Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics)

by Richard Yates

  He was fifty-six and burly, with a healthy crop of red hair just beginning to turn grey. As vice-president in charge of advertising sales he had risen as high as he ever would in the corporate structure. His excellent salary and stockholder’s dividends accounted for less than half his income; the rest came from shrewd investments. He lived in an exclusive Rockland County village; all his children were grown and he was a grandfather of three. Another man might have turned obsessively to golf or sailing or collecting antique shotguns, but George Taylor’s avocation was young girls. More than a few of his lunches with Wilder in the past had featured stories of girls who found it impossible to leave him alone, who hounded him and begged for him and fought for his favors, of how at least one had wept in his arms all night after her formal engagement to some recent graduate of Harvard Law.

  “Hell, I’m about ready for another one, aren’t you, John?” he said now, raising his empty glass.

  “Yeah; I’m ready.”

  And the second round launched him into a confessional monologue. “… Jesus, if you only knew what’s been going on with Sandy. I mean talk about a sweet little package of trouble; talk about a sweet little nest of rattlesnakes.” Sandy was a laughing, full-breasted girl who’d been his secretary for six months. “Bad enough when she worked for me, but it’s been even worse since I got her outa there. Told you I got her a job up at Drake and Cornfield, didn’t I? This new agency up on Fifty-ninth? You know, one of these swinging little shops where everybody says ‘creative’ all the time; they’ve got girls running around the office barefoot; got a lotta bright young studs on the make; I figured she’d fit in there. But son of a bitch, John, she can’t quit. Worst part of it is I can’t quit. Three, four evenings a week, half my vacation – Jesus. Crazy child. Twenty-two years old and all sex. All sex. Says she can’t stand boys her own age. Says I fulfill her. Last week my wife said ‘Pajamas? What’re you wearing pajamas for?’ And you know why I was wearing pajamas? Because my back was all raw welts from where Sandy’d clawed me. Crazy, crazy child. Couldn’t stand her apartment. Had this apartment with another girl, didn’t like it because she didn’t have enough privacy with me, so I got her a new one by herself – oh, she pays the rent and everything – she’s very strict about that – but now if I don’t show up there damn near every afternoon she’s calling me on the phone. Then about a month ago she said ‘Drive me to Philadelphia.’ I said ‘Why should I drive you to Philadelphia?’ She said ‘Because I want to blow you while you’re doing eighty miles an hour on the Jersey Turnpike.’ ”

  “And did she?”

  “Damn right she did, buddy. Eighty miles an hour. Jesus.”

  There was a third round of drinks and finally some food, which grew cold before they began to pick at it; then there were gulps of coffee and the promise of a long and dismal afternoon. Taylor grumbled about having to arrange the God damn December Issue Sales Conference; Wilder’s desk held an indecipherable batch of expense-account vouchers from Chicago that would somehow have to be put in order, and after that he’d be on the phone trying to set up a week’s worth of calls.

  The office was better than Bellevue. Its walls were white and its lights indirect; it contained women as well as men; everybody wore clothes and nobody pleaded to be saved or screamed or masturbated or kicked at windows – even so, there were signs of mounting desperation in every face as the day wore on, and the arrival of five o’clock was like the cop’s signal to unlock the big front door.

  “Hi,” he said, unlocking the door of his own home, released not only from the office but from the clangorous imprisonment of the subway.

  “Hi, there,” Janice said, and Tommy looked up from the television to acknowledge him with a mouthful of apple.

  When he’d taken off his coat and tie he went to the place where the bourbon and the ice were kept, with Janice following him closely. “Make you a drink?” he asked her.

  “Just a very small one. About a third of what you’re having.”

  The phone rang in the middle of dinner, and when Janice came back from it she said Paul wanted to drop over for a drink later on. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Course not.” And he guessed he didn’t; but if it hadn’t been for Tommy, solemnly slicing a pork chop across the table, he might have said he did. He knew what Borg would want tonight: he’d want to recommend a reputable psychiatrist, and Janice would sit nodding in wise approval, maybe even holding her husband’s hand.

  How had Borg known they were back from the country? But that was a stupid, easily answered question: Janice had called him today with news that John had acted “funny” all weekend and spent most of it in a drunken stupor. The two of them had been in cahoots on this thing from the start, after all. (It hadn’t taken him long, walking the corridor at Bellevue, to figure out that there’d been nothing accidental about Borg’s showing up in the Commodore bar that night.)

  He didn’t arrive until well after Tommy’s bedtime; then he came in wearing an open shirt and a baggy sweater as if to prove there was no serious business at hand. All he wanted was a little Scotch, thanks – very light.

  And the first part of their talk, as it had been for a year or more, was of politics. Hell, God knew anybody’d be better than Nixon, Wilder said, but even so he didn’t quite trust Kennedy. A rich boy, a glamour boy, a senator who’d never once spoken out against McCarthy even after it was safe for anyone to do so, a candidate who’d bought the primaries and rigged the convention – and he wound up that discourse by proclaiming, as he’d often done before, that he himself was an unregenerate Stevenson man.

  “Well, but John,” Paul Borg said, “I think we have to agree that Stevenson was a Greek. Kennedy’s a Roman. We need Romans in this country now.” That was something Borg had said before too, and it was so neatly phrased that Wilder suspected he had read it somewhere.

  On any other evening Janice would have said “Oh, exactly,” as if the line were brand-new to her, and gone on to explain that she’d always sensed something a little soft and indecisive about Stevenson; but she kept her mouth shut and vanished into the kitchen to make coffee. There were more important things on which to agree with Paul Borg tonight.

  Even after she was gone it took him quite a while to come out with the opening salvo. “John,” he began, tamping his pipe with a careful forefinger (ordinarily he smoked cigarettes, but he reserved a pipe for moments like this; he probably used it with difficult clients, too). “John, have you given any thought to psychotherapy?” And the very word was enough to bring Janice softly back into the room, averting her face as she set a tray of trembling cups and saucers on the coffee table.

  The question hung in the air and he made them wait for his answer, determined to keep his voice down. Tommy’s bedroom was far away down a hall between two closed doors, but even so there must be no chance of his hearing this.

  Given any thought to it? Yes, he had. Exactly once, on the last day in Bellevue when that greasy little clerk had made him say he would, as a condition of his release in Borg’s custody. “So if you’re speaking as my custodian, or whatever they call it, don’t come to me. Go to him. Take Janice along too. I’m sure the three of you can work something out, even if you have to lock me up again first.”

  Janice was almost visibly fighting an urge to say “John, that’s not fair”; instead she sipped coffee to show that this, at any cost, would be a civilized discussion.

  And Borg frowned through the billows of common sense that rose from his clenched pipe. They would get nowhere, he said, by harping on Bellevue. Neither he nor Janice had ever wanted him “locked up,” as they’d both made clear time and again. For John to attack them now as some sort of conspirators was simply –

  “ ‘Hostile,’ right? ‘Paranoid’?”

  “Those are your words, not mine. Look: suppose we consider the events leading up to Bellevue. You had a nervous breakdown in Chicago; when you got back you were wholly irrational. And frankly—” he lowered his eyes “—w
ell, this may be hindsight, but frankly I’d noticed a good many signs that something of the kind was building up over the past few months.”

  “Signs, huh? What signs?”

  “Excessive drinking, for one; compulsive drinking. Irritability: you’d blow up over the slightest – over nothing. And moodiness; sulkiness. Sometimes Natalie and I’d be over here, or you’d be at our place, and you wouldn’t say a word all evening.”

  Wilder almost said Maybe I was bored; instead he got a fresh drink and sat silent while Borg explained how much good a good psychiatrist might do for him. Oh, not one of the oldschool, doctrinaire Freudians – and certainly not one of these new, underqualified “hip” people, either – but a sound, reputable therapist who’d see him twice a week and “work” with him.

  A crisp little notebook was drawn from Borg’s hip pocket, a page torn out and laid on the coffee table: Dr. Jules Blomberg, with offices in the East Sixties. This man had helped a client of Borg’s to recover from an almost suicidal depression; he had helped an obese friend of that same client to lose a hundred pounds. And he was highly respected in the field: his papers were published in the best psychiatric journals; he’d lectured at many universities …

  “And of course you’ve told him all about me, right? And set up an appointment?”

  “I’ve told him a little about you, yes. The appointment is entirely your business.”

  Entirely his business. For some time there was no sound but the clicking of ice in his glass while he thought it over. What the hell. It might help; it might “work”; and if it didn’t he could always quit.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see the guy.” And he put both shoes on the coffee table to dramatize his capitulation.

  But Janice was still tense, and Paul Borg made great flames as he tried to light his pipe for the third or fourth time. He didn’t really know how to smoke the thing; maybe soon he’d stop trying. “There’s just one hitch, John,” he said at last. “Dr. Blomberg made it clear to me that he won’t work with you unless you stop drinking.”

  “Well,” he said, getting up. “There goes the ballgame. Dr. Blomberg is out of business. Dr. Blomberg is shit outa luck. So are you, buddy—” he pointed at Borg and then at his wife – “and so are you. I may be mentally ill and I may need ‘help,’ but I am not, never have been and never will be a drunk.” And to prove it he made straight for the bourbon bottle and poured himself a big one. This was the closest he’d come to losing his temper all evening, but he didn’t, cautioned not only by fear of waking Tommy but by a quick secret vision of Charlie bearing down on him in the corridor with his needle aloft (“All right, Mr. Wilder; I’ve warned you …”).

  “… We’ve been friends for years, John,” Borg was saying, “and it’s often struck me that you have a low tolerance for alcohol. We’ve drunk together many times, matching each other drink for drink, and when I’d be just beginning to feel high you’d be – well, drunk.”

  “Matter of opinion. Prejudiced opinion. You do drink every day, right? Just like me?”

  “Every day, yes. I don’t drink at lunch but I always have a few after work; usually a few after dinner.”

  “Which means,” Wilder said, “which means that along about three thirty or four you start craving it. You crave it so bad you can taste it, right?”

  “No; it’s not that way at all. I’m always tired at that time of day; sometimes by five o’clock I’m very nervous as well as tired. Then I have a few drinks and I’m not tired or nervous any more. Simple as that. Of course I need alcohol, John. The difference is, my system can handle it. I imagine it’s purely a matter of body chemistry.”

  “How nice for you,” Wilder said. “Isn’t that swell.”

  Then they heard a high, shy call from Tommy’s room. Janice hurried to him, while Wilder finished his drink in a gulp, and when she came back she said “He wants to see you, John.”

  “My God. He can’t have heard anything. I haven’t raised my voice once during this whole God-awful—”

  “No, it’s not that. He just woke up, and he says he wants to see you.”

  Going down the hall he found he wasn’t steady on his feet: he swayed and lurched against a wall with one shoulder.

  Tommy was sitting up in bed with the light on, surrounded by Yankee pennants and Kennedy posters. His pajamas were rumpled, his straight hair stuck out in all directions and he looked younger than ten. He looked about six or seven.

  “Well, hi,” Wilder said, sitting on the bed. He sat close enough so they could hug, if that was what Tommy wanted to do, and it was. The warm feel of him and the sour, little-boy smell of him were almost enough to make him weep. “What’s the matter, Tom? You just want a hug, or do you want to talk about something?”

  For some seconds it seemed that he’d just wanted the hug; then he said “Daddy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You went to Chicago for a week, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And then your business kept you there for another week.”

  “Right.”

  “Well then, how come your suitcase’s been in Mom’s closet ever since a week ago last Saturday?”

  “And what did you tell him?” Dr. Jules Blomberg inquired a few days later.

  “What could I tell him?”

  “Mm.” Dr. Blomberg was his own age or younger, chubby and nearly bald; he wore pink-tinted glasses that magnified his eyes, and his office was very well appointed: rich-looking paintings, rich-looking abstract sculpture on low pedestals around the carpet. There was a psychiatric couch on which Wilder had refused to lie, and there were two deep leather armchairs in which they now sat facing each other, man to man. That was all he had learned so far about Dr. Blomberg except that he didn’t take notes and had a habit of saying “Mm.”

  “Oh, looking back now I guess I might’ve found a way to tell him, but at the time it seemed impossible. For one thing I’d had a good deal to drink and my head was – I don’t know. Anyway I just held onto him and said – I said it was a tough question but I promised him I’d answer it soon, and I guess I went into some spiel about how I never broke promises. I knew I had to get out of there fast before I started bawling all over him, so I tucked him in and turned out his light and I think he went to sleep. But the point is, doctor, that’s when I decided to come to you.”

  “Mm. And to stop drinking.”

  “Right. That too.”

  And Dr. Blomberg spent the next twenty-five minutes, earning twenty-five dollars, on that. First he offered his professional endorsement of Alcoholics Anonymous as the most reliable, most enlightened and best means of dealing with the problem; then he dialed an avocado-colored telephone and asked for Mr. Costello.

  “… Fine, thanks, and you, sir? Good. Mr. Costello, I have a new patient here who wants to join the Program, and I wondered if you’d care to be his sponsor. … Well, I don’t want to inconvenience you, but I’d say the sooner the better. Tomorrow; possibly this evening, if you’re free. … No, actually, I think it might be preferable not to visit his home – there’s a young child involved – I thought perhaps you might meet him alone for a cup of coffee. …”

  A mercilessly bright coffee shop lay around the corner from this office (next door to a dark bar where Wilder had downed two quick ones to brace himself for confronting Blomberg and where he’d planned to repair for a few more as soon as Blomberg set him free); it was arranged that Mr. Costello would be there at the end of this session; then Blomberg earned a few more dollars in apologies and thanks: “… I hate to bring you out on such short notice, sir; I certainly appreciate it …” and in a silence allowing Mr. Costello to insist it was no trouble; he was happy to oblige.

  With the phone in its cradle at last and Blomberg still glowing from the pleasantries, he checked his watch, found there wasn’t time to open a new line of questioning and went back to a point he’d missed earlier in the interview about the nature of Wilder’s job with The American Scientist: what exactly
had Wilder meant by the term “classification specialist”?

  “Oh. Well, see, most space salesmen go out after any kind of advertising they can find. I was hired away from another magazine because I brought in two new product lines the Scientist had never approached before – foreign cars and highquality liquor. Both very lucrative.”

  “Mm. So you’re the ‘specialist’ in those two ‘classifications,’ I see. And I imagine the liquor end of it must involve a good deal of drinking as part of your – work.”

  “No, it’s not that simple, doctor. The liquor industry’s very solemn about ‘moderation.’ I mean, that week in Chicago was a distillers’ convention and of course there were parties, but that wasn’t the trouble: I did all the heavy drinking on my own.”

  “Yes. Well, I’m afraid our time is up, Mr. Wilder.”

  The coffee shop was nearly empty, as if everyone on the block preferred the bar for which he still yearned, and he didn’t have to wait long before his sponsor strode in with a briefcase.

  “John Wilder? Bill Costello.” He was ruddy and dapper, with sparse white hair as neat as Harry Truman’s and a big smile of very clean false teeth, and his handshake seemed determined to prove what laying off the booze could do for a man’s grip. “I want to congratulate you,” he said when he was settled across from Wilder with both pin-striped elbows on the plastic table. “Not only on your decision for AA but for putting yourself in Dr. Blomberg’s care. This town’s loaded with psychiatrists and I know I don’t have to tell you most of ’em are quacks. They’ll treat people like you and me for years, ignoring our problem, letting us drink ourselves into the madhouse or the grave. Black, please,” he said to the waitress. “Dr. Blomberg’s one of your rare, very rare exceptions. I think the world of that young man.”

  “You a former patient of his?”

  “Me? Oh, no; I’m afraid I’m too old to’ve had that privilege. I imagine Jules Blomberg was still a student when I – when I first joined the Program. Well. Down to business. When did you have your last drink, John?”