The Mask of Sanity

by Jacob M. Appel

  “It’s certainly an idea.”

  “Anyway, enough of my brilliant schemes. I’d better catch up with that chief resident of mine before she takes my job. But you and Amanda ought to come over to the bachelor pad one night for dinner. Gloria may squeeze every last dime out of me, but I’m not going to let her walk away with my friends. What do you say?”

  “We’ll see,” replied Balint. “It’s a busy month . . .”

  Sugarman nodded—with no apparent sense that he was being snubbed. “I’ll call you. We’ll set something up. Now take a triptan before your head explodes.”

  Balint’s rival slapped him on the back a second time and then lumbered down the corridor, leaving him alone in the elevator bay. A moment later, a Code 7000 blared over the public address system—a cardiac arrest—and then the resuscitation team charged past with their crash cart and defibrillator. Balint said a brief prayer for the dying patient, as he always did—more force of habit than faith; and for a moment, he wished it were himself.

  BALINT WENT through the motions of treating his patients that afternoon: checking blood pressures in both arms, ordering EKGs. What amazed him was how much medical care one could deliver while on autopilot. He managed to interrogate and console and even engage in small talk with the elderly congestive heart failure victims who comprised the bulk of his practice—and he was confident none noticed anything amiss. For six hours straight, he inquired after children, grandchildren, the status of college applications. He praised the talents of his patients’ other medical specialists, armies of ophthalmologists and endocrinologists whose names sounded vaguely familiar. He even removed a wood splinter from the thumb of a teenage girl who’d accompanied her great-aunt to an appointment. But if, at the end of the workday, anyone had quizzed Balint about these exchanges, he’d have conceded that he remembered absolutely nothing he’d said—and often not even which patients he had examined.

  He longed to speak to someone about his own problems. Anyone. To discuss how his life had unraveled so quickly and how he might patch it back together. Alas, he now confronted the second stark discovery of the week: he had nobody to talk to. Not one single human being. He had friends, of course, lots of them. College pals, medical school buddies, a handful of high school baseball teammates he met up with every Memorial Day weekend. If he’d wanted to hit the squash courts, or to go on a fishing trip, or even to shoot a round of pool, he had a Rolodex of colleagues and neighbors to invite. But for an intimate tête-à-tête, he had no place to turn.

  There was Steinhoff, the hip young Israeli who’d replaced Rabbi Felder, but he hardly knew the man. He could always make an appointment with a therapist, but his previous bout with psychiatry—after his father’s fatal asthma attack, when he was sixteen—had left him angrier and more mixed up than ever. He had no siblings, no close cousins. Other than Amanda and the girls, his mother and stepfather provided his only intimate connections, but his parents’ sole coping mechanism was denial. When his Aunt Clara’s liver cancer metastasized to her spine, Balint’s mother had attributed her sister’s pain to rheumatism. When he’d been rejected from Princeton, his first choice for college, she’d wanted him to phone the admissions office to make certain that he hadn’t fallen victim to a clerical error. So Balint could speak to his parents, but the last thing he wanted was his mother insisting that Sugarman’s nose rubbing had a hidden, nonsexual purpose. He already envisioned her asking, “Are you sure it wasn’t a medical procedure? Maybe he feared she was choking and he was trying to get a better look . . .” No, at the end of the day, he was utterly and incontrovertibly alone.

  After he’d attended to his final patient of the afternoon, Balint found himself in no hurry to return home. For what? So that he and Amanda could continue their game of make-believe until she decided to call it quits. For all he knew, she was already in the process of shifting their property into her own name—of setting herself up for the day when she transferred her address to Meadow Court. That’s what he would have done, he told himself, if he stood in her shoes. Of course, he didn’t stand in her shoes. Because he wasn’t the one having an extramarital affair. No matter how many attractive women he’d met since their wedding—nurses, flight attendants, bleached-blonde pharmaceutical sales reps who accompanied him to dinner talks—he’d never considered cheating. Never once. Not that he didn’t have desires. Didn’t everyone? But he valued the welfare of his daughters—the stability of their home—over any fleeting lust for personal gratification. Although it hadn’t actually crossed his mind that Amanda might cheat on him—why would she?—if it ever had, he’d have assumed that she also valued their children’s well-being over her sordid passions. So much, he lamented, for playing by the rules.

  Balint completed his electronic billing for the month and killed an hour reorganizing his filing cabinet. The sun already had dipped behind the adjoining laboratory building when he shut off the lights and drifted downstairs to the parking garage. Then he drove the streets aimlessly until the last light vanished in the western sky. To torment himself, he cruised past Sugarman’s house, but found no sign of the silver Saab. He flipped on the radio and half-listened to news of the latest war.

  What have you learned from this, Balint? he asked himself. That was the question he always posed after an unexpected negative outcome at the hospital—a medication error or a catheterization gone awry. It was probably the reason for his administrative successes. Yet now, applying the same question to his personal life, he came up with only one answer: playing by the rules was for losers.

  He’d lived his entire adult life as an upstanding citizen: hardworking, honest, faithful. He placed his patients’ interests first, honored his mother and stepdad, strove to set a good example for his children. He long ago had accepted that probity didn’t guarantee him immunity from the vagaries of misfortune—traffic accidents, stock sell-offs, fatal asthma attacks—but he couldn’t help but believe that virtuous living ought to insulate a man from betrayal by his own friends and family. Obviously it did not. Sugarman—glad-handing, oafish, two-faced Sugarman—had flouted the most fundamental of rules, and he’d been rewarded with Amanda.

  So what now? Even if he could find a confidante to bounce his ideas off, did he have any ideas genuinely worth sharing? What Balint really yearned to do was to clasp his bare hands around his rival’s fat neck and to squeeze until the man’s eyeballs turned blue. The image arose before him of Warren Sugarman prying at his knuckles, his lips quivering, his mottled face pleading for another chance. And then he imagined Sugarman’s tongue hanging limp from his bloated mouth, and he literally sensed the man’s weight as he eased his lifeless body to the ground.

  If he’d been able to kill his adversary without facing any consequences, Balint thought, he had no doubt he’d actually do it. Why not? And then a second idea struck him: Why should he get caught? He wasn’t your average petty criminal: he’d finished first in his class in medical school—seventy places ahead of his potential victim. If he was smart enough to run a cardiology division at thirty-four, wasn’t he also intelligent enough to eliminate his wife’s lover with impunity? Of course he was!

  That was how, as he drove along Van Buren Turnpike past Laurendale Preparatory Academy, where his innocent daughters would be attending the first and the third grades respectively, toward the house where they lived, Balint decided to murder his former friend and classmate, Warren Sugarman.

  CHAPTER TWO

  And then a miracle occurred: nothing happened.

  Balint had anticipated that his life with Amanda would change drastically after his discovery, but the reality was that their routine continued without any noticeable differences. He kept an eye out for pretexts she might use for contacting Sugarman, but nothing in her conduct struck him as unusual. There were no late-night phone calls from inside the pantry, no efforts to skip out on their social engagements. The only time she ever extricated herself from his company was on Saturday afternoons, every other week, when he drove
to Hager Heights to lunch with his parents. He tried to remember the first time she had ducked out of one of these meals—but the alarming reality was that she’d been avoiding his mother for years. Could it be, he wondered, that his wife’s affair with Sugarman had really been going on for that long? It was possible the pair also rendezvoused during the workweek, when Amanda was allegedly employed at the library, but Balint telephoned her in the reference room over the ensuing days, on various pretexts, and she always answered immediately.

  He considered visiting his parents again the following weekend—just to find out whether she met up with Sugarman in his absence—but he wanted to avoid provoking her suspicions. Instead he waited until the next Saturday. This time, Amanda didn’t even offer an excuse for staying home: no toothache, no stomach flu, no emergency staff meeting. She merely smiled at him over breakfast and said, “I don’t think I’m up to dealing with your mother today. You’re okay going on your own, aren’t you?”

  “You haven’t seen my parents in months.”

  “I’m sure they don’t mind.” She poured him a second cup of coffee. “Send them my love. I’ll see them when the girls come home from camp.”

  “And what will you do while I’m gone?”

  “I was thinking I might buy a dress for Allison Sucram’s wedding.”

  Balint vaguely remembered the Sucrams, one of the couples who played bridge with Amanda every fourth Tuesday. He assumed Allison was their daughter, but he wasn’t positive, and he certainly didn’t recall that the woman was getting married. “When is the wedding?” he asked.

  “October. First weekend. Please tell me you put it on your calendar.”

  “I’m sure it’s there,” Balint lied.

  “It had better be. And one more thing,” said Amanda. “Warren Sugarman called. He said you agreed to have dinner with him.”

  “He asked. I didn’t exactly agree . . .”

  “I didn’t want to be rude. On the other hand, I don’t want Gloria to think we’re betraying her—that we’re taking his side. You know how she is . . .”

  Balint eyed his wife warily. Was she probing him—trying to see how much he knew? Or was her life so compartmentalized that she could sleep with Sugarman and still worry sincerely about offending the man’s ex-wife? “She’s your friend,” said Balint. “If you want to tell Sugarman to go to hell, it’s fine by me.”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “Not particularly. He’s a butcher in the operating room,” said Balint—unable to resist a jab, even an overtly dishonest one. Sugarman actually had the steadiest hands in New Jersey. “The nurses call him Sweeney Todd behind his back.”

  A flicker of displeasure panned across Amanda’s features and then dissolved. “That’s too bad,” she replied. “But I imagine Gloria will be thrilled to hear it. In any case, I couldn’t say no without offending him, so we’re on for next month.”

  “Suit yourself. Just don’t have any surgical emergencies during dinner.”

  He stood up and kissed his wife on the forehead, a part of their morning ritual for nearly a decade, and he assured her that he’d be home by two o’clock. Then he drove the fifteen miles to Hager Heights, where his parents resided in a freestanding duplex on the campus of a planned retirement community. They’d moved there when his stepfather turned seventy. The development, Hager Estates, offered three levels of care: independent, supportive, and skilled. Basically, if you couldn’t fend for yourself, they moved you to an assisted-living facility, and ultimately to a nursing home, all three positioned around the same patch of manicured gardens. Balint’s stepfather had been a veterinarian and amateur inventor, and he’d once brimmed with intriguing zoological tidbits, but all he talked about these days was which neighbors had been shunted up the supervision ladder.

  Balint found his parents encamped on their veranda. The homemade lunch lay under aluminum foil on the wrought iron table. His stepfather set aside the morning newspaper and shook his hand vigorously. “How’s the hardworking man?”

  “Surviving,” answered Balint.

  His mother removed the Saran wrap from a bowl of tossed salad and began scooping iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes onto plates. “You’re alone?”

  “Unfortunately. Amanda’s still having dental problems.”

  His mother frowned. “How many teeth does that girl have? You should buy her a pair of dentures so we can have the privilege of her company every once in a while.”

  “She sends her regards.”

  “When was the last time we saw her? Three months ago? Four?” His mother set a dish of salad in front of him. “I’m starting to think she’s vanished. Or run off. If you get divorced without telling us, Jeremy, that will be the death of me.”

  “Nobody is getting divorced, Lilly,” snapped his stepfather. “Don’t even say such things.”

  “I wasn’t serious,” replied his mother. “Of course nobody’s getting divorced. For God’s sake, Henry, why can’t you sprout a sense of humor in your old age?” She turned toward Balint. “The important thing is that you’re here. Now what kind of blintzes would you like? Either cheese or strawberry . . .”

  Balint knew that his mother had been joking, that he’d probably endured similar remarks about Amanda disappearing on countless other occasions without ever registering them. At the same time, he wondered how his mother might react if he informed her that he was indeed filing for divorce—if he announced his plans that very moment, right there at the lunch table, effectively making it so. She’d be devastated, he feared, even though Amanda was leagues away from being the model daughter-in-law, or even an adequate one, because then she’d have to confront the possibility that her faultless son had somehow made a mistake. But now that he’d decided to kill Sugarman—an idea that he had grown increasingly comfortable with over the previous twelve days—he no longer saw any need for his marriage to end.

  Balint forced himself to act normally, although his mind remained focused on whether Amanda’s silver Saab would be parked at the foot of Sugarman’s driveway. He felt the blood pounding in his temples, but he made certain to stay with his parents until the usual hour, suffering through his mother’s display of her latest watercolors. Yet as soon at the clock struck one—the cue for his stepdad’s afternoon nap—he raced down the flagstone path and drove at top speed toward the surgeon’s address.

  En route, he flipped the radio to his favorite Golden Oldies station. The Mercedes filled with lyrics about teenage lovers, and he felt sorry for himself. Also stupid. What a fool he’d been to take Amanda for granted! Why had he failed to appreciate how good he’d had it for so many years? He recalled a moment shortly after they’d first moved to Laurendale, when Amanda had flown to visit her dying grandmother in Florida, and he’d heard on the radio that a New York-bound jet had crashed on the tarmac in Miami—and although he rationally knew that his wife wasn’t aboard the doomed plane, that she wasn’t due to return until the following day, he’d experienced an overwhelming and paralyzing yearning to hear her voice. Of course even then Amanda might have been screwing Sugarman on the sly.

  He turned off Chestnut Street onto Meadow Drive. It was a balmy August afternoon. On the golf course, the Canada geese had yielded their territory to motorized carts and teenage caddies. No trace of the accident marked the spot where he’d collided with the dachshund. This surprised him. He’d feared some vestige of the calamity—maybe a faint bloodstain on the asphalt—although he also understood that his concerns were foolish to the brink of paranoia.

  A sinewy, tight-faced woman jogged past on the opposite sidewalk—a friend of his wife’s named Bonnie Kluger who lived on their block and was always voicing contrarian opinions. Either she didn’t see Balint at the wheel, or she chose to ignore him. Behind the whitewashed brick wall rose the barking of a dog, startling Balint for an instant. He eased the Mercedes around the corner onto Meadow Court.

  As he’d expected—and dreaded—Amanda’s silver Saab basked at the top of the
drive. This time, Balint did not attempt to explore any further. Instead, he pulled over to the side of the road and sobbed.

  THE GIRLS returned from sleepaway camp the following Friday. In the ensuing hugging and tickling and reading of bedtime stories, Balint sensed some of his warmth for Amanda returning. They even made love on the night of the girls’ arrival—for the first time in a month—and he somehow managed to lose himself in the experience. But he wasn’t doing it for pleasure, he realized. Certainly not out of affection. He was having sex with Amanda in order to lull her into a false sense of security, to ensure that nobody suspected him of a motive for murdering her lover. It was a definitive moment for Balint: his entire existence, from that point forward, was aimed at one specific goal.

  The irony was that the more he thought about killing Sugarman—the more he trained all of his anger and disappointment upon this one objective—the more tolerable all of life’s smaller indignities seemed. When he was on weekend call over Labor Day, and Amanda deposited the girls with a neighbor for “a quick trip to the hairdresser,” which he recognized as code for a dash to Meadow Court, Balint relaxed in the physicians’ lounge at the hospital, calm as ever, reassured in the knowledge that he would ultimately savor his revenge. As the weeks passed, the more he thought about Sugarman, the more abstract the notion of murdering the man became. The reason he intended to kill his rival transcended the affair and the betrayal and even Sugarman’s very existence. It boiled down to something so much simpler: the real reason that he was going to eliminate Amanda’s lover was simply that he had decided he was going to do so—nothing more, nothing less. Because, like graduating first in his medical school class, he wanted to prove to himself that he could. Even on the occasions that he ran into Sugarman at the hospital, or consulted with him about a heart-transplant case, he found the encounters surprisingly tolerable—because, in the end, he knew that he’d have the last laugh. No matter what task occupied him at any given moment—raking leaves, delivering lectures to the medical students, taking the girls cranberry picking—in the back of his mind lurked the conviction that comforted him through all his daily troubles.