Set This House in Order

by Matt Ruff

  “Yes, Julie Sivik,” I said. “She’s my boss. She’s not the one I’m having a problem with, though.”

  “But you were, weren’t you?” Her eyes became distant, recollecting. “The last time you were here? You were obsessing over her…”

  “Well, yes, sort of, but—”

  “She’d led you on somehow, romantically, then changed her mind about it, and you were having real trouble coming to terms with that.”

  “Yes, but…but that was a while ago. I got over it.”

  “Ah!” Dr. Grey snapped out of her reverie, brightening. “Well, good! So who’s the new girl?”

  “Her name is Penny Driver,” I said. “But she’s not…it’s not a romantic relationship. We just work together.” I paused, for some reason wanting Dr. Grey to acknowledge this point, but she just stared at me expectantly, so after a moment I continued: “She started working at the Reality Factory last Monday—Julie hired her. And it turns out that…”

  I told her the story. Dr. Grey was attentive but very unresponsive at first, so much so that I started wondering, half-seriously, whether she’d fallen asleep with her eyes open. But when I described how I’d confronted Julie about her ulterior motives for hiring Penny, Dr. Grey came back to life, nodding vigorously. “Good,” she said, “I’m glad you called her on it. You were right, it was a bad idea, especially springing it on you that way.”

  “Well,” I said, encouraged, “I’m sure Julie meant well—”

  “Good intentions are overrated,” said Dr. Grey. “Probably you know this, but I’m not a big fan of good intentions.”

  “Um…”

  “But that’s a tangent. I’m sorry. Continue.”

  “Um, well, anyway, the very next day…”

  During the second half of the story, as I described Thread’s attempts to get me to “help Penny find herself,” Dr. Grey interrupted frequently, quizzing me about the exact wording of the e-mails, and about Penny’s, Thread’s, and Foul Mouth’s demeanors when they’d said and done certain things. She also wanted to know everything I had done, and after her comment about good intentions, I was worried that my own actions would be found wanting. But Dr. Grey’s judgment, when it came, was positive.

  “It sounds like you handled yourself pretty well, under the circumstances,” she said.

  “Well…except for the freaking-out part.”

  “A certain amount of skittishness is understandable, especially given the threats. But you are going to have to talk to this girl—”

  “I know. I just—”

  “You’re also going to have to tell Julie what’s been happening—I know you don’t want to involve her, but if Penny’s behavior starts affecting your work, your boss needs to know about it. Particularly since it’s her responsibility for hiring Penny in the first place.”

  I didn’t say anything to that, but Dr. Grey reacted as if I had. She must have seen something in my face—and whatever else the stroke had done to her, her instincts were as sharp as ever.

  “If the situation with Penny were to go from bad to worse,” she asked, “do you think Julie would try to hold you responsible?”

  “Well,” I said, carefully, “I don’t think she’d blame me directly…but she might act as if it were my fault.”

  “Let me ask you something else, then. You told me before that you’d gotten over your obsession with Julie. How, exactly?”

  “How?”

  “How did you get over it? As I recall, you were pretty hard up for her the last time you were here. And God knows I can’t have been much help, zonking out in the middle of our conversation…”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “You were helpful…or at least, as helpful as you could be.”

  “In other words, not very,” said Dr. Grey. “So how did you manage your feelings? Did you and Julie talk it out some more, or—”

  “No. No, Julie was pretty sick of talking about my feelings by that point. I can’t blame her, really…I mean, I know love isn’t rational, and there doesn’t have to be a logical explanation for why two people can’t be together, even if it seems like they might be right for each other…but I kept on wanting a logical explanation anyway. And Julie did the best she could, trying to make sense of it for me, but eventually she got fed up with me asking the same questions over and over…”

  “So you couldn’t talk to her anymore. How did you resolve it, then?”

  “I…I overheard something.”

  “Overheard what?”

  I stared at my hands.

  “Overheard what?” Dr. Grey repeated, patiently.

  “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

  Dr. Grey regarded me soberly. “I promise not to make fun,” she said.

  I sighed, and forced myself to tell it: “It happened about a week after I visited you. Julie started dating this other guy, a mechanic she met at Triple A, and I went a little crazy over it. One of the things she’d told me when she was trying to explain why we couldn’t go out was that she wasn’t interested in seeing anyone just then—but then she turned right around and started seeing someone after all. So that weekend, even though I knew she was tired of talking, I went by her apartment to try and get her to explain it to me one more time.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I was outside the door to Julie’s apartment, working up the nerve to knock, and that was when I heard them. Julie and the mechanic.”

  “Heard them…?”

  “Together. You know…”

  “Ah,” said Dr. Grey.

  “Julie’s bedroom is the farthest room from the outside door, but it’s a small apartment, and, well, they were being pretty noisy.”

  “So you heard them together in the bedroom. Then what?”

  “Well, I should have turned away and left.”

  “Yes, you should have,” Dr. Grey agreed. “But what did you do? Stay to listen?”

  My cheeks were burning, and for a moment I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at her. I nodded. “I couldn’t help myself,” I said, and then, remembering that my father might be listening, I quickly amended: “I mean, I could help myself, of course I could, but I chose not to.”

  “And how did it feel, eavesdropping on that?”

  “Awful. Awful, and wrong, but also…you know what a cathartic experience is, right?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Dr. Grey, “but I think you mean a vicarious experience.”

  “No, cathartic. I mean yes, there was a vicarious part to it too, at first…Julie sounded like she was really enjoying herself, and of course I wished it could have been me who was, who was making her happy that way. Maybe I even imagined that it was me, for a little bit. But then, as it went on, I started to feel…wrenched. It was like that feeling you have when you’re crying so hard that your whole body shakes—only I wasn’t crying, or shaking. And when it was over, when they finally finished and I snuck away, I felt washed out: fuzzy, and tired, and a little feverish—but also better, somehow.

  “I remember thinking to myself: ‘Maybe that’s the reason we couldn’t be together.’ Maybe, as much as I wanted to make Julie…happy…that way, maybe I just didn’t have it in me, and maybe Julie knew that, and that’s why she picked the mechanic instead of me. So I went home, thinking about that, and I went to bed early that night, and slept deep, and when I got up the next day I’d accepted it: accepted that Julie and I could never be a couple. All the obsessive feeling, the need for an explanation, that was all gone.”

  “Purged,” Dr. Grey said.

  “Yes.”

  “Or repressed,” she added. “Or split off.”

  “Split—…no!” I objected; this was a serious accusation. “I’ve never split off anything! I’ve never lost time, not even a second!”

  “You did say you slept deep that night…”

  “That was sleep, not a blackout! Besides, if I had lost time, somebody else in the house would have noticed!”

  “All right then, that’s good,” Dr. Grey said. “No blac
kout. But I still think your feelings about Julie might not be quite as settled as you’d like to believe. And that’s worth keeping in mind, if only so that you can keep those feelings separate from your feelings about Penny. Because dealing with a disordered multiple is difficult enough even when your motivations are crystal-clear.”

  “So what about Penny?” I asked, anxious to change the subject. “What do I do?”

  “The first thing you’ve got to do is talk to her,” Dr. Grey said. “To the facilitator, what’s her name—”

  “Thread.”

  “Thread, right. Set ground rules. You’ll probably have to deal with the protector first, so make it clear, up front, that you won’t tolerate abuse. No more threats, no more late-night phone calls, none of that. And this is very important, Andrew.” She raised a finger in warning. “If the threats do continue, if she escalates the violence in any way, you need to be willing to call the police.”

  I frowned.

  “This is serious, Andrew.”

  “I know it’s serious,” I said. “But I…I don’t want to make trouble for her. I don’t want to get her committed, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I don’t want to get her committed either,” said Dr. Grey, “but I also don’t want to see you get your head handed to you by a berserk alter. So promise me—”

  “All right, I promise. Cross my heart.”

  “Good…good. Now the next step, after you make contact and lay down the law, is to see if they’d be willing to come out here, to meet with me.”

  “Oh no!” I said. “Dr. Grey, I can’t ask you to—”

  “I’m not offering to treat them,” Dr. Grey assured me. “I can’t, I just don’t have the energy. But before I make a referral, I do want to meet this woman for myself. Confirm the diagnosis.”

  “All right. I guess I can bring Penny here. I can try.”

  “At some point,” Dr. Grey added, “I’d also like to discuss a referral for you.”

  “For me? What for? I’m not—”

  “I just think it might be helpful for you to have someone to talk to, a professional I mean. Someone to counsel you on whatever issues come up in your life. It wouldn’t have to be weekly sessions—just once a month, or whenever you needed a sympathetic ear. I’d offer to do it myself, but I couldn’t guarantee that I’d always be…well, as I say, I just don’t have the energy.” Even as she said this, she seemed to sag a little in the wheelchair, the alertness that had animated her for the past hour draining away.

  “Dr. Grey,” I said, suddenly afraid, “you are all right, aren’t you?”

  “That’s…an essay question, Andrew.” She laughed, but it was forced.

  “Should I not have come today? My father thought it might be a bad idea, that you were too—”

  “No, no, Andrew, please,” Dr. Grey said, struggling to rouse herself. “I…you know it’s odd, having treated your father and the others, I see you as someone familiar. But the truth is…the truth is we barely know each other. You’ve never seen me…at my best.” She sighed. “It’s been a difficult adjustment.” Her strong hand thumped the armrest of her wheelchair. “I miss seeing patients. Miss…miss working as hard as I used to. So don’t be sorry you came to me with a problem—I’m glad to help, glad to have a chance to help. I just wish I could have helped more when you…when you were starting out.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about there,” I said. “You did enough, just helping my father build the house. It’s worked out fine, really.”

  “Well, good,” said Dr. Grey, and then closed her eyes for a moment. “Could you get Meredith in here? I think I need to go back upstairs for a bit, now, and rest.”

  “Oh sure,” I said, getting up. “Should I—”

  “I’d like you to stay for lunch, if you can.” Dr. Grey opened her eyes again. “I just need a little nap first. You can skim through Minor’s book while you’re waiting. Let me know what you think of it.”

  “I’ve already read one paragraph,” I told her, “and I think it’s terrible.”

  “Excellent! Read more paragraphs, then. Over lunch, you can tell me why it’s terrible, in detail.” She smiled tiredly. “Make my day.”

  I would have been happy to make Dr. Grey’s day. But she never came back down from her nap, and eventually Meredith suggested that we eat lunch without her. We had sandwiches out on the porch, and in between nibbles (I still wasn’t very hungry) I asked about Dr. Grey’s condition. “Danny has good days and bad days,” Meredith said vaguely. “Today is about average—although I know she was glad to see you.”

  After we finished eating I waited around a little longer, hoping to at least say good-bye, but Dr. Grey went on sleeping. So I wrote her a note, thanking her for seeing me and telling her I would call once I’d made contact with Thread. Then I headed for the bus stop to begin the long trip back to Autumn Creek.

  On the way home, I thought about Julie.

  9

  I guess it’s not all that surprising that I would be confused about sex. Unlike many of the other souls in the house, I was never raped or molested; but my practical knowledge of the world had to come from somewhere, and a multiple household’s collective understanding of human sexuality is inevitably somewhat warped.

  It wasn’t the mechanics of the act that confounded me—I figured I had that part pretty much straight, although the thought of actually doing it scared the hell out of me. What puzzled me was the approach to sex. How, exactly, did two people decide they wanted to get together, and how did they communicate that fact to each other? I knew about flirting, but wasn’t sure how to distinguish it from ordinary friendliness. Suppose you thought somebody wanted you to kiss them: was there a way to find out for certain that they did, without making a fool of yourself? Was it OK to just ask, or did having to ask mean that the answer was probably no? What if you were kissing somebody: how did you know when they wanted to go further? What were the signs?

  My father’s answer to all of the above was a frustrating “You’ll learn.” I couldn’t really blame him for not being more helpful: not counting involuntary acts, my father was (and is) a virgin. As far as I know, he never even dated anyone, nor did he ever express any desire to.

  There were other souls in the house who had had sexual or romantic relationships, or pieces of relationships, but as a rule they guarded those memories closely. I knew, for instance, that Aunt Sam had had a “sweetheart” sometime during Andy Gage’s adolescence; knew too (from Adam, telling tales out of school) that she and the sweetheart had done a lot of intimate things together. But Aunt Sam would never talk about that; she wouldn’t even confirm the sweetheart’s existence. “A lady never tells,” was all she had to say about the matter. Even if she hadn’t been so ladylike, she might not have had anything useful to share with me: after all, just because she had a lot of experience being in a relationship didn’t mean she knew anything about starting one.

  So I was more or less on my own when, towards the end of 1995, I began to wonder whether Julie might be attracted to me. Oh, the other souls still kibitzed, of course—they always did that—but it was, to borrow a phrase from Mrs. Winslow, like having elephants give advice about ice-skating.

  Or almost like that. In retrospect, I’m forced to admit that Adam (another virgin) had a pretty good read on the situation. But his observations were so crude—and so contrary to what I wanted to hear—that I refused to take them seriously.

  “Julie’s not interested in fucking you,” he told me bluntly.

  “And you know this how?” I asked him. “Something you read in Playboy?”

  I’d meant to insult him, but Adam found this hilarious. “Yeah,” he said, cackling. “In the Women With Car Trouble issue…Seriously, Julie’s a lot of things, but she’s not shy. When she really wants something, she lets you know. She might pick the most inconvenient way imaginable to do it, but she lets you know.”

  “Well maybe this is different,” I suggested. “Maybe she’s still making
up her mind.”

  “Nah,” said Adam. “She just doesn’t want to fuck you.”

  “Adam—”

  “I’m not saying she never thought about it. Maybe she has. Maybe she daydreams about it sometimes, when she’s bored—maybe that’s what you picked up on. But it’s not serious. If she really wanted to fuck you, she would have by now.”

  I didn’t want to believe him, although my “evidence” that Julie might be interested in me was pretty insubstantial. True, she was very physically affectionate towards me, but as Adam never tired of pointing out, she was like that with almost everyone—even Dennis, on the rare occasions when they weren’t fighting. On the other hand, Julie and I had started spending an awful lot of time alone together outside of work, and that was something she didn’t do with anybody else. Our private talks were often extremely personal, touching on subjects you wouldn’t discuss with just anyone. We shared secrets; Julie called me her “confidant.”

  And there were incidents, things that happened that suggested we were more than just close friends, or could become more. Things that gave me hope.

  Like the night before Thanksgiving, when the two of us went out to celebrate the holiday at the same Bridge Street bar we’d gone to the day we first met. Julie ordered a kamikaze; I had a strawberry margarita with no alcohol in it. The waiter who brought our drinks made a comment about how he dreaded going home to see his family tomorrow, and that got Julie talking about her family, in particular about her father. Without going into details that aren’t mine to share, let’s just say that Julie’s relationship with her dad, while nowhere near as bad as Andy Gage’s relationship with his stepfather, was still pretty terrible—it’s not for nothing that she left home at sixteen.

  Julie talked about her father for almost two hours. I did my best to commiserate, although, as I reminded her at one point, I had no personal experience with abusive parents. But Julie didn’t seem to care about that; so I listened, and she poured out her heart. She was still talking as I walked her home, holding her hand the whole way.