Bedlam and Other Stories

by John Domini

  I had to laugh. But just before Robbie started shouting, the cool planes of Erin’s face broke up and I watched her realize she’d said too much.

  “Loving is juvving! Loving is juvving!” Robbie let the camera drop, knocked it into a corner with one awkward foot. “It is. But I’ve never juvv, j-judged anyone. Never never never never, always let everyone judge…me!”

  Without the camera’s counterbalance, he’d gone hipslung again, his wrists beind his pelvis. His head looked distant. The lower lip hung trembling.

  “I’ve never been married, either,” he said.

  Then he was turning to the fireplace in the wall behind him, maybe so we wouldn’t see him cry, or maybe so he could add some queer extra dramatic gesture to his latest outburst in operatic falsetto:

  “Oh kiss me, kiss me, I’m a bee—

  Then you’ll lose your beak in my tree!”

  But on “tree” he squatted suddenly, a violent move, a more athletic move than I would have thought possible for him. And he started whaling away at the fireplace with one of the andirons. The brass made a lousy whining clang against the brick.

  I was already on my feet. Mr. Challait himself had said the first rule was never to let Robbie get worked up. We had Librium, Thorazine, even a straitjacket. But somewhere along the way during the last couple moments, though with Robbie on one side and the sun on the other I hadn’t noticed, Erin had taken my hand. Now she held me in place.

  “Let him,” she shouted over the banging, “let him, please.”

  She sounded almost in tears herself. I tried to turn and look at her but instead Erin stood up beside me, softly crushing the bent fingers of the hand she held between her breasts and my own. She touched her mouth to my ear.

  “He needs to let it out,” she whispered. “It’s what he could never do before.”

  “Uh—” She flexed the fingers that held my fingers; I felt it between my legs.

  “What do we care about the rules? Let him, let him, really. We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to break the rules.”

  The single clear thought in my head was that, when Erin had said “he” in the last sentence, she’d meant Mr. Challait.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Robbie won’t hurt anything. Let’s leave him alone and go upstairs.”

  So this was our first serious mistake, allowing Robbie to think that smashing things was acceptable behavior. I should say too, though, that he did look harmless. For instance this time with the andirons, Robbie looked almost businesslike. Methodically his shoulders humped and went slack, humped and went slack, while with each blow the brass changed shape. So we let him be, our first mistake, and then tiptoed upstairs straight into our second. We ducked into our bedroom. We turned the noisy iron lock and went at each other. Knowing exactly what we were doing, Erin and I took it right out of control. Even the pause to slip on the rubber became charged with the determination of foreplay. Call it an outbreak, a mutual fit. In any case these gasping explorations back and forth across our locked room occurred more and more often as the second month dragged on into the third, as the hope of knowing Robbie better first started to turn frightening and then was dropped. We were trying to take our minds off the problem; we were trying to drown in each other’s mouths. Rough and dedicated encounters. We have since managed to forgive ourselves. Because where could we two ever have learned what our daily lovemaking would do to the loose-necked enigma in the rooms beneath? Even at school Erin and I had stayed away from the psychological stuff, the sensitivity sessions and rap sessions and skull sessions. These were always run by the Masters anyway. It was like strip-mining the ego. Erin and I instead had chosen the Independent Study Projects. It was forever said about each of us that we were “the precocious type.” We do like to read, and Erin keeps her journal. So what did we know about how our mystery prisoner would take the bumps and bangs above stairs that oddly echoed his below?

  Common sense, someone else might say. Simple common sense should have told Erin and me that we were heading out awfully far over a surface that was awfully thin. But what did common sense ever have to do with the situation at Mr. Challait’s? Conclusions, decisions, all brands of being sensible here meant nothing beside the slack-bellied wreck whose groanings made us doubt our very names. Here the only rule which could be counted on was behind the bedroom’s lock. By the onset of fall weather, I could no longer bring myself to wonder for any length of time about Robbie and how he was made. My curiosity had instead been transferred to the journal Erin continued to write in night after night. She’d ordered me never to look.

  So I looked, on the first night that was truly cold. Erin was standing beside the kitchen stove as if she’d never leave it, bending away from me over the heat to study her face in the chrome panel where the dials were. I went out to set the table and wound up in the bedroom alone. Her journal, one of those 1940’s black-and-white composition books, sat on the lower shelf of her nightstand under a magazine. It was the magazine, I think, that hardened me enough to look. I knew she’d written in the journal since she’d last read the magazine; I knew precisely what the routine had been last time we were in here. But she’d slipped the journal underneath because of some leftover schoolgirl impulse. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked. I hadn’t turned five pages before I got even angrier. The entries seemed to be, without exception, about Robbie. I shifted my legs and ran a finger down the pages, skimming lines to find my name. Not there. Not there. But Erin could go on under three separate date headings about Robbie’s bee-in-a-tree song:

  Human beings see the whole tree, the

  whole leafy outer surface, but to see

  the tree from the inside, the way a

  bee does, to see the bark change color

  and to see the aphids crawling over

  the knots, to circle and circle and

  still not see the whole tree in the

  human way, this requires a drastic

  change in point of view.

  I lay there stunned. So much thought. So much exploratory digging. In fact, I had to do some internal explorations myself, had to poke around considerably before I discovered the pebble I felt under my heart and identified it as betrayal. I lay there feeling betrayed. Therefore—and because the chill had made the house quieter, the wood in the stairs less responsive to the pressure of steps—I didn’t notice Erin’s coming until she was in the room.

  “Tommy!”

  If in my life there has ever been the kind of shouting and argument to make me think that my experience was going from bad to worse, that the next explosion would be the last straw, that in fact left me looking forward to the tragic breakdowns now sure to come, looking forward because at least the end would decide, would decide—if in my life there’s been one brush with the apocalypse, it came that evening as the dinner grew cold on the table downstairs. Erin lost control. The knob on my wrist ached for days from protecting myself against the lamp she threw. I knew I’d done wrong but I’d never expected such bile, such unpredictable whines and shouts. “It’s private!” was her main point. “It’s like, like how I can’t be positive with a diaphragm because I’m sort of between sizes down there, that’s how private this is!” More than once I saw not Erin but Erin’s mother, thrusting her boozy, drawn face at me. Meantime, after the throwing of the lamp, Erin kept taking up other items but then setting them down, dress shoes and those woven-wood jewelry boxes and the clock-radio. As she moved, reflected in the dark windows, for a moment I saw her differently: a slight-shouldered teenager throwing a tantrum over some little thing she’d believed was the whole world. But Erin began to move faster. With locked knees she went stutter-step through the dreck of our bedroom, touching and touching as if to fix her location. Somewhere along the way her insults expanded into anxiety. “One place where I can say anything, one place where I can let go and trust things—” this I’d stolen from her. With each chew of her lower lip her tone changed again. Yes and the change always seemed hooked, I‘ll
admit, to some muscle in my own face. I may have baited Erin. I lay across the bed with one leg cocked and downplayed the whole scene, never mind that it was the first real argument of my life. The careless looks I’d mastered at school were set in place, defenses I would have thought were as hopeless against Erin as studded bronze shields against nerve gas. Yet it worked. These rundown old bogeymen left Erin backed against the vanity table. And when I at last got a complete sentence of my own in, the table’s mirror started to rattle.

  I pointed out only that the entries I’d seen were all about Robbie. What was so private there? The vanity mirror rattled so loud I thought it would break. Then Erin’s tears started to come.

  “I feel guilty about him—can’t you understand I feel guilty about him?” She was bent forward slightly over her hands, looking out the opposite window and crying. “I know I shouldn’t have said what I did, I know I talked like he was a piece of the furniture, I know that. But there’s nothing I can do, he just gets scarier and it always feels worse—”

  I understood what was expected of me. I should clap my arms round her, take her face against my neck, whitewash the entire scene.

  “I’m so sure something terrible’s going to happen,” Erin said.

  I didn’t move from the bed. When Robbie started to howl, downstairs, I slipped out and left her standing alone.

  Then, our worst surprise. For weeks grinding on into months, nothing happened.

  Erin’s and my escapes to the bedroom did slowly intensify, and Robbie’s smashing likewise picked up steam. Maybe we just weren’t used to the waiting, the way irrationality must permeate the spine vertebra by vertebra. But I recall September and October differently. They felt blocked. Each afternoon following lunch, Erin would plod through her repertoire at the piano, five fugues by Bach. Five pieces of music that fell back on themselves every time they inched forward. Each Sunday about eleven my mother would call, and I’d do my best to wriggle away from her hints about having a baby. “Come on, Tommy,” she’d say, “this isn’t all happening in the mind.” I would chuckle gamely. And as I looked past the sweating phone, looked down between my own unathletic knees, I’d see my old house as it must be for Mom. A scarred welk-shell in which at every turn of the tunnel stood another bleary ghost. Come November it was only a year since my father had died. And as Mom went on teasing, as all her bright lines were eroded and the naked plea beneath revealed, I understood also why my mother hadn’t warned me about the dangers of a marriage so young. But…young? Erin and I were young? We lived like two fogies on a pension. Even our meals were mushy as if we wore dentures, since no knives were allowed in the house. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. The living-room flower vase, the one in Robbie’s only remaining photo of us, was so large you could waste an afternoon making sure it stood precisely in the middle of its table. The Girls In Apartment 3-G could take all morning. Plus there were the letters from Sylvia, Torsten, Cynthia, Nick, and Kimberly; there were the letters to Torsten, Nick, and Susan.

  “If we weren’t married,” Erin told me once as she thumbed a stamp into place, “we wouldn’t be writing to each other.”

  Meantime between us there kept coming Robbie, our very queer lull. Our pocket of thought, loud and charged with sensation, but nonetheless a lull. At dinner for instance, if Erin and I sat gumming another conversation into its nastiest shape, he’d whip something off the table and break it. He could shatter a plate so thoroughly that later on Erin and I would find pieces under each other’s clothes. If that didn’t get us up and bustling, if that didn’t at least change the subject to a dustpan and brush, soon enough Robbie would be at it with something bigger. He’d go get a camera and pound one of our dining-room chairs to pieces. A few days later, a few weeks later, the smashing would have picked up still more steam. Once a chair’s leg came off, Robbie would punch it foot-first through the nearest wall—a much more complicated business than the earlier flap about breaking the rules. He might tear the stuffing out of the sofa cushions only to replace them with the plastic seats ripped off the kitchen chairs.

  “He has all the instincts,” Erin said once, during the first week of November, I think. “All the natural manly instincts.”

  Yes in the glue of that autumn, Robbie offered unpredictable rising bubbles. Certainly Erin seemed to be forever bringing him up. Talking about his dead Mom, his protective shell of flab, his talent. It was as if now that I’d looked in her journal she’d decided I should know exactly what it was she spent all her time writing. Thus the queer lull could become queerer still. Talk about Robbie’s eruptions would end in one of our own. Erin would start going after me again about broken trust and I’d let my face do my dirty work. And then when Erin had slammed the bedroom door shut between us, when she’d thrown the lock, when through that barrier she’d shouted at me, “Why don’t you go? Why don’t you do something for once and go?”—when that hard place was reached, it always seemed that Robbie had come to stand in the hallway beside me. He might have started out by tearing apart something on the back lawn; in fact, by the middle of October it took only a single harsh word between Erin and myself to get him going. But before long his lumbering ostrich-step would echo up the stairwell. He’d slump into place, beside me but head and shoulders above me. Dully eyeing the bedroom doorknob.

  Myself, I started to muscle him around. I never let Erin touch him, but it became a rare day when I didn’t at least hook his collar, jerk him down to my eyes’ level. God, the vapor in his look. Then what was he after, to come staggering more and more often between us? I never let Erin touch him. But I said some mean things to him, maybe a few obscenities even, trying to get a response.

  No doubt we should have asked for help. There were any number of potential last straws. This smashed pitcher, that piece of upholstery gutted and scattered over the rug. But though Erin may have let the question dangle once or twice, I never picked it up. Certainly neither of us admitted anything directly. Instead we worked extra hours with plastic and putty to repair the holes Robbie had punched in our life. Instead we hid what we could from Mr. Challait and the maid. And most of all instead of asking for help we kept returning to the bedroom. Sometimes with disagreements still in our teeth, sometimes with no better excuse than the paper’s being read and the mail’s being late. Yes, these visits did slowly intensify. The morning we were to go pick up the Thanksgiving turkey, the maid had to ring our doorbell a half-dozen times. I can look at it clinically nowadays; I can say that Erin and I were learning about the timing of orgasms and so forth. A person with a technical way of looking at things would say we were getting better with each fuck. But the experience itself was brutal and way past analysis. Across acres of fields we’d discover low walls of human flesh. And these explorations were made room for more and more often, and we came up with all kinds of excuses for Mr. Challait. We assured him the broken windows were no bother. We never let him see how Robbie had trashed the darkroom downcellar. We pointed out that his son had some vendetta against the property, not against us, so that in fact Robbie was no more dangerous than a dog who needed to be housebroken. Finally, we would stand up to the father and insist that this was what he’d hired us for. We’d been brought here in the first place because the conventional thinkers had failed. For several long moments, the rich man would measure us with an impassive look. Eyes low-lidded, double-chin just visible. Then he’d nod. In the end nothing was allowed to stop us.

  But no. No, that’s a lousy way to put it. Maybe “nothing was allowed to stop us,” but Robbie and Erin and I never for a moment had the sense that we were worth stopping. Never for a moment, never for months. Scutwork, newspapers, and the mail. If I could make these three words into a dumb hit single and play it a million times a week, you might get the idea. Our calendar seemed a warehouse, stacked with empty boxes. The evenings were the worst. More and more I’d find myself out in one of those sticky inflatable plastic pillow-chairs, out on the front stoop. Looking beyond the chainlink fence, beyond the un
colored and half-dressed trees. I’d feel the restlessness of fall. School was underway; my father had packed the trunk for me and winked a sardonic, affable goodbye till Christmas. Or I would sense Erin’s birthday, coming up or not long past. A chip-on-the-shoulder mystic at school had told me once that Erin was “classic Scorpio,” but I preferred to think about the other implications of someone’s being born on Hallowe’en night. And then while picturing an infant girl surprised by masks and crepe paper, or while frightened boneless once again by the image of that grown man whose wink had gone to worms, then from my chilled and flaccid seat eventually I’d come to notice Robbie, who was taking another of his rackety naps on the sofa in the living room behind me, our Robbie, whose life between sleep and waking was the same slack cocoon of nightmare. My own tears would start to come. I’d have to run indoors, upstairs. Without turning on the bathroom light, with the colors of sundown burnishing the medicine-cabinet mirror, I stripped. Crying without end. I went on to the shower, crying face to the washcloth, as I had done morning after early morning a year ago in the shower stalls at the dorm. There no one would know about me.

  I’m not so smart. I’m not so good in bed as it may have seemed till now. I’m not the kind of person who would marry a high-school friend out of honest loneliness or because I felt scared about the future. I’m only restless. No one at home half the time and always very restless.

  Until the morning I left the bedroom door open. The lock unturned, the door itself ajar.

  I’d ducked out in mid-foreplay, on the old child’s pretext of needing a glass of water. I’d stopped the door with my heel and fallen on Erin too quick for her to notice.

  In letters since, letters from friends, we’ve learned that this experience is common enough among people our age. The roommate comes back to the dorm a day earlier than expected; the parents decide to beat the snowstorm home from the party. And always my friends write that they were surprised by how quickly they returned to dry reality. But sex is fragile, the web of mood far more important than the muscle and mucus clutching beneath its spidery reach. After Robbie crashed into our bedroom, Erin and I both recovered fast—though I believe she had the edge on me. I felt her hipbones jerk out of rhythm while I was still lost in the dark acreage between us. “Robbie!”