Trauma

by Patrick Mcgrath

  “I need you, and I want to deserve your love. Nothing’s more important to me than that.”

  “Charlie.”

  I looked for the change in her body, in her fingers, that would tell me I had reached her, touched her, but she was still. Then she sank back in the chair again and covered her mouth with her hand. Her eyes still gazed steadily at me and the light caught a dampness in them. She wanted to believe, but she resisted. She was covering her mouth to stop herself from saying something rash. Another ping! from the oven.

  “We should eat,” she said, but still she didn’t move. “You’re a very lonely man.”

  “I didn’t know how lonely until now.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. There’s still a bit missing, Charlie.”

  This again. “What do you mean, a bit missing?” I said. “What is it, heart, soul? Or you! You’re what’s missing!”

  She shrugged. But I was incomplete, she was right, and it was because I was alone, and desperate to escape my aloneness. This didn’t help my cause. I could hardly tell her that I wanted her back so as not to be alone anymore, but she knew that that’s what it was. It wasn’t about her needs then but mine, my need to complete myself. Or escape from myself.

  “You think that’s why I’m here?” I said.

  Her eyes weren’t damp anymore.

  “Because you’re lonely? Yes, I do.”

  Another silence. Another ping!

  “We should eat.”

  This time she got up and as she passed my chair she laid her fingers on my shoulder and I seized them. The next thing, she was in the chair with me, in my arms and clutching me, and I could feel the anger in her, confused anger, and desire. She kissed me as I ran my hands across her back and down her hips, then suddenly she pushed away from me and stood up, panting slightly, and I couldn’t tell if she was about to laugh or cry.

  “I’m not ruining that fish for you,” she said.

  While we ate we talked about Cassie, about Agnes’s work and about Danny, how her grief was at times as fresh as it had been the day he died. She told me she no longer believed it was my fault he killed himself. She now accepted that it would’ve happened anyway. She had never said this to me before, and I was astonished that she did now. But my response was dampened by the knowledge that this was not what really mattered to her. What mattered was that I’d left her.

  “So you could have stayed,” she said. “It would have been all right in the end.”

  “I couldn’t see it then.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  Leon was due home about nine, so I left a little before then. At the door she kissed me and told me to look after myself.

  “We’ll keep talking,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure we will,” she said, closing the door on me.

  I walked up Fulton Street to the subway. My mood was somber, the exhilaration I’d felt earlier now dissipated. But I wasn’t defeated yet. And at least I’d learned that she wanted to be convinced that I could love her properly and for good.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day Nora called me at my office. I knew our break wouldn’t be entirely clean, that she would require at least one conversation to justify to herself what she’d done. I didn’t intend to argue with her. I would urge her to seek help elsewhere, and give her the name of a colleague if she wanted it. I might suggest that the content of the nightmares indicated repressed trauma stemming from incidents in her childhood. On the phone she told me she’d left a few things behind, including her keys to the apartment. So she couldn’t get in. Could she stop by this evening and pick them up?

  “Of course,” I said.

  It was an uncomfortably warm day, damp and sultry. The city was tense and I felt a simmering antagonism whenever I was out on the street. I had Elly in the afternoon, and we had reached a complicated stage. After the session when she’d proposed that we have sex I’d spent some time attempting to persuade her that I was there not to replicate her relationship with her father but to enable her to come to terms with it, or rather to recover from it. I’d been working hard to convince her that here in my office she would come to no harm. I was reminded of that comment of Billy Sullivan’s, years back, when he’d said, “No safe place, man.”

  Elly was one of those for whom there was no safe place.

  Here was a woman whose bedroom when she was growing up wasn’t the haven within the home that every child needs.

  Night after night she had lain awake and waited for the door to crack open, for light from the upstairs landing to slide into the room, and with it the figure of a man in silhouette: her father. She told me later that when he came in she went out, by which she meant she left her body. She became expert at dissociating from the experience and watching as though from a high place, the corner of the ceiling, she said, what happened to the girl on the bed.

  Later, as a teenager, when her father went instead to her sister’s room, she became anorexic, and eventually she was hospitalized. This was all in the case notes. So alarmed did the medical staff become by her refusal to eat that they tried feeding her through a tube. And when she tore out the tube, they strapped her into a chair and forced it down her throat.

  This truly shocked me, that her doctors could be so criminally stupid as to hold her down against her will and push a tube into her mouth. This was what her father had done to her, pushed his tube into her mouth; it had caused the anorexia in the first place. So I knew it would be slow. But she trusted me now, and it was time for her to start talking about what had happened. It was time for her to remember. I met fierce resistance. “No, Dr. Weir, I don’t want to remember, don’t make me!” I allowed long silences. There were tears. Toward the end of each session I pulled back, leading her to safe ground, her life in the present, the relationship she’d formed with another prosecutor in the D.A.’s office, an older woman. This was familiar territory, and she was able to talk about the woman without becoming upset. She even laughed a little when she described their last date. She left my office with some confidence; she was looking forward, she said, to our next session. I saw her out myself. I could no longer afford a full-time receptionist.

  But I was exhausted. It becomes no easier, dealing with damage of this magnitude. And it was an effort to suppress my anger at what had been done to Elly. Moral outrage doesn’t help much. You must be sensitive every second to the nuanced message the patient is sending. Is she ready to take the next step? Is this the moment to press her, to try to break through the denial and expose the horror of what has been repressed? Or is it time to pull back, review progress, consolidate? This is my work. I do it well. But it’s exhausting.

  The subway was crowded, and it was a drained and listless Charlie Weir who emerged at Twenty-third Street. I didn’t relish seeing Nora, or for that matter anyone at all. I had a nice piece of pork tenderloin. I would boil a little rice, maybe some green beans, and have a simple dinner by myself. I had a new recording of sonatas that Mozart wrote in Munich when he was nineteen, and I knew they would purge the dross of the day. But instead of Wolfgang Amadeus I could look forward only to Nora Chiara. I took a shower, changed my clothes, poured myself a small scotch and settled down with the paper until she arrived.

  I buzzed her up and she stood in the doorway looking smaller than when I’d last seen her, that ghastly evening at Sulfur when Walt told me I wasn’t alive.

  “Come in.”

  “You’re drinking, Charlie. What’s happened?”

  She was nervous. She had often urged me to drink more. She’d have liked a man who went with her glass for glass. I poured her some wine. She took off her coat and hung it on the back of a chair. She made no move to collect her belongings and instead perched on a stool at the kitchen counter.

  “How’s Audrey?” I said.

  “Oh, they’re very generous, but I feel like such a refugee. I can’t impose on them much longer.”

  I’d begun to see Nora’s chronic homelessness as a symptom of
her pathology. There was a void in the woman and she tried to fill it by having others take her in and care for her. She lit a cigarette. I’d finally got the smell of her last cigarettes out of the apartment, and she detected my displeasure. I felt too tired to act gallant about her tobacco habit.

  “I’m sorry. Do you want me to go out on the fire escape?”

  There had been times in the last month or so when I’d asked her to smoke out there. Then one night she’d said it wasn’t safe. The bolts in the railing were corroded with rust. She told me I should speak to the super about it, or if not the super then I should report it to the city. I’d done nothing of the sort, and that had been the pretext for another fight.

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “Smoke away. So what are your plans?”

  “I thought we might talk about that, Charlie. My plans.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Don’t be cold. This is very hard for me. I know I’ve been a bitch, but you haven’t exactly been a saint.”

  “I never claimed to be a saint.”

  “Nor did I.”

  I’d already guessed what was coming and I didn’t like it one bit. This was all happening way too fast. She hadn’t been in the apartment ten minutes.

  “Could I have some more wine?”

  I poured her a little more. I wanted her sober for this.

  “We can’t just—”

  “We can’t just what?”

  “Charlie! Help me here!”

  She sat perched on the stool looking helpless and fragile and vulnerable and, yes, beautiful. There was always that, and with it my damn body responding. My body would betray me in a second, and it took all my will to stay on my own side of the kitchen counter and watch her with the appearance of if not indifference then sympathy. Distanced sympathy.

  “Can’t we just try again?”

  The irony was not lost on me: of human bondage, this was the motif, the cruel awareness that the very form of supplication I’d used with Agnes was now being employed on me. “It wouldn’t be any different if we did,” I said. “You really have to deal with your problems.” I said this with reasonableness and concern. And in a tone of regret.

  “But I will. I’ve been thinking about it all week. The offer you made me, the short course of therapy? I’ll do it. If only to mend things between us.”

  “It’s too late.” Oh, this cost me. This was harsh. To be so harsh when all I wanted was to unbutton her blouse.

  “No, it’s not!” She stood up, her face so naked in its appeal, so desperately weak and frightened. “Please don’t say it’s too late!”

  She came around the end of the counter and lay her head against my chest and wept. I put my arms around her, but loosely. I wanted her, but I couldn’t allow it, had I not made my choice? Was I not fighting for my life here? I took her by the shoulders and pushed her away. She stood there for a moment, so small and perfect, with her hair falling over her downturned face, and then gave a kind of damp sigh and turned and walked to the far end of the room and stood with her back to me. I came around the counter and hitched myself onto a stool and watched her, waiting.

  She spoke without turning. “I know you don’t mean it.”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  I thought, ludicrously, of a painting of St. Stephen the Martyr, that androgynous boy with the arrows in his body. Another dart had just pierced Nora’s flesh. She seemed the martyr now, myself the instrument of her martyrdom. But had I not made my choice?

  She walked across the room toward me. She came close and took my hands where they lay unmoving on my thighs. “You really don’t care anymore?”

  Her closeness nearly undid me. Inside this impassive man there raged a bloody civil war. I had to lie to her. Had I not made my choice? “It’s not the point if I care or not.”

  “But do you?”

  “It’s not about what I want.”

  Then it all changed.

  “It’s not about what you want!”

  Spoken, or spat, rather, with contempt. All at once I felt my exhaustion. I didn’t have the wherewithal to go on with this and I told her so. But she was already in the spare room getting her things. When she emerged she was still very upset, and I didn’t want her to leave like this; she should calm down before she went out on the street. But she wouldn’t answer me, she wouldn’t even look at me, and she sure as hell wouldn’t let me ride down in the elevator with her. Then she was gone. I didn’t feel right about what had happened. I went into the spare room. She had taken her things and also her keys to the apartment. I sat on the bed and cursed.

  In the days that followed I tried to calculate what all this meant. I heard nothing more from her, nor from Agnes. I wanted to tell Agnes what had happened, but I was unwilling to engage her support as I negotiated what I thought of as the death throes of my relationship with Nora. That is, if she’d even offer her support, and if indeed these were the death throes. I couldn’t assume that Nora would go quietly, and I knew I’d have to expect at least one more attempt to change my mind. By unintentionally arousing her contempt I might well have hammered the last or next-to-last nail in the coffin, though with Nora you could be sure of nothing. I strongly suspected I would again be forced to be cruel.

  Then the ax fell. Of human bondage: having rejected Nora with what I thought was finality, on Friday I called Agnes. Her tone was cool and measured and she didn’t spare my feelings. She said I was driven by loneliness and isolation, not by love, and she had no confidence that I wouldn’t hurt her again. She didn’t believe I’d changed in any fundamental way.

  “I’m not prepared to take the risk, Charlie.”

  “But there’s Cassie—”

  “You can still see Cassie.”

  I protested, of course I did. I said she had to give me a chance. I put up strong arguments and told her she was wrong, that I had changed, and knew what I wanted now, which was to be with my family. I would be loving, supportive, faithful—

  “Faithful isn’t your strong suit, Charlie.”

  This was unfair; it was with her that I’d been unfaithful! I told her I was finished with Nora. I said I couldn’t live without her.

  “You lived without me for seven years.”

  “And it was hell!”

  “I don’t think so. I knew you’d do this. Please don’t. It only makes it harder for me.”

  She didn’t flinch. There was no sympathy for my distress, no wavering, no opening to any possibility of compromise or delay. She wouldn’t meet me to discuss it further. She wouldn’t sleep on it, having slept on it already. This went on for several minutes, then all at once I gave up. There was no point. She had made her decision. She knew her own mind. I felt sick. I felt fatalistic. I felt nihilistic. I sat at my desk with my head in my hands. I went into the washroom and stared at myself in the mirror. I had planned to take her to Faust, which was being performed at Lincoln Center on Saturday night, and now I had to go alone. For the first time in a long while I couldn’t lose myself in that most darkly exhilarating of operas. I was unable to attend either to what was happening onstage or to the restless movement of my own thoughts. I was caught instead in some middle ground of distracted despair from which violent impulses erupted. I emerged onto the plaza and walked south on Broadway among the Saturday night crowds.

  It was loud on the street that Saturday night, almost deafening, all the roaring and wailing and screaming. From Columbus Circle I continued south on Eighth Avenue. There were theatergoers emerging from shows that had just let out, and dealers in doorways and scuzzy-looking characters hanging around sex arcades. There were garbage cans kicked over, the trash spilling out across the sidewalk. The closer I got to Forty-second Street the seedier the neighborhood became, but I didn’t give a damn anymore.

  I found what I was looking for somewhere west of Times Square, where in an empty lot at the end of a deserted street a Cadillac was sitting on blocks. The doors were off, the wheels and engine gone, but the backseat was intac
t and a woman sat there smoking in the shadows. I clambered through a hole in the fence, conscious only of a quickening hunger for cathartic sex.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It is from this night that I date my decline. I had begun to entertain domesticity scenarios in which Cassie once again had her real father, and Agnes and I grew old together. I was astonished at how hard it hit me, the destruction of this fantasy. It was particularly bad at night. After a period of quiescence the old disorder was awakened, and I felt it stirring in the darkness like a beast in its den. In the years I’d been treating trauma I’d learned this, that when ordinary anxiety becomes sufficiently acute it will rouse the dormant horror no matter how deeply repressed it is. I began dreaming about Danny again, and though I suppose I should have consulted someone, I was resistant to the idea. There was a perverse hubris attached to this: none of my colleagues enjoyed such intimate contact with the disorder. And now I felt it moving again.

  Monday was another very humid day and I had an appointment in the afternoon with Joe Stein. I found him in wry humor. I must have looked wretched.

  “You jump out a window too?”

  I sat down at his bedside. He was strapped into a molded plastic body jacket to keep his trunk immobilized. Stein was extraordinary. Any other man in his situation would be struggling with forms of humiliation connected to basic bodily functions, and also anxious about his sexual future. You expect a man to be depressed, if he’s sustained a spinal-cord injury like Stein’s; but he was upbeat. I could only conclude that I’d been right about him, that he’d absolved himself of the death of the pedestrian. He’d offered himself, he could do no more than that, and now he’d take life on any terms, even as a paraplegic. I asked him if his wife was still guardedly pessimistic.