Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  How well do you smile? That well? Did this communicate?

  Did he respond to the new oil problem? Did he suggest old oil? Mention India? New Orleans? Was it, in his opinion, murder or democracy sales? That is, good for democracy sales? Isn’t he opposed to democracy sales, quivering excitedly when it’s mentioned, like someone hitting the old oil again? Did he demand you take down a call, his call to the people? You told him to get himself some other wimp, didn’t you? “Fetch Bas!” for example?

  Did you tell him your father invented the pedal steel guitar? Did you tell him your mother read in her sleep? 85% retention? Did you try the brother business? Did he think it was important? Did you mention your sister, who never—not once—made an irrational decision? Whose family is interesting? Did you ask him that?

  And then did you tell him you liked sex? Did you like sex? And now? Did you mention that thing about ribbed, button-up sweaters? How well do you smile?

  Was God invoked?

  Or only the famous? Handel, Abba Eban, Dorothy Day? Did he make a response? Botticelli? Or no games? Did Gustave Flaubert find a place? Was the difference between the number of famous you could summon up and the number he could summon up sufficiently exciting? Painful? Is pain still the only form of excitement in social encounters? Did you relate the meaningless advice of Erasmus’s fool? Is Erasmus still broad enough to block further progress down a conversational route?

  Did you tell him you harbored his books? What was his response? Did he appear creative, as the long afternoon of his life drew to a close, still creative, bowling everyone over, corrupting the waiters and bartenders, menacingly creative? Did you ask him when he was going to write his second book, now that he had written his first one four times? He wasn’t yawning then, was he?

  Did you tell him he was a wretched goon-pig, as the hostess’s look trembled? Did you take the rings off your fingers and heave them in his face, crying, “There, that’s what you Yanks like,” crying, “Eat gold, Judas,” while the host gestured to his sons? Did you explain at the top of your lungs that he had stolen everything he had ever written, while he removed his glasses and with a white hand tucked his hair behind his ear? Did you continue explaining, “His work is so full of a borrowed cup here, a borrowed cup there, that if you dropped one of his books you would hear the sound of breaking porcelain”? Did you hurl him into the cold, unlit fireplace? How did you do with the host’s sons? And the hostess—into the fireplace?

  What was his response? What happened? To five of the people with whom you discussed this encounter, did it seem rewarding? To three? Why bother about response? Most people were kind, weren’t they, rationalizing, saying, “It’s hard to talk in a snowstorm,” that sort of thing? Can response be categorized at all? Isn’t his response to your opening tip of the head a completely separate world from his response to your final goodbyes? Can there be such a thing as an entire response, certifiable as a receipt, or are there merely unrelated manifestations of a very simple, unconsidered awareness? And what does it matter? How many friends simply said you were left with a horse on you? Did you say there was another point they had left lying around, unnoticed? Did you take up this point, the point that the important thing is making an impression? Remaining unforgettable? Don’t these so-called “friends” realize how exciting, in his eyes, you might now be? “Watch out—this new one, needs polish—but so young! Devastating moves!”—could they relate to that? Could you? What point then, noting his response? What point caring? How subtly do you smile? What point, unless…you began with some idea in mind? Did you have something like that, some little personal device you wanted to leave him with? One of those? Can you or your friends pick this apart? Some little thing, like a coin going from your pocket to his, only the transaction wasn’t made, and you blame yourself, don’t you? You look at it, still in your hand, still in your pocket, burning its hole there, so to speak, you look at it there, known to only you alone, and you wonder, “Won’t it ever move?”

  Some Numb Commitment

  “What I have in mind,” Mr. Challait said, “is for you two kids to live in the house next door with my son Robbie. Robbie, well. Well I don’t want to mislead you.”

  Robbie had gone mad, some years ago. Since then Mr. Challait had taken the case to a half-dozen institutions, had talked with doctors of every stripe and leaning, people from as far away as Tokyo and Buenos Aires. But at last he’d lost faith in professionals. “Any idiot can get a degree,” he said. So the father had decided instead to try a good diet, a place to live where Robbie would feel like part of the family, and a couple of guardians who wouldn’t come in with a lot of half-baked ideas they needed to work out even if it meant putting Mr. Challait’s son through Hell in the process.

  We nodded. Or rather I nodded, ignoring Erin, who I’d glimpsed trying to catch my eye. Mr. Challait rang the engraved brass bell beside his place-setting at the dinner table. When the maid came, he asked to have his son brought in. Erin meantime was keeping her chin raised, her neck-muscles tensed more than ordinarily, trying to get my attention. But I went on playing the Young Man At An Interview. I wouldn’t look at her.

  The son lumbered down from overhead somewhere. I remember that first visit as quick and obscure, the top of his lowered head sinking between his poor shoulders like one sketchy oval sinking into another, larger, sloppier one. He was no more than a few chalk lines melting together on a wet blackboard. I barely understood that he was an older person, in his late twenties or possibly even older.

  But Mr. Challait, Senior—he was there in the flesh. After Robbie was ushered out again, his father’s natural attractiveness became that much stronger. Erin and I agreed later that he reminded us of the Headmaster at our school. And we, of course, still suffered vertigo from finding ourselves so unexpectedly on a mountaintop of obvious old money. When Mr. Challait twisted his body to speak with the maid, the inner lining of his vest glimmered like antique silverware. Even his speech rolled out of him with the dignity of brass beds on casters. The way he suspended his name before us so we wouldn’t miss the pronunciation: “Shall-I.” The way he spoke the word “maybe” with the accent on the second syllable. And in every room we’d visited there had hung another mirror at least a yard square, framed in scrollwork that had been burnished mahogany, or trimmed in red and ocher, or left alone as simple fierce gold.

  “I can understand,” Mr. Challait was saying, “if you don’t want to be a part of this. I can understand a young couple preferring to be more, ah, more in the world.”

  To make it seem as if I was thinking it over, I gave Erin the look she’d wanted. One long moment of eye contact and mysterious choices already made.

  Most people aren’t married at our age. That was all we had to offer. In our case, the dogwood of high school graduation and the magnolia of marriage had scattered on consecutive weekends. Not even my mother had had much to say about any trouble we might run into afterwards. Our parents—hers are divorced; my father is dead—made the arrangements but kept out of the way. Though Erin’s mother did make some trouble at the wedding reception. Her mother really got on us, for a couple minutes there. “Bright boy,” I remember her screeching at me, “oh you’re much too cool to let it show, but I know what’s going on inside.” The only drink at the reception was a champagne punch, yet her mouth had reeked of whiskey. “My daughter,” she’d shouted, looking suddenly very much like Erin as her face came at me, “she is so stubborn, she is so stubborn—” and then Erin’s father had stepped in. The rest of the way both families bent over backwards to make sure things went smoothly. I can’t count the number of times we were told we’d made the right decision, not going to college. As if there’d been any decision about it, any conclusions first weighed and then assented to, about college or about any of the rest.

  Our eye contact, at Mr. Challait’s table, had grown to something larger. Erin has such bony cheeks, such intelligent lines at the eyebrows and the lips. Between that face and my own we had been the Bo
bbsey Twins of Cool. Yes long before her mother’s eruption over the wedding cake, I had learned how uncomfortable an adult was made if anyone under twenty kept his mouth shut and his face relaxed. Much too cool to let it show: I may have baited the woman. At our school, in fact, Erin and I had made a private game of our looks. We would paint our faces white and walk around the quad in ponderous hand-me-down Chesterfield coats. Like two ghosts, “incapable of human feeling,” we’d glide in our padding and speak to no one. Then late on one such painted night, Erin had taken my hand conclusively and led me into a closet off the main kitchen, a walk-in closet where the extra mattresses were kept. Without taking time even to clean off the whiteface, I’d fallen beside her in that airless hold. And Erin also had been the one to think of what we could do for a job. She’d found out soon enough how the riptide murk of my days and hours since my father died had floated me far beyond the reach of any college application. She’s like most girls who keep a journal, snooping, snooping. So Erin had let her own notification deadlines pass (I think Columbia was one place that had accepted her), and instead took some of the wedding money to run an ad in the better magazines. YOUNG RESPONSIBLE MARRIED COUPLE will cook clean house babysit… We received Mr. Challait’s appointment card before June was half over.

  The rich man rustled his napkin. A genteel noise, but one plainly meant to be heard. Like that, as if with this napkin Mr. Challait had yanked loose my backbone, all my feelings turned to panic. My stare went out of focus. I was no longer pretending, no longer merely making it seem I didn’t know about his offer. The man could pay for any doctor in the world, and he was throwing his son at two kids. His full-grown madman son. In that one glimpse earlier, I’d seen Robbie weighed more than Erin and I put together. And worse yet, I myself…with the insurance coming I could pay any tuition in the country and I was…my fists, below the table, pressed knuckle to knuckle painfully. I blinked my eyes into focus again, looked to Erin again. Nothing? Her mouth was shut, her face relaxed. Nothing there?

  “Ah,” Mr. Challait said, “if you’d like to discuss this privately—” Erin lifted her chin; nothing was about to speak for me once more.

  “We’ll take it,” I said roughly. “We’ll take the job.”

  Our goods filled two shopping bags and a trunk that had belonged to my father. Mr. Challait’s two homes were on a spread of a couple hundred acres stowed away beyond the reach of highways but nonetheless not far from the train to New York. We drove, however, a secondhand Duster, yet another gift. A wedding’s presents shape what you do as stubbornly as the ring squeezes your finger. We drove, up shoulderless roads where the heavy branches of June pines came down after the car passed, like the paws of a hungry creature who couldn’t quite gauge when we’d be in reach.

  That very afternoon, for the first time, we learned the full ruin of Robbie’s character. We were carrying the trunk through the front door, the shopping bags still in the car, when the madman took off out the back. He was in pyjamas. On queerly stiff legs he ran to a chainlink fence Mr. Challait had put up around three sides of the house. Robbie ran, in fact, as if he wanted to reach the fence rather than the open side. Erin dropped her end of the trunk first. By the time I got there Robbie was lying face-down in the dirt, the twisted bottom of the fence-chain clutched tightly in his hand. I mean that he had his naked palm closed, tightly, around two of those jagged steel tips which poke down all along the bottom of fences like that. Blood was seeping between his fingers. And as I came closer—slowly, wanting to put my arms around Erin, not wanting the first touch to betray any fright—I could hear Robbie counting by fours.

  Our next step seems to have come naturally. At the time, at least, it felt natural as our asking Mr. Challait to fence off the remaining open side of the yard. Erin and I decided we could analyze and classify Robbie’s sickness. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. The man did, in fact, eventually recover.

  At the time, anyway, it seemed it could be done. Analyzing Robbie, those early weeks, seemed as likely as our being there in the first place. So: what are the usual questions asked? From the maid, in bits and pieces, we learned that Robbie had been a good enough boy. He wasn’t so tough and out-of-doors as you’d like a boy to be, the Irish maid said, but he had a touch of the artist in him. Not once had he so much as harmed the hair on a fly until he was sent away to college. Mr. Challait himself explained the rest. “His mother had passed away only a few months before, you know.” Heart attack, the father said, a simple heart attack. “Well, six weeks after school started I had to go up there and find him in the university police station, and he was banging on the walls of his cell with a camera she’d given him.” The ringing of the lens guard against the sheet metal still came to him in dreams, the father admitted. “And there was a boy in the infirmary with a broken leg that Robbie, ah, had given him. That afternoon, that very afternoon, my son was in Boston talking to a man with so many degrees on the walls of his office you wondered what he was trying to prove. I should have known right then that route would get me nowhere.” But for more than ten years Robbie had lived at the mercy of those degrees, doped up and slipped aboard jet after jet, nodding among uneasy crowds of executives. But always the oh-so-impressive degree crumbled before Robbie’s madness. “Nothing,” Mr. Challait said. “Every time, there was nothing there for him.” By the time he reached the last institution, Robbie’s pants size was a full foot larger than it had been when he’d left for college.

  At Christmastime, when Mr. Challait had come for a visit with an armful of presents, his son had started to run away from him. This happened in the parking lot. Robbie had run from his father, and also from the nurse who’d brought him outside. He’d run towards the gate. Then after maybe twenty steps the aging boy had collapsed, bewildered and gasping for breath. That afternoon, “that very afternoon,” Mr. Challait had his son back where he would feel like a member of the family.

  “And if there’s one thing I know about,” Mr. Challait concluded, stroking the front of his vest significantly, “it’s dieting.”

  “Say what you like,” the maid said, “but the boy’s lost thirty pounds since he’s been home.”

  But whenever Erin and I tried to examine Robbie on our own, without anyone else lending a hand, what we noticed most was something else the maid had said: a touch of the artist in him. The man had sensibility. This despite continual pimples and cold sores, despite a flabby hipslung posture that would have been ridiculous if it hadn’t been so obviously, terribly impossible for him to correct. But if we asked him about how he felt, the answers we got were intriguing rhymes, sung in an operatic falsetto. His table manners were delicate and he drank without slurping. And if we asked him what he wanted to do—what you truly wanted, Robbie—he always reached for a camera. Taking pictures was the one pastime that brought him anywhere near enthusiasm. With a camera in his hands, Robbie could even stand up straight. Mr. Challait therefore had collected dozens of the solid black machines for his son. Literally, dozens. We found cameras in the salad bowl, cameras lens-down in the tub of shaving cream, cameras stuffed inside the large athletic socks that Robbie masturbated into. His darkroom then came as a surprise, an ordinary panelled closet downcellar. But after the first moment’s astonishment, standing together in the darkroom doorway, Erin and I noticed the dust that lay over everything. Even the developing pans had turned gray with dust. Robbie instead had his rolls of film sent out to the town newspaper, where one of the people in layout was an old family friend. The contact sheets that came back bore ruined shot after ruined shot, nondescript lumps out of focus or empty squares of white. Yet every once in a while there would turn up a miracle. Every once in a while we’d discover a razor-sharp and expertly composed shot of Erin and myself. Robbie would always catch us in some corny domestic pose. Erin and I might stand filling the flower vase with water, each holding the other’s free hand. Even the one contact sheet still left, now, has a shot like that.

  Thus it wasn’t a vacancy, beneath
the sore moonscape that Robbie presented to the world. There’d been something of substance betrayed when the connections went wrong. Yet precisely because Robbie was a complicated man, soon enough the thought of understanding him began to look grimmer. Too many wires needed untangling, too many levels of language needed unearthing. And Erin and I, our energy waning, his complications mounting—Erin and I felt the few reliable specs of our personalities going soft.

  Grimmer: we became careless. We made some bad mistakes.

  The first came when once we spoke about Robbie in the third person, while he was there listening. By itself, talking in this way caused no great disruption. Sometimes it seemed to irritate him, but mostly he’d let it pass. We must have been into our second month there by then. Erin and I sat with knees touching on the living-room sofa, and the sun through the front windows was a sleepy-making August sun. Robbie muttered and snapped photos, and the mood was romantic. Erin hitched her breasts in a way she knew I’d notice. She told me that on hot days like this one her older brother used to make her get in a “Kissing Box” for the neighborhood kids.

  “Just a big corrugated-cardboard box,” she said, smiling with her lips exaggerated. “But the open end was towards the wall, so that nobody else could see when a boy went in there to get a kiss. Really. Simple but effective, Mr. Bond. My brother charged a nickel.”

  “Er-rinn.” I was playing hard to get. “Is this the kind of talk for in front of Robbie?”

  “No. No, I’m saying my brother was just like Robbie. He liked to have the kissing and the sexy stuff around, but he would never get in a box like that himself.”