by Hugo Wilcken
In the silence—punctuated by the staccato of the police radio—I thought about D’Angelo. We’d been in high school out on the Island together, and for a while we’d been close. We’d both hovered on the edge of the same social group, without ever plunging in: that was how we’d found each other, as two outsiders. The following few months we’d been inseparable. And yet, under the surface, we’d had little in common. My interests had been cerebral; his more practical. I’d wanted to go to college; he hadn’t. I’d been brought up alone by an uncle and aunt, to whom I was not particularly close; he’d been raised in a tight-knit family with many siblings. After high school we’d inevitably drifted apart, but through a series of chance encounters had just about kept in touch. Once, Abby and I had bumped into him in the Park, and he’d joined our picnic. Another time, we’d arranged to meet for a drink in a midtown bar. But it had been a strained affair, full of awkward silences and forced laughter, and after that, I hadn’t really expected to hear from him again.
Then one morning D’Angelo had turned up at my office, unwashed and unkempt. It had been just as I was starting out, not long after Abby had left me. I’d had to keep him waiting, as I’d had patients until lunch. When I was finally free, I’d taken him down to a coffee place behind the avenue. He’d spun me a sob story, then hit me for a loan. We’d walked to my bank nearby; I’d withdrawn a generous sum for him. When I’d handed over the money, he’d broken down crying. “Please, please,” I’d pleaded. I didn’t care about the money, even if I could hardly afford it, but I couldn’t take a scene. Perhaps he’d realized that: he’d straightened up, shaken my hand, and strode off. About six months later, he’d sent me a check in the mail. I never banked it, though; I hadn’t wanted any further embarrassment in case it bounced.
Years after that episode, I’d received a call from him. He’d changed, utterly. He’d gotten himself back on track; he was a police officer now. On the phone he’d sounded assured, businesslike. He needed a psychiatrist to advise on the mental state of a man they’d detained. The usual police doctor wasn’t available, could I step in? And so he’d put me onto this sideline work. Our relationship had been placed on a professional footing, which somehow allowed us to be easy with each other again. The incident of the loan and the uncashed check had never come up, and I doubted it ever would. It was a silent bond between us, of undetermined importance. Sitting in the car beside him now, watching him as he drove, it occurred to me that there was, after all, one thing we had in common. Although we didn’t look alike, we both had evenly featured, everyman kind of faces. The sort that could simply dissolve into a street crowd.
The blocks flashed by in a streetlight blur. I thought about the job at hand. I’d been involved in dozens of these on-the-spot committals, but this wasn’t the way they usually worked. Normally, D’Angelo or another officer would phone, and I’d go down to the station. I’d examine the detained person, if possible, and ask a few questions. Then I’d give an opinion, sign the papers. If I was busy, I’d always assumed other doctors were on call. D’Angelo had never before turned up out of the blue at my office.
“It’s here.”
We pulled into a poorly lit downtown street I didn’t recognize, and parked on a corner. Rows of tenements stretched out endlessly into the blackness. Crossing the street, we made our way up the garbage-strewn stairway of a rundown building to a third-floor apartment, its front door slightly ajar. Inside, a room with peeling walls, a table and two chairs, a sofa, a formulaic painting of a seaside scene hanging opposite a tiny window. It felt like a hurried approximation of a living room, rather than an actual one. On one of the chairs sat a stocky, square-jawed man, thirties, plain dark suit, coolly smoking, legs splayed defiantly. A young woman leaned against the wall, the bare lightbulb above bleaching the color out of her face.
“Mrs. Esterhazy, this is Dr. Manne. He’s going to talk to your husband.”
She looked up wordlessly. Her cotton floral dress—lightweight for the season—had a small tear across the shoulder; there was a dark mark under her left eye. The man in the chair said: “Speak to him. Say hello.”
“Good evening, Doctor.”
I nodded, turned to D’Angelo: “This is the man?”
“No no. This is Mr. … He’s a family friend. The man you need to see is through there.”
A door in the far wall opened onto an identically sized room, with only a chair, a mattress, and various bits of debris scattered over the floor. A man was lying on the mattress, rail thin, eyes half closed, thick hair plastered down with sweat. D’Angelo’s young partner, Franklin, was watching over him: “He’s calmed down now. Kinda drifting off I think.”
“Okay, give me the story.”
“We got the call and came down. This man, Esterhazy, was ranting away, all agitated. He had that broken bottle in his hand.” Franklin pointed to where it lay in the corner of the room. “He’d taken a swing at his wife …”
“Did you see that?”
“No. It’s what she said. Anyway, we restrained him. He eventually quieted down. Officer D’Angelo went out to find you.”
“You’ve been here all this time? You didn’t take him down to the station? Why do you think he’s a psychiatric case?”
“Well …”
D’Angelo, who had followed me through, now interrupted: “He was rambling and ranting, talking about people out to get him, he was seeing things. The whole paranoid act.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“According to his wife, he doesn’t drink.”
I crouched down: “Mr. Esterhazy, can I talk to you? Open your eyes, please. How many people can you see in the room, Mr. Esterhazy? Can you tell me?”
Franklin and I sat him up. He was staring at the wall, pupils dilated, a puzzled look on his face. A wave of tiredness hit me. I was having difficulty concentrating; everything seemed bathed in a gray, unreal light. I rubbed my eyes, tried to shake it off. Eventually, the feeling passed. I kept talking to Esterhazy, until he snapped out of his daze. Now he looked frightened, vulnerable: “Who are you? What do you want from me?”
“It’s all right. My name is Dr. Manne. I’m here to help you.”
“I … I want to talk to you alone.”
“These are police officers. You can talk in front of them.”
“No. They’re trying to put me in the madhouse. They’re saying I’m insane. I’m not insane.”
“Nobody’s saying anything. We’re just trying to work out what happened. These officers tell me you threatened them with a broken bottle. And you hit your wife. Is that true?”
Esterhazy laughed uncertainly. “This is crazy. I don’t have a wife. My wife is dead. We split up a long time ago. They’re trying to …”
“Have you been drinking?”
“No. They drugged me. It’s made me lose my … I’m confused. They’re trying to put me away.”
“Who drugged you?”
“Ask them …” He gesticulated at D’Angelo and Franklin. D’Angelo looked at me and shrugged. I checked for needle marks on the man’s arm, but couldn’t see any.
“Why would anyone drug you?”
But Esterhazy was drifting off again: “It’s all mixed up … I’ve been brought here against my will …”
Under my breath, I said to D’Angelo: “Bring his wife in.”
I’d been at dozens of scenes like this. There was no commoner delusion than that the police, or the doctor, or the wife, or the family was trying to get the subject committed for nefarious reasons. The fear and confusion: they, too, were typical. And yet something didn’t feel right. But what with the tiredness, and the events of the day, I was no longer confident of my own reactions. I glanced over to the bottle in the corner, its bottom neatly shorn off. I looked about for the bottom, or its shattered remains, but couldn’t see a single shard of glass.
Esterhazy’s wife had come into the room now. She looked away as I turned my attention toward her: “Here, let me see your cheek.”
“Well … I’d go see a doctor in the morning. Check nothing’s broken.”
I hadn’t wanted to examine the bruise so much as get a better look at her face. It was hard to place: she was young, but that might have meant anywhere between eighteen and thirty. Her good looks, trim figure, tightly coiffed hair—it all had a flat, generic quality to it.
“Mr. Esterhazy, are you saying that this is not your wife?”
“What did you just call me? That’s not my name. And no, she’s not my wife. Never seen her before today.”
“Darling, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Don’t call me that.” He looked at her blankly. “I’m telling you, I’ve never seen her before today. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m here against my will. They’ve drugged me.”
“What year is it, Mr. Esterhazy?”
“I told you, that’s not my name. It’s Smith.”
“What year is it?”
“1949.”
“What month?”
“September.”
“What day?”
“Friday … I think.”
“All right.”
I signaled to Franklin to sit Esterhazy down again, while I ushered D’Angelo and Esterhazy’s wife back through to the other room. The square-jawed man I’d originally mistaken for Esterhazy was still sitting there in his dark suit, smoking. I couldn’t help but feel threatened by his presence, his silence.
The wife started whimpering. “I’m very sorry, Doctor. I don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t know why he won’t recognize me. It’s horrible. Of course, I can show you photos …”
“That won’t be necessary, Mrs. Esterhazy. Just tell me in your own words what happened.”
She took a moment to pull herself together. “He came home. He was acting strange. He came into the kitchen while I was cooking. He put his arms around my waist. He was talking about some plot against him or something. He started threatening me. Then he hit me …”
Was it a New York accent? Surely not from these parts, anyway, not from the tenements. Like her face, her voice seemed neutral, unplaceable. She talked on tearfully for another minute or so, but I was hardly listening. I noticed how she kept looking over to the square-jawed man, as if silently asking for his approval. For a moment, I wondered whether they were lovers. Psychosis rarely comes out of nowhere; usually there’s some sort of trigger. Perhaps Esterhazy had discovered the affair; perhaps that was the trigger … It was pointless speculation, I knew—I was drifting away from the facts.
The woman had stopped talking. D’Angelo pushed some forms across the table for me to sign and I took out my pen. As I went to sign, I felt some vague affinity with Esterhazy. As if his confusion were in some way mine as well.
“Where are you taking him?”
“Um. Stevens Institute.”
“Stevens Institute?” The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t pin down where I’d heard it. “Why not City Psychiatric?”
“Don’t ask me. That’s what I was told at the station. Stevens Institute.”
I scribbled a note and signature at the bottom of the forms. “I’m signing him in for forty-eight hours. If they want to keep him longer, the doctor in charge will have to send me a report first.”
Minutes later, I stood across the road from the building, keeping well within the shadows. I’d refused D’Angelo’s offer of a lift home—for some reason I’d wanted to watch unobserved as he and Esterhazy came out of the building. But after a good quarter of an hour, there was still no movement. Another wave of tiredness hit me. In a way I was glad of it; I’d be knocked out as soon as I got home, too exhausted to be spooked by my own apartment.
The occasional figure haunted the sidewalk, but it felt preternaturally quiet for Manhattan. I was somewhere on the Lower East Side, a couple of blocks from the water. In the other direction, the shabby street I was on crossed an avenue. I made my way toward it, flagged down a cab.
“Where to, Mac?”
“East Fifty-Sixth, corner of First.”
The driver turned back down where I’d come from and soon we were speeding through an industrial wasteland by the river, its derelict buildings gaping like teeth. I looked at my watch, and was surprised to find that it was not even nine o’clock.
“Going out or going home?”
“Home.”
“Lucky you. Me, I’m on all night.” Silence for a minute or two, then the driver continued: “Trouble is, you never know what the wife’s up to when you work all night, do you? I call her up. Stop the cab, go to a phone booth. Sometimes at one or two in the morning. Nine times out of ten she doesn’t answer. Says she’s in bed, doesn’t want to get up. But what do I know?”
I couldn’t tell whether it had been a bit of banter or something else, so I made an indistinct noise by way of reply. The driver lapsed into silence again, and a tension reigned in the cab. I found myself thinking about Esterhazy’s wife, visualizing her. The bruise on the cheek, almost too vivid, but no obvious swelling. The slightly robotic way she’d talked, despite the tears. The barely noticeable twitch in her leg, betraying trauma—or perhaps nervousness. I gazed through the window into a mist of drizzle. Then what seemed like moments later, the cab pulled into the curb. I was outside my building again. It was as if an eternity had passed since I’d last been there.
Through the iron gates and up two flights of stairs. My front door opened onto a corridor and a small kitchen. An archway led through to the living room, which looked out over a courtyard, and because the building opposite had no windows, it felt very private. A tiny refuge in the vastness of the city. The bedroom was hardly bigger than the double bed, over which hung a painting of a nude that Abby had left there. That was it, as far as decorations went. I hadn’t felt like homemaking after Abby had gone, and then after a while I’d grown to prefer the starkness. A girlfriend I’d once invited over had been shocked by this emptiness—as if I’d only just moved in, although I’d been there years. On these rare occasions when someone visited I realized what a strange place it was for a Park Avenue doctor to end up in. That, in turn, discouraged me from inviting people over.
I looked about the living room. Everything different, everything the same. I remembered how soul destroying it had been, in those first weeks after Abby had gone, to be forever coming back home to find everything exactly as I’d left it. Around the small table were two chairs, the same design but each slightly different. Abby had always sat in one particular chair and I in the other. Even now, ten years on, I used the same one and left the other empty. Similarly with the bed: I always slept on the same side. Once a year or so, I’d have a powerfully erotic dream about Abby—I hoped to God that was finished with now. Eventually I found a couple of sleeping pills in the kitchen cupboard, and chased them down with some whiskey from a dusty bottle I hadn’t touched in months. Even if I was dead tired, I wanted to be sure.
3
Saturday morning. I lay in bed an hour longer that usual, feeling neither tired nor well rested, wondering what to do with the day. If my workweek was tightly scheduled, weekends were generally free-form—in theory at least. Actually, it occurred to me now, they were no less scripted than my professional life. The day would start with breakfast over the Times, always at the same diner on the corner. In the afternoon I’d go to the Park with a novel, if it was fine, or visit a gallery, if it wasn’t. Occasionally I’d have an evening engagement; otherwise I’d go to the movies, or listen to music at home. And that was how it always went. The thought of doing it all over again today and tomorrow—and then next weekend and the one after—filled me with a sense of futility. The weekend routine: that too, it now seemed, was over.
My thoughts kept circling around Esterhazy and his wife, picking over little details from the night before. D’Angelo appearing at my office. The open door of the apartment. The too-neat, almost coquettish rip in the woman’s dress. The broken bottle, with no broken glass. A
half-dozen other incongruities. The more I brooded, the odder the events of the evening seemed. I continued in this vein for a while, dreaming up hypotheses, before finally pulling myself out of it. I was overthinking things again. If I drew back a little, broadened my perspective, I could see that nothing about last night was as strange as all that. I recognized within me that desire to enter into the patient’s fantasy, and resisted it. If I were leading the life of a normal man, I reasoned, I wouldn’t be fretting over minutiae like this. I’d simply be getting on with things. Taking my son to the game, perhaps. Or a date out to lunch. Or playing a round of golf with an old college buddy. And yet, that wasn’t the whole of it either. That wasn’t the only reason I was creating these complications for myself. There was Abby. I was using the Esterhazy case to avoid thinking about her.
Finally I got out of bed. I was ravenously hungry; with everything that had happened yesterday, I’d skipped dinner. As I shaved, I stared at my face in the mirror with more curiosity than usual. For a moment or two, under the intensity of my own gaze, it began to look strange. As if, instead, I were staring at a wax model of myself. It was that same sensation of the unreality of things that had struck me the day before, wandering around Manhattan. But then, in a blink, everything was normal again. The face was mine.
It was still fairly early, but the street was already mobbed with Saturday shoppers. Stopping outside the diner where I ritually had my breakfast, I felt like an actor hitting his spots. I ordered the same thing every morning, yet each time the waitress would make a point of giving me a menu before taking my order. An awkward charade, but it had always been like that and could never now be different. I’d never developed the kind of bantering, flirtatious relationship that the waitress had with several other male customers. I peered inside, without entering. There she was, chatting to another regular. I must have seen him in there hundreds of times. I even knew quite a bit about him, from overheard conversations. I knew that he lived on Sutton Place, just around the corner from my apartment. I knew that he worked in insurance, that he had a son, and that his son was blond-haired. I knew that he was separated from his wife, who lived somewhere in Brooklyn. I knew a dozen other facts—trivial or otherwise—without ever having exchanged a word with him. I wondered how I’d spent so many hours in that diner.