My Heart Laid Bare

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Afterward, when they were alone, Dr. Bies observed in a languid voice to Dr. Liebknecht, unscrewing the top of his silver pocket flask, “We must hope for two things: that the wench doesn’t do herself in too quickly and that the second Mrs. Grille doesn’t spend her husband’s money too quickly.” Dr. Liebknecht, who’d removed his pince-nez and was thoughtfully rubbing his eyes, sighed, and shrugged, and made no reply, as if he didn’t trust himself, at the moment, to speak.

  2.

  “I am not ill—I am well.”

  “I am not ill—I am well.”

  “I am not ill—I am well.”

  Rosamund bites her lower lip to keep from laughing, and draws blood. Rosamund is racked with silent tears. Rosmund’s clenched fists fly striking any available surface, causing such a disturbance in the Ladies’ Sulfur Bath that a therapist will lead her back to her room.

  “Don’t touch. I can’t bear it!”

  Trying to explain that she can’t continue, it’s no one’s fault but she can’t continue, yet she’s fearful of “crossing over” into the void, and so must continue; out of cowardice, not even pride.

  “I am not well—I am ill.”

  Her heart trips. On the verge of running wild. It can beat as many as two hundred fifty times a minute and her doctors have warned it might beat her to death if she didn’t make an effort to calm herself.

  Autogenic Self-Mastery does seem to her, despite the obvious charlatanry of the Parris Clinic (a haven for wealthy neurotics, misfits and failures), a basically sound idea. She accepts that her malaise is a malaise of the soul and that it creeps upon her from within. To master the malaise, she need only master the “self” that causes it—but how, precisely, is this done? Reciting the mantra I am not ill I am well, I am not well I am ill is like saying a rosary, numbing, hypnotic, silly, shameful. Laughter shades into a fit of coughing. Coughing shades into choking. Choking shades into heart palpitations. Heart palpitations shade into a fainting attack. And her swollen belly and bladder ache from the abnormal quantity of mineral water they’ve urged her to drink—twelve pints a day.

  An insensible body sprawled in the hottest of the baths. Damp black hair in clots spread like a spider’s legs across the chipped marble rim. Bruised eyes shut. In a chamois smock that clings to her thin body, her prominent collarbone and small hard breasts with nipples like berries. Roughly she squeezes these breasts not out of sensuality but to determine if she’s there. “I am not ill—I am well. Am I?” Thinking of Bies and Liebknecht, a vaudeville team. The one vague, false-fatherly, clammy-fat weighing beyond two hundred fifty pounds at five feet nine; sausage-neck tight to bursting; small squinting red-rimmed eyes; a bald dome of a head, tufts of gray hair in a cupid-fringe. A legitimate doctor, Mr. Grille ascertained, with a degree from a respectable medical school and a number of publicized cures, generally of wealthy patients, to boast of.

  Liebknecht, whom Rosamund fears, is Bies’s opposite: tall, lean, dry, watchful; quicksilver eyes that bore into Rosamund’s skull (one of the female patients shivering in the bath declares Liebknecht has the power to read thoughts); cheekbones severe and ascetic as if the flesh had eroded away; an air of angry sorrow, of pain, of loss. It’s believed among the Parris Clinic patients that Liebknecht has a tragic background—he’s a figure of romance, in his early sixties—perhaps a veteran of the War?—perhaps a Jewish emigre?—not a doctor of medicine like his fattish partner but a doctor of psychology, or is it psychotherapy—he’s reputed to have studied with the controversial Sigmund Freud and to have been a major participant in the International Psychoanalytical Congress at The Hague in 1920. (Freud! Rosamund, like the brightest young people of her circle, had read scattered essays by Freud and helpful resumés of his work, avidly accepting the mysterious unknowable Id as the volcanic source of libido, and the Ego, or “self,” as the seat of both identity and anxiety, and the Superego as internalized conscience—the dull, dreary, suffocating voice of authority. Less avid was Rosamund’s acceptance of Freud’s theory of sexuality in which, in short, the female compensates for her castration or anatomical deficiency in three possible ways: sexual anxiety and withdrawal, rivalry with men/lesbianism, or by shifting libido from her mother to her father, changing the object of her sexual interest from female to male and hoping for an infant, ideally a male infant, as a substitute for the lost penis. “But I don’t want an infant,” Rosamund protested. “I don’t even want a penis . . . what a burden!”) If Liebknecht is a Freudian he has said nothing to Rosamund of his beliefs but has only reiterated, in a kindly, commanding voice, one of the mantras of the Parris Clinic:

  “It is your own Wish turned against you that

  has made you ill, and it is your own Wish

  that will make you well.”

  Rosamund sees Liebknecht when he isn’t present, for, as the other patients claim, Liebknecht has the power to see with eyes like X-rays and the power to read thoughts at a distance. Where Bies is a heavyset perspiring presence, Liebknecht is a mysterious absence. On weak days, too exhausted to rise from bed, or from the enervating bath, Rosamund cringes as the man appears to her, with his expression of severity; though her trembling eyelids are closed, he stares at her with knowledge of her; her voice rings in her head. It is your own Wish, Rosamund. Yours.

  3.

  April, and Easter, and Rosamund wakes from her long languid drowse to find herself . . . herself. Her father has abandoned her and she has no relatives or friends she recalls with affection; her lovers have passed through her body like mild jolts of electricity, leaving no memory; soon she will be twenty-eight years old; a voice ringing in her ears I am not ill, I am well! not well, ill! not ill not well! I am not I! In the day room there’s Mrs. Harold Bender of the Manhattan Benders with her rouged face beaked like a parrot’s, a low wondering boastful voice for she is dying (of some sort of wasting disease) even as she claims she is well! is well! is well! and will be returning home soon in time for the contract bridge tournament in May, in which in previous seasons she’s performed brilliantly. These eyes snatching hungrily at where Rosamund who looks so youthful for her age stands, a willowy apparition in white. There’s the Captain, palsied, aged, a turtle’s head and sleep-dazed lidded eyes squinting up at Rosamund with the jest that he’d once been a tall dashing officer of the United States Army in charge of one of the post-War military districts in the South under the Reconstruction Act, his cousin was Thaddeus Stevens of Congress whose power had exceeded President Andrew Johnson’s—for a time. Hadn’t he known Rosamund, many years ago? Or had the woman been Rosamund’s mother, or grandmother? Nature had played quite a trick on him, the Captain laughed, for once he’d been young and now he was old; once tall, and now a virtual midget—“And yet, you know, dear, this isn’t truly me.” And there’s a plump sighing woman in her mid-thirties, spinster daughter of one of President Warren Harding’s disgraced cabinet members who has, it’s rumored, tried to kill herself several times, with overdoses of aspirin and alcohol; she never speaks above a whisper, and never raises her eyes. And there is elderly “Tia” Flanner who’d once been a dancer with the New York City Ballet and a lover of numerous wealthy men, now crippled with arthritis, her face a creased sack, fingers like claws, nearly blind yet chattering of the Discipline that has made her well and restored her youth. And there is the quivering skeleton David Johnson Brown, New York’s most prestigious architect in the heady days of the 1890’s when the great houses of the wealthy were being built on Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue and vicinity, gazing with death’s-head yearning at Rosamund asking if she has seen his houses? his artwork? (yes, Rosamund has, in fact she’s lived in a Sixty-sixth Street brownstone built by Brown) would she be his bride? for he’s very wealthy, a man of powerful connections, and knows how to make a woman happy.

  To avoid these apparitions in steamy Hades Rosamund finds herself running through the English garden; there’s a stand of juniper pines at the foot of a hill; she stands trembling at the edge of a pond staring, dream
ing, swaying on her feet breathing in the scent of brackish water, ripening vegetation, algae, she moves out into the surprisingly warm water, water to her waist, arms too heavy to lift in an appeal, a partly naked woman quivering in the water beneath her, rippling, shivering, the sky beneath her too, veined and pale, light on all sides. “Rosamund. No.”

  Dr. Liebknecht has spoken, softly, commandingly. Rosamund looks around but can’t see anyone. She’s panting like an animal, clutching at her small hard useless breasts. Soft muck beneath her toes, the pressure of water against her belly, her pelvis. “But why not! Why not! If it’s my Wish.” She begins to cry out of anger, resentment. Liebknecht in shadows at the edge of the pond, or hidden in the stand of juniper pines, or watching her from one of the myriad windows of the house flashing with the wan, dying light of sunset—“Rosamund, no. Come back at once.”

  Rosamund laughs, but obeys. Only a fool would try to drown herself in three feet of water clogged with lily pads and water irises.

  IT’S MAY, AND June; a reluctant chilly spring; Rosamund wakes, and Rosamund sleeps, and Rosamund lies comatose in the bath, and Rosamund whispers I am not ill I am well, not ill well, I am I and not-I until a fit of childish laughter overtakes her, and she’s yawning over the postcard of Florence, her jaws ache with yawning, and she recalls suddenly how she’d loved her cousin Timothy who’d died in the War, his plane shot down over Colombey-les-Belles in May 1918, she has a photograph of Tim in his dashing aviator’s topcoat with its broad fur collar, Tim in his helmet, goggles pushed back onto his head, that glamor-stance, a boastful smile, what are War and Death but glamor and boastful smiles yet Rosamund vowed she’d never smile again after word came of his death (and the poor body burnt to ash amid the plane wreckage) but she refuses to tell Dr. Liebknecht of this secret because it will lessen her in his eyes: she’s shallow and worthless like the rest, in love with her own infirmities and imminent deaths. Rosamund tears the postcard into several pieces and scatters the pieces in the air. Caring not for her father and new young stepmother, truly she doesn’t care whether they regard her with affection or suspicion, whether they return from Europe or remain forever, whether they live or die, truly Rosamund doesn’t though Dr. Liebknecht has suggested that she cares very much, she’s consumed with rage, why not admit it.

  “D’you know, Dr. Liebknecht—if ‘Liebknecht’ is your name—I don’t like you. That, I will admit.”

  “That, Miss Grille, is your privilege.”

  “And please don’t call me ‘Miss Grille’ as if I were some sort of North Atlantic fish. If you must call me anything—‘Rosamund.’”

  Dr. Liebknecht smiles. Even as the man insinuates himself into her soul. “Yes. ‘Rosamund.’ A fetchingly feminine name—and excellent disguise.”

  POOR MRS. BENDER it’s whispered at the noonday meal can no longer raise her head from her pillow, she’s desperate to play bridge in her bed, her estranged family has come to fetch her home but she refuses to leave for the Parris Clinic is her home now, Dr. Bies and Dr. Liebknecht have given her hope where there’s been no hope. Everywhere else, she tells Rosamund, is Death.

  CRIMINALS, ROSAMUND THINKS spitefully.

  She’ll telephone her father’s uncle Morgan Grille who’s a judge of the state supreme court, she’ll report criminal activities at the Parris Clinic, Mrs. Bender’s talon fingers digging into her arm and the woman’s terrified eyes, can will and destiny be one? can we ardently wish what will obliterate us? Quick, before it’s too late! (The rumor is that Mrs. Bender has left $1 million to the Parris Clinic though in her final days she’d despaired of maintaining the Discipline and pleaded to be forgiven by her doctors she’d adored, for disappointing them.)

  “You shouldn’t pass severe judgment on yourself, Rosamund,” Liebknecht informs her, “for being unable to love. For, to love, we must love someone—an object. But who is a worthy object? In this chaotic world, where? It’s your excellent instinct that guides you, forbidding you to love insignificant people who don’t deserve your love.”

  Rosamund laughs harshly, and fumbles to light a cigarette. Dr. Liebknecht doesn’t assist her. “But I won’t love you. Worthy as you are.”

  MIDSUMMER. THE NOCTURNAL insects sing of Death, of Death, yet new patients arrive at the Clinic: a tremulous white-haired woman in a wheelchair, an obese youth ostentatiously carrying a volume of Swinburne’s poems, twin sisters of fifty years of age perky as young partridges, bangs in a fringe on their foreheads. I am not ill—I am well. I am not ill—I am well. The prayerful chant arises from the cloistered sick as from a galaxy of nocturnal insects desperately singing against the end of time.

  The muted voices of America, Rosamund thinks. I am not ill—but make me well! Help me to live forever.

  How many casualties of the War. This new desperation not to die.

  As for Rosamund: she’s airy and transparent, rising above the surface of the earth like mist above the Hudson River in the early morning. She’s hard, hot, sharp as an ice pick, an instrument made for jabbing and drawing blood.

  “I can’t love you. You’re too old. Older than my father. And I don’t trust you. Worthy as you are.”

  YET IT’S HER own Wish that has made her ill, so it is her own Wish that will make her well.

  And make her his.

  SHE COMPLAINS OF melancholia, fatigue, dizziness and loss of appetite, she’s torn up the postcard from Rome signed with both her father’s and stepmother’s names, she’s torn up the copies of her quarterly bills at the Parris Clinic she receives (which are marked PAID IN FULL, for of course her father pays for everything), she’s stunned when Dr. Liebknecht prescribes for her what no other doctor has ever prescribed: muscular labor, exertion. “Rosamund. Stand up. Go out of here, and hike to the top of that hill. Bring me a handful of wildflowers from the crest of that hill. Now, before the sun is too hot. Hurry.” Clapping his hands at her as you’d urge on a dog.

  Rosamund laughs, shocked. Rosamund refuses.

  Yet within the hour on her feet, eager, excited, in sturdy walking shoes, a long-sleeved shirt to protect her arms, trousers comfortable as a man’s, Dr. Liebknecht’s panama hat on her head and her sleek black hair caught back in a careless chignon. Lean-hipped, flat-bosomed, she might be a young man. She’s walking fast, in dread of being joined by another patient. She’s half trotting. Hurrying. Swinging her arms. Smiling with the exertion. Beginning to pant. Trickles of sweat beneath her arms. Her head throbs, her blood pulses hard, bright, blinding. She hikes one mile, two miles, nearly three miles in hilly terrain, much of the way steeply uphill. The farthest distance Rosamund has ever hiked. She’s happy! She’s never been so happy! If her heart bursts it will be the doctor’s fault. If she collapses and has to be carried back to the Clinic on a stretcher by attendants it will be his fault. Breathing the sharp scent of pine needles she’s never breathed before, like this. Sun-heated grasses. Murmur and buzz of insects. The high sweet cries of birds. At the crest of the hill she picks Queen Anne’s lace, blue heal-all and wild asters, tough-stemmed flowers to bring back to Dr. Liebknecht as a love-offering. For of course she loves him.

  Shading her eyes gazing over the wild land falling beneath her to the wooded banks of the great river. How happy she is, how free! Her legs ache, she isn’t used to such exertion, yet how happy she is knowing she can do this at any time, hike to the top of this hill, or any hill. From this perspective the buildings and grounds of the Parris Clinic that have been the entire world to her for months are hardly visible.

  SHE LEAVES THE ragged, already withering bouquet in a jar in tepid water on the doorstep of Dr. Liebknecht’s residence. And avoids him for the remainder of that day, and all of the next day, and the next.

  IN THE PRIVACY of his office (dim slatted sunshine, a rustling of amorous birds in the ivy outside the window) he speaks suddenly from the heart, as Rosamund has never heard any man speak before, or any woman.

  He loves her, he says.

  And he believes that she mi
ght love him.

  Rosamund, stricken, claps her hands over her ears. “No. I don’t want to hear this.”

  Shall she confess: in the night she embraces herself with a lover’s ardent arm that is his arm; his head on the pillow gently nudges hers.

  Shall she confess: she is bitterly jealous of all his life that isn’t this single moment.

  She whispers, “No. It’s too late for me.”

  He tells her she must listen to no one except him. She must believe no one except him. For she knows that he loves her, and will make her his bride—“For this is our common destiny, Rosamund.”

  In the privacy of his office (the blinds drawn, a sudden silence outside the window) he rises to take her hands in his; to restore warmth to her hands that have gone cold; her eyelids flutter, she doesn’t dare look up at him, where his face should be there’s blindness, an intensification of light; she stammers, protesting it’s too late, she isn’t worthy, if he knew her innermost soul he wouldn’t love her.

  But he seems not to hear. Gripping her hands to quiet her, he stoops over her and presses his lips against her forehead.

  “I tell you, Rosamund—it’s so. We love each other, and we will be wed. This is our destiny.”

  4.

  I will not, thinks Rosamund.

  I will not, thinks Rosamund. Her heart tripping on the edge of running wild.

  But now she encounters the man everywhere on the grounds of the Parris Clinic. Walking swiftly in the early morning mist she sees him ascending the hill before her so she has no choice but to follow. Miles away beside the rapidly moving, vast river she sees him farther along the tangled bank, beckoning to her. No I will not. Yes. I don’t believe in destiny! In the slightly shabby English garden among the topiary hedges, along the graveled front drive between rows of stately poplars she sees him . . . turning quickly aside before he summons her to him. For now suddenly the man is everywhere. Close beside her in her bed, and in the hot lulling bath where, helpless, she can’t escape. “I love you, Rosamund. For only I know how you’ve suffered. How your soul devours itself. How, yearning to die, you yearn to live. And we will be wed—you have only to consent.”