Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  It happened again at the end of a booking, in the shower, and lasted well into the period in the waiting room between bookings. I was trying to read a trashy magazine when I noticed that the movie stars and supermodels kept coming unstuck. Famously strong marriages were falling apart without warning. The background was more prominent than the letters resting on it. Nor were they resting. I went to see what I thought was an ophthalmologist. He was actually an optometrist, a distinction that wasn’t important to me then. He checked my eyes and assured me there was nothing wrong with them. He updated the prescription for my glasses and told me to wear them more often. I felt reassured.

  At about this time I noticed that Simon was asking me more questions about my work. In light of what has happened it is hard to understand how I could have been blind for so long to just how sick his obsessive questioning was becoming. He would ask me about Joe Geraghty, about his working day, what kind of man he was, what he liked to do with me, what he liked to do with his wife, with Anna. He asked a lot about Anna. What could I tell him about Anna, what was she doing now? Stupidly, I thought, or preferred to think, he was finally succumbing to a certain voyeurism, which, out of embarrassment, he was trying to pass off as some sort of overarching concern for Anna and Sam, her son, that was rooted in Simon’s personal history.

  I had gotten to know about so many male obsessions, quirks, and fetishes that it was fairly easy to overlook an over-zealous interest in the life of an ex-girlfriend, especially if one was motivated to. What I hadn’t gotten to know, what Simon didn’t tell me for quite a while, was that he had taken to following Anna and Sam after catching sight of them one afternoon.

  Despite all this, and despite not living together, we were seeing more and more of each other. We were intimate with each other, not only but also physically, and exclusively so, excluding my work. We shared our most intimate thoughts. He read to me, explained things to me, showed me things, introduced me to the music he liked. I remember in particular a Billie Holiday CD he bought me around that time. She was one of his favorites. It was something he had played me that unforgettable night we first met. I’d heard the name but didn’t know it belonged to a black woman and that she was a singer. I certainly had no idea, before he told me, that Billie had been a prostitute before she was a singer.

  We went for walks together and out for drinks, usually to the Esplanade. I cooked for him and fed his dog. I knew all about him, his parents, and his brothers. When things were really bad I talked to his psychiatrist, and I know that Alex thinks I was good for Simon. I have showered him and he has even said that he loved me. What if he took an interest in his ex-girlfriend’s little boy?

  And so it happened, through Simon’s subterfuge, my need not to see it all, and Alex’s own problems, that the three of us allowed Simon to get worse.

  “Are you staying for dinner, Angel?”

  “No. I’d love to, but I’m on tonight.” “Anyone I know . . . or everyone I know?”

  “It’s your favorite client, among others. You know, I think he suspects something.”

  “Suspects what?” Simon asked, clearly alarmed.

  “I think he suspects she’s seeing someone else.”

  At this he stood up. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, they hardly ever have sex anymore. And she doesn’t want any more children.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He told me. How else would I know?”

  “I can’t believe the things he tells you!”

  “Yeah, scandalous, isn’t it?”

  “Well, there’s something that is particularly offensive about telling you that. It’s not that it’s private, hell, it’s all private but it’s . . . irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant!” I laughed, even though he hadn’t meant it to be funny. “Irrelevant to what?” I asked him.

  “How the hell can he screw you while he’s talking about his wife and child?”

  “Simon, I’ve told you. It’s not always the crap you see in the movies. I don’t dress up in a uniform or any shit like that. Well, not for him. He’s just one of those guys who spends every day talking nonstop about things that don’t matter to people he doesn’t like or people he’s afraid of. He knows he can trust me. He can say anything to me. That’s one of the reasons he keeps coming back. It’s pretty common with the regulars. It’s all part of it.”

  Simon had long before come to a conclusion about my work. Whatever Alex Klima had confirmed for me about the drug-like effects of the male orgasm, Simon’s view was altogether more matter-of-fact, more prosaic. Men, he said, were not paying me to have them come on demand. They were, for the most part, simply paying me to let them leave on demand.

  Joe was not only just about my favorite client, he was Simon’s favorite client too. Gradually, Joe had become the only one of my clients Simon wanted to hear about. One day I got two bookings in a row from twenty-second introductions simply because I looked young. That was the sort of thing I used to be able to talk about with Simon, to debrief, so to speak. It had always been a great help to me for us to be able to discuss the bookings together in a sort of clinical, academic way, as though we were two anthropologists. We would talk about the bookings and also about my responses to them.

  When the first of these bookings got me alone upstairs he told me, a little embarrassed, that he wanted me to dress as a schoolgirl. So when I managed to get the house school uniform from one of the other girls, I came back into the room intending to take on the role of the recalcitrant smart-talking seventeen-year-old slutty schoolgirl. But never a great actress, within five minutes I had regressed to a ten-year-old. Somehow I had become doe-eyed, docile, and utterly submissive. This was not what he wanted. He wanted the loud, vulgar, slightly cruel, back-talking, promiscuous pretty girl he could never get when he was in high school and when, instead, he found himself alone and naked with a frightened little girl he was unable to maintain his erection. He felt like a pedophile, and he left in a panic.

  I had wanted to talk to Simon about him. And about the next guy, who had also been in the market for a young girl. This guy looked like he could have been my grandfather. He spent a lot of time stroking my face with the back of his hand, commenting on the softness of my skin. I just sat there on the bed, letting him do it while the minutes, his minutes, ticked away. Both of us were naked, me and this old man who wanted to do this in his retirement. We were silent until he said without warning, “You’re young enough to be my daughter,” as though it had just occurred to him. The comparison did not stop him from taking his hand from my face to my chest and pushing me down until I was supine on the bed. Then he entered me. He had not wanted me in a school uniform, but he had stayed and finished after comparing me to his daughter. How sick was that?

  There was a time when Simon would have discussed all of this with me, but that time had passed. All he wanted to talk about, when it came to my work, was Joe or else what Joe said about Anna and Sam.

  “He’d be an only child . . . lonely,” he said, pouring himself another drink.

  “Who?”

  “Sam.”

  “Yes, he would be, an only child in a broken home.”

  “A broken home . . . What’s that, Angel? It’s just a cliché. It’s a term traditionally employed to keep mismatched people together through the pretense that the only thing their children need in order to be happy is their parents’ misery to stew in until they are old enough to escape.”

  “What’s wrong with parents staying together?”

  “Often there’s nothing wrong with it. But you can’t assume there never is and then make a value judgment when two people respond to circumstances they could not have foreseen in ways which might or might not be in the best interests of the children.”

  “I didn’t know you felt strongly about this too.”

  “You’ve got to watch those clichés because when the chips are down and the devil’s in the detail, the grass is always greener on the other side.�
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  “What?”

  “I’m kidding but, really, many people do make the mistake of thinking that as long as there are two parents’ names on the school enrollment form, that’s all a kid needs.”

  “And what does a kid need?”

  “What we all need.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Love, empathy. You can get both from one person . . . if you’re lucky enough to get to know such a person.”

  “What do you mean, empathy?” I asked him.

  “If you really want to help a child cope with life, you have to do more than just give it love. You have to empathize with children. You have to try to understand their anxieties, their terrors, their loneliness; you have to put yourself in their position.

  “The mother of a little girl I was teaching came to see me once. She told me, with a mix of anxiety and exasperation, of her daughter’s recent unreasonable behavior one day when the two of them were out walking on a crowded city street. The little girl, who was around six, suddenly started to scream quite hysterically. She refused to cross the road even while holding her mother’s hand. It was making her mother late and embarrassing her in public. The mother said she tried very hard to find out what was wrong with her daughter. She spoke softly to her and she spoke harshly to her. She tried to bribe her daughter.”

  “And what happened?”

  “She ended up dragging her across the street, with the girl literally kicking and screaming.”

  “What should the mother have done?”

  “Well, and I don’t say that it’s always easy to do this, she should have tried to imagine the child’s terror, not necessarily what was causing it, that mightn’t have been possible, but what it would have been like to experience it. She should have empathized with her.”

  “Sympathized?”

  “Empathy will work better. Sympathy is the capacity to be affected by someone else’s pain. Empathy requires that you go close to experiencing that pain yourself. It requires that you project yourself into the situation and then introspect on how you feel. The mother has to imagine herself being as terrified as her daughter is. If she can do that, she won’t feel like hitting her.”

  “Did she hit her?”

  “I suspect she did. She said she almost did.”

  “Why don’t you believe her?”

  “Because I used to be a child. It came naturally to me. I was an adult for a time, too. That came less naturally.”

  “Did your parents hit you as a child?”

  “My father would probably like to hit me now. I was not an only child, and my home was not broken in any way that would show up in a government census. There are an infinite number of ways to bring about the damage to a child that is connoted by the term broken home. A full house with two parents can rob you of comfort, stability, and self-esteem as fast and as surely as a crowd can rob you of company. Anyway, Anna won’t leave him. She knows when she’s onto a good thing.”

  “He doesn’t think she does. He thinks she might be having an affair.”

  Simon looked at me as though I had just slapped him. When he spoke, it was not without anger.

  “For Christ’s sake, what do you two do . . . undress each other very slowly so there’s time to speculate on her fidelity? I hope you charge him extra for the analysis.”

  Sometimes I hated Anna for the reasons the wife of a widower might hate his deceased wife, for the time they’d had together, for the retrospective saintliness death has conferred on her predecessor. But the widower’s new wife can at least comfort herself with the knowledge that there are some areas of her husband’s life where a ghost won’t do. In my case, the ghost was living. She had a son and a husband. She had a future as well as a past and so was all the more threatening. For the same reason, though, I could feel less guilty for hating her. And it was hate that formed the words I used when I stood up to tell Simon of a fear that Joe shared with him. And momentarily, but not for the first time, drunk on this feeling, I spoke without thinking and made one of my best-ever mistakes, a mistake that, in retrospect, is at least as responsible for my current situation as is calling the police when I found Simon had taken Joe and Anna’s son.

  “You know, he told me he thinks there’s someone else.”

  It would be comforting now to say that I didn’t know why I repeated this to him. But I knew. I thought that the suspicion of infidelity might tarnish her image, her halo, enough to allow us all to get on with our lives without her. I was completely wrong. It only fueled his illness. After that he just about wanted me to take notes whenever Joe said anything. And without understanding the effect it was having on Simon, I did my best to comply. Only once did I keep something back. That was because it said more about me than her, more than I wanted Simon to know.

  11. Joe and I were talking about cars, value for money in a new car, what to look for. Joe was in a good mood, telling me about his car. He was very proud of his car. We were joking about him taking me for a ride in it sometime and laughing with relief because we both knew it would never happen. I got on top of him when he asked. It was one of the ways he liked it. He had just had his car serviced and the joke mutated to a request for extra attention to take his mind off the mechanic’s bill. He wasn’t sure he could trust his mechanic, he told me as I guided him inside and started the moves. I went from small laughter to concern, whatever he was asking for, all the time gently moving the booking along, always appearing acquiescent and aroused. I was getting hot doing all the work when I began to experience the problem with my eyes again. It was hard to focus. Everything became a little flickery in front of me. Joe must have noticed that I was a little distracted because he asked me if everything was okay.

  “You’re doing a lot of work there, Angel. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it but . . .”

  “What? I’m fine. I’m happy, aren’t you?”

  “You can take a break if you want to, come back to it later. You been having late nights?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” I said unconvincingly, sliding him out of me. That’s when it happened, and it was unequivocal. I was still over him, but we were disjoined. He lay on his back, his conversation going from the way I made him feel to the way his mechanic made him feel.

  “Some people, I don’t know . . . you can just relax with them. Then there’re other people you just instinctively don’t feel you can trust. Know what I mean? Hey! Jesus! That’s . . . what is that? That’s new!”

  The really frightening thing was that I had no idea it was coming. I had never done it before when offered money to do it, and it was involuntary. It was not a lot but it was unmistakable. I had lost control and had peed on him. He laughed, a little surprised, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was good about it, but I was in shock. I had lost control of my body, and it frightened me.

  I made an appointment to see my GP and told her about my bladder problems, as I put it. She said it sounded to her like a urinary tract infection and took a urine sample from me before prescribing a short course of antibiotics. She asked me if I had been sexually active, to which I answered, “Just a little.” She wanted to have me tested for sexually transmissible diseases but I assured her that I’d had a test a few weeks earlier. I did not, of course, explain that my work required me to have one every month. She smiled curiously, said she was pleased to hear it and that it was better to be safe than sorry. But she didn’t outline what could be worse than being safe and sorry. She said the antibiotics ought to clear it up, but they didn’t. When I called to tell her that, if anything, it was happening more and that I was unable to gauge the extent of the urge, she said she would send me a referral to a urologist. I told her that, in addition to my bladder problems, my eyesight was still flickery on occasions. She recommended an ophthalmologist in whom she said she had the utmost faith.

  “But I’ve already seen an ophthalmologist.”

  “Really, when?”

  “I don’t know, a little while ago.”

  “An
d what happened?”

  “He checked my eyes and increased the prescription strength of my glasses lenses.”

  “Are you sure that wasn’t an optometrist?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Did you need a referral to see him?”

  “No.”

  “I think you saw an optometrist. I’m referring you to an ophthalmologist.”

  I thought to myself how grown-up I was to keep going to work, to keep paying bills, to keep visiting Simon, to keep cooking for him, shopping for him, reading the books he seemed to think I needed to read, without ever mentioning to him or Kelly or Alex or to anyone the unstoppable fear growing inside me, a fear that was like an imbecile unable to speak of the abomination that was itself. That fear, which edged its way out of me and into the world every time the light flickered in no one else’s eyes but mine, every time I would find myself unable to recognize faces until they came close enough, on a bad day, to be registered by scent; that fear cannot hold a candle to the fear I know now. I have lost him completely now. Back then he hadn’t yet taken Sam.

  I explained my symptoms to the ophthalmologist. When he first asked me what I did for a living, I was surprised. I almost said I was a dancer but instead I told him I was a student. What was I studying? I studied the books someone smarter and better-read than me thought I needed to read. The ophthalmologist smiled gently at this, mistaking for irony my attempt to be as honest with him as I could. He asked me whether the blurriness, the flickering, was more in one eye than the other. After too many moments I was embarrassed to say that I couldn’t remember and then worried that this made me sound either dishonest or else stupid.