Having Everything

by John L'Heureux

  * * *

  She was beginning, finally, to feel she could survive these meetings. “My name is Maggie; I’m an alcoholic.” This did not cover the ground, it did not tell the world who she was, but she wasn’t here to deal with the world. She was here to deal with her problem and then, and only then, with the world. Calvin Stubbs assured her this was so and he was an expert.

  She gave her little talk—my personal rap sheet, she called it—and she listened to the others give their little talks and she came to see that after one or two drinks they were all the same. Lost, she said. Done for, she said. Awash, Calvin said.

  Her rap-sheet talk became more relaxed; she let her feelings out, she showed her anger. They nodded and said, Good, Maggie, very good. But Calvin said, I’m not so sure about those feelings.

  “We alcoholics have short memories,” Calvin said. “We’ve put our drinking behind us, and we get to feel that if our families don’t do the same, they’re not playing fair with us, they’re not being good sports. They forgive us and we resent it. We forget that we’re the ones who need forgiveness.”

  “I’m the one who’s been through it,” Maggie said. “He’s been out …”

  “Out?”

  “Screwing Dixie, if you want to know. I’ll never forgive him.” And then she added, whether it was true or not, “Never.”

  “But he’s forgiven you.”

  “Men,” she said. “You’re all the same.”

  “I love you very much,” Calvin said. “But you’re cold, Maggie, and you’re proud of your coldness.”

  She bit her tongue and said nothing.

  “I’m afraid for you.”

  “Isn’t it something about Gaspard’s daughter,” Philip said.

  They were lying in bed reading companionably.

  “On TV all the time,” Philip said.

  “Well, she’s getting attention, and that’s what they all seem to want,” Maggie said.

  “Poor Gaspard,” he said.

  “Poor Bartleby,” she said.

  He smiled, because he knew it was a literary reference of some kind and he hoped, he hoped.

  19

  “Love and sex,” Philip said aloud, “love versus sex.” He was thinking of Hal Kizer, whom he was about to interview in preparation for taking over as Dean in January. He had never really talked to Hal. They had business exchanges, of course, and they served on committees together when they had to, and they had shared a couple chats—ugly, both times—when they were guests at department parties, but Hal was somebody Philip chose to avoid whenever possible. Hal was obsessed with sex, kinky sex, and he seemed to want Philip along for the ride. Philip didn’t care to think of what this might mean. In truth, he didn’t care to think of Hal Kizer at all, since everything about Hal made him uncomfortable.

  Maybe he wanted to keep him a caricature: the kinky shrink with his balls in a Cuisinart, someone easy to dismiss. Maybe if he got to know him, maybe even to like him, maybe even to find his sex research a legitimate subject of inquiry, then he might have to take him seriously. And what would that mean? The enemy should never come alive as people: the first rule of combat.

  His secretary buzzed him on the intercom. “Dr. Kizer is here,” she said, and in a second Hal was standing before Philip’s desk, smiling, his hand out.

  Philip came around the desk, welcomed him, and they sat facing one another in the matching leather armchairs. This was to be a democratic encounter.

  “We’ve never really talked,” Philip said.

  “So let’s.”

  “I’m trying to get the feel of the job,” Philip said, “so I’ve asked everybody on staff to stop in and say hello and tell me what their chief concerns are for the school and for themselves and, frankly, to express any reservations about me as Dean, if they have some.”

  “I don’t have any. I think you’ll be great.” He reached down and adjusted his crotch. It was a spontaneous gesture. It meant nothing.

  “Good. Well, that’s good.”

  “How is Maggie doing? Dixie hasn’t mentioned her lately, but I know they used to see each other quite a bit.”

  “Maggie’s doing fine. Thanks. She’s fine.”

  “Dixie’s given up drinking,” Hal said.

  “Well, in the history of civilization, drinking hasn’t done much good for many people, taken as a whole.”

  “I like a drink, myself.”

  “Yes, well, you do wonderful work, Hal. We’re very lucky to have you here.” He wasn’t up to this but he launched into it anyhow. “Why don’t you give me a sense of your research, Hal, where you think it’s going, where you hope it might go. Just a rough outline.”

  Hal didn’t pause to think. He just began. “Officially, like yourself, I’m an expert in manic depression,” he said. “I’m interested in cognitive therapy, of course, but I’m more interested in what mood elevators can do with depression—I don’t mean right now, necessarily, but with the next generation of pharmaceuticals—and I’m interested in the nature of the highs. Not so much in controlling the highs—bringing them down, smoothing them out—but in taking a good long look at them. What they allow to be created. What enlargement of spirit they make possible. What they imply about the inner life, about the soul.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “It is interesting, I think.”

  “The soul, you say.”

  “Of course I’m not Catholic, like you.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Nothing. Not lapsed from anything. Not aspiring to anything.” He paused for just a moment and then held Philip with his look. “Except sexual highs.”

  Philip blushed. He was over forty and men over forty didn’t blush, it was a scientific fact, but he blushed nonetheless.

  “Sexual ecstasy, to be exact. Or maybe just ecstasy through sex.”

  “Yes, well, you’ve indicated that before.”

  “And?”

  “And, frankly, it’s just not one of my interests.”

  “You could give it a try.”

  Philip shook his head.

  “You could try it with me.” He put his hands up, a surrender. “Relax, relax, I don’t mean with me. I mean you could come along with me on one of my little seminars, just give it a whirl. The girls are very careful. They know what they’re doing and they stop as soon as you say stop and—”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What you’ve got to understand is this, Phil: I’m not hooked on sex as an end in itself. What matters to me is where it takes me. You Catholics like to rise above the flesh and find some kind of ecstasy in denial of feeling. I’m working the opposite way. I’m trying to go through the flesh, through it, to an ecstasy that’s totally human and fulfilling. A mortal ecstasy. I don’t believe in denial.”

  “I see.”

  “And I suspect you don’t either.”

  “I’d like to change the subject, Hal, okay? S & M isn’t something I like to talk about, or hear about for that matter, and it certainly isn’t something I intend ever to try.”

  “Like Dixie.”

  Silence. Philip looked surprised.

  “Dixie doesn’t like it either. Or she thinks she doesn’t.”

  More silence.

  “You and I are not that different, you know. Our problems, I mean, and our solutions to them. We’re both at that moment in our lives when things can go anywhere. I want my life to expand. I want … more.”

  Philip stood then and walked back behind his desk. He flipped open his appointment book, looked at his watch, sat down at the desk.

  “I’m trying to be honest with you,” Hal said. “I’m trying to show you who I am as a man, as a person.”

  “Of course. I know that. Of course. But I’m more concerned right now about the professional aspects, the purely medical aspects, of the research we’re engaged in. Tell me about the developments you foresee with pharmaceuticals and the depressive cycle. That interests me a lot.”

  And so they filled out the hour w
ith talk about manic depression and the future miraculous stuff that would make Prozac and Thorazine and Stelazine look like Alka-Seltzer. But at the end of the interview, as Hal rose to leave, he said, “About the other stuff, Philip …,” and at once Philip interrupted him.

  “Yes, yes, I’m glad you mentioned that. You want to make sure that the other stuff, as you call it, doesn’t get in the way professionally. You see what I mean. I mean, the Med School doesn’t need another scandal … with Tippi Gaspard and molestation and all. The world at large is not ready for S & M.”

  Hal smiled and decided to give up trying to explain. “Gotcha,” he said. “There’ll be no scandal here.”

  Philip saw him to the door.

  Hal Kizer was a caricature. Talking about the spirit, the soul, the inner life. My God, the man’s entire inner life existed twelve inches south of his belt. He was a disgust.

  That enemy will never come alive, Philip thought, not if I can help it. Hal didn’t deserve to be taken seriously. He was a totally dispensable human being.

  Without thinking what he was doing, Philip went to the bathroom and washed his hands.

  Dixie was stalking him, but she never approached him. Philip was grateful for that. He worried only that she would approach Maggie. As it happened his worries were misplaced. It was Maggie who approached Dixie.

  They met for coffee at the student union.

  “We should have gone to lunch,” Dixie said. “That’s what Beecher and I do and we like it a lot.”

  “Beecher is very nice.”

  “You’ve stopped drinking, she told me.”

  “Beecher didn’t tell you that. She wouldn’t, not behind my back. I should imagine a lot of people know I’ve stopped drinking. Any one of them could have told you.”

  “Somebody told me, I thought it was Beecher.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You look awfully good.”

  “I look older. I look a little beat up, but I’ve made it this far and I’ll make it the rest of the way.”

  Dixie looked at her. “Cole is so proud of you,” she said.

  Maggie started to say something, stopped, and said something else. “The reason I asked to see you is part of my recovery. I have to apologize to everyone I’ve hurt through my drinking. And I’ve hurt you.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Well, I intended to.”

  Dixie’s eyes filled with tears.

  “And I apologize. I was working out my own insecurities on you, attacking you on drinking and so forth, and what I really wanted to do was kill you. And you know why.”

  “Philip, you mean.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. And I apologize.”

  Dixie was thinking about killing. Maggie wanted to kill her and she wanted to kill Hal. Maybe Hal wanted to kill Philip. Maybe Philip wanted to kill Maggie.

  “Do you accept my apology?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  There seemed to be something still unsaid. Maggie bit her lip and looked around the cafeteria and then back at Dixie: she was beautiful, but hopelessly dependent and insecure. She was pitiful.

  “You can do anything, you know. You should paint. You are a very artful woman.”

  “I’m beginning to see that,” Dixie said. “I’m beginning to believe it.”

  Maggie stood up. “Well, thank you.”

  “Can we have lunch sometime? Soon?”

  “Dixie,” Maggie said. “I’ve apologized. I’ve said that you’re artful and able. That’s as far as I can go. My amends do not include lunch.”

  “You’re an inspiration,” Dixie said. She went home and phoned Cole and told him how well his mother was doing.

  That night, as she often did, Dixie got into her MG and tooled around town for a while. She stopped at an art supply shop and looked in the window. She drove to Harvard and walked through the Square. And then she drove home.

  After Hal had gone to bed, she went out again in her car and drove to Philip Tate’s house. She parked the car down the street a little. She walked back and crossed the lawn and peered into his study window. He was not there. He must be upstairs with Maggie. She waited for a while and then she returned to her car.

  As she was getting in, a heavy Mercedes pulled up behind her, slowed, and then sped up. She could have sworn it was Hal. But that was impossible, because Hal was at home in bed. Nor was he smart enough to think of following her.

  When she got home, Hal’s car was in the garage just as it had been when she left. She went inside to the sunroom and lay on the chaise longue. She put her fist firmly up between her legs and, gouging it deep into her, thought of Philip and of Cole and of Philip. She fell asleep finally and dreamed of Cole.

  Upstairs, Hal lay in bed thinking. Dixie had more life to her than he had guessed: driving around town in the middle of night, peeking into Philip Tate’s windows. Maybe even fucking him? No. Not uptight Philip. He’d run if she made the offer. He’d fight her off if she put a hand on him. And yet she was a queer one, all right. This pleased him greatly.

  He had married her because of a misunderstanding—he had given her more credit for subtlety and sexual awareness than she deserved—and it had been many unhappy months before he realized his mistake.

  She was a docent at the National Museum at a time when the treasures of the Prado came on a tour of the United States. He was fascinated by the late Goya, his grotesques and his bloody-mindedness, and he was amused by the cool, disinterested way Dixie, on her guided tour, introduced the paintings. She was sexy and detached and she seemed to take the gore and the madness as historical peculiarities, with no odd or disturbing element about them. They did nothing to her, whereas they made Hal’s flesh tighten on his bones. He found himself physically excited by them. And therefore by her. He wanted to mess up that hair, yank up that dress, and take her right on the floor beneath Maja Nude.

  He went back a second and a third time. He made chat with her. He said suggestive, harmless things. He moved closer. She remained cool and indifferent. He found out she had studied painting, was a painter herself, and he guessed she had money, lots of it. Sex and money and a taste for Goya. He returned for a fourth visit. After the tour, he waited for her and was surprised to see that she was waiting for him as well. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said. “This picture is you. Pure you.” And she led him to the early Goyas and paused before The Manikin. On the tour she had explained that it was one of numerous designs for a tapestry, more in the mode of the rococo in its gaiety, with almost no trace of the violence and madness Goya was to paint later. It was a joyful painting, witty, with interesting psychological overtones. Now, alone with him, she said, “Isn’t it you? Really?” But he barely looked at the painting; he already knew it. It was sadomasochism masked as gaiety. Four women were tossing a man in a blanket. They were laughing, having a good old sexy time for themselves, and the little man, their victim, was sailing high in the air, his arms stiff, terror on his face. He knew what was going on—he was a sexual plaything, a penis dandled on the blade of a knife. Hal couldn’t stand it. He touched himself and he was hard, and with his hand there he looked straight at her and said, “It’s me?” She said, “It’s you.”

  For the first time Hal felt he really knew himself. This was what he wanted, this dandling on the knife blade. And she knew it. And she liked it. She was not deceived by him. He thought, This one knows me, with this one I can explore it all.

  Much later—indeed, too late—he discovered she had found the picture merely playful, a man having a good time with four women, somebody who was, she said, “a party kind of guy.” By then, of course, it was too late. They were married and she was frigid and he began to look for his dandling outside the house.

  Still, tonight, she had suddenly turned interesting. Following Phil Tate, peeking in his windows—she must be after his body, there was no other explanation. For some reason this excited him. He got up and went downstairs and found her on the chaise longue as usual, her fist
between her legs, a look of satisfying pain on her face. Why couldn’t she let him do that for her? Why couldn’t she just give it a try?

  “Come on, mousie,” he said. “Beddy-byes.” And he woke her from her very pleasant dream.

  Maggie had trouble sleeping these days. She would go to bed exhausted, and then wake after an hour or so, full of nervous energy, edgy and excitable. Sometimes she lay there waiting to fall asleep again, but lately she had been getting up to read. Tonight, as Philip got into bed beside her, she was sleeping soundly, but within minutes she was awake and restless. She started to get up.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Stay here and read. I’ll just close my eyes and doze.”

  “But the light,” she said.

  “It’s nice with you here,” he said, smiling, his eyes closed. “Never mind the light.”

  She read for a while and then, seeing he was still awake, laid her book across her chest and said, “I wonder why she ever married him.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I wonder why they ever married.”

  “Dixie, you mean? And Hal?”

  It was the first time in a long time they’d had the same thought without expressing it. They were both pleased.

  “Mm,” she said.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. “I had an interview with him today. He’s a brilliant psychiatrist. I know that from looking over his appointment papers and therefore I have to believe it, but my God, what a mess he is as a person.”

  “She’s the one that puzzles me.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t mind talking about her?”

  “Well, if you want. Do you think it’s a good idea?”

  “I don’t mean the sex thing. I mean what she is. She’s a rich woman, she’s beautiful, she’s had all this art education and she’s been a docent in a major museum. And now she’s painting. In oils. How does she come by this defenselessness thing? Is it a pose?”

  “It’s her attraction.”

  “You mean men like this poor-little-me routine? I thought that went out in the thirties. Or at least in the fifties.”

  “I imagine Hal liked it.”

  “Did you like it? Is that what made you … you know … have the affair with her? The fling?”