“Do you have my address?” I said.
“I forget it.”
I pulled a pen from my jacket pocket and scratched out my number on the Kleenex box.
“By noon, Passion,” I said, somewhat less convincingly than before, and stepped around her.
Donny looked up at me as I passed through the foyer. “Good evening,” I said. He was watching me very closely, nodding his head almost imperceptibly. As I stepped outside I could hear him start down the hall.
It was half past three in the morning when the doorbell rang. I had been dreaming about a castle in Scotland, which I’d visited on my twelfth birthday. I was looking down from the top of the battlements. A row of damp flags drooped behind me. It was late afternoon; the sun hid behind a fog; the wet brown terrain ran straight down to the ocean; from somewhere out on the grey water came the sound of oars. I was bored. Holidays were always so boring near the end; how one hungered to get back to school. I felt in my blazer pocket for a cigarette, yes, there it was, and carefully, for its paper was wet, I extracted it. I tapped my trouser pockets: good, I had matches. I was striking the tiny colourless head against the cover when I caught sight of a woman in a window across the courtyard. She passed very quickly, like that. But that part of the castle was supposed to be empty. She must be a ghost! I must tell my mother that I saw Emma Carpenter in the window of a castle!
And then I heard the doorbell ring again. I got up, wrapping a towel around my waist, and hurried to the door. Holding the towel with one hand and pulling in my stomach, I swung it open. For a second I drew a blank.
“Donny,” I said. “You’re early.”
He uttered something, a few words only, in a rather soft and not unpleasant voice, and I thought to myself, Ah, this is going to work out. I also realized I was still drunk.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked, and leaned forward. But at that very second he grabbed my head between both hands and brought his forehead smack against mine. Red light exploded and I dropped to the floor, the towel fluttering to the side. He looked down at me with absolute calm. He’s done this before, I thought. After waiting what seemed like a determined amount of time, like a man counting to ten before allowing himself to say something, he reached over and, putting his fingers slowly into my hair, grasped a handful and yanked.
“Do you want some more?” he said.
My eyes watered.
“Have you got any money in the house?”
For a wild second I thought there had been a grotesque misunderstanding, that he had somehow, the way things happen in dreams, mistaken me for somebody else.
“What?”
He pulled harder. “Money, fuckweed.” His grip relaxed.
“I’m a professor,” I protested, and in the tone of my voice, its cowardly pitch, a moment from my childhood flared up like a match head, when a boy named Steven Love had backed me against the brick wall of my school and I had heard myself say, in precisely the voice I now heard, “I’m not a’scared of you.”
“No safe, nothing like that?” he said.
“No, of course not.”
He grabbed up the towel and pushed my head away, releasing my hair. “Wipe yourself.”
I clamped the towel to my head.
He stood observing me for a moment. “A bleeder, eh?” You could see him thinking, like a slow reader turning the page of a book, as he moved to the next thought. “Jewellery?”
I shook my head.
He looked around the room. “I’m confused,” he said. “Rich guy like you, buys his pussy, pays in cash. You got to have some money around here.”
I sat up, holding the towel to my head. “I got it out of the bank today. Check my wallet.”
He looked at me uncertainly. “Bank cards?”
I didn’t answer.
“That’s some split you got in your melon,” he said, and he reached over and took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet.
I stepped away from him.
“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.” He kicked me in the shins, a short, sharp kick. I think he was aiming for my kneecap. I hopped away from him, but I tripped over my own feet. There was something slightly effeminate about it, the way I fell backwards with my hands out behind me, like a fat woman protecting her rear end. He’s going to beat me to death, I thought.
“You sure you don’t have a safe in here?”
I lay on the floor, my arm up. He leaned over. I could smell him. But he didn’t strike another blow. He simply waited with this eerie patience.
Then, “You in there?” he asked. He smelt of cigarette smoke. “You listening?” He gave my ear a pull and smacked the top of my head. “You listening?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m listening.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow.” He stood up. “Look at me,” he said. I was sure a kick was coming.
“Look at me,” he repeated. He leaned over and yanked away my hand. It was shaking.
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t.”
“Get yourself to the doctor, I don’t care, but I want to find something worthwhile here tomorrow when I come back.” He toed me with his shoe. “You hear me?”
“Yes.”
“What did I say?”
“You said you’ll be back tomorrow.”
“And what else did I say?”
“You want something worthwhile.”
“Okay. Good. And Passion doesn’t want to see you again. That relationship is over.” He toed me again. “You got me?”
“Yes, yes, I got you.”
“That all right with you? Answer me.”
“Yes, fine, okay, I won’t go back there.”
He stood up straight, bending a little backwards as if he had a backache. “Well, I guess I’m finished here. What do you think? Am I finished here?” He took a deep breath and looked around. “Okay, we’ll see you tomorrow, Professor. Noon sound good? Answer me. Noon’s good?”
“All right,” I said.
I went to the emergency room at Women’s College Hospital, where an Asian intern put six stitches in my forehead. I told him I’d slipped on the bathroom floor, but he wouldn’t have any of it. Automatically, as if it were printed on a slip that a machine had dispensed, he said, “You are too old to be fighting.”
“I need some painkillers,” I said. “My head is positively roaring.”
He looked at me with appraising neutrality. “Have you been drinking recently?”
“How recently?”
“Were you drinking last night?”
“I had a glass of wine with dinner.”
Instead of guffawing, he merely regarded me with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness. “I can’t prescribe painkillers if you’ve been drinking.”
“My head is throbbing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For heaven’s sake.”
He shrugged. “The problem with mixing alcohol and pain—”
“Jesus God, I don’t need a lesson in pharmacology. I’ve just been whacked on the head.”
“I thought you said you slipped.”
“The floor. The floor whacked me on the head. It came up like this and it banged my head.” I gave myself a glancing blow off the top of my head and, in doing so, cooked my own goose.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “In the interests of your welfare I recommend you stay here for an hour or two. Until things settle down.”
“Until what things settle down?”
“You could wait in the foyer. There’s reading material. Perhaps even yesterday’s newspaper.”
This, I supposed, was as close to a joke as he was going to get. Now it was my turn to look at him neutrally.
“Forget it.”
“Professor Halloway …”
“If you think I’m going to sit in your bloody waiting room with my noggin on fire and read the newspaper, you are as overworked as the newspapers say you are. There. How drunk could I be if I can manage a sentence like that witho
ut a stumble or a slur?”
“If you are still in discomfort tomorrow, you may return here and I’ll give you a prescription for something.”
When I got home I found the front door swinging on its hinges, dirt from the front garden hurled over the floor, a vase shattered. Someone had defecated in the kitchen sink.
Good God, I thought, reeling backwards, the smell making me gag, how did I get here? It struck me—for I suddenly saw myself as a man in the far corner of a photograph, irrelevant but fixed as such forever—that I was experiencing some kind of psychotic episode. I may even have said it out loud, You are experiencing a psychotic episode, but my heart was beating so fast I knew that very soon it wasn’t going to matter whether or not I understood what was happening to me.
“You’ve got to slow things down,” I said aloud, and to my surprise the sound of my own voice was quite reassuring. Even a hint of English exasperation, affectionate but firm. When I stopped speaking I noticed that everything began slowly to speed up again. My thoughts leapt forward. Little grey hounds, they were, dashing after the rabbit. But what exactly was the rabbit? Lord, what didn’t I think of next? What unimaginable clutter! Poetry, shards of poetry, Corbière, Musset, Hugo, nothing good, nothing great, just the trash of too much reading, too much teaching, too much listening to the sound of one’s own voice. And other things crowding around, standing too close, shouting “me too, me too, me too.” That stupid quitting of my summer job. But why remember it now? It was more than thirty years ago! (This between the kitchen and the foyer.) I swore to myself even back then, I solemnly declared a hundred times after that episode, that the next time I arrived here, got caught on board a train that shrieks down the tracks, I’d remember not to do anything about it. Feel what you like, dream what you like, scheme what you like, but don’t act on any of it. Leave it alone. Eventually it will just go, like dirty water running out of the bathtub.
And to be fair (here a wave of cheerfulness), for the most part it’s worked. La plupart du temps. All those tranquil years in between. What tranquil years? What fucking tranquil years? What are you talking about? When were you tranquil? Was it not like having a beast in the basement catching its breath?
But no (despair ran over me again), it hasn’t worked at all. I simply haven’t felt like this since … since when? Since last time. Since the dogs. Those poor sad dead dogs. She must have thought they were sleeping. Yes, all right now, don’t break my bloody arm, there were other incidents, if that’s what you want to call them. That business with the steak knife and my brother. But be honest, who hasn’t wanted to carve up his brother? What self-respecting younger brother hasn’t tried, at least once? And so half-heartedly too. My goodness. And Raissa, of course, yes, that was a slightly, how shall we say, energised period, stalking about the city, weeping over Madame Bovary in a public park. Oh, and the tall Jewish girl, goodness, she threw me for a loop, Lord, yes, that was madness too. I didn’t even want her. Ah yes, I know what you’re thinking, the addictive power of being loved, the third factor no one considers, you and me and it, just the three of us in such a small boat. But she left, you see, and, well, quite simply, I seem to be a chap who loves women who leave. Quod est demonstratum. It is their absolute, unmitigated, schizophrenic unavailability that makes them so precious. Indeed, who could be more desirable than an ex-lover crossing the street with a new man? Her coat swinging open, just a glimpse of all those treasures no longer within reach. Someone else’s now. Yes, indeed, someone else’s now.
And on it went, other episodes. How remarkable to have lasted so long, to have put up such a magnificent defence. A regular Maginot line. But why could I never—once the fit was upon me—see down the road to the point where none of this mattered, was the stuff of a port-and-cigars anecdote? A bad patch, old chap, but I got through it, and so on. Why the succumbing? It was as if my brain had turned against me, as if it had decided on its own to drive me mad. What does he need? Sleep? Then sleep shall be banished. Take it away. (A trifle grand, that, “to drive one mad.” A bit kingly. Something perhaps less chest-thumping. To undo one. Yes, better.)
So there, now we understand one another. You haven’t gone mad, you’ve always been mad. Small consolation, that. Hardly the prize at the end of the game show. Not exactly a new Chevrolet or a trip to Hawaii, this final persuasive knowledge that one has always been cracked, as they say in Mad magazine. Cracked. Hmm. Not exactly le mot juste. Unhinged seems closer to the point. Like a horse that won’t stop running. No, unhinged isn’t right either. What, precisely, is the word for a horse that won’t stop running?
But stop it now. You are having a psychotic episode. But even as I said the words psychotic episode I knew it was a useless strategy. A furnace had suddenly clicked on in my brain and I didn’t know how to turn it off. It would burn and burn and burn, it would agitate me for the rest of my life with its heat and speed and, worst of all, its insistence. Until it ran its course. Until I did something. Until I acted.
“Don’t do this,” I said out loud. “Don’t do this.” But it was such a weak voice, a tiny, ineffectual aunt whispering in the corner, “Wear your galoshes, dear. You’ll catch your death of …”
Feel what you like, dream what you like, scheme what you like. But for heaven’s sake, don’t act on it.
I went down into the basement and shuffled through a box containing the early drafts of my master’s thesis (The Theme of Descent in Nineteenth-century Symbolists) until I came across the clip from my former roommate’s gun. I squeezed a bullet into my palm. It was half the length of my baby finger, with a brass casing. I ran back up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but a wave of dizziness caught me at the top and I almost blacked out. I steadied myself in the doorway for a matter of moments. Good God, I groaned, how did I get here? Why, only a week ago I was happy; I got up in the morning, I read the paper, I patted the cat, I went to work. And now look. Look!
I clicked the clip into the heel of the gun and cocked it once to put a shell in the throat. I looked up the barrel to make sure the bullet was in place. I couldn’t see anything, but for a second there it looked like I was going to commit suicide. Committing suicide. Yes, it certainly was a commitment.
I pulled a bottle of Javex from the kitchen cupboard and poured it over the feces in the sink. I had to look away and plug my nose. I turned the taps on full steam, I swished the nozzle back and forth, and soon it was all gone. I poured in more Javex and ran the hot water until the kitchen window steamed over, my brain still shouting poetry, où le sceau de Dieu blêmit les fenêtres. Le sang et le lait coulèrent…
Finally it was done. It was my sink again. Restored. One obstacle had been cleared. There was, it seemed, a checklist in my head and I didn’t dare think farther down than the line at which I found myself at present. Out of the corner of my eye I could see it stretching onto a second page.
I pushed an easy chair in front of the main door, went back into the kitchen, and locked and double-checked the back door. Locked the door to the cellar. Fished through the kitchen drawers for a paring knife. Settled back on the chesterfield but only after checking the street again, north and south. Saw the red-haired woman whose dogs I’d poisoned. She came out of her house and got into her car. I wondered if she still thought about them, if she still missed them. Probably not. Probably fussing about something else by now. It would pass. Like the shit in the sink, it would be gone without a trace. A little, private episode. Really, how much of one’s life is made up of these private incidents; how submerged one is. You know, for example, that you will recover from a broken heart, but somehow that piece of information, that factoid, never arrives at the soul or the brain or the nervous system, yes, the nervous system, where it might do some good. But if you know you’re going to be all right, why then do you suffer so? To get there. To get where you know you are going to get to anyway. How pathetic, then, to feel good about having arrived. I survived, you say. Yes, but what else would you do? No one dies from love. Come, come.
I felt a curious urge—and with it a sense of impunity—to go into the street and tap on the red-haired woman’s car window and say, It was me, I killed your dogs. My life back then seemed so … peaceful. What leisurely problems I’d had. A bark here, a bark there. Really, such a fuss pour un rien. Confessing, therefore, seemed rather an easy thing. It had been, on the face of things, rather a small crime when one came right down to it. The barking, not the killing.
But I didn’t go into the street. I was far too busy. And besides, once one starts confessing, where exactly does one stop?
I took a deep breath. My, I was tired. Indeed, very tired. But I had work to do. I sat on the chesterfield and put on my reading glasses and took the paring knife and cut a deep “X” in the soft lead at the tip of the bullet.
“There, Donny,” I said.
I went into the living room and knelt on the couch (where Emma had read Anna Karenina) and looked out the window like a child waiting for the rain to stop. By nightfall he still hadn’t come. I went upstairs, the gun in my dressing-gown belt; stopped at the head of the stairs and looked back down the stairwell. I could feel a breeze blowing in through the crack in the broken door. I hurried back down to the basement, pulled out an old green banker’s lamp, brought it upstairs, hooked it above the front door and plugged it into the foyer wall socket. Raced back up the stairs. Flicked on the hall light. Perfect, the lamp went on. Flick on, flick off. Perfect. Perfect. I could hear, clear as if an orchestra was playing on the front lawn, the opening, almost inquisitive notes of the Concierto de Aranjuez.
Darkness fell; the street lights had come on and I hadn’t noticed; the sky kept its blue from the day, almost an aquatic blue, even though blackness lay over the streets and houses and lawns below. A full moon that looked as if it had been dispensed from a child’s bedtime book hung in the sky. The red-haired woman came home. She walked up her front stairs, looking to the right and left, and there was something touching about her, these bird-like looks to each side, a fragility, a loneliness, as if she hoped at the last second to catch sight of someone on the street, a friend, even a neighbour, someone to chat to for a second before the house swallowed her up for another interminable, unfillable night. I wondered if she might be lonely without her dogs, and I felt a stab of regret. Such an odd, strange, sad, violent thing to have done, dead doggies on the grass, sleepy doggies …
Sparrow Nights (v5) (epub) Page 14
