by D. W. Buffa
Several more patients had wandered in, taking their places on the molded plastic chairs scattered around the large day room.
They moved slowly when they walked and, apart from an occasional twitch or a sudden jerk, barely moved at all while they sat.
They did not speak, and the silence hung heavy in the air, broken only by a short-lived moan or a sob quickly suppressed. It made me think of an old train station, or a bus station late at night, places where strangers wait in crowded solitude the endless hours until it is their time to go.
“They get tired late in the day,” Elliott explained. “The medication has that effect.”
Elliott did not seem tired at all. If anything, he had become more energetic, and more intense, the longer I was there. I thought it might be because of the excitement he must have felt at having a visitor from the outside. I started to get to my feet.
“Perhaps I should be going. We can continue this another time.”
He seized my wrist and held it fast. “No,” he insisted. “There’s no reason for you to go. I haven’t told you yet why I thought you were having an affair with my wife. Don’t you want to know?”
I sat down again and he let go of my arm. “It isn’t true,” I said, wondering why I felt compelled to repeat the denial. Was it because the idea had once crossed my mind, and I felt guilty for the thought if not the deed?
The look he gave me was uncanny. While his eyes bored in on me, trying to reach the back of my skull, they seemed at the same time to dart all around. It was like watching a solar eclipse.
In the middle was a deep, dark, impenetrable point, that for the moment at least stayed fixed, surrounded by a dazzling fireworks of dancing, flying light.
“I saw you talking with her once at a party. She was always doing that, talking to the most attractive men. She liked to know that men, attractive men, found her attractive. It was important to her. It was part of the way she defined herself: a woman who was attractive to men.”
I remembered her all right, sleek, proud, and willful, with golden brown hair and dark, bottomless eyes. Her gaze never left you while she talked, and she drew you so far into her, made you feel so much a favorite, that you almost failed to notice how her eyes moved restlessly around the room when it was her turn to listen.
You could not help but notice her hands, long bony knuckled fingers that looked like they were waiting to snatch at something, to close tight around something, to grab at whatever they could get. I did not like her, and that might have made me want her even more, had she not been married to an associate in my firm for whom I felt a certain responsibility.
“She was a very attractive woman,” I heard myself saying.
“She knew you thought so. After that party she used to tease me about it. She’d tell me how much she liked older men.” He sensed my reaction before I was quite conscious that I had one.
“You were about the same age then, I am now,” he remarked.
“She said that if she ever decided to be unfaithful it would probably be with someone like you.”
Vanity, not hope, is the last thing to die. Why otherwise would I have tried to get the assurance of someone clinically insane that more than a dozen years earlier I was still young.
“Someone older?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.
Elliott was not thinking of me. “She was always ambitious. I wanted to be a teacher; she wanted me to be a lawyer. She convinced me that I should, told me how great she thought I’d be, told me how much she believed in me. And I believed what she said, because I believed in her.” He looked at me for a moment, pondering something he had clearly thought about before. “I was always defined by what other people thought, people I trusted, people I believed in. Isn’t that what everyone does—think of themselves in terms of what other people think they are or think they should be? The danger of course is that you find out one day that you can’t believe in them anymore, that there is nothing you can believe in anymore, that everything you believed before was based on a lie. Then you don’t know who you are. You’re alone, by yourself, without anything to go back to and without anything to look forward to.”
A sly, cynical grin stole across his mouth. “So they put people like me in an asylum, because, after all, what happened to me could only have been some kind of aberration, a mental disease, a mental defect. But, fortunately, a condition that can be cured, or at least controlled, with the right regimen of therapy and medication. Controlled! Do you know what they mean? Unquestioning obedience, docile acceptance. You agree with everything anyone tells you, do whatever they tell you to do, believe everything they tell you to believe. You become as crazy as everyone else out there. You don’t have to believe in God, but you damn well better believe in golf!”
“What?” I asked, startled less by what he had said than by the fanatical look that had entered his eyes. “Golf?”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Yes, golf. Recreation is good; getting along with other people is good. Taking life as a game.
It’s good. Not getting upset at the insanity of the world. That’s good. Everyone believes in golf.”
His eyes became wilder, and his head began to swing from side to side. “Jean liked golf, and tennis, and swimming, and horse-back riding.” He stopped, a shadow of doubt in his overheated eyes. “I think she drew the line at bowling. Not that she had anything against the game itself, you understand. Jean believed in games. She just didn’t think the right sort of people played that particular game. Bowling at one end of the scale, chess at the other. Too intellectual, she thought. Whatever else she was, she was always upwardly mobile. As a matter of fact, I think …”
It happened again, that same terrifying seizure that took possession of him like some demonic force, shaking his body like a limp rag while he tried desperately to find the one key rhyming word that would open the lock and let him go free.
“I think … blink … ink … wink …” His eyes bulged out, his face turned red. “Stink … chink … mink … fink.”
It was over. The life came back into his eyes, his skin became pale again, and from the tone of his voice you would have thought you were talking to a completely normal man.
“What were we talking about?” he asked, as if he had just for a moment forgotten what he was saying. “Oh, yes,” he said as soon as I reminded him. “Jean. She wanted success, and when she met Jeffries and realized how much he wanted her, I don’t think she thought about resisting. I was still several years away from the possibility of a partnership. Why would she wait for something she could have right away?” He looked at me, a whim-sical expression in his eyes. “In your world—the sane world—
isn’t instant gratification what everyone wants?
“Of course I didn’t know anything about it at the time. I still thought Jeffries was my friend. I had proof of it. Of all the people he knew, of all the lawyers he could have asked, I was the one he chose when he had to have his wife declared incompetent. And after that happened, after he was all alone, we spent even more time together than we had before.”
Elliott now seemed perfectly calm, almost relaxed, as if we were trading gossip about someone we had once both known.
“What made you think she was having an affair with me?” I asked.
“She started to lie to me. She came home two hours after her shift ended and told me it was because someone on the next shift called in sick. But because I was worried, I had called the hospital and been told she had left at the normal time. She fumbled for some excuse, something about it happening at the last minute and the switchboard did not know anything about it. I believed her. But things like that started to happen more and more often.
Each time she had an excuse. Each time I believed her, or tried to. My questioning became more intense, more frantic, and she began to replace explanation with analysis. She was worried about me, she insisted. I was imagining things; I was in danger of becoming paranoid. Finally, after she had come in late and made up some story th
at made no sense at all, I came right out and accused her of having an affair.
” ‘And just who am I supposed to be having an affair with?’
“She looked at me with such disdain, such contempt. I had been in love with her from the first moment I ever saw her. We were married six months after we met. I was never in love with anyone but her. And the way she looked at me! It felt like someone had torn my insides out. I wanted to die, right there and then; I just wanted to stop breathing.
” ‘I can’t live like this,’ she told me. ‘I need to get away for a few days. I need time to think.’
“She went away for three days, all weekend. Monday morning she called from the hospital to talk to the kids. She said she would be home for dinner. Later that day, during a break in a trial, I went to see Jeffries. I needed someone to talk to and he was the only person I could trust with something like this.
“I can see it all quite clearly now: Jeffries sitting behind his desk, looking up at me from over his glasses. ‘I must have just missed you Saturday,’ he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Over at the coast, at Salishan, at the bar conference. I saw Jean in the hotel lobby, talking to Antonelli. They must have been waiting for you. I couldn’t stay. I was with some other people.’
“I’m not quite sure what happened after that. I don’t remember anything about that afternoon in trial, only that all I could think about was getting home, seeing Jean, trying to convince myself that she could convince me none of it was true. When I got home, she was not there and neither were the children. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and when I answered a stranger handed me a summons. Jean had filed for divorce.”
His elbow on the table, Elliott rested his cheekbone against his thumb and the corner of his forehead against his index finger. He sat there, lost in contemplation.
“The next day,” he said presently, an absent expression on his face, “I had the breakdown. I was in court, in the middle of that trial, when it happened. That’s what they told me, anyway. I don’t really remember.”
His eyes came back into focus. “That’s why I came to kill you.
It was the only thing I could think about, killing you because of what you had done to me.” A cryptic smile floated over his mouth.
“I’m sure Jeffries was disappointed when I didn’t. He was always telling me things about you, how you would do anything to win, and how one day it was all going to catch up with you. He told me you were the most amoral person he had ever known, and that if he had to do it over again he would have made you serve thirty days for contempt instead of three. Then someone else would have had to take over the defense in that case he said you should never have won.”
He remembered something else. “He told me once that there were people in the firm who had not wanted to bring you in, who didn’t want you there, people he knew, people who would be delighted if I was the only criminal defense attorney in the firm. You see what he was doing. He never missed a chance to stir something up, to create resentment, to make me think that without you around I’d have everything I wanted. You were the senior partner, the lawyer with the great reputation, and then, on top of everything else, you were the one who was taking away my wife.”
Elliott smiled again, that same enigmatic look that suggested that there was always something else, some deeper meaning beneath the literal meaning of what he said. His fingers brushed across his mustache, over and over again, each time faster than the time before, and then, abruptly, stopped.
“Maybe Jeffries really did know I’d have a breakdown and what would happen if I did.”
It was easy to be carried along by what he said. Not only was there a sort of logic about it all, but, like most things exotic, Elliot exerted a strange kind of attraction. The longer I stayed there, the more difficult it was to remember that I was sitting at a table inside an insane asylum talking to a mental patient.
“There is an obvious question, Elliott,” I said with a self-conscious smile. “Forget what Jeffries said about me. Why go through all this deception? Why didn’t your wife just simply file for the divorce? Why make you think I was involved?”
He answered without the slightest hesitation, as if there could not possibly be any doubt about what the truth really was. “They couldn’t afford the scandal. Judges weren’t supposed to be sleeping with the wives of the lawyers who practiced in front of them.
It would have made it more difficult to get the other thing they wanted. Jeffries did not just want my wife, he wanted my children. He’d never had any of his own.”
Elliott reported this as if it was not only a self-evident fact, but one that had nothing directly to do with him. It was the way he described nearly everything that had happened before his breakdown. I had of course heard people talk about themselves with a certain detachment, passing judgment on their own behavior, but never anything like this. There was a break in time for Elliott, as definite as the way we divide all of history into what came before and what came after Christ. When he talked about things that happened before his commitment, there was no connection between what he was now and what he had been then. The old Elliott was dead, and, as near as I could tell, the new Elliott did not miss him at all.
Elliott’s eyes glistened with laughter. “If all this sounds a little paranoid—well, I am, a little paranoid, that is. That’s what they tell me, anyway. Of course, that’s what they tell everyone here.
Paranoid schizophrenia. They always try to give it a little twist, something that makes it sound like they really know what they’re talking about. Type I or Type II, delusions of this or delusions of that, acute or not so acute. And they always say it with such gravity, such enormous seriousness, and with the same somber, slow-moving gestures, the head bent forward, the hands behind the back, the stooped shoulder. You would think they were in church, getting ready to take communion. Paranoid schizophrenia.” His eyes turned hard and his voice was filled with contempt.
“They cover their ignorance with that phrase. It gives them a sense of power. They’re the ones who are really sick.”
At the end of the room, the orderly got to his feet and stretched his arms. All around, the patients began to stir.
“Time for class,” Elliott explained. The contempt had vanished.
His manner was almost playful. “Staff call it group therapy; we call it class. There are several different classes. My personal favorite is ‘medication management.’ We learn about the symptoms of our illness and how to manage them.” His eyes filled with mirth and he shut them partway to keep from laughing out loud.
“Think of it,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You explain to someone that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Then, as if this was all news to him, you explain the symptoms to look for. You tell him that these symptoms can be kept under control by medication, and that the trick is to take the medication in the prescribed dosage at the precise moment that you first detect the symptom.
In other words, you explain to him that he’s crazy, and then you tell him all the perfectly reasonable things he can do not to show it.”
There seemed never to be any gradual transition between his moods. It was one thing, then it was another. He had been cheerful and ironic; now he seemed completely serious.
“The strange part is that it seems to work. Some people become quite good at it. They learn to deal with their disease, to control it, and even perhaps to use it. Some of them, I think, even learn how to hide behind it.”
I did not know what he meant by this last remark. “Hide behind it?”
The cheerful glint came back to his eye. “Everyone learns how to tell people what they want to hear—or to see what they want to see—don’t they?”
I started to ask him something else, but his glance suddenly darted away and his face lost all expression. Before I could turn around to see what had brought this about, he was on his feet, standing still. The wire gate was rattling as Dr. Friedman opened the lock with his key.
Ther
e was something I had to know, though I could not have said then why I needed to know it. Perhaps it was just a feeling, or perhaps it was something more than that, a sense that there was more to this story than what he had told me.
“Elliott,” I said, taking him by the arm, “who represented you when you went to court? Who was the lawyer that handled your case?”
Dr. Friedman had come through the gate and was waiting a few feet away. Elliott looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t remember. Someone Jeffries found.”
We said goodbye and I turned to go. “Joseph,” he called out.
It was the only time he had used my first name. “Would you do me a favor?”
“Of course,” I replied.
He reached inside his suit coat, and when he did I realized it was probably the same suit he had worn the last time he had been in court, the day he was sent to the state hospital. He handed me an envelope and asked if I would deliver it to his children. It seemed an odd request.
“You don’t want to just put it in the mail?”
“I can’t. I don’t know where they live. I don’t even know their names.”
I was not certain I had heard him right. “You don’t know their names?” It was too late. He had already started to walk away.
“Do you know what he meant by that?” I asked Dr. Friedman as we made our way out. I glanced at the envelope. The word
“Children” was written on the front, and nothing else, not a name, not an address, nothing but that one word.