Having Everything

by John L'Heureux

  He lifted his head and stood looking down on her. He forced a smile.

  “You’d get to like it,” he said, “if you’d just let yourself go.”

  She covered her face.

  He took her hands away and kissed her softly on the mouth.

  “I’ve made you coffee,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  Philip was having lunch again with Dixie Kizer. They were in the hospital cafeteria and, though they had been there for more than a half hour, they had not yet been able to exchange a private word. People kept pausing at the table to say hello or to ask some dumb question or, it would seem, to engage in chat with the sole purpose of preventing a serious conversation.

  To each of them Philip dutifully introduced her. “This is Dixie Kizer, a friend.” And when they stayed longer, he would add, “Dixie is married to Hal Kizer. We’re having lunch.” So everybody knew who they were and what they were doing.

  Finally they were left alone.

  “How are you, Dixie?” Philip’s voice was intimate.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “I am very very sorry. I can never forgive myself for doing that … you know. But I am sorry. My only concern right now is you. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Of course you’re all right. What I mean to say is that I never meant to upset you. I mean, this can never happen again and it should never have happened in the first place. I know that. You know that. Above all, I don’t want to do you any injury. Do you understand?”

  “I’m a fool,” she said.

  “Please. Please don’t say that, Dixie. I’m the one who’s the fool.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Don’t say that. Please don’t feel that. It’s all wrong. And it’s all my fault.”

  “You’re so kind. You’re so gentle.”

  “I’m not. I try to be, but as you see, I fuck up. Excuse the language. I’m worried, I’m very worried.”

  “I know you are. But I’m not. I’m fine.”

  “This can’t happen again.”

  “No?”

  “It just can’t.”

  “Your wife is kind too. I followed her and I talked to her. We talked about her studies.”

  “And how did you know about her studies?”

  “I followed her. To class.”

  “Dixie.”

  He looked at her, unable for the moment to comprehend.

  “Sometimes I follow people.”

  “You can’t do this,” he said. “Poor Maggie.”

  “Is she angry with me?” She thought for a moment. “Is she angry with you?”

  This was insane. And he had brought it on himself.

  “Is she smart, smart, smart? I bet she is.”

  Philip thought of Maggie this morning as he had last seen her. She was already out of bed by the time he woke up, and when he went downstairs to breakfast, he found her bent over the table with books spread out all around her. Her face was strained with concentration and she was picking at the knuckles of her left hand. “Good morning,” he had whispered, and set about making coffee. “I’ll never get this stuff,” she said, and she did not look up until he was about to leave. “Bye,” he said, and gave her a kiss. “I’m so frightened,” she said. He had kissed her again, and left.

  “Maggie works very hard,” he said. And, though he had not intended to, he added, “She thinks you’re my patient. I didn’t say you weren’t.”

  “I’d like to be. Your patient.”

  “I can’t, Dixie. You can’t.”

  “I’d like to be anything of yours.”

  A busboy came and said, “You through?” and started piling their dishes. Philip waited in silence, but Dixie repeated, “I’d like to be anything of yours.”

  The busboy looked up at her and then at Philip.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “We’ve got to be sensible,” Philip said. “You’re not in love with me, Dixie, and I’m not in love with you.” She looked away, hurt. “It’s just something that happened. We made love and we shouldn’t have. We both have wives—marriage partners, I mean—and what we’ve done is, quite simply, adultery. And we can’t do that. We’re more responsible than that. Aren’t we.” It was not a question. “We are. You know we are.”

  “If that’s what you want,” she said.

  “It’s not a question of what I want, it’s a question of what’s got to be. I think this is the last time we can see each other, Dixie. Can we agree to that? We just have to put all this behind us.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But I’m right, am I not?”

  “I guess.”

  “So that’s settled,” he said. “And you will—promise me—you will talk this over with a good psychiatrist. Someone you trust. Someone who cares about you. Agreed?”

  “I guess.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and surprised himself by adding, “I’ll pray for you.”

  She smiled, a little sad.

  “That’s it, then.”

  “But we can still be friends, can’t we? We can still have lunch? Sometimes?”

  This was impossible. She simply did not get it.

  “Philip?”

  “No. I’m sorry. This is it. It’s done.”

  He wondered what would come next. He feared she would cry or get hysterical or start shouting things, but she merely smoothed the back of her left hand with her right, adjusted her ring, and finally reached for her handbag.

  “I understand,” she said, “and of course you’re right.”

  She stood and shook hands with him, smiling, and then she left.

  Maggie had still not dressed. She had spent the entire morning, in her caftan and slippers, trying to make sense out of Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction.” Husserl seemed to her an awful lot like Descartes and she didn’t see how the study of pure phenomena would lead her anywhere in the neighborhood of literature. Husserl wanted scientific certainty, which was very nice, she supposed, but the whole point of literature was that it dealt not with certainty but with mystery. Nevertheless she made an act of faith and went on studying: “deep structures,” “transcendental modes of inquiry,” “eidetic abstraction.” She wanted to cry.

  At lunchtime she ate a peanut butter sandwich and drank a glass of milk. She hated milk and she hated peanut butter, but she needed the protein and the energy and, let’s face it, the distraction. The truth was that she needed a Xanax, but she was not going to give in. Not now. She was going to conquer Husserl and hermeneutics and reception theory, and she was going to progress to structuralism and semiotics and all the rest of it, and she was eventually going to finish her goddam Ph.D.

  She took two aspirins for her headache and bent over her books once again.

  * * *

  Beecher Stubbs had phoned Hal Kizer’s office at five of nine to ask for an appointment at one. Nothing urgent, she said. Seeing her at one would mean missing a budget meeting, so Hal said yes, come ahead. Besides, she was up to something and it would be interesting to find out what.

  It was Beecher Stubbs’s good luck to pass by the hospital cafeteria while Philip Tate and Dixie Kizer were having lunch and it was her further good luck to notice they were deep in what seemed an intimate conversation. Luck had never been a problem for her. She had, after all, married Calvin. If she were the kind of person who bought lottery tickets, Beecher had no doubt she would win.

  She arrived in his waiting room just as Hal Kizer opened the office door to usher her inside.

  “It’s personal, of course,” she said, “but then it would be, wouldn’t it, or I wouldn’t be talking to a shrink. It’s about sex,” she said.

  Hal Kizer looked at her and said nothing. Sex? At her age? In her shape?

  “You’re probably thinking, sex, at my age? And I wouldn’t blame you, because I’m no spring chicken. But sex is never a problem, is it, so long as it’s working well. In that respect, it’s like mo
ney. If you’ve got it, you never think about it. It’s only when you don’t have it that it becomes a problem.” She paused. “Am I talking too much? Would you like to interrupt and say something?”

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  “I’m talking about sex that’s a leetle teeny tiny bit off the beaten path,” she said. “Not rough sex, as I think they call it, with manacles and everything, but sex that has a little spice to it, or vinegar maybe, the kind that makes you look up and take notice.”

  “Tell me about you,” he said. “Tell me about growing up and what you wanted to be and what you feared to be and then what you are. Or what you think you are.”

  “All that?” she said, and filled nearly the whole hour.

  She was a psychiatrist’s daughter, like nearly everybody, and she had majored in psych at college. Radcliffe. She had married Calvin straight out of school because he was adorable and because he didn’t mind that she was plump going on fat and because he said he loved her. And it turned out he did love her; imagine that. They had raised three lovely boys—Calvin Jr., Wesley, and Luther—who were doctors but not shrinks. Her hobbies were growing roses and parapsychology and she felt there was a connection between them because she had all of her most astonishing revelations about people while pruning the roses. Pruning, hmm, what do you make of that? Which brought her back to the issue of sex. How did he feel about sexual variation? Combination? Kinky stuff?

  He smiled. “And why are you asking me this?”

  “You’re a psychiatrist and I’d like to know what you think? I’m seeking help?”

  “For yourself? I don’t think so.”

  She found it very hard not to tell the truth so she said nothing.

  He looked at her, amused. She was smart. She was probably, as he had thought from the first, a troublemaker.

  She continued to look at him.

  “You’re very interesting,” he said.

  “Pshaw.”

  “So what do you want, really?”

  “I’m testing my instincts.”

  “About yourself? Or about me?”

  “About you,” she said, “because I worry about Dixie.”

  “Dixie has nothing to fear from me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That is what I mean.”

  “Though she has plenty to fear from herself.”

  Beecher thought for a moment. This was true, she had known this from the start, but did he mean what she meant or something altogether different? Had her instincts misled her?

  “Time’s up,” he said. “I think this will be it, don’t you? No further appointments.”

  “One more,” she said. “A follow-up.”

  He escorted her to the door.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  He had been tempted, just for laughs, to tell her about his seminar tonight with Theda, but he knew that, given the circumstances, she would not find it a laughing matter.

  It was going to be a long night, a difficult night, and so Philip had come home early to spend some time with Maggie.

  “Do you want to go shopping?” he said. “Get you a new dress for the dinner tonight? Something terrific?”

  Maggie looked from Philip to her books and then again to Philip.

  “I have to work,” she said. “I have to get this goddam stuff.”

  “Maybe a break would help.” He put his hand on her shoulder and, bending over, kissed her. “A coffee break?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay. How about if I just get a book and sit with you? At this end of the table.”

  “No!” she said.

  “I’ll go shower. Do good, sweetheart.”

  Maggie continued to read Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology. She heard him go upstairs and turn on the shower and she listened for a moment to the rush of the water. She read and she read. After a long time she became aware that there was no longer the sound of water, there was only the ticking of the kitchen clock and the beating of her heart and the terrible pulsing in her brain. And she was still on the same page. Well, she would get it. She would not let Husserl defeat her. And she would not take a pill either.

  A moment later she lowered her head to her book and, soundlessly, began to cry.

  The dinner party was exactly what they all expected. Old Gaspard had rounded up the usual suspects—Aspergarters, Tates, McGuinns, Fioris, the redoubtable Leona Spitzer, and a new addition, the Kizers—and the text for the evening was recovered memory. The subtext, of course, was that any and all of them might expect to be asked to testify on behalf of Gaspard. And they’d better be ready: what was happening was madness, the accuser was believed automatically, no matter how preposterous the accusation, anarchy was loosed upon the thinking world.

  His own case, for instance, Gaspard said. Was there ever a better father or mother than him and Mrs. G? No, there was not. Was there ever a more loved and protected daughter than their Colette? No, there was not. This whole lawsuit business was the fault of Colette’s psychiatrist, a crazy woman from southern California, who went around sowing ideas in the minds of unhappy, unattractive young women that they must have been molested in their childhood and that’s why their lives were all screwed up now. What were her credentials anyhow? She’d been to some touchy-feely institute in Los Angeles, and she’d worked with kids who really had been abused by their parents, there was proof of that, and now she thought every woman who was forty and depressed and devoid of self-esteem must have been molested as a child. It was irresponsible. It was lunatic. He was an eminent psychiatrist and he was being sued by his own daughter. Had anybody ever heard of anything so crazy?

  No. Nobody had. And it was too sad to talk about. Nonetheless, for longer than they wanted to, they talked about it. Then the dinner had to be served and, mercifully, Gaspard was called out to do the wine. They had a hired girl—Goldie, age seventy—who helped Mrs. G get dinner on the table but Gaspard allowed nobody but himself to do the wine. With apologies, he left the guests to their own company.

  Conversation picked up at once. They talked about the budget cuts that were killing the Med School, the new and attractive group of interns, the likely candidates for Dean.

  “My bet is on you,” Leona Spitzer said to Philip. “First the Chair, then the Deanery. It makes sense.”

  “I am unworthy, Lord,” Philip said.

  “I’ll take bets,” Hal said. “Listen, Phil, there’s something I want to ask you about,” and he put his arm across Philip’s shoulder and turned him away from the group. Within seconds, Hal had him engaged in private conversation. The others pretended not to notice.

  “I didn’t know you’d be here,” Dixie said to Maggie. “I’m glad.” She seemed very nervous.

  “You look awfully nice,” Maggie said. “White is so good on you, with that dark hair and those beautiful eyes.”

  “Oh, it’s … well … you’re always so kind to me.” Dixie glanced over at Philip and Hal, anxious. “Your course,” she said, “how is it going? Philip told me I shouldn’t have mentioned that I knew about the course, but I keep thinking of you coming out of the library with all those books in your arms. Husserl.”

  Maggie chose not to hear the comment about Philip. “Don’t mention Husserl,” she said. “He’s driving me out of my mind. Have you read him?”

  “Oh, I haven’t read anything. I was in art history.”

  “Stick with art history. Trust me.”

  “Husserl?” Aspergarter asked. “You’re reading Husserl?”

  “Who’s reading Husserl?” Leona Spitzer asked. “Nobody reads Husserl anymore.”

  “She is, Maggie is,” Dixie said.

  “Oh, sorry,” Leona said.

  “She knows everything about Husserl,” Dixie said.

  There was a pause, a moment of silence, and someone said, softly, “You mean she’s never read Husserl?” and there was something like contempt in the voice. Maggie had no idea who said it.

  “Dinner, everybody,”
Gaspard called. “Please, please, before the soup gets warm.”

  They moved into the dining room, where they discovered the soup comment was not really a joke, since the soup was gazpacho, handsomely iced in silver bowls. Hal Kizer made oohing noises that were appreciation and satire all at once. Roberto Fiori laughed. “Num, num, num,” Hal said.

  Maggie was seated next to Hal, Philip next to Dixie. Hal said something to Maggie, but she didn’t hear what he said. She was still hearing, “You mean she’s never read Husserl?” and she could feel the contempt in the voice. A man’s voice? A woman’s? She was not sure.

  Hal repeated what he had said, and again Maggie did not hear him, but it didn’t matter because Gaspard was clinking his glass with a spoon, signaling a toast.

  “To Philip Tate, first of all, our new Tyler P. Goldman Professor of Psychiatry, and then to his lovely wife Maggie, and we must not forget …,” and he went off into a speech that celebrated Chair holders old and new, forgotten and not forgotten, and eventually they were allowed to drink. Maggie listened and heard only, “never read Husserl?” and raised her glass and sipped her wine. Chardonnay, of course, the necessary wine this year. She sipped it again. And again.

  She smiled at Philip, she entered the conversation to nod, to agree. No, she had no opinions on recovered memory. Yes, she was sure a great deal of damage was done, innocently, sincerely. And all the while she thought, Yes, I am a fake, I am a dilettante, I have never read Husserl, I can’t even understand Hussserl, I can’t understand anything. She looked over at Philip, who was watching her, and deliberately she reached for her glass of wine and drank. She hated him and his concern for her. His pity. She smiled at Hal and put her hand on his wrist. She asked him something and he answered—she had already forgotten what she asked—and he went on talking about manic depression as if it mattered to anybody other than the doctor and the patient. She nodded and played with her glass and said yes, she supposed it was all very complex. She sipped her wine, slowly, then again. Philip was not talking to Dixie, she noticed. In fact he seemed to be avoiding her. He was arguing with Roberto Fiori, a friendly argument with laughter on both sides, and he kept his eye on Maggie while poor Dixie was left in silence, listening to whatever she could pick up from conversations on either side of her. Maggie emptied her glass of wine.