“Oscar Patton wants to marry me,” she said without warning. That got him. Peter raised his head, looked around like a man coming out of a trench in the middle of a battle to see what the noise was about. ‘You don’t like Oscar much, do you?” she asked.
“I don’t think you ought to marry him,” he said quickly.
“Why not?” The question issued as a challenge.
He didn’t answer at first, not prepared at the moment to tell her of his own plans, mainly because he had only plans for plans, a man who didn’t want to build a house unless he could also build the ground under it.
“Oscar and I get along very well together,” she added.
“You know why not,” he said, as much as he could say.
She shook her head. “I don’t. You have to tell me.”
They stared at each other across the table, old lovers—it was all there for a moment, everything that hadn’t been said, in the whisper of their eyes. Peter looked away, shaken.
“I couldn’t bear another bad marriage,” she said.
“I like Oscar much better than I did,” he said to be fair, the luck (too much of it) on his side.
“He doesn’t like you,” she said, a small smile at Oscar’s expense. “He says you’re destructive, Peter—self-destructive, too—that you set impossible terms for yourself, that you eventually cause a lot of harm to everyone around you because you’re incapable of compromise which is sanity.” She recited it as if it were a lesson she had memorized.
Peter looked at his hands, his nails dirty.
“It’s just that he’s jealous,” she said. “He thinks I see too much of you.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we ought to have our coffee in the living room.”
They resettled in the living room, Peter on the sofa, Lois in a charcoal yellow armchair, an unpractically low teak coffee table arbitrated between them.
“When you’re not around, Oscar’s a fine person,” she said, stirring her coffee, watching the circle within circles. She glanced up quickly to catch the unguarded moment of his response, saw nothing she hadn’t seen before. There was nothing to see. His face impassive, the pain in his eyes old news. “If I marry Oscar,” she said, “we won’t be able to be friends any more.” Her voice unnaturally high. “Oscar won’t stand for you being around. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“Does it matter to you that we won’t be able to see each other?” She poured him another cup of coffee, her hand trembling. Their hands touched, she moved back to her chair.
“Of course it matters to me,” he said, meaning it, wondering how much it really mattered. “That’s why,” he said solemnly, “I don’t have any right to tell you not to marry him.” He had a sense of being virtuous, which he immediately distrusted.
“You don’t take milk, do you?” she said, putting some in her own coffee. “That’s funny. When we were married, if you remember—but I’m sure you don’t—it was the other way around. I took it black then.” Her face turned toward him, wistful, years younger. Then: “You know you’re a liar.”
He laughed uneasily. “What are you talking about?” His voice cracking.
Lois stood up, stamped her foot, turned away, back, possessed, a child again, nibbling a finger. “You …” The phone rang. “You fraud,” she whispered, poised between nostalgia and intention, rushing off suddenly to the kitchen to answer her call.
Waiting for Lois, Peter gave himself over to the comfort of the couch, took off his shoes, loosened his belt—he had eaten too much. A sense of well-being, an excess of it, dulled his needs. He yawned, looked around, fought against sleep. The room was too small, overpopulated with taste: one of Lois’s paintings, a new one—an olive-faced woman in a room of flowers—peered at him from a cramped space of wall between two windows—the painting the only flaw in the room’s caution. The flowers more human than the girl—he knew the feeling. Which one was Lois? he wondered, knowing too well that she was all of them, but mostly, becalmed by terror, the olive girl. He drowsed, an invalid of comfort. Play it cool, a voice in him said (the new Becker), you’re winning, kid. Huh? How about that? He nudged the man next to him, who turned out—a coincidence—to be Oscar Patton.
“I’m sorry, Oscar,” he said, “but I’m taking Lois away from you for her own good. I had to do it, old man. It’s the rules of the street. I saw her first, married her first, held her hand at her first abortion. I hope you’ll be a good sport about it.” Peter offered his hand, which Patton pretended not to notice. “You’re taking it very well,” the doctor said blandly. “I’m proud of you, Peter. In your case, if you’ll allow me a professional judgment, the illusion is everything. Life itself. Destroy the illusion and …” His hand drew a cutting line across his throat. “Do you see what I’m getting at? Your common, run-of-the-mill sense of victory, as in this case, is all illusion anyway. Mortality, Peter, is its own defeat—life is compromise. So, you win her—so what? She’s a fairly attractive, unhappy woman in her late thirties. No great bargain. Anyway, I’m letting you have this sense of victory for your own good, Peter, so you can accept the larger defeats ahead of you with the proper respect and terror. If loss comes too easily, you don’t take it seriously.” He lowered his voice. “Beware of complacency, schmuck.” “Fuck you” was all Peter could think to say, but he withheld this timeless judgment, turned it on himself, since, half awake, he knew that Patton wasn’t actually in the room with him. He opened his eyes. The furniture sat erect, visitors on their best behavior. Lois returned, carrying bravely a smile like a wilted flower.
“I hope you’re in the mood for company,” she said, fluttery, looking around for something to do. “Oscar will be here in about twenty minutes.”
He nodded, finished a cup of cold coffee, not surprised.
“He asked to come over, Peter. I couldn’t tell him not to.” She picked up the coffee cups, then forgetting what she meant to do with them, put them down again in approximately the same place.
Her confusion made him uneasy. “Do you want me to leave?”
She shook her head. “I told him you were here. It would look worse if you left.”
He compromised with his anger. “You have enough furniture in here without me,” he said, a solemn kidder. “Lois, if you want me to stay, I will, but not for Patton’s sake.”
“For my sake?” She put her hands on his shoulders, flirted with him.
“Are you in love with Patton?” he asked, charmed into jealousy.
“If I were,” she said sweetly, “you’d be the last to know.”
When Patton arrived to occupy his chair, Lois gave him her undivided attention, as though Peter weren’t even in the room. And still it was clear to Peter, which made everything so much worse, that Patton, pampered like an honored guest, patronized by the woman he had asked to marry him, was the outsider—his place usurped. And Patton, for all the professional charm of his confidence, seemed to have a sense of it. The doctor sat at attention, white-maned, sucking an unfit pipe with absent-minded grace, a little more tired than usual. It was as though he had been sitting there for years waiting for a train, and was beginning to have some doubts that he was in the right place.
Lois served cognac, asked questions. The doctor lectured, told instructive anecdotes of cases he had been associated with—the patients referred to as “X” or “Y”—fascinating stories of fetishes, obsessive attachments, paranoia, dementia, divided personalities. Peter listened with horror; each aberration the doctor described seemed to him in some way an extension of one of his own. Peter wanted to declare a truce, but since the war itself was undeclared, to ask for a truce would be an act of aggression. And wasn’t it—the doctor merely telling stories—coincidence (madness?) that Peter saw what he saw? When he glanced at her, Lois smiled at him warmly, a lover’s smile. He had the sense, without knowing why, of being trapped between the two of them.
The last of the stories, an especially interesting case
to the doctor, seemed to Peter, even more than the others, an attempt on Patton’s part to expose him. The doctor told about a man, a patient of a friend of his, who was obsessed with the notion of retaining the past exactly as it was. The man (Mr. Y, he was called), woke one morning of his life in terror of losing his memory, unable at the moment of waking to remember the details of some incident in his adolescence.
“Mr. Y had the feeling,” the doctor said, “that in losing the past—even this very minor incident he was trying to recall—he was losing himself, the very structure of his life, his identity as an adult human being. You can imagine what a nightmare this was to him.” The doctor puffed thoughtfully on his pipe, sucking in the vapor of truth, giving it back to the air again, wiser, filtered. “This is not as uncommon as it sounds. It was the extent to which Y carried it that made it a disorder.” The doctor paused, looked around benignly at his audience to see if there were any questions.
“How far did he carry it?” Lois asked dutifully.
“Not very far at first,” the doctor said. “At first it was just a matter of writing everything down in a journal so as not to lose contact with his experiences. Every detail of his day, even the most casual of conversations, was put into the journal. He would even chronicle the times he went to the bathroom. Sometimes, I understand, he would write in his journal about what it was like to write in his journal.” The doctor refit his pipe, looked around.
Lois laughed belatedly. “That’s really very funny.”
The doctor puffed on his pipe a few times, nodded solemnly. “This satisfied Y for a while,” he said, “but then he got to feeling that writing this one journal wasn’t enough. It left too much of his life—his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his early encounters with sex—unaccounted for. It was at this time he began, on top of his regular journal, to keep a journal of the past.”
“How old was this man, Oscar?” Lois asked.
The doctor concentrated, took sustenance from his pipe. “I believe the man was forty-eight when he went into analysis,” he said, nodding to confirm his judgment. “His obsession with the past had been active, in varying degrees of intensity, for something like fifteen years before that. The pressure of maintaining the past with flawless accuracy—Y was a bug about accuracy—finally became too much for him and he sought help as a matter of survival. At that point, I understand, he had written something like fifteen volumes of notes about his own life. Think of it. Fifteen volumes, over two hundred pages each. And he was constantly revising them. In the interest of accuracy he went around interviewing people who had shared experiences with him; he would call strangers up in the middle of the night and quiz them about a detail of an incident that might or might not have taken place twenty years before. In his journal he would sometimes have three or four versions of the same incident and then attempt to synthesize them in some scientific way to get at the truth. But of course, poor Y could never be sure he had it absolutely right, and as you can imagine, that frustrated the hell out of him. When things got too much for him to do alone, he hired a foundation to help him with his research. Fortunately for him, Y was a fairly wealthy man and had been able through most of this period to keep a profitable business running. He was a man of enormous energy.” The doctor glanced at Peter, who obligingly squirmed in his seat, his pants sticking to him.
“Peter,” the doctor said, pinning him with a smile, “it was only when Y began to invest all his energy into the reconstruction of the past that he finally collapsed, as much from exhaustion as anything else. In many ways he was an extraordinary man. What he wanted—that is, what he believed he wanted—was a kind of total knowledge insofar as his own life was concerned. Impossible, but you couldn’t tell him. The analyst had great difficulty reaching him. At their second meeting, Y accused the doctor of advocating imperfection. Of advocating imperfection.” He laughed. “Can you imagine that?”
Peter nodded.
“That’s very interesting,” Lois said, muffling a yawn. “Did you cure the man, Oscar?”
Patton looked at his watch. “I’d completely lost track of the time,” he said. “This man’s under treatment with another doctor, Lois. He’s been making progress, I understand, but a cure—what I think you mean by a cure—is out of the question.”
“Why is it out of the question?” Peter asked. He discovered that his right leg was asleep and he was gradually working it back into circulation.
“It just is,” Patton said, smiling patiently. “You can’t uproot the habit of a lifetime in a few years of analysis. At best, Y will learn to compromise a little with the demands he’s made on himself.” He tapped out his pipe in an ashtray. “I think we’d better go,” he said to Peter, winking, returning the pipe absently to his mouth. “Lois is tired and she’s been having some trouble sleeping, she says.”
“I’m not a baby, Oscar,” Lois said.
“Nobody said you’re a baby,” the doctor said, “but you have a tendency to get run-down, as you know.”
“I’ve never been healthier in my life,” she said. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”
The phone rang. Lois looked anxiously at Peter, as if appealing to him to stop the sound of the phone before it reached Patton’s ears. “Who can it be?” she said.
Patton stood at attention. “The only way to find out is to answer it,” he said with a father’s amused tolerance, his smile like a bruise on an overripe peach.
Peter pulled himself to his feet. Lois backed out of the room, taking a last look, waving, as though she were going away for a year or two on a cruise.
“Well,” Patton said, glancing at his watch. With Lois gone, the two of them were like otters out of water. “It’s getting late.” What else was there to say? They waited, each second an hour, for Lois to return. The murmur of her voice carried through the closed door of the kitchen, but it was difficult, without actually eavesdropping, to get anything but an occasional word of what she was saying.
“Is she what you expected?” Patton said.
“What?” Peter held the question—not quite sure he had heard it right—at arm’s length, nodded. Patton, red-faced, breathing liquor, a breath away from him. “Look, Dr. Patton …” he said.
“Oscar,” Patton corrected him.
“Oscar, that man you were telling us about, the one who kept all those notebooks, did that have something to do with me?” It came out—Peter bleary with too much food and drink, memories, the exhaustion of being unable to remember—not quite the way he meant it. He meant—what?
Patton had the grace not to laugh at him. He smiled close-mouthed. “That’s interesting,” he said. “You felt that the story, which was an actual case—I didn’t make it up—had something to do with you?”
Peter smiled foolishly, his madness naked under Patton’s knowing glance. “I think that you thought it did,” he said, hoping to end it there. The difference, Peter decided, was that Patton’s man got lost in meaningless details—what Peter wanted was the substance of things.
Patton filled his pipe, relit it. “Why do you think that?” he said, the question insinuating its own answer.
Peter had the urge to shake him but was afraid that if he did, Patton might break. He sensed that though the doctor seemed solid to the eye, there was an invisible crack running through him. “Then, what was the point of the story?” Peter said mildly, compelled to pursue what no longer interested him.
Patton removed his pipe, coughed. A high-pitched laugh leaping suddenly from his throat as if it had been imprisoned there for years. “If I didn’t believe the story was relevant to you when I was telling it—and to tell you the truth, Peter, I wasn’t sure that it was—don’t you think that your reaction now is a giveaway?” Peter tried to protest, but Patton overrode him. “What worries me, Peter, is that like most obsessive people you are, essentially, for all your good intentions, unconcerned with anyone but yourself. I don’t want to see Lois hurt.”
“Don’t you think I’m c
oncerned about Lois?” Peter said. Patton, puffing at his pipe, never got the chance to answer.
Lois’s voice reached them suddenly from the kitchen. “Please, Bob,” she was pleading. “When I say no I mean no.” Then, aware that she was shouting, she lowered her voice.
Peter was tempted to rush into the kitchen—the phone a lifelong enemy—but instead sat down, pinched by jealousy, and had the disquieting sense that somehow he had been through this all before.
Patton contemplated the ceiling. “Get it out of your head,” he said.
“Get what out of my head?” Peter said, standing up, rage reviving him.
“Excuse me,” Patton said, looking around, distracted. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
Peter saw no point in repeating it. “You told Lois that I was destructive, didn’t you? What did you mean by that?”
“What I meant,” the doctor said, backing up as though afraid Peter was going to hit him, “is that you must learn to bend a little with the wind.” He retasted his words, not a little proud of the poetic aptness of his phrase. “Peter, this attempt of yours to re-establish a relationship with Lois after not seeing her or corresponding with her for fourteen years is an example of what I mean.”
And then, as her name was mentioned, as if conjured by them, Lois appeared in the room. Neither had seen her come in.
Patton looked at his watch, recorded the time. “Who was it, Lois?” he asked.
“No one you know, Oscar,” she said, her glance moving from one suitor to the other, her face flushed. “Some girl in the office had this problem she wanted to discuss—the drawings for this book we’re doing aren’t up to the level of the manuscript.”
“Was this Diane who called?” Patton asked.
Lois hesitated, glanced at Peter who was staring at his shoes. “No,” she said. “This was Mary Louise. Mrs. Rougerie. I told you about her, Oscar. She has to do things her own finicky way or she can’t do them at all.”
Patton nodded. “I think I’d better be going, Lois.” Almost before he asked for it, Lois was at the closet getting his coat. Patton waited with a martyr’s patience, looking like a man who has just discovered his daughter is no longer a virgin, a man who has known it secretly in his heart since the day of her birth.
A Man to Conjure With Page 23
