“No, who is she?”
The doctor cleared his throat, a cough of a laugh, a sound like the cracking of dry twigs. “It’s your dream, Peter, not mine. I was asking if you recognized this woman as someone in particular, someone you know.”
“It could have been anyone.”
“Go on.”
“I want to save her. I know that much in the dream … It isn’t always the same.”
“Uh huh.”
“Should I tell it to you from the beginning?”
“Go ahead.” The voice full of the pumped-up cheer of boredom, weary to death of other men’s sick and sour dreams.
“Would you rather I talked about something else?”
“Don’t worry about what I want to hear. Tell me about the dream if you want to talk about it.”
Peter noticed that there was a hole in the big toe of his right sock. He wiggled the toe and watched it with bemused detachment, as if it were being moved by a will outside his own. “My ambition,” he announced—a joke on himself, “is to do something better than anyone else can do it.”
“To do what better?”
“Something,” he said, choking on a laugh.
“Surely you can be more specific than that. What are you most interested in?”
“I’m interested in being a painter, a writer, a philosopher, a historian, an architect, a lawyer, a lover …” He laughed self-deprecatingly, a nervous noise rattling in his chest and throat—the doctor judging him somewhere, invisibly. “Sometimes I think I’d like to get on a horse and ride off into the country and not come back.” He listened to himself, his voice coming back at him from some distant wall like an echo. “The thing is I can’t … Maybe I’d better tell you about the dream. Okay?” He waited for the doctor’s approval.
“If you want to.”
“The dream …” he started. He felt like a little kid on an auditorium stage reciting his piece. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. “It usually starts with my hearing a woman’s voice calling for help,” he said. “At first I don’t know where I am or where the voice is coming from. Then I discover that I’m in some kind of enormous building, an apartment house or a hospital, with hundreds of rooms, and the woman is calling to me from one of them. All she says in this desperate voice is ‘Help me, Peter. Help me.’ She repeats it over and over again, until listening to it becomes painful. I wanted to help her, Doctor, but I couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from.” When he closed his eyes he was there, running frantically from room to room, the voice—the woman of the voice—always somewhere else.
“Go on.”
Peter opened his eyes—a wonder to see the ceiling where he left it, darker now, tilted. “I had to knock down the door with my shoulder to get into several of the rooms. It was always the wrong room.”
The doctor was writing furiously. “Go on.”
Peter raised his head. Where?
“The woman was calling you,” the doctor suggested.
“The voice always seemed to be coming from just beyond the next wall.” As he went on, Peter became less and less certain as to what he was making up for the sake of the story and what actually took place in the shadow reaches of his dream. “I kept going from room to room,” he said, caught up in the pursuit, “and I had the impression—don’t ask me why—that the building I was in was a kind of funeral parlor. The place smelled of death. I had the feeling that the woman who was calling me was the only one in the building still alive.”
“And you awake before you reach her? Is that how it happens?”
No. His eyes closed, Peter crashed through the last wall, a double thickness of brick, which gave way, like some heavy liquid, at the impact of his shoulder. There were no more rooms after that. He was outside, in a garden, among roses. The woman was there, waiting impassively (for him?) in a long feathery white nightgown, fragile as a ghost. So that she would recognize him, he flew to her, the ground going down as he went up. It was suddenly dark, the exquisite white figure of the woman as if imprinted on the shadowy outline of the garden. He approached her like the floating lover in a Chagall painting, kissed her cold mouth, then fell, landing on her pedestal. She was a statue. Had she always been?
“I asked you …” the doctor started to say but stopped himself. Peter was weeping. “Anyway, our time is up for today.”
“Tell me some more about your parents,” the doctor asked him on another occasion, after a prolonged silence.
“There’s nothing to tell. What I mean is, Dr. Cantor, we weren’t much of a family.”
“How so?”
“Well, as I told you, my father played in a band that traveled a lot, so he wasn’t home very much of the time. My mother died at fifteen—when I was fifteen,” he corrected himself. “She died in childbirth.”
“I see.” Sound of pencil scratching on paper. “What was your mother like?”
He hardly remembered. “She did her best,” he said in mitigation of her failure. “Herbie and I were wild kids and Papa was home less than six months out of the year.”
“What were your feelings about your father being away so much? Did it upset you?”
Peter discovered that his foot was asleep. “A little, I guess,” he said, shaking the foot, which seemed only circumstantially a part of him. “Most of the time I got along pretty well with him, he wasn’t a bad man—he could be very nice—though he was always a little distant, as if we were just another one of his audiences to be warmed up for his performance. I got along all right with him, but Herbie fought with Papa all the time they were together. They loved each other. They fought constantly.”
“Do you know what you just said?”
Peter sat up. “What?”
“You tell me,” he said in his bored, gentle voice—his middle-aged, professional voice. “It’ll be better if you lie down, however.”
“I told you that my father was never home,” Peter guessed, adjusting his head to the pillow, unable to find a comfortable spot.
“No, something after that. About your father and Herbie.”
“That they fought?”
“Yes. And what else?”
“They used to bait each other for no reason except it was the only way they knew how to talk. Is that what you mean? For example, Papa used to call Herbie the world’s biggest bum, and Herbie would say that everything he was he owed to his father.”
“But these fights between them were a means of communication, a means of affection? Isn’t that right?” “Did I say that?”
“You said they loved each other.” The doctor was writing again.
“In a way they did.”
“Do you think your father loved Herbie more than he loved you?”
The question embarrassed him. Peter looked at the ceiling, didn’t answer.
“You don’t want to talk about it, do you? Do you understand why?”
“I think Papa loved us all when we weren’t around,” Peter whispered. “When he didn’t have to be with us, he loved us.” It hurt him to say so.
“Then you did resent him somewhat, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t resent him,” he insisted in a loud, childlike voice, remotely recognizable as his own. “It wasn’t his fault he was out of town when my mother died. He couldn’t know she was going to die, could he? Anyway, I think our time is up, Dr. Cantor.” He laughed foolishly.
“That’s all right. Go on.”
“What should I say? Herbie was bothered about it more than I was. He really hated Papa for not being there. They …”
“What about you? Did you hate him?”
Peter leaped to his feet as though awakened from a dream. He confronted the doctor face to face, an owl-glassed middle-aged man. “I didn’t hate him,” he said. “It wouldn’t have mattered to Papa if I hated him or not.”
After a month of saying nothing—nothing coming of nothing—Peter told the doctor about Gloria and Delilah, changing their names (Gloria was Doris, and Delilah
, Lila) to protect them from the violation of Cantor’s knowledge.
“I don’t know if this makes any sense to you,” Peter said, “but I felt that I was in love with Lila, Doris and Lois at the same time. In different ways. Is that possible? What I mean is not that I loved Lois, Doris and Lila all at once, though sometimes I did, but I loved each one when I was with her or was thinking of her.” Lois, Doris, Lila, Peter: they seemed merely names now, pseudonyms in some wish-blown purgatory. When Lois left him they all died.
“When you say ‘love,’ do you mean you wanted to have intercourse with these girls? I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
“What do I have to do, define love for you?”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Not for me,” he said gently.
Looking at the ceiling, Peter found the cunt again, a deformity of its former self, an obscene grin like a scar on its face.
“I really had rocks for Gloria,” he confessed.
“Gloria?”
“I mean Doris. I used to get a hard-on just thinking about her.”
The doctor was writing again. “I don’t understand. Who’s Gloria?”
Peter couldn’t explain without admitting his deception; his guilt sweated his palms. “When I said Gloria I meant Doris,” he said—a deathbed confession.
The doctor found a laugh in his throat and gave it up. It was infectious. Peter began to laugh, though tensely unamused—the laughter tearing its way painfully out of him. He was unable to stop.
“Did your wife know about these other women?” the doctor asked, raising his voice sternly against the wail of sound coming from the couch.
Seizures of mirth continued to erupt in a painful rattle of sound, then stuttered to a death. Peter shook his head, withholding tears as a vanity of will. “I don’t think so,” he said; it was the first answer to come to mind. “If she did, she never mentioned it.”
“Did you have intercourse with these other girls? Doris, Gloria …?”
No answer.
“Was your wife a disappointment to you—you know what I mean—as a sexual partner? Is that why you looked elsewhere?”
Peter stared the ceiling blind. “I was in love with her,” he muttered—still, for all he knew (which was, God knows, little), in love with her.
“But you tell me you were also in love with Lila, Doris and Gloria, so what am I to make of your answer?” He cleared his throat, coughed.
“Doris and Gloria are the same person,” Peter said.
“You’re not responding to my question. What I’m asking is whether you and your former wife had sexual problems?”
Closing his eyes, a dizzying experience, he fell headlong through an opening in the floor, was in bed again with his wife, his former wife. She turned to him like a flower. “Be gentle, Peter,” she was saying. “Hurt me.” He flew out the window.
“I’m not asking you these things to pry,” the doctor said gently. “It’s important to know how you feel about certain things. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Go on please.”
“Where? What was I saying?”
The rustling of pages, labored breathing like the buzz of insects. A clock was ticking somewhere in the distance. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Lois was always afraid of becoming pregnant,” he lamented, “and I …”
“Go on.”
“It made it difficult.”
“I understand. Go on.”
“That’s all.”
“But you were married. Why should she be afraid of having a child?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” He was tired of being prodded, tired of the perverse will of his memory, tired of everything.
“Not to me. I’d like you to tell me what you know.”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Talk about whatever you like.”
He imagined the doctor looking forlornly at his watch, sluggish minutes prodding the dull nerve of his patience. “It wasn’t too bad,” Peter said, “until after the abortion.” A concession to the hours of failure they shared together. “After that …”
“I can understand. You were …”
“She wouldn’t stop bleeding. She bled—it was supposed to stop—for a full day and a half; it wouldn’t stop. I called the doctor—the man who performed the abortion—but he didn’t answer his phone, no one answered. I was going to go down there and kill him, but I was afraid to leave her while she was bleeding, and the night before—right after the operation—I had left her alone.” His throat turned to sand, spilled into his chest.
“I’m afraid I lost you,” the doctor said, his tone weather-less as always. “Did you leave her while she was hemorrhaging?”
“I didn’t. I left …” He couldn’t talk. The bones of his chest stretched beyond endurance.
“Take your time. No one’s rushing you. What happened after you left her? Why did you leave her alone?”
“I left her …” It was difficult to talk. “I left her a few hours after the operation, after I put her to bed. She said then—I was tucking her in—that it was my fault, everything was my fault. I held her hand. I was suffocating. She said she wanted me to go away. She said she no longer loved me and wanted me to go away. I was suffocating. Her hate. I had to get out of there. I went to a movie. Then it struck me what I had done. I left in the middle. When I got home she was lying in a pool of sweat, white as a ghost.”
“You wanted to escape. It was a natural impulse. You see that, don’t you?”
“No. I shouldn’t have run out. If it could be undone, I’d do anything now to be able to undo it.” He thought he heard the doctor say something (the word “self-indulgence” remained in his mind), but when he turned around—the doctor’s face impassive—he saw that he had been mistaken.
“Do you want to add anything,” the doctor said, “or are you through for today?”
Peter looked at his watch. They had gone five minutes over the allotted time. It was a victory of sorts. When he got to his feet the room turned over, the desk spilled match-sticks, the yellow rug flying on its side caught fire. Peter had to hold on to keep from falling. He burned in one piece, upright.
“A profitable session,” the doctor said in his toneless voice.
That night Peter, who hadn’t talked to his wife in months, phoned her at her parents’ house where she had been living since their separation.
“Let’s try again,” he said.
“Who do you wish to speak to?” It was Lois’s mother. They had the same voice on the phone.
“I want to speak to Lois. Let me speak to Lois, please.”
“Who is this?” the voice full of wary terror. “Lois isn’t here at the moment.”
“Mildred, let me speak to Lois, please.”
There was a moment of hesitation. “I told you she isn’t here,” she said, the voice murderously cold. “Now stop bothering us, please. There’s nothing for you here.”
“I want—” he started, but Mildred hung up before he could finish, the idiot silence haggling insanely in his ear.
Peter raged.
Doors opened somewhere, slammed of themselves, as though the place were haunted. It was to be expected. He was in a rooming house on 113th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, where he had been living for the past two weeks, the phone hanging black on the wall of a coffin-sized kitchen he shared with five other ghosts.
He called again.
“I want to speak to Lois,” he roared into the phone.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” her father said softly, “but Lois hasn’t been well and I don’t think she ought to talk to you.”
His face simmered with sweat. “What’s the matter with her, Will?” he asked gently, his voice hoarse, unnaturally solemn.
He could hear Mildred’s voice in the background. “Hang up, hang up, hang up—what’s the matter with you? Hang up.”
Will endured. “She’s been sick,” he said, a sig
h in his voice—a man of perpetual grief. “She’s been … troubled.” The word delicately chosen.
“I’m sorry, Will,” he said, as though he were apologizing for something he had done. “Would you let me talk to her for a few minutes? It will be all right, Will, believe me. I wouldn’t say anything to hurt her.”
“I can’t, Peter.”
“It’s important to me, Will.”
“There’s nothing I can do, Peter, if she doesn’t want to speak to you. I’m sorry about it, but that’s the way it is.”
“She doesn’t want to speak to me? She said that?”
“Those are her orders, Peter. Sorry.” He lowered his voice. “The last time you called—about a month ago I think it was—Lois was sick afterward. We have the brunt of it; she gets these fits of depression, Peter, where she cries all the time and won’t eat anything. I think it’s better …” He trailed off, as though the effort of talking had exhausted him.
Peter looked around the kitchen. A girl, an undergraduate type, was boiling water. She smiled, showing thousands of perfect teeth. “The last time I called,” he said into the phone, “was over two months ago, Will. I don’t call often.”
“Is it that long? It seemed to me that I remember you calling about a month ago.”
“Let me speak to her, Will.”
“I can’t. I’m going to have to hang up now, Peter.” He sighed his regret. “One minute.”
Peter waited. He heard Lois’s voice arguing with her mother, Will also involved, apologizing about something; then suddenly, before he had a chance to steady himself, Lois was on the phone. “Is that you, Peter?” she said in a voice that seemed to be coming from the other side of the world. He could hardly hear her. “I can’t stop crying, baby.”
“Lois?” He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“What, Peter?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.” She laughed, sobbing. “It’s just that I don’t want to do anything.”
“Take care of yourself,” he said absently, becoming aware, despite himself, of an almost illegibly scrawled message on the wall next to the phone. No one is ever home when I call, it said.
“You too.” A whisper: a secret.
A Man to Conjure With Page 14
