‘Well, Ellen,’ he said, ‘today is the day!’
She sat beside him and looked at him, not trusting herself to speak. She felt close to him – close to him as a friend. There were many things she had wanted to say, had planned on saying, at this time – she had wanted him to know how she had resented him at first, hated him, fought him with all her being; how she had come gradually to look forward to his visits, had learned from him to be wryly amused at the deceits a part of her practised on the rest of her and on him, had grown accustomed to testing all her motives, all her reasons for action, to questioning her least impulse, to looking upon herself as she might look upon a character in a play, critically, analytically. But now the time had come and he had spoken first, had miraculously used her own words and expressed her own feeling, and she had nothing to say.
He was not at a loss, however. He put his hand in his pocket and turned his back on the window, so that now he faced her and regarded her directly. ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ he asked.
Now that he had asked the question, commenced again the familiar ritual, she could answer him directly. ‘I slept very well,’ she said, ‘though it was a long time before I fell asleep. I was too excited, too anxious for the morning – but when I did, I slept like a log.’
‘Any dreams?’ He had his notebook out, and the little pencil on which the gold-plating was worn in places so that the base metal showed through.
‘I didn’t have a dream all night.’
‘One always dreams. Think. I’m sure you can remember.’
And she thought. And she did remember something. It came to her as it usually came, visually at first, a scurrying, a slipping away, a something that was perceived, yet not known, not recognized, disturbing in its evasiveness. But she did not let it go, she refused to let it slide away, she held on to it by asking herself questions: Was it dark? – was it big? – was it someone? – a man or a woman? – what was it doing? – was something happening? – to her or to someone else? And as she questioned, the image did not disappear, although she did not know it for what it was yet, but at the same time it expressed itself in words, sometimes in syllables, sometimes in whole clauses, the way a melody would form in her head, sounding itself little by little, and she would try to identify it, break it up into intervals, phrases …
‘What did you dream?’ he asked.
‘I dreamed – I dreamed’ – she was sure of herself now, it was coming, she could say it in a moment – ‘I dreamed I was playing. What it was I was playing I don’t know – some large, cumbersome instrument. It kept crawling away from me. I’d arch my fingers at it, I’d claw at it and catch hold of it to keep it from getting away. I’d try to play it – but the melody wouldn’t come. I could hear the melody in my head – strangely, I could see it dance in front of my eyes. I don’t know how I can explain that. It wasn’t notes I saw, not really, but a sort of flowing, a kind of sunny, twisting river of sound. I know what I’m saying is peculiar, but it seemed natural in my dream. I kept playing, or trying to play this tune, you see. And the instrument – it was a large instrument, but not as large as a piano – kept trying to run away. And I couldn’t play the tune, no matter how hard I tried – I couldn’t!’
‘What was the name of the instrument?’ he asked.
‘A harpsichord,’ she answered, not surprised that she had known it all the time, for this had happened often before. ‘And, now I remember, it was most peculiar, although I liked it for the peculiarity – and that, I suppose, is the reason it was so hard to play the tune! – the harpsichord, you see, has only one … only one…’ She stopped and looked at him, and laughed.
‘Blocked?’ he asked.
‘I am. I don’t know why. It was just on the tip of my tongue.’
‘Let’s try a word test. You know, say what first comes into your mind. Green?’
‘Lawn.’
‘Gate?’
‘Home.’
‘Basil?’
…
‘Basil?’
…
‘Blocked?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am. I don’t know why.’
‘Keyboard?’
‘Piano.’
‘Clavier?’
‘Only one Basil.’
He looked at her, and smiled and looked away. He was smiling still – she could see that. But why had he looked away? ‘Why did you say “Only one Basil”?’ he asked.
‘Because a clavier has only one – oh, I meant “manual”. That was what was strange about the harpsichord in my dream – that was what I kept blocking on. Man-ual. Only one man. Basil. I was dreaming of Basil. And of music, and how hard I would have to practise. That was all there was to it, wasn’t it? But why did I block?’
‘Because you did not want me to know,’ he said. ‘Because Basil is your husband.’
She looked at him, startled, then laughed. He laughed, too. ‘I think it’s about time you went home, Mrs Purcell,’ he said.
The doctor walked away from the window, leaving her, going towards the door. As he did this, something went wrong in her throat; she felt empty inside, forlorn. This must be how a child feels, she thought, when her father walks away from her for the first time, leaves her standing alone, and she knows that she must either walk or fall. And then she set her lips, made a face at the thought – she was independent of Dr Danzer; she knew it and he knew it; there was no doubt that she no longer needed him. But she did take a step forward, was drawn towards him against her will, stopping only when she saw the way he stood, the way he watched her, the remnants of his smile still about his lips, his dark eyes testing her.
‘Your husband should be downstairs by now,’ he said, ‘attending to the formalities. I’ll go and see if I can speed things up a little.’
‘There are forms to be filled, I suppose,’ she said, not because she wanted to know, but because she wanted to talk, to say a little more, to hold to him and his waning interest in her for a few more minutes.
‘The administration office must have its red tape,’ he admitted. And then he snapped his fingers, ‘Oh, say, I forgot! You are coming to see me next week, aren’t you? At my New York office? I’m there Wednesday mornings and all day Fridays.’
‘I can see you any time you wish.’
He took out his pencil again, and his pad. ‘Wednesday, at eleven?’ He looked up, smiling. ‘It’s just for a check-up, you know. We can have a talk. I think we should see each other for a little while more…’
‘Eleven will be fine.’
So she would see him again. Now that she knew, she was disappointed. She was on a long rope that let her roam, but she could be pulled back at any time. Yet, as always, he was right. She would want to see him again.
He had finished scribbling in his notebook, had tucked the worn pencil away. His hand was back in his pocket, and he took a few more steps toward the door. But then he stopped again. ‘May I ask you a question?’ he said.
‘Of course.’ She wondered why he asked her permission. For the last two years he had asked and she had answered many questions – why should she resent another now?
‘This morning, when you talked to the two attendants, you asked them to turn their backs on you – didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Why did you ask that?’
She was afraid. She could feel the rope tighten, could feel herself being pulled back. She moistened her lips and spoke carefully, remembering that her words must be assured, indicate poise, self-confidence.
‘It was just a whim. I awoke feeling very elated – I would say happy, but you would say elated. I felt very good towards everybody – I still do. But when Mary came into the room, and then Martha, I could not help remembering other times. I remembered how they used to look at me, to watch me – how careful they always were not to turn their backs on me…’
‘So you asked them to turn round,’ he said. He looked directly at her, and his eye
s were serious. ‘You know they couldn’t, don’t you? It’s a hospital rule that is never broken. It had nothing to do with you.’
‘It was silly of me,’ she said, ‘and I admit it.’
‘We are all of us a little silly at times.’ His eyes broke away from her glance, looked down at his pocketed hand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘good luck to you. I’ll go down and see what’s keeping that husband of yours.’ He walked sidewise through the door, backed into the hall, smiling at her, pulling his hand from his pocket and raising it, then dropping it, as if he wanted to wave but decided he had better not.
She watched him go, thinking to herself, what a nice guy he is, what an awfully nice guy! But when she stood aside, as he had taught her to do, and thought of him objectively, she realized that his niceness was all probably just a part of his professional manner, a bag of tricks to effect a transference, that she did not know his real personality because he had never shown it to her. If I had met him at a party, if I had been introduced to him by a friend, what would I have thought of him? she wondered.
She turned her back on the door he had forgotten to close, deciding to let it stand open, and went back to the window. He is meeting Basil now, she thought; he is talking to him, first about the weather, then about me. How do they get along together? she asked herself. Do they like each other? She would have to ask Basil sometime what he thought of Dr Danzer – sometime in the future, when this moment lay in the remote past, when the answer Basil gave to her question would be unimportant, when she could ask it casually, idly. She tried to visualize them together, Basil and the doctor, one large and blond and forceful, the other small and dark and diffident. She shut her eyes so that she might concentrate, but she did not succeed in seeing them both at once. First, she would see Basil, and then she would see Dr Danzer. It was as if she saw them with separate senses and had to switch back and forth from one to the other, could never use both senses together. But it was not important, it was only a game she was playing to pass the time. She would see Basil soon. He would be coming down the hall, coming through the door…
Suddenly she was afraid. Something had entered the room as she thought of Basil coming through the door, something old and well known, something archaic and dreadful. She had met this thing before – although not for many months, she had thought she had quite got over it, that she need not fear its return. It had come each time in the same way, unexpectedly, when she was thinking of something else. It had fallen upon her, embraced her, shut out the light.
She struggled against it, wanting to cry out, but knowing she dare not. If she screamed, one of the attendants would come running, would ask her what was wrong, would tell the doctor. And a part of her knew that nothing menaced her, that the black thing she feared came out of her past, that she had once even seen it in a dream, clearly and distinctly, and had known it for what it was. Remembering this, she also remembered her own formula for vanquishing this terror: all she had to do was to think of that dream, spend all her efforts in recapturing that experience, seeing it fully and precisely so that she could identify it – and laugh at it. For it was not very awful really – only her father’s body with the light behind it, swaying drunkenly over her crib, magnified and distorted by the shadows cast in the lamp’s light; and her mother’s voice, hoarse and shrill, crying, ‘Don’t you do it! – if you touch a hair of her head, I’ll murder you!’
But even knowing what it was that terrified her, seeing it again in her mind’s eye as she had seen it first in reality, as a child of three, she still had to fight its present form – the pervasive blackness that assailed her, the great, smothering blanket of panic that hung over her and threatened to descend upon her. She forced herself to go to the mirror, to look into it at her face, her bulging eyes, her straining, tensing mouth; at her hand that pressed against her cheek, pushed the flesh aside, stopped the flow of blood. And as she examined herself, held her eyes on the mirror and suppressed the desire to turn round, to look over her shoulder, she felt as if she were climbing up from the depths, struggling higher and higher, out of the dark and into the light. Her hand fell away from her face – although it left white fingers on the reddened flesh as a reminder – her lips relaxed and she managed to smile at herself. Her breathing became regular and her body seemed her own again; once more she was compact and whole, her natural self.
She stayed in front of the mirror, applying fresh rouge and lipstick, combing her hair. She reminded herself that Basil would be coming in shortly – this time as she thought these words the black fear did not strike, she was not even nervous – and she must look her best for him. This would be a difficult day for Basil – the first day in two years that he had spent more than a few hours with her. Two years was a long time; lovers had become strangers in less. She must do everything she could to make it easy for him, she must meet him more than half-way, she must stand aside and judge herself and him, as Dr Danzer had taught her to, try all along to be objective about their relationship. He will have changed, she told herself, Basil will have changed.
She had changed, too, although she could not tell how much or in what ways. Would he find her too different from the woman he had married? Would he like her now that she had learned to hide her conflicts, to face up to the darkness when it threatened her, to stand on her feet and fight back? Would he love her as he had once? Or would there still be the restraint that she had felt was due to the surroundings, her long absence from him, the difficulty of attempting to put back together the pieces of their former life for an hour or two once or twice a month? Perhaps they would never get the pieces back together again, no matter how much they had in the future. And, thinking of time, she looked at her watch, and saw that it was after nine o’clock.
Minute by minute the hours had fled until now the time of her life in this room was all but used up, would soon be forever past. She found herself listening for a sound in the corridor – Basil’s heavy, rhythmic stride, like drumbeats in the symphonies he conducted. And, at the same time, she thought about the world she was entering again, her unguarded future, the causes and effects that would shape her life but over which she would have only partial control, the conditionings. She looked around the room again, the familiar, enclosing scene, the four protective walls, the door which she could open or close – letting in or shutting out the sounds of other lives – the checkered pattern of light and dark on the floor cast by the sun as it invaded the latticed window. I shall leave all this order behind me, she thought, and enter into chaos. I shall never know from one moment to the next, although I shall pretend that I know, as I always used to pretend before, what will happen, how I shall behave, what awaits me. Life lies before me, and, ultimately, death – I can escape neither. I shall have to choose what I do, make decisions; only in the largest, most indirect sense will they be made for me. Once I hear Basil’s step, see his face, take his arm and go through that door, I shall have to keep on moving, acting, believing … believing in myself and in others.
Do I want to go through that door and leave this room and this reliable order forever? Wouldn’t it be safest to stay here, to accept this known, unchanging world rather than to leave it and submit to the unknown flux? She stood rigidly, her eyes shut, her hands flattened stiffly, pressing painfully, against her thighs. For an instant her mind was blank with indecision, she thought nothing, existed on the edge of her consciousness, balancing on the tight-rope that lies between sensation and numbness, thought and nullity, affirmation and negation. And then a scene flooded her vision, brightly and gloriously as footlights reveal a furnished stage – her room at home, her study, the rose walls, the long, low couch, the forthright elegance of the harpsichord. Quietly, precisely, the notes of Bach’s aria sounded in her mind, and she saw herself seated at the instrument, breathing with the gentle movements of the melody, safe within another, kinder discipline. And she opened her eyes, once more unafraid, to see Basil standing silently in the door.
2
Basil had been a fanfare, a bright cry of trumpets, a skirling of woodwinds. He stood easily, negligently, his face relaxed as if awaiting a smile, his fine blue eyes regarding her lovingly. She had seen him all at once, as she saw herself in the mirror: the high relief of his cheekbones beneath the tense, tanned face flesh; the wide, fond slant of his mouth; the dramatic arcs of his eyebrows and the deep sculptured sockets that held his eyes: the stone of his forehead and the blond verdure of his bristling hair. She had stepped forward towards him, then ran, was in his arms, her head against his shoulder, her cheek and mouth against the rough wool of his coat. He had held her close to him, his arm long and tight about her waist, had kissed her head, saying her name to her as he might to himself, ‘Ellen, Ellen.’ When she looked up at him he had kissed her on the mouth – there had been no hesitancy, no caution – frankly and firmly, ardently. She found it hard to breathe, and broke away, but had stood beside him a little longer, her hand lightly on his shoulder, looking at him and smiling when he smiled. ‘There are three bags,’ she had said – knowing she did not have to say anything of greater import – ‘a big one and two small ones. Will you help me?’
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly Page 3