"As someone might absent-mindedly hum?"
"As someone, contemplating suicide, might breathe."
"Why this year, Vyvyan? Why not last year? Or five years ago? or ten? Or five years from now?"
"How am I to answer you? The predictability of the onset of an acute psychological disorder, I conceive, falls below that of either earthquakes or solar eclipses."
"And so you're here."
"And so, Jerrold, I am here."
▼▼▼
Barbara, a petite woman with an early-morning interview show on our local ABC affiliate, began to resent my Thursday evening sessions with Vyvyan. By the final week in January, I had met with him eight times. The contract drawn up with Mr. Foxworth stipulated that his treatment would run six months; however, he was the only patient with whom I had ever agreed to meet after my posted office hours.
My wife regarded these lost evenings as "stolen." Thursday had traditionally been the night on which we met with three other couples for bridge and middle-aged chitchat. It also upset her that V.F.—as I referred to Vyvyan at home, to preserve the confidentiality of his case—was apparently a big man with a hot temper, a heavy vein of bitterness, and a history of violent acts. In Barbara, annoyance and concern alternated in strobelike flashes. I stood frozen by the annoyance and blinking before the concern.
"Can't you switch the sessions to another night?"
"Which one, Barb? I won't do it on the weekend, when conferences sometimes arise. Every other evening's taken. Mondays, I've got Mental Health League meetings. Tuesdays, I chair our fund raiser for the History Center. Wednesdays, you always—"
"Stop. I get the picture." And so Barbara would change tacks: "What if this loony V.F. person goes off his nut and—"
"He won't. And if he does, I have this." I showed her my pistol in its compact little shoulder holster.
"How creatively macho. Come on, Jerry, do you really think that calms my fears? Can't you get out of this? Can't you at least make room for poor old V.F. during regular office hours?"
"Barb, this is a favor for Van Foxworth, your daddy's longtime friend and associate. It was Dear Bill who got me into this."
Barbara looked at the ceiling through her bangs. "Thanks, Dad," she said. She put a hand on my chest. "But you're having fun with it, aren't you? Aren't you?"
"It has to be one of the most interesting cases I've ever had," I conceded. "And I may be doing some good."
"You'd better be," Barbara said.
▼▼▼
"You want to be as others are," I said during our final January session. "And you want there to be something distinctive about you even as you sink into the American melting pot?"
"Yes."
"Your height?" (I did not say, although I thought it, Your pied and misshapen face?)
"Nay, Jerrold. My height estranges. Or else it elicits, on the part of some, a mercenary ulteriority."
"Yeah," I said. "You could probably play basketball. The Hawks would pay you big-time just to ride the bench as a backup center."
I wasn't trying to be funny. Vyvyan had a raw athleticism that even his clownish wardrobe couldn't disguise. In Frankenstein, he had effortlessly scaled the face of Mont Saleve. And the Atlanta Hawks had once dropped a multimillion-dollar contract on a beanpole center averaging less than six points a game.
Vyvyan, who had a TV set in his warehouse room, began to laugh rumblingly. "What meaning does basketball impart to the quotidian rounds of our lives? What meaning can it impart?"
"For some, it's a living. A damned good one."
"Passing a ball through an elevated ring set on the horizontal at a predetermined height—"
"Yeah. Ten feet."
"—to produce a score that, if larger than one's competitor's, affords an excuse for noisy self-congratulation."
"Others join in, throwing money, confetti, silk undies. Meaning ensues from the activities to which we attribute meaning."
Vyvyan paused before asking, "Attribute your meaning to dreams?"
"Sure, I think dreams mean. They shed light on the details, if not always the causes, of all our waking anxieties."
So Vyvyan told me a dream he'd had some time ago: "By myself, I am a basketball team in an ebony uniform, with a mourning band around my left arm. Several players as bothersome as midges swarm about me in uniforms of many colors—my opponents. The vast arena is shot through with a blinding lambency, and I move within this heavy light like one struggling to swim in the sanctuary of a drowned cathedral.
"A zigzag of lightning cleaves the arena, divesting the golden light of its terrible weight. This is the signal for the contest to begin. I 'control,' as a sportscaster in the great hall sepulchrally announces, the opening tip-off, but am unable to bounce the ball on the floor without a midgelike opponent effecting a theft and fleeing from me. This galling pattern recurs and recurs.
"The large vertical squares to which each 'basket' is attached—backboards, affirms the sportscaster—are mirrors. I am the only player in the arena who can see his face in these opposing mirrors when I trot, ever more frustrated, toward the one goal or the other. I am odious even to myself, and the invisible spectators in the arena are audibly celebrating my frustration.
"At last, however, I secure the ball. I do not try to advance by the legal method of 'dribbling.' Rather, I march toward my goal with the ball held undislodgeably under my arm. The mites who attempt to interfere with my march I hurl from me as a bear flings the yelping dogs of a hunting pack. The arena quiets. I am under my goal."
"Go ahead," I urged Vyvyan.
He released a breath. "I am surrounded by flailing defenders. I lift the ball over my head and spring from the floor so that my upper body ripples in the mirror of the backboard. I perform with exultant savoir-faire a maneuver known to basketball enthusiasts as a 'gorilla dunk.' The backboard disintegrates. A myriad shards, each no larger than a sand grain, cascade down. I tower in ruins of my own making, glittery diamonds on my head and shoulders."
"Wow," I said.
"My dream had an epilogue. The arena experienced darkness. When the lights returned, I again had the ball, but now I faced the other basket. Arrayed against me was a team of only five players, each in gold, each of a stature akin to my own. I began with difficulty to 'dribble' the ball through their tenacious defense. Meanwhile, the arena's spectators jeered my efforts, but with catcalls more jocular than malign." He paused again. "There the epilogue concluded."
I said nothing. The dream, at least in tanden with its epilogue, limned a subconscious adjustment that deserved praise. My nape hairs were standing erect. My knuckles were tingling. On the other hand, to analyze the dream for Vyvyan would've been to interdict the chance of self-discovery. I sat silent, waiting.
"Have you no oneiromantic exegesis?"
"What about you, Vyvyan? Don't you have one?"
"I understand my dream, but its meaning comes from the projected symbology rather than from any latent import in the game itself. I still have no wish to achieve my identity as an Atlanta Hawk."
"Good for you," I said. We laughed together.
▼▼▼
"Vyvyan, are you afraid of dying?"
"I am afraid of not dying."
"Come again."
"I may not have the capacity to pass from sentience to oblivion."
"You think you're immortal?"
"That is my nightmare. It has often stayed my hand when I moved, in either weariness or despair, to destroy myself."
"You resist killing yourself because you don't think you'll be able to? You've lost me."
"My nightmare is that I am incapable of dying. Who knows by what arcane methodology my father infused me with the life force? Perhaps I cannot die. Perhaps I can only mutilate or fragment myself, to the devastating end that whatever of me remains, greatly injured or even unrecognizably atomized, continues to throb and feel." "God."
"I no longer postulate Him."
▼▼▼
"W
hat about plastic surgery?"
"Who would perform it?"
"Height reduction through spinal excisions or the removal of leg-bone segments?"
"Again, who would perform these procedures?"
"Then you'll have to face the world as you are and forgive it for beating up on you."
"As you do."
"As I do. 'Patienthood is ubiquitous.' " "If only the world would accommodate itself to me as I am."
"A child's wish, Vyvyan."
"I am so much more than a child that the wish acquires the force of an apostolic bull."
"That way lies delusion or disappointment."
"I am not for myself the source of that which confers meaning. I was, however, such a source for Victor Frankenstein."
"Come again."
"The paradox of my life is that my father found his existential ground in the quest to create me. When I turned out something other than he had fatuously anticipated, he rediscovered this ground in a campaign to thwart and undo me. In at least two ways, then, I gave his life meaning, while he thoughtlessly withheld from me that same indispensable quality. Cursed, cursed creator! Why do I live?"
I waited almost a minute before speaking. "Let me play devil's advocate, Vyvyan. Is Van Foxworth, your employer, any better than Victor Frankenstein, your creator?"
"Mr. Foxworth has not rejected me."
"Isn't he perhaps exploiting you? You're doing the work of three or four people, and he's paying you not much more than minimum wage."
"I am impervious to the peculiar allure of money."
"Are you impervious to the truth that a person may do the right, or the nearly right, for the wrong reasons?"
"I am sensible of the truth that Mr. Foxworth, who has gazed upon my unmasked countenance without rushing to take up a stick, has given me the means to live in a system hostile to the ill-favored."
"By sequestering you in CargoCo's big tin warehouse?"
"What more should he have done? Sought out a professor of the affections to counsel with me?"
"Touche," I said. "A moment ago you asked, 'Why do I live?' It seems —sorry if this seems simplistic—that you live to work."
"And so do you."
"Of course," I said. "Who would want it otherwise?"
▼▼▼
"When did you let your patients start piloting a couch again?" asked Barbara, who was visiting during my lunch break.
I was typing up notes from a session that had run long and eating at my desk: a pastrami-on-rye sandwich, a cup of decaffeinated mint tea, and a blueberry yogurt for dessert.
"That? Oh, that's for V.F. And any other patient who feels more comfortable lying down than sitting in a chair."
"Well," Barbara said, "it looks like an aircraft carrier."
"V.F.'s a big fella."
"So you've said. But that must've set you back plenty."
"CargoCo's paying for it. And even if they weren't, it'd be just another tax-deductible office expense."
Barbara put her handbag, a Judith Leiber black karung model that had cost more than the chaise lounge, on the floor, kicked off her high heels, and lay down on the couch.
Sighing, she linked her fingers behind her head and pointed her girlish toes at me. Her legs in their scabbards of coffee-colored nylon were enticing, but I was busy. Because of one overlong morning interview, I'd be fighting all day to catch up.
"Didn't you renounce the couch as part of your methodology?"
"V.F.'s a special case."
"You don't like their stereotypical implications. I don't like their, well, their extracurricular implications."
"You didn't always feel that way, Barb."
"We weren't married when I didn't feel that way." She let her nylons whisper together. "Odd that after all this time you should go back on such a crucial promise."
I spooned a last bite from the plastic yogurt cup. "Blame V.F. Blame Foxworth. Blame your father. Or don't blame anyone. It's a couch, a piece of furniture. It's entirely innocent."
"It wasn't the couch's innocence I was worried about."
Vanessa Frye, my secretary, buzzed to ask if I were ready to see my next patient. I said yes.
I went to the couch and kissed Barbara on the nose. "I'll see you this evening, okay?"
"No, you probably won't. It's Thursday, Jerry." She swung her legs toward me, put on her shoes, grabbed her karung bag. "Give my regards, when you see him, to the 'ill-favored' V.F. 'Bye."
She nodded at Mr. Myron as he entered. I took some satisfaction from the fact that he was an elderly man trying to sort out both his guilt and his grief after surviving a car accident that had killed his wife. The attractive woman scheduled after Mr. Myron, after all, would have intensified Barbara's sense of unease.
▼▼▼
"Female companionship," I said. "You asked Frankenstein for a woman, a distaff being, with whom to share a South American exile."
"A promise on which he tardily but brutally reneged. Thus were kindled the avenging fires of my outrage."
"He destroyed your woman. You destroyed his friend. Later, you destroyed his woman as well."
"Long ago," Vyvyan said. "Long ago."
"Don't you still wish for . . . female companionship?"
Vyvyan waved a mitten. "That my father spitefully desolated my Eve before bestowing upon her the quickening force no longer strikes me as an altogether horrid act."
"No? Why not?"
"Because the universe is so made, and each of us within it is so made, that the basic state of each living creature is aloneness. The chasms between persons resist bridging. We may do no more by way of defective consolation than shout at one another. This, in my second coming, I belatedly understand."
"I once had another patient who reached the same conclusion. But he added, 'I may be alone in my boat, but it's always comforting to see the lights of the other boats bobbing nearby.' "
"Very pretty. But a comfort I have seldom been given to know."
"You no longer even wish for female companionship? For sensual contact? For sex?"
Vyvyan laughed. "Do you forgive me my boorish inquiry, but what would you have me do, seek out and unconscionably violate a yeti?" He chuckled again, a brief morose rumble.
"Forgive my boorish inquiry, but are you still a, a virgin?"
Vyvyan levered himself up and turned around, his ghastly features disclosed like the rainbow-colored butt of a baboon. His alley-cat's eyes flickered, his lips writhed sneeringly.
"I do not rise to lures meretriciously designed to accommodate the voyeur casting them."
I felt pinned to my chair, assaulted. I looked away. "Vyvyan, it isn't wrong—it's standard procedure—to discuss the intimate circumstances of your life with your therapist. Otherwise—"
"Otherwise, we might prove ourselves accidental observers of a civility no longer in fashion. Nay, I have already surrendered to a barbarous modernity on far too many fronts. Spare me, importunate man, this additional shame!"
I couldn't stop him. He banged out of my office with his mask dangling from one hand. As if lame, I followed. He was already in the stairwell. My watch said sixteen minutes remained in our hour. Mr. Foxworth would see to it that I was paid for these minutes, but I still felt cheated.
▼▼▼
At noon one week later, Vyvyan telephoned my office to report that he had had a small accident. Nessa Frye, my secretary, patched the call through to me, and Vyvyan said that a crate in a precarious stack of crates had toppled onto his foot, breaking every bone in his left little toe. He spoke in a disturbingly wheezy tone:
"My foot is bound in plaster, and I am unable to locomote without the support of a crutch. Therefore—"
"Vyvyan, I'll come get you." He didn't want to meet with me.
"Nay. I suffer also from a severe catarrh. Thoracic congestion, nasal inflammation—"
Nastily runny eyes, I thought.
"—and a debilitating febricity. I must cancel our appointment this evening and take
time to mend."
"Vyvyan, what if I came to you?"
"Get you home to your fair and angelic wife. I am unfit company for the well." Abruptly, he rang off.
I buzzed my outer office. "Nessa, come in here, please."
At my desk, I worried the unspoken burden of Vyvyan's call. It was a subterfuge, I thought. He was still angry with me for pressing him on matters that his eighteenth-century sense of punctilio viewed as outside the therapeutic province. I was in danger of losing him. His final words, "I am not worthy company for the well," seemed to me ominously two- edged, as if he'd overcome the awful conviction that he couldn't die. This was a crisis requiring an unorthodox response. I looked up to find Vanessa Frye looking down.
"That was Mr. Goodloss, a patient psychologically in extremis."
"Yes, sir." Nessa is a dark-haired, unmarried woman in her early twenties, a weekend student at Georgia State, a psychology major with an intense desire to become a therapist. Her legs, sheathed in cafe au lait patterned stockings, reminded me of Barbara's.
"Mr. Goodloss and I have reached a critical turning point. What he
needs, Nessa, is validation for someone other than me or his employer, Mr. Foxworth. He needs to know that an attractive woman—you, for instance —can tolerate, possibly even admire, him."
"I don't think I'm following you, Dr. Zylstra."
"Mr. Goodloss can't make our session this evening, but I'm going to show him the depth of my concern by going to him. The mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. I'd like you to go with me."
Without hesitation, Nessa said, "I have a date tonight, but I'll call Jack and reschedule. This is more important."
"Bless you. Let me bring you up to speed."
Nessa had started working for me in early November, a week before Barbara's father and Mr. Foxworth had petitioned me to take Vyvyan on as a special after-hours client, almost as a humanitarian experiment. She knew that I'd been seeing Vyvyan. She'd read the transcriptions of a couple of our interviews, and she understood that looking at him without his mask would demand courage, self-control, and compassion. A faithful employee and a brilliant psychology student, Nessa agreed, altogether self- lessly, to help me.
The Ultimate Frankenstein Page 6
