And then one afternoon, when Helena is out of town visiting her parents, I go to see a revival of Tarkovsky’s Solaris and make a discovery that has nothing to do with the film. Almost directly in front of me—perhaps three rows separate us—I note the back of a head that looks very much like Dotty’s. When the film ends, I wait patiently for her to exit the row. What I haven’t noticed is that there is a man with her, someone I think I know but can’t place, and they are whispering to each other as they pass. I have to call her name to get her attention, and even then it takes an extra moment for her to turn around. She greets me warmly—I’ve actually known Dotty longer than I’ve known Joel—and without hesitation (or perhaps the slightest hesitation) she introduces me to her companion as if there were nothing unacceptable in my finding them together. Her self-possession is almost too good to be true. We stop briefly at a local coffee shop and when discussion of the movie is out of the way, I ask how Joel is doing. “It’s hard to say,” she says. “They say he’s making progress, but when I see him I’m not always sure what they mean by progress.”
“I never knew that Joel had problems with depression,” I say.
“It’s very recent with him,” she says. “He’s had bouts of depression before, but nothing remotely like what he’s been going through.”
While we talk, her companion, whose name eludes me, observes our conversation like an eavesdropper, watchful and silent.
For some reason I can’t explain, I neglect to mention this chance meeting with Dotty to Helena, who, for all I know, knows more about the friendship with this other man than I do.
Though I don’t remember exactly how it started, or even when, each morning before I go to work on my novel, I study the front page of the New York Times and find stories that conform with only the smallest of stretch to Joel’s shapeshifter alien theory. I discuss this with no one, not Helena, not even my therapist, though I have acquired a notebook in which I jot down these instances for future reference. I have the idea, which I realize is naïve and even a little dimwitted, of taking the notebook with me when I get around to visiting Joel (he’s been at the Forestvale Depression Center for almost eight months now) in the hope of cheering him up. It should cheer him to know that there are outside sources that confirm his most unacceptable beliefs.
I can’t say why I waited so long before visiting Joel at Forestvale, which is, in any event, a time-consuming thirty-two-mile drive from the city. I have been thinking of going for a while, but I always find some excuse at the last moment to avoid the trip. One morning, however, this morning in fact, I decide to go without subjecting the impulse to rational consideration. I have already driven a few blocks when I realize I have forgotten the notebook I have been assembling for Joel, and I drive back to retrieve it, the notion of postponing the trip once again making a brief, uninvited visit of its own.
The main building, though formidably grim on approach, is a lot more cheerful on the inside than I might have imagined. The walls are decorated with travel posters for exotic places.
A perky white-haired woman who seems to be in charge warns me as we make our way to Joel’s room that he might not recognize me at first. Patients who go through the shock treatment sequence, she says, tend to lose some immediate memory. It turns out that Joel is not in his quarters, and Mrs. Gassner, my guide, taken aback by his unexpected absence, actually looks under the bed before taking me to the common room. “He usually keeps to his own space,” she says. “That he’s out is a positive sign. I usually have to get one of the aides to take him to lunch.”
We find a crumpled version of Joel sitting by himself in front of a TV set that has not been turned on. “Joel, you have a visitor,” she says to him in her chirpy voice. Then to me: “You’re his brother, I assume. The resemblance is striking.”
“No,” I say.
Finally, Joel turns to look at us, and there is a benign smile on his face I can’t remember having seen before.
“Joel, your brother is here to see you,” she says.
“Thank you for coming,” he says stiffly, getting up from his chair, narrowing his eyes to assess me.
Eventually, Mrs. Gassner leaves us to ourselves, though not before finding us a place to talk—we’re set up at opposites sides of a card table—away from the other patients. I have difficulty knowing where to start.
“Are they treating you well?” I ask.
“What do you think?” he says. “No really, I’m fine. Couldn’t be better. Who sent you?”
“You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m Josh.”
“Of course I recognize you,” he says. “You’re Josh, aren’t you? What do you want, Josh?”
The longer we talk, the less it seems to me that the man sitting across from me is Joel. Or to put it another way, his Joelness, the qualities I think of that define Joel, have been diminished to virtual absence.
And then maybe forty minutes into our conversation, averting his eyes which have momentarily come into focus, he says, “You don’t need to believe everything she says about me.”
“I don’t,” I say. “Everything who says?”
“You know who,” he says. “I can tell by looking at you that you know. She’s got to justify herself. We all need to maintain our own realities in the face of the evidence amassed against us.”
I don’t disagree.
It is at this point I think of showing Joel the notebook with its corroborating evidence, but then I realize that I’ve forgotten to take it from the car. When I try to tell him about it—it is not easy to explain without an immediate context—Joel claps his hands over his ears. “I don’t know where you got that,” he says.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Eventually, he removes his hands from his ears and offers me another version of his eerie benign smile. “Don’t get your tits in an uproar,” he says. “Forget it, okay? If you’re not in the water yourself, Josh, it’s imprudent to make waves…. The thing to remember, Josh, the single most important thing, Josh, is that there are no crazy people in madhouses.”
When I get up to leave, we don’t shake hands, but Joel thanks me again for my visit before turning abruptly away.
4
Barely a month after Joel comes home from Forestvale, Dotty gives a party to which most or all of Joel’s closest friends are invited. On the way over, Helena and I have the following conversation in the car.
“Is she unhappier now that he’s returned?” I ask her.
“I know you’re kidding,” she says, “and I don’t know the answer to your question, but it’s possible. More than possible. When you get used to living alone, it’s hard to have someone invading your space again. You know as well as I do that Joel has never been easy to live with.”
If I knew that, I can’t remember knowing it, which is what I say though not quite in those words. “Then it’s especially nice of her to make this party for him.”
“Oh, Dotty’s a good person,” she says. “Though if you don’t want to be alone with someone, it’s protective to have other people around.”
“And you think that’s the reason for this party, to have other people around?”
“No, though it’s possible. I have no specific information one way or another.”
There are nine other guests when we arrive, but, oddly in my opinion, no sign of Joel, who, according to Dotty, has gone out to pick up some more beer.
Helena rolls her eyes at the news, but Dotty gives no indication that anything’s amiss. “More people are coming, it turns out, than we originally expected. Joel thought it would be a bad omen to run out of beer at his own welcome home party.” There is an understated WELCOME HOME, JOEL sign taped to the refrigerator door.
I tend to drink moderately these days—two glasses of wine at most in an evening—but tonight for some reason, perhaps some anxiety on Joel’s behalf, I go past my usual limit. After my third or fourth glass—all put away before Joel’s return—I see no point in keeping further count.
I am aware that I’ve said some outrageous things to people, some of whom I barely know; the looks I’ve gotten in exchange are my evidence. I see what I’m doing, when I think about it at all—I try to remain as oblivious as possible—as a kind of allegiance to Joel.
I am not aware of the exact moment of Joel’s return, only that at some point he is there at the center of a crowd, talking to a woman who earlier in the evening—I have only the vaguest sense of when— told me to “fuck off.” And what could I possibly have said to her to have provoked such unpleasantness? In waiting for Joel to extricate himself, I lose sight of him again.
I haven’t had my opportunity to wish Joel well when Helena comes by with my coat over her arm. “I think it’s about time I got you home,” she says.
“I haven’t talked to my friend Joel yet,” I say.
“Oh dear,” she says. “You seem to have insulted everyone else. Okay, sweetheart. Go say goodbye to Joel, and I’ll say goodbye to Dotty, who I suspect won’t be the least bit unhappy to see us go. Josh, promise me, okay?—that you’ll talk to no one else but Joel.”
I can’t make that promise, I tell her, though in the spirit of compromise I put down the mostly finished glass of wine in my hand on the first surface that approaches before going to look for my friend.
It takes the opening and closing of several doors—there is a couple necking in one of the guest bedrooms, and for a moment I think the man is Joel—before I find him sitting by himself in the dark in the TV room, which also serves as a library.
“How’s it hanging, buddy?” I greet him. “Helena says it’s time for us to go.”
“Who is it?” he asks.
“It’s me,” I say, “though the correct answer is it is I.”
“It’s good of you to come, me,” he says. “I’m all of a sudden extremely tired of talking to people. Can you imagine? I’m not used to staying up this late anymore. Goodnight, me.”
“Goodnight, buddy,” I say. “It’s been a great party, except for the handful of extraterrestrials that slipped in under false pretenses.”
“Ah hah,” he says. “If I were you, me, I’d let my wife do the driving home.”
As if on cue, Helena comes up on me from behind and takes me by the arm, leading me out of the house with only verbal resistance on my part. I seem to sleep most of the ride home, though there is an unfriendly one-sided conversation going on between us in the interstices.
When I go to bed that night, pressed up against Helena’s back in our king-sized bed, the earliest stages of self-righteous anger and regret beginning to overtake me, I wonder what Joel was thinking during our abbreviated conversation. I think he didn’t know me in the dark or want to know me, whoever I was. He’ll figure it out, I suspect, or not. Helena will find a way to forgive me in the morning. Or not. I meant well, I hear myself think as consciousness like bathwater seeps down the drain. I have the sense of watching myself fall asleep.
I dream of hiding out in an anonymous room at the far end of a house I lived in as a child, someone trying to get in, whoever ratcheting the handle at the side door. I refuse to panic, rehearse in my head the details of a hopelessly elaborate means of escape, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the body snatcher who has my name printed in black magic marker clipped to the pocket of his shirt.
OFFICE HOURS
I usually keep my door locked during office hours, not wanting to give the random eager student the wrong impression. I’m opposed to conferences, though I make myself available as required—I hang out at my desk one hour a week for just that purpose—but I see no point in unfelt encouragement. You have to knock at least three times to get me to open the door. So only the persistent, who usually visit with an agenda of complaint, get in to see me, and it is the persistent who are generally the most tiresome. So much of college teaching, so much of life, is wasting time in the disguise of conversation. Whatever small wisdom I have to impart has already been imparted in lectures or in the margins of papers I’ve graded. So, as the more perceptive of my students note, the way to gain my respect is to stay away.
The above is all prelude, of course, to my describing an experience in 180-degree opposition to my hard-earned expectations. And it happens with someone—a woman, a graduate student—who had come in on the wrong day to see the person who uses my office on the days I’m not there. This is what she said to me when, against better judgment, I opened the door to let her in on her fifth barely audible knock. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and said accusingly, “You’re not Professor Haggert.”
“Haggert is in on Mondays and Wednesdays,” I said.
Nevertheless she walked by me and sat down in the chair next to my desk. “What day is today?” she asked, as if she had caught me in some kind of self-contradiction.
My first impression was that she had been crying or had spent a sleepless night or both. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, though she was clearly not at her best, whatever that might have been.
“Today was Tuesday when I woke up this morning,” I said.
“Are you positive?” she said. “When I woke up it was Wednesday.”
So here was this woman I’d never met—I did have the sense that I’d seen her before somewhere or other but still—storming into my office to argue about what day it was. “If it was Wednesday,” I said, “Haggert would have been here instead of me.”
“And we both would have been happier,” she said. “Or maybe not.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Would you give Professor Haggert a message?”
“The thing is, Ms….I never see Haggert. We’re not here on the same days. You could leave him a note.”
“No,” she said. “I could but I can’t. A note has too much permanence.”
I laughed, assuming she had made a joke, but in the next moment I realized that had not been her intent. She was tearing up, foraging in her purse for something with which to wipe her eyes or blow her nose. Nothing emerged and she used the back of her hand to blot her eyes.
“Are you all right?” I said, not knowing what else to say, embarrassed at the poverty of my sympathy.
“Yes…no,” she said. “Would it be all right if I told you something? Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone you don’t know. You have a sympathetic presence.”
That was not my reputation, and as a probable consequence her remark flattered me into letting her continue. “In that case…” I said.
“I’ve gotten myself into something that feels inescapable,” she said. “What I’m saying is, I don’t know how to bring it to an end.”
“Is this an academic matter?”
“Well, it is and it isn’t. Some might consider it a personal matter, but that’s not the way it started. If it’s something that took place at the college, it’s an academic matter, isn’t it? By definition.”
“I see,” the persona of my sympathetic presence said.
“I’m older than most graduate students, not that much older but older, and at least then I was otherwise unattached. That’s the only reason I took him up on his offer.”
“His offer?”
“We had been having a conference dealing with this piece I had written and he suggested that we continue it, the conference, over dinner. That’s pretty much how it started. It was the natural continuation of a discussion we had been having. And what happened afterward was predictable if I had taken the time to think about, you know, the implicit context.”
“Okay,” I said. “Is this Professor Haggert we’re talking about?”
“Is it all right with you if I don’t mention any names? I’m not looking to hurt anyone’s reputation.”
“That’s a good thing,” I said, “though you never know—it might enhance whoever’s reputation.”
She looked at me uncertainly, then shook her head and permitted herself a very
small smile. “That was meant as a joke, right? People tell me I have zero sense of humor. You’ll have to get used to that.”
“Will I?”
She laughed. “I didn’t mean that the way you seem to think I meant it.”
That’s when someone else knocked at the door and my visitor got out of her seat in a kind of mock slow motion. “I’ll come back another time,” she said. “I don’t want to interfere with your job.”
When she finally made her way out, whoever was on the other side of the door was also gone.
I had no expectations of seeing her again, but when she didn’t show up the same time or any time after that the following Tuesday, it unmade my day.
The week after that, I left my office door unlocked during my posted office hour but no one I wanted to see showed up. One of the department secretaries stuck her head in to tell me that I hadn’t turned in last term’s grade book. The reason for that, which I explained to her for about the third time, is that I don’t use grade books.
When three weeks went by without a return visit, my accidental visitor began to grow in beauty and whatever virtues attended beauty. On the other hand, I wondered if I crossed her path in another context, say somewhere off campus, would I even recognize her. Her image remained strong if variable in memory. I cursed myself for not having remembered her name, though perhaps it had never been offered.
I came into the college the following Monday on an unacknowledged fact-finding tour disguised as an unavoidable errand. Haggert was in my office when I came in, conferencing with a student who was not remotely the one I was half hoping to find, planning to ask Haggert about my visitor and possibly uncover the level of involvement between them. For no apparent reason, Haggert and I had a kind of low-level antipathy going on between us. My irritation growing by the minute, I sat impatiently in the anteroom until chronic bad disposition got the better of me. Looking to pass the time with less duress, I went down to the student cafeteria for a cup of coffee. The Java Jive concession was open, which was not always the case, and I treated myself to a “giant” cappuccino, which was in fact the smallest size they served.
The Pavilion of Former Wives Page 8