Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  His wife joined me a little later. She’d come in from Westchester. We left the ward and found the cafeteria.

  “I guess I’m supposed to feel bad for walking out on him like I did, but I don’t. Nobody could’ve stayed with him. He didn’t want me. He as good as threw me out. I think he’d already made up his mind, don’t you?”

  “I wish you’d have let me know, Mrs. Stein.”

  “I thought you did know. I thought you saw him on Tuesday.”

  “He concealed it from me.”

  “Well, he didn’t conceal it from me!”

  She glared at me with damp eyes. She blamed me.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I was out of my mind. I couldn’t deal with him anymore. Do it then, I told him. If you want to do it so bad, why don’t you just go ahead?”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was he angry?”

  “Not angry, no. He kind of sat down and put his head in his hands and stared at the floor. First I thought he was going to do it, then I thought no, he can’t, it’s not in him, this thing’s eaten him all up, there’s nothing left.”

  She was struggling. The tears were starting to come.

  “Was there really nothing you could do for him?” she said.

  I let this question hang in the air. I sat with my elbow on the Formica table in that bright cafeteria as the early sun came streaming in, my hand covering my mouth.

  “Frankly, I didn’t expect this,” I said.

  She recovered her composure. She tipped her head to one side and flattened out her mouth in an expression of skepticism and weary disdain. Her opinion of my competence required no further elaboration. She was a small, slim brunette of about thirty-five.

  “At least he’s alive. Some small mercy.”

  I said nothing.

  “They told me they don’t know if he’ll walk again.”

  “We won’t know that for a while,” I said.

  “Joe in a wheelchair. My god.”

  Suddenly she rose to her feet, her chair scraping backward on the tiled floor. A group of nurses at a table nearby gazed at us with tired sympathy. They must be familiar, I thought, with these early-morning dramas involving the family of some poor soul admitted in the night.

  “I have to go,” she said. “I have kids.”

  I rose too and offered her my hand. She gazed at it and then shook it with that same flat, glum expression and walked away. I left the hospital and stood in the cool air on Gold Street, staring up at the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge and feeling like hell. I couldn’t face going home. I was a five-minute walk from Fulton Street.

  When Agnes answered I could hear through the intercom that I’d woken her, but she buzzed me in anyway. Once there had been no intercom, no buzzer, you shouted for whoever you wanted and the key was tossed down in a sock. She opened the door in her bathrobe, blinking and sleepy. It was years since I’d seen this, her early-morning face.

  “Is it Cass?” she said.

  Cassie and her stepfather were in Florida.

  “No, it’s not Cass.”

  “Oh, good.” She shuffled off toward the kitchen, yawning. “Come in then, Charlie,” she said. “It’s so early. What are you doing here?”

  I followed her into the kitchen and sat down. “I’ve just come from the Beekman. I couldn’t handle going home.”

  She was filling the kettle, still three-parts asleep. “Someone sick?”

  “Stein tried to kill himself.”

  Now she turned to face me. Now she woke up. “Oh my god. How is he?”

  “He’ll live.”

  She sat down. She frowned. I remember thinking, a man would want to know what he’d done.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” she said.

  To hear those words, was that why I was here? After Stein’s wife had glared at me with her damp eyes, accusing me of not doing enough for her husband—was I here to be absolved?

  “That’s exactly what I’d been telling him.”

  “Don’t let it all compound, Charlie.”

  The kettle boiled. She got up and made coffee. The sun was on the Woolworth Building now and it was already a warm day. I felt the tension begin to drain out of me.

  “I shouldn’t have woken you. I guess I just needed to hear that.”

  She made a grunting sound, as though to say, What are friends for? She poured us each a cup of coffee and put a carton of milk on the table. She sat down. “How’s Nora?”

  “She’s okay.”

  The tone shifted. I was on my guard where a moment before I’d allowed myself to wallow briefly in her sympathy. I closed my eyes. Tears came.

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  She got up and came around the table and sat on my lap, putting her arms around my neck and her face in my shoulder. I held her tentatively. How well I knew the warm body beneath the bathrobe and the flimsy cotton nightgown. It was as though we’d just risen from the same bed. As my hold grew firmer she pulled back a little.

  “You do make heavy weather, Charlie.”

  “Do I?”

  What did this mean? I didn’t care what it meant, I just didn’t want her to get up.

  She got up. She stood looking down at me.

  “Come back,” I said.

  Instead she reached out a hand. “Come on,” she said quietly. “Come to bed.”

  • • •

  I sat on the E train computing implications and constructing lies. For reasons I was too tired to work out, it seemed much worse to have gone to Agnes for consolation than for sex. But I’m a pragmatic man, and there was no undoing what had occurred. It couldn’t be more simple, I thought. It will not happen again; no boat will be rocked, no house will fall down. All that was required of me was to look as if I’d spent a number of hours at the bedside of a failed suicide. But I disliked the prospect; it is always shabby to deceive even if in doing so you spare the other pain. In the event I was excused even that piece of business: Nora was in the library all day.

  I arrived home that afternoon after my last appointment to find her in the apartment. She was eager to hear about Stein; she, too, had been woken when the call came early that morning. I was aware that I was sustaining my campaign of rationalization, my conviction that this thing I had with Agnes didn’t really count; and this being so, the point, the only point, was to protect Nora’s peace of mind. But no suspicion was even hinted at.

  We went out for dinner. We had lobster in the Chelsea Hotel, Nora drank a bottle of wine and we walked home along Twenty-third Street. As I prepared for bed I stared in the bathroom mirror. About the man behind the face I felt neutral. I didn’t dislike him but I didn’t particularly like him either. There he was, Charlie Weir, dog. That night the nightmare came back.

  I had an idea what to expect now. She would want to smoke a couple of cigarettes while she calmed down. Then she’d want a drink. She wouldn’t want to talk about it. She would then fall deeply asleep and not wake again until morning. And this was what happened. The next day she behaved as though nothing was wrong. We were supposed to be having dinner with Walt and Lucia but she asked me to call Walt and make some excuse. I did so.

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “Let me ask you a question.”

  We were in the living room. The sky was still light to the west. She was looking at a magazine. Her hair was pushed up on top of her head in a messy clump, a clip holding it in place.

  She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. She was wary. “Okay.”

  “You want to see someone? You want me to refer you to someone?”

  Surely there was cause for concern. She couldn’t say I was overreacting.

  “Let me think about it.”

  She spoke quietly, and I detected no defensiveness. Certainly no anger.

  “All right.”

  It took her longer this time to regain her equilibrium. I watched her closely. The decision to seek help must come from her alone a
nd without pressure from me. Three or four days later she talked about it. We were reading in bed, and I was about to turn out the light.

  “Do I have to see someone?” she said suddenly.

  “I think you do.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s happened three times now.”

  “Listen, you live in New York, you have bad dreams, it’s the city. It’s a war zone, Charlie, you have to be a warrior to live here.” She lay back and stared at the ceiling. Then she sat up again. “Can’t I just see you? I mean, if it happens again, couldn’t you just talk me through it? I really don’t want to go into therapy just for a couple of bad dreams.”

  I told her I couldn’t treat her. It was out of the question.

  She spoke without thinking. “You treated Agnes’s brother”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you have bad dreams too.”

  “Not like you.”

  We were silent for a while. Her mood troubled me. It suggested she was in denial about what I suspected might be the symptoms of posttraumatic stress. The nightmares. The heavy drinking. A kind of mental absence at times, a dissociation of affect that occurred even during sex.

  “Okay. Turn the light out.”

  She was soon asleep. But I lay there in the darkness, irritated that she was so casual about this, and that she could be careless enough to bring up Danny. You treated Agnes’s brother—had she no idea of the effect that would have on me? She didn’t know because I hadn’t told her, but my own bad dreams, which produced far fewer theatrical effects than hers, invariably involved Danny. I was the one who found the body.

  Joe Stein woke up from his coma and spent several days heavily sedated. I visited him during this period. He lifted a hand off the blanket. He had a tube in his mouth. In his doped eyes I detected an expression of wry resignation. Even at the toughest times in his therapy Stein’s sense of humor would flicker to life. He was always able to detach himself from his anguish, if only briefly.

  “You must be pretty worried,” I said.

  He lifted his eyebrows. I imagined if he could speak he would have said, Are you kidding me?

  “You know there’s every chance you’ll walk again.”

  He nodded. I believed he needed to hear this as often as possible. Whatever he’d been feeling when he was out on that ledge, he didn’t feel it now. Apparently he’d got through an entire bottle of scotch. Something occurred to me.

  “I wonder if you really did jump.”

  He gazed blankly at me.

  “Could it be you just slipped?”

  I spent twenty minutes with him. I told him I’d seen his wife, and that it was my impression she’d be there for him when he got out of here. He lifted his eyebrows at this. He seemed glad of the visit. I said I’d be back to see him soon.

  It was just after six when I left the hospital. It was a warm clear evening with just a breath of a breeze off the East River. Again it occurred to me to go to Fulton Street, but I stepped down hard on that idea. I was going home.

  Home. For a second I recoiled from the idea that the apartment on Twenty-third Street was home anymore. It seemed instead a sort of clinic, housing one patient. All at once I felt a flare of resentment toward Nora, the fact that she was sick and had somehow become my responsibility, and this in spite of my repeated insistence that I couldn’t treat her, that she wasn’t my patient and never could be. It was rush hour, and the E train was crowded and hot. I was tightly packed among a group of commuters who looked as irritable as I felt. Were they all going home to a neurotic woman?

  I would like to say she greeted me with warm solicitude, and that the last of my tension and anger dissipated within minutes of my walking through the door. It did not. She was in a foul mood. By now I understood that Nora had been unable, or refused, rather, to learn a single, simple, indispensable principle of human relations, which is that you don’t take out your anger on those closest to you unless they’re directly responsible for it. It was of course another aspect of the pathology. But I didn’t think this was the time to tell her so.

  “You haven’t spoken to the super, have you?” she said.

  She was avoiding my eyes and clattering about the kitchen, making too much noise with pots and pans. “This fucking drawer, will it never get fixed?”

  She wrenched the troublesome drawer with both hands and so violently that I fully expected it to come clear out of the unit and spill cutlery all over the kitchen floor. This was probably what she wanted, an explosion of stainless steel on the tiles.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  Oh, and now the quick sideways baleful glance, eyes hot with rage, and it occurred to me that she sensed I had betrayed her but could neither account for the feeling nor even precisely define it, and instead displaced it onto a kitchen drawer.

  “You tell me, Charlie. I won’t be treated like this. I don’t see why I should live here and be treated like this.”

  “Like what?”

  I was sitting on a kitchen stool staring at my hands, which were splayed flat on the countertop.

  “You’re so fucking cold.”

  She stood on the other side of the counter with her back against the stove staring at me. She was clutching a metal spatula as though to defend herself. The tears came. I did not go to her at once.

  “You see?” she cried. “You’re made of ice!”

  With a large, weary sigh I pushed the stool back and got to my feet.

  “No! No. Too late, Charlie. I don’t want comforting. You have to love me.”

  “I do love you.”

  She had turned her back on me. She made no pretense of activity at the stove, just gave me her back with her shoulders heaving slightly. I groped for the means of resolving the situation. It was immaterial who was right or wrong here; the only fact of any importance was her pain.

  “Nora, I do love you. Why do you think I don’t?”

  “You never show it anymore.”

  Still her back was to me, but the voltage was down.

  “You think so?”

  She put her hands on the stove and leaned over with her head bowed. She was sobbing. I wanted to be touched, to be moved, to care, but I couldn’t seem to.

  “I can’t stay here,” she muttered.

  Then something did move. There was a spark of some kind, something, at least—probably pity, though it didn’t much matter what it was—and I went to her and turned her toward me. She allowed herself to be embraced and held. After a few moments she pulled free and left the kitchen. Hearing the bathroom door close, I went to the other end of the room and leaned against the window frame and gazed out toward the river. The last light was fading from the sky over Jersey, and there was a rusty smear of a sunset.

  I felt empty. It was a state of mind with which I was familiar but hadn’t experienced in a while. I understood it as a mechanism of denial, which closed off emotion and sensation so as to protect me from being flooded. It was a flaw in my psyche for which I compensated by treating neurotic women for a living, and it was connected to Danny. After his suicide, and in the knowledge that I was responsible for it, I had been prone to states of emotional flatness and inertia, a sort of inner deadness. There’d been other symptoms too, more intrusive symptoms, for instance the dreams about him, what he’d looked like when I found him. I’d never had them seen to and I suppose I should have. This was why my marriage had collapsed with such suddenness, and why I’d been an emotional isolate for the past seven years. It was what I think Agnes meant when she said I had something missing. And now it was happening again.

  It is truly demoralizing to feel yourself powerless to prevent the repetition of a pattern of behavior that you recognize as productive only of suffering. I had helped many distressed men and women, more often women, to confront and eventually disrupt such patterns of compulsive behavior; but apparently I couldn’t do the same for myself.

  Nora and I later made some sort of peace, both of us exhausted by what had occurred
and by the stresses underlying its occurrence. The next day, after my last appointment, I walked east to Lexington Avenue to catch the downtown train. On impulse, I don’t know why, I got off at Astor Place and walked up Fourth Avenue to Union Square and sat on a bench under a tree. It was a dank, humid day with low clouds. There was an ugly feel to the city. It was suddenly the hot, unpleasant season in New York, and there had been a murder in Washington Heights that sounded like an eerie echo of Son of Sam, who’d terrorized us two summers back. I had the impression that my life had become an exercise in pointless circularity.

  • • •

  There was now no doubt that Nora and I were in a state of crisis, and that if our relationship were to be saved it would have to be me who did the saving. Knowing this, why then did I continue to see Agnes? In retrospect it seems clear that I intended things with Nora to break down, that I wanted her to leave me but was unable to act on that wish because I recognized her fragility and suspected how deeply she was damaged. I certainly didn’t want to be the agent of her breakdown. So I was providing asylum, protecting her, and from what? From myself. I had in fact become her doctor without intending to, and as her doctor I was shielding her from the man to whom she’d given her love but who’d grown weary of her and wished now to push her out. I was a divided man, doctor and lover, each contending with the other over the unstable psyche of Nora Chiara. For a number of days the two opposing impulses existed in a state of near-perfect equilibrium, but I was not so much a body at rest as a body in paralysis.

  We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment. We were largely silent, coolly polite to each other, but each for our own reasons unwilling to initiate the argument we knew would involve saying things that could never be unsaid. For both of us this awful icy silence was preferable to an apocalyptic row after which life would never be the same. There is a conservative element in most relationships and it tolerates much that is outrageous, or that later comes to be seen as such.