Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Chapter Eight

  I was still seeing Agnes during this period and had kept her abreast of developments in my relationship with Nora. She remained opaque with regard to her own relationship, but I felt no such imperative. Usually we’d find an hour in the middle of the day and meet in a small hotel off Third Avenue that we could both reach easily from our places of work, Agnes being at the time a lecturer at Hunter College. She took a keen interest in Nora, and after sex she would question me closely about her. She expressed no jealousy, no hostility toward her that I could detect. I didn’t mention the nightmare, though I did tell her about my renunciation of the unconscious on Sundays.

  “God, Charlie, I wish you’d tried that with me.”

  I was naked, postcoital, stretched out on the bed, my penis damp and flaccid on my thigh. She stood in a bathrobe looking out the window, smoking. She glanced at her watch. We had twenty minutes before we needed to shower and get out of there.

  “Was it a problem?” I said.

  “You were very earnest. I liked it. You were so political in those days. You’re not now.”

  “No.”

  “What happened? You’ve become a real cynic.”

  Nothing more cynical than a dog, I thought. “I guess I burned out.”

  “I guess you did. What a pity. You’re just not all there anymore, Charlie. Something’s missing.”

  “What?” I said, alarmed.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Forget it.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette and came and lay down beside me. It was a noisy room, the noon-hour midtown traffic loud on the street below, but we liked that. It seemed somehow appropriate for illicit sex in the middle of the day in Manhattan. Something missing?

  “So what’s she like?” she said.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “How does she sleep? What’s it like, the sleeping together? Not the sex, the sleeping together.”

  I hesitated. Why had she asked me that? Agnes at times displayed what I can only call a scalpel-like ability to penetrate other minds, other lives. It was uncanny. Nora slept badly. Even before the nightmare, several times she’d woken me with her thrashing around in the sheets, legs restless as though in her dreams she were running, and small cries and whimpers—there had been a few disturbed nights like this, but when I’d spoken to her in the morning she had no memory of it and no dreams to report.

  “Charlie, it’s a new bed, it takes me a while to settle down. I didn’t keep you awake, did I?”

  I told her no, she didn’t keep me awake, but it wasn’t true. Once woken I do not find it easy to get back to sleep. In the darkness, in the relative silence of the city late at night, anxiety steals in like a wolf. Glimpsing weakness of spirit it circles for the kill, and I would struggle to drive it off but fail, and then I had to go sit in the kitchen and read yesterday’s paper until sleep again became possible. This could take an hour, sometimes two. So yes, it was a problem, Nora’s disturbed sleep. And she had odd little phobias.

  “Charlie, the lights on the ceiling—I hate them. Can’t you get someone to move the blinds? You should just replace them, they don’t fit the window.”

  I was fond of the patterns of light on my ceiling at night, and told her so. She said she’d try to like them too, though I could see they continued to trouble her. I was reluctant to tell Agnes any more but she kept at me.

  “It’s years since you had somebody in your bed all night. It must be strange.”

  “Agnes, I don’t ask what goes on in your bedroom.”

  “You better not.”

  I never asked her about Leon anymore. I went into the bathroom to shower. How well we knew each other. When I’d first suggested we go to a hotel rather than the apartment, she’d figured out the reason at once.

  “So you’re seeing someone,” she said.

  Then, when we met there, she said she could tell it was serious. We hadn’t even got our clothes off!

  “Why do you think it’s serious?”

  I was genuinely interested. I often thought Agnes would have made a better psychiatrist than me. She’d turned with a wry cheerful smile, her hands behind her back as she undid her bra, a black lacy affair she knew I liked.

  “It may be the loneliness. It’s not there anymore. You used to carry it around like a sack of stones.”

  “And I don’t now?”

  She sat down on the bed. Then she stood up again and pulled back the bed cover to inspect the sheets. “So is it serious?”

  “It feels serious.”

  She looked up at me then, frowning. I held her gaze. There was no point in trying to conceal it.

  “And she’s living with you?”

  “Yes.”

  There was perhaps the faintest flinch, but I might have imagined it. She smoothed the bottom sheet with her palm and lay down with her hands behind her head and one leg crooked at the knee. She was a long pale bony creature in black underwear.

  “She have a job?”

  “She does research for an art historian.”

  I suspect she might have preferred a salesgirl in Bloomingdale’s, or a flight attendant. “Are you angry?”

  “No, god knows you’ve been on your own long enough. I thought you’d get hitched years ago.”

  Afterward we must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes and remembered where I was, and then looked at my watch, it was nearly one o’clock. Agnes stirred beside me. I sat up.

  “It’s almost one,” I said.

  “Christ.”

  But she didn’t rush. She ran her fingernails down my spine. “That was very nice, Charlie,” she said.

  At times I did feel some discomfort about my affair with Agnes, and was aware that I was rationalizing it, telling myself that it didn’t really count. Not an argument that Nora would buy—in her eyes, of course, Agnes would be the worst possible rival, far more dangerous than some casual stranger—but in my eyes, and in Agnes’s eyes, in the eyes, that is, of the perpetrators of this occasional minor transgression, this flimsy infidelity, it didn’t really count. Agnes certainly didn’t seem to consider it a matter of any great significance, remarking as we got dressed one time that it was like going to bed with an old shoe.

  “An old shoe?”

  “You know what I mean, Charlie. Comfortable and familiar.”

  Never a suggestion from her as to when we would meet again, or that very much had happened at all, in fact, other than the pleasuring of an old shoe. At the door, before we parted, she took my face in her hands and peered at me, frowning, with a small smile that was almost maternal in its tenderness, yet somehow more complicated than that.

  “You feel better, Charlie?”

  Her concern affected me. I was unprepared for the emotion it aroused.

  “Go home and look after that woman,” she said.

  A few nights later Nora again cried out in her sleep and woke us both. I switched on the bedside light. She was sitting upright with her fist pressed to her mouth, staring straight at the end of the bed as though somebody was there.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  She was trembling. I touched her arm and she reacted as if she’d had an electric shock, more a spasm than a recoil.

  She turned to me, her face alive with horror. With a kind of muted wail she reached for me, and I held her. She shuddered in my arms. I rocked her gently, murmuring that it was all right now, whatever had happened was a dream, she was safe now.

  “Oh Jesus, that was bad,” she whispered.

  “Tell me.”

  “I want a cigarette.”

  We sat in the kitchen and I made a pot of tea and she smoked. So it was not just random material floating up from the unconscious, I thought. This was the second time. It took some persuading to get her to talk.

  “It’s not that interesting, Charlie, I’m sure your patients bring you much better stuff.”

  “Just tell me,” I said.

  I glanced at the clock over the stove. It was
after two. The city was quiet except for a distant siren. Her fingers were playing with the cigarette lighter, turning it end on end on the kitchen counter. Eyes staring out of the window, where south of us the twin towers were cliffs of blackness against the pale glow of the sky, narrow rectangular smears of light scattered across them. There was moonlight on the river.

  “Someone was following me.”

  Standard stuff of nightmare.

  “Go on.”

  “But that’s it!”

  “Who’s following you?”

  She shook her head. I asked her if she didn’t know or if she couldn’t say.

  “Is it a man? Is he threatening you?”

  She became thoughtful. She wanted to remember. This was good.

  “And there’s something else,” she said, “a sound, but it’s kind of negative, like the opposite of wind—”

  I saw her suddenly stiffen. I took her hand. She was tense and cold. She was wearing only a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. I asked her if she wanted her bathrobe. She did, so I got it for her. When I came back she had relaxed a little. I helped her slip into the robe. She was still shivering.

  “Drink your tea.”

  “I’ve ruined your night. But that’s all I can remember.”

  “And you’ve never had it before?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure.

  “You could hear something like the opposite of wind. A sucking sound?”

  “There’s this noise it makes, sort of a rumble and a clatter. Loud. And there’s a roaring.”

  “Is it day or night?”

  “Night, I think.”

  “Inside or outside?”

  Her eyes suddenly filled with tears and again her fist went to her mouth.

  “Charlie, can I have a drink?”

  “Later. A rumble and a clatter, loud, you said, and a roaring. Like the subway? Were you in the subway, darling? Was someone following you in the subway?”

  “And there was laughing.” She turned to me.

  “Someone’s laughing?” I said.

  “And he’s coming after me. Oh, Christ.”

  “Nora darling, is it you laughing?”

  She shook her head.

  “Who then?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nora, who’s laughing? In your dream, who’s laughing?”

  She lifted her face. “My brother!”

  Some weeping then. I didn’t want to leave it alone, I wanted her to say it again, but she shook her head. It was enough. After a while I asked if anything had happened to her yesterday that might have triggered the dream, anything she might have seen or read or heard, but she didn’t think so. A little later we went back to bed and at once she fell asleep. But I didn’t sleep. She’d told me she was an only child. So who was laughing in the nightmare?

  • • •

  The next day I had appointments until six. When I got home she was in the kitchen with her head in a recipe book. There was a cigarette burning in the ashtray on the counter and an open bottle of wine. She hadn’t turned any of the lights on. I kissed her, and she asked me not to disturb her for a few minutes, she was trying to figure out how to cook this thing. I sat waiting for her. At last she turned the book over and went to the fridge.

  “How was your day?” I said.

  She grunted.

  “You went back to sleep right away.”

  “I’m so sorry. Were you exhausted?”

  It was said distractedly. She was intent on assembling her ingredients, onions and tomatoes and such. She pushed her hair behind her ears.

  “Did you think any more about your dream?”

  “I can’t deal with that now. Would you pour me some wine? And hand me down the oil. How spicy do you want it?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “We’ll have it spicy. I wish you’d fix this drawer.”

  She wasn’t just irritable, she was avoiding me. It was because of the nightmare. She wasn’t going to talk about it.

  She wanted it back where it belonged, down in the dark. A little later she complained about my very real inadequacy as a handyman. I suggested that since she was in the apartment all day she could talk to the super. If he wouldn’t fix the drawer, he’d know someone who could.

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not my apartment and anyway, he gives me the creeps. That’s the man’s job. I do the cooking, I do the washing—”

  I lifted my hands, I acquiesced. I knew better than to let a question of mere housework provoke an argument. I told her I’d find somebody. I went to embrace her, but she wasn’t having an of that.

  “Leave me alone, Charlie, can’t you see I’m not in the mood? I thought you were the fucking shrink.”

  This last was too much. Irritability I could tolerate, but this was overt hostility and I’d done nothing to provoke it. I sat down on a kitchen stool and stared at my hands. How to deal with it without infuriating her further? I assumed that by helping her in the night, by making her talk about her nightmare, I’d seen something she wanted to conceal from me, or more probably from herself, so now she was angry with me. But what had I seen? A dream involving her being followed, at night, and a roaring, rumbling, clattering noise in the background. What was following her, probably in the subway, that was so terrifying that even these few paltry details created enough panic that she had to punish me for hearing about them? And of course this sudden appearance of a brother, when she’d told me she had no brother—

  I detected fear of punishment, therefore guilt. It was possible, I thought, that what she remembered was not an actual event but a memory imposed on it in order to disguise it. It is a familiar ruse of the unconscious, to create a scenario capable of inspiring terror, but which in fact is just a screen, a disguising symptom, beneath which lies the memory of trauma proper. Had Nora been traumatized? I wasn’t going to ask her, not then. It was by playing what she’d called the fucking shrink that the unpleasantness had arisen in the first place. I left her to the cooking and took a shower.

  There was, of course, another possibility, that the laughing man she was fleeing from was not her brother, but my brother; and that the guilt stemmed from her failure to flee fast enough.

  When I returned to the kitchen she came and put her arms around me.

  “You will help me, won’t you, Charlie?”

  Chapter Nine

  You will help me, won’t you, Charlie? I had no appointments the next morning but I was in my office by nine. The night of the dinner party at Walt’s apartment, I’d heard it then, the almost imperceptible cry for help. I heard it but I paid no attention to it, and why? Desire. Desire accompanied by the almost imperceptible answering cry from somewhere in my own psyche: yes, my darling, I will help you. It is the narcissism of the psychiatrist, or of this psychiatrist, at least, to play the indispensable figure of succor and healing. This is how I appeared to my patients. But it seemed I’d made that same implicit promise to my lover. I had made the promise and she had heard me and now she was telling me it was time.

  It was nothing if not oblique. We did the daily traffic, talking about ourselves, our work, other people, food, money and such, and at the same time another conversation was beginning to go forward, on my side renewed sexual suspicion, on hers the discourse of her needs, which she spoke in a strange, hushed, foreign tongue addressed not to me but to a primal absent other with whom her arrangements had been made in early childhood, or so I presumed, probably her father. What was I to do?

  Nothing. I wasn’t her doctor. I’d refer her to someone. There are good reasons why a doctor must not attempt to treat members of his own family and other intimates, as I had learned at great personal cost. It must not happen again. I had no desire to exhume Nora Chiara’s childhood. I had no curiosity, no interest in it at all. When I was working at the psych unit and first became familiar with the posttraumatic disorders, I encountered many horrifying nightmares. I came to recognize them as the expression of
memories the mind couldn’t process and therefore repressed. With someone laughing in her ears Nora had run from a destructive force she called the opposite of wind, then woke up and for several seconds remained trapped in the emotional climate of the dream. She was left sobbing and shuddering, and clung to me like a child. I didn’t take this lightly. I was apprehensive the following night, and for several nights after, as to whether there would be a recurrence.

  Then came shattering news. For some weeks I’d been worried about Joe Stein. I was aware that there was trouble at home. He was a disturbed man, and to live with him would have been difficult for any woman. I had met his wife once, soon after the beginning of his therapy, and found her to be a competent, mature individual, quite strong enough in my opinion to help steer this tortured man through his crisis. But it seems there came a day when she decided she’d had enough. He had worn her out and used up what to me had looked like a store of goodwill more than adequate to see them through. What had he done to her? Whatever the immediate cause, Stein found himself deserted in his predicament, and rather than go home to an empty house in the suburbs had spent the night drinking whiskey in his office in the financial district.

  In the early morning he had climbed out onto the ledge outside his window. High above the street, between the canyon walls of silent office buildings, he had stood flattened against the stone with the wind picking at his clothes and the sun rising over the eastern shores of Long Island, just starting to touch the masonry of the old downtown skyscrapers. I don’t know how long he stood on the ledge. He was six stories up. Then he jumped. The fall would surely have killed him had he not landed on the canopy of a sandwich shop on the ground floor, which broke the fall sufficiently that when he crashed through it and onto the sidewalk below he didn’t die, although he did fracture his spine. When I arrived at the Beekman Hospital he was in a coma. They would know more, they told me, when the swelling subsided. I sat by his bedside for an hour. Uppermost in my mind was the question of why he hadn’t called me. But at the same time I knew why; it was because he’d concluded he was beyond the reach of psychiatry—I could offer him no hope. I couldn’t touch his conviction of his own worthlessness, which was of course a function of his guilt at having killed a man.