amoral than immoral, that he was something of a sociopath. That he really had no feelings. That he could probably have sat right here and discussed this thing coolly and objectively without raising his blood pressure or breaking a sweat. He could probably have even passed a polygraph test if it was in his own interest to do so. That's what I used to feel. Now I'm not so sure."

  "Do you think it would make you feel better if you were able to punish him?" he asked.

  "That's not it, you see. I don't want to punish him, I just want to stop him."

  "Then you feel you have a moral purpose?"

  "I came to feel that he was a man without one." I looked him in the eyes as I explained that the doctor had crossed a line a doctor just can't cross, not once or ever. And if he ever did, he'd misunderstood the basic relationship between doctor and patient, that there isn't any margin for error. This wasn't an error. This wasn't a slipup or mistake. It was fundamental betrayal. And if a doctor does it once, he's probably done it before, and he'll probably do it again.