Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  Nora and I were neither of us ready for upheaval. She was stronger than I expected. She’d steeled herself to what she saw as my iceman nature and was prepared—this seemed her unspoken position—to sustain the status quo until it could be sustained no longer, which would be a time of her choosing. I had resumed visiting Agnes, coming downtown in the middle of the day when Cassie was at school. I told her what was happening at home.

  “You don’t need that, Charlie,” she said. “Not with everything else you have to contend with.”

  Chapter Ten

  I’d often thought that Agnes would have made a much better psychiatrist than me. As a teacher of sociology her interest lay in what I thought of as the dramaturgical model of social life: all human interaction as performance, each one of us an actor, the self a sort of colloquium. I remember how we used to quarrel over the concept of emotion, about which she expressed real skepticism. It was our most divisive issue.

  I trusted Agnes but she didn’t understand Nora’s pathology. All that anger!—what the hell was I supposed to do about her? She wouldn’t go into therapy, and I certainly wasn’t going to sort out her childhood for her. So what sort of future could we contemplate? The next time I saw Agnes I told her all this. We were in our midtown hotel, getting undressed. She understood then that the situation was more complicated than she’d realized. I told her I thought that maybe I should treat Nora after all. It wasn’t so very complicated.

  She was horrified. “Are you out of your mind? You tried to treat Danny, had you forgotten?”

  It was hard to hear this. I told her I was young then, and inexperienced. I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. I said I thought it would be a pretty straightforward course of therapy, just tidy her up—

  Agnes was brisk in her response. “Tidy her up? Forget about that! Just cut her loose, Charlie. Let her go.”

  Cut her loose. Let her go. She was right. We had no future. She found me cold and I found her needy, moody and short-tempered. I also thought she was untrustworthy; I was still deeply suspicious of her relationship with my brother. So, yes, cut her loose. At the same time she was still intensely sexually attractive to me, and some part of it sprang from her wildly volatile nature. The problem was that she needed help, but that Charlie Weir was the last person on earth to provide it. Unless—and this only occurred to me when I was on my way back to the office—unless she agreed to an intensive, fixed-limit, goal-directed program of no more than twelve sessions over a period of six weeks.

  I had only one appointment that afternoon, a patient I thought of as My Abused Woman. Her name was Elaine Smith. Elly. She was a very attractive young attorney in the D.A.’s office who showed all the signs of having suffered, as a child, sustained sexual abuse at the hands of her father. He was dead now. He had been a distinguished financier in the city. Like Nora, Elly was still resisting the pressure of her memories, and growing panicked as she began to realize that resistance was futile. She had become angry that afternoon and acted out. She had cursed me, then strutted around my office in a fine state of outrage. She’d tossed her hair and slapped at her thigh with a rolled-up copy of the New York Times. Then she bluntly propositioned me, suggesting that the therapy would go a great deal more smoothly if we had sex just once. I’d encountered this before. My quiet refusal seemed only to inflame her rage and then she collapsed, weeping, onto the chesterfield.

  It had been a strenuous hour, but an important hour. I made sure she understood this before I let her go. I waved aside her tearful apologies and assured her she’d done good work and that this would soon be apparent to her.

  When she’d gone I took off my jacket and stretched out on the chesterfield myself, my hands behind my head. There were a number of reasons why I didn’t believe Nora had been abused as Elly had, foremost among them her uncomplicated attitude toward sex. But the two women did share a strong antagonism to their fathers, which accounted for the anger they both directed at me: paternal transference of the most primitive kind. The difference between them, of course, was the fact that I was seeing Elly as a patient; and thinking this, I felt the familiar anger began to stir. But now I had a specific proposal for Nora. If she agreed to it then we could perhaps put this destructive behavior behind us for good.

  That night we were going out to dinner with Walt and Lucia, who were shortly to leave for Italy, and I had only a few minutes to tell her about my idea. She was in the bathroom applying her makeup. She showed mild interest but said we should talk about it tomorrow. She had to get tarted up, she said, and it was already after seven. She seemed more concerned about her lipstick than her mental health.

  We were eating at Sulfur, which was busy. Audrey took us to a table in the back of the room. Nora was in a subdued mood but Walt was in good spirits and at once ordered a gin martini.

  “And one for me,” I said.

  The women would also have martinis, and Walt was pleased about this. Watching him, I remembered the pleasure my mother used to take in seeing her favorite son enjoying himself, and recalled those special occasions, usually a birthday—this would be after Fred left us—when she took us out to a good restaurant for dinner. Walt loved to eat in restaurants even then, though I was far less at ease with waiters looming over me demanding to know what I wanted. Mom would gaze at me, the waiter standing impassively with pad and lifted pencil, Walt’s eyes meanwhile darting about the busy room.

  “Come on, Charlie, you must make up your mind.”

  “Can I have a steak, please?”

  “You always have steak,” said Walt.

  “Are you sure?” Mom said.

  “No. Yes.”

  Flustered, furious, I would then have to decide how I wanted it cooked. But Walt knew that as his mother’s guest he had to sing for his supper, and he’d been doing it ever since, even when the table was his own. Nothing had changed. We sat there at Sulfur, the women laughing as he grew warm telling some story, and I nodded and sipped my martini and kept an eye on Nora.

  It was late in the meal that it happened. Lucia had gone to the washroom, and Nora was telling Walter about her work. It wasn’t going well. Writing was hell, she said.

  “Charlie can help, surely,” said Walt.

  I was for a moment unsure what he was saying, whether the spirit of the remark—was I not the man who helped people who were stuck in hell?—was benign or the reverse. It hardly mattered. What did matter was Nora’s answer.

  “Charlie doesn’t even know what I’m doing,” she said.

  She turned toward me. I hadn’t really been following the conversation.

  “What?”

  “I think if I left him he wouldn’t even notice.”

  “I’m sure he’d notice,” said Walt.

  “After a week.”

  “Now this isn’t very useful,” I said.

  Walt was leaning forward, his elbows on the table, looking from one of us to the other. He relished moments like this. But where had it all suddenly come from? Was she drunk?

  “I don’t think anybody wants to be questioned too closely about their work, do they?” I said. “Particularly writers. Artists, maybe.”

  Walt did not rise to this. He could have, but he chose not to. He wanted to hear more of Nora’s bile, delighted to listen to a woman’s anger not for once directed at himself.

  “Have you tried?” she said.

  “I think I have.”

  My hands were folded on the table. My gaze was calm, steady, sober. I was glad only Walt was here. I realized she was very angry. She wouldn’t look at me, her hands were restless and there was a sort of simmering menace that made me apprehensive. She was unpredictable in this state. She was also, curiously, very beautiful. It was passion that made her so.

  “Do you ever think about me, Charlie, if I’m not in the room?”

  “Do we need to do this here, darling?”

  “Walt knows what you are. Tell him, Walt.”

  Walt opened his hands as though to show he had no concealed
blades, this a sure sign he was about to tell a lie.

  “So tell me, Walter,” I said.

  His eyes drifted across the room. He wanted Lucia to come back and defuse this suddenly dangerous situation.

  “Then I’ll tell him,” said Nora.

  “Tell me what?”

  They must be having an affair. How else do men and women come to such intimacies as this, I mean Walt’s candid opinion of me, whatever it was, little though I cared?

  “He thinks you’re not truly alive.”

  Not truly alive! What a shit. What a complete and utter shit. “Thanks, Walter. And when did he share this penetrating aperçu with you?”

  “I was exaggerating,” said Walt. “But see, now you employ sarcasm, Charlie, you employ irony. You’re just so damn cerebral all the time.”

  That was enough. I rose to my feet.

  “Oh, sit down and don’t be an asshole,” said Nora. “We’re only talking.”

  She was drunk. I threw my napkin on the table. I wanted to fling a glass of wine in her face, in his face, in somebody’s face. Lucia appeared.

  “What’s going on?” she said as she sat down.

  “Good night,” I said.

  I walked south, heading for Fulton Street, for Agnes, driven by blind instinct, but I didn’t get that far. I thought better of it. I took a cab home. I took a sleeping pill. In the morning I left the apartment before Nora was awake.

  When I got home that evening she’d moved out. There was a brief typewritten note: Charlie, it’s not working. I’ve gone to Audrey’s. N.

  • • •

  Well, relief, at first. But not for long. More bad news: Dr. Sam Pike died. I heard about it at home. Massive coronary, I might have predicted it. I did predict it, in fact, we all did, all of us who knew that blustering, fallible, tenderhearted man. The greatest psychiatrist I ever knew, my teacher, my mentor and my friend. This was a man who could not only understand but also empathize, identify with any and every species of experience known to man. I once asked him if he could empathize with a necrophiliac.

  “I have,” he said.

  This was during my wilderness years, after I left Agnes. Sam and I worked closely together during that period, and it probably saved me. We collaborated on a book about trauma. We made the world remember—for it had forgotten, yet again—the clinical reality of the posttraumatic disorders. We established diagnostic criteria and constructed therapeutic regimes. We gave special emphasis to the creation of the trauma story, the detailed narrative of the emotion, the context and the meaning of trauma. We’d been sitting up late in his office drinking whiskey from paper cups, talking about the effects on the psyche of the commission of extreme transgressive acts like the sexual abuse of a child. That’s when I’d asked him if he could empathize with a necrophiliac.

  “All right,” I said, “but what about an eater of the dead?”

  “That too. You knew him.”

  A clear night in late summer, the window open, the distant hooting of a vessel in the harbor. All the other usual night sounds of New York City. We were both exhausted. I waited for him to say more. Suddenly he looked up, light in his eye and his lip wet. Significant movement in that baggy mind of his.

  “You know who I’m talking about.”

  “I don’t think I do.” He was making no sense.

  “You do.”

  “Who, Sam? Jesus!”

  Then I saw it. Danny, of course. Danny ate the dead.

  There was a memorial service in a church on Park Avenue a month or so later, and the number of people who showed up illustrated if nothing else the breadth of Sam’s influence. They came from all over the world, men and women whom he’d trained or treated or whose lives he had somehow touched and never superficially. I had for some years realized the extent to which my status within the psychiatric community reflected my close association with Sam Pike. I knew that our work had had a profound effect on certain areas of psychotherapy, largely the treatment of sexually abused women and children. The day of Sam’s memorial I was forcibly reminded that I had come a long way in the profession. My private life was something else again, but my work had not been for nothing.

  But I felt the lack. The gnawing sense of my own incompletion. I left the church and walked south. The inescapable fact of emotional failure again. Not truly alive. Already dead, then. Solitude was familiar, solitude was an old shoe, but this new solitude after Nora’s departure had an ominous undertone to it that hadn’t been there before, like the muffled chiming of a distant bell. I tried to write to her but it proved impossible because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, other than that I understood why she’d left me. It was obvious: she was terrified by the prospect of six weeks of intensive psychotherapy. She didn’t want to know what was wrong with her. She didn’t want to remember.

  Saying this, however, would be counterproductive. Her denial would only grow more stubborn, more impregnable. So I remained alone. I had my work, yes, but at the end of the day I came home through a dirty, frightened city to an apartment in which the telephone never rang and the mailbox almost never held a message of any importance. There was nothing I wanted to do except sleep, and during the day to escape into the problems of others. I dimly recognized the features of the old depression returning, the depression I’d idly thought of as my inheritance, left me by my mother instead of an apartment. Though there was of course Agnes.

  I called her the following Saturday and told her that Nora had left me.

  “Oh Charlie, what are we going to do with you?”

  She asked me to come to supper as Leon was out of town, and I agreed with some alacrity. I bought a good bottle of wine and got a haircut. I presented myself at Fulton Street at seven sharp and was surprised by my own fierce pleasure at walking into a warm, well-lit apartment with the smell of cooking, and the music of Monk, and a daughter who kissed me, and there was Agnes, drying her hands on a dish towel, a tall, kindly heron of a woman regarding me warmly and shaking her head.

  “Oh, you poor battered man,” she said.

  Cassie was full of compassion too, although she had no idea why I deserved it. “Yes, poor battered Daddy!” she cried.

  She flung her arms around me and clung to me for half a minute, pretending to sob, and I had to gently detach her as I couldn’t move. One of the reasons I remained so popular with Cass was because I was the Saturday parent. I took her out to lunch, I took her swimming, I took her to the movies. I never had to tell her to finish her homework or tidy her room, I just showed up and asked her what she wanted to do. She was flirtatious with me, affectionate, eager to confirm that I was her real daddy, not like Leon. We talked about her schoolwork, then I asked Agnes how her sister, Maureen, was doing and she said Cassie had seen her more recently than she had.

  “She’s doing good,” Cassie said. She was sprawled in the armchair with her book. She didn’t lower it. She’d lost interest in me now. Her rudeness I found oddly pleasing; it told me I was at home here and she was comfortable with me. Isolated people, those who live alone, are always conscious of their condition in the homes of families. Agnes knew I wanted to talk about Nora and that I wouldn’t be able to until Cassie had gone off to her room.

  After we’d eaten, Cassie disappeared. I washed the dishes. I noted with irritation the pleasure it gave me to perform this chore. I was aware of something soft in me, something weak, that I should be so pitifully incapable of accepting the fact that I was once more alone. It was my responsibility. I had created it. Why then did I hanker for the treacherous warmth of a shared kitchen, a shared bed? Twice I had known it, twice I had lost it, willfully and deliberately each time. I think I must have stood for a few seconds in front of the sink, unmoving, rigid with complicated displeasure, and Agnes saw it.

  “Sit down, Charlie,” she said quietly.

  I did as I was told.

  “Talk to me.”

  She sat there rolling a cigarette, an empty wineglass in front of her, a bowl of grapes on
the table. From the back of the apartment, from Cassie’s bedroom, came muted pop music.

  “I seem to be the only one who was taken by surprise,” I said.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Her face lifted to mine. I noticed how the eyelids had begun to droop at the corners, giving her eyes a slightly hooded look, and that the crosshatched lines beneath them were spreading across her cheekbones. The clefts in her cheeks were grooves now but it was all natural ravage, not the effects of dissipation, just the stuff time does with flesh. All this daily aging and changing, and me not there to observe it. Her hair was still the color of old straw, and no more kempt than when I’d first met her.

  “I don’t know you anymore,” I said.

  “For god’s sake, Charlie.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You don’t want her back?”

  I tried to explain the position Nora’s illness had put me in, my reluctant agreement that I would treat her, and her then promptly walking out on me. Agnes said nothing. She didn’t ask again if in spite of it all I wanted her back.

  “You probably thought it was a big mistake from the start,” I said, “and obviously you were right, but it didn’t feel like that.”

  “I don’t suppose I should have expected—” She left the thought unfinished.

  “What?”

  “I shouldn’t have expected you to be smarter than anybody else. You’ve been alone a long time. But you mustn’t try to treat her.”

  “Do you want me back?”

  It was reckless of me to ask. It made her angry. I knew it would.

  “What is wrong with you, Charlie? Aren’t you satisfied with all the damage you’ve done? How can you be so—”

  “So what?”

  “So obtuse.”

  Well, yes, that was the point, wasn’t it? I grew suddenly impatient of feeling like, I don’t know, a piece of damp lettuce. I said this. She didn’t respond.

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  “Oh, have another drink or something,” she said.